Space & Astronomy

A cosmic camera hog is helping astronomers figure out the rate of the universe’s expansion.

Images of the supernova Refsdal have popped up multiple times in the constellation Leo, thanks to light from the stellar explosion wending its way through the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies. Analyzing delays between Refsdal’s appearances provides a new measurement of the Hubble constant, researchers report online May 11 in Science. That constant describes how quickly galaxies are flying away from each other as the universe expands. The new measurement is now contributing to debate over how fast the universe is expanding.

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Supernovas are the massive explosions that come at the ends of some stars’ life cycles. They’re among the most violent and brilliant events in the universe. In 2014, astronomer Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis discovered the Refsdal supernova in images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Instead of a single burst in the sky, Kelly says, “We saw four images of it.” They formed a pattern known as an Einstein Cross. The cross resulted because the gravity of a cluster of galaxies between us and Refsdal distorts space and time to create a gravitational lens that deflects the light on its way to us.

The location and arrival times of the images we see depend on three things: the distribution of matter in the galaxy cluster that makes up the lens; the distances between Earth, the lens and the supernova; and the Hubble constant. The combined effect on the light from Refsdal is so strong that in 2014, Kelly predicted that one more image from the supernova would be delayed by another year. Sure enough, light from Refsdal showed up in the sky again in 2015 (SN: 1/5/16).

The new calculations from Kelly and colleagues greatly improve a 2018 measurement of the Hubble constant using Refsdal’s appearances, putting it at about 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec, based on gravitational lens models that most closely matched their observations. “The meticulous modeling of the [lens] system, along with the gravitational forces it generates, have allowed [the team] to decrease the margin of error in estimating the Hubble constant by more than a factor of two,” says astronomer Vivian Miranda of Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the new study.

Studies that estimate the Hubble constant in other ways don’t agree well with each other. One method that relies on ancient light left over from early cosmic times suggests that the universe is expanding at about 67 km/s/Mpc. That’s close to the value Kelly’s group found. But an expansion estimate that uses the distances to supernovas based on their brightness comes in around 74 km/s/Mpc (SN 7/30/19).

“The predicted value of the Hubble constant is highly sensitive to the dynamics of the universe, both in the distant past and the recent present,” Miranda says. “If our understanding of the universe is accurate, all the various methods of measuring the Hubble constant should align.”

Settling the discrepancy between different values of the Hubble constant is crucial to explaining things like dark energy, which appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe (SN: 3/21/98).

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It will take another supernova and lens to make a big leap in precision over the Refsdal study. A recurring image of a supernova in the constellation Cetus that’s expected to appear in 2037 might do the trick (SN: 9/13/21). In the meantime, Kelly says, further refinements in the model of the gravitational lens that caused the multiplied Refsdal images could improve estimates of the Hubble constant somewhat.

“This is the first example of this kind of measurement,” Kelly says. “It sets the stage for additional measurements and increased precision,” which could deepen astronomers’ insights into our ever-expanding universe. More

The star Fomalhaut is ready for its close-up.

Rings of dust encircle the young star in stunning new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The photos offer a clearer view of the star system — already famous for previous images of a purported, now widely disputed, planet. Features in the system include an oddly cockeyed asteroid belt, an expanding cloud of debris from a possible planet collision, and other unidentified bits that hint at a dynamic and crowded environment, researchers report May 8 in Nature Astronomy. 

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“It’s the first time we’re actually looking at the inner system, and it looks really different than I think anybody expected it to,” says astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “The expectation was that there would be something like our solar system,” a place that is relatively mature and stable. “It really starts changing how we think about the dynamics of the [Fomalhaut] system.”

Fomalhaut, a scant 25 light-years away, is a young star at the center of a rapidly evolving planetary system. It was once thought to host one of the first planets to be photographed outside of our solar system (SN: 11/13/08). However, the existence of the planet — dubbed Dagon — has long been in question (SN: 1/26/12). 

The new JWST images add to the growing evidence that Dagon is actually a cloud of dust. A collision among planets probably explains the dusty feature, says András Gáspár, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It is fading, and it is expanding in size,” he says, as it follows a trajectory consistent with dust blowing in the stellar wind from Fomalhaut. Those are all characteristics more indicative of dust clouds than planets.

But just because Dagon hasn’t seemed to have panned out, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other planets lurking around Fomalhaut.

Indirect evidence for other worlds comes from an unexpected asteroid belt, seen for the first time in the new images. The belt is tilted at a jaunty 23 degrees from everything else seen in orbit around the star.

“This is a truly unique aspect of the system,” Gáspár says. The tilted belt, he says, could be the result of as-yet-undiscovered planets stirring up the debris around Fomalhaut.

MacGregor agrees. “If you see a disk that’s like this, that has an [elongated] outer ring and a bunch of dust that’s getting dragged in, there are probably planets there,” she says. “I think the easiest explanation [for the tilted belt] is there’s a planet in there, and the planet is on an orbit that is not aligned with the disk.” The misaligned planet, in turn, is dragging the asteroid belt off-kilter with respect to the plane of the solar system, she says.

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The JWST images also turned up a newly identified feature in the outer belt around the star.  It’s a blob that Gáspár and his colleagues call the Great Dust Cloud. It’s not yet clear whether it’s a real feature, or just some bright object shining through from beyond the Fomalhaut system.

“It could easily be a background galaxy,” Gáspár says, “which would be a really cruel trick by nature.” Follow-up observations with JWST will help them decide, he says. If the object stays put while the Fomalhaut system keeps spinning, then it’s a cosmic photobomber, lurking in the background.

The latest images answer some questions about Fomalhaut while raising a host of new ones, Gáspár says. “This single observation of Fomalhaut revealed way too many aspects of the system that we need to understand and unpack,” he says. “We set out to spatially resolve the asteroid belt component but ended up opening a much greater box of surprises.” More

A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds.

In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that points toward the home galaxy and revealing the black hole’s madcap escape.

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But other researchers have been skeptical of this interpretation, with some suggesting that the scenario is too complex to explain the linear feature. In the new study, “we decided to explore what we thought was the most simple explanation,” says astronomer Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain.

He was inspired by a data plot in the original study, which compared the velocities of the stars in the linear feature with their positions, a comparison known as a velocity curve. To him, it looked like a spiral galaxy’s plot of its pinwheel rotation, where the stars in the galactic disk all move at nearly the same speed, no matter if they appeared to travel toward or away from Earth (SN: 8/17/21). That, combined with van Dokkum and colleagues’ estimate of the feature’s mass — roughly 100 million suns, which was surprisingly large for a simple line of stars — implied that the object is actually a spiral galaxy viewed on its edge, Trujillo says.

So he and his colleagues compared characteristics of the linear feature with those of a well-studied spiral galaxy called IC 5249, which astronomers know we see edge on from Earth. The team looked at the objects’ masses, surface brightnesses and general motions of stars. The properties of the galaxy and linear feature matched closely, the researchers report in the study, which is in press in Astronomy & Astrophysics and was also submitted April 24 at arXiv.org.

For now, “the evidence is not conclusive either way,” says astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England who studies galaxy evolution and was not involved in either study.

“A black hole being ejected from a galaxy would be really cool,” Conselice says. “But I think the simple explanation is that it’s either an edge-on galaxy, or some kind of filament or tidal debris,” left over from some previous galaxy interaction.

Van Dokkum still favors the black hole scenario, in part because of one new image. In the original Hubble images, the linear feature merely points toward a compact galaxy at its left. In a new ultraviolet image, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, “you start to see that this feature is actually connected to the galaxy,” which strengthens the runaway black hole theory, he says.

Trujillo and his colleagues suggest that the edge-on spiral galaxy and compact galaxy are independent structures but members of the same galaxy group, coincidentally close to each other from our viewpoint.

The debate’s resolution may have to wait at least until this summer when better imagery from Hubble arrives. More

A dusty belch is all that remains of a planet that was gobbled up by a star about 12,000 light-years away. It marks the first time anyone has seen a star in the act of eating a planet.

A brief burst of light captured by a couple of telescopes was probably caused by a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter being swallowed by its sun, researchers report May 3 in Nature. It’s a dramatic end that is the eventual destiny of many planets, including Earth.

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“Planetary engulfment has been predicted for a very long time, but their frequency was not well known,” says MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De. “So it was certainly exciting to realize we had found one.”

The discovery came about as De was on the hunt for binary stars. He was using data from the Palomar Observatory in California to look for spots in the sky that showed rapid increases in brightness. Such fluctuations can be a sign of stars coming close enough together that one will suck matter from the other (SN: 2/6/14).

One event from 2020 stood out. A spot of light rapidly got about 100 times as bright as it had been. It could have been the result of two stars merging. But a second look by NASA’s NEOWISE infrared space telescope suggested otherwise. Data from that observatory showed that the total amount of energy released in the flash was just one-thousandth what it would have been if two stars had merged, and that chilly dust surrounded the mash-up instead of hot plasma that would normally indicate a merger among stars.

The low energy suggested that one of the objects, assuming it was a merger of some kind, wasn’t a star at all. Instead, it was probably a giant planet. As the star noshed on the planet, a stream of cold dust sailed away like cosmic breadcrumbs from a stellar snack. “I was indeed surprised when we connected the dots together,” De says.

Planet-devouring stars are probably relatively common in the universe, says UCLA astrophysicist Smadar Naoz, who was not involved with the study. But the evidence, she says, has been circumstantial. Until now, astronomers have seen only signs of stars preparing for a planetary snack or debris left over from a presumed stellar meal.

“One of the things that I found in the paper that I really liked was the detective work” that pieced together evidence from multiple telescopes to confirm that the star expanded outward to eat a planet, Naoz says.

Naoz has pondered the ways that stars might gobble up planets. A star in the prime of life might consume a planet that wanders too close by in its orbit — think of that as a stellar lunch, Naoz says. A dying star, on the other hand, will swallow a planet as the star swells to become a red giant (SN: 4/7/20). That’s more like a cosmic dinner.

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The planet-eating star in this study is turning into a red giant, but is still early in its transformation.  “I would say it’s early supper,” Naoz says.

There’s a lot that’s still mysterious about stars munching on planets, De says. But upcoming observatories with large infrared cameras, he says, should let astronomers look for bright, long-lived infrared emissiosn that might reveal more planet-eating stars.

Our sun will evolve into a red giant and consume the Earth in about 5 billion years. “Because the Earth is much smaller than Jupiter,” De says, “the effects will certainly be more subdued … so finding Earth-like engulfments will be challenging, but we are actively working on ideas to identify them.” More