The Carina Nebula around the Wolf–Rayet star WR 22. Credit: ESO
[/caption]
Massive stars live fast and die young. But they are also beautiful. This amazingly spectacular new image from ESO shows the brilliant and unusual star Wolf-Rayet 22 nestled within billowing, colorful folds of the Carina Nebula. WR 22 is one of many exceptionally hot and brilliant stars contained by the beautiful Carina Nebula (also known as NGC 3372), a huge region of star formation in the southern Milky Way. The image was captured by ESO’s Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Wolf–Rayet stars are named after the two French astronomers who first identified them in the mid-nineteenth century, and WR 22 is one of the most massive ones we know of. It is a member of a double star system and has been measured to have a mass at least 70 times that of the Sun. Although the star lies over 5000 light-years from the Earth, it is so bright that it can just be faintly seen with the unaided eye under good conditions.
The colorful backdrop of the Carina Nebula is created by the interactions between the intense ultraviolet radiation coming from WR 22 and other hot massive stars within the nebula, and the vast gas clouds, mostly hydrogen, from which they formed. The central part of this enormous complex of gas and dust lies off the left side of this picture as can be seen in image another image on the ESO website. This area includes the famous star Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars and unstable stars in the universe.
For more info, and larger images for downloads (need a new desktop background?) see this ESO webpage.
Researchers studying Neptune’s atmosphere found evidence that a comet may have hit the planet about two centuries ago. Was this a “cold-case” file re-opened, or did they discover a way to travel back in time to witness a long-ago event? To make the discovery, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research actually used the Herschel Space Telescope’s PACS (Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer) instrument, along with what was learned from observations from when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter sixteen years ago. Continue reading “Comet Whacked Neptune 200 Years Ago”
A part of a Herschel/HIFI spectral scan (the white curve) overlaid on a background Spitzer Space Telescope image (ESA/HIFI/HEXOS/E. Bergin).
Love to read science papers? Here’s a batch that will keep you busy for a while. 152 papers were released this morning highlighting the Herschel telescope’s first science results. A few papers describe the observatory and its instruments, and the rest are dedicated to observations of many astronomical targets from bodies in the Solar System to distant galaxies. Herschel is the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimeter, so there’s a wide range of objects and topics covered, including star formation, galaxy evolution, and cosmology.
And you thought you’d have nothing to do this weekend!
IRAS 13481-6124 (upper left is about twenty times the mass of our sun and five times its radius. It is surrounded by its pre-natal cocoon. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/Univ. of Michigan
[/caption]
How do massive stars form? This has been one of the more hotly debated questions in astronomy. Do big stars form by accretion like low-mass stars or do they form through the merging of low mass protostars? Since massive stars tend to be quite far away and usually are surrounded by a shroud of dust, they are difficult to observe, said Stefan Kraus from the University of Michigan. But Kraus and his team have obtained the first image of a dusty disc closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that, big or small, all stars form the same way.
“Our observations show a disc surrounding an embryonic young, massive star, which is now fully formed,” said Kraus. “It’s the first time something like this has been observed, and the disk very much resembles what we see around young stars that are much smaller, except everything is scaled up and more massive.”
Not only that, but Kraus and his team found hints at a potential planet-forming region around the nascent star.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer Kraus and his team focused on IRAS 13481-6124, a star located about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and about 20 times more massive than our sun. “We were able to get a very sharp view into the innermost regions around this star by combining the light of separate telescopes,” Kraus said, “basically mimicking the resolving power of a telescope with an incredible 85-meter (280-foot) mirror.”
Kraus added that the resulting resolution is about 2.4 milliarcseconds, which is equivalent to picking out the head of a screw on the International Space Station from Earth, or more than ten times the resolution possible with current visible-light telescopes in space.
They also made complementary observations with the 3.58-meter New Technology Telescope at La Silla. The team chose this region by looking at archived images from the Spitzer Space Telescope as well as from observations done with the APEX 12-meter submillimeter telescope, where they discovered the presence of a jet.
“Such jets are commonly observed around young low-mass stars and generally indicate the presence of a disc,” says Kraus.
Astronomers have obtained the first clear look at a dusty disk closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that massive stars do form in the same way as their smaller brethren -- and closing an enduring debate. This artist's concept shows what such a massive disk might look like. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada
From their observations, the team believes the system is about 60,000 years old, and that the star has reached its final mass. Because of the intense light of the star — 30,000 times more luminous than our Sun — the disc will soon start to evaporate. The disc extends to about 130 times the Earth–Sun distance — or 130 astronomical units (AU) — and has a mass similar to that of the star, roughly twenty times the Sun. In addition, the inner parts of the disc are shown to be devoid of dust, which could mean that planets are forming around the star.
“In the future, we might be able to see gaps in this and other dust disks created by orbiting planets, although it is unlikely that such bodies could survive for long,” Kraus said. “A planet around such a massive star would be destroyed by the strong stellar winds and intense radiation as soon as the protective disk material is gone, which leaves little chance for the development of solar systems like our own.”
Kraus looks forward to observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), currently under construction in Chile, which may be able to resolve the disks to an even sharper resolution.
Previously, Spitzer detected dusty disks of planetary debris around more mature massive stars, which supports the idea that planets may form even in these extreme environments. (Read about that research here.) .
An artist's rendering of a Kuiper Belt object. Image: NASA
[/caption]
How do you study an extremely small planetary body in the dim outer reaches of our solar system? Get all your friends from around the world to wait for a very elusive – if not short-lived – special event. And in doing so, you may find something completely unexpected. Enter James Elliot from MIT, who worked with dozens of observatories and astronomers across the globe, including Jay Pasachoff from Williams College in Massachusetts, in an attempt to make observations of the Kuiper Belt Object 55636, (also known as 2002 TX300) a small body orbiting about 48 AU away from the Sun. Since this KBO is too small and distant for direct observations of its surface, the astronomers tracked and plotted its course, figuring out when it would pass in front of a distant star.
The KBO occulted, or passed in front of a bright background star, an event which lasted only 10 seconds. But in that short amount of time, the astronomers were able to determine the object’s size and albedo. Both of these results were surprising.
55636 was found to be smaller than previously thought, 300km in diameter, but it is highly reflective, meaning it is covered in fresh, white ice.
Most known KBOs have dark surfaces due to space weathering, dust accumulation and bombardment by cosmic rays, so 55636’s brightness implies it has an active resurfacing mechanism, or perhaps that in some cases, fresh water ice can persist for billions of years in the outer reaches of the Solar System. One graph of the occultation from the Las Cumbres Observatory. Credit: Elliot, et al.
42 astronomers from 18 observatories located in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico and the US were part of the observations, but because of weather and timing, only two observatories, both in Hawaii, were able to detect the occultation. Working with Wayne Rosing, Pasachoff coordinated the observations at the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network located at Haleakala Crater on Maui, Hawaii, which made the best observations.
But Pasachoff told Universe Today that having two different angles of view to work with provided the ability to make quite precise measurements of the KBO.
“It was absolutely crucial to have the second observation site,” he said. “Without it, we
would not have known where on a round or elliptical body the chord, the line of occultation, passed and we could not have set an upper limit to the size of the body.”
A chord near the edge of a huge body can be vanishingly small, Pasachoff added, illustrating why they needed at least two chords.
Although the surfaces of other highly reflective bodies in the solar system, such as the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, are continuously renewed with fresh ice from the condensation of atmospheric gases or by cryovolcanism that spews water instead of lava, 55636 is too small for these mechanisms to be at work.
“The surprising thing in a billion-year-old object that is so reflective is that it maintained or renewed its reflectivity,” said Pasachoff, “so possibilities include the darkening that we know takes place in the inner solar system is much less way out there; or the object renews its ice or frost from inside. We need new observations or more KBO’s with occultations, and we need more theoretical work.”
This was the first successful “planned” observation of a KBO using the stellar occultation method. In 2009 another team scoured through four and a half years of Hubble data to find on occultation of an extremely small KBO 975 meters (3,200 feet) across and a whopping 6.7 billion kilometers (4.2 billion miles) away.
For several years, Pasachoff and his team from Williams College have worked with Elliot and others from MIT, as well as Amanda Gulbis of the South African Astronomical Observatory to study Pluto by occultation. With careful measurements of a star’s brightness as Pluto hides or occults it, they have shown that Pluto’s atmosphere was slightly warming or expanding. A main goal now is to find out how the atmosphere is changing. This will be especially significant with the New Horizons spacecraft en route to Pluto.
Pasachoff said he knew 55636’s albedo would be bright, but was surprised how bright it was. The origins of this object is believed to come from a collision that occurred one billion years ago between one of the three known dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, Haumea and another object that caused Haumea’s icy mantle to break into a dozen or so smaller bodies, including 55636.
“Mike Brown (KBO and dwarf planet hunter from Caltech) told me last year, before the observations, that the object would be reflective since it is in the Haumea family, and Haumea itself has a high albedo,” Pasachoff said.
Pasachoff worked with Brown and his team last year in trying to capture the mutual occultations of transits of Haumea with its moon Namaka using the Palomar 5-meter telescope, but they weren’t successful in detecting the extremely small effect, given Haumea’s rapid rotation period.
Elliot used the occultation method to discover the rings of Uranus decades ago and continues to champion the method.
Pasachoff said the recent observation of 55636 was very rewarding. “It was an incredible observation, and I was very pleased to be part of it.” He said. “I am proud that all three of the graphs in the Nature article, and both of the successful observations, were arranged or made by our Williams College team.”
He added that any such observation includes at least these four elements: astrometric predictions, observations, reduction of data, interpretation.
“We were very fortunate and interested in being successful with observations,” Pasachoff said. “But it is important to note that Jim Elliot and his colleagues at MIT and Lowell Observatory have been working for years to refine the methods of predictions to get them accurate enough for this purpose. And this event was the first time that the predictions had been accurate enough to merit the all-out press of telescopes that we assembled. That we picked up the event, near the center of the prediction to boot, is a credit to the astrometry team.”
We spent 5 episodes telling the story of astronomy so far, how we got from the work of the Babylonians to the modern discoveries made in the last decade. But now we want to look forward, studying the current space missions and experiments to uncover the mysteries that astronomers hope to solve.
VISTA’s infrared view of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253). Credit: ESO
The new VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has captured a great new image of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253), and this video allows you to zoom in for a closer look. The sequence starts with a wide view of the southern sky far from the Milky Way. Only a few stars are visible, but then VISTA brings us in closer where the view shifts to the very detailed new infrared image of NGC 253 provided by the new telescope at Paranal. By observing in infrared light VISTA’s view is less affected by dust and reveals a myriad of cooler stars as well as a prominent bar of stars across the central region. The VISTA image provides much new information on the history and development of the galaxy. See the still image below.
[/caption]
The Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) lies in the constellation of the same name and is one of the brightest galaxies in the sky. It is prominent enough to be seen with good binoculars and was discovered by Caroline Herschel from England in 1783. NGC 253 is a spiral galaxy that lies about 13 million light-years away. It is the brightest member of a small collection of galaxies called the Sculptor Group, one of the closest such groupings to our own Local Group of galaxies. Part of its visual prominence comes from its status as a starburst galaxy, one in the throes of rapid star formation. NGC 253 is also very dusty, which obscures the view of many parts of the galaxy. Seen from Earth, the galaxy is almost edge on, with the spiral arms clearly visible in the outer parts, along with a bright core at its center.
Learn more about this image and the VISTA telescope at the ESO website.
Pan-STARRS PS1 Observatory. Image courtesy of Rob Ratkowski Photography and the Haleakala Amateur Astronomers.
[/caption]
There’s a new eye on the skies on the lookout for ‘killer’ asteroids and comets. The first Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) telescope, PS1, is fully operational, ready to map large portions of the sky nightly. It will be sleuthing not just for potential incoming space rocks, but also supernovae and other variable objects.
“Pan-STARRS is an all-purpose machine,” said Harvard astronomer Edo Berger. “Having a dedicated telescope repeatedly surveying large areas opens up a lot of new opportunities.”
“PS1 has been taking science-quality data for six months, but now we are doing it dusk-to-dawn every night,” says Dr. Nick Kaiser, the principal investigator of the Pan-STARRS project.
Pan-STARRS PS1 Observatory just before sunrise on Haleakala, Maui. Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophyiscs
Pan-STARRS will map one-sixth of the sky every month and basically be on the lookout for any objects that move over time. Frequent follow-up observations will allow astronomers to track those objects and calculate their orbits, identifying any potential threats to Earth. PS1 also will spot many small, faint bodies in the outer solar system that hid from previous surveys.
“PS1 will discover an unprecedented variety of Centaurs [minor planets between Jupiter and Neptune], trans-Neptunian objects, and comets. The system has the capability to detect planet-size bodies on the outer fringes of our solar system,” said Smithsonian astronomer Matthew Holman.
Pan-STARRS features the world’s largest digital camera — a 1,400-megapixel (1.4 gigapixel) monster. With it, astronomers can photograph an area of the sky as large as 36 full moons in a single exposure. In comparison, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope’s WFC3 camera spans an area only one-hundredth the size of the full moon (albeit at very high resolution).
This sensitive digital camera was rated as one of the “20 marvels of modern engineering” by Gizmo Watch in 2008. Inventor Dr. John Tonry (IfA) said, “We played as close to the bleeding edge of technology as you can without getting cut!”
Each image, if printed out as a 300-dpi photograph, would cover half a basketball court, and PS1 takes an image every 30 seconds. The amount of data PS1 produces every night would fill 1,000 DVDs. Another view of Pan STARRS PS1 Observatory. Image courtesy of Rob Ratkowski Photography and the Haleakala Amateur Astronomers.
“As soon as Pan-STARRS turned on, we felt like we were drinking from a fire hose!” said Berger. He added that they are finding several hundred transient objects a month, which would have taken a couple of years with previous facilities.
Located atop the dormant volcano Haleakala (that’s Holy Haleakala to you, Bad Astronomer) Pan-STARRS exploits the unique combination of superb observing sites and technical and scientific expertise available in Hawaii.
The composite image from 11 images, each with 5 sec exposure, spaced by 35-50 sec. The magnitude of Hayabusa is estimated to be 21 mag. Credit: Subaru Telescope Team
[/caption]
The world watched and waited for the Hayabusa spacecraft to make its return to Earth on June 13, 2010 and the people of Japan — who built and launched the little spacecraft that could (and did!) — were especially hopeful in watching and waiting. Japan’s Subaru Telescope (although located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii) turned its expectant eyes towards Hayabusa and captured the spacecraft’s flight between the Moon and Earth in 11 different images.
A note from the Subaru Telescope team:
During the busy time preparing the observations, Doctor Masafumi Yagi and his team managed to maneuver the telescope just in time to catch Hayabusa before it disappeared down south in the twilight sky. At that time, Hayabusa was a little less than half way between Moon and Earth. Five seconds exposures, each spaced by 35 – 50 seconds in the V filter with Suprime Cam, it showed up in clear trace at the position expected to be. Brightness is estimated to be only 21 magnitudes. At this level, one can see a background galaxy clearly.
We are waiting to hear more from the project team at ISAS/JAXA. In the meantime, congratulations to all who are involved in this unprecedented endeavor.
And here are some images of the recovery teams who picked up the sample return canister in the Woomera Prohibited Area in Australia. The canister will be taken to Japan and opened in a few weeks, or perhaps months, after rigorous testing. Only then will we find out if any asteroid samples made it in the canister for the ride back to Earth.
Recovery team makes sure all is safe with the sample return canister. Credit: JAXAThe recovery team handles the heat sheild for the Hayabusa sample return capsule. Credit: JAXA, Hayabusa Twitter feed.JAXA's Hayabusa space capsule is transported inside a box to a clean room inside the Instrumentation Building at the Woomera Test Range, South Australia. Credit: Australian Science Media Centre
TRAPPIST First Light Image of the Tarantula Nebula. Credit: ESO
[/caption]
Great shot of the Tarantula nebula!
A new robotic telescope dedicated primarily to hunting for extra solar planets has opened its eyes. Although its first light image is of a nebula, the TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile will focus on detecting and characterizing planets located outside of our solar system. The new telescope will also study comets.
“The two themes of the TRAPPIST project are important parts of an emerging interdisciplinary field of research — astrobiology — that aims at studying the origin and distribution of life in the Universe,” said Michaël Gillon, who is in charge of the exoplanet studies.
“Terrestrial planets similar to our Earth are obvious targets for the search for life outside the Solar System, while comets are suspected to have played an important role in the appearance and development of life on our planet,” adds his colleague Emmanuël Jehin, who leads the cometary part of the project.
TRAPPIST will make high precision measurements of “brightness dips” that might possibly be caused by exoplanet transits. During such a transit, the observed brightness of the star decreases slightly because the planet blocks a part of the starlight. The larger the planet, the more of the light is blocked and the more the brightness of the star will decrease.
For studying comets, TRAPPIST is equipped with special large, high quality cometary filters, allowing astronomers to study regularly and in detail the ejection of several types of molecules by comets during their journey around the Sun.
“With dozens of comets observed each year, this will provide us with a unique dataset, bringing important information about their nature,” says Jehin.
TRAPPIST is a lightweight 0.6-metre robotic telescope, fully automated and moving precisely across the sky at a high speed. The observing program is prepared in advance and the telescope can perform a full night of observations unattended. A meteorological station monitors the weather continuously and decides to close the dome if necessary. The control center for this telescope is in Liège, Belgium, about 12,000 km away.
See more first light images from TRAPPIST, including Omega Centauri and M83 at the ESO website.
