Space & Astronomy

The Milky Way might have once looked more like a legume than a starry whirlpool.

Over their unfathomably long lifetimes, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are generally thought to morph into lentil-shaped “lenticular” galaxies and then into elliptical blobs (SN: 4/23/18). But an analysis of nearby galaxies suggests that our galaxy, and others like it, was once lenticular, astronomer Alister Graham reports in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. If correct, Graham’s proposed update to the evolutionary sequence of galaxies would rewrite the history of the Milky Way.

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“Lenticulars have always been sort of the abandoned stepchild of [galaxy] morphology,” says astronomer Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England, who wasn’t involved in the study. But this paper puts them into focus, he says, as being a major aspect of how galaxies change.

Lenticulars get their name from the way their entire halo of stars, when viewed edge on, bulges in the middle and thins out toward the sides, much like a lentil. These galaxies exhibit a confusing mix of properties that’s made their presumed place in the middle of galaxy evolution sequences rather suspect.

“We’ve known for a while that that’s almost certainly not correct,” Conselice says. Particularly puzzling is that lenticulars, despite their spiral-like disks, don’t have lots of gas, which hinders them from producing new stars. Spiral galaxies do have lots of star-forming gas, and scientists aren’t sure why lenticular galaxies don’t.

Graham, of Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Australia, found new clues to this mystery of galaxy evolution by considering black holes.

Most galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole in their center, and when galaxies merge, so do those black holes. This makes the mass of a galaxy’s black hole a kind of record of its past collisions. If a galaxy got big by gobbling up its neighbors rather than by sucking up surrounding gas, its black hole should be hefty relative to the swarm of stars that surrounds it.

Using images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, Graham compared the black hole and stellar masses of about 100 nearby galaxies. For galaxies of the same shape, he saw that black hole mass and stellar mass tend to be linked in a predictable way — except for the lenticular galaxies.

When Graham took a closer look at the lenticulars, he realized they are actually two distinct groups that had been lumped together: those that have lots of interstellar dust and those that do not. This division, which he previously reported in the May Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could have been a superficial aesthetic difference. But the galaxies’ black hole masses suggest otherwise.

Dust-poor and dust-rich lenticulars have entirely different relationships between their black hole masses and stellar masses, suggesting different histories and explaining the apparently scattered behavior of lenticular galaxies. The dusty galaxies tend to have a heftier supermassive black hole than the ones found in both spirals and dust-poor lenticulars. Dust-poor lenticulars are usually on the small side in terms of both black hole mass and stellar mass.

This led Graham to conclude that spiral galaxies are actually in between the two types of lenticulars, evolutionarily speaking. His new analysis suggests that dust-poor lenticulars become spirals after capturing small “satellite galaxies” and other minor mergers — bumping up their black hole masses — and scooping up nearby gas.

When spirals collide with other substantial galaxies, he proposes, they become dust-rich lenticulars — and indeed, he adds, every dust-rich lenticular in his dataset was previously recognized as the remnant of a spiral galaxy merger. Collisions between these dust-rich lenticulars are then enough to finally erode the galaxies’ discs of stars and destroy their dust, producing blobby elliptical galaxies. 

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Black holes are a good tracer of galaxy evolution, Conselice says, but the new sequence could be controversial. One issue, he says, is that lenticular galaxies in the nearby universe are usually such lightweights that they would need to merge tens or even hundreds of times — far more than the expected average of around three over 10 billion years — to form a large spiral galaxy.

But things might have been different in the early universe, he adds. Long ago, there could have been more massive lenticulars. Figuring that out might be possible with the James Webb Space Telescope, which can see incredibly faint infrared light, so is allowing scientists to peer farther away — and further back in time — than ever before (SN: 12/16/22).

“If you could look in the more distant universe, you could potentially see some of these galaxies when they’re first forming, or when they’re evolving,” Conselice says. “We could potentially really test this idea.” More

Samples of the asteroid Ryugu contain bits of stardust that predate the birth of our solar system.

Slivers of Ryugu material, snagged by the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft, appear to come from the solar system’s frozen fringes, rather than from the asteroid itself, scientists report July 14 in Science Advances. These foreign fragments could illuminate details of the solar system’s history.

Finding these fragments “is really unique,” says cosmochemist Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It’s showing us a new type of material, but also telling us about the dynamics of material from the outer solar system.”

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The Hayabusa2 spacecraft visited the asteroid in 2018 and 2019, then returned to Earth with 5.4 grams of the space rock in 2020 (SN: 12/7/20). Scientists examined those samples in the lab in ways that can’t be done with telescopes or even spacecraft, like getting detailed measurements of chemical composition.

So far, those examinations have shown that Ryugu is rich in carbon, that it’s made of the same material as some of the rarest meteorites found on Earth, and that it was altered by water at some point in its past (SN: 6/9/22). Scientists think that Ryugu formed from the debris of a larger asteroid, which broke up in a collision and re-formed into a loose pile of rubble (SN: 3/20/19).

Nguyen, however, was searching for something different. “My focus of research is presolar grains,” tiny specks of material that formed from the ashes of dying stars, she says (SN: 1/13/20). “I was on the hunt for them.” These delicate grains contain different isotopes — atoms of an element that have different numbers of neutrons — than those formed by the sun, giving away their alien origins.

Nguyen and her colleagues examined two samples of Ryugu, each less than a millimeter in size. They then picked out tiny slivers of rock, 50 to 200 micrometers wide, called clasts, that stood out from the rest of the Ryugu sample.

Using scanning electron microscopes and other imaging techniques, Nguyen and colleagues found that two of the clasts are chemically different from the rest of Ryugu, with lower oxygen, magnesium and silicon contents, and greater amounts of iron and sulfur.

Electron microscope images of a sliver of solar system material (outlined in white) in a sample of the asteroid Ryugu show that the material is different from the rest of the asteroid. The different colors highlight different elements in the sample: oxygen (magenta), magnesium (green), silicon (light blue), iron (dark blue) and sulfur (yellow). The slivers also contain grains of silicates (white arrows) that come from outside the solar system.A. Nguyen et al/Science Advances 2023

The clasts also have much higher concentrations of presolar grains than the rest of the Ryugu material. The grains contain silicon carbide, which is easily destroyed by water, plus an extra abundance of organic matter.

That means the grains could not have been part of Ryugu’s parent body, which was extensively altered by water. The researchers think the grains were bits of a comet that formed in the outer solar system’s Kuiper belt, where the conditions were cool and dry. Then the grains sprinkled onto the rubble that formed Ryugu sometime between the original asteroid’s destruction and the rubble pile’s formation.

“Between these events, it kind of collected some other friends that came from other bodies, from different parts of the solar system,” Nguyen says. It’s not yet clear how material from the outer solar system found its way to Ryugu. Perhaps the asteroid formed farther from the sun — and hence, closer to the Kuiper belt — than it is today. “It’s interesting to visualize how this asteroid came about and what it gathered along the way.”

The discovery is “very exciting,” says cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who was not involved in the new work. “These clasts that got incorporated into Ryugu after it formed, they’re really valuable. I think they’re even more valuable than the Ryugu sample itself.”

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The clasts can reveal what the unaltered ingredients that formed the solar system were made of. Think of the disk that formed the planets as bread dough, Heck says. Once the dough is well-mixed, it’s hard to tell what went into it. Clasts like the ones in the Ryugu sample are like bits of unmixed flour that survived intact in the final loaf, he says — not delicious, but very informative.

“If we want to understand the ingredients from which the solar system formed, the original ingredients, we need to find these very rare, unaltered clasts,” Heck says. “This is one of them.” More

Plasma rain in the sun’s atmosphere makes a splash when it lands. New observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter have revealed previously unseen details of how this coronal rain falls, including bright fireball effects and sudden upward surges in plasma.

“These are the highest resolution images we have ever obtained from the solar corona,” says solar physicist Patrick Antolin of Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He presented the results at the National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff, Wales, the week of July 3 and in a paper to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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The corona is the sun’s wispy upper atmosphere, the sizzling tangle of plasma and magnetism that is visible during a total eclipse (SN: 6/30/19). When clumps of scorching-hot plasma in the corona suddenly cool, they condense and fall toward the solar surface, just like water droplets in Earth’s atmosphere. This coronal rain has been observed before, but details of its formation and falling were fuzzy (SN: 5/24/18).

The 2020 launch of Solar Orbiter promised to change that (SN: 2/9/20). The probe is making passes over the sun’s unexplored polar regions, carrying high resolution cameras and other instruments to investigate solar mysteries. In late March 2022, Solar Orbiter made its closest approach to the sun to date, swooping within 49 million kilometers of our star — about a third of the distance between the sun and Earth.

In images from the spacecraft taken during that close encounter, Antolin and colleagues discovered a new feature in the coronal rain. As the plasma raindrops fell, the region immediately below them brightened. The researchers think the brightening came from other plasma below the falling rain getting compressed and heated, similar to the way meteors in Earth’s atmosphere can create fireballs just ahead of the falling rocks (SN: 2/15/13).

“This is the first time we’ve seen that kind of compression from the rain falling this clearly,” says Emily Mason, a solar physicist at Predictive Science, a research company based in San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “The resolution just wasn’t there before.”

Antolin and colleagues also saw a rebound and upward flow of material after coronal raindrops smacked onto the chromosphere, the thin layer of plasma that lies between the sun’s visible surface and the corona.

“This rain is as dense as the chromosphere,” Antolin says. “It can fall to the chromosphere and then make a splash.” This sort of splash was predicted in computer simulations but had never been observed on the actual sun before.

On their own, the observations won’t directly solve the biggest solar mysteries, like why the diffuse corona sizzles at millions of degrees Celsius higher than the surface of the sun (SN: 8/20/17). But more observations of the same phenomena can help figure out details of the coronal environment, like how easily its gas compresses, or what its chemical composition is.

“We are not able to send a probe to the inner part of the corona because it’s so hot,” Antolin says. “So we can use these observations as indirect probes of the local environment.”

The observations are “an important litmus test for Solar Orbiter itself,” Mason says. “It’s good to see what Solar Orbiter is capable of.” More