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ScienceCasts Earth's Magnetosphere Elucidating The Black Holes The Surprising Power of a Solar Storm Weird Planets A Close Encounter With Jupiter Ancient remnants deep in the Kuiper belt The Super Fluid Core Of A Dead Neutron Star Massive Cloud On Collision Course With Milky Way Mysterious Objects at the Edge of the Electromagnetic Spectrum Big Mystery in the Perseus Cluster Spacecraft discovers thousands of doomed comets Close Encounter with Enceladus Amazing Moons The Sounds Of The InterStellar Space



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MXPlank News Letter - 2021-11-17







Hubble and VLT images of the disc around AU Microscopii






Using images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered fast-moving wave-like features in the dusty disc around the nearby star AU Microscopii. These odd structures are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now. The top row shows a Hubble image of the AU Mic disc from 2010, the middle row Hubble from 2011 and the bottom row is an image taken with the SPHERE instrument, mounted on the Very Large Telescope, from 2014. The black central circles show where the brilliant light of the central star has been blocked off to reveal the much fainter disc, and the position of the star is indicated schematically.





Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)








Hubble celebrates International Year of Astronomy with new view of Milky Way






A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy provided by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and its companion Great Observatories (the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory) is being unveiled on 10 Nov 2009. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.

Although best known for its visible-light images, Hubble also observes over a limited range of infrared light and this sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the galactic centre region. The composite image – made up of an image from each telescope – features the spectacle of stellar evolution: from vibrant regions of star birth, to young hot stars, to old cool stars, to seething remnants of stellar death called black holes.

This activity occurs against a fiery backdrop in the crowded, hostile environment of the galaxy's core, the centre of which is dominated by a supermassive black hole nearly four million times more massive than our Sun. Permeating the region is a diffuse, blue haze of X-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by outflows from the supermassive black hole as well as by winds from massive stars and by stellar explosions. Infrared light reveals more than a hundred thousand stars along with glowing dust clouds that create complex structures including compact globules, long filaments, and finger-like 'pillars of creation,' where newborn stars are just beginning to break out of their dark, dusty cocoons.




Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)








A monster in the Milky Way





This image, not unlike a pointillist painting, shows the star-studded centre of the Milky Way towards the constellation of Sagittarius. The crowded centre of our galaxy contains numerous complex and mysterious objects that are usually hidden at optical wavelengths by clouds of dust - but many are visible here in these infrared observations from Hubble.

However, the most famous cosmic object in this image still remains invisible: the monster at our galaxy's heart called Sagittarius A*. Astronomers have observed stars spinning around this supermassive black hole (located right in the centre of the image), and the black hole consuming clouds of dust as it affects its environment with its enormous gravitational pull.

Infrared observations can pierce through thick obscuring material to reveal information that is usually hidden to the optical observer. This is the best infrared image of this region ever taken with Hubble, and uses infrared archive data from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, taken in September 2011.





The center of the Milky Way galaxy, with the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), located in the middle, is revealed in these images. As described in our press release, astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to take a major step in understanding why material around Sgr A* is extraordinarily faint in X-rays.

The large image contains X-rays from Chandra in blue and infrared emission from the Hubble Space Telescope in red and yellow. The inset shows a close-up view of Sgr A* in X-rays only, covering a region half a light year wide. The diffuse X-ray emission is from hot gas captured by the black hole and being pulled inwards. This hot gas originates from winds produced by a disk-shaped distribution of young massive stars observed in infrared observations.


These new findings are the result of one of the biggest observing campaigns ever performed by Chandra. During 2012, Chandra collected about five weeks worth of observations to capture unprecedented X-ray images and energy signatures of multi-million degree gas swirling around Sgr A*, a black hole with about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. At just 26,000 light years from Earth, Sgr A* is one of very few black holes in the universe where we can actually witness the flow of matter nearby.

The authors infer that less than 1% of the material initially within the black hole's gravitational influence reaches the event horizon, or point of no return, because much of it is ejected. Consequently, the X-ray emission from material near Sgr A* is remarkably faint, like that of most of the giant black holes in galaxies in the nearby Universe.


The captured material needs to lose heat and angular momentum before being able to plunge into the black hole. The ejection of matter allows this loss to occur.

This work should impact efforts using radio telescopes to observe and understand the "shadow" cast by the event horizon of Sgr A* against the background of surrounding, glowing matter. It will also be useful for understanding the impact that orbiting stars and gas clouds might make with the matter flowing towards and away from the black hole.


The paper is available online and is published in the journal Science. The first author is Q.Daniel Wang from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA; and the co-authors are Michael Nowak from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA; Sera Markoff from University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, Fred Baganoff from MIT; Sergei Nayakshin from University of Leicester in the UK; Feng Yuan from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China; Jorge Cuadra from Pontificia Universidad de Catolica de Chile in Chile; John Davis from MIT; Jason Dexter from University of California, Berkeley, CA; Andrew Fabian from University of Cambridge in the UK; Nicolas Grosso from Universite de Strasbourg in France; Daryl Haggard from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL; John Houck from MIT; Li Ji from Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China; Zhiyuan Li from Nanjing University in China; Joseph Neilsen from Boston University in Boston, MA; Delphine Porquet from Universite de Strasbourg in France; Frank Ripple from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA and Roman Shcherbakov from University of Maryland, in College Park, MD.





Credit:
NASA, ESA, and G. Brammer
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al., IR: NASA/STScI









Huge system of dusty material enveloping the young star HR 4796A






This is an image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showing a vast, complex dust structure, about 240 billion kilometres across, enveloping the young star HR 4796A. A bright, narrow inner ring of dust is already known to encircle the star and may have been corralled by the gravitational pull of an unseen giant planet. This newly discovered huge dust structure around the system may have implications for what this yet-unseen planetary system looks like around the 8-million-year-old star, which is in its formative years of planet construction. The debris field of very fine dust was likely created from collisions among developing infant planets near the star, evidenced by a bright ring of dusty debris seen 11 billion kilometres from the star. The pressure of starlight from the star, which is 23 times more luminous than the Sun, then expelled the dust far into space.

Link:




Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)