Universe Today

May 21, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Spaceship Sighting Alert

The next few evenings will provide excellent opportunities for observing the International Space Station in the night skies above both Europe and North America. Beginning this evening, May 21 through May 23 the ISS will pass over from two to four times per night, depending on your location. Because of the station’s current orientation and flight path, it will be highlighted almost constantly by sunlight as it flies over these continents, and thus visible to Earthlings below. If you’ve never had the opportunity to see the space station fly over your backyard, this is a great chance to do so, given your specific area is free from cloud cover. And for those of you that have seen the ISS before, you know what a spectacular (and sometimes spine-tingling) sight it is. It’s unusual to get such a clear view of the ISS across such a wide spectrum of countries. And how, you ask, can you find out when the station will be flying over your house?

There are a couple of different websites that provide real-time tracking data and information about the ISS sighting opportunities. NASA has a Quick and Easy Sightings by City site, where you just search for your country and city which provides local times and the location in the sky where the station will be visible.

The European Space Agency also provides their ISS: Where Is It Now site that also allows you to select your country and city to find the station’s location.

The Heaven’s Above website (which also powers ESA’s site) is also an excellent site to find out when the ISS, as well as all sorts of other satellites and other heavenly sights will be visible. At Heaven’s Above, you can plug in your exact latitude and longitude, so if you live in a remote area, you’ll be able to have exact times and locations to look for satellites instead of relying on information for the nearest city.

So take this great chance to see our orbiting outpost. If you have a strong enough and tracking-capable telescope you might even be able to spot specific modules on the station, or the solar arrays. The Astrospider site has some images and movies available of what this looks like.

And this is a great opportunity to inspire a child about the wonders of space exploration and astronomy.

For more information about the ISS.

May 21, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Get Your Free Dione Atlas Here!

Every year my car insurance company provides a free road atlas that helps me get where I need to go. Now, the imaging team from the Cassini spacecraft is ensuring that future travelers will be able to find their way around Saturn’s icy moons by providing detailed atlases of the surface features of these remote satellites. The Cassini Imaging Team just released the third in a series of atlases, this one charting the fractured, 1,125 kilometer-wide Dione. To do this, they stitched together 449 high resolution images of the moon to produce a global map. These atlases are being released simultaneously to the public and the scientific community, available with just a click or two of your mouse. So, get your free atlases here!

The atlases can be found at the CICLOPS website (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.) And while you’re getting your free atlas, browse around for other amazing (and free) images of the Saturn system, such as this sensational image of Enceladus backdropped with Saturn’s rings:

The Cassini imaging team previously released atlases of the geologically active Enceladus and the obscure outer moon Phoebe. Atlases of other moons will be released as Cassini’s mission continues, with Iapetus and Tethys next in line.

For Dione, the atlas was produced at a scale of 1:1,000,000, where 1 inch on the map is one million inches, or almost 26 kilometers on the surface of the moon.

These maps will help planetary scientists study these worlds, serving as a basis for geologic interpretations, and help estimate the ages of surface regions, and aid in deciphering the processes that formed the moons’ landscapes. But most importantly, with their accurate calculation of latitude and longitude, these maps allow scientists to easily find, and refer to, features of interest on the moons’ surfaces.

While Cassini has not been able to image every portion of the surfaces of Saturn’s moons, the Imaging Team has been able to combine images from the Voyager mission to help fill in any voids in Cassini data.
Now that they atlases are being assembled, the next task for the Cassini scientists will be to name the features on the moons. This is usually done using names and locations from various mythologies from different cultures. Features from Dione will be named from Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

CICLOPS is located at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The lab’s director and Cassini imaging team leader, Carolyn Porco said, “Both robotic and human travelers to Saturn in the future will surely rely on this growing collection of maps and their derivatives to find their way among the moons of Saturn.”

Original news source: CICLOPS

May 20, 2008December 24, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

Phytoplankton Bloom Erupts in the North Sea

Usually the North Sea conjures up cold and gloomy visions. But as the stunning image above shows, this isn’t always the case. ESA’s Envisat captured vast green swirls of phytoplankton bloom drifting in the North Sea currents on May 7th 2008; spring has most definitely sprung for the Scottish waters. But how is this bright green bloom produced? What has stirred up all this activity? It seems that for a short time, the lush green landscape of Fife is matched by the sea-faring plankton off the UK coast…

This vivid green bloom was created by a type of plankton called phytoplankton. The microscopic plant floats near the surface of large bodies of water where sunlight is plentiful. Like any land-based plant, phytoplankton requires photosynthesis to survive. Other types of plankton include zooplankton (microscopic creatures) and bacterioplankton (water-borne bacteria) survive by feeding off other plankton varieties. The plant variety of plankton, phytoplankton, is well known to produce blooms when nutrients on the marine environment increase, boosting phytoplankton population. It would seem that the water off the Scotland coast has become particularly nutrient rich, with plenty of sunlight, creating magnificent displays observable from orbit.

This particular bloom was captured by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on board the ESA’s Envisat operating at a full spatial resolution of 300m (i.e. features of 300m can be resolved). The green hue is from the chlorophyll (essential for photosynthesis) contained within each phytoplankton cell. Depending on the phytoplankton species, it’s possible that there are hundreds to thousands of cells per millilitre of sea water.

Phytoplankton is very important when considering the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and their density in the worlds oceans are modelled in simulations of future climate change. During photosynthesis, they absorb carbon dioxide (and generate oxygen), so they form a highly influential carbon sink.

Source: ESA Picture of the Day

May 20, 2008December 24, 2015 by Tammy Plotner

World’s Strangest Telescope – The IceCube

Since the 1950s and the beginning of the “space race” scientists have wanted to practice astronomy and particle physics using high-energy neutrinos. So what’s stopping them? The challenge of building the kilometer-sized observatory they predict is needed to do the science. Enter IceCube, a revolutionary new design in neutrino detecting telescopes. Deep in the frozen wastelands at the South Pole, the world’s most extreme telescope will search for neutrinos from our Universe’s most violent astrophysical sources.

Those impossibly tiny particles known as neutrinos are produced by the decay of radioactive elements and elementary particles such as pions. Unlike photons or charged particles, neutrinos originate from deep within exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars and make their way throughout our Universe, eluding capture and study. Nothing stops a neutrino… Unless it crashes into an atom in ice.

When the rare neutrino collides with an atom in the ultra-transparent ice, it produces a muon that in turn radiates blue light. By observing this fluorescence, scientist can then detect the path of the muon and in turn the path of the neutrino. But, this kind of work really requires seeing in the dark – total dark. By using the Earth as a type of telescope optical tube assembly, neutrinos can enter into the North Pole just as photons enter into a primary objective lens. When they interact with the pure, uncontaminated ice at Earth’s South Pole it’s a whole lot like reaching a telescope’s secondary optic. The Earth itself, like an optical tube, keeps stray photons aways and the fluorescence produced with the muon can then be collected and studied.

So what’s all the fuss about neutrinos? Say Project IceCube: “The basic motivation is to understand our Universe, specifically what powers the most energetic engines in the cosmos and fuels the bombardment of cosmic rays to the Earth. We also want to understand the nature of Dark Matter. At the end, the stuff from which we are made is only 4% of the Universe’s inventory, whereas Dark Matter is 23%. These are motivations dominantly driven by curiosity, by the dream of mankind to understand our origins, our place in the cosmos, and a far future much beyond our human horizons.”

In short, IceCube is one cool telescope!

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. OPP-9980474 (AMANDA) and OPP-0236449 (IceCube), University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Daan Hubert/NSF

May 20, 2008October 7, 2024 by Nancy Atkinson

What Would You Say to ET?

This past semester at the University of Wyoming, students have been figuring out what humans, if they ever had the chance, should say to an extraterrestrial civilization. Professor Jeff Lockwood’s Interstellar Message Composition class is a creative writing class using the premise of interstellar communication to spur student’s imaginations about the current human condition, as well as the future. Funded in part by the NASA’s Wyoming Space Grant Consortium, the students compiled five questions they deemed as most important to ask another species. But this isn’t the first time communication with an alien species has been used to inspire students to think beyond themselves and their individual small worlds.

With a small group of people from the Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN area, I worked on a project from 1988-1994 called the World Timecapsule which prompted students to think about what they would convey to a distant civilization about humanity — the good, the bad, the wondrous, the beautiful and not-so-beautiful things about our world, our lives, and our history — in correlation to particular subjects they were studying in school. The World Timecapsule gathered submissions from over 5,000 students in five states before becoming part of SpaceArc, another similar educational program that ultimately launched student and public submissions on board a geosynchronous satellite in 1994. SpaceArc will orbit our planet for generations, where a passing alien ship might find it, or perhaps Earthlings could retrieve the satellite sometime in the future if we ever need to remember who we were back in the 1990’s.

Humans have always dreamed about communicating with extraterrestrials. This dream has prompted us to send radio signals out to space, to listen for those type of signals that another civilization might be sending, and to launch spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system along with information about ourselves â€“ from music to personal greetings to images and representations of ourselves.

While the chances of talking with or actually meeting up with another species is considered infinitesimal, we still dream about it and hope that one day it will be possible.

The students in Wyoming came up with five questions for an interplanetary visitor:

If you have fear, what do you fear?
What is the ultimate purpose of your species’ life?
How can we extend the longevity of our civilization?
What makes you and your kind happy?
What should we know?

Not only did students compile these questions, but they had to answer them as well.

Professor Lockwood said in a Christian Science Monitor article that even the idea of communication with another civilization kept his class engaged, and even if his students’ work is never heard or understood by the intended recipients, they still learned something about the fundamental difficulties of interpersonal communication.

So, how would you answer the five questions posed by the students? And, revisiting my work with the World Timecapsule, here’s a chance for you to share what you would say to another civilization if you had the chance. Post your sincere sentiments below.

Original News Source: Christian Science Monitor

May 20, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Spare Telescope Parts Could be Used for Homeland Security

The life of NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) ended in 2000 when the spacecraft’s remains splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a planned deorbit. But the space telescope’s spare parts live on, and they may have a new job. Instead of searching the universe for radioactive emissions, they could help military personnel search for dirty bombs and other radioactive materials. “If we can detect radioactive aluminum-26 on the other side of the galaxy we can find other radioactive materials like cesium-137 or cobalt-60 inside a building or on the other side of the street by the same method,” said Dr. James Ryan from the University of New Hampshire.

Ryan was a member of the research team that helped build and operate the gamma-ray imaging COMPTEL telescope onboard the CRGO, a 1991-2000 NASA mission. One of the key findings of COMPTEL was its map of radioactive aluminum from dying stars throughout the Galaxy.

Identical flight spares of all the telescope components were built, just in case any of the parts failed. While the spares were never launched, they haven’t been collecting dust on a shelf. At different times, Ryan told Universe Today, the flight spares were assembled into a working telescope, sometimes as a student exercise and once for the benefit of the US Army as a test for probing the interior of buildings based on the background gamma radiation being emitted from the contents of the building.

“It is a sensitive instrument and it required no great thought to envision this use for it,” Ryan said of his idea to use the parts to pinpoint the location of dirty bombs. He was motivated by witnessing a National Guard drill to search for and clean up radioactive material left over by “terrorists.”

“It was clear that we would be able to sense the presence and approximate location of the radioactive material without entering the building with this device,” he said.

The device, known as GRETA, short for the Gamma-ray Experimental Telescope Assembly, could potentially be loaded on a truck and used for homeland security work such as scanning shipping containers or buildings for radioactive materials.

GRETA can accurately determine the direction from which a radioactive source is being emitted by creating an image, unlike current technology used by the military, such as Geiger counters or spectrometers that can only determine that radiation in is the vicinity.

“They might detect the presence of cesium-137 but they won’t know where it is unless they get right up close to it, they would have to fish around inside the building,” said Ryan, which would be a safety issue for military personnel.

Other media outlets report that some scientists doubt the applicability of this technology, saying GRETA’s “older” design has its limitations. But Ryan told Universe Today that current technology has changed very little from what COMPTEL, and GRETA, employ.

“Few, if any, scintillator detectors today will perform better than what is in GRETA,” he said. “There are newer designs for gamma-ray telescopes under development, but they are far from a deployable state. All are expensive, far more than a GRETA-type instrument. In fact, one could argue that GRETA is optimized for this application, because it provides the sensitivity necessary for the imaging and spectroscopy, while still remaining affordable and deployable on a short time scale.”

While GRETA is a prototype, the blueprints for the detectors, electronics and operation software still exist and can be used, with little modification, to build up a commercial unit for a real field test.

Ryan said there could be several potential “customers” or users for this device. “The National Guard is an obvious one, because they are charged with the clean up and disposal problem if, and when, a terrorist cell is uprooted. The US Border Patrol, various branches of the military and different port authorities could all find this useful,” Ryan said.

More information about CGRO.

May 19, 2008June 5, 2022 by Tammy Plotner

Closer to the Heart – 47 Tucanae

Those huge, gravitationally bound balls of stars know as globular clusters aren’t without a heart. Containing a thick concentration of 10,000 to more than a million stars in a region spanning just 10 to 30 light-years, globular clusters are more akin to seething masses of suns where the lightweights head for the outer edges while the giants collect in the core. What causes this process? Do globular clusters really have a way of getting some stars closer to the heart?

What you see here is 47 Tucanae, the second largest globular cluster in the Milky Way’s busy galactic halo. As its name “47 Tucanae” implies, its core was first cataloged as a star and numbered the 47th in Tucana the Toucan – but not for long. On September 14, 1751 a French astronomer named Nicholas Louis de Lacaille was the first to discover its true nature with a half inch diameter spy glass and cataloged it as nebulous object. Next to observe and catalog it were James Dunlop in 1826, and John Herschel in 1834 when it became New General Catalog (NGC) 104.

At home some 13,400 to 16,000 light years away from our Earth, this inconceivably dense concentration of at least a million stars spans 120 light years at the outside, yet at its heart is more than 15,000 individual stars that are packed so densely that you couldn’t fit our solar system between them. Believed to have all been born about the same time from the same cloud of gas, globular clusters like 47 Tucanae are a wonderful study of how stars evolve and interact.

With such busy conditions, it only stands to reason that stellar collisions have occurred at one time or another and 47 Tucanae is no exception. In the core, 23 unusually hot and bright stars called blue stragglers have been identified – the double massive result of two stars bumping into one another. Due to the associated gravitational pull, heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster’s core, while lighter stars pick up speed and head for the outer edges. The more often collisions happen the more dramatic the results – pushing the smaller stars ever faster towards the periphery and creating exotic objects.

What no earthly photo can ever show is that 47 Tucanae contains at least twenty millisecond pulsars – better known as neutron stars. Can you imagine a sun that rotates on its axis a few hundreds to one thousand times a second? Just imagine the power. According to scientists, such peculiar objects are generally thought to have a companion from which they receive matter. Close interacting binaries and bright cataclysmic binaries… dwarf novae and nova-like variable candidates…. They all make their home here closer to the heart.

This incredible image of 47 Tucanae was done by Don Goldman of Macedon Ranges Obervatory

May 19, 2008December 24, 2015 by Astronomy Cast

Podcast: Adaptive Optics

Since the dawn of humanity, astronomers have wished to destroy the atmosphere. Oh sure, it’s what we breathe and all, but that stupid atmosphere is always getting in the way. Since destroying the atmosphere is out of the question, astronomers have figured out how to work with it. To distort the mirror of the telescope itself though the magic of adaptive optics.

Click here to download the episode

Adaptive Optics – Show notes and transcript

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

May 19, 2008December 24, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

No Doomsday in 2012

Apparently, the world is going to end on December 21st, 2012. Yes, you read correctly, in some way, shape or form, the Earth (or at least a large portion of humans on the planet) will cease to exist. Stop planning your careers, don’t bother buying a house, and be sure to spend the last years of your life doing something you always wanted to do but never had the time. Now you have the time, four years of time, to enjoy yourselves before… the end.

So what is all this crazy talk? We’ve all heard these doomsday predictions before, we’re still here, and the planet is still here, why is 2012 so important? Well, the Mayan calendar stops at the end of the year 2012, churning up all sorts of religious, scientific, astrological and historic reasons why this calendar foretells the end of life as we know it. The Mayan Prophecy is gaining strength and appears to be worrying people in all areas of society. Forget Nostradamus, forget the Y2K bug, forget the credit crunch, this event is predicted to be huge and many wholeheartedly believe this is going to happen for real. Planet X could even be making a comeback.

Related 2012 articles:

For all those 2012 Mayan Prophecy believers out there, I have bad news. There is going to be no doomsday event in 2012, and here’s why…

The Mayan Calendar
So what is the Mayan Calendar? The calendar was constructed by an advanced civilization called the Mayans around 250-900 AD. Evidence for the Maya empire stretches around most parts of the southern states of Mexico and reaches down to the current geological locations of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and some of Honduras. The people living in Mayan society exhibited very advanced written skills and had an amazing ability when constructing cities and urban planning. The Mayans are probably most famous for their pyramids and other intricate and grand buildings. The people of Maya had a huge impact on Central American culture, not just within their civilization, but with other indigenous populations in the region. Significant numbers of Mayans still live today, continuing their age-old traditions.

The Mayans used many different calendars and viewed time as a meshing of spiritual cycles. While the calendars had practical uses, such as social, agricultural, commercial and administrative tasks, there was a very heavy religious element. Each day had a patron spirit, signifying that each day had specific use. This contrasts greatly with our modern Gregorian calendar which primarily sets the administrative, social and economic dates.

Most of the Mayan calendars were short. The Tzolk’in calendar lasted for 260 days and the Haab’ approximated the solar year of 365 days. The Mayans then combined both the Tzolk’in and the Haab’ to form the “Calendar Round”, a cycle lasting 52 Haab’s (around 52 years, or the approximate length of a generation). Within the Calendar Round were the trecena (13 day cycle) and the veintena (20 day cycle). Obviously, this system would only be of use when considering the 18,980 unique days over the course of 52 years. In addition to these systems, the Mayans also had the “Venus Cycle”. Being keen and highly accurate astronomers they formed a calendar based on the location of Venus in the night sky. It’s also possible they did the same with the other planets in the Solar System.

Using the Calendar Round is great if you simply wanted to remember the date of your birthday or significant religious periods, but what about recording history? There was no way to record a date older than 52 years.

The end of the Long Count = the end of the Earth?
The Mayans had a solution. Using an innovative method, they were able to expand on the 52 year Calendar Round. Up to this point, the Mayan Calendar may have sounded a little archaic – after all, it was possibly based on religious belief, the menstrual cycle, mathematical calculations using the numbers 13 and 20 as the base units and a heavy mix of astrological myth. The only principal correlation with the modern calendar is the Haab’ that recognised there were 365 days in one solar year (it’s not clear whether the Mayans accounted for leap years). The answer to a longer calendar could be found in the “Long Count”, a calendar lasting 5126 years.

I’m personally very impressed with this dating system. For starters, it is numerically predictable and it can accurately pinpoint historical dates. However, it depends on a base unit of 20 (where modern calendars use a base unit of 10). So how does this work?

The base year for the Mayan Long Count starts at “0.0.0.0.0”. Each zero goes from 0-19 and each represent a tally of Mayan days. So, for example, the first day in the Long Count is denoted as 0.0.0.0.1. On the 19th day we’ll have 0.0.0.0.19, on the 20th day it goes up one level and we’ll have 0.0.0.1.0. This count continues until 0.0.1.0.0 (about one year), 0.1.0.0.0 (about 20 years) and 1.0.0.0.0 (about 400 years). Therefore, if I pick an arbitrary date of 2.10.12.7.1, this represents the Mayan date of approximately 1012 years, 7 months and 1 day.

This is all very interesting, but what has this got to do with the end of the world? The Mayan Prophecy is wholly based on the assumption that something bad is going to happen when the Mayan Long Count calendar runs out. Experts are divided as to when the Long Count ends, but as the Maya used the numbers of 13 and 20 at the root of their numerical systems, the last day could occur on 13.0.0.0.0. When does this happen? Well, 13.0.0.0.0 represents 5126 years and the Long Count started on 0.0.0.0.0, which corresponds to the modern date of August 11th 3114 BC. Have you seen the problem yet? The Mayan Long Count ends 5126 years later on December 21st, 2012.

Doomsday
When something ends (even something as innocent as an ancient calendar), people seem to think up the most extreme possibilities for the end of civilization as we know it. A brief scan of the internet will pull up the most popular to some very weird ways that we will, with little logical thought, be wiped off the face of the planet. Archaeologists and mythologists on the other hand believe that the Mayans predicted an age of enlightenment when 13.0.0.0.0 comes around; there isn’t actually much evidence to suggest doomsday will strike. If anything, the Mayans predict a religious miracle, not anything sinister.

Myths are abound and seem to be fuelling movie storylines. It looks like the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is even based around the Mayan myth that 13 crystal skulls can save humanity from certain doom. This myth says that if the 13 ancient skulls are not brought together at the right time, the Earth will be knocked off its axis. This might be a great plotline for blockbuster movies, but it also highlights the hype that can be stirred, lighting up religious, scientific and not-so-scientific ideas that the world is doomed.

Some of the most popular space-based threats to the Earth and mankind focus on Planet X wiping most life off the planet, meteorite impacts, black holes, killer solar flares, Gamma Ray Bursts from star systems, a rapid ice age and a polar (magnetic) shift. There is so much evidence against these things happening in 2012, it’s shocking just how much of a following they have generated. Each of the above “threats” needs their own devoted article as to why there is no hard evidence to support the hype.

But the fact remains, the Mayan Doomsday Prophecy is purely based on a calendar which we believe hasn’t been designed to calculate dates beyond 2012. Mayan archaeo-astronomers are even in debate as to whether the Long Count is designed to be reset to 0.0.0.0.0 after 13.0.0.0.0, or whether the calendar simply continues to 20.0.0.0.0 (approximately 8000 AD) and then reset. As Karl Kruszelnicki brilliantly writes:

“…when a calendar comes to the end of a cycle, it just rolls over into the next cycle. In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1 – or good-ol’ 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas.” – Excerpt from Dr Karl’s “Great Moments in Science“.

Sources: Dr Karl’s Great Moments in Science, IHT, 2012 Wiki

Leading image credits: MIT (supernova simulation), WikiMedia (Mayan pyramid Chichen Itza). Effects and editing: myself.

May 19, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Wow! Satellite Catches Bright Solar Flare From a Another Star

Artist's depiction of red-dwarf-flare. Image credit: Casey Reed/NASA

NASA’s Swift satellite picked up one of the brightest solar flares ever seen — not from our own sun, but a star 16 light-years away. This flare packed the power of thousands of solar flares combined, and a flare of this magnitude from our own sun would have stripped Earth’s atmosphere and sterilized the planet. Astronomers say the flare would have been visible to the naked eye on April 25, 2008 if the star had been easily observable in the night sky at the time. As it was, the flare’s brightness caused Swifts’ Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope to shut down for safety reasons. But Swift was able to study the flare for over 8 hours with its X-ray capabilities.

The Swift satellite normally searches for gamma ray bursts, and is surrounded with detectors that look for bursts of light. The spacecraft then “swiftly” and autonomously re-points itself to the location of the burst. However, this was no gamma ray burst, just a solar flare. But what a solar flare!

The star, EV Lacertae, is a basic red dwarf, the most common type of star in the universe. It shines with only one percent of the Sun’s light, and contains only a third of the Sun’s mass. It’s one of our closest stellar neighbors, but normally is not visible with the naked eye, as it holds a magnitude of -10.

“Here’s a small, cool star that shot off a monster flare. This star has a record of producing flares, but this one takes the cake,” says Rachel Osten, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Flares like this would deplete the atmospheres of life-bearing planets, sterilizing their surfaces.”

Astronomers say EV Lacertae is like an unruly child that throws frequent temper tantrums. It’s a relatively young star at a few hundred million years of age. But it’s a fast rotating star which generates a strong magnetic field, about 100 times as magnetically powerful as the Sun’s field. The energy stored in its magnetic field powers these giant flares.

The flare’s incredible brightness enabled Swift to make detailed measurements in X-ray, as the star remained bright in x-rays for about 8 hours. “This gives us a golden opportunity to study a stellar flare on a second-by-second basis to see how it evolved,” says Stephen Drake of NASA Goddard.

Flares release energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, but the extremely high gas temperatures produced by flares can only be studied with high-energy telescopes like those on Swift. Swift’s wide field and rapid repointing capabilities, designed to study gamma-ray bursts, make it ideal for studying stellar flares. Most other X-ray observatories have studied this star and others like it, but they have to be extremely lucky to catch and study powerful flares due to their much smaller fields of view.

Original News Source: NASA