Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Antique Stars Could Help Solve Mysteries Of Early Milky Way

The Milky Way is like NGC 4594 (pictured), a disc shaped spiral galaxy with around 200 billion stars. The three main features are the central bulge, the disk, and the halo. Credit: ESO
The Milky Way is like NGC 4594 (pictured), a disc shaped spiral galaxy with around 200 billion stars. The three main features are the central bulge, the disk, and the halo. Credit: ESO

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Utilizing ESO’s giant telescopes located in Chile, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have been examining “antique” stars. Located at the outer reaches of the Milky Way, these superannuated stellar specimens are unusual in the fact that they contain an over-abundance of gold, platinum and uranium. How they became heavy metal stars has always been a puzzle, but now astronomers are tracing their origins back to our galaxy’s beginning.

It is theorized that soon after the Big Bang event, the Universe was filled with hydrogen, helium and… dark matter. When the trio began compressing upon themselves, the very first stars were born. At the core of these neophyte suns, heavy elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen were then created. A few hundred million years later? Hey! All of the elements are now accounted for. It’s a tidy solution, but there’s just one problem. It would appear the very first stars only had about 1/1000th of the heavy-elements found in sun-like stars of the present.

How does it happen? Each time a massive star reaches the end of its lifetime, it will either create a planetary nebula – where layers of elements gradually peel away from the core – or it will go supernova – and blast the freshly created elements out in a violent explosion. In this scenario, the clouds of material once again coalesce… collapse again and form more new stars. It’s just this pattern which gives birth to stars that become more and more “elementally” concentrated. It’s an accepted conjecture – and that’s what makes discovering heavy metal stars in the early Universe a surprise. And even more surprising…

Right here in the Milky Way.

“In the outer parts of the Milky Way there are old ‘stellar fossils’ from our own galaxy’s childhood. These old stars lie in a halo above and below the galaxy’s flat disc. In a small percentage – approximately one to two percent of these primitive stars, you find abnormal quantities of the heaviest elements relative to iron and other ‘normal’ heavy elements”, explains Terese Hansen, who is an astrophysicist in the research group Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

The 17 observed stars are all located in the northern sky and could therefore be observed with the Nordic Optical Telescope, NOT on La Palma. NOT is 2.5 meter telescope that is well suited for just this kind of observations, where continuous precise observations of stellar motions over several years can reveal what stars belong to binary star systems.
But the study of these antique stars just didn’t happen overnight. By employing ESO’s large telescopes based in Chile, the team took several years to come to their conclusions. It was based on the findings of 17 “abnormal” stars which appeared to have elemental concentrations – and then another four years of study using the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma. Terese Hansen used her master’s thesis to analyse the observations.

“After slaving away on these very difficult observations for a few years I suddenly realised that three of the stars had clear orbital motions that we could define, while the rest didn’t budge out of place and this was an important clue to explaining what kind of mechanism must have created the elements in the stars”, explains Terese Hansen, who calculated the velocities along with researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and Michigan State University, USA.

What exactly accounts for these types of concentrations? Hansen explains their are two popular theories. The first places the origin as a close binary star system where one goes supernova, inundating its companion with layers of heavier elements. The second is a massive star also goes supernova, but spews the elements out in dispersing streams, impregnating gas clouds which then formed into the halo stars.

The research group has analysed 17 stellar fossils from the Milky Way’s childhood. The stars are small light stars and they live longer than large massive stars. They do not burn hydrogen longer, but swell up into red giants that will later cool and become white dwarves. The image shows the most famous of the stars CS31082-001, which was the first star that uranium was found in.
“My observations of the motions of the stars showed that the great majority of the 17 heavy-element rich stars are in fact single. Only three (20 percent) belong to binary star systems – this is completely normal, 20 percent of all stars belong to binary star systems. So the theory of the gold-plated neighbouring star cannot be the general explanation. The reason why some of the old stars became abnormally rich in heavy elements must therefore be that exploding supernovae sent jets out into space. In the supernova explosion the heavy elements like gold, platinum and uranium are formed and when the jets hit the surrounding gas clouds, they will be enriched with the elements and form stars that are incredibly rich in heavy elements”, says Terese Hansen, who immediately after her groundbreaking results was offered a PhD grant by one of the leading European research groups in astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg.

May all heavy metal stars go gold!

Original Story Source: Niels Bohr Institute News Release. For Further Reading: The Binary Frequency of r-Process-element-enhanced Metal-poor Stars and Its Implications: Chemical Tagging in the Primitive Halo of the Milky Way.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Early Galaxy Chemistry: VLT Observes Gamma-Ray Burst

Artist’s impression of a gamma-ray burst shining through two young galaxies in the early Universe. Credit: ESO

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“Shot through the heart and you’re to blame…” There’s nothing more powerful than a gamma-ray burst. These abrupt, mega-bright events are captured by orbiting telescopes where the information is immediately relayed to the ground for observation in visible light and infra-red. Some events are so powerful that they linger for hours or even days. But just how quick can we spot them? A burst cataloged as GRB 090323 was picked up by the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, then confirmed by the X-ray detector on NASA’s Swift satellite and with the GROND system at the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile. Within a day it was being studied by ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It was so intense it penetrated its host galaxy and another… heading out on a 12 billion light year journey just to get here.

“When we studied the light from this gamma-ray burst we didn’t know what we might find. It was a surprise that the cool gas in these two galaxies in the early Universe proved to have such an unexpected chemical make-up,” explains Sandra Savaglio (Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany), lead author of the paper describing the new results. “These galaxies have more heavy elements than have ever been seen in a galaxy so early in the evolution of the Universe. We didn’t expect the Universe to be so mature, so chemically evolved, so early on.”

As the brilliant beacon passed through the galaxies, the gases performed as a filter, absorbing some wavelengths of light. But the real kicker here is we wouldn’t have even known these galaxies existed if it weren’t for the gamma-ray burst! Because the light was affected, astronomers were able to detect the “composition of the cool gas in these very distant galaxies, and in particular how rich they were in heavy elements.” It had been surmised that early galaxies would have less heavy elements since their stellar populations weren’t old enough to have produced them… But the findings pointed otherwise. These new galaxies were rich in heavy elements and going against what we thought we knew about galactic evolution.

So exactly what does that mean? It would appear these new, young galaxies are forming stars at an incredible rate. To enrich their gases so quickly, it’s possible they are in a merger process. While this isn’t a new concept, it just may support the theory that gamma-ray bursts can be associated with “vigorous massive star formation”. Furthermore, it’s surmised that rapid stellar growth may have simply stopped in the primordial Universe. What’s left that we can observe some 12 billion years later are mere shadows of what once was… like cool dwarf stars and black holes. These two newly discovered galaxies are like finding a hidden stain on the outskirts of the distant Cosmos.

“We were very lucky to observe GRB 090323 when it was still sufficiently bright, so that it was possible to obtain spectacularly detailed observations with the VLT. Gamma-ray bursts only stay bright for a very short time and getting good quality data is very hard. We hope to observe these galaxies again in the future when we have much more sensitive instruments, they would make perfect targets for the E-ELT,” concludes Savaglio.

Original Story Source: ESO Press Release. For Further Reading: Super-solar Metal Abundances in Two Galaxies at z ~ 3.57 revealed by the GRB 090323 Afterglow Spectrum.

Posted on by Jason Major

Failed Star Is One Cool Companion

Artist's impression of a brown-dwarf object (left foreground) orbiting a distant white dwarf --the collapsed-core remnant of a dying star.

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Astronomers have located a planet-like star that’s barely warmer than a balmy summer day on Earth… it’s literally the coldest object ever directly imaged outside of our solar system!

WD 0806-661 B is a brown “Y dwarf” star that’s a member of a binary pair. Its companion is a much hotter white dwarf, the remains of a Sun-like star that has shed its outer layers. The pair is located about 63 light-years away, which is pretty close to us as stars go. The stars were identified by a team led by Penn State Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kevin Luhman using images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Two infrared images taken in 2004 and 2009 were overlaid on top of each other and show the stars moving in tandem, indicating a shared orbit.

These two infrared images were taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2009. They show a faint object moving through space together with a white dwarf. Credit: Kevin Luhman, Penn State University, October 2011. (Click to play.)

Of course, locating the stars wasn’t quite as easy as that. To find this stellar duo Luhman and his team searched through over six hundred images of stars located near our solar system taken years apart, looking for any shifting position as a pair.

The use of infrared imaging allowed the team to locate a dim brown dwarf star like WD 0806-661 B, which emits little visible light but shines brightly in infrared. (Even though brown dwarfs are extremely cool for stars they are still much warmer than the surrounding space. And, for the record, brown dwarfs are not actually brown.) Measurements estimate the temperature of WD 0806-661 B to be in the range of about 80 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit (26 to 54 degrees C, or 300 – 345 K)… literally body temperature!

“Essentially, what we have found is a very small star with an atmospheric temperature about cool as the Earth’s.”

– Kevin Luhman, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State

Six to nine times the mass of Jupiter, WD 0806-661 B is more like a planet than a star. It never accumulated enough mass to ignite thermonuclear reactions and thus more resembles a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. But its origins are most likely star-like, as its distance from its white dwarf companion – about 2,500 astronomical units – indicates that it developed on its own rather than forming from the other star’s disc.

There is a small chance, though, that it did form as a planet and gradually migrated out to its current distance. More research will help determine whether this may have been the case.

Brown dwarfs, first discovered in 1995, are valuable research targets because they are the next best thing to studying cool atmospheres on planets outside our solar system. Scientists keep trying to locate new record-holders for the coldest brown dwarfs, and with the discovery of WD 0806-661 B Luhman’s team has done just that!

A paper covering the team’s findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Other authors of the paper include Ivo Labbé, Andrew J. Monson and Eric Persson of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, Calif.; Didier Saumon of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico; Mark S. Marley of the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; and John J. Bochanski also of The Pennsylvania State University.

Read more on the Penn State science site here.

 

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Are The Milky Way’s First Stars Responsible For Destroying Its Satellite Galaxies?

About a decade ago, standard cosmological models encountered a slight problem when applied to the Milky Way… missing satellite galaxies. While the calculations predicted as many as 500, only 10 are documented and modern figures state as many as 20. So what happened to the other 480 that should be out there? Either they don’t exist – or we can’t see them for some reason. Thanks to research done by the LIDAU project and two researchers from Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, we might just have an answer.

About 150 million years after the Big Bang, the Universe’s first stars began to appear out of the cold, electrically neutral hydrogen and helium gas which filled it. As their intense light cut through the hydrogen atoms, it returned them to their plasma state in a process called reionisation. Things really began to heat up from there… gas began escaping the gravity of low-mass galaxies and as a consequence, they lost their star-forming abilities. By computing the observable consequences of this process, Pierre Ocvirk and Dominique Aubert demonstrated that the Milky Way’s first stars had the power of reionisation and it “is indeed an essential process in the standard model of galaxy formation.” This photo-evaporation state neatly explains the sparsity and age of Milky Way companions and offers up the reason satellite galaxies are rare in this neighborhood.

“On the other hand, their sensitivity to UV radiation means satellite galaxies are good probes of the reionisation epoch. Moreover, they are relatively nearby, from 30000 to 900000 light-years, which allows us to study them in great details, especially with the forthcoming generation of telescopes.” says Ocvirk. “In particular, the study of their stellar content with respect to their position could give us precious insight into the structure of the local UV radiation field during the reionisation.”

Current theory states this photo-evaporation was simply caused by nearby galaxies, resulting in a uniform event – but the new model built by the two French researchers proves this assumption wrong. Their high resolution numerical simulation accounts for the dynamics of the dark matter haloes from beginning to end, as well as their resultant gas impacted star formation and UV radiation.

“It is the first time that a model accounts for the effect of the radiation emitted by the first stars formed at the center of the Milky way, on its satellite galaxies. Indeed, contrary to previous models, the radiation field produced in this configuration is not uniform, but decreases in intensity as one moves away from the source.” explains Ocvirk. “On one hand, the satellite galaxies close to the galactic center see their gas evaporate very quickly. They form so few stars that they can be undetectable with current telescopes. On the other hand, the more remote satellite galaxies experience on average a weaker irradiation. Therefore they manage to keep their gas longer, and form more stars. As a consequence they are easier to detect and appear more numerous.”

Where did initial assumptions fall short? In previous models reionisation was thought to occur over an evenly distributed UV background, but the MIlky Way’s first stars had already done its damage by consuming its satellites. As the study suggests, our own galaxy is responsible for the lack of smaller companions.

Says Ocvirk; “This new scenario has deep consequences on the formation of galaxies and the interpretation of the large astronomical surveys to come. Indeed, satellite galaxies are affected by our galaxy’s tidal field, and can be slowly digested into our galaxy’s stellar halo. They can also be stretched into filaments and form stellar streams.”

It’s a very interesting new concept and will be one of the main science goals of the Gaia space mission, scheduled for launch in 2013. Until then, the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg team will continue in their efforts to further understand radiative processes during reionisation.

Original Story Source: Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg Press Release. For Further Reading: A signature of the internal reionisation of the Milky Way and LIDAU collaboration (Light In the Dark Ages of the Universe).

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Holmberg II – Forever Blowing Bubbles

Hubble’s famous images of galaxies typically show elegant spirals or soft-edged ellipses. But these neat forms are only representative of large galaxies. Smaller galaxies like the dwarf irregular galaxy Holmberg II come in many shapes and types that are harder to classify. This galaxy’s indistinct shape is punctuated by huge glowing bubbles of gas, captured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

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“I’m forever blowing bubbles… Pretty bubbles in the air…” Its name is Holmberg II, and it’s a dwarf galaxy that’s only 9.8 million light-years away. It’s part of the M81 Galaxy Group and one of the few that isn’t distracted by gravity from nearby peers. Holmberg II is an active little galaxy and one that’s full of holes – the largest of which spans 5500 light years wide. But what makes this one really fascinating is that it’s expelling huge bubbles of gas…

Here the remnants of mature and dying stars have left thick waves of dust and gas, carved into shape by stellar winds. Some ended their lives as supernovae – sending rippling shockwaves through the thinner material to hang in space like fantasy ribbons. With no dense nucleus to deform it like an elliptical galaxy, nor distorting arms like a spiral, this irregular star-forming factory is the perfect place for astronomers to take a close look stellar formation in a new way.

Keep thinking bubbles, because Holmberg II is the perfect example of the “champagne” model of starbirth – where new stars create even newer ones. How does it work? When a bubble is created by stellar winds, it moves outwards until it reaches the edge of the molecular cloud that spawned it. At the exterior edge, dust and gas have been compressed and form a nodule similar to a blister. Here another new star forms.. and triggers again… and triggers again… similar to the chain reaction which happens when you open a bottle of champagne.

And fill the glass again, because Holmberg II is also known as Arp 268. While Halton Arp certainly knows his stuff when it comes to unusual galaxies, there’s even more. According to the Hubble team, our little dwarf also has an ultraluminous X-ray source in the middle of three gas bubbles which appears in the image’s upper right hand corner. No one is quite sure of what it just might be! Maybe black hole bubbles?

“They fly so high… Nearly reach the sky. Then in my dreams they fade and die…” Perhaps Dean Martin?

Original Story Source: Hubble News.

Posted on by Steve Nerlich

Astronomy Without A Telescope – Star Formation Laws

NGC 1569 - a relatively close (11 million light years) starburst galaxy - presumably a result of fairly efficient star formation Credit: NASA/HST

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Take a cloud of molecular hydrogen add some turbulence and you get star formation – that’s the law. The efficiency of star formation (how big and how populous they get) is largely a function of the density of the initial cloud.

At a galactic or star cluster level, a low gas density will deliver a sparse population of generally small, dim stars – while a high gas density should result in a dense population of big, bright stars. However, overlying all this is the key issue of metallicity – which acts to reduce star formation efficiency.

So firstly, the strong relationship between the density of molecular hydrogen (H2) and star formation efficiency is known as the Kennicutt-Schmidt Law. Atomic hydrogen is not considered to be able to support star formation, because it is too hot. Only when it cools to form molecular hydrogen can it start to clump together – after which we can expect star formation to become possible. Of course, this creates some mystery about how the first stars might have formed within a denser and hotter primeval universe. Perhaps dark matter played a key role there.

Nonetheless, in the modern universe, unbound gas can more readily cool down to molecular hydrogen due the presence of metals, which have been added to the interstellar medium by previous populations of stars. Metals, which are any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, are able to absorb a wider range of radiation energy levels, leaving hydrogen less exposed to heating. Hence, a metal-rich gas cloud is more likely to form molecular hydrogen, which is then more likely to support star formation.

But this does not mean that star formation is more efficient in the modern universe – and again this is because of metals. A recent paper about the dependence of star formation on metallicity proposes that a cluster of stars develops from H2 clumping within a gas cloud, first forming prestellar cores which draw in more matter via gravity, until they become stars and then begin producing stellar wind.

Relationship between the power of stellar winds and stellar mass (i.e. big star has big wind) - with the effect of metallicity overlaid. The solid line is the metallicity of the Sun (Z=Zsol). High metallicity produces more powerful winds for the same stellar mass. Credit: Dib et al.

Before long, the stellar wind begins to generate ‘feedback’, countering the infall of further material. Once the outward push of stellar wind achieves unity with the inward gravitational pull, further star growth ceases – and bigger O and B class stars clear out any remaining gas from the cluster region, so that all star formation is quenched.

The dependence of star formation efficiency on metallicity arises from the effect of metallicity on stellar wind. High metal stars always have more powerful winds than any equivalent mass, but lower metal, stars. Thus, a star cluster – or even a galaxy – formed from a gas cloud with high metallicity, will have lower efficiency star formation. This is because all stars’ growth is inhibited by their own stellar wind feedback in late stages of growth and any large O or B class stars will clear out any remaining unbound gas more quickly than their low metal equivalents.

This metallicity effect is likely to be the product of ‘radiative line acceleration’, arising from the ability of metals to absorb radiation across a wide range of radiation energy levels – that is, metals present many more radiation absorption lines than hydrogen has on its own. The absorption of radiation by an ion means that some of the momentum energy of a photon is imparted to the ion, to the extent that such ions may be blown out of the star as stellar wind. The ability of metals to absorb more radiation energy than hydrogen can, means you should always get more wind (i.e. more ions blown out) from high metal stars.

Further reading:
Dib et al. The Dependence of the Galactic Star Formation Laws on Metallicity.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Solo Star Synthesis

Young binary stars. Image credit: NASA

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“Swing your partner round and round… Out of the cluster and out of town” While that’s a facetious description as to how binary stars end up losing their companions, it’s not entirely untrue. In practicing the field of astronomy, we’re quite aware that not all stars are single entities and at least half of the stellar population of the Milky Way consists of binaries. However, explaining just exactly why some are loners and others belong to multiple systems has been somewhat of a mystery. Now a team of astronomers from Bonn University and the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio astronomy think they have the answer…

The team recently published their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Apparently the environment that forms a particular group of stars plays a huge role in how many stars lead a lone existence – or have one or more companions. For the most part, star-forming nebulae produce binary stars in clustered groups. These groups then quickly disband into their parent galaxy and at least half of them become loners. But why do some double stars end up leading a solitary life? The answer might very well be how they interact gravitationally.

“In many cases the pairs are torn apart into two single stars, in the same way that a pair of dancers might be separated after colliding with another couple on a crowded dance floor”, explains Michael Marks, a PhD student and member of the International Max-Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

If this is the case, then single stars take on that state long before they spread out into a galaxy. Since conditions in star-forming regions vary widely in both appearance and population, science is taking a closer look at density. The more dense the region is, the more binary stars form – and the greater the interaction that splits them apart. Every cluster of stars has a different population, too.. And that population is dependant on the initial density. By using computer modeling, astronomers are able to determine what regions are most likely to contribute single stars are multiple systems to their host galaxy.

“Working out the composition of the Milky Way from these numbers is simple: We just add up the single and binary stars in all the dispersed groups to build a population for the wider galaxy”, says Kroupa. Michael Marks further explains how this concept applies universally: “This is the first time we have been able to compute the stellar content of a whole galaxy, something that was simply not possible until now. With our new method we can now calculate the stellar contents of many different galaxies and work out how many single and binary stars they have.”

Original Story Source: RAS News. For further reading: Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Animations of the interactions of binary stars.

Posted on by Jon Voisey

Help! My Stars are Leaking!

A fast-moving star, Alpha Camelopardalis, creates a stunning bow shock in this new image from WISE. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

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Star clusters are wonderful test beds for theories of stellar formation and evolution. One of the key roles they play is to help astronomers understand the distribution of stellar masses as stars form (in other words, how many high mass stars versus intermediate and low mass stars), known as the Initial Mass Function (IMF). One of the problems is that this is constantly evolving away from the initial distribution as stars die or are ejected from the cluster. As such, understanding these mechanisms is essential for astronomers looking to backtrack from the current population to the IMF.

To assist in this goal, astronomers led by Vasilii Gvaramadze at the University of Bonn in Germany are engaged in a study to search young clusters for stars in the process of being ejected.

In the first of two studies released by the team so far, they studied the cluster associated with the famous Eagle Nebula. This nebula is well known due to the famous “Pillars of Creation” image taken by the aging Hubble Space Telescope which shows towers of dense gas currently undergoing star formation.

Two main methods exist for discovering stars on the lam from their birthplace. The first is to examine stars individually and analyze their motion in the plane of the sky (proper motion) along with their motion towards or away from us (radial velocity) to determine if a given star has sufficient velocity to escape the cluster. While this method can be reliable, it suffers because the clusters are so far away, even though the stars could be moving at hundreds of kilometers per second, it takes long periods of time to detect it.

Instead, the astronomers in these studies search for runaway stars by the effects they have on the local environment. Since young clusters contain large amounts of gas and dust, stars plowing through it will create bow shocks, similar to those a boat makes in the ocean. Taking advantage of this, the team searched the Eagle Nebula cluster for signs of bow shocks from these stars. Searching images from several studies, the team found three such bow shocks. The same method was used in a second study, this time analyzing a lesser known cluster and nebula in Scorpius, NGC 6357. This survey turned up seven bow shocks of stars escaping the region.

In both studies, the team analyzed the spectral types of the stars which would indicate their mass. Simulations of nebulae suggested that the majority of ejected stars are given their initial kick as they have a close pass to the center of a cluster where the density is the highest. Studies of clusters have shown that their centers are often dominated by massive O and B spectral type stars which would mean that such stars would be preferentially ejected. These two studies have helped to confirm that prediction as all of the stars discovered to have bow shocks were massive stars in this range.

While this method is able to find runaway stars, the authors note that it is an incomplete survey. Some stars may have sufficient velocity to escape, but still fall under the local sound speed in the nebula which would prevent them from creating a bow shock. As such, calculations have predicted that roughly 20% of escaping stars should create detectable bow shocks.

Understanding this mechanism is important because it is expected to play the dominant role in the evolution of the mass distribution of clusters early in their life. An alternative method of ejection involves stars in a binary orbit. If one star becomes a supernova, the sudden mass loss suddenly decreases the gravitational force holding the second star in orbit, allowing it to fly away. However, this method requires that a cluster at least be old enough for stars to have evolved to the point they explode as supernova, delaying this mechanism’s importance until at least that point and allowing the gravitational sling-shot effects to dominate early on.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Gas, Not Galaxy Collisions Responsible for Star Formation in Early Universe

Artist concept of how a galaxy might accrete mass from rapid, narrow streams of cold gas. These filaments provide the galaxy with continuous flows of raw material to feed its star-forming at a rather leisurely pace. Credit: ESA–AOES Medialab

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Was the universe a kinder, gentler place in the past that we have thought? The Herschel space observatory has looked back across time with its infrared eyes and has seen that galaxy collisions played only a minor role in triggering star births in the past, even though today the birth of stars always seem to be generated by galaxies crashing into each other. So what was the fuel for star formation in the past?

Simple. Gas.

The more gas a galaxy contained, the more stars were born.

Scientists say this finding overturns a long-held assumption and paints a nobler picture of how galaxies evolve.

Astronomers have known that the rate of star formation peaked in the early Universe, about 10 billion years ago. Back then, some galaxies were forming stars ten or even a hundred times more vigorously than is happening in our Galaxy today.

In the nearby, present-day Universe, such high birth rates are very rare and always seem to be triggered by galaxies colliding with each other. So, astronomers had assumed that this was true throughout history.

GOODS-North is a patch of sky in the northern hemisphere that covers an area of about a third the size of the Full Moon. Credit: ESA/GOODS-Herschel consortium/David Elbaz

But Herschel’s observations of two patches of sky show a different story.

Looking at these regions of the sky, each about a third of the size of the full Moon, Herschel has seen more than a thousand galaxies at a variety of distances from the Earth, spanning 80% of the age of the cosmos.

In analyzing the Herschel data, David Elbaz, from CEA Saclay in France, and his team found that even though some galaxies in the past were creating stars at incredible rates, galaxy collisions played only a minor role in triggering star births. The astronomers were able to compare the amount of infrared light released at different wavelengths by these galaxies, the team has shown that the star birth rate depends on the quantity of gas they contain, not whether they are colliding.

They say these observations are unique because Herschel can study a wide range of infrared light and reveal a more complete picture of star birth than ever seen before.

However, their work compliments other recent studies from data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope which found ancient galaxies fed on gas,not collisions

“It’s only in those galaxies that do not already have a lot of gas that collisions are needed to provide the gas and trigger high rates of star formation,” said Elbaz.

Today’s galaxies have used up most of their gaseous raw material after forming stars for more than 10 billion years, so they do rely on collisions to jump-start star formation, but in the past galaxies grew slowly and gently from the gas that they attracted from their surroundings.

This study was part of the GOODS observations with Herschel, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey.

Read the team’s paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics: GOODS–Herschel: an infrared main sequence for star-forming galaxies’ by D. Elbaz et al.

Source: ESA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Colorful Cluster of Stars Competes with the Tarantula Nebula

The star cluster NGC 2100 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: ESO

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Who can shine the brightest in the Large Magellanic Cloud? A brilliant cluster of stars, open cluster NGC 2100 shines brightly, competing with the nearby Tarantula Nebula for bragging rights in this image from ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT).

Observers perhaps often overlook NGC 2100 because of its close proximity to the impressive Tarantula. The glowing gas of the Tarantula Nebula even tries to steal the limelight in this image — the bright colors here are from the nebula’s outer regions, and is lit up by the hot young stars that lie within the nebula itself.

But back to the star cluster — this brilliant star cluster is around 15 million years old, and located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. An open cluster has stars that are relatively loosely bound by gravity. These clusters have a lifespan measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years, as they eventually disperse through gravitational interaction with other bodies.

This new picture was created from exposures through several different color filters.The stars are shown in their natural colors, while light from glowing ionized hydrogen (shown here in red) and oxygen (shown in blue) is overlaid.

See more info at the ESO website.