Astronomy Archives

October 8, 2020October 8, 2020 by Evan Gough

Planets Don’t Wait for Their Star to Form First

The young star IRS 63 has baby planets forming around it while the star itself is still forming. Image Credit: Segura-Cox et al, 2020.

It looks like we may have to update our theories on how stars and planets form in new solar systems. A team of astronomers has discovered young planets forming in a solar system that’s only about 500,000 years old. Prior to this discovery, astronomers thought that stars are well into their adult life of fusion before planets formed from left over material in the circumstellar disk.

Now, according to a new study, it looks like planets and stars can form and grow up together.

October 8, 2020October 8, 2020 by Evan Gough

Time Flies. NASA Releases a Mosaic of TESS’ View of the Northern Sky After Two Years of Operation

This detail of the TESS northern panorama features a region in the constellation Cygnus. At center, the sprawling dark nebula Le Gentil 3, a vast cloud of interstellar dust, obscures the light of more distant stars. A prominent tendril extending to the lower left points toward the bright North America Nebula, glowing gas so named for its resemblance to the continent. Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA)

NASA’s TESS planet-finding spacecraft completed its primary mission about 3 months ago. TESS’s (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) job was to search the brightest stars nearest to Earth for transiting exoplanets. It found 74 confirmed exoplanets, with another ~1200 candidates awaiting confirmation.

It surveyed 75% of the sky during its two-year primary mission, and now NASA has released a composite image of the northern sky, made up of more than 200 individual images.

October 8, 2020October 8, 2020 by Andy Tomaswick

Astronomers Will Be Able to Use the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope to Search for Signals from Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Image of the FAST telescope in China — Image of the FAST Telescope in China

Back in April, we reported on how a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, and the SETI Institute planned to use the new Five-hundred-meter Aperture radio Telescope (FAST) to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. We now caught up with another of the project scientists to flesh out some more details of their observational plans and what observations they hope to make in the future.

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 by Evan Gough

7% of the Stars in the Milky Way’s Center Came From a Single Globular Cluster That Got Too Close and Was Broken Up

Central region of the Milky Way in infrared light. With this image, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has photographed the inner 890 x 640 light years of the Milky Way. The nuclear star cluster is located in a small area near the central massive black hole. The extended structures in the image are mostly clouds of gas and dust from the spiral arms of the Milky Way, which lie in the line of sight between Earth and the Galactic Centre. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)

The heart of the Milky Way can be a mysterious place. A gigantic black hole resides there, and it’s surrounded by a retinue of stars that astronomers call a Nuclear Star Cluster (NSC). The NSC is one of the densest populations of stars in the Universe. There are about 20 million stars in the innermost 26 light years of the galaxy.

New research shows that about 7% of the stars in the NSC came from a single source: a globular cluster of stars that fell into the Milky Way between 3 and 5 billion years ago.

October 6, 2020October 6, 2020 by Matt Williams

The Air Leak on the International Space Station is Worse Than Previously Believed

The International Space Station in orbit round Earth. Credit: NASA

On Tuesday, Sept. 29th, the Russian State Space Corporation (Roscosmos) announced that astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) had found the source of a suspected leak. The crew of Expedition 63 – NASA astronaut and Commander Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner – had been searching for this leak since August, and determined that it was “beyond expected levels.”

Roscosmos also said in a statement that “it was established that the spot is located in the Zvezda (star) service module, which contains scientific equipment.” They also emphasized that the leak “is not dangerous for the life and health of the ISS crew and does not prevent the ISS continuing manned flight.” Nevertheless, the amount of atmosphere lost may require additional oxygen to be pumped into the station.

October 6, 2020October 6, 2020 by Evan Gough

Here’s a Clever Idea, Looking for the Shadows of Trees On Exoplanets to Detect Multicellular Life

Exoplanet Kepler 62f would need an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide for water to be in liquid form. Artist's Illustration: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

That’s the kind of headline that can leave us scratching our heads. How can you see tree shadows on other worlds, when those planets are tens or hundreds of light years—or even further—away. As it turns out, there might be a way to do it.

One team of researchers thinks that the idea could potentially be used to answer one of humanity’s long-standing questions: Are we alone?

October 6, 2020October 6, 2020 by Evan Gough

The Carina Nebula. Seen With and Without Adaptive Optics

This image shows a comparison of the new image (top) of the western wall of the Carina Nebula taken by the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, and an image of the same region without Adaptive Optics (bottom). The top image was taken with the Gemini South telescope with the GSAOI instrument using the GeMS adaptive optics system, and the bottom image was taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory with the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope using the NEWFIRM instrument. Image Credit: International Gemini Observatory/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Ever wonder how modern astronomical observatories take such clear images of distant objects? Advances in mirror design have allowed for larger and larger primary mirrors. But adaptive optics play a huge role, too.

October 4, 2020October 4, 2020 by Matt Williams

Those are Exoplanets. You’re Looking at Actual Exoplanets 63 Light-Years Away!

Credit: Axel Quetz / MPIA Graphics Department

Located 63.4 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pictor is the young and bright blue star, Beta Pictoris. In 2008, observations conducted from the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile confirmed the presence of an extrasolar planet. This planet was Beta Pictoris b, a Super-Jupiter with an orbital period of up between 6890 and 8890 days (~19 to 24 years) that was confirmed by directly imaging it as it passed behind the star.

In August of 2019, a second planet was detected (another Super-Jupiter) orbiting closer to Beta Pictoris. However, due to its proximity to its parent star, it could only be studied through indirect means (radial velocity measurements). After conducting a reanalysis of data obtained by the VLT, astronomers with the GRAVITY collaboration were able to confirm the existence of Beta Pictoris c through direct imaging.

October 2, 2020October 2, 2020 by Paul M. Sutter

What Decides the Shape of Planetary Nebulae? Whatever’s Orbiting a Star When it Dies

This Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 5307, a planetary nebula which lies about 10000 light years from Earth. It can be seen in the constellation Centaurus (The Centaur), which can be seen primarily in the southern hemisphere. A planetary nebula is the final stage of a Sun-like star. As such, planetary nebulae allow us a glimpse into the future of our own Solar System. A star like our Sun will, at the end of its life, transform into a red giant. Stars are sustained by the nuclear fusion that occurs in their core, which creates energy. The nuclear fusion processes constantly try to rip the star apart. Only the gravity of the star prevents this from happening. At the end of the red giant phase of a star, these forces become unbalanced. Without enough energy created by fusion, the core of the star collapses in on itself, while the surface layers are ejected outward. After that, all that remains of the star is what we see here: glowing outer layers surrounding a white dwarf star, the remnants of the red giant star’s core. This isn’t the end of this star’s evolution though — those outer layers are still moving and cooling. In just a few thousand years they will have dissipated, and all that will be left to see is the dimly glowing white dwarf.

Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful objects in the galaxy, spanning a variety of shapes and sizes. They’re created in the death throes of stars like the sun, and new research sheds light into how they get their distinctive and unique shapes. The answer: anything unlucky enough to orbit that dying star.

October 1, 2020June 12, 2023 by Matt Williams

Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XI: What is the Transcension Hypothesis

Welcome back to our Fermi Paradox series, where we take a look at possible resolutions to Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where Is Everybody?” Today, we examine the possibility that the reason for the Great Silence is that all the aliens have evolved beyond the need to explore!

In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?“

This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Since Fermi’s time, several possible resolutions have been proposed, including the theory that advanced species eventually “transcend” the physical Universe, also known as the Transcension Hypothesis.