Beautifully illustrated poems celebrating Space and Science - Joanna Tilsley

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science.

A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz, the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo, an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month.

Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

 I had been reading a lot about cosmology and new physics at the time, and as I took my habitual walks across the marshes surrounding my home in North London, I pondered deeply upon the dimensions of space and time through which I was passing, as well as existing euphorically in the moment with the first stirrings of spring. 

The poems followed naturally through; in fact they burst out of me, allowing me to weave a pattern of deep emotion through a weft of scientific fact.

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NASA's Swift Mission Probes an Exotic Object: ‘Kicked’ Black Hole or Mega Star

Zoom into Markarian 177 and SDSS1133 and see how they compare with a simulated galaxy collision. 

When the central black holes in these galaxies combine, a "kick" launches the merged black hole on a wide orbit taking it far from the galaxy's core.

Related multimedia from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

An international team of researchers analyzing decades of observations from many facilities, including NASA's Swift satellite, has discovered an unusual source of light in a galaxy some 90 million light-years away.

The dwarf galaxy Markarian 177 (center) and its unusual source SDSS1133 (blue) lie 90 million light-years away. 

The galaxies are located in the bowl of the Big Dipper, a well-known star pattern in the constellation Ursa Major.

Image Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The object's curious properties make it a good match for a supermassive black hole ejected from its home galaxy after merging with another giant black hole, but astronomers can't yet rule out an alternative possibility.

The source, called SDSS1133, may be the remnant of a massive star that erupted for a record period of time before destroying itself in a supernova explosion.

"With the data we have in hand, we can't yet distinguish between these two scenarios," said lead researcher Michael Koss, an astronomer at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

"One exciting discovery made with NASA's Swift is that the brightness of SDSS1133 has changed little in optical or ultraviolet light for a decade, which is not something typically seen in a young supernova remnant."

Using the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, researchers obtained high-resolution images of Markarian 177 and SDSS1133 using a near-infrared filter. 

Twin bright spots in the galaxy's center are consistent with recent star formation, a disturbance that hints this galaxy may have merged with another.

Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/M. Koss (ETH Zurich) et al.

In a study published in the Nov. 21 edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ("SDSS1133: an unusually persistent transient in a nearby dwarf galaxy"), Koss and his colleagues report that the source has brightened significantly in visible light during the past six months, a trend that, if maintained, would bolster the black hole interpretation.

To analyze the object in greater detail, the team is planning ultraviolet observations with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in October 2015.

Whatever SDSS1133 is, it's persistent. The team was able to detect it in astronomical surveys dating back more than 60 years.

The mystery object is part of the dwarf galaxy Markarian 177, located in the bowl of the Big Dipper, a well-known star pattern within the constellation Ursa Major.

Although supermassive black holes usually occupy galactic centers, SDSS1133 is located at least 2,600 light-years from its host galaxy's core.

In June 2013, the researchers obtained high-resolution near-infrared images of the object using the 10-meter Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

They reveal the emitting region of SDSS1133 is less than 40 light-years across and that the center of Markarian 177 shows evidence of intense star formation and other features indicating a recent disturbance.

"We suspect we're seeing the aftermath of a merger of two small galaxies and their central black holes," said co-author Laura Blecha, an Einstein Fellow in the University of Maryland's Department of Astronomy and a leading theorist in simulating recoils, or "kicks," in merging black holes.

"Astronomers searching for recoiling black holes have been unable to confirm a detection, so finding even one of these sources would be a major discovery."

The collision and merger of two galaxies disrupts their shapes and results in new episodes of star formation.

If each galaxy possesses a central supermassive black hole, they will form a bound binary pair at the center of the merged galaxy before ultimately coalescing themselves.

Astronomers solve puzzle about bizarre object at the center of our galaxy

Telescopes from Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory use a powerful technology called adaptive optics, which enabled UCLA astronomers to discover that G2 is a pair of binary stars that merged together, cloaked in gas and dust. 

Credit: Ethan Tweedie

For years, astronomers have been puzzled by a bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that was believed to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole.

Having studied it during its closest approach to the black hole this summer, UCLA astronomers believe that they have solved the riddle of the object widely known as G2.

A team led by Andrea Ghez, professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, determined that G2 is most likely a pair of binary stars that had been orbiting the black hole in tandem and merged together into an extremely large star, cloaked in gas and dust, its movements choreographed by the black hole's powerful gravitational field.

The research is published today in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers had figured that if G2 had been a hydrogen cloud, it could have been torn apart by the black hole, and that the resulting celestial fireworks would have dramatically changed the state of the black hole.

"G2 survived and continued happily on its orbit; a simple gas cloud would not have done that," said Ghez, who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics. "G2 was basically unaffected by the black hole. There were no fireworks."

Black holes, which form out of the collapse of matter, have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light.

They cannot be seen directly, but their influence on nearby stars is visible and provides a signature, said Ghez, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.

Ghez, who studies thousands of stars in the neighborhood of the supermassive black hole, said G2 appears to be just one of an emerging class of stars near the black hole that are created because the black hole's powerful gravity drives binary stars to merge into one.

She also noted that, in our galaxy, massive stars primarily come in pairs. She says the star suffered an abrasion to its outer layer but otherwise will be fine.

Ghez and her colleagues, who include lead author Gunther Witzel, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar, and Mark Morris and Eric Becklin, both UCLA professors of physics and astronomy, conducted the research at Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory, which houses the world's two largest optical and infrared telescopes.

When two stars near the black hole merge into one, the star expands for more than 1 million years before it settles back down, said Ghez, who directs the UCLA Galactic Center Group. "This may be happening more than we thought.

The stars at the center of the galaxy are massive and mostly binaries. It's possible that many of the stars we've been watching and not understanding may be the end product of mergers that are calm now."

Ghez and her colleagues also determined that G2 appears to be in that inflated stage now. The body has fascinated many astronomers in recent years, particularly during the year leading up to its approach to the black hole.

"It was one of the most watched events in astronomy in my career," Ghez said.

Ghez said G2 now is undergoing what she calls a "spaghetti-fication", a common phenomenon near black holes in which large objects become elongated.

At the same time, the gas at G2's surface is being heated by stars around it, creating an enormous cloud of gas and dust that has shrouded most of the massive star.

Witzel said the researchers wouldn't have been able to arrive at their conclusions without the Keck's advanced technology.

"It is a result that in its precision was possible only with these incredible tools, the Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescopes," Witzel said.

The telescopes use adaptive optics, a powerful technology pioneered in part by Ghez that corrects the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere in real time to more clearly reveal the space around the supermassive black hole.

The technique has helped Ghez and her colleagues elucidate many previously unexplained facets of the environments surrounding supermassive black holes.

"We are seeing phenomena about black holes that you can't watch anywhere else in the universe," Ghez added.

"We are starting to understand the physics of black holes in a way that has never been possible before."

More information: Astrophysical Journal Letters, iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/796/1/L8/article

ICRAR: Hungry black hole consumes material faster than thought possible

A rendering of what Black Hole P13 would look like close up. 

Credit: by Tom Russell (ICRAR) using software created by Rob Hynes (Louisiana State University).

Astronomers have discovered a black hole that is consuming gas from a nearby star 10 times faster than previously thought possible.

The black hole, known as P13, lies on the outskirts of the galaxy NGC7793 about 12 million light years from Earth and is ingesting a weight equivalent to 100 billion billion hot dogs every minute.

The discovery was published today in the journal Nature.

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) astronomer Dr Roberto Soria, who is based at ICRAR's Curtin University node, said that as gas falls towards a black hole it gets very hot and bright.

He said scientists first noticed P13 because it was a lot more luminous than other black holes, but it was initially assumed that it was simply bigger.

"It was generally believed the maximum speed at which a black hole could swallow gas and produce light was tightly determined by its size," Dr Soria said.

"So it made sense to assume that P13 was bigger than the ordinary, less bright black holes we see in our own galaxy, the Milky Way."

When Dr Soria and his colleagues from the University of Strasbourg measured the mass of P13 they found it was actually on the small side, despite being at least a million times brighter than the Sun.

It was only then that they realised just how much material it was consuming.

"There's not really a strict limit like we thought, black holes can actually consume more gas and produce more light," Dr Soria said.

Dr Soria said P13 rotates around a supergiant 'donor' star 20 times heavier than our own Sun.

He said the scientists saw that one side of the donor star was always brighter than the other because it was illuminated by X-rays coming from near the black hole, so the star appeared brighter or fainter as it went around P13.

Primary Image: This is a combined optical /X-ray image of NGC 7793. 

Inset image: This is a rendering of what P13 would look like close up. 

Credit: X-ray (NASA /CXC /Univ of Strasbourg /M. Pakull et al); Optical (ESO /VLT /Univ of Strasbourg /M. Pakull et al); H-alpha (NOAO /AURA /NSF /CTIO 1.5m). 

Insert Image: created by Tom Russell (ICRAR) using software created by Rob Hynes (Louisiana State University).

"This allowed us to measure the time it takes for the black hole and the donor star to rotate around each other, which is 64 days, and to model the velocity of the two objects and the shape of the orbit," Dr Soria said.

"From this, we worked out that the black hole must be less than 15 times the mass of our Sun."

Dr Soria said P13 is a member of a select group of black holes known as ultraluminous X-ray sources.

"These are the champions of competitive gas eating in the Universe, capable of swallowing their donor star in less than a million years, which is a very short time on cosmic scales," he said.

More information: 'A mass of less than 15 solar masses for the black hole in an ultraluminous X-ray source' was published in Nature, 9 October 2014. C. Motch, M. W. Pakull, R. Soria, F. Grise, G. Pietrzynski. DOI: 10.1038/nature13730

Monster Black Hole discovered in centre of Dwarf Galaxy

Astronomers have just discovered the smallest known galaxy that harbours a huge, supermassive black hole at its core.

The relatively nearby dwarf galaxy may house a supermassive black hole at its heart equal in mass to about 21 million suns.

The discovery suggests that supermassive black holes may be far more common than previously thought.

A supermassive black hole millions to billions of times the mass of the sun lies at the heart of nearly every large galaxy like the Milky Way.

These monstrously huge black holes have existed since the infancy of the universe, some 800 million years or so after the Big Bang.

Scientists are uncertain whether dwarf galaxies might also harbour supermassive black holes.

"Dwarf galaxies usually refer to any galaxy less than roughly one-fiftieth the brightness of the Milky Way," said lead study author Anil Seth, an astronomer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

These galaxies span only several hundreds to thousands of light-years across, much smaller than the Milky Way's 100,000-light-year diameter, and they "are much more abundant than galaxies like the Milky Way," Seth said.

The researchers investigated a rarer kind of dwarf galaxy known as an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy; such galaxies are among the densest collections of stars in the universe.

"These are found primarily in galaxy clusters, the cities of the universe," Seth told reporters

This image shows a huge galaxy, M60, with the small dwarf galaxy that is expected to eventually merge with it.

Credit: NASA /Space Telescope Science Institute /European Space Agency

Now, Seth and his colleagues have discovered that an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy may possess a supermassive black hole, which would make it the smallest galaxy known to contain such a giant.

The astronomers investigated M60-UCD1, the brightest ultra-compact dwarf galaxy currently known, using the Gemini North 8-meter optical-and-infrared telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. M60-UCD1 lies about 54 million light-years away from Earth.

The dwarf galaxy orbits M60, one of the largest galaxies near the Milky Way, at a distance of only about 22,000 light-years from the larger galaxy's center, "closer than the sun is to the center of the Milky Way," Seth said.

The scientists calculated the size of the supermassive black hole that may lurk inside M60-UCD1 by analyzing the motions of the stars in that galaxy, which helped the researchers deduce the amount of mass needed to exert the gravitational field seen pulling on those stars.

For instance, the stars at the center of M60-UCD1 zip at speeds of about 230,000 mph (370,000 km/h), much faster than stars would be expected to move in the absence of such a black hole.

This illustration depicts the supermassive black hole located at the center of the very dense galaxy M60-UCD1. 

It may weigh 21 million times the mass of our sun.

Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe, G. Bacon (STScI)

The supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way has a mass of about 4 million suns, taking up less than 0.01 percent of the galaxy's estimated total mass, which is about 50 billion suns.

In comparison, the supermassive black hole that may lie in the core of M60-UCD1 appears five times larger than the one in the Milky Way, and also seems to make up about 15 percent of the dwarf galaxy's mass, which is about 140 million suns.

"That is pretty amazing, given that the Milky Way is 500 times larger and more than 1,000 times heavier than the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1," Seth said in a statement.

NASA X-Calibur: Black hole seeking telescope carried by giant balloon

High pressure helium is used to inflate the balloon that will carry X-Calibur high into the atmosphere. 

This photo of the balloon was taken during a previous mission in Antarctica. 

Credit: NASA

Scientists from NASA's Scientific Balloon Facility and University of Washington in St. Louis will soon launch a telescope with a giant balloon, planning the launch for sometime later this month.

Reaching heights of around 120,000 feet, the balloon will carry a polarimeter telescope meant to search for black holes.

X-Calibur, a polarimeter telescope measures a powerful kind of X-Ray that is emitted by objects being pulled into a black hole.

Black holes don't even let light escape their incredible gravity, and that's why scientists need a certain kind of telescope that can identify the X-Rays on the fringes of the black hole, which will give them an idea of its size and rotation speed.

Part of the goal of the mission is to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, which set certain parameters for how fast he believed a black hole can spin.

Launch Preparation

Scott Barthelmy, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, described the complicated pre-launch procedure needed to inflate the balloon and prep X-Calibur for flight.

The first step will be to roll out the ultra-thin plastic sheets of the balloon. Hoses will then pump pressurized helium into the balloon, which will expand and cause the balloon to rise in a mushroom-shaped cloud, until the 40-million-cubic foot (1,132,674 cubic meters) interior is full.

The ground weight will then be lifted off the balloon to let it rise. About 900 feet (274 m) of balloon material will be rolled out on the ground, and as the balloon rises it will pick up more and more of this train.

The very end of the balloon will be attached to X-Calibur.

A small crane will cradle X-Calibur about 10 feet (3 m) over the ground.

When the balloon drifts directly over the telescope and begins pulling up, a technician will be standing by to release the telescope from the crane.

If the release comes too early, the telescope could drop to the ground and smash. If it comes too late, the crane release could jam.

NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility website will host a live broadcast of the launch, which the scientists expect will happen around Sept. 14 or 15, if weather conditions allow. After the balloon launches, anyone can track its progress with a live Google map.

Black Holes: Seeking proof for the no-hair theorem

According to general relativity, a black hole has three measurable properties: mass, rotation (angular momentum), and electric charge.

That's it. If you know those three things, you know all there is to know about the black hole.

If the black hole is interacting with other objects, then the interactions can be much more complicated, but an isolated black hole is just mass, rotation (angular momentum) and electric charge.

In general relativity this is known as the no-hair theorem.

The basic idea of the no-hair theorem is that the material properties of any object (referred to as "hair" because a physicist named John Wheeler once coined the phrase "a black hole has no hair") become unmeasurable (hence unknowable) as the object collapses into a black hole.

On the surface this seems fairly reasonable. If a neutron star collapses into a black hole, for example, all the neutrons and their interactions become trapped inside the black hole's event horizon when the black hole forms.

The same would be true for an object that was lopsided (say with a mountain range on one side). As it collapses into a black hole, any irregularities would be squashed flat as it approaches the black hole limit.

But there are also difficulties with the no-hair theorem. For one, even though it's referred to as a theorem, it has never been proved in general relativity. So it really should be called the no-hair hypothesis.

There have been lots of demonstrations that the theorem is reasonable, and computer simulations tend to agree that black holes stabilise to a structure defined by mass, rotation (angular momentum) and electric charge, but none of these reach the level of proof.

Then there is the problem that if a black hole really is just defined by mass, rotation (angular momentum) and electric charge, then it has no temperature, and that means that its entropy is zero.

This violates the principles of thermodynamics. Of course when we try to include quantum theory into our black hole description we know that black holes do have a temperature.

In Stephen Hawking's theory, the temperature of a black hole depends upon its mass, so even a Hawking black hole would be definable by mass, rotation (angular momentum) and electric charge.

It's possible that the no-hair theorem is valid even for a quantum black hole.

But there is a more subtle mystery that hides within the no-hair theorem, because it would seem that a black hole is much simpler than other massive objects such as planets, stars and the like.

If you think about an object like the Sun, it has a certain chemical composition, and it's giving off light with different wavelengths having varying intensities.

There are sunspots, solar flares, convection flows that create granules, and the list goes on.

The Sun is a deeply complex object that we have yet to fully understand, and yet, if our Sun were compressed into a black hole, all that complexity would be reduced to mass, rotation (angular momentum) and electric charge.

So what happens when a complex object like a star collapses into a black hole? Where does all that complexity go?

In physics we refer to that complexity as the physical information of a system. According to quantum theory, physical information is never lost, but according to general relativity and the no-hair theorem, physical information that enters a black hole is lost forever.

This contradiction is known as the black hole information paradox, or sometimes the 'firewall paradox.'

Now you might think that the easy answer is just to presume the no-hair theorem is wrong but it's not that simple, and if we started exploring that paradox, things would get a bit hairy.

Fascinating rhythm: Light pulses illuminate a rare black hole in Messier 82

This image of the galaxy Messier 82 is a composite of data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. 

The intermediate-mass black hole M82 X-1 is the brightest object in the inset, at approximately 2 o'clock near the galaxy's center. 

Credit: NASA/H. Feng et al.

The universe has so many black holes that it's impossible to count them all. There may be 100 million of these intriguing astral objects in our galaxy alone.

Nearly all black holes fall into one of two classes: big, and colossal. Astronomers know that black holes ranging from about 10 times to 100 times the mass of our sun are the remnants of dying stars, and that supermassive black holes, more than a million times the mass of the sun, inhabit the centers of most galaxies.

But scattered across the universe like oases in a desert are a few apparent black holes of a more mysterious type.

Ranging from a hundred times to a few hundred thousand times the sun's mass, these intermediate-mass black holes are so hard to measure that even their existence is sometimes disputed.

Little is known about how they form. And some astronomers question whether they behave like other black holes.

Now a team of astronomers has accurately measured, and thus confirmed the existence of, a black hole about 400 times the mass of our sun in a galaxy 12 million light years from Earth.

The finding, by University of Maryland astronomy graduate student Dheeraj Pasham and two colleagues, was published online August 17 in the journal Nature.

Co-author Richard Mushotzky, a UMD astronomy professor, says the black hole in question is a just-right-sized version of this class of astral objects.

"Objects in this range are the least expected of all black holes," says Mushotzky.

"Astronomers have been asking, do these objects exist or do they not exist? What are their properties? Until now we have not had the data to answer these questions."

"While the intermediate-mass black hole that the team studied is not the first one measured, it is the first one so precisely measured, Mushotzky says, "establishing it as a compelling example of this class of black holes."

Rossi satellite telescope

Between 2004 and 2010 NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite telescope observed M82 X-1 about 800 times, recording individual x-ray particles emitted by the object.

Pasham mapped the intensity and wavelength of x-rays in each sequence, then stitched the sequences together and analyzed the result.

Among the material circling the suspected black hole, he spotted two repeating flares of light. The flares showed a rhythmic pattern of light pulses, one occurring 5.1 times per second and the other 3.3 times per second – or a ratio of 3:2.

The two light oscillations were like two dust motes stuck in the grooves of a vinyl record spinning on a turntable, says Mushotzky.

Pasham used the oscillations to estimate that M82 X-1 is 428 times the mass of the sun, give or take 105 solar masses.

He does not propose an explanation for how this class of black holes formed. "We needed to confirm their existence observationally first," he says. "Now the theorists can get to work."

Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER)

Though the Rossi telescope is no longer operational, NASA plans to launch a new X-ray telescope, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), in about two years.

Pasham, who will begin a post-doctoral research position at NASA Goddard in late August, has identified six potential intermediate-mass black holes that NICER might explore.

More information: "A 400 solar mass black hole in the M82 galaxy," Dheeraj R. Pasham, Tod E. Strohmayer, Richard F. Mushotzky, was published online Aug. 17, 2014 in Nature. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13710

NASA NuSTAR: Rare blurring of Black Hole X-Ray light

An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole and its surroundings. 

The regions around supermassive black holes shine brightly in X-rays. 

Some of this radiation comes from a surrounding disk, and most comes from the corona, pictured here as the white light at the base of a jet. 

This is one possible configuration for the Mrk 335 corona, as its actual shape is unclear. 

Credit: NASA-JPL / Caltech

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole.

A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.

"The corona recently collapsed in toward the black hole, with the result that the black hole's intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiraling inward," said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, United Kingdom, lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it.

The result was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light. Such events had been observed previously, but never to this degree and in such detail.

Supermassive black holes are thought to reside in the centers of all galaxies. Some are more massive and rotate faster than others.

The black hole in this new study, referred to as Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, is about 324 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Pegasus constellation.

It is one of the most extreme of the systems for which the mass and spin rate have ever been measured. The black hole squeezes about 10 million times the mass of our Sun into a region only 30 times the diameter of the Sun, and it spins so rapidly that space and time are dragged around with it.

This plot of data captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), shows X-ray light streaming from regions near a supermassive black hole known as Markarian 335. 

Credit: NASA

Even though some light falls into a supermassive black hole never to be seen again, other high-energy light emanates from both the corona and the surrounding accretion disk of superheated material.

Though astronomers are uncertain of the shape and temperature of coronas, they know that they contain particles that move close to the speed of light.

NASA's Swift satellite has monitored Mrk 335 for years, and recently noted a dramatic change in its X-ray brightness.

In what is called a target-of-opportunity observation, NuSTAR was redirected to take a look at high-energy X-rays from this source in the range of 3 to 79 kiloelectron volts.

This particular energy range offers astronomers a detailed look at what is happening near the event horizon, the region around a black hole from which light can no longer escape gravity's grasp.

Follow-up observations indicate that the corona is still in this close configuration, months after it moved.

Researchers don't know whether and when the corona will shift back. What's more, the NuSTAR observations reveal that the grip of the black hole's gravity pulled the corona's light onto the inner portion of its superheated disk, better illuminating it.

Almost as if somebody had shone a flashlight for the astronomers, the shifting corona lit up the precise region they wanted to study.

The new data could ultimately help determine more about the mysterious nature of black hole coronas. In addition, the observations have provided better measurements of Mrk 335's furious relativistic spin rate.

Relativistic speeds are those approaching the speed of light, as described by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

"We still don't understand exactly how the corona is produced or why it changes its shape, but we see it lighting up material around the black hole, enabling us to study the regions so close in that effects described by Einstein's theory of general relativity become prominent," said NuSTAR Principal Investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

"NuSTAR's unprecedented capability for observing this and similar events allows us to study the most extreme light-bending effects of general relativity."

More information: "Black hole spin and size of the X-ray-emitting region(s) in the Seyfert 1.5 galaxy ESO 362-G18," B. Agís-González, G. Miniutti, E. Kara, A. C. Fabian, M. Sanfrutos, G. Risaliti, S. Bianchi, N. L. Strotjohann, R. D. Saxton and M. L. Parker, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford University Press, in press: mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/443/4/2862

The black hole at the birth of the Universe

Before the Big Bang.

Credit: Image courtesy of Perimeter Institute

The big bang poses a big question: if it was indeed the cataclysm that blasted our universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago, what sparked it?

Three Perimeter Institute researchers have a new idea about what might have come before the big bang.

It's a bit perplexing, but it is grounded in sound mathematics and is it testable?

What we perceive as the big bang, they argue, could be the three-dimensional "mirage" of a collapsing star in a universe profoundly different than our own.

"Cosmology's greatest challenge is understanding the big bang itself," write Perimeter Institute Associate Faculty member Niayesh Afshordi, Affiliate Faculty member and University of Waterloo professor Robert Mann, and PhD student Razieh Pourhasan.

Conventional understanding holds that the big bang began with a singularity, an unfathomably hot and dense phenomenon of spacetime where the standard laws of physics break down.

Singularities are bizarre, and our understanding of them is very limited.

"For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity," Afshordi says in an interview with Nature.

The problem, as the authors see it, is that the big bang hypothesis has our relatively comprehensible, uniform, and predictable universe arising from the physics-destroying insanity of a singularity. It seems unlikely.

So perhaps something else happened. Perhaps our universe was never singular in the first place.

Their suggestion: our known universe could be the three-dimensional "wrapping" around a four-dimensional black hole's event horizon.

In this scenario, our universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole.

In our three-dimensional universe, black holes have two-dimensional event horizons -- that is, they are surrounded by a two-dimensional boundary that marks the "point of no return."

In the case of a four-dimensional universe, a black hole would have a three-dimensional event horizon.

In their proposed scenario, our universe was never inside the singularity; rather, it came into being outside an event horizon, protected from the singularity.

It originated as, and remains, just one feature in the imploded wreck of a four-dimensional star.

The researchers emphasize that this idea, though it may sound "absurd," is grounded firmly in the best modern mathematics describing space and time.

Specifically, they've used the tools of holography to "turn the big bang into a cosmic mirage."

Along the way, their model appears to address long-standing cosmological puzzles and, crucially -- produce testable predictions.

Of course, our intuition tends to recoil at the idea that everything and everyone we know emerged from the event horizon of a single four-dimensional black hole. We have no concept of what a four-dimensional universe might look like. We don't know how a four-dimensional "parent" universe itself came to be.

But our fallible human intuitions, the researchers argue, evolved in a three-dimensional world that may only reveal shadows of reality.

They draw a parallel to Plato's allegory of the cave, in which prisoners spend their lives seeing only the flickering shadows cast by a fire on a cavern wall.

"Their shackles have prevented them from perceiving the true world, a realm with one additional dimension," they write.

"Plato's prisoners didn't understand the powers behind the sun, just as we don't understand the four-dimensional bulk universe but at least they knew where to look for answers."

Journal Reference: Razieh Pourhasan, Niayesh Afshordi, Robert B. Mann. Out of the White Hole: A Holographic Origin for the Big Bang. arXiv, 2014

NASA NuSTAR: Celebrating two years of science in space

Artist's concept of NuSTAR on orbit.

NuSTAR has a 10-m (30') mast that deploys after launch to separate the optics modules (right) from the detectors in the focal plane (left). 

The spacecraft, which controls NuSTAR's pointings, and the solar panels are with the focal plane. 

NuSTAR has two identical optics modules to increase sensitivity. The background is an image of the Galactic center obtained with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a premier black-hole hunter among other talents, has finished up its two-year prime mission, and will be moving onto its next phase, a two-year extension.

"It's hard to believe it's been two years since NuSTAR launched," said Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"We achieved all the mission science objectives and made some amazing discoveries I never would have predicted two years ago."

In this new chapter of NuSTAR's life, it will continue to examine the most energetic objects in space, such as black holes and the pulsating remains of dead stars.

In addition, outside observers, astronomers not on the NuSTAR team, will be invited to compete for time on the telescope.

"NuSTAR will initiate a general observer program, which will start execution next spring and will take 50 percent of the observatory time," said Suzanne Dodd, the NuSTAR project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"We are very excited to see what new science the community will propose to execute with NuSTAR."

NuSTAR blasted into space above the Pacific Ocean on June 13, 2012, with the help of a plane that boosted the observatory and its rocket to high altitudes.

After a 48-day checkout period, the telescope began collecting X-rays from black holes, supernova remnants, galaxy clusters and other exotic objects.

With its long mast - the length of a school bus, NuSTAR has a unique design that allows it to capture detailed data in the highest-energy range of X-rays, the same type used by dentists.

It is the most sensitive high-energy X-ray mission every flown.

In its prime mission, NuSTAR made the most robust measurements yet of the mind-bending spin rate of black holes and provided new insight into how massive stars slosh around before exploding.

Other observations include: the discovery of a highly magnetized neutron star near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, measurements of luminous active black holes enshrouded in dust, and serendipitous discoveries of supermassive black holes.

Galaxy's Huge Black Hole Puts on Spectacular Fireworks Show - Video

The supermassive black hole at the center of a far-off galaxy is putting on a fireworks display of cosmic proportions.

Scientists captured the brilliant display in new images and a video tour of the spiral galaxy Messier 106 (also called NGC 4258).

NSF Karl Janksy Very Large Array

An amazing composite picture was created by combining data from three NASA telescopes and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Karl Janksy Very Large Array trained on Messier 106, which is about 23 million light-years away.

While the galaxy is spiral in shape, like the Milky Way, Messier 106 has two extra swirling arms that glow in X-ray, optical and radio light.

These features are called anomalous arms and intersect the galaxy at an angle instead of aligning with the main galactic disk.

The combination of data from multiple telescopes revealed that the swirling arms of Messier 106 are streams of shock waves and superheated gas.

The NSF telescope picked up radio waves from high-energy particles streaming from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

Infrared light data gathered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows that these bursts of particles create shock waves, similar to sonic booms, when they strike the main disk of the galaxy.

The shock waves heat up huge pockets of hydrogen gas to thousands of degrees.

Spiral Galaxy Messier 106

Spiral Galaxy Messier 106 has two extra swirling arms that glow in X-ray, optical and radio light. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA /CXC /Caltech /P.Ogle et al; Optical: NASA /STScI; IR: NASA /JPL-Caltech; Radio: NSF /NRAO /VLA

The new composite image released by NASA earlier this month shows X-rays seen by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory in blue; radio waves captured by the NSF's Karl Janksy Very Large Array are shown in purple; visible light data from the Hubble telescope can be seen in yellow and blue; and infrared light from the Spitzer telescope in red.

Chandra X-Ray images reveal huge, superheated gas bubbles above and below the plane of the galaxy.

This suggests that much of the gas inside the galaxy is heated to millions of degrees and then rides along the shock waves streaming from the black hole to the outer regions of the galaxy.

Researchers predict all the gas from the galaxy will be cast out within the next 300 million years unless it is somehow replenished. Since most of the gas is already gone, less gas is available for star formation.

Researchers using Spitzer estimate that stars are forming in Messier 106 almost 10 times more slowly than they are in the Milky Way.

The black hole at the center of Messier 106 is about 10 times larger than the black hole in the Milky Way and is sucking in material much more quickly.

Researchers hope to learn more about how the black hole is influencing the galaxy. The results of the new galaxy study were published June 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers pierce galactic clouds to shine light on black hole development - video

This is an illustration of the physical, spatial and temporal picture for the outflows emanating from the vicinity of the super massive black hole in the galaxy NGC 5548. 

The behaviour of the emission source in five epochs is shown along the time axis. 

The obscurer is situated at roughly 0.03 light years (0.01 parsecs) from the emission source and is only seen in 2011 and 2013 (it is much stronger in 2013). 

Outflow component 1 shows the most dramatic changes in its absorption troughs. Different observed ionic species are represented as colored zones within the absorbers. 

Credit: Ann Feild/Space Telescope Science Institute 

Jelle Kaastra

An international team of scientists including a Virginia Tech physicist have discovered that winds blowing from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy work to obscure observations and x-rays.

The discovery in today's (June 19, 2004) issue of Science Express sheds light on the unexpected behavior of black holes, which emit large amounts of matter through powerful, galactic winds.

Using a large array of satellites and space observatories, the team spent more than a year training their instruments on the brightest and most studied of the "local" black holes—the one situated at the core of Type I Seyfert Galaxy NGC 5548.

What they found was a bit of a surprise.

The researchers discovered much colder gas than expected based on past observations, showing that the wind had cooled and that a stream of gas moved quickly outward and blocked 90 percent of x-rays.

The observation was the first direct evidence of an obscuration process that—in more luminous galaxies—has been shown to regulate growth of black holes.

By looking at data from different sources, scientists found that a thick layer of gas lay between the galactic nucleus and the Earth blocked the lower energy x-rays often used to study the system, but allowed more energetic x-rays to get through.


An animated journey through the active galaxy NGC 5548. For a more in-depth explanation of the video, please see the Supporting Online Material. Credit: Kaastra et al., Science/

Data from Hubble Space Telescope also showed ultraviolet emissions being partially absorbed by a stream of gas.

A multi-wavelength observational campaign simultaneously looking at an object to decipher its secrets is rare, the researchers said.

In this illustration, the position of a dark, absorbing cloud of material is located high above the supermassive black hole and accretion disk in the center of the active galaxy NGC 5548. 

Numerous other filaments twist around the black hole as they are swept away by a torrent of radiation "winds." 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

"I don't think anyone has trained so many scopes and put in so much time on a single object like this," said Nahum Arav, an associate professor of physics with Virginia Tech's College of Science.

"The result is quite spectacular. We saw something that was never studied well before and we also deciphered the outflow in the object."

"We know far more about this outflow than any studied previously as to where it is and how it behaves in time. We have a physical model that explains all the data we've taken of the outflow over 16 years."

This image depicts the galaxy NGC 5548 taken at the MDM Observatory 1.3m telescope. 

Credit: Dr. Misty Bentz

The discovery was made by an international team led by SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research scientist Jelle Kaastra using the major space observatories of the European Space Agency, NASA, the Hubble Space Telescope, Swift, NuSTAR, Chandra, INTREGRAL, and other satellites and observation platforms.

"These outflows are thought to be a major player in the structure formation of the universe," Arav said.

"This particular outflow is comparatively small but because it's so close we can study it very well and then create a better understanding of how the phenomenon will work in very large objects that do affect the structure formation in the universe."

More information: "A fast and long-lived outflow from the supermassive black hole in NGC 5548," by J.S. Kaastra et al. Science Express, 2014. www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/… 1126/science.1253787