Hubble View Of A Nitrogen-Rich Nebula

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a planetary nebula named NGC 6153, located about 4,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).

The faint blue haze across the frame shows what remains of a star like the sun after it has depleted most of its fuel.

When this happens, the outer layers of the star are ejected, and get excited and ionized by the energetic ultraviolet light emitted by the bright hot core of the star, forming the nebula.

NGC 6153 is a planetary nebula that is elliptical in shape, with an extremely rich network of loops and filaments, shown clearly in this Hubble image.

However, this is not what makes this planetary nebula so interesting for astronomers.

Measurements show that NGC 6153 contains large amounts of neon, argon, oxygen, carbon and chlorine — up to three times more than can be found in the solar system.

The nebula contains a whopping five times more nitrogen than our sun!

Although it may be that the star developed higher levels of these elements as it grew and evolved, it is more likely that the star originally formed from a cloud of material that already contained a lot more of these elements.

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'Bashful' Black Hole in Neighboring Galaxy Revealed

Thanks to the extraordinary sensitivity of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have detected what they believe is the long-sought radio emission coming from a supermassive black hole at the center of one of our closest neighboring galaxies.

Evidence for the black hole’s existence previously came only from studies of stellar motions in the galaxy and from X-ray observations.

The galaxy, called Messier 32 (M32), is a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy, our own Milky Way’s giant neighbor. Unlike the Milky Way and Andromeda, which are star-forming spiral galaxies, M32 is an elliptical galaxy, with little star formation. About 2.5 million light-years from Earth, M32 is much smaller than either the Milky Way or Andromeda.

The galaxy M32 is a small satellite of the larger, spiral Andromeda Galaxy (M31), as shown in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The inset is a combined radio/optical/X-ray image of M32. The diffuse purple is the visible starlight of M32.

The central white object in the inset is the center of M32, where there is both radio and X-ray emission. Red shows radio-emitting objects, including a pair of presumed planetary nebulae (left center), and the green is an object strongly emitting X-rays.

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Evidence Of First Generation Stars In The Universe

Astronomers have long theorized the existence of a first generation of stars — known as Population III stars — that were born out of the primordial material from the Big Bang . All the heavier chemical elements — such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and iron, which are essential to life — were forged in the bellies of stars.

This means that the first stars must have formed out of the only elements to exist prior to stars: hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of lithium.

This artist’s impression shows CR7 a very distant galaxy discovered using ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is by far the brightest galaxy yet found in the early Universe and there is strong evidence that examples of the first generation of stars lurk within it.

These massive, brilliant, and previously purely theoretical objects were the creators of the first heavy elements in history — the elements necessary to forge the stars around us today, the planets that orbit them, and life as we know it.

This newly found galaxy is three times brighter than the brightest distant galaxy known up to now.

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The 'Eye Of Medusa' - Unknown Extreme Star Formation Discovered

NOEMA (Northern Extended Millimeter Array), the most powerful millimeter radio telescope of the Northern Hemisphere, has unveiled its first astronomical image: a unique and spectacular view of a previously unknown region of extreme star formation in the ‘Medusa merger’ – a luminous collision of two galaxies at more than 100 million light years from Earth.

The multi-wavelength image shows the ‘Eye of Medusa’ (orange) located directly below the black hole at the center of NGC 4149 (white and green).

The observations, conducted by IRAM using the new NOEMA observatory in the French Alps, reveal a giant region (about 500 light years across) of recently formed massive stars at the center of the ‘Eye of Medusa’, the central gas-rich region of the Medusa merger. The stars are still wrapped in their dusty birth clouds and completely hidden from view in visible light.

Other observatories have previously mapped the Medusa merger but none had detected the existence of this region of high-density gas in the ‘Eye’ until now. The new discovery has not only proven its existence, but also has implications for our understanding of the origins of the Universe and will influence future investigative techniques.

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A Look into the Deep Interiors of Stars and Planets

The matter that makes up distant planets and even-more-distant stars exists under extreme pressure and temperature conditions. This matter includes members of a family of seven elements called the noble gases, some of which–such as helium and neon–are household names.

Alexander Goncharov, Stewart McWilliams, and the rest of the team’s work on noble gases could help solve the mystery of why Saturn emits more heat from its interior than would be expected. In Jupiter and Saturn, helium would be insulating near the surface and turn metal-like at depths close to both planet’s cores, where it is also predicted to be dissolved in hydrogen.

 But neon behaved differently in the laboratory conditions mimicking the two gas giants. In Saturn, it would remain an insulator even at the core. As such, an ocean-like envelope of undissolved neon could collect deep within the planet and prevent the erosion of Saturn’s core compared to its neighbor, Jupiter.

New work from a team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Alexander Goncharov used laboratory techniques to mimic stellar and planetary conditions, and observe how noble gases behave under these conditions, in order to better understand the atmospheric and internal chemistry of these celestial objects. Their work is published the week of June 15 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team used a diamond-anvil cell to bring the noble gases helium, neon, argon, and xenon to more than 100,000 times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere (15-52 gigapascals), and used a laser to heat them to temperatures ranging up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 28,000 degrees Kelvin).

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Researchers Find Brightest Galaxy In The Known Universe 

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has found the brightest galaxy in the known universe.

This galaxy, fondly named WISE J224607.57-052635.0, emits over 300 trillion times more light than our sun.

This new discovery is part of a category of celestial objects termed “extremely luminous infrared galaxies”, or ELIRGs.

The main source of the galaxy’s energy output is a supermassive black hole at its center. When a large black hole pulls in surrounding matter, the gravity and friction of the matter orbiting the edge of the event horizon superheats the material, causing it to release energy in the form of light. This kind of black hole, which compresses the matter around it into a luminous disk, is called a quasar.

Although quasars are not rare, the example at the center of WISE J224607.57-052635.0 is unique because of its age relative to the mass of its black hole.

Although the images we see of this quasar and its galaxy are over 12.5 billion years old, it was already sustaining a gravitational pull of billions of times the mass of our sun, even when the universe was only about one tenth of its now 13.8 billion year age.

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Building A Supermassive Black Hole 

This month at the Science Club Nashville, we were privy to Dr. Jillian Bellovary, a Bridge Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Physics & Astronomy Department.

She started us off nicely with an easy-to-grasp introduction into black holes, then segued into the meat of her presentation: using cosmological simulations to study how galaxies and supermassive black holes form over cosmic time.

In her far more professional terms:

“I use the SPH+Nbody code Gasoline to study how massive black holes form and grow in a cosmological context. 

I am interested in seed formation, triggers of black hole growth, wandering black holes, intermediate mass black holes, the co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies, searching for massive black holes in dwarf galaxies, and making predictions for gravitational wave detectors, because maybe some day there will be some.”

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Cosmic Murder Mystery: Galactic Death By Strangulation 

As murder mysteries go, it’s a big one: how do galaxies die and what kills them? A new study, published today in the journal Nature, has found that the primary cause of galactic death is strangulation, which occurs after galaxies are cut off from the raw materials needed to make new stars.This is an artist’s impression of one of the possible galaxy strangulation mechanisms: star-forming galaxies (fed by gas inflows) are accreted into a massive hot halo, which ‘strangles’ them and leads to their death.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh have found that levels of metals contained in dead galaxies provide key ‘fingerprints’, making it possible to determine the cause of death.

There are two types of galaxies in the Universe: roughly half are ‘alive’ galaxies which produce stars, and the other half are ‘dead’ ones which don’t. Alive galaxies such as our own Milky Way are rich in the cold gas – mostly hydrogen – needed to produce new stars, while dead galaxies have very low supplies. What had been unknown is what’s responsible for killing the dead ones.

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Comet Wild 2 And A Glimpse Into The Birth Of The Solar System 

Our solar system, and other planetary systems, started as a disk of microscopic dust, gas, and ice around the young Sun. The amazing diversity of objects in the solar system today – the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets – was made from this primitive dust.

NASA’s Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples of comet Wild 2, a comet that originated outside the orbit of Neptune and was subsequently kicked closer to Earth’s orbit in 1974 when Jupiter’s gravity altered Wild 2′s orbit.

Three larger rocks, each containing several crystals, from comet Wild 2 are shown on the left of this image in cross-section, as imaged by an electron microscope. Fine-grained dust from the comet, still embedded in the aerogel it was captured in, is shown at right. All images are at the same scale; 5 micrometer scale bar is shown.

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Star’s Death Reveals Something New 

New results from the NASA NuSTAR telescope show that a supernova close to our galaxy experienced a single-sided explosion.

A team of scientists including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers found that X-ray emissions taken with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) show that the Supernova 1987A explosion was highly asymmetric. The results appear in the May 8 edition of the journal, Science.

This image shows the remnant of Supernova 1987A seen in light of very different wavelengths. Data (in red) show newly formed dust in the center of the remnant. Data in green and blue show where the expanding shock wave is colliding with a ring of material around the supernova. This ring was initially lit up by the ultraviolet flash from the original explosion, but over the past few years the ring material has brightened considerably as it collides with the expanding shockwave.

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Star Reveals A Secret 

To measure distances in the Universe, astronomers use Cepheids, a family of variable stars whose luminosity varies with time. Their role as distance calibrators has brought them attention from researchers for more than a century.

While it was thought that nearly everything was known about the prototype of Cepheids, named Delta Cephei, a team of researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the Johns Hopkins University, and the European Space Agency (ESA), have now discovered that this star is not alone, but that it has a hidden companion. A revelation published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Delta Cephei, prototype of Cepheids, which has given its name to all similar variable stars, was discovered 230 years ago by the English astronomer, John Goodricke. Since the early 20th century, scientists have been interested in measuring cosmic distances using a relationship between these stars’ periods of pulsation and their luminosities (intrinsic brightness), discovered by the American Henrietta Leavitt.

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The First Stars 

The first stars in the Universe were born several hundred million years after the Big Bang, ending a period known as the cosmological ‘dark ages’ – when atoms of hydrogen and helium had formed, but nothing shone in visible light.

 Now two Canadian researchers have calculated what these objects were like: they find that the first stars could have clustered together in phenomenally bright groups, with periods when they were as luminous as 100 million Suns. Alexander DeSouza and Shantanu Basu, both of the University of Western Ontario in Canada, publish their results in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

 An artist’s impression of some of the first stars in the early Universe. Five protostars are seen here forming in the center of disks of gas.

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Volcano Loki And Lava Lake Observed From Earth 

With the first detailed observations of a lava lake on a moon of Jupiter, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Arizona places itself as the forerunner of the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. The applied high-resolution imaging methods were developed by an international research team including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

This is an interferometric image of Jupiter’s moon Io taken with the LBT on Dec. 24, 2013 (left) compared to a satellite image on the basis of images from NASA space missions like Voyager 1 and 2 or Galileo (right). The lava lake of the Loki volcano can be seen in dark red on the LBT image. The circles mark the positions of further volcanoes on Io.

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Giant Cosmic Tsunami Awakens Comatose Galaxies 

Galaxies are often found in clusters, with many ‘red and dead’ neighbors that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers, led by Andra Stroe of Leiden Observatory and David Sobral of Leiden and the University of Lisbon, have discovered that these comatose galaxies can sometimes come back to life. If clusters of galaxies merge, a huge shock wave can drive the birth of a new generation of stars – the sleeping galaxies get a new lease of life. The scientists publish their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A radio image highlighting the shock wave (seen here as the bright arc running from bottom left to top right) in the ‘Sausage’ merging cluster, made using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. The shock wave was generated 1 billion years ago, when the two original clusters collided, and is moving at a very high speed of 9 million kilometers per hour.

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Visible This Month: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn 

Grab your telescopes and look to the heavens, because four of our solar system’s planet will be visible in the night sky this month, according to a video posted to YouTube earlier this week by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The video, narrated by JPL astronomer and senior outreach specialist for the US space agency’s Cassini mission to Saturn Jane Houston Jones, revealed that at different times during the month of May, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn will all be visible to stargazers.

Mercury and Venus

Mercury and Venus will become visible in the west-northwest part of the sky approximately one hour after sunset during the early part of the month. To see Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, you should look about 10 degrees above the horizon.

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Automatic Planet Finder Discovers 3 Planets 

Automation has already changed so many aspects of society, from how we manufacture cars to how we order fast food, and now astronomers are leveraging this computer technology to find new planets outside of our solar system.

A new study, set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, has revealed that three new exoplanets were discovered with the help of the Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope at Lick Observatory in California. This telescope robotically scans the sky on clear nights.

According to the report, all three planets in system HD 7924 revolve around their star at a distance closer than Mercury orbits our own Sun – giving them extremely short years of 5, 15, and 24 days.

In a University of Hawaii press release, study author BJ Fulton, a graduate student at the university, explained the impetus for leveraging automation in the hunt of new planets.

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Astronomers Discover Pulsar With Widest Orbit Ever 

A newly discovered pulsar has the widest orbit ever discovered around a neutron star and is part of a rare double neutron star system, and could help astronomers gain new insight as to how such systems form and evolve, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has announced.

Perhaps more impressively, the discovery (reported in a paper scheduled for publication in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal) was made by a pair of high school students who were analyzing data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia.

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Sombrero Galaxy To Be Visible Friday Night 

Astronomy enthusiasts have a golden opportunity to see what National Geographic refers to as a “stunning galaxy” on Friday night, as Messier 104 – better known as the Sombrero Galaxy – will be visible in the southern part of the sky, according to the website.

Messier 104 is “is a dramatic-looking telescope object with a distinctive dark dust lane that cuts right across its bright core, giving it a strong resemblance to its namesake,” they added. It is one of the brightest and most famous galaxies that can be seen using household telescopes.

Stargazers can track down the galaxy by mentally drawing a line from the moon to Gienah, a bright star that is located 165 light-years away in the constellation Corvus, Nat Geo said. Then, using either a good set of binoculars or a small backyard telescope, scan to the midpoint of this line in search of “a faint, fuzzy oval patch.” That object will be Messier 104.

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Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Visible Next Two Weeks 

Hot on the heels of last week’s peak viewing conditions for the Lyrid meteor shower comes the Eta Aquarids, which will become visible this week before peaking on Tuesday, May 6.

The Eta Aquarids are viewable in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres during pre-dawn hours, according to NASA, though the view is typically better in the South. National Geographic noted that stargazers should be able to see between five and 10 shooting stars per hour before the sun rises if they view from a dark location during its peak next week.

When viewing the Eta Aquarids, NASA recommends finding an area located far away from any artificial lights, and to bring a blanket, lawn chair or sleeping bag. Enthusiasts should lie on their backs with their feet facing east and look up, making certain to keep their eyes on as much of the sky as possible. After 30 minutes or so, their eyes will adapt and meteors will become visible.

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Here’s The Most Comprehensive Map Of The Universe Ever Produced 

You can now take a colorful 2 billion light year 3D joyride through the universe, courtesy of a couple of very cool videos from the University of Waterloo.

British and French astrophysicists worked together to draw up most comprehensive map of the universe ever produced and turned it into the movies above (and one below). It reminded us of a run-through of the human brain in MRI scans.

The map itself is a spherical representation of galaxy superclusters. Its creators hope it will provide key insights into one of physics’ greatest mysteries, dark matter.

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