Black Hole Activity May Protect Growth of Other Galaxies

Figure 1: An example of a galaxy cluster used in this study. Star-forming galaxies are indicated by blue circles, and "dead" galaxies by orange circles. Other objects in the image are galaxies and stars unrelated to the galaxy cluster. The pink and light blue shaded areas represent the "aligned" and "perpendicular" directions relative to the central galaxy of the cluster. The upper right image is a zoom-in view of the central galaxy. (Credit: University of Tokyo)

We normally think of black holes as destructive objects, but new research suggests that the supermassive black hole in the central galaxy of a galaxy cluster may actually help other galaxies in the cluster to continue growing.

Galaxy clusters contain hundreds to thousands of galaxies. But this crowding may be detrimental to the galaxies. Compared to isolated galaxies, clusters include a higher percentage of "dead" galaxies which have ceased star formation. This is possibly due to the presence of intracluster gas in clusters. Intracluster gas can strip the material for new stars out of galaxies, thus preventing new star formation.

Previous studies on nearby galaxies have found that dead galaxies are more likely to be located along the line extrapolated from the longest axis of the central galaxy, and less likely to be located near its shortest axis. But it was unknown when this pattern started to emerge. Knowing when the pattern started to become apparent would give insights into what might be causing it, and how it has affected the development of galaxy clusters over time.

Because of the finite speed of light, it takes time for the light from distant clusters to reach us, sometimes billions of years. By observing that light, we can see an image of what the cluster looked like when the light was first emitted, in a very real sense looking back in time.

A team of astronomers, led by Makoto Ando at the University of Tokyo, investigated the distribution of star-forming galaxies and "dead" galaxies within a cluster, using data for more than 5000 clusters across a span of 7 billion years obtained with the Subaru Telescope. The team found that the pattern of more dead galaxies being found near the longest axis of the central galaxy remained consistent as far back in time as the current data set could see.

Figure 2: The detected anisotropy of galaxies that have stopped growing (left) and a conceptual illustration of the data (right). This figure is based on measurements of clusters from about 6 billion years ago made by Hyper-Suprime Cam mounted on the Subaru Telescope. The white dots in the left figure show the fraction of galaxies that have stopped growing for each direction measured from the orientation of the central galaxy. The thick black lines are fitted to show the trends in the data. We can see that the fraction of galaxies that have stopped growing in the "direction aligned with the orientation (long axis) of the central galaxy," indicated by the pink shades, is higher than in the "direction perpendicular to the orientation of the central galaxy," indicated by the light blue shades. (Credit: University of Tokyo)

This distribution matches simulations where the activity of the supermassive black hole in the central galaxy blows away the intracluster gas which suppresses the galaxies. The activity of the supermassive black hole is more efficient around the shortest axis of the central galaxy than around the longest axis. So the black hole activity may actually be protecting the other galaxies.

Makoto Ando, the lead researcher, cautions, "We have not detected direct evidences of this mechanism, such as black hole activity or the anisotropic distribution of intracluster gas. These are expected to be detected by X-ray and radio observations in the future."

These results appeared as Ando et al. "Detection of anisotropic satellite quenching in galaxy clusters up to z~1" in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on December 22, 2022.

Source: Subaru Telescope

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NASA Gets Unusually Close Glimpse of Black Hole Snacking on Star

A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. The stream of gas stretching to the right is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole. A cloud of hot plasma (gas atoms with their electrons stripped away) above the black hole is known as a corona. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Recent observations of a black hole devouring a wandering star may help scientists understand more complex black hole feeding behaviors.

Multiple NASA telescopes recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close. Located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the center of another galaxy, it was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever observed.

Once the star had been thoroughly ruptured by the black hole’s gravity, astronomers saw a dramatic rise in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole. This indicated that as the stellar material was pulled toward its doom, it formed an extremely hot structure above the black hole called a corona. NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) satellite is the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths of light, and the event’s proximity provided an unprecedented view of the corona’s formation and evolution, according to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The work demonstrates how the destruction of a star by a black hole – a process formally known as a tidal disruption event – could be used to better understand what happens to material that’s captured by one of these behemoths before it’s fully devoured.

Most black holes that scientists can study are surrounded by hot gas that has accumulated over many years, sometimes millennia, and formed disks billions of miles wide. In some cases, these disks shine brighter than entire galaxies. Even around these bright sources, but especially around much less active black holes, a single star being torn apart and consumed stands out. And from start to finish, the process often takes only a matter of weeks or months. The observability and short duration of tidal disruption events make them especially attractive to astronomers, who can tease apart how the black hole’s gravity manipulates the material around it, creating incredible light shows and new physical features.

“Tidal disruption events are a sort of cosmic laboratory,” said study co-author Suvi Gezari, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “They’re our window into the real-time feeding of a massive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy.”

When a star wanders too close to a black hole, the intense gravity will stretch the star out until it becomes a long river of hot gas, as shown in this animation. The gas is then whipped around the black hole and is gradually pulled into orbit, forming a bright disk. Credits: Science Communication Lab/DESY

A Surprising Signal

The focus of the new study is an event called AT2021ehb, which took place in a galaxy with a central black hole about 10 million times the mass of our Sun (about the difference between a bowling ball and the Titanic). During this tidal disruption event, the side of the star nearest the black hole was pulled harder than the far side of the star, stretching the entire thing apart and leaving nothing but a long noodle of hot gas.

Scientists think that the stream of gas gets whipped around a black hole during such events, colliding with itself. This is thought to create shock waves and outward flows of gas that generate visible light, as well as wavelengths not visible to the human eye, such as ultraviolet light and X-rays. The material then starts to settle into a disk rotating around the black hole like water circling a drain, with friction generating low-energy X-rays. In the case of AT2021ehb, this series of events took place over just 100 days.

The event was first spotted on March 1, 2021, by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. It was subsequently studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope (which observes longer X-ray wavelengths than Swift).

Then, around 300 days after the event was first spotted, NASA’s NuSTAR began observing the system. Scientists were surprised when NuSTAR detected a corona – a cloud of hot plasma, or gas atoms with their electrons stripped away – since coronae usually appear with jets of gas that flow in opposite directions from a black hole. However, with the AT2021ehb tidal event, there were no jets, which made the corona observation unexpected. Coronae emit higher-energy X-rays than any other part of a black hole, but scientists don’t know where the plasma comes from or exactly how it gets so hot.

“We’ve never seen a tidal disruption event with X-ray emission like this without a jet present, and that’s really spectacular because it means we can potentially disentangle what causes jets and what causes coronae,” said Yuhan Yao, a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the new study. “Our observations of AT2021ehb are in agreement with the idea that magnetic fields have something to do with how the corona forms, and we want to know what’s causing that magnetic field to get so strong.”

Yao is also leading an effort to look for more tidal disruption events identified by ZTF and to then observe them with telescopes like Swift, NICER, and NuSTAR. Each new observation offers the potential for new insights or opportunities to confirm what has been observed in AT2021ehb and other tidal disruption events. “We want to find as many as we can,” Yao said.

More About the Mission

A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’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. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about the NuSTAR mission, visit: https://www.nustar.caltech.edu/

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Editor: Tony Greicius

Source: NASA/NuStar

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Hubble Spies a Long-Armed Galaxy

ESO 415-19

A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with patches of dark dust, and fuzzier, dimmer spiral arms in cooler colours, with spots of bright blue. Long, faint tidal streams stretch from the galaxy’s arms: one up to the top of the frame, one curving down to the bottom-left corner. In the top-right there is a smaller, orange elliptical galaxy. The background is studded with many tiny stars and galaxies. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which lies around 450 million light-years away, stretches lazily across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the centre of this object resembles a regular spiral galaxy, long streams of stars stretch out from the galactic core like bizarrely elongated spiral arms. These are tidal streams caused by some chance interaction in the galaxy’s past, and give ESO 415-19 a distinctly peculiar appearance.

ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to offer. These galaxies range from bizarre lonesome galaxies to spectacularly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space oddities are spread throughout the night sky, which means that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets.

This particular observation lies in a part of the night sky contained by the Fornax constellation. This constellation was also the site of a particularly important Hubble observation; the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Creating the Ultra Deep Field required almost a million seconds of Hubble time, and captured nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. Just as climate scientists can recreate the planet’s atmospheric history from ice cores, astronomers can use deep field observations to explore slices of the Universe’s history from the present all the way to when the Universe was only 800 million years old!

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Festive and Free-Floating

[KAG2008] globule 13

The background is filled with bright orange-red clouds of varying density. Towards the top-left several large, pale blue stars with prominent cross-shaped spikes are scattered. A small, tadpole-shaped dark patch floats near one of these stars. More of the same dark, dense gas fills the lower-right, resembling black smoke. A bright yellow star and a smaller blue star shine in front of this. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sahai

Just in time for the festive season, this new Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space  Telescope features a glistening scene in holiday red. This image shows a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper centre-left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two rather uninspiring names — [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259.

FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are regions of gas that are sufficiently dense that they photoevaporate less easily than the less compact gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionised and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation — typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet light. EGGs were only identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the Pillars of Creation, which were captured by Hubble in iconic images released in 1995. FrEGGs were classified even more recently, and are distinguished from EGGs by being detached and having a distinct ‘head-tail’ shape. FrEGGs and EGGs are of particular interest because their density makes it more difficult for intense UV radiation, found in regions rich in young stars, to penetrate them. Their relative opacity means that the gas within them is protected from ionisation and photoevaporation. This is thought to be important for the formation of protostars, and it is predicted that many FrEGGs and EGGs will play host to the birth of new stars.

The frEGG in this image is a dark spot in the sea of red light. The red colour is caused by a particular type of light emission known as H-alpha emission. This occurs when a very energetic electron within a hydrogen atom loses a set amount of its energy, causing the electron to become less energetic and this distinctive red light to be released.

Links

• Video of Festive and Free-Floating

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Hotspots found around young binary stars

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Maureira et al.

This Picture shows the very early stages of a binary star system with some intriguing features. It’s a radio image taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The two young stars, or protostars –– marked with star symbols –– are surrounded by a dusty disc. The colour represents the temperature distribution of the protostars and the surrounding area, with brighter yellow colours representing higher temperatures. There are three clumps of hot dust far away from the protostars, marked with crosses, but what’s heating them? 

A recent study, led by Maria Jose Maureira at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestial Physics in Germany, suggests that these regions are not only heated by the protostars but, most likely, also by shockwaves, similar to the ones produced when an airplane travels faster than the sound speed through air. These shocks can help enrich the gas in the disc with complex organic molecules at early stages, which could be passed on to nascent planets. The high temperatures in these shocks can also alter how dust particles stick together, changing how early the formation of planetary cores can occur.

Source: ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array)

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Astronomers may have uncovered how galaxies change their shape

EAGLES Simulation showcases how galaxies could change their shape from ICRAR on Vimeo.

Researchers may have answered a decades-old question about galaxy evolution, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate their research.

Ever since the Hubble Sequence, that classifies galaxy morphologies, was invented in 1926, astronomers have been refining our understanding of galaxy evolution and morphology as our technology advances.

By the 1970’s, researchers had confirmed that lone galaxies tend to be spiral-shaped, and those found in clusters of galaxies were likely to be smooth and featureless, known as elliptical and lenticular (shaped like a lens).

Published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, new research led by astronomers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) may have uncovered the reason for these differences in shapes.

Lead author Dr Joel Pfeffer from The University of Western Australia node of ICRAR, said the research explains the ‘morphology-density relation’ – where clustered galaxies appear smoother and more featureless than their solo counterparts.

“We’ve discovered there are a few different things going on when we get lots of galaxies packed together,” Dr Pfeffer said.

“The spiral arms on galaxies are so fragile, and as you go to higher densities in the galaxy clusters, spiral galaxies start to lose their gas.

“This loss of gas causes them to ‘drop’ their spiral arms, transforming into a lenticular shape.”

“Another cause is galaxy mergers, which can see two or more spiral galaxies crashing together to form one large elliptical galaxy in the aftermath.”

A visual representation of AI classifying galaxies based on data from the EAGLES simulation
Credit: ICRAR

Selections from 2022: A Pulsar in the Large Magellanic Cloud

A view of the Large Magellanic Cloud taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy
Credit: ESO/VMC Survey; CC BY 4.0

Editor’s Note: In these last two weeks of 2022, we’ll be looking at a few selections that we haven’t yet discussed on AAS Nova from among the most-downloaded articles published in AAS journals this year. The usual posting schedule will resume in January.

Total intensity (left) and circularly polarized intensity (right) images of part of the Large Magellanic Cloud at 888 megahertz, as seen by ASKAP. The zoomed-in images show the location of the newly discovered pulsar. Click to enlarge. Credit: Wang et al. 2022

Discovery of PSR J0523-7125 as a Circularly Polarized Variable Radio Source in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Main takeaway:

A team led by Yuanming Wang (The University of Sydney, Australia) reported the discovery of a pulsar — the dense, rapidly spinning remnant of a massive star’s core — using radio continuum data from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). The newfound pulsar is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and its discovery may pave the way for astronomers to find other extragalactic pulsars with unusual properties.

Why it’s interesting:

The newly discovered pulsar, PSR J0523−7125, is one of the most luminous known radio pulsars, but several aspects of its radio signal made it difficult to find: while most pulsars are identified via their brief flashes of radio emission, PSR J0523−7125’s pulses are uncharacteristically broad, and its radio emission falls off sharply at higher frequencies. Wang and collaborators observed the new pulsar as part of the Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) survey and identified it based on its high degree of circular polarization and lack of a multiwavelength counterpart.

Prospects for finding further pulsars:

This work by Wang and collaborators shows that radio surveys are a viable means of discovering pulsars with unusual pulse properties. The combination of circular polarization data with multiwavelength images is especially useful, allowing researchers to identify sources that emit circularly polarized light but are absent in optical images. The authors also posit that future searches with the Next Generation Very Large Array — a network of 263 radio dishes scheduled to begin construction in 2026 — could lead to the first discovery of a pulsar in another neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.

By Kerry Hensley  

 

Citation

Yuanming Wang et al 2022 ApJ 930 38. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac61dc

Source: American Astronomical Society/AAS - Nova

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Machine Learning Reveals How Black Holes Grow

Conceptual illustration of this research. Machine learning tries many different pairings of galaxy and black hole models, and then chooses the pairing that best matches actual observations. (Credit: H. Zhang; M. Wielgus et al.; ESA/Hubble & NASA; A. Bellini) Original size (2MB)

Machine learning has deduced the rules governing the relationship between the growth of a galaxy and the growth of the supermassive black hole at its center. The tight correlation between the two growth rates found in this research confirms a decades-old theory.

Most, if not all, galaxies are thought to harbor a supermassive black hole at their center. These black holes have masses greater than 100,000 times that of the Sun, up to even millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun. Astronomers have wondered how these behemoths grow so fast, and how they form in the first place.

Haowen Zhang (University of Arizona) and Dr. Peter Behroozi (NAOJ and University of Arizona), the lead authors on a new study, built a machine-learning framework in which computers would propose new rules for how supermassive black holes grew over time, use those rules to simulate the growth of billions of black holes in a virtual universe, and finally “observe” the virtual universe to test whether it agreed with observations of black holes in the real Universe. After trying millions of rulesets, the computers chose the rules that best describe existing observations.

The results show that supermassive black holes grew most vigorously in the first few billion years of the Universe, and then grew much more slowly since then.

“We’ve known for a while that galaxies have this strange behavior, where they reach a peak in their rate of forming new stars, then it dwindles over time, and then, later on, they stop forming stars altogether,” says Behroozi. “Now, we’ve been able to show that black holes do the same: growing and shutting off at the same times as their host galaxies. This confirms a decades-old hypothesis about black hole growth in galaxies.”

However, the results pose more questions. Black holes are much smaller than the galaxies in which they live. If the Milky Way were scaled down to the size of Earth, its supermassive black hole would be the size of the period at the end of this sentence. For the black hole to grow at the same rate as the larger galaxy requires synchronization between gas flows at vastly different scales. How black holes conspire with galaxies to achieve this balance is yet to be understood.

These results first appeared as Zhang et al. “TRINITY I: Self-Consistently Modeling Halo-Galaxy-Supermassive Black Hole Connection from z = 0-10” in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on October 16, 2022, with an edited version published on November 25, 2022.

Related Link

• Machine learning reveals how black holes grow (The University of Arizona)

Source: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)/News

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Alien Planet Found Spiraling to its Doom around an Aging Star

Kepler-1658b
Credit: Gabriel Perez Diaz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

The condemned planet could help answer questions about the fate of other worlds as their solar systems evolve.

Cambridge, Mass. – For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration.

The discovery offers new insights into the long-winded process of planetary orbital decay by providing the first look at a system at this late stage of evolution. Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth's ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older.

"We've previously detected evidence for exoplanets inspiraling toward their stars, but we have never before seen such a planet around an evolved star," says Shreyas Vissapragada, a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of a new study describing the results. "Theory predicts that evolved stars are very effective at sapping energy from their planets' orbits, and now we can test those theories with observations."

The findings were published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The ill-fated exoplanet is designated Kepler-1658b. As its name indicates, astronomers discovered the exoplanet with the Kepler space telescope, a pioneering planet-hunting mission that launched in 2009. Oddly enough, the world was the very first new exoplanet candidate Kepler ever observed. Yet it took nearly a decade to confirm the planet's existence, at which time the object entered Kepler's catalogue officially as the 1658th entry.

Kepler-1658b is a so-called hot Jupiter, the nickname given to exoplanets on par with Jupiter's mass and size but in scorchingly ultra-close orbits about their host stars. For Kepler-1658b, that distance is merely an eighth of the space between our Sun and its tightest orbiting planet, Mercury. For hot Jupiters and other planets like Kepler-1658b that are already very close to their stars, orbital decay looks certain to culminate in destruction.

Measuring the orbital decay of exoplanets has challenged researchers because the process is very slow and gradual. In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star.

Detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation. The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star's brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased.

The root cause of the orbital decay experienced by Kepler-1658b is tides — the same phenomenon responsible for the daily rise and fall in Earth’s oceans. Tides are generated by gravitational interactions between two orbiting bodies, such as between our world and the Moon or Kepler-1658b and its star. The bodies’ gravities distort each other’s shapes, and as the bodies respond to these changes, energy is released. Depending on the distances between, sizes, and rotation rates of the bodies involved, these tidal interactions can result in bodies pushing each other away — the case for the Earth and the slowly outward-spiraling Moon — or inward, as with Kepler-1658b toward its star.

There is still a lot researchers do not understand about these dynamics, particularly in star-planet scenarios. Accordingly, further study of the Kepler-1658 system should prove instructive.

The star has evolved to the point in its stellar life cycle where it has started to expand, just as our Sun is expected to, and has entered into what astronomers call a subgiant phase. The internal structure of evolved stars should more readily lead to dissipation of tidal energy taken from hosted planets’ orbits compared to unevolved stars like our Sun. This accelerates the orbital decay process, making it easier to study on human timescales.

The results further help in explaining an intrinsic oddity about Kepler-1658b, which appears brighter and hotter than expected. The tidal interactions shrinking the planet's orbit may also be cranking out extra energy within the planet itself, the team says.

Vissapragada points to a similar situation with Jupiter's moon Io, the most volcanic body in the Solar System. The gravitational push-and-pull from Jupiter on Io melts the planet's innards. This molten rock then erupts out onto the moon's famously infernal, pizza-like surface of yellow sulfurous deposits and fresh red lava.

Stacking additional observations of Kepler-1658b should shed more light on celestial body interactions. And, with TESS slated to keep scrutinizing thousands of nearby stars, Vissapragada and colleagues expect the telescope to uncover numerous other instances of exoplanets circling down the drains of their host stars.

"Now that we have evidence of inspiraling of a planet around an evolved star, we can really start to refine our models of tidal physics," Vissapragada says. "The Kepler-1658 system can serve as a celestial laboratory in this way for years to come, and with any luck, there will soon be many more of these labs."

Vissapragada, who recently joined the Center for Astrophysics a few months ago and is now being mentored by Mercedes Lopez-Morales, looks forward to the science of exoplanets continuing to dramatically advance.

"Shreyas has been a welcome addition to our team working on characterizing the evolution of exoplanets and their atmospheres," says Lopez-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics.

"I can't wait to see what all of us end up discovering together," adds Vissapragada.

About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity's greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

 

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)/News

 

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Media Contact:

Nadia Whitehead
Public Affairs Officer
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
nadia.whitehead@cfa.harvard.edu

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LOFAR detects gigantic radio sources in the universe

Artistic representation of the large-scale structure of the Universe above the core of the LOFAR telescope. The inset shows a zoom into a galaxy cluster where a megahalo is observed (orange emission, from LOFAR observations).

An international research team, led by the Observatory of Universität Hamburg has, using LOFAR, discovered four radio sources of up to ten million light years in size: megahalos.

Seen from a great distance, the universe is not evenly distributed; it actually resembles a net-like structure, somewhat similar to the way neurons are connected to one another in the brain. At the nodes of this so-called cosmic web hundreds, sometimes even thousands of galaxies are crowded together into galaxy clusters. Sometimes, two galaxy clusters collide with each other and merge into a single cluster. In the process, they release enormous amounts of energy, so large that they are the most powerful events happening in our Universe after the Big Bang. During these collisions, tiny, charged particles are accelerated to near-lightspeed, emitting radio waves that can be detected with radio telescopes.

Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), scientists have now discovered four galaxy clusters where a faint radio emission envelopes the entire clusters even reaching their outskirts. Dr. Virginia Cuciti led the international research team: “Megahalos extend up to ten million light years) in size, which means that they cover a volume that is about 30 times larger than the volume of the radio sources known so far in galaxy clusters. This implies that with megahalos we can now observe the peripheral regions of galaxy clusters which were previously almost inaccessible.”

Computer simulation of the large-scale structure of the Universe. The inset shows a zoom into a galaxy cluster where a megahalo is observed (orange emission, from LOFAR observations).

Cuciti’s team used LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey (LoTSS) observations of these four galaxy clusters. While analysing the data of one of the clusters, she and her teammates saw some significant hints of radio emission on exceptionally large scales, Cuciti says. “So, we decided to re-inspect all the images of a sample of 310 clusters that we were studying with the aim of looking for similar emission. When we discovered that three other clusters of this sample showed emission on similar scales and with similar characteristics, it became clear that we discovered a new type of cosmic phenomenon that opens the possibility to explore the external region of galaxy clusters through radio observations.”

This discovery could not have been made without LOFAR, Cuciti says. “It is not by chance that megahalos have been discovered with LOFAR. They are very large, and their emission is very faint. Moreover, the synchrotron spectrum of megahalos is steep, which basically means that they are brighter at low radio frequency, therefore a sensitive radio telescope operating at low radio frequency, such as LOFAR, is the ideal instrument to detect them.”

But even then, it was not easy, co-author and astronomer at ASTRON Timothy Shimwell says: “Even in the very sensitive and wide area LOFAR surveys dataset these objects were very hard to find because they are so faint and a very careful analysis of large quantities of data was required to identify them.”

LOFAR 2.0
A region of the LOFAR core seen from above. The two antenna types of LOFAR are visible.

With LOFAR currently undergoing an upgrade to LOFAR2.0, making it an even more sensitive instrument, even more valuable information can be found about megahalos. Cuciti: “With more sensitive observations we could be able to detect megahalos in a much larger number of clusters. This is actually one of the most interesting aspects of this work, because it means that, if megahalos are present in a large fraction of clusters, if not all of them, we are opening a new field of research, a new way to systematically explore the periphery of galaxy clusters with radio observations. The LOFAR 2.0 upgrade will increase the sensitivity of LOFAR, especially in the LBA (at 50 MHz), and will therefore allow us to answer to the question: how many clusters host megahalos?"

The Nature-article Galaxy clusters enveloped by vast volumes of relativistic electrons can be found here.

Source: ASTRON-Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy

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NASA’s Webb Unveils Young Stars in Early Stages of Formation

Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Science: Megan Reiter (Rice University)
Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)
Unannotated, 2000 X 1079, PNG (2.77 MB)

Release Images

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Scientists taking a “deep dive” into one of Webb’s iconic first images have discovered dozens of energetic jets and outflows from young stars previously hidden by dust clouds. The discovery marks the beginning of a new era of investigating how stars like our Sun form, and how the radiation from nearby massive stars might affect the development of planets.

The Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within the star cluster NGC 3324, has long intrigued astronomers as a hotbed for star formation. While well-studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, many details of star formation in NGC 3324 remain hidden at visible-light wavelengths. Webb is perfectly primed to tease out these long-sought-after details since it is built to detect jets and outflows seen only in the infrared at high resolution. Webb’s capabilities also allow researchers to track the movement of other features previously captured by Hubble.

Recently, by analyzing data from a specific wavelength of infrared light (4.7 microns), astronomers discovered two dozen previously unknown outflows from extremely young stars revealed by molecular hydrogen. Webb’s observations uncovered a gallery of objects ranging from small fountains to burbling behemoths that extend light-years from the forming stars. Many of these protostars are poised to become low mass stars, like our Sun.

“What Webb gives us is a snapshot in time to see just how much star formation is going on in what may be a more typical corner of the universe that we haven’t been able to see before,” said astronomer Megan Reiter of Rice University in Houston, Texas, who led the study.

Molecular hydrogen is a vital ingredient for making new stars and an excellent tracer of the early stages of their formation. As young stars gather material from the gas and dust that surround them, most also eject a fraction of that material back out again from their polar regions in jets and outflows. These jets then act like a snowplow, bulldozing into the surrounding environment. Visible in Webb’s observations is the molecular hydrogen getting swept up and excited by these jets. “Jets like these are signposts for the most exciting part of the star formation process. We only see them during a brief window of time when the protostar is actively accreting,” explained co-author Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Previous observations of jets and outflows looked mostly at nearby regions and more evolved objects that are already detectable in the visual wavelengths seen by Hubble. The unparalleled sensitivity of Webb allows observations of more distant regions, while its infrared optimization probes into the dust-sampling younger stages. Together this provides astronomers with an unprecedented view into environments that resemble the birthplace of our solar system.

“It opens the door for what’s going to be possible in terms of looking at these populations of newborn stars in fairly typical environments of the universe that have been invisible up until the James Webb Space Telescope,” added Reiter. “Now we know where to look next to explore what variables are important for the formation of Sun-like stars.”

This period of very early star formation is especially difficult to capture because, for each individual star, it’s a relatively fleeting event – just a few thousand to 10,000 years amid a multi-million-year process of star formation.

“In the image first released in July, you see hints of this activity, but these jets are only visible when you embark on that deep dive – dissecting data from each of the different filters and analyzing each area alone,” shared team member Jon Morse of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It’s like finding buried treasure.”

In analyzing the new Webb observations, astronomers are also gaining insights into how active these star-forming regions are, even in a relatively short time span. By comparing the position of previously known outflows in this region caught by Webb, to archival data by Hubble from 16 years ago, the scientists were able to track the speed and direction in which the jets are moving.

This science was conducted on observations collected as part of Webb’s Early Release Observations Program. The paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in December 2022.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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About This Release

Credits:

Release: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Media Contact:

Hannah Braun
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Science Contact:

Megan Reiter
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Permissions: Content Use Policy

Contact Us: Direct inquiries to the News Team.

Related Links and Documents: Journal Article

Source: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope/News

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Hubble Helps Discover a New Type of Planet Largely Composed of Water

PR Image heic2215a

Artist’s Illustration Of Kepler 138 Planetary System

Videos

PR Video heic2215a

Hubblecast 121: What can we learn from exoplanet transits?

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Researchers have found evidence for the existence of a new type of planet they have called a “water world,” where water makes up a large fraction of the entire planet. These worlds, discovered in a planetary system 218 light-years away, are unlike any planets in our Solar System.

The team, led by Caroline Piaulet of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the University of Montreal, published a detailed study of a planetary system known as Kepler-138 in the journal Nature Astronomy on 15 December.

Piaulet, who is a member of Björn Benneke’s research team at the University of Montreal, observed the exoplanets Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d with both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. She found that the planets could be composed largely of water.

Water wasn’t directly detected, but by comparing the sizes and masses of the planets to models, they conclude that a significant fraction of their volume — up to half of it — should be made of materials that are lighter than rock but heavier than hydrogen or helium (which constitute the bulk of gas-giant planets like Jupiter). The most common candidate material is water.

“We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,” explained Benneke. "However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138 c and d, are quite different in nature and that a large fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water. It is the best evidence yet for water worlds, a type of planet that was theorised by astronomers to exist for a long time.”

With volumes more than three times that of Earth and masses twice as big, planets c and d have much lower densities than Earth. This is surprising because most of the planets just slightly bigger than Earth that have been studied in detail so far all seemed to be rocky worlds like ours. The closest comparison, say researchers, would be some of the icy moons in the outer Solar System that are also largely composed of water surrounding a rocky core.

“Imagine larger versions of Europa or Enceladus, the water-rich moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, but brought much closer to their star,” explained Piaulet. “Instead of an icy surface, they would harbour large water-vapour envelopes."

“The secure identification of an object with the density of the icy moons of the Solar System, but significantly larger and more massive, clearly demonstrates the great diversity of exoplanets,” added team member Jose-Manuel Almenara of Grenoble Alpes University in France. “This is expected to be the outcome of a variety of formation and evolution processes.”

Researchers caution that the planets may not have oceans like those on Earth directly at the planet’s surface. “The temperature in Kepler-138 d’s atmosphere is likely above the boiling point of water, and we expect a thick dense atmosphere made of steam on this planet. Only under that steam atmosphere could there potentially be liquid water at high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs at high pressures, called a supercritical fluid," Piaulet said.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will also facilitate valuable follow-up research. “Now that we have securely identified the ‘water-world’ Kepler-138 d, the James Webb Space Telescope is the key to unveiling the atmospheric composition of such an exotic object,” shared team member Daria Kubyshkina of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. “It will give us critical information enabling us to compare the composition of the icy moons of the solar system with that of their larger and heavier extrasolar counterparts.

Recently, another team at the University of Montreal found a planet called TOI-1452b that could potentially be covered with a liquid-water ocean, but Webb will be needed to also confirm this.

In 2014 data from the NASA Kepler Space Telescope allowed astronomers to announce the detection of three planets orbiting Kepler-138, a red dwarf star in the constellation Lyra. This was based on a measurable dip in starlight as each planet momentarily passed in front of the star.

Benneke and his colleague Diana Dragomir, from the University of New Mexico, came up with the idea of re-observing the planetary system with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes between 2014 and 2016 to catch more transits of Kepler-138 d, the third planet in the system, in order to study its atmosphere.

The secure identification of an object with the density of the icy moons of the solar system, but significantly larger and more massive, clearly demonstrates the great diversity of exoplanets, which is expected to be the outcome of a variety of formation and evolution processes.

A new exoplanet in the system

While the earlier Kepler space telescope observations only showed transits of three small planets around Kepler-138, Piaulet and her team were surprised to find that the Hubble and Spitzer observations required the presence of a fourth planet in the system, Kepler-138 e.

This newly found planet is small and farther from its star than the three others, taking 38 days to complete an orbit. The planet is in the habitable zone of its star, a temperate region where it receives just the right amount of heat from its cool star to be neither too hot nor too cold to allow the presence of liquid water.

The nature of this additional, newly found planet, however, remains an open question because it does not seem to transit its host star. Observing the exoplanet’s transit would have allowed astronomers to determine its size.

With Kepler-138 e now in the picture, the masses of the previously known planets were measured again via the transit timing-variation method, which involves tracking small variations in the precise moments of the planets’ transits in front of their star caused by the gravitational pull of other nearby planets.

The researchers had another surprise: they found that the two water worlds Kepler-138 c and d are “twin” planets, with virtually the same size and mass, while they were previously thought to be drastically different. The closer-in planet, Kepler-138 b, on the other hand, is confirmed to be a small Mars-mass planet, one of the smallest exoplanets known to date.

“As our instruments and techniques become sensitive enough to find and study planets that are farther from their stars, we might start finding a lot more of these water worlds," Benneke concluded.

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More information

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

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of C. Piaulet (University of Montréal, Canada), B. Benneke (University of Montréal, Canada), J. M. Almenara (Grenoble Alpes University, France), D. Dragomir (University of New Mexico, USA), H. A. Knutson (California Institute of Technology, USA), D. Thorngren (University of Montréal, Canada), M. S. Peterson (University of Montréal, Canada), I. J. M. Crossfield (The University of Kansas, USA), E. M.-R. Kempton (University of Maryland, USA), D. Kubyshkina (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), A. W. Howard (California Institute of Technology, USA), R. Angus (American Museum of Natural History, USA), H. Isaacson (University of California - Berkeley, USA), L. M. Weiss (University of Notre Dame, USA), C. A. Beichman (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center–Caltech, USA), J. J. Fortney (University of California, USA), L. Fossati (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), H. Lammer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), P. R. McCullough (Johns Hopkins University, USA; Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), C. V. Morley (University of Texas, USA) and I. Wong (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; 51 Pegasi b Fellow).



Image credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI)

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Links

• Images of Hubble 
• Release on STScI website
• Release on the University of Montreal website
• Science paper

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Contacts:

Caroline Piaulet
Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, University of Montreal,
Montreal, Canada
Email: caroline.piaulet@umontreal.ca

Björn Benneke
Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, University of Montreal,
Montreal, Canada
Email: bjorn.benneke@umontreal.ca

Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble Chief Science Communications Officer
Email: Bethany.Downer@esahubble.org

 Source: ESA/Hubble/News

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NGC 3293: Chandra Sees Stellar X-rays Exceeding Safety Limits

NGC 3293
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./K. Getman et al.;
Infrared: ESA/NASA JPL-Caltech/Herschel Space Observatory/JPL/IPAC; NASA JPL-Caltech/SSC/Spitzer Space Telescope;

JPEG (469.7 kb) - Large JPEG (5.2 MB) - Tiff (18.6 MB) - More Images

A Tour of NGC 3293 - More Animations

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Astronomers have made the most extensive study yet of how magnetically active stars are when they are young. This gives scientists a window into how X-rays from stars like the Sun, but billions of years younger, could partially or completely evaporate the atmospheres of planets orbiting them.

Many stars begin their lives in “open clusters,” loosely packed groups of stars with up to a few thousand members, all formed roughly at the same time. This makes open clusters valuable for astronomers investigating the evolution of stars and planets, because they allow the study of many stars of similar ages forged in the same environment.

A team of astronomers led by Konstantin Getman of Penn State University studied a sample of over 6,000 stars in 10 different open clusters with ages between 7 million and 25 million years. One of the goals of this study was to learn how the magnetic activity levels of stars like our Sun change during the first tens of millions of years after they form. Getman and his colleagues used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory for this study because stars that have more activity linked to magnetic fields are brighter in X-rays.

This composite image shows one of those clusters, NGC 3293, which is 11 million years old and is located about 8,300 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. The image contains X-rays from Chandra (purple) as well as infrared data from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory (red), longer-wavelength infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope (blue and white), and optical data from the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile appearing as red, white and blue.

The researchers combined the Chandra data of the stars’ activity with data from ESA’s Gaia satellite — not shown in the new composite image — to determine which stars are in the open clusters and which ones are in the foreground or background. The team identified nearly a thousand members of the cluster.

They combined their results for the open clusters with previously published Chandra studies of stars as young as 500,000 years old. The team found that the X-ray brightness of young, Sun-like stars is roughly constant for the first few million years, and then fades from 7 to 25 million years of age. This decrease happens more quickly for heftier stars.

To explain this decline in activity, Getman’s team used astronomers’ understanding of the interior of the Sun and Sun-like stars. Magnetic fields in such stars are generated by a dynamo, a process involving the rotation of the star as well as convection, the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior.

Around the age of NGC 3293, the dynamos of Sun-like stars become much less efficient because their convection zones become smaller as they age. For stars with masses smaller than that of the Sun, this is a relatively gradual process. For more massive stars, a dynamo dies away because the convection zone of the stars disappears.

How active a star is directly affects the formation processes of planets in the disk of gas and dust that surrounds all nascent stars. The most boisterous, magnetically active young stars quickly clear away their disks, halting the growth of planets.

This activity, measured in X-rays, also affects the potential habitability of the planets that emerge after the disk has disappeared. If a star is extremely active, as with many NGC 3293 stars in the Chandra data, then scientists predict it will blast planets in its system with energetic X-rays and ultraviolet light. In some cases, this high-energy barrage could cause an Earth-sized rocky planet to lose much of its original, hydrogen-rich atmosphere through evaporation within a few million years. It might also strip away a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere that forms later, unless it is protected by a magnetic field. Our planet possesses its own magnetic field that prevented such an outcome for Earth.

A paper describing these results was published in the August issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. Coauthors of the paper are Eric D. Feigelson and Patrick S. Broos from Penn State University, Gordon P. Garmire from the Huntingdon Institute for X-ray Astronomy, Michael A. Kuhn from the University of Hertsfordshire, Thomas Preibisch from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, and Vladimir S. Airapetian from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Tour: Chandra Sees Stellar X-rays Exceeding Safety Limits

Source: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory

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Fast Facts for NGC 3293:

Scale: Image is about 22 arcmin (53 light-years) across.
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA 10h 35m 52.8 | Dec -58° 13´ 52"
Constellation: Carina
Observation Date: October 7, 2015
Observation Time: 19 hours 41 minutes
Obs. ID: 16648
Instrument: ACIS
References: Getman, K.V., et al., 2022, ApJ, 935, 43; arXiv:2203.02047
Color Code: X-ray: purple; Infrared: red, blue, white; Optical: red, green, blue;
Distance Estimate: About 8,300 light-years

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Finding Ways to Catch Collapsars Making Heavy Metals

An artist's impression of a collapsar and an associated gamma-ray burst
Credit: NASA/SkyWorks Digital

Researchers are still working out where heavy metals are made in the universe. A recent publication explores ways to tell if elements heavier than iron can be created when extremely massive stars collapse to form black holes.

An illustration of two neutron stars approaching a merger
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Making Heavy Metals

In the cores of stars, nuclear fusion combines light elements into heavier ones, with the largest stars generating elements up to iron. But elements bulkier than iron must arise elsewhere, since a star that attempts to create anything heavier is doomed to collapse in a supernova explosion.

About half of the elements beyond iron on the periodic table are thought to form through something called the r-process, in which atoms rapidly capture multiple neutrons in a dense, hot environment. Core-collapse supernovae were early contenders for r-process production, but simultaneous observations of light and gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars cemented mergers as an important source of heavy elements. Now, researchers are searching for ways to determine if certain supernovae could be sites of r-process element creation after all.

An illustration of the authors’ model, in which r-process-enriched material is surrounded by an r-process-poor shell
Credits: Barnes & Metzger 2022

Collapsars as Candidates

Collapsars are rapidly rotating massive stars that explode as supernovae when they can no longer sustain nuclear fusion, ultimately creating a black hole. As the star’s core collapses, material in the outer layers forms an accretion disk, in which conditions for r-process element formation may exist. To probe the possible role that collapsars play in generating r-process elements, Jennifer Barnes (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Brian Metzger (Columbia University and Flatiron Institute) modeled the effects of r-process nucleosythesis on the light curves of collapsars exploding as supernovae.

Barnes and Metzger first used an analytical model to predict when the presence of r-process products might be observable as the supernova’s emission rises and falls, as well as how best to observe these effects. The team found that it may be possible to discern whether a collapsar explosion contains r-process material by making long-wavelength observations several months after the explosion, depending on how the material is distributed, but early in the explosion might offer a better chance of identifying these events.

Demonstration of how the degree of mixing (ψmix) affects the resultant light curve. As the degree of mixing increases (higher ψmix), the emission shifts toward the near-infrared. Credit: Barnes & Metzger 2022

Light Curve Modeling

As a follow-on to their initial investigation, the team modeled the evolution of light curves from collapsar explosions that produce varying amounts of r-process material. These models explore how supernova light curves change as a function of the mass ejected in the explosion, the velocity of the ejected mass, the amount of nickel-56 (a radioactive form of nickel that decays into cobalt-56, creating the characteristic shape of many supernova light curves), and the amount and distribution of r-process material.

Citation

“Signatures of r-process Enrichment in Supernovae from Collapsars,” Jennifer Barnes and Brian D. Metzger 2022 ApJL 939 L29. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac9b41

By Kerry Hensley

Source: American Astronomical Society/AAS Nova

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Cosmic Smokescreen

NGC 6530/Lagoon Nebula
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, O. De Marco
Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.

Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. They scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.

Hubble’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — particularly with Wide Field Camera 3— have made it an indispensable tool for understanding starbirth and the origin of exoplanetary systems. In particular, Hubble was crucial to investigations of the proplyds around newly born stars in the Orion Nebula. The new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s unprecedented observational capabilities at infrared wavelengths will complement Hubble observations by allowing astronomers to peer through the dusty envelopes around newly born stars and investigate the faintest, earliest stages of starbirth.

Links

• Video of A Cosmic Smokescreen

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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