Universe News (miscellaneous articles)

[Unobscured Vision]

Yessir.  Clean room dressing is a pain, but totally worth it! There's a procedure for if you sneeze into the mask. There's a little hand-held stick with little fingers on it if you need to itch your face (and a procedure to go WITH it), and ones' skin DOES get dry inside there ... lots of stuff to be aware of and if ya screw up on ANY of it you potentially can cost the facility millions of dollars just to fix it. OR MORE.

 

Clean rooms are NO JOKE. Serious stuff goes on there.

 

Awesome camera and I can't wait to see the imagery that comes from it.  

[Draggendrop Veteran]

EXOPLANET IS VANISHING—AND REALLY FAST

 

This artist’s illustration shows a giant cloud of hydrogen streaming off a warm, Neptune-sized planet just 97 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet is tiny compared to its star, a red dwarf named GJ 3470. The star’s intense radiation is heating the hydrogen in the planet’s upper atmosphere to a point where it escapes into space. - Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Player/STScI

 

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An exoplanet almost 100 light years away from Earth is disappearing, and—by cosmic standards—disappearing fast, astronomers report.

 

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered GJ 3470b—a medium-sized exoplanet roughly the size of Neptune is evaporating at a rate 100 times faster than a previously discovered planet of similar size.

 

“This is the smoking gun that planets can lose a significant fraction of their entire mass,” says David Sing, professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study.

 

“GJ 3470b is losing more of its mass than any other planet we have seen so far; in only a few billion years from now, half of the planet may be gone.”

 

The findings, which appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics, advance knowledge about how planets evolve.

 

This graphic plots exoplanets based on their size and distance from their star. Each dot represents an exoplanet. Planets the size of Jupiter (located at the top of the graphic) and planets the size of Earth and so-called super-Earths (at the bottom) are found both close and far from their star. But planets the size of Neptune (in the middle of the plot) are scarce close to their star. This so-called desert of hot Neptunes shows that such alien worlds are rare, or, they were plentiful at one time, but have since disappeared. The discovery that GJ 3470b, a warm Neptune at the border of the desert, is fast losing its atmosphere suggests that hotter Neptunes may have eroded down to smaller, rocky super-Earths. - Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Field/STScI

 

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While these larger Jupiter-sized and smaller Earth-sized exoplanets are plentiful, medium Neptune-sized exoplanets (roughly four times larger than Earth) are rare. Researchers hypothesize that the atmospheres of these Neptunes get stripped off and they ultimately turn into smaller planets.

 

It’s difficult, however, to actively witness them doing so, because researchers can only study them in UV light, which limits researchers to examining nearby stars no more than 150 light-years away from Earth, not obscured by interstellar material.

 

NOTHING BUT A ROCKY CORE

 

GJ 3470b is 96 light-years away and circles a red dwarf star in the general direction of the constellation Cancer.

 

Hubble found that exoplanet GJ 3470b had lost significantly more mass and had a noticeably smaller exosphere than the first Neptune-sized exoplanet studied, GJ 436b, due to its lower density and receipt of a stronger radiation blast from its host star.

 

GJ 3470b’s lower density makes it unable to gravitationally hang on to the heated atmosphere, and while the star hosting GJ 436b was between 4 billion and 8 billion years old, the star hosting GJ 3470b is only 2 billion years old. A younger star is more active and powerful, and, therefore, has more radiation to heat the planet’s atmosphere.

 

Sing’s team estimates that GJ 3470b may have already lost up to 35 percent of its total mass and, in a few billion years, all of its gas may be stripped off, leaving behind only a rocky core.

more at the link...

https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/12/13/exoplanet-is-vanishingand-really-fast

 

[Unobscured Vision]

The latest information on our favorite System, Trappist-1.  Nicely presented and only eight hours old!

Courtesy of Astrum (Embedding isn't working, so just follow the link to YouTube ...) - "What makes the exoplanets of Trappist-1 so special? (13m34s)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKg8GUgSQG0

[Draggendrop Veteran]

This site is having problems of late with embedding...and quotes as of late...

 

So I'll have to do this the long way...

 

on second thought...I'll come back another day...

 

 

 

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Astronomers find a ‘fossil cloud’ uncontaminated since the Big Bang

Thursday, December 20, 2018

 

A simulation of galaxies (orange) and gas (blue) in the universe. There are rare pockets of gas left over from the Big Bang that has remained unpolluted by material from exploding stars.

 

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Astronomers have discovered an ancient remnant of the Big Bang with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. This scrap of pure material from the universe’s beginning could help researchers to better understand how and why different types of stars and galaxies formed in the early universe.

A group of astronomers, led by Fred Robert and Michael Murphy of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia used telescopes at the W. M. Keck Obervatory in Hawaii to find a cloud of gas left over from the Big Bang lurking far out in the universe. The telescope also found a quasar — an ultra-bright active galactic nucleus emitting lots of energy — lurking behind the cloud.

This cloud is a remarkable find because has changed remarkably little since its creation. “Everywhere we look, the gas in the universe is polluted by waste heavy elements from exploding stars. But this particular cloud seems pristine, unpolluted by stars even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang,” Robert said in a statement. “If it has any heavy elements at all, it must be less than 1/10,000th of the proportion we see in our Sun. This is extremely low; the most compelling explanation is that it’s a true relic of the Big Bang,” he added.

 

Illuminating History

Because the quasar behind the ancient cloud is so bright, it illuminates the material in it. This illumination allowed the researchers to see the spectral shadows of the hydrogen in the gas cloud, and because it hasn’t been contaminated, it’s a look at what the cloud looked like billions of years ago.

This is not the first cloud remnant from the Big Bang ever discovered. In 2011, researchers discovered two other “fossil clouds.”

“The first two were serendipitous discoveries, and we thought they were the tip of the iceberg. But no one has discovered anything similar – they are clearly very rare and difficult to see. It’s fantastic to finally discover one systematically,” astronomer John O’Meara, who discovered the first two fossil clouds along with colleagues, added in the statement.

“It’s now possible to survey for these fossil relics of the Big Bang,” Murphy said in the statement. Studying these ancient clouds gives scientists a better idea of what the universe was like at the time of the Big Bang — potentially explaining how and why some gases in the early universe became certain stars and galaxies and others didn’t.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/12/astronomers-find-a-fossil-cloud-uncontaminated-since-the-big-bang

 

paper...

Exploring the origins of a new, apparently metal-free gas cloud at z = 4.4

https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05098

[Unobscured Vision]

FANTASTIC! I love reading stuff like this, thanks @Draggendrop!

[Draggendrop Veteran]

 

 

Timelapse shows 25 years of Supernova 1987A

 

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One of the major astronomical events of the last century was Supernova 1987A. It was the closest observed supernova since Kepler’s Supernova, visible in 1604, and the first supernova visible in earthly skies since the invention of the telescope.

 

It first appeared in Earth’s night skies – visible only from the Southern Hemisphere – on February 24, 1987. It stayed bright enough to see with the eye for many months. And then it faded, but astronomers with telescopes continued to follow it.

 

Since then, Supernova 1987A has become one of the most studied objects in the history of astronomy. Last week, astronomers at the Dunlop Institute of the University of Toronto released the new timelapse shown at the top of this post, showing the supernova as it evolved over 25 years.

 

The supernova was the cataclysmic death of a blue supergiant star. It was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, at a distance of 168,000 light-years (and thus, of course, the supernova actually took place that many years ago).

 

The Dunop Institute said of the new timelapse:

… Yvette Cendes, a graduate student with the University of Toronto and the Leiden Observatory, has created a timelapse showing the aftermath of the supernova over a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2017. The images show the shockwave expanding outward and slamming into debris that ringed the original star before its demise.

 

In an accompanying paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal on October 31, Cendes and her colleagues add to the evidence that the expanding remnant is shaped – not like a ring like those of Saturn’s – but like a donut, a form known as a torus.

 

They also confirm that the shockwave has now picked up some one thousand kilometers per second [about 600 miles per second] in speed. The acceleration has occurred because the expanding torus has punched through the ring of debris.

 

The time-lapse was created from radio observations made with the CSIRO Australia Compact Telescope Array at the Paul Wild Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

https://earthsky.org/space/timelapse-shows-25-years-of-supernova-1987a

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Please note this thread is for general "news articles concerning 'bodies,events, theory' which are beyond the Solar System" .. not a general dumping ground for miscellaneous articles.

 

Thanks

[Jim K Global Moderator]

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Impending Galactic Crash Could Rip Open the Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Center

 

The end of the Milky Way as we know it may come a few billion years ahead of schedule.

 

According to a new paper published Jan. 4 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, our home galaxy appears to be on a crash course with one of its nearest satellites, the spiral of stars known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

 

This cosmic crash, modeled in lovely and terrifying detail by a team of astrophysicists at Durham University in the U.K., could begin as soon as 2 billion years from now — roughly 2 billion to 3 billion years sooner than the long-anticipated collision between the Milky Way and its nearest cosmic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. (Adjust your doomsday clocks accordingly.)

 

While the LMC boasts only about one-twentieth the solar mass of the Milky Way, the collision would nevertheless leave permanent scars on both galaxies, igniting once-dormant black holes, flinging stars quadrillions of miles out of orbit and staining the sky with crackling cosmic radiation.

 

"The destruction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, as it is devoured by the Milky Way, will wreak havoc with our galaxy," Marius Cautun, lead study author and postdoctoral fellow in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, said in a statement.

 

/snip

 

Live Science

 

Get your popcorn and coke ready.  Should be a "spectacular display of cosmic fireworks."

[DocM]

"...quadrillions of miles..."

 

For point of reference; one  quadrillion miles is ~170.1 light years, about the distance to the star Kappa Andromedae in the Andromeda constellation. #14

 

 

http://www.seasky.org/constellations/constellation-andromeda.html

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Wednesday...

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We Might See the First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole This Week

 

Few objects in the universe hold the same mystique as a black hole. These collapsed stars distort space and time, pulling in anything nearby with unfathomable gravity. Even light cannot escape their pull. That’s why they’re so mysterious — we can’t see black holes, but a project called the Event Horizon Telescope might be on the verge of producing the first-ever photo of one. Researchers have teased a “groundbreaking result” this week.

 

//

 

In advance of the possible observation, scientists used GPUs to model all the hypothetical shapes of an event horizon. The team ended up with hundreds of gigabytes of 3D volume data describing possible event horizons. They will compare these with what the Event Horizon Telescope actually sees. The Event Horizon Telescope project and the U.S. National Science Foundation will host a briefing on the results on Wednesday, April 10, at which time we might get our first ever look at a black hole.

 

/snip

 

Extreme Tech

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NSF press conference on first result from Event Horizon Telescope project

 

A global network of telescopes has been working to capture the first ever image of a black hole. On April 10 at 9 a.m. EDT, the National Science Foundation will hold a press conference to announce a groundbreaking result.

National Science Foundation

 

 

 

About the Event Horizon Telescope

 

 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

 

 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Quote

Astronomers capture first image of a black hole

 

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) -- a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration -- was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.

National Science Foundation

 

[LOC Veteran]

Incredible that we've been able to take a "picture" of a freakin black hole! Obviously this is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and not some lame stellar mass black hole! Seriously though, this is amazing. Was waiting since they announced this project to see this stuff. Just amazing that humanity has come this far. And it shows what we can accomplish when we don't let petty crap get in the way of discoveries and knowledge.

[DocM]

If I were in a sillier mood I'd be posting a Muse video...

[Unobscured Vision]

Now this is fascinating. This is the hypothesis that I lean toward the most in regards to whether or not Multiverse theories are true, and if so how it could work.

 

Do Black Holes Create New Universes? | Cosmological Natural Selection

Video Link | PBS Space Time YouTube Channel

 

 

Good stuff.  

[DocM]

Milky Way's core;  Sagittarius A+ black hole event horizon.

About 4.297 million times the mass of the Sun

 

.