An odd radio burst that seems to signal a previously undiscovered astrophysical phenomenon is now on the scene. Culled out of archival data gathered from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the burst may signal something exotic indeed, the last stages of the evaporation of a black hole. Another candidate: A collision between two neutron stars. And while the data in question come from a survey that included 480 hours of observation of the Magellanic Clouds, some 200,000 light years from Earth, the phenomenon they've uncovered is far more distant. Drawing the attention of astronomers was the fact that no radio burst yet found shows the same characteristics. Despite its strength, the signal lasted less than five milliseconds. Dispersion effects caused by its passage through ionized gas in deep space caused higher frequencies to arrive at the telescope before lower frequencies. Image: Visible-light (negative greyscale) and radio (contours) image of Small Magellanic Cloud and area...

By Larry Klaes Tau Zero journalist Larry Klaes here offers a look at a revolutionary telescope that will soon take our vision of the universe into new domains. In the early half of the next decade, an instrument called the Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope (CCAT) is planned to examine the Universe through a less-studied region of the electromagnetic spectrum from an observatory in the remote deserts of Chile higher than any current major ground-based facility. CCAT is the culmination of plans by Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) initiated in 2004 to jointly conduct submillimeter astronomy with the largest telescope ever conceived for such an endeavor. The 25-meter (82-foot) wide mirror of the CCAT will allow astronomers to see the Cosmos in the area between the infrared and radio realms of the electromagnetic spectrum, an area well beyond the region that is visible to human eyes. The moisture in Earth's atmosphere normally blocks light waves...

Speaking of absorbing views from a planetary surface, as we've been doing recently when discussing the Magellanic Clouds and what an observer there might see of the Milky Way, consider a much darker scenario. A galaxy called ESO 137-001 is in headlong flight toward the center of the galactic cluster Abell 3627. It is leaving in its wake a trail of gas that extends for more than 200,000 light years and is forming stars. Bear in mind that the Milky Way itself is 100,000 light years across and you'll get an idea of the magnitude of this tail, which Michigan State's Ming Sun calls one of the longest of its kind his team has ever seen. Millions of stars have now come to life in the tail, apparently forming within the last ten million years. Adding to optical studies are Chandra X-ray data that show additional regions thought to be star-bearing. Give these stars a few billion years to produce planets bearing intelligent life and you have a civilization coming into its own with skies that...

Centauri Dreams has always been captivated with the Magellanic Clouds, two galaxies that are the Milky Way's nearest neighbors in space. The fascination is in many respects visual. Knowing that they're a beautiful sight to those below the equator, the counter-thought came quickly to mind -- what would the Milky Way look like from one of these small satellite galaxies? How bright would it be, how much of the sky would it fill? While pondering such questions, have a look at the Large Magellanic Cloud below, and be sure to click to enlarge this gorgeous image. Pondering such things, I wrote a story called "Magellanic," a sort of Weird Tales-era fantasy (I realize that Weird Tales still exists, but I refer to the fabled issues of the 20's and 30's). Mixing in a first contact scenario in 1920's Tibet, a mountain-climbing adventurer at the end of his career, a bit of intelligence agency intrigue and throwing in Edwin Hubble for good measure, I thought I had a winner, but the story remained...

Considering that we can't see dark matter and have little idea what it is, the notion that we could take its temperature seems preposterous. But new work out of Durham University (UK) points to a way of using visible astronomical sources to draw conclusions about dark matter's effects in the early universe. Using computer simulations to examine the formation of the first stars, the researchers have applied 'cold' and 'warm' dark matter models, noting the effects we might expect to see today. These, in turn, should tell us something about how dark matter operates. Cold, or slow-moving dark matter particles have a particular signature. After the first 100 million years of expansion, dark and more or less uniform, the universe would have begun to witness the birth of structure as dark matter's gravity drew hydrogen, helium and lithium into the condensations that produced the first stars. In this model, the cold dark matter, clumping into spherical structures, would have produced stars...

Following up on yesterday's news about spectrometer advances at the Automated Planet Finder installation at Lick Observatory comes news of a different kind of telescope breakthrough. A radio telescope in Shanghai was linked via computer network to a five telescopes in Europe and another in Australia to study the active galaxy 3C273. A galaxy with a major black hole at its core is obviously interesting, but what stands out in the recent experiment is the working procedure. Never has very long baseline interferometry been pushed to such extremes. Image: Widely spaced telescopes combine their data to boost resolution, creating a kind of 'world telescope.' Credit: Paul Boven/JIVE. Satellite image: Blue Marble Next Generation, courtesy of NASA Visible Earth (visibleearth.nasa.gov). The idea of interferometry is straightforward: Combine signals from multiple telescopes to produce higher resolution data than could be obtained by any of the telescopes individually. Spread your telescopes out...

A Class 0 protostar is a star so young that the bulk of its light is emitted at long infrared wavelengths, blocked from Earth-based observatories by our atmosphere. It takes space-borne platforms like the Spitzer Space Telescope to make sense out of these objects, hundreds of which have now been identified, though few studied with the precision of the one designated IRAS 4B. There, signs abound of a region within the protostellar envelope that is warmer and denser than the material around it. Located about a thousand light years from Earth in the nebula NGC 1333, the infant star presents an interesting signature to Spitzer's infrared spectrograph. Out of thirty protostars examined by University of Rochester astronomers, IRAS 4B is the only one to show the infrared spectrum of water vapor, a fact understood to mean that material is falling from the protostar's envelope onto the surrounding, denser disk. As the ice hits the protoplanetary disk, it heats rapidly and emits its...

A vast, empty region in Eridanus may be giving us hints about the operation of dark energy in the distant universe. The region shows up on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe's map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The remnant of the Big Bang, the faint radio waves of the CMB provide the earliest picture we have of the cosmos. What the WMAP displayed to us was a view of its structure at a time just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. The Eridanus region stands out on the WMAP data because it's slightly colder, and I do mean 'slightly' -- we're talking about temperature differences in the area of millionths of a degree. Two possibilities thus arise: The cold spot could be intrinsic to the CMB itself, a structural anomaly in the early universe. Or it could indicate something through which the CMB radiation had to pass on its way to our detectors. Now a study using data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory VLA Sky Survey offers a possible...

A long-time old movie buff, I am delighted with the choice of name for a recently discovered neutron star that may be the closest such object to Earth. It's being called Calvera, after the bandit played so brilliantly by Eli Wallach in the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven. In astronomical terms, the 'Magnificent Seven' are the seven isolated neutron stars -- neutron stars with no associated binary companion, supernova remnant or radio pulsations -- known until the discovery of Calvera, which brings the number to eight. Co-discoverer Derek Fox (Penn State) calls the choice of names "...a bit of an inside joke on our part." And indeed, Calvera started life with a far less interesting name. The German-American ROSAT satellite (named after x-ray discoverer Wilhelm Röntgen) had compiled 18,000 x-ray sources. Comparing these with catalogs of visible, infrared and radio objects, Robert Rutledge (McGill University) discovered that the source known as 1RXS J141256.0+792204 had no known...

GALEX -- the Galaxy Evolution Explorer -- was an interesting mission to begin with, a space-based observatory conducting an all-sky survey of distant galaxies at ultraviolet wavelengths. Now it's come up with a real newsmaker, a star moving at an unusually fast 130 kilometers a second and sporting a comet-like tail. The material blowing off the red giant Mira is, in fact, forming a wake some thirteen light years long. No such phenomenon has ever been seen around a star before. Image: Mira appears as a small white dot in the bulb-shaped structure at right, and is moving from left to right in this view. The shed material can be seen in light blue. The dots in the picture are stars and distant galaxies. The large blue dot at left is a star that is closer to us than Mira. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. From what GALEX is telling us, the elements Mira is leaving behind, including carbon, oxygen and other building blocks for future star and planet formation, have been shed over a period of...

Could it be that vast magnetic structures filling as much as ten percent of the universe have remained all but invisible to us until now? That's the startling possibility raised by Gregory Benford (UC-Irvine) and Raymond Protheroe (University of Adelaide) in a new paper describing a possible source for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. They're looking at the remnants of jets that can be found in active galactic nuclei (AGN), and suggesting that even after these jets have turned off, a fossil structure may remain that is stable for billions of years. What exactly is the remnant of a jet? Here's the notion as explained in the authors' upcoming paper: Remnants of jets and their surrounding cocoons may persist long after their parent AGN fade from view. These colossal MHD structures decay slowly and yet may retain their relatively stable self-organized con?gurations. Decay depends on the structure circuit resistance, and lifetimes could be quite long, given the large inductance of the...

A research team using data from the Chandra x-ray observatory has examined supermassive black hole activity in galaxy clusters of different ages. Also known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), the black holes are the result of rapid growth in gas-rich environments in the early universe, explaining why they are more common in young clusters than in older ones. Comparing the fraction of AGN in clusters at large distance (when the universe was 58 percent of its current age) to relatively nearby clusters, the team found 20 times more AGN in the more distant sample. Paul Martini (Ohio State University) sees this as confirmation of earlier theory: "It's been predicted that there would be fast-track black holes in clusters, but we never had good evidence until now. This can help solve a couple of mysteries about galaxy clusters." Mysteries such as why the number of blue, star-forming galaxies seems to diminish as we move to nearer, older galactic clusters. The process would seem to involve...

We're so used to thinking of our Sun as a solitary object that having two Suns in the sky inspires the imagination of artist and writer alike. But what about whole clusters of stars? Evidence is mounting that the Sun was actually born in such a cluster. That's quite a jump from the era, not so long ago, when astronomers assumed stars like ours formed without companions, but cosmochemists like the wonderfully named Martin Bizzarro (University of Copenhagen) think they have the data to prove it. So here's the new notion: Most single stars like the Sun evolve in multiple systems, clusters of stars that also contain massive stars that burn their hydrogen and explode while the cluster is still producing young stars. If this is the case, then we should expect the early history of the surviving younger stars to be affected by the nearby fireworks. Bizzarro's team studied short-lived isotopes like aluminum-26 (26Al) and iron-60 (60Fe) as found in meteorites to see whether stellar debris from...

Among the numerous problems in actually imaging an exoplanet is the fact that telescopes produce artifacts that can mask the faint planetary signature. Light diffracts as it passes through the aperture of an optical telescope, causing a series of concentric rings to surround the observed star. This effect, known as an Airy pattern, has a bright disk at center whose size determines how small an object the telescope can see. But there are always ways of making a virtue of necessity. A team led by Niranjan Thatte (Oxford University) and Laird Close (University of Arizona) have developed a technique that effectively uses the artifacts produced by diffraction to determine the position of a dim stellar companion and retrieve its spectrum. The idea is that when the wavelength of light being studied is changed, the telescope artifacts can be seen to shift position, while the actual object around the star will not move. Here's how an ESO news release puts the matter: So if the image has an...

Putting an enormous radio telescope on the far side of the Moon has so many advantages that it's hard to imagine not doing it, once our technology makes such ventures possible. Whatever the time frame, imagine an attentuation of radio noise from Earth many orders of magnitude over what is possible anywhere on the near side, much less on Earth itself. In a recent telephone conversation, I discussed these matters with Italian space scientist Claudio Maccone, whose work on a mission to the Sun's gravity focus we've examined in these pages before. Having just completed a week at Rutgers attending its Symposium on Lunar Settlements, Maccone anticipates the publication of his new paper on the lunar far side and its scientific potential -- I'll have to put off the specifics of those interesting ideas until the paper actually appears. But do ponder the implications of a radio observatory conceivably able to probe extrasolar planets. As a news item in New Scientist explains: The interaction...

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), those titanic explosions in distant galaxies that some consider to be the most powerful events since the Big Bang, can be more luminous than anything else in the universe, at least for a while. But their moment in the spotlight is brief, less than a second to as much as a few minutes, and questions about their origins abound. Astronomers expecting speeds close to the 300,000 km/s of light itself for the material exploding from these bursts have now been vindicated by measurements made at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility. Image: Light curve of the gamma-ray burst of 7 June 2006, GRB 060607A. The red dots are the data obtained with the REM telescope observing the afterglow (in the near-infrared H-band) of the burst from 73 seconds after the explosion. The blue line is a fit to the data, allowing the astronomers to determine the peak of the light curve and so, derive the velocity of the material. (c) ESO. Space-to-ground coordination is...

Tom Ashbrook at Boston's WBUR does a terrific job interviewing Neil Turok (Cambridge University) and Alan Guth (MIT) on an issue dear to them both: the Big Bang. Did it occur as advertised, or are new ways of looking at the question through the lens of string theory changing everything? How has the inflation model developed over the years, and did the Big Bang mark the beginning of time? Here's an interview excerpt from Turok: "I think the challenge we're raising is that the usual picture of the Big Bang is based on an assumption which is that time, space, matter, energy, everything began at the Big Bang. And that assumption was made in the 60s when people got the first strong observational evidence that the Big Bang happened. But it's really just an assumption and our point of view has come out of new development in physics which are enabling us to describe the behaviour of matter in very extreme conditions such as were present around the Bang. And what we're seeing is that the Big...

An image with 25 times the resolution the Hubble Space Telescope can produce has shown unprecedented levels of detail on the star Altair. Located 15 light years away in the constellation Aquila (The Eagle), Altair is a young, hot star about twice the size of the Sun, known to rotate at 300 kilometers per second at its equator. That's about sixty times Sol's rotation rate, fast enough to flatten Altair into an oval, its radius larger at the equator than the poles. In fact, it's 22 percent wider than it is tall. [kml_flashembed movie="https://centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/altair_small.swf" height="300" width="450" /] Animation credit: Ming Zhao (University of Michigan) How do you get a surface image of a star a million times farther away than our own? The technique is optical interferometry, combining the light from multiple telescopes to simulate a much larger instrument. In this case, the four telescopes used (at Georgia State University's Center for High Angular...

Centauri Dreams' recent post on the eventual merging of the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy took us to a future some five billion years from now. But it also speculated on something even more distant in time. What happens if the universe's expansion does not stop accelerating? Eventually the galaxies beyond our own Local Group will exit the visible universe. Astronomers of that era would have no way of knowing those galaxies had ever existed, and would shape their cosmology accordingly. Meanwhile, our Local Group should still be visible -- the merged Andromeda/Milky Way elliptical galaxy and the survivors of the more than thirty galaxies, held together by mutual gravitational attraction, that make up the LG today. These galaxies should remain gravitationally bound despite the effects of the accelerated expansion, according to a paper by Lawrence Krauss (Case Western Reserve) and Richard Scherrer (Vanderbilt) to be published in October. A starry island in an endless black sea....

I remember a startling painting from an astronomy book I once had when I was a kid. It showed two spiral galaxies much like the Milky Way in the process of collision, and I recall the caption saying that the stars in galaxies were so widely spaced that even in an event like this, few if any stars would collide individually. The galaxies, so the writer surmised, would simply pass through each other, leaving both relatively unscathed. What made the picture interesting was reading in the same volume that the Milky Way is eventually going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy, so that I had the vivid image of a vast galaxy getting ever closer in the night sky until the entire view was consumed by cities of stars. It was a lovely image, but the idea of galaxies merging without notable disruptive effect is long gone. And new work from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has implications for our Solar System as well. In two billion years, with the Sun still firmly on the main...