Rare Radio Supernova In Nearby Galaxy Is Nearest Supernova In Five Years

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2009) — The chance discovery last month of a rare radio supernova -- an exploding star seen only at radio wavelengths and undetected by optical or X-ray telescopes -- underscores the promise of new, more sensitive radio surveys to find supernovas hidden by gas and dust.

"This supernova is the nearest supernova in five years, yet is completely obscured in optical, ultraviolet and X-rays due to the dense medium of the galaxy," said Geoffrey Bower, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of a paper describing the discovery in the June issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "This just popped out; in the future, we want to go from discovery of radio supernovas by accident to specifically looking for them."
Sky surveys like the one just launched by the Allen Telescope Array, which will look for bright but short-lived radio bursts from supernovas, will provide better estimates of the rate of star formation in nearby galaxies, Bower said. Radio emissions from supernovas also can help astronomers understand how stars explode and what happens before their cores collapse, since radio emissions are caused when debris from the explosion collides with the stellar wind previously shed by the stars.
Bower's colleagues are Andreas Bunthaler, Karl M. Menten and Christian Henkel of the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany; Mark J. Reid of Harvard University's Center for Astrophysics; and Heino Falcke of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
The radio supernova was discovered on April 8 in M82, a small irregular galaxy located nearly 12 million light years from Earth in the M81 galaxy group, by the Very Large Array, a New Mexico facility operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). It was subsequently confirmed by NRAO's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a 10-telescope array whose baseline stretches from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, providing the sharpest vision of any telescope on Earth.
The Allen Telescope Array, comprising 42 of a planned 350 radio dishes and supported by UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif., last week began a major survey of the radio sky that should turn up many more such radio supernovas, Bower said. While the VLA and VLBA have very narrow fields of view unsuited to all-sky surveys, the ATA's wide-angle view is ideal for scanning the full sky once a day, which is necessary to find sources that brighten and dim over several days.
"The ATA can detect objects at least 10 times fainter than this radio supernova, which pushes our survey an order of magnitude deeper than other radio surveys with more attention to transient and variable sources. Radio supernovas are a really strong aspect of that survey," he said. "This ( new radio supernova) is the kind of discovery that we would like to make with the Allen Telescope Array."
The ATA will compile an updated catalog of radio sources much as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey updated the older Palomar Observatory Sky Survey of visible and infrared objects. At the same time, it will look for radio signals indicative of intelligent life around other stars.
Not all supernovas produce radio emissions, Bower said. If the star has not sloughed off much of its envelope before collapsing inward to form a neutron star or black hole – a classic Type II supernova – then few radio emissions are produced from gas collisions.
On the other hand, supernovas in very active star-forming regions, like the center of M82, should produce copious radio emissions because of the density of gas and dust in the interstellar medium. That same gas and dust blocks optical, ultraviolet and X-rays, however, making radio surveys one of the few options to find and observe such supernovas.
Bower and his colleagues were studying the motion of M82 with the VLBA, which links the VLA and nine other radio telescopes into a very high resolution instrument, when they noticed a very bright radio source – five times brighter than anything else in the galaxy – in the VLA data. The team looked at earlier observations and found the same source, but almost twice as bright, in data taken May 3, 2008. Data from March 24, 2008, showed an even brighter source – 10 times brighter than in April 2009 – while Oct. 29, 2007, data showed no bright radio source.
Extrapolating backward in time, the research team estimates that the star exploded sometime in January 2008, apparently near the very center of the galaxy. The team rejected alternative explanations for the dimming radio source, such as a flare created by a star falling into a supermassive black hole.
The newly discovered supernova is thus the brightest in radio wavelengths in the past 20 years, Bower said, and is one of only a few dozen radio supernovas observed to date.
The team also looked at the complete data from the VLBA and detected a ring structure indicative of a shock wave plunging through the interstellar medium, bolstering its conclusion that it is a supernova. The ring is about 2,000 astronomical units across, consistent with a year-old supernova. (An astronomical unit 93 million miles, the average distance between Earth and the sun.)
The research was funded through National Science Foundation support of NRAO.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley. Original article written by Robert Sanders.

Most Powerful Supernova Ever Discovered: 100 Billion Times Brighter Than The Sun

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071016085212.htm

Science Daily — Astronomer Robert Quimby has done it again. Found the most luminous supernova ever, that is.

Quimby discovered the current record holder, supernova 2006gy, last year as part of his Texas Supernova Search project. Now he announces that a supernova he discovered earlier in the project is actually twice as luminous. Using follow-up studies to pinpoint its distance, supernova 2005ap peaked at more than 100 billion times the brightness of the Sun.
This supernova is a Type II, Quimby said, because it contains hydrogen. Most Type II supernovae are thought to result when the cores of massive stars, those seven to eight times or more heavy than the Sun, collapse under their own weight and trigger an explosion. This particular Type II is 300 times brighter than average, Quimby said, and lies in a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, well behind the famous Coma cluster of galaxies.
“It’s clearly not the same as 2006gy,” Quimby’s colleague and supernova expert J. Craig Wheeler of The University of Texas at Austin said. “It’s a puzzle.”
Quimby completed his Ph.D. under Wheeler’s supervision at Texas in May, and has just begun a post-doctoral appointment at Caltech. His Texas Supernova Search uses the 18-inch ROTSE-IIIb robotic telescope on McDonald Observatory’s Mount Fowlkes, a tiny neighbor to the giant 10-meter-class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET).
Quimby studied 2005ap with HET just a few days after its discovery. The results were intriguing, Quimby said. The supernova’s spectrum hinted at the presence of a highly shifted absorption line of oxygen III (an oxygen atom that has lost two of its electrons). Quimby knew that if the feature was oxygen III, then 2005ap was “possibly very far away and thus very luminous.”
Follow-up observations with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii by Quimby’s colleague Greg Aldering of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab not only confirmed Quimby’s HET detection of oxygen III, but added another, equally shifted element to the spectrum: magnesium.
Together, the studies confirmed 2005ap’s distance of 4.7 billion light-years. (In astronomical terms, this equates to a redshift of z = 0.2832.)
It was this distance measurement, combined with measurements of the supernova’s apparent brightness that allowed the calculation of its intrinsic brightness, or “luminosity,” and uncovered 2005ap as the most powerful supernova yet.
“Before 2006gy, I thought this should not be plausible,” Quimby said. “There I was finding my first supernovae — I was just happy to get anything. It turned out to be the most luminous supernova ever found.”
How is that Quimby has found the brightest supernova yet, twice in a row? “I’ve worked too damn hard for this to be luck,” he said.
Quimby explained, “I’m searching a huge volume of space, comparable to all previous nearby supernova surveys combined.” Also, Quimby will find supernovae that other studies ignore: he doesn’t filter out non-Type Ia supernovae, which is what many studies do that are searching for supernovae for cosmology studies, and he does search dwarf galaxies as well as galaxies with active black holes at their centers, which other studies avoid. Others also avoid supernovae near the cores of galaxies.
In fact, 2006gy was found in the core of a galaxy, and that galaxy has a weakly active central black hole, Wheeler said.
“There’s no question that [his results] have gotten everybody’s attention,” Wheeler said. The University of Michigan-run ROTSE collaboration, whose main mission is the search for gamma-ray bursts, has decided to expand the supernova search to its entire network. Its robotic telescopes in Australia, Turkey, and Namibia will soon join the unit at McDonald Observatory in this search. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Supernova Search, for which the HET provides confirming spectra, is also reconsidering its search filters in response to these discoveries, Wheeler said.
The result has been accepted for publication in the October 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, The Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by McDonald Observatory.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Astronomers Get Their Hands Dirty As They Lift The Veil On Galactic Dust

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071012105824.htm

Science Daily — There is more to a grain of dust than meets the eye, at least for astronomers as they attempt to probe deeper into distant galaxies. Until now dust has been a nuisance because it has obscured galaxies, and the stars within them, by absorbing the radiation they emit. But more recently dust has started to present opportunities because it emits radiation itself as a consequence of being heated up by nearby stars. Aided by new observing instruments and sophisticated computer software, this radiation enables astronomers to reconstruct what lies behind the dust. Furthermore the dust itself plays a vital role in star formation within galaxies.

The stage was set for dramatic advances in the study of galactic dust in a recent workshop funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) 's Exploratory Workshop. The big breakthrough is the ability to detect the dust at much higher resolution from its infrared radiation, according to Simone Bianchi, co-convenor of the ESF workshop. "It has been possible to do this since the eighties, but the new instruments have a higher sensitivity," said Bianchi.
At the same time new computer models are making it possible to work out the structure of the galaxy lying behind the dust, even though it cannot be observed directly at any wavelength. The key here is that the dust is acting as a relay for radiation emitted by the stars behind it. The dust absorbs high energy radiation from the stars and then heats up as a result. It then re-emits in the infra red waveband, which can now be detected with sensitive new instruments.
Plans were made at the workshop to use the European Space Agency's new infrared space telescope called Herschel, which will be launched in 2008 and be capable of detecting infrared radiation emitted by distant galactic dust. "The new instruments will allow us to detect dust associated with less dense regions of the interstellar medium," said Bianchi.
Astronomers also hope to learn more about the role played by dust in star formation. As Bianchi pointed out, there is a well established connection between the dust and the gas from which stars are formed. But the detailed relationship is unknown, and will require knowledge about the dust itself, in particular its molecular structure and lifecycle.
The ESF workshop focused mainly on spiral galaxies, because these are heavily obscured by dust. Galaxies are split into three categories by their structure, spiral, elliptical, and irregular. There is less dust in elliptical galaxies, while irregular galaxies are more difficult to model because they lack any orderly structure. "Spiral galaxies can be modelled in a more direct way because of their relatively simple geometry," said Bianchi. "However, recent comparison with observations of dust emission has shown that models may need a higher degree of complexity. This can be achieved now with the advances in computational facilities."
The ESF workshop was well timed to help Europe exploit the full potential of the data that will be obtained from the new instruments. It has already brought together the relevant European groups specialising in spiral galaxies and modelling dust, providing the platform for major advances in the field.
The workshop, held in Ghent, Belgium in May 2007, brought together 29 researchers from 10 different countries. Each year, ESF supports approximately 50 Exploratory Workshops across all scientific domains. These small, interactive group sessions are aimed at opening up new directions in research to explore new fields with a potential impact on developments in science.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by European Science Foundation.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Dusty Winds Bursting Out Of Black Holes May Have Seeded Planets, Life

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071010125734.htm

Science Daily — The hit song that proclaimed, "All we are is dust in the wind," may have some cosmic truth to it. New findings from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that space dust -- the same stuff that makes up living creatures and planets -- was manufactured in large quantities in the winds of black holes that populated our early universe.

The findings are a significant new clue in an unsolved mystery: where did all the dust in the young universe originate?
"We were surprised to find what appears to be freshly made dust entrained in the winds that blow away from supermassive black holes," said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester, U.K. Markwick-Kemper is lead author of a new paper appearing in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "This could explain where the dust came from that was needed to make the first generations of stars in the early universe."
Space dust is essential to the formation of planets, stars, galaxies and even life as we know it. The dust in our corner of the universe was piped out by dying stars that were once a lot like our sun. But, when the universe was less than a tenth of its present age of 13.7 billion years, sun-like stars hadn't been around long enough to die and make dust. So, what produced the precious substance back when the universe was just a toddler?
Theorists have long-postulated that short-lived, massive exploding stars, or supernovae, might be the source of this mysterious dust, while others have proposed that a type of energetic, growing supermassive black hole, called a quasar, could be a contributing factor. A quasar consists of a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dusty doughnut-shaped cloud that feeds it. Theoretically, dust could form in the outer portion of the winds that slowly blow away from this doughnut cloud.
"Quasars are like the Cookie Monster," said co-author Sarah Gallagher of the University of California at Los Angeles, who is currently a visiting astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. "They are messy eaters, and they can consume less matter than they spit out in the form of winds."
Nobody has found conclusive proof that either quasar winds or supernovae can create enough dust to explain what is observed in the early universe. Markwick-Kemper and her team decided to test the former theory and investigate a quasar, called PG2112+059, located in the center of a galaxy about 8 billion light-years way. Although this particular quasar is not located in the early universe, because it is closer, it is an easier target for addressing the question of whether quasars can make dust. The team used Spitzer's infrared spectrograph instrument to split apart infrared light from the quasar and look for signs of various minerals.
They found a mix of the ingredients that make up glass, sand, marble and even rubies and sapphires. While the mineral constituting glass was expected, the minerals for sand, marble and rubies were a surprise. Why? These minerals are not typically detected floating around galaxies, suggesting they could have been freshly formed in the winds rushing away from the quasar.
For instance, the ingredient that makes up sand, crystalline silicate, doesn't survive for long free-floating in space. Radiation from stars zaps the minerals back to an amorphous, glass-like state. The presence of crystalline silicate therefore suggests something -- possibly the quasars winds -- is churning out the newly made substance.
Markwick-Kemper and her team say the case of the missing dust is not firmly shut. They hope to study more quasars for further evidence of their dust-making abilities. Also, according to the astronomers, quasars may not be the only source of dust in the early universe. "Supernovae might have been more important for creating dust in some environments, while quasars were more important in others," said Markwick-Kemper. "For now, we are very excited to have identified the different species of dust in a quasar billions of light-years away."
Other authors of this paper include Dean Hines of the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo., and Jeroen Bouwman of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Spitzer's infrared spectrograph was built by Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Its development was led by Jim Houck of Cornell.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by NASA/Spitzer Space Telescope.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Disc Of Silicates Found In Heart Of Magnificent Ant Nebula

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927113205.htm

Science Daily — Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its unique ability to see small details, astronomers have uncovered a flat, nearly edge-on disc of silicates in the heart of the magnificent Ant Nebula. The disc seems, however, too 'skinny' to explain how the nebula got its intriguing ant-like shape.
The Ant Nebula is one of the most striking planetary nebulae known. Planetary nebulae - whose name arises because most are spherical and looked like planets when they were first discovered through older, less powerful telescopes - are glowing structures of gas cast off by solar-like stars at the ends of their lives. The morphology of the Ant Nebula - a bright core, three nested pairs of bipolar lobes and a ring-like outflow - is so unique that it was nicknamed the 'Chamber of Horrors' of planetary nebulae in the late 1950s.
But how can a spherical star produce such complex structures? The answer, many astronomers think, requires understanding of the discs surrounding the central star. By their nature, these discs bear witness to the phenomena that lead to the asymmetrical structures of planetary nebulae.
"The challenge is to actually detect these discs," explains team leader Olivier Chesneau, from the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France. "Most astronomical instruments do not have a sharp enough view to find, let alone study them. The Very Large Telescope Interferometer however, with its exceptionally high spatial resolution, is a powerful disc-hunter."
The disc of the Ant Nebula, which cannot be detected with a single 8.2-m VLT Unit Telescope, was uncovered in the interferometric mode where two 8.2-m Unit Telescopes were used to combine light, through the MID-infrared Interferometric instrument (MIDI). The observations reveal a flat, nearly edge-on disc whose major axis is perpendicular to the axis of the bipolar lobes.
The disc extends from about 9 times the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (9 Astronomical Units or 9 AU) to more than 500 AU. At the distance of the Ant Nebula, this corresponds to having detected structures that subtend an angle of only 6 milli-arcseconds. This is similar to distinguishing a two-storey building on the Moon.
The dust mass stored in the disc appears to be only one hundred thousandth the mass of the Sun and is a hundred times smaller than the mass found in the bipolar lobes.
"We must therefore conclude that the disc is too light to have a significant impact on the outflowing material and cannot explain the shape of the Ant Nebula", says Chesneau. "Instead, it looks more like this disc is some remnant of the material expelled by the star."
The observations also provide unquestionable evidence that the disc is primarily composed of amorphous silicate. "This," says Chesneau, "most likely indicates that the disc is young, perhaps as young as the planetary nebula itself."
The astronomers favour the possibility that the large quantity of material in the lobes was propelled by several large-scale events, triggered with the help of a cool stellar companion. The solution of the mystery thus resides in the core of the system, and requires better characterisation of the hot central star and its putative companion, currently hidden from our view by the dusty disc.
The results are presented in a Letter to the Editor published by the research journal Astronomy and Astrophysics ("A silicate disk in the heart of the Ant" by O. Chesneau et al.).
The team is composed of O. Chesneau and A. Spang (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France), F. Lykou, E. Lagadec, and A.A. Zijlstra (University of Manchester, UK), B. Balick (University of Washington, Seattle, USA), M. Matsuura (NAOJ, Tokyo, Japan), N. Smith (University of California, USA), and S. Wolf (Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany).
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by ESO.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Into The Chrysalis: VLT Interferometer Detects Disc Around Aged Star

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927113202.htm

Science Daily — A team of European astronomers has used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its razor-sharp eyes to discover a reservoir of dust trapped in a disc that surrounds an elderly star. The discovery provides additional clues about the shaping of planetary nebulae.

In the last phases of their life, stars such as our Sun evolve from a red giant which would engulf the orbit of Mars to a white dwarf, an object that is barely larger than the Earth. The transition is accomplished by the shedding of a huge envelope of gas and dust that sparkles in many colours, producing a most spectacular object: a planetary nebula. The celestial chrysalis becomes a cosmic butterfly.
This metamorphosis, rapid in terms of the star's lifetime, is rather complex and poorly understood. In particular, astronomers want to understand how a spherical star can produce a great variety of planetary nebulae, some with very asymmetrical shapes.
A team of scientists therefore embarked upon the study of a star which is presently on its way to becoming a cosmic butterfly. The star, V390 Velorum, is 5000 times as bright as our Sun and is located 2,600 light-years away. It is also known to have a companion that accomplishes its ballet in 500 days.
Astronomers postulate that elderly stars with companions possess a reservoir of dust that is thought to play a lead role in the final chapters of their lives. The shape and structure of these reservoirs remain, however, largely unknown.
To scrutinize the object with great precision, the astronomers linked observations taken with ESO's powerful interferometric instruments, AMBER and MIDI, at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. In particular, they combined, using AMBER, the near-infrared light of three of VLT's 8.2-m Unit Telescopes. "Only this triple combination of powerful telescopes allows us to pinpoint the position and the shape of the dusty reservoir on a milli-arcsecond scale," explains Pieter Deroo, lead-author of the paper that presents these results in the research journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
These observations clearly demonstrate that the dust present around the star cannot be distributed in a spherical shell. "This shows that whatever mechanism is shaping asymmetric planetary nebulae is already present prior to the metamorphosis taking place," says Hans Van Winckel, member of the team.
The astronomers found indeed evidence for a disc extending from 9 Astronomical Units* to several hundreds of AU. "This disc is found around a star that is in a very brief phase of its life - just a blink of an eye over the star's lifespan of billions of years - but this phase is very important," says Deroo. "It is in this period that a huge morphological change occurs, leading to the creation of a planetary nebula," he adds.
The very high spatial resolution measurements allowed the astronomers to decouple the unresolved contribution of the central star from the resolved disc emission. Even the very inner structure of the disc as well as its orientation and inclination could be determined. The observations probe the physical nature of the disc and reveal that the dust in the inner rim is extremely hot and puffed up. The disc is circumbinary as it surrounds both stars.
Dust processing (coagulation, crystallisation) is found to be very efficient in this circumbinary disc, despite the rather short evolutionary timescales involved. The disc around this evolved object is very similar to those around young stellar objects, in which planets are formed.
"The combination of MIDI and AMBER on ESO's VLTI is an extremely powerful and perhaps unique tool to study the geometry of the material around stars," concludes Van Winckel.
It looks like it is the season for disc 'hunting': the detection of a dusty disc in the notable Ant Nebula was also just announced (see ESO 42/07).
The results presented here are reported in a Letter to the Editor to appear in the research journal Astronomy and Astrophysics ("AMBER and MIDI interferometric observations of the post-AGB binary IRAS 08544-4431: the circumbinary disc resolved", by P. Deroo et al.).
The team includes Pieter Deroo, Bram Acke, Tijl Verhoelst, and Hans Van Winckel (K. U. Leuven, Belgium), Carsten Dominik (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), and Eric Tatulli (INAF-Observatorio di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy).
*One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. It corresponds to 149.6 million kilometres. For comparison, Saturn is 10 AU away from the Sun.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by European Organisation For Astronomical Research In The Southern Hemisphere.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

'One Of The Most Curious Objects In The Sky' Delights Astronomers Again

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070829192102.htm

Science Daily — Edwin Hubble once called IC 10 “one of the most curious objects in the sky,” and new observations of the extremely faint, lightweight dwarf galaxy are giving scientists new clues about how populations of stars are born.

Though the properties of stars is one of the most well-studied topics in astronomy, scientists still don’t fully understand all the mechanisms involved in star formation and evolution, particularly in galaxies with low levels of oxygen, nitrogen and other heavy elements. But scientists studying the IC 10 galaxy may soon understand how stars might have looked like in the distant past, when the universe was in a younger, more pristine form.
“A few years ago these types of studies would have been impossible from the ground,” said Dr. Taft Armandroff, director of the W. M. Keck Observatory, who’s own research includes the study of dwarf galaxies. “We can now study individual stars of galaxies several million light years from Earth to understand how star formation events may have affected the evolution of the Milky Way galaxy. This galaxy can teach us what the most common types of galaxies in the universe might be like.”
New images of IC 10 reveal a small region of space teeming with nearly a thousand stars. The image, obtained with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, shows evidence of a vigorous star formation event that took place within the last 10 million years.
Dr. William Vacca at the NASA Ames Research Center led the study and says IC 10 may answer many unresolved questions about stellar evolution. “IC 10 is a remarkable galaxy,” he said. “It is the only one we’ve seen that falls outside an established pattern of having a certain number of massive nitrogen-type stars for each carbon-type star. This imbalance has caused us to wonder if our past conclusions about massive stars have been correct. Do we need to revise the models of stellar evolution?”
Astronomers have known that IC 10 has more giant, rare stars called “Wolf-Rayet stars” than all other nearby dwarf galaxies combined. Wolf-Rayet stars are extremely hot blue stars losing enormous amounts of mass to the interstellar medium. In addition, the proportion of Wolf-Rayet stars in IC 10 seems to be wildly out of balance. For the number of stars containing carbon, astronomers expected to see a certain number containing nitrogen. But so far, very few nitrogen stars have been found. Could IC 10 be hiding a population of stars?
Using a combination of Hubble and Keck telescope images, Vacca’s team found many previously undiscovered stars in the IC 10 galaxy. Each new star can now be measured to determine its chemical composition. If the newly found stars contain nitrogen, then part of the “missing nitrogen” puzzle might be solved.
“The combination of HST images in the optical and Keck Laser Guide Star images in the infrared has been a major breakthrough in our understanding of dense stellar regions,” said co-author Dr. James R. Graham, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “IC 10 has so many stars in such a tiny region of space that ground-based studies have been confused. But the combination of HST and Keck has been revolutionary in our understanding of this object, and for any object with a dense region of stars.”
The new images of IC 10 are centered on a bright star first thought to possibly be the most luminous Wolf-Rayet star in IC 10. Follow up studies then found the star to be comprised of at least three or more components. Now, new data from Keck show the bright star ([MAC92] 24) is actually six or more stars, perhaps even a cluster of stars.
“This is the first time this sort of study has been done using adaptive optics,” said co-author Christopher Sheehy of the University of Chicago. “It gives us the ability to make these kinds of measurements accurately from the ground and there's no shortage of targets in need of a fresh look. The potential is exciting.”
The new data has also enabled scientists to measure the precise distance to IC 10, a figure that has eluded scientists since the object’s discovery more than 100 years ago. Dr. Vacca and his collaborators calculated the distance to IC 10 to be about 2.6 million light years from Earth, or 800 kiloparsecs. This is in good agreement with some previous estimates.
IC 10 was first discovered by Lewis Swift in 1889 at the Warner Observatory in Rochester, New York. The “Index Catalogue” (IC) is a catalogue of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters that supplements the more modern New General Catalogue (NGC). First published in 1895, the catalogue first described IC 10 as a “faint star involved in extremely faint and very large nebula.” It wasn’t until 1935 that IC 10 was first proposed as an extragalactic object and Edwin Hubble later proposed IC 10 might be a member of the Local Group. It took another 30 years before these suspicions could be confirmed using radial velocity and distance measurements.
Astronomers now know IC 10 is similar in many ways to the Large Magellenic Cloud of the Southern Hemisphere. But unlike the Large Magellenic Cloud, IC 10 orbits Andromeda, not the Milky Way. The study of IC 10 is giving astronomers a picture of what the Milky Way might have looked like billions of years ago before the galaxy’s interstellar medium was enriched with elements such as oxygen and nitrogen.
The paper, “Imaging of the Stellar Population of IC 10 with Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics and the Hubble Space Telescope,” was published in the June 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal. The research was made possible with grants provided by the National Science Foundation (AST 0205999 and AST 9876783) and NASA.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Keck Observatory.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Uncovering The Veil Nebula

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070805132542.htm

Science Daily — Although we don’t usually think about it, the stars twinkling in the night sky don’t shine forever. How long a star lives depends on how big and heavy it is. The bigger the star, the shorter its life. When a star significantly heavier than our Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses and blows itself apart in a catastrophic supernova explosion. A supernova releases so much light that it can outshine a whole galaxy of stars put together.

The exploding star sweeps out a huge bubble in its surroundings, fringed with actual stellar debris along with material swept up by the blast wave. This glowing, brightly-coloured shell of gas forms a nebula that astronomers call a ‘supernova remnant’. Such a remnant can remain visible long after the initial explosion fades away.A series of three new images taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals magnificent sections of one of the most spectacular supernova remnants in the sky – the Veil Nebula. The entire shell spans about 3 degrees, corresponding to about 6 full moons. The small regions captured in the new Hubble images provide stunning close-ups of the Veil. Fascinating smoke-like wisps of gas are all that remain visible of what was once a Milky Way star.Scientists estimate that the supernova explosion occurred some 5-10,000 years ago and could have been witnessed and recorded by ancient civilizations. These would have seen a star increase in brightness to roughly the brightness of the crescent Moon.The intertwined rope-like filaments of gas in the Veil Nebula result from the enormous amounts of energy released as the fast-moving debris from the explosion ploughs into its surroundings and creates shock fronts. These shocks, driven by debris moving at 600,000 kilometres per hour, heat the gas to millions of degrees. It is the subsequent cooling of this material that produces the brilliantly coloured glows.Like the larger scale ground-based observations, the high-resolution Hubble images display two characteristic features: sharp filaments and diffuse emission. These correspond to two different viewing geometries: sharp filaments correspond to an edge-on view of a shock front, and diffuse emission corresponds to a face-on view of it.The Hubble images of the Veil Nebula are striking examples of how processes that take place hundreds of light-years away can sometimes resemble effects we see around us in our daily life. The structures have similarities to the patterns formed by the interplay of light and shadow on the bottom of a swimming pool, rising smoke or ragged cirrus clouds.Why are astronomers interested in studying supernovae and their remnants? Supernovae are extremely important for understanding our own Milky Way. Although only a few stars per century in our Galaxy will end their lives in this spectacular way, these explosions are responsible for making all chemical elements heavier than iron in the Universe. Many elements, such as copper, mercury, gold, iodine and lead that we see around us here on Earth today were forged in these violent events billions of years ago. The expanding shells of supernova remnants were mixed with other material in the Milky Way and became the raw material for new generations of stars and planets.The chemical elements that constitute the Earth, the planets and animals we see around us – and as a matter of fact our very selves – were built deep inside ancient stars and in the supernova explosions that result in the nebula we are seeing here. The green in the grass and the red of our blood are indeed the colours of stardust.The Veil Nebula is a prototypical middle-aged supernova remnant, and is an ideal laboratory for studying the physics of supernova remnants: it is fairly nearby, has a large angular size and has a relatively small amount of foreground extinction.Also known as Cygnus Loop, the Veil Nebula is located in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. It is about 1,500 light-years away from Earth. One of the most remarkable parts of the remnant is the so-called Witch’s Broom Nebula (seen to the right in the overview image). The bright blue star – dubbed 52 Cygni and unrelated to the supernova explosion – can be observed with the naked eye on a clear summer’s night.The Hubble images were taken with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The colour is produced by composite of three different images. The different colours indicate emission from different kinds of atoms excited by the shock: blue shows oxygen, green shows sulphur, and red shows hydrogen.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by European Space Agency.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Star Caught Smoking

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070803092812.htm

Science Daily — Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers from France and Brazil have detected a huge cloud of dust around a star. This observation is further evidence for the theory that such stellar puffs are the cause of the repeated extreme dimming of the star.R Coronae Borealis stars are supergiants exhibiting erratic variability.

Named after the first star that showed such behaviour [1], they are more than 50 times larger than our Sun. R Coronae Borealis stars can see their apparent brightness unpredictably decline to a thousandth of their nominal value within a few weeks, with the return to normal light levels being much slower. It has been accepted for decades that such fading could be due to obscuration of the stellar surface by newly formed dusty clouds. This 'Dust Puff Theory' suggests that mass is lost from the R Coronae Borealis (or R CrB for short) star and then moves away until the temperature is low enough for carbon dust to form. If the newly formed dust cloud is located along our line-of-sight, it eclipses the star. As the dust is blown away by the star's strong light, the 'curtain' vanishes and the star reappears. RY Sagittarii is the brightest member in the southern hemisphere of this family of weird stars. Located about 6,000 light-years away towards the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), its peculiar nature was discovered in 1895 by famous Dutch astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn. In 2004, near-infrared adaptive optics observations made with NACO on ESO's Very Large Telescope allowed astronomers Patrick de Laverny and Djamel Mékarnia to clearly detect the presence of clouds around RY Sagittarii. This was the first direct confirmation of the standard scenario explaining the light variations of R CrB stars by the presence of heterogeneities in their envelope surrounding the star. However, the precise place where such dust clouds would form was still unclear. The brightest cloud detected was several hundred stellar radii from the centre, but it had certainly formed much closer. But how much closer? To probe the vicinity of the star, the astronomers then turned to ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. Combining two different pairs of the 8.2-m Unit Telescopes, the astronomers explored the inner 110 astronomical units [2] around the star. Given the remoteness of RY Sagittarii, this corresponds to looking at details on a one-euro coin that is about 75 km away! The astronomers found that a huge envelope, about 120 times as big as RY Sagittarii itself, surrounds the supergiant star. But more importantly, the astronomers also found evidence for a dusty cloud lying only about 30 astronomical units away from the star, or 100 times the radius of the star. "This is the closest dusty cloud ever detected around a R CrB-type variable since our first direct detection in 2004," says Patrick de Laverny, leader of the team. "However, it is still detected too far away from the star to distinguish between the different scenarios proposed within the Dust Puff Theory for the possible locations in which the dusty clouds form." If the cloud moves at the speed of 300 km/s, as one can conservatively assume, it was probably ejected more than 6 months before its discovery from deeper inside the envelope. The astronomers are now planning to monitor RY Sagittarii more carefully to shed more light on the evolution of the dusty clouds surrounding it. "Two hundred years after the discovery of the variable nature of R CrB, many aspects of the R CrB phenomenon remain mysterious," concludes de Laverny. Notes:R Coronae Borealis (R CrB) is a star barely visible with the unaided eye in the constellation of Coronae Borealis (The Northern Crown). Its variable nature was discovered by Edward Pigott, an English amateur astronomer, around 1795. An Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. It corresponds to about 215 solar radii or 149.6 million kilometres. RY Sagittarii has a radius of about 60 solar radii and is surrounded by a circumstellar envelope more than 35 AU in radius. This is more than three times the distance between the Sun and the outermost planet, Neptune.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by European Southern Observatory.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com