Astronomy

For the first time, astronomers have spotted a middleweight black hole in the nearby universe. The discovery could help solve the riddle of how even heftier black holes form and grow up with their host galaxies.

The black hole, which sits about 16,000 light-years from Earth in the center of star cluster Omega Centauri, is at least 8,200 times as massive as the sun, putting it squarely in a rare category of intermediate-mass black holes, researchers report July 10 in Nature. More

Keep your eyes on the night sky this summer, scanning for the constellation Corona Borealis, and if you are lucky, you may glimpse what appears to be a new star winking on in the dark.

The brightening point of light will not be a new star, but a nova eruption about 3,000 light-years from Earth. There, a white dwarf star orbiting a red giant tears material from its larger companion. When enough mass collects on the white dwarf’s surface, the rising pressure and temperature will trigger a blast that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye — but for only a few days to a week. More

Supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies may be churning out a lot of the universe’s high-energy neutrinos.

Two teams using data from IceCube, the world’s premier neutrino observatory located in Antarctica, have independently identified a common type of these active galaxies, called Seyfert galaxies, as likely neutrino producers. These findings, reported in Physical Review Letters and arXiv.org, bolster some astronomers’ view that the cores of such active galaxies could churn out the majority of the cosmic neutrinos seen streaming across the universe. More

Within the dusty cloud left behind by supernova 1987A, the most famous stellar explosion in modern history, astronomers have found compelling evidence for a long-sought neutron star.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has spied indirect hints of a powerful source of X-rays — likely some type of neutron star — coming from the core of the supernova remnant, researchers report February 22 in Science. The findings are part of a 37-year-old quest to determine what happened in the aftermath of the closest supernova in nearly 400 years and could provide insights into how a neutron star behaves mere decades after its birth.

“Supernova 1987A is truly a unique laboratory to study supernovas,” astronomer Patrick Kavanagh said February 17 in a news conference at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver. It’s “the gift that keeps on giving, with new observations continually yielding new discoveries,” said Kavanagh, of Maynooth University in Ireland.

It’s rare for scientists to have observations of a giant star before it explodes in a supernova — but they got lucky with supernova 1987A. On the left is the blue supergiant before the explosion. On the right is the explosion itself.David Malin, AAT

On February 23, 1987, telescopes around the world got a front-row seat to a spectacular supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way (SN: 2/8/17). Such explosions occur when a star at least eight times the mass of the sun dies. Located at the astronomically close distance of 160,000 light-years, supernova 1987A, as it came to be known, was visible with the naked eye in the night sky for months afterward. The energetic explosion generated tremendous amounts of neutrinos, a handful of which ended up in detectors on Earth. It was the first time such ghostly particles had been seen coming from beyond the solar system.

Since then, scientists have wondered whether the iron core of the blue supergiant star that led to 1987A collapsed into an ultradense neutron star or shrank all the way down to a black hole. The fact that neutrinos escaped the event favors the neutron star possibility, but whatever was left behind has yet to be spotted. That’s partly because the original star’s outer layers, now traveling away from the explosion at 10,000 kilometers per second, create a thick haze of dust that obscures the area. More

Circling around a pulsar in our galaxy is a mysterious entity that is either a very heavy neutron star, one of the lightest black holes ever discovered, or an exotic and never-before-seen quasi-stellar object.

The new finding comes from the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa, which carefully monitored 13 millisecond pulsars in a dense cluster of stars 40,000 light years from Earth. These pulsars are a type of neutron star that quickly spin, rotating in fractions of a second, while sending out powerful beams of radiation like a cosmic lighthouse. More

The biography of our home galaxy may be due for some revisions. That’s because a bar-shaped collection of stars at the center of the Milky Way appears to be much younger than expected.

The bar is a prominent feature of our galaxy (SN: 6/25/21). It spans thousands of light-years and links the galaxy’s spiraling arms of stars, making them resemble streams of water coming from a spinning lawn sprinkler. In computer simulations of the Milky Way’s evolution, the bar tends to form early in the galaxy’s roughly 13-billion-year lifetime. But the ages and locations of metal-rich stars suggest the bar finished forming just a few billion years ago, researchers report. The study, submitted November 28 to arXiv.org, is in press at Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.

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“These metal-rich stars are basically like fossil records of ancient stars that are telling the story of our home galaxy,” says Samir Nepal, an astrophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany.

Stars with large proportions of metal elements are built from the remnants of stars that have since exploded, ejecting the metals they forged from lighter elements. Those spewed metals enrich the materials in the core of galaxies like the Milky Way, which is why a new generation of metal-rich stars can form only deep inside galaxies. The spinning bar at the center of the Milky Way then scattered some of those stars throughout our galaxy.

Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, Nepal and colleagues reconstructed the development of the Milky Way bar through its influence on the distribution of metal-rich stars (SN: 5/9/18). They inferred the bar’s history, just as you might deduce where the batters stand in a baseball game by looking at the flight of the balls they hit, even if you can’t see home plate.

In tracking the ages of the metal-rich stars, the researchers identified a burst of star formation in the central part of the galaxy that petered out about 3 billion years ago. The downturn seems to mark the end of the Milky Way bar’s developmental phase, the researchers report. After that burst, they say, the inflow of new material into the bar probably dropped off substantially. That suggests the bar we see today is a stable feature that’s about 10 billion years younger than the galaxy as a whole.

The new insights about the metal-rich stars “are like the tip of the iceberg” of data coming from the Gaia telescope, says astrophysicist Cristina Chiappini, also with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. Assuming the revised age estimate of the bar is confirmed, future models of the galaxy’s evolution will have to account for why the bar developed so late.

The study has broader implications than correcting the history of our galaxy, says Ortwin Gerhard, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in the research. “The possibility of detailed observations of the motions and chemical abundances of stars in the Milky Way, particularly based on [data] from the Gaia satellite,” he says, means we can “expect to learn about the evolution of bars [in other galaxies] generally by studying the bar in the Milky Way.” More

A survey of small, cool stars is helping to narrow in on the conditions that might set the stage for life beyond our solar system.

A look at about 200 ultracool dwarf stars shows that they lack sufficient ultraviolet light intensity to have the potential to jump-start life, researchers report December 1 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. That may initially seem to be bad news for finding signs of alien life on distant planets. But the diminutive stars could instead serve as test beds to determine what other conditions can create the chemical foundations of life.

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Compared with our sun, the dwarf stars in the new study are minuscule, roughly the size of Jupiter and weighing about a tenth as much as the sun. They’re also among the most common types of stars. And because they’re cool and comparatively dim, it’s often easier to spot planets orbiting them than it is in the glare of large bright stars. Astronomers studying the tiny red star TRAPPIST-1, for example, found that it hosts seven Earth-sized planets, including three that may be within the star’s habitable zone, where conditions are amenable to life (SN: 2/22/17).

For life to exist on a habitable planet, though, it must start somehow. One possibility is that UV starlight provides the energy needed to link together the hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and other atoms that make up the compounds that are precursors to life.

With that in mind, space scientist Antígona Segura and colleagues used the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to measure the amount of UV radiation — among other things — emitted from 208 comparatively nearby ultracool dwarfs within 130 light-years from Earth (SN: 4/12/18). The stars they studied do emit UV light, as our sun does, and many produce bursts of UV when they let off flares. But overall, the UV energy the small stars release is too low to forge the chemicals needed to kick-start life, the team found.

The dearth of UV light doesn’t necessarily quash hopes of finding life around such stars. “UV is an energy source for prebiotic chemistry that we can measure, and that is why we focused on it,” says Segura, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “But there are many other energy sources, like cosmic and stellar particles, and particles, radiation and heat produced by radioactive decay, to name a few.”

Ultracool stars might be useful to discover whether something other than UV light can get life going. “We should search for life on the planets that have the least [UV] activity, where we can know with confidence that UV-driven prebiotic chemistry cannot happen,” says Paul Rimmer, a University of Cambridge astrophysicist who was not involved in the study. “If we find evidence of life on these [types of] planets, this will show that there are other paths to life.”

Also, Segura notes, sources of energy that could start life can also make planets less habitable for more complex life-forms. “We cannot currently say which [effects] would prevail. The best approach now is to study case by case and wait for more observational constraints, like for the case of the TRAPPIST-1 system.”

If astronomers eventually find life on planets orbiting ultracool dwarfs, it will confirm the potential for UV-free origins of life. But, Rimmer says, if it turns out that there are no signs of habitability on planets around the many small, dim dwarf stars we see, that would lower estimates of the likelihood of finding life outside our solar system. Either way, future surveys of ultracool dwarf stars could give researchers a better handle on the possible prevalence of extraterrestrial life in the universe. More

The “Oh-My-God” particle has a new companion.

In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!” With 320 quintillion electron volts, or exaelectron volts, it had the kinetic energy of a baseball zipping along at about 100 kilometers per hour.

Now, a new particle of comparable energy has been found, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science. Detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment near Delta, Utah, the particle had an energy of about 240 exaelectron volts. And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle.

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“It’s a huge, huge amount of energy but in a tiny, tiny, tiny object,” says astroparticle physicist John Matthews of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, co-spokesperson of the Telescope Array collaboration.

Cosmic rays consist of protons and atomic nuclei that zip through space at wide range of energies. Particles with energies over 100 exaelectron volts are exceedingly rare: On average, scientists estimate, one such particle falls on a square kilometer of Earth’s surface each century. And particles over 200 exaelectron volts are even rarer — only a few such particles have previously been detected.

When a cosmic ray hits Earth, it collides with a nucleus of an atom in the atmosphere, creating a cascade of other particles that can be detected on Earth’s surface.

To catch the rarest, highest-energy particles, scientists build giant arrays of detectors. The Telescope Array monitors an area of 700 square kilometers using more than 500 detectors made of plastic scintillator, material that emits light when hit by a charged particle. Additional detectors measure ultraviolet light produced in the sky by the shower of particles (although those detectors weren’t operating during the newly reported particle’s arrival). Based on the times that individual scintillator detectors were hit by the cascade of particles, scientists can determine the direction of the incoming cosmic ray and use that information to trace it back to its origins.

Extremely high-energy cosmic rays come from outside the Milky Way, but their exact sources are unknown (SN: 9/21/17). Most scientists think they are accelerated in violent cosmic environments, such as the jets of radiation that blast out of the areas around certain supermassive black holes, or starburst galaxies that form stars at a frenetic pace. 

Whatever their origins, the particles must come from the relatively nearby cosmic neighborhood. That’s because the highest-energy cosmic rays lose energy as they travel, by interacting with the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang (SN: 7/24/18).

Tracing back the particle’s location is complicated. “The issue is that when you detect a high-energy cosmic ray at Earth, the arrival direction that you get will not point to the source because it will be deflected by … any magnetic field that would be in the way,” says Telescope Array collaborator Noémie Globus, an astroparticle physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the RIKEN research institute in Japan.  

The magnetic fields present in the Milky Way and its environs scatter the cosmic rays like fog scatters light. To trace the particle to its home, scientists must take that scattering into account. But that backtracking pinpointed a cosmic void, a region of space with few galaxies at all, much less ones with violent processes going on. 

That makes this particle particularly interesting, says astrophysicist Vasiliki Pavlidou of the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece. “It’s actually pointing towards nothing at all, absolutely in the middle of nowhere.”

That might hint that scientist are missing something. For example, researchers may need to better understand the magnetic fields of the galaxy, says Pavlidou, who was not involved with the research. 

“Every time you have one of these very high-energy events, just because they are so rare, it’s a big deal.” More