“One is a Valentine’s Day heart, and the other is a surgical heart that you have in your body,” said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the image May 24 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. [Wired]
This infrared image is from WISE, more technically known as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a NASA space telescope launched on December 14, 2009. Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 326 miles, WISE snaps an infrared picture every eleven seconds. This one, of the so-called Heart and Soul nebulae, is made from 1,147 of these images stitched together.
For lovers of stellar beauty, the Herschel space telescope may have already earned its keep. Just one year after its launch, researchers from the European Space Agency have released this stunning image of a massive star being born in a vast bubble of cold dust.
Herschel’s far-infrared detectors are finely attuned to stellar nurseries. When a star begins to form, the dust and gas surrounding it heats up to a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, and it begins to emit far-infrared wavelengths. In the galactic bubble shown, known as RCW 120, the newborn star is the white blob at the bottom of the bubble.
The “baby” star is perhaps a few tens of thousands of years old. It is some eight to 10 times the mass of our Sun but is surrounded by about 200 times as much material. If more of that gas and dust continues to fall in on the star, the object has the potential to become one of the Milky Way Galaxy’s true giants [BBC].
Giant stars pose a particular challenge to our understanding of star formation, researchers say. Present theories suggest that stars that are larger than about 10 solar masses shouldn’t exist, because their fierce radiation should blast away the clouds that feed them materials to grow on. Yet astronomers have spotted stars that have 120 times the mass of our Sun.
Click through the gallery for a couple more amazing shots from Herschel.
Plans for the world’s largest telescope just took a major step forward. Researchers have selected a site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT): It will sit on the Cerro Armazones mountain in central Chile’s Atacama Desert. This site beat out other contenders, including other sites in Chile and La Palma in Spain, due to its excellent conditions for astronomy.
On this desert mountain, researchers will enjoy near-perfect observing conditions – at least 320 nights a year when the sky is cloudless. The Atacama’s famous aridity means the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is very limited, reducing further the perturbation starlight experiences as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere [BBC]. With such clear skies, astronomer Diego Mardones from the University of Chile remarked, “If you want to find another [observation area] like Chile, your options are Antarctica or space” [Merco Press].
The telescope’s primary mirror will measure 138 feet in diameter. The mirror will be made up of 984 segments and will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescope while returning images 15 times sharper than those beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope [Wired]. Astronomers say the telescope will provide new information on the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.
The E-ELT, which is estimated to cost almost a billion euros, is expected to be operational by 2018. The final go-ahead for the telescope’s construction is expected later this year.
Tomorrow marks 20 years since the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And to mark the occasion, NASA released the latest in a long line of incredibly gorgeous images of nebulae and star birth. This is the Carina nebula, which the telescope first shot in 2007. “We wanted to have an image that will be at least as spectacular as the iconic ‘pillars of creation,’ says Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, referring to a widely reproduced 1995 Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula. “This particular image can arguably be called ‘Eagle Nebula on steroids’” [Science News]. This sweeping view comes thanks to the Wide Field Camera 3, installed during a Hubble upgrade last summer.
This solar eclipse happens only once every 27 years, and John Monnier was there to see it.
Epsilon Aurigae is a star system about 2,000 light years from Earth. Astronomers have been able to see it for nearly two centuries, and noticed that it dims every 27 years or so. It made sense to assume that they were dealing with a binary star system, with a larger primary star and a smaller secondary star circling around the first. But that didn’t answer all their questions. Why, for instance, did the primary star normally appear dimmer than it should? And if there is a smaller star orbiting the main star, why can’t we see it? To explain that, astronomers developed the unlikely theory that a thick disk of dust was orbiting the smaller star in the same plane as the smaller star’s orbit of the larger star [UPI].
Launch up from your couch and voyage to the final frontier this weekend with Hubble 3D, a hi-tech piece of visual wizardry from Warner Bros, IMAX, and NASA. The movie tracks the efforts of the astronauts on board mission STS-125, who blasted off aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. For this mission, as DISCOVER explained in a review of the movie, Atlantis carried not only its regular payload of new gear for the telescope, but also a 600-pound IMAX camera to record the orbital repair job in breathtaking detail.
Apart from replacing worn out equipment and upgrading the world’s largest telescope so that it could continue to send home breathtaking images of the universe, the astronauts also functioned as cinematographers, using only eight minutes of film to shoot the repair work. The film also takes viewers on a tour of the telescope’s most famous observations, and explains what the ‘scope has revealed about such wonders as the stellar nurseries of the Orion nebula and our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Director Toni Meyers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station, says: “I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so” [CNN].
It’s the size of Jupiter, orbits at about the distance of Mercury, and isn’t too far from the temperature range of Earth. Meet Corot-9b, the newest find in the cavalcade of exoplanets and the one its discoverers say is most like the worlds of our own solar system.
“Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium,” said team member Tristan Guillot of the Côte d’Azure Observatory in Nice, France. “And it may contain up to 20 Earth masses of other elements, including water and rock at high temperatures and pressures” [Space.com]. The large group of astronomers reporting the find in Nature estimate the planet’s temperature at a range between just below zero and slightly above 300 degrees Fahrenheit. It completes an orbit in 95 days, though it’s about 1,500 light years away.
Here’s one benefit of a storm so ferocious that it rages on for centuries–scientists have plenty of time to observe it, and to wait for technology to improve so they can get an even better look.
The solar system’s biggest storm swirls on the giant gas planet Jupiter; it’s a tempest that goes by the name the Great Red Spot. Now, for the first time, scientists have constructed a detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system using thermal images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground telescopes.
Peering into the Great Red Spot, scientists found that there were surprising weather and temperature variations within the spot and that the dark red area in the spot’s center is actually a warm patch in the storm. The observations are detailed in the journalIcarus, and give researchers a better understanding of circulation patterns within this Jovian storm. Says Glenn Orton, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer who led the study: “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated” [Wired].
As the count of known planets in distant star systems continues to grow (the number now exceeds 400), so too does the number of ways we have to learn about them. Reporting in Nature this week, a team of astronomers say they have measured the makeup of an exoplanet‘s atmosphere using an Earth-based telescope for the first time.
Mark Swain’s team directed NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility toward HD 189733 b, a planet 63 light years away, discovered back in 2005. HD 189733 b was already known from space-borne observations to harbor several specific molecules in its atmosphere: water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide [Scientific American]. Swain’s analysis confirmed those previous findings using spectrography, in which the light from an object is broken down into its component wavelengths, allowing the identification of atoms or molecules by their unique emission or absorption properties [Scientific American]. Swain’s team also turned up something else—a spike in emissions at a very particular wavelength of light, 3.3 microns, that the earlier observations didn’t detect and that Swain’s team can’t explain–at least not yet.
The quest to find a second Earth–a potentially habitable planet that’s about the size of our home, but that lies in a distant solar system–has hit a snag. The Kepler space telescope was expected to be well on its way to detecting Earth-sized exoplanets by now, but an electronic glitch is slowing it down. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope’s electronics. The team is racing to fix the issue by changing the way data from the telescope is processed, but the delay could mean that ground-based observers now have the upper hand in the race to be the first to spot an Earth twin [Nature News].
Kepler, which was launched in March, uses the transit method to detect exoplanets; it’s watching a patch of 100,000 stars in hopes of detecting the brief dimming of a star’s light, which indicates that a planet has passed in front of the star. Kepler focuses light onto 42 light-detecting chips, called CCDs, each of which monitors stars in a different part of the telescope’s field of view. Each CCD is split into two for the purposes of sending data back to Earth, for a total of 84 data channels. Three of these channels are plagued by electronic noise that makes stars in their field of view appear to flicker – “like it’s changing its brightness at a rapid rate”, says Kepler chief scientist William Borucki [New Scientist]. That’s awkward, since the artificial flickers could obscure the real dimming that occurs during a planet’s transit.
New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good.
The telescope detected and studied a gamma ray burst, one of the massively bright and powerful explosions that occurs when stars go supernova in distant galaxies. Astronomers were interested in the gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths that were generated by the explosion, and that raced each other across the universe. After a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, they all arrived within nine-tenths of a second of one another in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, at 8:22 p.m., Eastern time, on May 9 [The New York Times].
The researchers were wondering if certain gamma rays with both high energies and short wavelengths would arrive last, at the back of the pack. That would suggest that they had violated one of the principles set out in Einstein‘s theory of relativity: that the speed of light is always constant. If researchers could detect a significant lag in some gamma rays, it would also give fresh hope to those ambitious researchers searching for a theory of everything.
Planets, planets, everywhere! Astronomers have announced the discovery of 32 new planets orbiting distant stars, bringing the list of known exoplanets up to more than 400. The batch of freshly discovered worlds include four that are only five or six times the mass of Earth, an encouraging sign in the quest for a truly Earth-like world that could support life. Researcher Stephane Udry says the discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy. “From [our] results, we know now that at least 40% of solar-type stars have low-mass planets. This is really important because it means that low-mass planets are everywhere, basically” [BBC News].
The discovery was made with the HARPS telescope at the European Southern Observatory‘s facility in Chile. HARPS uses the so-called wobble method to detect planets, in which researchers look for the slight quiver in a star’s regular movements that indicates the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.
Planets were found around a surprising variety of star types. Gas giant planets were found orbiting “metal-poor” stars — those lacking in elements other than hydrogen and helium — which until now had been considered unlikely places for planets to form [Washington Post]. Researchers also located four exoplanets around relatively cool, small stars known as M-class red dwarfs, and will continue to examine such stars for signs of Earth-like planets. The team expects to keep spotting planets by the dozen, says Udry: “Nature doesn’t like a vacuum so if there is space to put a planet it will put a planet there” [Reuters].
Image: European Southern Observatory. Artist’s impression of a newly discovered planet orbiting the star Gliese 667 C, which is part of a triple star system.
Astronomers have found an enormous and diffuse new ring of Saturn that lies far, far beyond the rest of the planet’s famous circlets. Researchers say the new ring is comprised of debris ejected from Saturn’s outlying moon Phoebe during impact. The new discovery also solves a puzzle regarding the curious two-faced appearance of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, whose leading hemisphere is much darker than its trailing side [New Scientist].
The ring, which has claimed the title of largest known ring in the solar system, starts about 3.7 million miles from Saturn and extends outward another 7.4 million miles. Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths…. “This is one supersized ring” [CNN], says Anne Verbiscer, coauthor of the study published in Nature. The ring has the same orbital tilt as the moon Phoebe–both are tilted at a 27 degree angle from Saturn’s main ring plane–which supports the theory that Phoebe’s ejected dust feeds the ring.
Astronomers have conclusive evidence that a planet spotted in a star system 500 light years away is rocky and solid, just like Earth. Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal. “We basically live on a rock ourselves,” said co-discoverer Artie Hartzes…. “It’s as close to something like the Earth that we’ve found so far. It’s just a little too close to its sun” [AP].
Yes, for while the exoplanet, Corot-7b, is rocky like Earth and is only about five times more massive than our home planet, it’s hardly our twin. Its close proximity to its star means that it completes an orbit (its “year”) in just 20 hours, and the climate extremes are punishing. Temperatures soar above 2,000 degrees on its day side and sink to minus 200 degrees on the night side. It means the surface could be covered with molten lava or boiling oceans and it certainly could not hold any form of life as we know it [Scientific American].
It was a tough repair job that one astronaut called brain surgery in space, but it sure was worth it. NASA has just released the first images taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope following the five-day servicing mission carried out by the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis in May, and it's clear that the mission went off without a hitch. Both the two new cameras and the repaired equipment are producing stunningly clear pictures of galaxies, nebulas, and stars. The breathtaking images that follow will both delight the public and allow astronomers to probe the universe's deepest mysteries.
This celestial "butterfly" is actually the pattern made by a dying star, which ejected vast clouds of gas that were then set glowing by ultraviolet radiation. The two "wings" of the nebula stretch across two light-years of space.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
It’s the size of Jupiter, orbits at about the distance of Mercury, and isn’t too far from the temperature range of Earth. Meet Corot-9b, the newest find in the cavalcade of 
As the count of known planets in distant star systems continues to grow (the number now exceeds 400), so too does the number of ways we have to learn about them. 
The quest to find a second Earth–a potentially habitable planet that’s about the size of our home, but that lies in a distant solar system–has hit a snag. The 
New results are in from the 
Planets, planets, everywhere! Astronomers have announced the discovery of 32 new planets orbiting distant stars, bringing the list of known 
Astronomers have found an enormous and diffuse new ring of 
Astronomers have conclusive evidence that a planet spotted in a star system 500 light years away is rocky and solid, just like Earth. Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal. “We basically live on a rock ourselves,” said co-discoverer Artie Hartzes…. “It’s as close to something like the Earth that we’ve found so far. It’s just a little too close to its sun” [
