Standard Model may account for Dark Matter and it may be massive

A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 

To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. 

The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars, plus dark matter, acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide lens in space. 

This gravitational lens bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it. Some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away (redshift value 6). 

Strong gravitational lensing as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in Abell 1689 indicates the presence of dark matter. 

Credit: NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI),G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA

The physics community has spent three decades searching for and finding no evidence that dark matter is made of tiny exotic particles.

Case Western Reserve University theoretical physicists suggest researchers consider looking for candidates more in the ordinary realm and, well, more massive.

Dark matter is unseen matter, that, combined with normal matter, could create the gravity that, among other things, prevents spinning galaxies from flying apart.

Physicists calculate that dark matter comprises 27 percent of the universe; normal matter 5 percent.

Instead of WIMPS, weakly interacting massive particles, or axions, which are weakly interacting low-mass particles, dark matter may be made of macroscopic objects, anywhere from a few ounces to the size of a good asteroid, and probably as dense as a neutron star, or the nucleus of an atom, the researchers suggest.

Physics professor Glenn Starkman and David Jacobs, who received his PhD in Physics from CWRU in May and is now a fellow at the University of Cape Town, say published observations provide guidance, limiting where to look.

They lay out the possibilities in a paper "Macro Dark Matter"

The Macros, as Starkman and Jacobs call them, would not only dwarf WIMPS and axions, but differ in an important way.

They could potentially be assembled out of particles in the Standard Model of particle physics instead of requiring new physics to explain their existence.

"We've been looking for WIMPs for a long time and haven't seen them," Starkman said. "We expected to make WIMPS in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and we haven't."

WIMPS and axions remain possible candidates for dark matter, but there's reason to search elsewhere, the theorists argue.

"The community had kind of turned away from the idea that dark matter could be made of normal-ish stuff in the late '80s," Starkman said.

"We ask, was that completely correct and how do we know dark matter isn't more ordinary stuff— stuff that could be made from quarks and electrons?"

After eliminating most ordinary matter, including failed Jupiters, white dwarfs, neutron stars, stellar black holes, the black holes in centers of galaxies and neutrinos with a lot of mass, as possible candidates, physicists turned their focus on the exotics.

Ancient Bow City crater points to massive meteorite strike

This is a map showing the structure and contour of the Bow City crater. Colour variation shows meters above sea level. 

Credit: Alberta Geographic Survey /University of Alberta

The discovery of an ancient ring-like structure in southern Alberta suggests the area was struck by a meteorite large enough to leave an eight-kilometre-wide crater, producing an explosion strong enough to destroy present-day Calgary, say researchers from the Alberta Geographic Survey and University of Alberta.

Doug Schmitt

The first hints about the impact site near the southern Alberta hamlet of Bow City were discovered by a geologist with the Alberta Geographic Survey and studied by a University of Alberta team led by Doug Schmitt, Canada Research Chair in Rock Physics.

Time and glaciers have buried and eroded much of the evidence, making it impossible at this point to say with full certainty the ring-like structure was caused by a meteorite impact, but that's what seismic and geological evidence strongly suggests, said Schmitt, a professor in the Faculty of Science and co-author of a new paper about the discovery.

"We know that the impact occurred within the last 70 million years, and in that time about 1.5 km of sediment has been eroded. That makes it really hard to pin down and actually date the impact."

Erosion has worn away all but the "roots" of the crater, leaving a semicircular depression eight kilometres across with a central peak.

Schmitt says that when it formed, the crater likely reached a depth of 1.6 to 2.4 km, the kind of impact his graduate student Wei Xie calculated would have had devastating consequences for life in the area.

"An impact of this magnitude would kill everything for quite a distance," he said. "If it happened today, Calgary (200 km to the northwest) would be completely fried and in Edmonton (500 km northwest), every window would have been blown out."

"Something of that size, throwing that much debris in the air, potentially would have global consequences; there could have been ramifications for decades."

The impact site was first discovered in 2009 by geologist Paul Glombick, who at the time was working on a geological map of the area for the Alberta Geographic Survey.

Glombick relied on existing geophysical log data from the oil and gas industry when he discovered a bowl-shaped structure.

The Alberta Geological Survey contacted the U of A and Schmitt to explore further, peeking into the earth by analyzing seismic data donated by industry.

Schmitt's student, Todd Brown, later confirmed a crater-like structure.

The research team's paper about the discovery was published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science in an early online release.

Mazda SkyActiv 2: Petrol engine with massive fuel economy ambitions

Auto-focused sites are buzzing over a recent report in Autocar, reporting Japanese automobile manufacturer Mazda's future gasoline engine technology, which will reduce carbon dioxide emissions below the amount generated to power electric cars.

Geek.com noted that, while electric cars do not pump out CO2 as they travel, they have a carbon footprint created when the electric power they run on is produced.

Though not due for some years to come, the very idea of a gasoline engine efficient enough to release less carbon dioxide than an electric car was tantalizing enough to make the numerous blog and car site headlines.

Specifically, the spotlight is on advances in Mazda's SkyActiv engine technology. Mark Tisshaw, writing in Autocar, said

"So efficient is its latest internal combustion engine technology, the Japanese firm claims that it could even eclipse pure electric cars for well-to-wheel CO2 emissions, without adding expensive and heavy hybrid or plug-in hybrid components."

At Mazda, the engine of the future is called the SkyActiv-G Generation 2, a follow-up to Mazda's SkyActiv-G Generation 1.

For SkyActiv-G Generation 2, Mazda will adopt homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) and an even higher compression ratio of 18:1 over SkyActiv-G Generation 1 high compression ratio of 14:1.

Mazda said on its site that increasing the compression ratio considerably improves thermal efficiency.

According to Autocar, it is likely SkyActiv-G Generation 2 technology could arrive in production before the decade is out.

For SkyActiv-G Generation 2, Mazda will adopt homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) and the higher compression ratio of 18:1.

Autocar said The HCCI system works in a way similar to a diesel engine, using piston compression rather than a spark plug to ignite the mixture in the chamber.

Automotive News explained how HCCI "compresses the fuel-air mixture to such a high pressure and temperature that it ignites by itself without requiring a spark, similar to the way a diesel engine operates."

That Mazda had ambitious plans for a generation of engines in years to come that could achieve 30 percent better fuel economy than the current line of Skyactiv engines was already evident back in January this year, when Mitsuo Hitomi, in charge of powertrain development, spoke at Mazda's Yokohama technical center.

Discussing goals, Hitomi said Skyactiv 2 will focus on improved internal combustion "If we want to dramatically improve fuel economy from here, the only route is through lean burning,"

Hitomi referred also to plans for a Skyactiv 3 lineup in the future that may help Mazda comply with 2025 emissions targets.

Hubble Fireworks: The Antennae Galaxies in Collision

Two galaxies are squaring off in Corvus and the latest pictures can be viewed here. 

When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. 

That's because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. 

During the slow, hundred million year collision, one galaxy can still rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. 

In this clash of the titans, dark dust pillars mark massive molecular clouds are being compressed during the galactic encounter, causing the rapid birth of millions of stars, some of which are gravitationally bound together in massive star clusters.

Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA

The bow shock of Kappa Cassiopeiae, a massive, hot supergiant

The red arc in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is a giant shock wave, created by a speeding star known as Kappa Cassiopeiae. 

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech

Runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy.

Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

In this case, the speedster star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae, or HD 2905 to astronomers.

It is a massive, hot supergiant moving at around 2.5 million mph relative to its neighbors (1,100 kilometers per second) but what really makes the star stand out in this image is the surrounding, streaky red glow of material in its path.

Such structures are called bow shocks, and they can often be seen in front of the fastest, most massive stars in the galaxy.

Bow shocks form where the magnetic fields and wind of particles flowing off a star collide with the diffuse, and usually invisible, gas and dust that fill the space between stars.

How these shocks light up tells astronomers about the conditions around the star and in space.

Slow-moving stars like our sun have bow shocks that are nearly invisible at all wavelengths of light, but fast stars like Kappa Cassiopeiae create shocks that can be seen by Spitzer's infrared detectors.

Incredibly, this shock is created about 4 light-years ahead of Kappa Cassiopeiae, showing what a sizable impact this star has on its surroundings. (This is about the same distance that we are from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the sun.)

For this Spitzer image, infrared light at wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns is rendered in blue, 8.0 microns in green, and 24 microns in red.

The Kappa Cassiopeiae bow shock shows up as a vividly red colour. The faint green features in this image result from carbon molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in dust clouds along the line of sight that are illuminated by starlight.

Delicate red filaments run through this infrared nebula, crossing the bow shock. Some astronomers have suggested these filaments may be tracing out features of the magnetic field that runs throughout our galaxy.

Since magnetic fields are completely invisible themselves, we rely on chance encounters like this to reveal a little of their structure as they interact with the surrounding dust and gas.

Kappa Cassiopeiae is visible to the naked eye in the Cassiopeia constellation, but its bow shock only shows up in infrared light.

Antarctic ice: UK Geologists find Massive valley deeper than Grand Canyon

Antarctic field camp located on the ice sheet surface directly over the hidden Ellsworth Trough 

Credit: Neil Ross 

A massive ancient subglacial trough, deeper than the Grand Canyon, exists under the ice of Antarctica, a team of UK experts says.

Scientists from Bristol University, Newcastle University and the British Antarctic Survey discovered the massive valley during three seasons of charting the Ellsworth Subglacial Highlands, an ancient mountain range buried beneath several kilometers of antarctic ice.

They used data from satellites and ice-penetrating radars towed behind snowmobiles and on-board small aircraft.

The massive subglacial valley is almost 2 miles deep, almost 190 miles long and up to 15 miles wide. In places, the floor of this valley is more than 6,500 feet below sea level, the researchers said.

Neil Ross

"The discovery of this huge trough, and the characterization of the surrounding mountainous landscape, was incredibly serendipitous," Newcastle University physical geographer Neil Ross said.

"We had acquired ice penetrating radar data from both ends of this huge hidden valley, but we had no information to tell us what was in between," he said.

"Satellite data was used to fill the gap, because despite being covered beneath several kilometers of ice, the valley is so vast that it can be seen from space."

A moving ice field carved the deep valley and its surrounding mountains millions of years ago, the scientists said.

"To me, this just goes to demonstrate how little we still know about the surface of our own planet," Ross said.

"The discovery and exploration of hidden, previously unknown landscapes is still possible and incredibly exciting, even now."

More information: 'Evidence from ice shelves for channelized meltwater flow beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet' - Nature Geoscience 6, 945–948 (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1977

Jansky Very Large Array (VLA): Solving a 30-year-old problem in massive star formation

This false-colour Very Large Array image of the ionized gas in the star forming region Sgr B2 Main was used to detect small but significant changes in brightness of several of the sources. 

The spots and filaments in this image are regions of ionized gas around massive stars. 

The changes in brightness detected support a model that could solve a 30-year-old question in high mass star formation. 

Credit: NRAO /Agnes Scott College

An international group of astrophysicists has found evidence strongly supporting a solution to a long-standing puzzle about the birth of some of the most massive stars in the universe.

Young massive stars, which have more than 10 times the mass of the Sun, shine brightly in the ultraviolet, heating the gas around them, and it has long been a mystery why the hot gas doesn't explode outwards.

Now, observations made by a team of researchers using the Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), a radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico, have confirmed predications that as the gas cloud collapses, it forms dense filamentary structures that absorb the star's ultraviolet radiation when it passes through them. As a result, the surrounding heated nebula flickers like a candle.

The findings were published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Massive stars dominate the lives of their host galaxies through their ionizing radiation and supernova explosions," said Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics and an author on the paper.

"All the elements heavier than iron were formed in the supernova explosions occurring at the ends of their lives, so without them, life on Earth would be very different."

Observations of the massive star forming region Sgr B2 were made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in 1989 and 2012. 

The VLA has been operational since 1980 and received a major upgrade that was completed in 2011. 

Credit: NRAO/AUI

Stars form when huge clouds of gas collapse. Once the density and temperature are high enough, hydrogen fuses into helium, and the star starts shining.

The most massive stars, though, begin to shine while the clouds are still collapsing.

Their ultraviolet light ionizes the surrounding gas, forming a nebula with a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius. Simple models suggest that at this stage, the gas around massive stars will quickly expand.

But observations from the VLA radio observatory show something different: a large number of regions of ionized hydrogen (so-called HII regions) that are very small.

"In the old theoretical model, a high-mass star forms and the HII region lights up and begins to expand."

Chris De Pree

"Everything was neat and tidy," said lead author Chris De Pree, a professor of astronomy and director of the Bradley Observatory at Agnes Scott College.

"But the group of theorists I am working with were running numerical models that showed accretion was continuing during star formation, and that material was continuing to fall in toward the star after the HII region had formed."

More information: arxiv.org/abs/1312.7768

Spanish Research: Black hole that doesn't emit x-rays discovered near massive star

Trailed intensity image of the two lines constructed from the phase binned spectra. 

Two orbital cycles are displayed for clarity. 

The colour scale indicates counts normalised to the continuum, with the black colour corresponding to 0.98 and the white colour to 1.08 in Fe II and 1.16 in HeII. 

Credit: Nature 

Researchers in Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Universidad de Alicante, Universitat de Barcelona, and Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (IEEC-CSIC), Spain have discovered a black hole that doesn't reveal itself through x-ray radiation thrown off by material that is being sucked into it.

In their paper published in the journal Nature, team members from several research institutions throughout Spain, report that the black hole appears to exist as a companion (binary) to a massive Be star that spins so fast it's surrounded by a gas disk.

I. Negueruela

Up until now, virtually all black holes have been discovered via x-ray radiation signals—as material is pulled in past the point of no return, radiation is flung out into space where it is noted by space scientists here on Earth.

In this new effort, the research team was able to identify the black hole because of its behaviour, rather than its signature.

Many Be stars have been found to have companions—most of the time they are supernova remnants (neutron stars) but never before has a Be star been found to have a black hole as a companion.

The star, named MWC 656 is really big—approximately 10 to 16 times as massive as our sun. It spins really fast too (approximately 671,000 mph) which the researchers say, explains why the black hole next to it doesn't emit any radiation.

J. Casares

They suggest that because the star is spinning so fast, it casts gas into a disk surrounding its equator which in turn is cast off towards the black hole, but rather than being pulled in, the gas joins an accretion disk that surrounds the "mouth" of the black hole, moving so fast (due to the angular momentum of the gas cast off from the star) that it can't be pulled in. Thus the disk simply continues to grow larger.

The black hole is pretty big too (approximately 3.8 to 6.9 more massive than our sun) which likely puts it in the category of stellar mass black holes—those that come into existence when a star runs out of fuel.

The discovery of the "silent" black hole suggests that many more like it might exist, which will undoubtedly lead researchers to look for more, now that they know what to look for.

More information: A Be-type star with a black-hole companion, Nature 505, 378–381 (16 January 2014) J. Casares, I. Negueruela, M. Ribó, I. Ribas, J. M. Paredes, A. Herrero & S. Simón-Díaz DOI: 10.1038/nature12916

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): Massive Sunspot AR1944

One of the largest sunspots in the last nine years, labeled AR1944, was seen in early January 2014, as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). 

An image of Earth has been added for scale. 

Credit: NASA/SDO

An enormous sunspot, labeled AR1944, slipped into view over the sun's left horizon late on Jan. 1, 2014.

The sunspot steadily moved toward the right, along with the rotation of the sun, and now sits almost dead center, as seen in the image above from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Sunspots are dark areas on the sun's surface that contain complex arrangements of strong magnetic fields that are constantly shifting.

The largest dark spot in this configuration is approximately two Earths wide, and the entire sunspot group is some seven Earths across.

For comparison, another giant sunspot, five to six Earths across, is shown below from 2005. The image was captured by the European Space Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Sunspots are part of what's known as active regions, which also include regions of the sun's atmosphere, the corona, hovering above the sunspots.

Active regions can be the source of some of the sun's great explosions: solar flares that send out giant bursts of light and radiation due to the release of magnetic energy, or coronal mass ejections that send huge clouds of solar material out into space.

As the sunspot group continues its journey across the face of the sun, scientists will watch how it changes and evolves to learn more about how these convoluted magnetic fields can cause space weather events that can affect space-borne systems and technological infrastructure on Earth.

Two of the largest sunspots in the last nine years: the one on the left is from Jan. 17, 2005, captured by ESA/NASA's Solar Heliospheric Observatory; the one on the right is from Jan. 7, 2014, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. 

Credit: ESA/NASA SOHO and NASA SDO

NASA's Aqua Sees Massive US Winter Storm

On January 2, 2014, NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the United States multiple times, allowing the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board to capture this true-colour image of a massive winter storm moving up the eastern seaboard. 

Another image taken the same day by the GOES-13 satellite shows moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cold air from Canada moving across the U.S. (Shown below)

Very cold temperatures and dangerous wind chills are moving in behind the system. 

The next storm is forming, and will bring blizzard conditions to the northern Plains Friday Night into Saturday. 

Extreme wind chills to -55 F are possible in the northern Plains this weekend. 

Credit: NASA/NOAA

Massive galaxy cluster verifies predictions of cosmological theory

Hubble space telescope optical image (green), mass map (limousin et al 2012; contours), and cso/bolocam 140 ghz (red) and 268 ghz (blue) maps of the galaxy cluster macs j0717+3745. 

The lack of 268 ghz signal at subcluster b (second large concentration from upper right) is due to the kinetic sunyaev-zeldovich effect. 

Credit: p. Korngut

By observing a high-speed component of a massive galaxy cluster, Caltech/JPL scientists and collaborators have detected for the first time in an individual object the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a change in the cosmic microwave background caused by its interaction with massive moving objects.

MACS J0717.5+3745 is an extraordinarily dynamic galaxy cluster with a total mass greater than 1015 (a million billion) times the mass of the sun or more than 1,000 times the mass of our own galaxy.

It appears to contain three relatively stationary subclusters (A, C, and D) and one subcluster (B) that is being drawn into the larger galaxy cluster, moving at a speed of 3,000 kilometers per second.

The galaxy cluster was observed by a team led by Sunil Golwala, professor of physics at Caltech and director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) in Hawaii.

Subcluster B was observed during what appears to be its first fall into MACS J0717.5+3745.

Its momentum will carry it through the center of the galaxy cluster temporarily, but the strong gravitational pull of MACS J0717.5+3745 will pull subcluster B back again.

Eventually, subcluster B should settle in with its stationary counterparts, subclusters A, C, and D.

Though subcluster B's behavior is dramatic, it fits neatly within the standard cosmological model. But the details of the observations of MACS J0717.5+3745 at different wavelengths were puzzling until they were analyzed in terms of a theory called the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.

In 1972, two Russian physicists, Rashid Sunyaev and Yakov Zel'dovich, predicted that we should be able to see distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the afterglow of the Big Bang—whenever it interacts with a collection of free electrons.

These free electrons are present in the intracluster medium, which is made up primarily of gas.

Gas within dense clusters of galaxies is heated to such an extreme temperature, around 100 million degrees, that it no longer coheres into atoms.

According to Sunyaev and Zel'dovich, the photons of the CMB should be scattered by the high-energy electrons in the intracluster medium and take on a measurable energy boost as they pass through the galaxy cluster.

NASA WISE: Massive black hole duo

Two black holes are entwined in a gravitational tango in this artist's conception. 

Supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies are thought to form through the merging of smaller, yet still massive black holes, such as the ones depicted here. 

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), helped lead astronomers to what appears to be a new example of a dancing black hole duo. 

Called WISE J233237.05-505643.5, the suspected black hole merger is located about 3.8 billion light-years from Earth, much farther than other black hole binary candidates of a similar nature. 

Credit: NASA

Astronomers have spotted what appear to be two supermassive black holes at the heart of a remote galaxy, circling each other like dance partners.

The incredibly rare sighting was made with the help of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

Follow-up observations with the Australian Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, Australia, and the Gemini South telescope in Chile, revealed unusual features in the galaxy, including a lumpy jet thought to be the result of one black hole causing the jet of the other to sway.

"We think the jet of one black hole is being wiggled by the other, like a dance with ribbons," said Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is lead author of a paper on the findings appearing in the Dec. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

"If so, it is likely the two black holes are fairly close and gravitationally entwined."

The findings could teach astronomers more about how supermassive black holes grow by merging with each other.

The WISE satellite scanned the entire sky twice in infrared wavelengths before being put into hibernation in 2011. NASA recently gave the spacecraft a second lease on life, waking it up to search for asteroids, in a project called NEOWISE.

The new study took advantage of previously released all-sky WISE data. Astronomers sifted through images of millions of actively feeding supermassive black holes spread throughout our sky before an oddball, also known as WISE J233237.05-505643.5, jumped out.

"At first we thought this galaxy's unusual properties seen by WISE might mean it was forming new stars at a furious rate," said Peter Eisenhardt, WISE project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and a co-author of the study.

"But on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes."

Almost every large galaxy is thought to harbor a supermassive black hole filled with the equivalent in mass of up to billions of suns.

How did the black holes grow so large? One way is by swallowing ambient materials. Another way is through galactic cannibalism.

When galaxies collide, their massive black holes sink to the center of the new structure, becoming locked in a gravitational tango. Eventually, they merge into one even-more-massive black hole.

More information: Preprint paper: arxiv.org/abs/1310.2257

NASA NuSTAR: Space Telescope Discovers 10 Monster Black Holes

This optical colour image of galaxies is seen overlaidwith X-ray data (magenta) from NASA's black hole-hunting NuSTAR space telescope. 

The arrow points to magenta blobs indicating giant, supermassive black holes discovered by the space telescope. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech`

A powerful NASA space telescope has found not one, but 10 monster black holes lurking in the hearts of distant galaxies — the first major finds for the X-ray space observatory, scientists say.

The discoveries, which scientists say occurred "serendipitously," were made as astronomers reviewed images from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), an X-ray space telescope designed specifically to hunt black holes.

"We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images," David Alexander, a professor with Durham University's physics department, said in a statement.

Then the team confirmed what they saw with observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, which also can look at low-energy light.

The 10 black holes discovered are just the beginning of hundreds of expected finds, the scientists added. With every supermassive black hole catalogued, scientists are hoping to better understand the population.

Surrounded by galaxies
According to NASA, discovering the supermassive black holes were a key piece of a puzzle first uncovered in 1962. Astronomers found a glow of X-rays in the background of the universe, but didn't know where the glow came from.

Today, scientists know the glow (also called the cosmic X-ray background) comes from very distant supermassive black holes, some of which are as large as 17 billion times the mass of the sun. But how these black holes form is still under investigation.

"Our early results show that the more distant supermassive black holes are encased in bigger galaxies," stated Daniel Stern, a co-author of the study and the project scientist for NuSTAR at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This is to be expected. Back when the universe was younger, there was a lot more action with bigger galaxies colliding, merging and growing."

While NuSTAR can detect these big black holes, other measurements (such as mass) come from agency observatories including the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescope.

The research appeared Aug. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal.

NASA Cassini: Massive Saturn Storm Pulls Water and Ammonia Ices from the Depths

This series of images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the development of the largest storm seen on the planet since 1990. 

These true-colour and composite near-true-color views chronicle the storm from its start in late 2010 through mid-2011, showing how the distinct head of the storm quickly grew large but eventually became engulfed by the storm’s tail. 

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Space Science Institute

Once every 30 years or so, or roughly one Saturnian year, a monster storm rips across the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet.

In 2010, the most recent and only the sixth giant storm on Saturn observed by humans began stirring. It quickly grew to superstorm proportions, reaching 15,000 kilometers (more than 9,300 miles) in width and visible to amateur astronomers on Earth as a great white spot dancing across the surface of the planet.

Now, thanks to near-infrared spectral measurements taken by NASA's Cassini orbiter and analysis of near-infrared colour signatures by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Saturn's superstorm is helping scientists flesh out a picture of the composition of the planet's atmosphere at depths typically obscured by a thick high-altitude haze.

The key finding: cloud particles at the top of the great storm are composed of a mix of three substances: water ice, ammonia ice, and an uncertain third constituent that is possibly ammonium hydrosulphide.

According to the Wisconsin researchers, the observations are consistent with clouds of different chemical compositions existing side-by-side, although a more likely scenario is that the individual cloud particles are composed of two or all three of the materials.

Writing in the current edition (Sept. 9, 2013) of the journal Icarus, a team led by UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center planetary scientists Lawrence Sromovsky, and including Kevin Baines and Patrick Fry, reports the discovery of the icy forms of water and ammonia.

Water in the form of ice has never before been observed on Saturn.

"We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere," explains Sromovsky, a senior scientist at UW-Madison and an expert on planetary atmospheres.

"The upper haze is so optically pretty thick that it is only in the stormy regions where the haze is penetrated by powerful updrafts that you can see evidence for the ammonia ice and the water ice. Those storm particles have an infrared colour signature that is very different from the haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere."

"The water could only have risen from below, driven upward by powerful convection originating deep in the atmosphere. The water vapor condenses and freezes as it rises. It then likely becomes coated with more volatile materials like ammonium hydrosulfide and ammonia as the temperature decreases with their ascent," Sromovsky adds.

The interesting effect, he notes, is that in Saturn's massive storm, at least, the observations can be matched by having particles of mixed composition, or clouds of water ice existing side-by-side with clouds of ammonia ice.

In the latter scenario, water ice would make up 22 percent of the cloud head and ammonia ice 55 percent.

The remaining fraction would be made up by the third constituent, which though less certain, is believed to be ammonia hydrosulfide.

"Up until now, there have been no quantitative calculations of spectra for cloud structures and compositions that matched the observed spectrum of an actual storm cloud feature," says Sromovsky.

Journal Reference:
L.A. Sromovsky, K.H. Baines, P.M. Fry. Saturn’s Great Storm of 2010–2011: Evidence for ammonia and water ices from analysis of VIMS spectra. Icarus, 2013; 226 (1): 402 DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2013.05.043

NASA SDO: Massive CME Arch - Video

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory had a fantastic view of the eruption on June 13th, 2013. 

It occurred on the north western limb of the Sun and plasma can be seen flowing back to the surface along magnetic field lines. 

Credit: NASA / SDO

Massive Asteroid Toutatis on Earth Fly-by Video

A new video captures the giant asteroid 4179 Toutatis tumbling through space on its flyby of Earth earlier this week.

The asteroid Toutatis video, which is about 40 seconds long, combines 64 radar images taken Wednesday and Thursday (Dec. 12 and 13) by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif. On those days, Toutatis was about 4.3 million miles (7 million kilometers) from Earth, or about 18 times farther away than the moon is.

The new radar images — which have a resolution of 12 feet (3.75 meters) per pixel — show the 3-mile-wide (5 kilometers) asteroid in striking detail.

Toutatis is revealed to be an elongated, irregularly shaped object with multiple ridges, researchers said. Strange bright glints may indicate surface boulders, they added.

The video also sheds light on how Toutatis moves. The asteroid spins about its long axis every 5.4 days and wobbles through space like a badly thrown football, scientists said.

Magnatar: massive magnetic star

The most magnetic massive star seen yet is dragging a giant cloak of trapped charged particles around it.

This newly discovered star, NGC 1624-2, could help shed light on what role the magnetism of stars plays in the evolution of stars and their galaxies.

NGC 1624-2, which lies about 20,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, has about 35 times the sun's mass.

Its hefty mass gives it plenty of fuel, making it bright and hot and thus likely to burn out relatively quickly after a lifetime of about 5 million years, or one-tenth of 1 percent of the sun's current age at midlife.

This massive star possesses a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than the sun's and nearly 10 times stronger than that detected around any other high-mass star.

"Magnetic fields of this strength are extremely rare — they are only known to exist in a few other stars of much lower mass," study lead author Gregg Wade, an astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada, reported.

"To find such a strong field is very lucky." This powerful magnetic field binds and controls the stellar wind of energetic particles streaming from NGC 1624-2 "to a very large distance from the star — 11.4 times the star's radius," Wade said.

"The huge volume of this magnetosphere is remarkable. It's more than four times wider than that of any other comparable massive star, and in terms of volume it is around 80 times larger."

While NGC 1624-2 is the most magnetic of all known massive stars, a few intermediate-mass stars have magnetic fields maybe twice as strong, Wade said.

In addition, as powerful as NGC 1624-2's magnetic field is, it might pale in comparison with that of magnetars – dense remnants of dead stars that are often thought of as the universe's most magnetic objects.

"The magnetic field of NGC 1624-2 is about 20,000 gauss at the star's surface. A typical magnetar might have a field on the order of 10 trillion gauss, so the strength of the magnetar's field is much larger — that is, 500 million times larger," Wade said.

However, "the standard basis for comparison of how 'much' magnetic field is present is the magnetic flux, which is equal to the strength of the magnetic field times the surface area of the star," Wade said.

"In that case, the flux of NGC 1624-2 is almost 700 times larger than that of a typical magnetar. "In other words, if NGC 1624-2 were to suddenly collapse to the size of a magnetar while retaining all of its magnetism, it would have a surface magnetic field of nearly 10,000 trillion gauss. Holy cow!"

NASA Goddard: Major X1.1 Class Solar Flare July 6, 2012 - YouTube

Active Region 1515 released an X1.1 class flare from the lower right of the sun on July 6, 2012, peaking at 7:08 PM EDT. This flare caused a radio blackout, labeled as an R3 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations scale that goes from R1 to R5. Such blackouts can cause disruption to both high and low level radio frequencies.

Earth's magnetosphere also underwent a minor geomagnetic storm on the evening of July 6 in response to relatively slow coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that have erupted from other regions on the sun since July 4.

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

Kuiper Belt Wider and More Massive than Asteroid belt

Kuiper Belt is a region in space initially predicted by astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper.

Now, this was way back in 1951. It took more than four decades before the said region was finally discovered.

In fact, it took five years of searching before David Jewitt and Jane Luu were finally successful.

Well, you can say that there are similarities between Kuiper Belt and the asteroid belt, both being composed of celestial objects.

Recent discoveries reveal that the Kuiper is much much larger than originally thought, about 20 times wider and perhaps 200 times more massive.

Also, while the asteroid belt is composed mainly of asteroids and meteoroids, which are basically made up of rock and metal, Kuiper is made up of frozen volatiles (methane, ammonia, and water). That’s right, the objects there are pretty much like comets.

Now, how did a “planet” like Pluto get to be reclassified into a KBO? First, Pluto is found right inside Kuiper. Furthermore, there are lots of objects in there that are pretty much of the same size (only slightly smaller actually) as Pluto. Finally, there are objects outside (but near) Kuiper that are larger than Pluto.

One of these objects is Eris, which is estimated to be 27% more massive than Pluto. Another object which is larger than Pluto and also believed to have been once a KBO is Triton, Neptune’s natural satellite.

We’ve mentioned earlier that most of the objects found in Kuiper have similar composition to those of comets. It would be therefore tempting to conclude that Kuiper and the Oort cloud are one. The Oort cloud is a hypothetical region believed to be the “dwelling place” of comets.

Scientists however think the Oort cloud is much much farther away. While the Kuiper Belt is in the region between 30 AU to 55 AU from the Sun, the Oort cloud is believed to be 50,000 AU from the Sun. That’s nearly one light-year away.

A deeper understanding of Kuiper should emerge once the spacecraft New Horizons reaches Pluto in July 2015. New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 for the purpose of exploring the Kuiper Belt.

Massive Solar Flare: 'Twister' Swirls Up 12x the Earth's size

A stalk-like prominence rose up above the sun, then split into roughly four strands that twisted themselves into a knot and dispersed over a two-hour period (July 12, 2011). NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory took a video of the sun twister. CREDIT: NASA/SDO/GSFC


A NASA satellite has caught a stunning, yet eerie, video of a huge plasma twister rising up from the surface of the sun.

The video, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows a plasma eruption that swirls up like a tornado to a dizzying height of up to 93,206 miles (150,000 kilometers) above the solar surface.

"Its height is roughly between 10 to 12 Earths," stated solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.