#astrophysics

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Stay Safe and Stay Curious

ViaMrScientifik

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope studying our solar system, is finally coming to the end of its life. At the end of January 2020, in anticipation of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope launch in 2021, NASA decided to end the telescope’s mission, power down its primary systems, and effectively discontinue further scientific research. The decision marked the conclusion of a 16-year campaign, which was initially intended to only be five years in duration. During its extended lifespan, Spitzer made significant contributions to our knowledge of the universe, including insight into our own origins and the evolution of galaxies.

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Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside have discovered a peculiar ultramassive galaxy that existed for only a brief time in the early universe before becoming inactive. The ultramassive galaxy, known as XMM-2599, exploded with star formation before the universe was even 2 billion years old. By 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the galaxy had formed a mass equal to over 300 billion suns—the single most massive galaxy we’ve ever discovered from that timeframe. By 1.8 billion years, the galaxy had stopped formation entirely, which poses a fascinating question, why did it suddenly stop?

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Discovering signs of extraterrestrial life in the universe has been a highly sought-after field of inquiry throughout much of scientific history. Finding other life forms, whether they’re microscopic or similar to us, would undoubtedly revolutionize many areas of science and how we understand our place in the cosmos. While no real evidence has been found supporting the existence of extraterrestrial life, there are quite a few institutions dedicated to the search—and that search is continuing to get bigger.

The SETI Institute, one of the pillar institutions for the search, is ramping up its efforts by funding a variety of new initiatives…Continue Reading 

On November 11^th, 2019, the NASA Parker Solar Probe (PSP) successfully completed its third rotation around the Sun, in an ongoing effort to collect detailed data about the heliosphere region. The probe is the closest any spacecraft has come to the Sun, which allows the onboard instruments up-close access to its structure and inner workings. PSP is set to make 24 orbits before ending its mission, with eventual iterations moving the probe closer and closer to the Sun. Despite only being two years into its journey, PSP is already providing a great deal of valuable data.

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3D Map Shows The Milky’s Perplexing Curves

Astronomers have created a new 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy, and in a new paper published in Nature Astronomy, illustrate that the galaxy as a whole has a warped structure, progressively twisting out into a spiral.

This isn’t exactly the biggest surprise. For decades, astronomers have observed a twisting pattern of hydrogen gas out in the far reaches of the galaxy. But since that gas layer extends so far out, it was never really clear whether individual stellar bodies in the galaxy were exhibiting the same kind of warping, and whether there was a consistent warp throughout the Milky Way.

This new 3D map wasn’t even intended to trace the galaxy’s warp. “Most science is serendipitous,” says Richard de Grijs, an astronomer based at Macquarie University in Sydney, and a coauthor of the new study. It was his former graduate student, lead author Xiaodian Chen, now at the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences, who had previously compiled a large collection of observations of over 50,000 stars in the galaxy, particularly in infrared. Chen decided to use observations of the Cepheids—a class of young, bright, pulsating stars—to attempt to outline the shape of the Milky Way.

The Cepheids are particularly useful for any astronomical investigation requiring you to trace distance through outer space. They show period changes in brightness over time, and measuring the cycles in those brightness can basically tell you the distance between two points down to an incredibly accurate scale. And since dust and gas doesn’t absorb much of the light on longer wavelengths, astronomers use infrared to look at those cycles.

And while the warping of the galaxy isn’t a new revelation, Elena D’Onghia, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the study, thinks it’s interesting how the team took advantage of the Cepheids in creating the new galactic map that can characterize the warp at a rather high accuracy.

D'Onghia does note, however, that the origin of the warp still needs a more detailed explanation, especially since the hydrogen gas still seems to twist more rigorously then the stars do. “It could be due to torques exerted by a large satellite galaxy like the Large Magellanic Cloud, or the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that impacted the Milky Way disk not long ago,” she says. “It could be by torques exerted by the inner disk, as the authors claim. [They] do not really explore the different ways to generate the warp as compared to the data.”

Still, there are some larger astronomical questions the findings ought to help resolve, especially when it comes to dark matter. About 85 percent of the universe is thought to be made of dark matter. We can’t directly observe it, but its presence is implied because it gravitationally affects the movements of other celestial structures whirring around through outer space. “We know we need it to explain the motions of the stars in the Milky Way,” says de Grijs. Understanding the shape of the Milky Way means we can get a better handle on where that dark matter is located in the galaxy.

The findings also ought to help the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is tasked with making observations of approximately one billion astronomical objects (about one percent of the Milky Way galaxy). The new map could give the Gaia project a benchmark with which to compare measurements as they come in.

And let’s not forget that Chen’s catalog of 50,000 is ripe for more thorough analysis to unveil more mysteries of the Milky Way. “There’s a lot more we can do with this and continue to explore what’s in the data,” says de Grijs.