APEX Telescope: The Cool Clouds of the Carina Nebula

Observations made with the APEX telescope in submillimetre-wavelength light at a wavelength of 870 µm reveal the cold dusty clouds from which stars form in the Carina Nebula. 

This site of violent star formation, which plays host to some of the highest-mass stars in our galaxy, is an ideal arena in which to study the interactions between these young stars and their parent molecular clouds.

The APEX observations, made with its LABOCA camera, are shown here in orange tones, combined with a visible light image from the Curtis Schmidt telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. 

The result is a dramatic, wide-field picture that provides a spectacular view of Carina’s star formation sites. 

The nebula contains stars equivalent to over 25 000 Suns, and the total mass of gas and dust clouds is that of about 140 000 Suns.

Credit: ESO/APEX/T. Preibisch et al. (Submillimetre); N. Smith, University of Minnesota/NOAO/AURA/NSF (Optical)

Centaurus A: Facing a mid-life crisis!

Centaurus A was facing a midlife crisis.

The giant elliptical galaxy's brightest stars were old and puffy, and it had nearly run out of gas needed to create new ones.

The galaxy was just a featureless blob that had lost its sparkle.

Then a chance encounter allowed boring old Centaurus A to have a fling with a younger, smaller galaxy.

The event revived the elder partner, triggering a fresh round of star birth and creating one of its most notable features: a dark dust lane along its middle.

In a surprise twist, new observations show the cosmic hanky-panky also caused Centaurus A to sprout two spiral arms – something no other elliptical galaxy is known to have.

The discovery offers new insights into how galaxies form and evolve, and hints at a new way for spiral structure to emerge.

Shocking revelation
The bisecting dust lane led astronomers in the early 19th century to think that Centaurus A might be two separate objects lying side by side. More recent studies have shown that the dust is most likely a disc left behind by a galactic merger.

By blocking visible light, the dust also conceals the intimacies of the galaxy's steamy affair. To gather more clues, Daniel Espada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and colleagues looked at Centaurus A in radio wavelengths.

These longer waves emerge from carbon monoxide gas at the galaxy's centre and can pierce the dusty veil, allowing the team to trace otherwise hidden structures. What they saw was shocking.

"We were quite surprised to find what clearly looked like spiral arms," says team member Alison Peck of the Joint ALMA Observatory in Santiago, Chile.

Their images show the tentacles of gas curving around the galaxy's middle, with widths and orientations similar to those of the arms of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.

What's more, the gas tentacles are "moving in a way that you would expect spiral arms to move", says Peck.

Army's LEMV Airship: An all-seeing super blimp makes debut flight

The U.S. Army has launched the debut flight of its massive Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a souped-up blimp designed to fly continuously for 21 days and provide full surveillance of an area.

The LEMV was launched Tuesday from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The test flight lasted about 90 minutes.

The all-seeing airship is longer than football field and taller than a seven-story building, according to maker Northrop Grumman.

Its shape separates the 21st-century "hybrid air vehicle," as Northrop Grumman calls it, from the blimps that have flown over sporting events for decades.

The LEMV is aerodynamic, with a shape closer to an airfoil than an elongated football like classic blimps. So while old-school blimps stay aloft because of the helium inside, the LEMV uses the helium and its shape to achieve lift.

Northrop Grumman has a $517 million contract to build three airships for the Army.

The first test flight included two pilots, but in the future, the Army hopes to have unmanned flights.

"I think the Army sees this as truly an exciting breakthrough," said Dave Nagy, vice president of business development for military aircraft systems at Northrop Grumman.

He says the Army will benefit from the LEMV because just a handful of these airships will be able to do what no other monitoring system can do.

They can stay up in the air for long periods of time and can cover a significant area of ground and the LEMV will not only be able to scan the ground for insurgents, but it may also have other uses, like hauling supplies and precious cargo to troops.

At a time when the military is looking for more cost-effective options for intelligence and surveillance gathering in places like Afghanistan, fueling the blimp will cost approximately $11,000 for a 21-day period of service.

Coincidentally, the debut flight took the LEMV right over the site of the fiery Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937. Nagy says the location, however, was deliberate.

"It's one of few locations that has hangar infrastructure for this size of vehicle," he said.

For now, Northrop Grumman will continue to test the LEMV from Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the company will continue to "expand the flight envelope," Nagy says. He said this technology will allow the military to be more flexible in the future.

Most Distant Dwarf Galaxy Detected

The gravitational lens B1938+666 as seen in the infrared when observed with the 10-meter Keck II telescope with Adaptive Optics on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

In the center is a massive red galaxy 9.8 billion light-years from Earth that acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, distorting the light from an even more distant galaxy, 17.3 billion light-years away.

The result is a spectacular Einstein ring image of the background galaxy.

The team used distortions within the ring to find evidence for a low-mass dark galaxy, which is a satellite of the foreground lensing galaxy.

Using this gravitational lensing effect the mass of the dark galaxy was found to be 200 million times the mass of the Sun, which is similar to the masses of the satellite galaxies found around our own Milky Way, but is 9.8 billion light-years further away. Credit: D. Lagattuta / W. M. Keck Observatory.

Hawaii Astronomers Find Planet in the Process of Forming

Artist's conception of the area near the planet LkCa 15 b. Click on picture for larger view. Credit: Karen L. Teramura, UH IfA.

The first direct image of a planet in the process of forming around its star has been captured by University of Hawaii astronomer Adam Kraus.

What astronomers are calling LkCa 15 b, looks like a hot "protoplanet" surrounded by a swath of cooler dust and gas, which is falling into the still-forming planet.

Images have revealed that the forming planet sits inside a wide gap between the young parent star and an outer disk of dust.

Kraus (UH Institute for Astronomy) and colleague Michael Ireland (Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory) combined the power of the 10-meter Keck Observatory telescopes with a bit of optical sleight of hand.

"LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found, about 5 times younger than the previous record holder," said Kraus.

"This young gas giant is being built out of the dust and gas. In the past, you couldn't measure this kind of phenomenon because it's happening so close to the star. But, for the first time, we've been able to directly measure the planet itself as well as the dusty matter around it."

Kraus will be presenting the discovery at an Oct. 19 meeting at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The meeting follows the acceptance of a research paper on the discovery by Kraus and Ireland by The Astrophysical Journal.

The optical sleight of hand used by the astronomers is to combine the power of Keck's Adaptive Optics with a technique called aperture mask interferometry. The former is the use of a deformable mirror to rapidly correct for atmospheric distortions of starlight.

The latter involves placing a small mask with several holes in the path of the light collected and concentrated by a giant telescope. With that, the scientists can manipulate the light waves.

"It's like we have an array of small mirrors," said Kraus. "We can manipulate the light and cancel out distortions." The technique allows the astronomers to cancel out the bright light of stars. They can then resolve disks of dust around stars and see gaps in the dusty layers where protoplanets may be hiding.

"Interferometry has actually been around since the 1800s, but through the use of adaptive optics has only been able to reach nearby young suns for about the last 7 years." said Dr. Ireland.

"Since then we've been trying to push the technique to its limits using the biggest telescopes in the world, especially Keck."

The discovery of LkCa 15 b began as a survey of 150 young dusty stars in star-forming regions. That led to the more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

"LkCa 15 was only our second target, and we immediately knew we were seeing something new," said Kraus. "We could see a faint point source near the star, so thinking it might be a Jupiter-like planet we went back a year later to get more data."

NASA GRAIL: Artist's Rendition

Using a precision formation-flying technique, the twin GRAIL spacecraft will map the moon's gravity field, as depicted in this artist's rendering. 

Radio signals traveling between the two spacecraft provide scientists the exact measurements required as well as flow of information not interrupted when the spacecraft are at the lunar farside, not seen from Earth. 

The result should be the most accurate gravity map of the moon ever made.

The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, including the size of a possible inner core, and it should provide scientists with a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed. GRAIL is a part of NASA's Discovery Program.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)-B spacecraft successfully executed its first flight path correction maneuver Wednesday, Oct. 5. The rocket burn helped refine the spacecraft's trajectory as it travels from Earth to the moon and provides separation between itself and its mirror twin, GRAIL-A. The first burn for GRAIL-A occurred on Sept. 30.

"Both spacecraft are alive and with these burns, prove that they're kicking too, as expected," said David Lehman, GRAIL project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "There is a lot of time and space between now and lunar orbit insertion, but everything is looking good."

GRAIL-B's rocket burn took place on Oct. 5 at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT). The spacecraft's main engine burned for 234 seconds and imparted a velocity change of 56.1 mph (25.1 meters per second) while expending 8.2 pounds (3.7 kilograms) of propellant.

GRAIL-A's burn on Sept. 30 also took place at 11 a.m. PDT. It lasted 127 seconds and imparted a 31.3 mph (14 meters per second) velocity change on the spacecraft while expending 4 pounds (1.87 kilograms) of propellant.

These burns are designed to begin distancing GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B's arrival times at the moon by approximately one day and to insert them onto the desired lunar approach paths.

Read more on NASA Grail Mission

The Giant Magellan Telescope

Plans for an enormous new telescope in Chile took a major step forward this week with a $50 million infusion from the University of Chicago to aid the observatory's construction.

The new observatory, called the Giant Magellan Telescope, is designed to detect objects 100 times fainter than those seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The University of Chicago funds will help cover the anticipated $700 million cost for the telescope, which astrophysicists hope will be able to collect valuable data needed to make strides in understanding dark matter and dark energy, the project's planners said.

The Giant Magellan Telescope will consist of six circular mirrors, each 28 feet (8.4 meters) across, set in a flower-petal arrangement around a seventh central mirror to make up the GMT's main mirror.

Together, the mirrors form the equivalent of a nearly 82-foot (24.5-meter) telescope. The new telescope will be built at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and should take about seven years to complete.

Survivor Black Holes May Be Mid-Sized

New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton strengthens the case that two mid-sized black holes exist close to the center of a nearby starburst galaxy.

These "survivor" black holes avoided falling into the center of the galaxy and could be examples of the seeds required for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies, including the one in the Milky Way.

For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole: the stellar-mass variety with masses about ten times that of the Sun, and the supermassive ones, located at the center of galaxies, that range from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses.

But a mystery has remained: what about black holes that are in between? Evidence for these objects has remained controversial, and until now there were no strong claims of more than one such black hole in a single galaxy. Recently, a team of researchers has found signatures in X-ray data of two mid-sized black holes in the starburst galaxy M82 located 12 million light years from Earth.

"This is the first time that good evidence for two mid-sized black holes has been found in one galaxy," said Hua Feng of the Tsinghua University in China, who led two papers describing the results. "Their location near the center of the galaxy might provide clues about the origin of the Universe's largest black holes - supermassive black holes found in the centers of most galaxies."

One possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes involves a chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters that results in the buildup of extremely massive stars, which then collapse to form intermediate-mass black holes. The star clusters then sink to the center of the galaxy, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to form a supermassive black hole.

NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory Launched

Solar Dynamics Observatory Launched

The Solar Dynamics Observatory and its Atlas V rocket rolled out to the launch pad at Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Weather for launch day stands at 40 percent "go" at liftoff time due to wind, cloud thickness and a slight chance of showers. The temperature at launch time is expected to be a chilly 51 degrees.

Live coverage of the launch will begin at 7:15 a.m. Wednesday on NASA TV and NASA's Launch Blog.

SDO's unprecedented mission will study the sun and its dynamic behavior. Onboard telescopes will scrutinize sunspots and solar flares using more pixels and colors than any other observatory in the history of solar physics. And SDO will reveal the sun's hidden secrets in a prodigious rush of pictures.

XMM-Newton: ESA's X-Ray Observatory - 10 years in Space

XMM-Newton, the most powerful X-ray observatory ever built and launched into space, marks its 10th anniversary on December 10th. XMM-Newton's observations have revolutionised the way we view the hottest and most extreme regions of the Universe.

Scientists from the UK who have played a pivotal role in the success of the orbiting observatory, which is the size of a small bus, will be marking the occasion at a special event in Madrid organised by the European Space Agency (ESA).

"After 10 years of operation and over 600 million kilometres on the clock, XMM-Newton is continuing to perform outstandingly well," says Dr Steve Sembay, from the University of Leicester who is Principal Investigator of one of the instruments on board.

Ten achievements of XMM-Newton:

+ made crucial observations that have impacted on every aspect of astronomy

+ traced the largest structures in space: the galaxy clusters

+ probed the regions closest to stellar-sized black holes in our Galaxy, and the super-massive black holes at the heart of external galaxies

+ showed how super-massive black holes grow over time and drive the evolution of the most massive galaxies in the universe

+ tracked the production and dispersal of the chemical elements by exploding stars

+ measured powerful magnetic activity in young stars like our Sun

+ discovered that Mars has a vastly larger atmosphere than previously thought

+ played a key role in the study of the elusive "dark matter", believed to account for the missing mass of the Universe

+ observed X-rays emitted from around the Earth and around other planets such as Saturn and Jupiter

+ made the largest catalogues of cosmic X-ray emitters ever - over a quarter of a million entries in the latest release - providing vast samples of newly discovered objects

The European Space Agency's mission has three gold-coated mirror modules which focus X-rays onto advanced instruments on board.

The development and construction of two of the three science instruments was led by UK groups, including teams at the University of Leicester and the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College London; the latter also contributed to the third instrument on board. Other UK institutions that have been involved include the University of Birmingham and the University of Cambridge.

The international instrument teams play a vital role in maintaining the instruments in orbit and ensuring they continue to deliver good science.

The UK is also home to the Leicester-led XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC), an international consortium which plays a complementary role in the XMM-Newton project, carrying out the science data processing for every observation and using the XMM-Newton observations to compile the largest catalogues of cosmic X-ray sources ever made.

Professor Mike Watson, from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy and XMM-Newton's Survey Scientist said: "XMM-Newton has allowed astronomers to peer deeper than ever before into the cosmos at X-ray wavelengths, giving us new insights into some of the most extreme regions of the Universe."

"It is still one of the foremost space observatories in operation, and one of the most successful space missions, yielding over 2000 scientific publications to date. The instruments are still in very good condition and the discoveries and cutting-edge science continue to accumulate.

"Next year the University of Leicester celebrates the 50th anniversary of its involvement in space science. The success of XMM-Newton is a testament to the far-reaching implications of this research."