There’s more dark matter than regular matter in the Universe, and they’re normally all mixed up together in galaxies. But astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have found a situation where dark matter and normal matter can be wrenched apart. In a collision between giant galaxy clusters, hot gas clouds in the clusters encounter friction as they pass through one another, separating them from the stars. The dark matter isn’t affected by this friction either, so astronomers were able to calculate the effect of its gravity on regular matter.
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Hidden Stores of Deuterium Discovered in the Milky Way
A six year study by NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE, satellite has turned up previously hidden quantities of deuterium – a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Astronomers have wondered for years why the levels of deuterium in the Milky Way vary across the galaxy. FUSE has found that deuterium tends to bind to interstellar grains of dust, hiding it from view. Extreme events, like supernovae shockwaves, can vapourize the grains of dust, freeing the deuterium, and making it visible.
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Universe Has Used Up a Fifth of Its Gas Tank
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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