Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.
An infrared image of N103B, the remainders of a supernova that exploded about 1,000 years ago in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Goddard
It might be a bad idea to get close to dead stars. Like a White Walker from Game of Thrones, this “cosmic zombie” white dwarf star was dangerous even though it was just a corpse of a star like our own. The result from this violence is still visible in the Spitzer Space Telescope picture you see above.
Astronomers believe the giant star was shedding material (a common phenomenon in older stars), which fell on to the white dwarf star. As the gas built up on the white dwarf over time, the mass became unstable and the dwarf exploded. What’s left is still lying in a pool of gas about 160,000 light-years away from us.
“It’s kind of like being a detective,” stated Brian Williams of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the research. “We look for clues in the remains to try to figure out what happened, even though we weren’t there to see it.”
This explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud — one of the closest satellite galaxies to Earth — is known as a Type 1a supernova, but it’s a rare breed of that kind. Type 1as are best known as “standard candles” because their explosions have a consistent luminosity. Knowing how luminous the supernova type is allows astronomers to estimate distance based on its apparent brightness; the fainter the supernova is, the further away it is.
Most Type 1as happen when two orbiting white dwarfs smash into each other, but this scenario is more akin to something that Earthlings saw in 1604. Informally called Kepler’s supernova, because it was discovered by astronomer Johannes Kepler, astronomers believe this arose from a red giant and white dwarf interaction. The evidence left for this conclusion showed the supernova leftovers embedded in dust and gas.
Investigators have submitted their results to the Astrophysical Journal.
Artist rendering of a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
It’s oft-repeated that black holes are powerful gravity wells, because they represent a dense concentration of matter in one location. But what about their magnetic fields? A new study suggests that this force could be at least as strong as gravity in supermassive black holes, the singularities that lurk in the center of many galaxies.
Simulations of magnetic fields of gas falling into these beasts suggest that this action — if the gas carries a magnetic field — makes the field stronger until it equals gravity.
Magnetic fields can affect properties such as how luminous black holes appear (in radio) and how powerful the jets emanating from the singularity are. The scientists speculate that when you see bright jets from a black hole, this could imply a strong magnetic field indeed.
A computer simulation of gas (yellow) falling into a black hole, and jets emanating from the singularity. Credit: Alexander Tchekhovskoy (LBNL)
“Surprisingly, the magnetic field strength around these exotic objects is comparable to the magnetic field produced in something more familiar: a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine that you can find in your local hospital,” the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy stated.
“Both supermassive black holes and MRI machines produce magnetic fields that are roughly 10,000 times stronger than the Earth’s surface magnetic field, which is what guides an ordinary compass.”
New information on how strong the magnetic fields was based on recent work with the Very Long Baseline Array, a networked group of radio telescopes in the United States. Specifically, the information came from a program named MOJAVE (Monitoring Of Jets in Active galactic nuclei with VLBA Experiments) that looks at jets around several hundred supermassive black holes.
The researchers emphasized that more observational research will be needed to supplement the simulations. The work will be published today in Nature. Leading the research was Mohammad Zamaninasab, a past researcher at Max Planck.
The word "lightsaber" only appears once in the first Star Wars movie. Credit: Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp./Tom Murphy/YouTube
We all remember the lightsaber fight from Star Wars: A New Hope, yes? So you might be surprised to learn the iconic word was only uttered once in the first film of the franchise.
This revelation comes after an intrepid soul (Tom Murphy) assembled all the English dialog of the movie in the video above, which he calls ARST ARSW. “This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit,” he wrote on YouTube.
If you can make it through all 43 minutes, the Force is indeed strong with you.
Some other fun facts, from a quick browse of the contents:
“Doomed” appears twice (guess C-3PO was feeling optimistic)
“Force” appears 22 times
“Father” appears 12 times
“Hyperspace” appears four times
“Leader” appears 13 times (especially in the X-wing scenes)
“Jabba” appears 9 times
“Luke” appears 57 times
“Obi-Wan” appears 20 times and “Ben” 11 times
“Princess” appears 12 times and “Leia” three times
“Reward” appears six times (remember, that’s what Han Solo wants) and “rich” three times
Galaxy clusters MACS J0717+3745 colliding about five billion light-years away from Earth. This is a composite image of visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope (background), X-ray data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (blue) and radio waves from the Very Large Array (red).Credit: Van Weeren, et al.; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA
Shock waves! Fast-moving particles! Magnetic fields! This image has it all. Behold the merging galaxy clusters MACS J0717+3745 about five billion light-years from our planet.
That funny red thing you see in the center is new data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array showing a spot where “shocks caused by the collisions are accelerating particles that then interact with magnetic fields and emit the radio waves,” officials at the National Radio Astronomical Observatory stated.
“The complex shape of this region is unique; we’ve never spotted anything like this before,” stated Reinout van Weeren, an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “The shape probably is the result of the multiple ongoing collisions.”
This is a composite image of new exposures from VLA and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, with an older image from the Hubble Space Telescope. And if you take a second look, there’s also a black hole: “The straight, elongated radio-emitting object is a foreground galaxy whose central black hole is accelerating jets of particles in two directions,” NRAO added. “The red object at bottom-left is a radio galaxy that probably is falling into the cluster.”
Astronomers presented their findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Boston.
NASA astronaut Ed White floats outside of the Gemini 4 spacecraft June 3, 1965. Credit: NASA
In five decades of spacewalks, we challenge you to find a set of photos that more fully represents the potential of the tumbling gymnastics you can do during a spacewalk.
NASA astronaut Ed White stepped out of his Gemini 4 spacecraft 49 years ago today, equipped in a spacesuit and attached to his spacecraft by nothing more than a tether. These incredible pictures (taken by commander Jim McDivitt) give a sense of how White moved around, propelled by a small maneuvering unit in his hand.
After about 20 minutes of orbital exercises, White was ordered back to the spacecraft. “It’s the saddest moment of my life,” he said. In a NASA oral history interview in 1999, McDivitt later recalled the trouble they had getting him back inside:
NASA astronaut Ed White testing maneuverability during a 23-minute spacewalk on Gemini 4, June 3, 1965. Credit: NASA
I was kind of anxious to have him get back inside the spacecraft, because I’d like to do this in the daylight, not in the dark. But by the time he got back in, it was dark. So, when we went to close the hatch, it wouldn’t close. It wouldn’t lock. And so, in the dark I was trying to fiddle around over on the side where I couldn’t see anything, trying to get my glove down in this little slot to push the gears together. And finally, we got that done and got it latched.
It was the first time any American had done this — but White was not the first in the world. That honor belongs to Alexei Leonov, who pushed out of Vokshod 2 in March 1965. (The Soviet spacewalk was actually quite terrifying, as Leonov had to reduce the pressure in his spacesuit to get back inside the spacecraft.)
Even after White’s triumph, there was much to learn about spacewalking. Several astronauts in later Gemini missions struggled with doing tasks outside the spacecraft because there were not enough handholds to keep a grip in microgravity. It took until Gemini 12 for a combination of astronaut training and spacecraft design to make spacewalking a more controlled procedure — just in time for the Apollo moon program of the 1960s and 1970s.
Below the video about Gemini 4 are several more pictures of White’s adventures in space. Gemini 4 was White’s only spaceflight. He died in a launch pad fire for Apollo 1 on Jan. 27, 1967.
NASA astronaut Ed White during a spacewalk June 3, 1965. In his hand, the Gemini 4 astronaut carries a Hand Held Self Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU) to help him maneuver in microgravity. Credit: NASANASA astronaut Ed White during a 23-minute spacewalk on Gemini 4 June 3, 1965. Credit: NASAAttached by a tether, Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White tests out spacewalking June 4, 1965. Credit: NASA
King of the Nerds promotional poster. Credit: TBS/Facebook
So you know the difference between a bat’leth and a Batmobile, or you can win any board game you get your hands on, or you can easily rhyme off 20 alien species who were in Star Wars. And whatever your nerd or geek cred skills, you’re interested in competition — in showing off what you can do and becoming the best among friends.
If this sounds like attributes similar to what you have, there’s a T.V. show out there for you. It’s called King of the Nerds and it’s casting its third season.
I had the pleasure of watching the last season closely because my former classmate at the University of North Dakota, Kayla LaFrance, participated and won!
I saw a range of colorful competitions, such as playing a modified game of Quidditch or racing go-karts around a darkened track. There were celebrity judges and appearances; as a Star Trek fan, my personal favourite was George Takei (Sulu on the original series). And there were also a disorienting set of skills among the competitors, who had knowledge of anything from space to languages to engineering to even debating skills.
While participating appears to be its own reward, the prize for the winner is a cool $100,000. If this perks your interest, the producers say that applicants should e-mail [email protected] to apply, including your name, phone number, and a brief summary of why you should be on King of the Nerds.
Eligibility is limited to U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older, according to the Facebook page. There are eight episodes ordered for TBS and the show will air in early 2015.
(And by the way, Kayla has no idea I’m writing this article. It’ll be a surprise to her.)
Artist's impression of "mega-Earth" Kepler 10c. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Can you imagine a world that is 17 times as massive as Earth, but still rocky? Or two planets that are doomed to be swallowed up by their parent star in just a blink of astronomical time?
While these scenarios sound like science fiction, these are real-life finds released today (June 2) at the American Astronomical Association meeting in Boston.
Here’s a rundown of the finds about these planets in our ever-more-amazing universe.
‘Mega-Earth’ Kepler-10c
Spinning around its star every 45 days is Kepler-10c, which is about 2.3 times as large as Earth but a heavyweight, at 17 times more massive. The planet was discovered by the prolific NASA Kepler space telescope (which was sidelined after a reaction wheel failed last year, but now has been tasked with a new planet-hunting mandate.)
While initially astronomers thought Kepler-10c was a “mini-Neptune”, or a world that is similar to that planet in our solar system, its mass measured by the HARPS-North instrument on the Galileo National Telescope showed it was a rocky world. What’s more, astronomers believe the planet did not “let go” of any atmosphere over time, which implies the planet’s past is similar to what it was today.
Here’s the other neat thing: astronomers found that the system was 11 billion years old, at a time when the universe was young (it was formed 13.7 billion years ago) and the elements needed to make rocky planets were scarce. This implies that rocky planets could have formed earlier than previously thought.
“I was wrong that old stars do not have rocky planets, which has consequences about the Fermi Paradox,” the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’s (CfA) Dimitar Sasselov said in a webcast press conference today (June 2). The Fermi Paradox, simply put, refers to the question of why we can’t see civilizations since they are assumed to have spread quite a ways since the universe was formed.
Artist’s impression of Kepler-56b being torn apart by its star about 130 million years from today. Its sibling planet, Kepler-56c, will last until 155 million years from now. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
‘We’re doomed!’ Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c
If there was anybody in the vicinity of these two planets, you’d want to move out of the way fairly quickly — at least when talking about astronomical time. Both of these planets, whose orbits are within the equivalent distance of Mercury to the sun, are expected to be swallowed up by their star in 130 million years (for Kepler-56b) and 155 million years (Kepler-56c). It’s the first time two doomed planets have been found in a single system.
“Possibly the core of planet will be left behind and you [will] see this dead corpse floating behind in the universe,” said CfA’s Gongjie Li in the press conference.
There are two factors behind this: the size of the star will enlarge as it gets older (which is typical among stars) and the tidal forces between the planets and their star will also cause them to slow down in their orbits and rip apart. Interestingly enough, another gas giant planet called Kepler-56d will remain safe from most of the chaos since its orbit is equivalent to the asteroid belt in our own solar system.
“Looking at this system is like foreseeing our own solar system,” added Li, referring to the fact that in another five billion years or so our sun will enlarge and swallow Mercury and Venus at the least, boiling off all the oceans on our planet and killing anything left.
Artist’s conception of an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Windy City: Why living near a red dwarf might be a bad idea
One fertile ground for exoplanet discoveries — particularly when looking for planets about Earth’s size in the habitable zone — is red dwarfs, because they are smaller and therefore have less light to obscure any rocky worlds orbiting nearby. A new study warns that they could be less friendly to life than previously believed.
CfA’s Ofer Cohen said that red dwarfs can have intense stellar winds, when looking at the model of a known red dwarf with three planets around it: KOI 1422.02, KOI 2626.01, KOI 584.01. Even a magnetic field the size of Earth would not be able to protect the planet from being stripped of its atmosphere assuming a certain intensity of stellar flares.
A member of the audience pointed out that the red dwarf star under study likely has stronger winds than 95% of all red dwarfs, however. Cohen acknowledged that, but added “the main effect is not the stellar activity, but these giants are close to the star.” All the same, this could require a more nuanced understanding of the habitable zone around these stars, he added.
Artist’s impression of exoplanets. Credit: J. Jauch
Heavy metal: Figuring out how much planets have
In astronomical terms, any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are considered to be “metallic”. Past research found that metal-rich stars tend to have hot Jupiter exoplanets, while the smaller planets have a larger span of metal possibilities.
A team led by CfA’s Lars Buchhave surveyed more than 400 stars with 600 exoplanets, and found that planets smaller than 1.7 times the size of Earth are more likely to be rocky, while those than are 3.9 times the size of Earth or larger are likely gassy.
In between is a zone called “gas dwarfs”, which are planets 1.7 and 3.9 times the size of Earth that likely have hydrogen and helium atmospheres blanketing their surface.
Also intriguing: the researchers discovered that planets far away from their stars can get larger before picking up a lot of gas and becoming a “gas dwarf”, presumably because there isn’t as much gas material out there.
The team also discovered that stars with smaller, Earth-like worlds metallicities like our sun, while stars with “gas dwarfs” have more metals, and stars with gas giants have even more metals. But bear in mind these are for planets close to their host star, which are easiest for Kepler to find. Buchhave plans to do work for planets further away.
Screenshot of a video showing all the Saturn V launches happening at the same time. Credit: SpaceOperaFR/YouTube (screenshot)
Editor’s note:We posted this yesterday only to find that the original video we used had been pulled. Now, we’ve reposted the article with a new and improved version of the video, thanks to Spacecraft Films.
To the moon! The goal people most remember from the Apollo program was setting foot on the surface of our closest neighbor. To get there required a heck of a lot of firepower, bundled in the Saturn V rocket. The video above gives you the unique treat of watching each rocket launch at the same time.
Some notes on the rockets you see:
Apollos 4 and 6 were uncrewed test flights.
Apollo 9 was an Earth-orbit flight to (principally) test the lunar module.
Apollo 8 and 10 were both flights around the moon (with no lunar landing).
Apollo 13 was originally scheduled to land on the moon but famously experienced a dangerous explosionthat forced the astronauts to come back to Earth early — but safely.
Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 safely made it to the moon’s surface and back.
Skylab’s launch was also uncrewed; the Saturn V was used in this case to send a space station into Earth’s orbit that was used by three crews in the 1970s.
You don’t see Apollo 7 pictured here because it did not use the Saturn V rocket; it instead used the Saturn IB. It was an Earth-orbiting flight and the first successful manned one of the Apollo program. (Apollo 1 was the first scheduled crew, but the three men died in a launch pad fire.)
Artist's impression of complex life on other worlds. Credit: PHL @ UPR Arecibo, NASA, Richard Wheeler @Zephyris
What a multitude of worlds! A new study suggests that the Milky Way could host 100 million planets with complex life, leaving no lack of choice for astronomers to look for organisms beyond Earth. The challenge is, however, that these worlds might be too far away from us to do much yet.
“On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that we are alone,” stated Louis Irwin, lead author of the study and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at El Paso. “On the other hand, we are likely so far away from life at our level of complexity, that a meeting with such alien forms is extremely improbable for the foreseeable future.”
The figure came from studying a list of more than 1,000 exoplanets for metrics such as their density, temperature, chemistry, age and distance from the parent star. From this, Irwin’s team formulated a “biological complexity index” that ranges between 0 and 1.0. The index is rated on “the number and degree of characteristics assumed to be important for supporting multiple forms of multicellular life,” the research team stated.
Assuming that Europa (a moon of Jupiter believed to have an ocean below its ice) is a good candiate for life, the team estimated that 1% to 2% of exoplanets would have a BCI that is even higher than that. So to translate that into some estimates: 10 billion stars in the Milky Way, averaging one planet a star, which brings us to 100 million planets minimum.
Artists impression of Gliese 581g. Credit: Lynette Cook/NSF
So what does this metric mean? There’s of course no guarantee that complex life exists in any of these places — just that the conditions could be conducive to life. Also, the researchers added, don’t assume that any life in this category would be intelligent life, but more life that is more complex than a microbe. And the known planets with higher BCIs tend to be pretty far away from us. (One of the closest is the Gliese 581 system, which is 20 light-years away.)
“Planets with the highest BCI values tend to be larger, warmer, and older than Earth,” added Irwin, “so any search for complex or intelligent life that is restricted just to Earth-like planets, or to life as we know it on Earth, will probably be too restrictive.”
Neptune photographed by Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL
Faster than you can say “trans-Neptunian object” three times, the reaches beyond Neptune’s orbit start to fill out in this animation. And it’s astounding. Dots representing icy bodies large and small fill the area.
What’s more sobering is realizing how little we knew about this region 20 years ago. Pluto was the first object in that region discovered in 1930, and it wasn’t until 1992 QB1 was discovered that our understanding of this neighborhood increased, wrote creator Alex Parker, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Made this for a talk I gave today. I think it came out pretty nice,” Parker wrote yesterday (May 29) on Twitter.
Parker added on the video page: “This animation illustrates the approximate relative sizes and the true orbital motion of all known trans-Neptunian objects with average orbital distances (semi-major axes) greater than Neptune’s. The objects are revealed on the date of their discovery. Data extracted from the Minor Planet Center database.”
On Twitter, he also provided a link to another visualization of asteroid discoveries between 1980 and 2011 by Scott Manley:
