Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond.
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Here’s this week’s image for the WITU Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the instrument responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess. Best wishes to everyone celebrating Thanksgiving, no matter where you are!
UPDATE: The answer is now posted below.
This is the Trifid Nebula, as seen by the Gemini Telescope. This observation was done as a result of an essay contest for elementary school children, and the winner, Ingrid Braul from British Columbia, Canada, wrote: “I think the Trifid Nebula is the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. It’s really pretty with all the colours in it. When I look at it closely, I think of it as a majestic cloud of creation. It makes me think of the beginning of time, and how our solar system started.”
Like archaeologists who dig through the layers of dirt to unearth crucial pieces of the history of mankind, astronomers have been gazing through the thick layers of interstellar dust obscuring the central bulge of the Milky Way and have unveiled an extraordinary cosmic relic. Within the bulge is an unusual mix of stars in the stellar grouping known as Terzan 5, and such a mix has never been observed anywhere in the bulge before. This peculiar conglomeration of stars suggests that Terzan 5 is one of the bulge’s primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its very early days.
The new observations of Terzan 5 show that this object, unlike all but a few exceptional globular clusters, does not harbor stars which are all born at the same time — what astronomers call a “single population” of stars. Instead, the multitude of glowing stars in Terzan 5 formed in at least two different epochs, the earliest probably some 12 billion years ago and then again 6 billion years ago. Dust around Terzan 5. Credit: ESO
“Only one globular cluster with such a complex history of star formation has been observed in the halo of the Milky Way: Omega Centauri,” says team member Emanuele Dalessandro. “This is the first time we see this in the bulge.”
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, equipped with the Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD), the astronomers were able to “disperse the fog” of the dust clouds in the central bulge to reveal the myriad of stars.
Through the sharp eye of the VLT, the astronomers also found that Terzan 5 is more massive than previously thought: along with the complex composition and troubled star formation history of the system, this suggests that it might be the surviving remnant of a disrupted dwarf galaxy, which merged with the Milky Way during its very early stages and thus contributed to form the galactic bulge.
The team hopes this is only the first in a series of discoveries on the origin of bulges in galaxies.
“The history of the Milky Way is encoded in its oldest fragments, globular clusters and other systems of stars that have witnessed the entire evolution of our galaxy,” says Francesco Ferraro, lead author of a paper appearing in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. “Our new study opens a new window on yet another piece of our galactic past.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear some of the images from the STS-129 shuttle mission to the International Space Station were CGI renderings taken from a science fiction novel. Take the above image, for example of astronaut Mike Foreman working on the exterior of the ISS during the second space walk of the mission. It looks almost surreal. But these are genuine images of real people working on an authentic, almost-completed space station. This images, and the other images below, leave me in awe of what we are accomplishing in space. Enjoy this gallery of amazing images from the fifth and last shuttle flight of 2009.
Robert Satcher on the Canadarm2 during the first space walk of STS-129. Credit: NASA
Here’s another awe-inspiring image. Anchored to a Canadarm2 mobile foot restraint, astronaut Robert Satcher Jr. works during the first space walk of the mission. Satcher and Mike Foreman (out of frame)installed antennas, cables, and other items to prepare for the Tranquility node that will be brought up to the station next year.
Starship Enterprise? No, just the space shuttle and space station. Credit: NASA
There was some chatter on Twitter that this image brought to mind visions of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. But this is a closeup of Atlantis’ docking ring backdropped by the ISS as the shuttle crew approached for docking with the station. Docking occurred at 10:51 a.m. (CST) on Nov. 18, 2009.
Another great shot: Sunrise in space. This scene shows from the Russian section of the ISS, as photographed by one of the STS-129 crew members.
Satcher works on the Z1 truss. Credit: NASA
I always love these images which demonstrate how HUGE the ISS is. Here, Robert Satcher works on the Z1 truss section during the first EVA of the mission.
ISS and docked spacecraft. Credit: NASA
Taking on the appearance of a busy spaceport, the Russian segment of the ISS has a docked Soyuz spacecraft (center) and a Progress resupply vehicle that is docked to the Pirs Docking Compartment.
Mike Foreman looks at his spacewalking partner Randy Bresnik. Credit: NASA
Every shuttle mission picture gallery isn’t complete without a picture of an astronaut with another astronaut visible in the helmet visor reflection. Here, Mike Foreman’s helmet reveals his crewmate, Randy Bresnik, capturing the image with an electronic still camera. The two were in the midst of the second scheduled space walk for the Atlantis crewmembers.
Upside down, or not? Credit: NASA
Who is upside down? Charlie Hobaugh (left), STS-129 commander and Robert Satcher , or the astronaut who took the picture? The two are pictured near a window in the Destiny laboratory.
Mealtime on the ISS. Credit: NASA
Eight of the 12 crew members of the joint ISS/shuttle crews pose for a photo at the galley in the Unity node. Pictured from the left are NASA astronauts Leland Melvin, Robert Satcher Jr., Charlie Hobaugh, Nicole Stott, cosmonauts Roman Romanenko, Maxim Suraev, and astronauts Jeff Williams, and Frank De Winne, commander of Expedition 21 from the ESA.
Launch of Atlantis on Nov. 16, 2009. Credit: NASA
A gorgeous shot of Atlantis’ launch on Nov. 16. Below is another launch picture, with the members of the NASA Tweetup watching by the famous countdown clock. Atlantis' launch with Twitterers. Photo credit:Jim Grossmann
Scientists caused quite a stir in 1996 when they announced a meteorite had been found in Antarctica that might contain evidence for microscopic fossils of Martian bacteria. While subsequent studies of the now famous Allen Hills Meteorite shot down theories that the Mars rock held fossilized alien life, both sides debated the issue and the meteorite is still being studied. Now, Craig Covault in Spaceflightnow.com reports that a new look at ALH84001 provides “evidence that supports the existence of life on the surface of Mars, or in subsurface water pools, early in the planet’s history.” Covault says we can expect a public announcement by NASA Headquarters within a few days.
Research using a more advanced High Resolution Electron Microscopy than was in existence when the initial findings were made 13 years ago has provided the new evidence. Covault reported that the “laboratory sensors are being focused directly on carbonate discs and associated tiny magnetite crystals present inside the meteorite Allen Hills ALH 84001.” The data reveal information that counters a “wide range of opposing theories as to why the finding should not be supported as biological in origin.”
The new findings were reported in the November issue of the respected journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the journal of the Geochemical and Meteoritic Society. The authors include Kathie Thomas-Keprta, Simon Clement, David McKay (who led the original team), Everett Gibson and Susan Wentworth, all of the Johnson Space Center.
Covault said the new work centers on what is called magnetic bacteria that on Earth, and Mars as well, leave distinctively-shaped remnants in the rock. These features test with a high chemical purity more like a biological feature than geological.
Artist concept of a view inside a black hole. Credit: April Hobart, NASA, Chandra X-Ray Observatory
Very likely, the last image that comes to mind when thinking of black holes is that they need to be nurtured, coddled and protected when young. But new research reveals the first large black holes in the universe likely formed and grew deep inside gigantic, starlike cocoons that smothered their powerful x-ray radiation and prevented surrounding gases from being blown away.
“Until recently, the thinking by many has been that supermassive black holes got their start from the merging of numerous, small black holes in the universe,” said Mitchell Begelman, from the University of Colorado-Boulder. “This new model of black hole development indicates a possible alternate route to their formation.”
Ordinary black holes are thought to be remnants of stars slightly larger than our sun that used up their fuel and died.
But the first big black holes likely formed from very large stars that formed early in the Universe, probably within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The unique process of these large stars becoming black holes includes the formation of a protective cocoon, made of gas.
“What’s new here is we think we have found a new mechanism to form these giant supermassive stars, which gives us a new way of understanding how big black holes may have formed relatively fast,” said Begelman.
These early supermassive stars would have grown to a huge size — as much as tens of millions of times the mass of our sun — and would have been short-lived, with its core collapsing in just in few million years.
The main requirement for the formation of supermassive stars is the accumulation of matter at a rate of about one solar mass per year, said Begelman. Because of the tremendous amount of matter consumed by supermassive stars, subsequent seed black holes that formed in their centers may have started out much bigger than ordinary black holes.
Begelman said the hydrogen-burning supermassive stars would had to have been stabilized by their own rotation or some other form of energy like magnetic fields or turbulence in order to facilitate the speedy growth of black holes at their centers.
After the seed black holes formed, the process entered its second stage, which Begelman has dubbed the “quasistar” stage. In this phase, black holes grew rapidly by swallowing matter from the bloated envelope of gas surrounding them, which eventually inflated to a size as large as Earth’s solar system and cooled at the same time, he said.
Once quasistars cooled past a certain point, radiation began escaping at such a high rate that it caused the gas envelope to disperse and left behind black holes up to 10,000 times or more the mass of Earth’s sun. With such a big head start over ordinary black holes, they could have grown into supermassive black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the sun either by gobbling up gas from surrounding galaxies or merging with other black holes in extremely violent galactic collisions.
Begelman said big black holes formed from early supermassive stars could have had a huge impact on the evolution of the universe, including galaxy formation, possibly going on to produce quasars — the very bright, energetic centers of distant galaxies that can be a trillion times brighter than our sun.
Begelman’s paper will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Mice galaxies, merging. Credit: Hubble Space Telescope
Here’s your chance to play online slot machines without risking your life savings. Plus it’s an opportunity to contribute to a citizen science project that is sure to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy mergers. Galaxy Zoo’s newest project asks for help in looking at colliding galaxies, and uses a tool akin to a cosmic slot machine to compare images of galactic pile-ups with millions of simulated mergers.
“The analogy I’ve been using is that it is like driving past a car crash,” said Galaxy Zoo team member Chris Lintott from Oxford University. “You get a snapshot of the action, but there are two things you want to know: what caused the crash (or what did things look like before it all went wrong), and you want to know what the outcome is going to be. We’re doing the same thing. We want to know what the galaxies looked like before the mergers started disrupting them, and we want to know how they are going to end up. Just like our other Galaxy Zoo projects, humans are much better at doing this than computers, and lots of humans are even better.”
The Galaxy Zoo mergers project goes live on November 24 at http://mergers.galaxyzoo.org
“This is another classic Galaxy Zoo problem,” Lintott told Universe Today. “We found 3,000 galaxy mergers from Galaxy Zoo 1, and we don’t have a good understanding of the processes that take place during and after the collisions. This new project will help us work that out.”
On the Galaxy Zoo Mergers page, there will be a real image of a galactic merger in the center and with eight randomly selected merger simulations filling the other eight ‘slots’ around it. Visitors to the site pick which animation best demonstrates what is happening in that collision. But if they don’t see a good simulation, they can “spin the wheel again,” Lintott said, until a good depiction of the merger shows up. A Grazing Encounter Between Two Spiral Galaxies (NGC 2207 and IC2163). Credit: HubbleSite
“By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated possibilities and selecting only the very best matches the users are helping to build up a profile of what kind of factors are necessary to create the galaxies we see in the Universe around us — and, hopefully, having fun too,” Lintott said.
There’s also the “enhance” option, where you can take control. “Once you have picked a simulation, you can take control of it directly, and change the parameters by hand such as the size, mass, the speed, for example. So, if you get impatient you can take control and see if you can do a better job than the slot machine,” Lintott explained.
For some of mergers, there will be a unique solution – only one way to get the merger we see today. For others there may be many different simulations that could provide the answer.
The Mergers project is a bit different than the regular Galaxy Zoo in that there will be, initially, just one daily challenge. “We’re aiming for one a day, but obviously if everyone who reads Universe Today turns up, we’ve got an idea of how many people we need to look at each one, so then we’ll change them out quicker,” Lintott said. “The more that people do, the more galaxies they’ll get to see.”
Of course, galaxy mergers are beautiful and amazing astronomical objects to behold, so the Galaxy Zoo team is hoping this will be a popular project.
“The point of Galaxy Zoo is to try and understand how we got the mix of galaxies that we see today,” Lintott said. “One of the mysteries is trying to work out how the ellipticals formed. We know that one way to form elliptical is to smash two spirals together. There’s the famous simulation of the Milky Way and Andromeda colliding and everyone assumes it will end up as a big elliptical that has used up all its gas. But actually it’s not clear how often that happens, and it’s not clear that you always get elliptical when you smash spirals together. In fact we know that in some cases they don’t. There is a lot of debate as to how important mergers are in this process.”
Right now, 3% of galaxies are in the process of merging, so, Lintott said, if most big galaxies undergo a merger every million years or so, this is clearly an important process.
“But we don’t understand what affects it has, and that’s what we hope to realize in this project.”
And Lintott admitted this newest Galaxy Zoo project is supposed to be fun and addictive. “Some people will love it, and some people will probably prefer the regular Galaxy Zoo. But it’s nice to have a range of scientific tasks that we have to work through.”
Why – and how — do brown dwarfs form? Since these cosmic misfits fall somewhere between planets and stars in terms of their temperature and mass, astronomers haven’t yet been able to determine how they form: are their beginnings like planets or stars? Now, the Spitzer Space Telescope has found what could be two of the youngest brown dwarfs. While astronomers are still looking to confirm the finding of these so-called “proto brown dwarfs” it has provided a preliminary answer of how these unusual stars form.
The baby brown dwarfs were found in Spitzer data collected in 2005. Astronomers had focused their search in the dark cloud Barnard 213, a region of the Taurus-Auriga complex well known to astronomers as a hunting ground for young objects.
“We decided to go several steps back in the process when (brown dwarfs) are really hidden,” said David Barrado of the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, Spain, lead author of the paper, published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal. “During this step they would have an (opaque) envelope, a cocoon, and they would be easier to identify due to their strong infrared excesses. We have used this property to identify them. This is where Spitzer plays an important role because Spitzer can have a look inside these clouds. Without it this wouldn’t have been possible.”
Barrado said the findings potentially solve the mystery about whether brown dwarfs form more like stars or planets. The team’s findings? Brown dwarfs form like low-mass stars.
Brown dwarfs are cooler and more lightweight than stars and more massive (and normally warmer) than planets. They are born of the same dense, dusty clouds that spawn stars and planets. But while they may share the same galactic nursery, brown dwarfs are often called “failed” stars because they lack the mass of their hotter, brighter stellar siblings. Without that mass, the gas at their core does not get hot enough to trigger the nuclear fusion that burns hydrogen — the main component of these molecular clouds — into helium. Unable to ignite as stars, brown dwarfs end up as cooler, less luminous objects that are more difficult to detect — a challenge that was overcome in this case by Spitzer’s heat-sensitive infrared vision. This artist's rendering gives us a glimpse into a cosmic nursery as a star is born from the dark, swirling dust and gas of this cloud. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Young brown dwarfs also evolve rapidly, making it difficult to catch them when they are first born. The first brown dwarf was discovered in 1995 and, while hundreds have been found since, astronomers had not been able to unambiguously find them in their earliest stages of formation until now.
Spitzer’s longer-wavelength infrared camera penetrated the dusty natal cloud to observe STB213 J041757. The data, confirmed with near-infrared imaging from Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, revealed not one but two of what would potentially prove to be the faintest and coolest brown dwarfs ever observed.
The twins were observed from around the globe, and their properties were measured and analyzed using a host of powerful astronomical tools. One of the astronomers’ stops was the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii, which captured the presence of the envelope around the young objects. That information, coupled with what they had from Spitzer, enabled the astronomers to build a spectral energy distribution — a diagram that shows the amount of energy that is emitted by the objects in each wavelength.
From Hawaii, the astronomers made additional stops at observatories in Spain (Calar Alto Observatory), Chile (Very Large Telescopes) and New Mexico (Very Large Array). They also pulled decade-old data from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre archives that allowed them to comparatively measure how the two objects were moving in the sky. After more than a year of observations, they drew their conclusions.
“We were able to estimate that these two objects are the faintest and coolest discovered so far,” Barrado said. This theory is bolstered because the change in brightness of the objects at various wavelengths matches that of other very young, low-mass stars.
While further study will confirm whether these two celestial objects are in fact proto brown dwarfs, they are the best candidates so far, Barrado said. He said the journey to their discovery, while difficult, was fun. “It is a story that has been unfolding piece by piece. Sometimes nature takes its time to give up its secrets.”
Lead image caption: This image shows two young brown dwarfs, objects that fall somewhere between planets and stars in terms of their temperature and mass. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Calar Alto Obsv./Caltech Sub. Obsv.
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let Fraser know if you can be a host, and he’ll schedule you into the calendar.
Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.
Screens showing two beams in the LHC. Credit: CERN
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Two beams circulated simultaneously inside the Large Hadron Collider for the first time today, allowing for the first proton-proton collisions to take place. “It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program.”
The beams crossed at points where various detectors are stationed. The beams were made to cross at point 1, where the ATLAS all purpose detector is located, then at point five at the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, where the ALICE (heavy ion detector) and the LHCb (looking for heavy particles containing a bottom quark) are positioned.
The first collisions are allowing operators to test the synchronization of the beams.
“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years’ work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance,” said ATLAS spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti at a press conference today.
“The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.
“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”
“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”
The first collisions come just three days after the LHC restart. Since the start-up this weekend, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV (gigaelectron volts). The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.
Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. If everything goes as planned, everyone at CERN hopes to obtain good quantities of collision data for all the experiments’ calibrations by Christmas, when the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV (terraelectron volts) per beam.
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The weird mystery of the flyby anomaly just got even weirder. Since the early 1990’s scientists and mission controllers have noticed that some spacecraft experience unexpected changes in speed during Earth-flybys. The unexplained variation is extremely small and has occurred as either speed gained or lost, but this variant is not predicted by fundamental physics. The anomaly doesn’t happen to every spacecraft but scientists were hoping to gain more insight into the anomaly when the Rosetta spacecraft swung by Earth on Nov. 13 to pick up a gravitational boost for its journey to rendezvous with a comet in 2014. However, in a major disappointment – which had deepened the mystery — the Rosetta spacecraft did not experience the flyby anomaly during this swingby of Earth, even though the same spacecraft did experience the anomaly when it flew by Earth 2005, but didn’t in 2007.
“It’s a mystery as to what is happening with these gravity events,” said Trevor Morley, lead flight dynamics specialist working on Rosetta. “Some studies have looked for answers in new interpretations of current physics. If this proves correct, it would be absolutely ground-breaking news.”
For the Earth swingbys where the anomaly has been detected, Morley said the main manifestation has been “the inability to get anything like a reasonable fit of an orbit to an arc of radiometric data that encompasses both the pre- and post-perigee (closest to the Earth) intervals.”
For those cases when an anomaly has been seen, the change has been very slight, but noticeable. “In every case, a reasonable data fit could be established only by inserting an artificial velocity change along the direction of the orbital velocity in the vicinity of perigee,” Morley said. Earth as seen by the Osiris camera on Rosetta. Credit: ESA
For this flyby, the team made allowances for the software to estimate an impulsive maneuver at perigee, aligned along the orbital velocity. But after analyzing the radiometric data gathered by ESA and NASA ground stations, nothing anomalous was seen.
“The difference in the quality of the data fit was absolutely negligible,” Morley said. “For Rosetta’s third and final Earth swingby, there was no anomaly.”
Several ideas have been tossed around in an attempt to explain why the anomaly occurs, but no one has been able to pin the cause down as of yet.
Ideas range from tidal effects of the near-Earth environment, atmospheric drag, or the pressure of radiation emitted or reflected by the Earth, to much more extreme possibilities, such as dark matter, dark energy or previously unseen variations in General Relativity.
One American research team, led by ex-NASA scientist John Anderson, is even looking at the possibility that Earth’s rotation may be distorting space-time – the fundamental fabric of our Universe – more than expected, and affecting nearby spacecraft. But there is as yet no explanation how this could happen.
Plus no one can explain why some flybys experience the anomaly and others don’t.
