Astronomy

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

In May, a star in the Pinwheel galaxy exploded in just the right place at nearly the right time for astronomers to unravel details of its death. It was the closest supernova to go off in the last five years.

Astronomers have long been fascinated with these stellar explosions, which signal the end of life for the universe’s biggest stars. Not only are they dramatic — a supernova can shine 5 billion times as bright as our sun — but the explosions seed the universe with gold, silver, zinc and other elements forged only in a dying star’s last moments.

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High-speed gas shooting from the galaxy M87 is causing stars to go nova, a study suggests, and no one knows how.

A nova occurs after a dense star known as a white dwarf receives gas from an orbiting star (SN: 2/12/21). As the white dwarf’s intense gravity squeezes the gas, it heats up and explodes, but both stars survive the violence. In fact, over millions of years, the same star goes nova again and again. Recent observations indicate that these eruptions forged much, and perhaps most, of the universe’s supply of the valuable metal lithium (SN: 5/7/19).

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Nova explosions erupt in our galaxy as well as others, including the giant elliptical M87, whose jet of fast-moving gas is powered by the black hole at the galaxy’s center (SN: 4/10/19). Now Hubble Space Telescope data show that there’s an excess of these explosions along M87’s jet, researchers report in a study submitted September 28 to arXiv.org.

Alec Lessing, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, Michael Shara, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and their colleagues used the telescope to locate 135 nova outbursts in M87, whose jet is many thousands of light-years long. The galaxy itself is 54 million light-years from Earth, at the heart of the nearest galaxy cluster, named Virgo.

The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this composite picture of the galaxy M87 and its jet of fast-moving gas, which is many thousands of light-years long.NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA

After identifying the nova explosions, the team plotted their positions in the galaxy. “It was striking to the eye,” Shara says of the plot. “The novae appeared to be preferentially aligned with the jet.”

By dividing the galaxy into 10 equal sectors, the astronomers found that 25 blasts occurred along the jet — versus only 10 to 16 in each of the galaxy’s other sectors. The chance that this is just a statistical fluke is only about 0.3 percent, the researchers say.

“I was really surprised,” says Massimo Della Valle, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Naples, who was not involved with the new study. “If these objects are novae, the jet has to be responsible for this somehow.”

Perhaps, he says, the jet pushes interstellar gas onto white dwarf stars in nova systems, increasing the amount of material that accumulates on the stars’ surfaces. As a result, the white dwarfs explode more frequently than they otherwise would, accounting for the surplus of nova outbursts along the jet.

The jet itself, Shara says, doesn’t seem to supply enough gas or radiation to explain the explosions. “The jet is to blame, but we just don’t know why or how,” he says. “It is somehow causing the novae to be more prevalent in that sector, but whether it’s because it’s triggering the novae somehow or birthing the novae — making more of them there — or some other process … we don’t know.”

For additional clues, Shara hopes to use Hubble to examine other galaxies that resemble M87, to see whether their jets are also accompanied by such eruptions. More

It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron.

It’s the galaxy NGC 4632, and new radio telescope images suggest that it sports a rare “polar ring” — a halo of mostly hydrogen gas tilted about 90 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk.

These spectacular structures, which can also contain dust and stars, are thought to encircle only about 1 in 1,000 galaxies. But now it seems that many more — possibly 30 times as many — could be hiding in plain sight, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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“The implication would be that there are tons of these things out there, masquerading as normal galaxies,” says astronomer Ronald Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Astronomers are still puzzling out how any galaxies have polar rings at all. But they’re thought to form as galaxies grow, either by colliding with other galaxies or by gobbling up gas.

“The rings give us clues about how [galaxies] can grow and evolve,” says astronomer Nathan Deg of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

Deg and colleagues spotted the ringlike structure around NGC 4632 — and one encircling another galaxy, NGC 6156 — in data from the WALLABY survey, a project that is scanning half of the southern sky with the ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia.

“It immediately strikes you that, hey, look, there’s something funny going on right here that kind of looks like a ring,” Deg says.

It can be tough to tell rings from warped galactic disks, depending on how galaxies are oriented with respect to Earth. So the team used virtual reality visualizations to help distinguish the galaxies’ disks from the potential rings, and compared the real data with simulated observations of perfect polar rings viewed at different angles.

The scientists report that the stunning structures sported by the two galaxies are indeed probably polar rings, with NGC 4632’s ring spanning roughly 60,000 light-years.

And these two may have plenty of company. The fact that the team has already spotted two potential polar rings in the 592 galaxies included in these first bits of WALLABY data suggests that earlier estimates of the frequency of such structures were too low.

The team’s simulations, which tested how polar ring galaxies look to telescopes when viewed at different angles, indicate a similar conclusion. Altogether, the observations and simulations suggest that as many as 3 percent of nearby galaxies could have overlooked rings, too.

A fruit of these combined efforts is a striking composite image of NGC 4632’s starry disk, viewed in visible light, and the radio glow of its hydrogen halo. Hydrogen emits mostly radio light, so the structure is invisible in visible-light images of the galaxy previously taken by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Larger telescopes taking closer looks, Deg says, might be able to spot stars in the halo too.

Thanks to large surveys like WALLABY, Deg says, “we’re in an era where we can discover these and figure out the rings in a way that we never could before.” More

Names have significance, especially when they’re written in the stars.

A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Named after explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite galaxies are visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. But Magellan’s name is not fitting, astronomer Mia de los Reyes and colleagues argue. The leader of the first expedition to successfully circle the globe, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519 (SN: 9/17/19).

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“Because we’re naming things in the night sky, which belongs to everyone, we think that it’s important to have names that reflect all of humanity,” says de los Reyes, of Amherst College in Massachusetts. She calls for the name change in an opinion piece published September 12 in Physics. Magellan’s voyage helped pave the way for Spanish colonialism in South America, Guam and the Philippines, says de los Reyes, who is Filipino American. “Many people see Magellan as a villain in the Philippines.”

The Magellanic clouds loom large in the field of astronomy. They’re independent galaxies, but close enough that astronomers can observe the individual stars within (SN: 4/1/22). “The Magellanic Clouds are this amazing laboratory for seeing things up close and personal,” says astronomer Sally Oey of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a supporter of the name change.

Magellan wasn’t an astronomer. The clouds were noted by a member of his expedition, but they were already well-known to many cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, and even to previous European explorers. “It doesn’t make sense to have them named after any one person, let alone a person who never actually studied them,” says astronomer Gurtina Besla of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The galaxies have been known scientifically by Magellan’s name since only the end of the 19th century — well after Magellan’s voyage. That’s just a blip in the history of astronomy, the researchers argue.

More than 100 astronomers have expressed interest in the campaign, anchored by a core group of about 50, de los Reyes says. The group aims to bring the proposal to the International Astronomical Union, in hopes of eventually holding a vote on the name change. Other fields of science are undergoing similar debates, with groups of researchers pushing to revise offensive names for certain plants and animals, for example (SN: 8/25/21).

The astronomers are now trying out new names.  One popular suggestion is to call them the “Milky Clouds.” That would maintain the commonly used acronyms, LMC and SMC. And it would reflect the galaxies’ connection to something much bigger than any one person — the Milky Way. More