Chandra Sees Closest Super-Nova in Decades

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory glimpsed one of the closest supernovas witnessed in decades. The telescope was able collect data on a the type 1a explosion that took place January 21 2014.

 This is one of the closest supernovas (located in the nearby Messier 82 galaxy) witnessed in decades.

The data gathered from the explosion allowed scientists to rule out one possible cause.

The type 1a supernovas is thought that the explosion may be triggered when a white dwarf takes on too much mass from its companion star, immersing it in a cloud of gas that produces a significant source of X-rays after the explosion.

Using NASA's Swift and Chandra telescopes, Astronomers searched the location of the explosion, for such an X-ray source. However, no source was found.

It is possible that this supernova, SN 2014J, could have been caused by the merger of two white dwarf stars, which would result in little or no X-rays after the explosion.

Read the rest of the article HERE on the NASA page

"Hand of God" Nebula

A new photo released by NASA, captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. 

The image was created  as  spinning material interacts with magnetic fields, it glows with X-rays.  This of course is not the first time the nebula has be photographed.  Previously  it had been detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

From the article:

• The hand-shaped object is a pulsar wind nebula that was the result of a star that blew up in a supernova explosion 17,000 light-years away.

                   

Click HERE for the complete NASA article

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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What's Weirder that a Single Super Massive Black Hole? Dual Supermassive Black holes!

The Chandra X-ray telescope continues to find some of the strangest objects in the Universe. Case in point - A pair of super massive black holes in the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393.

In the image here, we see a composite of blue which is the X-ray information from Chandra and gold which is the optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope. And according to the Wired article, the insert is just data of the high energy x-rays as seen by Chandra. The blue indicates hot gas but low x-ray energy, it also indicates strong iron bands which means the pair are growing.

Since black holes of this size are found mostly in the center of galaxies, the pair indicates a collision between two separate galaxies which also accounts for the large amount of gas and dust that are obscuring the pair.

What is truly amazing is that it is obvious that the pair of super-massive black holes are strongly influencing each other. Astronomically speaking they are close, but the influence is being felt over a distance of 490 light years! Plus at 160 million light years, they are the closest pair of super-massive black holes us.

Are There Trillions and Trillians of Comets & Asteroids Around the Milkyway's Giant Black Hole?

Just about every day, the black hole at the center of our Milkyway Galaxy flairs uo with a burst of gamma as well as X-ray radios. This here to fore undiscovered phenomena was discovered by the Cnandra space telescope operated by NASA and documented over several years.

Not all the x-ray radiation need come from material falling  through the black hole's event horizon.  Any object that passes withing 100 million miles of  the super massive singularity would instantly be torn apart.  Then it would be torn apart by the gravitational forces. Then the material would then be vaporized by friction bye  the hot, thin gases that are falling into the black hole giant. 

From the article 
Very long observations ...will be made with Chandra later in 2012 that will give valuable new information about the frequency and brightness of flares and should help to test the model proposed here to explain them.

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.

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

Scientists Unraveling Catalyst of Supernovas

Astronomers have been using type 1a supernovas as a baseline for determining the expansion of the universe. So it becomes somewhat a sore spot when they have to admit that understanding how supernovas function or more to the point, what exactly "lights the fuse" of these titanic explosions.

Most astronomers feel that the mainstream explanation fills the bill best. From the Yahoo News article:

• Type 1a supernovae are formed when a white dwarf star -- the collapsed remnant of an old star -- becomes unstable after it exceeds its weight limit.

This instability could come from several different causes, like"

• the merging of two white dwarfs
• or accretion (of) material from a sun-like companion

Recent studies using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have results that suggest nearly all the supernovae studied came from two white dwarfs merging. Supernova through accretion should be approximately 50 times brighter in x-rays than actually observed. Further study needs to take place however to determine if this is indeed the case in all types of galaxies and not just elliptical.

Understanding how supernova work can go a long way to understanding dark matter and galaxy formation.

Complete Yahoo News article submitted by Tim Sayhill

Dark Energy Is Ripping the Universe Apart

An article in IO9 throws fuel on the 'dark energy' fire. At a recent press conference NASA announced new measurements from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory confirm the existence of "dark energy" that is causing the universe to expand.

Ten years ago, it was discovered that the universe was expanding at an ever increasing rate. To explain this phenomenon astrophysicists proposed the action of a here to fore unknown and undiscovered force they called 'dark energy'. This force was so powerful that not only was it pulling the universe apart but eventually galaxies and eventually every molecule.

Remember Shaun's story 'Curtain Call' well this would be the effect many billions of years in the future when galaxies and eventually stars themselves are so far apart that for all intents there would be nothing to see in the night sky. Sobering thought that.

<- dark energy in IO9 ->

Chandra reveals new twists in Crap Nebula

IO9 posts an article from the Chandra Observatory photo site. Chandra has been taking x-ray photographs of the Crab Nebula and has in my mind taken one of the most startling x-ray views of a pulsar ever taken. In this photo you can see the nebula's inner X-ray ring, which is a shock wave that marks the boundary between the surrounding nebula, and the jets of matter and anti-matter shooting out of the pulsar. Click the link below to go to the chandra photo site for some really interesting news and images.

<- Chandra images ->

Space telescopes image the Sombrero Galaxy

Data from a trio of space telescopes – Chandra, Spitzer and Hubble – have been combined to produce the new image of the sombrero Galaxy. Chandra observations reveal hot gas that glows in X rays and extends about 60,000 light years from the centre of the galaxy, which itself is only 50,000 light years wide. The gas is probably being blown outwards by a wind driven by supernova explosions in the galaxy.

Click on the article title to go to the site. They have an excellent short video of how the image of this galaxy was put together from the data from the other three telescopes.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

New Panorama Reveals More Than a Thousand Black Holes

A new wide-field panorama reveals more than a thousand supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, some up to several billion times more massive than the sun. This survey, taken in a region of the Bootes constellation, involved 126 separate Chandra exposures of 5,000-seconds each, making it the largest contiguous field ever obtained by the observatory. At 9.3 square degrees, it is over 40 times larger than the full moon seen on the night sky, which is also shown in this graphic for scale. In this image, the red represents low-energy X-rays, green shows the medium range, and blue the higher energy X-rays

submitted by Shaun Saunders

Stellar Bang with a New Twist

For years, astronomers have relied on a variety of supernova called a Type Ia. These titanic explosions were thought to produced a consistent brightness. Using that "standard candle," astronomers could calculate a supernova's distance from Earth and also track the acceleration of the universe caused by the mysterious force called dark energy. Now, the discovery of two supernova remnants in a nearby galaxy calls the consistency of Type Ia explosions into question.

Supernovae occur when stars with big enough masses--at least 1.4 times that of the sun--have exhausted the supply of fuel that powers the thermonuclear fusion reactions in their cores. When the reactions stop, the stars can no longer push outward against the inexorable effects of gravity. In an instant, they collapse into tiny versions of their former selves, and the recoil from that abrupt and violent process produces the supernovae, which expel huge amounts of matter outward at hypersonic speeds. Up to now, astronomers have identified four types of supernova, including Type Ia.

Now a team from several universities using NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft say they have discovered supernova remnants that harbor the usual products of Type Ia explosions but are considerably brighter and contain much more hot gas than normal.

After studying x-ray observations of the remnant clouds, the astronomers concluded that the stars exploded when they were only 100 million years old, instead of the 1 billion to 1.5 billion years old for a typical star producing a Type Ia. One possible explanation, is that both stars grew up in a dense star-forming area and therefore could pull in a great deal of matter easily and quickly. That might have caused them to grow prematurely massive and trigger the supernovae.

Please click on the article title to read more and click here for more information on SuperNova

posted by Shaun A. Saunders

Chandra Discovers source of Cosmic Rays

New clues about the origins of cosmic rays, mysterious high-energy particles that bombard the Earth, have been revealed using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. An extraordinarily detailed image of the remains of an exploded star provides crucial insight into the generation of cosmic rays.

For the first time, astronomers have recorded the acceleration of cosmic ray electrons in a supernova remnant that shows that the electrons are being accelerated at close to the theoretically maximum rate. This provides compelling evidence that supernova remnants are key sites for producing cosmic ray particles.

The findings were created from an image of Cassiopeia A, a 325-year-old remnant produced by the explosive death of a massive star.