Astronomy Archives

June 11, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Magnetic Fields Dominate Young Stars of all Sizes?

Image courtesy of Manel Carrillo, Josep Miquel Girart (CSIC-IEEC), Nimesh Patel (SMA), Spitzer

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When it comes to the role of magnetism in the formation of stars, size might not matter.

A team of researchers led by Josep Girart, of the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (in Spain), studied the slow evolution of a dust cloud into a massive star, and realized that the cloud’s magnetic field controls the star’s development more than any other factor. They propose that the story is the same for small stars — an idea that could offer a new way to understand the formation of the early universe.

The new hypothesis is presented in this week’s issue of the journal Science, and the lead image represents an artist’s rendering of the concept.

The background shows a false-color Spitzer image of the massive star-forming region G31.41, with the colors indicating various wavelengths of light. The zoom-in region represents the dust emission from the massive hot core (color and contour image) superposed with bars showing the structure of the magnetic field.

Pictured in the bottom of the image is the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, which was used for the observations.

The authors describe how the magnetic field at G31.41 has deformed the dust cloud into an hourglass shape – a telltale sign of magnetically controlled star formation.

They say that this magnetic energy dominates over the other energies at play — e.g., centrifugal force and turbulence — and suggest that the role of the magnetic field in the early stages of star formation could be very similar for both small and massive stars.

“The energetic relations do not differ too much” between massive and small stars, the authors write. “Both cores are collapsing because gravity has overcome pressure forces, but the collapsing dynamics are controlled by the magnetic energy rather than by turbulence.”

Girart and his colleagues point out that this only holds true for forming stars; older massive stars are more influenced by radiation and ionization pressure, turbulence, and outflows than by magnetic fields.

Massive stars play a crucial role in the production of heavy elements and in the evolution of the interstellar medium, so this discovery might eventually lead to new insights about the formation of the early universe.

Source: Science

June 11, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Add Heat, Then Tectonics: Narrowing the Hunt for Life in Space

In order to support life, an exoplanet should simply hang out where heat from its star is just right for liquid water. Right?

Not necessarily. New research is suggesting that in order to support life, such a planet might also need plate tectonics, and those are triggered in a narrower band of distance from the parent star.

Rory Barnes, a University of Washington astronomer, is lead author of a paper to be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters that uses new calculations from computer modeling to define a “tidal habitable zone.”

Besides liquid water, scientists think plate tectonics are needed to pull excess carbon from its atmosphere and confine it in rocks, to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Tectonics, or the movement of the plates that make up a planet’s surface, typically is driven by radioactive decay in the planet’s core, but a star’s gravity can cause tides in the planet, which creates more energy to drive plate tectonics.

“If you have plate tectonics, then you can have long-term climate stability, which we think is a prerequisite for life,” Barnes said.

The tectonic forces cannot be so severe that geologic events quickly repave a planet’s surface and destroy life that might have gotten a foothold, he said. The planet must be at a distance where tugging from the star’s gravitational field generates tectonics without setting off extreme volcanic activity that resurfaces the planet in too short a time for life to prosper.

“Overall, the effect of this work is to reduce the number of habitable environments in the universe, or at least what we have thought of as habitable environments,” Barnes said. “The best places to look for habitability are where this new definition and the old definition overlap.”

The new calculations have implications for planets previously considered too small for habitability. An example is Mars, which used to experience tectonics but that activity ceased as heat from the planet’s decaying inner core dissipated.

But as planets get closer to their suns, the gravitational pull gets stronger, tidal forces increase and more energy is released. If Mars were to move closer to the sun, the sun’s tidal tugs could possibly restart the tectonics, releasing gases from the core to provide more atmosphere. If Mars harbors liquid water, at that point it could be habitable for life as we know it.

Various moons of Jupiter have long been considered as potentially harboring life. But one of them, Io, has so much volcanic activity, the result of tidal forces from Jupiter, that it is not regarded as a good candidate. Tectonic activity remakes Io’s surface in less than 1 million years.

“If that were to happen on Earth, it would be hard to imagine how life would develop,” Barnes said.

A potential Earth-like planet, but eight times more massive, called Gliese 581d was discovered in 2007 about 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. At first it was thought the planet was too far from its sun, Gliese 581, to have liquid water, but recent observations have determined the orbit is within the habitable zone for liquid water. However, the planet is outside the habitable zone for its sun’s tidal forces, which the authors believe drastically limits the possibility of life.

“Our model predicts that tides may contribute only one-quarter of the heating required to make the planet habitable, so a lot of heat from decay of radioactive isotopes may be required to make up the difference,” Jackson said.

Barnes added, “The bottom line is that tidal forcing is an important factor that we are going to have to consider when looking for habitable planets.”

Source: The University of Washington via Eurekalert. The paper is available here.

June 10, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Wild Little Mercury to Cause Interplanetary Smashup? Maybe.

Artistic design : J Vidal-Madjar; planet textures from NASA; copyright: IMCCE-CNRS

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The chaotic evolution of the planetary orbits in the Solar System could cause a close approach or even a collision within the next 5 billion years, according to a paper in this week’s issue of Nature.

The odds are small, but that didn’t stop NASA from releasing a series of really fun “what-if” images (below) …

Mercury is the wild card, according to co-authors Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau of the Paris Observatory. If its orbit elongates, our puniest neighbor could throw the whole block in peril.

Because its orbit resonates with that of Jupiter, Mercury could become the planet gone wild (eccentric in astronomy speak), colliding with Venus.

The chance is slim, the authors point out — around 1 percent. But the finding — revealed through thousands of computer simulations — was a surpise.

“More surprisingly, in one of these high-eccentricity solutions, a subsequent decrease in Mercury’s eccentricity induces a transfer of angular momentum from the giant planets that destabilizes all the terrestrial planets,” the authors write, “with possible collisions of Mercury, Mars or Venus with the Earth.”

Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California Santa Cruz who wrote an accompanying editorial about the new paper, couched it as “a note of definite cheer” in the midst of “a seemingly endless torrent of baleful economic and environmental news.” Indeed, there’s a 99 percent chance that the planets will not engage in a destructive round of planetary billiards, and that’s a good thing.

“With 99 percent certainty, we can rely on the clockwork of the celestial rhythm — but with the remaining 1 percent we are afforded a vicarious thrill of danger,” he writes.

Presumably inspired by that vicarious thrill, NASA teamed up with space artist J. Vidal-Madjar to craft the following smash-up images, which were provided by Nature. Enjoy!

June 10, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Lunar, Solar Eclipses Hold Secrets to Other Worlds

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Want to know about the atmospheres of planets around other stars, and the stars themselves?

Start at home.

A pair of papers in this week’s issue of Nature is advocating continued studies of both lunar eclipses, when the Moon transits Earth’s shadow, and solar eclipses — when the Moon comes directly between Earth and the sun.

Enric Palle, of the Spanish Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, and his co-authors point out in one of the papers that of the 342 planets known to be orbiting other stars, 58 ‘transit’ the stellar disk, meaning that they can be detected through a periodic decrease in the flux of starlight.

“The light from the star passes through the atmosphere of the planet, and in a few cases the basic atmospheric composition of the planet can be estimated,” they write. To calibrate our abilities to study those other atmospheres, it’s best to practice on Earth, they propose.

The team utilized the optical and near-infrared transmission spectrum of the Earth, obtained during a lunar eclipse. The technique is different from another common practice: observing the earthshine, or the light reflected from the dark side of the Moon.

“Some biologically relevant atmospheric features that are weak in the reflection spectrum (such as ozone, molecular oxygen, water, carbon dioxide and methane) are much stronger in the transmission spectrum, and indeed stronger than predicted by modelling,” Palle and his co-authors write. “We also find the ‘fingerprints’ of the Earth’s ionosphere and of the major atmospheric constituent, molecular nitrogen (N2), which are missing in the reflection spectrum.”

“Thus, the transmission spectrum can provide much more information about the atmospheric composition of a rocky planet than the reflection spectrum can.”

In the second paper, author Jay Pasachoff, who splits his time between Caltech and Williams College, in Massachusetts, reviewed a wealth of knowledge gleaned from solar eclipses.

“Observations of the Sun during total eclipses have led to major discoveries, such as the existence of helium (from its spectrum), the high temperature of the corona (though the reason for the high temperature remains controversial), and the role of magnetic fields in injecting energy into—and trapping ionized gases within—stellar atmospheres,” he writes.

Pasachoff notes that there’s no real end in sight for the usefulness of solar eclipses: “The Moon is receding from the Sun sufficiently slowly that our descendants on Earth will be able to see total eclipses for over 600 million years.”

But he predicts an eventual transition from ground-based to space solar telescopes, especially for getting at tantalizing solar mysteries like the nature of coronal heating.

“At present the paired science and beauty of solar eclipses remain uniquely available to scientists and others in the path of totality.”

Source: Nature

June 10, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Astronomers Announce First Newborn Stars at Milky Way’s Core

The Galactic Center. Credit: Suzan Stolovy (SSC/Caltech), JPL-Caltech, NASA

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Astronomers have found the first evidence of newborn stars at the center of the Milky Way, a region once thought to be inhospitable to the formation of new stars.

Solange Ramirez, the principal investigator of the research program at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, announced three objects during a press conference today as part of the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena.

“These baby stars … are stars that have just ignited their core, and are just starting to produce light,” she said. “It is a very early phase.”

The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust, and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves, and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic place, but they’re baffled as to how this occurs. Confounding the problem is all the dust standing between us and center of our galaxy. Until now, nobody had
been able to definitively locate any baby stars.

“These stars are like needles in a haystack,” Ramirez said. “There’s no way to find them using optical light, because dust gets in the way. We needed Spitzer’s infrared instruments to cut through the dust and narrow in on the objects.”

Ramirez and her colleagues plan to look for additional baby stars in the future, and ultimately to piece together what types of conditions allow stars to form in such an inhospitable environment as our galaxy’s core.

“By studying individual stars in the galactic center, we can better understand how stars are formed in different interstellar environments,” said Deokkeun An, also of Caltech, who is lead author of a paper submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

“The Milky Way galaxy is just one of more than hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe. However, our galaxy is so special because we can take a closer look at its individual stellar components.”

The core of the Milky Way is a mysterious place about 600 light-years across. While this is just a fraction of the size of entire the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years across, the core is stuffed with 10 percent of all the gas in the galaxy — and loads of stars.

Before now, there were only a few clues that stars can form in the galaxy’s core. Astronomers had found clusters of massive adolescent stars, in addition to clouds of charged gas — a sign that new stars are beginning to ignite and ionize surrounding gas. Past attempts had been unsuccessful in finding newborn stars, or as astronomers call them, young stellar objects.

The astronomers looked at their candidate stars with Spitzer’s spectrograph — an instrument that breaks light apart to reveal its rainbow-like array of infrared colors. Molecules around stars leave imprints in their light, which the spectrograph can detect.

The results revealed three stars with clear signs of youth, for example certain warm, dense gases. These youthful features are found in other places in the galaxy where stars are being formed.

“It is amazing to me that we have found these stars,” said Ramirez. “The galactic center is a very interesting place. It has young stars, old stars, black holes, everything. We started mining a catalog of about one million sources and managed to find three young stars — stars that will help reveal the secrets at the core of the Milky Way.”

The young stellar objects are all less than about one million years old. They are embedded in cocoons of gas and dust, which will eventually flatten to disks that, according to theory, later lump together to form planets.

Source: AAS teleconference and press release (meeting teleconferences available via UStream)

June 9, 2009December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Ultracool Stars Orbit Crazily Around, Outside the Milky Way

Projected orbits of ultracool subdwarfs. Credit: MIT

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A recently discovered type of star called ultracool subdwarfs have unusual and wild orbits unlike any ever encountered, with one such star having an orbit that loops outside and then back into our galaxy. Astronomers have now been able to clarify the origins of these unusual, faint stars that may have come from other galaxies.

“The orbits we calculated for these object are far more diverse than we have originally thought,” said Adam Burgasser of MIT. “One of the stars we studied has an orbit that appears to take it outside the Milky Way galaxy, and it may even have an extra-galactic origin.” Burgasser and colleague John Bochanski of MIT presented their findings on June 9, in a press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Pasadena, California.

Ultracool subdwarfs were first recognized as a unique class of stars in 2003, and are distinguished by their low temperatures (“ultracool”) and low concentrations of elements other than hydrogen and helium (“subdwarf”). They sit at the bottom end of the size range for stars, and some are so small that they are closer to the planet-like objects called brown dwarfs. Only a few dozen ultracool subdwarfs are known today, as they are both very faint — up to 10,000 times fainter than the Sun — and extremely rare.
While most stars travel in circular orbits around the center of the Milky Way, ultracool subdwarfs and eccentric and very fast orbits. They appear to be traveling at very high speeds, up to 500 km/s, or over a million miles per hour.

“If there are interstellar cops out there, these stars would surely lose their driver’s licenses,” said Burgasser.

Burgasser’s team of astronomers assembled measurements of the positions, distances and motions of roughly two dozen of these rare stars. Robyn Sanderson, co-author and MIT graduate student, then used these measurements to calculate the orbits of the subdwarfs using a numerical code developed to study galaxy collisions. Despite doing similar calculations for other types of low-mass stars, “these orbits were like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Sanderson.

Watch this movie of the projected “wild ride” of one of these ultracool subdwarfs (great music!)

Sanderson’s calculations showed an unexpected diversity in the ultracool subdwarf orbits. Some plunge deep into the center of the Milky Way on eccentric, comet?like tracks; others make slow, swooping loops far beyond the Sun’s orbit. Unlike the majority of nearby stars, most of the ultracool subdwarfs spend a great deal of time thousands of light?years above or below the disk of the Milky Way.

“Someone living on a planet around one of these subdwarfs would have an incredible nighttime view of a beautiful spiral galaxy — our Milky Way — spread across the sky,” Burgasser speculated.

Comparison of the Galactic orbits of LSR 1610-0040 (orange), 2MASS 1227-0447 (green) and the Sun (white). Credit: MIT

Sanderson’s orbit calculations confirm that all of the ultracool subdwarfs are part of the Milky Way’s halo, a widely dispersed population of stars that likely formed in the Milky Way’s distant past. However, one of the subdwarfs, a star named 2MASS 1227?0447 in the constellation Virgo, has an orbit indicating that it might have a very different lineage, possibly extragalactic.

“Our calculations show that this subdwarf travels up to 200,000 light years away from the center of the Galaxy, almost 10 times farther than the Sun,” said Bochanski. This is farther than many of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors, suggesting that this particular subdwarf may have originated somewhere else.

“Based on the size of its one billion?year orbit and direction of motion, we speculate that 2MASS 1227?0447 might have come from another, smaller galaxy that at some point got too close to the Milky Way and was ripped apart by gravitational forces,” said Bochanksi.

Astronomers have previously identified streams of stars in the Milky Way originating from neighboring galaxies, but all have been distant, massive, red giant stars. The ultracool subdwarf identified by Burgasser and his team is the first nearby, low?mass star to be found on such a trajectory. “If we can identify what stream this star is associated with, or which dwarf galaxy it came from, we could learn more about the types of stars that have built up the Milky Way’s halo over the past 10 billion years,” said Burgasser.

Sources: AAS, MIT (see more images and animations)

June 9, 2009December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

The Curious Case of the Shrinking Star

Credit: NASA

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is undoubtedly enormous. But it’s shrinking, and astronomers aren’t sure why.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been monitoring the star by aiming the Infrared Spatial Interferometer, atop Mt. Wilson in Southern California, toward the star’s home in the constellation Orion. Since 1993, the Betelgeuse star (pictured in a NASA image at left) has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent.

betelgeuse1 — UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser, cleans one of the large mirrors of the Infrared Spatial Interferometer. Credit: Cristina Ryan (2008)

Betelgeuse is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter. Its radius is about five astronomical units, or five times the radius of Earth’s orbit. Its measured shrinkage means the star’s radius has shrunk by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

“To see this change is very striking,” said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics. “We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size.”

Townes and his colleague, Edward Wishnow, a research physicist at UC Berkeley, presented their findings at a press conference on Tuesday during the Pasadena meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The results also appeared June 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Despite Betelgeuse’s diminished size, Wishnow pointed out that its visible brightness, or magnitude, which is monitored regularly by members of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, has shown no significant dimming over the past 15 years.

The ISI has been focusing on Betelgeuse for more than 15 years in an attempt to learn more about these giant massive stars and to discern features on the star’s surface, Wishnow said. He speculated that giant convection cells on the star’s surface might affect the measurements. Like convection granules on the Sun, the cells are so large that they bulge out from the surface. Townes and a former graduate student observed a bright spot on the surface of Betelgeuse in recent years, although at the moment, the star appears spherically symmetrical.

“But we do not know why the star is shrinking,” Wishnow said. “Considering all that we know about galaxies and the distant universe, there are still lots of things we don’t know about stars, including what happens as red giants near the ends of their lives.”

Betelgeuse was the first star ever to have its size measured, and even today is one of only a handful of stars that appears through the Hubble Space Telescope as a disk rather than a point of light. In 1921, Francis G. Pease and Albert Michelson used optical interferometry to estimate its diameter was equivalent to the orbit of Mars. Last year, new measurements of the distance to Betelgeuse raised it from 430 light-years to 640, which increased the star’s diameter from about 3.7 to about 5.5 AU.

“Since the 1921 measurement, its size has been re-measured by many different interferometer systems over a range of wavelengths where the diameter measured varies by about 30 percent,” Wishnow said. “At a given wavelength, however, the star has not varied in size much beyond the measurement uncertainties.”

The measurements cannot be compared anyway, because the star’s size depends on the wavelength of light used to measure it, Townes said. This is because the tenuous gas in the outer regions of the star emits light as well as absorbs it, which makes it difficult to determine the edge of the star.

The Infrared Spatial Interferometer, which Townes and his colleagues first built in the early 1990s, sidesteps these confounding emission and absorption lines by observing in the mid-infrared with a narrow bandwidth that can be tuned between spectral lines. The technique of stellar interferometry is highlighted in the June 2009 issue of Physics Today magazine.

Townes, who turns 94 in July, plans to continue monitoring Betelgeuse in hopes of finding a pattern in the changing diameter, and to improve the ISI’s capabilities by adding a spectrometer to the interferometer.

“Whenever you look at things with more precision, you are going to find some surprises,” he said, “and uncover very fundamental and important new things.”

Sources: AAS and UC Berkeley. The paper is available here.

June 9, 2009December 24, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Volcanoes in Hawaii

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The Hawaiian Island chain is a group of islands formed by the constant eruption of a volcanic hotspot underneath the Earth’s tectonic plates. The slow movement of the Pacific plate carries the islands away from the volcano hotspot, so the volcanoes go dormant and eventually extinct. The tallest volcano and the largest volcano in the world are located in Hawaii. Even the most active volcano in the world can be found in Hawaii. If you want to see volcanoes, it’s the place to go.

Hawaii Volcanoes

Mauna Loa – This active shield volcano is the second tallest volcano in the world, but it’s thbiggest volcano in the world. It has erupted within the last century.
Hualalai – The third most active volcano in Hawaii.
Kohala – the oldest of the 5 shield volcanoes that make up the Big Island of Hawaii.
Kilauea – An active volcano on the eastern side of the Island of Hawaii. It’s in an almost constant state of eruption.
Mauna Kea – The tallest volcano in the world, located on the Big Island of Hawaii.

We have written many article about volcanoes for Universe Today. Here’s some information about shield volcanoes, the kind found in Hawaii.

Want more resources on the Earth? Here’s a link to NASA’s Human Spaceflight page, and here’s NASA’s Visible Earth.

We have also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast about Earth, as part of our tour through the Solar System – Episode 51: Earth.

June 9, 2009December 24, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Scoria

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Scoria is a kind of rock produced by volcanic activity. Like pumice, it forms when lava which is rich in gas cools quickly. It forms when molten rock is rising in a volcanic pipe, the decreasing pressure allows the gas to expand out (like opening a can of soda releases carbon dioxide).

Scoria rocks can either form inside the volcano, and be ejected out in eruptions. Or it can erupt as lava that cools quickly before the gas bubbles can escape the rapidly cooling rock. Scoria is similar to pumice, in that it has bubbles of gas trapped within it, but the bubbles are much smaller. Unlike pumice, scoria doesn’t usually float in water.

Another name for scoria is cinder, and it’s the primary component of cinder cones. These are relatively small volcanoes that appear suddenly, built up to a maximum height of a few hundred meters and then go extinct. The cone builds up from the scoria, rock and ash ejected from the volcano, which rains back down around it.

While pumice ranges in color from white to black, scoria is darker in color, ranging from dark brown, to black to red. The Easter Island statues were carved out of volcanic rock, and the red stones on top were carved out of a different type of scoria rock prized for its red color.

We have written many articles about volcanoes and rocks for Universe Today. Here’s an article about obsidian, a type of volcanic glass produced when lava cools quickly. And here’s an article about basalt, rocks formed from cooled lava.

Want more resources on the Earth? Here’s a link to NASA’s Human Spaceflight page, and here’s NASA’s Visible Earth.

We have also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast about Earth, as part of our tour through the Solar System – Episode 51: Earth.

June 9, 2009April 26, 2016 by Brian Ventrudo

Astronomers Predict Birth of a New Star

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A computer simulation of the dark nebula Barnard 68 suggests the cloud will collapse into a brand new star relatively soon… at least on an astronomical time scale.

Astrophysicist João Alves, director of the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, and his colleague Andreas Bürkert from the University of Munich, believe the dark cloud Barnard 68 will inevitably collapse and give rise to the new star, according to an article published recently in the April 2009 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Barnard 68 (B68) is a dark nebula about 400 light years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus. Such nebulae are interstellar clouds of dust and gas located within the Milky Way which block out the light of the stars and other objects behind them.

Most astronomers believe stars form from giant gas clouds which collapse under their own gravity until high density and temperatures lead to nuclear fusion. Although many details of the process are still not understood, the new study may be able to shed some light on this.

Alves and Bürkert suggest the collision of two gas clouds could be the mechanism that activates the birth of a star. They suggest Barnard 68 is already in an initial unstable state and that it will collapse “soon” – within some 200,000 years.

Images show B68 is a cold gas cloud with a mass equivalent to that of two suns. But there’s a smaller cloud just 1/10 as massive getting close enough to collide with the larger cloud.

In order to prove their theory, the two astrophysicists have simulated the scenario in a supercomputer at the University of Munich. They modelled two globules separated by one light year, with masses and speeds similar to those of Barnard 68 and its “small” companion. By using a numerical algorithm, the researchers showed how these two virtual gas clouds evolved over time.

The results showed that the smaller globule penetrated the larger one after around 1.7 million years at a speed of 370 metres per second. The model also showed that the stability of the initial situation declined over time. At the moment when the two globules merged, enormous densities were generated, making the system collapse and creating the ideal conditions for the formation of a star.

The researchers varied the physical parameters of the globules until they worked out the circumstances in which the merger of two gas clouds will lead to their subsequent collapse. According to Bürkert and Alves’ calculations, a new star system will form from B68 within 200,000 years.

Source: FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology