Space & Astronomy

One of the oldest known objects in the universe is wandering around the Milky Way.

Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars nearly the same age as the universe.

Refining the ages of clusters like M92 can help put limits on the age of the universe itself. It can also help solve cosmic conundrums about how the universe evolved.

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The age is “on the edge of the age of the universe, as estimated by other groups,” says astronomer Martin Ying of Dartmouth College. “It helps us set the lower bound of the age of the universe. We don’t expect M92 to be born before the universe, right?”

Globular clusters like M92 are tight knots of stars that are thought to have all formed at the same time. That makes it easier for astronomers to measure the stars’ ages (SN: 7/23/21). Stars that are born at different masses have different fates: The big ones use up their fuel quickly and die young, and the small ones linger. Figuring out how many of the cluster’s stars have aged out of the main parts of their fuel-burning years gives a sense of when the whole cluster was born.

But those estimates rely on assumptions about how stellar evolution works. Ying and colleagues wanted to find an age measurement that would sidestep those assumptions.

Using a computer, the team created 20,000 synthetic stellar populations for M92, each for a different possible cluster age. They then compared the colors and brightnesses for each of these populations with Hubble Space Telescope observations of M92 and calculated the age that fit the collection best.

This isn’t the first time astronomers have measured M92’s age, but previous estimates relied on just one synthetic collection of stars. Comparing thousands of them reduced the uncertainty introduced by the assumptions baked into each one. The new technique reduced the uncertainty of the cluster age by about 50 percent, Ying says. The team found the cluster is 13.8 billion years old, give or take 750 million years. That’s strikingly close to the best estimate of the age of the universe: a smidge over 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 24 million years, according to the Planck satellite’s measurement of the first light emitted after the Big Bang (SN: 12/20/13).

The age of clusters like M92 is important partly because of a rising tension over how fast the universe is growing. Astronomers have known since the 1990s that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, thanks to a mysterious substance dubbed dark energy (SN: 8/25/22). But recent measurements of the rate of that expansion, a figure called the Hubble constant, disagree with each other (SN: 7/30/19).

One way around that tension is to accept a different age for the universe, says cosmologist and study coauthor Mike Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas at Austin.

“We often think about it as, Moses came down from Mount Sinai with ‘13.8 billion years’ written on some tablets or something, but it’s not quite like that,” he says. “If one takes the Hubble tension seriously, then one also has to say we don’t know the age of the universe that well.”

That’s where M92 comes in. Before spacecraft measured the cosmos’ earliest light, globular cluster ages were the best way to place limits on the age of the universe. That practice had fallen out of fashion for a while, says cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new work.

But improvements in computing, theory, and measurements of the distances to clusters like M92 make it worth trying again.

“The Hubble tension itself is a really challenging nut to crack,” Freedman says. This measurement alone isn’t precise enough to settle the debate. But “the more kinds of constraints we have, the better,” she says. “It’s showing a way for the future.” More

Ashley Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She has worked at The Scientist, the Simons Foundation, Duke University and the W.M. Keck Observatory, and was the web producer for Science News from 2013 to 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. More

The discovery of phosphorus in a cloud at the edge of the Milky Way has extended the region in our galaxy where life might be found.

Phosphorus is one of six essential elements for life on Earth, along with nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur (SN: 12/16/22). Until now, it had been the only one of those elements missing from the farthest reaches of our galaxy. Finding phosphorus that far out could extend the galaxy’s habitable zone out from its center by roughly 22,000 light-years, researchers reported June 8 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque. That in turn could motivate astronomers to look in the hinterlands of the Milky Way for planets and any life they might harbor.

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The team pointed two radio telescopes at a cool, dusty gas cloud at the edge of the galaxy. The cloud is a frigid –248° Celsius — a mere 25 degrees above absolute zero. It sits about 74,000 light-years from the galactic center, nearly triple the distance Earth is from the Milky Way’s core. And it has signatures of phosphorus monoxide and phosphorus mononitride, astrochemist Lilia Koelemay said at the meeting.

Looking for phosphorus in that distant cloud was a long shot, says astrochemist Lucy Ziurys, Koelemay’s collaborator at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The element is produced only in supernovas. But there’s not a lot of material in the outer Milky Way, so it’s hard to build stars big enough to end their lives in massive, element-spewing explosions (SN: 11/2/21). Beyond 49,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, there is only one supernova remnant known, Ziurys says.

One way phosphorus could have ended up in the outer galaxy is through a supernova closer to the center that launched a “galactic fountain,” Ziurys says. “A supernova explodes, the material gets thrown out of the galactic plane, then settles back down near the galactic edge.” The material would be very diluted there, but “if there are different supernovae going off, they’re going to keep polluting the outer galaxy,” she says.

“The detection of the phosphorus-bearing molecules … seems clear and compelling,” says Francesco Fontani, an astrophysicist at the Italian Institute for Astrophysics in Florence, who was not involved in the study. He has observed some of the other essential elements for life in the outer galaxy, but never phosphorus.

The detection of phosphorus in a cloud at the edge of the Milky Way (position marked with a circle at the bottom of this illustration) means that the galactic habitable zone, which previously was thought to end about 52,000 light-years from the center (blue region), might extend at least 22,000 light-years farther out (red region). The yellow dot marks the position of the sun.JPL-Caltech/NASA, R. Hurt/SSC/Caltech, L. Koelemay, C. Chang

Because astronomers had not found the six life-essential elements so far from the galactic center, they assumed the region where life could exist in the Milky Way — what’s called the galactic habitable zone — extended at most to the farthest supernova they’d found, about 52,000 light years from the galactic center. There’s an assumed inner edge as well at about 6,500 light-years from the galaxy’s core. The relatively large numbers of supernovas occurring there would expose any planets in the region to intense ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, making it difficult for life to last for long.

“This detection, together with previous detections of organic molecules at similar large distances from the galactic center, supports the idea that the outer boundaries of the galactic habitable zone could be wider than what we previously thought,” Fontani says.

For life to emerge so far from the galaxy’s center, planets would need to exist out there. So far, they have been observed only relatively close to the solar system — most within a few thousand light-years. “I don’t think we know right now whether they can form at larger galactic-central distances,” Ziurys says. Finding the six elements for life at the galaxy’s edge, she says, will hopefully spur on the search for the most distant places where it could thrive. More

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — For the first time, astronomers have detected starlight from distant galaxies that host extremely bright supermassive black holes called quasars.

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal that four of these galaxies are massive, compact and possibly disk-shaped, astronomers report June 12 at the JWST First Light meeting. Studying the galaxies could help solve the mystery of how black holes in the early universe grew so big so fast (SN: 1/18/21).

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“Ever since the discovery of [distant] quasars, there have been studies trying to detect their host galaxies,” said MIT astrophysicist Minghao Yue. But until JWST’s sharp infrared eyes came along, it wasn’t possible. “This opens up brand new windows towards finally understanding luminous quasars and their host galaxies.”

Quasars are black holes that are feeding so furiously, the material they gobble heats to white-hot temperatures, shining brighter than the stars in the galaxies around them. They’re so bright and distant that each appears as a single, starlike point of light.

Two independent groups used that starlike quality to erase the black hole glow from images of their galaxies, like a sculptor coaxing a figure out of marble.

Yue and colleagues used JWST to observe six quasar-hosting galaxies. Around the same time, astrophysicist Xuheng Ding of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and colleagues used JWST to look at another pair of quasars. The light from all the quasars was emitted more than 12.8 billion years ago, or less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

The teams used actual stars in the images to simulate the starlike shapes of the quasars. Then they subtracted the simulated quasar from the image of each whole galaxy, and voilà: Only starlight remained.

Ding’s team got a direct peek at both of their galaxies, while Yue’s team glimpsed two of their six. All the measured galaxies appear to be less than a tenth as wide as the Milky Way, measuring between 2,600 and 8,000 light-years across. The two galaxies that Yue and colleagues observed contain enough stars to make up between 10 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the sun, the researchers estimate. The pair that Ding and colleagues looked at weigh in at about 25 billion and 63 billion solar masses, the team reported at the meeting and in a study to appear in Nature.

Those masses are comparable to that of all the stars in the Milky Way, which in total add up to roughly 60 billion times the mass of the sun. That’s surprisingly massive for so early in the universe’s history.

What’s more, the galaxies seem to break a rule set by observations of galaxies in the nearby universe. Locally, galaxies tend to split their mass between stars and black holes in a predictable way: The more massive its central supermassive black hole, the more stars a galaxy has. These galaxies appear to pack more mass into their black hole than their amount of stars should allow.

“At least for these luminous quasars, they really are over-massive,” Yue said.

The mass calculations might prove to be overestimates, says astrophysicist Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in either study. Converting the light that JWST can see into stars rests on assumptions about how many stars of various masses a galaxy has. Modern galaxies have a lot more dim, lightweight stars than bright, hefty ones, so astronomers typically assume that the brightest stars they see are just the tip of the iceberg. But that might not have been the case 800 million years after the Big Bang, Shapiro says.

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“You’re observing the tail and inferring the dog,” he says. “If there were a mass distribution that favors high-mass stars, you could be significantly overestimating the mass associated with the light.”

But “the fact that we can see it at all is very exciting,” says astronomer Madeline Marshall of the National Research Council Canada in Victoria. The fact that two groups are reporting starlight from quasar hosts independently is very convincing, she says.

“Pre-JWST, we could not detect host galaxies of [distant] quasars,” she said at the meeting. “Now, with only the first year of observations … we can actually detect some of these hosts for the first time.”

These first few quasar hosts are just the beginning, Ding says. JWST is scheduled to observe at least 10 more, some of which are even farther away. A larger sample will help astronomers figure out enduring cosmic riddles about how black holes and galaxies influence each other as they grow.

“We don’t know how black holes can be so big in the early universe,” Ding says. “You need to understand the environment of this monster, how it can collect so much matter to it. So knowing the conditions — the mass of the host galaxies, for example — at least then you can say how their local environment is.” More

A long-suspected black hole may have finally come out of hiding.

A monstrously massive black hole in a distant galaxy probably has a smaller companion that orbits it every 12 years. But that tiny partner has never been detected. Now, astronomers claim to have seen a flash of light coming directly from the smaller black hole for the first time.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said astronomer Mauri Valtonen on June 7 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque.

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Astronomers have been watching this object since the 1880s, when it showed up in a survey of asteroids as a brilliant point of light. That point of light, now dubbed OJ287, is a blazar. Among the brightest-looking objects in the universe, blazars are supermassive black holes that launch bright jets of radiation into space, and those jets happen to point almost directly at Earth. This one sits about 3.5 billion light-years away.

Sometimes, OJ287 shines even brighter than usual. For the past 40 years or so, astronomers have noticed that the object has a dramatic jump in brightness every 11 to 12 years.

In 1996, Valtonen and his colleague Harry Lehto, both of the University of Turku in Finland, suggested that the outbursts could be due to one supermassive black hole orbiting an even more massive black hole. Both black holes are probably behemoths, the astronomers calculated: The smaller is around 150 million times the mass of the sun, and the bigger is around 18 billion solar masses. For perspective, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way is about 4 million solar masses (SN: 5/12/22).

The bigger black hole is thought to be surrounded by a disk of white-hot gas and dust, which glows at many wavelengths of light. If the smaller black hole exists, then every time it plunges through that disk, it would trigger a flash of light — thus explaining the recurring outbursts.

[embedded content]
This animation shows a flash of light that a smaller supermassive black hole in the blazar OJ287 emits when it crashes through the disk of gas and dust swirling around the other more massive black hole it orbits.

But until now, no light had been detected from the second black hole itself. Its presence was merely inferred from those regular flares.

Valtonen and his colleagues predicted that the most recent flare should arrive in January or February 2022 and arranged to monitor OJ287 every day using telescopes on Earth and in space. The team saw flares like the ones they had seen before, but there was a new flare that was different. It was bright and quick, fading after one night.

The team proposed that this flare came from a jet created by the smaller black hole pulling material out of the disk as it approached, before the collision.

“It swallows a whole lot of disk matter,” Valtonen said. “That matter falls into the secondary black hole, and you get a huge flare.”

Previous observations missed that flare because it is so short. The team almost missed it in 2022, due to bad weather. “We never observed OJ287 night to night to night [before], this was the first time,” he said. “That’s why we saw it.”

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Some researchers have suggested other ways for a single black hole to give off the same pattern of light. If the team’s interpretation is correct, then it marks the first time the second black hole has been seen directly, Valtonen says.

“The detection of the second black hole should put an end to this discussion,” he says. “More generally, this could be the beginning of work on secondary jets in binary black hole systems, which could open up a new research field, now that we have at least one concrete example to study.” If other binary black holes make similar flashes as the smaller black hole crosses the larger one’s disk, astronomers now know how to look for them.

The observations do suggest the presence of a second black hole, says Caltech astronomer Seppo Laine, although other ideas are still possible.

“Mauri has been basically pushing this supermassive black hole binary model for decades now,” Laine says. “It doesn’t completely confirm it, but if this interpretation is correct, then it’s a significant step forward.”

Unfortunately, it may be difficult to test. The short flares come only once a decade, so astronomers need to be ready the next time. To resolve the two black holes directly, Valtonen says, might take a radio telescope in space. More

If you’re looking to visit a gas giant planet in another solar system — or if you’re simply a science fiction writer who needs such a world for your story — you’d better steer clear of little red stars.

A search for planets like Jupiter around low-mass red dwarf stars came up empty, researchers report in the July Astronomical Journal. “Around 200 stars, we did not detect a single one of these planets,” says Emily Pass, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

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The find — or lack thereof — lends support to a theory of giant-planet building called core accretion. In this theory, gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn form by gradually piecing together a solid core out of debris orbiting a young star (SN: 4/14/22). That core eventually gets massive enough to attract lots of gas. But low-mass red dwarf stars shouldn’t host much solid material to begin with, so a paucity of gas giants is in line with that theory.

About three out of every four stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, a type of star much fainter, cooler and smaller than the sun (SN: 8/23/21). They glow dimly because they were born with little mass, about eight to 60 percent that of the sun. Previous planet searches have found that few red dwarfs have gas giant planets. But the new search targeted red dwarfs with only 10 to 30 percent of the sun’s mass, which are the most common such stars.

Pass and colleagues spent about six years searching for the Doppler shift an orbiting planet would cause in starlight as the world pulled its sun toward and away from us. All the observed stars are nearby, within 50 light-years of Earth. The closest is the well-studied Barnard’s Star, just six light-years away, which was once thought to possess two Jupiter-sized planets (SN: 4/26/69).

But no gas giants turned up around that star or any of the others. Extrapolating to the rest of the galaxy, the researchers conclude that fewer than two out of every 100 low-mass red dwarfs have planets as massive as Jupiter.

“To actually form a Jupiter [around the lowest-mass stars] is very hard,” says Edward Bryant, an astronomer at University College London, who was not one of the researchers conducting the search. “Their lack of a detection of a Jupiter analog I think is very consistent with the expectations from core accretion.” Because the disks of gas and dust around infant low-mass red dwarfs are small, there’s less material to create gas giants the size of Jupiter.

But smaller, rocky worlds stand a much better chance.

In fact, many red dwarfs do have Earth-sized planets, some at the right distances from their suns to sport pleasant temperatures. “We are talking about strange new worlds, not an Earth 2.0,” Pass says.

In our solar system, she says, Jupiter’s gravity may have prevented lots of ice from reaching Earth. As a result, our world didn’t end up completely underwater. In a planetary system lacking such a massive gas giant, an Earth-sized planet could turn into a water world that might still give rise to a highly intelligent species, but one that would live underwater — think dolphins — and not do any astronomy at all.

“It’s not saying that you can’t have life on these planets,” Pass says. “But those planets are just going to be so different than our own experiences.” More

A spacecraft plunging into the sun’s atmosphere has revealed the likely source of powerful blasts of plasma in fast solar winds.

Far from the sun, the solar wind is a nebulous, turbulent plasma. But when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe dipped within about 8 million kilometers of the sun’s surface, it detected narrow plasma streams (SN: 12/15/21). The streams appear to be guided by magnetic fields tracing back to two relatively cool regions of the sun’s atmosphere known as coronal holes, researchers report June 7 in Nature.

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The solar wind — the steady stream of charged particles flowing from the sun — has two distinct speeds, dubbed as “slow” and “fast.” Until now, it wasn’t clear what was speeding the fast solar wind along. The plasma in most of the solar wind consists of protons, electrons and the nuclei of atoms blowing at hundreds of kilometers a second. But plasma from the area above the coronal holes can travel more than 10 times as fast.

The fast plasma streams were associated with events known as switchbacks, in which portions of the magnetic fields near the sun reverse direction (SN: 1/15/21). Switchbacks can result when magnetic field loops close to the sun’s surface connect to long field lines extending away from the sun. The reconnection leads to a sharp switchback kink that kicks the plasma on its way into space as the kink straightens out.

Higher energy streams, the researchers propose, are the result of newly reconnected field lines with sharply kinked switchbacks, while lower energy streams come from field lines with older kinks that had become more smoothed out.

Although the evidence that the fast solar wind is due to magnetic reconnections is compelling, it’s still circumstantial, says astrophysicist Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley. “Our results suggest that the solar wind can be accelerated to high speeds very close to the sun,” Bale says. “This is somewhat different [than the] standard scenario of wind energization,” where the acceleration takes place farther from the sun.

Getting a handle on processes like the origin of the fast solar wind is important for practical reasons, Bale says. “We also believe that magnetic reconnection is responsible for solar flares and is involved in the release of coronal mass ejections, which have a major impact in space weather.” Solar flares and the space weather they create have led to electrical grid disruptions on Earth and interrupted radio communications, and they may threaten astronauts (SN: 7/30/2020).

The findings are also an important clue in the enduring mystery of why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees Celsius hotter than its surface, says astrophysicist Gary Zank, who was not involved in the study (SN: 8/20/17). “But they do not identify the heating mechanism.”

The observations identify the importance of magnetic reconnection close to the sun, says Zank, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “The next step is to link that to the dissipation of the magnetic energy in determining the actual heating process.”

Another interesting aspect of the study is how the structure of the solar surface seems to be imprinted on the solar wind near the sun despite the presence of turbulence, says Amitava Bhattacharjee, a Princeton University astrophysicist who was not involved with the study. Other researchers have proposed that it can happen, he says, but in the new study, “the experimental and simulation evidence is more convincing.”

Parker’s ever closer encounters with the sun could confirm the source of the fast solar wind more definitively. And future passes will come as the sun heads into a phase with increasing numbers of sunspots and more solar wind, on the way to peak solar activity around July 2025.  “As we move into solar maximum,” Bale says, “we expect some serious surprises.” More