Hubble observes energetic lightshow at Saturn’s north pole

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Saturn’s northern auroras

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Saturn’s northern auroras

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Videos

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Animation of Saturn’s northern auroras

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Closeup of Saturn's auroras

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Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space telescope have taken a series of spectacular images featuring the fluttering auroras at the north pole of Saturn. The observations were taken in ultraviolet light and the resulting images provide astronomers with the most comprehensive picture so far of Saturn’s northern aurora.

In 2017, over a period of seven months, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope took images of auroras above Saturn’s north pole region using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The observations were taken before and after the Saturnian northern summer solstice. These conditions provided the best achievable viewing of the northern auroral region for Hubble.

On Earth, auroras are mainly created by particles originally emitted by the Sun in the form of solar wind. When this stream of electrically charged particles gets close to our planet, it interacts with the magnetic field, which acts as a gigantic shield. While it protects Earth’s environment from solar wind particles, it can also trap a small fraction of them. Particles trapped within the magnetosphere — the region of space surrounding Earth in which charged particles are affected by its magnetic field — can be energised and then follow the magnetic field lines down to the magnetic poles. There, they interact with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper layers of the atmosphere, creating the flickering, colourful lights visible in the polar regions here on Earth [1].

However, these auroras are not unique to Earth. Other planets in our Solar System have been found to have similar auroras. Among them are the four gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Because the atmosphere of each of the four outer planets in the Solar System is — unlike the Earth — dominated by hydrogen, Saturn’s auroras can only be seen in ultraviolet wavelengths; a part of the electromagnetic spectrum which can only be studied from space.

Hubble allowed researchers to monitor the behaviour of the auroras at Saturn's north pole over an extended period of time. The Hubble observations were coordinated with the “Grand Finale” of the Cassini spacecraft, when the spacecraft simultaneously probed the auroral regions of Saturn [2]. The Hubble data allowed astronomers to learn more about Saturn’s magnetosphere, which is the largest of any planet in the Solar System other than Jupiter.

The images show a rich variety of emissions with highly variable localised features. The variability of the auroras is influenced by both the solar wind and the rapid rotation of Saturn, which lasts only about 11 hours. On top of this, the northern aurora displays two distinct peaks in brightness — at dawn and just before midnight. The latter peak, unreported before, seems specific to the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere at Saturn’s solstice.

The main image presented here is a composite of observations made of Saturn in early 2018 in the optical and of the auroras on Saturn’s north pole region, made in 2017, demonstrating the size of the auroras along with the beautiful colours of Saturn.

Hubble has studied Saturn's auroras in the past. In 2004, it studied the southern auroras shortly after the southern solstice (heic0504) and in 2009 it took advantage of a rare opportunity to record Saturn when its rings were edge-on (heic1003). This allowed Hubble to observe both poles and their auroras simultaneously.

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Notes

[1] The auroras here on Earth have different names depending on which pole they occur at. Aurora Borealis, or the northern lights, is the name given to auroras around the north pole and Aurora Australis, or the southern lights, is the name given for auroras around the south pole.

[2] Cassini was a collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. It spent 13 years orbiting Saturn, gathering information and giving astronomers a great insight into the inner workings of Saturn. Cassini took more risks at the end of its mission, travelling through the gap between Saturn and its rings. No spacecraft had previously done this, and Cassini gathered spectacular images of Saturn as well as new data for scientists to work with. On 15 September 2017 Cassini was sent on a controlled crash into Saturn.

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More Information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
Image credit: NASA, ESA & L. Lamy

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Links

• Images of Hubble
• Study in Geophysical Research Letters

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Contacts

Laurent Lamy
Observatoire de Paris
Paris, France
Tel: +33 145 077668
Email: laurent.lamy@obspm.fr

Mathias Jäger
ESA/Hubble, Public Information Officer
Garching, Germany
Tel: +49 176 62397500
Email: mjaeger@partner.eso.org

Source: ESA/HUBBLE/News

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Stars v. Dust in the Carina Nebula

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The Carina Nebula in infrared ligh

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A wider view of the Carina Nebula

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Digitized Sky Survey image of Eta Carinae Nebula

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The Carina Nebula in the constellation of Carina

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Videos

 

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ESOcast 175 Light: Stars and Dust in the Carina Nebula (4K UHD)

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3D view of the Carina Nebula

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Zoom into the Carina Nebula

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Pan across the Carina Nebula

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VISTA gazes into one of the largest nebulae in the Milky Way in infrared

The Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, has been beautifully imaged by ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. By observing in infrared light, VISTA has peered through the hot gas and dark dust enshrouding the nebula to show us myriad stars, both newborn and in their death throes.

About 7500 light-years away, in the constellation of Carina, lies a nebula within which stars form and perish side-by-side. Shaped by these dramatic events, the Carina Nebula is a dynamic, evolving cloud of thinly spread interstellar gas and dust.

The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that causes the surrounding gas to glow. By contrast, other regions of the nebula contain dark pillars of dust cloaking newborn stars. There’s a battle raging between stars and dust in the Carina Nebula, and the newly formed stars are winning — they produce high-energy radiation and stellar winds which evaporate and disperse the dusty stellar nurseries in which they formed.

Spanning over 300 light-years, the Carina Nebula is one of the Milky Way's largest star-forming regions and is easily visible to the unaided eye under dark skies. Unfortunately for those of us living in the north, it lies 60 degrees below the celestial equator, so is visible only from the Southern Hemisphere.

Within this intriguing nebula, Eta Carinae takes pride of place as the most peculiar star system. This stellar behemoth — a curious form of stellar binary— is the most energetic star system in this region and was one of the brightest objects in the sky in the 1830s. It has since faded dramatically and is reaching the end of its life, but remains one of the most massive and luminous star systems in the Milky Way.

Eta Carinae can be seen in this image as part of the bright patch of light just above the point of the “V” shape made by the dust clouds. Directly to the right of Eta Carinae is the relatively small Keyhole Nebula — a small, dense cloud of cold molecules and gas within the Carina Nebula — which hosts several massive stars, and whose appearance has also changed drastically over recent centuries.

The Carina Nebula was discovered from the Cape of Good Hope by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in the 1750s and a huge number of images have been taken of it since then. But VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy — adds an unprecedentedly detailed view over a large area; its infrared vision is perfect for revealing the agglomerations of young stars hidden within the dusty material snaking through the Carina Nebula. In 2014, VISTA was used to pinpoint nearly five million individual sources of infrared light within this nebula, revealing the vast extent of this stellar breeding ground. VISTA is the world’s largest infrared telescope dedicated to surveys and its large mirror, wide field of view and exquisitely sensitive detectors enable astronomers [1] to unveil a completely new view of the southern sky.

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Notes

[1] The Principal Investigator of the observing proposal which led to this spectacular image was Jim Emerson (School of Physics & Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, UK). His collaborators were Simon Hodgkin and Mike Irwin (Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK). The data reduction was performed by Mike Irwin and Jim Lewis (Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK).

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More Information

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It has 15 Member States: Austria, Belgium, 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 and with Australia as a strategic partner. 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 and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

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Links

• More information about VISTA
• Photos of VISTA
• More ESO images of the Carina Nebula

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Contacts

Jim Emerson
School of Physics & Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London
London, UK
Email: j.p.emerson@qmul.ac.uk

Calum Turner
Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Source: ESO/News

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Gemini Confirms the Most Distant Radio Galaxy

Top: Two-dimensional GMOS spectrum of the strong emission line observed in the radio galaxy TGSS J1530+1049. The size of the emission region is a bit less than one arcsec. Bottom: One-dimensional profile of the observed emission line. The asymmetry indicates that the line is Lyman-α at redshift of z = 5.72, making TGSS J1530+1049 the most distant radio galaxy known to date.

Using the Gemini North telescope in Hawai`i, an international team of astronomers from Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK has discovered the most distant radio galaxy to date, at 12.5 billion light years, when the Universe was just 7% of its current age.

The team used spectroscopic data from the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N) to measure a redshift of z = 5.72 for the radio galaxy identified as TGSS J1530+1049. This is the largest redshift of any known radio galaxy. The redshift of a galaxy tells astronomers its distance because galaxies at greater distances move away from us at higher speeds, and this motion causes the galaxy's light to shift farther into the red. Because light has a finite speed and takes time to reach us, more distant galaxies are also seen at earlier times in the history of the Universe.

The study was led by graduate students Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands) and Murilo Marinello (Observatório Nacional, Brazil), and the observations were obtained through Brazil's participation in Gemini. "In the Gemini spectrum of TGSS J1530+1049, we found a single emission line of hydrogen, known as the Lyman alpha. The observed shift of this line allowed us to estimate the galaxy's distance," explains Marinello.

The relatively small size of the radio emission region in TGSS J1530+1049 indicates that it is quite young, as expected at such early times. Thus, the galaxy is still in the process of assembling. The radio emission in this kind of galaxy is powered by a supermassive black hole that is sucking in material from the surrounding environment. This discovery of the most distant radio galaxy confirms that black holes can grow to enormous masses very quickly in the early Universe.

The measured redshift of TGSS J1530+1049 places it near the end of the Epoch of Reionization, when the majority of the neutral hydrogen in the Universe was ionized by high-energy photons from young stars and other sources of radiation. "The Epoch of Reionization is very important in cosmology, but it is still not well understood," said Roderik Overzier, also of Brazil's Observatorio Nacional, and the Principal Investigator of the Gemini program. "Distant radio galaxies can be used as tools to find out more about this period."

The research has been published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A preprint of the paper is available at astro-ph.

Source: Gemini Observatory

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Infant exoplanet weighed by Hipparcos and Gaia

Beta Pictoris system

Copyright ESO/A-M. Lagrange et al.

The mass of a very young exoplanet has been revealed for the first time using data from ESA’s star mapping spacecraft Gaia and its predecessor, the quarter-century retired Hipparcos satellite. 

Astronomers Ignas Snellen and Anthony Brown from Leiden University, the Netherlands, deduced the mass of the planet Beta Pictoris b from the motion of its host star over a long period of time as captured by both Gaia and Hipparcos.

The planet is a gas giant similar to Jupiter but, according to the new estimate, is 9 to 13 times more massive. It orbits the star Beta Pictoris, the second brightest star in the constellation Pictor.

The planet was only discovered in 2008 in images captured by the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Both the planet and the star are only about 20 million years old – roughly 225 times younger than the Solar System. Its young age makes the system intriguing but also difficult to study using conventional methods.

“In the Beta Pictoris system, the planet has essentially just formed,” says Ignas. “Therefore we can get a picture of how planets form and how they behave in the early stages of their evolution. On the other hand, the star is very hot, rotates fast, and it pulsates.”

This behaviour makes it difficult for astronomers to accurately measure the star’s radial velocity – the speed at which it appears to periodically move towards and away from the Earth. Tiny changes in the radial velocity of a star, caused by the gravitational pull of planets in its vicinity, are commonly used to estimate masses of exoplanets. But this method mainly works for systems that have already gone through the fiery early stages of their evolution.

In the case of Beta Pictoris b, upper limits of the planet’s mass range had been arrived at before using the radial velocity method. To obtain a better estimate, the astronomers used a different method, taking advantage of Hipparcos’ and Gaia’s measurements that reveal the precise position and motion of the planet’s host star in the sky over time.

Astrometric measurements to detect exoplanets

Copyright ESA 

“The star moves for different reasons,” says Ignas. “First, the star circles around the centre of the Milky Way, just as the Sun does. That appears from the Earth as a linear motion projected on the sky. 

We call it proper motion. And then there is the parallax effect, which is caused by the Earth orbiting around the Sun. Because of this, over the year, we see the star from slightly different angles.” 

And then there is something that the astronomers describe as ‘tiny wobbles’ in the trajectory of the star across the sky – minuscule deviations from the expected course caused by the gravitational pull of the planet in the star’s orbit. This is the same wobble that can be measured via changes in the radial velocity, but along a different direction – on the plane of the sky, rather than along the line of sight.

“We are looking at the deviation from what you expect if there was no planet and then we measure the mass of the planet from the significance of this deviation,” says Anthony. “The more massive the planet, the more significant the deviation.”

To be able to make such an assessment, astronomers need to observe the trajectory of the star for a long period of time to properly understand the proper motion and the parallax effect.

The Gaia mission, designed to observe more than one billion stars in our Galaxy, will eventually be able to provide information about a large amount of exoplanets. In the 22 months of observations included in Gaia’s second data release, published in April, the satellite has recorded the star Beta Pictoris about thirty times. That, however, is not enough.

“Gaia will find thousands of exoplanets, that’s still on our to-do list,” says Timo Prusti, ESA’s Gaia project scientist. “The reason that the exoplanets can be expected only late in the mission is the fact that to measure the tiny wobble that the exoplanets are causing, we need to trace the position of stars for several years.”

Combining the Gaia measurements with those from ESA’s Hipparcos mission, which observed Beta Pictoris 111 times between 1990 and 1993, enabled Ignas and Anthony to get their result much faster. This led to the first successful estimate of a young planet’s mass using astrometric measurements.

“By combining data from Hipparcos and Gaia, which have a time difference of about 25 years, you get a very long term proper motion,” says Anthony.

“This proper motion also contains the component caused by the orbiting planet. Hipparcos on its own would not have been able to find this planet because it would look like a perfectly normal single star unless we had measured it for a much longer time.

“Now, by combining Gaia and Hipparcos and looking at the difference in the long term and the short term proper motion, we can see the effect of the planet on the star.”

The result represents an important step towards better understanding the processes involved in planet formation, and anticipates the exciting exoplanet discoveries that will be unleashed by Gaia’s future data releases.

 Note for Editors

“The mass of the young planet Beta Pictoris b through the astrometric motion of its host star,” by I. Snellen and A. Brown is published in Nature Astronomy, 20 August 2018.  

Source: ESA/GAIA

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First Science with ALMA’s Highest-Frequency Capabilities

Illustration highlighting ALMA's high-frequency observing capabilities.

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello. Hi-res image

The upper blue portion of this graph shows the spectral lines ALMA detected in a star-forming region of the Cat's Paw Nebula. The lower black portion shows the lines detected by the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. The ALMA observations detected more than ten times as many spectral lines. Note that the Herschel data have been inverted for comparison. Two molecular lines are labeled for reference. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. McGuire et al. Hi-res image

Composite ALMA image of NGC 6334I, a star-forming region in the Cat's Paw Nebula, taken with the Band 10 receivers, ALMA's highest-frequency vision. The blue component is heavy water (HDO) streaming away from either a single protostar or a small cluster of protostars. The orange region is the "continuum emission" in the same region, which scientists found is extraordinarily rich in molecular fingerprints, including glycolaldehyde , the simplest sugar-related molecule. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO): NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton. Hi-res image

ALMA Band 10 image of heavy water (HDO) streaming away from NGC 6334I in the Cat's Paw Nebula. This image is the result of ALMA's highest-frequency observing capabilities, which push the limits of ground-based astronomy. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton. Hi-res image

Pictured here is one of the cold cartridge assemblies of the Band 10 receiver, which gives ALMA its highest-frequency capabilities. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).  Hi-res image

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Astronomers observe cosmic steam jets and molecules galore

The ALMA telescope in Chile has transformed how we see the universe, showing us otherwise invisible parts of the cosmos. This array of incredibly precise antennas studies a comparatively high-frequency sliver of radio light: waves that range from a few tenths of a millimeter to several millimeters in length. Recently, scientists pushed ALMA to its limits, harnessing the array’s highest-frequency (shortest wavelength) capabilities, which peer into a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that straddles the line between infrared light and radio waves.

“High-frequency radio observations like these are normally not possible from the ground,” said Brett McGuire, a chemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and lead author on a paper appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “They require the extreme precision and sensitivity of ALMA, along with some of the driest and most stable atmospheric conditions that can be found on Earth.”

Under ideal atmospheric conditions, which occurred on the evening of 5 April 2018, astronomers trained ALMA’s highest-frequency, submillimeter vision on a curious region of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (also known as NGC 6334I), a star-forming complex located about 4,300 light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation Scorpius.

Previous ALMA observations of this region at lower frequencies uncovered turbulent star formation, a highly dynamic environment, and a wealth of molecules inside the nebula.

To observe at higher frequencies, the ALMA antennas are designed to accommodate a series of “bands” — numbered 1 to 10 — that each study a particular sliver of the spectrum. The Band 10 receivers observe at the highest frequency (shortest wavelengths) of any of the ALMA instruments, covering wavelengths from 0.3 to 0.4 millimeters (787 to 950 gigahertz), which is also considered to be long-wavelength infrared light.

These first-of-their-kind ALMA observations with Band 10 produced two exciting results.

Jets of Steam from Protostar

One of ALMA’s first Band 10 results was also one of the most challenging, the direct observation of jets of water vapor streaming away from one of the massive protostars in the region. ALMA was able to detect the submillimeter-wavelength light naturally emitted by heavy water (water molecules made up of oxygen, hydrogen and deuterium atoms, which are hydrogen atoms with a proton and a neutron in their nucleus).

“Normally, we wouldn’t be able to directly see this particular signal at all from the ground,” said Crystal Brogan, an astronomer at the NRAO and co-author on the paper. “Earth’s atmosphere, even at remarkably arid places, still contains enough water vapor to completely overwhelm this signal from any cosmic source. During exceptionally pristine conditions in the high Atacama Desert, however, ALMA can in fact detect that signal. This is something no other telescope on Earth can achieve.”

As stars begin to form out of massive clouds of dust and gas, the material surrounding the star falls onto the mass at the center. A portion of this material, however, is propelled away from the growing protostar as a pair of jets, which carry away gas and molecules, including water.

The heavy water the researchers observed is flowing away from either a single protostar or a small cluster of protostars. These jets are oriented differently from what appear to be much larger and potentially more-mature jets emanating from the same region. The astronomers speculate that the heavy-water jets seen by ALMA are relatively recent features just beginning to move out into the surrounding nebula.

These observations also show that in the regions where this water is slamming into the surrounding gas, low-frequency water masers – naturally occurring microwave versions of lasers — flare up. The masers were detected in complementary observations by the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array.

ALMA Observes Molecules Galore

In addition to making striking images of objects in space, ALMA is also a supremely sensitive cosmic chemical sensor. As molecules tumble and vibrate in space, they naturally emit light at specific wavelengths, which appear as spikes and dips on a spectrum. All of ALMA’s receiver bands can detect these unique spectral fingerprints, but those lines at the highest frequencies offer unique insight into lighter, important chemicals, like heavy water. They also provide the ability to see signals from complex, warm molecules, which have weaker spectral lines at lower frequencies.

Using Band 10, the researchers were able to observe a region of the spectrum that is extraordinarily rich in molecular fingerprints, including glycolaldehyde , the simplest sugar-related molecule.

When compared to previous best-in-the-world observations of the same source with the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, the ALMA observations detected more than ten times as many spectral lines.

“We detected a wealth of complex organic molecules surrounding this massive star-forming region,” said McGuire. “These results have been received with excitement by the astronomical community and show once again how ALMA will reshape our understanding of the universe.”

ALMA is able to take advantage of these rare windows of opportunity when the atmospheric conditions are “just right” by using dynamic scheduling. That means, the telescope operators and astronomers carefully monitor the weather and conduct those planned observations that best fit the prevailing conditions.

“There certainly are quite a few conditions that have to be met to conduct a successful observation using Band 10,” concluded Brogan. “But these new ALMA results demonstrate just how important these observations can be.”

“To remain at the forefront of discovery, observatories must continuously innovate to drive the leading edge of what astronomy can accomplish,” said Joe Pesce, the program director for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at NSF. “That is a core element of NSF’s NRAO, and its ALMA telescope, and this discovery pushes the limit of what is possible through ground-based astronomy.”

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Contact:

Charles Blue, Public Information Officer
(434) 296-0314; 
cblue@nrao.edu

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This research is presented in a paper titled “First results of an ALMA band 10 spectral line survey of NGC 6334I: Detections of glycolaldehyde (HC(O)CH2OH) and a new compact bipolar outflow in HDO and CS,” by B. McGuire et al. in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. [http://apjl.aas.org] Preprint: [ https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05438]

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)/News

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Sprawling galaxy cluster found hiding in plain sight

An X-ray image (in blue) with a zoom in optical image (gold and brown) showing the central galaxy of a hidden cluster, which harbors a supermassive black hole. Image: Taweewat Somboonpanyakul

Bright light from black hole in a feeding frenzy had been obscuring surrounding galaxies

MIT scientists have uncovered a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth, is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies and surrounds an extremely active supermassive black hole, or quasar.

The central quasar goes by the name PKS1353-341 and is intensely bright — so bright that for decades astronomers observing it in the night sky have assumed that the quasar was quite alone in its corner of the universe, shining out as a solitary light source from the center of a single galaxy.

But as the MIT team reports today in the Astrophysical Journal, the quasar’s light is so bright that it has obscured hundreds of galaxies clustered around it.

In their new analysis, the researchers estimate that there are hundreds of individual galaxies in the cluster, which, all told, is about as massive as 690 trillion suns. Our Milky Way galaxy, for comparison, weighs in at around 400 billion solar masses.

The team also calculates that the quasar at the center of the cluster is 46 billion times brighter than the sun. Its extreme luminosity is likely the result of a temporary feeding frenzy: As an immense disk of material swirls around the quasar, big chunks of matter from the disk are falling in and feeding it, causing the black hole to radiate huge amounts of energy out as light.

“This might be a short-lived phase that clusters go through, where the central black hole has a quick meal, gets bright, and then fades away again,” says study author Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “This could be a blip that we just happened to see. In a million years, this might look like a diffuse fuzzball.”

McDonald and his colleagues believe the discovery of this hidden cluster shows there may be other similar galaxy clusters hiding behind extremely bright objects that astronomers have miscatalogued as single light sources. The researchers are now looking for more hidden galaxy clusters, which could be important clues to estimating how much matter there is in the universe and how fast the universe is expanding.

The paper’s co-authors include lead author and MIT graduate student Taweewat Somboonpanyakul, Henry Lin of Princeton University, Brian Stalder of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and Antony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fluffs or points

In 2012, McDonald and others discovered the Phoenix cluster, one of the most massive and luminous galaxy clusters in the universe. The mystery to McDonald was why this cluster, which was so intensely bright and in a region of the sky that is easily observable, hadn’t been found before.

“We started asking ourselves why we had not found it earlier, because it’s very extreme in its properties and very bright,” McDonald says. “It’s because we had preconceived notions of what a cluster should look like. And this didn’t conform to that, so we missed it.”

For the most part, he says astronomers have assumed that galaxy clusters look “fluffy,” giving off a very diffuse signal in the X-ray band, unlike brighter, point-like sources, which have been interpreted as extremely active quasars or black holes.

“The images are either all points, or fluffs, and the fluffs are these giant million-light-year balls of hot gas that we call clusters, and the points are black holes that are accreting gas and glowing as this gas spirals in,” McDonald says. “This idea that you could have a rapidly accreting black hole at the center of a cluster — we didn’t think that was something that happened in nature.”

But the Phoenix discovery proved that galaxy clusters could indeed host immensely active black holes, prompting McDonald to wonder: Could there be other nearby galaxy clusters that were simply misidentified?

An extreme eater

To answer that question, the researchers set up a survey named CHiPS, for Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight, which is designed to reevaluate X-ray images taken in the past.

“We start from archival data of point sources, or objects that were super bright in the sky,” Somboonpanyakul explains. “We are looking for point sources inside fluffy things.”

For every point source that was previously identified, the researchers noted their coordinates and then studied them more directly using the Magellan Telescope, a powerful optical telescope that sits in the mountains of Chile. If they observed a higher-than-expected number of galaxies surrounding the point source (a sign that the gas may stem from a cluster of galaxies), the researchers looked at the source again, using NASA’s space-based Chandra X-Ray Observatory, to identify an extended, diffuse source around the main point source.

“Some 90 percent of these sources turned out to not be clusters,” McDonald says. “But the fun thing is, the small number of things we are finding are sort of rule-breakers.”

The new paper reports the first results of the CHiPS survey, which has so far confirmed one new galaxy cluster hosting an extremely active central black hole.

“The brightness of the black hole might be related to how much it’s eating,” McDonald says. “This is thousands of times brighter than a typical black hole at the center of a cluster, so it’s very extreme in its feeding. We have no idea how long this has been going on or will continue to go on. Finding more of these things will help us understand, is this an important process, or just a weird thing that there’s only one of in the universe.”

The team plans to comb through more X-ray data in search of galaxy clusters that might have been missed the first time around.

“If the CHiPS survey can find enough of these, we will be able to pinpoint the specific rate of accretion onto the black hole where it switches from generating primarily radiation to generating mechanical energy, the two primary forms of energy output from black holes,” says Brian McNamara, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo, who was not involved in the research. “This particular object is interesting because it bucks the trend. Either the central supermassive black hole’s mass is much lower than expected, or the structure of the accretion flow is abnormal. The oddballs are the ones that teach us the most.”

In addition to shedding light on a black hole’s feeding, or accretion behavior, the detection of more galaxy clusters may help to estimate how fast the universe is expanding.

“Take for instance, the Titanic,” McDonald says. “If you know where the two biggest pieces landed, you could map them backward to see where the ship hit the iceberg. In the same way, if you know where all the galaxy clusters are in the universe, which are the biggest pieces in the universe, and how big they are, and you have some information about what the universe looked like in the beginning, which we know from the Big Bang, then you could map out how the universe expanded.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Kavli Research Investment Fund at MIT, and by NASA.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: Mit/News

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Astronomers Identify Some of the Earliest Galaxies in the Universe

The distribution of satellite galaxies orbiting a computer-simulated galaxy, as predicted by the Lambda-cold-dark-matter cosmological model. The blue circles surround the brighter satellites, the white circles the ultrafaint satellites (so faint that they are not readily visible in the image). The ultrafaint satellites are amongst the most ancient galaxies in the Universe; they began to form when the Universe was only about 100 million years old (compared to its current age of 13.8 billion years). The image has been generated from simulations from the Auriga project carried out by researchers at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, UK, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany. Credit: Durham ICC/HITS/MPIA/Auriga/S. Bose et al. Low Resolution (jpg)

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers from Durham University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found evidence that the faintest satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way galaxy are among the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe.

The research group’s results suggest that galaxies including Segue-1, Bootes I, Tucana II and Ursa Major I are, in fact, some of the first galaxies ever formed, thought to be over 13 billion years old. Their findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

When the Universe was about 380,000 years old, the very first atoms formed. These were hydrogen atoms, the simplest element in the periodic table. These atoms collected into clouds and began to cool gradually and settle into the small clumps or "halos" of dark matter that emerged from the Big Bang.

This cooling phase, known as the "cosmic dark ages," lasted about 100 million years. Eventually, the gas that had cooled inside the halos became unstable and began to form stars. These objects are the very first galaxies ever to have formed. With the formation of the first galaxies, the Universe burst into light, bringing the cosmic dark ages to an end.

Dr. Sownak Bose of the CfA, working with Dr. Alis Deason and Professor Carlos Frenk at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), identified two populations of satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

The first was a very faint population consisting of the galaxies that formed at the end of the “cosmic dark ages”. The second was a slightly brighter population consisting of galaxies that formed hundreds of millions of years later — once the hydrogen that had been ionized (that is, had their electrons knocked out) — by the intense ultraviolet radiation emitted by the first stars was able to cool into more massive dark matter halos. Eventually, the halos of dark matter became so massive that bright galaxies like our own Milky Way were able to form.

Remarkably, the team found that a model of galaxy formation that they had developed previously agreed perfectly with the data, allowing them to infer the formation times of the faint satellite galaxies.

Professor Frenk, Director of Durham’s ICC, said: "Finding some of the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe orbiting in the Milky Way's own backyard is the astronomical equivalent of finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited the Earth. It is hugely exciting.

"Our finding supports the current model for the evolution of our Universe, the 'Lambda-cold-dark-matter model' in which the elementary particles that make up the dark matter drive cosmic evolution," said Professor Frenk. In this model "Lambda" refers to dark energy, which is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate.

Dr. Bose, who was a PhD student at the ICC when this work began and is now a research fellow at the CfA, said: “A nice aspect of this work is that it highlights the complementarity between the predictions of a theoretical model and real data.

"A decade ago, the faintest galaxies in the vicinity of the Milky Way would have gone under the radar. With the increasing sensitivity of present and future galaxy censuses, a whole new trove of the tiniest galaxies has come into the light, allowing us to test theoretical models in new regimes."

Dr. Deason, who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the ICC said: "This is a wonderful example of how observations of the tiniest dwarf galaxies residing in our own Milky Way can be used to learn about the early Universe."

Dr. Bose is supported through the Institute for Theory and Computation fellowship at Harvard University, while Dr. Deason is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Professor Frenk and Dr. Deason are both supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council Consolidated Grant for Astronomy and Durham University.

A paper describing this work appears in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a 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:

Megan Watzke
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
+1 617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu

Peter Edmonds
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
+1 617-571-7279
pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

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Hubble Paints Picture of the Evolving Universe

HDUV GOODS-North Field

Credits: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)

 Release images

Astronomers using the ultraviolet vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have captured one of the largest panoramic views of the fire and fury of star birth in the distant universe. The field features approximately 15,000 galaxies, about 12,000 of which are forming stars. Hubble’s ultraviolet vision opens a new window on the evolving universe, tracking the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period, which happened about 3 billion years after the big bang.

Ultraviolet light has been the missing piece to the cosmic puzzle. Now, combined with infrared and visible-light data from Hubble and other space and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history.

The image straddles the gap between the very distant galaxies, which can only be viewed in infrared light, and closer galaxies, which can be seen across a broad spectrum. The light from distant star-forming regions in remote galaxies started out as ultraviolet. However, the expansion of the universe has shifted the light into infrared wavelengths. By comparing images of star formation in the distant and nearby universe, astronomers glean a better understanding of how nearby galaxies grew from small clumps of hot, young stars long ago.

Because Earth’s atmosphere filters most ultraviolet light, Hubble can provide some of the most sensitive space-based ultraviolet observations possible.

The program, called the Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey, extends and builds on the previous Hubble multi-wavelength data in the CANDELS-Deep (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) fields within the central part of the GOODS (The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014.

This image is a portion of the GOODS-North field, which is located in the northern constellation Ursa Major.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

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Related Links

This site is not responsible for content found on external links

• The science paper by P. Oesch et al.
• NASA's Hubble Portal
• GOODS-North Field
• GOODS-South Field
• Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
• MAST Portal for Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey

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Contact

Ann Jenkins / Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
410-338-4488 / 410-338-4514
jenkins@stsci.edu / villard@stsci.edu

Pascal Oesch
University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
011-41-22-379-2466
pascal.oesch@unige.ch

Mireia Montes
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
011-61-2-9385-6694
m.montes@unsw.edu.au

Source: HubbleSite/News

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Students digging into data archive spot mysterious X-ray source

Flaring source in NGC 6540
Copyright: ESA/XMM-Newton; A. De Carlo (INAF)

An enigmatic X-ray source revealed as part of a data-mining project for high-school students shows unexplored avenues hidden in the vast archive of ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray Observatory.

When XMM-Newton was launched in 1999, most students who are finishing high school today were not even born. Yet ESA’s almost two-decade old X-ray observatory has many surprises to be explored by the next generation of scientists.

A taste of new discoveries was unveiled in a recent collaboration between scientists at the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, Italy, and a group of twelfth-grade students from a secondary school in nearby Saronno.

The fruitful interaction was part of the Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky project, EXTraS, an international research study of variable sources from the first 15 years of XMM-Newton observations.

“We recently published the EXTraS catalogue, which includes all the X-ray sources – about half a million – whose brightness changes over time as observed by XMM-Newton, and lists several observed parameters for each source,” says Andrea De Luca, one of the scientists who coordinated the student project.

“The next step was to delve into this vast dataset and find potentially interesting sources, and we thought this would be an exciting challenge for a student internship.”

Flaring source in NGC 6540

Copyright ESA/XMM-Newton; A. De Carlo (INAF)

High-school students
Copyright INAF

 
Scientists at INAF in Milan have been cooperating with local schools for a few years, hosting several groups of students at the institute for a couple of weeks and embedding them in the activities of the various research groups.

“For this particular project, the students received an introduction about astronomy and the exotic sources we study with X-ray telescopes, as well as a tutorial on the database and how to use it,” explains Ruben Salvaterra, another scientist involved in the programme.

“Once they were ready to explore the data archive, they proved very effective and resourceful.”

The six students analysed about 200 X-ray sources, looking at their light curve – a graph showing the object’s variability over time – and checking the scientific literature to verify whether they had been studied already.

Eventually, they identified a handful of sources exhibiting interesting properties – a powerful flare, for example – that had not been previously reported by other studies.

“One of the sources stood out as especially intriguing,” says Andrea.

Featuring the shortest flare of all analysed objects, this source appears to be located in the globular cluster NGC 6540 – a dense grouping of stars – and had not been studied before.

After presenting their findings to the scientists in a seminar, the students went back to school. But the work for Andrea, Ruben and collaborators had only just begun.

“The source identified by the students displays brightness changes like no other known objects, so we started looking more in detail,” says Ruben.

An otherwise low-luminosity source of X-rays, XMM-Newton saw it brighten by up to 50 times its normal level in 2005, and quickly fall again after about five minutes.

Stars like our Sun shine moderately in X-rays, and occasionally undergo flares that boost their brightness like the one observed in this source. However, such events normally last much longer – up to a few hours or even days.

On the other hand, short outbursts are observed in binary star systems hosting a dense stellar remnant such as neutron star, but these outpourings of X-rays are characterised by a much higher luminosity.

“This event is challenging our understanding of X-ray outbursts: too short to be an ordinary stellar flare, but too faint to be linked to a compact object,” explains collaborator Sandro Mereghetti, lead author of the paper presenting the results.

Another possibility is that the source is a so-called chromospherically active binary, a dual system of stars with intense X-ray activity caused by processes in their chromosphere, an intermediate layer in a star’s atmosphere. But even in this case, it does not closely match the properties of any known object of this class.

The scientists suspect that this peculiar source is not unique, and that other objects with similar properties are lurking in the XMM-Newton archive but have not yet been identified because of the combination of low luminosity and short duration of the flare.

“The systematic study of variability that led to the compilation of the EXTraS catalogue, together with this first attempt at data mining, suggests that we have opened a new, unexplored window on the X-ray Universe,” adds Sandro.

The team plans to study the newly identified source in greater detail to better understand its nature, while searching for more similar objects in the archive.

“It is exciting to find hidden jewels like this source in the XMM-Newton archive, and that young students are helping us find them while learning and having fun,” concludes Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton project scientist at ESA.

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Notes for Editors

“EXTraS discovery of a peculiar flaring X-ray source in the Galactic globular cluster NGC 6540” by S. Mereghetti et al. 2018 is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201833086.

The students involved in this project are Razvan Patrolea, Lorenzo Apollonio, Elena Pecchini, Cinzia Torrente, Bartolomeo Bottazzi-Baldi and Martino Giobbio from Liceo scientifico G.B. Grassi in Saronno, Italy. They discovered the peculiar source during a two-week internship at INAF, Milan, in September 2017, as part of an initiative supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.

The discovery was made as a result of the Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky (EXTraS) project, a EU/FP7 project devoted to a systematic variability study of the X-ray sources in the XMM-Newton public archive.

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For further information, please contact:

Andrea De Luca
INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica
Milano, Italy
INFN, Pavia, Italy
Email: andrea.deluca@inaf.it

Ruben Salvaterra
INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica
Milano, Italy
Email: ruben.salvaterra@inaf.it

Sandro Mereghetti
INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica
Milano, Italy
Email: sandro.mereghetti@inaf.it

Norbert Schartel
XMM-Newton Project Scientist
European Space Agency
Email: norbert.schartel@esa.it

Markus Bauer








ESA Science and Robotic Exploration Communication Officer









Tel: +31 71 565 6799









Mob: +31 61 594 3 954









Email: markus.bauer@esa.int

Source: ESA/Space Science

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Water Is Destroyed, Then Reborn in Ultrahot Jupiters

These simulated views of the ultrahot Jupiter WASP-121b show what the planet might look like to the human eye from five different vantage points, illuminated to different degrees by its parent star. The images were created using a computer simulation being used to help scientists understand the atmospheres of these ultra-hot planets. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Vivien Parmentier/Aix-Marseille University (AMU).  › Full image and caption

Imagine a place where the weather forecast is always the same: scorching temperatures, relentlessly sunny, and with absolutely zero chance of rain. This hellish scenario exists on the permanent daysides of a type of planet found outside our solar system dubbed an "ultrahot Jupiter." These worlds orbit extremely close to their stars, with one side of the planet permanently facing the star.

What has puzzled scientists is why water vapor appears to be missing from the toasty worlds' atmospheres, when it is abundant in similar but slightly cooler planets. Observations of ultrahot Jupiters by NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, combined with computer simulations, have served as a springboard for a new theoretical study that may have solved this mystery. 

According to the new study, ultrahot Jupiters do in fact possess the ingredients for water (hydrogen and oxygen atoms). But due to strong irradiation on the planet's daysides, temperatures there get so intense that water molecules are completely torn apart. 

"The daysides of these worlds are furnaces that look more like a stellar atmosphere than a planetary atmosphere," said Vivien Parmentier, an astrophysicist at Aix Marseille University in France and lead author of the new study. "In this way, ultrahot Jupiters stretch out what we think planets should look like." 

While telescopes like Spitzer and Hubble can gather some information about the daysides of ultrahot Jupiters, the nightsides are difficult for current instruments to probe. The new paper proposes a model for what might be happening on both the illuminated and dark sides of these planets, based largely on observations and analysis of the ultrahot Jupiter known as WASP-121b, and from three recently published studies, coauthored by Parmentier, that focus on the ultrahot Jupiters WASP-103b, 

WASP-18b and HAT-P-7b, respectively. The new study suggests that fierce winds may blow the sundered water molecules into the planets' nightside hemispheres. On the cooler, dark side of the planet, the atoms can recombine into molecules and condense into clouds, all before drifting back into the dayside to be splintered again. 

Water is not the only molecule that may undergo a cycle of chemical reincarnation on these planets, according to the new study. Previous detections of clouds by Hubble at the boundary between day and night, where temperatures mercifully fall, have shown that titanium oxide (popular as a sunscreen) and aluminum oxide (the basis for ruby, the gemstone) could also be molecularly reborn on the ultrahot Jupiters' nightsides. These materials might even form clouds and rain down as liquid metals and fluidic rubies. 

Star-planet hybrids

Among the growing catalog of planets outside our solar system -- known as exoplanets -- ultrahot Jupiters have stood out as a distinct class for about a decade. Found in orbits far closer to their host stars than Mercury is to our Sun, the giant planets are tidally locked, meaning the same hemisphere always faces the star, just as the Moon always presents the same side to Earth. As a result, ultrahot Jupiters' daysides broil in a perpetual high noon. Meanwhile, their opposite hemispheres are gripped by endless nights. Dayside temperatures reach between 3,600 and 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 and 3,000 degrees Celsius), ranking ultrahot Jupiters among the hottest exoplanets on record. Nightside temperatures are around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (1,000 degrees Celsius), cold enough for water to re-form and, along with other molecules, coalesce into clouds.

Hot Jupiters, cousins to ultrahot Jupiters with dayside temperatures below 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 Celsius), were the first widely discovered type of exoplanet, starting back in the mid-1990s. Water has turned out to be common in their atmospheres. One hypothesis for why it appeared absent in ultrahot Jupiters has been that these planets must have formed with very high levels of carbon instead of oxygen. Yet the authors of the new study say this idea could not explain the traces of water also sometimes detected at the dayside-nightside boundary. 

To break the logjam, Parmentier and colleagues took a cue from well-established physical models of the atmospheres of stars, as well as "failed stars," known as brown dwarfs, whose properties overlap somewhat with hot and ultrahot Jupiters. Parmentier adapted a brown dwarf model developed by Mark Marley, one of the paper's coauthors and a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, to the case of ultrahot Jupiters. Treating the atmospheres of ultrahot Jupiters more like blazing stars than conventionally colder planets offered a way to make sense of the Spitzer and Hubble observations. 

"With these studies, we are bringing some of the century-old knowledge gained from studying the astrophysics of stars, to the new field of investigating exoplanetary atmospheres," said Parmentier.

Spitzer's observations in infrared light zeroed in on carbon monoxide in the ultrahot Jupiters' atmospheres. The atoms in carbon monoxide form an extremely strong bond that can uniquely withstand the thermal and radiational assault on the daysides of these planets. The brightness of the hardy carbon monoxide revealed that the planets' atmospheres burn hotter higher up than deeper down. Parmentier said verifying this temperature difference was key for vetting Hubble's no-water result, because a uniform atmosphere can also mask the signatures of water molecules. 

"These results are just the most recent example of Spitzer being used for exoplanet science -- something that was not part of its original science manifest," said Michael Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "In addition, it's always heartening to see what we can discover when scientists combine the power of Hubble and Spitzer, two of NASA's Great Observatories."

Although the new model adequately described many ultrahot Jupiters on the books, some outliers do remain, suggesting that additional aspects of these worlds' atmospheres still need to be understood. Those exoplanets not fitting the mold could have exotic chemical compositions or unanticipated heat and circulation patterns. Prior studies have argued that there is a more significant amount of water in the dayside atmosphere of WASP-121b than what is apparent from observations, because most of the signal from the water is obscured. The new paper provides an alternative explanation for the smaller-than-expected water signal, but more studies will be required to better understand the nature of these ultrahot atmospheres.

Resolving this dilemma could be a task for NASA's next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, slated for a 2021 launch. Parmentier and colleagues expect it will be powerful enough to glean new details about the daysides, as well as confirm that the missing dayside water and other molecules of interest have gone to the planets' nightsides.

"We now know that ultrahot Jupiters exhibit chemical behavior that is different and more complex than their cooler cousins, the hot Jupiters," said Parmentier. "The studies of exoplanet atmospheres is still really in its infancy and we have so much to learn."

The new study is forthcoming in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. 

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages Hubble. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-1821
Calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Adam Hadhazy

Source: JPL-Caltech/News

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