A Spiral Star

Recently researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have found a star with spiral arms. What is that you may be wondering, well if you notice the picture above the star consits of a central star, much like our Sun or any other star, but this particular case has spiral arms!

The star is formally called SAO 206462 and is located in the constellation Lupus and only about four hundred light years away from Earth. This discover is a first for spiral stars. Prior to this researches knew of exotic looking stars, from dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, binary stars, and exploding stars, but never any spiral stars.

Granted the millions of stars already catalouged, it is surprising to find such an exotic case so close to Earth. This leads us to wonder what else is out there.

For full story check out the link from NASA

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. NASA has recently released pictures from the Cassini probe which in my humble opinion are truly breathtaking. I will let you all just take a look, and check this apod link out for the high res pic!

An even more interesting video I came across however takes images like the one above and actually puts together a "fly by" film of the Cassini spacecraft. Knowing that these are real images, not animations or models, really speaks for the beauty found around us!

Looking into the eye of the storm

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

Image from NASA

Evidence for a pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy has been found in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This main image is a composite of X-rays from Chandra (blue) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Meanwhile, the inset box shows the central region of NGC 3993 as observed just by Chandra.

The diffuse blue emission in the large image is from hot gas near the center of NGC 3393 and shows low energy X-rays. The inset shows only high energy X-rays, including emission from iron. This type of emission is a characteristic feature of growing black holes that are heavily obscured by dust and gas.

Two separate peaks of X-ray emission (roughly at 11 o'clock and 4 o'clock) can clearly be seen in the inset box. These two sources are black holes that are actively growing, generating X-ray emission as gas falls towards the black holes and becomes hotter. The obscured regions around both black holes block the copious amounts of optical and ultraviolet light produced by infalling material.

At a distance of 160 million light years, NGC 3393 contains the nearest known pair of supermassive black holes. It is also the first time a pair of black holes has been found in a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes in NGC 3393 are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.

Dubbed "minor mergers" by scientists, such collisions of one larger and another smaller galaxy may, in fact, be the most common way for black hole pairs to form. Until the latest Chandra observations of NGC 3393, however, it has has been difficult to find good candidates for minor mergers because the merged galaxy is expected to look like an ordinary spiral galaxy.

If this was a minor merger, the black hole in the smaller galaxy should have had a smaller mass than the other black hole before their host galaxies started to collide. Good estimates of the masses of both black holes are not yet available to test this idea, although the observations do show that both black holes are more massive than about a million Suns. 

Follow the link for the full article!

Benjamin Button's Star

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

How curious would it be to find a star which shows signs of great aging and yet also appears relatively young? The star, cleverly called SDSS J102915+172927, is a curious case discovered by Lorenzo Monaco of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, which shows both signs of old age and youth at the same time.

The low concentrations of elements heavier than Helium within the star are signs that the star is relatively young. As a brisk refresher, a star can be grossly oversimplified as a sphere of hot gas held in balance by a delicate tug of war battle between gravity and pressure forces. Nuclear Fusion is the process which powers the great engines of stars, and in simplest terms the process involves taking two light elements and combining them to create a heavier element.

As such young stars start out as gas balls filled mainly with hydrogen and helium - the most abundant elements in the universe - and through the process of nuclear fusion they great heavier and heavier elements within their cores until the "fuel" can no longer efficiently run undergo the process.

The low concentration of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium suggests it is the most primitive star ever discovered, yet the exact ratio of these heavier elements suggests it is much younger.

Possible explanations include the cooling of the star nursery. If the star was cooled by interstellar dust or some other means that could explain the odd ratios of elements yet youthful star.

Hopefully now that the southern hemisphere sky is starting to open up as scientists construct more and more observatories in the region we will be able to find out many more interesting cases such as SDSS J102915+172927.

Hit the source for the full story.

Black Hole Devours Star

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

What an sight it must be to witness a black hole devouring a star. Something as massive, if not even grander than our own fair star being sucked into a cosmic singularity undergoing all sorts of time dilations and length contractions.

Well recently scientists have been able to get an accurate representation of what this process is like. Check out the video and follow the link for the full story!

How the Milky Way Formed

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

For all those stuck inside today because of Hurricane Irene, you may like to take a few minutes and check out this fascinating video depicting a simulation of how the Milky Way Galaxy formed.

The process took billions of years, but just imagine living during this tumultuous time of the galaxy's lifetime. As of now, our galaxy is pretty stable and normal, but it is predicted that we will undergo a collision/merger with our neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy in the coming future!

Thanks Dominic Wilmes for sending this in!

Living on a Chunk of Coal

Article by, Adrian Vatchinsky

National Geographics recently reported on an exoplanet that just had what it takes to stand out amongst the now hundreds of exoplanets discovered in the last few years.

Before you get your hopes up that this planet is the long lost twin of Earth, it should be noted that the temperatures on this planet are assumed to reach about 980 C, which can more than fry an egg. What makes this planet so interesting is that it is extremely dark. In fact, a lump of charcoal reflects more light than this Jupiter-sized planet!

The planet was discovered by the Keplar Space Telescope which is specifically designed with the goal of finding exoplanets across the Universe. The way the Keplar telescope detects these minuscule specs out in space it by focusing its sensors on an area of the sky. It then looks for any dimming or changes in the incoming light from the stars. A possible reason as to why such a dimming occurred could be, if all things aligned properly, that a planet passed in between the star and our eye in the sky. When it came to this particular planet, there was a change in relative brightness of the host star of only 6.5 parts per million!

Other tests to detect exoplanets include detecting small wobbles in stars which could be due to planets' gravitational pull on their stars.

Even though this planet may not be the blue jug of water we have been searching for it is nonetheless a testament to the accuracy and engineering of our latest attempt at probing the night skies!

Follow the link for the article

Simulation of a Supernovae

Source: Wired
An awesome simulation of a supernovae! If only we could get so close in person.