Friday, March 31, 2017

CDF-S Transient: Mysterious Cosmic Explosion Puzzles Astronomers

 
 CDF-S XT1
Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/Universidad Católica de Chile/F.Bauer et al.
 

 CDF-S Transient - Video 

Tour of CDF-S XT1
 
animation




Scientists have discovered a mysterious flash of X-rays using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, in the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, as reported in our latest press release. The X-ray source is located in a region of the sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), which is shown in the main panel of this graphic. Over the 17 years Chandra has been operating, the telescope has observed this field many times, resulting in a total exposure time of 7 million seconds, equal to two and a half months. In this CDF-S image, the colors represent different bands of X-ray energy, where red, green, and blue show the low, medium, and high-energy X-rays that Chandra can detect.

The mysterious source that scientists discovered, shown in the inset box, has remarkable properties. 

Prior to October 2014, this source was not detected in X-rays, but then it erupted and became at least a factor of 1,000 brighter in a few hours. After about a day, the source had faded completely below the sensitivity of Chandra.

Thousands of hours of legacy data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes helped determine that the event came from a faint, small galaxy about 10.7 billion light years from Earth. For a few minutes, the X-ray source produced a thousand times more energy than all the stars in this galaxy.

While scientists think this source likely comes from some sort of destructive event, its properties do not match any known phenomenon. This means this source may be of a variety that scientists have never seen before.

The researchers do, however, have some ideas of what this source could be. Two of the three main possibilities to explain the X-ray source invoke gamma-ray burst (GRB) events, which are jetted explosions triggered either by the collapse of a massive star or by the merger of a neutron star with another neutron star or a black hole. If the jet is pointing towards the Earth, a burst of gamma-rays is detected. As the jet expands, it loses energy and produces weaker, more isotropic radiation at X-ray and other wavelengths.

Possible explanations for the CDF-S X-ray source, according to the researchers, are a GRB that is not pointed toward Earth, or a GRB that lies beyond the small galaxy. A third possibility is that a medium-sized black hole shredded a white dwarf star.

Thousands of hours of legacy data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes helped determine that the event came from a faint, small galaxy about 10.7 billion light years from Earth. For a few minutes, the X-ray source produced a thousand times more energy than all the stars in this galaxy.

The mysterious X-ray source was not seen at any other time during the two and a half months of exposure time Chandra has observed the CDF-S region. Moreover, no similar events have yet been found in Chandra observations of other parts of the sky.

This X-ray source in the CDF-S has different properties from the as yet unexplained variable X-ray sources discovered in the elliptical galaxies NGC 5128 and NGC 4636 by Jimmy Irwin and collaborators. In particular, the CDF-S source is likely associated with the complete destruction of a neutron star or white dwarf, and is roughly 100,000 times more luminous in X-rays. It is also located in a much smaller and younger host galaxy, and is only detected during a single, several-hour burst.

Additional highly targeted searches through the Chandra archive and those of ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift satellite may uncover more examples of this type of variable object that have until now gone unnoticed. Future X-ray observations by Chandra and other X-ray telescopes may also reveal the same phenomenon from other objects.

A paper describing this result appears in the June 2017 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations. 

Fast Facts for CDF-S Transient:

Scale: Main Image is 16 arcmin across; Inset Image is 3.7 arcsec across
Category: Cosmology/Deep Fields/X-ray Background, Black Holes
Coordinates (J2000): RA 03h 32m 39s | Dec -27° 51' 34"
Constellation: Fornax
Observation Date: Inset Image: October 2, 2014
Observation Time: Inset Image: 26 hours 7 minutes.
Obs. ID: Inset Image: 16454
Instrument: ACIS
References: Bauer, F. et al., 2017, MNRAS (in press); arXiv:1702.04422
Color Code: Inset Image: X-ray (Blue)
Distance Estimate: About 10.7 billion light years



The NGC and its modern counterpart

LEDA 213994, NGC 4424
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA


Some astronomical objects have endearing or quirky nicknames, inspired by mythology or their own appearance. Take, for example, the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), the Sombrero Galaxy, the Horsehead Nebula, or even the Milky Way. However, the vast majority of cosmic objects appear in astronomical catalogues, and are given rather less poetic names based on the order of their discovery.

Two galaxies are clearly visible in this Hubble image, the larger of which is NGC 4424. This galaxy is catalogued in the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and lusters of Stars (NGC), which was compiled in 1888. The NGC is one of the largest astronomical catalogues, which is why so many Hubble Pictures of the Week feature NGC objects. In total there are 7840 entries in the catalogue and they are also generally the larger, brighter, and more eye-catching objects in the night sky, and hence the ones more easily spotted by early stargazers.

The smaller, flatter, bright galaxy sitting just below NGC 4424 is named LEDA 213994. The Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA) is far more modern than the NGC. Created in 1983 at the Lyon Observatory it contains millions of objects. However, many NGC objects still go by their initial names simply because they were christened within the NGC first. No astronomer can resist a good acronym, and “LEDA” is more appealing than “the LMED”, perhaps thanks to the old astronomical affinity with mythology when it comes to naming things: Leda was a princess in Ancient Greek mythology.



Thursday, March 30, 2017

Stars Born in Winds from Supermassive Black Holes ESO’s VLT spots brand-new type of star formation

Artist’s impression of stars born in winds from supermassive black holes

Videos
ESOcast 101 Light: Stars found in black hole blasts
Artist’s impression of stars born in winds from supermassive black holes



ESO’s VLT spots brand-new type of star formation

Observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed stars forming within powerful outflows of material blasted out from supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. These are the first confirmed observations of stars forming in this kind of extreme environment. The discovery has many consequences for understanding galaxy properties and evolution. The results are published in the journal Nature.

A UK-led group of European astronomers used the MUSE and X-shooter instruments on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile to study an ongoing collision between two galaxies, known collectively as IRAS F23128-5919, that lie around 600 million light-years from Earth. The group observed the colossal winds of material — or outflows — that originate near the supermassive black hole at the heart of the pair’s southern galaxy, and have found the first clear evidence that stars are being born within them [1].

Such galactic outflows are driven by the huge energy output from the active and turbulent centres of galaxies. Supermassive black holes lurk in the cores of most galaxies, and when they gobble up matter they also heat the surrounding gas and expel it from the host galaxy in powerful, dense winds [2].

Astronomers have thought for a while that conditions within these outflows could be right for star formation, but no one has seen it actually happening as it’s a very difficult observation,” comments team leader Roberto Maiolino from the University of Cambridge. “Our results are exciting because they show unambiguously that stars are being created inside these outflows.”

The group set out to study stars in the outflow directly, as well as the gas that surrounds them. By using two of the world-leading VLT spectroscopic instruments, MUSE and X-shooter, they could carry out a very detailed study of the properties of the emitted light to determine its source.

Radiation from young stars is known to cause nearby gas clouds to glow in a particular way. The extreme sensitivity of X-shooter allowed the team to rule out other possible causes of this illumination, including gas shocks or the active nucleus of the galaxy.

The group then made an unmistakable direct detection of an infant stellar population in the outflow [3]. These stars are thought to be less than a few tens of millions of years old, and preliminary analysis suggests that they are hotter and brighter than stars formed in less extreme environments such as the galactic disc.

As further evidence, the astronomers also determined the motion and velocity of these stars. The light from most of the region’s stars indicates that they are travelling at very large velocities away from the galaxy centre — as would make sense for objects caught in a stream of fast-moving material.

Co-author Helen Russell (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK) expands: “The stars that form in the wind close to the galaxy centre might slow down and even start heading back inwards, but the stars that form further out in the flow experience less deceleration and can even fly off out of the galaxy altogether.

The discovery provides new and exciting information that could better our understanding of some astrophysics, including how certain galaxies obtain their shapes [4]; how intergalactic space becomes enriched with heavy elements [5]; and even from where unexplained cosmic infrared background radiation may arise [6].

Maiolino is excited for the future: “If star formation is really occurring in most galactic outflows, as some theories predict, then this would provide a completely new scenario for our understanding of galaxy evolution.


More Information

This research was presented in a paper entitled “Star formation in a galactic outflow” by Maiolino et al., to appear in the journal Nature on 27 March 2017.

The team is composed of R. Maiolino (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), H.R. Russell (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK), A.C. Fabian (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK), S. Carniani (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), R. Gallagher (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), S. Cazzoli (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), S. Arribas (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), F. Belfiore ((Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), E. Bellocchi (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), L. Colina  (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), G. Cresci (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), W. Ishibashi (Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland), A. Marconi (Università di Firenze, Italy; Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), F. Mannucci (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), E. Oliva (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), and E. Sturm (Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany).

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.



Links



Contacts

Roberto Maiolino
Cavendish Laboratory, Kavli Institute for Cosmology
University of Cambridge, UK

Email: r.maiolino@mrao.cam.ac.uk

Richard Hook
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email:
rhook@eso.org

Source: ESO

β Pictoris b: An Exoplanet With the Atmosphere of a Brown Dwarf

Using advanced imaging techniques and the special capabilities of the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) the light from β Pictoris has been suppressed in these images using GPI’s Y, J, H, K1 and K2 filters. The arrow indicates the location of the exoplanet β Pictoris b in all but the left image.


Using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a team of astronomers led by J. Chilcote (University of Toronto) found that the low mass stellar companion β Pictoris b is about 13 times more massive than Jupiter with a surface temperature of about 1720 K. While these parameters are in good agreement with earlier observations, they allow better comparisons with planetary evolution models. The Gemini data indicate that β Pictoris b best matches an exoplanet with an atmosphere like that of a low-surface gravity (L21) brown dwarf. 

Observations at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), are refining our understanding of the β Pictoris system. The system contains the ~ 13 Jupiter mass companion β Pictoris b which is at the mass boundary sometimes used to distinguish between an exoplanet and a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are objects that are not massive enough for sustained nuclear reactions. Brown dwarfs less massive than 13 Jupiters cannot even start a nuclear reaction.

Based on the GPI data, combined with planetary evolution and atmospheric models, Chilcote suggests a “hot-start” planet formation scenario for β Pictoris b. He adds, “This is consistent with the disk instability formation mechanism for wide-orbit giant exoplanets.” However, the characteristics for the atmosphere of β Pictoris b found in this work best match those of low-surface gravity brown dwarfs, not planets. 

The team studied β Pictoris b during the verification and commissioning of the Gemini Planet Imager and as part of an astrometric (position) monitoring program designed to constrain the orbit of the exoplanet. This work is also part of a Gemini Large and Long Program. 

“With GPI the Gemini Observatory is at the forefront of exoplanet exploration,” said Chilcote. He adds, “Direct imaging allows for the discovery of planets on solar systems-scale orbits, provides new insight into the formation and characteristics of extrasolar systems, and enable direct spectroscopic observations of their atmospheres.” 

Since the first detection of an exoplanet in 1995 (51 Pegasi b) the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets has changed the understanding of planetary systems and their formation. Over the past two decades, more than 3400 of planetary systems with stars of various masses and at different stages of evolution have been detected. Some of these planetary systems present features very similar to our solar system. The current challenge for astronomers is to better characterize these planets, especially the exoplanet atmospheres which can give us information about the history of formation of the planets.

The full results are accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. A preprint is available here

Abstract:
 
Using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) located at Gemini South, we measured the near-infrared (1.0– 2.4 µm) spectrum of the planetary companion to the nearby, young star β Pictoris. We compare the spectrum obtained with currently published model grids and with known substellar objects and present the best matching models as well as the best matching observed objects. Comparing the empirical measurement of the bolometric luminosity to evolutionary models, we find a mass of 12.9 ± 0.2MJup, an effective temperature of 1724 ± 15 K, a radius of 1.46 ± 0.01 RJup, and a surface gravity of log g = 4.18 ± 0.01 [dex] (cgs). The stated uncertainties are statistical errors only, and do not incorporate any uncertainty on the evolutionary models. Using atmospheric models, we find an effective temperature of 1700 − 1800 K and a surface gravity of log g = 3.5–4.0 [dex] depending upon model. These values agree well with other publications and with “hot-start” predictions from planetary evolution models. Further, we find that the spectrum of β Pic b best matches a low-surface gravity L2 ± 1 brown dwarf. Finally comparing the spectrum to field brown dwarfs we find the the spectrum best matches 2MASS J04062677–381210 and 2MASS J03552337+1133437.


Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Subaru Telescope Detects the Shadow of a Gas Cloud in an Ancient Proto-supercluster

A team led by researchers from Osaka Sangyo University, with members from Tohoku University, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and others, has used the Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope to create the most-extensive map of neutral hydrogen gas in the early universe (Figure 1). This cloud appears widely spread out across 160 million light-years in and around a structure called the proto-supercluster. It is the largest structure in the distant universe, and existed some 11.5 billion years ago. Such a huge gas cloud is extremely valuable for studying large-scale structure formation and the evolution of galaxies from gas in the early universe, and merits further investigation.

Figure 1: The distribution of galaxies in the proto-supercluster region 11.5 billion years ago (top left), and the Subaru Telescope Suprime-Cam image used in this work (right, larger image). Neutral hydrogen gas distribution is superposed on the Subaru image. The red color indicates denser regions of the neutral hydrogen gas. Cyan squares correspond to member galaxies in the proto-supercluster, while objects without cyan squares are foreground galaxies and stars. The distribution of neutral hydrogen gas does not align perfectly with the galaxies. (Credit: Osaka Sangyo University/NAOJ)


"We are surprised because the dense gas structure is extended much more than expected in the proto-supercluster," said Dr. Mawatari. "Wider field observations with narrow-band filters are needed to grasp full picture of this largest structure in the young Universe. This is exactly the type of strong research that can be done with Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) recently mounted at the Subaru Telescope. We intend to study the gas – galaxy relation in various proto-superclusters using the HSC."

Understanding Matter Distribution in the Universe

Stars assembled to form galaxies, and galaxies are clustered to form larger structures such as clusters or superclusters. Matter in the current universe is structured in a hierarchical manner on scales of ~ 100 million light-years. However, we cannot observe inhomogeneous structure in any direction or distance over scales larger than that. One important issue in modern astronomy is to clarify how perfectly the large-scale uniformity and homogeneity in matter distribution is maintained. In addition, astronomers seek to investigate the properties of the seeds of large-scale structures (i.e., the initial matter fluctuations) that existed at the beginning of the universe. Thus, it is important to observe huge structures at various epochs (which translates to distances). The study of gaseous matter as well as galaxies is needed for an accurate and comprehensive understanding. This is because local superclusters are known to be rich in gas. Furthermore, it is clear that there are many newborn galaxies in ancient (or distant) clusters. A detailed comparison between the spatial distributions of galaxies and gas during the early epochs of the universe is very important to understand process of galaxy formation from the dim (low light-emitting) clumps of gas in the early universe.

In order to investigate early, dim gas clouds, astronomers take advantage of the fact that light from bright distant objects gets dimmed by foreground gas (giving an effect like a "shadow picture"). Since neutral hydrogen in the gas cloud absorbs and dims light from background objects at a certain wavelength, we can see characteristic absorption feature in the spectrum of the background object. In many previous observations, researchers used quasars (which are very bright and distant) as background light sources. Because bright quasars are very rare, opportunities for such observations are limited. This allows astronomers to get information about the gas that lies only along the line of sight between a single QSO and Earth in a wide survey area. It has long been the goal to obtain "multi-dimensional" information of gas (e.g., spatially resolve the gas clouds) rather than the "one-dimensional" view currently available. This requires a new approach.

Expanding the View

To widen their view of these objects in the early universe, Dr. Ken Mawatari at Osaka Sangyo University and his colleagues recently developed a scheme to analyze the spatial distribution of the neutral hydrogen gas using imaging data of galaxies of the distant epoch (Figure 2). There are two major advantages to this approach. First, instead of rare quasars, the team uses numerous normal galaxies as background light sources to investigate gas distribution at various places in the search area. Second, they use imaging data taken with the narrow-band filter on Suprime-cam. It is fine-tuned so that light with certain wavelengths can be transmitted, to capture evidence of absorption by the neutral hydrogen gas (the shadow picture effect). Compared with the traditional scheme of observations based on spectroscopy of quasars, this new method enables Mawatari and his collaborators to obtain wide-area gas distribution information relatively quickly.

The researchers applied their scheme to the Subaru Telescope Suprime-Cam imaging data taken in their previous large survey of galaxies. The fields investigated in this work include the SSA22 field, an ancestor of a supercluster of galaxies (proto-supercluster), where young galaxies are formed actively, in the universe 11.5 billion years ago in the early universe.

Figure 2: Schematic pictures of an analysis scheme of previous work (left) and a new method (right). In the previous approach, basically a single background light source (quasar) can be used in a searched area. On the other hand, with the new scheme, it is easier to spatially resolve the neutral hydrogen gas density by using many normal galaxies in a searched area as background light sources. In the new scheme, absorption strength by the neutral hydrogen gas is estimated by measuring how much flux of the background galaxies becomes dimmed in the narrow-band image, not by using spectrum. By combining this scheme with the wide-area imaging ability of the Subaru Telescope, Mawatari, et al. made the most-extensive map of neutral hydrogen gas ever created. (Credit: Osaka Sangyo University/NAOJ)

New Maps of Neutral Hydrogen Distribution

The researchers' work resulted in very wide-area maps of the neutral hydrogen gas in the three fields studied (Figure 3). It appears that the neutral hydrogen gas absorption is significantly strong over the entire SSA22 proto-supercluster field compared with those in the normal fields (SXDS and GOODS-N). It is clearly confirmed that the proto-supercluster environment is rich in neutral hydrogen gas, which is the major building block of galaxies.

Figure 3: Sky distribution of the neutral hydrogen gas in the three fields studied in this work. While in the normal fields (SXDS and GOODS-N) the neutral hydrogen gas density is consistent with the average density in the entire universe at 11.5 billion years ago, the neutral hydrogen gas density is higher than the average over the entire SSA22 proto-supercluster field. Contours correspond to the galaxies' number density. Bold, solid thin, and dashed contours mean the average, high density, and low density regions, respectively. (Credit: Osaka Sangyo University/NAOJ)


The team's work also revealed that gas distribution in the proto-supercluster region does not align with the galaxies' distribution perfectly (see Figure 1 and Figure 3). While the proto-supercluster is rich in both galaxies and gas, there is no local-scale dependency of gas amount correlated with the density of galaxies inside the proto-supercluster. This result may mean that the neutral hydrogen gas not only is associated with the individual galaxies but also spreads out diffusely across intergalactic space only within the proto-supercluster. Since the neutral hydrogen gas excess in the SSA22 field is detected over the entire searched area, this overdense gas structure is actually extended more than 160 million light-years. In the traditional view of structure formation, matter density fluctuation is thought to be smaller and large-scale high-density structure was rarer in the early universe. The discovery that a gas structure that extends across more than 160 million light-years (which is roughly same as present-day superclusters in scale) already existed in the universe 11.5 billion years ago is a surprising result of this study.

By investigating spatial distribution of the neutral hydrogen gas in a very large area, the researchers have provided a new window on the relation between gas and galaxies in the young universe. The SSA22 huge gas structure revealed by this work is considered a key object to test the standard theory of structure formation, and so further investigation is anticipated.

This research will be published in the journal of the British Royal Astronomical Society (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, publisher Oxford University Press) in its June, 2017 issue of the printed version (Mawatari et al. 2017, MNRAS, 467, 3951, "Imaging of diffuse HI absorption structure in the SSA22 protocluster region at z = 3.1"). This work is supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid JP26287034 and JP16H06713.




Tuesday, March 28, 2017

NuSTAR Probes Puzzling Galaxy Merger

This optical image shows the Was 49 system, which consists of a large disk galaxy, Was 49a, merging with a much smaller "dwarf" galaxy Was 49b. Image credit: DCT/NRL.  › Full image and caption


A supermassive black hole inside a tiny galaxy is challenging scientists' ideas about what happens when two galaxies become one.

Was 49 is the name of a system consisting of a large disk galaxy, referred to as Was 49a, merging with a much smaller "dwarf" galaxy called Was 49b. The dwarf galaxy rotates within the larger galaxy's disk, about 26,000 light-years from its center. Thanks to NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, scientists have discovered that the dwarf galaxy is so luminous in high-energy X-rays, it must host a supermassive black hole much larger and more powerful than expected.

"This is a completely unique system and runs contrary to what we understand of galaxy mergers," said Nathan Secrest, lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Data from NuSTAR and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey suggest that the mass of the dwarf galaxy's black hole is huge, compared to similarly sized galaxies, at more than 2 percent of the galaxy's own mass.

"We didn't think that dwarf galaxies hosted supermassive black holes this big," Secrest said. "This black hole could be hundreds of times more massive than what we would expect for a galaxy of this size, depending on how the galaxy evolved in relation to other galaxies."

The dwarf galaxy's black hole is the engine of an active galactic nucleus (AGN), a cosmic phenomenon in which extremely high-energy radiation bursts forth as a black hole devours gas and dust. This particular AGN appears to be covered by a donut-shaped structure made of gas and dust. NASA's Chandra and Swift missions were used to further characterize the X-ray emission.

Normally, when two galaxies start to merge, the larger galaxy's central black hole becomes active, voraciously gobbling gas and dust, and spewing out high-energy X-rays as matter gets converted into energy. That is because, as galaxies approach each other, their gravitational interactions create a torque that funnels gas into the larger galaxy's central black hole. But in this case, the smaller galaxy hosts a more luminous AGN with a more active supermassive black hole, and the larger galaxy's central black hole is relatively quiet.

An optical image of the Was 49 system, compiled using observations from the Discovery Channel Telescope in Happy Jack, Arizona, uses the same color filters as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Since Was 49 is so far away, these colors are optimized to separate highly-ionized gas emission, such as the pink-colored region around the feeding supermassive black hole, from normal starlight, shown in green. This allowed astronomers to more accurately determine the size of the dwarf galaxy that hosts the supermassive black hole.

The pink-colored emission stands out in a new image because of the intense ionizing radiation emanating from the powerful AGN. Buried within this region of intense ionization is a faint collection of stars, believed to be part of the galaxy surrounding the enormous black hole. These striking features lie on the outskirts of the much larger spiral galaxy Was 49a, which appears greenish in the image due to the distance to the galaxy and the optical filters used.

Scientists are still trying to figure out why the supermassive black hole of dwarf galaxy Was 49b is so big. It may have already been large before the merger began, or it may have grown during the very early phase of the merger.

"This study is important because it may give new insight into how supermassive black holes form and grow in such systems," Secrest said. "By examining systems like this, we may find clues as to how our own galaxy's supermassive black hole formed."

In several hundred million years, the black holes of the large and small galaxies will merge into one enormous beast.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center. ASI provides the mission's ground station and a mirror archive. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

For more information on NuSTAR, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar - http://www.nustar.caltech.edu

News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425

elizabeth.landau@jpl.nasa.gov


Monday, March 27, 2017

First evidence of rocky planet formation in Tatooine system

A disc of rocky debris from a disrupted planetesimal surrounds white dwarf plus brown dwarf binary star. The white dwarf is the burned-out core of a star that was probably similar to the Sun, the brown dwarf is only ~60 times heavier than Jupiter, and the two stars go around each other in only a bit over two hours. Credit: Mark Garlick, UCL, University of Warwick and University of Sheffield.  Full resolution JPEG
 

Using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South, a team led by Jay Farihi (University College London) found, for the first time, a dust and debris disk surrounding a binary star with a white dwarf as a substellar companion. To date, almost all of the known planetary systems which include a white dwarf are single stars. Using GMOS spectra Farihi et al. identified critical metal features in the spectrum as well as the higher Balmer lines. From the Gemini data the team estimated a surface temperature of 21,800 Kelvin (about 3.5 times hotter than the Sun) and a mass of ~0.4 solar masses for the white dwarf star and a mass of ~0.063 solar masses for the companion. 

The research is published in the February 27th online issue of Nature Astronomy.

The following text is provided verbatim from the University College London press release



Evidence of planetary debris surrounding a double sun, ‘Tatooine-like’ system has been found for the first time by a UCL-led team of researchers.

Published today in Nature Astronomy and funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Research Council, the study finds the remains of shattered asteroids orbiting a double sun consisting of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf roughly 1000 light-years away in a system called SDSS 1557.

The discovery is remarkable because the debris appears to be rocky and suggests that terrestrial planets like Tatooine – Luke Skywalker’s home world in Star Wars – might exist in the system. To date, all exoplanets discovered in orbit around double stars are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and are thought to form in the icy regions of their systems.

In contrast to the carbon-rich icy material found in other double star systems, the planetary material identified in the SDSS 1557 system has a high metal content, including silicon and magnesium. These elements were identified as the debris flowed from its orbit onto the surface of the star, polluting it temporarily with at least 1017 g (or 1.1 trillion US tons) of matter, equating it to an asteroid at least 4 km in size.

Lead author, Dr Jay Farihi (UCL Physics & Astronomy), said: “Building rocky planets around two suns is a challenge because the gravity of both stars can push and pull tremendously, preventing bits of rock and dust from sticking together and growing into full-fledged planets. With the discovery of asteroid debris in the SDSS 1557 system, we see clear signatures of rocky planet assembly via large asteroids that formed, helping us understand how rocky exoplanets are made in double star systems."

In the Solar System, the asteroid belt contains the leftover building blocks for the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, so planetary scientists study the asteroids to gain a better understanding of how rocky, and potentially habitable planets are formed. The same approach was used by the team to study the SDSS 1557 system as any planets within it cannot yet be detected directly but the debris is spread in a large belt around the double stars, which is a much larger target for analysis.

The discovery came as a complete surprise, as the team assumed the dusty white dwarf was a single star but co-author Dr Steven Parsons (University of Valparaíso and University of Sheffield), an expert in double star (or binary) systems noticed the tell-tale signs. "We know of thousands of binaries similar to SDSS 1557 but this is the first time we've seen asteroid debris and pollution. The brown dwarf was effectively hidden by the dust until we looked with the right instrument", added Parsons, "but when we observed SDSS 1557 in detail we recognised the brown dwarf's subtle gravitational pull on the white dwarf."

The team studied the binary system and the chemical composition of the debris by measuring the absorption of different wavelengths of light or ‘spectra’, using the Gemini Observatory South telescope and the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope, both located in Chile. 

Co-author Professor Boris Gänsicke (University of Warwick) analysed these data and found they all told a consistent and compelling story. "Any metals we see in the white dwarf will disappear within a few weeks, and sink down into the interior, unless the debris is continuously flowing onto the star. We'll be looking at SDSS 1557 next with Hubble, to conclusively show the dust is made of rock rather than ice."


Notes to Editors
 
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact Dr Rebecca Caygill, UCL press office. T: +44 (0)20 3108 3846 / +44 (0)7733 307 596, E: r.caygill@ucl.ac.uk

J. Farihi, S. G. Parsons, B. T. Gansicke, ‘A circumbinary debris disk in a polluted white dwarf system’ will be published by Nature Astronomy at 1600 London time / 1100 US Eastern Time on 27 February 2017 and is under a strict embargo until then. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-016-0032.

About UCL (University College London)
 
UCL was founded in 1826. We were the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to open up university education to those previously excluded from it, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world's top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has over 38,000 students from 150 countries and over 12,000 staff. Our annual income is more than £1 billion.

www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow us on Twitter @uclnews | Watch our YouTube channel  YouTube.com/UCLTV
 
About the University of Warwick
 
The University of Warwick is consistently ranked in the top 10 universities in the UK and top 100 in the world. It is one of the UK's leading universities, with an acknowledged reputation for excellence in research, teaching and innovation, alongside pioneering links with business and industry.

About the University of Sheffield
 
With almost 27,000 of the brightest students from over 140 countries, learning alongside over 1,200 of the best academics from across the globe, the University of Sheffield is one of the world’s leading universities.

A member of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group of leading research-led institutions, Sheffield offers world-class teaching and research excellence across a wide range of disciplines.

Unified by the power of discovery and understanding, staff and students at the university are committed to finding new ways to transform the world we live in.

Sheffield is the only university to feature in The Sunday Times 100 Best Not-For-Profit Organisations to Work For 2016 and was voted number one university in the UK for Student Satisfaction by Times Higher Education in 2014. In the last decade it has won four Queen’s Anniversary Prizes in recognition of the outstanding contribution to the United Kingdom’s intellectual, economic, cultural and social life.

Sheffield has six Nobel Prize winners among former staff and students and its alumni go on to hold positions of great responsibility and influence all over the world, making significant contributions in their chosen fields.

Global research partners and clients include Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Glaxo SmithKline, Siemens and Airbus, as well as many UK and overseas government agencies and charitable foundations.

About the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
 
The Science and Technology Facilities Council is keeping the UK at the forefront of international science and tackling some of the most significant challenges facing society such as meeting our future energy needs, monitoring and understanding climate change, and global security. The Council has a broad science portfolio including supporting UK work in space and ground-based astronomy technologies and research. http://www.stfc.ac.uk/


Sunday, March 26, 2017

With Astronomy Rewind, Citizen Scientists Will Bring Zombie Astrophotos Back to Life

At left is a photograph of the Orion Nebula from page 396 of the June 1905 Astrophysical Journal -- without coordinate labels to fix its celestial position and orientation. Astrometry.net was able to recognize the star pattern, after which the image was rotated more than 180° to put north up and placed in context on the sky in WorldWide Telescope. Credits: American Astronomical Society, NASA/SAO Astrophysics Data System & WorldWide Telescope. Low Resolution (jpg)

"There's no telling what discoveries await," says Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, CfA), one of the project's founders. "Turning historical scientific literature into searchable, retrievable data is like turning the key to a treasure chest."

Astronomy Rewind is the latest citizen-science program on the Zooniverse platform, which debuted at Oxford University a decade ago with Galaxy Zoo and now hosts more than 50 active "people-powered" projects across a variety of scientific disciplines. After going through a short exercise to learn what they're looking for, users will view scanned pages from the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) dating from the 19th century to the mid-1990s, when the Society began publishing electronically. Volunteers' first task will be to determine what types of images the pages contain: photos of celestial objects with (or without) sky coordinates? maps of planetary surfaces with (or without) grids of latitude and longitude? graphs or other types of diagrams?

The images of most interest are ones whose scale, orientation, and sky position can be nailed down by some combination of labels on or around the images plus details provided in the text or captions. Pictures that lack such information but clearly show recognizable stars, galaxies, or other celestial objects will be sent to Astrometry.net, an automated online service that compares astrophotos to star catalogs to determine what areas of sky they show.

Modern electronic astronomical images often include information about where they fit on the sky, along with which telescope and camera were used and many other details. But such "metadata" are useful to researchers only if the original image files are published along with the journal articles in which they’re analyzed and interpreted. This isn’t always the case -- though it's becoming more common with encouragement by the AAS -- so some electronic journal pages will eventually be run through Astronomy Rewind and Astrometry.net too.

Thanks to these human-assisted and automated efforts, many thousands of "new old" images will ultimately end up in NASA's and others' data repositories alongside pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. They will also be incorporated into the Astronomy Image Explorer, a service of the AAS and its journal-publishing partner, the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing, and viewable in WorldWide Telescope, a powerful data-visualization tool and digital sky atlas originally developed by Microsoft Research and now managed by the AAS.

The scans of pages from the AAS journals -- the Astronomical Journal (AJ), Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), ApJ Letters, and the ApJ Supplement Series -- are being provided by the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a NASA-funded bibliographic service and archive at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), part of the CfA.

Astronomy Rewind is built on a foundation laid by the ADS All-Sky Survey, an earlier effort to extract scientifically valuable images from old astronomy papers using computers. "It turns out that machines aren’t very good at recognizing celestial images on digitized pages that contain a mixture of text and graphics," says Alberto Accomazzi (SAO/ADS). "And they really get confused with multiple images of the sky on the same page. Humans do much better."

Accomazzi's CfA colleague Goodman, who runs a collaboration called Seamless Astronomy to develop, refine, and share tools that accelerate the pace of astronomical research, helped bring ADS and Zooniverse together. According to Zooniverse co-investigator Laura Trouille (Adler Planetarium), 1.6 million volunteers have made about 4 billion image classifications or other contributions using the platform over the last 10 years. "This isn't just busywork," says Trouille. "Zooniverse projects have led to many surprising discoveries and to more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications."

If Astronomy Rewind attracts volunteers in numbers comparable to other astronomy projects on Zooniverse, Trouille estimates that at least 1,000 journal pages will be processed daily. Each page will be examined by five different citizen scientists; the more of them agree on what a given page shows, the higher the confidence that they're right. It shouldn't take more than a few months to get through the initial batch of pages from the AAS journals and move most of them on to the next stage, where the celestial scenes they contain will be annotated with essential information, extracted into digital images, mapped onto the sky, and made available to anyone who wants access to them.

"You simply couldn't do a project like this in any reasonable amount of time without 'crowdsourcing,'" says Julie Steffen, AAS Director of Publishing. "Astronomy Rewind will breathe new life into old journal articles and put long-lost images of the night sky back into circulation, and that's exciting. But what's more exciting is what happens when a volunteer on Zooniverse looks at one of our journal pages and goes, 'Hmm, that’s odd!' That'll be the first step toward learning something new about the universe."

This video provides a quick demonstration of the value of placing "antique" astronomy images back on the sky in WorldWide Telescope through the project called Astronomy Rewind.

Astronomy Rewind and its partners and precursors have received funding from NASA's Astrophysics Data Analysis Program, Microsoft Research, Astrometry.net, Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), IOP Publishing, and the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

The American Astronomical Society (AAS), established in 1899, is the major organization of professional astronomers in North America. The membership (approx. 8,000) also includes physicists, mathematicians, geologists, engineers, and others whose research interests lie within the broad spectrum of subjects now comprising contemporary astronomy. The mission of the American Astronomical Society is to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe, which it achieves through publishing, meeting organization, education and outreach, and training and professional development.

IOP Publishing provides publications through which leading-edge scientific research is distributed worldwide. Beyond IOP’s core journals program of more than 70 publications, high-value scientific information is made easily accessible through an ever-evolving portfolio of community websites, magazines, open-access conference proceedings, and a multitude of electronic services. The company is focused on making the most of new technologies and continually improving electronic interfaces to make it easier for researchers to find exactly what they need, when they need it, in the format that suits them best. IOP Publishing is part of the Institute of Physics (IOP), a leading scientific society with more than 50,000 international members. The Institute aims to advance physics for the benefit of all by working to advance physics research, application, and education; and engaging with policymakers and the public to develop awareness and understanding of physics. Any financial surplus earned by IOP Publishing goes to support science through the activities of the Institute.

Zooniverse is the world's largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers -- hundreds of thousands of people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Its goal is to enable research that would not otherwise be possible or practical. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many refereed publications.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.


For more information, contact:

Rick Fienberg / Julie Steffen
AAS Press Officer / AAS Director of Publishing
+1 202-328-2010 x116 / +1 202-328-2010 x125

rick.fienberg@aas.org / julie.steffen@aas.org

Rob Bernstein
Publisher, IOP Publishing
+1 202-747-1807

rob.bernstein@iop.org

Megan Watzke / Peter Edmonds
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
+1 617-496-7998 / +1 617-571-7279

mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu / pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Alyssa Goodman
Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Science

agoodman@cfa.harvard.edu

Laura Trouille
Director of Citizen Science, Adler Planetarium
Co-Investigator, Zooniverse
+1 312-322-0820

trouille@zooniverse.org


Saturday, March 25, 2017

Andromeda's Bright X-Ray Mystery Solved by NuSTAR

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscope Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has identified a candidate pulsar in Andromeda -- the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way. This likely pulsar is brighter at high energies than the Andromeda galaxy's entire black hole population. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/JHU .  › Full image and caption


The Milky Way's close neighbor, Andromeda, features a dominant source of high-energy X-ray emission, but its identity was mysterious until now. As reported in a new study, NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission has pinpointed an object responsible for this high-energy radiation. 

The object, called Swift J0042.6+4112, is a possible pulsar, the dense remnant of a dead star that is highly magnetized and spinning, researchers say. This interpretation is based on its emission in high-energy X-rays, which NuSTAR is uniquely capable of measuring. The object's spectrum is very similar to known pulsars in the Milky Way.

It is likely in a binary system, in which material from a stellar companion gets pulled onto the pulsar, spewing high-energy radiation as the material heats up. 

"We didn't know what it was until we looked at it with NuSTAR," said Mihoko Yukita, lead author of a study about the object, based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

This candidate pulsar is shown as a blue dot in a NuSTAR X-ray image of Andromeda (also called M31), where the color blue is chosen to represent the highest-energy X-rays. It appears brighter in high-energy X-rays than anything else in the galaxy. 

The study brings together many different observations of the object from various spacecraft. In 2013, NASA's Swift satellite reported it as a high-energy source, but its classification was unknown, as there are many objects emitting low energy X-rays in the region. The lower-energy X-ray emission from the object turns out to be a source first identified in the 1970s by NASA's Einstein Observatory. 
Other spacecraft, such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton had also detected it. However, it wasn't until the new study by NuSTAR, aided by supporting Swift satellite data, that researchers realized it was the same object as this likely pulsar that dominates the high energy X-ray light of Andromeda.

Traditionally, astronomers have thought that actively feeding black holes, which are more massive than pulsars, usually dominate the high-energy X-ray light in galaxies. As gas spirals closer and closer to the black hole in a structure called an accretion disk, this material gets heated to extremely high temperatures and gives off high-energy radiation. This pulsar, which has a lower mass than any of Andromeda's black holes, is brighter at high energies than the galaxy's entire black hole population.

Even the supermassive black hole in the center of Andromeda does not have significant high-energy X-ray emission associated with it. It is unexpected that a single pulsar would instead be dominating the galaxy in high-energy X-ray light.

"NuSTAR has made us realize the general importance of pulsar systems as X-ray-emitting components of galaxies, and the possibility that the high energy X-ray light of Andromeda is dominated by a single pulsar system only adds to this emerging picture," said Ann Hornschemeier, co-author of the study and based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
Andromeda is a spiral galaxy slightly larger than the Milky Way. It resides 2.5 million light-years from our own galaxy, which is considered very close, given the broader scale of the universe. Stargazers can see Andromeda without a telescope on dark, clear nights. 

"Since we can't get outside our galaxy and study it in an unbiased way, Andromeda is the closest thing we have to looking in a mirror," Hornschemeier said.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center. ASI provides the mission's ground station and a mirror archive. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

For more information on NuSTAR, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar - http://www.nustar.caltech.edu


News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425

elizabeth.landau@jpl.nasa.gov

Source: JPL-Caltech

Friday, March 24, 2017

Hubble detects supermassive black hole kicked out of galactic core

Galaxy with an ejected supermassive black hole

Gravitational waves eject black hole from galaxy



Astronomers suspect gravitational waves

An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the centre of the distant galaxy 3C186. The black hole was most likely ejected by the power of gravitational waves. This is the first time that astronomers found a supermassive black hole at such a large distance from its host galaxy centre.

Though several other suspected runaway black holes have been seen elsewhere, none has so far been confirmed. Now astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected a supermassive black hole, with a mass of one billion times the Sun’s, being kicked out of its parent galaxy. “We estimate that it took the equivalent energy of 100 million supernovae exploding simultaneously to jettison the black hole,” describes Stefano Bianchi, co-author of the study, from the Roma Tre University, Italy.

The images taken by Hubble provided the first clue that the galaxy, named 3C186, was unusual. The images of the galaxy, located 8 billion light-years away, revealed a bright quasar, the energetic signature of an active black hole, located far from the galactic core. “Black holes reside in the centres of galaxies, so it’s unusual to see a quasar not in the centre,” recalls team leader Marco Chiaberge, ESA-AURA researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, USA.

The team calculated that the black hole has already travelled about 35 000 light-years from the centre, which is more than the distance between the Sun and the centre of the Milky Way. And it continues its flight at a speed of 7.5 million kilometres per hour [1]. At this speed the black hole could travel from Earth to the Moon in three minutes.

Although other scenarios to explain the observations cannot be excluded, the most plausible source of the propulsive energy is that this supermassive black hole was given a kick by gravitational waves [2] unleashed by the merger of two massive black holes at the centre of its host galaxy. This theory is supported by arc-shaped tidal tails identified by the scientists, produced by a gravitational tug between two colliding galaxies.

According to the theory presented by the scientists, 1-2 billion years ago two galaxies — each with central, massive black holes — merged. The black holes whirled around each other at the centre of the newly-formed elliptical galaxy, creating gravitational waves that were flung out like water from a lawn sprinkler [3]. As the two black holes did not have the same mass and rotation rate, they emitted gravitational waves more strongly along one direction. When the two black holes finally merged, the anisotropic emission of gravitational waves generated a kick that shot the resulting black hole out of the galactic centre.

“If our theory is correct, the observations provide strong evidence that supermassive black holes can actually merge,” explains Stefano Bianchi on the importance of the discovery. “There is already evidence of black hole collisions for stellar-mass black holes, but the process regulating supermassive black holes is more complex and not yet completely understood.”

The researchers are lucky to have caught this unique event because not every black hole merger produces imbalanced gravitational waves that propel a black hole out of the galaxy. The team now wants to secure further observation time with Hubble, in combination with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other facilities, to more accurately measure the speed of the black hole and its surrounding gas disc, which may yield further insights into the nature of this rare object.



Notes


[1] As the black hole cannot be observed directly, the mass and the speed of the supermassive black holes were determined via spectroscopic analysis of its surrounding gas.

[2] First predicted by Albert Einstein, gravitational waves are ripples in space that are created by accelerating massive objects. The ripples are similar to the concentric circles produced when a rock is thrown into a pond. In 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) helped astronomers prove that gravitational waves exist by detecting them emanating from the union of two stellar-mass black holes, which are several times more massive than the Sun.

[3] The black holes get closer over time as they radiate away gravitational energy.



More Information


The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The results of the study were presented in the paper The puzzling case of the radio-loud QSO 3C 186: a gravitational wave recoiling black hole in a young radio source?, to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of Marco Chiaberge (STScI, USA; Johns Hopkins University, USA), Justin C. Ely (STScI, USA), Eileen Meyer (University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA), Markos Georganopoulos (University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA), Andrea Marinucci (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy), Stefano Bianchi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy), Grant R. Tremblay (Yale University, USA), Brian Hilbert (STScI, USA), John Paul Kotyla (STScI, USA), Alessandro Capetti (INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Italy), Stefi Baum (University of Manitoba, Canada), F. Duccio Macchetto (STScI, USA), George Miley (University of Leiden, Netherlands), Christopher O’Dea (University of Manitoba, Canada), Eric S. Perlman (Florida Institute of Technology, USA), William B. Sparks (STScI, USA) and  Colin Norman (STScI, USA; Johns Hopkins University, USA)

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Chiaberge (STScI/ESA)



Links



Contacts 

Marco Chiaberge
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, USA
Tel: +1 410 338 4980
Email:
chiab@stsci.edu

Stefano Bianchi
Roma Tre University
Rome, Italy
Tel: +39 657337241
Email:
bianchi@fis.uniroma3.it

Mathias Jäger
ESA/Hubble, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Cell: +49 17662397500
Email:
mjaeger@partner.eso.org