Astronomers Begin Observing Hanny’s Voorwerp with the Hubble Space Telescope

The green "blob" is Hanny's Voorwerp. Credit: Dan Herbert, Peter Smith, Matt Jarvis, Galaxy Zoo Team, Isaac Newton Telescope

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The green “blob” is Hanny’s Voorwerp. Credit: Dan Herbert, Peter Smith, Matt Jarvis, Galaxy Zoo Team, Isaac Newton Telescope

A storybook astronomy mystery is now part of the most famous telescope in history. A team of astronomers secured time on the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Hanny’s Voorwerp, the unusual object found by Dutch teacher Hanny Van Arkel while she was scanning through images for the Galaxy Zoo project. Hubble will be trained on the Voorwerp during three separate observing sessions, the first of which occurred on April 4, 2010. “The WFC3 (Wide Field Camera 3) images were obtained (Sunday),” said Principal Investigator Bill Keel from the University of Alabama in an email to Universe Today “and I was able to pull the calibrated files over last night for a quick look. Combining pairs of offset images to reject cosmic rays optimally will take some further work, but we’re happy to start working with the data and see what emerges at each step.”


The Voorwerp (also known by the much less endearing name of SDSS J094103.80+344334.2) created a sensation among amateur, armchair and professional astronomers alike, almost immediately after Van Arkel saw the object in 2007 and posted a question on the Galaxy Zoo forum, asking “What is this?” All this took place just a month after the Galaxy Zoo project opened up their online citizen science shop, and the rest is history. But in case you haven’t heard the story yet, a quick rundown is that ‘voorwerp’ means ‘object’ in Dutch – and as of yet, no one has determined exactly what Hanny’s Voorwerp is.

The working hypothesis, according to the Galaxy Zoo team, is that Hanny’s Voorwerp might be a “light echo” of an event that occurred millions of years ago. The object itself consists of dust and gas which perhaps was illuminated by a quasar outburst within the nearby galaxy IC 2497 (see the images). The outburst has faded within the last 100,000 years but the light reached the dust and gas in time for our telescopes to see the effect.

Hanny's Voorwerp. Credit: Matt Jarvis, William Herschel Telescope.

The Galaxy Zoo images come from observations done by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In evidence of the interest in this object, since 2007 Hanny’s Voorwerp has also been imaged by the Swift gamma-ray satellite, the Suzaku X-ray telescope, the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), the Issac Newton Telescope and the William Herschel Telescope, to name a few.

But now, the most famous telescope of all – with its new and updated instruments – will take a gander to see if the mysteries of the Voorwerp can be solved.

The team – which includes Keel, and fellow Galaxy “Zookeepers” Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Vardha Nicola Bennert, Daniel Thomas, and Hanny Van Arkel herself – submitted a proposal to the Space Telescope Science Institute back in 2008 and were among the proud and few from close to 1000 proposals submitted to be granted observing time on Hubble.

During the three observing sessions, three different Hubble instruments will be used.

“The observations use three instruments and would naturally be broken into three target visits,” said Keel, “some constrained to be at different times because of the required orientations on the sky –for example, to have both Hanny’s Voorwerp and IC 2497 in the narrow field of view of ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) with the monochromatic ramp filters.”

“The next observations will probably be the most visually striking,” Keel continued. “Two orbits’ worth of ACS images in narrow bands including [O III] an H-alpha emission, and are scheduled for April 12. The final visit in the program has 2 orbits of STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) spectroscopy around the nucleus of IC2497, and should be coming up by mid-June.”

The April 4 observations included three orbits of data from the WFC3.

So, even though the first images have now been seen, the team won’t be able to share their findings until all the observations have occurred and the data has been analyzed.

Hanny Van Arkel. Image courtesy of Hanny.

“I indeed can’t say much more than that we got the first data in our mailboxes,” Van Arkel said in an email to Universe Today. “The team is still working on it and until they’ve worked it out, I won’t even understand enough of it myself to explain anything on the matter. It is exciting however that the investigations have started and it’s nice to see how many curious people are sending me messages about it and ‘retweeting’ my quotes on Twitter. After almost two years, I’m very much looking forward to the outcome of all of this!”

Van Arkel isn’t the only one excited.

“Through a combination of geometry and weather,” Keel shared,”I saw HST sail by to our south less than two orbits after it finished this first data set. So I waved in what was probably a most unprofessional manner.”

And the rest of us will be waiting – and waving – until Hubble can tell us more about Hanny’s Voorwerp.

For more information:

Hanny Van Arkel’s website

A post on the Galaxy Zoo blog by Bill Keel explaining in greater detail the Hubble observing sessions.

Galaxy Zoo

For other citizen science projects, visit the Zooniverse

Mystery Object Found Orbiting Brown Dwarf

This Hubble Space Telescope image of young brown dwarf 2M J044144 show it has a companion object at the 8 o'clock position that is estimated to be 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter.Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Todorov and K. Luhman (Penn State University)

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Big planet or companion brown dwarf? Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have discovered an unusual object orbiting a brown dwarf, and its discovery could fuel additional debate about what exactly constitutes a planet. The object circles a nearby brown dwarf in the Taurus star-forming region with an orbit approximately 3.6 billion kilometers (2.25 billion miles) out, about the same as Saturn from our sun. The astronomers say it is the right size for a planet, but they believe the object formed in less than 1 million years — the approximate age of the brown dwarf — and much faster than the predicted time it takes to build planets according to conventional theories.

Kamen Todorov of Penn State University and his team conducted a survey of 32 young brown dwarfs in the Taurus region.

The object orbits the brown dwarf 2M J044144 and is about 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. Brown dwarfs are objects that typically are tens of times the mass of Jupiter and are too small to sustain nuclear fusion to shine as stars do.

Artist's conception of the binary system 2M J044144. Science Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Todorov and K. Luman (Penn State University) Artwork Credit: Gemini Observatory, courtesy of L. Cook

While there has been a lot of discussion in the context of the Pluto debate over how small an object can be and still be called a planet, this new observation addresses the question at the other end of the size spectrum: How small can an object be and still be a brown dwarf rather than a planet? This new companion is within the range of masses observed for planets around stars, but again, the astronomers aren’t sure if it is a planet or a companion brown dwarf star.

The answer is strongly connected to the mechanism by which the companion most likely formed.

The Hubble new release offers these three possible scenarios for how the object may have formed:

Dust in a circumstellar disk slowly agglomerates to form a rocky planet 10 times larger than Earth, which then accumulates a large gaseous envelope; a lump of gas in the disk quickly collapses to form an object the size of a gas giant planet; or, rather than forming in a disk, a companion forms directly from the collapse of the vast cloud of gas and dust in the same manner as a star (or brown dwarf).

If the last scenario is correct, then this discovery demonstrates that planetary-mass bodies can be made through the same mechanism that builds stars. This is the likely solution because the companion is too young to have formed by the first scenario, which is very slow. The second mechanism occurs rapidly, but the disk around the central brown dwarf probably did not contain enough material to make an object with a mass of 5-10 Jupiter masses.

“The most interesting implication of this result is that it shows that the process that makes binary stars extends all the way down to planetary masses. So it appears that nature is able to make planetary-mass companions through two very different mechanisms,” said team member Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University.

If the mystery companion formed through cloud collapse and fragmentation, as stellar binary systems do, then it is not a planet by definition because planets build up inside disks.

The mass of the companion is estimated by comparing its brightness to the luminosities predicted by theoretical evolutionary models for objects at various masses for an age of 1 million years.

Further supporting evidence comes from the presence of a very nearby binary system that contains a small red star and a brown dwarf. Luhman thinks that all four objects may have formed in the same cloud collapse, making this in actuality a quadruple system.

“The configuration closely resembles quadruple star systems, suggesting that all of its components formed like stars,” he said.

The team’s research is being published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The team’s paper: Discovery of a Planetary-Mass Companion to a Brown Dwarf in Taurus

Source: HubbleSite

Hubble Confirms Cosmic Acceleration with Weak Lensing

This image shows a smoothed reconstruction of the total (mostly dark) matter distribution in the COSMOS field, created from data taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes.Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Simon (University of Bonn) and T. Schrabback (Leiden Observatory)

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Need more evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating? Just look to the Hubble Space Telescope. An international team of astronomers has indeed confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The team, led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory, conducted an intensive study of over 446,000 galaxies within the COSMOS (Cosmological Evolution Survey) field, the result of the largest survey ever conducted with Hubble. In making the COSMOS survey, Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the Universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the orbiting telescope. It took nearly 1,000 hours of observations.

In addition to the Hubble data, researchers used redshift data from ground-based telescopes to assign distances to 194,000 of the galaxies surveyed (out to a redshift of 5). “The sheer number of galaxies included in this type of analysis is unprecedented, but more important is the wealth of information we could obtain about the invisible structures in the Universe from this exceptional dataset,” said co-author Patrick Simon from Edinburgh University.

In particular, the astronomers could “weigh” the large-scale matter distribution in space over large distances. To do this, they made use of the fact that this information is encoded in the distorted shapes of distant galaxies, a phenomenon referred to as weak gravitational lensing. Using complex algorithms, the team led by Schrabback has improved the standard method and obtained galaxy shape measurements to an unprecedented precision. The results of the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The meticulousness and scale of this study enables an independent confirmation that the expansion of the Universe is accelerated by an additional, mysterious component named dark energy. A handful of other such independent confirmations exist. Scientists need to know how the formation of clumps of matter evolved in the history of the Universe to determine how the gravitational force, which holds matter together, and dark energy, which pulls it apart by accelerating the expansion of the Universe, have affected them. “Dark energy affects our measurements for two reasons. First, when it is present, galaxy clusters grow more slowly, and secondly, it changes the way the Universe expands, leading to more distant — and more efficiently lensed — galaxies. Our analysis is sensitive to both effects,” says co-author Benjamin Joachimi from the University of Bonn. “Our study also provides an additional confirmation for Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicts how the lensing signal depends on redshift,” adds co-investigator Martin Kilbinger from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and the Excellence Cluster Universe.

The large number of galaxies included in this study, along with information on their redshifts is leading to a clearer map of how, exactly, part of the Universe is laid out; it helps us see its galactic inhabitants and how they are distributed. “With more accurate information about the distances to the galaxies, we can measure the distribution of the matter between them and us more accurately,” notes co-investigator Jan Hartlap from the University of Bonn. “Before, most of the studies were done in 2D, like taking a chest X-ray. Our study is more like a 3D reconstruction of the skeleton from a CT scan. On top of that, we are able to watch the skeleton of dark matter mature from the Universe’s youth to the present,” comments William High from Harvard University, another co-author.

The astronomers specifically chose the COSMOS survey because it is thought to be a representative sample of the Universe. With thorough studies such as the one led by Schrabback, astronomers will one day be able to apply their technique to wider areas of the sky, forming a clearer picture of what is truly out there.

Source: EurekAlert

Paper: Schrabback et al., ‘Evidence for the accelerated expansion of the Universe from weak lensing tomography with COSMOS’, Astronomy and Astrophysics, March 2010,

Review: Hubble 3-D IMAX

Hubble 3-D IMAX movie poster.

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I have seen the new Hubble 3-D IMAX movie twice now, and both times I was overcome with tears by the end of the film. It wasn’t that the story of Hubble itself was overwhelming; no, that story I already knew by heart. It wasn’t that the account of the servicing mission to save Hubble was especially dramatic; actually, I think watching the five EVAs live on NASA TV in May 2009 was more heart-pounding. And it wasn’t that the cinematography was overly stunning or that there were non-stop 3-D effects.

What this film does is portray the immensity and gloriousness of our universe, and that we are currently, serendipitously, living during an amazing era of discovery, one that humanity has never known before. Some of these discoveries we are only able to make because of this marvelous telescope and the people who laid their lives on the line to fix it and make it better. It also shows — almost subtly – that we are inexorably connected to the Universe around us, joined like the intertwining web of 3-D galaxies shown near the movie’s final scenes. We are witnessing – and are a part of – history.

The movie chronicles the 20-year life of Hubble, and focuses on the STS-125 servicing mission, the final mission to Hubble. There ARE wonderful 3-D views of Hubble itself, anchored to shuttle Atlantis’ payload bay, where the telescope appears to come out into the audience and into your lap. This includes stunning views of planet Earth spinning overhead. “This is a gift we astronauts have been given,” astronaut Mike Massimino says of the vistas that can only be seen from space.

And viewers get to experience not one, but two shuttle launches captured in the so-close-up-you-can-feel-it shots which can only be experienced in IMAX. But much of the footage from on-orbit detailing the EVAs and action inside the shuttle were shot with the regular, albeit high-tech cameras that normally NASA flies on missions, including the small “lipstick” cameras on the helmets of the spacewalkers, and some was able to be rendered in grainy, but effective 3-D. The only genuine IMAX 3-D camera on board the mission was bolted to the shuttle’s cargo bay and it carried only 5,400 feet of film – which translates into just 8 minutes of IMAX 3-D footage. Here’s an article about a 3 D Solar System

Endearing are the behind-the-scenes looks at the STS-125 mission. Astronauts joking with each other on orbit – Commander Scott Altman sticking gum under the shuttle’s “dashboard,” Massimino describing how suiting up for an EVA is like putting on a snowsuit as a child. “You need your Mom,” he says.

In both showings I attended, the scene that got the most audible reaction from the audience was Drew Feustal making a chicken salad tortilla wrap. But, hey, we all have to eat, and for those who have never seen food preparation or astronauts eating in space before, it holds a certain level of fundamental fascination.

Additionally we get to hear what is going through the minds of the astronauts on launch day. Mike Good recalls how his grandfather opened up the Universe by showing him views through a telescope. Megan McArthur glows with excitement. John Grunsfeld meticulously goes through in his mind all the tasks that lie before him and the crew.

The film quickly moves through the EVAs, highlighting anxious moments of the mission — stuck bolts, the handrail that Massimino had to rip off of Hubble, the tension of undertaking the meticulous repairs on a one-of-a-kind iconic telescope, all while wearing a bulky spacesuit. But within a 43 minute film, these situations are dealt with quickly, — and honestly, — the movie doesn’t give real justice to how tense some of these situations really were.

A vast canyon of dust and gas in the Orion Nebula from a 3-D computer model based on observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (STScI/AURA)

But most mesmerizing in the film are 3-D visualizations of actual Hubble data. For this film, regular 2-D Hubble images were converted into 3-D environments, giving the audience the impression they are traveling through space and time.

Viewers get to experience an exhilarating ride through the Orion Nebula, swooping through a giant canyon of gas and dust, and witness star-forming regions that include dusty tadpole-shaped objects that are fledgling solar systems, likely a vision of how our own solar system once looked.

Later we travel to the distant Virgo Cluster and emerge on the other side of a black hole, and then travel back in time to witness early misshapen galaxies. Returning to more recent views that include new images from the Wide Field Camera 3 that was installed on STS-125, we see an ocean of stars in multiple wavelengths. Upon pulling away from the stars, we see 3-D galaxies interwoven like a web.

It’s these mind-numbing visions that produce a child-like sense of awe and wonder – and in my case, tears. The film is a testament to how Hubble has allowed us to see the wonders of our Universe.

I asked for reactions from the members of the audience following the premier showing of Hubble 3-D at the Kennedy Space Center IMAX, and while many commented on the amazing graphics, they also observed how small they felt in comparison to the rest of the Universe, but yet, incredibly an integral part of all that is.

The graphics were created by image processing specialists at Hubble’s Space Telescope Science Institute,– familiar names to those of us that follow Hubble : Frank Summers, Zolt Levay, Lisa Frattare, and Greg Bacon. They worked with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (more about them in a subsequent, upcoming article on Universe Today), and the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology.

Hubble 3-D was directed by Toni Myers, who has been at the helm of all the space-themed IMAX movies, and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Go see the movie if you have the chance, and bring anyone who may not normally follow space exploration or astronomy. Their view of the Universe will never be the same.

For more info see the official Hubble 3-D IMAX website. Official trailer below.

Hubble Captures Double Aurorae Light Show on Saturn

Hubble's view of Saturn with a double view of its fluttering aurorae. Credit: NASA, ESA and Jonathan Nichols (University of Leicester)


In January and March 2009, researchers using Hubble took advantage of a rare opportunity to record Saturn when its rings are edge-on, resulting in a unique look featuring both of the giant planet’s poles. And Saturn cooperated by providing an incredible double light show with Saturn’s own northern and southern lights. Since Saturn is only in this position every 15 years or so, this favorable orientation has allowed a sustained study of the two beautiful and dynamic aurorae.

Since it takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the Sun, the opportunity to image both of its poles occurs only twice in that period. Hubble has been snapping pictures of the planet at different angles since the beginning of the mission in 1990, but 2009 brought a unique chance for Hubble to image Saturn with the rings edge-on and both poles in view. At the same time Saturn was approaching its equinox so both poles were equally illuminated by the Sun’s rays.

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These recent observations go well beyond just a still image and have allowed researchers to monitor the behavior of both Saturn’s poles in the same shot over a sustained period of time. The movie they created from the data, collected over several days during January and March 2009, has aided astronomers studying both Saturn’s northern and southern aurorae. Given the rarity of such an event, this new footage will likely be the last and best equinox movie that Hubble captures of our planetary neighbor.

Despite its remoteness, the Sun’s influence is still felt by Saturn. The Sun constantly emits particles that reach all the planets of the Solar System as the solar wind. When this electrically charged stream gets close to a planet with a magnetic field, like Saturn or the Earth, the field traps the particles, bouncing them back and forth between its two poles. A natural consequence of the shape of the planet’s magnetic field, a series of invisible “traffic lanes” exist between the two poles along which the electrically charged particles are confined as they oscillate between the poles. The magnetic field is stronger at the poles and the particles tend to concentrate there, where they interact with atoms in the upper layers of the atmosphere, creating aurorae, the familiar glow that the inhabitants of the Earth’s polar regions know as the northern and southern lights.

At first glance the light show of Saturn’s aurorae appears symmetric at the two poles. However, analysing the new data in greater detail, astronomers have discovered some subtle differences between the northern and southern aurorae, which reveal important information about Saturn’s magnetic field. The northern auroral oval is slightly smaller and more intense than the southern one, implying that Saturn’s magnetic field is not equally distributed across the planet; it is slightly uneven and stronger in the north than the south. As a result, the electrically charged particles in the north are accelerated to higher energies as they are fired toward the atmosphere than those in the south. This confirms a previous result obtained by the space probe Cassini, in orbit around the ringed planet since 2004.

Source:
ESA

Double Hubble Sequence Shows Galaxies Go Spiral

This image created from data taken from both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey demonstrates that the Hubble sequence six billion years ago was very different from the one that astronomers see today. Credit: NASA, ESA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, R. Delgado-Serrano and F. Hammer (Observatoire de Paris)

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Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes. But in the past, the various galaxy shapes used to be more diverse and “peculiar” than they are now. Over time, according to a new study, galaxies tend to become spirals. “Six billion years ago, there were many more peculiar galaxies than now — a very surprising result,” said Rodney Delgado-Serrano, lead author of a new paper. “This means that in the last six billion years, these peculiar galaxies must have become normal spirals, giving us a more dramatic picture of the recent Universe than we had before.”

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a team of astronomers created the first demographic census of galaxy types at two different points in the Universe’s history, putting together two Hubble sequences from different eras that help explain how galaxies form. The results showed that the Hubble sequence six billion years ago was very different from the one that astronomers see today.

The top image represents the current — or local — universe, and the bottom image represents the make up of the distant galaxies (six billion years ago), showing a much larger fraction of peculiar galaxies. In sampling 116 local galaxies and 148 distant galaxies, the researchers found that more than half of the present-day spiral galaxies had so-called peculiar shapes only 6 billion years ago.

Edwin Hubble invented the Hubble Sequence, sometimes called the Hubble tuning-fork diagram. The diagram divides galaxies into three 3 broad classes based on their basic shapes: spiral, barred spiral, and elliptical.

“Our aim was to find a scenario that would connect the current picture of the Universe with the morphologies of distant, older galaxies — to find the right fit for this puzzling view of galaxy evolution,” said François Hammer of the Observatoire de Paris who led the team of astronomers.

The astronomers think that these peculiar galaxies did indeed become spirals through collisions and merging. This is contrary to the widely held opinion that galaxy mergers result in the formation of elliptical galaxies, but Hammer and his team propose a “spiral rebuilding” hypothesis, which suggests that peculiar galaxies affected by gas-rich mergers are slowly reborn as giant spirals with discs and central bulges.

Crashes between galaxies give rise to enormous new galaxies and, although it was commonly believed that galaxy mergers decreased significantly eight billion years ago, the new result implies that mergers were still occurring frequently after that time — up to as recently as four billion years ago.

Link to higher resolution version of the top image.

Papers:
Hammer, et al.
Delgado-Serrano et al.

Source: Space Telescope Institute

Hubble Takes A Look at Possible Asteroid Collision

Hubble Views of Comet-like Asteroid P/2010 A2. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

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We reported earlier that on January 6, 2010, ground-based observatories may have spotted evidence of an asteroid collision in the asteroid belt. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken a look at the mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust. With Hubble’s sharp vision, astronomers believe a head-on collision between two asteroids has actually occured. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

“This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets,” said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.”

Asteroid collisions would likely have an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.
Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.

Close-up of Comet-like Asteroid P/2010 A2. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. As a comet nears the sun and warms up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.

This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.

“If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight,” Jewitt said.

The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.

“The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process,” Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.

The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught “in the act.”

At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

Source: HubbleSite

Latest from Hubble: Star Formation Fizzling Out in Nearby Galaxy

NGC 2976.. NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington, Seattle)

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Most galaxies are throughout the universe are happenin’ places, with all sorts of raucous star formation going on. But for a nearby, small spiral galaxy, the star-making party is almost over. In this latest Hubble release, astronomers were surprised to find that star-formation activities in the outer regions of NGC 2976 are fizzling out, and any celebrating is confined to a few die-hard partygoers huddled in the galaxy’s inner region.

The reason? Well, the star birth began when another party-crashing galaxy interacted with NGC 2976. But that happened long ago, and now star formation in the galaxy is fizzling out in the outer parts as some of the gas was stripped away and the rest collapsed toward the center. With no gas left to fuel the party, more and more regions of the galaxy are going to sleep.

“Astronomers thought that grazing encounters between galaxies can cause the funneling of gas into a galaxy’s core, but these Hubble observations provide the clearest view of this phenomenon,” explains astronomer Benjamin Williams of the University of Washington in Seattle, who directed the Hubble study, which is part of the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program. “We are catching this galaxy at a very interesting time. Another 500 million years and the party will be over.”

NGC 2976 does not look like a typical spiral galaxy. It has a star-forming disk, but no obvious spiral pattern. Its gas is centrally concentrated, but it does not have a central bulge of stars. The galaxy resides on the fringe of the M81 group of galaxies, located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

“The galaxy looks weird because an interaction with the M81 group about a billion years ago stripped some gas from the outer parts of the galaxy, forcing the rest of the gas to rush toward the galaxy’s center, where it is has little organized spiral structure,” Williams says.

The galaxy’s relatively close distance to Earth allowed Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to resolve hundreds of thousands of individual stars. What look like grains of sand in the image are actually individual stars. Studying the individual stars allowed astronomers to determine their color and brightness, which provided information about when they formed.

The image was taken over a period in late 2006 and early 2007.

“This type of observation is unique to Hubble,” Williams says. “If we had not been able to pick out individual stars, we would have known that the galaxy is weird, but we would not have dug up evidence for a significant gas rearrangement in the galaxy, which caused the stellar birth zone to shrink toward the galaxy’s center.”

Simulations predict that the same “gas-funneling” mechanism may trigger starbursts in the central regions of other dwarf galaxies that interact with larger neighbors. The trick to studying the effects of this process in detail, Williams says, is being able to resolve many individual stars in galaxies to create an accurate picture of their evolution.

Williams’ results will appear in the January 20, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: HubbleSite

Hubble Unveils Stunning Star Birth in M83

It appears Hubble’s new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is working. And how! The new camera installed during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83. Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp “eye” of WFC3 has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

M83 from ESO and Hubble. Credit for Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute), M. Dopita (Australian National University), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee
M83 from ESO and Hubble. Credit for Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute), M. Dopita (Australian National University), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

The image at right is Hubble’s close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy’s core, the bright whitish region at far right. An image of the entire galaxy, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Wide Field Imager on the ESO/MPG 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, is shown at left. The white box outlines Hubble’s view.

WFC3’s broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy’s star-formation history.

Now that’s the birth of a star!

See more views of M83 and a video at the HubbleSite

New Hubble Release: Dramatic Galaxy Collision

NGC 2623, or Arp 243, is about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (the Crab). Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Evans (Stony Brook University, New York & National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA)

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At first glance, this latest image release from Hubble appears to be one really bizarre-looking galaxy. But actually, this is a pair of spiral galaxies that resemble our own Milky Way smashing together at breakneck speeds. The centers have already merged into one nucleus, and the two tidal tails stretching out from the center are sparkling with active star formation, prompted by the exchange of mass and gases from the dramatic collision. This object, NGC 2623, or Arp 243, is about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (the Crab), and is in the late stages of the merging process.

The prominent lower tail is richly populated with bright star clusters — 100 of them have been found in these observations. The large star clusters that the team has observed in the merged galaxy are brighter than the brightest clusters we see in our own vicinity. These star clusters may have formed as part of a loop of stretched material associated with the northern tail, or they may have formed from debris falling back onto the nucleus. In addition to this active star-forming region, both galactic arms harbor very young stars in the early stages of their evolutionary journey.

Watch this video for more information on NGC 2623:

Some mergers (including NGC 2623) can result in an active galactic nucleus, where one of the supermassive black holes found at the centers of the two original galaxies is stirred into action. Matter is pulled toward the black hole, forming an accretion disc. The energy released by the frenzied motion heats up the disc, causing it to emit across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NGC 2623 is so bright in the infrared that it belongs to the group of very luminous infrared galaxies (LIRG) and has been extensively studied as the part of the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey (GOALS) project that combines data from Hubble, the Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). The combination of resources is helping astronomers characterize objects like active galactic nuclei and nuclear star formation by revealing what is unseen at visible wavelengths.

The data used for this color composite were actually taken in 2007 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard Hubble, but is just being released now, as a team of over 30 astronomers, led by Aaron S. Evans, recently published an overview paper, detailing the first results of the GOALS project. Observations from ESA’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) telescope contributed to the astronomers’ understanding of NGC 2623.

NGC 2623 paper
GOALS Overview paper
GOALS website

Source: European Hubble website