Young Star HD 95086: Two dust belts surrounded by a large dust halo

An artist's impression of a young star surrounded by debris rings and a vast dust halo. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Scientists at the University of Arizona have discovered what might be the closest thing to "baby photos" of our solar system.

A young star called HD 95086 is found to have two dust belts, analogous to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in the Solar System, surrounded by a large dust halo that only young planetary systems have.

Similar dust structures are also found around another, slightly older star called HR 8799, where four massive planets occupy the large gap between the two belts.

HR 8799, the first star found to host four directly imaged planets, is often referred to as a younger and scaled-up version of our Solar System.

Finding another star similar to HR 8799 suggests a common model for how stars form planets and how their planetary systems evolve.

The ages of these systems span an interesting period, about 10 to 90 million years, when terrestrial planets form and giant planets settle down to their final configuration in our own Solar System, the team reports.

"We think HD 95086 is a snapshot of what our solar system might have looked like when it was only 10 to 20 million years old," said Kate Y.L.Su, an associate astronomer in the UA's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory and lead author of the paper.

Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ESA's Herschel Space Observatory combined with detailed simulations, the researchers found HD 95086 and HR 8799 each have a vast disk halo of fine dust, suggesting enhanced collisional activities in their Kuiper-belt-like belts.

This is an expected behavior for systems that are experiencing dynamical settling of gas giants and possibly late formation of giant ice planets.

A schematic view of the HD 95086 system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The large gap between the warm and cold belts in HD 95086, HR 8799 and some other nearby older systems like debris disk twins Vega and Fomalhaut is an excellent signpost for multiple, yet-to-be-discovered planets, according to the research team.

HD 95086 and HR 8799 are located 295 and 129 light years from Earth in the constellations of Carina and Pegasus, respectively.

"The HD 95086 system with its a young star hosting at least one planet of about five Jupiter masses along with massive asteroid and Kuiper-like debris belts is a promising target for planet hunting,"

Su said. "Both systems are very similar, except the HD 95086 has more dust, which is in line with theories of planet formation and leads us to believe it is the younger of the two. By looking at other systems like these we can piece out how our solar system came to be."

"There have to be more planets than have been discovered to make a gap that is this big," said Sarah Morrison, a co-author of the paper and a PhD student in the UA's Department of Planetary Sciences who ran computer models to constrain the possibilities of how many planets are likely to inhabit the system, what their masses could be like and where their orbits could be.

"We think that the system is a prime candidate for direct imaging campaigns to find those planets."

CIBER: Caltech rocket experiment finds surprising cosmic light

The entrance of the CIBER optics, showing two near-infrared wide-field cameras (top), an absolute spectrometer (lower left) and a Fraunhofer line spectrometer (lower right). 

Credit: Jamie Bock/Caltech

Using an experiment carried into space on a NASA suborbital rocket, astronomers at Caltech and their colleagues have detected a diffuse cosmic glow that appears to represent more light than that produced by known galaxies in the universe.

The researchers, including Caltech Professor of Physics Jamie Bock and Caltech Senior Postdoctoral Fellow Michael Zemcov, say that the best explanation is that the cosmic light originates from stars that were stripped away from their parent galaxies and flung out into space as those galaxies collided and merged with other galaxies.

This explanation is described in a paper published November 7 in the journal Science,

The discovery suggests that many such previously undetected stars permeate what had been thought to be dark spaces between galaxies, forming an interconnected sea of stars.

"Measuring such large fluctuations surprised us, but we carried out many tests to show the results are reliable," says Zemcov, who led the study.

Although they cannot be seen individually, "the total light produced by these stray stars is about equal to the background light we get from counting up individual galaxies," says Bock, also a senior research scientist at JPL.

Bock is the principal investigator of the rocket project, called the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER), which originated at Caltech and flew on four rocket flights from 2009 through 2013.

In earlier studies, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which sees the universe at longer wavelengths, had observed a splotchy pattern of infrared light called the cosmic infrared background.

The splotches are much bigger than individual galaxies.

"We are measuring structures that are grand on a cosmic scale," says Zemcov, "and these sizes are associated with galaxies bunching together on a large-scale pattern."

Initially some researchers proposed that this light came from the very first galaxies to form and ignite stars after the Big Bang.

Others, however, have argued the light originated from stars stripped from galaxies in more recent times.

CIBER was designed to help settle the debate. "CIBER was born as a conversation with Asantha Cooray, a theoretical cosmologist at UC Irvine and at the time a postdoc at Caltech with [former professor] Marc Kamionkowski," Bock explains.

"Asantha developed an idea for studying galaxies by measuring their large-scale structure. Galaxies form in dark-matter halos, which are over-dense regions initially seeded in the early universe by inflation.

Furthermore, galaxies not only start out in these halos, they tend to cluster together as well. Asantha had the brilliant idea to measure this large-scale structure directly from maps.

Experimentally, it is much easier for us to make a map by taking a wide-field picture with a small camera, than going through and measuring faint galaxies one by one with a large telescope."

More information: On the Origin of Near-Infrared Extragalactic Background Light Anisotropy, Science, www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/… 1126/science.1258168

Puppis A: Supernova remnant seen in Two LIghts

Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/IAFE

The destructive results of a mighty supernova explosion reveal themselves in a delicate blend of infrared and X-ray light, as seen in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton.

The bubbly cloud is an irregular shock wave, generated by a supernova that would have been witnessed on Earth 3,700 years ago.

The remnant itself, called Puppis A, is around 7,000 light-years away, and the shock wave is about 10 light-years across.

The pastel hues in this image reveal that the infrared and X-ray structures trace each other closely.

Warm dust particles are responsible for most of the infrared light wavelengths, assigned red and green colours in this view.

Material heated by the supernova’s shock wave emits X-rays, which are colored blue.

Regions where the infrared and X-ray emissions blend together take on brighter, more pastel tones.

The shock wave appears to light up as it slams into surrounding clouds of dust and gas that fill the interstellar space in this region.

From the infrared glow, astronomers have found a total quantity of dust in the region equal to about a quarter of the mass of our sun.

Data collected from Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph reveal how the shock wave is breaking apart the fragile dust grains that fill the surrounding space.

Supernova explosions forge the heavy elements that can provide the raw material from which future generations of stars and planets will form.

Studying how supernova remnants expand into the galaxy and interact with other material provides critical clues into our own origins.

Infrared data from Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer (MIPS) at wavelengths of 24 and 70 microns are rendered in green and red.

X-ray data from XMM-Newton spanning an energy range of 0.3 to 8 kiloelectron volts are shown in blue.

Most precise measurement of an alien world's size: Kepler-93b

Using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer Space Telescopes, scientists have made the most precise measurement ever of the size of a world outside our solar system, as illustrated in this artist's conception.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The size of the exoplanet, dubbed Kepler-93b, is now known to an uncertainty of just 74 miles (119 kilometers) on either side of the planetary body.

The findings confirm Kepler-93b as a "super-Earth" that is about one-and-a-half times the size of our planet. Although super-Earths are common in the galaxy, none exist in our solar system.

Exoplanets like Kepler-93b are therefore our only laboratories to study this major class of planet.

With good limits on the sizes and masses of super-Earths, scientists can finally start to theorize about what makes up these weird worlds.

Previous measurements, by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, had put Kepler-93b's mass at about 3.8 times that of Earth.

The density of Kepler-93b, derived from its mass and newly obtained radius, indicates the planet is in fact very likely made of iron and rock, like Earth.

"With Kepler and Spitzer, we've captured the most precise measurement to date of an alien planet's size, which is critical for understanding these far-off worlds," said Sarah Ballard, a NASA Carl Sagan Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author of a paper on the findings published in the Astrophysical Journal.

"The measurement is so precise that it's literally like being able to measure the height of a six-foot tall person to within three quarters of an inch, if that person were standing on Jupiter," said Ballard.

Kepler-93b orbits a star located about 300 light-years away, with approximately 90 percent of the sun's mass and radius.

The exoplanet's orbital distance, only about one-sixth that of Mercury's from the sun—implies a scorching surface temperature around 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit (760 degrees Celsius).

Despite its new found similarities in composition to Earth, Kepler-93b is far too hot for life.

To make the key measurement about this toasty exoplanet's radius, the Kepler and Spitzer telescopes each watched Kepler-93b cross, or transit, the face of its star, eclipsing a tiny portion of starlight.

Kepler's unflinching gaze also simultaneously tracked the dimming of the star caused by seismic waves moving within its interior.

These readings encode precise information about the star's interior. The team leveraged them to narrowly gauge the star's radius, which is crucial for measuring the planetary radius.

Spitzer, meanwhile, confirmed that the exoplanet's transit looked the same in infrared light as in Kepler's visible-light observations.

These corroborating data from Spitzer, some of which were gathered in a new, precision observing mode, ruled out the possibility that Kepler's detection of the exoplanet was bogus, or a so-called false positive.

Taken together, the data boast an error bar of just one percent of the radius of Kepler-93b.

The measurements mean that the planet, estimated at about 11,700 miles (18,800 kilometers) in diameter, could be bigger or smaller by about 150 miles (240 kilometers), the approximate distance between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

More Information: Kepler-93b: A Terrestrial World Measured to within 120 km, and a Test Case for a New Spitzer Observing Mode - Authors: Sarah Ballard et al. 2014 ApJ 790 12. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/790/1/12

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory celebrates 15th anniversary

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO

Fifteen years ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Since its deployment on July 23, 1999, Chandra has helped revolutionize our understanding of the universe through its unrivaled X-ray vision.

Chandra, one of NASA's current "Great Observatories," along with the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, is specially designed to detect X-ray emission from hot and energetic regions of the universe.

With its superb sensitivity and resolution, Chandra has observed objects ranging from the closest planets and comets to the most distant known quasars.

It has imaged the remains of exploded stars, or supernova remnants, observed the region around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and discovered black holes across the universe.

Chandra also has made a major advance in the study of dark matter by tracing the separation of dark matter from normal matter in collisions between galaxy clusters. It is also contributing to research on the nature of dark energy.

To celebrate Chandra's 15th anniversary, four new images of supernova remnants; the Crab Nebula, Tycho, G292.0+1.8, and 3C58 – are being released.

These supernova remnants are very hot and energetic and glow brightly in X-ray light, which allows Chandra to capture them in exquisite detail.

"Chandra changed the way we do astronomy. It showed that precision observation of the X-rays from cosmic sources is critical to understanding what is going on," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director in Washington.

"We're fortunate we've had 15 years, so far, to use Chandra to advance our understanding of stars, galaxies, black holes, dark energy, and the origin of the elements necessary for life."

Chandra orbits far above Earth's X-ray absorbing atmosphere at an altitude up to 139,000 km (86,500 mi), allowing for long observations unobscured by Earth's shadow.

When it was carried into space in 1999, it was the largest satellite ever launched by the shuttle.

"We are thrilled at how well Chandra continues to perform," said Belinda Wilkes, director of the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"The science and operations teams work very hard to ensure that Chandra delivers its astounding results, just as it has for the past decade and a half."

"We are looking forward to more ground-breaking science over the next decade and beyond."

Originally called the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), the telescope was first proposed to NASA in 1976.

Prior to its launch aboard the shuttle, the observatory was renamed in honour of the late Indian-American Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Known to the world as Chandra (which means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit), he was widely regarded as one of the foremost astrophysicists of the 20th century.

"Chandra continues to be one of the most successful missions that NASA has ever flown as measured against any metric, cost, schedule, technical success and, most of all, scientific discoveries," said Martin Weisskopf, Chandra Project Scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"It has been a privilege to work on developing and maintaining this scientific powerhouse, and we look forward to many years to come."

Black hole fireworks in nearby galaxy Messier 106

A galaxy about 23 million light-years away is the site of impressive, ongoing, fireworks. 

Rather than paper, powder, and fire, this galactic light show involves a giant black hole, shock waves, and vast reservoirs of gas. 

Credit: NASA /CXC /JPL-Caltech /STScI /NSF /NRAO /VLA

Celebrants this Fourth of July will enjoy the dazzling lights and booming shock waves from the explosions of fireworks.

A similarly styled event is taking place in the galaxy Messier 106 (NGC 4258), as seen by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions.

Energetic jets, which blast from Messier 106's central black hole, are heating up material in the galaxy and thus making it glow, like the ingredients in a firework.

The jets also power shock waves that are driving gases out of the galaxy's interior.

Those gases constitute the fuel for churning out new stars. A new study estimates the shock waves have already warmed and ejected two-thirds of the gas from the center of Messier 106.

With a reduced ability to birth new stars, Messier 106 appears to be transitioning into a barren, so-called lenticular galaxy full of old, red stars. Lenticular galaxies are flat disks without prominent spiral arms.

"Jets from the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 106 are having a profound influence on the available gas for making stars in this galaxy," said Patrick Ogle, an astrophysicist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a new paper describing the results.

"This process may eventually transform the spiral galaxy Messier 106 into a lenticular galaxy, depriving it of the raw material to form stars."

Many galaxies contain a central black hole that actively "feeds" upon nearby gas.

Some of the material, as it draws toward the black hole, dramatically speeds up and violently spews out as twin jets near the black hole's poles.

As one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors, Messier 106 offers a great opportunity for investigating these high-powered jets.

Messier 106 is 23.5 million light-years distant, and visible with binoculars in the constellation Canes Venatici.

For the new study, researchers used data obtained with the Spitzer infrared telescope before the observatory ran out of coolant in 2009, as planned.

The data amount to a map of the infrared light emitted by heated-up hydrogen molecules in Messier 106.

The warmed hydrogen is a signature of the jet from the central black hole energizing the surrounding disk of the galaxy.

Spitzer Space telescope Image: Stars Forming Inside Serpent constellation

Serpens Cloud Core (Infrared)

Spitzer spotted this star nursery in the Serpens constellation.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS

A NASA space telescope has peeled back the dusty veil around the Serpent constellation to reveal a cluster of newborn stars.

The baby stars were spotted by NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope in the Serpens Cloud Core, a stellar nursery that is home to one of the youngest collections of stars astronomers have observed in the Milky Way.

It's about 750 light-years away from Earth and is part of the snake-shaped Serpens (or "Serpent") constellation.

The new view combines 82 images taken over more than 16 hours by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which has been scanning the cosmos in non-visible, infrared light for the last decade.

Serpens Cloud Core (Optical)

The image also incorporates observations from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), an infrared survey of the whole sky that was completed in 2001 using ground-based telescopes.

The newborn stars appear in red, orange and yellow, and a cloud of excess gas is shown in blue.

Clouds of dust shroud the Serpens Cloud Core, hiding its star nursery in visible wavelengths of light (the only kind of light humans can see), but an infrared telescope like Spitzer can reveal unseen cosmic objects by collecting longer, invisible wavelengths of light in the infrared spectrum.

Still, the dark patch on the left side of the center of the image shows a spot cloaked in so much dust that the infrared wavelengths were blocked.

The Serpens Cloud Core interests astronomers because it contains only small stars, and does not include any of the giant bright stars found in many other star-forming regions in the Milky Way, such as the Orion nebula.

The Earth's own sun is a medium-sized star, and astronomers are still unsure if it formed in a small star-forming region like Serpens or a large star-forming region like Orion.

N103B Supernova explosion: New suspect identified

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows N103B, all that remains from a supernova that exploded a millennium ago in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy 160,000 light-years away from our own Milky Way. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Goddard

Supernovas are often thought of as the tremendous explosions that mark the ends of massive stars' lives.

While this is true, not all supernovas occur in this fashion.

A common supernova class, called Type Ia, involves the detonation of white dwarfs, small, dense stars that are already dead.

New results from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed a rare example of Type Ia explosion, in which a dead star "fed" off an aging star like a cosmic zombie, triggering a blast.

The results help researchers piece together how these powerful and diverse events occur.

"It's kind of like being a detective," said Brian Williams of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead author of a study submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

"We look for clues in the remains to try to figure out what happened, even though we weren't there to see it."

Supernovas are essential factories in the cosmos, churning out heavy metals, including the iron contained in our blood.

Type Ia supernovas tend to blow up in consistent ways, and thus have been used for decades to help scientists study the size and expansion of our universe.

Researchers say that these events occur when white dwarfs, the burnt-out corpses of stars like our sun, explode.

Evidence has been mounting over the past 10 years that the explosions are triggered when two orbiting white dwarfs collide, with one notable exception.

Kepler's supernova, named after the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was among those who witnessed it in 1604, is thought to have been preceded by just one white dwarf and an elderly, companion star called a red giant.

Scientists know this because the remnant sits in a pool of gas and dust shed by the aging star.

Spitzer's new observations now find a second case of a supernova remnant resembling Kepler's.

Called N103B, the roughly 1,000 year-old supernova remnant lies 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy near our Milky Way.

"It's like Kepler's older cousin," said Williams. He explained that N103B, though somewhat older than Kepler's supernova remnant, also lies in a cloud of gas and dust thought to have been blown off by an older companion star. "The region around the remnant is extraordinarily dense," he said.

Unlike Kepler's supernova remnant, no historical sightings of the explosion that created N103B are recorded.

Both the Kepler and N103B explosions are thought to have unfolded as follows: an aging star orbits its companion, a white dwarf.

As the aging star molts, which is typical for older stars, some of the shed material falls onto the white dwarf. This causes the white dwarf to build up in mass, become unstable and explode.

According to the researchers, this scenario may be rare. While the pairing of white dwarfs and red giants was thought to underlie virtually all Type Ia supernovas as recently as a decade ago, scientists now think that collisions between two white dwarfs are the most common cause.

The new Spitzer research highlights the complexity of these tremendous explosions and the variety of their triggers. The case of what makes a dead star rupture is still very much an unsolved mystery.

NASA Spitzer coolant loss: Future of Warm mission

Faced with a budget crunch, NASA is likely to shutter its Spitzer space telescope, an infrared space observatory, the fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories.

The decision may help the US space agency to pump in the saved money to fund the functioning of Hubble, Kepler, Chandra and other orbiting observatories, the US space agency said in a statement.

NASA took stock of its fleet of orbiting astrophysics telescopes and decided which to save and which to shutter based on the findings of an independent review panel and turned down the Spitzer space telescope’s request for an extension.

“To me it is really sad that this country can not find just a few million bucks more to throw into this to keep these things active and running as they should be,” senior review panel chair Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was quoted as saying.

However, for many, the end of road for Spitzer do not appear as abrupt as they could see it coming.

Spitzer was launched in 2003 as a multipurpose observatory targeted at the low-energy infrared wavelengths of light blocked by earth’s atmosphere.

Spitzer finished its prime mission in 2009 when it exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant used to chill the instruments.

The loss of the coolant left two of Spitzer’s three instruments unusable, but two of the four wavelength bands on its main camera continued to operate as the Spitzer Warm Mission, Nature reported.

“Right now it can take images in a couple wavebands at tremendous sensitivity, but compared to what it used to do, its capabilities are far reduced,” Oppenheimer said.

“The committee felt that instead of chopping off a bunch of money from other missions, if we end that one large mission we can save everything else,” he explained.

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

The Helix nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae.

Discovered in the 18th century, these colourful astronomical beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Read more about the future of a warmer Spitzer and its role in providing new scientific discovery in the stark coldness of space. 

NASA Spitzer: Cosmic Clumps Cast the Darkest Shadows

Astronomers have found cosmic clumps so dark, dense and dusty that they throw the deepest shadows ever recorded.

Image credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /University of Zurich

The clumps were discovered within a huge cosmic cloud of gas and dust. Infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of these blackest-of-black regions in the cloud paradoxically light the way to understanding how the brightest stars form.

The large cloud looms in the center of this image of the galactic plane from Spitzer. The zoom oval to the right shows details of the cloud, revealing the dense clumps.

A new study takes advantage of the shadows cast by these dark clumps to measure the cloud's overall structure and mass.

These dense, clumpy pockets of star-forming material within the cloud are so thick with dust that they scatter and block not only visible light, but almost all background infrared light as well.

"The map of the structure of the cloud and its dense cores we have made in this study reveals a lot of fine details about the massive star and star cluster formation process," said Michael Butler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The dusty cloud, the results suggest, will likely evolve into one of the most massive young clusters of stars in our galaxy.

The densest clumps will blossom into the cluster's biggest, most powerful stars, called O-type stars, the formation of which has long puzzled scientists.

These hulking stars have major impacts on their local stellar environments while also helping to create the heavy elements needed for life.

The blue callout image reveals the overall darkness of the cloud, calculated using Spitzer’s infrared observations at a wavelength of 8 microns. Artifacts left by individual stars have been removed from the data.

The background image combines data from Spitzer surveys. Blue represents 3.6-micron light and green shows light of 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's infrared array camera.

Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS). The red spot in the center of the zoom oval, unrelated to the new study's findings, is a young star whose radiating heat has lit up a surrounding cocoon of dust.

Read more on this story here

NASA Chandra: Inside the Flame Nebula - NGC 2024

Image credit: X-ray: NASA /CXC /PSU /K.Getman, E.Feigelson, M.Kuhn & the MYStIX team; Infrared:NASA /JPL-Caltech

Stars are often born in clusters, in giant clouds of gas and dust.

Astronomers have studied two star clusters using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared telescopes and the results show that the simplest ideas for the birth of these clusters cannot work, as described in our latest press release.

This composite image shows one of the clusters, NGC 2024, which is found in the center of the so-called Flame Nebula about 1,400 light years from Earth.

In this image, X-rays from Chandra are seen as purple, while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are coloured red, green, and blue.

A study of NGC 2024 and the Orion Nebula Cluster, another region where many stars are forming, suggest that the stars on the outskirts of these clusters are older than those in the central regions.

This is different from what the simplest idea of star formation predicts, where stars are born first in the center of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust when the density is large enough.

The research team developed a two-step process to make this discovery. First, they used Chandra data on the brightness of the stars in X-rays to determine their masses.

Next, they found out how bright these stars were in infrared light using data from Spitzer, the 2MASS telescope, and the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT).

By combining this information with theoretical models, the ages of the stars throughout the two clusters could be estimated.

According to the new results, the stars at the center of NGC 2024 were about 200,000 years old while those on the outskirts were about 1.5 million years in age.

In Orion, the age spread went from 1.2 million years in the middle of the cluster to nearly 2 million years for the stars toward the edges.

NASA WISE Discovers Coldest Brown Dwarf Neighbour of the Sun

This artist's conception shows a newfound object named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, the coldest known brown dwarf. 

Credit: Penn State University/NASA/JPL-Caltech

A brown dwarf as cold as the North Pole has been discovered lurking remarkably close to our solar system, and it appears to be the coldest of its kind yet found, scientists say.

Using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers discovered the dim, "failed star" lurking just 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our sun.

"It's very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close," Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, said in a statement.

"And given its extreme temperature, it should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."

This diagram illustrates the locations of the star systems closest to the sun. 

Credit: Penn State University

Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars because they have many of the elements of that make up stars, but they lack the huge mass needed to kick off nuclear fusion in their core.

As a result, these objects don't radiate starlight and they sometimes resemble planets.

Some are even cool enough to have atmospheres much like gas giants.

While brown dwarfs are hidden in images taken in the visible spectrum, infrared telescopes like WISE can pick up the meager glow of brown dwarfs.

Luhman and colleagues first spotted the object in WISE data. It appeared to be moving quite fast, hinting that it was close by.

The team then investigated the object using Spitzer and the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachon in Chile to measure its distance and temperature.

"It is remarkable that even after many decades of studying the sky, we still do not have a complete inventory of the sun's nearest neighbours," Michael Werner, the project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.

Dubbed WISE J085510.83-071442.5, our newfound neighbor is now the record-holder for the coldest brown dwarf, with a temperature between minus 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 48 to minus 13 degrees Celsius), Luhman and colleagues say.

The previous record holders were more tepid, chilling only to room temperature.

At 3 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, the object also may be one of the least massive brown dwarfs ever found, the astronomers say.

Because it is so small, the scientists say it's possible that the body is actually a planet ejected from its star system, but brown dwarfs are known to be quite common cosmic objects.

The findings were described April 21 in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA Wise: Brown Star is discovered to be a close neighbour of our Sun

This image is an artist's conception of the brown dwarf WISE J085510.83-071442.5. 

The Sun is the bright star directly to the right of the brown dwarf. 

Credit: Robert Hurt /JPL, Janella Williams /Penn State University

A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind, as frosty as Earth's North Pole, has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes.

Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun.

Kevin Luhman

"It is very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a researcher in the Penn State Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"In addition, its extreme temperature should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."

Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight.

The newfound coldest brown dwarf, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, has a chilly temperature between minus 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 48 to minus 13 degrees Celsius).

Previous record holders for coldest brown dwarfs, also found by WISE and Spitzer, were about room temperature.

Although it is very close to our solar system, WISE J085510.83-071442.5 is not an appealing destination for human space travel in the distant future.

"Any planets that might orbit it would be much too cold to support life as we know it" Luhman said.

Add caption

WISE J085510.83-071442.5 was discovered through its rapid motion across the sky in two infrared images the WISE satellite taken six months apart in 2010. 

Two additional images were taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2013 and 2014 to measure its distance via the parallax effect. 

Credit: NASA/JPL/IPAC

Professional and amateur astronomers join forces: Pro-Am Venture

Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise, the galaxies are M101 (the "Pinwheel Galaxy"), M81, Centaurus A, and M51 (the "Whirlpool Galaxy"). 

M101 is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, but about 70% bigger. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA /CXC /SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA /JPL-Caltech

Long before the term "citizen science" was coined, the field of astronomy has benefited from countless men and women who study the sky in their spare time.

These amateur astronomers devote hours exploring the cosmos through a variety of telescopes that they acquire, maintain, and improve on their own.

Some of these amateur astronomers specialise in capturing what is seen through their telescopes in images and are astrophotographers.

What happens when the work of amateur astronomers and astrophotographers is combined with the data from some of the world's most sophisticated space telescopes?

Collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers reveal the possibilities and are intended to raise interest and awareness among the community of the wealth of data publicly available in NASA's various mission archives.

This effort is particularly appropriate for this month because April marks Global Astronomy Month, the world's largest global celebration of astronomy.

The images in this quartet of galaxies represent a sample of composites created with X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and optical data collected by an amateur astronomer.

In these images, the X-rays from Chandra are shown in pink, infrared emission from Spitzer is red, and the optical data are in red, green, and blue.

The two astrophotographers who donated their images for these four images, Detlef Hartmann and Rolf Olsen, used their personal telescopes of 17.5 inches and 10 inches in diameter respectively.

More details on how these images were made can be found in this blog post.

However, the long exposures of these objects may help to reveal phenomena that may otherwise be missed in the relatively short snapshots taken by major telescopes, which are tightly scheduled and often oversubscribed by professional astronomers.

Therefore, projects like this Astro Pro-Am collaboration might prove useful not only for producing spectacular images, but also contributing to the knowledge of what is happening in each of these cosmic vistas.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope: Planet-forming Disks Explained by Magnetism

Magnetic loops carry gas and dust above disks of planet-forming material circling stars, as shown in this artist's conception.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers say that magnetic storms in the gas orbiting young stars may explain a mystery that has persisted since before 2006.

Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study developing stars have had a hard time figuring out why the stars give off more infrared light than expected.

The planet-forming disks that circle the young stars are heated by starlight and glow with infrared light, but Spitzer detected additional infrared light coming from an unknown source.

A new theory, based on three-dimensional models of planet-forming disks, suggests the answer: Gas and dust suspended above the disks on gigantic magnetic loops like those seen on the sun absorb the starlight and glow with infrared light.

Neal Turner

"If you could somehow stand on one of these planet-forming disks and look at the star in the center through the disk atmosphere, you would see what looks like a sunset," said Neal Turner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The new models better describe how planet-forming material around stars is stirred up, making its way into future planets, asteroids and comets.

While the idea of magnetic atmospheres on planet-forming disks is not new, this is the first time they have been linked to the mystery of the observed excess infrared light.

According to Turner and colleagues, the magnetic atmospheres are similar to what takes place on the surface of our sun, where moving magnetic field lines spur tremendous solar prominences to flare up in big loops.

Stars are born out of collapsing pockets in enormous clouds of gas and dust, rotating as they shrink down under the pull of gravity.

As a star grows in size, more material rains down toward it from the cloud, and the rotation flattens this material out into a turbulent disk. Ultimately, planets clump together out of the disk material.

In the 1980s, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite mission, a joint project that included NASA, began finding more infrared light than expected around young stars.

Using data from other telescopes, astronomers pieced together the presence of dusty disks of planet-forming material but eventually it became clear the disks alone weren't enough to account for the extra infrared light, especially in the case of stars a few times the mass of the sun.

One theory introduced the idea that instead of a disk, the stars were surrounded by a giant dusty halo, which intercepted the star's visible light and re-radiated it at infrared wavelengths.

Then, recent observations from ground-based telescopes suggested that both a disk and a halo were needed.

Finally, three-dimensional computer modeling of the turbulence in the disks showed the disks ought to have fuzzy surfaces, with layers of low-density gas supported by magnetic fields, similar to the way solar prominences are supported by the sun's magnetic field.

The new work brings these pieces together by calculating how the starlight falls across the disk and its fuzzy atmosphere.

The result is that the atmosphere absorbs and re-radiates enough to account for all the extra infrared light.

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.

Exploring the Third Dimension of Cassiopeia A

One of the most famous objects in the sky - the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant - will be on display like never before, thanks to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a new project from the Smithsonian Institution.

A new three-dimensional (3D) viewer, being unveiled this week, will allow users to interact with many one-of-a-kind objects from the Smithsonian as part of a large-scale effort to digitize many of the Institutions objects and artifacts.

Scientists have combined data from Chandra, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and ground-based facilities to construct a unique 3D model of the 300-year old remains of a stellar explosion that blew a massive star apart, sending the stellar debris rushing into space at millions of miles per hour.

The collaboration with this new Smithsonian 3D project will allow the astronomical data collected on Cassiopeia A, or Cas A for short, to be featured and highlighted in an open-access program -- a major innovation in digital technologies with public, education, and research-based impacts.

To coincide with Cas A being featured in this new 3D effort, a specially-processed version of Chandra's data of this supernova remnant is also being released.

This new image shows with better clarity the appearance of Cas A in different energy bands, which will aid astronomers in their efforts to reconstruct details of the supernova process such as the size of the star, its chemical makeup, and the explosion mechanism.

The colour scheme used in this image is the following: low-energy X-rays are red, medium-energy ones are green, and the highest-energy X-rays detected by Chandra are coloured blue.

Cas A is the only astronomical object to be featured in the new Smithsonian 3D project. This and other objects in the collection - including the Wright brothers plane, a 1,600-year-old stone Buddha, a gunboat from the Revolutionary War, and fossil whales from Chile -- were being showcased in the Smithsonian X 3D event, taking place on November 13th and 14th at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

In addition to new state-of-the-art 3D viewer, the public will be able to explore these objects through original videos, online tours, and other supporting materials.

Cas A is the only supernova remnant to date to be modeled in 3D. To create this visualization, unique software that links the fields of astrophysics and medical imaging (known as "astronomical medicine") was used.

Since its initial release in 2009, the 3D model has proven a rich resource for scientists as well as an effective tool for communicating science to the public.

Providing this newly formatted data in an open source framework with finely-tuned contextual materials will greatly broaden awareness and participation for general public, teacher, student and researcher audiences.

Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO

Carina Nebula Image: Spitzer Space Telescope 10 years old

The Carina Nebula. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The infrared observatory Spitzer has been at work for 10 years, revealing the cool dusty regions where stars and planets form, as well as shedding light on planets, exoplanets, stars and galaxies.

Spitzer data have brought a better understanding of the Milky Way's spiral arm structure, led to the discovery of Saturn's largest and faintest ring, and the observatory was the first to detect light from an exoplanet.

Spitzer has enabled astronomers to investigate the composition, dynamics and atmospheres of exoplanets.

This image shows the Carina Nebula, a region where dust and gas are shaped by winds and radiation from the massive star Eta Carinae (100 times the mass of the Sun).

Infrared wavelength radiation from the star destroys dust, leaving cavities within the nebula surrounded by higher density "spikes".

This Spitzer image, reprocessed as part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) project, uses Spitzer's infrared array camera, with emission from wavelengths of 3.6 µm shown in blue, 4.5 µm in green and 8.0 µm in red. In the composite image, the dust appears red and the hotter gas, green.

Spitzer was originally called the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, and was renamed after its launch in honour of the late astronomer Lyman Spitzer.

It is one of NASA's Great Observatories, together with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the now-defunct Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

Spitzer used up its coolant for longer-wavelength observations in 2009, and is now continuing to work in the "warm mission phase".

This image is published in the October 2013 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics.