Posted on by David Dickinson

Bazinga: Mysterious Earth Orbiting Asteroid Turns Out to be Space Junk

The launch of Chan'ge-2 with 3rd stage (arrowed) now known as 2010 Q (Credit CALT).

Can’t find asteroid 2010 QW1 in the Minor Planet Database? No, the “Men in Black” didn’t secretly remove this Earth-orbiting asteroid from the listing… but recent top-notch detective work by astronomers did.

The mystery of this object all started back on August 23rd of this year, when the PanSTARRS sky survey based on the summit of Haleakala on the island of Maui in Hawai’i spotted an asteroid that was given the provisional designation of 2013 QW1.

The object was in a wide-ranging orbit around the Earth, leading astronomers to wonder if it was a naturally captured asteroid or perhaps space debris from a previous launch. Either solution to the dilemma would be fascinating. Our large Moon keeps the Earth pretty well swept clear of debris, though a “second Moon,” however small, would be an interesting find. And if 2013 QW1 were to prove artificial, it just might be a piece of history.

The European Space Agency’s NEO Coordination Centre decided to take up the challenge. A call went out to track and observe the 2013 QW1, and a team led by Elisabetta Dotto of INAF-Observatorio di Roma & Maria Barucci & Davide Perna of the Observatoire de Paris managed to get time on the Italian Telescopio Nazaionale Galileo based at La Palma to obtain a spectrum of the object.

“It was a bit of a challenge, because the object was moving fast with respect to a typical NEO,” said Dr. Perna in a recent ESA press release.

The team used an instrument known as DOLORES to make the crucial measurements. DOLORES stands for the Device Optimized for LOw RESolution. The spectrum obtained in the early morning hours of August 25th shows something much brighter than your typical asteroid, but is characteristic of a painted metallic object.

The launch of Chan'ge-2 with 3rd stage (arrowed) now known as 2010 Q (Credit CALT).
The launch of Chan’ge-2 with 3rd stage (arrowed) now known as 2013 QW1 (Credit: CALT).

And thus, 2013 QW1 was removed from the ledger of NEO asteroids maintained by the IAU Minor Planet Center (MPEC). And the leading suspect? The third stage booster of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket that launched the Chang’e 2 spacecraft from Xichang, China on October 1st, 2010.

Chang’e-2 entered lunar orbit 8 days after launch, and departed on June 8th of the following year after studying and mapping the Moon. Chang’e-2 then went on to become the first spacecraft to directly reach the L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth from lunar orbit. The spacecraft also made the first flyby of NEO asteroid 4179 Toutatis on December 13th of last year. The probe is estimated to continue functioning into 2014, and will be used to hone China’s ability to track objects in deep space.

The NORAD tracking identification assigned to the 3rd stage booster that launched Chan’ge-2 is 2010-50B.

This sort of discovery is not without precedent.

The launch of Apollo 12, with the 2nd stage arrowed. (Credit: NASA).
The launch of Apollo 12, with the 3rd stage (arrowed) would one day be “asteroid Joo2E3”. (Credit: NASA).

On September 3rd, 2002, amateur astronomer Bill Yeung discovered an asteroid tentatively designated J002E3. Subsequent studies revealed that the asteroid had a spectrum consistent with that of titanium oxide paint, a decidedly unasteroid-like coating for a space rock to sport. This was, however, a common veneer in use during the Apollo era, and it is now known that J002E3 is the S-IVB third stage booster that launched the second mission to land men on the Moon on November 14th, 1969. Unlike other boosters, such as the one that launched Apollo 14, the Apollo 12 3rd stage did not impact the Moon as part of seismic experiments. After a brief period as a “pseudo-moon” of the Earth, J002E3 was kicked out into solar orbit in June 2003 and may return to our neighborhood once again in the 2040s.     

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has documented the lunar crash sites of these historic boosters. It’s of note that the Apollo 10 Lunar Module Snoopy remains discarded out in solar orbit as well, having been used as a dress rehearsal for the historic Apollo 11 landing. Apollo 10 never landed on the Moon. Efforts have been made by UK astronomer Nick Howes to recover it as well.

And there are more relics of the Space Age awaiting discovery. One of the first things we always check in the case of a pass by a newly discovered NEO closer than the Moon to the Earth is its history, to see if it matches up with any launches headed out beyond Earth orbit in the past.

And the upcoming Mars launches of MAVEN and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission in October & November will be the first to depart Earth orbit since 2011. These will give future generations of asteroid hunters new human-made space hardware to ponder.

The B612 Foundation’s asteroid-hunting Sentinel Space Telescope will also “up the game,” scouting for asteroids from a vantage point interior to the Earth’s orbit. Sentinel is slated for launch in 2016 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

And no, the fabled “Black Knight” satellite of UFO conspiracy buffs’ dreams is nowhere to be found.

What other fascinating relics of the Space Age lie are out there in the solar system, waiting to tell their tale?

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

This Neutron Star Behaves Just Like The Hulk

The Hulk (Bruce Banner), as portrayed in The Avengers. Credit: Marvel & Subs

When Bruce Banner gets angry, he gets big and green and strong and well, vengeful. The Hulk is the stuff of comic book legend and as Mark Ruffalo recently showed us in The Avengers, Banner’s/Hulk’s personality can transform on a dime.

Turns out rapid transformations are the case in astronomy, too! Scientists found a peculiar neutron star that can change from radio pulsar, to X-ray pulsar, back and forth. In the Hulk’s case, a big dose of gamma rays likely fuelled his ability to transform. This star’s superpowers, however, likely come from a companion star.

“What we’re seeing is a star that is the cosmic equivalent of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ with the ability to change from one form to its more intense counterpart with startling speed,” stated Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

“Though we have known that X-ray binaries — some of which are observed as X-ray pulsars — can evolve over millions of years to become rapidly spinning radio pulsars, we were surprised to find one that seemed to swing so quickly between the two.”

A neutron star and its companion flipping between accretion (when it emits X-rays) and when accretion has stopped (when it emits radio pulses). Credit: Bill Saxton; NRAO/AUI/NSF. Animation by Elizabeth Howell
A neutron star and its companion flipping between accretion (when it emits X-rays) and when accretion has stopped (when it emits radio pulses). Credit: Bill Saxton; NRAO/AUI/NSF. Animation by Elizabeth Howell

The star’s double personality came to light after astronomers made an accidental double-discovery. IGR J18245-2452, as the star is called, was flagged as a millisecond radio pulsar in 2005 using the  National Science Foundation’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Then this year, another team found an X-ray pulsar in the same region of the star cluster M28.

It took a little while to sort out the confusion, we’re sure, but eventually astronomers realized it was the same object behaving differently. That said, they were mighty confused: “This was particularly intriguing because radio pulses don’t come from an X-ray binary and the X-ray source has to be long gone before radio signals can emerge,” stated lead researcher Alessandro Papitto, who is with of Institute of Space Sciences in Catalunya (Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) in Spain.

The key, it turns out, comes from the interplay with the star’s companion. Material doesn’t flow continuously, as astronomers previously believed is true of these system types, but in bunches. Starting and stopping the flow then led to swings in the behavior, making the star alternate between X-ray and radio emissions.

So to sum up what is happening:

– Neutron stars like IGR J18245-2452 are superdense star remnants that formed after supernovas. A teaspoon of this material is often cited as being as heavy as a mountain (but be careful, as mass and weight are different). Still, we can all understand this stuff is very dense and would take a superhero (Hulk?) to move.

– A neutron star that has a normal star nearby forms an X-ray binary, which happens when the neutron star poaches starstuff off its companion. When the material hits the neutron star, the stuff gets really hot and emits X-rays.

– When the material stops, magnetic fields on the neutron produce radio waves. These appear to blink on and off from the perspective of Earth, as the neutron rotates super-fast (several times a second).

Pulsar diagram (© Mark Garlick)
Pulsar diagram (© Mark Garlick)

In the case of IGR J18245-2452, it behaved like an X-ray binary star for about a month, stopped suddenly, and then sent out radio waves for a while before flipping back again. (A month is less than a blink in astronomical terms, when you recall the universe is 13.8 billion years old.)

To take the longer view, astronomers used to believe that X-ray binaries could evolve into radio emitters over time. Now, though, it appears a star can be these two things at almost the same time.

“During periods when the mass flow is less intense, the magnetic field sweeps away the gas and prevents it from reaching the surface and creating X-ray emission,” NASA stated. “With the region around the neutron star relatively gas free, radio signals can easily escape and astronomers detect a radio pulsar.”

A whole suite of telescopes in Earth and space contributed to this discovery, but of note: the X-ray source was first spotted with the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL). You can read more details in the paper published in Nature.

Sources: National Radio Astronomy Observatory and NASA

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Magnetic Fields are Crucial to Exomoon Habitability

Artist's conception of an Earth-like exomoon orbiting a gaseous planet. Image credit: Avatar, 20th Century Fox

Astronomers believe that hidden deep within the wealth of data collected by NASA’s Kepler mission are minuscule signatures confirming the presence of exomoons. With such a promising discovery on the horizon, researchers are beginning to address the factors that may deem these alien moons habitable.

A new study led by Dr. René Heller from McMaster University in Canada and Dr. Jorge Zuluaga from the University of Antioquia in Colombia takes a theoretical look at habitability – exploring the key components that may make exomoons livable.  While stellar and planetary heating play a large role, it’s quickly becoming clear that the magnetic environments of exomoons may be even more critical.

An exoplanet’s habitability is first and foremost based on the circumstellar habitable zone – the temperature band around a star in which water may exist in its liquid state. Exomoons, however, have an additional set of constraints that affect their habitability. In a set of recent papers, Dr. Heller and Dr. Rory Barnes (from the University of Washington) defined a “circumplanetary habitable edge,” which is roughly analogous to the circumstellar habitable zone.

Here the question of habitability is based on the relationship between the exomoon and its host planet. The additional energy source from the planet’s reflected starlight, the planet’s thermal emission, and tidal heating in the moon may create a runaway greenhouse effect, rendering the exomoon uninhabitable.

One look at Io – Jupiter’s closest Galilean satellite – shows the drastic effects a nearby planet may have on its moon.  The strong gravitational pull of Jupiter distorts Io into an ellipsoid, whose orbit around the giant planet is eccentric due to perturbations from the other Galilean moons. As the orbital distance between Jupiter and Io varies on an eccentric orbit, Io’s ellipsoidal shape oscillates, which generates enormous tidal friction. This effect has led to over 400 active volcanic regions.

Note that this is an edge, not a zone.  It defines only an innermost habitable orbit, inside which a moon would become uninhabitable. The exomoon must exist outside this edge in order to avoid intense planetary illumination or tidal heating.  Exomoons situated in distant orbits, well outside the circumplanetary habitable edge, have a chance at sustaining life.

But the question of habitability doesn’t end here. Harmful space radiation can cause the atmosphere of a terrestrial world to be stripped off. Planets and moons rely heavily on magnetic fields to act as protective bubbles, preventing harmful space radiation from depleting their atmospheres.

With this in mind, Heller and Zuluaga set out to understand the evolution of magnetic fields of extrasolar giants, which are thought to affect their moons. It’s unlikely that small, Mars-sized exomoons will produce their own magnetic fields. Instead, they may have to rely on an extended magnetic field from their host planets.

This planetary magnetosphere is created by the shock between the stellar wind and the intrinsic magnetic field of the planet. It has the potential to be huge, protecting moons in very distant orbits.  Within our own Solar System Jupiter’s magnetosphere ends at distances up to 50 times the size of the planet itself.

Heller and Zuluaga computed the evolution of the extent of a planetary magnetosphere.  “Essentially, as the pressure of the stellar wind decreases over time, the planetary magnetic shield expands,” Dr. Heller told Universe Today. “In other words, the planetary magnetosphere widens over time.”

Evolution of the host planets magnetosphere for a
Evolution of the host planets magnetosphere (represented by the blue line) for Neptune-, Saturn-, and Jupiter-like planets. All increase over time by a varying amount.

The team applied these two models to three scenarios: Mars-sized moons orbiting Neptune-, Saturn-, and Jupiter-like planets. These three systems were always located in the center of the circumstellar habitable zone of a 0.7 solar-mass star. Here are the take-home messages:

1.) Mars-like exomoons beyond 20 planetary radii around any of the three host planets act like free planets around a star. They are well outside the habitable edge, experiencing no significant tidal heating or illumination. While their extreme distance is promising, they will never be enveloped within their host planet’s magnetosphere and are therefore unlikely to harbor life.

2.) Mars-like exomoons between 5 and 20 planetary radii face a range of possibilities. “Intriguingly, formation theory and observations of moons in the Solar System tell us that this is the range in which we should expect most exomoons to reside,” explains Dr. Heller.

For an exomoon beyond the habitable edge of a Neptune-like planet it may take more than the age of the Earth, that is, 4.6 billion years to become embedded within its host planet’s magnetosphere. For a Saturn-like planet it may take even longer, but for a Jupiter-like planet it will take less than 4.3 billion years.

3.) Mars-like exomoons inside 5 planetary radii are enveloped within the planetary magnetosphere early on but not habitable as they orbit within the planet’s habitable edge.

In order for an exomoon to be habitable it must exist well outside the habitable edge, safe from stellar and planetary illumination as well as tidal heating. But at the same time it must also exist near enough to its host planet to be embedded within the planet’s magnetosphere. The question of habitability depends on a delicate balance.

Dr. Zuluaga stressed that “one of the key consequences of this initial work is that although magnetic fields have been recognized as important factors determining the habitability of terrestrial planets across the Universe, including the Earth, Mars, and Venus, in the case of moons, the magnetic environment could be even more critical at defining the capacity of those worlds to harbor life.”

The paper has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available for download here.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Soyuz Launches Expedition 37/38 to the International Space Station

The Soyuz TMA-10M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying the Expedition 37 crew to orbit. Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi.

The next crew of the International Space Station is on their way to orbit. Three members of the Expedition 37 crew members blasted off in a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 20:58 UTC (4:58 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, Sept. 25, and will take a fast-track six-hour flight to the Space Station.

Update: The crew has now docked safely to the ISS, at 10:45 pm EDT (02:45 UTC).

Watch a video of the launch, below.

Michael Hopkins of NASA and Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) are scheduled to dock their Soyuz spacecraft to the Poisk module on the Russian segment of the at 02:48 UTC on Sept. 26 (10:48 p.m. EDT, Sept. 25) All the action of the launch and docking will be on NASA TV.

The crew is scheduled to open the hatches between the Soyuz spacecraft and the space station about two hours later.
Hopkins, Kotov and Ryazanskiy will be greeted by three Expedition 37 crew members who have been aboard the space station since late May: Commander Fyodor Yurchikin of Rosmosmos and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.

The new crew will remain aboard the station until mid-March. Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will return to Earth Nov. 11.

NASA says the new crew will take part in several new science investigations that will focus on human health and human physiology. The crew will examine the effects of long-term exposure to microgravity on the immune system, provide metabolic profiles of the astronauts and collect data to help scientists understand how the human body changes shape in space. The crew also will conduct 11 investigations from the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program on antibacterial resistance, hydroponics, cellular division, microgravity oxidation, seed germination, photosynthesis and the food making process in microgravity.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Webcast: What Happens When You Fall Into a Black Hole?

An illustration of one of the zany metaphors about the black hole firewall paradox. Credit: Maki Naro via Txchnologist.

What happens if you fall into a black hole? According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the fall would be uneventful, until at some point the force of gravity would rip you apart. But a new theory suggests a different fate — and if correct, could challenge our understanding of gravity and how the universe works. Join the folks from the Kavli Foundation today, September 25, at 19:00 UTC (3 pm EDT, Noon PDT) as they host a live discussion and Q & A session about the latest theories about matter entering a black hole, and how these ideas are prompting researchers to reconsider our understanding of gravity.

They’ll be discussing the “blackhole firewall paradox” that you may have been hearing about lately.

You can watch live below. To submit questions ahead of time or during the webcast, send an email to [email protected] or post on Twitter with hashtag #KavliLive.

This fun graphic above refers to the recent article written by Dennis Overbye of the New York Times, “A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox.” The graphic was done by illustrator Maki Naro, sent to us via the Txchnologist blog’s Zany Science Metaphors.

You can see more information about the webcast at the Kavli Foundation website.

The panelists for the discussion includes Raphael Bousso (U.C. Berkeley), Juan Maldacena (Princeton University), Joseph Polchinski (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at U.C. Santa Barbara), and Leonard Susskind (Stanford University).

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

New Camera Aboard APEX Gets First Light

This image of the star formation region NGC 6334 is one of the first scientific images from the ArTeMiS instrument on APEX. The picture shows the glow detected at a wavelength of 0.35 millimetres coming from dense clouds of interstellar dust grains. The new observations from ArTeMiS show up in orange and have been superimposed on a view of the same region taken in near-infrared light by ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal. Credit: ArTeMiS team/Ph. André, M. Hennemann, V. Revéret et al./ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

And the “Cat’s Paw” was waiting to strike! In this exceptionally detailed image of star-forming region NGC 6334 we can get a sense of just how important new instrumentation can be. In this case it’s a new camera called ArTeMiS and it has just been installed on a 12-meter diameter telescope located high in the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment – or APEX for short – operates at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, providing us with observations ranging between radio wavelengths and infrared light. These images give astronomers powerful new data to help them further understand the construction of the Universe.

Exactly what is ArTeMiS? The camera provides wide field views at submillimeter wavelengths. When added to APEX’s arsenal, it will substantially increase the amount of details a particular object has to offer. It has a detector array similar to a CCD camera – a new technology which will enable it to create wide-field maps of target areas with a greater amount of speed and a larger amount of pixels.

Like almost all new telescope projects, both personal and professional, the APEX team met up with “first light” problems. Although the ArTeMiS Camera was ready to go, the weather simply wouldn’t cooperate. According to the news release, very heavy snow on the Chajnantor Plateau had almost buried the building in which the scope operations are housed! However, the team was determined. Using a makeshift road and dodging snow drifts, the team and the staff at the ALMA Operations Support Facility and APEX somehow managed to get the camera to its location safely. Undaunted, they installed the ArTeMiS camera, worked the cryostat into position and locked the instrumentation down in its final position.

However, digging their way out of the snow wasn’t all the team had to contend with. To get ArTeMis on-line, they then had to wait for very dry weather since submillimeter wavelengths of light are highly absorbed by atmospheric moisture. Do good things come to those who wait? You bet. When the “magic moment” arrived, the APEX team was ready and the initial test observations were a resounding success. ArTeMiS quickly became the focus tool for a variety of scientific projects and commissioned observations. One of these projects was to image star-forming region NGC 6334 – the Cat’s Paw Nebula – in the southern constellation of Scorpius. Thanks to the new technology, the ArTeMiS image shows a superior amount of detail over earlier photographic observations taken with APEX.

What’s next for ArTeMiS? Now that the camera has been tested, it will be returned to Saclay in France to have even more detectors installed. According to the researchers: ” The whole team is already very excited by the results from these initial observations, which are a wonderful reward for many years of hard work and could not have been achieved without the help and support of the APEX staff.”

Original Story Source: ESO Public News Release.

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Here’s One Idea Of How To Search For Life Beyond Earth

Early on, Mars had giant active volcanoes, which would have released significant methane. Because of methane’s high greenhouse potential, even a thin atmosphere might have supported liquid water. Credit: NASA

Using a phone to search for signs of life? Yeah, we can get behind that. One group of researchers has a system that they’ve been testing out in analog environments with the aim of (eventually, one day, they hope) it being applied, say, to other planets — such as Mars.

Here’s  how it works:

“Initially the human astrobiologist takes images of his/her surroundings using a mobile phone camera. These images are sent via Bluetooth to a laptop, which processes the images to detect novel colors and textures, and communicates back to the astrobiologist the degree of similarity to previous images stored in the database,” read a press release on the technology.

View of Mars' surface near the north pole from the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona
View of Mars’ surface near the north pole from the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona

The aim is to eventually have robots, if necessary, do the same thing on Mars or in other locations. Field tests have been done in Martian analog environments, with intriguing results.

“In our most recent tests at a former coal mine in West Virginia, the similarity-matching by the computer agreed with the judgement of our human geologists 91% of the time,” stated Patrick McGuire, who works in Freie Universität’s planetary sciences and remote sensing department in Germany.

“The novelty detection also worked well, although there were some issues in differentiating between features that are similar in color but different in texture, like yellow lichen and sulfur-stained coalbeds. However, for a first test of the technique, it looks very promising.”

You can check out more details in this paper on Arxiv, a site that publishes articles before they are peer-reviewed. The information has also been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

Source: European Planetary Science Congress

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

How Spitzer’s Focus Changed To Strange New Worlds

Artist's concept of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope surrounded by examples of exoplanets it has looked at. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After 10 years in space — looking at so many galaxies and stars and other astronomy features — the Spitzer Space Telescope is being deployed for new work: searching for alien worlds.

The telescope is designed to peer in infrared light (see these examples!), the wavelength in which heat is visible. When looking at infrared light from exoplanets, Spitzer can figure out more about their atmospheric conditions. Over time, it can even detect brightness differences as the planet orbits its sun, or measure the temperature by looking at how much the brightness declines when the planet goes behind its star. Neat stuff overall.

“When Spitzer launched back in 2003, the idea that we would use it to study exoplanets was so crazy that no one considered it,” stated Sean Carey of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center, which is at the California Institute of Technology. “But now the exoplanet science work has become a cornerstone of what we do with the telescope.”

Of course, the telescope wasn’t designed to do this. But to paraphrase the movie Apollo 13, NASA was interested in what the telescope could do while it’s in space — especially because the planet-seeking Kepler space telescope has been sidelined by a reaction wheel problem. Redesigning Spitzer, in a sense, took three steps.

Classifying Galaxies
An example of Spitzer’s past work: This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows infrared light from the Sunflower galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 63. Spitzer’s view highlights the galaxy’s dusty spiral arms. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Fixing the wobble: Spitzer is steady, but not so steady that it could easily pick out the small bit of light that an exoplanet emits. Engineers determined that the telescope actually wobbled regularly and would wobble for an hour. Looking into the problem further, they discovered it’s because a heater turns on to keep the telescope battery’s temperature regulated.

“The heater caused a strut between the star trackers and telescope to flex a bit, making the position of the telescope wobble compared to the stars being tracked,” NASA stated. In October 2010, NASA decided to cut the heating back to 30 minutes because the battery only needs about 50 per cent of the heat previously thought. Half the wobble and more exoplanets was more the recipe they were looking for.

The Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA
The Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA

Repurposing a camera: Spitzer has a pointing control reference sensor “peak-up” camera on board, which originally gathered up infrared light to funnel to a spectrometer. It also calibrated the telescope’s star-tracker pointing devices. The same principle was applied to infrared camera observations, putting stars in the center of camera pixels and allowing a better view.

Remapping a camera pixel: The scientists charted the variations in a single pixel of the camera that showed them which were the most stable areas for observations. For context, about 90% of Spitzer’s exoplanet observations are about a 1/4 of a pixel wide.

That’s pretty neat stuff considering that Spitzer’s original mission was just 2.5 years, when it had coolant on board to allow three temperature-sensitive science instruments to function. Since then, engineers have set up a passive cooling system that lets one set of infrared cameras keep working.

Source: NASA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Stars in this Jam-Packed Galaxy are 25 Times Closer Together than in the Milky Way

Galaxy M60-UCD1 is an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy, and is packed with an extraordinary number of stars. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MSU/J.Strader et al, Optical: NASA/STScI

Meet galaxy M60-UCD1. This is not your average, every day, ordinary galaxy. First of all, it’s what is known as an ‘ultra-compact dwarf galaxy,’ which – as the name implies — are unusually dense and small galaxies. Additionally, it is the most luminous known galaxy of its type and one of the most massive, weighing 200 million times more than our Sun. But M60-UCD1 is jam-packed with an extraordinary number of stars, making it the densest galaxy in the nearby Universe that we know of. Stars in M60-UCD1 are thought to be 25 times closer together than the stars in our galaxy.

Quick and easy access to neighboring star systems (if you lived there) might be your first thought. But remember, space is big, no matter where you are.

“Traveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxy,” said Jay Strader of Michigan State University in Lansing, first author of a paper describing these results. “But it would still take hundreds of years using present technology.”

Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies were discovered about a decade ago. They are typically about only 100 light years across compared to the 1,000 light years or more than other dwarf galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy is 120,000 light-years across.

This graph shows where M60-UCD1 fits in as far as luminosity and size. Credit: Strader et al.
This graph shows where M60-UCD1 fits in as far as luminosity and size. Credit: Strader et al.

Strader said that what makes M60-UCD1 so remarkable is that about half of its mass is found within a radius of only about 80 light years. This would make the density of stars about 15,000 times greater than found in Earth’s neighborhood in the Milky Way.

“Our discovery of M60-UCD1 lends support to the idea that ultra-compact dwarfs could be stripped-down version of more massive galaxies,” Strader wrote in a post on the Chandra blog. “The first reason is its mass: we estimate that it contains about 400 million stars, far more than observed for even massive star clusters, and much closer to the galaxy regime. We also observe that M60-UCD1 has two “parts”: an inner, even denser core embedded in a more diffuse field of stars. This structure is not expected for a star cluster, but it’s a natural outcome of the tidal stripping process that could produce an ultra-compact dwarf.”

And so, this UCD is providing astronomers with clues to how these types of galaxies fit into the galactic evolutionary chain.

Additionally, this galaxy appears to have a central black hole, as Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal the presence of an X-ray source sitting right at the center.

While supermassive black holes are known to be common in the most massive galaxies, it is unknown whether they occur in less massive galaxies like M60-UCD1, Strader said.

“Further observations of M60-UCD1 and other ultra-compact dwarfs could confirm a new, significant population of massive black holes,” Strader said. “These masses of these black holes would be notable: while most central black holes in galaxies have only a fraction of a percent of the mass of their host galaxies, in ultra-compact dwarfs the black holes could be a full 10% of the mass of the dwarf. This is because so many of the dwarf’s outer stars have been stripped away, essentially boosting the contribution of the unaffected central black hole to the total mass of the galaxy.”

M60-UCD1 is located near a massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, also called M60, about 60 million light years from Earth. The galaxy was discovered with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and follow-up observations were done with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona.

Here’s the paper describing the discovery and the galaxy.

Sources: Chandra website, Chandra blog

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Enceladus, Afterburners Still Firing

This view of Saturn's moon Enceladus and its prominent plumes was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on April 2, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

We can never get enough of seeing those intriguing jets and plumes from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, especially this great view from the Cassini spacecraft where the plumes are back-it from the Sun while the moon’s surface is lit with reflected light from Saturn. And as you can see, those jets are still firing. There are close to 100 geyser jets of varying sizes near Enceladus’s south pole spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds out into space. If you look closely, you’ll see the entire plume is as large as the moon itself.

Can we please send another spacecraft just to study this fascinating moon?


The image was taken in blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 2, 2013, when Cassini was about 517,000 miles (832,000 kilometers) from Enceladus.

See more details at the Cassini website.