Posted on by Shannon Hall

New Image Captures one of the Brightest Volcanoes Ever Seen in the Solar System

Image of Io taken in the near-infrared with adaptive optics at the Gemini North telescope on August 29. In addition to the extremely bright eruption on the upper right limb of the satellite, the lava lake Loki is visible in the middle of Io’s disk, as well as the fading eruption that was detected earlier in the month by de Pater on the southern (bottom) limb. Io is about one arcsecond across. Image credit: Katherine de Kleer/UC Berkeley/Gemini Observatory/AURA

Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io — with over 400 active volcanoes, extensive lava flows and floodplains of liquid rock — is by far the most geologically active body in the Solar System. But last August, Io truly came alive with volcanism.

Three massive volcanic eruptions led astronomers to speculate that these presumed rare outbursts were much more common than previously thought. Now, an image from the Gemini Observatory captures what is one of the brightest volcanoes ever seen in our Solar System.

“We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they’re usually not this bright,” said lead author Imke de Pater from the University of California, Berkeley, in a press release. In fact, only 13 large eruptions were observed between 1978 and 2006. “Here we had three extremely bright outbursts, which suggest that if we looked more frequently we might see many more of them on Io.”

De Pater discovered the first two eruptions on August 15, 2013, from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The brightest was calculated to have produced a 50 square-mile, 30-feet thick lava flow, while the other produced flows covering 120 square miles. Both were nearly gone when imaged days later.

The third and even brighter eruption was discovered on August 29, 2013, at the Gemini observatory by UC Berkeley graduate student Katherine de Kleer. It was the first of a series of observations monitoring Io.

Images of Io taken in the near-infrared with adaptive optics at the Gemini North telescope tracking the evolution of the eruption as it decreased in intensity over 12 days. Due to Io’s rapid rotation, a different area of the surface is viewed on each night; the outburst is visible with diminishing brightness on August 29 & 30 and September 1, 3, & 10. Image credit: Katherine de Kleer/UC Berkeley/Gemini Observatory/AURA
Images of Io tracking the evolution of the eruption as it decreased in intensity over 12 days. Due to Io’s rapid rotation, a different area of the surface is viewed on each night; the outburst is visible with diminishing brightness on August 29 & 30 and September 1, 3, & 10. Image credit: Katherine de Kleer / UC Berkeley / Gemini Observatory / AURA

De Kleer and colleagues were able to track the heat of the third outburst for almost two weeks after its discovery. The team timed observations from Gemini and NASA’s nearby Infrared Telescope Facility to coincide with observations by the Japanese HISAKI spacecraft.

This allowed the observations to “represent the best day-by-day coverage of such an eruption,” said de Kleer. The team was able to conclude that the energy emitted from the late-August eruption was about 20 Terawatts, and expelled many cubic kilometers of lava.

“At the time we observed the event, an area of newly-exposed lava on the order of tens of square kilometers was visible,” said de Kleer. “We believe that it erupted in fountains from long fissures on Io’s surface, which were over ten-thousand-times more powerful than the lava fountains during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland, for example.”

The team hopes that monitoring Io’s surface annually will reveal the style of volcanic eruptions on the moon, the composition of the magma, and the spatial distribution of the heat flows. The eruptions may also shed light on an early Earth, when heat from the decay of radioactive elements — as opposed to the tidal forces influencing Io — created exotic, high-temperature lavas.

“We are using Io as a volcanic laboratory, where we can look back into the past of the terrestrial planets to get a better understanding of how these large eruptions took place, and how fast and how long they lasted,” said coauthor Ashley Davies.

The latest results have been published in the journal Icarus.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Hubble Spots Farthest Lensing Galaxy Yet

Credit: NASA, ESA, K.-V. Tran (Texas A&M University), and K. Wong (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics)

Sometimes there’s a chance alignment — faraway in the universe, where objects are separated by unimaginable distances measured in billions of light-years — when a galaxy cluster in the foreground intersects light from an even more distant object. The conjunction plays visual tricks, where the galaxy cluster acts like a lens, appearing to magnify and bend the distant light.

The rare cosmic alignment can bring the distant universe into view. Now, astronomers have stumbled upon a surprise: they’ve detected the most distant cosmic magnifying glass yet.

Seen above as it looked 9.6 billion years ago, this monster elliptical galaxy breaks the previous record holder by 200 million light-years. It’s bending, distorting and magnifying the distant spiral galaxy, whose light has taken 10.7 billion years to reach Earth.

“When you look more than 9 billion years ago in the early universe, you don’t expect to find this type of galaxy-galaxy lensing at all,” said lead researcher Kim-Vy Tran from Texas A&M University in a Hubble press release.

“Imagine holding a magnifying glass close to you and then moving it much farther away. When you look through a magnifying glass held at arm’s length, the chances that you will see an enlarged object are high. But if you move the magnifying glass across the room, your chances of seeing the magnifying glass nearly perfectly aligned with another object beyond it diminishes.”

The team was studying star formation in data collected by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai’i, when they came across a strong detection of hot hydrogen gas that appeared to arise form a massive, bright elliptical galaxy. It struck the team as odd. Hot hydrogen is a clear sign of star birth, but it was detected in a galaxy that looked far too old to be forming new stars.

“I was very surprised and worried,” Tran recalled. “I thought we had made a major mistake with our observations.”

So Tran dug through archived Hubble images, which revealed a smeared, blue object next to the larger elliptical. It was the clear signature of a gravitational lens.

“We discovered that light from the lensing galaxy and from the background galaxy were blended in the ground-based data, which was confusing us,” said coauthor Ivelina Momcheva of Yale University. “The Keck spectroscopic data hinted that something interesting was going on here, but only with Hubble’s high-resolution spectroscopy were we able to separate the lensing galaxy from the more distant background galaxy and determine that the two were at different distances. The Hubble data also revealed the telltale look of the system, with the foreground lens in the middle, flanked by a bright arc on one side and a faint smudge on the other — both distorted images of the background galaxy. We needed the combination of imaging and spectroscopy to solve the puzzle.”

By gauging the intensity of the background galaxy’s light, the team was able to measure the giant galaxy’s total mass. All in all it weighs 180 billion times more than our Sun. Although this may seem big, it actually weighs four times less than the Milky Way galaxy.

“There are hundreds of lens galaxies that we know about, but almost all of them are relatively nearby, in cosmic terms,” said lead author Kenneth Wong from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics. “To find a lens as far away as this one is a very special discovery because we can learn about the dark-matter content of galaxies in the distant past. By comparing our analysis of this lens galaxy to the more nearby lenses, we can start to understand how that dark-matter content has evolved over time.”

Interestingly, the lensing galaxy is underweight in terms of its dark-matter content. In the past, astronomers have assumed that dark matter and normal matter build up equally in a galaxy over time. But this galaxy, suggests this is not the case.

The team’s results appeared in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available online.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Surprise! Classical Novae Produce Gamma Rays

These images show Fermi data centered on each of the four gamma-ray novae observed by the LAT. Colors indicate the number of detected gamma rays with energies greater than 100 million electron volts (blue indicates lowest, yellow highest). Image Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

In a classical nova, a white dwarf siphons material off a companion star, building up a layer on its surface until the temperature and pressure are so high (a process which can take tens of thousands of years) that its hydrogen begins to undergo nuclear fusion, triggering a runaway reaction that detonates the accumulated gas.

The bright outburst, which releases up to 100,000 times the annual energy output of our Sun, can blaze for months. All the while, the white dwarf remains intact, with the potential of going nova again.

It’s a relatively straightforward picture — as far as complex astrophysics goes. But new observations with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope unexpectedly show that three classical novae — V959 Monocerotis 2012, V1324 Scorpii 2012, and V339 Delphini 2013 — and one rare nova, also produce gamma rays, the most energetic form of light.

“There’s a saying that one is a fluke, two is a coincidence, and three is a class, and we’re now at four novae and counting with Fermi,” said lead author Teddy Cheung from the Naval Research Laboratory in a press release.

The first nova detected in gamma rays was V407 Cygni — a rare star system in which a white dwarf interacts with a red giant — in March 2010.

One explanation for the gamma-ray emission is that the blast from the nova hits the hefty wind from the red giant, creating a shock wave that accelerates any charged particles to near the speed of light. These rapid particles, in turn, produce gamma rays.

But the gamma-ray peak follows the optical peak by a couple of days. This likely happens because the material the white dwarf ejects initially blocks the high-energy photons from escaping. So the gamma rays cannot escape until the material expands and thins.

But the later three novae are from systems that don’t have red giants and therefore their winds. There’s nothing for the blast wave to crash into.

“We initially thought of V407 Cygni as a special case because the red giant’s atmosphere is essentially leaking into space, producing a gaseous environment that interacts with the explosion’s blast wave,” said coauthor Steven Shore from the University of Pisa. “But this can’t explain more recent Fermi detections because none of those systems possess red giants.”

In a more typical system it’s likely that the blast creates multiple shock waves that expand into space at slightly different speeds. Faster shocks could blast into slower ones, creating the interaction necessary to produce gamma rays. Although, the team remains unsure if this is the case.

Astronomers estimate that between 20 and 50 novae occur each year in the Milky Way galaxy. Most go undetected, their visible light obscured by intervening dust, and their gamma rays dimmed by distance. Hopefully, future observations of nearby novae will shed light on the mysterious process producing gamma rays.

The results will appear in Science on August 1.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Numerous Jets Spied with New Sky Survey

Caption: The area shown here was part of the very first image taken for the UWISH2 survey. It shows on the top a region of massive star formation (called G35.2N) with two spectacular jets. On the bottom an intermediate mass young stellar cluster (Mercer14) can be seen. Several jets are visible in its vicinity, as well as a region of photo-ionized material surrounding a young massive star. Credit: University of Kent

Jets — narrow beams of matter spat out at a high speed — typically accompany the most enigmatic astronomical objects. We see them wherever gas accretes onto compact objects, such as newborn stars or black holes. But never before have astronomers detected so many at once.

This remarkable discovery is expected to prompt significant changes in our understanding of the planetary nebulae population in the Galaxy, as well as properties of jets ejected from young forming stars.

The results come from a five-year survey (officially dubbed UWISH2) covering approximately 180 degrees of the northern sky, or 1450 times the size of the full moon. The survey utilizes the 3.8-meter UK Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i.

Caption: This image shows a field that contains a newly discovered photogenic planetary nebulae. Internally dubbed by the research team as the "Jelly-Fish PN" it shows an almost circular ring of emission from molecular hydrogen with a variety of structure in the ring itself and inside. The central ionizing source responsible for the radiation is a white dwarf, which is too faint at the near infrared wavelengths to be visible in the image. Image Credit: University of Kent
This image shows a field that contains a newly discovered photogenic planetary nebulae, known as “Jelly-Fish PN.” It shows an almost circular ring of emission from molecular hydrogen with a variety of structure in the ring itself and inside. Image Credit: University of Kent

At these longer wavelengths, any cosmic dust becomes transparent, allowing us to see regions previously hidden from view. This includes jets from protostars and planetary nebulae, as well as supernova remnants, the illuminated edges of vast clouds of gas and dust, and the warm regions that envelope massive stars and their associated clusters of smaller stars.

Based on current estimates using these data, the project expects to identify about 1000 jets from young stars — at least 90 percent of which are new discoveries — as well as 300 planetary nebulae — at least 50 percent of which are also new.

“These discoveries are very exciting,” said lead author Dirk Froebrich from the University of Kent in a press release. “We will ultimately have much better statistics, meaning we will be able to investigate the physical mechanisms that determine the jet lengths, as well as their power. This will bring us much closer to answering some of the fundamental questions of star formation: How are these jets launched and how much energy, mass and momentum do they feed back into the surrounding interstellar medium.”

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Early Tidal and Rotational Forces Helped Shape Moon

Using a precision formation-flying technique, the twin GRAIL spacecraft will map the moon's gravity field, as depicted in this artist's rendering. Radio signals traveling between the two spacecraft provide scientists the exact measurements required as well as flow of information not interrupted when the spacecraft are at the lunar farside, not seen from Earth. The result should be the most accurate gravity map of the moon ever made. The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, including the size of a possible inner core, and it should provide scientists with a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed. GRAIL is a part of NASA's Discovery Program. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The shape of the moon deviates from a simple sphere in a way that scientists have struggled to explain. But new research shows that tidal forces during the moon’s early history can explain most of its large-scale topography. As the moon cooled and solidified more than four billion years ago, the sculpting effects of tidal and rotational forces became frozen in place.

Astronomers think the moon formed when a rogue planet, larger than Mars, struck the Earth in a great, glancing blow. A cloud rose 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) above the Earth, where it condensed into innumerable solid particles that orbited the Earth. Over time these moonlets combined to form the moon.

So the moon was sculpted by Earth’s gravity from the get-go. Although scientists have long postulated that tidal forces helped shape the molten moon, the new study provides a much more detailed understanding of the additional forces at play.

Ian Garrick-Bethell from UCSC and colleagues studied topographic data gathered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and information about the moon’s gravity field collected by the agency’s twin GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft.

Not long after the moon’s formation, the crust was decoupled from the mantle below by an intervening ocean of magma. This caused immense tidal forces. At the poles, where the flexing and heating was greatest, the crust became thinner, while the thickest crust formed at the equators. Garrick-Bethel likened this to a lemon shape with the long axis of the lemon pointing at the Earth.

But this process does not explain why the bulge is now only found on the far side of the moon. You would expect to see it on both sides, because tides have a symmetrical effect.

“In 2010, we found one area that fits the tidal heating effect, but that study left open the rest of the moon and didn’t include the tidal-rotational deformation. In this paper we tried to bring all those considerations together,” said Garrick-Bethell in a press release.

Any rotational forces would cause the spinning moon to flatten slightly at the poles and bulge out near the equator. It would have had a similar effect on the moon’s shape as the tidal heating did — both of which left distinct signatures in the moon’s gravity field. Because the crust is lighter than the underlying mantle, gravity signals reveal variations in the moon’s internal structure, many of which may be due to previous forces.

Interestingly, Garrick-Bethell and colleagues discovered that the moon’s overall gravity field is no longer aligned with the topography. The long axis of the moon doesn’t point directly toward Earth as it likely did when the moon first formed; instead, it’s offset by about 30 degrees.

“The moon that faced us a long time ago has shifted, so we’re no longer looking at the primordial face of the moon,” said Garrick-Bethell. “Changes in the mass distribution shifted the orientation of the moon. The craters removed some mass, and there were also internal changes, probably related to when the moon became volcanically active.”

The details and timing of these processes are still uncertain, but the new analysis should help shed light on the tidal and rotational forces abundant throughout the Solar System and the Galaxy. These simple forces, after all, have helped shape our nearest neighbor and the most distant exoplanet.

The results have been published today in Nature.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Mysterious Molecules in Space Named?

The diffuse interstellar bands. Image Credit: P. Jenniskens, F. X. Desert

It’s a well-kept secret that the vacuum of space is not — technically speaking — a vacuum. Strong winds generated from supernova explosions push material into the interstellar medium, tainting space with the heavier elements generated by nuclear fusion. These lonely molecules account for a significant amount of all the hydrogen, carbon, silicon, and other atoms in the Universe.

Although these molecules remain mysterious, since we don’t know their exact chemical composition or atomic arrangements, they’re likely the cause of diffuse interstellar bands: unknown fingerprints within the spectra of distant astronomical objects.

New research, however, offers a tantalizing new possibility: these mysterious molecules may be silicon hydrocarbons.

Researchers on Earth should be able to identify the interstellar molecules easily. They simply have to demonstrate which molecules in the laboratory absorb light at the same wavelengths as the diffuse interstellar bands. But despite decades of effort, the identity of the molecules has remained a mystery.

“Not a single one has been definitively assigned to a specific molecule,” said coauthor Neil Reilly from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in a press release.

Now, Michael McCarthy from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Reilly, and their colleagues are pointing to an unusual set of molecules — silicon-terminated carbon chain radicals such as SiC3H, SiC4H and SC5H — as potential twins to those found in interstellar space.

The researchers, however, were unable to create every spectral absorption line (over 400) responsible for the diffuse interstellar bands. But they think that longer molecules in this silicon-containing hydrocarbon family might cause the lines.

Absorption wavelength as a function of the number of carbon atoms in the silicon-terminated carbon chains SiC_(2n+1)H, for the extremely strong pi-pi electronic transitions. When the chain contains 13 or more carbon atoms - not significantly longer than carbon chains already known to exist in space - these strong transitions overlap with the spectral region occupied by the elusive diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs). CREDIT: D. Kokkin, ASU
Absorption wavelength as a function of the number of carbon atoms in the silicon-terminated carbon chains SiC_(2n+1)H. When the chain contains 13 or more carbon atoms — not significantly longer than carbon chains already known to exist in space — these strong transitions overlap with the spectral region occupied by the elusive diffuse interstellar bands. Image Credit: D. Kokkin, ASU

So the group remains cautious. History shows that while many possibilities have been proposed as the source of diffuse interstellar bands, none have been proven definitely. And they certainly need to conduct further research before they can say with certainty they’ve identified the mysterious interstellar molecules.

“The interstellar medium is a fascinating environment,” said McCarthy. “Many of the things that are quite abundant there are really unknown on Earth.”

Posted on by Shannon Hall

ALMA Observes Binary Star System with Wacky Disks

ALMA data of HK Tau shown in a composite image with Hubble infrared and optical data. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); K. Stapelfeldt et al. (NASA/ESA Hubble)

When it comes to exoplanets, we’ve discovered an array of extremes — alien worlds that seem more like science fiction than reality. But there are few environments more extreme than a binary star system in which planet formation can occur. Powerful gravitational perturbations from the two stars can easily grind a planet to dust, let alone prevent it from forming in the first place.

A new study has uncovered a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming disks in the young binary star system HK Tau. It’s the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary disks around a double star, shedding light on the birth and eventual orbit of the planets in a multiple star system.

The “Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has given us an unprecedented view of a main star and its binary companion sporting mutually misaligned protoplanetary disks,” said Eric Jensen from Swarthmore College in a press release. “In fact, we may be seeing the formation of a solar system that may never settle down.”

The two stars in the system — located roughly 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus — are less than four million years old and are separated by about 58 billion kilometers, or 13 times the distance of Neptune from the Sun.

ALMA’s high sensitivity and unprecedented resolution allowed Jensen and colleagues to fully resolve the rotation of HK Tau’s two protoplanetary disks.

“It’s easier to observe spread-out gas and dust because it has more surface area – just in the same way that it might be hard to see a small piece of chalk from a distance, but if you ground up the chalk and dispersed the cloud of chalk dust, you could see it from farther away,” Jensen told Universe Today.

The key velocity data taken with ALMA that helped the astronomers determine that the disks in HK Tau were misaligned. The red areas represent material moving away from Earth and the blue indicates material moving toward us. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
The key velocity data taken with ALMA. The red areas represent material moving away from Earth and the blue indicates material moving toward us. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)

The carbon monoxide gas orbits both stars in two broad belts that are clearly rotating — the side spinning away from us is redshifted, while the side spinning toward us is blueshifted.

“What we find in this binary system is that the two orbiting disks are oriented very differently from each other, with about a 60 or 70 degree angle between their orbital planes,” Jensen told Universe Today. Because the disks are so misaligned it’s clear that at least one is also out of sync with the orbit of their host stars.

“This clear misalignment has given us a remarkable look at a young binary star system,” said coauthor Rachel Akeson from the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. “Though there have been hints before that this type of misaligned system exists, this is the cleanest and most striking example.”

Stars and planets form out of vast clouds of dust and gas. Small pockets in these clouds collapse under the pull of gravity. But as the pocket shrinks, it spins rapidly, with the outer region flattening into a turbulent disk. Eventually the central pocket becomes so hot and dense that it ignites nuclear fusion — in the birth of a star — while the outer disk — now the protoplanetary disk — begins to form planets.

Despite forming from a flat, regular disk, planets can end up in highly eccentric orbits, and may be misaligned with the star’s equator. One likely explanation is that a binary companion star influences them — but only if its orbit is initially misaligned with the planets.

“Because these disks are misaligned with the binary orbit, then so too will be the orbits of any planets they form,” Jensen told Universe Today. “So in the long run, the binary companion will influence those planet orbits, causing them to oscillate and tend to come more into line with the binary orbit, and at the same time become more eccentric.”

Looking forward, the researchers want to determine if this type of system is typical or not. If it is, then tidal forces from companion stars may easily explain the orbital properties that make the present sample of exoplanets so unlike the planets of our own Solar System.

The results will appear in Nature on July 31, 2014.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

GAIA is “Go” for Science After a few Minor Hiccups

Gaia Camera Array - Credit: Astrium / ESA

In astronomy we throw around the term “light-year” seemingly as fast as light itself travels. And yet actually measuring this distance is incredibly tricky. A star’s parallax — its tiny apparent shift once a year caused by our moving viewpoint on Earth — tells its distance more truly than any other method.

Accurate parallaxes of nearby stars form the base of the entire cosmic distance ladder out to the farthest galaxies. It’s a crucial science that’s about to take a giant leap forward. The European Space Agency’s long-awaited Gaia observatory — launched on Dec. 19, 2013 — is now ready to begin its science mission. Continue reading “GAIA is “Go” for Science After a few Minor Hiccups”

Posted on by Shannon Hall

X-ray Glow: Evidence of a Local Hot Bubble Carved by a Supernova

An artist's conception of the hot local bubble. Image Credit: NASA

I spent this past weekend backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park, where although the snow-swept peaks and the dangerously close wildlife were staggering, the night sky stood in triumph. Without a fire, the stars, a few planets, and the surprisingly bright Milky Way provided the only light to guide our way.

But the night sky as seen by the human eye is relatively dark. Little visible light stretching across the cosmos from stars, nebulae, and galaxies actually reaches Earth. The entire night sky as seen by an X-ray detector, however, glows faintly.

The origins of the soft X-ray glow permeating the sky have been highly debated for the past 50 years. But new findings show that it comes from both inside and outside the Solar System.

Decades of mapping the sky in X-rays with energies around 250 electron volts — about 100 times the energy of visible light — revealed soft emission across the sky. And astronomers have long searched for its source.

At first, astronomers proposed a “local hot bubble” of gas — likely carved by a nearby supernova explosion during the past 20 million years — to explain the X-ray background. Improved measurements made it increasingly clear that the Sun resides in a region where interstellar gas is unusually sparse.

But the local bubble explanation was challenged when astronomers realized that comets were an unexpected source of soft X-rays. In fact, this process, known as solar wind charge exchange, can occur anywhere atoms interact with solar wind ions.

After this discovery, astronomers turned their eyes to within the Solar System and began to wonder whether the X-ray background might be produced by the ionized particles in the solar wind colliding with diffuse interplanetary gas.

In order to solve the outstanding mystery, a team of astronomers led by Massimilliano Galeazzi from the University of Miami developed an X-ray instrument capable of taking the necessary measurements.

Galeazzi and colleagues rebuilt, tested, calibrated, and adapted X-ray detectors originally designed by the University of Wisconsin and flown on sounding rockets in the 1970s. The mission was named DXL, for Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local Galaxy.

On Dec. 12, 2012, DXL launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico atop a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket. It reached a peak altitude of 160 miles and spent a total of five minutes above Earth’s atmosphere.

The data collected show that the emission is dominated by the local hot bubble, with, at most, 40 percent originating from within the Solar System.

“This is a significant discovery,” said lead author Massimiliano Galeazzi from the University of Miami in a press release. “Specifically, the existence or nonexistence of the local bubble affects our understanding of the galaxy in the proximity to the Sun and can be used as foundation for future models of the Galaxy structure.”

It’s now clear that the Solar System is currently passing through a small cloud of cold interstellar gas as it moves through the Milky Way.

Colors indicate the density of interstellar helium near Earth and its enhancement in a downstream cone as the neutral atoms respond to the sun's gravity (blue is low density, red is high). Also shown are the observing angles for DXL and ROSAT. Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Colors indicate the density of interstellar helium near Earth and its enhancement in a downstream cone as the neutral atoms respond to the sun’s gravity (blue is low density, red is high). Also shown are the observing angles for DXL and ROSAT. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The cloud’s neutral hydrogen and helium atoms stream through the Solar System at about 56,000 mph (90,000 km/h). The hydrogen atoms quickly ionize, but the helium atoms travel at a path largely governed by the Sun’s gravity. This creates a helium focusing cone — a breeze focused downstream from the Sun — with a much greater density of neutral atoms. These easily collide with solar wind ions and emit soft X-rays.

The confirmation of the local hot bubble is a significant development in our understanding of the interstellar medium, which is crucial for understanding star formation and galaxy evolution.

“The DXL team is an extraordinary example of cross-disciplinary science, bringing together astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and heliophysicists,” said coauthor F. Scott Porter from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It’s unusual but very rewarding when scientists with such diverse interests come together to produce such groundbreaking results.”

The paper has been published in Nature.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

The Little Rover that Could: Opportunity Reaches Odometer Milestone

This scene from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Lunokhod 2 Crater." Image Credit: NASA

NASA’s Opportunity mars rover now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles of driving. Given that the rover has been roaming the Red Planet for over a decade, that’s a travel speed of roughly 2.5 miles per year, and it’s one to be proud of.

“Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world,” said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a NASA press release. “This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance.”

The previous record was held by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover, which landed on the moon in 1973. It drove about 24.2 miles in less than five months, according to calculations recently made using images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and ’70s,” said Steve Squyres from Cornell University, and principal investigator for NASA’s twin Mars rovers. “We’re in a second golden age now, and what we’ve tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago. It has been a real honor to follow in their historical wheel tracks.”

The gold line on this image shows Opportunity's route from the landing site inside Eagle Crater, in upper left, to its current location. Image Credit: NASA
The gold line on this image shows Opportunity’s route from the landing site inside Eagle Crater (upper left) to its current location. Image Credit: NASA

A drive of 157 feet on July 27 put Opportunity’s odometer at 25.01 miles. The rover is currently headed southward along the western rim of Endeavour crater: a site that is continuing to yield evidence of ancient environments with less acidic water than those examined at Opportunity’s landing site.

If the rover can continue to operate for another 25.2 miles — the distance of a marathon — it will approach the next major investigation site: a valley, which scientists have dubbed “Marathon Valley.” Observations from spacecraft in orbit suggest that the valley is composed of a stack of layered sediments, offering a glimpse at the Red Planet’s changing geologic history.

Opportunity has continued to rove, gather scientific observations, and report back to Earth for over 40 times its designed lifespan. Now every additional mile reached will set the record for the longest off-Earth roving distance.