Category Archives: Astronomy

Astronomers have uncovered the first solid evidence that merger events between black holes can deliver a "kick" powerful enough to send a black hole spinning out of its galaxy.

The team, which included Vijay Varma, a physicist at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Albert Einstein Institute, Germany, examined gravitational-wave data from the merger event known as GW200129 collected by the LIGO detectors and their European counterpart, Virgo. Through that analysis, the scientists discovered that the black hole created in that collision and merger had been sent hurtling through space at 3 million mph (4.8 million kph) a finding described by one team member as "both surprising and shocking."

"When two black holes collide, they leave behind a more massive, remnant black hole. This process can impart a recoil 'kick' to the remnant black hole," Varma, lead author of a paper detailing the team's work, told Space.com.

Related: 8 ways we know that black holes really do exist

When black holes orbit each other, they emit gravitational waves essentially gravitational radiation that carry away energy and angular momentum as they ripple through the fabric of space. These emissions cause the orbit to shrink, leading to a collision and merger of the black holes.

If the black holes have unequal masses or spins, however, this leads to an asymmetry in the emission of gravitational waves, with them being primarily emitted in one direction. Because the basic laws of physics require that momentum has to be conserved, this asymmetry results in a large kick, causing the remnant black hole to recoil in the opposite direction.

"Black hole mergers also emit gravitational radiation, similar to astrophysical processes that emit electromagnetic radiation light," Varma continued.

These large kicks are expected when the merger's orbital plane precesses, or "wobbles." Orbital precession is observable as a small amplitude modification in the gravitational-wave signal. "This binary black hole system is also the first signal showing strong signs of orbital precession, whereby the orbital plane wobbles," co-author Scott Field, a mathematician at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, told Space.com.

Varma added that by analyzing gravitational radiation, astronomers and astrophysicists can learn about black-hole mergers. Additionally, because black holes are influential in the evolution of the galaxies, learning more about these processes could reveal how collections of stars like the Milky Way develop.

This is the first time astronomers have collected strong evidence that such a merger can eject the resulting black hole from its galaxy.

"Unlike previously observed black hole merger events, this is the first one to provide strong evidence for enormous recoil velocity. Large enough, in fact, for the remnant black hole to most likely escape from its host environment," Field said. "While we knew general relativity allowed for such extreme possibilities in principle, we did not know if the universe would produce them. The final black hole's speed is sufficiently large that it most probably exceeds the escape velocity of its host environment."

Field added that this result will have important implications for binary black hole formation scenarios, too. This is because supermassive black holes, like Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the heart of the Milky Way, form through a series of collisions that scientists call hierarchical mergers. Black holes kicked from a galaxy can't partake in this process.

The discovery of mergers lopsided enough to give black holes a powerful kick is now possible thanks to technology that allows for more precise detections of gravitational waves.

"Black hole mergers don't emit any light, so gravitational waves are the only way to observe and learn about them. We would not know about this ejected, rogue black hole without gravitational wave observatories," Field added.

Scientists aren't precisely sure where the gravitational wave event GW200129 originated, so Field points out that the team can't completely sure the black hole was ejected from its galaxy, but this is the probable outcome of it moving at such extreme speeds, according to the researchers.

"If that is indeed the case, it is now roaming around the universe by itself as a rogue black hole," Varma said.

The merger that occurred here may be a miniature version of an even more dramatic event, he noted. "A similar phenomenon happens when supermassive black holes merge, which can happen after a galactic merger," Varma said. "The final supermassive black hole can get displaced from the center of the merged galaxy, or even ejected from it, leaving behind a galaxy without a central black hole."

Although existing gravitational-wave detectors are not quite powerful enough to observe supermassive black hole mergers, the authors added that future space-based detectors like the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, might be able to.

"Gravitational-wave astronomy has delivered many high-impact, truly remarkable discoveries over the past five or so years," Field said. "Before the first detection of gravitational waves, the mantra of our field had been that gravitational waves will open a new window on the universe. And this has proven to be true with each and every new LIGO observing run."

The research is described in a paper (opens in new tab) published May 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

You can follow Rob Lea on Twitter at @sciencef1rst. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).

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A black hole formed by a lopsided merger may have gone rogue - Space.com

One of the last places in the Universe you want to find yourself is next to a supernova. When a star explodes, the energy released is mind crushing: They can be 10 billion times as luminous as the Sun, literally outshining all the other stars in a galaxy combined. The chaos and mayhem are absolutely brutal, and its difficult to believe anything could survive it.

Yet a relatively new hypothesis is that something can: A binary companion star, one that orbited the supernova progenitor before it exploded, and that may play a crucial role in the star going supernova in the first place. And now just such a companion star may have been found in Hubble images, one that survived the explosion and may still be reeling from the effects [link to paper].

In November 2013 the light from the supernova reached Earth. Called SN2013ge, it came from the explosion of a star in NGC 3287, a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Leo. Its whats called a core collapse supernova, when a massive star runs out of fuel at the end of its life. The stellar core collapses, sending out a vast blast of energy that blows away the stars outer layers, accelerating them to a decent fraction of the speed of light.

But it was a weird one. Normally, the outer layers of a star are almost entirely hydrogen, so when we take spectra of the supernova we see lots of hydrogen in it. But theres a class of core collapse supernovae that does not show hydrogen. The thinking is that in the last stages of its life, the star blew away its outer layers in a fierce wind, and that material is lost to space before the star explodes. These are called stripped supernovae. SN2013ge was clearly this kind of supernova.

We do see stars blasting away their outer layers called Wolf-Rayet stars, theyre nearly as terrifying as supernovae but observations of supernovae dont quite jibe with this idea. So astronomers turned to a different hypothesis: The supernova progenitor star wasnt alone, but was instead in a binary system.

If it had a companion star, things change. When the progenitor starts to die, it swells up into a huge red supergiant. This happens whether the star is single or not; examples include Betelgeuse and Antares, both so luminous theyre among the brightest stars in the sky despite their great distance from us.

But if theres another star there in a close orbit around it, the red supergiant will dump a lot of its outer layers onto this other star instead of losing them to space. The second star accumulates this matter mostly hydrogen and can gain a lot of mass. When the first star explodes we dont see hydrogen in it because its all on the other star.

This changes what we see. The supernova fades over time, but the light from the second star doesnt, so we should see a huge brightening during the explosion, then a fading, but then it levels off after a few years due to the second stars steady light. Also, you expect to see a lot of ultraviolet light from the event as the hell fury of the supernova slams into the second star, creating an immense and powerful shock wave.

And thats just whats seen from SN2013ge. The astronomers proposed using Hubble Space Telescope specifically to observe stripped supernovae to look for evidence of a companion star, and found it in this case. Looking at SN2013ge for years after the event, they find the light from the explosion had faded but right next to it was a steady source that did not fade. They also saw two bright peaks in ultraviolet light during the supernova itself, indicating they were seeing UV from the explosion as well as the shock wave as material blasted the second star.

This is the first time such evidence has been found in a stripped supernova. To be fair, there could be other reasons this was seen; perhaps the second source is a small, unresolved cluster of stars that hosted the progenitor. It would have to be unusually small, though, and the astronomers assign only a 10% chance this is the case. It could also be material previously ejected from the progenitor star getting whacked by the exploded material, but the colors of the light make this unlikely as well.

If the second source is truly a companion star, then its weird too: The light indicates its a B5 supergiant, an immense and truly massive star late in its life. That would be expected if it ate a lot of the other stars material, but its also a lot redder than expected for such a star. That could be due to it still recovering from all that hydrogen dumped on it before the first star exploded, though.

More observations, as always, are needed. And not just of SN2013ge but also of other stripped supernovae. The good news is that these do happen often enough to spot, and we do tend to get observations of them early on as well as monitor them for many years. And if the SN2013ge second source is actually a B5 supergiant, then it too will eventually explode. Maybe not for many years, or even centuries, but who knows? We may get lucky if we keep watching these ridiculously powerful events.

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Bad Astronomy | SN2013ge indicates a companion star may have survived the blast - Syfy

image:Recipients of the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman. view more

Credit: Shaw Prize

Hipparcos, launched in 1989, measured the positions and motions of over 100 000 stars with an accuracy two orders of magnitude better than ground-based observatories. Gaia, launched in 2013 and still operating, has measured the positions and motions of billions of stars, quasars and Solar System objects with even higher accuracy. The results from these missions offer an exquisitely detailed portrait of the distribution and properties of the stars in our Galaxy, as well as unique insights into its formation and history, and they impact almost every branch of astronomy and astrophysics. This award is also intended to honour the much larger community of astronomers and engineers who made Hipparcos and Gaia possible.

The measurement of the positions, distances and motions of planets and stars has been central to astronomy since prehistoric times. The early naked-eye star catalogues of Ptolemy (ca. 100170 CE), Ulugh Beg (13941449) and Tycho Brahe (15461601) were supplanted in the last two centuries by telescopic catalogues of ever-increasing size and accuracy. However, by the late twentieth century, astrometry from ground-based optical telescopes encountered insurmountable barriers to further improvements, arising from atmospheric distortions, thermal and gravitational forces on the telescopes, and the difficulties of stitching together data from different telescopes.

The era of precision space astrometry began with the European Space Agencys Hipparcos mission (19891993). Hipparcos catalogued over 100 000 bright stars. It measured annual changes in the apparent position of these stars on the sky as small as the width of a human thumb in Beijing as viewed from Hong Kong. By measuring small variations in stellar positions as the Earth travelled around its orbit (parallax), Hipparcos determined distances to over 20 000 stars with uncertainties of less than 10%.

ESAs Gaia mission, launched in December 2013, is based on the same design principles as Hipparcos, but has vastly greater capabilities. Gaia has measured the positions of 10 000 times as many stars as Hipparcos with an accuracy 100 times greater. Gaia has catalogued almost one per cent of all the stars in the Milky Way, and so far has measured parallax-based distances to over 50 million stars with uncertainties of less than 10%. Such parallaxes are the foundation of all distances in astronomy and thus are the firmest foundation we have for measuring the scale of the Universe.

The study of the preliminary catalogues released by the Gaia project, all of which are in the public domain, has already transformed many areas of astronomical understanding. Even richer, larger and more accurate catalogues will be produced before the mission is completed in 2025 or later. Gaia is providing a survey of our Galaxy that will not be surpassed in quantity or quality for decades to come.

Gaia can measure changes in the positions of stars on the sky as small as the width of a human hair in Beijing as viewed from Hong Kong, and motions on the sky smaller than the apparent rate of growth of a hair belonging to an astronaut on the Moon, as seen from Earth. This remarkable performance is achieved by a unique architecture consisting of two telescopes pointing in very different directions, whose images are combined on a single detector. The telescope spins once every six hours, and sends back to Earth precise measurements of the times at which the stars cross a fixed point on the detector.

Why is accurate astrometry so important? The answer is that it provides fundamental data positions, velocities, and distances that underpin almost every aspect of modern astronomy and astrophysics. Accurate distances to stars allow us to measure their intrinsic luminosities, and this in turn is a sensitive measure of their internal physical processes, such as crystallisation in the interior of degenerate stars. Small-scale inhomogeneities in the spatial distribution of stars provide a glimpse of disrupted clusters of stars, perhaps similar to the one in which the Sun was born. Measurements of the velocities of stars allow us to infer their Galactic orbits, which in turn provide clues to the formation history of the Milky Way and the distribution of the mysterious dark matter within it.

Gaia is detecting debris from small satellite galaxies that were disrupted long ago by the Milky Way, as well as irregularities in the distribution of stars in the Galactic disc that may reflect recent disturbances from surviving satellite galaxies or unseen clumps of dark matter. Gaia measurements have for the first time allowed us to determine the orbits of distant star clusters and dwarf galaxies. Gaia will provide a rich harvest of ancillary astronomical results, including an all-sky multi-colour photometric survey of a billion stars; radial velocities of many millions of stars; light curves for hundreds of thousands of variable stars; the discovery and measurement of thousands of extrasolar planets; a survey of asteroids and other small Solar System bodies in unprecedented detail; a uniform catalogue of hundreds of thousands of distant quasars; and stringent new tests of Einsteins theory of gravity.

Hipparcos and Gaia succeeded because of the collective efforts of many people lasting over half a century. The Shaw Prize recognises two of these individuals who have made sustained key scientific contributions to the two missions. Lennart Lindegren originated many of the concepts of the Hipparcos mission design and was leader of one of the two independent teams that carried out the data analysis for Hipparcos. He was a member of the Hipparcos science team for two decades and the Gaia science team for two decades after that. Michael Perryman was Project Scientist for Hipparcos from 1981 to 1997, Chair of the Hipparcos Science Team for the same period, and lead author on the 1997 paper describing the Hipparcos catalogue. Perryman was also Project Scientist for the Gaia mission from 1995 to 2008, Chair of the Gaia Science Advisory Group from 1995 to 2000, and Chair of the Gaia Science Team from 2001 to 2008. Lindegren and Perryman proposed the concept for Gaia in the 1990s and were instrumental in its scientific and technical design.

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The IAU is the international astronomical organisation that brings together more than 12 000 active professional astronomers from more than 100 countries worldwide. Its mission is to promote and safeguard astronomy in all its aspects, including research, communication, education and development, through international cooperation. The IAU also serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and the surface features on them. Founded in 1919, the IAU is the world's largest professional body for astronomers.

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Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman receive the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy - EurekAlert

Among our crosswords and other puzzles, well be featuring logic challenges from Puzzle Communication Nikoli, a cult-favorite puzzle publication from Japan. A PDF of the puzzle, as well as the solution, can be downloaded below.

Gesaku got his ideas from the things that he saw around him every day: the design of floor tiles on a subway platform or the ripples in a pond. Gesakuthe only name by which he is knownwas a dedicated reader of Japans Puzzle Communication Nikoli, the most influential puzzle publication in history. Nikoli is famed not just for making Sudoku a household name, but also for being created almost entirely by fans like Gesaku.

Many of those readers submit hand-crafted examples of existing puzzles. Gesaku was one of the rare readers who created his own, and he was one of Nikolis most prolific. More than 30 of his original puzzles have been chosen for publication; only two or three creators have managed this feat in Nikolis more than four decades of publication.

Shapes and mathematical regularity were Gesakus muses, according to Nikoli president Yoshinao Anpuku. Anpuku had spoken with Gesaku in the past, but the magazine has lost touch with him, and its unknown if hes still making puzzles.

Gesakus Tentai Show debuted in 2001 as a logic puzzle based on filling a grid with symmetrical shapesrecalling origami, celestial bodies such as galaxies and stars, and traditional Japanese clan symbols. The puzzle was modestly received at first, but six months later Gesaku came up with an idea that made Tentai Show one of Nikolis most beloved reader creationsusing solving logic to create a picture, making each one a kind of puzzle-based constellation.

This connection with the celestial is reinforced in the puzzles pun-based name. The Japanese word ten-taisyo means symmetry about a point, while the word tentai means heavenly body, such as a star, writes author Alex Bellos in his book about Japanese logic puzzles, Puzzle Ninja. Tentai Show is thus an anglicized pronunciation of point symmetry with a double meaning of astronomical show.

A Tentai Show consists of a grid with scattered dots. The goal is to divide the entire grid into regions, each containing a single dot. Each region must have rotational symmetry, meaning that it must form the same shape when rotated 180 degrees around the dot at the center of the region. (For example, the letter S and rectangles have this symmetry; E does not.)

Since no region can contain two dots, one way to start is to draw a line between any squares that contain a dot or a fraction of one. These segments start to form the outlines of the regions. To fill in the rest of the outlines, you will need to mentally rotate the segment 180 degrees around each dot. For example, a top edge must be matched by a bottom edge, a left by a right. Remember that the sides of the grid are part of the outlines of the regions, too. As you start to fill in the grid, you will see that the positions of the dots force a unique arrangement of regions.

To complete the puzzle and see the final image, shade in all the regions that contain a black dot at the center.

In the downloadable PDF below, youll find the instructions above, an example, three puzzles of increasing difficulty, and an Atlas Obscura surprise.

Stumped? Download the solutions!

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Puzzle Monday: Logic, Symmetry, and Astronomy - Atlas Obscura

Nassau Community College's former observatory is looking for a new home, and a group of amateur astronomers hopes it could become New York City's first for-the-public observatory.

The Garden City school closed the 12-foot-high, 6-foot-wide observatory at the end of 2019 as it prepared for renovations. The structure, which was used by astronomy students for more than 40 years, is being replaced by a green roof and six open-air telescopes.

Local astronomers and professors are scrambling to move the half-ton galvanized steel observatory off the campus by May 24th and find it a new home.

I couldn't let it go to the scrap, and I even wanted it if I didn't have a bunch of trees in my yard, Id plop it in the middle of my yard, said Dr. Thomas Bruckner, chair of Physical Sciences at the college. But a lot of people wanted it, it was just a matter of picking it up. It's big and heavy. It doesn't come apart.

The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York is leading the mission, and after a nearly yearlong journey, it may have settled on a permanent home in the Bronx. The old observatory could see past the Andromeda Galaxy, more than 2.5 million light years from Earth, on a clear, dark night so a public space offers a unique opportunity for young aspiring astronomers to explore the cosmos.

The final frontier is just within reach if city park officials can agree to the plan in time.

Over nearly 200 years, several stargazers have tried and failed to set up the city's first public observatory, according to the International Planetarium Society. The closest alternatives are at Columbia University and various City University of New York campuses, including one shuttered on top of Ingersoll Hall at Brooklyn College. All of which are prioritized for their students.

The latest quest has likewise felt long, since the Amateur Astronomers Association took on the challenge of moving the Nassau Community College observatory in May 2021. But the association doesnt want to move the structure to a temporary home only to have to pay for a second move.

Bart Fried, the organizations executive vice president and a telescope historian, said each move would cost more than $3,000, depending on the distance, because a boom truck is required.

The first location that came to mind, in July 2021 when amateur astronomers began planning, was Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Its dark, and the organization has been running the parks stargazing programs for more than 40 years. But they were turned down after more than three months because of historical preservation issues, according to Fried, and the search continued.

The next site was about seven miles up the Belt Parkway. Shirley Chisholm State Park is built on a Brooklyn landfill and is a treeless stretch of prairie grassland perfect for stargazing with no obstructions.

There was one hitch. The park closes at 7 p.m., and that doesnt work for summer when it isnt fully dark until after that time.

After Shirley Chisholm [State Park] turned us down, we were feeling pretty defeated at this point, said Kat Troche, a member of the NASA Solar System Ambassador program involved in relocating the public observatory. Wow, we can't even give this thing away.

The Amateur Astronomers Association was willing to provide the programming and staffing and pay for installation, upkeep and retrofitting including theft and defacement. According to Fried, the giant structure doesnt require a foundation, and therefore no concrete work is needed in order to relocate/situate the observatory. Aside from putting metal rods into the ground to hold the observatory down, no digging will be required either. To level the structure, it needs to sit on about 6 inches? of wood decking, which will be hidden by the domes skirt. And access to utility lines isnt necessary because it will be powered by battery packs charged by solar panels.

This is super important [to have a public observatory in New York City]. One of our events could inspire future astronauts, future cosmologists, and astrophysics, Troche said. The stars it's something to aspire to. We have this natural urge to wander and the cosmos allows us to do that.

The observatory still had no solid option for a home until one fall evening in 2021. While hosting a sidewalk astronomy event near The Bronx High School of Science, it dawned on the members of the Amateur Astronomers Association that they were standing in the perfect location.

We dont do enough in the Bronx. Why dont we put the dome up there where the public can use it; and Bronx Science can use it and we can use it? Fried remembered thinking at the time. It will be New York Citys very first truly public observatory even though there have been attempts over 150 or 200 years, all of which failed for various reasons, including several attempts in Central Park.

The location is across Goulden Avenue from The Bronx High School of Science on the grassy banks along the Jerome Park Reservoir. The school also has a planetarium, and a very active astronomy club headed by the schools physical science teachers Neil Farley and Colin Morrell. School administrators have approved the plan, but it still needs sign off from city officials.

Currently, city park officials are reviewing plans for a resting place in Jerome Park, according to email correspondence shared with Gothamist.

We are in close contact with the Amateur Astronomers Association on the relocation of the observatory, and are looking into the potential of re-homing it in one of our parks, wrote Dan Kastanis, a press officer at New York City Parks Department. No plan has been finalized at this time.

While the goal is to move the observatory to its new home before Memorial Day, the parks department called their process not straight-forward with many logistical, legal and permitting issues that must be worked out first. That includes figuring out accessibility for people with disabilities, graffiti prevention and the installation process.

In the meantime, theres still a possibility that parks approval wont come in time for the observatorys eviction from Nassau Community College on May 24th. If that happens, the Amateur Astronomers Association has a backup plan. It will need to find a way to temporarily move the 360-degree rolling-top dome less than a half-mile away to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York where it will be cleaned and repainted.

Despite the hassle, the several astronomers involved are determined to make this observatory accessible to anyone curious enough to gaze into the cosmos.

Of all the sciences, astronomy is the least resolved. We only know what 4% of the matter in our universe, we don't know what the rest is, Bruckner said. It's the next generations of the curious that will lead us into discovering what our universe is made out of how and why we came to be.

If all goes well, the Amateur Astronomers Association plans to celebrate the opening of the New York City Public Observatory this summer in a permanent Bronx home. The festivities would include a first-light party, a tradition that marks the initial viewing through a new telescope.

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NYC's first public observatory is running out of time to find a home - Gothamist

Move over, Gustav Holst. Theres a new Planets in town. And this one is based on astronomy, not astrology.

Holsts seven-movement orchestral suite The Planets premiered in London in 1918. Now, a little more than a century later, a modern version on the theme saw first light on Sunday May 22, 2022. But while Holst turned to astrology for inspiration, composer Daniel Perttu turned to astronomy.

Pianist Jeffrey Biegels longtime dream was to bring to life an updated version of Holsts The Planets, infusing the music with current scientific understanding. Biegel was born deaf, and until the age of three, when corrective surgery allowed him to hear for the first time, his world was very closed. He relied on other means of expression and communication, and so music became his first language. As a result, his projects often have an out of the box element. Biegels vision of a revamped Planets features the pianist as a space traveler journeying through the solar system.

A Planets Odyssey isnt your typical three-movement concerto. Instead, its in a theme-and-variations form. It begins with the Big Bang, followed by the pianist introducing the main theme of the concerto, Perttu explains. This theme is then varied as the pianist visits each planet and is inspired by the unique properties of each planet. Like Holst, Perttu skips the Earth. But unlike Holst, these planets are featured in their order from the Sun. And more importantly, Perttu focuses solely on the science.

Perttu picked a few characteristics of each planet for inspiration and transformed those into sonic visions. For example, Mercury, subject of the first variation, is the innermost and smallest of the solar systems planets and experiences extremes in temperature. It also has virtually no atmosphere. So Perttu drew on those characteristics to produce a variation that conveys the imagery of a stark, extreme kind of place.

Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, apart from the Moon and the Sun. Its atmosphere is largely roiling clouds of carbon dioxide. At the planets surface, where temperatures reach a whopping 470C (870F), the pressure is some 90 times that of Earths. At some point in its early, cooler history, Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and may have harbored life, but thats all long gone by now. The prospect of potential current or past life is always thrilling, and thats the angle that sonically describes Venus in this variation.

Rounding out the rocky planets, Mars continues to capture our imagination, with its dusty red surface and the solar systems biggest volcano. Perttu nevertheless reads a sadness in Marss story. A planet that once may have had a lush environment with liquid water on its surface and perhaps life is today instead a cold and arid world.

When we get to the gas giants, Perttu introduces a sense of airiness to the music. First comes majestic Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, rich in hydrogen and helium. Its famous for its Great Red Spot, which is, in fact, one humongous storm that has raged for more than 300 years. The Great Red Spot and other storms on Jupiter are also sites of lightning! In fact, Perttu describes this passage as swirly, blustery, and sometimes tempestuous.

Ask most any astronomer what drew them to the subject, and the answer more often than not is their first view of Saturn through a telescope. The sight of the ethereal planet with its system of rings is inspiring at every level. But to add to the planets attraction, we now know that its atmosphere contains diamonds. And not only that, but that the diamonds might fall as rain! Hence, Saturns variation is slower but shimmery in its sensibility.

William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. The ice giants atmosphere is largely hydrogen and helium, with traces of methane that give the planet its eerie, greenish hue (by absorbing the red wavelengths of light). Uranus is a planet with a quirk: A cataclysmic interaction with another body in the early solar system tipped it over on its side with respect to its orbital plane, so instead of orbiting the Sun like the other planets, it rolls along in its orbit. Because of this, Perttu has inverted the main theme in the variation, as well as infusing it with a dark, dismal sentiment.

Perttu composed the eighth variation to reflect a sense of windiness since the last of our planets, Neptune, is the windiest of them all. The blue ice giant, the most distant of all planets (more than 30 times the Earth-Sun distance), is dark and cold, and supersonic winds rage through its atmosphere at speeds greater than 2,000 km/h (1,200 mph). For comparison, the fastest winds recorded on Earth clock in at around 400 km/h.

And in a neat final touch, we end our odyssey all the way out in the Kuiper Belt. Of course, when Holst composed The Planets, Pluto and other distant solar system objects hadnt yet been discovered. But in a fitting coda to A Planets Odyssey, Perttu brings us to the very outer edges of our solar system.

On Sunday May 22, 2022, in the evening, the Canton Symphony Orchestra (lead commissioning orchestra in a consortium of multiple orchestras) ushered A Planets Odyssey into the world, under the direction of the Orchestras Music Director, Gerhardt Zimmermann. Biegel was at the piano.

Today is tomorrow's history, Biegel said, after the concert. There is a unique energy in the room when all the stars align to witness the birth of a new creation Dan's A Planets Odyssey created a synergy of musical, spiritual, and scientific energies igniting the hearts and minds of the audience and the performers. He concludes, It is a feeling which joins us in an historic moment like no other.

Perttu was also philosophical following the concert. Writing this piece was not only about creating a musical representation of our scientific knowledge of the planets in 2020, but it was also about how the science can inspire imagination, he mused. Who would have thought of diamond rain?! There are mysteries in this universe that likely go beyond our most fantastical speculation and this piece is meant to capture that spirit as well.

After the thrill of Sunday evening, Biegel notes that the journey doesnt finish there. He envisions that A Planets Odyssey will serve the purposes of music, science and education for students learning about our solar system.

If youre in the Flagstaff, Arizona, area in September 2022, make sure you catch the next performance of A Planets Odyssey by the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra conducted by Music Director Charles Latshaw, with Jeffrey Biegel as piano soloist.

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Piano Concerto on the Planets Premieres - Sky & Telescope - Sky & Telescope

By Minerva Baumann, Media Relations OfficerNMSU News Team

Astronomers cant go back in time to observe how the solar system was formed, but they can observe planets that are forming now and use computer simulations to help them better understand the process.

A New Mexico State University astronomy professor is part of a team of scientists that wrote a paper published this month in the journal Nature that has identified a protoplanet in another star system that may be forming differently than expected. It is the first system in which the evidence points to this alternative theory of planet formation.

The paper images of embedded Jovian planet formation at a wide separation around AB Aurigae was published in the May 9 edition of the journal Nature and co-authored by NMSU astronomy associate professor Wladimir Lyra.

The ultimate arbiter of science is nature. We need to observe what nature does. Then to advance our knowledge, we build models to explain our observations, said Lyra, who builds computer models based on astronomical data.

The recent paper is a result of Lyras collaboration among a group of scientists including lead author Thayne Currie, an astrophysicist at NASA-Ames Research Center and the Subaru Telescope. Currie, along with other researchers, shared observational data of the protoplanet forming around AB Aurigae, a very young star in the Auriga constellation about 531 light years from the Sun.

Its not even a baby planet. Its an embryo planet, Lyra said. Its a planet that is still embedded in the disc. These planets form from gas and dust around young stars. Thats how the Earth and other planets around the Sun were formed.

Using the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers found the data on this protoplanet was intriguing and not easily explainable. Lyra created a computer simulation to match the observations and better understand the process of how this massive gas giant planet is forming.

What they found is unexpected.

On this particular observation, what was observed was a planet 10 times more massive than Jupiter at a distance from the star that is twice the distance that Pluto is from the sun, Lyra said. This planet is still embedded in the disc. It is also still very hot. You can see the object is still glowing from its formation.

For decades, scientists have relied on two theories of how planets and stars form. One is core accretion, also known as bottom up, when small bodies about the size of an asteroid, collide and coalesce in a disk cloud, eventually adding gasses and growing massive planets the size of Jupiter or Saturn.

The second theory of planet formation is gravitational instability, also known as top down. This theory begins with a massive disc of dust and gas so large that it ends up fragmenting. In a disc around a star, these fragments collapse from the top down and are about as massive as Jupiter. This is the process by which massive stars form in a galaxy.

While the theory of gravitational instability forming planets has been around for decades, there has been no clear-cut case that demonstrates a planet could be formed in that way. The Nature article outlines evidence that the protoplanet observed around AB Aurigae is such a planet, countering long established theories.

I think that the main message from a theoretical perspective from this paper is that this is a system for which gravitational instability is a plausible mechanism for formation of this protoplanet, Lyra said. There are several independent lines of evidence that point toward gravitational instability.

Lyra emphasized while the evidence points to the formation of this protoplanet by gravitational instability, so far it doesnt disprove the possibility of it forming through the core accretion method.

The team will continue looking at that system in longer wavelengths, probing deeper into the disc. Lyra called it a very interesting avenue to explore in the future to see if there are conditions that this planet can still form by core accretion.

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NMSU professor has alternate theory on planet formation - Las Cruces Bulletin

I believe that it is in our DNA that there is the need to explore, to find something and make sense to it.

The connection between space and our origins is unique and quite identical, so I believe that through my images of the cosmos, Im reconnecting to that realm that I belong.

As much as I love photographing space as an explorer, the images that I capture are much more prefunding as Im witnessing the grandeur with never ending bliss of heaven.

Astrophotography makes me feel like actually taking part in that whole thing of whats going on.

The fact that we cant explain the wonders of the cosmos and the Universe, drives me to go out more over and over again.

The Milky-way is our home in the cosmos, the galaxy that we live in holds about 100 billion stars. During the past few decades we have discovered that at least from a physical perspective, humans are but a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe.We live on a small planet which revolves around a very ordinary star.

The Kepler space observatory has shown us that our Milky Way galaxy is teeming with about a billion Earth-size planets orbiting their parent stars in the Habitable Zone (that not-so-cold-not-so-hot region that allows for liquid water to exist on the planets surface) so its inevitable that earth like planets exist in our home galaxy, one can imagine now what cannot exist in the grandeur cosmos.

A deep image of a tiny piece of sky, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Almost every point of light in this image represents a galaxy with about a hundred billion stars like the Sun.

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Why am I addicted to astronomy? - Newsbook

Astronomers have discovered a new example of a creepy kind of dead star that shoots death rays so powerful they cook their binary companion star and eat its remains.

No, Im not kidding. And this discovery is interesting because the two stars are closer together than any other object in its class, swinging around each other in an astonishing 62 minutes. This makes it a weird example of whats a weird class of objects in the first place.

To look for such objects, a team of astronomers used archived observations from the Zwicky Transient Facility a sky survey that takes huge images of the sky every night looking for things that move or change brightness: Asteroids, supernovae, variable stars, black holes with bad table manners, and the like.

They searched the data for short-timescale periodic brightness changes in 20 million objects that were fainter than youd expect for a star of their kind. That may seem pretty specific, but then they had a specific kind of object in mind: black widow pulsars.

Thats an apt name for something that, well, shoots out a death ray, cooks its companion, and eats it.

Ive written about pulsars many times:

Pulsars are neutron stars,the incredibly dense corpse of the core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. The outer layers of the star get blasted away, but the core itself collapses. If the core has less than about three times the Suns mass it will become a ball of neutronsvery roughly 20 kilometers wide. This makes it ultradense; a cubic centimeter of it the size of a six-sided die will have a mass of about 100 million tons,about the same as if you took every car in the United States and crushed them down until all together they were the size of a sugar cube.

Neutron stars tend to spin rapidly, and have powerful magnetic fields that can be trillions of times stronger than Earths. This sets up a lot of different phenomena; one is that this powers incredibly strong beams of radiation that blast away from the magnetic poles of the star, which sweep around the sky due to the neutron stars rotation like a pair of lighthouse beams.When these beams pass over Earth we see a blip of light, a pulse, hence the termpulsar.

Some pulsars are solitary, and others have normal stars like the Sun orbiting them. Its not a lot of fun being near a pulsar, but if youre a star far enough away you can survive, even in a binary system.

But some stars are much closer in and face the fury of hell.

A star that close is more likely to be hit by those spinning beams of radiation, and also the beams effects on them are more powerful. They can zap the binary companion star so energetically that it heats up and loses material the pulsar is almost literally boiling it away. That material then leaves the star and flies into space where some will fall onto the pulsar, feeding the energy and the beams.

Again, black widow pulsar is amazingly apt.

So thats what the astronomers were looking for in the data, and not only did they find one, they found a weird one. Called ZTF J1406+1222, its about 3,700 light-years away from us and has the shortest orbital period of any known black widow, just 62 minutes. That means the two objects are very close together; for a standard neutron star mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, the companion has a mass just a twentieth of the Suns so about 50 times Jupiters and their orbit is only about 800,000 km across. Thats less than three times the distance of the Moon from the Earth.

That secondary object is getting fried.

Thats already strange, but it gets stranger. The mass of the second object is too small to be a normal star. Its possibly a brown dwarf, an object more than about 13 but less than about 77 times the mass of Jupiter. It might also be a star that was once like the Sun but lost a lot of mass to the pulsar, exposing its core. Whatever it is, its density is 10 grams per cubic centimeter, which is high. Twice as dense as Earth, and 10 times that of a normal star. On the low end for a brown dwarf, but again also possibly an old, mostly eaten stellar core.

The amount of energy the pulsar beams is staggering, about 10 times the Suns total energy output. The astronomers calculated the temperature of the secondary object, and found that on the side facing away from the pulsar beams its about 6,300C, but on the side facing into the beams its over 10,000C. Ouch. Those beams are heating it up by about 4,000 C, and likely that heat from the dayside carries over into the night side via circulation in the atmosphere. Interestingly thats hotter than many stars, so if that secondary is a brown dwarf its a whole lot different than other ones, which are generally pretty cool temperature-wise. And if its a stripped core that would be amazing to know as well.

Theres a third star too; the astronomers measured the motion of the pulsar through space and found another star traveling with it. If that actually is a second companion in what is then a trinary system, its pretty far removed, with the third star taking very roughly 10,000 years or so to orbit once. Thats a long way off, but still, what a view!

If you could survive it. I think I prefer seeing it from Earth. Still, the third star, if it is physically associated, will help astronomers understand this system, because somehow it stayed bound to the binary even at such a distance. A supernova is an exceedingly violent event; being able to keep a third star makes the physics tricky.

Everything about this object is tricky. I imagine astronomers will be looking to get more data on it because its full of surprises, and itll be a fun puzzle to solve. And thats one of the biggest reasons we observe the skies.

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Bad Astronomy | Black widow pulsar is zapping and eating its companion | SYFY WIRE - Syfy

Few subjects are as awe-inspiring and fascinating than the night sky, and we've just uncovered an archive of photos from NASA that are out of this world. Astronomy Picture of the Day is a free website that exists to bring you just that: every day a different image or photograph of the universe gets featured, and there's also a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer so that you can find out more about the shot.

For example, in the picture above by Ignacio Javier Diaz Bobilloy , the explanation on the Astronomy Picture of the Day NASA website reads: "The entire Carina Nebula, captured here, spans over 300 light years and lies about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina. Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically. While Eta Carinae itself maybe on the verge of a supernova explosion, X-ray images indicate that much of the Great Nebula in Carina has been a veritable supernova factory."

Wondering what the difference between astronomy and astrophotography is? Astronomy is the scientific study of celestial objects, space, and the physical universe, while astrophotography is "the use of photography in astronomy!"

You can see up to 35 years' (yes, years) worth of daily photos on the Archive to inspire your astrophotography. Why not bookmark the page and revisit for a daily dose?

And if you're keen to start taking stunning astronomical images yourself, why not discover the best cameras for astrophotography?

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Landscape astrophotography masterclassWhat is astrophotography and what camera equipment do you need?Best CCD cameras for astrophotography

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Astronomy picture of the day: discover 35 years' worth of amazing NASA images - Digital Camera World