Universe Today

Image credit: ESO

New observations from the Japanese 8-m Subaru telescope and the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed new details in the Virgo galaxy cluster – located 50 million light years away. One insight is that massive young stars seem to be able to form in isolation, far away from the brighter parts of galaxies.

At a distance of some 50 million light-years, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest galaxy cluster. It is located in the zodiacal constellation of the same name (The Virgin) and is a large and dense assembly of hundreds of galaxies.

The “intracluster” space between the Virgo galaxies is permeated by hot X-ray emitting gas and, as has become clear recently, by a sparse “intracluster population of stars”.

So far, stars have been observed to form in the luminous parts of galaxies. The most massive young stars are often visible indirectly by the strong emission from surrounding cocoons of hot gas, which is heated by the intense radiation from the embedded stars. These “HII regions” (pronounced “Eitch-Two” and so named because of their content of ionized hydrogen) may be very bright and they often trace the beautiful spiral arms seen in disk galaxies like our own Milky Way.

New observations by the Japanese 8-m Subaru telescope and the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) have now shown that massive stars can also form in isolation, far from the luminous parts of galaxies. During a most productive co-operation between astronomers working at these two world-class telescopes, a compact HII region has been discovered at the very boundary between the outer halo of a Virgo cluster galaxy and Virgo intracluster space.

This cloud is illuminated and heated by a few hot and massive young stars. The estimated total mass of the stars in the cloud is only a few hundred times that of the Sun.

Such an object is rare at the present epoch. However, there may have been more in the past, at which time they were perhaps responsible for the formation of a fraction of the intracluster stellar population in clusters of galaxies. Massive stars in such isolated HII regions will explode as supernovae at the end of their short lives, and enrich the intracluster medium with heavy elements.

Observations of two other Virgo cluster galaxies, Messier 86 and Messier 84, indicate the presence of other isolated HII regions, thus suggesting that isolated star formation may occur more generally in galaxies. If so, this process may provide a natural explanation to the current riddle why some young stars are found high up in the halo of our own Milky Way galaxy, far from the star-forming clouds in the main plane.

The Virgo Cluster
The galaxies in the Universe are rarely isolated – they prefer company. Many are found within dense structures, referred to as galaxy clusters, cf. e.g., ESO PR Photo 16a/99.

The galaxy cluster nearest to us is seen in the direction of the zodiacal constellation Virgo (The Virgin), at a distance of approximately 50 million light-years. PR Photo 04a/03 (from the Wide Field Imager camera at the ESO La Silla Observatory) shows a small sky region near the centre of this cluster with some of the brighter cluster galaxies. PR Photo 04b/03 displays an image of a larger field (partially overlapping Photo 04a/03) in the light of ionized hydrogen – it was obtained by the Japanese 8.2-m Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea (Hawaii, USA). The field includes some of the large galaxies in this cluster, e.g., Messier 86, Messier 84 and NGC 4388. In order to show the faintest possible hydrogen emitting objects embedded in the outskirts of bright galaxies, their smooth envelopes have been “subtracted” during the image processing. This is why they look quite different in the two photos.

Clusters of galaxies are believed to have formed because of the strong gravitational pull from dark and luminous matter. The Virgo cluster is considered to be a relatively young cluster, because studies of the distribution of its member galaxies and X-ray investigations of hot cluster gas have revealed small “subclusters of galaxies” around the major galaxies Messier 87, Messier 86 and Messier 49. These subclusters are yet to merge to form a dense and smooth galaxy cluster.

The Virgo cluster is apparently cigar-shaped, with its longest dimension of about 10 million light-years near the line-of-sight direction – we see it “from the end”.

Stars in intracluster space
Galaxy clusters are dominated by dark matter. The largest fraction of the luminous (i.e. “visible”) cluster mass is made up of the hot gas that permeates all of the cluster. Recent observations of “intracluster” stars have confirmed that, in addition to the individual galaxies, the Virgo cluster also contains a so-called “diffuse stellar component”, which is located in the space between the cluster galaxies.

The first hint of this dates back to 1951 when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), working at the 5-m telescope at Mount Palomar in California (USA), claimed the discovery of diffuse light coming from the space between the galaxies in another large cluster of galaxies, the Coma cluster. The brightness of this intracluster light is 100 times fainter than the average night-sky brightness on the ground (mostly caused by the glow of atoms in the upper terrestrial atmosphere) and its measurement is difficult even with present technology. We now know that this intracluster glow comes from individual stars in that region.

Planetary nebulae
More recently, astronomers have undertaken a new and different approach to detect the elusive intracluster stars. They now search for Sun-like stars in their final dying phase during which they eject their outer layers into surrounding space. At the same time they unveil their small and hot stellar core which appears as a “white dwarf star”.

Such objects are known as “planetary nebulae” because some of those nearby, e.g. the “Dumbbell Nebula” (cf. ESO PR Photo 38a/98) resemble the disks of the outer solar system planets when viewed in small telescopes.

The ejected envelope is illuminated and heated by the very hot star at its centre. This nebula emits strongly in characteristic emission lines of oxygen (green; at wavelengths 495.9 and 500.7 nm) and hydrogen (red; the H-alpha line at 656.2 nm). Planetary nebulae may be distinguished from other emission nebulae by the fact that their main green oxygen line at 500.7 nm is normally about 3 to 5 times brighter than the red H-alpha line.
Search for intracluster planetary nebulae

An international team of astronomers [2] is now carrying out a very challenging research programme, aimed at finding intracluster planetary nebulae. For this, they observe the regions between cluster galaxies with specially designed, narrow-band optical filters tuned to the wavelength of the green oxygen lines.

The main goal is to study the overall properties of the diffuse stellar component in the nearby Virgo cluster. How much diffuse light comes from the intracluster space, how is it distributed within the cluster, and what is its origin?

Because the stars in this region are apparently predominantly old, the most likely explanation of their presence in this region is that they formed inside individual galaxies, which were subsequently stripped of many of their stars during close encounters with other galaxies during the initial stages of cluster formation. These “lost” stars were then dispersed into intracluster space where we now find them.

The Subaru observations
Japanese and European astronomers used the Suprime-Cam wide-field mosaic camera at the 8-m Subaru telescope (Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA) to search for intracluster planetary nebulae in one of the densest regions of the Virgo cluster, cf. PR Photo 04b/03. They needed a telescope of this large size in order to select such objects and securely discriminate them from the thousands of foreground stars in the Milky Way and background galaxies.

In particular, by observing in two narrow-band filters sensitive to oxygen and hydrogen, respectively, the planetary nebulae visible in this field could be “separated” from distant (high-redshift) background galaxies, which do not have strong emission in both the green and red band. It is very time-consuming to observe the weak H-alpha emission and this can only be done with a big telescope.

Some 40 intracluster planetary nebulae candidates were found in this field which had the expected oxygen/H-alpha line intensity ratios of 3 – 5, such as those depicted PR Photo 04d/03. Unexpectedly, however, the data also showed a small number of star-like emission objects with oxygen/H-alpha line ratios of about 1. This is more typical of a cloud of ionized gas around young, massive stars – like the so-called HII regions in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

However, it would be very unusual to find such star formation regions in the intracluster region, so follow-up spectroscopic observations were clearly needed for confirmation.

The VLT measurements
The only way to make sure that these unusual objects are actually powered by young stars is by a detailed spectroscopical study, analyzing the emitted light over a wide range of wavelengths. One of the objects was observed in this way in April 2002 with the FORS2 multi-mode instrument at the 8.2-m VLT YEPUN telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile).

This was a most challenging observation, even for this very powerful facility, requiring several hours of exposure time. The brightness of the faint object (the flux of the oxygen [OIII 500.7]-line) was comparable to that of a 60-Watt light bulb at a distance of about 6.6 million km, i.e., about 17 times farther than the Moon.

The recorded (long-slit) spectrum (PR Photo 04e/03) is indeed that of an HII region, with characteristic emission lines from hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur, and with underlying blue “continuum” emission from hot, young stars. This is the first concrete evidence that some of the ionized hydrogen gas in the intracluster medium near NGC 4388 is heated by massive stars, rather than radiation from the nucleus of the galaxy.

Comparing the spectrum with simple starburst models showed that this HII region is “powered” by one or two hot and massive (O-type) stars. The best-fitting starburst model implies an estimated total mass of young stars of some 400 solar masses with an age of about 3 million years. The object is obviously very compact – it is indeed unresolved in all the images. The inferred radius of the HII region is about 11 light-years.

Young stars form far from galaxies
This compact star-forming region is located about 3.4 arcmin north and 0.9 arcmin west of the galaxy NGC 4388, corresponding to a distance of some 82,000 light-years (projected) from the main star-forming regions in this galaxy. The small cloud is moving away from us with an observed velocity of 2670 km/sec. This is considerably faster than the mean velocity of the Virgo cluster (about 1200 km/sec) but similar to that of NGC 4388 (2520 km/sec), indicating that it is probably falling through the Virgo cluster core together with NGC 4388, but it cannot have moved far during the comparatively short lifetime of its massive stars.

It is not known whether it once was or still is bound to NGC 4388, or whether it only belonged to the surroundings that fell into the Virgo cluster with this galaxy. In any case, the existence of this HII region is a clear demonstration that stars can form in the “diffuse” outskirts of galaxies, if not in intracluster space.

Because of internal dynamical processes, the stars in this object cannot remain forever in a dense cluster. Within a few hundred million years they will disperse and mix with the diffuse stellar population nearby. This isolated star formation is therefore likely to contribute to the intracluster stellar population, either directly, or after having moved away from the halo of NGC 4388.

This mode of isolated star formation does not contribute much to the total intracluster light emission – at the current rate it can explain only a small fraction of the diffuse light now observed in this region. However, it may have been more significant in the past, when protogalaxies and proto-galaxy groups, rich in neutral gas and with gas clouds at large distances from their centers, fell into the forming Virgo cluster for the first time.

Prospects
The existence of isolated compact HII regions like this one is important as a very different site of star formation than those normally seen in galaxies. The massive stars born in such isolated clouds will explode as supernovae and enrich the Virgo intracluster medium with metals.

Other possible – but not yet spectroscopically verified – compact HII regions in the halos of both Messier 86 and Messier 84 have been detected during this work. This finding thus also calls into question the current use of emission-line planetary nebulae luminosities as a distance indicator; to obtain the best possible accuracy, it will henceforth be necessary to weed out possible HII regions in the samples.

If compact HII regions exist generally in galaxies, they may possibly be the birthplaces of some of the young stars now observed in the halo of our Milky Way galaxy, high above the main plane. Observational programmes with both the Subaru and VLT telescopes are now planned to discover more of these interesting objects and to explore their properties.

Original Source: ESO News Release

Image credit: ESO

A team of European astronomers have located the closest brown dwarf star ever discovered. Epsilon Indi, located only 12 light-years from the Earth, was thought to be a single star, but the ESO team spotted its companion. Epsilon Indi B is 45 times the mass of Jupiter and takes 400 years to orbit the main star.

A team of European astronomers [2] has discovered a Brown Dwarf object (a ‘failed’ star) less than 12 light-years from the Sun. It is the nearest yet known.

Now designated Epsilon Indi B, it is a companion to a well-known bright star in the southern sky, Epsilon Indi (now “Epsilon Indi A”), previously thought to be single. The binary system is one of the twenty nearest stellar systems to the Sun.

The brown dwarf was discovered from the comparatively rapid motion across the sky which it shares with its brighter companion : the pair move a full lunar diameter in less than 400 years. It was first identified using digitised archival photographic plates from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys (SSS) and confirmed using data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Follow-up observations with the near-infrared sensitive SOFI instrument on the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory confirmed its nature and has allowed measurements of its physical properties.

Epsilon Indi B has a mass just 45 times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, and a surface temperature of only 1000 ?C. It belongs to the so-called ‘T dwarf’ category of objects which straddle the domain between stars and giant planets.

Epsilon Indi B is the nearest and brightest T dwarf known. Future studies of the new object promise to provide astronomers with important new clues as to the formation and evolution of these exotic celestial bodies, at the same time yielding interesting insights into the border zone between planets and stars.

Tiny moving needles in giant haystacks
Imagine you are a professional ornithologist, recently returned home from an expedition to the jungles of South America, where you spent long weeks using your high-powered telephoto lenses searching for rare species of birds. Relaxing, you take a couple of wide-angle snapshots of the blooming flowers in your back garden, undistracted by the common blackbird flying across your viewfinder. Only later, when carefully comparing those snaps, you notice something tiny and unusually coloured, flittering close behind the blackbird: you’ve discovered an exotic, rare bird, right there at home.

In much the same way, a team of astronomers [2] has just found one of the closest neighbours to the Sun, an exotic ‘failed star’ known as a ‘brown dwarf’, moving rapidly across the sky in the southern constellation Indus (The Indian). Interestingly, at a time when telescopes are growing larger and are equipped with ever more sophisticated electronic detectors, there is still much to be learned by combining old photographic plates with this modern technology.

Photographic plates taken by wide-field (“Schmidt”) telescopes over the past decades have been given a new lease on life through being digitised by automated measuring machines, allowing computers to trawl effectively through huge and invaluable data archives that are by far not yet fully exploited [3]. For the Southern Sky, the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) has recently released scans made by the SuperCOSMOS machine of plates spanning several decades in three optical passbands. These data are perfectly suited to the search for objects with large proper motions and extreme colours, such as brown dwarfs in the Solar vicinity.
Everything is moving – a question of perspective

In astronomy, the `proper motion’ of a star signifies its apparent motion on the celestial sphere; it is usually expressed in arcseconds per year [4]. The corresponding, real velocity of a star (in kilometres per second) can only be estimated if the distance is known.

A star with a large proper motion may indicate a real large velocity or simply that the star is close to us. By analogy, an airplane just after takeoff has a much lower true speed than when it’s cruising at high altitude, but to an observer watching near an airport, the departing airplane seems to be moving much more quickly across the sky.

Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, is just 4.2 light-years away (cf. ESO PR 22/02) and has a proper motion of 3.8 arcsec/year (corresponding to 23 km/sec relative to the Sun, in the direction perpendicular to the line-of-sight). The highest known proper motion star is Barnard’s Star at 6 light-years distance and moving 10 arcsec/year (87 km/sec relative to the Sun). All known stars within 30 light-years are high-proper-motion objects and move at least 0.2 arcsec/year.

Trawling for fast moving objects
For some time, astronomers at the Astrophysical Institute in Potsdam have been making a systematic computerised search for high-proper-motion objects which appear on red photographic sky plates, but not on the equivalent blue plates. Their goal is to identify hitherto unknown cool objects in the Solar neighbourhood.

They had previously found a handful of new objects within 30 light-years in this way, but nothing as red or moving remotely as fast as the one they have now snared in the constellation of Indus in the southern sky. This object was only seen on the very longest-wavelength plates in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey database. It was moving so quickly that on plates taken just two years apart in the 1990s, it had moved almost 10 arcseconds on the sky, giving a proper motion of 4.7 arcsec/year. It was also very faint at optical wavelengths, the reason why it had never been spotted before. However, when confirmed in data from the digital Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), it was seen to be much brighter in the infrared, with the typical colour signature of a cool brown dwarf.

At this point, the object was thought to be an isolated traveller. However, a search through available online catalogues quickly revealed that just 7 arcminutes away was a well-known star, Epsilon Indi. The two share exactly the same very large proper motion, and thus it was immediately clear the two must be related, forming a wide binary system separated by more than 1500 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

Epsilon Indi is one of the 20 nearest stars to the Sun at just 11.8 light years [5]. It is a dwarf star (of spectral type K5) and with a surface temperature of about 4000 ?C, somewhat cooler than the Sun. As such, it often appears in science fiction as the home of a habitable planetary system [6]. That all remains firmly in the realm of speculation, but nevertheless, we now know that it most certainly has a very interesting companion.

This is a remarkable discovery: Epsilon Indi B is the nearest star-like source to the Sun found in 15 years, the highest proper motion source found in over 70 years, and with a total luminosity just 0.002% that of the Sun, one of the intrinsically faintest sources ever seen outside the Solar System!

After Proxima and Alpha Centauri, the Epsilon Indi system is also just the second known wide binary system within 15 light years. However, unlike Proxima Centauri, Epsilon Indi B is no ordinary star.

Brown dwarfs: cooling, cooling, cooling …
Within days of its discovery in the database, the astronomers managed to secure an infrared spectrum of Epsilon Indi B using the SOFI instrument on the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory (Chile). The spectrum showed the broad absorption features due to methane and water steam in its upper atmosphere, indicating a temperature of ‘only’ 1000 ?C. Ordinary stars are never this cool – Epsilon Indi B was confirmed as a brown dwarf.

Brown dwarfs are thought to form in much the same way as stars, by the gravitational collapse of clumps of cold gas and dust in dense molecular clouds. However, for reasons not yet entirely clear, some clumps end up with masses less than about 7.5% of that of our Sun, or 75 times the mass of planet Jupiter. Below that boundary, there is not enough pressure in the core to initiate nuclear hydrogen fusion, the long-lasting and stable source of power for ordinary stars like the Sun. Except for a brief early phase where some deuterium is burned, these low-mass objects simply continue to cool and fade slowly away while releasing the heat left-over from their birth.

Theoretical discussions of such objects began some 40 years ago. They were first named ‘black dwarfs’ and later ‘brown dwarfs’, in recognition of their predicted very cool temperatures. However, they were also predicted to be very faint and very red, and it was only in 1995 that such objects began to be detected.

The first were seen as faint companions to nearby stars, and then later, some were found floating freely in the Solar neighbourhood. Most brown dwarfs belong to the recently classified spectral types L and T, below the long-known cool dwarfs of type M. These are very red to human eyes, but L and T dwarfs are cooler still, so much so that they are almost invisible at optical wavelengths, with most of their emission coming out in the infrared. [7].
How massive is Epsilon Indi B?

The age of most brown dwarfs detected to date is unknown and thus it is hard to estimate their masses. However, it may be assumed that the age of Epsilon Indi B is the same as that of Epsilon Indi A, whose age is estimated to be 1.3 billion years based on its rotational speed. Combining this information with the measured temperature, brightness, and distance, it is then possible to determine the mass of Epsilon Indi B using theoretical models of brown dwarfs.

Two independent sets of models yield the same result: Epsilon Indi B must have a mass somewhere between 4-6% of that of the Sun, or 40-60 Jupiter masses. The most likely value is around 45 Jupiter masses, i.e. well below the hydrogen fusion limit, and definitively confirming this new discovery as a bona-fide brown dwarf.

The importance of Epsilon Indi B
PR Photo 03c/03 shows the current census of the stars in the solar neighbourhood. All these stars have been known for many years, including GJ1061, which, however, only had its distance firmly established in 1997. The discovery of Epsilon Indi B, however, is an extreme case, never before catalogued, and the first brown dwarf to be found within the 12.5 light year horizon.

If current predictions are correct, there should be twice as many brown dwarfs as main sequence stars. Consequently, Epsilon Indi B may be the first of perhaps 100 brown dwarfs within this distance, still waiting to be discovered!

Epsilon Indi B is an important catch well beyond the cataloguing the Solar neighbourhood. As the nearest and brightest known brown dwarf and with a very accurately measured distance, it can be subjected to a wide variety of detailed observational studies. It may thus serve as a template for more distant members of its class.

With the help of Epsilon Indi B, astronomers should now be able to see further into the mysteries surrounding the formation and evolution of the exotic objects known as brown dwarfs, halfway between stars and giant planets, the physics of their inner cores, and the weather and chemistry of their atmospheres.

An historical note – the southern constellation Indus
The constellation Indus lies deep in the southern sky, nestled between three birds, Grus (The Crane), Tucana (The Toucan) and Pavo (The Peacock), cf. PR Photo 03d/03.

First catalogued in 1595-1597 by the Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, this constellation was added to the southern sky by Johann Bayer in his book ‘Uranometria’ (1603) to honour the Native Americans that European explorers had encountered on their travels.

In particular, it has been suggested that it is specifically the native peoples of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia that are represented in Indus, just over two thousand kilometres south of La Silla where the first spectroscopic observations of Epsilon Indi B were made some 400 years later.

In the later drawing by Bode shown here, Epsilon Indi, the fifth brightest star in Indus, is associated with one of the arrows in the Indian’s hand.

Original Source: ESO News Release

Image credit: Hubble

Just in case you were worried, it appears that a supernova would have to be really really close to the Earth before it could cause massive damage to our environment. Scientists at NASA and Kansas University used data from a recent exploding star to determine that a supernova would have to be only 26 light-years away in order to strip away the ozone layer – an encounter that only happens once every 670 million years.

We have one less thing to worry about. While the cosmic debris from a nearby massive star explosion, called a supernova, could destroy the Earth’s protective ozone layer and cause mass extinction, such an explosion would have to be much closer than previously thought, new calculations show.

Scientists at NASA and Kansas University have determined that the supernova would need to be within 26 light years from Earth to significantly damage the ozone layer and allow cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to saturate the Earth’s surface.

An encounter with a supernova that close only happens at a rate of about once in 670 million years, according to Dr. Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who presents these findings today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Perhaps a nearby supernova has bombarded Earth once during the history of multicellular life with its punishing gamma rays and cosmic rays,” said Gehrels. “The possibility for mass extinction is indeed real, yet the risk seems much lower than we have thought.”

The new calculations are based largely on advances in atmospheric modeling, analysis of gamma rays produced by a supernova in 1987 called SN1987a, and a better understanding of galactic supernova locations and rates. A supernova is an explosion of a star at least twice as massive as our Sun.

Previous estimates from the 1970s stated that supernovae as far as 55 light years from Earth could wipe out up to 90 percent of the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The damage would be from gamma rays and cosmic rays, both prodigiously emitted by supernovae. Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light. Cosmic rays are atomic particles, the fastest-moving matter in the Universe, produced when the expanding shell of gas from the exploded star runs into surrounding dust and gas in the region. Gamma rays, moving at light speed, would hit the Earth’s atmosphere first, followed closely by the cosmic rays moving at close to light speed.

Gamma-ray light particles (called photons) and the cosmic-ray particles can wreak havoc in the upper atmosphere, according to Dr. Charles Jackman of NASA Goddard, who provided the atmospheric analysis needed for the new calculation.

The particles collide with nitrogen gas (N2) and break the molecule into highly-reactive nitrogen atoms (N). The nitrogen atoms then react fairly quickly with oxygen gas (O2) to form nitric oxide (NO) and, subsequently, other nitrogen oxides (NOx). The nitrogen oxide molecules can then destroy ozone (O3) through a catalytic process. This means that a single NOx molecule can destroy an ozone molecule and remain intact to destroy hundreds of more ozone molecules.

The new calculations — based on the NASA Goddard two-dimensional photochemical transport model — show that a supernova within 26 light years from Earth could wipe out 47 percent of the ozone layer, allowing approximately twice the amount of cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth’s surface. Excessive UV radiation is harmful to both plants and animals, thus a doubling of UV levels would be a significant problem to life on Earth.

The gamma-ray irradiation would last 300 to 500 days. The ozone layer would then repair itself, but only to endure cosmic-ray bombardment shortly after, lasting at least 10 years. (Cosmic rays are electrically charged particles whose paths are influenced by magnetic fields, and the extent of such fields in the interstellar medium is not well understood.)

The calculations simultaneously point to the resilience of the ozone layer as well as its fragility in a violent Universe, said Dr. Claude Laird of the University of Kansas, who developed the gamma-ray and cosmic ray input code and performed the atmospheric model simulations. Although the ozone layer should recover relatively rapidly once the particle influx tapers off — within about one to two years, the Goddard models show — even this short period of time is sufficient to cause significant and lasting damage to the biosphere.

“The atmosphere usually protects us from gamma rays, cosmic rays, and ultraviolet radiation, but there’s only so much hammering it can take before Earth’s biological defenses break down,” he said.

Dr. John Cannizzo of NASA Goddard and University of Maryland, Baltimore Country, initiated and coordinated the new calculations. “I’ve long been fascinated by the possibility of extinction from something as remote as a star explosion,” he said. “With this updated calculation, we essentially worked backwards to determine what level of ozone damage would be needed to double the level of ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface and then determined how close a supernova would need to be to cause that kind of damage.”

These results will appear in the Astrophysical Journal 2003, March 10, vol. 585. Co-authors include Barbara Mattson of NASA Goddard (via L3 Com Analytics Corporation) and Wan Chen of Sprint IP Design in Reston, Virginia.

Original Source: NASA News Release