Category: Astronomy

The massive spiral galaxy NGC 5746. Image credit: NASA Click to enlarge
Chandra observations of the massive spiral galaxy NGC 5746 revealed a large halo of hot gas (blue) surrounding the optical disk of the galaxy (white). The halo extends more than 60,000 light years on either side of the disk of the galaxy, which is viewed edge-on.

The galaxy shows no signs of unusual star formation, or energetic activity from its nuclear region, making it unlikely that the hot halo is produced by gas flowing out of the galaxy. Computer simulations and Chandra data show that the likely origin of the hot halo is the gradual inflow of intergalactic matter left over from the formation of the galaxy.

Spiral galaxies are thought to form from enormous clouds of intergalactic gas that collapse to form spinning disks of stars and gas. One prediction of this theory is that massive spiral galaxies should be immersed in halos of hot gas left over from the galaxy formation process.

Hot gas has been detected around spiral galaxies in which vigorous star formation is ejecting matter from the galaxy, but until now, hot halos due to infall of intergalactic matter had not been detected. Indeed, the extensive hot gas halo around NGC 5746 is faint and would be very difficult to detect without a powerful X-ray telescope such as Chandra. Also, the galaxy’s special orientation and large mass increased the chance of detection.

The discovery of a hot halo around NGC 5746 was welcome news to astronomers because it shows that the “missing” hot halos predicted by computer models in fact exist.

Original Source: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

An artist’s illustration of a rocky planet orbiting around a red dwarf star. Image credit: ESO Click to enlarge
Common wisdom among astronomers holds that most star systems in the Milky Way are multiple, consisting of two or more stars in orbit around each other. Common wisdom is wrong. A new study by Charles Lada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) demonstrates that most star systems are made up of single stars. Since planets probably are easier to form around single stars, planets also may be more common than previously suspected.

Astronomers have long known that massive, bright stars, including stars like the sun, are most often found to be in multiple star systems. This fact led to the notion that most stars in the universe are multiples. However, more recent studies targeted at low-mass stars have found that these fainter objects rarely occur in multiple systems. Astronomers have known for some time that such low-mass stars, also known as red dwarfs or M stars, are considerably more abundant in space than high-mass stars.

By combining these two facts, Lada came to the realization that most star systems in the Galaxy are composed of solitary red dwarfs.

“By assembling these pieces of the puzzle, the picture that emerged was the complete opposite of what most astronomers have believed,” said Lada.

Among very massive stars, known as O- and B-type stars, 80 percent of the systems are thought to be multiple, but these very bright stars are exceedingly rare. Slightly more than half of all the fainter, sun-like stars are multiples. However, only about 25 percent of red dwarf stars have companions. Combined with the fact that about 85 percent of all stars that exist in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, the inescapable conclusion is that upwards of two-thirds of all star systems in the Galaxy consist of single, red dwarf stars.

The high frequency of lone stars suggests that most stars are single from the moment of their birth. If supported by further investigation, this finding may increase the overall applicability of theories that explain the formation of single, sun-like stars. Correspondingly, other star-formation theories that call for most or all stars to begin their lives in multiple-star systems may be less relevant than previously thought.

“It’s certainly possible for binary star systems to ‘dissolve’ into two single stars through stellar encounters,” said astronomer Frank Shu of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, who was not involved with this discovery. “However, suggesting that mechanism as the dominant method of single-star formation is unlikely to explain Lada’s results.”

Lada’s finding implies that planets also may be more abundant than astronomers realized. Planet formation is difficult in binary star systems where gravitational forces disrupt protoplanetary disks. Although a few planets have been found in binaries, they must orbit far from a close binary pair, or hug one member of a wide binary system, in order to survive. Disks around single stars avoid gravitational disruption and therefore are more likely to form planets.

Interestingly, astronomers recently announced the discovery of a rocky planet only five times more massive than Earth. This is the closest to an Earth-size world yet found, and it is in orbit around a single red dwarf star.

“This new planet may just be the tip of the iceberg,” said Lada. “Red dwarfs may be a fertile new hunting ground for finding planets, including ones similar in mass to the earth.”

“There could be many planets around red dwarf stars,” stated astronomer Dimitar Sasselov of CfA. “It’s all in the numbers, and single red dwarfs clearly exist in great numbers.”

“This discovery is particularly exciting because the habitable zone for these stars – the region where a planet would be the right temperature for liquid water – is close to the star. Planets that are close to their stars are easier to find. The first truly Earth-like planet we discover might be a world orbiting a red dwarf,” added Sasselov.

This research has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication and is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601375

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Original Source: CfA News Release

M15 has a double neutron star system that will eventually merge violently. Image credit: NOAO Click to enlarge
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe, emitting huge amounts of high-energy radiation. For decades their origin was a mystery. Scientists now believe they understand the processes that produce gamma-ray bursts. However, a new study by Jonathan Grindlay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and his colleagues, Simon Portegies Zwart (Astronomical Institute, The Netherlands) and Stephen McMillan (Drexel University), suggests a previously overlooked source for some gamma-ray bursts: stellar encounters within globular clusters.

“As many as one-third of all short gamma-ray bursts that we observe may come from merging neutron stars in globular clusters,” said Grindlay.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) come in two distinct “flavors.” Some last up to a minute, or even longer. Astronomers believe those long GRBs are generated when a massive star explodes in a hypernova. Other bursts last for only a fraction of a second. Astronomers theorize that short GRBs originate from the collision of two neutrons stars, or a neutron star and a black hole.

Most double neutron star systems result from the evolution of two massive stars already orbiting each other. The natural aging process will cause both to become neutron stars (if they start with a given mass), which then spiral together over millions or billions of years until they merge and release a gamma-ray burst.

Grindlay’s research points to another potential source of short GRBs – globular clusters. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in the universe crammed into a tight space only a few light-years across. Such tight quarters provoke many close stellar encounters, some of which lead to star swaps. If a neutron star with a stellar companion (such as a white dwarf or main-sequence star) exchanges its partner with another neutron star, the resulting pair of neutron stars will eventually spiral together and collide explosively, creating a gamma-ray burst.

“We see these precursor systems, containing one neutron star in the form of a millisecond pulsar, all over the place in globular clusters,” stated Grindlay. “Plus, globular clusters are so closely packed that you have a lot of interactions. It’s a natural way to make double neutron-star systems.”

The astronomers performed about 3 million computer simulations to calculate the frequency with which double neutron-star systems can form in globular clusters. Knowing how many have formed over the galaxy’s history, and approximately how long it takes for a system to merge, they then determined the frequency of short gamma-ray bursts expected from globular cluster binaries. They estimate that between 10 and 30 percent of all short gamma-ray bursts that we observe may result from such systems.

This estimate takes into account a curious trend uncovered by recent GRB observations. Mergers and thus bursts from so-called “disk” neutron-star binaries – systems created from two massive stars that formed together and died together – are estimated to occur 100 times more frequently than bursts from globular cluster binaries. Yet the handful of short GRBs that have been precisely located tend to come from galactic halos and very old stars, as expected for globular clusters.

“There’s a big bookkeeping problem here,” said Grindlay.

To explain the discrepancy, Grindlay suggests that bursts from disk binaries are likely to be harder to spot because they tend to emit radiation in narrower blasts visible from fewer directions. Narrower “beaming” might result from colliding stars whose spins are aligned with their orbit, as expected for binaries that have been together from the moment of their birth. Newly joined stars, with their random orientations, might emit wider bursts when they merge.

“More short GRBs probably come from disk systems – we just don’t see them all,” explained Grindlay.

Only about a half dozen short GRBs have been precisely located by gamma-ray satellites recently, making thorough studies difficult. As more examples are gathered, the sources of short GRBs should become much better understood.

The paper announcing this finding was published in the January 29 online issue of Nature Physics. It is available online at http://www.nature.com/nphys/index.html and in preprint form at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512654.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Original Source: CfA News Release

Saturn’s moon Dione in a false colour view. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge
The leading hemisphere of Dione displays subtle variations in color across its surface in this false color view.

To create this view, ultraviolet, green and infrared images were combined into a single black and white picture that isolates and maps regional color differences.

This “color map” was then superposed over a clear-filter image. The origin of the color differences is not yet understood, but may be caused by subtle differences in the surface composition or the sizes of grains making up the icy soil.

Terrain visible here is on the moon’s leading hemisphere. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and rotated 17 degrees to the right.

See Detail on Dione (Monochrome) for a similar monochrome view.

All images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately 597,000 kilometers (371,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release

An artist’s conception of an exiled star speeding out of the milkyway. Image credit: Ruth Bazinet, CfA Click to enlarge
TV reality show contestants aren’t the only ones under threat of exile. Astronomers using the MMT Observatory in Arizona have discovered two stars exiled from the Milky Way galaxy. Those stars are racing out of the Galaxy at speeds of more than 1 million miles per hour – so fast that they will never return.

“These stars literally are castaways,” said Smithsonian astronomer Warren Brown (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). “They have been thrown out of their home galaxy and set adrift in an ocean of intergalactic space.”

Brown and his colleagues spotted the first stellar exile in 2005. European groups identified two more, one of which may have originated in a neighboring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. The latest discovery brings the total number of known exiles to five.

“These stars form a new class of astronomical objects – exiled stars leaving the Galaxy,” said Brown.

Astronomers suspect that about 1,000 exile stars exist within the Galaxy. By comparison, the Milky Way contains about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) stars, making the search for exiles much more difficult than finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack.” The Smithsonian team improved their odds by preselecting stars with locations and characteristics typical of known exiles. They sifted through dozens of candidates spread over an area of sky almost 8000 times larger than the full moon to spot their quarry.

“Discovering these two new exiled stars was neither lucky nor random,” said astronomer Margaret Geller (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), a co-author on the paper. “We made a targeted search for them. By understanding their origin, we knew where to find them.”

Theory predicts that the exiled stars were thrown from the galactic center millions of years ago. Each star once was part of a binary star system. When a binary swings too close to the black hole at the galaxy’s center, the intense gravity can yank the binary apart, capturing one star while violently flinging the other outward at tremendous speed (hence their technical designation of hypervelocity stars).

The two recently discovered exiles both are short-lived stars about four times more massive than the sun. Many similar stars exist within the galactic center, supporting the theory of how exiles are created. Moreover, detailed studies of the Milky Way’s center previously found stars orbiting the black hole on very elongated, elliptical orbits – the sort of orbits that would be expected for former companions of hypervelocity stars.

“Computer models show that hypervelocity stars are naturally made near the galactic center,” said theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We know that binaries exist. We know the galactic center holds a supermassive black hole. So, exiled stars inevitably will be produced when binaries pass too close to the black hole.”

Astronomers estimate that a star is thrown from the galactic center every 100,000 years on average. Chances of seeing one at the moment of ejection are slim. Therefore, the hunt must continue to find more examples of stellar exiles in order to understand the extreme environment of the galactic center and how those extremes lead to the formation of hypervelocity stars.

The characteristics of exiled stars give clues to their origin. For example, if a large cluster of stars spiraled into the Milky Way’s central black hole, many stars might be thrown out at nearly the same time. Every known hypervelocity star left the galactic center at a different time, therefore there is no evidence for a “burst” of exiles.

Hypervelocity stars also offer a unique probe of galactic structure. “During their lifetime, these stars travel across most of the Galaxy,” said Geller. “If we could measure their motions across the sky, we could learn about the shape of the Milky Way and about the way the mysterious dark matter is distributed.”

The first newfound exile, in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, is designated SDSS J091301.0+305120. It is traveling out of the galaxy at a speed of about 1.25 million miles per hour and currently is located at a distance of about 240,000 light-years from the earth. The second exile, in the direction of the constellation Cancer, is designated SDSS J091759.5+672238. It is moving outward at 1.43 million miles per hour and currently is located about 180,000 light-years from the earth.

Both stars, although traveling at tremendous speeds through space, are located so far from the earth that their motion cannot be detected except with sophisticated astronomical instruments.

This research has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication and will be available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601580. Authors on the paper are Brown, Geller, Scott Kenyon and Michael Kurtz (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory).

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Original Source: CfA News Release

IMAGE launch on March, 2000. Image credit: NASA Click to enlarge
NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite recently ceased operations, bringing to a close a successful six-year mission. IMAGE was the premier producer of new discoveries on the structure and dynamics of the Earth’s external magnetic field (magnetosphere) and its contents.

“The IMAGE mission showed us space around the Earth is anything but empty, and that plasma clouds can be imaged and tracked just as we do from space for Earth’s surface weather,” said Barbara Giles, IMAGE Program Scientist at NASA headquarters.

Prior to the launch of IMAGE, the energetic particles and electrically charged gas (plasma) surrounding the Earth were completely invisible to human observers. IMAGE enabled researchers to study the global structure and dynamics of the Earth’s inner magnetosphere as it responded to energy from solar winds.

“Nearly six years of imagery by the pioneering cameras on IMAGE revolutionized our understanding of geospace and our knowledge of its space weather,” said James Burch, IMAGE principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio.

IMAGE was launched on March 25, 2000. It successfully completed its two-year primary mission and continued providing data into December 2005, when it stopped responding to commands from ground controllers. Preliminary analysis indicated the craft’s power supply subsystems failed, rendering it lifeless. The satellite is in an extended elliptical orbit and poses no threat to the planet.

IMAGE discoveries have been reported in more than 400 peer-reviewed publications. More than 20 Ph.D. theses were based on data from the mission. Science highlights include:

– Confirmations: plasma plume creation, post-midnight peak in storm plasmas, the neutral solar wind, terrestrial origin of geospace storm plasmas and continuous nature of magnetic reconnection.

– Discoveries: plasmaspheric shoulders and notches, proton auroras in unexpected places, surprisingly slow plasmasphere rotation, a hot oxygen geocorona and a secondary interstellar neutral atom stream.

– Resolutions: the source of kilometric continuum radiation, solar- wind and auroral intensity effects on ionospheric out flow and the relationship between proton and electron auroras during geospace storms.

The IMAGE education and public outreach program received numerous awards for videos, books, primary and secondary school curricula, teacher training, museum exhibits, planetarium shows, student workbooks and web-based information.

The extensive archival database generated by IMAGE promises to yield new discoveries and will support investigations by other spacecraft and ground-based observatories for many years.

IMAGE was a Medium Explorer mission sponsored by NASA’s Sun-Earth Connections Program and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Southwest Research Institute conducts IMAGE science operations. James Burch is the mission principal Investigator, and Thomas Moore at Goddard is the Mission Scientist.

For information about the IMAGE mission on the Web, visit:

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Original Source: NASA News Release

An image of how one element of the SKA might look. Image credit: Chris Fluke. Click to enlarge
European funding has now been agreed to start designing the world’s biggest telescope. The “Square Kilometre Array” (SKA) will be an international radio telescope with a collecting area of one million square metres – equivalent to about 200 football pitches – making SKA 200 times bigger than the University of Manchester’s Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and so the largest radio telescope ever constructed. Such a telescope would be so sensitive that it could detect TV Broadcasts coming from the nearest stars.

The four-year Square Kilometre Array Design Study (SKADS) will bring together European and international astronomers to formulate and agree the most effective design. The final design will enable the SKA to probe the cosmos in unprecedented detail, answering fundamental questions about the Universe, such as “what is dark energy?” and “how did the structure we see in galaxies today actually form?”.

The new telescope will test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to the limit – and perhaps prove it wrong. It is certain to add to the long list of fundamental discoveries already made by radio astronomers including quasars, pulsars and the radiation left over from the Big Bang. By the end of this decade the design will be complete and astronomers anticipate building SKA in stages, leading to completion and full operation in 2020.

The SKA concept was first proposed to observe the characteristic radio emission from hydrogen gas. Measurements of the hydrogen signature will enable astronomers to locate and weigh a billion galaxies.

As the University of Manchester’s Prof Peter Wilkinson points out, “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but its signal is weak and so a huge collecting area is needed to be able to study it at the vast distances that take us back in time towards the Big Bang”. To which Prof Steve Rawlings, University of Oxford, adds,”The distribution of these galaxies in space tells us how the universe has evolved since the Big Bang and hence about the nature of the Dark Energy which is now making the universe expand faster with time”.

Another target for the SKA is pulsars – spinning remnants of stellar explosions which are the most accurate clocks in the universe. A million times the mass of the Earth but only the size of a large city, pulsars can spin around hundreds of times per second. Already these amazing objects have enabled astronomers to confirm Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves, but University of Manchester’s Dr Michael Kramer is looking further ahead. “With the SKA we will find a pulsar orbiting a black hole and, by watching how the clock rate varies, we can tell if Einstein had the last word on gravity or not”, he says.

Prof Richard Schilizzi, the International SKA Project Director, stresses the scale of the instrument needed to fulfil these science goals. “Designing and then building, such an enormous technologically-advanced instrument is beyond the scope of individual nations. Only by harnessing the ideas and resources of countries around the world is such a project possible”. Astronomers in Australia, South Africa, Canada, India, China and the USA are collaborating closely with colleagues in Europe to develop the required technology which will include sophisticated electronics and powerful computers that will play a far bigger role than in the present generation of radio telescopes. The European effort is based on phased array receivers, similar to those in aircraft radar systems. When placed at the focus of conventional mass-produced radio ‘dishes’, these arrays operate like wide-angle radio cameras enabling huge areas of sky to be observed simultaneously. A separate, much larger, phased array at the centre of the SKA will act like a radio fish-eye lens, constantly scanning the sky.

Funding for this global design programme has been provided by the European Commission’s Framework 6 ‘Design Studies’ programme, which is contributing about 27% of the total ?38M funding over the next four years. Individual countries are contributing the remainder. The UK has invested ?5.6M (?8.3M) funding provided by PPARC.
When coupled with the UK’s share of the EC contribution, then the UK’s overall contribution to the SKA Design Study (SKADS) programme is about 30% of the total.

The ?38M European technology development programme is funded by the European Commission and governments in eight countries led by the Netherlands, the UK, France and Italy. The programme is being coordinated by Ir. Arnold van Ardenne, Head of Emerging Technologies at The Netherlands ASTRON Institute. In van Ardenne’s view “the critical task is to demonstrate that large numbers of electronic arrays can be built cost effectively – so that our dreams of radio cameras and radio fish-eye lenses can be turned into reality”.

In the UK, a group of universities currently including Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds and Glasgow, funded by PPARC, is involved in all aspects of the design but is concentrating on sophisticated digital phased arrays and the distribution and analysis of the enormous volumes of data which the SKA will produce. University of Cambridge’s Dr Paul Alexander makes the point that “the electronics in the SKA makes it very flexible and allows for completely new ways of scanning the sky. But to make it work will require massive computing power”. Designers believe that by the time the SKA reaches full operation, 14 years from now, a new generation of computers will be up to the task.

The geographical location of SKA will be decided in the mid-term future and several nations have already expressed interest in hosting this state of the art astronomical facility.

Original Source: PPARC News Release

Two debris disks resemble the Kuiper Belt. Image credit: UC Berkeley Click to enlarge
A survey by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of 22 nearby stars has turned up two with bright debris disks that appear to be the equivalent of our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy rocks outside the orbit of Neptune and the source of short-period comets.

The debris disks encircling these stars fall into two categories – wide and narrow belts – that appear to describe all nine stars, including the sun, which are known to have debris disks linked to planet formation. In fact, the sharp outer edges of the narrow belts, such as the Kuiper Belt in our solar system, may be a tip-off to the existence of a star-like companion that continually grooms the edge, in the same way that shepherding moons trim the edges of debris rings around Saturn and Uranus.

Research astronomer Paul Kalas, professor of astronomy James Graham and graduate student Michael Fitzgerald of the University of California, Berkeley, along with Mark C. Clampin of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will report their discovery and conclusions in the Jan. 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The newfound stellar disks, each about 60 light years from Earth, bring to nine the number of stars with dusty debris disks observable at visible wavelengths. The new ones are different, however, in that they are old enough – more than 300 million years – to have settled into stable configurations akin to the stable planet and debris orbits in our own solar system, which is 4.6 billion years old. The other seven, except for the sun, range from tens of millions to 200 million years old – young by solar standards.

In addition, the masses of the stars are closer to that of the sun.

“These are the oldest debris disks seen in reflected light, and are important because they show what the Kuiper Belt might look like from the outside,” said Kalas, the lead researcher. “These are the types of stars around which you would expect to find habitable zones and planets that could develop life.”

Most debris disks are lost in the glare of the central star, but the high resolution and sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has made it possible to look for these disks after blocking the light from the star. Kalas has discovered debris disks around two other stars (AU Microscopii and Fomalhaut) in the past two years, one of them with the Hubble telescope, and has studied details of most of the other known stars with disks.

“We know of 100-plus stars that have infrared emission in excess of that emitted from the star, and that excess thermal emission comes from circumstellar dust,” Kalas said. “The hard part is obtaining resolved images that give spatial information. Now, two decades after they were first discovered, we are finally beginning to see the dust disks. These recent detections are really a tribute to all the hard work that went into upgrading Hubble’s instruments during the last servicing mission.”

The small sampling already shows that such disks fall into two categories: those with a broad belt, wider than about 50 astronomical units; and narrow ones with a width of between 20 and 30 AU and a sharp outer boundary, probably like our own Kuiper Belt. An astronomical unit, or AU, is the average distance between the Earth and sun, about 93 million miles. Our Kuiper Belt is thought to be narrow, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU to about 50 AU.

Most of the known debris disks seem to have a central area cleared of debris, perhaps by planets, which are likely responsible for the sharp inner edges of many of these belts.

Kalas and Graham speculate that stars also having sharp outer edges to their debris disks have a companion – a star or brown dwarf, perhaps – that keeps the disk from spreading outward, similar to the way that Saturn’s moons shape the edges of many of the planet’s rings.

“The story of how you make a ring around a planet could be the same as the story of making rings around a star,” Kalas said. Only one of the nine stars is known to have a companion, but then, he said, no one has yet looked at most of these stars to see if they have faint companions at large distances from the primary star.

He suggests that a stray star passing by may have ripped off the edges of the original planetary disk, but a star-sized companion would be necessary to keep the remaining disk material, such as asteroids, comets and dust, from spreading outward.

If true, that would mean that the sun also has a companion keeping the Kuiper Belt confined within a sharp boundary. Though a companion star has been proposed before – most recently by UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, who dubbed the companion Nemesis – no evidence has been found for such a companion.

A key uncertainty, Kalas said, is that while we can see many of the large planetesimals in our Kuiper Belt, we can barely detect the dust.

“Ironically, our own debris disk is the closest, yet we know the least about it,” he said. “We would really like to know if dust in our Kuiper Belt extends significantly beyond the 50 AU edge of the larger objects. When we acquire this information, only then will we be able to place our sun correctly in the wide or narrow disk categories.”

The star survey by Kalas, Graham, Fitzgerald and Clampin was one of the first projects of the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the Hubble, which was installed in 2002. The 22 stars were observed over a two year period ending in September 2004. The stars with debris disks detectable in visible light were HD 53143, a K star slightly smaller than the sun but about 1 billion years old, and HD 139664, an F star slightly larger than the sun but only 300 million years old.

“One is a K star and the other is an F star, therefore they are more likely to form planetary systems with life than the massive and short-lived stars such as beta-Pictoris and Fomalhaut,” he noted. “When we look at HD 53143 and HD 139664, we may be looking at astrophysical mirrors to our Kuiper Belt.”

The disk around the oldest of the two stars, HD 53143, is wide like that of beta-Pictoris (beta-Pic), which was the first debris disk ever observed, about 20 years ago, and AU Microscopii (AU Mic), which Kalas discovered last year. Both beta-Pic and AU Mic are about 10 million years old.

The disk around HD 139664, however, is a narrow belt, similar to the disk around the star Fomalhaut, which Kalas imaged for the first time early last year. HD 139664 has a very sharp outer edge at 109 AU, similar to the sharp outer edge of our Kuiper Belt at 50 AU. The belt around HD 139664 starts about 60 AU from the star and peaks in density at 83 AU.

“If we can understand the origin of the sharp outer edge around HD 139664, we might better understand the history of our solar system,” Kalas said.

The research was supported by grants from NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Original Source: UC Berkeley News Release

A graphic representing NASA’s ACE and Wind and ESA’s Cluster spacecraft encountering solar particle jets. Image credit: UC Berkeley Click to enlarge
A fleet of NASA and European Space Agency space-weather probes observed an immense jet of electrically charged particles in the solar wind between the Sun and Earth. The jet, at least 200 times as wide as the Earth, was powered by clashing magnetic fields in a process called “magnetic reconnection”.
magnetic reconnection in the solar wind

These jets are the result of natural particle accelerators dwarfing anything built on Earth. Scientists build miles-long particle accelerators on Earth to smash atoms together in an effort to understand the fundamental laws of physics.

Similar reconnection-powered jets occur in Earth’s magnetic shield, producing effects that can disable orbiting spacecraft and cause severe magnetic storms on our planet, sometimes disrupting power stations.

The newly discovered interplanetary jets are far larger than those occurring within Earth’s magnetic shield. The new observation is the first direct measurement indicating magnetic reconnection can happen on immense scales.

Understanding magnetic reconnection is fundamental to comprehending explosive phenomena throughout the Universe, such as solar flares (billion-megaton explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere), gamma-ray bursts (intense bursts of radiation from exotic stars), and laboratory nuclear fusion. Just as a rubber band can suddenly snap when twisted too far, magnetic reconnection is a natural process by which the energy in a stressed magnetic field is suddenly released when it changes shape, accelerating particles (ions and electrons).

“Only with coordinated measurements by Sun-Earth connection spacecraft like ACE, Wind, and Cluster can we explore the space environment with unprecedented detail and in three dimensions,” says Dr. Tai Phan, lead author of the results, from the University of California, Berkeley. “The near-Earth space environment is the only natural laboratory where we can make direct measurements of the physics of explosive magnetic phenomena occurring throughout the Universe.” Phan’s article appears as the cover article in Nature on January 12.

The solar wind is a dilute stream of electrically charged (ionized) gas that blows continually from the Sun. Because the solar wind is electrically charged, it carries solar magnetic fields with it. The solar wind arising from different places on the Sun carries magnetic fields pointing in different directions. Magnetic reconnection in the solar wind takes place when “sheets” of oppositely directed magnetic fields get pressed together. In doing so, the sheets connect to form an X-shaped cross-section that is then annihilated, or broken, to form a new magnetic line geometry. The creation of a different magnetic geometry produces extensive jets of particles streaming away from the reconnection site.

Until recently, magnetic reconnection was mostly reported in Earth’s “magnetosphere”, the natural magnetic shield surrounding Earth. It is composed of magnetic field lines generated by our planet, and defends us from the continuous flow of charged particles that make up the solar wind by deflecting them. However, when the interplanetary magnetic field lines carried by the solar wind happen to be in the opposite orientation to the Earth?s magnetic field lines, reconnection is triggered and solar material can break through Earth’s shield.

Some previous reconnection events measured in Earth?s magnetosphere suggested that the phenomenon was intrinsically random and patchy in nature, extending not more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers (miles). However, “This discovery settles a long-standing debate concerning whether reconnection is intrinsically patchy, or whether instead it can operate across vast regions in space,” said Dr. Jack Gosling of the University of Colorado, a co-author on the paper and a pioneer in research on reconnection in space.

The broader picture of magnetic reconnection emerged when six spacecraft ? the four European Space Agency Cluster spacecraft and NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Wind probes ? were flying in the solar wind outside Earth?s magnetosphere on 2 February 2002 and made a chance discovery. During a time span of about two and a half hours, all spacecraft observed in sequence a single huge stream of jetting particles, at least 2.5 million kilometers wide (about 1.5 million miles or nearly 200 Earth diameters), caused by the largest reconnection event ever measured directly.

“If the observed reconnection were patchy, one or more spacecraft most likely would have not encountered an accelerated flow of particles,” said Phan. “Furthermore, patchy and random reconnection events would have resulted in different spacecraft detecting jets directed in different directions, which was not the case.”

Since the spacecraft detected the jet for more than two hours, the reconnection must have been almost steady over at least that timespan. Another 27 large-scale reconnection events ? with the associated jets – were identified by ACE and Wind, four of which extended more than 50 Earth diameters, or 650,000 kilometers (about 400,000 miles). Thanks to these additional data, the team could conclude that reconnection in the solar wind is to be looked at as an extended and steady phenomenon.

The 2 February 2002 event could have been considerably larger, but the spacecraft were separated by no more than 200 Earth diameters, so its true extent is unknown. Two new NASA missions will help gauge the actual size of these events and examine them in more detail. The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, scheduled for launch in May or June of 2006, will consist of two spacecraft orbiting the Sun on opposite sides of the Earth, separated by as much as 186 million miles (almost 300 million kilometers). Their primary mission is to observe Coronal Mass Ejections, billion-ton eruptions of electrically charged gas from the Sun, in three dimensions. However, the spacecraft will also be able to detect magnetic reconnection events occurring in the solar wind with instruments that measure magnetic fields and charged particles. The Magnetospheric Multi-Scale mission (MMS), planned for launch in 2013, will use four identical spacecraft in various Earth orbits to perform detailed studies of the cause of magnetic reconnection in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Original Source: NASA News Release