SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Crater 2 - Humongous Galaxy Orbiting Our Own JUST APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE?!

Milky Way. ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier via NASA

April 25, 2016 - SPACE - Researchers scanning the skies just got a big surprise. They spotted a humongous galaxy orbiting our own, where none had been seen before. It appeared, seemingly, out of nowhere.

So, just how did the newly-discovered Crater 2 manage to pull off this feat, like a deer leaping from the interstellar bushes to stare us down through our collective headlights?

Although the appearance may seem sudden, the fact is that Crater 2 has been there all along. We just missed it.

Now that we know it’s there, though, there are a few other humiliating details that astronomers discovered.

First of all, we can’t blame the galaxy’s size for its relative obscurity. Crater 2 is so enormous that researchers have already pegged it as the fourth largest galaxy orbiting our own.

We can’t blame its distance, either. Crater 2's orbit around the Milky Way puts it right in our neighborhood.

That said, how did we still not know it was there? A new paper out in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from researchers at the University of Cambridge has an answer for us. It turns out that, despite being large and close, Crater 2 is also a pretty dark galaxy.

In fact, it’s one of the dimmest galaxies ever spotted in the universe. That, along with some much brighter neighbors, let the galaxy that researchers have nicknamed “the feeble giant” escape detection until now.

Now that we have seen Crater 2, however, the discovery raises questions about what else is out there.

Researchers are already talking about mounting a search for similarly large, dark galaxies around us. It’s a good reminder that there’s still so much about space that we don’t know.
- Gizmodo.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: "Zone of Avoidance" - Scientists Baffled By Mysterious Gravitational Acceleration On The Milky Way Galaxy Or Where It's Coming From, As Hundreds Of Other Galaxies Are Discovered Hidden Behind It?!

© icrar.org

February 10, 2016 - SPACE - Scientists have finally mapped the final frontier, and it turns out that one of the most secretive areas of space is just beyond our own backyard – the Milky Way was found to be hiding hundreds of galaxies from eager astronomers.

Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth – very close in astronomical terms – it took researchers decades to map the distribution of the galaxies behind our own, the Milky Way.

The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) mapped 883 galaxies, new and old, in research published in the Astronomical Journal.

© icrar.org

A team of international scientists have dubbed the area the “Zone of Avoidance.” Of the 883 galaxies mapped, over a third have never been seen before.

The astronomers used CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, which is famous for assisting with moon landings.


WATCH: Raw data visualisation of Hidden Galaxy positions.

The telescope is equipped with an innovative receiver that allowed scientists see past the stars and dust of the Milky Way into a previously unexplored region of space.

“The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it’s very interesting to study our own galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,” lead scientist Professor Lister Staveley-Smith from The University of Western Australia node of the ICRAR said.

The discovery may also help explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns.

Scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations in universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and ’80s, according to Professor Staveley-Smith.

“We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” he said.


WATCH: Animation showing hidden galaxies discovered in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’.

 

“We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometers per hour.”

This research identified several new structures that could help explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).


WATCH: Annotated animation showing hidden galaxies discovered in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’.

 

Observing radio waves is the only technique that allowed astronomers to view the hidden galaxies, and they were able to map the sky 13 times fast then previously by using the Parkes radio telescope.

“An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn’t know about until now,” University of Cape Town astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg said. - RT.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: "The Apocalypse" - Monstrous "Comet-Shaped" Gas Cloud To Smash Into The Milky Way Galaxy With "Spectacular Burst"!

© nrao.edu

January 30, 2016 - SPACE - A monstrous cloud is now heading to our Milky Way galaxy with enormous speed and is ready to collide with it, scientists said, adding that when it plows into our galaxy, the reaction will trigger star formation and provide gas for 2 million new stars.

The Smith Cloud, a high-velocity cloud of hydrogen gas “is plummeting toward our galaxy at nearly 700,000 miles per hour,” said the team of astronomers who have been working with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The cloud, supposedly coming from the outer regions of the galactic disk where it originated about 70 million years ago, was discovered in the 1960s by doctoral astronomy student Gail Smith.

The “apocalypse” it brings is not going to happen tomorrow – the scientists found out that the cloud is expected to plow into the Milky Way's disk in some 30 million years.

When the collision takes place, it “will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation, perhaps providing enough gas to make 2 million suns,” the astronomers say.

"The cloud is an example of how the galaxy is changing with time," Andrew Fox, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said. "It's telling us that the Milky Way is a bubbling, very active place where gas can be thrown out of one part of the disk and then return back down into another."

And the cloud is really monstrous even up to space standards – the comet-shaped region of gas in the cloud is about 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years across.

© ESA / NASA

“If the cloud could be seen in visible light, it would span the sky with an apparent diameter 30 times greater than the size of the full moon,” astronomers say.

While the cloud is heading to our galaxy with monstrous speed (and probably monstrous intentions), the scientists try to unravel the mystery of the phenomenon.

The researchers wonder how the cloud got to “where it is now” or what exactly catapulted it out of the Milky way.“Could it be a region of dark matter — an invisible form of matter — that passed through the disk and captured Milky Way gas? The answers may be found in future research,” the scientists ask. - RT.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Mysterious Object At The Center Of The Milky Way Is Racing Towards The Earth - Actually INCREASING In Speed From 6.2 Million To 7.4 Million Miles Per Hour!

April 2, 2015 - SPACE - Towards the centre of our galaxy there is a strange object known as G2 that is drifting around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.  The origins of this 'cloud' have remained somewhat a mystery and now a new theory has been proposed - the cloud is actually a star.  New observations suggest it is too compact to be a clump of gas, and instead its more likely to be a stellar object. 

The new theory was proposed by scientists from the University of Cologne in Germany and published in the Astrophysical Journal.

G2 has fascinated astronomers since it was first found in 2002 because it is not obvious where it has come from.

University of Cologne scientists say G2 cloud is actually a star. The object was found orbiting the Milky Way's core in 2002. This composite image shows the
motion of the dusty cloud G2 as it closes in on, and then passes, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way - and it remains compact, like a star

Studying it could help scientists understand how supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies draw in material and ‘feed’.

Observations had suggested G2 was stretched, like a cloud - and may even have a companion, dubbed G1.

But according to the team, the latest observations show that G2 remained intact as it made a recent close pass to the black hole.

If it had been a cloud, it would have been spread apart by the black hole’s intense gravity.

‘For us, everything points at it being a young star,’ Dr Andreas Eckart, a co-author on the paper, told Space.com.

Before 2014, the cloud was moving away from us, but now it is moving towards Earth - increasing in speed from 6.2 million to 7.4 million mph (10 million to 12 million km/h).

WHY IS G2 SO IMPORTANT TO ASTRONOMERS?

Sagittarius A* lurks 26,000 light years away in the Milky Way's innermost region.

For a black hole, it is very dim - about a billion times fainter than others of its supermassive types - making it something of a mystery.

Black holes eat matter from their surroundings and blow matter back. The way they do that influences the evolution of the entire galaxy.

Its interaction with the gas clouds G1 and G2 will give astronomers a unique opportunity to see how faint supermassive black holes 'feed'.

They hope to understand these black holes don't consume matter in the same way as their brighter counterparts in other galaxies.

The findings could shed light on how stars are formed, how the galaxy grows and how it interacts with other galaxies.

G2 has fascinated astronomers since it was first found in 2002 because it is not obvious where it has come from. Studying it could help scientists understand
how supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies (illustrated) draw in material and ‘feed’

‘We don't see any stretching of the cloud that was claimed previously,’ Dr Eckart said.

‘We get a much more coherent picture of a single object.’

Other experts, though, have suggested the team is not observing the whole object, and thus is missing some of its features.

 'Our basic idea is that G1 and G2 might be clumps of the same gas streamer,’ Dr Oliver Pfuhl of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in December.

Now debate will rage on whether G2 is a cloud of gas (illustrated left) or a star (illustrated right). Observations had suggested G2 was stretched, like a cloud. But
according to the team, the latest observations show that G2 remained intact as it made a recent close pass to the black hole - suggesting it is a star

'In this case, we should be able to simultaneously fit both data sets and, indeed, our model captures the G1 and G2 orbits remarkably well.'

If they are clouds, the likely source for both G1 and G2 could be clumps in the wind of one of the massive disk stars, which could have been ejected some 100 years ago.

Whatever they turn out to be, the answer could reveal a fascinating insight into some of the goings on near the black hole at the Milky Way's core.  - Daily Mail.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Run, Star, Run - Fastest Star Known Breaks Free From Our Galaxy's Bonds; Scientists Baffled; "Common Explanations For Other Previous Hypervelocity Stars Do Not Apply"?! [VIDEO]

An artist impression of the mass-transfer phase followed by a double-detonation supernova that leads to the ejection of US 708.
(ESA / Hubble, NASA, S. Geier)

March 9, 2015 - SPACE - A hypervelocity star traveling at a speed of 1,200 kilometers per second is heading away from the Milky Way galaxy, boosted by its sibling star’s death as a massive supernova.

The star, known as US 708, was first discovered in 2005 and is supposed to be the remnant of a red giant. Now, scientists at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, have measured its full 3D speed, relative to the center of the galaxy, with the help of the data of the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii – and it turns out to be breathtaking: 1,200 kilometers a second or 2.7 million miles per hour, W. M. Keck Observatory reported on Thursday.

“At that speed, you could travel from Earth to the moon in five minutes,” one astronomer at the University of Hawaii Eugene Magnier said in a press-release.

The scientists also found out that the star was spinning quickly, at over 100 kilometers per second, which means that in the past it has received an energetic boost. What is also odd about the star is that it has lost its hydrogen, so common explanations suitable for any other previously discovered hypervelocity stars, do not apply.

Hypervelocity stars are those traveling fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of its galaxy.

Usually, the stars that are going fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of our galaxy resemble the sun and are slower than US 708. They are thought to have once had pairs. However, when one star is sucked in by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the other one gets released from the grip of the whole galaxy.


WATCH: Double-detonation supernova leads to the ejection of US 708 from the galaxy.

However, astronomers believe that US 708 was in a very close relationship with another star – so close, in fact, that even a black hole couldn't tear them apart. The current theory suggests that the star’s pair was a white dwarf that might have stolen all its hydrogen, passed on to the partner’s helium core – until the fatal destabilization that caused ignition, turning it into a massive supernova.

“The only way to get rid of the companion is a thermonuclear supernova,” Stephan Geier of the European Southern Observatory said, adding that the star was propelled by the breaking of the pair – but not by the explosion. “It’s not a shockwave, it's the mere fact that this star is unleashed from this very tight binary.”

Now, astronomers, who have published their findings in the Friday issue of journal Science, hope to find more stars like US 708 to study supernovas of this type. They are called “standard candles”, and help measure distances in the universe.

“If we can really prove this scenario, then we have a means to study those explosions in a new and very interesting way,” said Geier. - RT.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: New Milky Way Neighbor Discovered - "May Be A Huge Number Of Dwarf Galaxies Out There"!

December 25, 2014 - SPACE - The Milky Way, the galaxy we live in, is part of a cluster of more than 50 galaxies that make up the ‘Local Group’, a collection that includes the famous Andromeda galaxy and many other far smaller objects. Now a Russian-American team have added to the canon, finding a tiny and isolated dwarf galaxy almost 7 million light years away.

The image below is a negative image of the galaxy, KKs 3, made using the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. The core of the galaxy is the right hand dark object at the top centre of the image, with its stars spreading out over a large section around it. (The left hand of the two dark objects is a much nearer globular star cluster.)

“Finding objects like Kks3 is painstaking work, even with observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope," said.

Team member Prof Dimitry Makarov, also of the Special Astrophysical Observatory. "But with persistence, we’re slowly building up a map of our local neighbourhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought. It may be that are a huge number of dwarf spheroidal galaxies out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos.”

The team, led by Prof Igor Karachentsev of the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Karachai-Cherkessia, Russia, found the new galaxy, named KKs3, using the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in August 2014. Kks3 is located in the southern sky in the direction of the constellation of Hydrus and its stars have only one ten-thousandth of the mass of the Milky Way.

Kks3 is a ‘dwarf spheroidal’ or dSph galaxy, lacking features like the spiral arms found in our own galaxy. These systems also have an absence of the raw materials (gas and dust) needed for new generations of stars to form, leaving behind older and fainter relics. In almost every case, this raw material seems to have been stripped out by nearby massive galaxies like Andromeda, so the vast majority of dSph objects are found near much bigger companions.

Isolated objects must have formed in a different way, with one possibility being that they had an early burst of star formation that used up the available gas resources. Astronomers are particularly interested in finding dSph objects to understand galaxy formation in the universe in general, as even HST struggles to see them beyond the Local Group. The absence of clouds of hydrogen gas in nebulae also makes them harder to pick out in surveys, so scientists instead try to find them by picking out individual stars.

For that reason, only one other isolated dwarf spheroidal, KKR 25, has been found in the Local Group, a discovery made by the same group back in 1999.

The team will continue to look for more dSph galaxies, a task that will become a little easier in the next few years, once instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope begin service. - Daily Galaxy.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Second Sun And Nibiru Memes - Astronomers Discover Sister To Earth's Sun?!

June 16, 2014 - SPACE - As part of a search into the origins of our galaxy, astronomers at the University of Texas have identified what they believe to be a sister to the Earth’s sun.

Reuters/NASA

According to the Guardian, this potential sibling has not been named, and currently only goes by the title, Star HD 162826. Astronomers currently hypothesize that the sister sun was formed out of the same cluster of stars that ultimately gave birth to our own sun approximately 4.5 billion years ago. If true, the discovery could also shed light on humanity’s search for extraterrestrial life.

Led by astronomer Ivan Ramirez, researchers at the University of Texas said that they've been studying HD 162826 – which is 15 percent larger than our sun – for more than 15 years.

“The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars. This cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has since broken up,” Ramirez said in a statement. “A lot of things can happen in that amount of time,” he added, including the potential for these stars to shift along to other points in the Milky Way and host other planets.

Although the HD 16286 cannot be seen by the naked eye, it can be spotted with a pair of binoculars thanks to its large size. It’s located in the lower end of the constellation Hercules, and if you’re out stargazing it can be spotted near another star called Vega.

As noted by the Huffington Post, further study into the star’s origins could also reveal information about how and why life formed on Earth.

Image from mcdonaldobservatory.org

"We want to know where we were born," Ramirez said. "If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here."

One of the more intriguing possibilities is that HD 162826 also delivers life-giving energy other planets in its orbits, much like our own sun does for the Earth. It’s also possible that when the cluster of stars containing our sun broke up, the blueprints for life – such as DNA molecules or bacteria – were spread along all the stars contained within. Potentially, that means that other planets in the galaxy might actually host life that shares a similar make-up as life on Earth.

"The idea is if a planet has life, like Earth, and if you hit it with an asteroid, it will create debris, some of which will escape into space," astronomer Mauri Valtonen of Finland’s University of Turku in Finland said to Space.com in 2012. "And if the debris is big enough, like 1 meter across, it can shield life inside from radiation, and that life can survive inside for millions of years until that debris lands somewhere. If it happens to land on a planet with suitable conditions, life can start there." - RT. 

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Dark Matter Paradigm - Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting Andromeda And Milky Way Defy Accepted Theory?!

June 12, 2014 - SPACE - Dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to wedge them into the model are flawed, reports an international team of astrophysicists. The study pokes holes in the current understanding of galaxy formation and questions the accepted model of the origin and evolution of the universe. According to the standard paradigm, 23 percent of the mass of the universe is shaped by invisible particles known as dark matter.

Image Credit: Observatoire de Paris / GEPI / François Hammer et al.

"The model predicts that dwarf galaxies should form inside of small clumps of dark matter and that these clumps should be distributed randomly about their parent galaxy," said David Merritt, professor of astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology. "But what is observed is very different. The dwarf galaxies belonging to the Milky Way and Andromeda are seen to be orbiting in huge, thin disk-like structures."

The study, led by Marcel Pawlowski at Case Western Reserve University, critiques three recent papers by different international teams, all of which concluded that the satellite galaxies support the standard model. The critique by Merritt and his colleagues found "serious issues" with all three studies. The team of 14 scientists from six different countries replicated the earlier analyses using the same data and cosmological simulations and came up with much lower probabilities—roughly one tenth of a percent—that such structures would be seen in the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy.

"The earlier papers found structures in the simulations that no one would say really looked very much like the observed planar structures," said Merritt. "Either the selection of model satellites is different from that of the observed ones, or an incomplete set of observational constraints has been considered, or the observed satellite distribution is inconsistent with basic assumptions. Once these issues have been addressed, the conclusions are different: Features like the observed planar structures are very rare."

The standard cosmological model is the frame of reference for many generations of scientists, some of whom are beginning to question its ability to accurately reproduce what is observed in the nearby universe. Merritt counts himself among the small and growing group that is questioning the accepted paradigm.

"Our conclusion tends to favor an alternate, and much older, model: that the satellites were pulled out from another galaxy when it interacted with the Local Group galaxies in the distant past," he said. "This 'tidal' model can naturally explain why the observed satellites are orbiting in thin disks."

Scientific progress embraces challenges to upheld theories and models for a reason, Merritt notes. "When you have a clear contradiction like this, you ought to focus on it," Merritt said. "This is how progress in science is made."

Merritt co-authored "Co-orbiting satellite galaxy structures are still in conflict with the distribution of primordial dwarf galaxies," to be published in an upcoming issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A pre-print of the paper is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1799.

The image at the top of the page is an artist's conception of a dwarf galaxy seen from the surface of a hypothetical exoplanet. A recent study finds that the dark matter in dwarf galaxies is distributed smoothly rather than being clumped at their centers. This contradicts simulations using the standard cosmological model. A paper by Matt Walker (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and co-author Jorge Peñarrubia (University of Cambridge, UK) describing the study was accepted for publication in the The Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Matt Walker said: After completing this study, we know less about dark matter than we did before. - Daily Galaxy.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: "They Shouldn't Even Exist" - Fifteen Old, Massive Galaxies Found In The Early Universe?!

March 13, 2014 - SPACE - Yet another enigma has been discovered about the early Universe: galaxies that seem to come out of nowhere. Most of the galaxies that have been observed from the early days of the universe were young and actively forming stars. Now, an international team of astronomers have discovered galaxies that were already mature and massive in the early days. The finding raises new questions about how these galaxies formed so rapidly and why they stopped forming stars so early.

Fifteen mature galaxies were found at a record-breaking average distance of 12 billion light years, when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old. Their existence at such an early time raises new questions about what forced them to grow up so quickly.

Today the universe is filled with galaxies that have largely stopped forming stars, a sign of galactic maturity. But in the distant past, galaxies were still actively growing by consuming gas and turning it into stars. This means that mature galaxies should have been almost non-existent when the universe was still young.

Together with lead author Caroline Straatman and principal investigator Ivo Labbe, both of Leiden University, the astronomers used deep images at near-infrared wavelengths to search for galaxies in the early universe with red colors. The characteristic red colors indicate the presence of old stars and a lack of active star formation. The galaxies are barely detectable at visual wavelengths and are easily overlooked. But in the new near-infrared light images they are easily measured, from which it can be inferred that they already contained as many as 100 billion stars on average per galaxy.

The mature galaxies have masses similar to that of the Milky Way, which still forms new stars at a slow rate. The newly discovered galaxies must have formed very rapidly in roughly 1 billion years, with explosive rates of star-formation. The rate of star formation must have been several hundred times larger than observed in the Milky Way today.

The galaxies were discovered after 40 nights of observing with the FourStar camera on the Magellan Baade Telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and combined with data from Hubble's Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. Using special filters to produce images that are sensitive to narrow slices of the near-infrared spectrum, the team was able to measure accurate distances to thousands of distant galaxies at a time, providing a 3-D map of the early universe.

The image at the top of the page shows the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). The million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called "dark ages", the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark Universe. The new image offers insights into what types of objects reheated the Universe long ago.

This historic new view is actually two separate images taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Both images reveal some galaxies that are too faint to be seen by ground-based telescopes, or even in Hubble's previous faraway looks, called the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs), taken in 1995 and 1998.

"Hubble takes us to within a stone's throw of the big bang itself," says Massimo Stiavelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA, and the HUDF project lead. The combination of ACS and NICMOS images is used to search for galaxies that existed between 400 and 800 million years (corresponding to a redshift range of 7 to 12) after the big bang. A key question for HUDF astronomers is whether the Universe appears to be the same at this very early time as it did when the cosmos was between 1 and 2 billion years old.

This finding was published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. - Daily Galaxy.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Hypergiant Yellow Star Discovered - The Largest Ever Seen; Over 1,300 TIMES The Size Of Our Sun!

March 12, 2014 - SPACE - A powerful telescope in Chile has imaged the largest yellow star ever discovered.

This artist’s impression shows the yellow hypergiant star HR 5171. This is a very rare type of star
with only a dozen known in our galaxy. (ESO)

The star, called HR 5171 A, shines 12,000 light-years from Earth in the center of a new image released today. Known as a "yellow hypergiant," The star is more than 1,300 times the diameter of the sun, much larger than scientists expected after earlier observations, European Southern Observatory officials said in a statement. You can see the yellow hypergiant in a new video from ESO as well.

The new measurements place the star as one of the top 10 largest stars ever discovered. Scientists using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to observe the star got another surprise as well. HR 5171 A is actually part of a double star system, with its companion orbiting extremely close to the hypergiant.

HR 5171 A is 50 percent larger than the red supergiant Betelgeuse, the star that makes up one of the constellation Orion's shoulders. Only 12 yellow hypergiants have been found in the Milky Way, and they are in an unstable stage of life, according to ESO. Yellow hypergiants are rapidly changing, and shoot out material that forms a large atmosphere around the star.

HR 5171, the brightest star just below the centre of this wide-field image, is a yellow hypergiant, a very rare type of stars with only a dozen known in our galaxy. Image released March 12, 2014. (ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2)

"The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise," Olivier Chesneau, a scientist of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France working with the VLT said in a statement. "The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut … The companion we have found is very significant as it can have an influence on the fate of HR 5171 A, for example, stripping off its outer layers and modifying its evolution."

Although the huge star is very far from Earth, keen observers can come close to spotting it with the naked eye, ESO officials said. The star shines about 1 million times brighter than the sun.


WATCH: Huge Yellow 'Hypergiant' Star Revealed.

 


"HR 5171 A has been found to be getting bigger over the last 40 years, cooling as it grows, and its evolution has now been caught in action," ESO officials said. Only a few stars are caught in this very brief phase, where they undergo a dramatic change in temperature as they rapidly evolve."

Chesneau and his international team of scientists used a special technique called interferometry to combine the light from multiple individual telescopes, creating a giant telescope they used to observe HR 5171 A, ESO officials said.

The new study will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. - FOX News.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: The Electric Universe - Mysterious Energy Ribbon At The Edge Of Solar System Is A "Cosmic Roadmap" For The Instellar Magnetic Field!

February 14, 2014 - SPACE - A strange ribbon of energy and particles at the edge of the solar system first spotted by a NASA spacecraft appears to serve as a sort of "roadmap in the sky" for the interstellar magnetic field, scientists say.

An all-sky map made by the IBEX spacecraft shows a surprising bright ribbon of emission coming from
the edge of the solar system. Credit: Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)

By comparing ground-based studies and in-space observations of solar system's mysterious energy ribbon, which was first discovered by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) in 2009, scientists are learning more details about the conditions at the solar system's edge. The study also sheds light into the sun's environment protects the solar system from high-energy cosmic rays.

"What I always have been trying to do was to establish a clear connection between the very high-energy cosmic rays we're seeing [from the ground] and what IBEX is seeing," study leader Nathan Schwadron, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, told Space.com.

 Previously, maps from ground-based observatories showed researchers that clusters of cosmic rays — extremely high-energy particles that originate from supernovas — are correlated with the IBEX ribbon. The ribbon is roughly perpendicular to the interstellar magnetic field while cosmic rays stream, on average, along the interstellar magnetic field. (The particles themselves are created from interactions between the solar wind and interstellar matter.)

In the longer term, Schwadron said work like this will help scientists better understand more about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. This is a region that only one mission — NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft — has reached so far, and scientists know little about what that environment is like.

Cosmic ray intensities (left) compared with predictions (right) from NASA's IBEX spacecraft. The similarity between these observations and predictions supports the local galactic magnetic field direction determined from IBEX observations made from particles at vastly lower energies than the cosmic ray observations shown here. The blue area represents regions of lower fluxes of cosmic rays. The gray and white lines separate regions of different energies—lower energies above the lines, high energies below. Credit: Nathan Schwadron/UNH-EOS

 Travelling through the transition zone

The sun's sphere of influence in the solar system is known as the heliosphere. The sun's "solar wind" of high-energy particles flows within the heliosphere and pushes back against high-energy cosmic rays originating in interstellar space. The transition zone between these two regions is called the heliosheath.

Here's where a mystery arises: Voyager 1's measurements of the magnetic field from the edge of interstellar space show a starkly different direction of the magnetic field inferred in the IBEX ribbon, Schwadron said.

"At that point, you say to yourself what’s wrong? What could possibly be the issue? It seems like we now have good independent confirmation that the IBEX ribbon is ordered by the interstellar magnetic field, and we know that Voyager 1 takes fairly good measurements," Schwadron said.


WATCH:  NASA | IBEX Provides First View of the Solar System's Tail.

The few studies examining this issue, showing little consensus. An October paper co-authored by Schwadron in Astrophysical Journal Letters argued that Voyager 1 could be measuring interstellar plasma coming in through magnetic field lines, but may still be in the heliosheath itself. This stands in contrast to findings from NASA and other science groups saying Voyager 1 is definitively in interstellar space.

The researchers noted that Voyager 1 is picking up its information "at a specific time and place", but IBEX's data is collected and averaged across vast distances, so that could also lead to discrepancies.

"What is really missing here is our understanding of the physics," Schwadron said, adding that reconnection between magnetic field lines could be an example of something that changes the conditions of the boundary region.

The research was published today (Feb. 13) in the journal Science Express and includes participation from several United States research institutions. - SPACE.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Astronomers Observe Striking And Stunning Developments From The SN 1987A Supernova In Dwarf Galaxy Orbiting The Milky Way - Reveals Molecules And Dust That Did Not Exist A Few Decades Ago?!

January 07, 2014 - SPACE - "SN 1987A is a special place since it hasn't mixed with the surrounding environment, so what we see there was made there," said Remy Indebetouw, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the University of Virginia. "The new ALMA results, which are the first of their kind, reveal a supernova remnant chock full of material that simply did not exist a few decades ago."

Striking new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope capture, for the first time, the remains of 1987A brimming with freshly formed dust. If enough of this dust makes the perilous transition into interstellar space, it could explain how many galaxies acquired their dusty, dusky appearance.

Galaxies can be remarkably dusty places and supernovae are thought to be a primary source of that dust, especially in the early Universe. But direct evidence of a supernova's dust‐making capabilities has been slim up to now, and could not account for the copious amount of dust detected in young, distant galaxies. But now observations with ALMA are changing that.

"We have found a remarkably large dust mass concentrated in the central part of the ejecta from a relatively young and nearby supernova," said Indebetouw. "This is the first time we've been able to really image where the dust has formed, which is important in understanding the evolution of galaxies."

An international team of astronomers used ALMA to observe the glowing remains of 1987A , which is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way about 160 000 light‐years from Earth. SN 1987A is the closest observed supernova explosion since Johannes Kepler's observation of a supernova inside the Milky Way in 1604.

Astronomers predicted that as the gas cooled after the explosion, large amounts of dust would form as atoms of oxygen, carbon, and silicon bonded together in the cold central regions of the remnant. However, earlier observations of SN 1987A with infrared telescopes, made during the first 500 days after the explosion, detected only a small amount of hot dust.

With ALMA's unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, the research team was able to image the far more abundant cold dust, which glows brightly in millimetre and submillimetre light. The astronomers estimate that the remnant now contains about 25 percent the mass of the Sun in newly formed dust. They also found that significant amounts of carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide have formed.

As the shockwave from the initial explosion radiated out into space, it produced bright glowing rings of material, as seen in earlier observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. After hitting this envelope of gas, which was sloughed off by the progenitor red giant star as it neared the end of its life, a portion of this powerful explosion rebounded back towards the centre of the remnant. "At some point, this rebound shockwave will slam into these billowing clumps of freshly minted dust," said Indebetouw. "It's likely that some fraction of the dust will be blasted apart at that point. It's hard to predict exactly how much — maybe only a little, possibly a half or two thirds." If a good fraction survives and makes it into interstellar space, it could account for the copious dust astronomers detect in the early Universe.

"Really early galaxies are incredibly dusty and this dust plays a major role in the evolution of galaxies," said Mikako Matsuura of University College London, UK. "Today we know dust can be created in several ways, but in the early Universe most of it must have come from supernovae. We finally have direct evidence to support that theory." - Daily Galaxy.

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: Strange Space Winds Blows Through The Solar System; New Study Reveals That We Are Now In A Surprisingly Complex And Dynamic Part Of The Milky Way Galaxy; Interstellar Wind Stream Could Have Wide-Reaching Effects!

As our ancestors predicted, we are currently moving from one sphere of influence into an higher octave of influence, through the doorway of the fourth age into the fifth age, when the true planetary caretakers or the ancient ones will rise. In chronicling Earth's spiral orbit with the Sun's carousel of light, they understood that we will enter a new form of consciousness with the birth of a new sun. This consciousness envelope of the planet will adjust  with the changing spin orientation of the electrons around the atom as we enter a more compact and intense field of light, brought on as we go through a denser cloud of magnetic dust, these cosmic rays will eventually lead to the compression of our atmosphere, seeding and perfecting conscious awareness. This sphere of influence will bring about a new paradigm, where our vibrations will rise in word, deeds and actions by detachment from the frequencies of fear under the Priest Class and fully embrace the natural laws of Ma'at, finding order, spiritualize matter and ascend in accordance with cosmic dictates. - The COSMIC Spirit.

September 15, 2013 - SPACE - Shifting cosmic winds suggest that our solar system lives in a surprisingly complex and dynamic part of the Milky Way galaxy, a new study reports.

A view from the Earth and Sun from far above the North Pole. As an interstellar wind blows in from the
constellation Scorpio, the sun's gravity captures it and forms a tail. The slower wind (dark blue) is bent
stronger than its faster counterpa (NASA/GSFC/UNH)

Scientists examining four decades' worth of data have discovered that the interstellar gas breezing through the solar system has shifted in direction by 6 degrees, a finding that could affect how we view not only the entire galaxy but the sun itself.

"The shift in the wind is evidence that the sun lives in an evolving galactic environment," study lead author Priscilla Frisch of the University of Chicago told SPACE.com via email.

The winds of change
Charged particles stream off the sun to form a huge invisible shellaround the solar system called the heliosphere. Outside of this shell lies the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC), a haze of hydrogen and helium approximately 30 light-years across.

The LIC is wispy, featuring just 0.016 atoms per cubic inch on average. LIC gas tends to be blocked by the heliosphere, but a thin stream makes it past the sun's magnetic field at the rate of 0.0009 atoms per cubic inch (0.015 atoms per cubic cm), researchers said.

"Right now, the sun is moving through an interstellar cloud at a relative velocity of 52,000 miles per hour," Frisch said. "This motion allows neutral atoms from the cloud to flow through the heliosphere — the solar wind bubble — and create an interstellar 'wind.'"

In 2012, three papers citing measurements by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft showed that the wind has changed slightly over the past decade.

The sun is passing through a wispy cloud of interstellar gas known as the Local Interstellar Cloud. As the
sun moves through it, it sweeps up neutral interstellar helium into a cone behind it.
(NASA/Goddard/Adler/University of Chicago/Wesleyan University)

Frisch and her team were intrigued, and they began to wonder just how far back the difference extended. Studying data gathered by a number of spacecraft — IBEX, the joint European Space Agency/NASA Ulysses probe and several craft from the 1970s, including NASA's Mariner 10 and the Soviet research satellite Prognoz 6 — the team found that, over the course of 40 years, the wind had shifted by 6 degrees.

What's causing this change in direction? According to Frisch, it may be related to turbulence in the interstellar cloud around the solar system.

"Winds on Earth are turbulent, and other data show that interstellar clouds are also turbulent," she said. "We find that the 6-degree change is comparable to the turbulent velocity of the surrounding cloud on [the] outside of the heliosphere."

Wide-reaching effects
Interstellar winds stream in from the direction of the constellation Scorpius, almost perpendicular to the sun's path through the galaxy. As the winds interact with the sun, they create a distinctive feature.

"Helium is gravitationally focused to create a trail of helium known as the 'focusing cone' behind the sun as it moves through space," Frisch said.

The dense cone makes the particles easier to study as they pack in behind Earth's star.

The changing wind could have implications that go beyond understanding the region surrounding the solar system. It could also affect studies of the charged particles streaming off the sun.

"When we try to understand the past and present heliosphere, we can no longer assume that the heliosphere changes only because of the solar wind," Frisch said. "Now we have evidence that changes in the interstellar wind may be important."

The new study was published online Sept. 5 in the journal Science. - FOX News.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Strange, Pulsating Star Found - Reveals Powerful Magnetic Field Around The Giant Black Hole At The Heart Of Earth's Milky Way Galaxy!

August 18, 2013 - SPACE - A strange, pulsing star has revealed a powerful magnetic field around the giant black hole at the heart of Earth’s Milky Way galaxy, scientists say.

Artist's impression of PSR J1745-2900, a pulsar with a very high magnetic field.

The finding may help shed light on how the galaxy's supermassive black hole devours matter around it and spits out powerful jets of superhot matter, the researchers added.

The center of virtually every large galaxy is suspected to host a supermassive black hole with a mass that can range from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. Astronomers think the Milky Way's core is home to the monster black hole called Sagittarius A* — pronounced "Sagittarius A-star" — that is about 4 million times the mass of Earth's sun.

Scientists want to learn more about how black holes distort the universe around them, hoping to see if the leading theory regarding black holes, Einstein's theory of general relativity, holds up or if new concepts might be necessary. One way to see how black holes warp space and time is by looking at clocks near them. Cosmic versions of clocks are known as pulsars — rapidly spinning neutron stars that regularly give off pulses of radio waves.

Pulsar tells the tale

Astronomers have been searching for pulsars near Sagittarius A* for the past 20 years.

Earlier this year, NASA's NuSTAR telescope helped confirm the existence of such a pulsar apparently less than half a light-year away from the black hole, one that pulsates radio signals every 3.76 seconds. Scientists quickly analyzed the pulsar using the Effelsberg Radio Observatory of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

"On our first attempt, the pulsar was not clearly visible, but some pulsars are stubborn and require a few observations to be detected," said study lead author Ralph Eatough, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. "The second time we looked, the pulsar had become very active in the radio band and was very bright. I could hardly believe that we had finally detected a pulsar in the galactic center."

Additional observations were performed in parallel and subsequently with other radio telescopes around the world. "We were too excited to sleep in between observations," said study co-author Evan Keane from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.

The newfound pulsar, named PSR J1745-2900, belongs to a rare kind of pulsars known as magnetars, which only make up about 1 out of every 500 pulsars found to date. Magnetars possess extremely powerful magnetic fields, ones about 1,000 times stronger than the magnetic fields of ordinary neutron stars, or 100 trillion times the Earth's magnetic field.

The radio pulses from magnetars are highly polarized, meaning these signals oscillate along one plane in space. This fact helped the researchers detect a magnetic field surrounding Sagittarius A*.

Black hole magnetic field revealed

Black holes swallow their surroundings, mainly hot ionized gas, in a process of accretion. Magnetic fields threading within this accretion flow can influence how this infalling gas is structured and behaves.

"The magnetic field we measure around the black hole can regulate the amount of matter the black hole eats and could even cause it to spit matter out in so-called jets," Eatough told SPACE.com. "These measurements are therefore of great importance in understanding how supermassive black holes feed, a process that can affect galaxy formation and evolution."

As radio signals traverse the magnetized gas around black holes, the way they are polarized gets twisted depending on the strength of the magnetic fields. By analyzing radio waves from the magnetar, the researchers discovered a relatively strong, large-scale magnetic field pervades the area surrounding Sagittarius A*.

In the area around the pulsar, the magnetic field is about 100 times weaker than Earth's magnetic field. However, "the field very close to the black hole should be much stronger — a few hundred times the Earth's magnetic field," Eatough said.

If the magnetic field generated by the infalling gas is accreted down to the event horizon of the black hole — its point of no return — that could help explain the radio and X-ray glow long associated with Sagittarius A*, researchers added.

"It is amazing how much information we can extract from this single object," said study co-author Adam Deller at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo.

Astronomers predict there should be thousands of pulsars around the center of the Milky Way. Despite that, PSR J1745-2900 is the first pulsar discovered there. "Astronomers have searched for decades for a pulsar around the central black hole in our galaxy, without success. This discovery is an enormous breakthrough, but it remains a mystery why it has taken so long to find a pulsar there," said study co-author Heino Falcke at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

"It could be the environment is very dense and patchy, making it difficult to see other pulsars," Eatough added.

The researchers cannot test the leading theory regarding black holes using PSR J1745-2900 — they cannot measure the way it warps space-time accurately enough, since the pulsar is slightly too far away from Sagittarius A* and, being relatively young, its spin is too variable. The researchers suggest pulsars that are closer to the black hole and are older with less variable spins could help test the theory.

"If there is a young pulsar, there should also be many older ones. We just have to find them," said study co-author Michael Kramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 14 in the journal Nature. - TWC.

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: Earth's Galactic "Neighborhood" Just Got Upgraded - Study Reveals That The Earth Is Closer To The Center Of The Milky Way Than Previously Thought?!

June 03, 2013 - SPACE - Earth may not be located in the center of the universe, but a new study finds that it is a little closer to the center of the galaxy than previously thought.

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring
Andromeda galaxy, left, in 3.75 billion years. (NASA)

Astronomers thought the solar system was located in a small "spur" of the Milky Way, a galaxy that contains somewhere between 200-400 billion stars.

The center of the Milky Way likely still contains a "supermassive black hole" that the rest of the stars orbit around, but it turns out that the solar system is likely located on one of the star's "main arms" of the spiral galaxy known as the "Local Arm."

"Our new evidence suggests that the Local Arm should appear as a prominent feature of the Milky Way," Alberto Sanna, of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement.

"Based on both the distances and the space motions we measured, our Local Arm is not a spur. It is a major structure, maybe a branch of the Perseus Arm, or possibly an independent arm segment."

Sanna presented his research Monday at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Indianapolis.

He and his colleagues used data from the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array, a series of 10 radio telescopes spread throughout the continental United States, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands.

The array is used to track near-Earth asteroids, measure the sizes, spins and shapes of galaxies, and estimate the distance of stars from Earth.

Measuring the Milky Way is difficult because the solar system is located inside it. To solve the problem, Sanna and his team took measurements from when Earth was located on either side of the sun, allowing them to get different perspectives and new measurements.

The new finding suggested the solar system is most likely located on a major arm of the galaxy, not an offshoot of that.

The team says our "Milky Way neighborhood just went upscale," but perhaps we shouldn't get too comfortable: A NASA finding last year suggested that the Milky Way is "destined for a head-on collision" with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

"It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed," the agency says.

According to NASA, the collision will likely occur about 4 billion years from now. - USN.

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE: Colossal Quasar Discovered With Energy Output 100 Times Milky Way Galaxy!

January 27, 2013 - SPACE - This past December, researchers discovered a quasar known as SDSS J1106+1939 with the most energetic outflow ever, a finding that may answer questions about how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass and why there are so few large galaxies in the universe. The rate that energy is carried away by the huge mass of material ejected is equivalent to two trillion times the power output of the sun. The black hole at the heart of quasar SDSS J1106-1939 is massive, estimated to be a thousand times heavier than the black hole in the Milky Way. "This is about 100 times higher than the total power output of the Milky Way galaxy — it's a real monster outflow," said Nahum Arav, an associate professor of physics in College of Science at Virginia Tech and leader of the research team, which includes Benoit Borguet, now a postdoctoral researcher now at the University of Liege, Belgium; Doug Edmonds and Carter Chamberlain, both graduate research assistants at Virginia Tech, and Chris Benn, a collaborator who works with the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in Spain.

Researchers studied the quasar in great detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile – the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory, and found the most energetic quasar outflow ever discovered. The findings were released today (Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012) by the European Southern Observatory. Theorists have predicted energy flows of this magnitude, and simulations have suggested these outflows impact the galaxies around them, but it has all been speculation — until now. "For the last 15 years many theorists have said that if there were such powerful outflows it would help answer many questions on the formation of galaxies, on the behavior of black holes, and on the enrichment of the intergalactic medium with elements other than hydrogen and helium," Arav said. "This discovery means we can better explain the formation of galaxies. There are hundreds of people doing the theoretical side of the work. They hypothesize outflows in their simulations, and now we've found an outflow in the magnitude that has only been theorized in the past. Now they can refine their already impressive models and base them on empirical data." And while black holes are noted for pulling material in, quasars accelerate some of the material and eject it at high speed. The larger the quasar, the more material it can take, the higher speed it can accelerate it, and the further it can eject the material.

"Quasars have been known for 40 years," Arav explained. "We were able to figure out how to measure the mass of mechanical energy the black hole is putting out – by calculating the size of the outflow, how far away from the black hole it was, and how much mass it had per unit area." The quasar's outflow is at least five times more powerful than the previous record holder, also discovered by Arav and his research group in 2009, and material from the outflow is inferred to be about a thousand light years away from the black hole at the heart of quasar SDSS J1106-1939. Every year, according to the team's analysis, a mass of more than 400 times that of the sun is streaming away from the quasar at a speed of 8,000 kilometers per second.*"I've been looking for something like this for a decade," Arav said, "so it's thrilling to finally find one of the monster outflows that have been predicted." Research done in 2010 using precise measurements on the light from distant quasars suggested that the value of the fine-structure constant may have changed over the history of the universe. If the quasar results are ever confirmed, our concepts of space and time are sure to change our fundamental understanding of the universe.

The fine-structure constant, or alpha, is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force. If alpha were just 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars wouldn't be able to make carbon and oxygen, which would have made it impossible for life as we know it in our universe to exist. A 2010 study shows that alpha seems to have varied a tiny bit in different directions of the universe billions of years ago, being slightly smaller in the northern hemisphere and slightly larger in the southern hemisphere. One intriguing implication is that the fine-structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe. The physicists, John Webb from the University of New South Wales and his coauthors, used data from two telescopes to uncover the spatial dependence of the fine-structure constant. Using the north-facing Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the south-facing Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile, the researchers observed more than 100 quasars, which are extremely luminous and distant galaxies that are powered by massive black holes at their centers. By combining the data from the two telescopes that look in opposite directions, the researchers found that, 10 billion years ago, alpha seems to have been larger by about one part in 100,000 in the southern direction and smaller by one part in 100,000 in the northern direction. The data for this “dipole” model of alpha has a statistical significance of about 4.1 sigma, meaning that that there is only a one in 15,000 chance that it is a random event.

Quasars are highly luminous objects that emit light over a wide range of wavelengths, with peaks at several wavelengths due to emission by elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, silicon, carbon and iron in the gas around the quasar. When light from the quasar passes near a galaxy on its way to Earth, the gas around the galaxy causes a distinct pattern of absorption lines in the quasar spectrum. By measuring the wavelengths of the absorption lines due to heavy elements we can determine both the redshift of the gas and the value of the fine-structure constant, alpha, at the time when the light from the quasar was absorbed. Such observations suggest that the value of alpha was slightly smaller billions of years ago. Quasars are compact but highly luminous objects -so luminous that they can be studied in intricate detail using ground-based telescopes despite being vast distances away from us. We think that quasars contain black holes at their centres and that the immense gravitational force exerted by the black hole is extremely efficient at converting matter in its vicinity into light. Since quasars are found in all directions in the sky, they provide a powerful way of charting almost the entire universe. Some quasars are so far away that we see them as they were billions of years ago. Indeed, by observing quasars scientists can chart a continuous “universal history” that starts when the universe was only about one billion years old and continues up to the present day. - Daily Galaxy.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: The Electric Universe - Recent Starbursts In The Milky Way Galaxy's Center!

Figure 1a: SOFIA/FORCAST mid-infrared image
of the Milky Way Galaxy’s nucleus showing the
circumnuclear ring (CNR) of gas and dust clouds
orbiting a central supermassive black hole. The bright
Y-shaped feature is believed to be material infalling from
the ring toward the black hole that is located where the
arms of the “Y” intersect. Image credit:NASA

January 09, 2013 - SPACE - Researchers using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) have captured new images of a seven light-year-diameter ring of gas and dust surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, and of a neighboring cluster of extremely luminous young stars embedded in dust cocoons. These images are the subjects of two posters presented this week during the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Long Beach, Calif. Ryan Lau of Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and his collaborators studied the Milky Way’s circumnuclear ring, or CNR (Figure 1a). Matt Hankins of the University of Central Arkansas (Conway, Ark.) is lead author of the other paper, regarding the Quintuplet Cluster, or QC (Figure 2a).

SOFIA is a highly modified Boeing 747SP aircraft carrying a telescope with an effective diameter of 100 inches (2.5 meters) to altitudes as high as 45,000 feet (14 km). The images were obtained during SOFIA flights in 2011 with the FORCAST (Faint Object infraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope) instrument built by a team with Principal Investigator Terry Herter of Cornell. Each image is a combination of multiple exposures at wavelengths of 20, 32, and 37 microns that are partially or completely blocked by water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere and thus inaccessible to ground-based observatories even on high mountain peaks. Our Galaxy’s nucleus lies behind interstellar dust clouds in the mid-plane of the Milky Way which are mostly or completely opaque to visible and near-infrared light but more transparent at longer infrared wavelengths.

Figure 1b: HST/NICMOS near-infrared image showing the same field of view with the same scale and orientation as Figure 1a. At this wavelength, opaque dust in the plane of the Milky Way hides features that are visible in the SOFIA image. In contrast, the stars seen  in the HST image emit mostly visible and near-infrared light and so are not apparent in the SOFIA mid-infrared image. Extra opacity due to especially dense concentrations of dust in the CNR produces patches of apparently lower star density in the near-infrared image. Image credit:NASA.

Figure 2a: SOFIA/FORCAST mid-infrared image  of a region including the Quintuple Cluster (QC),  a group of young stars located about 35 parsecs (100 light years) from the galaxy’s nucleus, near the left margin of the frame. The compact bright objects rendered white and blue in this image are dust cloud “cocoons” heated from within by the highest-luminosity stars in the cluster to temperaturesthat make them prominent at mid-infrared wavelengths. Other features in this image are interstellar clouds ofgas and dust. The large rounded oblong feature below the QC is an expanding cloud of debris produced by violent ejections of material from a massive star nearing the end of its life. Image credit:NASA

Figures 1b and 2b show comparison images of the CNR and QC regions made with a near-infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. The CNR and other exotic features revealed by the FORCAST camera on SOFIA are invisible in the Hubble images. Figure 3 shows the two fields studied in these papers as square insets on a large-scale image of the galactic center made by the Spitzer Space Telescope at a wavelength of 8 microns. The nucleus of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole with 4 million times the mass of the Sun that is orbited by a large disk of gas and dust. The ring seen in Figure 1a is the inner edge of that disk. The galactic center also hosts several exceptionally large star clusters containing some of the most luminous young stars in the Galaxy, one of which is the Quintuplet Cluster seen in Figure 2. The combination of SOFIA’s airborne telescope with the FORCAST camera produced the sharpest images of those regions ever obtained at mid-infrared wavelengths, allowing discernment of new clues about what is happening near the central black hole. “The focus of our study has been to determine the structure of the circumnuclear ring with the unprecedented precision possible with SOFIA” said Mr. Lau. “Using these data we can learn about the processes that accelerate and heat the ring.” Mr. Hankins, lead author of the QC paper, noted that, “Something big happened in the Milky Way’s center within the past 4 to 6 million years which resulted in several bursts of star formation, creating the Quintuplet Cluster, the Central Cluster, and one other massive star cluster.” Hankins added, “Many other galaxies also have so-called ‘starbursts’ in their central regions, some associated with central black holes, some not.

Figure 2b: HST/NICMOS image of the QC region matching the SOFIA/FORCAST field of view in Figure 2a. The QC itself is at the left of the frame. Most of the features in the SOFIA mid-infrared image are not seen in the HST image due to their sub-stellar temperatures and intervening interstellar dust. Image credit:NASA

Figure 3: Spitzer Space Telescope wide-field  image of the galactic center at a wavelength intermediate between those of the SOFIA/FORCAST  and HST/NICMOS images. The QC and CNR field locations and orientations are shown. Image credit:NASA

The Milky Way’s center is much nearer than other galaxies, making it easier for us to explore possible connections between the starbursts and the black hole.” SOFIA Chief Scientific Advisor Eric Becklin, who is working with the CNR group, determined the location of the galaxy’s nucleus as a graduate student in the 1960s by laboriously scanning a single-pixel infrared detector to map the central region. Becklin said, “The resolution and spatial coverage of these images is astounding, showing what modern infrared detector arrays can do when flown on SOFIA. We hope to use these data to substantially advance our understanding of the environment near a supermassive black hole.” SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) that is based and managed at NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., manages the SOFIA science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) headquartered in Columbia, Md., and the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart. - SETI.

The SETI Institute and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific are partners in leading the SOFIA Education and Public Outreach programs.

For more information about SOFIA, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/sofia

http://www.dlr.de/en/sofia

For information about SOFIA's science mission, visit:

http://www.sofia.usra.edu

http://www.dsi.uni-stuttgart.de/index.en.html