Hubble Discovers Red Giant Ejecting Mars Sized Gas Blobs

Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected NEAR a dying star called V Hydrae, a red giant. The plasma balls are moving fast enough to travel the distance from Earth to the moon in thirty minutes. Astronomers estimate that this has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

These fireballs are puzzling to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae. 

From the article:

The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

for complete article press HERE

Hubble Discovers two Exo-Planets Circling Red Dwarf

(CNN) — For a craft that was launched in 1990, Hubble  continues to provide us with awe-inspiring firsts. This time, In May, researchers discovered three Earth-like worlds orbiting an ultracool red dwarf star 40 light-years away.

Red dwarf stars are at the end of the range of what is classified as a star. These stars are half the temperature and a 10th the mass of the sun, so it was a first to find planets orbiting this star which also appeared to be in the "habitable zone" of the star, meaning liquid water could pool on their surfaces. 

 click HERE for complete article

13+ Billion Year Old Galaxy Photographed by Hubble

An international team of astronomers, using NASA's Hubble space telescope, has set a new
distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe.

This infant galaxy, located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major, named GN-z11, was photographed as it was seen 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 million years after the Big Bang.


Full NASA article can be read HERE

BMU #444 online Now

Hi, welcome to episode 444 of Beam Me Up

After opening, I play a fairly smooth and quiet piece of anime music
leading up to the 25th anniversary of Hubble with just a few discussion
points concerning Hubble as one of the single greatest research tool of the 20th century.

From the blog a  short film on the paradoxes of time travel which proves very funny, New Horizons nears to it flyby of Pluto, I comment on the ultimate failure of Alton Musk's Falcon booster, Carole sent me an article on electric space craft engine.

Kallimus sends in an article about a new cable program hosted by Neal DeGrasse which sounds fascinating!

There are a few more articles..

Lastly is The English Dead by Vaughn Stanger part two.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

There Are More Stars than you can Imagine!

I love thought experiments like this.  Ones that instill awe and thought provoking as well. 

From PBS via the Kim Komando blog is a short film that once again amazes one to just imagine how many stars are visible vs how many are really in the field of view. 

As a gift one year, I received a copy of the deep field experiment which is totally amazing as to how many galaxies ARE out there, even in the most empty part of the sky.

Check it out, you too will be amazed!

A Short Film on Hubble's Deep Field Experiment

A fan of the program sent in this link from Flixxy.com.  The link concerned the Ultra Deep Field project that astronomers performed with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope.   I have one of these photos hanging above my work area.   Every time I look at it, I am again amazed and stunned.  The incredible density of galaxies is hard to believe even when looking at the proof.

Check out the Flixxy video below:

Dry Jupiter-Like Exoplanets Discovered

How we understand planetary  formation may, quite possibly, be all wrong.  

At present, the disk accretion theory is the most popular, where dust particles begin coming together in the planetary disk.  As the clumps become larger they begin attracting more and more clumps to the point where planetesimals form.  As they become larger, they begin to pull gases out of the ring to form proto - atmospheres  made up of oxygen in the form of water vapor.  

All of this worked very well until:

  From the Sci-News.com article:

• A team of astronomers headed by Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of the Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy has found that the abundance of water vapor in the atmospheres of the three newly discovered hot Jupiters – HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b (Located between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth)  – is between ten and a thousand times less than what standard planet formation theories predict. 

This discovery really brings our understanding of planetary formation into question. 

These planets are classified as hot Jupiters with average temperatures between 1652 and 3992 degrees Fahrenheit. These were thought to be ideal candidates for detecting water vapor in their atmospheres.

(***I would like to interject something here.  Regardless  of the water vapor or the hot Jupiters and the disclaimer in the full article that Hubble didn't actually "see" the planets, is the fact that Hubble can see ANYTHING 900 light years away! That is so far away that the average calculator goes nuts and you get cryptic answers from scientific calc. or numbers like 5865696000000 for just 1 year of light travel.  That's 6 thousand trillion 700 billion miles more or less then times that by 900 years!  Can you even begin to wrap your head around such mind numbing numbers?  That is how powerful Hubble is.....What a fabulous tool and how lucky we are to be around in the years of it's operation.   Editor***)

Dwarf Starburst Galaxies Played Important Role In Early Universe

Scientists using data from the Hubble Space Telescope,studying early dwarf galaxies have observed the brilliant flashes of star formation.

Even though all galaxies produce stars, these young dwarf galaxies were producing new stars at a prodigious rate. So fast was this formation, that they could double the number of stars they hold in just 150 million years. By comparison, regular galaxies only master this feat in 1 to 3 billion years!


Read the rest of this really good article from Space.com


 

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.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Shrinking

Space.com is reporting that Jupiter's great red spot appears to be shrinking!  This observation is based on photos taken by the Hubble space telescope since the early 90s, as well as observations from amateur astronomers.

While the storm has been observations from  the late 1800s estimated  the spot at 25,500 miles across.  A century later, the Voyager spacecraft flybys  in 1979 revealed the spot had shrunk to 14,500 miles.


Images from Hubble showed in images taken in 1995, the storm shrinking to 13,020 miles across. By 2009, the Red Spot had diminished to 11,130 miles.

Read the complete Space.com article HERE

The Milky Way - Then and Now

Astronomers using  NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's deep-sky surveys,  have revealed  visual evidence of how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, evolved into  the magnificent spiral galaxy  we see today.

Studying  the evolution of 400 galaxies similar to the Milky Way, astronomers concluded that the Milky Way most likely began as faint, blue, low-mass object,  probably was a flat disk with a bulge in the middle,  containing lots of gas.

Even at this early stage the young galaxy's center was  home to a super-massive black hole that probably grew along with the galaxy.

From the NASA article:

• "Of course, we can't see the Milky Way itself in the past."  said study co-leader Pieter G. van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Conn.  "We selected galaxies billions of light-years away that will evolve into galaxies like the Milky Way. By tracing the Milky Way's siblings, we find that our galaxy built up 90 percent of its stars between 11 billion and 7 billion years ago, which is something that has not been measured directly before."

Read the complete article HERE

Ancient Galaxy is the Farthest Object Ever Discovered

Astronomers using data from Hubble and the Keck 1 telescope located at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have discovered the oldest galaxy ever, discovered to this point.

The galaxy, which astronomers are calling z8_GND_5296 was formed around  the first 700 million years after the big band.   This would make it the oldest and most distant galaxy discovered so far.

The galaxy is so distant, it is like looking back in time some 13+ billion years ago! 

z8_GND_5296  is also making a name for itself for another reason as well.  It has been estimated that this incredibly distant  galaxy is producing stars about 150 times more quickly than the Milky Way. 

For example,  the Milky Way may produce about one or two sunlike stars each year, z8_GND_5296 birthed about 300 per year approximately, however that was  13 billion years ago. 

For more information check out Space.com for this article   HERE

Was the Early Universe a Cosmic Zoo?

The question, up until recently, was - how did the young universe appear?  Was it an orderly cross section of a few well mannered galaxies or was it a miss-mash of varied galactic types.

According to a recent article in Space.com, NASA's Hubble space telescope's "CANDLES" (Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extra-galactic Legacy Survey) study shows that the universe, even 11 billion years ago, "the diversity of galaxies in the early universe was as varied as the many galaxy types seen today"   This conclusion based on a galaxy classification system known as the Hubble Sequence of which CANDLES is a part.  The Sequence shows that the universe over the past 11 billion years was just as diverse as present day.

This becomes important when we look at how the Hubble Sequence is set up and the results that were garnered from the young universe.  The Sequence divides galaxies into three basic types based on their appearance:  Spiral which has plenty of gas for star building.  As the gas runs out galaxies transition to elliptical galaxies which are for all intents, blobs or middle aged to older.  In between Spiral and elliptical is the transitional lenticular galaxy which has a blob like bright center but also maintains some spiral arm structures.  The lenticular galaxies are middle aged.   What the Sequence is showing however is that all three galaxy types were in evidence in the young universe. 

From the Space.com article:

• Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany said "The galaxies look remarkably mature, which is not predicted by galaxy formation models to be the case that early on in the history of the universe."
• While past research showed that these distinct types of galaxy morphology existed as early as 8 billion years ago, the new study extends that understanding back another 2.5 billion years.

Read the complete Space.com article here

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.

Pillars of Creation, Vaporized Thousands of Years Ago?

I had heard speculation of this a few years ago and even noted it.

Now it seems, if not confirmed, thought by today's astronomers to be very likely that the beautiful construct in the Eagle nebula, called the Pillars of Creation, may in fact have been destroyed thousands of years ago by the shock wave from a nearby supernova. This fact will be extremely hard to to confirm however. Because of the distance ( in overall stellar terms the pillars are pretty close, relatively speaking, some 7000 light years distant) it will be at least another millennium before the light from their destruction starts to reach us.

"The Pillars of Creation" was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. The Pillars are of great interest by astronomers because these columns of dust and gas are likely places where stars form. which makes the next time they were re-imaged turned out to be a bit melancholy. In 2007 researchers again focused on this region of space using the Spitzer Space Telescope. These new images showed the Pillars and next to them, a giant cloud of hot dust thought to have been heated by the blast of a star that possibly went supernova.
What's more this shock wave could have already reached the Pillars, causing them to disintegrate about 6,000 years ago. (hence the 1000 year estimate before we start to see evidence of the destruction)

Read more at the Daily Galaxy here

And an excellent break down of this information in the Wikipedia here

Hubble Finds Two Galaxies Lined Up For Who Knows What!

Kallamis writes....  

Found this on Space.com. There is no article, just one statement.

   Apparently galaxies NGC3314A and NGC3314B are not on a collision course, but are actually separated by thousands of light years. No real info there but that, but watching it is relaxing, even though it only lasts about 2 minutes, and you of course have an ad first. Here's the link for anyone interested in watching it. They have a lot more there as well.

Video link here

Image of a Supernova Ring

Supernova  1987a

1987AOn February 23, 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud a star exploded with enough energy to be seen all the way across the universe. The Super Nova took place in an irregular satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and was photographed recently by the European Space Agency’s Faint Object Camera. The FOC is part of the science platform aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The photograph taken by the FOC shows an image of a gaseous ring surrounding the central supernova remnant. Most interesting the photo shows clumps and spaces in the ring. As the article in The Daily Galaxy blog reports that this:

• indicates that the material is not uniformly distributed.

Prelude to a Supernova

Check the photo out. This is one of the stars in the binary star system Eta Carinae, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image is the residual of an outburst first observed in April 1843. At its height t was the second brightest star in the sky, outshone only by Sirius. The event lasted until the start of the 20th century.

The event's aftermath, shown in the Hubble photo, shows the huge clouds of matter thrown out by the event in the 18 hundreds, called a false nova because it so closely resembles a nova when it occurs. The cloud comes from the death throes of the larger of the pair and is highly unstable. So unstable in fact that it could end its life as a supernova, the brightest ever seen from Earth, in the very near future.

Eta Carinae is one of the closest stars to Earth that is likely to explode in a supernova in the relatively near future - but future is a relative term in interstellar time. The supernova could happen in a few hundred years or a few hundred millenia.

photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Larger sized photos and more info at the NASA Goddard Flickr site here

Hubble Discovers a "Waterworld,"

The Hubble Space Telescope continues to do history making discoveries. Of late Hubble has brought us the extrasolar planet with the unimposing moniker GJ1214b a water world.

Now I suspect that at this moment you are thinking of the movie staring Kevin Costner  with the same title, but GJ1214b is a far cry from Costner's temperate world.  Hubble's waterworld atmosphere appears to  consist of more than 50% water!  The "surface" of the planet seems to be also mostly all water.  But that is as close as we are going to get to anything even close to human habitability.   Due to it's orbit, which is very close to the system's sun, the mean surface is apx. 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  At this point you have to be thinking liquid water at 450 degrees?!  Then think what an atmosphere that is thick with water and this would result in massive pressures at the surface, allowing water to remain in a "fluid" state.  The high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water.

So we have a planet with an atmosphere dense with super-heated steam, and on the surface thick viscous water possibly littered with huge  hot "icebergs"

Read complete IO9 article here  

   



    

Hubble Discovers Dazzling 'Necklace' Nebula!

You would think I would get tired after all these years of telling you how amazing Hubble is. But the truth is that Hubble keeps one upping itself with even more amazing astro-science and photographs. Case in point, the strange and amazing Necklace Nebula! What we see in the picture here is a composite from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 which captured the glow of hydrogen (here in blue), oxygen (the green glowing elements of the photo) and nitrogen (which when excited glows red). Hubble discovered this planetary nebula, which is the glowing remains of a Sun-like star. The bright ring, (measuring 12 trillion miles wide) dotted with bright clumps of gas and it is what caused these clumps to exist along with the complete glowing ring of gas and what causes the whole ring structure to exist and glow.

The core of the nebula shows only one bright orbit, but is in fact 2 stars. Instead of saying again what the NASA site has so well described - here from the article:

• A pair of stars orbiting close together produced the nebula, also called PN G054.2-03.4. About 10,000 years ago one of the aging stars ballooned to the point where it engulfed its companion star. The smaller star continued orbiting inside its larger companion, increasing the giant’s rotation rate.
  
• The bloated companion star spun so fast that a large part of its gaseous envelope expanded into space. Due to centrifugal force, most of the gas escaped along the star’s equator, producing a ring. The embedded bright knots are dense gas clumps in the ring.
• The pair is so close, only a few million miles apart, they appear as one bright dot in the center. The stars are furiously whirling around each other, completing an orbit in a little more than a day.

Did you catch that? One of the companions went of main sequence and ballooned to such a degree that it's neighbor is orbiting INSIDE the other star! As the smaller companion spins the bigger faster it throws out material along the equator hence causing the "ring". Even now after all this, both continue to orbit each other, but so fast that a complete orbit is a little bit more than 1 Earth day! Is astronomy a wild science or what!!!!

You can read the complete article here