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Scientists unveil largest atlas of nuclear galactic rings

April 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 30 (ANI): The most complete atlas of nuclear rings, enormous star-forming ring-shaped regions that circle certain galactic nuclei, has been unveiled by an international team of astrophysicists.

The catalogue, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, includes 113 such rings in 107 galaxies.

“AINUR (the Atlas of Images of Nuclear Rings) is the most complete atlas of nuclear rings created to date”, Sébastien Comerón, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), and co-author of the joint study with other scientists from the universities of La Laguna, Oulu (Finland) and Alabama (United States), tells SINC.

The atlas has just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and covers 113 nuclear rings in 107 different galaxies. Six are dust rings in elliptical galaxies, while the rest (the majority) are star-forming rings in disc galaxies.

The nuclear rings are ring-shaped, star-forming configurations located around galactic nuclei. They range in size on average from between 500 to 3,000 light years, and they are very bright because they contain an abundance of young stars, including some extremely massive ones. This kind of star has a short lifetime but shines very brightly before exploding as a supernova.

To find the rings, the astrophysicists used images from around 500 galaxies observed by the Hubble space telescope, which belongs to NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as using other references. (ANI)

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Andromeda galaxy expanded by cannibalizing on stars from other galaxies

September 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 3 (ANI): A new research has shown that the vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by cannibalizing on stars from other galaxies.

According to a report by BBC News, when an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were “remnants of dwarf galaxies”.

This consumption of stars has been suggested previously, but the team’s ultra-deep survey has provided detailed images to show that it took place.

This shows the “hierarchical model” of galaxy formation in action.

The model predicts that large galaxies should be surrounded by relics of smaller galaxies they have consumed.

The scientists charted the outskirts of Andromeda in detail for the first time. They discovered stars that could not have formed within the galaxy itself.

Pauline Barmby, an astronomer from the University of Western Ontario told BBC News that the pattern of the stars’ orbits revealed their origin.

“Andromeda is so close that we can map out all the stars,” she said. “And when you see a sort of lump of stars that far out, and with the same orbit, you know they can’t have been there forever,” she added.

Andromeda, which is approximately 2.5 million light years away from Earth is still expanding, say the scientists.

The researchers also saw a “stream of stars” of a nearby galaxy called Triangulum “stretching” towards Andromeda.

According to Dr Scott Chapman, reader in astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, “Ultimately, these two galaxies may end up merging completely. Ironically, galaxy formation and galaxy destruction seem to go hand in hand.”

Nickolay Gnedin, an astrophysicist from the University of Chicago, described the work as showing “galactic archaeology in action”. (ANI)

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ISRO Jobs – ISRO ISCA Jobs – Scientist vacancy in ISRO ISCA – Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) – ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC)

August 14, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

ISRO Jobs | ISRO ISCA Jobs | Scientist vacancy in ISRO ISCA | Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) | ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC)

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Earliest stars in Universe may have been twins

July 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 10 (ANI): Astrophysicists, using extremely detailed computer simulations, have determined that the earliest stars in the universe formed not only as individuals, but sometimes also as twins.

The robust simulations of the early universe were created by astrophysicists Matthew Turk and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and Brian O’Shea of Michigan State University.

“We used to think that these stars formed by themselves, but now we see from our computer simulations that sometimes they have siblings,” said Turk.

“These stars provide the seeds of next generation star formation, so by understanding them we can better understand how other stars and galaxies formed,” he added.

To make this discovery, the researchers created an extremely detailed computer simulation of early star formation.

Into this virtual universe, they sprinkled primordial gas and dark matter as it existed soon after the Big Bang, data they obtained from observations of the cosmic microwave background.

This mostly uniform radiation – a faint glow of radio waves spread across the entire sky – contains subtle variations that reflect the beginning of all structure in the universe.

The simulations focused on the first Population III stars: massive, hot stars thought to have formed a mere several hundred million years after the Big Bang.

As the researchers watched their simulated universe evolve, waves of gas and dark matter swirled through the hot, dense universe.

As the universe cooled, gravity began to draw the matter together into clumps. In areas rich with matter, stars began to form.

In one out of the researchers’ five simulations, a single cloud of dust and dark matter formed into “twin” stars: one with a mass equivalent to about 10 suns, and one with a mass equivalent to about 6.3 suns.

Both of them were still growing at the end of the calculation and will likely grow to many times that mass.

“We ran five of these calculations starting from the beginning of the universe, and to our surprise one of them was special,” said Abel.

“This opens a whole new realm of research possibilities. These stars could evolve into two black holes, which could have created gravitational waves we could detect with an instrument like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory,” he added.

“This will help us fine-tune our models for how structure in the universe formed and evolved. Understanding the very early stars helps us understand what we see today,” Turk said. (ANI)

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Milky Way’s “dark matter” mystery solved by astrophysicists

July 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 9 (ANI): A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable “dark matter” believed to make up much of the mass of the universe.

In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way “antimatter positrons” from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

Thus, the scientists said, the observed distribution of gamma rays is not evidence for dark matter.

“There is no great mystery,” said Richard Lingenfelter, a research scientist at UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who conducted the studies with Richard Rothschild, a research scientist also at UCSD, and James Higdon, a physics professor at the Claremont Colleges.

“The observed distribution of gamma rays is in fact quite consistent with the standard picture,” he added.

Over the past five years, gamma ray measurements from the European satellite INTEGRAL have perplexed astronomers, leading some to argue that a “great mystery” existed because the distribution of these gamma rays across different parts of the Milky Way galaxy was not as expected.

To explain the source of this mystery, some astronomers had hypothesized the existence of various forms of dark matter, which astronomers suspect exists, but have not yet found.

What is known for certain is that our galaxy and others are filled with tiny subatomic particles known as positrons, the antimatter counterpart of typical, everyday electrons.

The scientists calculated that most of the gamma rays should be concentrated in the inner regions of the galaxy, just as was observed by the satellite data.

“The observed distribution of gamma rays is consistent with the standard picture where the source of positrons is the radioactive decay of isotopes of nickel, titanium and aluminum produced in supernova explosions of stars more massive than the Sun,” said Rothschild.

The scientists point out that a basic assumption of one of the more exotic explanations for the purported mystery – dark matter decays or annihilations – is flawed, because it assumes that the positrons annihilate very close to the exploding stars from which they originated.

“We clearly demonstrated this was not the case, and that the distribution of the gamma rays observed by the gamma ray satellite was not a detection or indication of a ‘dark matter signal’,” said Lingenfelter. (ANI)

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Astronomers obtain first detection of magnetic field on bright star Vega

June 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Paris, June 24 (ANI): Astronomers, using the NARVAL spectropolarimeter of the Bernard-Lyot telescope in France, have obtained the first detection of a magnetic field on the bright star Vega.

According to an article in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomers clearly observe the magnetically-induced effect in the spectrum of Vega, thereby showing that the star possesses a magnetic field, something unknown so far.

Using the high-sensitivity NARVAL spectropolarimeter installed at the Bernard-Lyot telescope at the Pic du Midi Observatory in France, a team of astronomers detected the effect of a magnetic field (known as the Zeeman effect) in the light emitted by Vega.

Vega is a famous star among amateur and professional astronomers. Located at only 25 light years from Earth in the Lyra constellation, it is the fifth brightest star in the sky. It has been used as a reference star for brightness comparisons.

Vega is twice as massive as the Sun and has only one-tenth its age.

Because it is both bright and nearby, Vega has been often studied but it is still revealing new aspects when it is observed with more powerful instruments.

Vega rotates in less than a day, while the Sun’s rotation period is 27 days.

The intense centrifugal force induced by this rapid rotation flattens its poles and generates temperature variations of more than 1000 degrees Celsius between the polar (warmer) and the equatorial regions of its surface.

Astronomers analyzed the polarization of light emitted by Vega and detected a weak magnetic field at its surface.

This is really not a big surprise because one knows that the charged particle motions inside stars can generate magnetic fields, and this is how solar and terrestrial magnetic fields are produced.

However, for more massive stars than the Sun, such as Vega, theoretical models cannot predict the intensity and the structure of the magnetic field, so that astronomers had no clue to the strength of the signal they were looking for.

After many unsuccessful attempts in past decades, both the high sensitivity of NARVAL and the full dedication of an observing campaign to Vega have made this first detection possible.

he strength of Vega magnetic field is about 50 micro-tesla, which is close to that of the mean field on Earth and on the Sun.

This first observational constraint opens the way to in-depth theoretical studies about the origin of magnetic fields in massive stars.

Astronomers believe that this discovery will be a key step in understanding stellar magnetic fields and their influence on stellar evolution. (ANI)

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Probe to look out for gravity waves emitted 14 billion years ago

May 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 16 (ANI): A new probe is going to look for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang, that may still carry a faint signature of gravitational waves, which rippled through the very fabric of space-time nearly 14 billion years ago.

A tiny fraction of a second following the Big Bang, the universe allegedly experienced the most inflationary period it has ever known.

“During this inflationary era, space expanded faster than the speed of light. It sounds crazy, but it fits a variety of cosmological observations made in recent years,” said University of Chicago physicist Bruce Winstein.

“Theorists take it to be true, but we have to prove it,” said Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. “It needs a real test, and that test is whether or not gravity waves were created,” he added.

“The CMB is probably our best handle on the overall structure of the universe and how it was born,” he further added.

Winstein and his Chicago associates are part of the international QUIET (Q/U Imaging ExperimenT; the Q and U stand for radiation parameters called Stokes parameters) collaboration that has devised such a test.

QUIET’s goal is to detect remnants of the radiation emitted at the earliest moments of the universe, when gravity waves rippled through the very fabric of space-time itself.

The intensive gravitational fields that existed at these earliest moments, according to Einstein, produced gravity waves that alternatively compressed and expanded space, first in one direction, then another.

The QUIET experiment began operating last October with an antenna array that contains 19 detectors.

Since then, QUIET collaborators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have produced 91 detectors sensitive to the radiation at a higher frequency.

Over the past several months, the Chicago collaboration has assembled and calibrated these 91 detectors in the basement of the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Winstein’s team has tested each detector, adjusting 10 critical voltages for each to yield the best performance.

According to Winstein, correctly optimized voltages can improve detector performance by a large factor, making it possible to observe in one day what would have otherwise required a week.

This newer, more sensitive array will begin operating in June. (ANI)

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Planck satellite all set to measure the Big Bang

May 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Berlin, May 13 (ANI): Together with ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Space Telescope Herschel, Planck is all set to go into orbit on May 14, to begin its studies of the cosmic microwave radiation and of the clues it gives about the Big Bang, the earliest phases of the cosmic history, and the structure and composition of the Universe. ccording to the standard model of cosmology, our Universe began 13.7 billions years ago in a Big Bang, the origin of Space and Time.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the relic heat from this Big Bang, released 380,000 years after beginning and still traveling freely through space today.

At that early time, weak fluctuations of matter density were present, which are seen as variations of temperature in the CMB.

By observing these fluctuations, cosmologists can infer how the large-scale structure of today’s Universe – galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments – were formed.

The Planck satellite will be placed at the second Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth-Moon system (L2), located about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth – four times the distance to the Moon.

It will spin around its own axis, which will always point towards the Sun, with each rotation recording another strip of the sky and mapping its temperature to an accuracy of about one million of a degree.

The data are sent to Earth and turned into temperature maps of the sky in data processing centers in France and Italy.

What the maps look like depends on certain characteristics of the Universe, for example on the curvature of space.

For hypothetic Universes with specified properties, computer simulations using the MPA software generate virtual maps, which will be compared with maps of the real sky.

“From the comparison, we can draw conclusions about the structure of our own Universe, for example how much ordinary matter and dark energy exist in it,” explained Torsten Ensslin, head of the Planck group at MPA (The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics).

From their computer simulations, MPA cosmologists have shown how the CMB has influenced the gravitational field of dark matter.

The unseen structures of dark matter can therefore be deduced from temperature variations in the CMB.

The mission is expected to detect thousands of distant objects in a frequency range barely studied so far, and so to offer new insights into the physics of galaxies, Active Galactic Nuclei and quasars in the submillimeter domain.

These will show Planck scientists energetic processes in the immediate vicinity of massive black holes.

Planck may also help us to understand the birth of the first stars in the Universe and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. (ANI)

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‘Astro-comb’ to hunt for Earth-like planets

May 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 8 (ANI): Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created an “astro-comb” to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant stars.

In most cases, extrasolar planets can’t be seen directly-the glare of the nearby star is too great-but their influence can be discerned through spectroscopy, which analyzes the energy spectrum of the light coming from the star.

Not only does spectroscopy reveal the identity of the atoms in the star (each element emits light at a certain characteristic frequency), it can also tell researchers how fast the star is moving away or toward Earth, courtesy of the Doppler effect, which occurs whenever a source of waves is itself in motion.

By recording the change in the frequency of the waves coming from or bouncing off of an object, scientists can deduce the velocity of the object.

Though the planet might weigh millions of times less than the star, the star will be jerked around a tiny amount owing to the gravity interaction between star and planet.

This jerking motion causes the star to move toward or away from Earth slightly in a way that depends on the planet’s mass and its nearness to the star.

The better the spectroscopy used in this whole process, the better will be the identification of the planet in the first place and the better will be the determination of planetary properties.

In tests, the Harvard researchers are now able to calculate star velocity shifts of less than 1 m/sec, allowing them to more accurately pinpoint the planet’s location.

Smithsonian researcher David Phillips says that he and his colleagues expect to reach a velocity resolution of 60 cm/sec, and maybe even 1 cm/sec, which when applied to the activities of large telescopes presently under construction, would open new possibilities in astronomy and astrophysics, including simpler detection of more Earth-like planets.

With this new approach, Harvard astronomers achieve their great improvement using a frequency comb as the basis for the astro-comb.

A special laser system is used to emit light not at a single energy but a series of energies (or frequencies), evenly spaced across a wide range of values.

A plot of these narrowly-confined energy components would look like the teeth of a comb, hence the name frequency comb.

The energy of these comb-like laser pulses is known so well that they can be used to calibrate the energy of light coming in from the distant star.

The resultant astro-comb should enable a further expansion of extrasolar planetary detection. (ANI)

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Astronomers spot most distant object in the Universe

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, April 28 (ANI): Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe, which is a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth.

According to a report in New Scientist, it detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic “dark ages”, when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.

The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the brightest type of stellar explosion.

GRBs occur when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out jets of gas at nearly the speed of light.

These jets send gamma rays our way, along with “afterglows” at other wavelengths, which are produced when the jet heats up surrounding gas.

The burst, dubbed GRB 090423 for the date of its discovery on April 23, was originally spotted by NASA’s Swift satellite at 0755 GMT.

Within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst’s infrared afterglow.

Some of the first observations were made on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Gemini North telescope.

Other telescopes later measured the spectrum of the afterglow, revealing that the burst detonated about 13.1 billion light years from Earth.

“It’s the most distance gamma-ray burst, but it’s also the most distant object in the universe overall,” said Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a member of the team that observed the afterglow with Gemini North.

This burst lies at a redshift of 8.2, more distant than the previous GRB record holder, which lay at a redshift of 6.7.

Other astronomers have claimed to find galaxies at even greater distances – at redshifts of 10 and 9, but those findings are still ambiguous, according to Joshua Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, who observed the afterglow using the Gemini South telescope in Chile.

Until now, the record holder for the farthest galaxy had a spectroscopically confirmed redshift of 6.96.

The burst’s immense distance makes the now-dead star the earliest object to be discovered from an era called ‘reionisation’, which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang.

At that time, an obscuring fog of neutral hydrogen atoms was being burned off by radiation from the first stars and galaxies, and possibly also from the annihilation of dark matter particles.

“For astronomy, this is a watershed event,” Bloom told New Scientist. “This is the beginning of the study of the universe as it was before most of the structure that we know about today came into being,” he added. (ANI)

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Half of Universe’s starlight comes from young star-forming galaxies

April 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 9 (ANI): Using a two-tonne telescope, scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have found that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away.

The finding was a result of a two-year analysis of data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project.

“While those familiar optical images of the night sky contain many fascinating and beautiful objects, they are missing half of the picture in describing the cosmic history of star formation,” said UBC Astronomy Professor Douglas Scott.

“Stars are born in clouds of gas and dust,” said Barth Netterfield, a cosmologist in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U of T.

“The dust absorbs the starlight, hiding the young stars from view. The brightest stars in the Universe are also the shortest lived and many never leave their stellar nursery. However, the warmed dust emits light at far-infrared and submillimetre wavelengths – invisible to the human eye, but visible to the sensitive thermo-detectors on BLAST,” he added.

According to UBC Professor Mark Halpern, part of the UBC team that also includes post-doctoral fellows Ed Chapin and Gaelen Marsden, “The history of star formation in the universe is written out in our data. It is beautiful. And it is just a taste of things to come.”

The study combines BLAST submillimetre observations at wavelengths around 0.3 mm – between infrared and microwave wavelengths – with data at much shorter infrared wavelengths from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

It confirmed that all of the Far Infrared Background comes from individual distant galaxies, answering a decade-old question of the radiation’s origin.

“BLAST has given us a new view of the Universe,” said Netterfield, whose U of T colleagues on the project include department chair Peter G. Martin and graduate students Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe (now a post-doc at UBC) and Enzo Pascale (now a faculty member at Cardiff University).

“The data we collected enable us to make discoveries in topics ranging from the formation of stars to the evolution of distant galaxies,” he added. (ANI)

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Indian scientists find three new bacteria in stratosphere

March 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Bangalore, Mar 17 (ANI): Indian scientists have discovered three new species of bacteria, which are not found on earth and highly resistant to ultra violet radiation.

These new micro-organisms were found in the upper stratosphere.

The species have been named as Janibacter Hoylei, Bacillus Isronensis and Bacillus Aryabhata respectively.

According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), a balloon experiment was conducted using 26.7 million cubic feet balloon carrying a 459 kilograms scientific payload soaked in 38 kilograms of liquid neon.

The payload consisted of a cryosampler containing 16 evacuated and sterilised stainless steel probes.

Throughout the flight, the probes remained immersed in the liquid neon to create a “cryopump effect”. These cylinders after collecting air samples from different heights ranging from 20 to 41 kilometres were parachuted down and safely retrieved.

In all, 12 bacterial and six fungal colonies were detected, nine of which, based on 16S RNA gene sequence, showed greater than 98 percent similarity with reported known species on earth.

All the three newly identified species had significantly higher Ultra Violet resistance compared to their nearest phylogenetic neighbours.

This multi-institutional effort had Jayant Narlikar from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune as Principal Investigator and veteran Scientists U. R. Rao from ISRO and P. M. Bhargava from Anveshna supported as mentors of the experiment.

S. Shivaji from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), and Yogesh Shouche from National Centre For Cell Science (NCCS) were the biology experts and Ravi Manchanda from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was in charge of the balloon facility.

C.B.S. Dutt was the Project Director from ISRO who was in charge of preparing and operating the complex payload.

The balloon was flown from the national balloon facility in Hyderabad.

It was operated by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

The samples were analysed by the scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, as well as the National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, for independent examination.

This was the second such experiment conducted by ISRO, the first one being in 2001. Even though the first experiment had yielded positive results, it was decided to repeat the experiment by exercising extra care to ensure that it was totally free from any terrestrial contamination. (ANI)

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Intergalactic dust detected by analysis of quasars’ colors

February 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 27 (ANI): A team of astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have detected intergalactic dust by analyzing the colors of distant quasars whose light passes in the vicinity of foreground galaxies on its way to the Earth.

“Galaxies contain lots of dust, most of it formed in the outer regions of dying stars,” said team leader Brice Menard of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.

“The surprise is that we are seeing dust hundreds of thousands of light-years outside of the galaxies, in intergalactic space,” he added.

Dust grains block blue light more effectively than red light, according to astronomer Ryan Scranton of the University of California, Davis, another member of the discovery team.

“We see this when the sun sets: light rays pass through a thicker layer of the atmosphere, absorbing more and more blue light, causing the sun to appear reddened,” he said.

“We find similar reddening of quasars from intergalactic dust, and this reddening extends up to ten times beyond the apparent edges of the galaxies themselves,” he added.

The team analyzed the colors of about 100,000 distant quasars located behind 20 million galaxies, using images from SDSS-II.

“Putting together and analyzing this huge dataset required cutting-edge ideas from computer science and statistics,” said team member Gordon Richards of Drexel University.

“Averaging over so many objects allowed us to measure an effect that is much too small to see in any individual quasar,” he added.

Supernova explosions and “winds” from massive stars drive gas out of some galaxies, Menard explained, and this gas may carry dust with it. Alternatively, the dust may be pushed directly by starlight.

“Our findings now provide a reference point for theoretical studies,” said Menard.

Intergalactic dust could also affect planned cosmological experiments that use supernovae to investigate the nature of “dark energy,” a mysterious cosmic component responsible for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

“Just like household dust, cosmic dust can be a nuisance,” said Scranton. “Our results imply that most distant supernovae are seen through a bit of haze, which may affect estimates of their distances,” he added. (ANI)

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NASA spacecraft all set to search for Earth-like worlds

February 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 20 (ANI): NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is all set to be moved to the launch pad and will soon begin a journey to search for worlds that could potentially host life.

Kepler is scheduled to blast into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, aboard a Delta II rocket on March 5.

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth – rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface.

Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

“Kepler is a critical component in NASA’s broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present,” said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars,” he added.

The mission will spend three-and-a-half years surveying more than 100,000 sun-like stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

It is expected to find hundreds of planets the size of Earth and larger at various distances from their stars.

If Earth-size planets are common in the habitable zone, Kepler could find dozens; if those planets are rare, Kepler might find none.

In the end, the mission will be humanity’s first step toward answering a question posed by the ancient Greeks: are there other worlds like ours or are we alone?

“Finding that most stars have Earths implies that the conditions that support the development of life could be common throughout our galaxy,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, alifornia.

“Finding few or no Earths indicates that we might be alone,” he added.

The Kepler telescope is specially designed to detect the periodic dimming of stars that planets cause as they pass by. Some star systems are oriented in such a way that their planets cross in front of their stars, as seen from our Earthly point of view.

As the planets pass by, they cause their stars’ light to slightly dim, or wink.

The telescope can detect even the faintest of these winks, registering changes in brightness of only 20 parts per million.

To achieve this resolution, Kepler will use the largest camera ever launched into space, a 95-megapixel array of charged couple devices, known as CCDs. (ANI)

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2 billion yr old galactic impact has left Milky Way ringing

February 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Canberra, Feb 19 (ANI): In a new research, an international team of astronomers has explained that a small galaxy colliding with our own almost two billion years ago has caused the Milky Way to vibrate, or ‘ring’, that is still being felt.

“Astronomers have known for almost a decade that the Milky Way is ringing,” researcher Professor Ken Freeman of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, told ABC News.

They have suspected the ringing was caused by a bar-like structure in the centre of the galaxy.

“In the centre of our galaxy is a bar-like structure that is quite massive,” said Freeman. “Because it’s not round, its gravitational field is not round, so you get a certain kind of resonance between the bar and the stars that are moving,” he added.

But, Freeman and colleagues have now shown, through mathematical modeling, that a major cause of the galactic ringing was a collision by a small galaxy that occurred 1.9 billion years ago.

“Like a stone dropping into a pond, the collision resulted in vibrations that set up a resonance in the Milky Way and caused stars to group into clusters,” said Freeman.

Freeman said that clusters of stars can occur during star formation. They also can form when a small galaxy is sucked into our own, broken up into pieces and its debris spread around.

He said it is important to “weed out” the clusters that form as a result of the ringing, in order to determine the formation of the Milky Way.

“It’s pretty important to work out which one of these is which, if we want to try and trace what has happened in the galaxy over the years,” said Freeman.

The new model shows a series of dense star streams, which are similar to the distribution of stars observed in our solar neighbourhood.

According to Freeman, the model allowed him and his colleagues to turn back the clock and determine when the galaxy that helped set off the ringing collided with the Milky Way.

He says that although it is difficult to determine the exact size of the smaller galaxy, he estimates that it would have been one-hundredth the size of the Milky Way.

Freeman is eager to collect more data to further test the model and is awaiting the launch of a European satellite named Gaia, which is scheduled to launch in 2015, which is expected to produce a massive increase in data. (ANI)

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Astronomers find “Super-Neptune”

January 22, 2009 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 22 (ANI): Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptune orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth, which they have termed as “Super-Neptune”.

While Neptune has a diameter 3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the new world (named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earth masses.

HAT-P-11b was discovered because it passes directly in front of (transits) its parent star, thereby blocking about 0.4 percent of the star’s light.

This periodic dimming was detected by a network of small, automated telescopes known as “HATNet,” which is operated by the Center in Arizona and Hawaii.

HAT-P-11b is the 11th extrasolar planet found by HATNet, and the smallest yet discovered by any of the several transit search projects underway around the world.

Transit detections are particularly useful because the amount of dimming tells the astronomers how big the planet must be.

By combining transit data with measurements of the star’s “wobble” (radial velocity) made by large telescopes like Keck, astronomers can determine the mass of the planet.

A number of Neptune-like planets have been found recently by radial velocity searches, but HAT-P-11b is only the second Neptune-like planet found to transit its star, thus permitting the precise determination of its mass and radius.

The newfound world orbits very close to its star, revolving once every 4.88 days. As a result, it is baked to a temperature of around 1100 degrees F.

The star itself is about three-fourths the size of our Sun and somewhat cooler.

There are signs of a second planet in the HAT-P-11 system, but more radial velocity data are needed to confirm that and determine its properties.

Another team has located one other transiting super-Neptune, known as GJ436b, around a different star. It was discovered by a radial velocity search and later found to have transits.

According to Harvard astronomer Gaspar Bakos, who led the discovery team, “Having two such objects to compare helps astronomers to test theories of planetary structure and formation.”

HAT-P-11 is in the constellation Cygnus, which puts in it the field of view of NASA’s upcoming Kepler spacecraft.

Kepler will search for extrasolar planets using the same transit technique pioneered by ground-based telescopes.

This mission potentially could detect the first Earth-like world orbiting a distant star. (ANI)

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Black holes not guilty of shutting down star formation

January 22, 2009 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 22 (ANI): A team of astronomers from Yale University has found evidence that indicates black holes are not responsible for shutting down star formation.

They discovered that galaxies stop forming stars long before their central supermassive black holes reach their most powerful stage.

Until recently, astronomers believed that active galactic nuclei (AGN), the supermassive, extremely energetic black holes at the centers of many young galaxies, were responsible for shutting down star formation in their host galaxies once they grew large enough.

It was thought that AGN feed on the surrounding galactic material, producing enormous amounts of energy (expelled in the form of light) and heat the surrounding material so that it can no longer cool and condense into stars.

But, new research shows that this shutting-down process appears to take place much earlier in the AGN’s lifetime, well before it starts shining brightly.

“This high-luminosity phase, when the AGN are at their biggest and brightest and most powerful, is not the phase responsible for the shutdown of star formation,” said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate in Yale’s astronomy department and lead author of the study.

The researchers analyzed images of 177 galaxies taken by two different space telescopes to create a comprehensive view of galaxies with AGN, including ones where the AGN were both obscured by the galaxy’s dust and gas, and ones where there was an unobstructed view of the AGN from the Earth’s vantage point.

Until now, some astronomers believed they can’t see AGN in any galaxies that are still actively forming stars simply because the light from the AGN is obscured by the galaxy’s gas and dust.

Schawinski and his team are the first to show that in fact there are no bright AGN at the centers of star-forming galaxies.

By subtracting out the light from the AGN, the team discovered that all of the galaxies with bright AGN had stopped forming stars several hundred million years earlier.

“The key result is the finding that there is a lack of AGN in galaxies that are currently forming stars,” said Meg Urry, head of the Yale team and director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. “That tells us the AGN doesn’t turn on until long after the stars stop forming,” Urry added.

As for the real culprit, responsible for shutting down star formation, “it’s possible that an earlier, low-luminosity phase is responsible,” said Schawinski.

“Either way, this result shows that our previous understanding of how the shutting-down process works wasn’t as simple as we thought,” he added. (ANI)

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Baby Jupiter grew up really fast, thanks to a big growth spurt

January 6, 2009 By Rajiv Gupta Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 6 (ANI): A new study of planet formation around young stars has revealed that the planet Jupiter may have gained weight in a hurry during its infancy, since the material from which it formed probably disappeared in just a few million years.

For the study, Smithsonian astronomers examined the 5 million-year-old star cluster NGC 2362 with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which can detect the signatures of actively forming planets in infrared light.

They found that all stars with the mass of the Sun or greater have lost their protoplanetary (planet-forming) disks. Only a few stars less massive than the Sun retain their protoplanetary disks.

These disks provide the raw material for forming gas giants like Jupiter. Therefore, gas giants have to form in less than 5 million years or they probably won’t form at all.

“Even though astronomers have detected hundreds of Jupiter-mass planets around other stars, our results suggest that such planets must form extremely fast. Whatever process is responsible for forming Jupiters has to be incredibly efficient,” said lead researcher Thayne Currie of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Even though nearly all gas giant-forming disks in NGC 2362 have disappeared, several stars in the cluster have “debris disks,” which indicates that smaller rocky or icy bodies such as Earth, Mars, or Pluto may still be forming.

“The Earth got going sooner, but Jupiter finished first, thanks to a big growth spurt,” explained co-author Scott Kenyon.

Kenyon added that while Earth took about 20 to 30 million years to reach its final mass, Jupiter was fully grown in only 2 to 3 million years.

Previous studies indicated that protoplanetary disks disappear within 10 million years.

The new findings put even tighter constraints on the time available to create gas giant planets around stars of various masses. (ANI)

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