GALAXY SHOCK

FROM:  NASA 

Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. In this case, the speedster star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae, or HD 2905 to astronomers. It is a massive, hot supergiant moving at around 2.5 million mph relative to its neighbors (1,100 kilometers per second). But what really makes the star stand out in this image is the surrounding, streaky red glow of material in its path. Such structures are called bow shocks, and they can often be seen in front of the fastest, most massive stars in the galaxy. Bow shocks form where the magnetic fields and wind of particles flowing off a star collide with the diffuse, and usually invisible, gas and dust that fill the space between stars. How these shocks light up tells astronomers about the conditions around the star and in space. Slow-moving stars like our sun have bow shocks that are nearly invisible at all wavelengths of light, but fast stars like Kappa Cassiopeiae create shocks that can be seen by Spitzer’s infrared detectors.  Image Credit-NASA-JPL-Caltech

MEGA GALAXY MERGER MAKES MANY STARS

FROM: NASA, HERSCHEL SPACE OBSERVATORY
Herschel Space Observatory Finds Mega Merger of Galaxies

WASHINGTON -- A massive and rare merging of two galaxies has been spotted in images taken by the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

Follow-up studies by several telescopes on the ground and in space, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, tell a tale of two faraway galaxies intertwined and furiously making stars. Eventually, the duo will settle down to form one super-giant elliptical galaxy.

The findings help explain a mystery in astronomy. Back when our universe was 3 billion to 4 billion years old, it was populated with large reddish elliptical-shaped galaxies made up of old stars. Scientists have wondered whether those galaxies built up slowly over time through the acquisitions of smaller galaxies, or formed more rapidly through powerful collisions between two large galaxies.

The new findings suggest massive mergers are responsible for the giant elliptical galaxies.

"We're looking at a younger phase in the life of these galaxies -- an adolescent burst of activity that won't last very long," said Hai Fu of the University of California at Irvine, who is lead author of a new study describing the results. The study is published in the May 22 online issue of Nature.

"These merging galaxies are bursting with new stars and completely hidden by dust," said co-author Asantha Cooray, also of the University of California at Irvine. "Without Herschel's far-infrared detectors, we wouldn't have been able to see through the dust to the action taking place behind."

Herschel, which operated for almost four years, was designed to see the longest-wavelength infrared light. As expected, it recently ran out of the liquid coolant needed to chill its delicate infrared instruments. While its mission in space is over, astronomers still are scrutinizing the data, and further discoveries are expected.

In the new study, Herschel was used to spot the colliding galaxies, called HXMM01, located about 11 billion light-years from Earth, during a time when our universe was about 3 billion years old. At first, astronomers thought the two galaxies were just warped, mirror images of one galaxy. Such lensed galaxies are fairly common in astronomy and occur when the gravity from a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object. After a thorough investigation, the team realized they were actually looking at a massive galaxy merger.

Follow-up characterization revealed the duo is churning out the equivalent of 2,000 stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way hatches about two to three stars a year. The total number of stars in both colliding galaxies averages out to about 400 billion.

Mergers are fairly common in the cosmos, but this particular event is more unusual because of the prolific amounts of gas and star formation, and the sheer size of the merger at such a distant epoch.

The results go against the more popular model explaining how the biggest galaxies arise: through minor acquisitions of small galaxies. Instead, mega smash-ups may be doing the job.

A PLACE WHERE STARS COME FROM

FROM: NASA

A Nearby Stellar Cradle
The Milky Way and other galaxies in the universe harbor many young star clusters and associations that each contain hundreds to thousands of hot, massive, young stars known as O and B stars. The star cluster Cygnus OB2 contains more than 60 O-type stars and about a thousand B-type stars. Deep observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have been used to detect the X-ray emission from the hot outer atmospheres, or coronas, of young stars in the cluster and to probe how these fascinating star factories form and evolve. About 1,700 X-ray sources were detected, including about 1,450 thought to be stars in the cluster. In this image, X-rays from Chandra (blue) have been combined with infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (red) and optical data from the Isaac Newton Telescope (orange).

Image Credit: NASA

NASA'S SPITZER FINDS FIRST OBJECTS BURNED FURIOUSLY

FROM:  NASA
WASHINGTON -- The faint, lumpy glow from the very first objects in the
universe may have been detected with the best precision yet using
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The objects could be wildly massive
stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen
individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of
what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.

The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in
quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.

"These objects would have been tremendously bright," said Alexander
"Sasha" Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new paper appearing in The
Astrophysical Journal. "We can't yet directly rule out mysterious
sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe,
but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a
glimpse of an ancient epoch. Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for
NASA's upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what
and where these first objects were."

Spitzer first caught hints of this remote pattern of light, known as
the cosmic infrared background, in 2005, and again with more
precision in 2007. Now, Spitzer is in the extended phase of its
mission, during which it performs more in-depth studies on specific
patches of the sky. Kashlinsky and his colleagues used Spitzer to
look at two patches of sky for more than 400 hours each.

The team then carefully subtracted all of the known stars and galaxies
in the images. Rather than being left with a black, empty patch of
sky, they found faint patterns of light with several telltale
characteristics of the cosmic infrared background. The lumps in the
pattern observed are consistent with the way the very distant objects
are thought to be clustered together.

Kashlinsky likens the observations to looking for Fourth of July
fireworks in New York City from Los Angeles. First, you would have to
remove all the foreground lights between the two cities, as well as
the blazing lights of New York City itself. You ultimately would be
left with a fuzzy map of how the fireworks are distributed, but they
would still be too distant to make out individually.

"We can gather clues from the light of the universe's first
fireworks," said Kashlinsky. "This is teaching us that the sources,
or the "sparks," are intensely burning their nuclear fuel."

The universe formed roughly 13.7 billion years ago in a fiery,
explosive Big Bang. With time, it cooled and, by around 500 million
years later, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take
shape. Astronomers say some of that "first light" may have traveled
billions of years to reach the Spitzer Space Telescope. The light
would have originated at visible or even ultraviolet wavelengths and
then, because of the expansion of the universe, stretched out to the
longer, infrared wavelengths observed by Spitzer.

The new study improves on previous observations by measuring this
cosmic infrared background out to scales equivalent to two full moons
-- significantly larger than what was detected before. Imagine trying
to find a pattern in the noise in an old-fashioned television set by
looking at just a small piece of the screen. It would be hard to know
for certain if a suspected pattern was real. By observing a larger
section of the screen, you would be able to resolve both small- and
large-scale patterns, further confirming your initial suspicion.

Likewise, astronomers using Spitzer have increased the amount of the
sky examined to obtain more definitive evidence of the cosmic
infrared background. The researchers plan to explore more patches of
sky in the future to gather more clues hidden in the light of this
ancient era.

"This is one of the reason's we are building the James Webb Space
Telescope," said Glenn Wahlgren, Spitzer program scientist at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "Spitzer is giving us tantalizing clues,
but James Webb will tell us what really lies at the era where stars
first ignited."

Other authors are Richard Arendt of Goddard and the University of
Maryland in Baltimore; Matt Ashby and Giovanni Fazio of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.; and
John Mather and Harvey Moseley of Goddard. Fazio led the initial
observations of these sky fields.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., manages the
Spitzer Space Telescope mission for the agency's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the
Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science
Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at
Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

LIGHT OF ALIEN SUPER EARTH

FROM:  NASA
News Releases
May 8, 2012 RELEASE : 12-138  NASA's Spitzer Sees the Light of Alien "Super Earth"  WASHINGTON -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a "super-Earth" planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.

"Spitzer has amazed us yet again," said Bill Danchi, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets."

The planet, called 55 Cancri e, falls into a class of planets termed super Earths, which are more massive than our home world but lighter than giant planets like Neptune. Fifty-five Cancri e is about twice as big and eight times as massive as Earth. The planet orbits a bright star, called 55 Cancri, in a mere 18 hours.

Previously, Spitzer and other telescopes were able to study the planet by analyzing how the light from 55 Cancri changed as the planet passed in front of the star. In the new study, Spitzer measured how much infrared light comes from the planet itself. The results reveal the planet is likely dark and its sun-facing side is more than 2,000 Kelvin (3,140 degrees Fahrenheit), hot enough to melt metal.

The new information is consistent with a prior theory that 55 Cancri e is a water world: a rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a "supercritical" state where it is both liquid and gas, and topped by a blanket of steam.

"It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away," said Michaël Gillon of Université de Liège in Belgium, principal investigator of the research, which appears in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The 55 Cancri system is relatively close to Earth at 41 light-years away. It has five planets, with 55 Cancri e being the closest to the star and tidally locked, so one side always faces the star. Spitzer discovered the sun-facing side is extremely hot, indicating the planet probably does not have a substantial atmosphere to carry the sun's heat to the unlit side.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, likely will be able to learn even more about the planet's composition. The telescope might be able to use a similar infrared method as Spitzer to search other potentially habitable planets for signs of molecules possibly related to life.

"When we conceived of Spitzer more than 40 years ago, exoplanets hadn't even been discovered," said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "Because Spitzer was built very well, it's been able to adapt to this new field and make historic advances such as this."

In 2005, Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light from a planet beyond our solar system. To the surprise of many, the observatory saw the infrared light of a "hot Jupiter," a gaseous planet much larger than the solid 55 Cancri e. Since then, other telescopes, including NASA's Hubble and Kepler space telescopes, have performed similar feats with gas giants using the same method.

In this method, a telescope gazes at a star as a planet circles behind it. When the planet disappears from view, the light from the star system dips ever so slightly, but enough that astronomers can determine how much light came from the planet itself. This information reveals the temperature of a planet, and, in some cases, its atmospheric components. Most other current planet-hunting methods obtain indirect measurements of a planet by observing its effects on the star.

During Spitzer's ongoing extended mission, steps were taken to enhance its unique ability to see exoplanets, including 55 Cancri e. Those steps, which included changing the cycling of a heater and using an instrument in a new way, led to improvements in how precisely the tele

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE SHOWS STAR WITH TWO GAS JETS

“NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image of a baby star sprouting two identical jets (green lines emanating from fuzzy star). The jet on the right had been seen before in visible-light views, but the jet at left -- the identical twin to the first jet -- could only be seen in detail with Spitzer's infrared detectors. The left jet was hidden behind a dark cloud, which Spitzer can see through. The twin jets, in a system called Herbig-Haro 34, are made of identical knots of gas and dust, ejected one after another from the area around the star. By studying the spacing of these knots, and knowing the speed of the jets from previous studies, astronomers were able to determine that the jet to the right of the star punches its material out 4.5 years later than the counter-jet. The new data also reveal that the area from which the jets originate is contained within a sphere around the star, with a radius of 3 astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun. Previous studies estimated that the maximum size of this jet-making zone was 10 times larger. The wispy material is gas and dust. Arc-shaped bow shocks can be seen at the ends of the twin jets. The shocks consist of compressed material in front of the jets. The Herbig-Haro 34 jets are located at approximately 1,400 light-years away in the Orion constellation. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech “

The above picture and excerpt are from the NASA website: