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

ALMA Takes First "Baby" Pictures

The ALMA array in Chile has accomplished what will prove to be one of many firsts.  ALMA is the first telescope to take pictures of a proto-planet system that is actively in the process of making planets. 






Here is the complete PopularMechanic article

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.

Half of Sol Type Stars May Be Binary?!

In a new study, astronomers have concluded that half of all sun like stars are in a multiple star system.   This comes from scientists using  the upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.   These conclusions from scientists that observed a previously unseen companion star.  

The standing theory as to how such a strange formation could have taken place is that the companion must have occurred as the primary star formed and then fractured into two separate bodies during formation.

John Tobin, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory stated that:

• "This fits the theoretical model of companions forming from fragmentation in the disk"
• The new observations add to a growing body of evidence supporting the disk-fragmentation idea.  This showed that disks are present early in the star formation process, a necessity for binary pairs to form through disk fragmentation.

For more, read the complete Daily Galaxy article HERE

Also Science 2.0 for some detailed information HERE

Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered

What is hugely larger than our sun, set to shortly explode in a mind numbingly powerful explosion, has rings of ejected material with the mass of four of our own sun and..... wait for it.....Yellow! Hard to believe but this weird creature is indeed a super massive star on the fast tract to a super nova.

This star is in a very rare class called a hyper-giant. These stars are so massive that it is impossible to maintain their massive outer layers for not much longer than a few hundred million years before the outer layers crash down onto the core causing a titanic explosion.

In this infrared photo captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array you can see the bright central star with the two huge ejection rings.

from the Daily Galaxy

Which Came First - The Black Hole or the Galaxy?

You know, if this question had been put to me before, i would have said the galaxy. I was under the impression that galaxies grew like the solar system where the material that made up the solar system grew together and slowly formed and compressed until Sol began fusing blowing the remaining material out to form the planets. that was until I read this article in the Daily Galaxy.

From the article:

• A recent study suggests that super-massive black holes can trigger the formation of stars, thus 'building' their own host galaxies.
• (this) could also explain why galaxies hosting larger black holes have more stars.

A team of astronomers came to this unusual conclusion by observing quasar HE0450-2958, the "naked quasar" or "homeless" quasar. It gained that designation by not appearing to have a host galaxy. Astronomers to this point thought that the quasar's galaxy was hidden behind large amounts of dust. But using a near infra-red observatory (dust glows brightly under near infra-red) they found no associated dust clouds. However a near by galaxy with dust clouds was making start at a staggering rate!

Are the first stars in the universe still around?

It has been a long standing prevailing view that the very first stars that lit the early universe had all burned out due in part to their immense size. A new study seems to contradict this position.

It now seems quite possible that some of the universe’s first stars may still be shining in the Milky Way 13 billion years after being formed.

A new series of simulations at the University of Heidelberg in Germany seem to indicate that gases in the early universe could have produced many small stars instead of a few very large ones. It is also speculated that in these tightly packed collection of small stars, a few would have been ejected due in part to gravity dynamics. If this happened then the smaller cooler stars could have miserly with their fuel and instead of burning up in a few million years, still be going to the present day.

These results are far from being widely accepted in the astrophysical community. Many researchers say they have several qualms about those conclusions.

From the ScienceNews article

• If any of the first stars did survive until today, their brightness wouldn’t require an exceptionally large telescope to image them, says Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics,... But making a positive ID won’t be easy, he adds. Only high-resolution spectra could distinguish primordial stars, which would contain only hydrogen and helium, from slightly younger stars containing trace amounts of heavier elements, he notes.

read complete ScienceNews article here

Could This Be Where Some of the Universe's Missing Mass is?

Oh and the first person that calls the show Saturday and says...what? You reach into your back pocket?!" gets hung up on! lol Ok, here is what I am basing this question on. Astronomers used to think that elliptical galaxies contained around a trillion stars each. But looking at new data, they believe that these types of galaxies actually contain five trillion to ten trillion stars, and that by itself means the universe would have three times as many stars as we'd previously believed.

The new data come from technological advancements in detecting much dimmer stars or red dwarfs. Up until recently, red dwarf stars have been extremely difficult to detect because they are extremely dim in nature. Now that astronomers can detect the red dwarfs it turns out red dwarfs are way more common than was previously believed. Elliptical galaxies contain around 20 times as many of them as our own galaxy and could turn out to make up 80 percent of all stars in the universe. This could mean there's less "dark matter" than previously thought, since these red dwarfs could account for a lot of the universe's missing mass.

IO9 red dwarf article Wiki Red Dwarf article
Thanks to Dan for bringing the article to my attention

Goldilocks Planet! Just Right!

You have to figure that when Tim and Dan both find this article exciting, you have to pay attention.
Here is what is going on:

Astronomers, first time, have spotted a planet that circles a star called Gliese 581. It's about 120 trillion miles away. This planet is the first to be uncovered that orbits its' primary in the "life" zone. This zone allows for conditions that would support life as we know it. Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.

From the Yahoo article:

• (the planet) is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star — 14 million miles away versus 93 million. It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days. And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark. Temperatures can be as hot as 160 degrees or as frigid as 25 degrees below zero, but in between — in the land of constant sunrise — it would be "shirt-sleeve weather..

This is not the first time we have heard of Gliese 581. It seems that six other planets have been found orbiting the star. Very solar indeed huh?

Read complete areticle here Yahoo article:
Wikipedia article on the Goldilocks zone

Mysterious Object Viewed in the Taurus star-forming system

Tell me this doesn't have science fiction written all over it. Check out the picture. On the right you have a mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category. It's in a binary system with the brown dwarf companion buuuuuuuuut
it’s too young to have formed by accretion, though it masses like a planet, evidence points towards or better away from the normal way planets form, and it too light to be another brown dwarf.

So at the very least the conventions held for planetary formation have to be re-examined. As
Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, recently said in The Astrophysical Journal. “This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.”

It gets weirder, read the complete Wired article here

When Worlds Colide just happened!

Sciencedaily.com has a story detailing two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision. It's very much as if Venus and Earth were to collide. The operative word here is "mature". This happened not in a young system where you would suspect something of this nature to occur, but in an older well defined system similar to the Solar System. Astronomers have never documented this happening before, and up to this point had considered major collisions in older systems unlikely if not impossible.

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Youngest Solar Systems Detected by Astronomers

Astronomers at the University of Michigan have found what are believed to be some of the youngest solar systems yet detected.

The systems are around the young stars UX Tau A and LkCa 15, located in the Taurus star formation region just 450 light years away. Using a telescope that measures levels of infrared radiation, the researchers noticed gaps in the protoplanetary disks of gas and dust surrounding these stars. They say those gaps are most likely caused by infant planets sweeping those areas clear of debris.

A paper on the findings by astronomy doctoral student Catherine Espaillat, professor Nuria Calvet, and their colleagues is published in the Dec. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.