Super Massive Black Hole Radiation Emitted

Space continues to be a foundation of extraordinary new discoveries and the latest finding by a collection of astronomers is no exception. Astronomers discovered an “extragalactic afterburner” trailing over two million light years from the center of a far off galaxy, according to a statement from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. The astronomers contend that the jet of materials looks like to the afterburner flood of a fighter jet.

The astronomers letter that a closer assessment of the “extragalactic afterburner” shows regularly spaced areas that are brighter than the relax of the jet in a prototype that is like to the way that the afterburner starting a jet engine has brighter areas in its glow.

The New Earth-Planet Discovered Range of Astronomers

Another new Earth as like planet have been discovered, prompting the new question of whether the universe is beset with millions of planets similar to our own. Astronomers with the University of Hawaii have apparently discovered 5 planets just 12 light years away. According to astronomers, Tau Ceti the star just about which the planets track now tops the list of best probable places to search for alien life.

The star’s space places it just 3 times as far as our suns adjacent stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Its 5 planets are estimated to have masses between 2 and 6 times the mass of the Earth creation it the lowest-mass terrestrial system yet detected. 

The international group of astronomers, from the UK, Chile, the USA, and Australia, joint more than 6000 observations from 3 different instruments and intensively modeled the data. Using latest techniques, the team has established a method to detect signals half the size formerly thought possible.

Most Huge Black Hole Establish By Texas Telescope

Astronomers with a telescope in the Lone Star state have calculated what they believe is the most huge black hole yet recorded, The University of Texas at Austin (UT). The black crack, which lies at the middle of the galaxy NGC 1277, located some 220 million light-years from Earth, is so big it is tricky to comprehend: It is 17 billion solar masses, or 17 billion period the mass of our Sun, and makes up 14% of its comparatively small host galaxy’s entire mass.

Astronomers Of super-Jupiter World Solar System

In a rare direct image of a world past Earth, astronomers have marked a planet 13 times more huge than Jupiter, the largest main planet in our own solar system. The planet orbits a star called Kappa Andromeda that is 2.5 times the mass of the sun and is placed 170 light-years gone from Earth. As a gas huge better than Jupiter, it's top secret as a "super-Jupiter."

Astronomers declare the object's immense size spaces it right on the border of the classifications for giant planets and a type of unsuccessful star known as a brown dwarf. Michael McElwain, one of a member of the detection team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a Nov. 19 report. "But this isn't ultimate, and other considerations could push the object across the line into tan dwarf territory.

The Solar Fried Planets Atmosphere

An international team of astronomers has fixed a star in the work of devouring one of its planets. BD+48 740, a red giant they pragmatic using the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, appears to have the gas of a scorched planet in its atmosphere.  This is reliable with a rocky world, recently destroyed.

The great researchers who concentrate in stellar evolution have lengthy known that the inner planets are in danger.  The trouble starts in the isolated future when the sun's core runs out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion. To keep the fires flaming, the sun will begin to fuse hydrogen external the core, in a layer closer to the stellar surface. This will turn the sun into a red oversize, at least 200 times wider than it is today. Mercury, Venus, Earth and possibly even Mars might be engulfed. 

The fate of Earth is not a confidence, however. Some researchers believe that Earth's orbit might spiral outward, keeping the planet at a safe space from the future inferno.  This could happen if solar winds carry a path a major fraction of the sun's mass in the years most important up to the red giant phase. On the other hand, the sun might get bigger so fast that our planet has no chance to escape.  Earth would get trapped in the sun's rapidly advancing atmosphere and spiral innermost to oblivion.

Lasers From Keck telescopes Discover Quirky Star Close To Middle Of Milky Method

 The powerful Lasers from the twin Keck telescopes of the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea point to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where scientists have establish a second star orbiting a super massive black hole. Now a day’s Scientists using the Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea have originate a second star in a surprisingly fast orbit around the black hole at the middle of the Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery, published world today in the great journal Science, may help astronomers determine if Einstein was right in his fundamental calculation of how black holes warp space and time, said UCLA physicist Andrea Ghez, organizer of the discovery group.

The shining star, known as S0-102, orbits the black hole in 11.5 years, a virtual sprint that allows astronomers to study an entire orbit for perturbations that offer clues to the black hole’s structure. Let’s before this finding, astronomers knew of only 1 star near the black hole with a very short orbit: S0-2, which completes a circuit (CKT) in 16 years. Both are in the assemblage Sagittarius.

Revisiting the 'Pillars of Creation'

In 1995, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took an iconic image of the Eagle nebula, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation," highlighting its finger-like pillars where new stars are thought to be forming. Now, the Herschel Space Observatory has a new, expansive view of the region captured in longer-wavelength infrared light.The Herschel mission is led by the European Space Agency, with important NASA contributions.

The Eagle nebula is 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens. It contains a young, hot star cluster, NGC6611, visible with modest backyard telescopes, which is sculpting and illuminating the surrounding gas and dust. The result is a huge, hollowed-out cavity and pillars, each several light-years long.

The new Herschel image shows the pillars and the wide field of gas and dust around them. Captured in far-infrared wavelengths, the image allows astronomers to see inside the pillars and structures in the region. Herschel's image also makes it possible to search for young stars over a much wider region, and come to a much fuller understanding of the creative and destructive forces inside the Eagle nebula.

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars.

All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth, but orbit close to their star. That makes them too hot to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700 planets confirmed to orbit other stars -- called exoplanets -- only a handful are known to be rocky.

"Astronomers are just beginning to confirm thousands of planet candidates uncovered by Kepler so far," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington." Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all around us."

Herschel Finds Oceans of Water in Disk of Nearby Star

Using data from the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have detected for the first time cold water vapor enveloping a dusty disk around a young star. The findings suggest that this disk, which is poised to develop into a solar system, contains great quantities of water, suggesting that water-covered planets like Earth may be common in the universe. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions.

Scientists previously found warm water vapor in planet-forming disks close to a central star. Evidence for vast quantities of water extending out into the cooler, far reaches of disks where comets take shape had not been seen until now. The more water available in disks for icy comets to form, the greater the chances that large amounts eventually will reach new planets through impacts.

"Our observations of this cold vapor indicate enough water exists in the disk to fill thousands of Earth oceans," said astronomer Michiel Hogerheijde of Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands. Hogerheijde is the lead author of a paper describing these findings in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal Science.
 

Space Observatory Provides Clues to Creation of Earth's Oceans

Astronomers have found a new cosmic source for the same kind of water that appeared on Earth billions of years ago and created the oceans. The findings may help explain how Earth's surface ended up covered in water.

New measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory show that comet Hartley 2, which comes from the distant Kuiper Belt, contains water with the same chemical signature as Earth's oceans. This remote region of the solar system, some 30 to 50 times as far away as the distance between Earth and the sun, is home to icy, rocky bodies including Pluto, other dwarf planets and innumerable comets.

"Our results with Herschel suggest that comets could have played a major role in bringing vast amounts of water to an early Earth," said Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of a new paper in the journal Nature, published online today, Oct. 5. "This finding substantially expands the reservoir of Earth ocean-like water in the solar system to now include icy bodies originating in the Kuiper Belt.

NASA's Chandra Finds Nearest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.

The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.

"If this galaxy wasn't so close, we'd have no chance of separating the two black holes the way we have," said Pepi Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that appears in this week's online issue of the journal Nature. "Since this galaxy was right under our noses by cosmic standards, it makes us wonder how many of these black hole pairs we've been missing."

NASA'S Wise Mission Discovers Coolest Class of Stars

Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body.

Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground."

Researchers Detail How A Distant Black Hole Devoured A Star

Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.

"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."

Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event -- the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.

NASA's Chandra Observatory Images Gas Flowing Toward Black Hole

The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.

The black hole is at the center of a large galaxy known as NGC 3115, which is located about 32 million light years from Earth. A large amount of previous data has shown material falling toward and onto black holes, but none with this clear a signature of hot gas.

By imaging the hot gas at different distances from this supermassive black hole, astronomers have observed a critical threshold where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the black hole's gravity and falls inward. This distance from the black hole is known as the "Bondi radius."

NASA's Chandra Finds Massive Black Holes Common in Early Universe

Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for more than six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million to 950 million years old.

"Until now, we had no idea what the black holes in these early galaxies were doing, or if they even existed,” said Ezequiel Treister of the University of Hawaii, lead author of the study appearing in the June 16 issue of the journal Nature. “Now we know they are there, and they are growing like gangbusters."

WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. "Starting today thousands of new eyes will be looking at WISE data, and I expect many surprises," said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the mission's principal investigator. WISE launched into space on Dec. 14, 2009 on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light with greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessors. From its polar orbit, it scanned the skies about one-and-a-half times while collecting images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light. It took more than 2.7 million images over the course of its mission, capturing objects ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids relatively close to Earth.

Like other infrared telescopes, WISE required coolant to chill its heat-sensitive detectors. When this frozen hydrogen coolant ran out, as expected, in early October, 2010, two of its four infrared channels were still operational. The survey was then extended for four more months, with the goal of finishing its sweep for asteroids and comets in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. The mission's nearby discoveries included 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and 133 near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28 million miles of Earth's path around the sun. The satellite went into hibernation in early February of this year.

Today, WISE is taking the first major step in meeting its primary goal of delivering the mission's trove of objects to astronomers. Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012. A predecessor to WISE, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, served a similar role about 25 years ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise, the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades. "We are excited that the preliminary data contain millions of newfound objects," said Fengchuan Liu, the project manager for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "But the mission is not yet over the real treasure is the final catalog available a year from now, which will have twice as many sources, covering the entire sky and reaching even deeper into the universe than today's release."

SOHO Spots 2000th Comet

As people on Earth celebrate the holidays and prepare to ring in the New Year, an ESA/NASA spacecraft has quietly reached its own milestone: on December 26, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 2000th comet. Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world, SOHO has become the single greatest comet finder of all time. This is all the more impressive since SOHO was not specifically designed to find comets, but to monitor the sun. "Since it launched on December 2, 1995 to observe the sun, SOHO has more than doubled the number of comets for which orbits have been determined over the last three hundred years," says Joe Gurman, the U.S. project scientist for SOHO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Of course, it is not SOHO itself that discovers the comets that is the province of the dozens of amateur astronomer volunteers who daily pore over the fuzzy lights dancing across the pictures produced by SOHO's LASCO (or Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) cameras. Over 70 people representing 18 different countries have helped spot comets over the last 15 years by searching through the publicly available SOHO images online. The 1999th and 2000th comet were both discovered on December 26 by Michal Kusiak, an astronomy student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Kusiak found his first SOHO comet in November 2007 and has since found more than 100.

"There are a lot of people who do it," says Karl Battams who has been in charge of running the SOHO comet-sighting website since 2003 for the Naval Research Lab in Washington, where he also does computer processing for LASCO. "They do it for free, they're extremely thorough, and if it wasn't for these people, most of this stuff would never see the light of day." Battams receives reports from people who think that one of the spots in SOHO's LASCO images looks to be the correct size and brightness and headed for the sun characteristics typical of the comets SOHO finds. He confirms the finding, gives each comet an unofficial number, and then sends the information off to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass, which categorizes small astronomical bodies and their orbits.

Global Eruption Rocks the Sun

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity. "The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before." For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption."

They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of violence.

"To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," says Title, "we have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun." This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts. "The whole-sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO. "This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."