Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time in 4,000 Years of Mapping the Universe

Paintings of Saturn by German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Eimmart, a pioneering woman in science, from 1693–1698.

Eimmart's depictions are based on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, the first to confirm that Saturn’s mysterious appendages, which had confounded astronomers since Galileo Galilei, were in fact 'a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.'

What makes Eimmart's painting unique is that it combines the observations of more than ten astronomers into a depiction of superior accuracy.

Credit: Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Bologna

Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope, antagonising the church and unleashing a “hummingbird effect” of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloguing the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos.

We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe.

Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astro-visualisation scholar Michael Benson explores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, a pictorial catalogue of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our “gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness.”

From glorious paintings of the creation myth predating William Blake’s work by centuries to the pioneering galaxy drawing that inspired Van Gogh’s Starry Night to NASA’s maps of the Apollo 11 landing site, the images remind us that the cosmos, like Whitman, like ourselves, is vast and contains multitudes.

This masterwork of scholarship also attests, ever so gently, ever so powerfully, to the value of the “ungoogleable,” a considerable portion of Benson’s bewitching images comes from the vaults of the world’s great science libraries and archives, bringing to light a wealth of previously unseen treasures.

Beginning in 1870, French-born artist and astronomer Étienne Trouvelot spent a decade producing a series of spectacular illustrations of celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena. 

In 1872, he joined the Harvard College Observatory and began using its powerful telescopes in perfecting his drawings. 

His pastel illustrations, including this chromolithograph of Mare Humorum, a vast impact basin on the southwest side of the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon, were among the first serious attempts to enlist art in making popular the results of observations using technology developed for scientific research.

Courtesy of the U. of Michigan Library

Étienne Trouvelot's 1873 engravings of solar phenomena, produced during his first year at the Harvard College Observatory for the institution's journal. 

The legend at the bottom reveals that the distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles, more than 12 times the diameter of Earth. 

Despite the journal's modest circulation, such engravings were soon co-opted by more mainstream publications and became trailblazing tools of science communication that greatly influenced public understanding of the universe's scale.

Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard

CUORE: Creating the coldest cubic meter in the universe

Yale scientists working on the cryostat of the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE). 

The experiment is located in a clean room deep underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy to shield the experiment from cosmic rays and other environmental backgrounds. 

Credit: CUORE collaboration

The drive to create the coldest cubic meter in the universe may be centered in Italy, but its ultimate success will depend on instruments developed at Yale University.

An international team of scientists recently set a world record by cooling a copper vessel with a volume of a cubic meter down to a temperature of 6 milliKelvins, or -273.144 degrees Celsius.

It was the first experiment to chill an object so large this close to absolute zero.

The collaboration, called CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events), involves 130 scientists from the United States, Italy, China, Spain, France, and other countries.

It is based at the underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) of the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), in Italy.

"This is a major technological achievement," said Karsten Heeger, a professor of physics at Yale and director of Yale's Arthur W. Wright Laboratory.

CUORE is part of the new experimental program in neutrinos and dark matter pursued at the Wright Lab.

Yale physicists are building and testing instrumentation that will be used at temperatures of 10mK in the experiment's cryostat, which is the chilled chamber.

Reina Maruyama, an assistant professor of physics, is one of the original proponents for the US involvement in CUORE and is a coordinator of its data analysis

"In collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, we have developed a detector calibration system that will deploy radioactive sources into the coldest region of the cryostat and characterise our detectors," Heeger said.

Once the CUORE experiment is fully operational, it will study important properties of neutrinos, the fundamental, subatomic particles that are created by radioactive decay and do not carry an electrical charge.

Specifically, the experiment will look at a rare process called neutrino-less double-beta decay.

The detection of this process would let researchers demonstrate, for the first time, that neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are the same, thereby offering a possible explanation for the abundance of matter, rather than anti-matter, in the universe.

The experiment uses heat-sensitive detectors that operate in extremely cold temperatures. "It poses a unique challenge," Heeger said.

"We are trying to detect a minuscule amount of heat from nuclear decay, but need to know this very precisely. The detector calibration will tell us if we see the heat from double-beta decay or environmental backgrounds."

Now that the cryostat has reached base temperature, the commissioning and cryogenic testing of the calibration system will take place in the next few months, Heeger said.

More information: crio.mib.infn.it/wigmi/pages/cuore.php

POLARBEAR Detects Curls in the Universe’s Oldest Light CMB

Measurements of polarization of the cosmic microwave background. 

Credit: POLARBEAR

Cosmologists have made the most sensitive and precise measurements yet of the polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

The report, published October 20 in the Astrophysical Journal, marks an early success for POLARBEAR, a collaboration of more than 70 scientists using a telescope high in Chile's Atacama desert designed to capture the universe's oldest light.

"It's a really important milestone," said Kam Arnold, the corresponding author of the report who has been working on the instrument for a decade.

"We're in a new regime of more powerful, precision cosmology." Arnold is a research scientist at UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and part of the cosmology group led by physics professor Brian Keating.

POLARBEAR measures remnant radiation from the Big Bang, which has cooled and stretched with the expansion of the universe to microwave lengths.

This cosmic microwave background, the CMB, acts as an enormous backlight, illuminating the large-scale structure of the universe and carrying an imprint of cosmic history.

Arnold and many others have developed sensitive instruments called bolometers to measure this light.

Arrayed in the telescope, the bolometers record the direction of the light's electrical field from multiple points in the sky.

"It's a map of all these little directions that the light's electric field is pointing," Arnold explained.
POLARBEAR has now mapped these angles with resolution on a scale of about 3 arcminutes, just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon.

The team found telling twists called B-modes in the patterns of polarization, signs that this cosmic backlight has been warped by intervening structures in the universe, including such mysteries as dark matter, composed of substance that remains unknown, and the famously aloof particles called neutrinos, which elude capture making them difficult to study.

This initial report, the result of the first season of observation, maps B-modes in three small patches of sky.

Dust in our own galaxy also emits polarized radiation like the CMB and has influenced other measurements, but these patches are relatively clean, Arnold says. and variations in the CMB polarization due to dust occur on so broad a scale that they do not significantly influence the finer resolution B-modes in this report.

"We are confident that these B-modes are cosmological rather than galactic in origin," Arnold said.

Observations continue, and the data stream will ultimately be fed by additional telescopes comprising the Simons Array. Together they will map wider swaths of the sky, making fundamental discoveries possible.

"POLARBEAR is a real tour de force. With a relatively small, but strong, UC-led team we have surpassed the next-nearest competitors by an order of magnitude in sensitivity."

"We have paved the way towards solving the deepest mysteries in the quest to understand matter and energy at the beginning of time," said Brian Keating.

POLARBEAR is a collaboration of scientists from many institutions including experiment founder, Adrian Lee, professor of physics at UC Berkeley.

Subaru Telescope: Traces of One of Universe's First Stars Detected

The most massive stars in the early universe would eject material high in iron when they exploded. 

Astronomers can read the composition of the next generation of stars to determine what made up their ancestors.

Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

An ancient star in the halo surrounding the Milky Way galaxy appears to contain traces of material released by the death of one of the universe's first stars, a new study reports.

The chemical signature of the ancient star suggests that it incorporated material blasted into space by a supernova explosion that marked the death of a huge star in the early universe, one that may have been 200 times more massive than the sun.

"The impact of very-massive stars and their explosions on subsequent star formation and galaxy formation should be significant," lead author Wako Aoki, of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told Space.com by email.

Hidden giants
The first stars in the cosmos, known as Population III stars, formed from the hydrogen and helium that dominated the early universe.

Through nuclear fusion, other elements were forged in their hearts. At the end of their lifetimes, supernovas scattered these elements into the space around them, where the material was folded into the next generation of stars.

The universe's first massive stars would have been short-lived, so to determine their composition, scientists must examine the makeup of their offspring, stars that formed from the material distributed by their explosive deaths.

While numerical simulations have suggested that at least some of the first stars should have reached enormous proportions, no previous observational evidence had managed to confirm their existence.

Aoki and a team of scientists used the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to perform follow-up observations of a large sample of low-mass stars with low quantities of what astronomers term "metals," elements other than hydrogen and helium. 

They identified SDS J0018-0939, an ancient star only 1,000 light-years from Earth.

"The low abundance of heavy elements suggests that this star is quite old — as old as 13 billion years," Aoki said.
(Scientists think the Big Bang that created the universe occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago.)

The chemical composition of SDS J0018-0939 suggests it gobbled up the material blown off of a single massive ancient star, rather than several smaller bodies.

If multiple supernovas had provided the material that constructed the star, the "peculiar abundance ratios" in its interior would have been erased, Aoki said.

Volker Bromm of the University of Texas, Austin agrees, saying that SDS J0018 likely evolved from the material from a single star, which could have been more than 200 times as massive as the sun.

Bromm, who has performed theoretical studies on the properties of the first generation of stars and their supernova explosions, did not participate in the new study.

He authored a corresponding "News & Views" article that appeared with the research online today (Aug. 21) in the journal Science.

Signs of low-mass first-generation stars have appeared to be more plentiful in their descendants, which contain large amounts of carbon and other light elements, but until these results, scientists had detected no traces of their very massive siblings.

The scarcity suggested that low-mass stars were more numerous in the early universe.

"We have come to understand that the first stars had a range of masses, from a few solar masses, all the way up to 100 solar masses, or even more," Bromm told reporters.

"The typical, or average, mass is predicted to be somewhere close to a few tens of solar masses.".

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

Planet Mercury: Result of early hit-and-run collisions

New simulations show that Mercury and other unusually metal-rich objects in the solar system may be relics left behind by hit-and-run collisions in the early solar system. 

Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Caltech.

Planet Mercury's unusual metal-rich composition has been a longstanding puzzle in planetary science.

According to a study published online in Nature Geoscience July 6, Mercury and other unusually metal-rich objects in the solar system may be relics left behind by collisions in the early solar system that built the other planets.

The origin of planet Mercury has been a difficult question in planetary science because its composition is very different from that of the other terrestrial planets and the moon.

This small, innermost planet has more than twice the fraction of metallic iron of any other terrestrial planet. Its iron core makes up about 65 percent of Mercury's total mass; Earth's core, by comparison, is just 32 percent of its mass.

How do we get Venus, Earth and Mars to be mostly "chondritic" (having a more-or-less Earth-like bulk composition) while Mercury is such an anomaly?

Erik Asphaug

For Arizona State University professor Erik Asphaug, understanding how such a planet accumulated from the dust, ice and gas in the early solar nebula is a key science question.

There have been a number of failed hypotheses for Mercury's formation.

None of them until now has been able to explain how Mercury lost its mantle while retaining significant levels of volatiles (easily vaporized elements or compounds, such as water, lead and sulphur).

Mercury has substantially more volatiles than the moon does, leading scientists to think its formation could have had nothing to do with a giant impact ripping off the mantle, which has been a common popular explanation.

To explain the mystery of Mercury's metal-rich composition, ASU's Asphaug and Andreas Reufer of the University of Bern have developed a new hypothesis involving hit-and-run collisions, where proto-Mercury loses half its mantle in a grazing blow into a larger planet (proto-Venus or proto-Earth).

One or more hit-and-run collisions could have potentially stripped away proto-Mercury's mantle without an intense shock, leaving behind a mostly-iron body and satisfying a number of the major puzzles of planetary formation, including the retention of volatiles, in a process that can also explain the absence of shock features in many of the mantle-stripped meteorites.

Asphaug and Reufer have developed a statistical scenario for how planets merge and grow based on the common notion that Mars and Mercury are the last two relics of an original population of maybe 20 bodies that mostly accreted to form Venus and Earth. These last two planets lucked out.

"How did they luck out? Mars, by missing out on most of the action, not colliding into any larger body since its formation, and Mercury, by hitting the larger planets in a glancing blow each time, failing to accrete," explains Asphaug, who is a professor in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE).

"It's like landing heads two or three times in a row - lucky, but not crazy lucky. In fact, about one in 10 lucky."

"The surprising result we have shown is that hit-and-run relics not only can exist in rare cases, but that survivors of repeated hit-and-run incidents can dominate the surviving population."

"That is, the average unaccreted body will have been subject to more than one hit-and-run collision," explains Asphaug.

"We propose one or two of these hit-and-run collisions can explain Mercury's massive metallic core and very thin rocky mantle."

According to Reufer, who performed the computer modeling for the study, "Giant collisions put the final touches on our planets."

"Only recently have we started to understand how profound and deep those final touches can be."

"The implication of the dynamical scenario explains, at long last, where the 'missing mantle' of Mercury is - it's on Venus or the Earth, the hit-and-run targets that won the sweep-up," says Asphaug.

More Information: Mercury and other iron-rich planetary bodies as relics of inefficient accretion: Authors: E. Asphaug & A. Reufer - Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2189:

ESA Athena to study the hot and energetic universe

Artist's impression of an active galaxy. 

Credit: ESA/AOES Medialab

ESA has selected the Athena advanced telescope for high-energy astrophysics as its second 'Large-class' science mission.

The observatory will study the hot and energetic Universe and takes the 'L2' slot in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015–25 plan, with a launch foreseen in 2028.

By combining a large X-ray telescope with state-of-the-art scientific instruments, Athena will address key questions in astrophysics, including: how and why does ordinary matter assemble into the galaxies and galactic clusters that we see today? How do black holes grow and influence their surroundings?

Scientists believe that black holes lurk at the centre of almost all galaxies and that they play a fundamental role in their formation and evolution.

To investigate this connection, Athena will observe X-ray emission from very hot material just before it is swallowed by a black hole, measuring distortions due to gravitational light-bending and time-delay effects in this extreme environment. Athena will also be able to determine the spin of the black hole itself.

Athena's powerful instruments will also allow unprecedented studies of a wide range of astronomical phenomena.

These include distant gamma-ray bursts, the hot gas found in the space around clusters of galaxies, the magnetic interplay between exoplanets and their parent stars, Jupiter's auroras and comets in our own Solar System.

"Athena will be a state-of-the-art observatory that will provide a significant leap forward in scientific capabilities compared with previous X-ray missions, and will address fundamental open questions in astrophysics," says Alvaro Giménez, ESA's Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

"Its selection ensures that Europe's success in the field of X-ray astronomy is maintained far beyond the lifetime of our flagship observatory XMM-Newton."

The selection process for L2 began in March 2013, when ESA issued a call to the European science community to suggest the scientific themes to be pursued by the Cosmic Vision programme's second and third Large missions.

In November 2013, the theme of "the hot and energetic Universe" was selected for L2 for a launch in 2028, with "the gravitational Universe" selected for L3 and a planned launch in 2034.

Now officially selected for L2, Athena now moves into a study phase. Once the mission design and costing have been completed, it will eventually be proposed for 'adoption' in around 2019, before the start of construction.

After launch, Athena will travel to its operational orbit around the gravitationally semi-stable location in space some 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth as seen from the Sun, a position coincidentally known as L2. ESA's Herschel, Planck and Gaia missions have also used L2 orbits.

Scanning the skies for Exoplanets and Exomoons in other solar systems

The best prospect for habitable exomoons may be around gas giants. 

Credit: NASA

The first exoplanet was discovered in 1994.

Twenty years later, NASA's exoplanet catalog lists more than 1700 planets confirmed around other stars.

Most of these extra-solar-systems have been measured by changes in light spectra, in stellar motion or dust disks around stars.

Some exoplanets-more than 40 as of today-have even been directly photographed.

Jupiter's moons

One way or the other, we know that exoplanets are out there in abundance, in places we thought they would be and in places we didn't dream a planet could possibly exist. So what comes next? Finding moons.

Exomoons are naturally formed satellites circling around planets in other solar systems. Like the exoplanets themselves, we assume that exomoons are out there in relatively high abundance.

This assumption is based partly upon what we see around us in our own Solar System and partly upon our hypotheses about planetary formation.

Saturn's moons

This is what we observe in our own Solar System: moons are extremely common.

From Earth's one Moon to Jupiter's (currently known) fifty, every planet in the Solar System one astronomical unit or more from the Sun has a natural satellite.

Even Pluto, no longer officially classified as a planet, has a smaller companion circling around it.

Of note, the solid bodies such as Earth and Pluto have very few companions, while gaseous bodies Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have many.

Pluto and Charon

Furthermore, the masses of the Moon and Charon have a very specific relationship to Earth and Pluto in terms of mass: each satellite is about 10-2 the mass of their parent planet.

By contrast, the ratio of satellite masses to parent planet masses for the gas giants is very different: 10-4.

The differences in mass-ratio, how massive the moon is compared to the parent planet, and the differences in composition between the moons of solid planets and those of the gas giants led to a search for different formation scenarios for Earth's moon and the moons of the outer planets.

This is the current hypothesis: that there are two different methods of satellite formation at work in our Solar System.

Amy Barr Mlinar

Both methods were recently reviewed by Dr.Amy Barr Mlinar of Brown University at the Space Telescope Science institute Spring Symposium.

"This has been worked out starting about in the 1960's up through now," said Barr, "You have this [moon/planet] mass ratio of about 10-2 for solid planets, and a [moon/planet] mass ratio of about 10-4 for planets with a gaseous envelope."

Essentially, difference in mass ratios reflects the two completely different origins of our Moon and the satellites of Jupiter.

At the high end of the moon/planet mass ratio, 10-2 are the satellites of solid bodies (Earth and Pluto). These moons were formed from collisions.

Sometime in the distant past an object some large percentage of Earth's size struck the Earth, knocking material away that later coalesced into the Moon. The same is likely true of Charon, Pluto's companion.

Read the full article here

Finding Life on other planets will take good science and luck

Humanity will have the tools to detect alien life in the next two decades, but whether scientists can actually find life in another solar system depends a lot on luck, a panel of experts said Wednesday (May 21).

While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), expected to launch in 2018, will have the ability to search for the chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of alien worlds, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that scientists will find extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe.

No one is sure how life begins or how ubiquitous it is, making it very difficult to pinpoint when and where to find it, scientists said during a session at the 30th US National Space Symposium in Clorado.

"We don't know how many planets we're going to have to examine before we find life, and not finding it on 10 or 100 doesn't mean it's not there," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate said during the panel. "This may be very tricky."

This diagram shows the position of Kepler-186f in relation to Earth.

Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech

A mission still in the early stages of development could also help scientists investigate alien worlds even without the use of a large telescope.

"Starshade," the huge sunflower-shaped craft would block light from a star to allow a well-positioned space telescope to look at the atmospheres of rocky planets orbiting sun-like stars, a historically difficult feat.

By using the starshade, scientists can hunt for an "Earth twin" orbiting a yellow star in the habitable zone like Earth, the only planet scientists know hosts life.

"We'll have the capability to find it [life] and we'll have that capability within a decade with James Webb and hopefully within two decades with an Earth twin, but beyond that, it's really just up to chance," Seager, who is affiliated with the starshade group, said.

The project is led by Jeremy Kasdin, a professor at Princeton University, N.J., in conjunction with JPL and support from Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif.

Kasdin gave a TED talk about the project on March 19.

Stellar explosion on outer reaches of Universe provides clues about black hole formation

Top left box (a): Image of the field of the GRB121024A captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), Chile. 

The GRB121024A is the point marked by the dotted lines.

The glow of the GRB121024A in the image does not correspond to its distance from the Earth. 

In fact, as can be seen, the GRB121024A is one of the brightest objects in the field, despite being one of the most distant, if not the most distant one, in the image.

So the point marked corresponds to the explosion of a star about ~11,000 million years ago when the age of the Universe was only one third of what it is now. 

General box (b): Artist's impression of the GRB121024A.

It is possible to see the jets emerging from the dying star in the center of which a black hole would form. The blue wave spread by the jet represents the circular polarization detected.

Acknowledgements: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger. Credit: UPV/EHU

On 24 October 2012 observatories across the world were alerted about a huge stellar explosion, the GRB121024A.

However, only the European Southern Observatory using its Very Large Telescope located in Chile managed to take accurate polarimetric measurements of the phenomenon.

The data obtained on that explosion, which took place about 11,000 million years ago, have made it possible to reconstruct how a black hole is formed.

The work, which has had the participation of the Ikerbasque researcher Javier Gorosabal, co-director of the Associated Unit with the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia /CSIC-UPV /EHU, has been published in the prestigious journal Nature.

There is no other event in the cosmos that can compete in terms of energy and intensity with stellar explosions on the outer reaches of the universe and which are known as LGRBs (Long Gamma-Ray Bursts): in just one second a single GRB can emit as many as hundreds of stars like the Sun during its 10,000-million-year-lifetime.

For the last decade astrophysicists have been in possession of strong evidence that LGRBs occur when the so-called massive stars burst; these are huge stars with masses of up to hundreds of times bigger than that of the Sun and which, moreover, spin rapidly on a rotation axis.

As these stars are massive and spin, they do not explode like a normal star, which does so radially, as a ball does when it deflates, for example.

The implosion of these huge stars would produce, according to theoretical models, a huge spinning top, which would turn in the way that water rotates down the plughole of a basin, until a black hole is finally formed.

The energy given off by this gigantic explosion would be emitted in two jets displaying a high level of energy and which would be aligned with the rotation axis of the dying star.

What is more, all these stars have magnetic fields. And these are intensified further if they rotate rapidly, as in the case of the LGRBs.

So during the internal collapse of the star towards the central black hole, the magnetic fields of the star would also swirl around the star's rotation axis, and during the collapse of the star, a powerful "magnetic geyser" would be produced and be ejected from the environment of the black hole that is being formed; the effects of this can be felt at distances of billions of kilometres.

Image of the GRB121024A captured by means of the polarimeter fitted onto the FORS2 instrument of the VLT. 

The polarimeter provides two images for each object in the field of vision.

The polarized objects appear considerably brighter in one band than in the other. The non-polarized objects, the vast majority, display the same intensity in the upper and lower band.

The object indicted by the arrow is the GRB121024A which displayed a circular polarization of 0.6%. 

Credit: Wiersema et al. 2014, Nature, DOI 10.1038/nature13237.

This complex scenario led one to predict that the light emitted during the explosion of the star must have been circularly polarized as if it were a screw, and that is what, for the first time, the authors have detected in Chile: a circularly polarized light that is the direct consequence of a black hole "recently" created on the outer reaches of the Universe and which has been confirmed by the theoretical model.

What is more, an optical circular polarization to such a high degree had never been detected, and nor had one been detected in such a distant source. All this indicates that the GRB121024A is an extraordinary event.

The VLT is one of the largest and best equipped telescopes in the world; it makes use of the exceptional astronomical observation conditions of the Atacama desert.

That is why the use of the VLT is very limited and is regulated by a highly competitive process in which every six months an international committee selects the best proposals for observation submitted.

So the only way to access these technologically state-of-the-art facilities is by means of powerful international consortia. 27 institutions belonging to 13 countries have participated in the study published by the prestigious journal Nature.

More information: K. Wiersema, S. Covino, K. Toma, A.J. van der Horst, K. Varela, M. Min, J. Greiner, R.L.C. Starling, N.R. Tanvir, R.A.M.J. Wijers, S. Campana, P.A. Curra, Y. Fan, J.P.U. Fynbo, J. Gorosabel, A. Gomboc, D. Götz, J. Hjorth, Z.P. Jin, S. Kobayashi, C. Kouveliotou, C. Mundell, P.T.O'Brien, E. Pian, A. Rowlinson, D.M. Russell, R. Salvaterra, S. Di Serego Alighieri, G. Tagliafferri, S.D. Vergani, J. Eliott, C. Fariña, O.E. Hartoog, R. Karjalainen, S. Klose, F. Knust, A.J. Levan, P. Schady, V. Sudilovsky, & R. Willingale. "Circular Polarization in the optical afterglow of GRB121024A". Nature, 2014, DOI: 10.1038/nature13237

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Image: A cross-section of the Universe

This is an image of a galaxy cluster taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope gives a remarkable cross-section of the Universe, showing objects at different distances and stages in cosmic history.

They range from cosmic near neighbours to objects seen in the early years of the Universe. 

The 14-hour exposure shows objects around a billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. 

Credit: NASA, ESA

An image of a galaxy cluster taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope gives a remarkable cross-section of the Universe, showing objects at different distances and stages in cosmic history.

They range from cosmic near neighbours to objects seen in the early years of the Universe. The 14-hour exposure shows objects around a billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye.

This new Hubble image showcases a remarkable variety of objects at different distances from us, extending back over halfway to the edge of the observable Universe.

The galaxies in this image mostly lie within about five billion light-years of us, but the field also contains objects that are both closer and more distant.

Studies of this region of the sky have shown that many of the objects that appear to lie close together may actually be billions of light-years apart.

This is because several groups of galaxies lie along our line of sight, creating something of an optical illusion.

Hubble's cross-section of the Universe is completed by distorted images of galaxies in the very distant background.

These objects are sometimes distorted due to a process called gravitational lensing, an extremely valuable technique in astronomy for studying very distant objects.

This lensing is caused by the bending of the space-time continuum by massive galaxies lying close to our line of sight to distant objects.

One of the lens systems visible here is called CLASS B1608+656, which appears as a small loop in the centre of the image. It features two foreground galaxies distorting and amplifying the light of a distant quasar.

The light from this bright disc of matter, which is currently falling into a black hole, has taken nine billion years to reach us—two thirds of the age of the Universe.

As well as CLASS B1608+656, astronomers have identified two other gravitational lenses within this image. Two galaxies, dubbed Fred and Ginger by the researchers who studied them, contain enough mass to visibly distort the light from objects behind them.

Fred, also known more prosaically as [FMK2006] ACS J160919+6532, lies near the lens galaxies in CLASS B1608+656, while Ginger ([FMK2006] ACS J160910+6532) is markedly closer to us.

Despite their different distances from us, both can be seen near to CLASS B1608+656 in the central region of this Hubble image.

Big Bang Expansion: 'Smoking Gun' for Universe's discovery - Video

Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the theorised dramatic expansion of the universe that put the "bang" in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, new research suggests.

If it holds up, the landmark discovery — which also confirms the existence of hypothesised ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves — would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.

"If it is confirmed, then it would be the most important discovery since the discovery, I think, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," Harvard CfA astronomer Avi Loeb, who is not a member of the study team, told reporters, comparing the finding to a 1998 observation that opened the window on mysterious dark energy and won three researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

BICEP2 Post Big Bang Discovery: Evidence spotted for universe's early expansion

In this 2007 photo provided by Steffen Richter, the sun sets behind the BICEP2 telescope, foreground, and the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica. 

In the faint glowing remains of the Big Bang, scientists found "smoking gun" evidence that the universe began with a split-second of astonishingly rapid growth from a seed far smaller than an atom. 

To find a pattern of polarization in the faint light left over from the Big Bang, astronomers scanned about 2 percent of the sky for three years with the BICEP2 at the south pole, chosen for its very dry air to aid in the observations, said the leader of the collaboration, John Kovac of Harvard. 

Credit: AP Photo/Steffen Richter

The universe was born almost 14 billion years ago, exploding into existence in an event called the Big Bang.

Now researchers say they've spotted evidence that a split-second later, the expansion of the cosmos began with a powerful jump-start.

Experts called the discovery a major advance if confirmed by others. Although many scientists already believed that initial, extremely rapid growth spurt happened, finding this evidence has been a key goal in the study of the universe.

Researchers reported Monday that they did it by peering into the faint light that remains from the Big Bang.

Lawrence Krauss

If verified, the discovery "gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning," when it was far less than one-trillionth of a second old, said theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work.

"It's just amazing," he said. "You can see back to the beginning of time."

Alan Guth

Another outside expert, physicist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the finding already suggests that some ideas about the rapid expansion of the universe can be ruled out.

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot soup of particles.

It took about 380,000 years to cool enough that the particles could form atoms, then stars and galaxies.

Billions of years later, planets formed from gas and dust that were orbiting stars. The universe has continued to spread out.

This image provided by the BICEP2 Collaboration shows slight temperature fluctuations, indicated by variations in colour, of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) of a small patch of sky and the orientation of its polarisation, shown as short black lines.

Researchers say since the CMB is a form of light, it exhibits all the properties of light, including polarisation. 

The changes in a particular type of polarisation, indicated here, are theorised to be caused by gravitational waves. 

These waves are signals of an extremely rapid inflation of the universe in its first moments. 

Credit: AP Photo/BICEP2 Collaboration

Krauss said he thinks the new finding could rank with the greatest discoveries about the universe over the last 25 years, such as the Nobel prize-winning discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating.

The new results were announced by a collaboration that includes researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The team plans to submit its results to a scientific journal this week, said its leader, John Kovac of Harvard.

Read the full article here

NASA CAL: Creating the Coldest Spot in Universe on the Space Station

The icy chill of empty space will soon be trumped by the temperatures aboard the International Space Station.

Using NASA's Cold Atom Lab (CAL), scientists plan to reach temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero on the station, allowing them to study challenging aspects of quantum mechanics.

"We're going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally," JPL's Rob Thompson said in a statement.

Thompson is the Project Scientist for the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), an atomic 'refrigerator' planned to make the orbiting laboratory its new home in 2016.

He said, "We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin"—one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory utilizes a magnetic trap that confines particles, allowing them to cool to temperatures just barely above absolute zero. Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

When atoms of rubidium and sodium reach temperatures near absolute zero, they, they behave as both particles and waves, merging into a single wave of matter.

Known as Bose-Einstein Condensates (BCEs), the new material was predicted by both Albert Einstein and Satyendra Bose in the early 20th century.

Mixing two BCEs isn't like blending ordinary gases — the condensates instead behave like waves, interfering with one another so that two atoms combined together can result in no atom at all.

"The Cold Atom Lab will allow us to study these objects at perhaps the lowest temperatures over," Thompson said.

Researchers will also be able to mix super-cool atomic gases on board the space station.

Atoms will float free of perturbations, which will allow for extremely sensitive measurements of the weak interactions that occur.

"This could lead to the discovery of interesting and novel quantum phenomena," Thompson said.

The International Space Station is a prime location to perform such experiments because of lack of interference from the pull of gravity.

A basic principle of thermodynamics is that gas cools as it expands. When gas is sprayed from a household aerosol can, the can cools because the remaining gas within it expands to fill the recently-vacated space.