Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 15, 2017 An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. This artistic impression shows the universe around the star formation area with, as an overlay, the scientists' observations. Credit: Veronica Allen/Alexandra Elconin

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. The astronomers suspect that multiple stars-to-be share the same star formation disk, but the precise process is still a puzzle. The article with their findings has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

An international team of astronomers studied the star forming region G35.20-0.74N, more than 7000 light years from Earth in the southern sky. The astronomers used the (sub)millimeter telescope ALMA that is based on the Chilean Chajnantor plateau. ALMA can map molecular gas clouds in which stars form.

The researchers saw something special in the disk around a young, heavy star. While large amounts of oxygen-containing and sulfur-containing hydrocarbons were present throughout the disk, the astronomers found only nitrogen-containing molecules in the southeastern part of the disk. In addition, it was 150 degrees warmer on the nitrogen side than on the other side of the disk.

Based on these observations, the scientists suspect that there are multiple stars forming at the same time in one disk and that some stars are hotter or heavier than others. The researchers expect the disk to eventually break into several smaller disks as the stars grow.

A few years ago, there have been observed chemical differences in a star forming region in Orion. First author Veronica Allen (University of Groningen and SRON): "The area in Orion is five times bigger than our area. We have probably been lucky because we expect that such a chemical difference to be short-lived."

Second author Floris van der Tak (University of Groningen and SRON): "Many of the nitrogen molecules are poisonous cyanides. We do not know much about them because it is dangerous to work with those molecules in laboratories on earth."

The astronomers are now investigating the star formation cloud in more detail. Allen: "Maybe we can see the disk break into smaller disks in real time." In addition, the astronomers make models to see how differences in age, mass, temperature or gas density can cause a difference in chemical composition, too.

Explore further: First radio detection of lonely planet disk shows similarities between stars and planet-like objects

More information: V. Allen et al. Chemical segregation in hot cores with disk candidates. An investigation with ALMA, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2017). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201629118

First radio observations of the lonely, planet-like object OTS44 reveal a dusty protoplanetary disk that is very similar to disks around young stars. This is unexpected, given that models of star and planet formation predict ...

Stars form from gas and dust floating in interstellar space. But, astronomers do not yet fully understand how it is possible to form the massive stars seen in space. One key issue is gas rotation. The parent cloud rotates ...

For the first time, astronomers have been able to peer into the heart of planet formation, recording the temperature and amount of gas present in the regions most prolific for making planets.

Observations led by astronomers at the University of Leeds have shown for the first time that a massive star, 25 times the mass of the Sun, is forming in a similar way to low-mass stars.

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan has captured the first clear image of a young star surrounded by an accretion disk. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes ...

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the ...

Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.

China successfully launched on Thursday its first X-ray space telescope to study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, state media reported.

For decades, scientists thought that the magnetic field lines coursing around newly forming stars were both powerful and unyielding, working like jail bars to corral star-forming material. More recently, astronomers have ...

A small international team of researchers has found that water waves created due to scattering from a spinning vortex can show rotational superradiancean effect astrophysicists have predicted likely to occur in black holes, ...

Researchers at the University of Texas San Antonio using observations from NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, found that the dust surrounding active, ravenous black holes is much more compact ...

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Astronomers see mysterious nitrogen area in a butterfly-shaped star formation disk - Phys.Org

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FILE With an impending deep solar eclipse overshadowing their efforts, the Clark Planetarium hosted a gala to foster excitement for astronomy education.

SALT LAKE CITY With an impending deep solar eclipse overshadowing their efforts, the Clark Planetarium hosted a gala Thursday to foster excitement for astronomy education.

In anticipation a solar eclipse that will be viewable across much of the United States on Aug. 21, the Clark Planetarium has renewed its efforts to offer education resources and draw excitement to its programs for students with the help of former NASA scientist Phil Plait.

"Total eclipses are rare, and we haven't had one in the United States for quite some time," said Tom Beckett, an organizer of the planetarium gala. "This is a great opportunity to use an astronomical event to get people interested in astronomy."

Though Salt Lake City will not see the totality of the eclipse only a 91 percent partial coverage people may see the complete event from as close as Driggs, Idaho.

The planetarium's gala is a fundraiser to create astronomy education resources.

Plait returned to the planetarium for his third speaking appearance. Known as the "Bad Astronomer," he offered a keynote speech to explain the mechanics behind the eclipse and dispel some of the misunderstandings about eclipses.

"There are a lot of eclipse myths like, if you look at it, you'll go blind," Plait said.

Plait, who began public speaking while he was working for on the Hubble telescopes, said he sees his speaking engagements as something of a stand-up routine for science. He refers to himself as a science communicator and earned the title of the "Bad Astronomer" through his efforts at dispelling scientific misconceptions and creating humor around the concepts.

The risk associated with viewing an eclipse, he explained, comes after the roughly two-minute period of totality where the moon passes in front of the sun. That period of time allows the pupil of the eye to dilate, adjusting to the shadow cast by the moon, and the risk of injury follows as the moon continues forward, suddenly exposing the brightness of the sun once again.

Plait noted that despite this effect, he has yet to encounter a documented case of anyone becoming totally blinded by a passing eclipse.

"You can lose a little bit of your vision forever, or all of it for a short time, but your eye can heal," he said.

Beckett said there will be educators and telescopes available at the planetarium and throughout Salt Lake County during the eclipse to accommodate viewers who are not able to drive to Idaho to see the full eclipse.

Beckett also said the planetarium will have a viewing party as the Earth comes into alignment with Saturn and the sun, creating the best chance for people to see the rings of Saturn for another 17 years.

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Planetarium sees solar eclipse as opportunity to raise interest in astronomy - Deseret News

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficientasteroidmining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies likeSpaceXhave decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and theGiant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Cometsalso contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companiesPlanetary ResourcesandDeep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Original article onSpace.com.

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Using Astronomy to Prospect for Asteroids Could Help Us Mine the ... - Seeker

A cloud of gas and young stars in the Perseus molecular cloud may be revealing a strange truth to the universe: most, if not all, stars are born in pairs. This means that somewhere out there, the Sun has a lost companion and it may be one of several known stars. Essentially, all stars form in molecular clouds. In the Perseus observations, nearly all of these stars were gravitationally bound. This may be a requirement of protostars the egg-like objects could require a common center of gravity with a companion to accumulate mass. The dense cores then use leftover material to form more stars, continuing the process. So why doesnt the Sun have a binary companion (well, depending on who you ask)? It seems that 60 percent of stars shed their binary sister over time, gaining a wider distance from their partner until they are gravitationally severed. They also may not all have the same symmetry with regard to mass, meaning that some former companions could be brown dwarfs cast out by larger stars. The authors of the paper, accepted in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, say more work is needed to confirm their hypothesis. But if its true, the hunt may be on for the companion the Sun once had.

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Stars may all be born in pairs and lose their siblings later - Astronomy Magazine