Jellyfish Galaxies

New images from Hubble have supported the theory that jellyfish black holes are created when they are pulled into dense galaxy clusters. This stretches the spiral shape into the familiar sea creature and eventually turns into an elliptical galaxy as it is integrated into the cluster. A trio of researchers, two from the University of Hawaii and one from the University of Dunham, have studied images from Hubble and have witnessed what they believed to be how spiral galaxy evolve when they near a cluster. Cold gas from the galaxy gets pulled into the cluster, and the outer stars on the spirals also get pulled, resulting in the stretch that they are observing. The theory explains both the presence of the jellyfish galaxies and the orphan stars that are not part of the spiral galaxy. 

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Chandra X-Ray Observatory

The Chandra X-Ray has been NASA's flagship mission for X-Ray astronomy. It was first launched in July 23, 1999 and it is telescope that is designed to detect hot regions of the universe, such as exploding stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes. Since X-rays are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, Chandra must orbit above it. The observatory moves by the use of thrusters, one for propulsion and another for momentum unloading. The path it takes around the Earth is an elliptical orbit, in which the thrusters apply torques to help it maintain its altitude. The power of the observatory comes from the Sun's rays, which is then stored in its batteries and distributed throughout its system. Chandra's altitude is 200 times the height of Hubble, almost a third of the way to the moon. Chandra is also the largest space craft launched at a length of 45 feet and the mission that deployed it was commanded by the first woman commander. Chandra has the ability to detect particles entering a black hole up to the last second! This is why when it comes to quasars or supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, or any other phenomena with the production of high energy light, Chandra is the telescope to use.
Its telescope consists of different lenses than usual optical telescopes. Since the photons its observing  are at a higher energy, they ricochet off the mirrors if they are at a grazing angle. Thus, they have to be parallel to the incoming X-rays, which is why they are barrel shaped, rather than disk shaped. Another interesting feature is that the smoothness of the mirrors have been reached to a few atoms. This is the equivalent of making the Earth's surface so smooth that Everest would be less than two meters tall. They are coated with the reflective and rare metal Iridium.

Coating the mirrors at Optical Coating Laboratories inc.
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Galaxies siphoning off hydrogen!

I thought this was an interesting read. There's a pair of two galaxies that seemed to have a river of hydrogen flowing from one to the other. But there is a hypothesis that this could actually be the reason for major star formation in spiral galaxies and how they keep up the pace in star formation. Larger ones effectively siphon off this hydrogen, cold and diffuse, gas from smaller galaxies. Using the GBT, the Green Bank Telescope, astronomer D.J Pisano found the filament of tenuous gas using its immense single dish, unblocked aperture, and its location in the national radio quiet zone. There is also another theory in which this galaxy had a close encounter with its neighbor and the filament is just a ribbon of neutral atomic hydrogen. If this is the case, then there should be stars in this ribbon. Further study will enable astronomers to get a better idea of galaxy evolution.

Credit: D.J. Pisano (WVU); B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); Palomar Observatory -- Space Telescope Science Institute 2nd Digital Sky Survey (Caltech); Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
Source: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-river-hydrogen-space-green-bank.html#jCp

Weather on a Brown Dwarf.

The Very Large Telescope has recently been in use to map out the weather of a Brown Dwarf, specifically WISE J104915.57-531906.1B. The star is known as Luhman 16B and is one of tworecently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The distance enables astronomers to detect this faint star, which is in the gap between Jupiter sized planets and low mass, cool stars. In the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, this would be to the lower right, if it were to be considered a star. They are the most elusive of the stars and they do not have enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion. Astronomers using ESO's Very Large telescope managed to map out light and dark features on the surface of Luhman 16B and a comment from Ian Crossfield, (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany), the lead author of the new paper, sums up the results: "Previous observations suggested that brown dwarfs might have mottled surfaces, but now we can actually map them. Soon, we will be able to watch cloud patterns form, evolve, and dissipate on this brown dwarf—eventually, exometeorologists may be able to predict whether a visitor to Luhman 16B could expect clear or cloudy skies."
They were able to do this by what I thought to be an interesting way of imaging differences in luminosities, using the CRIRES instrument of the VLT. This stands for CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle spectrograph and it provides a solving power of up to 10^5 in the spectral range, optimizing resolution through a mosaic of Alladin arrays which allows the observation of fainter stars such ass brown dwarfs with greater detail. Studying the atmospheres of brown dwarfs might give astronomers an idea of the atmospheres of young, giant gas planets. 

The brown dot is where I believe brown dwarfs to be located. Perhaps even out of the graph.

The figure shows the object at six equally spaced times as it rotates once on its axis. Credit: ESO/I. Crossfield
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Extreme Power of Black Hole

Located at around 3.9 billion light years away from the Earth, black hole RX J1532.9+3021 was found to have extremely bright projections of x-rays. This means that the black hole is not only massive, but active. Astronomers used Nasa's Chandra Observatory to detect and measure the luminous source of X-rays, its mass determined to be around a quadrillion times the mass of the sun. The interesting thing about this black hole is that the hot glowing gas should cool down, and form trillion of stars as the gas expands. But this is not the case and no burst of star formations are detected. Astronomers have found two cavities in the gas and the super massive black hole is located in the center of the two cavities; where two supersonic jets are thought to be the cause of the 'drilling' of the gas. Effectively creating the cavities. Astronomers detected the jet using radio images and have found that no mater is falling into the black hole to account for the large X-ray sources. The only premise put forward that works is if the black hole is ultra massive. Such a black hole wouldn't require as much matter to fall into it to produce such jets. Another one, which also causes the black hole to be massive, is if it is spinning extremely rapidly. Information has also come in and there has been another cavity that has been detected but not aligned to the jets, and much older. This could suggest that the black hole is indeed spinning, and it is precessing. I personally wouldn't have guess that a black hole would precess, after all, isn't it a hole in the fabric of space? That would mean torsions in space could exist.

credit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford/J.Hlavacek-Larrondo et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M.Postman & CLASH team
Source;http://phys.org/news/2014-01-rx-j153293021-extreme-power-black.html

New Earth sized gas planet discovered

                                                                                  Artists conception of KOI-314c       
A planet was found to transit its star and found to have a size 60 percent larger diameter but weighed the same as Earth. This suggests that it's atmosphere is thicker, and it is a more gaseous planet. This is a great discovery because it supports the idea that there is no clear line between gas planets and rocky planets when it comes to size. The team of international astronomers that found the planet gave light into its characteristics using NASA's Kepler telescope. They found that it's denser than water by thirty percent, orbiting a red dwarf star. This suggests that the planet is enveloped by hydrogen and helium hundreds of miles thick. To weigh KOI-314c, they used a different method that usually implemented on exoplanets. Instead of of finding out the wobbles of the star once a planet transits it, to then extrapolate the mass to see what forces causes the wobbling, they used TTV. Transit timing variations. Essentially it can only be used when a star has more than one planet orbiting it, and astronomers see what occurs to the star when they both transit the star and their respective times time and time again, and see the intricate dance of wobbling that gives away their masses. This can lead to other questions as well. Is there a critical size in which rocky planets are preferred in planetary evolution, or does the dependence of whether it will be a gassy planet or rocky has something do other than size? Distance? The composition of stellar dust and its properties?
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