Astronomy

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

A long, cold stream of gas is feeding a very distant galaxy like a vast bendy straw. The finding suggests a new way for galaxies to grow in the early universe, researchers report in the March 31 Science.

Computer simulations predicted that streams of gas should connect galaxies to the cosmic web (SN: 3/6/23). But astronomers expected that gas to be warm, making it unsuitable for star-forming fuel and galaxy growth.

So astronomer Bjorn Emonts and his colleagues were surprised to see a stream of cold, star-forming gas leading into the Anthill Galaxy, a massive galaxy whose light takes 12 billion years to reach Earth.

The team spotted the stream while mapping cold gas in the galaxy’s neighborhood using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. Emonts was particularly interested in radio wavelengths of light that carbon atoms emit when the temperature is between about -260° and -160° Celsius.

“People didn’t think that these streams could get so cold,” says Emonts, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va.

But there, in the data, a frigid stream stretched at least 325,000 light-years away from the galaxy. The stream carries the mass of 70 billion suns and deposits the equivalent of about 450 suns in cold gas onto the galaxy every year, the team calculated. That’s enough to double the galaxy’s mass within a billion years.

Emonts thinks that no one had seen such a stream before because his team used ALMA in an unusual configuration, with its telescopes arranged as close together as possible. That gave the observatory lower resolution, but a wider field of view.

“People don’t normally do that,” Emonts says. “We basically defocused ALMA to the worst possible extent.”

If other galaxies are fed by similar structures, it could mean that early galaxies grew mostly by drinking directly from the cosmic streams, rather than by the leading hypothesis — violent galaxy mergers (SN: 6/28/19). More

A neutron star pileup may have emitted two different kinds of cosmic signals: ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves and a brief blip of energy called a fast radio burst.

One of the three detectors that make up the gravitational wave observatory LIGO picked up a signal from a cosmic collision on April 25, 2019. About 2.5 hours later, a fast radio burst detector picked up a signal from the same region of sky, researchers report March 27 in Nature Astronomy.

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If strengthened by further observations, the finding could bolster the theory that mysterious fast radio bursts have multiple origins — and neutron star mergers are one of them.

“We’re 99.5 percent sure” the two signals came from the same event, says astrophysicist Alexandra Moroianu, who spotted the merger and its aftermath while at the University of Western Australia in Perth. “We want to be 99.999 percent sure.”

Unfortunately, LIGO’s two other detectors didn’t catch the signal, so it’s impossible to precisely triangulate its location. “Even though it’s not a concrete, bang-on observation for something that’s been theorized for a decade, it’s the first evidence we’ve got,” Moroianu says. “If this is true … it’s going to be a big boom in fast radio burst science.”

Mysterious radio bursts

Astronomers have spotted more than 600 fast radio bursts, or FRBs, since 2007. Despite their frequency, the causes remain a mystery. One leading candidate is a highly magnetized neutron star called a magnetar, which could be left behind after a massive star explodes (SN: 6/4/20). But some FRBs appear to repeat, while others are apparent one-off events, suggesting that there’s more than one way to produce them (SN: 2/7/20).

Theorists have wondered if a collision between two neutron stars could spark a singular FRB, before the wreckage from the collision produces a black hole. Such a smashup should emit gravitational waves, too (SN: 10/16/17).

Moroianu and colleagues searched archived data from LIGO and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, a fast radio burst detector in British Columbia, to see if any of their signals lined up. The team found one candidate pairing: GW190425 and FRB20190425A.

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Even though the gravitational wave was picked up only by the LIGO detector in Livingston, La., the team spotted other suggestive signs that the signals were related. The FRB and the gravitational waves came from the same distance, about 370 million light-years from Earth. The gravitational waves were from the only neutron star merger LIGO spotted in that observing run, and the FRB was particularly bright. There may even have been a burst of gamma rays at the same time, according to satellite data — another aftereffect of a neutron star merger.

“Everything points at this being a very interesting combination of signals,” Moroianu says. She says it’s like watching a crime drama on TV: “You have so much evidence that anyone watching the TV show would be like, ‘Oh, I think he did it.’ But it’s not enough to convince the court.”

Neutron star secrets

Despite the uncertainty, the finding has exciting implications, says astrophysicist Alessandra Corsi of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. One is the possibility that two neutron stars could merge into a single, extra-massive neutron star without immediately collapsing into a black hole. “There’s this fuzzy dividing line between what’s a neutron star and what’s a black hole,” says Corsi, who was not involved in the new work.

In 2013, astrophysicist Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas suggested that a neutron star smashup could create an extra-massive neutron star that wobbles on the edge of stability for a few hours before collapsing into a black hole. In that case, the resulting FRB would be delayed — just like in the 2019 case.

The most massive neutron star yet observed is about 2.35 times the mass of the sun, but theorists think they could grow to be around three times the mass of the sun without collapsing (SN: 7/22/22). The neutron star that could have resulted from the collision in 2019 would have been 3.4 solar masses, Moroianu and colleagues calculate.

“Something like this, especially if it’s confirmed with more observations, it would definitely tell us something about how neutron matter behaves,” Corsi says. “The nice thing about this is we have hopes of testing this in the future.”

The next LIGO run is expected to start in May. Corsi is optimistic that more coincidences between gravitational waves and FRBs will show up, now that researchers know to look for them. “There should be a bright future ahead of us,” she says. More

A rocky planet that circles a small star nearly 40 light-years from Earth is hot and has little or no atmosphere, a new study suggests. The finding raises questions about the possibility of atmospheres on the other orbs in the planetary system.

At the center of the system is the red dwarf star dubbed TRAPPIST-1; it hosts seven known planets with masses ranging from 0.3 to 1.4 times Earth’s, a few of which could hold liquid water (SN: 2/22/17; 3/19/18). The largest, TRAPPIST-1b, is the closest to its parent star and receives about four times the radiation Earth receives from the sun, says Thomas Greene, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

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Like all other planets in the system, TRAPPIST-1b is tidally locked, meaning that one side of the planet always faces the star, and one side looks away. Calculations suggest that if the stellar energy falling on TRAPPIST-1b were distributed around the planet — by an atmosphere, for example — and then reradiated equally in all directions, the planet’s surface temperature would be around 120° Celsius.

But the dayside temperature of the planet is actually around 230° C, Greene and colleagues report online March 27 in Nature. That, in turn, suggests that there’s little or no atmosphere to carry heat from the perpetually sunlit side of the planet to the dark side, the team argues.

To take TRAPPIST-1b’s temperature, Greene and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the planet in a narrow band of infrared wavelengths five times in 2022. Because the observations were made just before and after the planet dodged behind its parent star, astronomers could see the fully lit face of the planet, Greene says.

The team’s results are “the first ‘deep dive’ look at this planet,” says Knicole Colon, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, who was not involved with the study. “With every observation, we expect to learn something new,” she adds.

Astronomers have long suggested that planets around red dwarf stars might not be able to hold onto their atmospheres, largely because such stars’ frequent and high-energy flares would blast away any gaseous shroud they might have during their early years (SN: 12/20/22). Yet there are some scenarios in which such flares could heat up a planet’s surface and drive volcanism that, in turn, yields gases that could help form a new atmosphere.

“To be totally sure that this planet has no atmosphere, we need many more measurements,” says Michaël Gillon, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium who was not part of the new study. It’s possible that when observed at a wider variety of wavelengths and from other angles, the planet could show signs of a gaseous shroud and thus possibly hints of volcanism.

Either way, says Laura Kriedberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who also did not participate in the study, the new result “definitely motivates detailed study of the cooler planets in the system, to see if the same is true of them.” More

17th century scientist Christiaan Huygens set his sights on faraway Saturn, but he may have been nearsighted.

Huygens is known, in part, for discovering Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and deducing the shape of the planet’s rings. But by some accounts, the Dutch scientist’s telescopes produced fuzzier views than others of the time despite having well-crafted lenses.

That may be because Huygens needed glasses, astronomer Alexander Pietrow proposes March 1 in Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.

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To make his telescopes, Huygens combined two lenses, an objective and an eyepiece, positioned at either end of the telescope. Huygens experimented with different lenses to find combinations that, to his eye, created a sharp image, eventually creating a table to keep track of which combinations to use to obtain a given magnification. But when compared with modern-day knowledge of optics, Huygens’ calculations were a bit off, says Pietrow, of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany.

One possible explanation: Huygens selected lenses based on his flawed vision. Historical records indicate that Huygens’ father was nearsighted, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Christiaan Huygens also suffered from the often-hereditary affliction.

Assuming that’s the reason for the mismatch, Pietrow calculates that Huygens had 20/70 vision: What someone with normal vision could read from 70 feet away, Huygens could read only from 20 feet. If so, that could be why Huygens’ telescopes never quite reached their potential. More

A streak of light stretching away from a remote galaxy might be the first sure sign of a gargantuan black hole on the run, a new study reports. The putative black hole, fleeing its host galaxy, appears to be leaving a trail of newborn stars and shocked gas in its wake. If confirmed, the intergalactic escape could help astronomers learn more about what happens to black holes when galaxies collide.

“It’s a very cool, serendipitous discovery,” says astronomer Charlotte Angus of the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the new work. “The possibility that this might be due to a supermassive black hole that’s been ejected from its galaxy is very exciting. These events have been predicted by theory, but up until now, there’s been little evidence for them.”

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While looking for colliding dwarf galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues spotted something peculiar: a long, straight line that seemed to extend away from a distant galaxy, growing narrower and brighter as it went (SN: 5/18/22).

“Whatever it is, we haven’t seen it before,” says van Dokkum, of Yale University. “Most astronomical objects are shaped like a spiral or a blob. There are not many objects that are just a line in the sky.” When astronomers do see lines, they’re usually from something moving, like a satellite crossing the telescope’s field of view (SN: 3/3/23).

To figure out what it was, van Dokkum and colleagues took follow-up observations with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Those observations showed that the streak was associated with a galaxy whose light took about 8 billion years — more than half the age of the universe — to get to Earth, the team reports in a paper submitted February 9 to arXiv.org. The distance measurement let the team calculate the length of the line: roughly 200,000 light-years.

That certainly ruled out a satellite.

“We considered a lot of explanations, and the one that fit the best is what we’re witnessing is a massive object, like a black hole, moving very rapidly away from the galaxy,” van Dokkum says.

The runaway black hole showed up as a straight line in a Hubble image (shown). The origin galaxy is at the top right of the streak. The galaxy is so far away that the line stretches for 200,000 light-years.P. van Dokkum et al/arXiv.org 2023

Black holes on their own are invisible. But “if a black hole leaves a galaxy, it doesn’t leave by itself,” van Dokkum says. Some of the stars and gas that were gravitationally bound to the black hole leave with it. That gas will emit strong radiation that telescopes can detect. The black hole’s path through the gas and dust in the galaxy’s outer regions can compress some of that gas into new stars, too, which would also be visible (SN: 7/12/18).

Another possibility is that the line is a jet of radiation launched by the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. But that scenario would probably lead to a beam that is narrow when it is close to the galaxy and broadens as it gets farther away. This streak does the opposite.

If it’s a black hole, it could have been ejected from the galaxy’s center by interacting with one or two other black holes nearby. Almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. When galaxies merge, their central black holes also eventually merge (SN: 3/5/21). If the conditions are right, that merger can give the resulting black hole a “kick,” sending it flying away at high speed (SN: 4/25/22).

Alternatively, the black hole could have been spat out of a smashup among three galaxies. When a third galaxy joins an ongoing merger, three supermassive black holes jockey for position. One black hole can be tossed out of the galactic smashup, while the other two take off more slowly in the other direction.

That’s what van Dokkum thinks happened in this case. There are signs of a shorter, dimmer streak heading in the opposite direction from the bright, straight line.

More observations of this system, perhaps with the James Webb Space Telescope, are needed to confirm that it really is an ejected supermassive black hole, Angus says. More theoretical calculations of what a runaway supermassive black hole should look like would help too.

The finding motivates Angus to search through archived data for more potential black hole streaks. “I wonder if there are more of these features out there, sitting in someone’s data that might have just been missed,” she says.

Van Dokkum does too. “Now that we know what to look for, these very thin streaks, it makes sense to go back to Hubble data. We have 25 years of Hubble images that have not been searched with this purpose,” he says. “If there are more to be found, I think we can do it.” More