Source: DLR
The German-American Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, completed an important milestone by achieving 'first light' when it performed its first observations during the night between 25 and 26 May 2010. SOFIA is the only airborne observatory in the world, operated jointly by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR). The observatory carried out observations of astronomical objects at infrared wavelengths in flight. (read more)
Source: Chandra
A detailed study of Chandra observations over ten years shows that M31* was in a very dim, or quiet, state from 1999 to the beginning of 2006. However, on January 6, 2006, the black hole became more than a hundred times brighter, suggesting an outburst of X-rays. This was the first time such an event had been seen from a supermassive black hole in the nearby, local universe. After the outburst, M31* entered another relatively dim state, but was almost ten times brighter on average than before 2006. The outburst suggests a relatively high rate of matter falling onto M31* followed by a smaller, but still significant rate. (read more)
Source: ESA - oshi
Thousands of galaxies crowd into this Herschel image of the distant Universe. Each dot is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars.
For more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over strangely bright galaxies in the distant Universe. These ‘luminous infrared galaxies’ appear to be creating stars at such phenomenal rates that they defy conventional theories of galaxy formation.
Now ESA’s Herschel infrared space observatory, with its ability for very sensitive mapping over wide areas, has seen thousands of these galaxies and pinpointed their locations, showing for the first time that they are packing themselves closely together, forming large clusters of galaxies by the force of their mutual gravity. (read more)
Source: NASA/SWIFT
Data from an ongoing survey by NASA's Swift satellite have helped astronomers solve a decades-long mystery about why a small percentage of black holes emit vast amounts of energy.
Only about one percent of supermassive black holes exhibit this behavior. The new findings confirm that black holes "light up" when galaxies collide, and the data may offer insight into the future behavior of the black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy. The study will appear in the June 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The intense emission from galaxy centers, or nuclei, arises near a supermassive black hole containing between a million and a billion times the sun's mass. Giving off as much as 10 billion times the sun's energy, some of these active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the most luminous objects in the universe. They include quasars and blazars. (read more)
Source: ESA - oshi
This glowing core is the stellar equivalent of an insect’s cocoon. Nestled in the bright centre are two newly forming stars. When they reach maturity they will begin to generate their own energy and shine out across the Universe.
Small, isolated clouds of forming stars are known as Bok Globules after the 20th century astronomer Bart Bok. Back in the 1940s, their identification was an important step towards the realisation that stars form from the condensation of gas clouds in space.
It was not until the Infrared Astronomical Satellite was launched in the 1980s, and the era of space-based infrared astronomy began, that the idea of Bok Globules as stellar cocoons was confirmed by João Yun and co-authors. (read more)
Source: HubbleSite
Artist's concept of the exoplanet WASP-12b.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
"The Star That Ate My Planet" may sound like a B-grade science fiction movie title, but this is really happening 600 light-years away. Like a moth in a candle flame, a doomed Jupiter-sized planet has moved so close to its sunlike parent star that it is spilling its atmosphere onto the star. This happens because the planet gets so hot that its atmosphere puffs up to the point where the star's gravity pulls it in. The planet will likely be completely devoured in 10 million years. Observations by Hubble's new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph measured a variety of elements in the planet's bloated atmosphere as the planet passed in front of its star. The planet, called WASP-12b, is the hottest known world ever discovered, with an atmosphere seething at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. (read more)
Source: NASA Science News
In a surprising development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.
Jupiter before and after the disapearance of the South Equatorial Band.
Credit: Anthony Wesley
Known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), the brown cloudy band is twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long. The loss of such an enormous "stripe" can be seen with ease halfway across the solar system. (read more)
Source: ESO Photo Release eso1020
Messier 83 by HAWK-I/VLT.
Credit: ESO/M. Gieles
ESO is releasing a beautiful image of the nearby galaxy Messier 83 taken by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The picture shows the galaxy in infrared light and demonstrates the impressive power of the camera to create one of the sharpest and most detailed pictures of Messier 83 ever taken from the ground. (read more)
Source: Space Daily
Artist conception of the unique binary star NLTT 11748.
Credit: Steve Howell/Pete Marenfeld/NOAO
Santa Barbara CA (SPX) May 19, 2010 Astrophysicists at UC Santa Barbara are the first scientists to identify two white dwarf stars in an eclipsing binary system, allowing for the first direct radius measurement of a rare white dwarf composed of pure helium.
The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. These observations are the first to confirm a theory about a certain type of white dwarf star. (read more)
Source: Universtity of California, Santa Barbara
Gallery of exoplanets with retrograde orbits. Exoplanets, discovered by WASP together with ESO telescopes, that unexpectedly have been found to have retrograde orbits, are shown in this artist's conception. In all cases the star is shown to scale, with its rotation axis pointing up and with realistic colors. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
The discovery of nine new planets challenges the reigning theory of the formation of planets, according to new observations by astronomers. Two of the astronomers involved in the discoveries are based at the UC Santa Barbara-affiliated Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), based in Goleta, Calif., near UCSB.
Unlike the planets in our solar system, two of the newly discovered planets are orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star. This, along with a recent study of other exoplanets, upsets the primary theory of how planets are formed. There is a preponderance of these planets with their orbital spin going opposite to that of their parent star. They are called exoplanets because they are located outside of our solar system. (read more)
Source: NASA
Western view of the horizon after sunset on May 16th, 2010. Created with Stellarium.
This weekend, Venus and the crescent Moon are gathering in the western sky for a spectacular conjunction, and they're not alone. The International Space Station and, very likely, space shuttle Atlantis will join them for a rare four-way meeting of spaceships and planets over many locations. (read more)
Source: NASA/JPL
A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image, seen as a line of yellow-green dots in the boxes near center. A second asteroid, called 1992 UZ5, was also observed cruising by, as highlighted in the boxes near the upper left (the larger boxes are blown-up versions of the smaller ones).
This image from WISE shows the Tadpole nebula.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image -- two satellites orbiting above WISE (highlighted in the ovals) streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. The apparent motion of asteroids is slower than satellites because asteroids are much more distant, and thus appear as dots that move from one WISE frame to the next, rather than streaks in a single frame.
This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old -- infants in stellar terms -- and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These "tadpoles" appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE's infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.
The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.
Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.
WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.
Links:
NASA/JPL
NASA/WISE
Berkeley/WISE
Source: ESA Technology Transfer Programme
Entrepreneurs have the chance to win prizes totalling a million euros in this year's European Satellite Navigation Competition. ESA will award a special prize of ¤10 000 for the best idea and support the business start up at one of its four incubation centres. (read more)
Source: ESA News
Volcanic ash in Meridiani Planum
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Deposits of volcanic ash colour this view of the Meridiani Planum, as seen by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera. They also give clues to the prevailing wind direction in this region of Mars. (read more)
Source: Chandra X-ray Observatory for NASA by SAO
Credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang et al.
Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas.
The X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. This background source is a rapidly growing supermassive black hole located far beyond the wall at a distance of about two billion light years. This is shown in the illustration as a star-like source, with light traveling through the Sculptor Wall towards the Earth. The relative location of the background source, the Sculptor Wall, and the Milky Way galaxy are shown in a separate plot, where the view instead looks down on the source and the Wall from above.
An X-ray spectrum of the background source is given in the inset, where the yellow points show the Chandra data and the red line shows the best model for the spectrum after including all of the Chandra and XMM data. The dip in X-rays towards the right side of the spectrum corresponds to absorption by oxygen atoms in the WHIM contained in the Sculptor Wall. The characteristics of the absorption are consistent with the distance of the Sculptor Wall as well as the predicted temperature and density of the WHIM. This result gives scientists confidence that the WHIM will also be found in other large-scale structures.
This result supports predictions that about half of the normal matter in the local Universe is found in a web of hot, diffuse gas composed of the WHIM. Normal matter — which is different from dark matter -- is composed of the particles, such as protons and electrons, that are found on the Earth, in stars, gas, and so on. A variety of measurements have provided a good estimate of the amount of this "normal matter" present when the Universe was only a few billion years old. However, an inventory of the nearby Universe has turned up only about half as much normal matter, an embarrassingly large shortfall. (read more)
Source: ESA News
NGC 1999: Truly a hole in space. Credit: ESA/Herschel.
ESA’s Herschel infrared space telescope has made an unexpected discovery: a hole in space. The hole has provided astronomers with a surprising glimpse into the end of the star-forming process.
Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas that can now be studied in unprecedented detail with Herschel. Although jets and winds of gas have been seen coming from young stars in the past, it has always been a mystery exactly how a star uses these to blow away its surroundings and emerge from its birth cloud. Now, for the first time, Herschel may be seeing an unexpected step in this process. (read more)
Source: Max-Planck Institut für extraterrestrische Physik
An international team of astronomers from Germany and Japan has discovered the most distant cluster of galaxies known so far - 9.6 billion light years away. The X-ray and infrared observations showed that the cluster hosts predominantly old, massive galaxies, demonstrating that the galaxies formed when the universe was still very young. These and similar observations therefore provide new information not only about early galaxy evolution but also about history of the universe as a whole.(read more)
Source: ESA Science and Technology
Water is an extremely important molecule in the Universe, abundant in a large variety of cosmic environments — from our own blue planet and its neighbourhood, the Solar System, through interstellar clouds where new stars and planets are formed, and even beyond the Milky Way, in star-forming galaxies. Due to the large amount of water vapour present in the Earth's atmosphere, however, astronomical observations of water from ground-based facilities are virtually impossible, even from the driest and highest deserts; they need to be carried out with space observatories.
Herschel's HIFI instrument was especially designed to follow the water trail in the Universe over a wide range of scales, from the Solar System out to extragalactic sources. Early results, presented this week at the Herschel First Results Symposium, demonstrate how HIFI uses water to probe the physical and chemical conditions in different regions of the cosmos.(read more)
