Supernova May Indeed be the Stuff Planets Are Made of......

An international group of scientists, using data obtained from NASA's SOFIA, an infrared observatory, have concluded that  supernova do indeed output enough material for planetary formation.

The groups observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago. The cloud contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths.  

The researchers had evidence that a supernova’s outward-moving shock wave can produce huge amounts of dust. The question was - would the dust continue to spread, after encountering the interstellar medium - or be pushed back into the relative vicinity of the supernova. 

The team found that The dust survived the initial shock waves from the supernova event and continued "flowing into the interstellar medium where it can become part of the ...  material for new stars and planets..."

Check out the complete NASA article HERE

Hubble Being Used to Study Star Formation Using the Ultraviolet Ultra Deep Field Study.

Hey, check out this pic.  As nice as it looks just looking at it, becomes amazing when you know just what it is.   First off, there is no doubt about it being a Hubble shot.  Or that it is an extremely narrow shot.  But the Caltech in Pasadena astronomers who took the photo used one of Hubble's greatest abilities of being able to see very deep into the universe.  This shot covers less real-estate than a full moon but peers back into the universe to within just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

As noteworthy as the photo is, it is ground breaking for another reason.  For most of its operational life, Hubble has explored the visible and near infra-red spectrum.  Recently astronomer   Harry Teplitz has had Hubble look deep into space using using its ability to photograph in the ultraviolet wavelengths.   From the article:

• "Ultraviolet is where we see the hottest light from the youngest stars," said Teplitz, who led a new study called "Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field." "It is a direct measure of star formation."

The ability to photograph in the  ultraviolet means that now scientists will be able to study star formation  from 5 to 10 billion years ago when the bulk of star formation to place. 

  You can see a much better detailed pic at the LA Science Now page HERE as well as read the complete article.

Mystery Signal From the Past

Astronomers using the 210 foot CSIRO Parks radio telescope located in Australia have detected a radio source from 10 billion light years away!

The drama, though, started in 2007 when astronomers were studying a whole sky survey from 2001.  What immediately stood out was an incredibly powerful and extremely short, about 5 millisecond, a curiously short duration, one that was never again, until seven years to the day.

As odd as this sounds, there's more.  The first time it was recorded, the burst was so short it was somewhat doubtful that it had really happened at all.  So when the bursts started again after more than half a decade, astronomers were anxious to study the data.  However their results didn't seem to make sense.  

First, the events seem to come from an unbelievable distance, well outside the Milkyway.  Being as bright as the events were, and the distance involved, they had to be something cataclysmic.  Something along the line of  neutron stars merging or black holes, a dying magnetar, or a black hole feasting on a star, the bursts coming from huge amounts of stellar material dropping through the event horizon.  One thing is clear however.  These bursts came from so far away that when they started the universe was only half as old as it's present age, or 6 to 9 billion years old.

The implications are numerous but it may be very likely that they shed some light on the Universe's missing matter.

One thing however seems to be apparent, the initial "quiet" time between bursts.  It seems that bursts like these should be happening every 10 seconds if the sky could be observed completely by large radio telescopes.

Article in Space Reporter

Nebula May be an Indicator of Galaxy's Newest Black Hole

W49B, shown in this photo is the remnants of the end of a super-massive star's life.  This super-nova took place about 26,000 LY away, as seen from Earth the explosion took place, according to the Wired article, the object is only about 1000 years old. 

(Ok, other than 1000 years old and possibly one of the youngest in the galaxy, something about that statement caught me strange. the Wired article  was worded just as I entered it.  2600 lys away and a 1000 years old.  Do you see yet what has me going....ahhhhh what???  Let me explain...and where does my logic fall down?  Light travels at light speed, for the most part right?  When the super-nova blew, light traveled from it to us.  Said star is 26000 LY, we are not  interested so much in distance but in time 26,000 years time to be exact.  So how can something that blew 26,000 years ago be anything but 26,000 years old? )

Oddities in age not withstanding, W49B is still an odd creature.  Looking at it's shape it is evident that the collapse and release of matter was not uniform.  You can see from the picture that instead of a uniform globe, the super-nova left huge spikes at what may have been it's poles.  

Also, data gathered from the Chandra X-Ray telescope:

• only half of it showed concentrations of iron while sulfur and silicon were spread evenly throughout. This type of explosion, known as a bipolar supernova, has never been seen before in the galaxy.

Chandra can also look "inside" of the nebula cloud:

• Intermediate-mass stars will give rise to neutron stars — heavy, compact objects that emit copious amounts of X-rays or radio pulses.  Since these signals are not present, scientists suggest that the star was massive enough to continue the collapse all the way to a black hole.

Read the complete Wired article here

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Extra-Solar Planet

Astronomers have confirmed that the extra-solar planet called Fomalhaut b is indeed exist!

When it was first observed, Fomalhaut b, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, caused a great deal of controversy. The first pictures taken of the planet could not be reproduced because of a broken module on the Hubble. Second, the orbit was so oblique that there were questions as to it being a proper planet, leading astronomers to label it a "rogue" planet.

On of the things that makes Fomalhaut b worthy of interest it was one of the first directly imaged extrasolar planets ever seen.

After it's discovery in 2004 it was not seen again until 2010, with a new instrument, by 2012 several other telescopes had managed to photograph Fomalhaut b and finally in 2013 the original team again photographed the planet in the star's huge debris ring.

The reason that the planet was so difficult to find was it;s hugely oblique orbit, anywhere from 40 A.U. to a staggering 350 A.U.s. acting much more like a comet from our own solar system’s outer Kuiper belt. Check out the picture above and the demonstration below.

A Black Hole How Big?!

Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole on record.  Located in the center of the NGC 1277 galaxy about 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, lays a monster 17 billion times the mass of our sun with an event horizon ten times the size of our solar system!  By comparison, the Milky Way's center singularity is about four million solar masses.

Most super massive black holes at the center of galaxies make up roughly .1 percent of their host galaxy mass.  But NGC 1277 accounts for a staggering 14% of it host's mass!  Now that one ultra massive black hole has been uncovered, it would seem they are not as uncommon as previously thought.  The astronomy team at the Planck Institute for Astronomy have found five more galaxies with similar characteristics.  Plus they may have discovered (confirmation is still pending) a black hole that could be as large as 30 billion solar masses eight months ago.

One thing is really clear with the discovery however.  The discovery of these ultra-massive black holes will have to lead to a rethink of the dynamics behind the formation of galaxies.

Thanks to Dan for the heads up.

complete Register article

Tatooine May Exsist?!

Oh you Star Wars fans are going to love this one! Remember in the earlier part of the first Star Wars movie when Luke looks up into the glare of the dual suns on Tatooine? Well it seems that the Kepler space telescope has pulled another rabbit out of the hat by finding a planetary system that for all world reminds on of planet Tatooine.

Dan pointed me towards this article that details the very strange planetary system of Kepler 47. For it seems that this system of planets orbits not one but two suns!  Plus the Kepler 47 suns  are themselves orbiting each other and do so in as little a 7.5 days!  The two planets (kepler 47b & 47c) are themselves in varying degrees of odd.  47b orbits the pair of stars in less than 50 days where 47c orbits the pair every 303 days. This would put the planet in the "habitable zone," where life could possibly exist because of liquid water.

NASA announced that Kepler-47 is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. This discovery seems to prove that planets can for in the highly unstable space around a binary star system. Plus it goes further to show that once these planets form, they can "persist" in the system for very long periods.

Astronomers found two planets in the Kepler 47 system that orbit two stars

Of course if you were standing on the surface of the "Tatooine" planet, the stars would not look very much like those out of Star Wars. One star is about the size of our sun but is only about 85% as bright. The other is very small, in the range of 1/3 the size of Sol and putting out only 1% as much energy.

Astronomers were quick to point out that two or more stars in a system are not unusual. The question to this point was, could a planet form in such an unstable system. Now they know that they can and do form.

NASA Kepler 47 article here

artwork NASA

Black Hole Observed Destroying Star

A team of astronomers at John Hopkins University have witnessed an event that is believed to only happen once every ten thousand years. A super-massive black hole destroying and absorbing an orbiting star.

The super massive black-hole in question resides in the center of a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years distant from the Milkyway. The John Hopkins team of astronomers led by Dr Suvi Gerzari was looking for ultraviolet light from the center of a galaxy, which is often a clue that a black hole has recently absorbed a star at some point in the past. Much to their surprise the team noticed a bright glare coming from the center of a distant galaxy. This bright light is an indication that a black hole is in the process of consuming a star in close orbit around it. This happens so infrequently that the astronomers have been looking for years to observe the phenomenon.


was looking for a bright flare in ultraviolet light from the nucleus of a galaxy, which is a lingering clue that a black hole has consumed a star. Instead, they discovered an active black hole in the process of consuming a star.

Read complete Australian Geographic article here

Thanks to Dan for the heads up on this article

Hyper-velocity Ejected Star

Now here is another truly strange character - Ejected Stars or Rogue Stars if you like. These are stars that astronomers say are or were ejected from the MW galaxy.

It would seem however that this is an extremely difficult thing to do. Here is an excerpt of the Science Daily article that gives you an idea just HOW difficult.

• the primary mechanism (for ejecting stars from the milky-way galaxy) that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's core.

It seems that it is so difficult and thus so rare that only sixteen hyper-velocity stars have been verified, and even though they have enough speed to eventually leave the Milky Way all together, they are still "inside" the galaxy.

However this may not be the case completely. Here is another excerpt.

• Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hyper-velocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core.

Very strange indeed.  Here is the link to the rest of the Science Daily article

Picture shows Four runaway stars plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas and creating bright bow waves and trailing tails of glowing gas. The stars in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are among 14 young runaway stars spotted by the Advanced Camera for Surveys between October 2005 and July 2006 (from wikipedia.org)

Looking For Exo - Civilizations

In this recent Daily Galaxy article I found a really novel approach for looking for life or more to the fact, thriving high tech civilizations on other planets.   In the past astronomers have looked for alien civilizations by listening for radio signals or looking for ultra-short laser pulses.   Now in the past it was not uncommon to listen in the communications bands as well hoping that we literally "listen in" for  extraterrestrial intelligence.  The problem in that approach is that like us it is not unreasonable to expect that many of these signals would be shielded or better focused and in cable for television and phone, therefor making such signals almost impossible to detect.

Now astronomers from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Princeton University have suggested a novel idea for detecting alien societies - urban lights.

It is a beautifully simple idea and it is played out every 90 minutes or so aboard the ISS.   It is a very striking sight to see the lights of the big cities glowing on the night side of Earth.   A truly vigorous society on another planet would almost certainly have bright cities at night.   No matter what wavelength these lifeforms would see in, artificial lighting is all but a given in a city environment.   The astronomers are of the mindset that the total change in light levels  from a planet with city lighting will vary in a way that is measurably different from a planet that has no artificial lights.

It really is a brilliant and brilliantly simple idea.  Read the complete Daily Galaxy blog article here.

Smallest Black Hole Discovered

It has indeed been a productive month for black holes. Record setting absolutely huge black holes as big as our solar system has set the record for the largest super massive black hole.

But NASA has discovered a black hole that sets a record for another reason. Being one of the smallest ever discovered. Object IGR J17091-3624 is very very small. In fact, it's probably only three times as massive as the Sun! Dangerously close to the lower limit that could for a black hole at all! Any less massive and it would have stopped collapsing well short of becoming a black hole all together.

More information is available on NASA's site.  

Mysteries of 2000 Y.O. Chineese Super-Nova Solved

Tim Sayell sends in an interesting article from Yahoo News concerning mysteries surrounding a 2 thousand year old super nova documented two Millennium ago in 185 A.D. by Chinese astronomers. This particular Super nova was the first of its' kind ever documented. Of course it wasn't until the 60s that scientists began to understand that this titanic explosion was the death throes of a star. But after finding many more such "super explosions " RCW 86 began to stand out as an odd set of data that seemed to contradict itself. The really obvious occurrence is that RCW-86 is more than twice the size (expansion) than any other super nova of it's type and age had any right being. (the article states that in infrared the expansion globe is larger than our full moon!)

Astronomers combined data from Spitzer and WISE telescopes with existing information from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory.

Evidence suggests that RCW 86 may have been a binary star with RCW 86 being a sun much like our own. Stars like our SOL don't often explode, but an influx of fuel during the expansion to a red giant phase may have triggered a mild explosion and RCW 86 collapsed to a white dwarf, leaving a LOT of empty space around it. Any further fuel from the companion would mean that a much more energetic explosion was imminent.

When the supernova finally did take place, it did not encounter the regular dust that surrounds most of these type 1A explosions and expanded rapidly and continued for quite a while..


There is an excellent description of how the white dwarf and the companion star dynamic worked over at the yahoo site here.

Images Of Planet Forming

Tim Sayell sends in an article from Yahoo News that says "Astronomers have captured the first direct image of a planet being born." Now if that isn't exciting enough...."it's the youngest planet ever observed. The previous record holder was about five times older." Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, along with Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, Using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, said that the planet is forming from a ring of dust and debris circling a 2-milion-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth.

Just two million years old? I would have put planetary formation would take place at a minimum of three times that long!

The complete Yahoo News article is here and it is very informative


oooooooooooooohhhh Lookie what Dave Tackett found!!!! From the Huffington Post the actual telescope's photo! Thanks Dave!

Scientists Believe that Uranus Took Two Massive Impacts

There is little debate that Uranus is a strange place. It is the only planet in the solar system to be 90º off axis and quite literally rolls around the sun. This odd sideways polar position for Uranus may have been caused from not one but two giant impacts. This comes from simulations that were run by two astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. To get such a huge tilt, Uranus would have to have been smashed into by another planet the size of Uranus which would have totally disrupted Uranus' system of moons. Since that is not the case, the two astronomers suggest that Uranus could have been hit by two Earth sized planets several billion years ago. Scientists also suspect that Neptune may have been impacted very much like Uranus, leading many astronomers to reconsider their models of how the outer Solar System formed.........

Check out the Dvice article here

A planet made of Diamonds?

Back in 2007, I wrote this article which dealt with the "discovery" of the largest diamond in the galaxy, which scientists concluded was the exposed core of a white dwarf star. So when I first started seeing this article making the rounds, I just figured that it was new people finding old stories. Then Tim Sayell sent me this Yahoo News item which deals not with white dwarf cores, but a very unusual planet!

Located about an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the strange crystalline planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers. Now this is at first glance the makings of a white dwarf, but the weirder thing is that even if it were the remnants of a massive star, it appears that the outer layers of the star's "atmosphere" were stripped off by a massive companion neutron star which it orbits every two hours. This orbit is so tight it would fit inside our own Sun!

It gets weirder still, carbon in a crystalline matrix...got it, diamond like material. Knowing that it is small but with the ability to crush carbon down to a crystal mean ultra-massive - scientists calculate slightly more than Jupiter, but with such a small size, something in the area of 20 times as dense. Oxygen is likely to be present at the surface, but lighter elements like hydrogen and helium are not present.

Read complete article here Wikipedia article here

A Galaxy With Two Super Massive Black Holes?!! How'd that happen?

What is more scary than one huge black monstrosity that consumes everything that come withing reach of massive jaws and ravenous appetite? Two scary black monsters that's what!

Check the pic that I have posted with this entry that I found in the Daily Galaxy.

It is generally accepted now that every galaxy has a singularity massing millions of solar masses or in rare cases a billion of our sun's mass located at it's center.

So here we have a picture of a galaxy 425 million light-years distant. Both super massive black holes are pumping out prodigious amounts of energy. Even though they look like they are close in a cosmic kind of way, they are actually separated by 11,000 light years! According to the Daily Galaxy article that equals about 1/3 the distance from the edge of the Milky-Way towards the center.

The presence of two super massive black holes most likely occurred when two galaxies collided.
You would think that dual super massive singularities would be a fairly rare occurrence but it seems that astronomers are if not common, a lot more likely to take place when galaxies do collide.

The Daily Galaxy article is a fascinating read - check it out here

Could Galactic Flashes be Signal Transmissions by Other Civilizations?

Astronomers are looking at a strange occurrence in deep space, the occasional celestial flash. According to astronomers "These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations."

The scientists will use the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky over a wide range of frequencies. The hope is to combine the power of 13,000 antennas and apply them to the survey.

The first added to the array will consist of 256 antennas and will star surveying the sky in the summer of 2011. However the New Mexico Long Wavelength Array when complete will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas covering an area of 248 miles.

The array will produce radio images that may reveal radio waves in the 20 to 80 MHZ range coming from planets outside our solar system. These frequencies represent one of the last and most poorly explored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena.


One phenomenon in particular is radio flashes that previous experiments had proved existed. However all the flashes so far seemed to have been non-astronomy targets -- either the sun, or meteors reflecting TV signals high in Earth's atmosphere. But just showing that they can be detected means searches using the Long Wavelength Array technology might lead to new discoveries.

The Daily Galaxy

Pluto's Status Changes Once again.

Tim Sayell writes -First is one, then it's not....then it is one...then it's not... You know what I think? I think two scientists in white coats find an empty observatory somewhere and just flip a coin...
Anyway, Pluto might be a planet again.

Well that might be a bit hasty, but according to the Yahoo News article that Tim sent in Pluto has become the largest body in the outer solar system. It seems that with further observation, Eris (the body that caused all this trouble with Pluto.) has had it's size placed at somewhat smaller than Pluto. Not by much mind you, they are so close as to be almost the same size. That is precisely what makes many astronomers uncomfortable. With the discovery of Eris, it became clear that the outer reaches of the Solar System contain many Pluto class bodies. If Pluto was a planet then the very real possibility arose that instead of nine planets we would have literally hundreds of them. If Eris was not a planet then smaller Pluto could not be one either.

It makes sense. The smallest recognized planet in the inner system is Mercury which is only 3,000 miles in diameter, Pluto is less than half that at about 1400 miles. Also all the inner planets have basically circular orbits all in the same plane. Kuiper objects like Pluto and Eris have eccentric orbits that are tilted to the normal planetary plane.

But it is not only size that determines a planet. One of the criteria says that a planet must be able to clear all other bodies in it's orbital plane. All the planets out to Neptune have done just that. The thing is that as you move away from the sun your orbit becomes much larger. It becomes much harder, only gas giants are capable of the job that far away from Sol. The curious thing is, according to the Yahoo article, that if Earth were moved to Pluto's orbit, it could not clear it's orbit and therefor would not be a planet, which is clearly ridiculous.

So the argument still goes on it would seem. Check out the article at Yahoo News for the pros and cons of Pluto's planethood. HERE

Youngest Black Hole Discovered

Dan points out a recent NASA discovery. In 1979 something very rare took place. In the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth, a star exploded into a super-nova. A black hole was born in the remnant of the star, SN 1979C. Am I saying that black holes are rare? No, however, having one form in our neighborhood, practically speaking at out front door, is though.

What makes this explosion so very unique is best explained by the NASA science news article.

• Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old object provides a unique opportunity to watch a black hole develop from infancy.

That's right, most black holes that have been discovered are fantastically far removed from our local group and even the Milky Way galaxy. Even more astounding is that most are millions and millions of years old. To uncover evidence of one so close and younger than a human lifespan is stupendous good luck! Plus the first one we have been able to study from birth!

The singularity is still very small, but it is busily consuming the remnants gasses of the exploded star or, stranger still, has a binary companion that it is feeding off. In any case, in the past 30 years it has absorbed about the mass of Earth, which is right in line with what would be considered as much as it possibly could in so short a period.

And here is an article from Newsy.com sent in by Brandon Twichell

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

Astronomers estimate billions of Earth size planets

That's right I said billions. This from an article Dan brought me from the Washington Post (via the BDN) This bold number was based on an estimate by astronomers from the University of California at Berkeley, viewing a small section of sky over a four year period. The scientist posited that the number of smaller planets in a given area far outstrip that of big gas giants etc. Also the premise is that there is a strong likely-hood that at least a quarter of G class stars will have Earth size planets. In the absolutely staggering number of planets in the universe (present estimate is 5 with 22 zeros after it) a few billion of them being Earth class mass is still a small number, but still several magnitudes higher than previously thought.

That Earth mass planets are all but common may well play out when NASA's Kepler Mission begins operating early in 2011. Scientists in that project will be searching for Earth sized and possibly habitable planets.

Wiki on Kepler Mission