Universe Today

An astronomer studying small irregular galaxies has discovered a remarkable feature in one of them that may provide key clues to understanding how galaxies form and the relationship between the gas and the stars within galaxies.

Liese van Zee of Indiana University Bloomington, using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, found that a small galaxy 16 million light-years from Earth is surrounded by a huge disk of hydrogen gas that has not been involved in the galaxy’s star-formation processes and may be primordial material left over from the galaxy’s formation. “If that’s the case, then we may have found a nearby sample similar to the stuff of the early universe,” van Zee said.

“Why the gas in the disk has remained so undisturbed, without stars forming, is somewhat perplexing. When we figure out how this happened, we’ll undoubtedly learn more about how galaxies form,” she said.

She presented her findings on Wednesday (Jan. 12) at the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, Calif.

The galaxy van Zee studied, called UGC 5288, had been regarded as just one ordinary example of a numerous type called dwarf irregular galaxies. As part of a study of such galaxies, she had earlier made a visible-light image of it at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

When she observed the galaxy later using the radio telescope, she found that it is embedded in a huge disk of atomic hydrogen gas. In visible light, the elongated galaxy is about 6,000 by 4,000 light-years, but the hydrogen-gas disk, seen with the VLA, is about 41,000 by 28,000 light-years. “The gas disk is more than seven times bigger than the galaxy we see in visible light,” she said.

The hydrogen disk can be seen by radio telescopes because hydrogen atoms emit and absorb radio waves at a frequency of 1420 MHz, a wavelength of about 21 centimeters.

A few other dwarf galaxies have large gas disks, but unlike these, UGC 5288’s disk shows no signs that the gas was either blown out of the galaxy by furious star formation or pulled out by a close encounter with another galaxy. “This gas disk is rotating quite peacefully around the galaxy,” van Zee explained. That means, she said, that the gas around UGC 5288 most likely is pristine material that has never been “polluted” by the heavier elements produced in stars.

What’s surprising, said Martha Haynes, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is that the huge gas disk seems to be completely uninvolved in the small galaxy’s star-formation processes. “You need the gas to make the stars, so we might have thought the two would be better correlated. This means we really don’t understand how the star-forming gas and the stars themselves are related,” Haynes said.

It’s exciting to find such a large reservoir of apparently unprocessed matter, Haynes said. “This object and others like it could be the targets for studying pristine material in the universe,” she said.

Haynes was amused that a galaxy that looked “boring” to some in visible-light images showed such a remarkable feature when viewed with a radio telescope.

“This shows that you can’t judge an object by its appearance at only one wavelength. What seems boring at one wavelength may be very exciting at another,” Haynes said.

Original Source: Indiana University

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered a hatchery for massive stars.

A new striking image from the infrared telescope shows a vibrant cloud called the Trifid Nebula dotted with glowing stellar “incubators.” Tucked deep inside these incubators are rapidly growing embryonic stars, whose warmth Spitzer was able to see for the first time with its powerful heat-seeking eyes.

The new view offers a rare glimpse at the earliest stages of massive star formation ? a time when developing stars are about to burst into existence.

“Massive stars develop in very dark regions so quickly that is hard to catch them forming,” said Dr. Jeonghee Rho of the Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., principal investigator of the recent observations. “With Spitzer, it’s like having an ultrasound for stars. We can see into dust cocoons and visualize how many embryos are in each of them.”

The new false-color image can be found at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media. It was presented today at the 205th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, Calif.

The Trifid Nebula is a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Previous images taken by the Institute for Radioastronomy millimeter telescope in Spain show that the nebula contains four cold knots, or cores, of dust. Such cores are “incubators” where stars are born. Astronomers thought the ones in the Trifid Nebula were not yet ripe for stars. But, when Spitzer set its infrared eyes on all four cores, it found that they had already begun to develop warm stellar embryos.

“Spitzer can see the material from the dark cores falling onto the surfaces of the embryonic stars, because the material gets hotter as gravity draws it in,” said Dr. William T. Reach of the Spitzer Science Center, co-author of this new research. “By measuring the infrared brightness, we can not only see the individual embryos but determine their growth rate.”

The Trifid Nebula is unique in that it is dominated by one massive central star, 300,000 years old. Radiation and winds emanating from the star have sculpted the Trifid cloud into its current cavernous shape. These winds have also acted like shock waves to compress gas and dust into dark cores, whose gravity caused more material to fall inward until embryonic stars were formed. In time, the growing embryos will accumulate enough mass to ignite and explode out of their cores like baby birds busting out of their eggs.

Because the Trifid Nebula is home to just one massive star, it provides astronomers a rare chance to study an isolated family unit. All of the newfound stellar embryos are descended from the nebula’s main star. Said Rho, “Looking at the image, you know exactly where the embryos came from. We use their colors to determine how old they are. It’s like studying the family tree for a generation of stars.”

Spitzer discovered 30 embryonic stars in the Trifid Nebula’s four cores and dark clouds. Multiple embryos were found inside two massive cores, while a sole embryo was seen in each of the other two. This is one of the first times that clusters of embryos have been observed in single cores at this early stage of stellar development.

“In the cores with multiple embryos, we are seeing that the most massive and brightest of the bunch is near the center. This implies that the developing stars are competing for materials, and that the embryo with the most material will grow to be the largest star,” said Dr. Bertrand Lefloch of Observatoire de Grenoble, France, co-author of the new research.

Spitzer also uncovered about 120 small baby stars buried inside the outer clouds of the nebula. These newborns were probably formed around the same time as the main massive star and are its smaller siblings.

Other authors of this work include Dr. Giovanni Fazio, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Mass.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif. JPL is a division of Caltech.

The new Spitzer image is a combination of data from the telescope’s infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. The infrared array camera was built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; its development was led by Fazio. The multiband imaging photometer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Boeing North American, Canoga Park, Calif. The instrument’s development was led by Dr.George Rieke, University of Arizona.

Additional information about the Spitzer Space Telescope is available at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

A dense globular star cluster near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy holds a buzzing beehive of rapidly-spinning millisecond pulsars, according to astronomers who discovered 21 new pulsars in the cluster using the National Science Foundation’s 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. The cluster, called Terzan 5, now holds the record for pulsars, with 24, including three known before the GBT observations.

“We hit the jackpot when we looked at this cluster,” said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, VA. “Not only does this cluster have a lot of pulsars — and we still expect to find more in it — but the pulsars in it are very interesting. They include at least 13 in binary systems, two of which are eclipsing, and the four fastest-rotating pulsars known in any globular cluster, with the fastest two rotating nearly 600 times per second, roughly as fast as a household blender,” Ransom added. Ransom and his colleagues reported their findings to the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in San Diego, CA, and in the online journal Science Express.

The star cluster’s numerous pulsars are expected to yield a bonanza of new information about not only the pulsars themselves, but also about the dense stellar environment in which they reside and probably even about nuclear physics, according to the scientists. For example, preliminary measurements indicate that two of the pulsars are more massive than some theoretical models would allow. “All these exotic pulsars will keep us busy for years to come,” said Jason Hessels, a Ph.D student at McGill University in Montreal.

Globular clusters are dense agglomerations of up to millions of stars, all of which formed at about the same time. Pulsars are spinning, superdense neutron stars that whirl “lighthouse beams” of radio waves or light around as they spin. A neutron star is what is left after a massive star explodes as a supernova at the end of its life.

The pulsars in Terzan 5 are the product of a complex history. The stars in the cluster formed about 10 billion years ago, the astronomers say. Some of the most massive stars in the cluster exploded and left the neutron stars as their remnants after only a few million years. Normally, these neutron stars would no longer be seen as swiftly-rotating pulsars: their spin would have slowed because of the “drag” of their intense magnetic fields until the “lighthouse” effect is no longer observable.

However, the dense concentration of stars in the cluster gave new life to the pulsars. In the core of a globular cluster, as many as a million stars may be packed into a volume that would fit easily between the Sun and our nearest neighbor star. In such close quarters, stars can pass near enough to form new binary pairs, split apart such pairs, and binary systems even can trade partners, like an elaborate cosmic square dance. When a neutron star pairs up with a “normal” companion star, its strong gravitational pull can draw material off the companion onto the neutron star. This also transfers some of the companion’s spin, or angular momentum, to the neutron star, thereby “recycling” the neutron star into a rapidly-rotating millisecond pulsar. In Terzan 5, all the pulsars discovered are rotating rapidly as a result of this process.

Astronomers previously had discovered three pulsars in Terzan 5, some 28,000 light-years distant in the constellation Sagittarius, but suspected there were more. On July 17, 2004, Ransom and his colleagues used the GBT, and, in a 6-hour observation, found 14 new pulsars, the most ever found in a single observation.

“This was possible because of the great sensitivity of the GBT and the new capabilities of our backend processor,” said Ingrid Stairs, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The processor, named, appropriately, the Pulsar Spigot, was built in a collaboration between the NRAO and the California Institute of Technology. The processor, which generates almost 100 GigaBytes of data per hour, allowed the astronomers to gather and analyze radio waves over a wide range of frequencies (1650-2250 MegaHertz), adding to the sensitivity of their system.

Eight more observations between July and November of 2004 discovered seven additional pulsars in Terzan 5. In addition, the astronomers’ data show evidence for several more pulsars that still need to be confirmed.

Future studies of the pulsars in Terzan 5 will help scientists understand the nature of the cluster and the complex interactions of the stars at its dense core. Also, several of the pulsars offer a rich yield of new scientific information. The scientists suspect that one pulsar, which shows strange eclipses of its radio emission, has recently traded its original binary companion for another, and two others have white-dwarf companions that they believe may have been produced by the collision of a neutron star and a red-giant star. Subtle effects seen in these two systems can be explained by Einstein’s general relativistic theory of gravity, and indicate that the neutron stars are more massive than some theories allow. The material in a neutron star is as dense as that in an atomic nucleus, so that fact has implications for nuclear physics as well as astrophysics.

“Finding all these pulsars has been extremely exciting, but the excitement really has just begun,” Ransom said. “Now we can start to use them as a rich and valuable cosmic laboratory,” he added.

In addition to Ransom, Hessels and Stairs, the research team included Paulo Freire of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, Fernando Camilo of Columbia University, Victoria Kaspi of McGill University, and David Kaplan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The pulsar research also was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Science and Engineering Research Canada, the Quebec Foundation for Research on Nature and Technology, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canada Research Chairs Program, and the National Science Foundation.

Original Source: NRAO News Release

Hubble astronomers have uncovered, for the first time, a population of infant stars in the Milky Way satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC, visible to the naked eye in the southern constellation Tucana), located 210,000 light-years away.

Hubble’s exquisite sharpness plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds. They have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel to sustain nuclear fusion. The smallest of these infant stars is only half the mass of our Sun.

Although star birth is common within the disk of our galaxy, this smaller companion galaxy is more primeval in that it lacks a large percentage of the heavier elements that are forged in successive generations of stars through nuclear fusion.

Fragmentary galaxies like the SMC are considered primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. Most of these types of galaxies existed far away, when the universe was much younger. The SMC offers a unique nearby laboratory for understanding how stars arose in the early universe. Nestled among other starburst regions with the small galaxy, the nebula NGC 346 alone contains more than 2,500 infant stars.

The Hubble images, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, identify three stellar populations in the SMC and in the region of the NGC 346 nebula ? a total of 70,000 stars. The oldest population is 4.5 billion years, roughly the age of our Sun. The younger population arose only 5 million years ago (about the time Earth’s first hominids began to walk on two feet). Lower-mass stars take longer to ignite and become full-fledged stars, so the protostellar population is 5 million years old. Curiously, the infant stars are strung along two intersecting lanes in the nebula, resembling a “T” pattern in the Hubble plot.

The observations, by Antonella Nota of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, Md., are being presented today at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, Calif.

The other science team members are: M. Sirianni (STScI/ESA), E. Sabbi (Univ. of Bologna), M. Tosi (INAF – Bologna Observ.), J.S. Gallagher (Univ. of Wisconsin), M. Meixner (STScI), M. Clampin (GSFC), S. Oey (Univ. of Michigan), A. Pasquali (ETH Zurich), L. Smith (Univ. College London), and R. Walterbos (New Mexico State Univ.).

Original Source: Hubble News Release

For the first time, astronomers have been able to combine the deepest optical images of the universe, obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, with equally sharp images in the near-infrared part of the spectrum using a sophisticated new laser guide star system for adaptive optics at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The new observations, presented at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in San Diego this week, reveal unprecedented details of colliding galaxies with massive black holes at their cores, seen at a distance of around 5 billion light-years, when the universe was just over half its present age.

Observing distant galaxies in the infrared range reveals older populations of stars than can be seen at optical wavelengths, and infrared light also penetrates clouds of interstellar dust more readily than optical light. The new infrared images of distant galaxies were obtained by a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, UCLA, and the W. M. Keck Observatory. Jason Melbourne, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, said the initial findings include some surprises and that researchers will continue to analyze the data in the weeks to come.

“We have never been able to achieve this level of spatial resolution in the infrared before,” Melbourne said.

In addition to Melbourne, the research team, led by David Koo of UCSC and James Larkin of UCLA, includes Jennifer Lotz, Claire Max, and Jerry Nelson at UCSC; Shelley Wright and Matthew Barczys at UCLA; and Antonin H. Bouchez, Jason Chin, Scott Hartman, Erik Johansson, Robert Lafon, David Le Mignant, Paul J. Stomski, Douglas Summers, Marcos A. van Dam, and Peter L. Wizinowich at Keck Observatory.

“For the first time in these deep images of the universe we can cover all wavelengths of light from the optical to the infrared with the same level of spatial resolution. This allows us to observe detailed substructures in distant galaxies and study their constituent stars with a precision we couldn’t possibly obtain otherwise,” said Koo, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.

The images were obtained by Wright and the Keck AO team during testing of the laser guide star adaptive optics system on the 10-meter Keck II Telescope. They are the first science-quality images of distant galaxies obtained with the new system. This marks a major step for the Center for Adaptive Optics Treasury Survey (CATS), which will use adaptive optics to observe a large sample of faint, distant galaxies in the early universe, said UCLA’s Larkin.

” We’ve worked very hard for several years taking data around bright stars. But we have been very restricted in terms of the number and types of objects that we can observe. Only with the laser can we now reach the richest and most exciting targets.” Larkin said.

Adaptive optics (AO) corrects for the blurring effect of the atmosphere, which seriously degrades images seen by ground-based telescopes. An AO system precisely measures this blurring and corrects the image using a deformable mirror, applying corrections hundreds of times per second. To measure the blurring, AO requires a bright point-source of light in the telescope’s field of view, which can be created artificially by using a laser to excite sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere, causing them to glow. Without such a laser guide star, astronomers have had to rely on bright stars (“natural guide stars”), which drastically limits where AO can be used in the sky. Furthermore, natural guide stars are too bright to allow observations of very faint, distant galaxies in the same part of the sky, Koo said.

“The advent of the laser guide star at Keck has opened up the sky for adaptive optics observations, and we can now use Keck to focus on those fields where we already have wonderful, deep optical images from the Hubble Space Telescope,” Koo said.

Because the diameter of the Keck Telescope’s mirror is four times larger than Hubble’s, it can obtain images four times sharper than Hubble in the near infrared now that the laser guide star adaptive optics system is available to overcome the blurring effects of the atmosphere.

The images being presented at the AAS meeting were obtained in an area of the sky known as the GOODS-South field, where deep observations have already been made by Hubble, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and other telescopes. There are six faint galaxies in the images, including two X-ray sources identified by Chandra. The X-ray emissions, combined with the disordered morphology of these objects, suggested recent merger activity, Melbourne said. Mergers can funnel large amounts of matter into the center of a galaxy, and X-ray emissions from the galactic center indicate the presence of a massive black hole that is actively consuming matter.

” We are now fairly certain that we are seeing galaxies that have undergone recent mergers,” Melbourne said. “One of these systems has a double nucleus, so you can actually see the two nuclei of the merging galaxies. The other system is highly disordered–it looks like a train wreck–and is a much stronger X-ray source.”

In addition to lighting up the galactic nucleus with x-ray emissions, mergers also tend to trigger the formation of new stars by shocking and compressing clouds of gas. So the researchers were surprised to find that the system with a double nucleus is dominated by relatively old stars and does not appear to be producing many young stars.

” If we are right about the merger scenario, then this merger is occuring between two galaxies that had already formed most of their stars billions of years before and did not have a lot of gas left over to make new stars,” Melbourne said.

If additional study shows that such objects are common further back in time, these observations could help explain one of the puzzles of galaxy formation. According to the prevailing theory of hierarchical galaxy formation, large galaxies are built up over billions of years through mergers between smaller galaxies. Since mergers trigger star formation, it has been difficult to explain the existence of very large galaxies that lack significant populations of young stars.

“One idea is that you can have a so-called dry merger, where two galaxies full of old stars but little gas merge without forming many new stars. What we are seeing in this object is consistent with a dry merger,” Melbourne said. “Even in a dry merger, there may still be enough gas to feed the black hole, producing X-ray emissions, but not enough to yield a strong burst of star formation.”

Further observations at mid- to far-infrared wavelengths, expected later this year from the Spitzer Space Telescope, may help confirm this. The Spitzer data will provide a better indication of the dust content of the galaxy, a crucial variable in interpreting these observations, Melbourne said.

The laser guide star adaptive optics system was funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation. The artificial laser guide star system was developed and integrated in a partnership between the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the W. M. Keck Observatory. The laser was integrated at Keck with the help of Dee Pennington, Curtis Brown, and Pam Danforth. The NIRC2 near-infrared camera was developed by the California Institute of Technology, UCLA, and the Keck Observatory. The Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among CalTech, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This work has been supported by the Center for Adaptive Optics, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center managed by UC Santa Cruz.

Original Source: Keck News Release

Astronomers using the Gemini South 8-meter telescope in Chile have observed new details in the dusty disk surrounding the nearby star Beta Pictoris which show that a large collision between planetary-sized bodies may have occurred there as recently as the past few decades.

The mid-infrared observations provide the best evidence yet for the occurrence of energetic encounters between planetesimals during the process of planetary formation.

“It is as if we were looking back about 5 billion years and watching our own solar system as it was forming into what we see today,” said Dr. Charles Telesco of the University of Florida who led the team. “Our research is a bit like a detective dusting for fingerprints to figure out a crime scene, only in this case we use the dust as a tracer to show what has happened within the cloud. The properties of the dust show not only that this was a huge collision, but that it probably happened recently in both astronomical and even human timescales.”

The team?s data revealed a significantly higher concentration of small dust grains in one region of the debris disk that gave Beta Pictoris a lopsided appearance in previous observations. According to team member Dr. Scott Fisher of the Gemini Observatory, it is the unique properties of this fine dust that allows speculation on the timing of this collision. “Many of us remember pounding chalk dust out of erasers in school,? he said. ?After you sneeze a few times, you open a window and the fine dust blows away. In Beta Pictoris, the radiation from the star will blow away the fine particles created by the collision quite rapidly. The fact that we still see them in our observations means that the collision probably happened in the past 100 years or so. Almost assuredly my grandparents were alive when this collision occurred.?

Computer models done at the University of Florida by team members Dr. Stanley Dermott, Dr. Tom Kehoe and Dr. Mark Wyatt (of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK) show that the timescales necessary to remove this fine dust in Beta Pictoris are on the order of decades. “This process moves out the smaller dust particles very quickly and leaves behind the larger debris,” said Dermott. “The larger particles will eventually disperse throughout the cloud as it orbits around the central star and the bright clump we see now will essentially dissolve into the disk.”

Disks of material surrounding stars such as Beta Pictoris are thought to contain objects of all sizes, from small dust grains similar to household dust to large planetesimals, or developing planets. As all of these objects orbit around the star, just like the Earth circles the Sun, they occasionally collide. The largest of these catastrophic encounters leave behind tell-tail debris clouds of fine dust observable at infrared wavelengths. By collecting high-resolution images from across a broad swath of the thermal infrared part of the spectrum, the research team from the US, UK and Chile was able to study such a cloud within the larger Beta Pictoris disk and analyze the images to determine the spatial distribution and estimate the size of the debris particles in the post-collision aftermath.

A collision similar to this one may well have created our own Moon several billion years ago when a Mars-sized body collided with what would eventually become the Earth. While the Moon itself formed out of large rocks and debris created by the collision, the small dust particles were blown away by radiation pressure from the young Sun. In the Beta Pictoris system radiation from the central star blows at about 15 times the intensity of the Sun, clearing out small grains even more quickly.

Because the Beta Pictoris disk is oriented to us edge-on, the observed asymmetry is visible as a bright ?clump? in the cigar-shaped cloud of material orbiting the central star. The Gemini images also reveal new structures in the disk that might show where planets are forming in the system. The team is still studying these features, and follow-up observations are planned using Gemini South?s newly silver-coated 8-meter mirror. This silver coating (now on both Gemini telescopes) makes the twin telescopes the most powerful facilities on Earth for this type of infrared research.

Beta Pictoris was one of the first “circumstellar” disks discovered by astronomers. It was initially detected in IRAS (Infrared Astronomy Satellite) data in 1983 by a team led by Dr. Fred Gillett (formerly Gemini?s Lead Scientist) and then imaged by Dr. Bradley Smith and Dr. Richard Terrile. Its lopsided nature was apparent even then, but until recently, observations yielded insufficient data at high-enough resolutions to show the clumpy nature of this asymmetry and estimate the relative particle distribution in the cloud.

The Gemini data were obtained using the Gemini Thermal-Region Camera Spectrograph (T-ReCS) on the Gemini South Telescope on Cerro Pach?n in Chile.

The international team published their findings and conclusions in the January 13 issue of the journal Nature and in San Diego, California at the 205th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Original Source: Gemini News Release

A trio of massive, young star clusters found embedded in a star cloud may shed light on the formation of super-star clusters and globular clusters.

The discovery, made with images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, is being presented today by You-Hua Chu and Rosie Chen of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and Kelsey Johnson of the University of Virginia to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. This finding indicates that super-star clusters may be formed by coalescence of smaller clusters.

The tightly packed group of clusters was found in the core of the active star formation region NGC 5461, within an arm of the giant spiral galaxy M101. This galaxy is located about 23 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper).

?NGC 5461 has such a high concentration of light in its core that some astronomers have thought it might host a super-star cluster,? said Chu, who is a professor of astronomy at Illinois and principal investigator of the project. Super-star clusters, with a total mass of up to 1 million times that of the sun, are five to 50 times more massive than the spectacular R136 cluster at the center of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They are believed to be the young counterparts of the massive globular clusters in our galaxy.

Hubble Space Telescope images of the core of NGC 5461 revealed a tight group of three massive clusters surrounded by a cloud of stars within a region about 100 light-years in diameter. Although each cluster is comparable to the R136 cluster, the total mass within this small volume is similar to that of a super-star cluster.

?If NGC 5461 were several times farther away, even the Hubble Space Telescope would be unable to resolve this tight group of clusters,? said Chen, a graduate student at Illinois. ?It is possible that some of the super-star clusters previously reported in distant galaxies actually consist of groups of clusters similar to NGC 5461.?

The large amount of mass at the core of NGC 5461 produces a strong gravitational field, causing the clusters and stars to move and interact dynamically. The rapidly fluctuating gravitational field produced by this interaction dissipates the relative motion of the clusters into random motions of individual stars. Eventually, the clusters and surrounding star cloud will merge into one single star cluster.

?The Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 5461 provide a unique glimpse of a super-star cluster in the making,? said Johnson, a professor of astronomy at Virginia. ?There is no super-star cluster yet, but it is just a matter of time.?

The dynamical evolution of the clusters at the core of NGC 5461 is being simulated by astronomy professor Paul Ricker at Illinois. Preliminary results show that under optimal conditions these clusters may merge within a few million years.

?Fortunately, NGC 5461 is near enough, and young enough for us to resolve it with the Hubble Space Telescope,? Chu said. ?We were indeed lucky to catch it at such an opportune time.?

The work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The researchers will report their findings in the Feb. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Original Source: UIUC News Release

Image credit: McDonald Observatory
Observations of the white dwarf star, Sirius B, made with NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite give astronomers firm new evidence that mathematical models widely used to predict white dwarf star mass and radius are correct.

Jay B. Holberg of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is presenting the result today at the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

The FUSE result is important because Sirius B is one of the few stars that astronomers have to test their ideas on the relationship between mass and radius for white dwarf stars. White dwarf stars are small but astonishingly dense stars. Sirius B is the size of the Earth and as massive as the sun.

Theory that describes how white dwarf stars can exist emerged in the early 1930s, when Subramanyan Chandrasekhar ? or Chandra, as he was known ? calculated the limit to a white dwarf’s mass by applying Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It was one of the first applications of quantum mechanics to large physical systems in the sky.

No white dwarf star could be more than 1.4 times as massive as the sun or it will collapse, Chandra predicted.

“Chandra was the first person to lay out the essential details of how white dwarfs sustain themselves, and it is very, very different from the sun or any other stars,” Holberg said.

Unlike most white dwarfs, Sirius B is part of a binary system, and astronomers can determine the mass of stars in a binary system.

“Having a binary system ? when two stars orbit one another – is virtually the only way you can fundamentally measure the mass of a star,” Holberg said. “You observe their orbits, get the period, know how far away they are, and you can find the sum of the two star masses. If you can time the orbits and know how far apart the stars are, you can determine the individual star masses. That’s the most accurate way, the acceptable way to determine star masses.

“But this star has always been devilishly difficult to observe,” Holberg said. The primary star in the system, Sirius A, is 8 light years from Earth and has twice the mass of the sun. It is the brightest star in the night sky, visible below Orion. Sirius B is 10,000 times dimmer than Sirius A. Astronomers can?t even see the white dwarf companion when it comes closest to the primary star during its 50-year, very elongated orbit around Sirius A.

For the post several years, Holberg and colleagues have observed Sirius B with the Voyager and Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer spacecrafts. They have refined the star’s temperature and gravity – gravity being the gravitational field at the surface of the star – to refine estimates of its mass and radius.

“The methods we’re using are spectroscopic. They infer the mass from synthetic models that we produce from measurements of temperature and gravity, the only two parameters of matter for a white dwarf.”

Holberg and his colleagues published the best determination of Sirius B’s mass-radius relationship in 1998, but that was “still far from definitive,” Holberg said. “That is, the uncertainties are so large, that while these studies define the basic relationship, they don?t tell you lots of details we need to know about these stars.”

The FUSE observations gave Holberg and his colleagues better spectral data on Sirius B’s gravitational field and temperature needed to calculate mass. “And this is a very clean spectrum. We rolled the FUSE spacecraft to keep Sirius A from contaminating the spectrum, and we succeeded very well.

“The mathematical model very well predicts our results on the gravitational field, temperature and brightness of this white dwarf star,” Holberg said. “That helps us determine the radius of the star. What we really want to do is determine mass and radius to within one percent. By verifying the Chandrasekhar limit, you put a great deal of astrophysics on much firmer footing,” he added.

“Astronomy has reached the level where you can make very definitive comparisons between the models and the observations. And it looks like we are going to come out to what we expected,” Holberg said.

Original Source: University of Arizona News Release