Since the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe has converted 20% of its original matter into stars. This is according to a new survey by an international team of astronomers. Other than stars, a tiny fraction of non-primordial material is dust expelled from massive stars and supermassive black holes. The survey was made using the Millennium Galaxy Catalogue, which contains more than 10,000 large galaxies. It looks like the Universe will need another 70 billion years to use up all its original fuel.
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Swirling Pinwheels Near the Heart of the Milky Way
Astronomers have gathered new data on a formation of stars called the Quintuplet cluster. These are a group of stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The new data comes from the W.M. Keck telescope, which gathered high resolution images of the stars. They appear to be massive binary stars near the end of their short lives, which are giving off huge amounts of gas and dust. These dust plumes are creating pinwheel-shaped spirals around the stars as they orbit each other.
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Hubble Reveals Dimmest Stars in a Nearby Cluster
New photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope show some of the faintest stars ever seen in a globular cluster. The cluster is NGC 6397, which formed almost right at the beginning of the Universe, nearly 12 billion years ago. This means the stars in the formation are made of the primordial material that formed shortly after the Bang Bang. These dim stars are white dwarfs that were once more massive versions of our own Sun. They cool at a very predictable rate, giving astronomers another way to calculate the age of the Universe.
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Why Old Stars Seem to Lack Lithium
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope think they’ve found a solution to the “cosmological lithium discrepancy”. A specific amount of lithium was generated at the beginning of the Universe, during the Big Bang. But some of the oldest stars in the Universe, made from this primordial material, have much lower quantities. The researchers found that these stars do have the proper amount of lithium, it’s just being mixed into the stars, sinking out of view of our telescopes. Why this mixing is happening is still a mystery.
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Orion Revealed by Spitzer
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this image of the Orion Nebula using its Infrared Array Camera. In this infrared view, intricate structures made up of gas and dust in the nebula are revealed. Spitzer’s camera took 10,000 exposures of the region, which were combined on computer to make up the full image. The telescope has already uncovered nearly 2,300 planet-forming disks in the region, which would be hidden to visible light telescopes like Hubble.
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Officials Propose 12 Planets in the Solar System
The International Astronomical Union, currently meeting in Prague, has announced a proposal that would boost the number of planets in the Solar System to 12. Under their new classification, the asteroid Ceres, Pluto’s moon Charon, and the newly discovered UB313 (aka Xena) would join the traditional 9 planets we’re familiar with. Any additional large bodies would also be described as planets. The IAU will make a final vote on this proposal on August 24.
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Hourglass-Shaped Magnetic Field Discovered
Astronomers have finally discovered an object that has long been theorized: an hourglass-shaped magnetic field in a star forming region. The field is located in the protostellar system NGC IRAS 4A, which is located about 980 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. Theorists predicted that the magnetic fields of collapsing clouds of gas and dust would form this hourglass shape because of the competing forces of magnetism and gravity.
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James Van Allen Dies
Renowned space scientist Dr. James A. Van Allen died this morning at the age of 91. Although he had a lifetime’s worth of contributions to astronomy, space science and space exploration, Dr. Allen was best known for his discovery of the radiation belts that surround the Earth. An experiment he designed for the spacecraft Explorer 1 gauged the Van Allen belts using tiny Geiger counters to measure radiation. He retired from full time teaching at the University of Iowa in 1985, but continued to write, oversee research, and monitor data sent back by spacecraft he was involved with.
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Chandra Confirms the Hubble Constant
Nearly every single astronomical measurement depends on the Hubble constant, a number that calculates the expansion of the Universe. NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently measured this value independently, and came up with a similar number – 77 km per second per megaparsec (3.26 million light-years to the megaparsec). Give or take 15%. This confirms that the Universe is still between 12 and 14 billion years old.
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Constant Rain of Space Dust Adds Up
A slow, steady rain of cosmic space dust is always falling through the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles from space are infused with a rare isotope of helium that makes it immediately identifiable compared to a more common isotope of helium we find here on Earth. Scientists recently drilled an ice core in Antarctica containing a record of this dust fall that goes back 30,000 years. This new data gives scientists another line of data to study global climate history as the ratio between the isotopes varies between interglacial periods.
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