Tag: hubble space telescope

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Spots Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Leaving Behind Trail of Newborn Stars

A supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a 2,00,000-light-year-long condensed trail of newborn stars, twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, in its wake, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US.

Captured accidentally by NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, the black hole was seen racing through the intergalactic space so fast that, within our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes.

“We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole,” said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US.

“What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole,” said van Dokkum.

The researchers have published their paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They said that the black hole lies at one end of the column, at the other end of which lies its parent galaxy. They think that the gas is being ‘shocked’ and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole.

“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,” van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy.

“I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before,” said van Dokkum.

Van Dokkum and his team followed up the sight with spectroscopy with the W M Keck Observatories in Hawaii. The star trail being “quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual” made them conclude that they were looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

Astronomers suspect this phenomenon to likely be the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes, the first two having perhaps merged 50 million years ago. Brought together closer at their centres, they whirled around each other as a binary black hole, they said.

Then came another galaxy with its own supermassive black hole, mixing up the three to form a chaotic and an unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy, they said.

Following this, the remaining binary system of black holes shot off in the opposite direction, they said.

There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core, they said.

The next step, they said, would be to do follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

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NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures Collision of DART With Asteroid Dimorphos

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement.

Hubble‘s time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART’s collision reveals surprising and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space, NASA said in their statement.

Smashing head on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off of the asteroid.

The Hubble movie offers invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact, NASA said.

This was over a volume of space much larger than could be recorded by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew past the binary asteroid minutes after DART’s impact, they said.

The primary objective of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos, the agency said.

Though neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform researchers how to potentially divert an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary, the statement said.

The DART experiment also provided fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system.

“The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system. We’ve never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it’s really surprising.

“I think it’s fantastic. Too much stuff is going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure out,” said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

The study, led by Li along with 63 other DART team members, was published on March 1 in the journal Nature.

The movie shows three overlapping stages of the impact aftermath: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiral swirl of debris caught up along the asteroid’s orbit about its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the pressure of sunlight, resembling a windsock caught in a breeze, the statement said.

The statement described that the Hubble movie starts at 1.3 hours before impact.

In this view both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central bright spot; even Hubble can’t resolve the two asteroids separately.

The thin, straight spikes projecting away from the center (and seen in later images) are artifacts of Hubble’s optics.

The first post-impact snapshot is 2 hours after the event.

Debris flies away from the asteroid, moving with a range of speeds faster than four miles per hour, fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it does not fall back onto the asteroid, the statement said.

The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments.

At about 17 hours after the impact the debris pattern entered a second stage.

The dynamic interaction within the binary system starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern, the statement described.

The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos.

“This is really unique for this particular incident,” said Li. “When I first saw these images, I couldn’t believe these features. I thought maybe the image was smeared or something.” Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles, the statement said.

This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery is compounded later when Hubble records the tail splitting in two for a few days, the statement said.

A multitude of other telescopes on Earth and in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft, also observed the DART impact and its outcomes.

This Hubble movie is part of a suite of new studies published in the journal Nature about the DART mission.

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NASA’s Webb Captures Pillars of Creation Filled With New Stars, Dense Cloud of Dust

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a lush, highly detailed landscape the iconic Pillars of Creation where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear at times semi-transparent in near-infrared light.

Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.

Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.

What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top — the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.

Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to “pierce through” the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe.

This scene was first imaged by Hubble in 1995 and revisited in 2014, but many other observatories have also stared deeply at this region. Each advanced instrument offers researchers new details about this region, which is practically overflowing with stars.

This tightly cropped image is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA.

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