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Martin Wolff's List: Astronomy
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Intel Corp. founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, have donated $200 million to Caltech and the University of California for the construction of the world's largest optical telescope, with a mirror nearly 100 feet across and three times the size of the current record holder. Caltech officials said Wednesday that matching gifts from the two institutions are expected to bring the total to $300 million. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation had already donated $50 million of the $79 million spent on design of the telescope and its 30-meter mirror.
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Astronomers have at last found definitive evidence that the universe's first dust – the celestial stuff that seeded future generations of stars and planets – was forged in the explosions of massive stars. The findings, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are the most significant clue yet in the longstanding mystery of where the dust in our very young universe came from.
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Astronomers at Rutgers and Penn State universities have discovered galaxies in the distant universe that are ancestors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. These ancient objects, some of the first galaxies ever to form, are being observed as they looked when the universe was a mere two billion years old. Today, scientists peg the universe’s age at 13.7 billion years, so light from these galaxies traveled almost 12 billion years to reach Earth.
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Astronomers say they have found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets. The discovery, they said, means that our solar system might be more typical of planetary systems across the universe than had been thought.
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Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in a new dynamic image of the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Called "Rho Oph" by astronomers, it's one of the closest star-forming regions to our own solar system. Located near the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus, the nebula is about 407 light years away from Earth.
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Gravitational lenses occur when light traveling towards us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted as it encounters a massive object between the galaxy and us. These gravitational lenses often allow astronomers to peer much further back into the early universe than they would normally be able to.
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Apr 03, 08
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University of California at Irvine scientists have discovered a cluster of galaxies in a very early stage of formation that is 11.4 billion light years from Earth – the farthest of its kind ever to be detected. These galaxies are so distant that the universe was in its infancy when their light was emitted.
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Using a new technique, two NASA scientists have identified the lightest known black hole. With a mass only about 3.8 times greater than our Sun and a diameter of only 15 miles, the black hole lies very close to the minimum size predicted for black holes that originate from dying stars.
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“Red Supergiant (RSG) stars represent the final brief stage in a massive star’s life cycle before it goes supernova. They are very rare objects, so to find this many in the same place is remarkable. Together they contain 40 RSGs, which is nearly 20% of all the known RSGs in the Milky Way. These stars are all at the brink of going supernova,†said Dr Ben Davies of the Rochester Institute of Technology.
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Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to use the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in the U.S. with the special addition of an extra telescope 50 km away, the team studied the disk of gas and rocky particles around the star HL Tau. This star is thought to be less than 100,000 years old (by comparison the Sun is 4.6 billion years old) and lies in the direction of the constellation of Taurus at a distance of 520 light years. The disk around HL Tau is unusually massive and bright, which makes it an excellent place to search for signs of forming planets.
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A new discovery has resolved some of the mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. Omega Centauri is visible from Earth with the naked eye and is one of the favorite celestial objects for stargazers from the southern hemisphere. Although the cluster is 17,000 light-years away, located just above the plane of the Milky Way, it appears almost as large as the full Moon when the cluster is seen from a dark rural area. Exactly how Omega Centauri should be classified has always been a contentious topic.
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An international team of astronomers has discovered the coldest brown dwarf star ever observed. This finding is a new step toward filling the gap between stars and planets. The first brown dwarfs were detected in 1995. Since then, this type of stellar object has been found to share common properties with giant planets, even though differences remain.
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New measurements from some of the most distant galaxies bolster the evidence that the strongest burst of star formation in the history of the Universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang. An international team of astronomers from the UK, France, Germany and the USA have found evidence for a dramatic surge in star birth in a newly discovered population of massive galaxies in the early Universe.
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Dark matter has taunted astronomers and physicists ever since the astronomer Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology pointed out in the 1930s that clusters of galaxies appear to be missing enough visible matter to hold them together gravitationally. Speculation has centered on the possibility that the dark matter consists of hypothetical elementary particles left over from the Big Bang — so-called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, that are immune to most forces of nature and so can pass through us and the Earth like ghosts.
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There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts of data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts. “Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct,†said Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins. “No sacrifices have been made. It just feels as if you are in it.â€
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A cluster of stars called Omega Centauri shines like a jewel of the southern hemisphere night sky. It is visible to the naked eye, but through a telescope, millions of stars are revealed to be part of this globular cluster. A new image shows Omega Centauri in all its splendor.
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It turns out that Andromeda, previously thought to be the biggest galaxy in this part of the universe, may not have bragging rights over the Milky Way after all... Determining the shape, size and mass of the Milky Way is difficult. Most of the mass is in the form of invisible dark matter, a component that far outweighs the ordinary matter in stars and gas clouds. The astronomers, who reported their findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, used the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The team looked at bright, star-forming regions within the Milky Way, then measured the motion of those regions against the background of far more distant objects as the Milky Way rotated.
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When the universe was still young, they were already dying. The first stars ever to grace the cosmos with light were brutish monsters, so the story believed by most astronomers goes, lumbering clouds of hydrogen and helium hundreds of times more massive than the Sun. They lived fast and bright and died hard, exploding or collapsing into massive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang, never to be seen again. But they might have left something behind.
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Ripples in cosmic gas that resemble speedboat wakes have revealed a new population of young, renegade stars barreling through the universe at more than 112,000 miles (180,250 kilometers) an hour. The stars appear to be just a few million years old and a few times larger than the sun.
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"Active, supermassive black holes were everywhere in the early universe," said Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. "We had seen the tip of the iceberg before in our search for these objects. Now, we can see the iceberg itself."
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