ESO UK Astronomers Discover Sandstorms in Space

Astronomers have discovered sandstorms in space, according to a report published in the Nature journal.

Astronomers from the University of Sydney and the University of Manchester have discovered sandstorms in space while observing three red giant stars.

They have used one of the powerful telescopes in European Southern Observatory in Northern Chile to observe the stars.

The study revealed that super strong sand storms were responsible for removing massive amounts of dust grains around the red stars and the existence of dust grains of nearly a millionth of a metre across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars' light, according to BBC report.

"The winds that stream from the upper atmosphere of the red giant stars are responsible for removing massive amounts of matter," said Barnaby Norris, researcher at the University of Sydney, in a statement.

According to the astronomers, star grains themselves are transparent like powdered glass, but so incredibly fine so as to appear like smoke.

These grains contain majority of the chemical elements critical to the formation of earth-like planets and life come from the winds driven from dying red giant stars.

They claim that Earth and everybody living on it are probably made of the stardust.

The ultimate fate of the star itself can hinge upon the efficiency of the wind. The mass removed by the wind can bring a somewhat heavier star below the critical threshold required to fuel a cataclysmic supernova explosion, defusing the bomb and allowing it to fade away as a white dwarf star.

Researchers claim that this new discovery will give more information about the red giant stars death and it will give us more information on how these old, dying stars manage to drive such powerful winds.

"The grains that we have discovered here will come as a real shock to the accepted wisdom in the field. They are both much larger and much closer to the stellar surface than anyone expected," said Norris.

"Hopefully our findings will help to illuminate a key step in the grand cycle as matter is expelled from stars into the galaxy only to seed new generations of stellar and planetary birth," he concluded.

HiRISE: Gullies and Lobate Material in a Crater in the Nereidum Montes

This image includes a crater that has been heavily influenced by later geologic processes.

First of all, terrain-altering or -burying processes have eliminated much of the pattern of ejecta that surrounds fresh craters.

The crater also appears fairly flat-floored with short walls (not very deep) for its size, indicating material has filled it in.

These modifying effects may be due to deposition and activity of ice-rich or other mantling sediments deposited at some point in the past.

Finally, the crater clearly exhibits gullies starting on its northern wall and extending to its center.

The arc-shaped ridge inside the southern edge of the crater, partially buried by the filling material, is particularly curious - it could be a wind-caused or other accumulation of crater-fill material.

One of the rationales for acquiring an image of this location is to investigate the relationship between these features; HiRISE's full resolution can provide better details of the terrain.

HiRISE: Concentric Structures in Meridiani Planum

This image shows a number of unusual, quasi-circular structures from 300 to 600 meters in diameter that apparently formed within bright flows in Meridiani Planum.

The strange structures were observed earlier in MOC image E12-01295.

They are located near the equator, about 300 kilometers West of the MER rover Opportunity.

New details can be seen in the HiRISE image that yield clues to the origin of these mysterious features.

The dark rings seen within the concentric structures appear rougher than their surroundings.

The bright material in which they formed is densely fractured, suggesting that it is quite brittle.

Several small impact craters found within the bright unit produced sprays of dark ejecta, suggesting that the bright surface layer may be only a few meters thick.

A compositional and morphological boundary separates the contorted central region of the unit from the smooth margins.

A full interpretation awaits detailed analysis, but these observations suggest that the lobate bright unit may have been produced by an ancient flow of water-saturated fluvial sediments.

The circular structures within the flow could have formed by desiccation, as the sediments dried out and contracted, similar to mud cracks but on a much larger scale. Or they may have formed by a process of diapirism, if a solid crust formed on the surface of the drying sediments that was denser than the water-saturated slurry below.

On Earth, slurries of sand and water that are pressurised by the weight of the overburden can rise to the surface to form "injectites," eruptions of sand and water that can reach heights of hundreds of meters.

Whether they were formed by desiccation or injection, these unusual features record a unique moment in the distant past of Mars.

Hubble captures Supersonic Star ejected from Milky Way

This Hubble Space Telescope photo shows the superfast star HE 0437-5439 (with arrow) as it is being booted from the MIlky Way galaxy. Credit: NASA/ESA/Z. Levay (STScI)/O. Gnedin/W.Brown

A super-hot blue star hurtling through space has been shot completely out of the Milky Way, new Hubble Space Telescope photos reveal.

The star is streaking across space at a blistering speed of 1.6 million mph (2.5 million kph) – three times faster than our sun's orbital velocity in the Milky Way. Hubble observations confirm that the stellar speedster hails from the Milky Way's core, settling some confusion over where it originally called home.

Astronomers think the star is a survivor from a triple-star system that traveled through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy 100 million years ago, but made the perilous mistake of wandering too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and flung the other two out of the Milky Way. The two ejected stars then merged to form a super-hot, blue star.

While it may seem a little farfetched, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for the so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected.

"Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star comes from by measuring the star's direction of motion on the sky," said astronomer Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the study and a member of the Hubble team that observed the star.

"Its motion points directly from the Milky Way center. These exiled stars are rare in the Milky Way's population of 100 billion stars. For every 100 million stars in the galaxy lurks one hypervelocity star."

This illustration shows one possible mechanism for how the star HE 0437-5439 acquired enough energy to be ejected from our Milky Way galaxy. Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI)/O. Gnedin/W. Brown