Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead of roaming freely on their own. Not many were known until now, but a team of astronomers, using data from several European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other facilities, have just discovered at least 70 new rogue planets in our galaxy. This is the largest group of rogue planets ever discovered, an important step towards understanding the origins and features of these mysterious galactic nomads.
“We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many,” says Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France and the University of Vienna, Austria, and the first author of the new study published today in Nature Astronomy.
Rogue planets, lurking far away from any star illuminating them, would normally be impossible to imagine. However, Miret-Roig and her team took advantage of the fact that, in the few million years after their formation, these planets are still hot enough to glow, making them directly detectable by sensitive cameras on large telescopes. They found at least 70 new rogue planets with masses comparable to Jupiter’s in a star-forming region close to our Sun, in the Upper Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations [1].
To spot so many rogue planets, the team used data spanning about 20 years from a number of telescopes on the ground and in space. “We measured the tiny motions, the colors, and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky,” explains Miret-Roig. “These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.”
The team used observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), and the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope located in Chile, along with other facilities. “The vast majority of our data come from ESO observatories, which were absolutely critical for this study. Their wide field of view and unique sensitivity were keys to our success,” explains Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new research. “We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data.”
The team also used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, marking a huge success for the collaboration of ground- and space-based telescopes in the exploration and understanding of our Universe.
The study suggests there could be many more of these elusive, starless planets that we have yet to discover. “There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star,” Bouy explains.
By studying the newly found rogue planets, astronomers may find clues to how these mysterious objects form. Some scientists believe rogue planets can form from the collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to lead to the formation of a star, or that they could have been kicked out from their parent system. But which mechanism is more likely remains unknown.
Further advances in technology will be key to unlocking the mystery of these nomadic planets. The team hopes to continue to study them in greater detail with ESO’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and due to start observations later this decade. “These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities,” says Bouy. “The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found.”
Note
[1] The exact number of rogue planets found by the team is hard to pin down because the observations don’t allow the researchers to measure the masses of the probed objects. Objects with masses higher than about 13 times the mass of Jupiter are most likely not planets, so they cannot be included in the count. However, since the team didn’t have values for the mass, they had to rely on studying the planets’ brightness to provide an upper limit to the number of rogue planets observed. The brightness is, in turn, related to the age of the planets themselves, as the older the planet, the longer it has been cooling down and reducing in brightness. If the studied region is old, then the brightest objects in the sample are likely above 13 Jupiter masses, and below if the region is on the younger side. Given the uncertainty in the age of the study region, this method gives a rogue planet count of between 70 and 170.
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Núria Miret-Roig, Hervé Bouy, Sean N. Raymond, Motohide Tamura, Emmanuel Bertin, David Barrado, Javier Olivares, Phillip A. B. Galli, Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Luis Manuel Sarro, Angel Berihuete, Nuria Huélamo. A rich population of free-floating planets in the Upper Scorpius young stellar association. Nature Astronomy, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01513-x
James Webb Space Telescope: An Astronomer On the Team Explains How To Send A Giant Telescope To Space – and Why
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The James Webb Space Telescope is the biggest orbital telescope ever built and is scheduled to be launched into space on Dec. 18, 2021. NASA/Desiree Stover, CC BY
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space on Dec. 25, 2021, and with it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets, and accomplish many other scientific goals.
To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test, and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built.
In order to detect the most distant and oldest galaxies, the telescope needs to be huge and kept extremely cold. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY
It works kind of like a satellite dish. Light from a star or galaxy will enter the mouth of the telescope and bounce off the primary mirror toward the four sensors: NIRCam, which takes images in the near-infrared; the Near Infrared Spectrograph, which can split the light from a selection of sources into their constituent colors and measures the strength of each; the Mid-Infrared Instrument, which takes images and measures wavelengths in the middle infrared; and the Near Infrared Imaging Slitless Spectrograph, which splits and measures the light of anything scientists point the satellite at.
This design will allow scientists to study how stars form in the Milky Way and the atmospheres of planets outside the Solar System. It may even be possible to figure out the composition of these atmospheres.
The NIRCam, seen here, will measure infrared light from extremely distant and old galaxies. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY
Ever since Edwin Hubble proved that distant galaxies are just like the Milky Way, astronomers have asked: How old are the oldest galaxies? How did they first form? And how have they changed over time? The Webb telescope was originally dubbed the “First Light Machine” because it is designed to answer these very questions.
One of the main goals of the telescope is to study distant galaxies close to the edge of the observable universe. It takes billions of years for the light from these galaxies to cross the universe and reach Earth. I estimate that images my colleagues and I will collect with NIRCam could show protogalaxies that formed a mere 300 million years after the Big Bang – when they were just 2% of their current age.
Finding the first aggregations of stars that formed after the Big Bang is a daunting task for a simple reason: These protogalaxies are very far away and so appear to be very faint.
Webb’s mirror is made of 18 separate segments and can collect more than six times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope mirror. Distant objects also appear to be very small, so the telescope must be able to focus the light as tightly as possible.
The telescope also has to cope with another complication: Since the universe is expanding, the galaxies that scientists will study with the Webb telescope are moving away from Earth, and the Doppler effect comes into play. Just like the pitch of an ambulance’s siren shifts down and becomes deeper when it passes and starts moving away from you, the wavelength of light from distant galaxies shifts down from visible light to infrared light.
The five layers of silvery material underneath the gold mirror are a sunshield that will reflect light and heat to keep the sensors incredibly cold. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY
Webb detects infrared light – it is essentially a giant heat telescope. To “see” faint galaxies in infrared light, the telescope needs to be exceptionally cold or else all it would see would be its own infrared radiation. This is where the heat shield comes in. The shield is made of a thin plastic coated with aluminum. It is five layers thick and measures 46.5 feet (17.2 meters) by 69.5 feet (21.2 meters) and will keep the mirror and sensors at minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 234 Celsius).
The Webb telescope is an incredible feat of engineering, but how does one get such a thing safely to space and guarantee that it will work?
Engineers and scientists tested the entire telescope in an an extremely cold, low-pressure cryogenic vacuum chamber. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY
Test and rehearse
The James Webb Space Telescope will orbit a million miles from Earth – about 4,500 times more distant than the International Space Station and much too far to be serviced by astronauts.
Over the past 12 years, the team has tested the telescope and instruments, shaken them to simulate the rocket launch and tested them again. Everything has been cooled and tested under the extreme operating conditions of orbit. I will never forget when my team was in Houston testing the NIRCam using a chamber designed for the Apollo lunar rover. It was the first time that my camera detected light that had bounced off the telescope’s mirror, and we couldn’t have been happier – even though Hurricane Harvey was fighting us outside.
Rehearsals and training at the Space Telescope Science Institute are critical to make sure that the assembly process goes smoothly and any unexpected anomalies can be dealt with. NASA/STScI, CC BY
After testing came the rehearsals. The telescope will be controlled remotely by commands sent over a radio link. But because the telescope will be so far away – it takes six seconds for a signal to go one way – there is no real-time control. So for the past three years, my team and I have been going to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and running rehearsal missions on a simulator covering everything from launch to routine science operations. The team even has practiced dealing with potential problems that the test organizers throw at us and cutely call “anomalies.”
To fit inside a rocket, the telescope needs to fold into a compact package. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY
Some alignment required
The Webb team continued to rehearse and practice until the launch date, but our work is far from done now.
We need to wait 35 days after launch for the parts to cool before beginning alignment. After the mirror unfolds, NIRCam will snap sequences of high-resolution images of the individual mirror segments. The telescope team will analyze the images and tell motors to adjust the segments in steps measured in billionths of a meter. Once the motors move the mirrors into position, we will confirm that telescope alignment is perfect. This task is so mission-critical that there are two identical copies of NIRCam on board – if one fails, the other can take over the alignment job.
This alignment and checkout process should take six months. When finished, Webb will begin collecting data. After 20 years of work, astronomers will, at last, have a telescope able to peer into the farthest, most distant reaches of the universe.
It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbor. With an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide, and a surface hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a scorched and suffocating wasteland where life as we know it could not survive. The planet’s clouds are similarly hostile, blanketing the planet in droplets of sulfuric acid strong enough to burn a hole through human skin.
And yet, a new study supports the longstanding idea that if life exists, it might make a home in Venus’ clouds. The study’s authors, from MIT, Cardiff University, and Cambridge University, have identified a chemical pathway by which life could neutralize Venus’ acidic environment, creating a self-sustaining, habitable pocket in the clouds.
Within Venus’ atmosphere, scientists have long observed puzzling anomalies — chemical signatures that are hard to explain, such as small concentrations of oxygen and nonspherical particles, unlike sulfuric acid’s round droplets. Perhaps most puzzling is the presence of ammonia, a gas that was tentatively detected in the 1970s, and that by all accounts should not be produced through any chemical process known on Venus.
In their new study, the researchers modeled a set of chemical processes to show that if ammonia is indeed present, the gas would set off a cascade of chemical reactions that would neutralize surrounding droplets of sulfuric acid and could also explain most of the anomalies observed in Venus’ clouds. As for the source of ammonia itself, the authors propose that the most plausible explanation is of biological origin, rather than a nonbiological source such as lightning or volcanic eruptions.
As they write in their study, the chemistry suggests that “life could be making its own environment on Venus.”
This tantalizing new hypothesis is testable, and the researchers provide a list of chemical signatures for future missions to measure in Venus’ clouds, to either confirm or contradict their idea.
“No life that we know of could survive in the Venus droplets,” says study co-author Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But the point is, maybe some life is there, and is modifying its environment so that it is livable.”
The study’s co-authors include Janusz Petkowski, William Bains, and Paul Rimmer, who are affiliated with MIT, Cardiff University, and Cambridge University.
Life suspect
“Life on Venus” was a trending phrase last year, when scientists including Seager and her co-authors reported the detection of phosphine in the planet’s clouds. On Earth, phosphine is a gas that is produced mainly through biological interactions. The discovery of phosphine on Venus leaves room for the possibility of life. Since then, however, the discovery has been widely contested.
“The phosphine detection ended up becoming incredibly controversial,” Seager says. “But phosphine was like a gateway, and there’s been this resurgence in people studying Venus.”
Inspired to look more closely, Rimmer began combing through data from past missions to Venus. In these data, he identified anomalies, or chemical signatures, in the clouds that had gone unexplained for decades. In addition to the presence of oxygen and nonspherical particles, anomalies included unexpected levels of water vapor and sulfur dioxide.
Rimmer proposed the anomalies might be explained by dust. He argued that minerals, swept up from Venus’ surface and into the clouds, could interact with sulfuric acid to produce some, though not all, of the observed anomalies. He showed the chemistry checked out, but the physical requirements were unfeasible: A massive amount of dust would have to loft into the clouds to produce the observed anomalies.
Seager and her colleagues wondered if the anomalies could be explained by ammonia. In the 1970s, the gas was tentatively detected in the planet’s clouds by the Venera 8 and Pioneer Venus probes. The presence of ammonia, or NH3, was an unsolved mystery.
“Ammonia shouldn’t be on Venus,” Seager says. “It has a hydrogen attached to it, and there’s very little hydrogen around. Any gas that doesn’t belong in the context of its environment is automatically suspicious for being made by life.”
Livable clouds
If the team were to assume that life was the source of ammonia, could this explain the other anomalies in Venus’ clouds? The researchers modeled a series of chemical processes in search of an answer.
They found that if life were producing ammonia in the most efficient way possible, the associated chemical reactions would naturally yield oxygen. Once present in the clouds, ammonia would dissolve in droplets of sulfuric acid, effectively neutralizing the acid to make the droplets relatively habitable. The introduction of ammonia into the droplets would transform their formerly round, liquid shape into more of a nonspherical, salt-like slurry. Once ammonia is dissolved in sulfuric acid, the reaction would trigger any surrounding sulfur dioxide to dissolve as well.
The presence of ammonia then could indeed explain most of the major anomalies seen in Venus’ clouds. The researchers also show that sources such as lightning, volcanic eruptions, and even a meteorite strike could not chemically produce the amount of ammonia required to explain the anomalies. Life, however, might.
In fact, the team notes that there are life-forms on Earth — particularly in our own stomachs — that produce ammonia to neutralize and make livable an otherwise highly acidic environment.
“There are very acidic environments on Earth where life does live, but it’s nothing like the environment on Venus — unless life is neutralizing some of those droplets,” Seager says.
Scientists may have a chance to check for the presence of ammonia, and signs of life, in the next several years with the Venus Life Finder Missions, a set of proposed privately funded missions, of which Seager is principal investigator, that plan to send spacecraft to Venus to measure its clouds for ammonia and other signatures of life.
“Venus has a lingering, unexplained atmospheric anomalies that are incredible,” Seager says. “It leaves room for the possibility of life.”
This research was supported in part by the Simons Foundation, the Change Happens Foundation, and the Breakthrough Initiatives.
William Bains, Janusz J. Petkowski, Paul B. Rimmer, Sara Seager. The production of ammonia makes Venusian clouds habitable and explains observed cloud-level chemical anomalies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021; 118 (52): e2110889118 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110889118
NASA Releases Wild Footage of Its Solar Probe Actually ‘Touching the Sun’
A NASA probe covered in an advanced carbon heat shell, as well as ground-up animal bones, has made the landmark achievement of actually“touching” the Sun’s atmosphere earlier this year, according to the space agency.
The tiny Parker Solar Probe traversed the treacherous environment of the star’s upper atmosphere known as the corona and “touched the Sun,” according to a statement by the agency, collecting important data on the solar atmosphere.
“Parker Solar Probe ‘touching the Sun’ is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate admin of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
During the important trek, the probe also collected a trove of images that have since been compiled into a spectacular video that shows an unprecedentedly close look at the Sun:
The Solar Probe can be seen traversing the solar atmosphere known as a pseudostreamer, which are massive ribbon-like structures that can be seen during solar eclipses.
“Passing through the pseudostreamer was like flying into the eye of a storm,” a statement reads on the NASA website. “Inside the pseudostreamer the conditions quieted, particles slowed and the number of switchbacks dropped — a dramatic change from the busy barrage of particles the spacecraft usually encounters in the solar wind.”
As NASA explains, switchbacks are magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind that are plentiful within the solar atmosphere. While these were previously believed to be rare occurrences, the Parker probe found that they are rife throughout the solar wind.
“We see evidence of being in the corona from magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in white-light images,” said Parker Solar Probe project scientist Nour Raouafi of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The video’s capture is truly an amazing feat considering that it was blasting through the solar atmosphere at a withering speed of 142 kilometers per second, and scientists are optimistic that it will help us significantly advance our understanding of how the Sun works.
What You Need to Know About the Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse on Nov 18-19, 2021 (the Longest in Nearly 6 Centuries)
Learn what the energy of the Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse on Nov 18-19, 2021 means for you and how to tune into the opportunities and navigate the challenges here now. Message by Melanie Beckler.
According to NASA, for people on the U.S. East Coast, the partial eclipse begins a little after 2 in the morning on Nov 19, reaching its maximum at 4am—that’s when you’ll really want to be watching the moon. For those on the West Coast, the partial eclipse begins at 11 p.m. on Nov 18, with a maximum at 1 a.m.
Astronomers May Have Discovered a Planet Outside Of Our Galaxy
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Signs of a planet transiting a star outside of the Milky Way galaxy may have been detected for the first time. This intriguing result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, opens up a new window to search for exoplanets at greater distances than ever before.
The possible exoplanet candidate is located in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also called the Whirlpool Galaxy because of its distinctive profile.
Exoplanets are defined as planets outside of our Solar System. Until now, astronomers have found all other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way galaxy, almost all of them less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth. An exoplanet in M51 would be about 28 million light-years away, meaning it would be thousands of times farther away than those in the Milky Way.
“We are trying to open up a whole new arena for finding other worlds by searching for planet candidates at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to discover them in other galaxies,” said Rosanne Di Stefano of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study, which was published in Nature Astronomy.
This new result is based on transits, events in which the passage of a planet in front of a star blocks some of the star’s light and produces a characteristic dip. Astronomers using both ground-based and space-based telescopes — like those on NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions — have searched for dips in optical light, electromagnetic radiation humans can see, enabling the discovery of thousands of planets.
Di Stefano and colleagues have instead searched for dips in the brightness of X-rays received from X-ray bright binaries. These luminous systems typically contain a neutron star or black hole pulling in gas from a closely orbiting companion star. The material near the neutron star or black hole becomes superheated and glows in X-rays.
Because the region producing bright X-rays is small, a planet passing in front of it could block most or all of the X-rays, making the transit easier to spot because the X-rays can completely disappear. This could allow exoplanets to be detected at much greater distances than current optical light transit studies, which must be able to detect tiny decreases in light because the planet only blocks a tiny fraction of the star.
The team used this method to detect the exoplanet candidate in a binary system called M51-ULS-1, located in M51. This binary system contains a black hole or neutron star orbiting a companion star with a mass about 20 times that of the Sun. The X-ray transit they found using Chandra data lasted about three hours, during which the X-ray emission decreased to zero. Based on this and other information, the researchers estimate the exoplanet candidate in M51-ULS-1 would be roughly the size of Saturn and orbit the neutron star or black hole at about twice the distance of Saturn from the Sun.
While this is a tantalizing study, more data would be needed to verify the interpretation as an extragalactic exoplanet. One challenge is that the planet candidate’s large orbit means it would not cross in front of its binary partner again for about 70 years, thwarting any attempts for a confirming observation for decades.
“Unfortunately to confirm that we’re seeing a planet we would likely have to wait decades to see another transit,” said co-author Nia Imara of the University of California at Santa Cruz. “And because of the uncertainties about how long it takes to orbit, we wouldn’t know exactly when to look.”
Can the dimming have been caused by a cloud of gas and dust passing in front of the X-ray source? The researchers consider this to be an unlikely explanation, as the characteristics of the event observed in M51-ULS-1 are not consistent with the passage of such a cloud. The model of a planet candidate is, however, consistent with the data.
“We know we are making an exciting and bold claim so we expect that other astronomers will look at it very carefully,” said co-author Julia Berndtsson of Princeton University in New Jersey. “We think we have a strong argument, and this process is how science works.”
If a planet exists in this system, it likely had a tumultuous history and violent past. An exoplanet in the system would have had to survive a supernova explosion that created the neutron star or black hole. The future may also be dangerous. At some point, the companion star could also explode as a supernova and blast the planet once again with extremely high levels of radiation.
Di Stefano and her colleagues looked for X-ray transits in three galaxies beyond the Milky Way galaxy, using both Chandra and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton. Their search covered 55 systems in M51, 64 systems in Messier 101 (the “Pinwheel” galaxy), and 119 systems in Messier 104 (the “Sombrero” galaxy), resulting in the single exoplanet candidate described here.
The authors will search the archives of both Chandra and XMM-Newton for more exoplanet candidates in other galaxies. Substantial Chandra datasets are available for at least 20 galaxies, including some like M31 and M33 that are much closer than M51, allowing shorter transits to be detectable. Another interesting line of research is to search for X-ray transits in Milky Way X-ray sources to discover new nearby planets in unusual environments.
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Strange Signal Detected From The Heart Of Our Galaxy
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Nobody really knows what’s at the heart of the Milky Way. It’s the galaxy we call home, but its center is so densely packed with billions of stars that even our most powerful telescopes can’t see it. It’s a commonly held belief that right at the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole – a phenomenon that scientists and astronomers call “Sagittarius A* – but they can’t directly observe the black hole. We assume that it’s there because of the behavior of stars and other observable stellar objects around it.
Famously, black holes don’t “send out” anything. Instead, they pull everything in. Nothing can escape from a black hole of the size of Sagittarius A* – not even light. That’s why scientists are so puzzled by a newly-discovered radio signal that’s coming from the galactic center. The signal seems to have been aimed at Earth so precisely that one scientist said it was as if someone “buzzed” us. That’s the kind of sentence that gets UFO enthusiasts excited, but in this case, scientists are just as excited as anybody who believes in extraterrestrial life. This signal has an origin point, whether it’s artificial or not, and it’s the job of scientists to find it. The problem is that finding it is likely to be much harder said than done.
The mysterious signal was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP for short. It’s an enormous assemble of 36 dish antennas standing in the vast, empty desert of Western Australia. The sole task of ASKAP is to keep an eye (or ear) on the universe and look out for radio waves. The antennas are redirected to monitor different areas of space throughout the year, but they sweep past the galactic core regularly. Although the discovery of the unexplained signal wasn’t announced to the public until October 12th, the scientists who monitor ASKAP say they’ve encountered the same signal more than once. Curiously, though, it isn’t there every time they look. Whatever this mysterious source is, the radio signal it sends out is unlike anything that’s ever been detected before. If something is hiding in the centre of the Milky Way and sending this signal to us, it appears to be an utterly unique object.
Scientists aren’t known for giving catchy titles to stellar phenomena. They’ve called the enigmatic signal “ASKAP J173608.2-3216325.” We prefer to use its nickname – “the Ghost.” The official announcement tells us that the Ghost signal was picked up thirteen times in just fourteen months between April 2019 and August 2020. Scientists then spent more than a year trying to find an adequate explanation for its existence before revealing its existence to the general public. They’ve had no luck, and their job has been made harder because the signal doesn’t appear to follow a pattern. The signal is inconsistent, with no set guarantees on when it will appear or how long it will last. That makes it exceptionally unlikely to be a quasar, a neutron star, or any object moving in a regular orbit.
Tara Murphy, who wrote the scientific paper announcing the signal’s discovery and is an astrophysicist with the University of Sydney, has probably spent more time studying the signal than anybody else. She’s baffled by it because the signal is so weak that it’s almost invisible when it first appears before becoming steady brighter, fading away altogether, and then reappearing. Her first theory was that it might be an exceptionally large pulsar – a specific type of neutron star that spins rapidly and gives off electromagnetic radiation – but if it were a pulsar, we should be able to detect it with instruments we have on Earth. Tara and her team attempted to do so at Australia’s Parkes Observatory using the Murriyang telescope. They found nothing. She then contacted NASA and asked them to look for X-rays using the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. None were found. The VISTA telescope in Chile looked for infrared or near-infrared signals and drew a blank. The only conclusion that can be drawn from that is that there’s no pulsar.
To make matters worse, South Africa’s Meerkat array also turned its attention to the problem and added to the confusion. Meerkat is more sensitive than the Australian array and was able to detect variations in the Ghost signal that lasted for a day rather than a week, and showed signs of circular polarisation. Fewer than one percent of all known signals in the universe display this feature, and they’re almost always connected to magnetic fields. This signal has to be coming from something huge and something that has a magnetic field but isn’t a star and doesn’t have a predictable pattern of behavior. That strongly raises the possibility of it having an artificial origin – but you won’t catch any scientists saying that out loud any time soon.
This is yet another reminder of how little we know about the mysteries that are out there in the stars. We tend to think of stars as little more than celestial decorations – pretty to look at but trivial. We sing about them in nursery rhymes. We even use them as a source of entertainment. It’s not a coincidence that “Starburst” – one of the most popular online slots games in the world – is set in deep space and uses star expansion as a feature. Most online slots players probably don’t think of themselves as armchair astronomers, but there has to be something that draws them to the game. Space isn’t there for entertainment, though. It offers us jackpots that an online slots player couldn’t even dream of – but we lack the technology to go chasing after them.
Human beings won’t make it to the center of the galaxy in our lifetimes. It’s possible that we’ll never make it there at all – our planet might die before we develop technology capable of traveling that far. We might never find out whether this radio signal is an attempt at communication or not. We do know there’s something out there, though – and it’s the desire to know what that “something” is that keeps us all hooked on space.
The Most Powerful Space Telescope Ever Built Will Look Back In Time To the Dark Ages of the Universe
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Hubble took pictures of the oldest galaxies it could – seen here – but the James Webb Space Telescope can go back much farther in time. NASA
Some have called NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope the “telescope that ate astronomy.” It is the most powerful space telescope ever built and a complex piece of mechanical origami that has pushed the limits of human engineering. On Dec. 18, 2021, after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the telescope is scheduled to launch into orbit and usher in the next era of astronomy.
I’m an astronomer with a specialty in observational cosmology – I’ve been studying distant galaxies for 30 years. Some of the biggest unanswered questions about the universe relate to its early years just after the Big Bang. When did the first stars and galaxies form? Which came first, and why? I am incredibly excited that astronomers may soon uncover the story of how galaxies started because James Webb was built specifically to answer these very questions.
The Universe went through a period of time known as the Dark Ages before stars or galaxies emitted any light. Space Telescope Institute
The ‘Dark Ages’ of the universe
Excellent evidence shows that the universe started with an event called the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, which left it in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state. The universe immediately began expanding after the Big Bang, cooling as it did so. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was a hundred trillion miles across with an average temperature of an incredible 18 billion F (10 billion C). Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was 10 million light years across and the temperature had cooled to 5,500 F (3,000 C). If anyone had been there to see it at this point, the universe would have been glowing dull red like a giant heat lamp.
Throughout this time, space was filled with a smooth soup of high energy particles, radiation, hydrogen and helium. There was no structure. As the expanding universe became bigger and colder, the soup thinned out and everything faded to black. This was the start of what astronomers call the Dark Ages of the universe.
The soup of the Dark Ages was not perfectly uniform and due to gravity, tiny areas of gas began to clump together and become more dense. The smooth universe became lumpy and these small clumps of denser gas were seeds for the eventual formation of stars, galaxies and everything else in the universe.
Although there was nothing to see, the Dark Ages were an important phase in the evolution of the universe.
The Dark Ages ended when gravity formed the first stars and galaxies that eventually began to emit the first light. Although astronomers don’t know when first light happened, the best guess is that it was several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers also don’t know whether stars or galaxies formed first.
Current theories based on how gravity forms structure in a universe dominated by dark matter suggest that small objects – like stars and star clusters – likely formed first and then later grew into dwarf galaxies and then larger galaxies like the Milky Way. These first stars in the universe were extreme objects compared to stars of today. They were a million times brighter but they lived very short lives. They burned hot and bright and when they died, they left behind black holes up to a hundred times the Sun’s mass, which might have acted as the seeds for galaxy formation.
Astronomers would love to study this fascinating and important era of the universe, but detecting first light is incredibly challenging. Compared to massive, bright galaxies of today, the first objects were very small and due to the constant expansion of the universe, they’re now tens of billions of light years away from Earth. Also, the earliest stars were surrounded by gas left over from their formation and this gas acted like fog that absorbed most of the light. It took several hundred million years for radiation to blast away the fog. This early light is very faint by the time it gets to Earth.
But this is not the only challenge.
As the universe expands, it continuously stretches the wavelength of light traveling through it. This is called redshift because it shifts light of shorter wavelengths – like blue or white light – to longer wavelengths like red or infrared light. Though not a perfect analogy, it is similar to how when a car drives past you, the pitch of any sounds it is making drops noticeably.
Similar to how a pitch of a sound drops if the source is moving away from you, the wavelength of light stretches due to the expansion of the universe.
By the time light emitted by an early star or galaxy 13 billion years ago reaches any telescope on Earth, it has been stretched by a factor of 10 by the expansion of the universe. It arrives as infrared light, meaning it has a wavelength longer than that of red light. To see first light, you have to be looking for infrared light.
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Telescope as a time machine
Enter the James Webb Space Telescope.
Telescopes are like time machines. If an object is 10,000 light-years away, that means the light takes 10,000 years to reach Earth. So the further out in space astronomers look, the further back in time we are looking.
The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to detect the oldest galaxies in the universe. NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY-SA
The strategy will be to stare deeply at one patch of sky for a long time, collecting as much light and information from the most distant and oldest galaxies as possible. With this data, it may be possible to answer when and how the Dark Ages ended, but there are many other important discoveries to be made. For example, unraveling this story may also help explain the nature of dark matter, the mysterious form of matter that makes up about 80% of the mass of the universe.
James Webb is the most technically difficult mission NASA has ever attempted. But I think the scientific questions it may help answer will be worth every ounce of effort. I and other astronomers are waiting excitedly for the data to start coming back sometime in 2022.
‘Planetary Defense!’ NASA Will Launch November Mission to Deflect ‘Devastating’ Asteroid from Hitting Earth by NUDGING It with A Spacecraft, Agency Says
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NASA said on Monday that its mission to deflect an asteroid in deep space using a spacecraft is targeting a late November launch
NASA’s mission to deflect an asteroid using a spacecraft is targeting a late November launch
The DART spacecraft will head towards the Didymos binary on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
It will smash into Didymoon at roughly 13,500mph on October 2, 2022
Didymoon came close to Earth in 2003, coming within 3.7 million miles
According to NASA, over 25,000 near-Earth objects have been discovered
NASA said on Monday that its mission to deflect an asteroid in deep space using a spacecraft is targeting a late November launch.
Known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the U.S. space agency will send the DART spacecraft to a pair of asteroids – the Didymos binary – at 1:20 a.m. EST on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
DART will smash in one of the two asteroids, known as Didymoon, at roughly 13,500mph on October 2, 2022.
In doing so, it will change the speed of Didymoon by a fraction of a percent, but it will be enough so NASA can measure its altered orbit.
This will provide valuable input into future missions to deflect asteroids.
At roughly 160 meters (524ft) wide, Didymoon orbits a much larger space rock known as Didymos that is approximately 780 meters (2,559ft) across.
Didymoon came relatively close to Earth in 2003, coming within 3.7 million miles.
Of the two asteroids, Didymoon is more likely to hit Earth, given there are more space rocks its size that NASA and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) have yet to observe.
‘DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion,’ NASA said in a statement.
The Schumann Resonance And Gaia: Connection Between The Brain And The Planet
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Beyond the “subtle” energies, almost spiritual or astral, there is a dimension of energies that are well known and typified by academic science. We speak of forces of an electromagnetic nature, radiation fields, terrestrial magnetism, cosmic radiation, etc. The Schumann resonance falls on this spectrum.
Named after the theoretical physicist who proposed and proved them, Winifred Schumann (1880-1974), it consists of a band of ELF (“Extremely Low Frequencies”) peaks of approximately 7.83 Hz, that surrounds the Earth in the band between the ground and the ionosphere as the “background” of the electromagnetic field of the planet.
Before continuing, we must discriminate some conceptual errors, as they have been vulgarized in this way:
One, that at the time of its discovery that given value was “approximate” —that is, there are zones and times of fluctuation. For example, the weather: an increase in the number of electrical storms in the world increases that frequency, conversely, it decreases.
Second, it is stated that today it is 12 Hz, which is also variable.
Third (and this is the biggest error) that this means that the Earth’s day has accelerated, with which today it would be 16 hours. Gross mistake because the electromagnetic frequency of these waves has nothing to do with the speed of the Earth’s rotation — and in that sense, I can say that I have observed that people who repeat this mistake in good faith lack, in general, minimal training or intellectual understanding technical or scientific.
This is how it would be presented:
Haarp Antennas
But let us return to the starting point of the «Schumann resonance» and ask ourselves why the interest that the subject has aroused among many people, generally reluctant to the aseptic academic field, motivating them to internalize and – as we have pointed out – sometimes echoing conclusions and proposals wrong (although I wonder if this “misinformation” was not precisely indirectly stimulated by intelligence services in order to make a fool of the outsider investigators of the System and, consequently, devalue the results they had obtained).
And why such an inordinate interest of that public for this phenomenon? Because different authors have pointed out that it would have a direct link with the subtle nature of the human being. The resonance would have the same frequency as the Alpha state produced by the human brain, with which they suppose that its increase or increase would translate to increasing the frequencies of the same and this would be evidence of the “quantum leap” of humanity, that is, your leap forward in the opening of consciousness.
This is where we should point out some details.
Correspondence Principle
It is true that Analogy is one of the fundamental and subtle principles of the spiritualistic understanding of the Universe. Although the academics will argue that it is a fallacy, known as ergo propter hoc, that is to say ‘with this and therefore because of this, experimental observation constantly confirms it.
However, that the human being has a cerebral behavior that has the same range as an ELF behavior of the planet where he lives and is interpreted as that the Schumann resonance acts on and modifies the electrochemical activity of the brain, it would be as absurd as to maintain that the activity Electrochemistry modifies the ELF of the planet since it ignores a Fundamental Law of the Universe: the Principle of Correspondence.
This phenomenon is named in honor of Winfried Otto Schumann (1888-1974), who mathematically predicted its existence in 1952, despite being observed for the first time by Nikola Tesla and forming the basis of his scheme for power transmission and communications. wireless.
That is to say, it is aligned with that principle (the Microcosmic in the Macrocosmic and the Macrocosmic in the Microcosmic), yes, but we insist on remembering that the principle of Correspondence is so-called because one fact corresponds to another, but that does not mean that one of them produces the other.
I urge the reader who has just arrived at these issues, perhaps to stop here and turn to deepen that concept that – I am convinced – is “liberating” in terms of open-mindedness to understand not only what we are developing here but also the entire efficacy of Esotericism itself.
Electromagnetic harmonization
That said, let’s get back to what we are dealing with. Because we must highlight another fact: the cerebral rhythm that we know as Alpha (inducer of what we perceive with a state of deep myo-relaxation, meditation, the state of mind Ku when saying Zen, etc.) is not 7.8 (let’s round-up: 8) cycles per second: it is between 8 and 12 c / sec. And when the brain frequency changes — be it up or down — it ceases to be one type of brain wave category to transform into another that is accompanied by a different psychic picture (not the same and improved).
But there is another detail to take into account: these brain frequencies that we are talking about are, as we said, electrochemical, and although they act on the electromagnetic nature of human nature, they constitute just one more variable.
On the other hand, the Schumann resonance is pure and exclusively electromagnetic, so that it is because of that parity, that correspondence, that we must look for effects that may interest us. With which we are accepting that there is undoubtedly a relationship between Schumann’s discovery and human nature, but such a link would perhaps not be psychic but electromagnetic.
In this sense, any alteration of this ELF field can have an impact first in biology, in the greater or lesser intensity of the auric field – understood as the surplus part of the physical body of its “bioplasmic egg” or “bioenergetic” -. Consequently, it impacts (harmonizes or disharmonizes) electromagnetically (and in a subtle phase, bio energetically).
It is here where the knowledge and practice of Bioenergetics —in the paradigm of Wilhelm Reich and his disciple Alexander Lowen— shows its importance since such exercises are designed to promote auric balance as a consequence of electromagnetic balance.
Also and from this correspondence it is quite obvious that any significant alteration of the Schumann resonance on a planetary level will result in an alteration of our own electromagnetic fields, and the abuse of the Internet and WiFi, the proximity of power lines and public transformers, heavy machinery in constant operation will be, precisely, factors that will disturb us.
Without going with the conspiracy of putting on hats made of aluminum foil while we walk through life, he points out the importance of applying the teachings of Radionics since they act, precisely at that level, although in a very limited range, restricted to the person or the home where it applies. Inevitably, I will explain in an immediate work some of the options of making Radionics play in our favor, but what we want here is to draw attention to the fact that the increase in disturbances in the Schumann field translate into alterations of our electromagnetic fields and they are also behind certain illnesses, interpersonal conflicts and so on.
So the “parapsychological harmonization” we are insisting on here must also include “radionic harmonizations” or “electromagnetic harmonizations” if you prefer to call them that.
Gaia
But the “Schumann field” (as I will call it from now on) has a very interesting aspect about all of us and in debt to that principle of Correspondence of which we spoke: that in so far as it is an electromagnetic field – or, better still, electromagnetic pulses on a greater “field” also electromagnetic but at the same time, corresponding to the human electromagnetic field.
Gaia, which we understand as the “consciousness” of the Earth may well be a fact, as well as that our natural parapsychological disposition allows us to “contact”, “tune in”, “empathize” (call it whatever you wish) with it.
What then we must ask ourselves here is: how many “spiritual or extraterrestrial contacts”, how many channelings will be nothing more than the misinterpretation of Gaia speaking to us at the episodic moments that the Schumann field “corresponds” to a significant (but not absolute) number of humans?
I will step into the void and propose my suspicion: that the “Schumann resonant field” and the “Akashic Records” are the same. Or also, that the “Schumann field” and the backup of the Collective Unconscious are the same. What to think about the need for human physiology for an extra-cerebral “information repository” and for it to be that Schumann field? (We will not discuss here what is a proven fact that bothers neuroscientists: the brain does not have the capacity to store the information that an average person accumulates not only in their entire life but simply in the first forty years of it).
I am not necessarily thinking of a conscious and autonomous Gaia that “speaks” to us, but rather that many phenomena that we perceive (and make the mistake of interpreting literally, without even going through the reflection of its symbolic nature) represent how our unconscious rationalizes the impulses of the Reality of that Gaia. And here we must return to what we understand by Reality.
Recent scientific studies suggest that consciousness is physically integrated, causally active information encoded in a global electromagnetic field of the brain.
It is now more than clear that it is not That “that is seen and touched.” What I postulate is that Reality – thus, with capital letters – is greater, transcendent to everyday “reality”, since it is limited to what we can not so much “perceive” but rather “understand”, so that everything that transcends the reality paradigm of an individual would be perceived, yes, but misinterpreted in its decoding.
Otherwise, I say: whoever “empathizes” with the Schumann field consciously accesses the “information.” Then if you “believe” (and this is quite a topic: pre-existing beliefs that distort understanding – not perception – of Reality) that it is some ESP, past life regression, or reading of akhásic records is just one (respectable ) personal belief that at the end of the day the nature of the practical result you get does not change.
Why do we suspect that the Schumann field accumulates information?
Because in it there are not only those ELFs (or, rather, that set of ELFs are in turn interacting with other electromagnetic fields). As we know, radio broadcasts need two types of waves: the one we call “carrier” and the “modulator” (as in commercial AM stations). The “carrier” is the “base” emission that is then affected (modulated) by another signal, causing the first to carry the second. The carrier is a range, the modulator is information. In analogy to this, the Schumann field may be the “carrier” where our unconscious psyche “mounts” the information.
What then can be practical applications of this knowledge? Let’s see:
A) In everyday life
That a person can enter Alpha at a time of low Schumann activity (there are sites on the Web that give access to updated recordings of the resonance and vice versa: the Schumann sound induces the Alpha state), that is, when it is closest at 7.83 Hz, it would allow him access to the information both stored in it – according to the theory that we have presented – and to use it as a “carrier” of his psychic energy, manifesting this in a wide range of parapsychological phenomenology (preferably towards that which exists predisposition in the individual, predisposition towards one or another phenomenon that is easily discriminated with a simple ESP evaluation with Zenner charts).
In another sense, the variations of the Schumann field, in turn, can act (blocking or exacerbating, depending on the case) in the “Dragon veins”, the energetic lattices of the Earth itself that we know as the “Hartmann Network” and “Lines of Curry ”, about which we will talk in another work.
B) In spiritual Knowledge
Being then a “bell” or “resonance box” of the Collective Unconscious, millenary concepts such as “kosmocrator”, “planetary genius” and, of course, “egregor” are understood, since this field would become the so-called “plastic mediator” well known among esotericists.
Indeed, the “plastic mediator” has been called that which allows the “psychic” to materialize as the “physical.”
To be consistent with esoteric teachings, how can an idea, however intense, “jump” the abyss of Reality to make itself tangible? (As the spiritualist currents teach in general and very particularly as proposed by the Principle of Mentalism). Such would then be “archetypal images” that act on, or for the human being, when the disposition of his paradigm allows him to include them in his Reality, for example, when in meditation we accept without questioning and without surprise the most bizarre manifestations that may appear to us.
Let’s stop for a moment at this point. Almost all meditators will agree with me in what I have just stated: in the meditative state we perceive (or occur) manifestations that, beyond their nature, purpose, or “message”, in the normal waking state (that is, in the normal state). Brain Beta) we would qualify as strange and we would seek to “rationalize” with conventional explanations (such as saying “hallucinations” believing that we explain it that way when the word “hallucination” is only a label that names the phenomenon but does not explain it, but in that state, we accept naturally. That is, we “internalize”, which is misleading because, with the same argument, we can affirm that our psyche is the one that is subsumed in the “Schumann field.” I will say more:
In general, esoteric authors have assumed that the “plastic mediator” cited is the astral plane. The point is that there still remains a remarkable difference of nature between the “mental” and the “astral.” It is there when we can propose that the “Schumann field” is that mediator between the psychic and the astral, and the latter (the astral) in turn mediator with the physical. And extrapolating, we may well ask ourselves if that “field” in turn is not a “level”, “plane” or “limbo” where certain entities of an intermediate nature remain.
Finally, I will comment on the aforementioned fact that the HAARP Project has been deactivated. One of two possibilities: either it was a failure because they did not achieve the purpose (presumably, to impact on the collective unconscious of the masses through a «social engineering 2.0» that could consist of «modulations» in the information field) or, by the On the contrary, they are committed to strategies with a better cost-benefit ratio.
SpaceX Inspiration4 Mission Will Send 4 People with Minimal Training into Orbit – and Bring Space Tourism Closer to Reality
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Four people – none of them trained astronauts – are scheduled to launch into orbit aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Sept. 15, 2021. NASA Johnson/Flickr, CC BY-NC
On Sept. 15, 2021, the next batch of space tourists is set to lift off aboard a SpaceX rocket. Organized and funded by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, the Inspiration4 mission touts itself as “the first all-civilian mission to orbit” and represents a new type of space tourism.
The four crew members will not be the first space tourists this year. In the past few months, the world witnessed billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launching themselves and a lucky few others into space on brief suborbital trips. While there are similarities between those launches and Inspiration4 — the mission is being paid for by one billionaire and is using a rocket built by another, Elon Musk — the differences are noteworthy. From my perspective as a space policy expert, the mission’s emphasis on public involvement and the fact that Inspiration4 will send regular people into orbit for three days make it a milestone in space tourism.
The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission include a physician assistant, a data engineer, a geoscientist, and billionaire Jared Isaacman, left. Inspiration4/John Kraus via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Why Inspiration4 is different
The biggest difference between Inspiration4 and the flights performed earlier this year is the destination.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic took – and in the future, will take – their passengers on suborbital launches. Their vehicles only go high enough to reach the beginning of space before returning to the ground a few minutes later. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon vehicle, however, are powerful enough to take the Inspiration4 crew all the way into orbit, where they will circle the Earth for three days.
The four-person crew is also quite different from the other launches. Led by Isaacman, the mission features a somewhat diverse group of people. One crew member, Sian Proctor, won a contest among people who use Isaacman’s online payment company. Another unique aspect of the mission is that one of its goals is to raise awareness of and funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As such, Isaacman selected Hayley Arceneaux, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude and childhood cancer survivor, to participate in the launch. The final member, Christopher Sembroski, won his seat when his friend was chosen in a charity raffle for St. Jude and offered his seat to Sembroski.
Because none of the four participants has any prior formal astronaut training, the flight has been called the first “all civilian” space mission. While the rocket and crew capsule are both fully automated – no one on board will need to control any part of the launch or landing – the four members still needed to go through much more training than the people on the suborbital flights. In less than six months, the crew has undergone hours of simulator training, lessons in flying a jet aircraft, and spent time in a centrifuge to prepare them for the G-forces of launch.
There have also been other fundraising events for St. Jude, including a 4-mile virtual run and the planned auction of beer hops that will be flown on the mission.
The Inspiration4 mission is a step toward giving more people access to views like this – the aurora borealis seen from the International Space Station. NASA
The future of space tourism?
Sending a crew of amateur astronauts into orbit is a significant step in the development of space tourism. However, despite the more inclusive feel of the mission, there are still serious barriers to overcome before average people can go to space.
For one, the cost remains quite high. Though three of the four are not rich, Isaacman is a billionaire and paid an estimated $200 million to fund the trip. The need to train for a mission like this also means that prospective passengers must be able to devote significant amounts of time to prepare – time that many ordinary people don’t have.
Finally, space remains a dangerous place, and there will never be a way to fully remove the danger of launching people – whether untrained civilians or seasoned professional astronauts – into space.
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Despite these limitations, orbital space tourism is coming. For SpaceX, Inspiration4 is an important proof of concept that they hope will further demonstrate the safety and reliability of their autonomous rocket and capsule systems. Indeed, SpaceX has several tourist missions planned in the next few months, even though the company isn’t focused on space tourism. Some will even include stops at the International Space Station.
Even as space remains out of reach for most on Earth, Inspiration4 is an example of how billionaire space barons’ efforts to include more people on their journeys can give an otherwise exclusive activity a wider public appeal.
An artist’s impression of an accretion disk rotating around an unseen supermassive black hole. The accretion process produces random fluctuations in luminosity from the disk over time, a pattern found to be related to the mass of the black hole in a new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers. Credit: Mark A. Garlick/Simons Foundation
The feeding patterns of black holes offer insight into their size, researchers report. A new study revealed that the flickering in the brightness observed in actively feeding supermassive black holes is related to their mass.
Supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun and usually reside at the center of massive galaxies. When dormant and not feeding on the gas and stars surrounding them, SMBHs emit very little light; the only way astronomers can detect them is through their gravitational influences on stars and gas in their vicinity. However, in the early universe, when SMBHs were rapidly growing, they were actively feeding—or accreting—materials at intensive rates and emitting an enormous amount of radiation—sometimes outshining the entire galaxy in which they reside, the researchers said.
The new study, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy graduate student Colin Burke and professor Yue Shen, uncovered a definitive relationship between the mass of actively feeding SMBHs and the characteristic timescale in the light-flickering pattern. The findings are published in the journal Science.
The observed light from an accreting SMBH is not constant. Due to physical processes that are not yet understood, it displays a ubiquitous flickering over timescales ranging from hours to decades. “There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial,” Burke said.
The team compiled a large data set of actively feeding SMBHs to study the variability pattern of flickering. They identified a characteristic timescale, over which the pattern changes, that tightly correlates with the mass of the SMBH. The researchers then compared the results with accreting white dwarfs, the remnants of stars like our sun, and found that the same timescale-mass relation holds, even though white dwarfs are millions to billions of times less massive than SMBHs.
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Explainer diagram – When Black Holes Line Up
The light flickers are random fluctuations in a black hole’s feeding process, the researchers said. Astronomers can quantify this flickering pattern by measuring the power of the variability as a function of timescales. For accreting SMBHs, the variability pattern changes from short timescales to long timescales. This transition of variability pattern happens at a characteristic timescale that is longer for more massive black holes.
The team compared black hole feeding to our eating or drinking activity by equating this transition to a human belch. Babies frequently burp while drinking milk, while adults can hold in the burp for a more extended amount of time. Black holes kind of do the same thing while feeding, they said.
“These results suggest that the processes driving the flickering during accretion are universal, whether the central object is a supermassive black hole or a much more lightweight white dwarf,” Shen said.
“The firm establishment of a connection between the observed light flicker and fundamental properties of the accretor will certainly help us better understand accretion processes,” said Yan-Fei Jiang, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute and study co-author.
Astrophysical black holes come in a broad spectrum of mass and size. In between the population of stellar-mass black holes, which weigh less than several tens of times the mass of the sun, and SMBHs, there is a population of black holes called intermediate-mass black holes that weigh between about 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun.
Researchers have discovered a definitive relationship between the mass of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) and their light flickering patterns. This relationship encodes critical information about accretion processes and could be used to help locate elusive mid-sized black holes.
IMBHs are expected to form in large numbers through the history of the universe, and they may provide the seeds necessary to grow into SMBHs later. However, observationally this population of IMBHs is surprisingly elusive. There is only one indisputably confirmed IMBH that weighs about 150 times the mass of the sun. But that IMBH was serendipitously discovered by the gravitational wave radiation from the coalescence of two less massive black holes.
“Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like,” Burke said.
Astronomers worldwide are waiting for the official kickoff of an era of massive surveys that monitor the dynamic and variable sky. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time will survey the sky over a decade and collect light flickering data for billions of objects, starting in late 2023.
“Mining the LSST data set to search for flickering patterns that are consistent with accreting IMBHs has the potential to discover and fully understand this long-sought mysterious population of black holes,” said co-author Xin Liu, an astronomy professor at the U. of I.
This study is a collaboration with astronomy and physics professor Charles Gammie and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Qian Yang, the Illinois Center for Advanced Study of the Universe, and researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of St. Andrews, U.K.; the Flatiron Institute; the University of Southampton, U.K.; the United States Naval Academy; and the University of Durham, U.K.
Burke, Shen, and Liu also are affiliated with the Center for Astrophysical Surveys at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois.
More information: A characteristic optical variability timescale in astrophysical accretion disks, Science (2021). science.sciencemag.org/lookup/ … 1126/science.abg9933
By the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Phys.org
Videos of Cosmic Proportions
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An animated gif of a meteorite-dropping fireball was observed in Ontario in January 2020.
Western leads global project observing rare meteor showers and meteorite falls
As billionaires battle it out in a space race that only a handful of the world’s richest persons can play, a highly inclusive international project is looking in the other direction – what’s flying towards Earth – and all are welcome.
Led by Western University’s Denis Vida, the Global Meteor Network (GMN) is a collection of more than 450 video meteor cameras hosted by amateur astronomers and professionals alike in 23 countries across the globe.
More than 1,600 Geminid meteors were observed in December 2020 using a Global Meteor Network camera in Croatia. Image by Global Meteor Network
That’s a lot of cameras and more, much more, are on the way. The massive array, working collectively and connectively, is needed to achieve GMN’s mission prime: ensuring that no unique space events, such as rare meteor showers or meteorite-dropping fireballs, are missed.
“The main operational goal of the project is to establish a decentralized, science-grade instrument which observes the night sky every night of the year from as many locations around the world as possible,” said Vida, a postdoctoral associate in Western’s department of physics and astronomy.
A new paper, soon-to-be-published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and currently available at arXiv, details the project and also shares some of GMN’s impressive preliminary findings.
Meteor astronomers, like Vida and Western’s Canada Research Chair in Planetary Small Bodies Peter Brown, have a unique challenge to get their data. Unlike other fields of astronomy, where the objects of interest, like planets or distant galaxies, are usually so far away that they can be observed from virtually any point on the globe, meteors occur much closer to Earth and most burn up in the atmosphere at heights of around 100 km.
“Other astronomers can pool their resources to build a big telescope on top of a mountain where the skies are dark and clear year-round, but meteor astronomers need spatial coverage most of all,” said Vida.
Video showing the aurora captured by a GMN camera in Alaska. Video by Bill Witte.
A bright, meteorite-dropping fireball can occur anywhere in the world, and can only be well observed from within a distance of 300 km. To get the exact fall location and the orbit, it needs to be observed by at least two cameras in two different locations. That’s exactly what GMN provides.
GMN cameras installed in the UK. Photo by Roger Banks
Just a few months ago, the Winchcombe meteorite made international headlines. Several GMN cameras in the UK tracked the fireball together with other meteor networks, leading to important data retrieval and its eventual discovery on Earth. Spurred by the Winchcombe event, more than 150 meteor enthusiasts in the UK now want to install GMN cameras.
“There are already more than 100 existing ones in the UK, so that’s really exciting,” said Vida. “Its role in the recovery and analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite fall is proof positive that GMN works.”
GMN started when Vida was an undergraduate student. The first system was installed at Western in 2017, and GMN has continued to grow since with cameras now in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta, as well as the United States, the UK, Spain, Belgium, Croatia, and Brazil.
GMN station locations in North America and coverage area at the height of 100 km.
“A few friends and I realized that we can use low-cost Raspberry Pi single-board computers and reduce the cost of a single meteor observing system by 10 times, allowing us to install many more cameras than was previously possible,” said Vida.
Raspberry Pi computers are considered the most popular single-board systems and are often used in DIY projects or as a cost-effective system for learning to code.
Beyond the thrilling visuals, GMN provides the world’s meteor community with real-time awareness of the near-Earth meteoroid environment by publishing orbits of all observed meteors from around the globe within 24 hours of observation. The network also observes meteor showers in an effort to better understand flight patterns, flux capacities, and even predict future events.
The location of all the cameras and the latest data is available for anyone to explore, via the GMN website.
It’s almost impossible for the human mind to imagine the incredible forces involved in a supernova. They’re so colossal that they would make the largest atomic bomb that’s ever exploded on Earth seem like a party popper. They’d make the biggest volcanic eruption ever seen look like popping candy. When stars expand, collapse, or implode, each event is monumental. In extreme cases, such events can warp the space-time continuum. The death of a star is a reminder of the impermanence of everything and also the fact that we live in a tiny corner of an enormous universe.
We’re all fascinated with stars to a greater or lesser degree. We looked up at them at night and wished upon them as children. Our ancient ancestors imagined shapes in them, creating constellations and building legends around them. We’ve used them to navigate the oceans and track the passing of time. Even today, some people trust their fate to them via the medium of astrology. They’ve also become playthings in online slots games like “Starburst.” For all the entertainment value of that online slots game and all the complex mathematics that goes into its running, it’s nothing compared to a real supernova. You could add all the mathematical functions of every online slots game at Rose Slots CA together, and you still wouldn’t get close to being able to accurately model a supernova. They’re difficult things to study because they happen so rarely and so far away.
The rarity of supernovae is what makes them so difficult to study. Even our most powerful telescopes can’t see past the dense cluster of stars at the centre of the Milky Way, obscuring our view of our native galaxy. It’s thought that there’s an average of around four supernovae per century in the Milky Way, but none of them have ever been directly observed from Earth because we can’t predict them and don’t know where to look. The closest and most detailed look that scientists on Earth have ever got at a supernova happened in 2016 when a star died in a small galaxy more than 4.6 billion light years from our own. The explosion was unusually bright – around five hundred times brighter than the average supernova – so the star must have been colossal. That’s about all scientists could discern about it from such a distance other than the fact that a massive release of hydrogen probably meant it was two stars that had merged to form a white dwarf before collapsing.
Because of the comparative lack of information available about supernovae, scientists have until now divided them into just two different categories. That all changed at the beginning of July 2021. Through a combination of luck and observation, astronomers were able to capture a supernova in progress a mere 31 million light years away. It exhibited characteristics that experts have never seen in a supernova before, leading it to be classified as a third, never-before-seen type of supernova. In the process, they believe they might have solved a one-thousand-year-old mystery.
Before this new observation, supernovas were divided into “core-collapse supernovae” and “thermonuclear supernovae.” A core-collapse supernova happens when a large star – at least eight times more massive than our own Sun – runs out of fuel to burn and collapses in on itself, becoming either a super-dense neutron star or even a black hole in the process. Thermonuclear supernovae happen when white dwarf stars explode outward, sometimes creating nebulae or enormous gas clouds in the process. A third type of supernova – a so-called “electron-capture supernova” – was theorised by Japanese scientist Ken’ichi Nomoto during the 1980s but remained strictly theoretical until this week. We now know that Ken’ichi’s theory was correct.
In Nomoto’s model, a large star that runs out of fuel and begins to collapse might eventually force electrons into the atomic nuclei of its core through sheer gravity, resulting in the star losing most of its mass before exploding. Such a supernova should be far less radioactive than a regular thermonuclear supernova and should leave behind a neutron-rich core. The recently detected supernova, named “Supernova 2018zd” after the year in which the star began to be monitored, shows signs of all these processes. It lost a lot of its mass before it went supernova, its chemical composition is highly unusual, the explosion was comparatively weak, there’s little sign of radiation, and the core appears to be rich in neutrons. Happily, Nomoto is still alive and has had the opportunity to review the data first-hand. He’s delighted to finally be proven correct.
Perhaps encouraged by the discovery of this new type of supernova (which might be named the Nomoto Supernova in his honour), Nomoto has now suggested that the great supernova of 1054 might have been a stellar event of this kind. Historical accounts tell us that in the year 1054, a bright light appeared in the sky and remained visible in the daytime for 23 days. The people of the time didn’t know what it was, but we now recognise it as the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. It’s long been suspected that the Crab Nebula was created by a supernova, but Nomoto now believes it to be the product of an electron-capture supernova. The detection of a neutron star or even a neutron-rich core within the heart of the nebula might confirm his theory – and that’s the project he’s now working on.
Stars can live for billions of years. Our own native star will still be spinning in the sky long after everybody reading this article has turned to dust. We’re all footprints in the sand as far as the stars are concerned. They existed long before life emerged on Earth, and they’ll still be spinning in the sky long after the Earth has been destroyed by the expansion of the sun. Even after thousands of years of gazing up at them in wonder, our understanding of them leaves much to be desired. Understanding how they die, though, might hold the key to understanding how they’re born. Thanks to Nomoto and the people who monitored Supernova 2018zd, we know more today than we did yesterday. Progress is slow, but it’s happening.
Astronomers Have Identified a White Dwarf so Massive That It Might Collapse
Maunakea and Haleakala, Hawai’i — Astronomers have discovered the smallest and most massive white dwarf ever seen. The smoldering cinder, which formed when two less massive white dwarfs merged, is heavy, “packing a mass greater than that of our Sun into a body about the size of our Moon,” says Ilaria Caiazzo, the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech and lead author of the new study appearing in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature. “It may seem counterintuitive, but smaller white dwarfs happen to be more massive. This is due to the fact that white dwarfs lack the nuclear burning that keeps up normal stars against their own self-gravity, and their size is instead regulated by quantum mechanics.”
The discovery was made by the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, which operates at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory; two Hawai’i telescopes — W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai’i Island, and University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakala, Maui — helped characterize the dead star, along with the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar, the European Gaia space observatory, and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
White dwarfs are the collapsed remnants of stars that were once about eight times the mass of our Sun or lighter. Our Sun, for example, after it first puffs up into a red giant in about 5 billion years, will ultimately slough off its outer layers and shrink down into a compact white dwarf. About 97 percent of all stars become white dwarfs.
While our Sun is alone in space without a stellar partner, many stars orbit around each other in pairs. The stars grow old together, and if they are both less than eight solar masses, they will both evolve into white dwarfs.
The new discovery provides an example of what can happen after this phase. The pair of white dwarfs, which spiral around each other, lose energy in the form of gravitational waves and ultimately merge. If the dead stars are massive enough, they explode in what is called a type Ia supernova. But if they are below a certain mass threshold, they combine together into a new white dwarf that is heavier than either progenitor star. This process of merging boosts the magnetic field of that star and speeds up its rotation compared to that of the progenitors.
Astronomers say that the newfound tiny white dwarf, named ZTF J1901+1458, took the latter route of evolution; its progenitors merged and produced a white dwarf 1.35 times the mass of our Sun. The white dwarf has an extreme magnetic field almost 1 billion times stronger than our Sun’s and whips around on its axis at a frenzied pace of one revolution every seven minutes (the zippiest white dwarf known, called EPIC 228939929, rotates every 5.3 minutes).
“We caught this very interesting object that wasn’t quite massive enough to explode,” says Caiazzo. “We are truly probing how massive a white dwarf can be.”
What’s more, Caiazzo and her collaborators think that the merged white dwarf may be massive enough to evolve into a neutron-rich dead star, or neutron star, which typically forms when a star much more massive than our Sun explodes in a supernova.
“This is highly speculative, but it’s possible that the white dwarf is massive enough to further collapse into a neutron star,” says Caiazzo. “It is so massive and dense that, in its core, electrons are being captured by protons in nuclei to form neutrons. Because the pressure from electrons pushes against the force of gravity, keeping the star intact, the core collapses when a large enough number of electrons are removed.”
If this neutron star formation hypothesis is correct, it may mean that a significant portion of other neutron stars takes shape in this way. The newfound object’s close proximity (about 130 light-years away) and its young age (about 100 million years old or less) indicate that similar objects may occur more commonly in our galaxy.
MAGNETIC AND FAST
The white dwarf was first spotted by Caiazzo’s colleague Kevin Burdge, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, after searching through all-sky images captured by ZTF. This particular white dwarf, when analyzed in combination with data from Gaia, stood out for being very massive and having a rapid rotation.
“No one has systematically been able to explore short-timescale astronomical phenomena on this kind of scale until now. The results of these efforts are stunning,” says Burdge, who, in 2019, led the team that discovered a pair of white dwarfs zipping around each other every seven minutes.
The team then analyzed the spectrum of the star using Keck Observatory’s Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS), and that is when Caiazzo was struck by the signatures of a very powerful magnetic field and realized that she and her team had found something “very special,” as she says. The strength of the magnetic field together with the seven-minute rotational speed of the object indicated that it was the result of two smaller white dwarfs coalescing into one.
Data from Swift, which observes ultraviolet light, helped nail down the size and mass of the white dwarf. With a diameter of 2,670 miles, ZTF J1901+1458 secures the title for the smallest known white dwarf, edging out previous record holders, RE J0317-853 and WD 1832+089, which each have diameters of about 3,100 miles.
In the future, Caiazzo hopes to use ZTF to find more white dwarfs like this one, and, in general, to study the population as a whole. “There are so many questions to address, such as what is the rate of white dwarf mergers in the galaxy, and is it enough to explain the number of type Ia supernovae? How is a magnetic field generated in these powerful events, and why is there such diversity in magnetic field strengths among white dwarfs? Finding a large population of white dwarfs born from mergers will help us answer all these questions and more.”
Caiazzo, I., Burdge, K.B., Fuller, J. et al. A highly magnetized and rapidly rotating white dwarf as small as the Moon. Nature, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03615-y
