Space news topic and space related news

[Toliman]

NEW HUBBLE CONSTANT MEASUREMENT ADDS TO MYSTERY OF UNIVERSE'S EXPANSION RATE

In 1924, American astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that he discovered galaxies outside of our Milky Way by using the powerful new Hooker telescope perched above Los Angeles. By measuring the distances to these galaxies, he realized the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from us. This was incontrovertible evidence the universe is uniformly expanding in all directions. This was a big surprise, even to Albert Einstein, who predicted a well-balanced, static universe. The expansion rate is the basis of the Hubble constant. It is a sought-after value because it yields clues to the origin, age, evolution, and future fate of our universe.

For nearly the past century astronomers have worked meticulously to precisely measure the Hubble constant. Before the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, the universe's age was thought to lie between 10 and 20 billion years, based on different estimates of the Hubble constant. Improving this value was one of the biggest justifications for building the Hubble telescope. This paid off in the early 1990s when a team led by Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago greatly refined the Hubble constant value to a precision of 10%. This was possible because the Hubble telescope is so sharp at finding and measuring Cepheid variable stars as milepost markers — just as Edwin Hubble did 70 years earlier.

But astronomers strive for ever greater precision, and this requires further refining yardsticks for measuring vast intergalactic distances of billions of light-years. Freedman's latest research looks at aging red giant stars in nearby galaxies. They are also milepost markers because they all reach the same peak brightness at a critical stage of their late evolution. This can be used to calculate distances.

Freedman's research is one of several recent studies that point to a nagging discrepancy between the universe's modern expansion rate and predictions based on the universe as it was more than 13 billion years ago, as measured by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. This latest measurement offers new evidence suggesting that there may be something fundamentally flawed in the current model of the universe.


https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2019/news-2019-28

[Toliman]

Almost 400 High-Priority Proposals for New ALMA Observing Cycle

On October 1, 2019, a new observing cycle will kick off at ALMA. Cycle 7 will have 4,300 hours available for observations with the 12 meters diameter antennas array. The ALMA Review Panels carried out the scientific assessment of the 1,773 proposals submitted in response to the Call for Proposals last April.

In June 2019, the panels met in Atlanta (USA). One hundred fifty-eight astronomers from around the world gathered to rank the non-large proposals scientifically. The panels, together with their chairs, also recommend which Large Programs, requiring more than 50 hours of observation, should schedule the observatory.


https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/announcement/almost-400-high-priority-proposals-for-new-alma-observing-cycle/




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiFD_LBx2nM

[Toliman]

ALMA Identified Dark Ancestors of Massive Elliptical Galaxies

Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to identify 39 faint galaxies that are not seen with the Hubble Space Telescope's most in-depth view of the Universe, 10 billion light-years away. They are ten times more numerous than similarly massive but optically–bright galaxies detected with Hubble. The research team assumes that these faint galaxies precede massive elliptical galaxies in the present Universe. However, no significant theories for the evolution of the Universe have predicted such an abundant population of star-forming, dark, massive galaxies. The new ALMA results throw into question our understanding of the early Universe. These results appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

"Previous studies have found extremely active star-forming galaxies in the early Universe, but their population is quite limited," says Tao Wang, lead author of this research at the University of Tokyo, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). "Star formation in the dark galaxies we identified is less intense, but they are 100 times more abundant than the extreme starbursts. It is important to study such a major component of the history of the Universe to comprehend galaxy formation."

Wang and his team targeted three ALMA windows to the deep Universe opened up by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST): the CANDELS fields. The team discovered 63 extremely red objects in the infrared images taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope: they are too red to be detected with HST. However, Spitzer's limited spatial resolution prevented astronomers from identifying their nature.

ALMA detected submillimeter-wave emission from 39 out of the 63 extremely red objects. Thanks to its high resolution and sensitivity, ALMA confirmed that they are massive, star-forming galaxies that are producing stars 100 times more efficiently than the Milky Way. These galaxies are representative of the majority of massive galaxies in the Universe 10 billion years ago, most of which have so far been missed by previous studies.

More here:
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/alma-identified-dark-ancestors-of-massive-elliptical-galaxies/

[Toliman]

ALMA Shows What's Inside Jupiter's Storms

Swirling clouds, big colorful belts, giant storms. The beautiful and incredibly turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter has been showcased many times. But what is going on below the clouds? What is causing the many storms and eruptions that we see on the 'surface' of the planet? However, to study this, visible light is not enough. We need to study Jupiter using radio waves.

New radio wave images made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provide a unique view of Jupiter's atmosphere down to fifty kilometers below the planet's visible (ammonia) cloud deck.

"ALMA enabled us to make a three-dimensional map of the distribution of ammonia gas below the clouds. And for the first time, we were able to study the atmosphere below the ammonia cloud layers after an energetic eruption on Jupiter," said Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley (EE. UU.).

The atmosphere of giant Jupiter is made out of mostly hydrogen and helium, together with trace gases of methane, ammonia, hydrosulfide, and water. The top-most cloud layer is made up of ammonia ice. Below that is a layer of solid ammonia hydrosulfide particles, and deeper still, around 80 kilometers below the upper cloud deck, there likely is a layer of liquid water. The upper clouds form the distinctive brown belts and white zones seen from Earth.


https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/audiences/alma-shows-whats-inside-jupiters-storms/

[Vawmataw]

K2-18b: Water vapour discovery means giant 'super-Earth' could support life
Water vapour has been discovered in the atmosphere of an enormous Earth-like planet already known to have habitable temperatures, which scientists say means it could support life.

The unprecedented detection was made on K2-18b, which is eight times the mass of our home world.

Read more: https://news.sky.com/story/k2-18b-water-vapour-discovery-means-giant-super-earth-could-support-life-11806755

Is Another Interstellar Visitor Headed Our Way?
Astronomers have discovered a potentially interstellar object — the second after 'Oumuamua — and this one's a comet that will pass nearest the Sun later this year.

First there was 'Oumuamua, discovered nearly two years ago. Now we might be in store for another interstellar flyby, this time by the recently discovered comet known for now by the provisional designation C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) — formerly gb00234. Gennady Borisov captured the object on August 30, 2019, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory when it was about 3 astronomical units (a.u.) from the Sun. Unlike 'Oumuamua, which wasn't spotted until well after perihelion, the new comet is approaching the plane of the solar system and will reach perihelion on December 10, 2019.

Read more: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/possible-interstellar-comet-headed-our-way/

[Toliman]

K2-18b: Water vapour discovery means giant 'super-Earth' could support life
Water vapour has been discovered in the atmosphere of an enormous Earth-like planet already known to have habitable temperatures, which scientists say means it could support life.

That is interesting I heard already earlier something about water vapour in exoplanets atmosphere. Yeah, it really could support life.

[Toliman]

First Image of a Black Hole Wins US$3 Millions Breakthrough Prize
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/announcement/first-image-of-a-black-hole-wins-us3-millions-breakthrough-prize/

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for capturing the first image of a black hole. The iconic picture released worldwide last April was the result of a global effort to form an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes, including ALMA, to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope. EHT Director, Shep Doeleman, will accept the award on behalf of the collaboration at a ceremony on November 3, 2019. Seven current and recent ALMA collaborators are among the scientists sharing the prize.



SATURN'S RINGS SHINE IN NEW HUBBLE PORTRAIT
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2019/news-2019-43

[Toliman]

ALMA explores a Cosmic Jellyfish

Using the detailed eyes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have mapped the intense tails of a cosmic jellyfish: a number of knotty streams of gas spewing outwards from a spiral galaxy named ESO 137-001.

This celestial cnidaria is shown here in beautiful detail. The various elements making up this image were captured by different telescopes. The galaxy and its surroundings were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope; its tails, which trace streams of hydrogen and show up in hues of bright purple, by the MUSE instrument mounted on the VLT; and bright hotspots of carbon dioxide emission from within the system, which show up as flares of orange-red, were spotted by ALMA.

These tails are caused by a dramatic phenomenon known as ram-pressure stripping. The space between galaxies in a cluster is not empty, but full of material that acts like a viscous fluid. As a galaxy travels through this resistant environment, gas is stripped out of the galaxy to form a wake that creates beautiful, intricate systems such as that seen here around ESO 137-001 (which resides in the Norma galaxy cluster). The direction and position of the tail shed light on the way in which the galaxy is moving — with galaxies usually falling towards the centre of the cluster itself.

This image offers the first high-resolution map of the cold molecular gas lurking within a ram-pressure stripped system. ESO 137-001 is one of the nearest jellyfish galaxies to Earth, and is particularly interesting because its long, extended tails of gas contain features known as 'fireballs': bursts of star formation. The precise mechanisms governing how stars form within jellyfish tails are mysterious, and this map thus provides a new window onto the conditions needed for new stars to form in such intense, changeable environments.

The ALMA array comprises 66 antennas, and is located on the Chajinator plateau in the Chilean Atacama Desert at an altitude of 5000 meters. ALMA observes the night sky from this remote location to unlock the secrets of how the Universe — and its weird and wonderful residents, ESO 137-001 included — formed and evolved, revealing more about our cosmic origins.



https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/audiences/alma-explores-a-cosmic-jellyfish/

[Toliman]

ALMA Observes Counter-intuitive Flows Around Black Hole
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/alma-observes-counter-intuitive-flows-around-black-hole/

At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe.

"Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner orbits around the black hole," explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. "Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions."

Supermassive black holes already existed when the Universe was young, just a billion years after the Big Bang. But how these extreme objects, whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time to grow so fast, is an outstanding question among astronomers. This new ALMA discovery could provide a clue. "Counter-rotating gas streams are unstable, which means that clouds fall into the black hole faster than they do in a disk with a single rotation direction," said Impellizzeri. "This could be a way in which a black hole can grow rapidly."

NGC 1068 (also known as Messier 77) is a spiral galaxy approximately 47 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cetus. At its center is an active galactic nucleus, a supermassive black hole that is actively feeding itself from a thin, rotating disk of gas and dust, also known as an accretion disk.

Previous ALMA observations revealed that the black hole is gulping down material and spewing out gas at incredibly high speeds. This gas that gets expelled from the accretion disk likely contributes to hiding the region around the black hole from optical telescopes.

[Toliman]

HUBBLE STUDIES GAMMA-RAY BURST WITH THE HIGHEST ENERGY EVER SEEN

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2019/news-2019-56

[Toliman]

ALMA Spots Earliest Environment Pollution in the Universe
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/alma-spots-earliest-environment-pollution-in-the-universe/

Researchers have discovered gigantic clouds of gaseous carbon more than a radius of 30,000 light-years around young galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This is the first confirmation that carbon atoms produced inside of stars in the early Universe have spread beyond galaxies. No theoretical studies have predicted such huge carbon cocoons around growing galaxies, which raises questions about our current understanding of cosmic evolution.

"We examined the ALMA Science Archive thoroughly and collected all the data that contain radio signals from carbon ions in galaxies in the early Universe, only one billion years after the Big Bang," says Seiji Fujimoto, the lead author of the research paper who is an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen, and a former Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. "By combining all the data, we achieved unprecedented sensitivity. To obtain a dataset of the same quality with one observation would take 20 times longer than typical ALMA observations, which is almost impossible to achieve."

Heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen did not exist in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang. They were formed later by nuclear fusion in stars. However, it is not yet understood how these elements spread throughout the Universe. Astronomers have found heavy elements inside baby galaxies but not beyond those galaxies, due to the limited sensitivity of their telescopes. This research team summed the faint signals stored in the data archive and pushed the limits.
"The gaseous carbon clouds are almost five times larger than the distribution of stars in the galaxies, as observed with the Hubble Space Telescope," explains Masami Ouchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. "We spotted diffuse but huge clouds floating in the coal-black Universe."

[Toliman]

UFRO will evaluate alternatives for antenna control systems for ALMA
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/announcement/ufro-will-evaluate-alternatives-for-antenna-control-systems-for-alma/

Some of the ALMA observatory's control systems were designed over 10 years ago and will soon need to be replaced. Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO) in Temuco, Chile, was awarded Quimal funds from Conicyt to explore maintenance alternatives for these real-time systems.

"We are very pleased with the outcome, which is the product of an active collaboration between the observatory and the university over the last five years," says Jorge Ibsen, Head of Computing at ALMA. "This project marks an important contribution from southern Chile to the development of local astro-engineering."

Dr. Patricio Galeas, professor in charge of the project, will work with a budget of around 200 million Chilean pesos and will have two years to develop the project in conjunction with ALMA. This is the first time that UFRO has been awarded an initiative of this size in the field of astronomy.

[Toliman]

January 2020, status of JWST telescope - still not ready.

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/status/index.html

[Toliman]

The Turbulent Life of Two Supermassive Black Holes Caught in a Galaxy Crash
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/the-turbulent-life-of-two-supermassive-black-holes-caught-in-a-galaxy-crash/

An international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to create the most detailed image yet of the gas surrounding two supermassive black holes in a merging galaxy.

400 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation of Ophiuchus, two galaxies are crashing into each other and forming a galaxy we know as NGC 6240. This peculiarly-shaped galaxy has been observed many times before, as it is relatively close by. But NGC 6240 is complex and chaotic. The collision between the two galaxies is still ongoing, bringing along in the crash two growing supermassive black holes that will likely merge as one larger black hole.

To understand what is happening within NGC 6240, astronomers want to observe the dust and gas surrounding the black holes in detail, but previous images have not been sharp enough to do that. New ALMA observations have increased the resolution of the images by a factor of ten – showing for the first time the structure of the cold gas in the galaxy, even within the sphere of influence of the black holes.

"The key to understanding this galaxy system is molecular gas," explained Ezequiel Treister of the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. "This gas is the fuel that is needed to form stars, but it also feeds the supermassive black holes, which allows them to grow."

Most of the gas is located in a region between the two black holes. Less detailed observations taken previously suggested that this gas might be a rotating disk. "We don't find any evidence for that," said Treister. "Instead, we see a chaotic stream of gas with filaments and bubbles between the black holes. Some of this gas is ejected outwards with speeds up to 500 kilometers per second. We don't know yet what causes these outflows."

Another reason to observe the gas in such detail is that it helps to determine the mass of the black holes. "Previous models, based on surrounding stars, indicated that the black holes were much more massive than we expected, around a billion times the mass of our Sun," said Anne Medling of the University of Toledo in Ohio. "But these new ALMA images for the first time showed us how much gas is caught up inside the black holes' sphere of influence. This mass is significant, and therefore we now estimate the black hole masses to be lower: around a few hundred million times the mass of our Sun. Based on this, we think that most previous black hole measurements in systems like this could be off by 5-90 percent."

[Vawmataw]

Second terrestrial planet found around closest star to the Sun
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2020/01/second-terrestrial-planet-found-around-closest-star-to-the-sun

Our nearest celestial neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri, likely has a second planet.

The planet, dubbed Proxima c, is at least about 6 times the mass of Earth and orbits its tiny red dwarf host once every 5.2 years. If confirmed, the newly discovered super-Earth would be the second terrestrial world found in the Proxima Centauri system, which is located just 4.2 light-years from Earth.

According to the researchers, the discovery of Proxima c could provide insights into how low-mass planets around low-mass stars form, especially when the planets begin their lives well beyond a star's "snow line," where water turns to solid ice. 

[Toliman]

Hmm, that link doesn't work

However I already heard about it, very interesting news!

[Vawmataw]

Fmawn Ta 'Rrta then, now astronomy.com

[Toliman]

huh, yeah

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

In deepening the mystery of the significant dimming of the star Betelgeuse, the LIGO consortium has detected mysterious bursts of gravity waves emanating from a point in the sky near Betelgeuse. However, there has been no significant change in observations (including visual) in electromagnetic signals. So, Betelgeuse has not gone supernova....yet. According to what I read, there is a small but significant separation of the point the gravity waves seem to be coming from, and in truth, Betelgeuse is too close to us for LIGO to make efficient spatial measurements on.

I just went out and confirmed that, despite being just slightly brighter than the other body stars of Orion (Rigel excepted!), it is still still there

Irayo nìtxan, ma Toliman for posting all the stories about ALMA. ALMA is one of my favorite observatories.

[Toliman]

I just went out and confirmed that, despite being just slightly brighter than the other body stars of Orion (Rigel excepted!), it is still still there

Yeah, tonight I looked on Orion too, it was exactly like as you write.

I don't know whether I want supernova explosion of Betelgeuse... yeah, it would be really epic however Orion without this star... it already would be not same nice constellation...

Irayo nìtxan, ma Toliman for posting all the stories about ALMA. ALMA is one of my favorite observatories.

Yeah, ALMA is one of my favourite observatories too.