Studying neutron stars on many channels in parallel

Numerical simulation of the resulting ejecta material of two merging neutron stars. Red colors refer to ejected material with a high fraction of neutrons which will appear typically redder than blue material that contains a higher fraction of protons. © I. Markin (University of Potsdam)

International research team succeeds for the first time in analyzing very different signals simultaneously

An international team of researchers, including the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the University of Potsdam, has developed a method to analyze most of the observable signals associated with neutron star mergers simultaneously. For the first time, it was possible to model and interpret the emitted gravitational waves, the kilonova, and the afterglow of the gamma-ray burst of the merger of two neutron stars observed on August 17, 2017. The study and the code infrastructure developed for it provide precise information about the properties of nuclear matter and form the basis for the analysis of future events. The research results have now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our new method will help to analyze the properties of matter at extreme densities. It will also allow us to better understand the expansion of the universe and to what extent heavy elements are formed during neutron star mergers,” explains Tim Dietrich, Professor at the University of Potsdam and leader of a Max Planck Fellow group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Dietrich is corresponding author of the paper.

Extreme conditions in a cosmic laboratory

A neutron star is a superdense astrophysical object formed at the end of a massive star's life in a supernova explosion. Like other compact objects, some neutron stars orbit each other in binary systems. They lose energy through the constant emission of gravitational waves – tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time – and eventually collide. Such mergers allow researchers to study physical principles under the most extreme conditions in the universe. For example, the conditions of these high-energy collisions lead to the formation of heavy elements such as gold. Indeed, merging neutron stars are unique objects for studying the properties of matter at densities far beyond those found in atomic nuclei.

The new method was applied to the first and so far only multi-messenger observation of binary neutron star mergers. In this event, discovered on August 17, 2017, the stars' last few thousand orbits around each other had warped space-time enough to create gravitational waves, which were detected by the terrestrial gravitational-wave observatories Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. As the two stars merged, newly formed heavy elements were ejected. Some of these elements decayed radioactively, causing the temperature to rise. Triggered by this thermal radiation, an electromagnetic signal in the optical, infrared, and ultraviolet was detected up to two weeks after the collision. A gamma-ray burst, also caused by the neutron star merger, ejected additional material. The reaction of the neutron star's matter with the surrounding medium produced X-rays and radio emissions that could be monitored on time scales ranging from days to years.

More accurate results for future detections

The new tool for simultaneously analyzing astrophysical data from different sources allows researchers to interpret all these signals at the same time and to incorporate additional information from radio and X-ray observations of neutron stars (e.g., from NASA's NICER telescope), from nuclear physics calculations, and even from heavy-ion collision experiments at accelerators on Earth. "We can now go beyond the usual step-by-step combination process that we have done before. By analyzing coherently and simultaneously, we get more precise results," says Peter T. H. Pang, scientist at Utrecht University, first author of the paper and lead developer of the code. To even further improve the developed software over the coming years, Dietrich was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant worth 1.5 million euros in 2022.

The gravitational-wave detectors are currently in their fourth observing run. The next detection of a neutron star merger could come any day, and the researchers are eagerly waiting to use the tool they developed again.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/News

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Media contact:

Dr. Elke Müller
Press Officer AEI
Potsdam, Scientific Coordinator
tel:+49 331 567-7303
tel:+49 331 567-7298
elke.mueller@aei.mpg.de

Science contact:

Prof. Dr. Tim Dietrich
Max Planck Fellow
tel:+49 331 567-7253
tel:+49 331 567-7298
tim.dietrich@aei.mpg.de

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Publication

Peter T. H. Pang, Tim Dietrich, Michael W. Coughlin, Mattia Bulla, Ingo Tews, Mouza Almualla, Tyler Barna, Ramodgwendé Weizmann Kiendrebeogo, Nina Kunert, Gargi Mansingh, Brandon Reed, Niharika Sravan, Andrew Toivonen, Sarah Antier, Robert O. VandenBerg, Jack Heinzel, Vsevolod Nedora, Pouyan Salehi, Ritwik Sharma, Rahul Somasundaram, Chris Van Den Broeck

An updated nuclear-physics and multi-messenger astrophysics framework for binary neutron star mergers
Nature Communications, Vol. 14, p. 1-13 (2023)

Source

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It’s all relative

NGC 1356

A collection of galaxies. On the left side a large spiral galaxy with swirling, twisted arms is flanked by a smaller, but still detailed, spiral behind its arm on the left, and a smaller spiral above it. On the right side is a fourth, round spiral galaxy seen face-on. Between them lies a single bright star. Several stars and distant galaxies dot the background. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Acknowledgement: L. Shatz

This Hubble Picture of the Week features a richness of spiral galaxies: the large, prominent spiral galaxy on the right side of the image is NGC 1356; the two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 (above it) and LEDA 95415 (very close at its left) respectively; and finally, IC 1947 sits along the left side of the image.

ThIs image is a really interesting example of how challenging it can be to tell whether two galaxies are actually close together, or just seem to be from our perspective here on Earth. A quick glance at this image would likely lead you to think that NGC 1356, LEDA 467699 and LEDA 95415 were all close companions, whilst IC 1947 was more remote. However, we have to remember that two-dimensional images such as this one only give an indication of angular separation: that is, how objects are spread across the sphere of the night sky. What they cannot represent is the distance objects are from Earth.

For instance, whilst NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415 appear to be so close that they must surely be interacting, the former is about 550 million light-years from Earth and the latter is roughly 840 million light-years away, so there is nearly a whopping 300 million light-year separation between them. That also means that LEDA 95415 is likely nowhere near as much smaller than NGC 1356 as it appears to be.

On the other hand, whilst NGC 1356 and IC 1947 seem to be separated by a relative gulf in this image, IC 1947 is only about 500 million light-years from Earth. The angular distance apparent between them in this image only works out to less than four hundred thousand light-years, so they are actually much much closer neighbours in three-dimensional space than NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415!

Links

• Pan: It’s all relative

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Astronomers Uncover Seismic Ripples in Oldest Known Spiral Galaxy with ALMA's Aid

Simulation by Bland-Hawthorn and Tepper-Garcia illustrates a galaxy disk being disturbed, leading to the propagation of a seismic ripple throughout the disk. Credit: Bland-Hawthorn and Tepper-Garcia, University of Sydney

Left: the gas distribution. Middle: The gas movements due to small-scale seismic motions were revealed in BRI 1335-0417, with spiral arm patterns shown in the black line. Blue parts move towards us, while red parts move away from us. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T. Tsukui, et al. | Right: similar distribution and movements are seen in a numerical simulation forming seismic waves in a galactic disk. The red box shows a field of view similar to the observation. Credit: Bland-Hawthorn and Tepper-Garcia 2021a

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has enabled a team of scientists led by Dr. Takafumi Tsukui to observe seismic-like ripples in the ancient galactic disk of BRI 1335-0417, the oldest known spiral galaxy at over 12 billion years old. This unprecedented observation reveals the galaxy's dynamic growth patterns, showcasing a vertically oscillating disk movement similar to ripples on a pond. The study, recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, marks the first time such phenomena have been detected in an early galaxy.

This movement could result from external influences like incoming gas or interactions with smaller galaxies, both crucial for star formation. The research also unveiled a bar-like structure within the galaxy, the most distant of its kind ever observed, which plays a significant role in transporting gas to the galaxy's center.

The rapid star formation rate of BRI 1335-0417 is a few hundred times faster than in modern galaxies like the Milky Way. Understanding the mechanisms behind this rapid rate is crucial, especially as spiral structures in early universes are rare, and their formation remains a mystery.

ALMA's unique configuration of 66 antennas was instrumental in this discovery, offering a detailed view of a galaxy billions of light-years away, providing a snapshot of the Universe when it was just 10 percent of its current age.

Source: ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array)/Image Releases
Scientific Paper

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Additional Information

This image release is based on a Press Release by the Australian National University (ANU).

ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), NSTC and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ.

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Young open cluster Messier 39 investigated in detail

Gaia color-magnitude diagram of M 39 displaying the members identified in the study. The color indicates the membership class, as defined in the text. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312.08581

Italian astronomers have performed high-resolution spectroscopic observations of a young open cluster known as Messier 39. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a paper published Dec. 14 on the pre-print server arXiv, yield essential information about the cluster's chemical composition.

Open clusters (OCs), formed from the same giant molecular cloud, are groups of stars loosely gravitationally bound to each other. So far, more than 1,000 of them have been discovered in the Milky Way, and scientists are still looking for more, hoping to find a variety of these stellar groupings. Expanding the list of known galactic open clusters and studying them in detail could be crucial for improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of our galaxy.

Messier 39 (or M39 for short, also known as NGC 7092) is a young Galactic open cluster located some 1,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. The cluster has a linear tidal radius of 28 light years, a mass of about 232 solar masses, and its age is estimated to be approximately 280 million years.

However, although Messier 39 was discovered almost three centuries ago, it has not been observed with high-resolution spectroscopy yet and its chemical composition remains unknown. That is why a team of astronomers led by Javier Alonso-Santiago of the Catania Astrophysical Observatory in Italy, decided to conduct such observations of this cluster using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere spectrograph (HARPS-N) and the Fiber-fed Echelle Spectrograph (FIES).

"We focused on M 39, a nearby young open cluster little studied in recent years, whose chemical composition was so far unknown. We performed high-resolution spectroscopy with the HARPS-N and FIES spectrographs for 20 likely cluster members that were supplemented with archival photometry and Gaia DR3 data," the researchers explained.

First of all, the team identified 260 likely members of Messier 39 within a radius of 250 arcminutes around the nominal cluster center. It turned out that the three identified members are double-lined spectroscopic binary systems, and that there are no evolved stars in this sample. By examining the spatial distribution of these members, a distance to Messier 39 was inferred to be approximately 980 light years.

The astronomers managed to derive radial and projected rotational velocities of the stars in their sample. They found that most of the stars have rotational velocities ranging from −6 to −3 km/s, and a mean radial velocity for Messier 39 was calculated to be −5.46 km/s. They also estimated the extinction and the atmospheric parameters of these stars.

The authors of the study carried out the chemical analysis for the nine coolest stars in the sample (with effective temperatures below 7,100 K), determining abundances for 21 elements. They found that Messier 39 has a solar-like metallicity (0.04 dex) and that the investigated stars have a chemical composition similar to that of the sun.

The researchers noted that only sodium shows a lower abundance in the studied sample, while sulfur and the heaviest elements, especially barium, display higher values. Moreover, it was found that Messier 39 shows solar-like mean ratios for alpha elements and iron-peak elements to iron, while for the neutron-capture elements this ratio is slightly overabundant.

Based on these results, the scientists concluded that the chemical composition of this cluster is fully compatible with that of the Galactic thin disk.

by Tomasz Nowakowski (Phys.org)

Source: Phys.org/News

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More information: J. Alonso-Santiago et al, High-resolution spectroscopy of the young open cluster M 39 (NGC 7092), arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312.08581

Journal information: arXiv

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New Red Galaxies Turn Out to be Already Known Blue Galaxies

Figure 1: A blue-excess dust obscured galaxy (BluDOG) imaged by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope.
Credit: NAOJ / HSC Collaboration

Not all discoveries turn out to be actual new discoveries. This was the case for the extremely red objects (EROs) found in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data. Analysis shows that they are very similar to blue-excess dust obscured galaxies (BluDOGs) already reported in Subaru Telescope data.

Quasars, some of the brightest objects in the Universe, are driven by a supermassive black hole with a mass that can reach more than a billion times that of the Sun. These objects are the focus of much research, but how they form remains poorly understood. The prevailing theory is that they form in galaxies with clouds of gas and dust that obscure the growing quasar until it is powerful enough to blast away the clouds. If this is true, it should be able to catch the short timeframe where a quasar breaks out of its cloud.

Because the transition period is short, it is necessary to observe a large number of pre-quasar candidates and hope to get lucky enough to catch a galaxy just as the quasar starts to break out. Looking at data from JWST, a group of extremely red objects (EROs) were identified as possible transitionary quasars. But then researchers at the Subaru Telescope, a Japanese telescope in Hawai`i, noticed that even though they are called "red," EROs also have a significant blue component, similar to blue-excess dust obscured galaxies (BluDOGs) found in Big Data from the Subaru Telescope and described in a report last year.

Analysis showed that EROs and BluDOGs are likely the same class of objects, but important differences also exist. One possibility is that EROs are in an earlier stage in their evolution than BluDOGs. To determine the true relationship between EROs, BluDOGs, and quasars a larger sample of candidates needs to be collected. The larger sample will be studied by the next generation of astronomy instruments including an infrared space telescope project called GREX-PLUS being planned in Japan.

Source: Subaru Telescope

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More details are available in the press release by Shinsyu University.

These results appeared in the following papers.
[1] "Optical properties of infrared-bright dust-obscured galaxies viewed with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam", Noboriguchi et al., The Astrophysical Journal (2019)

[2] "Extreme Nature of Four Blue-excess Dust-obscured Galaxies Revealed by Optical Spectroscopy", Noboriguchi et al., The Astrophysical Journal (2022)

[3] "Similarity between compact extremely red objects discovered with JWST in cosmic dawn and blue-excess dust-obscured galaxies known in cosmic noon", Noboriguchi et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023)

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Relevant Links

Discovering Dust-Obscured Active Galaxies as They Grow (Subaru Telescope August 26, 2015 Press Release) NAOJ December 15, 2023 Press Release Shinsyu University December 15, 2023 Press Release Waseda University December 15, 2023 Press Release

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Never-before-seen Fast Radio Burst sheds new light on deep space signals

Dynamic spectra (or “waterfall” plots) for all the bursts from FRB 20220912A detected using the Allen Telescope Array, the frequency-averaged pulse profiles, and the time-averaged spectra. Credit: Sofia Z. Sheikh et al., SETI Institute

Licence type: Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

Animation of discovery plots for the 35 FRBs, shown in chronological order. Credit: Sofia Z. Sheikh et al., SETI Institute
Licence type: Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

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Astronomers are continuing to unravel the mystery of deep space signals after discovering a never-before-seen quirk in a newly-detected Fast Radio Burst (FRB).

FRBs are millisecond-long, extremely bright flashes of radio light that generally come from outside our Milky Way galaxy. Most happen only once but some “repeaters” send out follow-up signals, adding to the intrigue surrounding their origin.

A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has now shed new light on them, after spotting a “highly active” repeating FRB signal that is behaving differently to anything ever detected before.

Scientists at the SETI Institute in California recorded 35 FRBs from one source, FRB 20220912A, over a period of two months and found that a fascinating pattern emerged.

Like most repeating FRBs, each burst drifted from higher to lower frequencies over time.

But with FRB 20220912A there was also a never-before-seen drop in the centre frequency of the bursts, revealing what sounds like a cosmic slide-whistle when converted into a sonification using notes on a xylophone.

In it, most of the highest notes can be heard in the first few seconds and the majority of the lowest ones in the final seconds, as if the xylophone player is repeatedly hitting the lowest available bar on the instrument.

Astronomers think at least some FRBs are generated by a type of neutron star known as a magnetar – the highly magnetized cores of dead stars – while other theories point the finger at colliding neutron star binaries or merging white dwarfs.

“This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB properties and the discovery of some new ones,” said lead author Dr Sofia Sheikh, of the SETI Institute.

“We’re narrowing down the source of FRBs, for example, to extreme objects such as magnetars, but no existing model can explain all of the properties that have been observed so far.”

The researchers made their discovery after carrying out 541 hours of observations using the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA).

They also tried to identify a pattern in the timings between the bursts but none was found, further illustrating the unpredictable and mystifying nature of these intense blasts of radio waves.

Nevertheless, the latest research is another step forward in the quest to unlock the secrets of FRBs, which generate as much energy in a thousandth of a second as our Sun does in an entire year.

“It has been wonderful to be part of the first FRB study done with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – this work proves that new telescopes with unique capabilities, like the ATA, can provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science,” Dr Sheikh added.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)/News

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Media contacts:

Rebecca McDonald
Director of Communications
SETI Institute
rmcdonald@seti.org

Robert Massey
Royal Astronomical Society
Mob: +44 (0)7802 877699
press@ras.ac.uk

Sam Tonkin
Royal Astronomical Society
Mob: +44 (0)7802 877700
press@ras.ac.uk

Science contacts:

Dr Sofia Sheikh, Postdoctoral Fellow at the SETI Institute
ssheikh@seti.org

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Multimedia and captions

Supplied animated gif: https://ras.ac.uk/media/1478

Animation of discovery plots for the 35 FRBs, shown in chronological order. The gradual shift towards the bottom of the observing window can be seen in the dedispersed frequency vs. time plot (top reddish subplot).

Sonification: https://ras.ac.uk/media/1481

This sound bite is a data sonification of the 101 sub-bursts observed with the ATA and analysed in this work. The centre frequency of each sub-burst is mapped to a xylophone note [in a one-octave A Lydian scale]. There is a lot of scatter in the notes, but most of the highest notes appear in the first few seconds, and most of the lowest notes appear in the last few seconds, as if the xylophone player is hitting the lowest available bar on the instrument repeatedly. We use statistical methods to verify that this trend from high to low is significant, and would likely continue if the ATA could observe at even lower frequency ranges (equivalent to ‘adding more notes’ at the bottom of the xylophone).

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Further information

The new work appears in “Characterization of the Repeating FRB 20220912A with the Allen Telescope Array”, Sofia Z. Sheikh et al., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press.

A pre-print paper is available on arXiv at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.07756

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Notes for editors

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognises outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4,000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.

The RAS accepts papers for its journals based on the principle of peer review, in which fellow experts on the editorial boards accept the paper as worth considering. The Society issues press releases based on a similar principle, but the organisations and scientists concerned have overall responsibility for their content.

Keep up with the RAS on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Download the RAS Supermassive podcast
Submitted by Sam Tonkin on Tue, 12/12/2023 - 16:09

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NASA's Hubble Presents a Holiday Globe of Stars

Dwarf Irregular Galaxy UGC 8091

Credits: Image: ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESA, Yumi Choi (NSF's NOIRLab), Karoline Gilbert (STScI), Julianne Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics/Flatiron Inst., UWashington)

Release Images

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The billion stars in galaxy UGC 8091 resemble a sparkling snow globe in this festive Hubble Space Telescope image from NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).

The dwarf galaxy is approximately 7 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is considered an "irregular galaxy" because it does not have an orderly spiral or elliptical appearance. Instead, the stars that make up this celestial gathering look more like a brightly shining tangle of string lights than a galaxy.

Some irregular galaxies may have become tangled by tumultuous internal activity, while others have formed by interactions with neighboring galaxies. The result is a class of galaxies with a diverse array of sizes and shapes, including the diffuse scatter of stars that is this galaxy.

Twelve camera filters were combined to produce this image, with light from the mid-ultraviolet through to the red end of the visible spectrum. The red patches are likely interstellar hydrogen molecules that are glowing because they have been excited by the light from hot, energetic stars. The other sparkles on show in this image are a mix of older stars. An array of distant, diverse galaxies appear in the background, captured by Hubble's sharp view.

The data used in this image were taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys from 2006 to 2021.

Among other things, the observing programs involved in this image sought to investigate the role that dwarf galaxies many billions of years ago had in re-heating the hydrogen that had cooled as the universe expanded after the big bang.

Astronomers are also investigating the composition of dwarf galaxies and their stars to uncover the evolutionary links between these ancient galaxies and more modern galaxies like our own.

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

Source: HubbleSite/News

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About This Release

Credits:

Media Contact:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble

Permissions: Content Use Policy

Contact Us: Direct inquiries to the News Team.

Related Links and Documents

• ESA/Hubble's Release
• NASA's Hubble Portal

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What happens if you put a black hole into the Sun?

Artist’s impression of putting a small black hole at the centre of the Sun in a thought experiment.
© MPA, background image: Wikimedia/Creative Commons.

These two diagrams show the radial evolution of a star with the mass of the Sun without (left) and with (right) a black hole with an initial mass similar to an asteroid. The black solid line shows the radius of the photosphere, the vertical dashed line the current age of the Sun. The red region shows where hydrogen is converted to helium in nuclear fusion, which provides the bulk of the solar luminosity until the black hole starts to grow noticeably (black region; for lower ages the black hole is too small to be seen in this plot). The black hole drives convection (hatches), which mixes the innermost parts of the star. Note the different scaling of the y-axes. © MPA

In a hypothetical scenario, small, primordial black holes could be captured by newly forming stars. An international team, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has now modelled the evolution of these so-called “Hawking stars” and found that they can have surprisingly long lifetimes, resembling normal stars in many aspects. Asteroseismology could help to identify such stars, which in turn could test the existence of primordial black holes and their role as a component for dark matter.

Let’s do a scientific exercise: If we assume that a large number of very small black holes where created just after the Big Bang (so-called primordial black holes), some of them might be captured during the formation of new stars. How would this affect the star during its lifetime?

“Scientist sometimes ask crazy questions in order to learn more,” says Selma de Mink, director of the stellar department at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA). “We don’t even know whether such primordial black holes exist, but we can still do an interesting thought experiment.”

Primordial black holes would have formed in the very early Universe with a wide range of masses, from some as small as an asteroid up to thousands of solar masses. They could constitute an important component of dark matter, as well as being the seeds for the supermassive black holes at the centre of present-day galaxies.

With a very small probability, a newly forming star could capture a black hole with the mass of an asteroid or a small moon, which would then occupy the star’s centre. Such a star is called a “Hawking star”, named after Stephen Hawking, who first proposed this idea in a paper in the 1970s. The black hole at the centre of such a Hawking star would grow only slowly, as the infall of gas to feed the black hole is hampered by the outflowing luminosity. An international team of scientists has now modelled the evolution of such a star with various initial masses for the black hole and with different accretions models for the stellar centre. Their astonishing result: when the black hole mass is small, the star is essentially indistinguishable from a normal star.

“Stars harbouring a black hole at their centre can live surprisingly long,” says Earl Patrick Bellinger, MPA Postdoc and now Assistant Professor at Yale University, who led the study. “Our Sun could even have a black hole as massive at the planet Mercury at its centre without us noticing.”

The main difference between such a Hawking star and a normal star would be near the core, which would become convective due to the accretion onto the black hole. It would not alter the properties of the star at its surface and would elude present detection capabilities. However, it could be detectable using the relatively new field of asteroseismology, where astronomers are using acoustic oscillations to probe the interior of a star. Also in their later evolution, in the red giant phase, the black hole might lead to characteristic signatures. With upcoming projects such as PLATO, such objects might be discovered. However, further simulations are needed to determine the implications of putting a black hole into stars of various masses and metallicities.

If primordial black holes were indeed formed soon after the Big Bang, looking for Hawking stars could be one way to find them. “Even though the Sun is used an exercise, there are good reasons to think that Hawking stars would be common in globular clusters and ultra-faint dwarf galaxies,” points out Professor Matt Caplan at Illinois State University, co-author of the study. “This means that Hawking stars could be a tool for testing both the existence of primordial black holes, and their possible role as dark matter.”

Source: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics/News

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Contacts:

Earl Patrick Bellinger
Postdoc
2225
ebellinger@mpa-garching.mpg.de

Selma E.de Mink
Director
2041
sedemink@mpa-garching.mpg.de

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Original publication

Earl P. Bellinger, Matt E. Caplan, Taeho Ryu, Deepika Bollimpalli, Warrick H. Ball, Florian Kühnel, R. Farmer, S. E. de Mink, and Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard

Solar Evolution Models with a Central Black Hole

2023 ApJ 959 113

DOI

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NASA's Hubble Watches 'Spoke Season' on Saturn

Saturn
Credits: Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)

Release Images | Release Videos

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This photo of Saturn was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023, when the ringed planet was approximately 850 million miles from Earth. Hubble's ultra-sharp vision reveals a phenomenon called ring spokes.

Saturn's spokes are transient features that rotate along with the rings. Their ghostly appearance only persists for two or three rotations around Saturn. During active periods, freshly-formed spokes continuously add to the pattern.

In 1981, NASA's Voyager 2 first photographed the ring spokes. NASA's Cassini orbiter also saw the spokes during its 13-year-long mission that ended in 2017.

Hubble continues observing Saturn annually as the spokes come and go. This cycle has been captured by Hubble's Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program that began nearly a decade ago to annually monitor weather changes on all four gas-giant outer planets.

Hubble's crisp images show that the frequency of spoke apparitions is seasonally driven, first appearing in OPAL data in 2021 but only on the morning (left) side of the rings. Long-term monitoring show that both the number and contrast of the spokes vary with Saturn's seasons. Saturn is tilted on its axis like Earth and has seasons lasting approximately seven years.

"We are heading towards Saturn equinox, when we'd expect maximum spoke activity, with higher frequency and darker spokes appearing over the next few years," said the OPAL program lead scientist, Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This year, these ephemeral structures appear on both sides of the planet simultaneously as they spin around the giant world. Although they look small compared with Saturn, their length and width can stretch longer than Earth's diameter!

"The leading theory is that spokes are tied to Saturn's powerful magnetic field, with some sort of solar interaction with the magnetic field that gives you the spokes," said Simon. When it's near the equinox on Saturn, the planet and its rings are less tilted away from the Sun. In this configuration, the solar wind may more strongly batter Saturn's immense magnetic field, enhancing spoke formation.

Planetary scientists think that electrostatic forces generated from this interaction levitate dust or ice above the ring to form the spokes, though after several decades no theory perfectly predicts the spokes. Continued Hubble observations may eventually help solve the mystery.

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

Source: HubbleSite/News

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About This Release

Credits:

Media Contact:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Science: Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)

Permissions: Content Use Policy

Contact Us: Direct inquiries to the News Team.

Related Links and Documents

• Hubble Captures the Start of a New Spoke Season at Saturn
• NASA's Hubble Portal
• ESA/Hubble's Release

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New 1.5-billion-pixel ESO image shows Running Chicken Nebula in unprecedented detail

PR Image eso2320a
The Running Chicken Nebula

PR Image eso2320b
The Running Chicken Nebula, annotated

PR Image eso2320c
The Running Chicken Nebula in the constellation of Centaurus

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Videos

PR Video eso2320a

The 1.5-billion-pixel Running Chicken Nebula 

 

PR Video eso2320b

3D animation of the Running Chicken Nebula 

 

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While many holiday traditions involve feasts of turkey, soba noodles, latkes or Pan de Pascua, this year, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is bringing you a holiday chicken. The so-called Running Chicken Nebula, home to young stars in the making, is revealed in spectacular detail in this 1.5-billion-pixel image captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site in Chile.

This vast stellar nursery is located in the constellation Centaurus (the Centaur), at about 6500 light-years from Earth. Young stars within this nebula emit intense radiation that makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow in shades of pink.

The Running Chicken Nebula actually comprises several regions, all of which we can see in this vast image that spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons [1]. The brightest region within the nebula is called IC 2948, where some people see the chicken’s head and others its rear end. The wispy pastel contours are ethereal plumes of gas and dust. Towards the centre of the image, marked by the bright, vertical, almost pillar-like, structure, is IC 2944. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.

There are, however, many young stars within IC 2948 and IC 2944 themselves — and while they might be bright, they’re most certainly not merry. As they spit out vast amounts of radiation, they carve up their environment much like, well, a chicken. Some regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules, can withstand the fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation pervading this region. If you zoom in to the image, you might see them: small, dark, and dense pockets of dust and gas dotted across the nebula.

Other regions pictured here include, to the upper right, Gum 39 and 40, and to the lower right, Gum 41. Aside from nebulae, there are countless orange, white and blue stars, like fireworks in the sky. Overall in this image, there are more wonders than can be described — zoom in and pan across, and you’ll have a feast for the eyes.

This image is a large mosaic comprising hundreds of separate frames carefully stitched together. The individual images were taken through filters that let through light of different colours, which were then combined into the final result presented here. The observations were conducted with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VST, a telescope owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and hosted by ESO at its Paranal site in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is ideally suited for mapping the southern sky in visible light. The data that went into making this mosaic were taken as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.

Source: ESO/News

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Notes

[1] This image, edge to edge, is 270 light-years wide. It would take an average chicken almost 21 billion years to run across it. That’s much longer than our Universe has been around for.

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More information

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration for astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organisation in 1962, today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, 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’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. ESO operates three observing sites: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its Very Large Telescope Interferometer, as well as survey telescopes such as VISTA. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Together with international partners, ESO operates ALMA on Chajnantor, a facility that observes the skies in the millimetre and submillimetre range. At Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky” — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. From our offices in Santiago, Chile we support our operations in the country and engage with Chilean partners and society.

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Links

• Photos of the survey telescopes at Paranal, including VST 
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Contacts

Juan Carlos Muñoz Mateos
ESO Media Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6176
Email: jmunoz@eso.org

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Media Manager
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6670
Cell: +49 151 241 664 00
Email: press@eso.org

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NGC 2264: Sprightly Stars Illuminate 'Christmas Tree Cluster'

NGC 2264 (Video)

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: T.A. Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) and B.A. Wolpa (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA); Infrared: NASA/NSF/IPAC/CalTech/Univ. of Massachusetts; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & J.Major

JPEG (444.5 kb) - Large JPEG (4.8 MB) - Tiff (13.4 MB) - More Images

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This new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars — with ages between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth. The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than the Sun, ranging from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses.

This new composite image enhances the resemblance to a Christmas tree through choices of color and rotation. The blue and white lights (which blink in the animated version of this image) are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the National Science Foundation-supported WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak shows a nebula of gas in the cluster in green, corresponding to the “pine needles” of the tree. Finally infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white. This image has been rotated clockwise by 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image.

NGC 2264 (Video)

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: T.A. Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) and B.A. Wolpa (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA); Infrared: NASA/NSF/IPAC/CalTech/Univ. of Massachusetts; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & J.Major

 

Young stars, like those in NGC 2264, are volatile and produce strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen at different wavelengths of light. The coordinated, blinking variations shown in this animation, however, are artificial, to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree. In reality the variations of the stars are not synchronized.

The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes. Some of these are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the Sun — but much more powerful — and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of the stars that go in and out of view as the stars rotate. There can also be changes in the thickness of gas obscuring the stars, and changes in the amount of material still falling onto the stars from disks of surrounding gas.

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.

Source: NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory

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Visual Description:

This release features a composite image of a cluster of young stars looking decidedly like a cosmic Christmas tree! The cluster, known as NGC 2264, is in our Milky Way Galaxy, about 2,500 light-years from Earth. Some of the stars in the cluster are relatively small, and some are relatively large, ranging from one tenth to seven times the mass of our Sun.

In this composite image, the cluster's resemblance to a Christmas tree has been enhanced through image rotation and color choices. Optical data is represented by wispy green lines and shapes, which creates the boughs and needles of the tree shape. X-rays detected by Chandra are presented as blue and white lights and resemble glowing dots of light on the tree. Infrared data show foreground and background stars as gleaming specks of white against the blackness of space. The image has been rotated by 160 degrees from the astronomer's standard of North pointing upwards. This puts the peak of the roughly conical tree shape near the top of the image, though it doesn't address the slight bare patch in the tree's branches, at our lower right, which in a living room should probably be turned to the corner!

In this release, the festive cluster is presented as both a static image, and as a short animation. In the animation, blue and white X-ray dots from Chandra flicker and twinkle on the tree, like the lights on a Christmas tree.

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Fast Facts for (NGC 2264):

Scale: Image is about 77 arcmin (56 light-years) across.
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA 06h 40m 52s | Dec +09° 52´ 37"
Constellation: Monoceros
Observation Dates: 8 observations from February 2002 to December 2011
Observation Time: 137 hours 26 minutes (5 days, 17 hours, 26 mintues)
Obs. ID: 2540, 2550, 9768, 9769, 13610, 13611, 14368, 14369
Instrument: ACIS
Color Code: X-ray: blue, purple, white; Optical: green; Infrared: red, green, blue
Distance Estimate: About 2,500 light-years

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NASA's Webb Rings in the Holidays with the Ringed Planet Uranus

Uranus Close-up (NIRCam image)
Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Uranus Wide (NIRCam Image)
Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Uranus Wide (Compass NIRCam Image)
Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently trained its sights on unusual and enigmatic Uranus, an ice giant that spins on its side. Webb captured this dynamic world with rings, moons, storms, and other atmospheric features – including a seasonal polar cap. The image expands upon a two-color version released earlier this year, adding additional wavelength coverage for a more detailed look.

With its exquisite sensitivity, Webb captured Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the elusive Zeta ring – the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet. It also imaged many of the planet’s 27 known moons, even seeing some small moons within the rings.

In visible wavelengths as seen by Voyager 2 in the 1980s, Uranus appeared as a placid, solid blue ball. In infrared wavelengths, Webb is revealing a strange and dynamic ice world filled with exciting atmospheric features.

One of the most striking of these is the planet’s seasonal north polar cloud cap. Compared to the Webb image from earlier this year, some details of the cap are easier to see in these newer images. These include the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap, toward the lower latitudes.

Several bright storms can also be seen near and below the southern border of the polar cap. The number of these storms, and how frequently and where they appear in Uranus’s atmosphere, might be due to a combination of seasonal and meteorological effects.

The polar cap appears to become more prominent when the planet’s pole begins to point toward the Sun, as it approaches solstice and receives more sunlight. Uranus reaches its next solstice in 2028, and astronomers are eager to watch any possible changes in the structure of these features. Webb will help disentangle the seasonal and meteorological effects that influence Uranus’s storms, which is critical to help astronomers understand the planet’s complex atmosphere.

Because Uranus spins on its side at a tilt of about 98 degrees, it has the most extreme seasons in the solar system. For nearly a quarter of each Uranian year, the Sun shines over one pole, plunging the other half of the planet into a dark, 21-year-long winter.

With Webb’s unparalleled infrared resolution and sensitivity, astronomers now see Uranus and its unique features with groundbreaking new clarity. These details, especially of the close-in Zeta ring, will be invaluable to planning any future missions to Uranus.

Uranus can also serve as a proxy for studying the nearly 2,000 similarly sized exoplanets that have been discovered in the last few decades. This “exoplanet in our backyard” can help astronomers understand how planets of this size work, what their meteorology is like, and how they formed. This can in turn help us understand our own solar system as a whole by placing it in a larger context.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing 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 the Canadian Space Agency.

Source: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope/News

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About This Release

Credits:

Media Contact:

Ann Jenkins
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Science Advisor: Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Emma Dahl (NASA-JPL)

Permissions: Content Use Policy

Contact Us: Direct inquiries to the News Team.

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Sighting forbidden light

MCG-01-24-014

A spiral galaxy. It appears to be almost circular and seen face-on, with two prominent spiral arms winding out from a glowing core. It is centred in the frame as if a portrait. Most of the background is black, with only tiny, distant galaxies, but there are two large bright stars in the foreground, one blue and one red, directly above the galaxy. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick

This whirling image features a bright spiral galaxy known as MCG-01-24-014, which is located about 275 million light-years from Earth. In addition to being a well-defined spiral galaxy, MCG-01-24-014 has an extremely energetic core, known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), so it is referred to as an active galaxy. Even more specifically, it is categorised as a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies host one of the most common subclasses of AGN, alongside quasars. Whilst the precise categorisation of AGNs is nuanced, Seyfert galaxies tend to be relatively nearby ones where the host galaxy remains plainly detectable alongside its central AGN, while quasars are invariably very distant AGNs whose incredible luminosities outshine their host galaxies.

There are further subclasses of both Seyfert galaxies and quasars. In the case of Seyfert galaxies, the predominant subcategories are Type-1 and Type-2. These are differentiated from one another by their spectra — the pattern that results when light is split into its constituent wavelengths — where the spectral lines that Type-2 Seyfert galaxies emit are particularly associated with specific so-called ‘forbidden’ emission. To understand why emitted light from a galaxy could be considered forbidden, it helps to understand why spectra exist in the first place. Spectra look the way they do because certain atoms and molecules will absorb and emit light very reliably at very specific wavelengths. The reason for this is quantum physics: electrons (the tiny particles that orbit the nuclei of atoms and molecules) can only exist at very specific energies, and therefore electrons can only lose or gain very specific amounts of energy. These very specific amounts of energy correspond to certain light wavelengths being absorbed or emitted.

Forbidden emission lines, therefore, are spectral emission lines that should not exist according to certain rules of quantum physics. But quantum physics is complex, and some of the rules used to predict it use assumptions that suit laboratory conditions here on Earth. Under those rules, this emission is ‘forbidden’ — so improbable that it’s disregarded. But in space, in the midst of an incredibly energetic galactic core, those assumptions don’t hold anymore, and the ‘forbidden’ light gets a chance to shine out towards us.

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Rubin Observatory Will Unlock Fossil Record of Galaxy Cluster Evolution

PR Image noirlab2333a
Enhanced image of Intracluster light in the Abell 85 galaxy cluster

PR Image noirlab2333b
Rubin at sunset

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Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s fast-moving telescope and huge digital camera will illuminate the faint glow of free-floating stars within galaxy clusters

Intracluster light, the collective glow of innumerable stars stripped from their home galaxies and left to wander vast intergalactic space, is incredibly faint and difficult to detect. Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time will be the first astronomical survey to provide scientists with the data they need to detect intracluster light in thousands of galaxy clusters, unlocking clues to the evolutionary history of the Universe on large scales.

Galaxies, like our Milky Way galaxy, are collections of billions of stars held together by gravity. Sometimes galaxies clump together in clusters containing hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. These galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe that are held together by their own gravity, and they take billions of years to form and change. If we could somehow watch their evolution in fast-forward, we wouldn’t need movies — the dramatic interactions between galaxies would keep us mesmerized. But there is a way we can read the stories of galaxy cluster history, and our cosmic storyteller is the population of stars that have been stripped from their home galaxies and strewn into the spaces between galaxies in the cluster. These stars give off a ghostly glow called intracluster light, and it’s at least 1000 times fainter than the darkest night sky we can perceive with our eyes. Intracluster light has stayed mostly hidden from existing telescopes and cameras because it’s so faint. But with the data from Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will begin in 2025, scientists will be able to observe this extremely faint light like never before. 

Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE). Rubin is a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which will jointly operate Rubin.

Over millions of years, as galaxies collide and merge, intracluster light forms a ‘fossil record’ of the dynamical interactions a galaxy cluster has experienced, offering a wealth of information about the history of the cluster system and the history of the Universe on large scales.

“Stars stripped from their galaxies end up populating the space between galaxies in a cluster. These stars are like the dust released from a piece of chalk when you write on a blackboard.” says Mireia Montes, research fellow at Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and member of the Rubin/LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration. "By tracking the stellar chalk dust with Rubin, we hope to be able to read the words on the galaxy cluster blackboard."

>How many of a galaxy cluster’s stars are actually free-floating, contributing to the glow? How are they distributed in the cluster? The answers to these questions aren’t well known, because intracluster light has been so difficult to study until now. “There’s so much we don’t know about intracluster light,” says Montes. “The power of Rubin is that it’s going to provide us with lots of clusters of galaxies that we can explore.”

In addition to studying intracluster light for clues about the history of galaxy clusters, scientists can also use it to gain insight about the elusive substance known as dark matter — an invisible material that doesn’t emit or reflect light and is found in high concentrations around clusters of galaxies.

Rubin will scan the entire southern hemisphere sky every few nights for ten years with the largest digital camera in the world, revealing intracluster light that, until now, astronomers have largely been able to detect only with long and targeted observations of one galaxy cluster at a time. Over the course of its 10-year survey, Rubin will take millions of high-resolution images of distant galaxy clusters, and scientists will be able to stack these images together into the largest ultra-long-exposure images ever created of the southern hemisphere sky. The stacked images will give scientists more galaxy clusters with detectable intracluster light in each field of view than they've had in total to date. In this way, Rubin will expand the number of galaxy clusters we can study from just a handful to thousands, which will allow researchers like Montes to analyze the faint glow of intracluster light across the Universe.

From the evolution of galaxy clusters to the distribution of dark matter, intracluster light holds important clues about how the large-scale structure of the Universe came to be. “Intracluster light may look like something very small and insignificant, but it has a lot of implications,” Montes says. “It complements what we already know, and will open new windows into the history of our Universe.”

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More information

Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). Its primary mission is to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, providing an unprecedented data set for scientific research supported by both agencies. Rubin is operated jointly by NSF’s NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). NOIRLab is managed for NSF by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and SLAC is operated for DOE by Stanford University. Additional contributions from a number of international organizations and teams are acknowledged.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

NSF’s NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

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Links

• Vera C. Rubin Observatory website
• Vera C. Rubin Observatory images
• More Rubin images
• Rubin videos

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Contacts

Mireia Montes
Member of the Rubin/LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration
Email: mmontes@iac.es

Kristen Metzger
Communications Manager for Education and Public Outreach, Rubin Observatory
Email: kristen.metzger@noirlab.edu

Bob Blum
Director for Operations, Vera C. Rubin Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab
Tel: +1 520-318-8233
Email: bob.blum@noirlab.edu

Željko Ivezić
Professor of Astronomy, University of Washington/AURA
Tel: +1-206-403-6132
Email: ivezic@uw.edu

Josie Fenske
Communications NSF’s NOIRLab
Email: fenske.josie@noirlab.edu

Manuel Gnida
Media Relations Manager, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Tel: +1 650-926-2632 (office)
Cell: +1 415-308-7832 (cell)
Email: mgnida@slac.stanford.edu

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