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Martin Wolff's List: Astrophysics
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By working in synergy with a ground-based telescope array, the joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/NASA Suzaku X-ray observatory is shedding new light on some of the most energetic objects in our galaxy, but objects that remain shrouded in mystery. These cosmic powerhouses pour out vast amounts of energy, and they accelerate particles to almost the speed of light. But very little is known about these sources because they were discovered only recently. "Understanding these objects is one of the most intriguing problems in astrophysics," says Takayasu Anada of the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science in Kanagawa, Japan.
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Four years of observations from the European Space Agency’s Integral satellite may have cleared up one of the most vexing mysteries in our Milky Way: the origin of a giant cloud of antimatter surrounding the galactic center. The cloud itself is roughly 10,000 light-years across, and generates the energy of about 10,000 Suns. The antimatter cloud was discovered in the 1970s by gamma-ray detectors flown on balloons. Scientists have proposed a wide range of explanations for the origin of the antimatter, which is exceedingly rare in the cosmos.
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A new space mission is going to shed light on some of the most extreme astrophysical processes in nature - including pulsars, remnants of supernovae, and supermassive black holes. The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is a four-tonne observatory packed with state-of-the-art particle detectors that will study the gamma-ray sky in unprecedented detail.
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Edwin E. Salpeter, an astrophysicist widely known for his studies of chain reactions in stars and as a developer of the “Salpeter-Bethe equation†describing how helium changes to carbon, died November 25, 2008 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 83. His death was announced by Cornell University, where he was an emeritus professor of physical sciences.
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In a shock finding, astronomers using CSIRO’s Parkes telescope have detected a huge burst of radio energy from the distant universe that could open up a new field in astrophysics.
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They are the zestiest bits of matter in the universe. They can zing through space for millions of years at essentially the speed of light and with 100 million times the energy produced by the biggest particle accelerators on the earth, before crashing occasionally into Earth’s atmosphere and dying in a spray of microscopic fluff.
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The Crab Nebula, located 6,500 light years away in the constellation Taurus, was formed in a spectacular supernova explosion in 1054. According to ancient sources, including Chinese texts that referred to it as a "guest star," the explosion was visible in daylight for more than three weeks, and may briefly have been brighter than the full moon. At the heart of the nebula remains an incredibly rapidly spinning neutron star that sweeps two narrow radio beams across the Earth each time it turns. The lighthouse-like radio pulses have given the star the name "pulsar."
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A central problem in solar physics is why the sun's atmosphere gets hotter as it rises, from about 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 kelvins) at the photosphere (solar surface) to more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million Kelvins) in the corona, which extends for millions of miles. Without an outside force heating the corona, its temperature would plummet, says solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
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