Universe Today

Image credit: ESO
Using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the magnification effect of a gravitational lens, a team of French and Swiss astronomers [2] has found several faint galaxies believed to be the most remote known.

Further spectroscopic studies of one of these candidates has provided a strong case for what is now the new record holder – and by far – of the most distant galaxy known in the Universe.

Named Abell 1835 IR1916, the newly discovered galaxy has a redshift of 10 [3] and is located about 13,230 million light-years away. It is therefore seen at a time when the Universe was merely 470 million years young, that is, barely 3 percent of its current age.

This primeval galaxy appears to be ten thousand times less massive than our Galaxy, the Milky Way. It might well be among the first class of objects which put an end to the Dark Ages of the Universe.

This remarkable discovery illustrates the potential of large ground-based telescopes in the near-infrared domain for the exploration of the very early Universe.

Digging into the past
Like palaeontologists who dig deeper and deeper to find the oldest remains, astronomers try to look further and further to scrutinise the very young Universe. The ultimate quest? Finding the first stars and galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang.

More precisely, astronomers are trying to explore the last “unknown territories”, the boundary between the “Dark Ages” and the “Cosmic Renaissance”.

Rather shortly after the Big Bang, which is now believed to have taken place some 13,700 million years ago, the Universe plunged into darkness. The relic radiation from the primordial fireball had been stretched by the cosmic expansion towards longer wavelengths and neither stars nor quasars had yet been formed which could illuminate the vast space. The Universe was a cold and opaque place. This sombre era is therefore quite reasonably dubbed the “Dark Ages”.

A few hundred million years later, the first generation of stars and, later still, the first galaxies and quasars, produced intense ultraviolet radiation, gradually lifting the fog over the Universe.

This was the end of the Dark Ages and, with a term again taken over from human history, is sometimes referred to as the “Cosmic Renaissance”.

Astronomers are trying to pin down when – and how – exactly the Dark Ages finished. This requires looking for the remotest objects, a challenge that only the largest telescopes, combined with a very careful observing strategy, can take up.

Using a Gravitational Telescope
With the advent of 8-10 meter class telescopes spectacular progress has been achieved during the last decade. Indeed it has since become possible to observe with some detail several thousand galaxies and quasars out to distances of nearly 12 billion light-years (i.e. up to a redshift of 3 [3]). In other words astronomers are now able to study individual galaxies, their formation, evolution, and other properties over typically 85 % of the past history of the Universe.

Further in the past, however, observations of galaxies and quasars become scarce. Currently, only a handful of very faint galaxies are seen approximately 1,200 to 750 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 5-7). Beyond that, the faintness of these sources and the fact their light is shifted from the optical to the near infrared has so far severely limited the studies.

An important breakthrough in this quest for the earliest formed galaxy has now been achieved by a team of French and Swiss astronomers [2] using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) equipped with the near-infrared sensitive instrument ISAAC. To accomplish this, they had to combine the light amplification effect of a cluster of galaxies – a Gravitational Telescope – with the light gathering power of the VLT and the excellent sky conditions prevailing at Paranal.

Searching for distant galaxies
The hunt for such faint, elusive objects demands a particular approach.

First of all, very deep images of a cluster of galaxies named Abell 1835 were taken using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on the VLT. Such relatively nearby massive clusters are able to bend and amplify the light of background sources – a phenomenon called Gravitational Lensing and predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

This natural amplification allows the astronomers to peer at galaxies which would otherwise be too faint to be seen. In the case of the newly discovered galaxy, the light is amplified approximately 25 to 100 times! Combined with the power of the VLT it has thereby been possible to image and even to take a spectrum of this galaxy. Indeed, the natural amplification effectively increases the aperture of the VLT from 8.2-m to 40-80 m.

The deep near-IR images taken at different wavelengths have allowed the astronomers to characterise the properties of a few thousand galaxies in the image and to select a handful of them as potentially very distant galaxies. Using previously obtained images taken at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea and images from the Hubble Space Telescope, it has then been verified that these galaxies are indeed not seen in the optical. In this way, six candidate high redshift galaxies were recognised whose light may have been emitted when the Universe was less than 700 million years old.

To confirm and obtain a more precise determination of the distance of one of these galaxies, the astronomers obtained Director’s Discretionary Time to use again ISAAC on the VLT, but this time in its spectroscopic mode. After several months of careful analysis of the data, the astronomers are convinced to have detected a weak but clear spectral feature in the near-infrared domain. The astronomers have made a strong case that this feature is most certainly the Lyman-alpha emission line typical of these objects. This line, which occurs in the laboratory at a wavelength of 0.1216 ?m, that is, in the ultraviolet, has been stretched to the near infrared at 1.34 ?m, making Abell 1835 IR1916 the first galaxy known to have a redshift as large as 10.

The most distant galaxy known to date
This is the strongest case for a redshift in excess of the current spectroscopically confirmed record at z=6.6 and the first case of a double-digit redshift. Scaling the age of the Universe to a person’s lifetime (80 years, say), the previous confirmed record showed a four-year toddler. With the present observations, we have a picture of the child when he was two and a half years old.

From the images of this galaxy obtained in the various wavebands, the astronomers deduce that it is undergoing a period of intense star formation. But the amount of stars formed is estimated to be “only” 10 million times the mass of the sun, approximately ten thousand times smaller than the mass of our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

In other words, what the astronomers see is the first building block of the present-day large galaxies. This finding agrees well with our current understanding of the process of galaxy formation corresponding to a successive build-up of the large galaxies seen today through numerous mergers of “building blocks”, smaller and younger galaxies formed in the past.

It is these building blocks which may have provided the first light sources that lifted the fog over the Universe and put an end to the Dark Ages.

For Roser Pell?, from the Observatoire Midi-Pyr?n?es (France) and co-leader of the team, “these observations show that under excellent sky conditions like those at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, and using strong gravitational lensing, direct observations of distant galaxies close to the Dark Ages are feasible with the best ground-based telescopes.”

The other co-leader of the team, Daniel Schaerer from the Geneva Observatory and University (Switzerland), is excited: “This discovery opens the way to future explorations of the first stars and galaxies in the early Universe.”

More information
The information presented in this Press Release is based on a research article in the European research journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” (A&A, volume 416, page L35; “ISAAC/VLT observations of a lensed galaxy at z=10.0” by Roser Pell?, Daniel Schaerer, Johan Richard, Jean-Fran?ois Le Borgne, and Jean-Paul Kneib). It is available on the web at the EDP web site.

Additional explanations and images are available on the authors’ web page, at http://obswww.unige.ch/sfr and http://webast.ast.obs-mip.fr/galaxies/

Original Source: ESO News Release

Image credit: UC Berkeley
Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that may be a nursery for planets.

The dim red dwarf star is a mere 33 light years away, close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics to sharpen the image should be able to see whether the dust disk contains clumps of matter that might turn into planets.

“Circumstellar disks are signposts for planet formation, and this is the nearest and youngest star where we directly observe light reflected from the dust produced by extrasolar comets and asteroids – i.e., the objects that could possibly form planets by accretion,” said Paul Kalas, assistant research astronomer at UC Berkeley and lead author of a paper reporting the discovery.

“We’re waiting for the summer and fall observing season to go back to the telescopes and study the properties of the disk in greater detail. But we expect everyone else to do the same thing – there will be lots of follow-up.”

A paper announcing the discovery will be published online in Science Express this week, and will appear in the printed edition of the journal in March. Coauthors with Kalas are Brenda C. Matthews, a post-doctoral researcher with UC Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory, and astronomer Michael C. Liu of the University of Hawaii. Kalas also is affiliated with the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz.

The young M-type star, AU Microscopium (AU Mic), is about half the mass of the sun but only about 12 million years old, compared to the 4.6 billion year age of the sun. The team of astronomers found the star while searching for dust disks around stars emitting more than expected amounts of infrared radiation, indicative of a warm, glowing dust cloud.

The image of AU Mic, obtained last October with the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter telescope atop Mauna Kea, shows an edge-on disk of dust stretching about 210 astronomical units from the central star – about seven times farther from the star than Neptune is from the sun. One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles.

“When we see scattered infrared light around a star, the inference is that this is caused by dust grains replenished by comets and asteroid collisions,” Kalas said. Because 85 percent of all stars are M-type red dwarfs, the star provides clues to how the majority of planetary systems form and evolve.

Other nearby stars, such as Gliese 876 at 16 light years and epsilon-Eridani at 10 light years, wobble, providing indirect evidence for planets. But images of debris disks around stars are rare. AU Mic is the closest dust disk directly imaged since the discovery 20 years ago of a dust disk around beta-Pictoris, a star about 2.5 times the mass of the sun and 65 light years away. Though the two stars are in opposite regions of the sky, they appear to have been formed at the same time and to be traveling together through the galaxy, Kalas said.

“These sister stars probably formed together in the same region of space in a moving group containing about 20 stars,” Kalas said. This represents an unprecedented opportunity to study stars formed under the same conditions, but of masses slightly larger and slightly smaller than the sun.

“Theorists are excited, too, at the opportunity to understand how planetary systems evolve differently around high-mass stars like beta-Pictoris and low-mass stars like AU Mic,” he said.

The pictures of AU Mic were obtained by blocking glare from the star with a coronagraph like that used to view the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The eclipsing disk on the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter telescope blocked view of everything around the star out to about 50 AU. At this distance in our solar system, only the Kuiper Belt of asteroids and the more distant Oort cloud, the source of comets, would be visible.

Kalas said that sharper images from the ground or space should show structures as close as 5 AU, which means a Jupiter-like planet or lump in the dusty disk would be visible, if present.

“With the adaptive optics on the Lick 120-inch telescope or the Keck 10-meter telescopes, or with the Hubble Space Telescope, we can improve the sharpness by 10 to 100 times,” Kalas said.

In a companion paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, the Berkeley-Hawaii team reports indirect evidence for a relatively dust-free hole within about 17 AU of the star. This would be slightly inside the orbit of Uranus in our own solar system.

“Potential evidence for the existence of planets comes from the infrared spectrum, where we notice an absence of warm dust grains,” he said. “That means that grains are depleted within about 17 AU radius from the star. One mechanism to clear out the dust disk within 17 AU radius is by planet-grain encounters, where the planet removes the grains from the system.”

“The dust missing from the inner regions of AU Mic is the telltale sign of an orbiting planet. The planet sweeps away any dust in the inner regions, keeping the dust in the outer region at bay,” said Liu.

Aside from further observations with the 2.2-meter telescope in Hawaii, Kalas and his colleagues plan to use the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared observatory launched last August by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to conduct a more sensitive search for gas.

The research was supported by the NASA Origins Program and the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Original Source: UC Berkeley News Release

Image credit: CfA
Since its discovery in 1998, the “winking star” called KH 15D has baffled astronomers seeking to explain its long-lasting (24-day) eclipses. Many hypothesized that the eclipses were caused by intervening blobs of material within a protoplanetary disk surrounding a single, young Sun-like star.

By examining the past history of these eclipses and how they are changing with time, astronomer Joshua Winn (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues have overturned this hypothesis and devised a new theory that explains nearly everything about the system.

They found that the “winking star” is actually a double star system. Something in the foreground, possibly a dusty disk of material surrounding the binary, intermittently blocks the light from one or both stars, as the stars orbit each other. Eventually, both stars will be completely covered by the dust curtain, and the “winking star” system will disappear from view.

“These two stars have been playing hide and seek with us. The second star used to peek out briefly, but now is completely obscured. Soon, it will be joined by the first star and both will remain hidden for decades,” says Winn.

Archives Reveal The Truth
The vital clues to understanding the “winking star” were found in archival sky photographs from Harvard College Observatory, in Massachusetts, and Asiago Observatory, in Italy. Examination of the Harvard photographs showed that during the first half of the 20th century, there were none of the total eclipses that are observed today. Asiago photographs taken between 1967 and 1982 held evidence of eclipses, but with a key difference: the system was brighter than it is today, both during eclipses and outside of eclipses. This extra light must have come from a second star that was visible in the 1970s, but is completely hidden today.

This insight was the key to unlocking the mystery of KH 15D. Before 1960, neither star was being eclipsed. Then, a curtain of dust drifted into the foreground as seen from the Earth, blocking part of the orbit of one of the stars. Throughout the 1970s, that star underwent eclipses as its orbital motion carried it behind the curtain. By 1998, the curtain had advanced enough to completely hide one of the stars-and the other star periodically drops out of sight as its orbit takes it behind the curtain. By about 2012, both stars will be completely hidden from view.

Radial velocity measurements currently being made by John Johnson (UC Berkeley), a co-author of this study, will be able to test whether the visible star is moving back and forth, tugged by the gravity of a stellar-mass companion.

“The Asiago plates give very convincing evidence, but the radial velocity measurements will be the clincher,” says Johnson.

The New Picture of KH 15D
Assembling the observations of KH 15D like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle reveals two stars no older than 10 million years. (Our Sun, by contrast, is 5 billion years old.) They revolve around each other every 48 days in highly elliptical orbits, which explains the 48-day eclipse period. Their average distance apart is approximately 0.25 astronomical units (23 million miles), or two-thirds the distance from Mercury to the Sun. Yet their eccentric orbits take them as close to each other as only 0.07 AU (6.5 million miles).

“As binaries go, their orbit is not unusual” says co-author Krzysztof Stanek (CfA).

Winn agrees, adding, “The weird thing about this system is that there’s something blocking the light from these stars-something opaque, with a sharp edge.” The identity of this curtain is unknown, but it may be the edge of a disk of dust that surrounds both of the stars.

“Dust disks have been seen around other binary star systems,” says Matthew Holman (CfA), a co-author of the study. “We imagine that the disk in this system is inclined, relative to the plane of the orbit of the two stars. That would cause the disk to wobble, the way a Frisbee sometimes wobbles in the air after a bad throw.”

According to Holman’s calculations, the dust may exist in a ring located 2.6 AU (240 million miles) from the stars. The material in the ring itself makes one complete orbit about every 4 years, but the wobbling (or “precession”) of the ring has a much longer period of about 1000 years. A similar theory has been proposed independently by Eugene Chiang and Ruth Murray-Clay of UC Berkeley.

“Starting around 1960, the edge of this precessing disk happened to start blocking our view of the stars,” says Holman. “After another decade, the disk will precess a little further and completely block our view.” Some time after that, depending on how thick the ring is, the process will reverse itself as the stars are gradually uncovered, and the eclipses will stop.

Many questions about KH 15D still remain. For example, what is the nature of the disk? Why is it inclined to the orbital plane of the binaries? Why does it have such a sharp edge? The winking stars of KH 15D are likely to confound astronomers with these and other riddles for years to come.

This research will be published in the March 1, 2004 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The authors of the study are Joshua Winn (CfA), Matthew Holman (CfA), John Johnson (UC Berkeley), Krzysztof Stanek (CfA), and Peter Garnavich (University of Notre Dame).

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Original Source: CfA News Release

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is now on the launch pad, and it should be heading up into space early tomorrow. If you’ve got some free time and a connection to the Internet, why not watch the launch live on your computer? I really enjoy watching the launches live, since there’s still a quite a bit of suspense. You also get a sense of the various tasks that need to be performed to get a spacecraft off the ground. The launch is scheduled for early Thursday, February 26 at 0736 UTC (2:36 am EST). I know, that’s the middle of the night for a lot of you, but if you’re a night owl, tune it in.

Click here to access the live feed.

Enjoy!

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today