Space and astronomy news
Humanity’s been fortunate to have a star situated over Earth’s north pole. The star, known as Polaris, or the North Star, has guided many sailors safely to port. But Polaris is a fascinating star in its own right, not just because of its serendipitous position.
Continue reading “Polaris, Earth’s North Star, Has A Surprisingly Spotted Surface”
About 16,000 light-years away, a massive star experienced an unusual dimming event. This can happen in binary stars when one star passes in front of the other. It can also be due to intrinsic reasons like innate variability. But this star dimmed by as much as one-third, a huge amount.
What happened?
Continue reading “A Giant Star is Fading Away. But First, it Had an Enormous Eruption”
Every year, the Pacific Northwest and California experience “wildfire season,” a period where heat and low humidity combine, leading to an increased risk of fires. This year has been particularly bad and in California alone, wildfires have destroyed over two million acres of land, forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, and threatened many historic institutions and landmarks.
One of them is the Mount Wilson Observatory that sits atop Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains overlooking Pasadena (northeast of LA). This famous observatory is home to several telescopes that were, for a time, the largest of their kind in the world. And thanks to the heroic efforts of firefighters, it looks as though the Mt. Wilson Observatory is now safe amid a particularly bad wildfire season.
Continue reading “It Looks Like Firefighters Saved Mt. Wilson Observatory”
Telescopes have come a long way in the past few centuries. From the comparatively modest devices built by astronomers like Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, telescopes have evolved to become massive instruments that require an entire facility to house them and a full crew and network of computers to run them. And in the coming years, much larger observatories will be constructed that can do even more.
Unfortunately, this trend towards larger and larger instruments has many drawbacks. For starters, increasingly large observatories require either increasingly large mirrors or many telescopes working together – both of which are expensive prospects. Luckily, a team from MIT has proposed combining interferometry with quantum-teleportation, which could significantly increase the resolution of arrays without relying on larger mirrors.
If you’ve ever stood outside after twilight has passed, or a few hours before the sun rises at dawn, then chances are you’ve witnessed the phenomenon known as zodiacal light. This effect, which looks like a faint, diffuse white glow in the night sky, is what happens when sunlight is reflected off of tiny particles and appears to extend up from the vicinity of the Sun. This reflected light is not just observed from Earth but can be observed from everywhere in the Solar System.
Using the full power of the Very Large Telescopic Interferometer (VLTI), an international team of astronomers recently discovered that the exozodiacal light – i.e., zodiacal light around other star systems – close to the habitable zones around nine nearby stars was far more extreme. The presence of such large amounts of dust in the inner regions around some stars may pose an obstacle to the direct imaging of Earth-like planets.
The reason for this is simple: even at low levels, exozodiacal dust causes light to become amplified intensely. For example, the light detected in this survey was roughly 1000 times brighter than the zodiacal light seen around the Sun. While this exozodiacal light had been previously detected, this is the first large systematic study of this phenomenon around nearby stars.
The team used the VLTI visitor instrument PIONIER which is able to interferometrically connect all four Auxiliary Telescopes or all four Unit Telescopes of the VLTI at the Paranal Observatory. This led to not only extremely high resolution of the targets but also allowed for a high observing efficiency.
Credit: ESO/G. Hüdepohl
In total, the team observed exozodiacal light from hot dust close to the habitable zones of 92 nearby stars and combined the new data with their earlier observations.
In contrast to these earlier observations – which were made with the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) array at Georgia State University – the team did not observe dust that will later form into planets, but dust created in collisions between small planets of a few kilometers in size – objects called planetesimals that are similar to the asteroids and comets of the Solar System. Dust of this kind is also the origin of the zodiacal light in the Solar System.
As a by-product, these observations have also led to the discovery of new, unexpected stellar companions orbiting around some of the most massive stars in the sample. “These new companions suggest that we should revise our current understanding of how many of this type of star are actually double,” says Lindsay Marion, lead author of an additional paper dedicated to this complementary work using the same data.
“If we want to study the evolution of Earth-like planets close to the habitable zone, we need to observe the zodiacal dust in this region around other stars,” said Steve Ertel, lead author of the paper, from ESO and the University of Grenoble in France. “Detecting and characterizing this kind of dust around other stars is a way to study the architecture and evolution of planetary systems.”
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory.
However, the good news is that the number of stars containing zodiacal light at the level of our Solar System is most likely much higher than the numbers found in the survey.
“The high detection rate found at this bright level suggests that there must be a significant number of systems containing fainter dust, undetectable in our survey, but still much brighter than the Solar System’s zodiacal dust,” explains Olivier Absil, co-author of the paper, from the University of Liège. “The presence of such dust in so many systems could therefore become an obstacle for future observations, which aim to make direct images of Earth-like exoplanets.”
Therefore, these observations are only a first step towards more detailed studies of exozodiacal light, and need not dampen our spirits about discovering more Earth-like exoplanets in the near future.
Further Reading: ESO