A billion miles sounds impossibly far, but in planetary terms, You can get there, said Elizabeth Turtle.

In Turtles lifetime, shes seen human technology reach Uranus and Neptune, quick flybys that completely transformed our understanding of the solar system.

Thats why she is leading the hunt for rocks on Titan one of Saturns moons that, surprisingly, could tell us a lot about Earths early days.

Turtle who goes by the nickname Zibi is the principal investigator for NASAs Dragonfly mission, a drone-like vehicle the space agency plans to launch toward Titan in 2026.

The Dragonfly rotorcraft will finally arrive on Titan in 2034, after an eight-year-long voyage from Earth. During its 2.7 year-long baseline mission, it will take advantage of Titans dense atmosphere to travel more than 100 miles almost double the distance traveled by all of the land-based Mars rovers combined. By flying to multiple locations, the mission hopes to collect organic samples from a variety of environments.

Zibi Turtle. Photo by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Titan is one of the many satellites in the outer solar system with an interior water ocean, making it an ideal place to search for elements necessary for the origin of life. Its much colder than our planet, but is chemically similar to early Earth, Turtle said.

Humans have probed Titan in the past. In 2005, the European Space Agency landed on the moon during the Cassini mission, parachuting a camera toward the terrain that took photos during its two-and-a-half-hour descent. With Dragonfly, scientists hope to measure the chemical composition of the moons surface. Theyll look at how Titans atmosphere could affect those chemical compounds to get a better picture of which might be biologically relevant to the development of life.

In an interview with the PBS NewsHour, Turtle, who is also a planetary scientist, discussed the mission and what scientists are hoping to find. (Spoiler alert, it may not be aliens.)

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ive always been really interested in astronomy. My dad majored in astronomy. I kind of grew up going out to look at comets and meteor showers and aurora and things like that. Id always had an interest in college. I took a bunch of astrophysics courses and then I started taking planetary science courses. The planets are a little more closer and tangible, you can get there.

At the time, Voyager was making its way out to the Neptune and just the idea of exploration and the sense of how much we were learning in such a short period of time with these Uranus and Neptune flybys, was very quick. The New Horizons flyby took a very short period of time, and yet it completely transforms the understanding of the system.

Zibi Turtle is seen here in front of Yasur Volcano during a 2014 trip to observe and study volcanoes in Vanuatu, an archipelago about 1,000 miles east of Australia. Photo by Zibi Turtle

Its a very exciting field, theres just so much we dont know, and so many things that we have opportunities to learn.

I ended up going to grad school in planetary science and worked with the Galileo mission, studying Io and Europa, both moons of Jupiter. Then I worked with the Cassini mission, studying Titan primarily and some of the other icy satellites in the Saturnian system.

Titan is unique in that its the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere. This atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earths atmosphere, and then it has methane as its next major constituent. Its so much colder in the outer solar system that the compositions are different, so you get very complex organic molecules. This complex organic matter has had the availability of liquid water in the past. You have all the ingredients we know to be necessary for life on the surface of Titan.

We want to study the pre-biotic chemistry the chemical steps that occurred that may have supported the development of life.

Dragonfly will take samples of Titans surface materials for chemical analysis. Image by NASA

Titan in many ways chemically is similar to early Earth, and so by studying Titan we can get an understanding of what processes may have happened here.

Instead of driving across the surface the way we often do on Mars, we fly from place to place with a rotorcraft. This gives us the ability to get to places over 100 kilometers apart and measure compositions in different environments with different histories.

In the past on Titan, liquid water would have been in contact with this organic material, meaning theres great opportunity for all of this pre-biotic organic synthesis to occur. We really want to understand the results of these chemistry experiments that Titan has been doing for millions of years. Then we want to put that in the context of Titan as a system.

Titan has a much thicker ice crust, but it has this organic material and thats really where the connection to the early Earth comes in.

Titan has a much thicker ice crust, but it has this organic material and thats really where the connection to the early Earth comes in. Its about the only place in the solar system that has this level of chemical complexity in terms of just the size of the carbon molecules on Titan, so its really the only the only parallel to Earth in terms of the chemistry available.

The other thing thats similar to the Earth is that because theres an atmosphere interacting with the surface, the geology is very similar. Not only do you have these similar molecules, but they have processes, like wind and rain, transporting them across the surface and mixing them the same way we have here on earth. There are lakes and seas on Titan of liquid methane instead of water here on earth, Titan being made of water ice instead of silicate rock here on Earth.

*Laughs*

We dont have reason to believe life would have developed on Titan. We cant say that it didnt, but its certainly not necessarily something wed expect. The surface temperature on Titan is 94 Kelvin, -290 Fahrenheit. Thats certainly not conducive to life as we know it. Everything is frozen solid at the surface.

We have the capability to make the measurements to detect chemical bio signatures, things like the chiral preferences for the structure of molecules. We do know that water and organic material have been in contact for long periods, but we dont know how long it took life to develop on Earth. We dont even know how long you need.

At this point, given the conditions there, we would be remiss if we didnt if we didnt look.

Hundreds of people are working on all of these projects and coming up with ways to solve challenges, to make things work better. Its a lot of fun. But its more fun when it works. Those are some of the less fun moments of mission or instrument design when you hit challenges that there isnt a way to surmount. Thats where things can be on the more frustrating side.

The exploration is incredibly fun. I remember as a grad student and postdoctoral researcher coming in to work at night when the new images from Galileo of Io were coming back, theres something different every time you look at it. It was spectacular to rush in and pull up the images and see what had happened, what volcanoes had started erupting since the previous flyby.

Zibi Turtle (bottom row, center) poses with the rest of the team from the Dragonfly mission. Image by NASA

That had this human desire to explore, to see whats behind beyond the horizon. This is just looking at all the ways of learning whats beyond the horizon further out in the solar system. Part of the excitement is really learning whats new and seeing what what we havent seen before on other planets and then trying to figure out how it works.

We went from barely knowing what the surface of Titan was like to understanding the geography of Titan, geological processes and how they fit together and how Titan works as a system. Its a huge privilege to be able to participate in that journey. And well be doing the same with the Europa Clipper and with Dragonfly.

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This drone will fly on one of Saturns moons. Heres the woman leading the mission - PBS NewsHour

On April 10, 2019, a tweet went viral showing computer scientist Katie Bouman and her look of delightful surprise. Bouman was at the helm of the team that developed an algorithm that stitched together images to give the world a very first look at a black hole. The rest is history, still in the making.

Bouman, a graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL), is an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Boumans work with the Event Horizon Telescope team and her own CHIRP algorithm, which stands for Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors, was pivotal in the breakthrough that helped create the image of a black hole intergalactic dying stars that many scientists before her deemed impossible to photograph by virtue of their properties. Bouman and her team, had other ideas.

It is this that underlines the grand narrative of women and their roles in space research and astrophysics. The achievement solidified Bouman as a role model in a field that has been typically male dominated for long. Her work and achievements also pay homage to women in space, and their myriad contributions that have helped mankind understand science beyond the times.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

Boumans work came right on the back of NASA astronaut Christina Kochs arrival at the International Space Station (ISS). Soon after her arrival, NASA made a milestone announcement by extending Kochs stay aboard the ISS until February 2020. This scheduled her to officially become the longest woman resident in space, wherein she is set to clock 328 days in microgravity. Her stay will come mighty close to the 340 days that fellow NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent at ISS, and her contribution will be instrumental in our understanding of the effects of long term spaceflight in near-zero gravity conditions.

In India, on July 22, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)s historic Chandrayaan-2 mission took off for the moon. While the mission did not complete its objective due to a part-mission failure with the Vikram lander, ISROs Chandrayaan-2 still played a crucial role in progressing Indias position in global space mission. At its helm were the Rocket Women of India, ISROs project director Muthayya Vanitha, and mission director, Ritu Karidhal. Their tumultuous contributions were a part of Mangalyaan Indias Mars mission, Chandrayaan, and Mission Shakti, Indias own anti-satellite missile test. Karidhal and Vanitha became the face of ISROs achievements while Karidhals 22-year stint at ISRO became widely recognised, Vanitha was named as one of the top five scientists to watch by Nature journal.

ISRO mission director Ritu Karidhal.

Back at NASA, Koch set more records later in 2019 when she, along with new ISS resident Jessica Meir, held the first ever all-female spacewalk on October 18. In her post-spacewalk broadcast back to Earth, Koch stated, We're in sort of a new chapter now where we've crossed that line and two women have done it. Now, hopefully, it will become commonplace and it won't even necessarily be something that's a big deal down the road.

Koch and Meirs contribution to our space research was the first of its kind, but aims to make it regular and natural for more women astronauts to follow. It is this that makes the contributions of Bouman, Koch, Meir and all other women in space research right now so important the ultimate goal, after all, is to not have any notion of gender bias around.

The women that made 2019 the year of women in space also pay homage to astrophysicists, engineers and researchers, dating all the way back to the first Apollo mission in 1969. While progress in this field has not been the fastest, it speaks volumes when one considers that during the iconic Apollo 11 mission, the only woman in the entire team was JoAnn H. Morgan, the only woman in the Apollo mission control room, and the first ever female engineer at NASAs Kennedy Space Center. For India, the image of women researchers celebrating post Chandrayaan-2s successful launch will inspire generations to come.

The trail blazed forth by these women have seen their impact already, in the form of NASA renaming the street in front of their Washington, DC headquarters to Hidden Figures Way in honour of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, women who were pivotal to achievements made in the first Space Race era. NASA further announced the Artemis moon mission for 2024, when the first ever woman is slated to set foot on the moon.

Going forward, 2019 will be remembered as the year when women led mankinds charge towards the unexplored frontiers, bringing mankind closer to reaching for the stars.

Get the best of News18 delivered to your inbox - subscribe to News18 Daybreak. Follow News18.com on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and on YouTube, and stay in the know with what's happening in the world around you in real time.

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Year in Review: Milestones for Women in Space Through 2019 - News18

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Christopher Palma, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Students and Teaching Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University

As an astronomer, the question I hear the most is why isn't Pluto a planet anymore? More than 10 years ago, astronomers famously voted to change Pluto's classification. But the question still comes up.

When I am asked directly if I think Pluto is a planet, I tell everyone my answer is no. It all goes back to the origin of the word "planet." It comes from the Greek phrase for "wandering stars." Back in ancient times before the telescope was invented, the mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy called stars "fixed stars" to distinguish them from the seven wanderers that move across the sky in a very specific way. These seven objects are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

When people started using the word "planet," they were referring to those seven objects. Even Earth was not originally called a planet but the Sun and Moon were.

Since people use the word "planet" today to refer to many objects beyond the original seven, it's no surprise we argue about some of them.

Although I am trained as an astronomer and I studied more distant objects like stars and galaxies, I have an interest in the objects in our Solar System because I teach several classes on planetary science.

The word "planet" is used to describe Uranus and Neptune, which were discovered in 1781 and 1846 respectively, because they move in the same way that the other "wandering stars" move. Like Saturn and Jupiter, if you look at them through a telescope, they appear bigger than stars, so they were recognized to be more like planets than stars.

Not long after the discovery of Uranus, astronomers discovered additional wandering objects these were named Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta. At the time they were considered planets, too. Through a telescope they look like pinpoints of light and not disks. With a small telescope, even distant Neptune appears fuzzier than a star. Even though these other, new objects were called planets at first, astronomers thought they needed a different name since they appear more star-like than planet-like.

William Herschel (who discovered Uranus) is often said to have named them "asteroids" which means "star-like," but recently, Clifford Cunningham claimed that the person who coined that name was Charles Burney Jr., a preeminent Greek scholar.

Today, just like the word "planet," we use the word "asteroid" differently. Now it refers to objects that are rocky in composition, mostly found between Mars and Jupiter, mostly irregularly shaped, smaller than planets, but bigger than meteoroids. Most people assume there is a strict definition for what makes an object an asteroid. But there isn't, just like there never was for the word "planet."

In the 1800s the large asteroids were called planets. Students at the time likely learned that the planets were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Juno, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and, eventually, Neptune. Most books today write that asteroids are different than planets, but there is a debate among astronomers about whether the term "asteroid" was originally used to mean a small type of planet, rather than a different type of object altogether.

These days, scientists consider properties of these celestial objects to figure out whether an object is a planet or not. For example, you might say that shape is important; planets should be mostly spherical, while asteroids can be lumpy. As astronomers try to fix these definitions to make them more precise, we then create new problems. If we use roundness as an important distinction for objects, what should we call moons? Should moons be considered planets if they are round and asteroids if they are not round? Or are they somehow different from planets and asteroids altogether?

I would argue we should again look to how the word "moon" came to refer to objects that orbit planets.

When astronomers talk about the Moon of Earth, we capitalize the word "Moon" to indicate that it's a proper name. That is, the Earth's moon has the name, Moon. For much of human history, it was the only Moon known, so there was no need to have a word that referred to one celestial body orbiting another. This changed when Galileo discovered four large objects orbiting Jupiter. These are now called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the moons of Jupiter.

This makes people think the technical definition of moon is a satellite of another object, and so we call lots of objects that orbit Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Ida and a large number of other asteroids moons. When you start to look at the variety of moons, some, like Ganymede and Titan, are larger than Mercury. Some are similar in size to the object they orbit. Some are small and irregularly shaped, and some have odd orbits.

So they are not all just like Earth's Moon. If we try to fix the definition for what is a moon and how that differs from a planet and asteroid, we are likely going to have to reconsider the classification of some of these objects, too. You can argue that Titan has more properties in common with the planets than Pluto does, for example. You can also argue that every single particle in Saturn's rings is an individual moon, which would mean that Saturn has billions upon billions of moons.

The most recent naming challenge astronomers face arose when they discovering planets far from our Solar System orbiting around distant stars. These objects have been called extrasolar planets, exosolar planets or exoplanets.

Astronomers are currently searching for exomoons orbiting exoplanets. Exoplanets are being discovered that have properties unlike the planets in our Solar System, so astronomers have started putting them in categories like "hot Jupiter," "warm Jupiter," "super-Earth" and "mini-Neptune."

Ideas for how planets form also suggest that there are planetary objects that have been flung out of orbit from their parent star. This means there are free-floating planets not orbiting any star. Should planetary objects that are flung out of a solar system also get ejected from the elite club of planets?

When I teach, I end this discussion with a recommendation. Rather than arguing over planet, moon, asteroid and exoplanet, I think we need to do what Herschel and Burney did and coin a new word. For now, I use "world" in my class, but I do not offer a rigorous definition of what makes something a world and what does not. Instead, I tell my students that all of these objects are of interest to study.

A lot of people seem to feel that scientists wronged Pluto by changing its classification. I look at it that Pluto was only originally called a planet because of an accident; scientists were looking for planets beyond Neptune, and when they found Pluto they called it a planet, even though its observable properties should have led them to call it an asteroid.

As our understanding of this object has grown, I feel like the evidence now leads me to call Pluto something besides planet. There are other scientists who disagree, feeling Pluto still should be classified as a planet.

But remember: The Greeks started out calling the Sun a planet given how it moved on the sky. We now know that the properties of the Sun show it to belong in a very different category from the planets; it's a star, not a planet. If we can stop calling the Sun a planet, why can't we do the same to Pluto?

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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Planetary Confusion Why Astronomers Keep Changing What It Means to Be A Planet - Space.com

Billions of years ago, in the center of a galaxy cluster far, far away (15 billion light-years, to be exact), a black hole spewed out jets of plasma. As the plasma rushed out of the black hole, it pushed away material, creating two large cavities 180 degrees from each other. In the same way you can calculate the energy of an asteroid impact by the size of its crater, Michael Calzadilla, a graduate student at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI), used the size of these cavities to figure out the power of the black holes outburst.

In a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Calzadilla and his coauthors describe the outburst in galaxy cluster SPT-CLJ0528-5300, or SPT-0528 for short. Combining the volume and pressure of the displaced gas with the age of the two cavities, they were able to calculate the total energy of the outburst. At greater than 1054 joules of energy, a force equivalent to about 1038 nuclear bombs, this is the most powerful outburst reported in a distant galaxy cluster. Coauthors of the paper include MKI research scientist Matthew Bayliss and assistant professor of physics Michael McDonald.

The universe is dotted with galaxy clusters, collections of hundreds and even thousands of galaxies that are permeated with hot gas and dark matter. At the center of each cluster is a black hole, which goes through periods of feeding, where it gobbles up plasma from the cluster, followed by periods of explosive outburst, where it shoots out jets of plasma once it has reached its fill. This is an extreme case of the outburst phase, says Calzadilla of their observation of SPT-0528. Even though the outburst happened billions of years ago, before our solar system had even formed, it took around 6.7 billion years for light from the galaxy cluster to travel all the way to Chandra, NASAs X-ray emissions observatory that orbits Earth.

Because galaxy clusters are full of gas, early theories about them predicted that as the gas cooled, the clusters would see high rates of star formation, which need cool gas to form. However, these clusters are not as cool as predicted and, as such, werent producing new stars at the expected rate. Something was preventing the gas from fully cooling. The culprits were supermassive black holes, whose outbursts of plasma keep the gas in galaxy clusters too warm for rapid star formation.

The recorded outburst in SPT-0528 has another peculiarity that sets it apart from other black hole outbursts. Its unnecessarily large. Astronomers think of the process of gas cooling and hot gas release from black holes as an equilibrium that keeps the temperature in the galaxy cluster which hovers around 18 million degrees Fahrenheit stable. Its like a thermostat, says McDonald. The outburst in SPT-0528, however, is not at equilibrium.

According to Calzadilla, if you look at how much power is released as gas cools onto the black hole versus how much power is contained in the outburst, the outburst is vastly overdoing it. In McDonalds analogy, the outburst in SPT-0528 is a faulty thermostat. Its as if you cooled the air by 2 degrees, and thermostats response was to heat the room by 100 degrees, McDonald explains.

Earlier in 2019, McDonald and colleagues released a paper looking at a different galaxy cluster, one that displays a completely opposite behavior to that of SPT-0528. Instead of an unnecessarily violent outburst, the black hole in this cluster, dubbed Phoenix, isnt able to keep the gas from cooling. Unlike all the other known galaxy clusters, Phoenix is full of young star nurseries, which sets it apart from the majority of galaxy clusters.

With these two galaxy clusters, were really looking at the boundaries of what is possible at the two extremes, McDonald says of SPT-0528 and Phoenix. He and Calzadilla will also characterize the more normal galaxy clusters, in order to understand the evolution of galaxy clusters over cosmic time. To explore this, Calzadilla is characterizing 100 galaxy clusters.

The reason for characterizing such a large collection of galaxy clusters is because each telescope image is capturing the clusters at a specific moment in time, whereas their behaviors are happening over cosmic time. These clusters cover a range of distances and ages, allowing Calzadilla to investigate how the properties of clusters change over cosmic time. These are timescales that are much bigger than a human timescale or what we can observe, explains Calzadilla.

The research is similar to that of a paleontologist trying to reconstruct the evolution of an animal from a sparse fossil record. But, instead of bones, Calzadilla is studying galaxy clusters, ranging from SPT-0528 with its violent plasma outburst on one end to Phoenix with its rapid cooling on the other. Youre looking at different snapshots in time, says Calzadilla. If you build big enough samples of each of those snapshots, you can get a sense how a galaxy cluster evolves.

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The billion-year belch - MIT News

Every new planet found orbiting a distant star opens a world of possibilities for astronomers. And a team of scientists has now discovered a rocky exoplanet -- a little bigger than Earth -- which is among the smallest, nearest exoplanets known to date.

The exoplanet -- implying a planet outside our Solar System -- has been dubbed as GJ 1252 b. It is only 66.5 light-years away, orbiting a red dwarf star GJ 1252, according to researchers from the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, among others.

Here we present the discovery of GJ 1252 b, a small planet orbiting an M dwarf. The planet was initially discovered as a transiting planet candidate using TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data. Based on the TESS data and additional follow-up data, we are able to reject all false positive scenarios, showing it is a real planet. In addition, we were able to obtain a marginal mass measurement, say the researchers in a pre-print version on arXiv, which is operated by Cornell University. The research has also been submitted to the American Astronomical Society.

The Solar System has either small, rocky planets like Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, or much larger planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune that are dominated by gases rather than land, say scientists. The discovery of exoplanets such as GJ 1252 b will enable scientists to better understand the worlds orbiting other stars, as well as study the missing link between rocky Earth-like planets and gas-dominant mini-Neptunes.

The diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light-years, and our galaxy is just one of the millions of galaxies. So, 66.5 light-years imply that it is one of our neighboring stars, say experts. GJ 1252 was observed by camera 2 of the TESS spacecraft during Sector 13, from June 19, 2019, to July 17, 2019.

NASA describes TESS as the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. TESS -- launched on April 18, 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket -- will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.

According to the scientists, GJ 1252 b joins a small but growing group of small planets orbiting nearby M dwarf stars. It also joins the group of small planets orbiting at very short periods, commonly called ultra-short periods, or USPs. Experts say that USPs orbital period ranges from about one day down to less than 10 hours, and even as short as about 4 hours, especially around M dwarfs. Planets in this group are believed to have undergone photo-evaporation which removed their atmosphere.

GJ 1252 b joins the short but growing list of small planets orbiting bright and nearby stars discovered by TESS that are amenable to detailed characterization. GJ 1252 is one of the closest planet host stars to the Sun to host a planet with a measured radius. GJ 1252s brightness and the short orbital period (0.518 day, or 12.4 hours) make it a potential target for transmission and emission spectroscopy, which can reveal whether or not the planet has an atmosphere, says the team.

The field of exoplanets has come a long way since the first discoveries at the end of the 20th century. One of the current frontiers in the study of exoplanets is that of small planets, smaller than Neptune and Uranus. However, the number of small planets with a well-measured mass is still small, say experts.

The study of small planets is hampered by the lack of small planets orbiting stars that are bright enough for detailed follow-up investigations. The TESS mission is designed to overcome this problem by detecting transiting planet candidates orbiting bright stars positioned across almost the entire sky. So far, 4,104 exoplanets have been confirmed in our galaxy.

Among those, planet candidates orbiting nearby M dwarf stars present a special opportunity, as their typical high proper motion and small size make it easier to rule out false-positive scenarios. This quickly clears the way for follow-up studies, including mass measurement and atmospheric characterization, says the study.

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Astronomers discover a new exoplanet 66.5 light-years away, making it one of the nearest known to date - MEAWW

Thanks to the vastly improved capabilities of todays telescopes, astronomers have been probing deeper into the cosmos and further back in time. In so doing, they have been able to address some long-standing mysteries about how the Universe evolved since the Big Bang. One of these mysteries is how supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which play a crucial role in the evolution of galaxies, formed during the early Universe.

Using the ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, an international team of astronomers observed galaxies as they appeared about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang (ca. 12.5 billion years ago). Surprisingly, they observed large reservoirs of cool hydrogen gas that could have provided a sufficient food source for SMBHs. These results could explain how SMBHs grew so fast during the period known as the Cosmic Dawn.

The team was led by Dr. Emanuele Paolo Farina of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA). He was joined by researchers from both the MPIA and MPA, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), UC Santa Barbara, the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, the Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPEP).

For decades, astronomers have been studying SMBHs, which exist at the core of most galaxies and are identified by their Active Galatic Nuclei (AGN). These nuclei, which are also known as quasars, can emit more energy and light than the rest of the stars in the galaxy combined. To date, the most distant one observed is ULAS J1342+0928, which is located 13.1 billion light-years away.

Given that the first stars are estimated to have formed just 100,000 years after the Big Bang (ca. 13.8 billion years ago), this means that SMBHs had to have formed quickly from the first stars to die. Until now, though, astronomers had not found dust and gas in high enough quantities during the early Universe to explain this rapid growth.

In addition, previous observations conducted with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) revealed that early galaxies contained a lot of dust and gas, which fueled rapid star formation. These findings indicated that there would not have been much material left over to feed black holes, which only deepened the mystery of how they too grew so rapidly.

To address this, Farina and his colleagues relied on data gathered by the VLTs Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to survey 31 quasars at a distance of around 12.5 billion light-years (thus observing what they looked like 12.5 billion years ago). This makes their survey one of the largest samples of quasars from this early period of the Universe. What they found were 12 extended and surprisingly dense hydrogen clouds.

These hydrogen clouds were identified by their characteristic glow in UV light. Given the distance and the effect of redshift (where the wavelength of light is stretched due to cosmic expansion), earthbound telescopes perceive the glow as red light. As Farina explained in an MPIA press release:

The most likely explanation for the shining gas is the mechanism of fluorescence. The hydrogen converts the energy-rich radiation of the quasar into light with a specific wavelength, which is noticeable by a glimmer.

The clouds of cool, dense hydrogen which were several billion times the mass of the Sun formed halos around the early galaxies that extended for 100,000 light-years from the central black holes. Ordinarily, detecting such clouds around quasars (which are intensely bright) is rather difficult. But thanks to the sensitivity of the MUSE instrument which Farina described as a game changer the team found them rather quickly.

As Alyssa Drake, a researcher with the MPIA who also contributed to the study, said:

With the current studies, we are only just beginning to investigate how the first supermassive black holes were able to develop so rapidly. But new instruments like MUSE and the future James Webb Space Telescope are helping us to solve these exciting puzzles.

The team found that these gas halos were tightly bound to the galaxies, providing the perfect food source to sustain both rapid star formation and the growth of supermassive black holes. These observations effectively resolve the mystery of how supermassive black holes could exist so early in the history of the Universe. As Farina summarizes it:

We are now able to demonstrate, for the first time, that primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation. This adds a fundamental piece to the puzzle that astronomers are building to picture how cosmic structures formed more than 12 billion years ago.

In the future, astronomers will have even more sophisticated instruments with which to study galaxies and SMBHs in the early Universe, which should reveal even more details about ancient gas clouds. This includes the ESOs Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), as well as space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The study that describes the teams findings appeared in the December 20th issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Further Reading: ESO, MPIA, The Astrophysical Journal

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Black Holes Were Already Feasting Just 1.5 Billion Years After the Big Bang - Universe Today

Do supermassive black holes have friends? The nature of galaxy formation suggests that the answer is yes, and in fact, pairs of supermassive black holes should be common in the universe.

I am an astrophysicist and am interested in a wide range of theoretical problems in astrophysics, from the formation of the very first galaxies to the gravitational interactions of black holes, stars and even planets. Black holes are intriguing systems, and supermassive black holes and the dense stellar environments that surround them represent one of the most extreme places in our universe.

The supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy, called Sgr A*, has a mass of about 4 million times that of our Sun. A black hole is a place in space where gravity is so strong that neither particles or light can escape from it. Surrounding Sgr A* is a dense cluster of stars. Precise measurements of the orbits of these stars allowed astronomers to confirm the existence of this supermassive black hole and to measure its mass. For more than 20 years, scientists have been monitoring the orbits of these stars around the supermassive black hole. Based on what we've seen, my colleagues and I show that if there is a friend there, it might be a second black hole nearby that is at least 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.

Almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its heart, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers are still studying why the heart of galaxies often hosts a supermassive black hole. One popular idea connects to the possibility that supermassive holes have friends.

To understand this idea, we need to go back to when the universe was about 100 million years old, to the era of the very first galaxies. They were much smaller than today's galaxies, about 10,000 or more times less massive than the Milky Way. Within these early galaxies the very first stars that died created black holes, of about tens to thousand the mass of the Sun. These black holes sank to the center of gravity, the heart of their host galaxy. Since galaxies evolve by merging and colliding with one another, collisions between galaxies will result in supermassive black hole pairs the key part of this story. The black holes then collide and grow in size as well. A black hole that is more than a million times the mass of our son is considered supermassive.

If indeed the supermassive black hole has a friend revolving around it in close orbit, the center of the galaxy is locked in a complex dance. The partners' gravitational tugs will also exert its own pull on the nearby stars disturbing their orbits. The two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other, and at the same time, each is exerting its own pull on the stars around it.

The gravitational forces from the black holes pull on these stars and make them change their orbit; in other words, after one revolution around the supermassive black hole pair, a star will not go exactly back to the point at which it began.

Using our understanding of the gravitational interaction between the possible supermassive black hole pair and the surrounding stars, astronomers can predict what will happen to stars. Astrophysicists like my colleagues and me can compare our predictions to observations, and then can determine the possible orbits of stars and figure out whether the supermassive black hole has a companion that is exerting gravitational influence.

Using a well-studied star, called S0-2, which orbits the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of the galaxy every 16 years, we can already rule out the idea that there is a second supermassive black hole with mass above 100,000 times the mass of the Sun and farther than about 200 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. If there was such a companion, then I and my colleagues would have detected its effects on the orbit of SO-2.

But that doesn't mean that a smaller companion black hole cannot still hide there. Such an object may not alter the orbit of SO-2 in a way we can easily measure.

Supermassive black holes have gotten a lot of attention lately. In particular, the recent image of such a giant at the center of the galaxy M87 opened a new window to understanding the physics behind black holes.

The proximity of the Milky Way's galactic center a mere 24,000 light-years away provides a unique laboratory for addressing issues in the fundamental physics of supermassive black holes. For example, astrophysicists like myself would like to understand their impact on the central regions of galaxies and their role in galaxy formation and evolution. The detection of a pair of supermassive black holes in the galactic center would indicate that the Milky Way merged with another, possibly small, galaxy at some time in the past.

That's not all that monitoring the surrounding stars can tell us. Measurements of the star S0-2 allowed scientists to carry out a unique test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In May 2018, S0-2 zoomed past the supermassive black hole at a distance of only about 130 times the Earth's distance from the Sun. According to Einstein's theory, the wavelength of light emitted by the star should stretch as it climbs from the deep gravitational well of the supermassive black hole.

The stretching wavelength that Einstein predicted which makes the star appear redder was detected and proves that the theory of general relativity accurately describes the physics in this extreme gravitational zone. I am eagerly awaiting the second closest approach of S0-2, which will occur in about 16 years, because astrophysicists like myself will be able to test more of Einstein's predictions about general relativity, including the change of the orientation of the stars' elongated orbit. But if the supermassive black hole has a partner, this could alter the expected result.

Finally, if there are two massive black holes orbiting each other at the galactic center, as my team suggests is possible, they will emit gravitational waves. Since 2015, the LIGO-Virgo observatories have been detecting gravitational wave radiation from merging stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars. These groundbreaking detections have opened a new way for scientists to sense the universe.

Any waves emitted by our hypothetical black hole pair will be at low frequencies, too low for the LIGO-Virgo detectors to sense. But a planned space-based detector known as LISA may be able to detect these waves which will help astrophysicists figure out whether our galactic center black hole is alone or has a partner.

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This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Live Science'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

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Giant Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy May Have a Friend - Livescience.com

In the course of conducting solar astronomy, scientists have noticed that periodically, the Suns tangled magnetic field lines will snap and then realign. This process is known as magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic topology of a body is rearranged and magnetic energy is converted into kinetic energy, thermal energy, and particle acceleration.

However, while observing the Sun, a team of Indian astronomers recently witnessed something unprecedented a magnetic reconnection that was triggered by a nearby eruption. This observation has confirmed a decade-old theory about magnetic reconnections and external drivers, and could also lead to a revolution in our understanding of space weather and controlled fusion and plasma experiments.

The team responsible for the discovery was led by Abhishek Srivastava, a solar scientist from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), and included astronomers from the University of South Bohemia, the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University, Centre for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and the Armagh Observatory.

Using data from NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory, Srivastava and his colleagues observed a magnetic explosion unlike any other. It began in the upper reaches of the Suns atmosphere (the corona), where a large loop of material (aka. a prominence) was launched by an eruption from the Suns surface. This loop then began descending back to the surface, but then ran into a mass of entangled field lines, triggering a magnetic explosion.

As Abhishek Srivastava, a solar scientist from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), explained:

This was the first observation of an external driver of magnetic reconnection. This could be very useful for understanding other systems. For example, Earths and planetary magnetospheres, other magnetized plasma sources, including experiments at laboratory scales where plasma is highly diffusive and very hard to control.

In previous cases, magnetic reconnections that were observed on both the Sun and around Earth had been spontaneous in nature. These occur only when conditions are just right in a particular region of the Sun, which includes a thin sheet of ionized gas (aka. plasma) that only conducts electric current but only weakly.

While the possibility of forced reconnections driven by explosions was first theorized 15 years ago, none had ever been seen directly. This type of reconnection can happen in a wider range of places where plasma sheets have even lower resistance to conducting electric current. However, it also requires an eruption to trigger it, which will squeeze the plasma and magnetic fields and cause them to reconnect.

Using the SDO, the team was able to study this plasma by examining the Sun at a wavelength that showed particles heated to between 1 2 million C (1.8 3.6 million F). This allowed them to observe and take images of a forced reconnection event in the solar corona for the first time in history. It began with the prominence in the corona falling back into the photosphere, where it ran into a mess of field lines and reconnected in a distinctive X-shape.

Magnetic reconnections offer a possible explanation for why the Suns corona is actually millions of degrees hotter than the lower atmosphere which has been an enduring mystery for astronomers. To address this, solar scientists have spent decades looking for a possible mechanism that could be responsible for driving this heat.

With this in mind, Srivastava and his team observed the plasma in multiple ultraviolet wavelengths to calculate its temperature after the reconnection event. The data showed that the prominence, which was cooler than the surrounding corona, became hotter after the reconnection event. This suggests that forced reconnection could be responsible for heating the corona locally.

While spontaneous reconnection could still be a contributing factor, forced reconnections appear to be a bigger one, capable of raising plasma temperatures faster, higher, and in a more controlled fashion. In the meantime, Srivastava and his colleagues will continue to look for more forced reconnection events in the hopes of better understanding the mechanics behind them and how often they might happen.

These results could also lead to additional solar research to see if eruption events like flares and coronal mass ejections could also cause forced reconnection. Since these eruptions are the driving force behind space weather, which can wreak havoc on satellites and electronic infrastructure here on Earth, further research into forced reconnection could help lead to better predictive models

These, in turn, would allow for early warnings and preemptive measures to be taken in the event of a flare or ejection. Understanding how magnetic reconnection can be forced by an external driver could also lead to breakthroughs in the lab. This is particularly true of fusion experiments, where scientists are working to figure out how to control streams of super-heated plasma.

Credit: NASA, The Astrophysical Journal

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Astronomers Discovered a New Kind of Explosion That the Sun Can Do - Universe Today

When stars exhaust their supply of fuel, they collapse under their own weight and explode, blowing off their outer layers in an event known as a supernova. In some cases, these events leave behind neutron stars, the smallest and densest of stellar objects (with the exception of certain theoretical stars) that sometimes spin rapidly. Pulsars, a class of neutron star, can spin up to several hundred times per second.

One such object, designated J0030+0451 (J0030), is located about 1,100 light-years from Earth in the Pisces constellation. Recently, scientists using NASAs Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) were able to measure the pulsars size and mass. In the process, they also managed to locate the various hot spots on its surface, effectively creating the first map of a neutron star.

Since 2017, NICER has been conducting observations from the International Space Station (ISS) for the purpose of creating of learning what goes on inside a neutron star. In addition to providing high-precision measurements of neutron stars and other super-dense objects, the data it collects will also be used to create an X-ray map of the cosmos and to test pulsars as a possible navigation beacon.

As Paul Hertz, the director of NASAs astrophysics division, said in a recent NASA press release:

From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars. Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now.

For decades, scientists have been studying pulsars in the hopes of getting a better understanding of their inner workings. According to the simplest model, pulsars have incredibly powerful magnetic fields shaped like a dipole magnet. Combined with the pulsars rotation, this causes particles from its surface to be focused into tight beams emitted from the poles. This creates a strong strobing effect that resembles a lighthouse to observers.

This effect leads to variations in the pulsars brightness (in the X-ray wavelength), which astronomers have observed in the past. At the same time, astronomers have also observed hotspots on the surface of pulsars, which are the result of their magnetic fields ripping particles from the surface and accreting them around the poles. While the entire surface glows brightly in X-rays, these hot spots glow brighter.

However, the new NICER studies of J0030 (a millisecond pulsar that revolves 205 times per second) showed that pulsars arent that simple. Using NICER data obtained from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped out the hotspots on J0030 and came to similar conclusions about its mass and size.

The first team was led by Thomas Riley and his supervisor Anna Watts, a doctoral student in computational astrophysics and a professor of astrophysics (respectively) at the University of Amsterdam. To recreate the X-ray signals they observed, Riley and his colleagues conducted simulations of overlapping circles of different sizes and temperatures using the Dutch national supercomputer Cartesius.

In addition to determining that J0030 is around 1.3 Solar masses and 25.4 km (15.8 mi) wide, they identified two hot spots one small and circular, the other long and crescent-shaped. The second team, led by astronomy professor Cole Miller of the University of Maryland, conducted similar simulations using UMDs Deepthought2 supercomputer.

They found that J0030 is 1.4 Solar masses, measures 26 km (16.2 mi) wide, and came up with two solutions for hotspots. In the first, they identified two possible hotspots, one of which has two ovals that closely matches the results of Rileys team. In the second, they found a possible third hotspot located around the pulsars southern rotational pole.

As Riley explained, these results revealed a great deal about J0030 and other pulsars:

When we first started working on J0030, our understanding of how to simulate pulsars was incomplete, and it still is. But thanks to NICERs detailed data, open-source tools, high-performance computers and great teamwork, we now have a framework for developing more realistic models of these objects.

As predicted by Einsteins General Theory of Relativity, a pulsar is so dense that its gravity warps the very fabric of space-time around it. The effect is so pronounced that light coming from the side facing away from the observer is bent and redirected towards them. This makes the star look bigger than it really is and means that hot spots dont disappear entirely when they rotate away from the observer.

Thanks to NICERs precision, which is about 20 times that of previous instruments, astronomers are able to measure the arrival of each X-ray from a pulsar to better than a hundred nanoseconds. From Earth, the two teams had a clear view of J0030s northern hemisphere and expected to find one hotspot there. Instead, they identified up to three, all of which were located in the southern hemisphere.

As Miller explained, these observations would not have been possible without NICERs precision:

NICERs unparalleled X-ray measurements allowed us to make the most precise and reliable calculations of a pulsars size to date, with an uncertainty of less than 10%. The whole NICER team has made an important contribution to fundamental physics that is impossible to probe in terrestrial laboratories.

This constitutes the first case of astronomers mapping out the surface of a pulsar, and the results indicate that their magnetic fields are more complicated than the traditional dipole model would suggest. While scientists have yet to determine why J0030s spots are arranged and shaped the way they are, these findings indicate that these answers could be within reach.

Even more impressive is the fact that two teams arrived at similar findings independently of one another. As Zaven Arzoumanian, the NICER science lead at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, expressed:

Its remarkable, and also very reassuring, that the two teams achieved such similar sizes, masses and hot spot patterns for J0030 using different modeling approaches. It tells us NICER is on the right path to help us answer an enduring question in astrophysics: What form does matter take in the ultra-dense cores of neutron stars?

As part of the Astrophysics Mission of Opportunity element of NASAs Explorers program, NICERs main scientific objective is to precisely measure the size and mass of several pulsars. This information will yield valuable clues as to what transpires within their interiors, where matter is compressed to densities that are impossible to simulate in laboratories here on Earth.

This information will also help advance astronomers understanding of black holes and other super-dense objects. The analysis of the NICER observations of J0030 has already led to a series of papers that are featured in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Be sure to check out this video that explains the researchers findings as well, courtesy of the NASA Goddard:

Further Reading: NASA

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Astronomers Map the Surface of a Pulsar - Universe Today

Astronomers gazing into the heart of the Milky Way have discovered new clues about our galaxy's dramatic past.

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers created a high-resolution image of our galaxy's center. The new observations revealed a burst of new star formation in the Milky Way's early years that was so intense, it led to more than 100,000 supernovas, or exploding stars.

"Our unprecedented survey of a large part of the Galactic centre has given us detailed insights into the formation process of stars in this region of the Milky Way," Rainer Schdel, a researcher with the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA) in Granada, Spain, who led the observations, said in a statement.

Video: See the Milky Way's Central Region in Incredible VLT ViewRelated: Our Milky Way Galaxy's Core Revealed (Photos)

An image of the central region of the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope.

An annotated version of the image highlights different features in the central region of the Milky Way.

"Contrary to what had been accepted up to now, we found that the formation of stars has not been continuous," Francisco Nogueras-Lara, who led two new studies based on these observations of the Milky Way central region at IAA, said in the same statement.

One of the studies, which was published today (Dec. 16) in the journal Nature Astronomy, found that about 80% of the stars in the core of the Milky Way formed between 8 billion and 13.5 billion years ago. For comparison, scientists believe that the Milky Way galaxy is about 13.6 billion years old.

"This initial period of star formation was followed by about six billion years during which very few stars were born," ESO officials said in the statement. "This was brought to an end by an intense burst of star formation around one billion years ago when, over a period of less than 100 million years, stars with a combined mass possibly as high as a few tens of million suns formed in this central region."

Video: Milky Way Galaxy's Central Region - Very Large Telescope Zoom-In

"The conditions in the studied region during this burst of activity must have resembled those in 'starburst' galaxies, which form stars at rates of more than 100 solar masses per year," said Nogueras-Lara, who is now based at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

Researchers captured these images using an instrument on VLT called HAWK-I, a wide-field imager that observes the sky in near-infrared wavelengths, which allows it to "see" through dense clouds of interstellar dust and gas. The HAWK-I instrument allowed researchers to capture this stunning new view of the Milky Way, which was first published in October in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Scientists Spot Ancient Star Burst in Milky Way's Heart in Stunning New Image - Space.com

When Stephen Hawking passed away almost three years ago, he left behind a legacy of revolutionary thinking in astrophysics and a life story that would inspire pretty much anyone. But according to a recent statement from the Stephen Hawking Foundation, theres one way the geniuss legacy was also sadly incomplete: He passed away with a mere 91% completion rating for CD Projekt Reds The Witcher 3.

For Stephen Hawkings admirers, knowing the inspirational figure came up short in the 2013 RPG classic seeking out some Places of Power and rare Gwent cards goes to show that even great geniuses struggle to finish everything before their time is up.

Now, none of this is to understate the scope of what Hawking did in his lifetime: Its an incredible accomplishment just to get this far in The Witcher 3 when most novice gamers simply push through the games main story arcs while brushing aside the majority of Witcher contracts and side missions. In fact, whats most tragic about all of this is realizing that the author of Brief History Of Time finished both the Of Swords and Dumpling and Master Armourers side quests without ever uncovering most of the games Bear Armor diagrams.

Its heartbreaking to imagine how unfulfilled Hawking must have felt as he took his final breath knowing full well that there was a small corner of the Skellige Islands mountainside that he hadnt yet explored. It was probably a small solace to know that he had overcome debilitating ALS to inspire millions worldwide while transforming astrophysics with his prediction that black holes emit radiation, especially given that his place in history would forever be haunted by that 9% of The Witcher 3s rich world that he had failed to fully explore.

In a press statement, Hawkings estate stressed that the famous physicist had been committed to maxing out Geralt during his life, spending hours every night in his Cambridge study and often prioritizing game sessions over family responsibilities and research into black-body radiation. In fact, in the months leading up to his death, Hawking apparently became obsessed with finding a way to retry the failed Cave of Dreams quest, unwilling to accept that this one misstep on his Death March difficulty playthrough would forever cost him completion perfection.

Its sad to say, but many gamers will no doubt question what they ever found inspiring about Hawkings life story now that they know he came up short in parts of the Novigrad fistfight circuit.

Thankfully, the late science icons foundation appears to be taking these concerns seriously and has already announced plans to spend $3.5 million setting up a charitable foundation to help kids around the world attain a 100% rating in CD Projekt Reds upcoming Cyberpunk 2077. Heres hoping that means no one will ever have to experience the searing disappointment Stephen Hawking must have felt at the end of his life.

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A Life Unfinished: Stephen Hawkings Estate Just Revealed The Genius Astrophysicist Died With Only 91% Completion For The Witcher 3 - The Onion

This illustration depicts a gas halo surrounding a quasar in the early Universe. The quasar, in orange, has two powerful jets and a supermassive black hole at its center, which is surrounded by a dusty disc. The gas halo of glowing hydrogen gas is represented in blue.A team of astronomers surveyed 31 distant quasars, seeing them as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. They found that 12 quasars were surrounded by enormous gas reservoirs: halos of cool, dense hydrogen gas extending 100 000 light-years from the central black holes and with billions of times the mass of the Sun. These gas stashes provide the perfect food source to sustain the growth of supermassive black holes in the early Universe.Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomers using ESOs Very Large Telescope have observed reservoirs of cool gas around some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. These gas halos are the perfect food for supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies, which are now seen as they were over 12.5 billion years ago. This food storage might explain how these cosmic monsters grew so fast during a period in the Universes history known as the Cosmic Dawn.

We are now able to demonstrate, for the first time, that primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation, says Emanuele Paolo Farina, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who led the research published today in The Astrophysical Journal. This adds a fundamental piece to the puzzle that astronomers are building to picture how cosmic structures formed more than 12 billion years ago.

Astronomers have wondered how supermassive black holes were able to grow so large so early on in the history of the Universe. The presence of these early monsters, with masses several billion times the mass of our Sun, is a big mystery, says Farina, who is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching bei Mnchen. It means that the first black holes, which might have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast. But, until now, astronomers had not spotted black hole food gas and dust in large enough quantities to explain this rapid growth.

To complicate matters further, previous observations with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, revealed a lot of dust and gas in these early galaxies that fuelled rapid star formation. These ALMA observations suggested that there could be little left over to feed a black hole.

To solve this mystery, Farina and his colleagues used the MUSE instrument on ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert to study quasars extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes which lie at the center of massive galaxies. The study surveyed 31 quasars that are seen as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. This is one of the largest samples of quasars from this early on in the history of the Universe to be surveyed.

This image shows one of the gas halos newly observed with the MUSE instrument on ESOs Very Large Telescope superimposed to an older image of a galaxy merger obtained with ALMA. The large-scale halo of hydrogen gas is shown in blue, while the ALMA data is shown in orange.The halo is bound to the galaxy, which contains a quasar at its center. The faint, glowing hydrogen gas in the halo provides the perfect food source for the supermassive black hole at the center of the quasar.The objects in this image are located at redshift 6.2, meaning they are being seen as they were 12.8 billion years ago. While quasars are bright, the gas reservoirs around them are much harder to observe. But MUSE could detect the faint glow of the hydrogen gas in the halos, allowing astronomers to finally reveal the food stashes that power supermassive black holes in the early Universe.Credit: ESO/Farina et al.; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Decarli et al.

The astronomers found that 12 quasars were surrounded by enormous gas reservoirs: halos of cool, dense hydrogen gas extending 100,000 light years from the central black holes and with billions of times the mass of the Sun. The team, from Germany, the US, Italy and Chile, also found that these gas halos were tightly bound to the galaxies, providing the perfect food source to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation.

The research was possible thanks to the superb sensitivity of MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, on ESOs VLT, which Farina says was a game changer in the study of quasars. In a matter of a few hours per target, we were able to delve into the surroundings of the most massive and voracious black holes present in the young Universe, he adds. While quasars are bright, the gas reservoirs around them are much harder to observe. But MUSE could detect the faint glow of the hydrogen gas in the halos, allowing astronomers to finally reveal the food stashes that power supermassive black holes in the early Universe.

In the future, ESOs Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will help scientists reveal even more details about galaxies and supermassive black holes in the first couple of billion years after the Big Bang. With the power of the ELT, we will be able to delve even deeper into the early Universe to find many more such gas nebulae, Farina concludes.This research is presented in a paper to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team is composed of Emanuele Paolo Farina (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy [MPIA], Heidelberg, Germany and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics [MPA], Garching bei Mnchen, Germany), Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia (MPA), Tiago Costa (MPA), Fabian Walter (MPIA), Joseph F. Hennawi (MPIA and Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, US [UCSB Physics]), Anna-Christina Eilers (MPIA), Alyssa B. Drake (MPIA), Roberto Decarli (Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics [INAF], Bologna, Italy), Thales A. Gutcke (MPA), Chiara Mazzucchelli (European Southern Observatory, Vitacura, Chile), Marcel Neeleman (MPIA), Iskren Georgiev (MPIA), Eduardo Baados (MPIA), Frederick B. Davies (UCSB Physics), Xiaohui Fan (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, US [Steward]), Masafusa Onoue (MPIA), Jan-Torge Schindler (MPIA), Bram P. Venemans (MPIA), Feige Wang (UCSB Physics), Jinyi Yang (Steward), Sebastian Rabien (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching bei Mnchen, Germany), and Lorenzo Busoni (INAF-Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Florence, Italy).

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Black Holes' Breakfast at the Cosmic Dawn Revealed by VLT [Video] - SciTechDaily

Scientists using data from NASA's NICER telescope onboard the ISS have created the first-ever surface map of a pulsar, according to reports from Space.Com.

"Thanks to NICER's detailed data, open-source tools, high-performance computers and great teamwork, we now have a framework for developing more realistic models of these objects," said Thomas Riley, a doctoral student in computational astrophysics who led one of the research teams.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits bursts or pulses of radiation. At the same time, the pulsar itself is spinning like a top. These stars also have strong magnetic fields channel jets of superaccelerated radioactive particles through the stars' north and south poles, which creates the bursts of light we use to find them. They are a sort of radio wave strobe light, if you will. These pulses don't last very long: a couple of seconds, max and sometimes the magnetic field doesn't line up with the rotational axis, so we can't always see this light. According to NASA, another way to think about pulsars is like a lighthouse beam: you can only see the light when it is pointing directly at you.

The NICER telescope (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) was installed on the ISS in June 2017 to monitor and collect data on neutron stars. Incredibly, it is also being used to test pulsars as potential navigation beacons for deep space missions. NASA astronomers were studying pulsar J0030+0451 in the constellation Pisces about 1,100 light-years away. From the NICER data, scientists were able to map the star's size and shape while mapping the shape and location of million-degree "hot spots" on the star's surface.

Neutron stars are the densest visible structure in our universe. They are the white-hot core that remains after a star one to three times the mass of our sun collapses on itself with enough force to crush most protons and electrons into neutrons. Larger stars will collapse into a black hole that's how dense neutron stars are. They're the equivalent of compressing 500,000 planet Earths into an area roughly the size of Manhattan. The only thing denser than a neutron star (that we know of) is the uncharted abyss of a black hole.

Paul Hertz, the astrophysics division director at theNASA Headquarters in Washington, said, "From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsarsPulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now."

You can read a collection of papers on this study that have been published online in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and see the map in NASA Goddard's video below!

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Astrophysicists Create the First-Ever Surface Map of a Pulsar Using Data from NASAs NICER Telescope on the ISS - Outer Places

With 2020 fast approaching, and as happens with any year that ends in "0," people around the world are planning to celebrate the New Year with extra gusto.

News outlets are publishing end of decade retrospectives. Magazines and podcasts are compiling the best songs, movies, and TV shows of the decade. Dads across the country are preparing a joke they've waited 10 years to use.

But is it all premature?

In recent weeks, a vocal minority of people on social media have argued that the new decade doesn't start in 2020 but in 2021. And according to the New York Times, they might be right.

The Times reports that in 1999, Geoff Chester, an astronomer and a public affairs officer at the Naval Observatory, stated that the new millennium began in 2001. Chester explained that the Observatory uses a modified Julian date to tell time, and the calendar states that new decades begin on years ending in "1."

That stems from the work of a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who in 525 devised the A.D. system to record the number of years since Jesus was born. Because Exiguus began his calendar with the birth of Jesus at year 1, it followed that all new decades began with years ending in "1."

The Naval Observatory's master clock keeps precise time for the Department of Defense. It also governors the times for satellites and all Apple products, including iPhones. So obviously, the Observatory's ruling has plenty of clout.

But it's not quite that simple. Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a curator in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, told the Times that it's simply a consensus to recognize decades from years that end in "0" to years that end in "9." In fact, citing popular opinion, Merriam-Webster dictionary says the new decade does, in fact, begin in 2020.

So, go ahead and celebrate the end of the new decade on Dec. 31. Just don't expect to win any online arguments.

Alex Hider is a writer for the E.W. Scripps National Desk. Follow him on Twitter @alexhider.

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Is the decade really over at the end of 2019? - WPIX 11 New York

There are around a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, and most are rather humdrum but the oddballs are so strange that they challenge our understanding of physics

By Stuart Clark

WITH hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, you would expect a few oddballs and you would be right. Stars do follow a more or less set life path, determined by their mass. But we are increasingly finding that the details of those lives can diverge more than we ever imagined. In some cases, we are discovering stellar characteristics and habits so outlandish that they challenge our understanding of physics.

From a cannibalistic star to one that makes impossible elements and another that refuses to die, here is our introduction to some of the strangest stars in the universe.

Our galaxy is leaking stars. That is the only conclusion astronomers have been able to draw from the discovery of a few dozen stars travelling so fast that not even the gravity of the Milky Way can hold on to them. The record holder is S5-HVS1, which clocks in at 1700 kilometres per second so fast that it has already broken out into the lonely reaches of intergalactic space. But how has an enormous ball of gas accelerated to such a speed?

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When Warren Brown at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics identified the first hypervelocity star in 2005, it appeared to have come from the centre of the galaxy. That pointed the finger at the supermassive black hole there. Browns calculations showed that if a pair of stars passed close enough, the black hole would snatch hold of one of them and shoot the other off into space.

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A spotters guide to the Milky Ways most badly behaved stars - New Scientist

Black holes are notoriouslybashful beasts. The supermassive monsters that dwell at the centers of galaxiesweigh millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and control the fatesof everything in their vicinity, including light. Despite such outsizeinfluence over their home galaxies, black holes never show their faces.

Until now.After more than a decade of work, results from the Event Horizon Telescope, orEHT, stunned the world this year with the first direct image of a black holesevent horizon, the region beyond which not even light can escape.

To make this remarkable image, scientists cobbled together a massive telescope by connecting seven observatories around the world to create a tool effectively the size of Earth (SN: 4/27/19, p. 7). The result: a picture of the round silhouette of a black hole against the ringlike backdrop of its brightly glowing accretion disk, the gas and other material drawn in by the black holes voracious gravitational appetite.

Almost immediately, that image shored up Einsteins general theory of relativity, weighed in on the best way to measure a black holes mass (SN Online: 4/22/19) and provided evidence that event horizons are real. Now the EHT team is digging into what else the telescopes vast amount of data can reveal, in the hopes of cracking more black hole mysteries.

This is justthe beginning of this kind of new era of observing event horizons, says KazuAkiyama, an EHT team member and astrophysicist at the MIT Haystack Observatoryin Westford, Mass.

The initial black hole snapshot, unveiled in April, focused on a distant galaxy, M87 (SN: 4/27/19, p. 6). At roughly 6.5 billion solar masses, M87s black hole is 1,000 times as massive as EHTs other target, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. That black hole, Sagittarius A*, also known as Sgr A*, weighs about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

Being moremassive made M87s giant an easier subject. Gases swirling around that blackhole were more sluggish and changed brightness less often and less dramaticallythan those moving more nimbly around Sgr A*.

M87 was sittingstill for its portrait, says EHT team member Andrew Chael, an astrophysicistat Princeton University. Sgr A* is like a cheetah running across the frame.

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In datacollected during a week in April 2017, Sgr A* changed its appearance over thecourse of a few minutes. So while M87s black hole lent itself to a singlestill image, for Sgr A*, we may need to construct a movie, Akiyama says.

The simplestway to make a movie would be to break up one nights observations intosegments, make an image from each segment and string them together, says EHTteam member Katie Bouman, a data scientist at Caltech. But theres not enoughinformation in even the smallest segment to produce a reliable image. Youreconstruct nonsense, she says.

Instead, the team is working on techniques to fill in gaps and carry information about the black holes appearance forward in time. We assume that although the source is evolving, its not evolving randomly there is some continuity in how the gas is moving around the black hole, Bouman says. By stitching together a movie that plays smoothly, she and colleagues hope to understand the black holes structure.

Getting a good look at Sgr A*s event horizon will give physicists one of the best tests yet of general relativity, says physicist Feryal zel of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The century-old theory predicts how the mass of a black hole warps spacetime (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). General relativity also makes precise predictions for the size of the bright ring and dark silhouette for black holes of a given mass.

M87s blackhole was too far away for astronomers to know precisely its mass beforecapturing the image. But Sgr A*s mass is well known, thanks to decades ofmeasurements of stars orbiting the Milky Ways black hole. Capturing Sgr A*simage would be a clean test of some of the things we want to look at, zelsays. The ring and the shadow, it either is the size you expect or its not.Thats an incredible opportunity for us.

A movie ofM87s black hole may be in the works, too. Our observations provided goodevidence that M87 is actually changing [within] the timescale of a week,Akiyama says. Studying how the black hole changes could reveal details of howit rotates, spinning magnetized plasma around it like a dancers skirt.

Among othertreasures waiting in already collected data is the polarization of lightemitted from the bright ring of M87s black hole. This measure of theorientation of light waves wiggling up and down, left and right, or at anangle lets scientists determine the arrangement of strong magnetic fieldsnear the black hole. Those magnetic fields are thought to control how the blackhole accretes matter.

Thearrangement tells you how the black hole eats, says astrophysicist and EHT teammember Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics inCambridge, Mass. Black holes are known for their hearty appetites, but actuallyits extremely difficult to fall into a black hole, he says. An orbiting bitof matter will just keep orbiting forever unless some friction or viscosity inthe environment drags it toward the black hole.

Physicists think magnetic fields are what make the environment around black holes viscous. In 2015, Johnson and colleagues published EHT observations of the polarization around Sgr A*, which showed tangled magnetic fields close to the black hole and more organized fields farther away. But those observations came from just four telescopes.

We have thisbeautiful theory of why black holes can eat, but weve never seen evidence forit, Johnson says. So if EHT can see these magnetic fields, we might have ourfirst glimpse into this accretion process.

Polarizationcould also help explain one mysterious feature of M87: It launches a bright,energetic jet that extends light-years into space. Magnetic fields that gettwisted around the black hole as it spins are important for launching the jet,physicists think, but the details are murky.

If we couldsee this polarization, we might be able to see these processes directly themagnetic fields and the jet and how theyre connected to the black hole,Johnson says.

EHT will fire up again in April 2020, this time with 11 observatories, including Kitt Peak in Arizona and NOEMA in the French Alps. Further in the future, EHT scientists are considering sending a telescope to space. Extending EHT into Earths orbit would alleviate worries about weather on the ground ruining observations and would help make even sharper images of even more black holes.

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2019 brought us the first image of a black hole. A movie may be next - Science News

Image caption: Professor David McClelland, Professor Susan Scott, Dr Robert Ward and Dr Bram Slagmolen, from the ANU Research School of Physics with the TorPeDO, A low-frequency gravitational force sensor.

Fast forward to the present and the gravitational-wave observatories in the United States and Italy have detected the mergers of two black holes, the collision of two neutron stars and possibly also a black hole eating a neutron star. Neutron stars and black holes are thesuper-dense remains of dead stars.

We were quite astonished by the first successful detection of gravitational waves on the evening of 14 September 2015, which was from two big black holes smashing into each other 1.3 billion light years away, McClelland says.

Scott says the first detection was beyond exciting. All thoughts about Australia gaining yet another Prime

Minister in the previous hour vanished and instead my mind was racing with the wonderful and immense opportunities for discovery that lay ahead, she says.

The three founders of the project, from the US, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics on behalf of the international team for this ground-breaking work.

Being part of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery is the highlight of my career, McClelland says.

I am so fortunate to be supported by an outstanding team at ANU, including long termers Bram Slagmolen, Robert Ward and Dan Shaddock.

The speed with which the Nobel Prize was awarded is testament to the enormity of the discovery in the physics world, Scott says.

Soon after the Nobel Prize was awarded, the international collaboration detected two neutron stars smashing together, which brought some light to their work and opened up a new scientific field where gravitational- wave physicists and astronomers could work together.

The LIGO detectors were recently taken offline for upgrades to improve their range and precision.

Instruments called quantum squeezers, designed at ANU, were installed on the LIGO detectors. The squeezers dampen quantum noise that can drown out weak gravitational-wave signals. This and other upgrades have improved the sensing capabilities of the detectors.

In this new dawn for space discovery, ANU will establish a centre next year to formally bring together gravitational-wave scientists with astronomers, to ensure the Universitys leading role in gravitational astrophysics both nationally and internationally into the future. The ANU SkyMapper telescope, with a wide field of view and capability to scan large areas of the southern sky quickly, will play an important role in the emerging field of gravitational-wave astronomy.

The new ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics (CGA), bridging the ANU Research School of Physics and the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, will play a vital role in finding more violent events in the Universe.

We expect to detect gravitational waves from lots more cataclysmic events including those weve never detected before such as nearby exploding stars and neutron stars spinning rapidly in space, which produce much fainter signals, Scott says.

McClelland also expects some surprising discoveries in the future.

The most important discoveries may well be objects on the warped side of the Universe we never knew existed, he says.

This story originally appeared in ANU Reporter.

Main image credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence

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The Universe is constantly expanding, which certainly gives humanity a reason to question, investigate and explore far beyond Earths orbit.

In no particular order, Dr Rebecca Allen and PhD candidate Sara Webb from Swinburnes Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing compiled this list of the best in space news from 2019.

On 20 July 1969, the words Thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind echoed across television sets broadcasting the Apollo 11 Moon landing to 600 million people across the world.

Fifty years later, in 2019, NASA marked the anniversary by streaming footage of the launch online to a new generation of stargazers and aspiring astronauts.

The agency held a "Man on the Moon" parade, projected a life-sized Saturn V rocket on the Washington Monument and unveiled astronaut Neil Armstrong's spacesuit.

The announcement of the Artemis mission also proposed to land the first woman and the next man on the Moonby 2024, and explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.

On 10 April, a team of international astronomers revealed the first image of a black hole.

The picture was taken over five days of observations in April 2017, using eight telescopes around the world - a collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope.

It depicts bright gas swirling around a supermassive black hole at the centre of M87, a galaxy about 54-million light-years away.

On 1 January, NASAs New Horizons spacecraft returned the sharpest possible images of 486958 Arrokath, an object located in a region at the outer edges of our solar system known as the Kuiper belt.

Also known as Ultima Thule, a Latin term for the most distant place beyond the borders of the known world, it is the farthest object explored so far.

On 3 July, astronomers and tourists alike scattered across the Atacama Desert in Chile to view the total solar eclipse, a moment where the moon completely blocks out the sun.

The path of total darkness spread from Chile to Argentina, with just two and a half minutes for observers to catch the ring of fire.

In September, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed a prototype for the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy Rocket, both designed to carry crew and cargo to Earths orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.

While the prototype is still in testing stages, Starship is predicted to carry up to 100 people and be completely reusable after each mission.

In October, astronomers accidentally discovered the footprints of a monster galaxy in the early Universe that had never been seen before.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 radio telescopes high in the Chilean mountains, researchers noticed a faint emission of light in sensitive observations.

The researchers estimate that the signal came from so far away that it took 12.5 billion years to reach Earth, therefore giving us a view of the Universe in its infancy.

Study co-author, Swinburnes Professor Ivo Labb, says the monster galaxy is forming new stars at 100 times the rate of our Milky Way.

NASAs Mars rover, Opportunity, reached its final resting place on the red planet in February.

The rover was active from June 2004, travelling more than 45 kilometres across the dusty surface and returning more than 200,000 images. It also exceeded its 90-day life expectancy 60-fold.

Opportunity stopped communicating after a severe dust storm blanketed its location in 2018. It remained unresponsive despite more than a thousand commands to restore contact until 13 February.

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Space news highlights of 2019 | Swinburne news - Swinburne University of Technology

For decades, people have wondered whether there are life forms existing beyond Earth or not. But the question may have been answered by astronomers upon their recent discovery.

Express reports that astronomers are currently trying to determine what the strange blinking lights from space are in case they would become evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial spaceships or structures. The scientists noticed the vanishing and reappearing lights in the sky, and as of now they believe that the lights might be coming from natural, if somewhat extreme, astrophysical sources but they have yet to come to a conclusive answer.

If this is proven to be true, then it might pave the way for a new field of astrophysics. The researchers even noted that their findings could potentially mean from going past traditional measures of astrophysics to the further searches of extraterrestrial life and or advanced technology coming from the extraterrestrial life outside the planet. The researchers analyzed old images of similar phenomena dating back to the 1950s, including military catalog sky images and compared them to modern findings, looking out for indicators such as stars that supposedly disappeared from the Milky Way.

According to Stockholm University professor and member of the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias Beatriz Villaroel, discovering a star that appears out of nowhere would certainly include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today.

It also bears noting that stars that are dying out turn into white dwarves or explode in a process called a supernova. With this in mind, the blinking lights from the sky could mean a few things: a failed supernova, natural astrophysical phenomena, or evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Moving along with blinking lights, Space previously reported that the unusual flashing lights are also measured as Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs by astronomers. So far, scientists have only been able to document 20, but as the recent report may suggest, there are more. These lights are supposedly coming from galaxies that are billions of light-years away from our planet. However, the cause of these lights appearing has yet to be determined.

It is possible that the lights could be coming from an alien transmitter, indicating advanced technology built by aliens.

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Aliens: Mysterious blinking lights in the sky may be a sign of other life - EconoTimes

Do you have an interest in physics? Are you exploring your postgraduate options in the field? A physics degree can equip you with numerous skills that are highly appealing to employers, notes the Institute of Physics.

For instance, those engaged in research which can be autonomous in nature gain strong work ethics. This includes setting and meeting deadlines, learning to communicate results through a range of methods and managing a research project giving you project planning and management skills, in addition to being responsible for managing your workload and motivation.

Aspiring physicists may want to consider enrolling in the Physics Section of the University of Geneva a public university in Switzerland known for its quality of research and academic prowess.

The university ranks among the top institutions in the League of European Research Universities an acclaim won in part due to its strong ties to many national and international Geneva-based organisations including CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Its domains of excellence in research include physics of elementary particles, astrophysics, cosmology, biophotonics, quantum communication, and quantum materials.

Becoming a student at the university will prove to be enriching as it offers prospective students an unparallelled experience. The university is nestled in Geneva also known by the moniker the Capital of Peace as its home to the European seat of the United Nations and the international headquarters of the Red Cross. The city is also home to hundreds of international organisations, such as World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and International Telecommunications Union, making it a cosmopolitan capital where people from all the nations meet and communicate on a daily basis.

University of Geneva Section of Physics

Enrolling in a Master or PhD degree in physics at the University of Geneva is to undertake a voyage of discovery. Students will develop unique skills in theoretical physics, elementary particles, astrophysics, quantum materials and applied physics from a faculty who are highly knowledgeable in the field.

The physics curriculum at the University of Geneva is strongly research oriented, making it an ideal location for those with a strong motivation for scientific research. Whats unique about the university is that students can expect to work side by side and obtain training from top scientists who work at the forefront of scientific advancement in all relevant fields.

To add another feather to the universitys cap, two of University of Genevas professors are recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. Further attesting to its international standing is its steady high ranking, particularly in physics, in the ShanghaiRankings Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2019.

The university offers five Masters in Physics programmes in each of its research spear points. Each programme starts with two semesters of courses, all of which are conducted in English, providing students with an in-depth education in their selected fields. The third and fourth semesters are reserved for a personal research project in one of the more than 40 research groups in theoretical and experimental physics available here.

University of Geneva Section of Physics

Master in Theoretical Physics students will develop a critical eye in identifying the most relevant aspects of physical systems and understanding our reality through mathematical modelling. Fields studied include the evolution of the universe and its most fundamental building blocks, the theory of superconductivity and the emergence of life.

The Master in Elementary Particle and Nuclear Physics introduces students to the grand mysteries of the universe, ranging from the nature of gravity and cosmic rays to physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. Meanwhile, the Master in Cosmology and Astrophysics of Particles allows students to embark on a study of the origin and evolution of the universe, its building blocks, the mechanism of inflation and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Those enrolled in the Master in Quantum Matter Physics will acquire a strong foundation in fascinating emergent phenomena such as superconductivity, quantum criticality, topological excitations and fractional statistics. Meanwhile, the Master in Applied Physics introduces students to quantum entanglement, ultrafast lasers and non-linear physics.

The University of Geneva has many unique appeals, including its world recognised quality of research and teaching and high teacher/student ratio, ensuring students learn in an intimate environment that fosters personal development. The university also offers intensive tutoring; close contact with researchers and professors ensure students are primed for career-success.

The university offers a truly international environment that prides itself on its international collaborations, facilitating students global learning and understanding of current industry practices and trends. Students will enjoy the palpable spirit of research and innovation while studying at this institution situated at the heart of Europe.

Without a doubt, the universitys physics section offers top-notch formation in physics thats at the forefront of science and technology, providing students with the intellectual tools that allow them to solve problems within and outside the realms of physics in an autonomous, original way.

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