Tag: astronomy

A pulsar that’s eating a galaxy

8:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a pulsar emitting energy at a rate far greater than ever predicted and which is believed caused by the very fast in-fall of matter into the neutron star.

Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar – a dense stellar remnant left over from a supernova explosion – ever recorded. The discovery was made with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. “You might think of this pulsar as the ‘Mighty Mouse’ of stellar remnants,” said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “It has all the power of a black hole, but with much less mass.”

More here. The galaxy where this pulsar resides, M82, has been known for decades to be one of the most interesting, with evidence of vast explosions tearing it apart. This pulsar is at its center, and appears to be sucking in matter at a rate previously believed impossible, suggesting that the supermassive black holes found at the center of many galaxies could form much faster that any theory predicted.

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Ground-breaking ceremony for Thirty Meter Telescope cancelled because of protesters

9:07 am

A ground-breaking ceremony on Mauna Kea, which would have included a blessing from native Hawaiians, was cancelled Tuesday when protesters showed up trying to block the telescope’s construction.

There were also small numbers of protesters at other locations that are also connected to the telescope project.

With previous similar protests of other telescope projects, the protesters seem to always disappear when the projects agree to give them money. Makes me wonder if their religious fervor is much shallower than the news stories of this protest would lead us to believe.

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A giant black hole in a tiny galaxy

10:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have unexpectedly discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of a nearby tiny galaxy, comprising almost 18% of the galaxy’s entire mass.

To weigh the beast, the researchers measured the velocity of stars whipping about the galaxy’s centre using an infrared spectrometer on the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The high velocity of the stars is best explained by a central black hole that tips the scales at 21 million times the Sun’s mass, concluded Seth’s team. That is more than five times heavier than the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way — even though M60-UCD1 has an estimated diameter of about one-six-hundredth that of our home galaxy.

Previously astronomers had believed that the size of a galaxy would predict the size of its central black hole, and that a galaxy this small would not house such a supermassive object. This find upsets those theories.

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Dawn’s arrival at Ceres delayed one month

5:12 pm

Though engineers have solved the problems caused when a radiation blast disabled Dawn’s ion engine and put it into safe mode for a week, the fix will cause a one month delay in its arrival at the asteroid Ceres.

Controllers discovered Dawn was in safe mode Sept. 11 after radiation disabled its ion engine, which uses electrical fields to “push” the spacecraft along. The radiation stopped all engine thrusting activities. The thrusting resumed Monday (Sept. 15) after controllers identified and fixed the problem, but then they found another anomaly troubling the spacecraft.

Dawn’s main antenna was also disabled, forcing the spacecraft to send signals to Earth (a 53-minute roundtrip by light speed) through a weaker secondary antenna and slowing communications. The cause of this problem hasn’t been figured out yet, but controllers suspect radiation affected the computer’s software. A computer reset has solved the issue, NASA added. The spacecraft is now functioning normally.

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Philae’s landing site chosen

3:32 am

Philae's primary landing site

The Rosetta science team has chosen the primary landing site on Comet 67P/C-G for its Philae probe.

Site J is on the ‘head’ of the comet, an irregular shaped world that is just over 4 km across at its widest point. The decision to select Site J as the primary site was unanimous. The backup, Site C, is located on the ‘body’ of the comet. The 100 kg lander is planned to reach the surface on 11 November, where it will perform indepth measurements to characterise the nucleus in situ, in a totally unprecedented way.

This site is, located in the outside center of the nucleus’s smaller lobe, was picked unanimously because it appears to be the easiest to reach while also providing good science.

The descent to the comet is passive and it is only possible to predict that the landing point will place within a ‘landing ellipse’ typically a few hundred metres in size.

A one square kilometre area was assessed for each candidate site. At Site J, the majority of slopes are less than 30º relative to the local vertical, reducing the chances of Philae toppling over during touchdown. Site J also appears to have relatively few boulders, and receives sufficient daily illumination to recharge Philae and continue science operations on the surface beyond the initial battery-powered phase.

Provisional assessment of the trajectory to Site J found that the descent time of Philae to the surface would be about seven hours, a length that does not compromise the on-comet observations by using up too much of the battery during the descent.

I have put a close-up of the landing site below the fold.
» Read more

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Universal Big Bang lithium deficit confirmed

9:10 am

The uncertainty of science: New data from a globular cluster in nearby dwarf galaxy has confirmed that the deficit of lithium that astronomers have found in the Milky Way also exists in other galaxies.

According to the Big Bang theory, the amount of lithium in the universe should be two or three times more than it is. This result shows that the deficit exists outside the Milky Way, which suggests strongly that something significant is wrong with the Big Bang theory.

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Nothing for New Horizons after Pluto

8:57 am

As New Horizons begins its final shake-down in advance of its July 2015 flyby of Pluto, scientists have so far failed to find any Kuiper Belt objects in the right place for it to fly past after Pluto.

They haven’t given up hope, however. The search continues. As for the Pluto flyby,

The hibernating spacecraft will send weekly status beacons back to Earth, with wakeup scheduled for Dec. 7 to begin the final phase of its approach to Pluto. New Horizons will stay awake for two years to prepare for the encounter, fly by Pluto, and downlink science data. The craft’s appointment with Pluto is set for July 14, 2015, when it will zoom about 6,200 miles from the icy world’s unmapped surface for a one-shot chance to explore Pluto’s geology and atmosphere.

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Spitzer spots asteroid collision

11:57 am

A monitoring program of a young star by the Spitzer Space Telescope has paid off with evidence of a major collision between asteroids in the debris disk that surrounds the star.

Scientists had been regularly tracking the star, called NGC 2547-ID8, when it surged with a huge amount of fresh dust between August 2012 and January 2013. “We think two big asteroids crashed into each other, creating a huge cloud of grains the size of very fine sand, which are now smashing themselves into smithereens and slowly leaking away from the star,” said lead author and graduate student Huan Meng of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

While dusty aftermaths of suspected asteroid collisions have been observed by Spitzer before, this is the first time scientists have collected data before and after a planetary system smashup. The viewing offers a glimpse into the violent process of making rocky planets like ours.

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Did Stardust capture stardust?

4:19 pm

Scientists now believe that the spacecraft Stardust captured seven particles from interstellar space during its seven year journey.

Inside the canister, a tennis racket-like sample collector tray captured the particles in silica aerogel as the spacecraft flew within 149 miles (about 240 kilometers) of a comet in January 2004. An opposite side of the tray holds interstellar dust particles captured by the spacecraft during its seven-year, three-billion-mile journey.

Scientists caution that additional tests must be done before they can say definitively that these are pieces of debris from interstellar space. But if they are, the particles could help explain the origin and evolution of interstellar dust. The particles are much more diverse in terms of chemical composition and structure than scientists expected. The smaller particles differ greatly from the larger ones and appear to have varying histories. Many of the larger particles have been described as having a fluffy structure, similar to a snowflake. [emphasis mine]

It appears that for these seven particles, the scientists conclude they are likely interstellar particles because of the speed in which they were traveling when captured as well as their make-up. Both suggest an origin outside the solar system.

However, we should be cautious about this. The data still remains tenuous and preliminary. More work obviously needs to be done to pin this down definitively. More information here.

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Rosetta detects its first dust grains

8:57 am

67P/C-G on August 12, 2014

The Rosetta science team announced today that the spacecraft’s Grain Impact Analyser and Dust Accumulator (GIADA) has captured its first dust grains from Comet 67P/C-G.

Earlier this month, GIADA detected the first four dust grains in its Impact Sensor. The first detection was made on 1 August, when Rosetta was 814 km from 67P/C-G, and about 543 million kilometres from the Sun. Further impacts from three more dust grains were detected on 2, 4, and 5 August, at distances of 603, 286, and 179 km from the comet, respectively.

There is still too little data to come to any firm conclusions about the density and make-up of the coma, but this announcement confirms that the instrument is working as designed. When the comet zips past the Sun at its closest point on August 13, 2015, this instrument will then be able to give us a very good assessment of this particular comet’s behavior as it slowly evaporates.

Meanwhile, the images keep coming. The picture at the top of the post was taken on August 12 from about 64 miles.

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The Milky Way’s most distant stars

11:18 pm

Astronomers have discovered the two most distant stars of the Milky Way.

Both stars are red giants, aging suns that shine so brightly observers can see them from afar. One star is about 890,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces—33 times farther from the Milky Way’s center than we are and well beyond the edge of the galactic disk. The only other Milky Way member at a comparable distance is a small galaxy named Leo I, which orbits ours at a distance of 850,000 light-years. If the star in Pisces revolves on a circular path as fast as we do, it takes some eight billion years to complete a single orbit around the galaxy. That’s more than half the age of the universe.

The other newfound star is about 780,000 light-years distant in the constellation Gemini and more than a million light-years from the other star. For comparison, the previous record-breaking individual star was only about half a million light-years from Earth.

Both stars are so far outside the galaxy’s disk that it is quite possible that they are not part of the Milky Way at all.

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Another Rosetta closeup of 67P/C-G

4:15 pm

67P on August 8

The above image is not the most recent daily image from Rosetta, but it is the most interesting of the last three.

It shows the side of the comet nucleus that has not been featured in most images, as the topographical differences between its two sections is not as distinctly highlighted. What is highlighted is the neck that connects the two sections, lighter colored and thus likely made up of less dusty ice.

Also of interest here is the circular features on the larger bottom section. These certainly resemble craters, and are likely remnants of early impacts that are now been corroded away as the nucleus’s ice particles evaporate off the surface. The scientific question here is this: Why are crater features more evident on this side and section of the comet nucleus than on other areas of its surface?

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Rosetta arrives

10:14 am

Rosetta has successfully achieved orbit around Comet 67P/C-G and has transmitted its first close up images. More information here and here about the rendezvous and what science the mission scientists plan to do as they orbit the comet.

The image below is looking down and past the comet’s smaller component as it casts a shadow on the neck and the larger component beyond. As with the earlier images, the comet’s pitted and corroded surface, lacking any obvious craters, is reminiscent to me of a pile of dirty snow that has been dissolving away. In fact, when I lived in New York I would see this kind of look every winter. When the city would get a big snowfall snowplows would push it into large mounds on the side of the road. As time passed these piles would get dirty from the city’s soot and grime, and also slowly melt away. After several weeks it would look almost exactly like the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

The images and data that will come down from Rosetta over the next year and half as it orbits the comet in its journey around the Sun will be most fascinating. Stay tuned!

67P/C-G up close

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Eta Carinae’s next big show

9:22 am

Astronomers are gearing up to observe the next binary fly-by of Eta Carinae’s companion star over the next few weeks.

A binary system, η Carinae has two stars that swing past one another every 5.5 years. The bigger star — some 90 times the mass of the Sun — is incredibly unstable, always seemingly on the verge of blowing up. When the smaller companion star makes its closest approach to the primary star, as is happening now, the interaction between the two triggers violent changes in the high-energy radiation pouring out of the system.

Astronomers are watching the show in the hope of learning what drives this enigmatic system. In the 1840s, η Carinae had a mysterious eruption; in recent decades, it has again brightened unexpectedly. “The star is in an awfully deranged state, and no one knows why,” says Kris Davidson, an astronomer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Eta Carinae is also famous because it was one of the first objects imaged by Hubble after its repair in 1993, and was thus the first stellar explosion ever caught on camera in a visually sharp and clear manner. (See my book The Universe in a Mirror for that fascinating story.)

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Comet 67P/C-G at 126 miles

8:57 am

Comet 67P/C-G at 126 miles

The image above was taken by Rosetta on August 4 from only 126 miles (234 kilometers). Unlike earlier images, this image is raw, uncropped and unprocessed. All I have done is rescale it to fit on my webpage. As they explain at the link,

As you can see, the comet is not centred in the full-frame image. This is a result of the rendezvous burn conducted the previous day, which adjusted Rosetta’s trajectory towards the comet. This effect is corrected for in the commands sent to the spacecraft after the new orbit has been determined.

The science team also notes that beginning tomorrow, the comet will be close enough that they will no longer have to provide a cropped close-up using the navigation camera and that this uncropped raw version will be sufficient.

Rendezvous and orbital insertion on Wednesday!

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An exoplanet that was once like a star

8:43 am

Astronomers, using WISE data, have discovered a strange exoplanet that is now as cool as a rocky planet, but was once as hot as a red dwarf star.

The current temperature of the object is 100-150 degrees Celsius, intermediate between that of the Earth and Venus. But the object shows evidence of a possible ancient origin, implying that a large change in temperature has taken place. In the past this object would have been as hot as a star for many millions of years.

Called WISE J0304-2705, the object is a member of the recently established “Y dwarf” class – the coolest stellar temperature class yet defined, added to the end of the sequence OBAFGKMLT (for historical reasons this is not in alphabetical order but follows a decline in temperature from O to T). Although its temperature is not far off that of our own world, the object is not like the rocky Earth-like planets and instead is a giant ball of gas like Jupiter.

As cool as this discovery is (no pun intended), I am most enlightened by the information in the second paragraph above. I had not realized that astronomers had added L, T, and Y classes to the low temperature end of their stellar classification system. For those new to astronomy, you remember the sequence of the first seven classes with the phrase “O Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me”. I wonder what how we can amend this phrase to include the L, T, Y, classes?

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Today’s Comet 67P image

9:05 am

Comet 67P on August 2

The image above was taken on August 2 using Rosetta’s navigation camera. It has been processed by the science team to bring out the details. I have also rotated it to match the August 1 image taken at a distance of 620 miles that was taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow angle camera, designed to do the actual science.

You can see that the navigation camera does a pretty good job on its own of capturing the comet’s nucleus. Both images show that the instruments are working perfectly, and thus tell us that the next few months will be quite spectacular after Rosetta goes into orbit in three days, followed in November by the landing of Philae somewhere on the comet’s surface.

If you download both images and then switch back and forth between them you can get a better feel for the geometry of the surface features.

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Comet 67P from 1000 k

11:06 pm

67P from 1000 kilometers

Above is a new image of Comet 67P as seen from about 1000 kilometers, or about 620 miles, released by the Rosetta science team today. The image was taken on August 1 and has been processed somewhat to bring out the details. The black spot near the junction between the nucleus’s two sections is not real but an artifact of the camera’s CCD.

This image is the first real clear and sharp look at the nucleus, and what it shows us is a surface quite different from the many other asteroids that science probes have imaged close-up in the past. From this angle there are far few craters visible then is normally seen on asteroids, and the surface has complex roughness and pitted look that I suspect the planetary geologists are right now scratching their heads about and waving their arms trying to explain. My first guess, which no one should take too seriously, is that as material vents off the comet when it gets close to the Sun it leaves behind these scars.

One more thing: If you go here you can see a number of additional image releases in the last 24 hours, all fascinating. This link explains that the features that looked like craters in earlier images were actually artifacts from the camera’s CCD.

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A Hubble Space Telescope status report

4:48 pm

Five years after the last shuttle repair mission, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to operate almost perfectly.

Jeletic said other than a single gyro failure, the observatory is operating in near-flawless fashion five years after the final shuttle crew departed. “Batteries are fine, solar arrays are fine, all the communications equipment is fine, we don’t see any glitches with the computers, the instruments are all fine,” he said. “In fact, an interesting statistic, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was repaired by the astronauts during the last servicing mission, that’s actually now run longer on the repair than it did originally for the Wide Field Camera part of it.”

The ACS, like the repaired Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, no longer has any internal redundancy. “It’s amazing. It truly is,” Jeletic said. “Given all the things that can fail, a lot of people were hoping for one or two years of continued work with it. Now we’ve gotten over five.” Likewise, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which also is operating in “single-string” mode, is still going strong.

When they completed the 2009 servicing mission, the goal was to give Hubble five more years of operation. They’ve done that, and are now looking to keep the telescope going till at least 2020, marking 30 years in orbit.

The only issue, not surprisingly, is the failure of one of the six gyros on board. These have traditionally been the telescope’s biggest problem, and have been replaced twice over during shuttle missions. Three of today’s six however are using a new design which will hopefully extend their life significantly.

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Fermi proves that novae produce gamma rays

12:56 pm

The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has discovered that novae, small scale stellar explosions similar to some supernovae but far less powerful, also produce gamma rays when they explode.

A nova is a sudden, short-lived brightening of an otherwise inconspicuous star caused by a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a white dwarf, a compact star not much larger than Earth. Each nova explosion releases up to 100,000 times the annual energy output of our sun. Prior to Fermi, no one suspected these outbursts were capable of producing high-energy gamma rays, emission with energy levels millions of times greater than visible light and usually associated with far more powerful cosmic blasts.

What is significant about this is that it demonstrates a solid link between novae and supernovae, since only recently have scientists shown that some supernovae also produce gamma ray bursts. It suggests that the two explosions are produced by somewhat similar processes, but at very different scales. This fact will have important ramifications in the study of stellar evolution and the death of stars. For example, some nova stars often go nova repeatedly. Other data suggest that some more powerful eruptions can be recurrent as well. Extending this recurrent pattern to supernova suggests many new theoretical possibilities.

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