Colossal Hot Cloud Envelopes Colliding Galaxies

Apr. 30, 2013 Scientists have used Chandra to make a detailed study of an enormous cloud of hot gas enveloping two large, colliding galaxies. This unusually large reservoir of gas contains as much mass as 10 billion Suns, spans about 300,000 light years, and radiates at a temperature of more than 7 million degrees. This giant gas cloud, which scientists call a "halo," is located in the system called NGC 6240. Astronomers have long known that NGC 6240 is the site of the merger of two large spiral galaxies similar in size to our own Milky Way. Each galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The black holes are spiraling toward one another, and may eventually merge to form a larger black hole. Another consequence of the collision between the galaxies is that the gas contained in each individual galaxy has been violently stirred up. This caused a baby boom of new stars that has lasted for at least 200 million years. During this burst of stellar birth, some of the most massive stars raced through their evolution and exploded relatively quickly as supernovas. The scientists involved with this study argue that this rush of supernova explosions dispersed relatively high amounts of important elements such as oxygen, neon, magnesium, and silicon into the hot gas of the newly combined galaxies. According to the researchers, the data suggest that this enriched gas has slowly expanded into and mixed with cooler gas that was already there. During the extended baby boom, shorter bursts of star formation have occurred. For example, the most recent burst of star formation lasted for about five million years and occurred about 20 million years ago in Earth's timeframe. However, the authors do not think that the hot gas was produced just by this shorter burst. What does the future hold for observations of NGC 6240? Most likely the two spiral galaxies will form one young elliptical galaxy over the course of millions of years. It is unclear, however, how much of the hot gas can be retained by this newly formed galaxy, rather than lost to surrounding space. Regardless, the collision offers the opportunity to witness a relatively nearby version of an event that was common in the early Universe when galaxies were much closer together and merged more often. In this new composite image of NGC 6240, the X-rays from Chandra that reveal the hot gas cloud are colored purple. These data have been combined with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which shows long tidal tails from the merging galaxies, extending to the right and bottom of the image.

A paper describing these new results on NGC 6240 is available online and appeared in the March 10, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors in this study were Emanuele Nardini (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA, Cambridge, MA and currently at Keele University, UK), Junfeng Wang (CfA and currently at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL), Pepi Fabbiano (CfA), Martin Elvis (CfA), Silvia Pellegrini (University of Bologna, Italy), Guido Risalti (INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Italy and CfA), Margarita Karovska (CfA), and Andreas Zezas (University of Crete, Greece and CfA).

Saturn's Youthful Appearance Explained

Apr. 30, 2013 As planets age they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age -- a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties. New research published in the journal Nature Geosciencehas revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot. Researchers from the University of Exeter and the Ecole Normale Suprieure de Lyon found that layers of gas, generated by physical instability deep within the giant planet, prevent heat from escaping and have resulted in Saturn failing to cool down at the expected rate. Professor Gilles Chabrier from Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter said: "Scientists have been wondering for years if Saturn was using an additional source of energy to look so bright but instead our calculations show that Saturn appears young because it can't cool down. Instead of heat being transported throughout the planet by large scale (convective) motions, as previously thought, it must be partly transferred by diffusion across different layers of gas inside Saturn. These separate layers effectively insulate the planet and prevent heat from radiating out efficiently. This keeps Saturn warm and bright." Characterised by its distinctive rings, Saturn is one of the largest planets in our Solar System, second only in size to massive Jupiter. It is primarily made of hydrogen and helium and its excessive brightness has previously been attributed to helium rains, the result of helium failing to mix with Saturn's hydrogen rich atmosphere. Layered convection, like that recently discovered in Saturn, has been observed in Earth's oceans where warm, salty water lies beneath cool and less salty water. The denser, salty water prevents vertical currents forming between the different layers and so heat cannot be transported efficiently upwards. These findings suggest that the interior structure, composition and thermal evolution of giant planets in our Solar System, and beyond, may be much more complex than previously thought.

Deep, Detailed Image of Distant Universe

Apr. 30, 2013 Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars. "The sensitivity and resolution of the VLA, following its decade-long upgrade, made it possible to identify the specific objects responsible for nearly all of the radio background emission coming from beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy," said Jim Condon, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "Before we had this capability, we could not detect the numerous faint sources that produce much of the background emission," he added. Previous studies had measured the amount of radio emission coming from the distant Universe, but had not been capable of attributing all the radio waves to specific objects. In earlier observations, emission from two or more faint objects often was blurred or blended into what appeared to be a single, stronger source of radio waves. "Advancing technology has revealed more and more of the Universe to us over the past few decades, and our study shows individual objects that account for about 96 percent of the background radio emission coming from the distant Universe," Condon said. "The VLA now is a million times more sensitive than the radio telescopes that made landmark surveys of the sky in the 1960s," he added. In February and March of 2012, Condon and his colleagues studied a region of sky that previously had been observed by the original, pre-upgrade, VLA, and by the Spitzer space telescope, which observes infrared light. They carefully analyzed and processed their data, then produced an image that showed the individual, radio-emitting objects within their field of view. Their field of view, in the constellation Draco, encompassed about one-millionth of the whole sky. In that region, they identified about 2,000 discrete radio-emitting objects. That would indicate, the scientists said, that there are about 2 billion such objects in the whole sky. These are the objects that account for 96 percent of the background radio emission. However, the researchers pointed out, the remaining 4 percent of the radio emission could be coming from as many as 100 billion very faint objects.

Further analysis allowed the scientists to determine which of the objects are galaxies containing massive central black holes that are actively consuming surrounding material and which are galaxies undergoing rapid bursts of star formation. Their results indicate that, as previously proposed, the two types of galaxies evolved at the same rate in the early Universe. "What radio astronomers have accomplished over the past few decades is analogous to advancing from the early Greek maps of the world that showed only the Mediterranean basin to the maps of today that show the whole world in exquisite detail," Condon said. Condon worked with William Cotton, Edward Fomalont, Kenneth Kellermann, and Rick Perley of NRAO; Neal Miller of the University of Maryland; and Douglas Scott, Tessa Vernstrom, and Jasper Wall of the University of British Columbia. The researchers published their work in theAstrophysical Journal. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Mars Opportunity Rover in Standby as Commanding Moratorium Ends

Apr. 30, 2013 During a moratorium on commanding this month while Mars passed nearly behind the sun -- a phase called solar conjunction - NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered a type of standby mode. Mission controllers learned of the changed status on April 27 when they first heard from Opportunity after the period of minimized communication during the solar conjunction. They prepared fresh commands today (April 29) for sending to the rover to resume operations. Initial indications suggest the rover sensed something amiss while doing a routine camera check of the clarity of the atmosphere on April 22. "Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur." Opportunity has been working on Mars for more than nine years. NASA's other Mars rover, Curiosity, which landed last year, is also nearing the end of its solar conjunction moratorium on commanding. Curiosity has reported coming through the conjunction in full health. Controllers plan to send Curiosity's first set of post-conjunction commands on May 1.