Posted on by Tammy Plotner

NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer Retires

Technicians work on RXTE in 1995. Credit: NASA/Goddard

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For more than 16 years, 2,200 papers in refereed journals, 92 doctoral theses, and more than 1,000 rapid notifications alerting astronomers around the globe to new astronomical activity, the NASA Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer is now retired. It sent the last of its data on January 4th of this year and on January 5th the plucky little satellite was decommissioned. If you’re not familiar with Rossi’s activities, then picture sending back images and data on the extreme environments around white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes… because that’s what made the mission famous.

On December 30, 1995, the mission was launched as XTE from Cape Canaveral, Florida on board a Delta II 7920 rocket. Within weeks it was named in honor of Bruno Rossi, an MIT astronomer and a pioneer of X-ray astronomy and space plasma physics who died in 1993. However, the mission itself didn’t die – it excelled with honors. The entire scientific community recognized the importance of RXTE research and bestowed it with five awards – four Rossi Prizes (1999, 2003, 2006 and 2009) from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS and the 2004 NWO Spinoza prize, the highest Dutch science award, from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

On board, the Rossi was three scientific instruments housed in one unit. The first was the Proportional Counter Array (PCA), which was centered on the lower end of the energy band and was crafted by Goddard. The second instrument was the High Energy X-Ray Timing Experiment (HEXTE) that could be aimed at very specific targets and was manufactured by the University of California at San Diego for exploring the upper energy range. The last of the trio was the All-Sky Monitor developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. It took in about 80% of the sky during each orbit, delivering astronomers with an unprecedented amount of data on the wide variances of X-Ray sky and allowing them to record bright sources over a period of time as short as a few microseconds up to months. All of this information was taken in over a broad span of energy ranging from 2,000 to 250,000 electron volts.

The Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer asked little and returned much. Over its operating lifetime it gave us new insight in the life cycles of neutron stars and black holes. Through its eyes we learned about magnetars and discovered the first accreting millisecond pulsar. But that’s not all. The RXTE provided hard evidence which supported Einstein’s theory by observing “frame dragging” in the neighborhood of a black hole. Even though the instrumentation would be considered antique by today’s standards, it certainly served its purpose. “The spacecraft and its instruments had been showing their age, and in the end RXTE had accomplished everything we put it up there to do, and much more,” said Tod Strohmayer, RXTE project scientist at Goddard.

According to the NASA news release, the decision to decommission RXTE followed the recommendations of a 2010 review board tasked to evaluate and rank each of NASA’s operating astrophysics missions. The three and a half ton satellite is expected to return to Earth sometime between the years 2014 and 2023, depending on solar activity. It will have a fiery end… burning out like the superstar that it was. To celebrate its career, the scientific community will hold a special session on RXTE during the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Austin, Texas. The session is scheduled for Tuesday, January 10, at 3 p.m. CST. A press conference on new RXTE results will also be held at the meeting on January 10 at 1:45 p.m. EST. The decision to decommission RXTE followed the recommendations of a 2010 review board tasked to evaluate and rank each of NASA’s operating astrophysics missions. “After two days we listened to verify that none of the systems we turned off had autonomously re-activated, and we’ve heard nothing,” said Deborah Knapp, RXTE mission director at Goddard.

On the contrary… We heard a lot from Rossi!

Original Story Source: NASA News Release.

Posted on by Jason Major

X-rays Unwrap a Poky Little Pulsar

A pulsar within a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud. X-rays are blue; optical data is red and green. (NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al.)

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For the first time astronomers have located a pulsar – the super-dense, spinning remains of a star – nestled within the remnants of a supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The image above, a composite of x-ray  and optical light data acquired by NASA’s Chandra Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, shows the pulsar shining brightly on the right surrounded by the ejected outer layers of its former stellar life.

The optically-bright area on the left is a large star-forming region of dust and gas nearby SXP 1062.

A pulsar is a neutron star that emits high-energy beams of radiation from its magnetic poles. These poles are not always aligned with its axis of rotation, and so the beams swing through space as the neutron star spins. If the Earth happens to be in direct line with the beams at some point along their path, we see them as rapidly flashing radiation sources… sort of like a cosmic lighthouse on overdrive.

What’s unusual about this pulsar – called SXP 1062 – is its slow rate of rotation. Its beams spin around at a rate of about once every 18 minutes, which is downright poky for a pulsar, most of which spin several times a second.

X-ray image of SXP 1062

This makes SXP 1062 one of the slowest known pulsars discovered within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy cruising alongside our own Milky Way about 200,000 light-years distant.

The supernova that presumably created the pulsar and its surrounding remnant wrapping is estimated to have taken place between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago – relatively recently, by cosmic standards. To see a young pulsar spinning so slowly is extra unusual since younger pulsars have typically been observed to have rapid rotation rates. Understanding the cause of its leisurely pace will be the next goal for SXP 1062 researchers.

Read more about SXP 1062on the Chandra photo album page.

 

Image credit: X-ray & Optical: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

In The Still Of The Night… Listening To The “Heartbeat” Of A Tiny Black Hole

Artist's rendering showing the jet fully established. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

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Is everything quiet in deep space?  Not hardly.  It’s a place jammed with noises of all kinds.  So much noise, in fact, that it could be quite difficult to pick up a faint signature of something small…  something like the smallest black hole known.  Thanks to  NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) , an international team of astronomers have found the pulse they were looking for and it’s a pattern that’s only been seen in one other black hole system.

Its name is IGR J17091-3624 and it’s a binary system which consists of a normal star and a black hole with a mass that measures only about three times solar.  In theoretical terms, that’s right at the edge where possibility of being a black hole begins.

Here’s the picture…  In this binary system, escaping gas from the “normal” star flows across space in the direction of the black hole.  This action creates a disk where friction heats it to millions of degrees – releasing X-rays.  Periodic changes in the strength of the X-ray emissions point towards the actions taking place within the gas disk.  Scientists theorize that fast changes occur at the event horizon… the point of no return.

IGR J17091-3624 was discovered when it went into outburst in 2003. Current observations have it becoming active every few years and its most recent flare began in February of this year and has been kicking up cosmic dust ever since. Observations place it in the general direction of Scorpius, but astronomers aren’t sure of an exact distance – somewhere between 16,000 light years to more than 65,000. However, IGR J17091-3624 isn’t absolutely alone in its unique changes. Black hole binary, GRS 1915+105, also displays a number of well-ordered rhythms, too.

This animation compares the X-ray ‘heartbeats’ of GRS 1915 and IGR J17091, two black holes that ingest gas from companion stars. GRS 1915 has nearly five times the mass of IGR J17091, which at three solar masses may be the smallest black hole known. A fly-through relates the heartbeats to hypothesized changes in the black hole’s jet and disk. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

“We think that most of these patterns represent cycles of accumulation and ejection in an unstable disk, and we now see seven of them in IGR J17091,” said Tomaso Belloni at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy. “Identifying these signatures in a second black hole system is very exciting.”

Binary GRS 1915 has some very cool characteristics.  Right now astronomers have observed jets blasting out in opposite directions cruising along at 98% the speed of light.  These originate at the event horizon where strong magnetic fields fuel them and each pulsation matches the occurrence of the jets. By observing the X-ray spectrum with RXTE, researchers have discovered the interior of the disk creates enough radiation to halt the gas flow – an outward wind which negates the inward flow – and shuts down activity.  As a result, the inner disk glows hot and bright, eliminating itself as it flows toward the black hole and kick starts the jet activity again.  It’s a process that happens in as little as 40 seconds!

Right now astronomers aren’t able to prove that IGR J17091 has a particle jet, but the regular pulsations indicate it. Records show this “heartbeat” occurs about every five seconds – about 8 times faster than its counterpart and some 20 times more faint. Numbers like this would make it a very tiny black hole.

“Just as the heart rate of a mouse is faster than an elephant’s, the heartbeat signals from these black holes scale according to their masses,” said Diego Altamirano, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and lead author of a paper describing the findings in the November 4 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s just the beginning of a full scale program involving RXTE to compare information from both black holes.  Even more detailed data will be added from NASA’s Swift satellite and XMM-Newton, too.

“Until this study, GRS 1915 was essentially a one-off, and there’s only so much we can understand from a single example,” said Tod Strohmayer, the project scientist for RXTE at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Now, with a second system exhibiting similar types of variability, we really can begin to test how well we understand what happens at the brink of a black hole.”

Original Story Source: NASA Mission News

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Tarantula Nebula Is Growing!

Don’t like spiders? Well, here’s one that will grow on you! Located about 160,000 light years in the web of the Large Magellanic Cloud, star-forming region 30 Doradus is best known as the “Tarantula Nebula”. But don’t let it “bug” you… this space-born arachnid is home to giant stars whose intense radiation causes stellar winds to blast through surrounding gases to give us an incredible view!

When seen through the eyes of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, these huge shockwaves of x-ray energy heat the encompassing gaseous environment up to multi-millions of degrees and show up as blue. The supernovae detonations blast their way outward… gouging out “bubbles” in the cooler gas and dust. They show up hued as orange when observed through infra-red emissions and recorded by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

What’s so special about the Tarantula? Because it is so close, it’s a prime candidate for studying an active HII region. This stellar nursery is the largest in our Local Group and a perfect laboratory for monitoring stellar evolution. Right now astronomers are intensely interested in what causes growth on such a large scale – and their curent findings show it doesn’t have anything to do with pressure and radiation from the massive stars. However, an earlier study had opposing conclusions when it came to 30 Doradus’ central regions. By employing the Chandra Observatory observations, we may just find different opinions!

“Observations show that star formation is an inefficient and slow process. This result can be attributed to the injection of energy and momentum by stars that prevents free-fall collapse of molecular clouds. The mechanism of this stellar feedback is debated theoretically; possible sources of pressure include the classical warm H II gas, the hot gas generated by shock heating from stellar winds and supernovae, direct radiation of stars, and the dust-processed radiation field trapped inside the H II shell.” says Laura Lopez (et al). “By contrast, the dust-processed radiation pressure and hot gas pressure are generally weak and not dynamically important, although the hot gas pressure may have played a more significant role at early times.”

Original Story Source: Chandra News Release. For Further Reading: What Drives the Expansion of Giant H II Regions?: A Study of Stellar Feedback in 30 Doradus.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

New NASA Mission Hunts Down Zombie Stars

This is an artist's concept of a pulsar (blue-white disk in center) pulling in matter from a nearby star (red disk at upper right). The stellar material forms a disk around the pulsar (multicolored ring) before falling on to the surface at the magnetic poles. The pulsar's intense magnetic field is represented by faint blue outlines surrounding the pulsar. Credit: NASA

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Neutron stars have been classed as “undead”… real zombie stars. Even though technically defunct, the neutron star continues to shine – and occasionally feed on a neighbor if it gets too close. They are born when a massive star collapses under its gravity and its outer layers are blown far and wide, outshining a billion suns, in a supernova event. What’s left is a stellar corpse… a core of inconceivable density… where one teaspoon would weigh about a billion tons on Earth. How would we study such a curiosity? NASA has proposed a mission called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) that would detect the zombie and allow us to see into the dark heart of a neutron star.

The core of a neutron star is pretty incredible. Despite the fact that it has blown away most of its exterior and stopped nuclear fusion, it still radiates heat from the explosion and exudes a magnetic field which tips the scales. This intense form of radiation caused by core collapse measures out at over a trillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. If you don’t think that impressive, then think of the size. Originally the star could have been a trillion miles or more in diameter, yet now is compressed to the size of an average city. That makes a neutron star a tiny dynamo – capable of condensing matter into itself at more than 1.4 times the content of the Sun, or at least 460,000 Earths.

“A neutron star is right at the threshold of matter as it can exist – if it gets any denser, it becomes a black hole,” says Dr. Zaven Arzoumanian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We have no way of creating neutron star interiors on Earth, so what happens to matter under such incredible pressure is a mystery – there are many theories about how it behaves. The closest we come to simulating these conditions is in particle accelerators that smash atoms together at almost the speed of light. However, these collisions are not an exact substitute – they only last a split second, and they generate temperatures that are much higher than what’s inside neutron stars.”

If approved, the NICER mission will be launched by the summer of 2016 and attached robotically to the International Space Station. In September 2011, NASA selected NICER for study as a potential Explorer Mission of Opportunity. The mission will receive $250,000 to conduct an 11-month implementation concept study. Five Mission of Opportunity proposals were selected from 20 submissions. Following the detailed studies, NASA plans to select for development one or more of the five Mission of Opportunity proposals in February 2013.

This is an artist's concept of the NICER instrument on board the International Space Station. NICER is the cube in the foreground on the left. The circular objects protruding from the cube are telescopes that focus X-rays from the pulsar on to the detector. Credit: NASA

What will NICER do? First off, an array of 56 telescopes will gather X-ray information from a neutron stars magnetic poles and hotspots. It is from these areas that our zombie stars release X-rays, and as they rotate create a pulse of light – thereby the term “pulsar”. As the neutron star shrinks, it spins faster and the resultant intense gravity can pull in material from a closely orbiting star. Some of these pulsars spin so fast they can reach speeds of several hundred of rotations per second! What scientists are itching to understand is how matter behaves inside a neutron star and “pinning down the correct Equation Of State (EOS) that most accurately describes how matter responds to increasing pressure. Currently, there are many suggested EOSs, each proposing that matter can be compressed by different amounts inside neutron stars. Suppose you held two balls of the same size, but one was made of foam and the other was made of wood. You could squeeze the foam ball down to a smaller size than the wooden one. In the same way, an EOS that says matter is highly compressible will predict a smaller neutron star for a given mass than an EOS that says matter is less compressible.”

Now all NICER will need to do is help us to measure a pulsar’s mass. Once it is determined, we can get a correct EOS and unlock the mystery of how matter behaves under intense gravity. “The problem is that neutron stars are small, and much too far away to allow their sizes to be measured directly,” says NICER Principal Investigator Dr. Keith Gendreau of NASA Goddard. “However, NICER will be the first mission that has enough sensitivity and time-resolution to figure out a neutron star’s size indirectly. The key is to precisely measure how much the brightness of the X-rays changes as the neutron star rotates.”

So what else does our zombie star do that’s impressive? Because of their extreme gravity in such small volume, they distort space/time in accordance with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. It is this space “warp” that allows astronomers to reveal the presence of a companion star. It also produces effects like an orbital shift called precession, allowing the pair to orbit around each other causing gravitational waves and producing measurable orbital energy. One of the goals of NICER is to detect these effects. The warp itself will allow the team to determine the neutron star’s size. How? Imagine pushing your finger into a stretchy material – then imagine pushing your whole hand against it. The smaller the neutron star, the more it will warp space and light.

Here light curves become very important. When a neutron star’s hotspots are aligned with our observations, the brightness increases as one rotates into view and dims as it rotates away. This results in a light curve with large waves. But, when space is distorted we’re allowed to view around the curve and see the second hotspot – resulting in a light curve with smoother, smaller waves. The team has models that produce “unique light curves for the various sizes predicted by different EOSs. By choosing the light curve that best matches the observed one, they will get the correct EOS and solve the riddle of matter on the edge of oblivion.”

And breathe life into zombie stars…

Original Story Source: NASA Mission News.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Galaxy Interactions Could Cause Overweight Black Holes

Two examples of galaxy pairs in the COSMOS survey (courtesy of the Chandra X-ray Center). The Hubble Space Telescope images show galaxies undergoing a close encounter (shown in gold). X-rays, as detected by Chandra, indicate which of the two galaxies hosts an AGN. In addition, diffuse X-ray emission from hot gas is present thus highlighting that such galaxy associations tend to reside in galaxy groups, an environment of rapid galaxy and black hole growth.

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Yep. It’s true. Almost all galaxies are guilty of having a supermassive black hole in their centers. Some even tip the scales at millions – or even billions – of times more mass than the Sun. However, how they came to be so weighty is a true enigma. Thanks to research done by Dr. John Silverman (IPMU) and the international COSMOS team, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope have revealed that galaxy interactions may be responsible for the growth of supermassive black holes – and they’ve left behind some very important clues…

If you’re big – you’re big. As a general rule, supermassive black holes like to hang out in massive galaxies. Their mass is usually directly related to the central bulge. Now the consensus is that massive galaxies gained their girth (at least in part) by mergers and interactions with smaller galaxies. This act of cannibalism in galactic evolution has been postulated to explain how matter gathers toward the middle, eventually resulting in a supermassive black hole.

How do we determine this? One way is to take a closer look at galaxies currently in merger as compared to ones in isolation. While the concept is easy, carrying out the test hasn’t been. A supermassive black hole leaves visual observations “blinded by the light” while a quasar can effectively “outshine” an entire host galaxy, leaving an interactor almost impossible to detect. But, like a bulging waistline, such interactions should distort the overall contours of the galaxy.

Now the COSMOS team might have an answer to the riddle.. by assuming a galaxy is interacting if it has a nearby neighbor. It’s a test that can happen without needing to know if distortion is present in optical images. What makes it possible are accurate distance measurements of about 20,000 galaxies in the COSMOS field as provided by the zCOSMOS redshift survey with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Isolated galaxies are used to give a comparison sample to lay the foundation as to whether an active galactic nucleus is common to interacting galaxies. With help from NASA’s Chandra Observatory, X-ray observations pinpoint galaxies which host an AGN. The X-ray emission signature dominates in growing SMBHs and X-rays are capable of cutting through the gas and dust of star-forming regions.

In their report to The Astrophysical Journal the team states that galaxies in close pairs are twice as likely to harbor AGNs as compared to galaxies in isolation. This answer may prove that beginning galaxy interactions can lead to “enhanced black hole growth”. Because it’s not a drastically common occcurrance, it means that only about 20% of SMBHs that break the scale happen via a merger event and that “final coalescence” might also play a role.

One thing we do know is that galaxies and their black holes, like people and their waistlines, all get a little heavier with time.

Original Story Source: Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Univserse.

Posted on by VirtualAstro

ROSAT – Fiery Debris To Rain From The Sky

ROSAT Credit: NASA

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The recent re-entry of the UARS satellite was not the end of falling satellite debris, as the German ROSAT X-ray observatory satellite will soon crash back to Earth.

Last month NASA’s large UARS satellite re-entered the atmosphere and burned up over the Pacific Ocean, with about 500 kg of debris falling into the water. But the smaller Roentgen Satellite or ROSAT will have approximately 30 pieces equaling 1.5 tons that will resist burn up and make it to the surface.

The largest piece of the satellite expected to reach the surface is the heat-resistant, 32 inch, 400 kg mirror.

Compared to UARS, there is an increased chance of someone being hit by a piece of the falling debris. The odds have been estimated as a 1 in 2,000; UARS was 1 in 3,200.

As with UARS, it is unknown where ROSAT will burn up and where its remaining parts will impact the surface, however the satellite is expected to re-enter between the 21st and 24th of October. The Center for Orbital and Re-Entry Debris studies predicts October 23, 2011 a 06:40 UTC ± 30 hours.

For up to date predictions check the Centre for Orbital and Re-Entry Debris Studies.

Prediction Ground Track Credit: Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies

Until then, you can keep an eye out for the small satellite as it is a naked eye object. It’s nowhere near as bright as the ISS, but it is visible. Check Heavens Above or Spaceweather for predictions of when it will pass over your location.

The 2.4 ton Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT) was launched by NASA in 1990 as a joint venture between Germany, Britain and the USA.

The satellite was designed to catalogue X-ray sources in deep space and mapped around 110,000 stars and supernovae. It also discovered that some comets emit X-rays. It was permanently damaged in 1998, and its mission was officially ended in February of 1999.

ROSAT will soon meet its fiery end; will you see it pass over before then?

Keep an eye out for that falling mirror.

Credit: NASA
Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Looking Into The Eye Of A Monster – Active Galaxy Markarian 509

Active galaxy Markarian 509 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope's WFPC2. Credits: NASA, ESA, J. Kriss (STScI) and J. de Plaa (SRON)

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“The world is a vampire, sent to drain… Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames…” Ah, yes. It’s the biggest vampire of all – the supermassive black hole. In this instance, it’s not any average, garden-variety black hole, but one that’s 300 million times the mass of the Sun and growing. Bullet with butterfly wings? No. This is more a case of butterfly wings with bullets.

An international team of astronomers using five different telescopes set their sites on 460 million light-year distant Markarian 509 to check out the action surrounding its huge black hole. The imaging team included ESA’s XMM-Newton, Integral, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Chandra and Swift satellites, and the ground-based telescopes WHT and PARITEL. For a hundred days they monitored Markarian 509. Why? Because it is known to have brightness variations which could mean turbulent inflow. In turn, the inner radiation then drives an outflow of gas – faster than a speeding bullet.

“XMM-Newton really led these observations because it has such a wide X-ray coverage, as well as an optical monitoring camera,” says Jelle Kaastra, SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, who coordinated an international team of 26 astronomers from 21 institutes on four continents to make these observations.

And the vampire reared its ugly head. Instead of the previously documented 25% changes, it jumped to 60%. The hot corona surrounding the black hole was spattering out cold gas “bullets” at speeds in excess of one million miles per hour. These projectiles are torn away from the dusty torus, but the real surprise is that they are coming from an area just 15 light years away from the center. This is a lot further than most astronomers speculate could happen.

“There has been a debate in astronomy for some time about the origin of the outflowing gas,” says Kaastra.

But there’s more than just bullets here. These new observations at multiple wavelengths are showing the coolest gas in the line of sight toward Markarian 509 has 14 different velocity components – all from different locations at the galaxy’s heart. What’s more, there’s indications the black hole accretion disc may have a shield of gas harboring temperatures ranging in the millions of degrees – the motivating force behind x-rays and gamma rays.

An artist's impression of the central engine of an active galaxy. A black hole is surrounded by matter waiting to fall in. Fearsome radiation from near the black hole drives an outflow of gas. Credits: NASA and M. Weiss (Chandra X-ray Center)

“The only way to explain this is by having gas hotter than that in the disc, a so-called ‘corona’, hovering above the disc,” Jelle Kaastra says. “This corona absorbs and reprocesses the ultraviolet light from the disc, energising it and converting it into X-ray light. It must have a temperature of a few million degrees. Using five space telescopes, which enabled us to observe the area in unprecedented detail, we actually discovered a very hot ‘corona’ of gas hovering above the disc. This discovery allows us to make sense of some of the observations of active galaxies that have been hard to explain so far.”

To make things even more entertaining, the study has also found the signature of interstellar gas which may have been the result of a one-time galaxy collision. Although the evidence may be hundreds of thousands of light years away from Mrk 509, it may have initially triggered this activity.

“The results underline how important long-term observations and monitoring campaigns are to gain a deeper understanding of variable astrophysical objects. XMM-Newton made all the necessary organisational changes to enable such observations, and now the effort is paying off,” says Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist.

Ah, Markarian 509… “Despite all my rage… I am still just a rat in cage.”

Original Story Source: ESA News. For Further Reading: Multiwavelength Campaign on Mrk 509 VI. HST/COS Observations of the Far-ultraviolet Spectrum.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Even Small Galaxies Can Have Big Black Holes

Astronomers detected supermassive black holes in 28 distant, low-mass galaxies, including the four shown in these Hubble Space Telescope images. Image credit: A. Koekemoer, Space Telescope Science Institute.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has done it again. By utilizing a slitless grism, the Wide Field Camera 3 has uncovered evidence that supermassive black holes are right at home in some very small galaxies. Apparently these central black holes began their life when their host galaxies were first forming!

“It’s kind of a chicken or egg problem: Which came first, the supermassive black hole or the massive galaxy? This study shows that even low-mass galaxies have supermassive black holes,” said Jonathan Trump, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trump is first author of the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

It’s another cosmic conundrum. As we’ve learned, large galaxies are host to central supermassive black holes and many of them are the AGN variety. But the real puzzle is why do some smaller galaxies contain them when most do not? By taking a closer look at dwarf galaxies some 10 billion light-years away, astronomers are reaching back in time to when the Universe was about an estimated quarter of its current age.

“When we look 10 billion years ago, we’re looking at the teenage years of the universe. So these are very small, young galaxies,” Trump said.

If your mind is still wondering what a “slitless grism” is, then wonder no more. It’s part of Hubble’s WFC3 infrared camera that provides spectroscopic information. Thanks to highly detailed information on the different wavelengths of light, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) team could achieve separate spectra from each sector of the candidate galaxies and identify emissions from black hole sources.

“This is the first study that is capable of probing for the existence of small, low-luminosity black holes back in time,” said coauthor Sandra Faber, University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and CANDELS principal investigator. “Up to now, observations of distant galaxies have consistently reinforced the local findings–distant black holes actively accreting in big galaxies only. We now have a big puzzle: What happened to these dwarf galaxies?”

It’s possible they are forerunners of the massive galaxies we see today. “Some may remain small, and some may grow into something like the Milky Way,” Trump said. But this theory is a juxtaposition in itself. According to Faber, “To become big galaxies today, the dwarf galaxies would have to grow at a rate much faster than standard models predict. If they remain small, then nearby dwarf galaxies should also have central black holes. There might be a large population of small black holes in dwarf galaxies that no one has noticed before.”

But these distant little dwarfs aren’t quiet – they are actively forming new stars. According to Trump, “Their star formation rate is about ten times that of the Milky Way. There may be a connection between that and the active galactic nuclei. When gas is available to form new stars, it’s also available to feed the black hole.”

But the Hubble wasn’t the only instrument interested in the 28 small galaxy studies. The team also employed x-ray data acquired by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. To help refine their information on such small, faint objects, the data was combined to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

“This is a powerful technique that we can use for similar studies in the future on larger samples of objects,” Trump said. “Together the compactness of the stacked OIII spatial profile and the stacked X-ray data suggest that at least some of these low-mass, low-metallicity galaxies harbor weak active galactic nuclei.”

Original Story Source: University of Santa Cruz News. For Further Reading: A CANDELS WFC3 Grism Study of Emission-Line Galaxies at z~2: A Mix of Nuclear Activity and Low-Metallicity Star Formation.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Stellar X-Rays Strip Planet To Bare Bones

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Hamburg/S.Schröter et al; Optical: NASA/NSF/IPAC-Caltech/UMass/2MASS, UNC/CTIO/PROMPT; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

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Some 880 light years away, a star named CoRoT-2a is busy decimating one of its planets – CoRoT-2b. Orbiting the parent star at a distance of over two million miles is dangerous business in this cosmic neighborhood. While the intrepid exoplanet might be about a thousand times the size of Earth right now, it’s getting about five million tons of matter stripped away from it every second. Thanks to new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, we’re able to take a closer look at this high-energy process for an even better understanding of how planets may – or may not – survive the process of forming a solar system.

“This planet is being absolutely fried by its star,” said Sebastian Schroeter of the University of Hamburg in Germany. “What may be even stranger is that this planet may be affecting the behavior of the star that is blasting it.”

Discovered by the French Space Agency’s Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) satellite in 2008, this hot system is estimated to be between about 100 million and 300 million years old. The active parent star is assumed to be completely formed, yet its high magnetic activity is producing a bright x-ray signature comparable to that of a younger star. What could be causing the deviation that racks CoRoT-2b with a hundred thousand times more radiation than we receive from Sol?

“Because this planet is so close to the star, it may be speeding up the star’s rotation and that could be keeping its magnetic fields active,” said co-author Stefan Czesla, also from the University of Hamburg. “If it wasn’t for the planet, this star might have left behind the volatility of its youth millions of years ago.”

However, CoRoT-2a might not be alone. There’s a possibility that it’s a binary system with the companion positioned at roughly a thousand AU. If so, why can’t the x-ray instruments detect it? The answer is… it is not feeding on a planet to keep it active. CoRoT-2b’s huge size and proximity make for an intriguing combination. For as long as it lasts…

“We’re not exactly sure of all the effects this type of heavy X-ray storm would have on a planet, but it could be responsible for the bloating we see in CoRoT-2b,” said Schroeter. “We are just beginning to learn about what happens to exoplanets in these extreme environments.”

Original Story Source: Chandra News. For further reading: The corona and companion of CoRoT-2a. Insights from X-rays and optical spectroscopy.