Colossus In Coma Cluster One Of Largest Structures In Universe, Enormous Arms Of Hot Gas Stretch Half A Million Light Years

Coma Cluster                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Credit: Chandra

A team of astronomers has discovered enormous arms of hot gas in the Coma cluster of galaxies by using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. These features, which span at least half a million light years, provide insight into how the Coma cluster has grown through mergers of smaller groups and clusters of galaxies to become one of the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity. A new composite image, with Chandra data in pink and optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey appearing in white and blue, features these spectacular arms (mouse over the image for their location). In this image, the Chandra data have been processed so extra detail can be seen. The X-ray emission is from multimillion-degree gas and the optical data shows galaxies in the Coma Cluster, which contain only about 1/6 the mass in hot gas. Only the brightest X-ray emission is shown here, to emphasize the arms, but the hot gas is present over the entire field of view. Researchers think that these arms were most likely formed when smaller galaxy clusters had their gas stripped away by the head wind created by the motion of the cluster through the hot gas, in much the same way that the headwind created by a roller coaster blows the hats off riders. Coma is an unusual galaxy cluster because it contains not one, but two giant elliptical galaxies near its center. These two giant elliptical galaxies are probably the vestiges from each of the two largest clusters that merged with Coma in the past. The researchers also uncovered other signs of past collisions and mergers in the data. X-Ray Image of Coma Cluster

Credit: Chandra

From their length, and the speed of sound in the hot gas (~4 million km/hr), the newly discovered X-ray arms are estimated to be about 300 million years old, and they appear to have a rather smooth shape. This gives researchers some clues about the conditions of the hot gas in Coma. Most theoretical models expect that mergers between clusters like those in Coma will produce strong turbulence, like ocean water that has been churned by many passing ships. Instead, the smooth shape of these lengthy arms points to a rather calm setting for the hot gas in the Coma cluster, even after many mergers. Large-scale magnetic fields are likely responsible for the small amount of turbulence that is present in Coma. Estimating the amount of turbulence in a galaxy cluster has been a challenging problem for astrophysicists. Researchers have found a range of answers, some of them conflicting, and so observations of other clusters are needed. Two of the arms appear to be connected to a group of galaxies located about two million light years from the center of Coma. One or both of these arms connects to a larger structure seen in the XMM-Newton data, and spans a distance or at least 1.5 million light years. A very thin tail also appears behind one of the galaxies in Coma. This is probably evidence of gas being stripped from a single galaxy, in addition to the groups or clusters that have merged there. These new results on the Coma cluster, which incorporate over six days worth of Chandra observing time, are available online will appear in the September 20, 2013, issue of the journal Science. The first author of the paper is Jeremy Sanders from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. The co-authors are Andy Fabian from Cambridge University in the UK; Eugene Churazov from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany; Alexander Schekochihin from University of Oxford in the UK; Aurora Simionescu from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, Japan; Stephen Walker from Cambridge University in the UK and Norbert Werner from Stanford University in Stanford, CA. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass. Source: Nano Patents And Innovations

Read More........→September 24, 2013

Meteorites: the secret signs

Meteorites fall on the Earth (Artist's view)

The international expedition to study meteorite catastrophes of the past - a joint Russian-American mission, headed by world-renowned scientist - Dallas Abbott. It belongs to her discovery of a number of such craters on the planet and the hypothesis about the impact of meteorites on Earth evolution. At this time, the scientists are going to dot the "i" in the origin of the two Russian lakes. "Smerdyache" - the most enigmatic and mysterious lake in the Moscow region, near the Shatura. Even the name is scary. It is said that once there was a church. She went into the water together with the priest. Truth or fiction, is not known. However, the landscape around adds mystique ... and unusual shape of the lake - a perfect

Smerdyache lake

circle. "This lake is the most suspicious of 30-40 lakes in Shatura, - said Vyacheslav Gusiakov, head of the Laboratory of the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics SB RAS. - The origin of the remaining lakes are more or less clear. And here is flat terrain and suddenly there is a ring structure, surrounded by a rampart and further reduction ... " But it is almost perfectly round shape of the lake and attracted fans of extraterrestrial stories. Their version: Lake meteorite origin. Formed ten thousand years from the fall of 20 meter outer body. Evidence of this hypothesis, a lot. However, he has not yet found a meteorite. A joint Russian-American expedition just to dot the "i" in the origin of this water body. Vyacheslav Gusiakov believes that the main thing - to find the right place and to take samples under the ground, to see if there are rocks ejected from the depths, to study the geological section of the

Depression Svetloyar Lake - Crater meteorite origin

site at a depth of 50-60 meters. But the first round of the lake, and the most cursory examination of his right brings some interesting finds. "There is a set of stones that just amazed how all of this - says a leading researcher at the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Maccabees. - In some places there are pebbles on which surprisingly smooth parallel cracks. But these cracks occur when the subject put a lot of pressure and suddenly take it off. " The task of scientists to take as many samples and conduct laboratory research to say for sure whether the Moscow region in the past undergone a meteoric bombardment. "As part of any meteorite is metal, nickel - sure researcher Dallas Abbott, leader of the expedition. - On the ground, the soil is very little nickel. And if we find it in large numbers, it could be argued that it was the fall of the cosmic body. This is one way to prove that the lake

Image above: As part of an international expedition took part: Professor Dallas Abbott, a member of the Observatory-Doherty Earth Lomond, a researcher micrographs Dee Breger.

appeared as a direct result of a meteorite. "Renowned scholar American Dallas Abbott for the first time in the Russian outback. It belongs to her discovery of several craters on Earth. The most famous - underwater crater Mahuika near New Zealand. It was formed in 1447. Then, according to Abbott, fell into the ocean a huge meteorite, which caused a mega-tsunami, the wave height of over 100 meters. In 2009, she made a sensational new report: Little Ice Age in the 6th century, which lasted four years on Earth, too, caused by the fall of a large meteorite. It was followed by volcanic eruptions, dust emission in the atmosphere, crop failure, famine. The result - a global epidemic of plague. Dallas does not exclude that the Flood could also arise due to the fall of the celestial body. In the history of mankind are many myths and legends about the raging elements. But not knowing how to explain the disaster, people attributed their otherworldly forces. A striking example - Lake Svetloyar in the Nizhny Novgorod region. From this

Alexey Kiselev long held the view of meteoritic origin of the lake Svetloyar

place connects the mysterious disappearance of Kitezh City, according to the legend of the past into the water together with the people, not willing to surrender to the army of Batu. There are earlier - Mari myth. Lecturer of the Department of Astronomy of the University Mininskogo Alexey Kiselev retells it: "According to legend, there lived a tribe pans. Goddess Turk angry with the tribe and sent fiery horse, and this horse has destroyed the rebellious lords ... " But, there to have spoken, and the fall of meteorites - the phenomenon is not rare in our lives. But unlike a dead moon, where craters all at a glance, everything on Earth "space wounds" quickly tightened the winds and the rain. Search craters - this is one way to revive the memories of the past. Even after a century, the modern world reflect the cosmic threat not yet in force. ROSCOSMOS Press Release: http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=20141, Images, Text, Credits: Roscosmos TV studio (ROSCOSMOS PAO) / Dmitry Karabelnikov (images) / Translation: Orbiter.ch Aerospace. Greetings, Source: Orbiter.ch Space News

Read More........→June 12, 2013

Hubble breaks record for furthest supernova

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has broken the record in the quest to find the furthest supernova of the type used to measure cosmic distances. This supernova exploded more than 10 billion years ago (redshift 1.914), at a time the Universe was in its early formative years and stars were being born at a rapid rate. The supernova, designated SN UDS10Wil [1], belongs to a special class of exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae. These bright beacons are prized by astronomers because they can be used as a yardstick for measuring cosmic distances, thereby yielding clues to the nature of dark

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (compass and scale)

energy, the mysterious force accelerating the rate of expansion of the Universe. “This new distance record holder opens a window into the early Universe, offering important new insights into how these supernovae form,” said astronomer David O. Jones of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., lead author on the science paper detailing the discovery. “At that epoch, we can test theories about how reliable these detonations are for understanding the evolution of the Universe and its expansion.” One of the debates surrounding Type Ia supernovae is the nature of the fuse that ignites them. This latest discovery adds credence to one of two competing theories of how they explode. Although preliminary, the evidence favours the explosive merger of two burned out stars — small, dim, and dense stars known as white

The CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS)

dwarfs, the final state for stars like our Sun. The discovery was part of a three-year Hubble program called the CANDELS+CLASH Supernova Project, begun in 2010 [2]. This program aimed to survey faraway Type Ia supernovae to determine their distances and see if their behaviour has changed over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, using the sharpness and versatility of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. So far, CANDELS+CLASH has uncovered more than 100 supernovae of all types that exploded from 2.4 to over 10 billion years ago. The team has identified eight of these discoveries as Type Ia supernovae that exploded more than 9 billion years ago — including this new record-breaker, which, although only four percent older than the previous record holder, pushes the record roughly 350 million years further back in

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey: before, after, and difference

time [3]. The supernova team’s search technique involved taking multiple near-infrared images spaced roughly 50 days apart over the span of three years, looking for a supernova’s faint glow. After spotting SN UDS10Wil in December 2010, the CANDELS team then used the spectrometer on Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, along with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, to verify the supernova’s distance and to decode its light, hoping to find the unique signature of a Type Ia supernova. Finding remote supernovae opens up the possibility to measure the Universe’s accelerating expansion due to dark energy [4]. However, this is an area that is not fully understood — and nor are the origins of Type Ia supernovae. “This new result is a really exciting step forward in our study of supernovae and the distant Universe,” said team member Jens Hjorth of the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. “We can begin to explore and understand the stars that cause these

After view of the record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey

violent explosions.” The team’s preliminary evidence shows a sharp decline in the rate of Type Ia supernova blasts between roughly 7.5 billion years ago and more than 10 billion years ago. This, combined with the discovery of such Type Ia supernovae so early in the Universe, suggests that the explosion mechanism is a merger between two white dwarfs. In the single white dwarf scenario — a pathway in which a white dwarf gradually feeds off a partnering normal star and explodes when it accretes too much mass — the rate of supernovae can be relatively high in the early Universe, because some of these systems can reach the point of explosion very quickly. The steep drop-off favours the double white dwarf mechanism, because it predicts that most stars in the early Universe are too young to become

Hubble in orbit

Type Ia supernovae. Knowing what triggers Type Ia supernovae will also show how quickly the Universe enriched itself with heavier elements, such as iron. These exploding stars produce about half of the iron in the Universe, the raw material for building planets, and life. The team’s results will appear in the 10 May 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Notes: [1] The supernova has been catalogued as SN UDS10Wil in the CANDEL-CLASH list. It has also been nicknamed SN Wilson, after the 28th U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. [2] This project searches for supernovae in near-infrared light and verifies their distances with spectroscopy. The supernova search draws on two large Hubble programs studying distant galaxies and galaxy clusters: the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH). [3] The previous record holder was recently announced by a team that identified a supernova that exploded around 9 billion years ago (redshift 1.7). The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal, available here:http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/763/1/35 [4] It has been known since the late 1920s that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us with a speed that is proportional to their distance. Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître were the first to infer that this implied the whole Universe is expanding. In 2011, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the teams of astronomers that discovered, using Type Ia supernovae, that this expansion is actually accelerating (ann11069) — Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, Saul Perlmutter of the University of California at Berkeley, and Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra. This acceleration is attributed to dark energy, whose nature is unknown. Notes for editors: The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. The research is presented in a paper entitled “The Discovery of the Most Distant Known Type Ia Supernova at Redshift 1.914”, accepted for publication in 10 May 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The international team of astronomers in this study consists of: D. O. Jones (Johns Hopkins University, USA), S. A. Rodney (Johns Hopkins University, USA; Hubble Fellow), A. G. Riess (Johns Hopkins University, USA; Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), B. Mobasher (University of California, USA), T. Dahlen (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), C. McCully (The State University of New Jersey, USA), T. F. Frederiksen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), S. Casertano (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), J. Hjorth (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), C. R. Keeton (The State University of New Jersey, USA), A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), L. Strolger (Western Kentucky University, USA), T. G. Wiklind (Joint ALMA Observatory, ESO, Chile), P. Challis (Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), O. Graur (Tel-Aviv University, Israel; American Museum of Natural History, USA), B. Hayden (University of Notre Dame, USA), B. Patel (The State University of New Jersey, USA), B. J. Weiner (University of Arizona, USA), A. V. Filippenko (University of California, USA), P. Garnavich (University of Notre Dame, USA), S. W. Jha (The State University of New Jersey, USA), R. P. Kirshner (Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), S. M. Faber (University of California, USA), H. C. Ferguson (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), N. A. Grogin (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), and D. Kocevski (Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA). Links: Images of Hubble: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/category/spacecraft/, NASA press release: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/11/, CANDELS survey: http://candels.ucolick.org/, CLASH collaboration: http://www.stsci.edu/~postman/CLASH/, Research paper: http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1306.pdf, Images, Text, Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Riess, Z. Levay (STScI and JHU), and D. Jones and S. Rodney (JHU) / S. Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz), H. Ferguson (STScI), and the CANDELS team. Greetings, Orbiter.ch, Source: Orbiter.ch Space News

Read More........→April 07, 2013

Baffling Pulsar Leaves Astronomers in the Dark.

This illustration shows the two states of emission observed from pulsar PSR B0943+10, which is well known for switching between a 'bright' and 'quiet' mode at radio wavelengths. Observations of PSR B0943+10, performed simultaneously with ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory and ground-based radio telescopes, revealed that this source exhibits variations in its X-ray emission that mimic in reverse the changes seen in radio waves. No current model is able to predict what could cause such sudden and drastic changes to the pulsar's entire magnetosphere and result in such a curious emission. In the upper part of the illustration, the artist's impression on the left shows the pulsar with glowing cones of radiation stemming from its magnetic poles – a state referred to as 'radio-bright' mode. Radio emission from pulsars is known to arise from these cones, and we see it pulsate because the pulsar's rotation and magnetic axes are misaligned. The graphs on the right side show data from X-ray observations, performed with XMM-Newton (upper graph), and from radio observations, performed with the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR; lower graph). The upper graph shows that, in the 'radio-bright' mode, the pulsar does not shine brightly in X-rays. The lower graph shows a bright and pulsating emission at radio wavelengths. In the lower part of the illustration, the artist's impression on the left shows the pulsar in a different state, with glowing 'hot-spots' that are located at its magnetic poles. In particular, the illustration shows the pulsar in a state characterized by bright X-ray emission, arising from the polar caps, and relatively low radio emission from the cones that stem from the pulsar's magnetic poles ('X-ray-bright/radio-quiet' mode). The graphs on the right side show how, in this mode, the pulsar exhibits a brighter and pulsating X-ray emission, whereas the radio emission is fainter but still pulsating. Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab; ESA/XMM-Newton; ASTRON/LOFAR, Baffling Pulsar Leaves Astronomers in the Dark. Source: Minsex

Read More........→April 05, 2013

World’s largest space observatory opens in Chile

The ALMA space observatory was inaugurated here on a desert plateau some 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) above sea level, at a ceremony attended by President Sebastian Pinera and other dignitaries. “Here in this desert, the driest in the world, it is a great privilege to inaugurate the observatory,” Pinera said. Calling it “the world’s most powerful,” he said the observatory will make “a significant contribution to humanity, enable a better understanding of the universe in which we live, and perhaps assist us discover life beyond Earth.” “ALMA is a huge telescope 16 kilometers (10 miles) in diameter,” said the facility’s director Thijs de Graauw, as it was declared officially opened. Amid excited applause, 59 of the 66 antennas slowly began to rotate and point toward the interior of the universe. By October, all the antennas will be fully installed and operational. Gianni Marconi, an astronomer at the massive ground array of telescopes, recently proudly proclaimed to AFP that ALMA is “the largest observatory that has ever been built.” ALMA — short for the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array, an acronym which means “soul” in Spanish — is a joint effort among North American, European and Asian agencies. The observatory is located near Pedro de Atacama, a desert town popular with tourists. With almost no humidity or vegetation to block its view of the heavens, ALMA’s antennas range in diameter from seven meters (23 feet) to 12 meters (39 feet.) “There is virtually no water vapor, there is just so little that whatever light is emitted from a heavenly body, galaxy or star, it gets here with no interference” Marconi said. When scientists who homed in on this site for ALMA said they were looking for a place that had a high altitude, low humidity, sunny weather and fairly effortless logistical access. De Graauw told AFP recently that ALMA’s ultra-precise equipment would be used to seek answers to huge questions — star formation, the birth of planets and how the system was created after the Big Bang. Unlike optical or infrared telescopes, ALMA can capture the faint glow and gas present in the formation of the first stars, galaxies and planets in an extremely cold region of the universe. “It\'s a revolution in the history of the universe in the realm of millimetric and sub-millimetric waves, which can look through clouds of dust and focus on the formation of stars themselves,” De Graauw added. “Telescopes cannot see what is happening inside these clouds. With ALMA, we can. And that is like opening a new window. Source: Chillnews.net

Read More........→March 14, 2013