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Unique Star Discovery Nicknamed 'Nasty 1'

Sunday, June 7th 2015 06:04 AM

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered surprising new clues about a hefty, rapidly aging star whose behavior has never been seen before in our Milky Way galaxy. In fact, the star is so weird that astronomers have nicknamed it "Nasty 1," a play on its catalog name of NaSt1. The star may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of extremely massive stars.   First discovered several decades ago, Nasty 1 was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our sun. The star loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.   This visible-light image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a pancake-shaped disk of gas around an extremely bright star in our Milky Way galaxy. The disk glows brightly in the light of ionized nitrogen. The central star is nicknamed "Nasty 1," derived from its catalog name of NaSt1. Nas...

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Pluto's Moons Orbit Like Tumbleweeds

Thursday, June 4th 2015 02:38 AM

Artist’s illustration of the chaotic spin of Pluto's moon Nix. This set of computer modeling illustrations of Pluto's moon Nix shows how the orientation of the moon changes unpredictably as it orbits the "double planet" Pluto-Charon. This illustration is based on dynamical models of spinning bodies in complex gravitational fields -- like the field produced by Pluto and Charon's motion about each other. Astronomers used this simulation to try to understand the unpredictable changes in reflected light from Nix as it orbits Pluto-Charon. They also found that Pluto's moon Hydra also undergoes chaotic spin. The football shape of both moons contributes to their wild motion. The consequences are that if you lived on either moon, you could not predict the time or direction the sun would rise the next day. (The moon is too small for Hubble to resolve surface features, and so the surface textures used here are purely for illustration purposes.)  Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Sh...

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Astronomers Discover Brightly Illuminated mini-Neptune

Sunday, May 17th 2015 04:19 AM

A group of astronomers led by Benjamin Montet of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, has discovered a highly irradiated mini-Neptune exoplanet orbiting a low-mass star known as EPIC 201912552. A paper describing the find by Montet and co-authors has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and is available on the arXiv.org website.   A hypothetical mini-Neptune. Image credit: DLR Institute of Planetary Research.   EPIC 201912552 is an M2.8 dwarf star at a distance of approximately 111 light-years. The newly-discovered planet, EPIC 201912552b, is a so-called mini-Neptune, about 2.2 times the radius of Earth.   It orbits its host star every 33 days at a distance of approximately 0.15 AU.   According to astronomers from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Planetary Habitability Laboratory, EPIC 201912552b has an Earth Similarity Index of 0.73.   Co-author Daniel Foreman-Mackey of the New Yo...

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NASAâ€™s SDO Captures X2.7-Class Solar Flare

Saturday, May 16th 2015 05:12 AM

Astronomers using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured stunning images of a significant solar flare on May 5, 2015. The Sun emitted an X2.7-class solar flare, peaking at 6:11 p.m. EDT on May 5, 2015. Image credit: NASA / GSFC / SDO. A solar flare is a tremendous explosion on the Sun that happens when energy stored in twisted magnetic fields, usually above sunspots, is suddenly released. Radiation is emitted across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves at the long wavelength end, through optical emission to X-rays and gamma rays at the short wavelength end. The amount of energy released is the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time. The first solar flare recorded in literature was on September 1, 1859. Astronomers classify these events according to their brightness in the X-ray wavelengths. There are three categories: X-class flares are major events that can trigger radio blac...

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How to Find the Andromeda Galaxy

Friday, May 15th 2015 04:40 AM

One of the greatest puzzles for anyone who has just acquired a telescope is how to find objects in the night sky. They have seen all the beautiful pictures in books, magazines, and the internet, and want to see these wonders with their own eyes through their new telescope. But where to begin? The method most amateur astronomers use to find objects in the sky is called starhopping. This involves navigation from bright, easily seen objects, stars, to faint, hard-to-see objects, such as galaxies. To understand how this works, let?s go through the process step by step, using it to locate and observe the Andromeda Galaxy, number 31 in Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects. There are several tools which will help this process. The first is a good star chart, such as this one produced by Starry Night. A good star atlas, such as Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas, will do as well.  The difficulty with all star charts is that they represent the skies on a much smaller sca...

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Astrophysicists Offer Proof that Famous Image Shows Forming Planet

Thursday, May 7th 2015 04:13 AM

A recent and famous image from deep space marks the first time we've seen a forming planetary system, according to a study by astrophysicists. The team found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in fact made by forming planets.   The team, led by Daniel Tamayo from the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in fact made by forming planets.   "HL Tau likely represents the first image taken of the initial locations of planets during their formation," says Tamayo. "This could be an enormous step forward in our ability to understand how planets form."   The image of HL Tau, taken in October 2014 by the state-of-the-art Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile's Atacama Desert, sparked a flurry of scientific debate.  ...

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White Dwarf May Have Shredded Passing Planet

Saturday, April 18th 2015 07:27 AM

The destruction of a planet may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of astronomers has found evidence that this may have happened in an ancient cluster of stars at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Using several telescopes, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers have found evidence that a white dwarf star – the dense core of a star like the Sun that has run out of nuclear fuel – may have ripped apart a planet as it came too close. In this Chandra image of ngc6388, researchers have found evidence that a white dwarf star may have ripped apart a planet as it came too close. When a star reaches its white dwarf stage, nearly all of the material from the star is packed inside a radius one hundredth that of the original star. Image Credit:  NASA/CXC/IASF Palermo/M.Del Santo et al; NASA/STScI How could a white dwarf star, which is only about the size of the Earth, be responsible for such an extreme act? The answer is gravity. W...

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Astronomers witness a star being born

Friday, April 10th 2015 03:48 AM

Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers caught a glimpse of a future star just as it is being born out of the surrounding gas and dust, in a star-forming region similar to the one pictured above.    Credit: NASA, ESA                                             The study's authors -- who include astronomers from Yale University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany -- found the object using the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Known as L...

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Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water

Friday, April 10th 2015 03:23 AM

Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice. The results are published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters. Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water (H2O) or of carbon dioxide (CO2) or whether it was mud. Using radar measurements from the NASA satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have been able to determine that is water ice...

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Nine New Satellites of Milky Way Galaxy Discovered

Wednesday, March 11th 2015 07:52 AM

Using the data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), astronomers have found nine new ultra-faint Milky Way satellites. Based on the morphological properties, three of the new satellites are dwarf galaxies, one of which is located at the very outskirts of the Milky Way. The remaining six objects have sizes and luminosities comparable to an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy called Segue 1 and could be either dwarf galaxies or globular clusters. This image shows the newly-discovered dwarf galaxy Eridanus 2. Image credit: Sergey E. Koposov et al / Dark Energy Survey. “The discovery of so many satellites in such a small area of the sky was completely unexpected. I could not believe my eyes,” said Dr Sergey Koposov of the Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy, UK, who is the first author of the paper submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint). The newly-discovered satellites were found in the southern hemisphere near the Large and Small Mag...

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