- Brightest-ever cosmic explosion solved but new mysteries sparked BBC.com
- Scientists identify origin of the ‘BOAT’ — the brightest cosmic blast of all time Space.com
- James Webb telescope finds origins of the biggest explosion since the Big Bang — revealing a new cosmological mystery Livescience.com
- The Brightest-Ever Gamma-Ray Burst—Observed in October 2022—Resulted from Supernova: Study | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- JWST detection of a supernova associated with GRB 221009A without an r-process signature Nature.com
Tag Archives: cosmic
Cosmic radiation during spaceflight could increase risk of erectile dysfunction in astronauts – Space.com
- Cosmic radiation during spaceflight could increase risk of erectile dysfunction in astronauts Space.com
- Astronauts may suffer from erectile dysfunction after trips to space, study finds Yahoo! Voices
- Cosmic-ray exposure on space missions could cause erectile dysfunction, liquid channels in ice boost frost damage – Physics World physicsworld.com
- Erectile Dysfunction a Side-Effect Future Space Travellers Must Brace For, Study Finds! | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Scientists Have Bad News for Astronauts’ Genitals Yahoo! Voices
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Einstein’s Theory in Action: Supernova Explosion Revealed by Rare “Cosmic Magnifying Glasses” – SciTechDaily
- Einstein’s Theory in Action: Supernova Explosion Revealed by Rare “Cosmic Magnifying Glasses” SciTechDaily
- Astronomers capture rare “bizarre” star explosion that could help uncover “the mysteries of the universe” CBS News
- A tiny galaxy brightening up a distant supernova Nature.com
- Seeing quadruple: Rare gravitational lensing warps light from explosion of distant dying star : Big Island Now Big Island Now
- ‘Cosmic magnifying glass’ reveals super-rare warped supernova with gravitational lens. (Thanks, Einstein!) Space.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Brightest cosmic explosion of all time: How we may have solved the mystery of its puzzling persistence – Phys.org
- Brightest cosmic explosion of all time: How we may have solved the mystery of its puzzling persistence Phys.org
- Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected SciTechDaily
- Brightest Cosmic Burst Since The Big Bang Observed And There’s Something Strange Going On msnNOW
- Largest explosion since the Big Bang was powered by a bizarre energy jet unlike any other Livescience.com
- Recording the entire process of a tera-electron volt gamma-ray burst during the death of a massive star Phys.org
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected – SciTechDaily
- Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected SciTechDaily
- Largest explosion since the Big Bang was powered by a bizarre energy jet unlike any other Livescience.com
- Brightest cosmic explosion on record is even weirder than first thought Business Insider
- Recording the entire process of a tera-electron volt gamma-ray burst during the death of a massive star Phys.org
- Brightest Cosmic Burst Since The Big Bang Observed And There’s Something Strange Going On Giant Freakin Robot
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Goodnight stars, wherever you are: Light pollution making our cosmic theater barely visible
Alarming report says Earth’s surface is getting brighter, leaving people in big cities with very little to see in the skies at night
POTSDAM, Germany — Stars in the night sky are vanishing due to light pollution, according to stargazers around the world. These citizen scientists say Earth’s surface is rapidly getting brighter, eroding star visibility. For those living in major cities like New York, it can be nearly impossible to see the countless stars which cover the sky each night.
The findings are based on observations from citizen astronomers worldwide over the past 12 years. They reveal a worrisome trend – most people on earth can no longer see the shimmering Milky Way without a telescope. In big cities, people are lucky to even glimpse the Big Dipper now.
Study authors from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences say the change in visibility is equivalent to around a 10-percent annual increase in luminosity — faster than satellites have previously indicated. The growth of light pollution is occurring despite policies which cut down on streetlamps, billboards, neon signs, and car headlights usage.
To put this problem in perspective, lead author Dr. Christopher Kyba says estimates that a child born in an area where 250 stars were visible would likely see fewer than 100 in the same location 18 years later.
“In many inhabited places on Earth, the night sky never fully grows dark. It instead glows with an artificial twilight caused by the scatter of anthropogenic light in the atmosphere,” researchers write in a media release.
Known as skyglow, the phenomenon is responsible for the visible brightening of the night sky and the erosion of our ability to see stars. Its ubiquity and luminance has increased exponentially over much of the last century.
Light pollution can also be a health problem
Satellites that can measure global skyglow are limited in resolution and sensitivity. They are often blind to the wavelengths produced by modern LED lights that have come to dominate technology over the past decade. So, the international team evaluated 51,351 citizen scientist observations of naked-eye stellar visibility from 2011 through 2022.
They asked participants worldwide to compare star maps at different levels of light pollution to what they could see with their own eyes through the online platform Globe at Night. The study in the journal Science found the night sky has increased in brightness from artificial light by roughly seven to 10 percent per year.
“The contributions of individual people work together as if they were a global sensor network, making new science possible,” says Kyba in a statement.
Estimates show that the Milky Way galaxy is no longer fully visible to one-third of humanity — including 60 percent of Europeans and 80 percent of Americans. Scientists have found excessive artificial lighting at night can have a number of adverse consequences. It disrupts our sleep, messes with wildlife, and is a big waste of energy.
“Skyglow affects both diurnal and nocturnal animals and also destroys an important part of our cultural heritage,” says Constance Walker, co-author of the study and head of the Globe at Night project.
“Perhaps the most important message that the scientific community should glean from the Kyba et al. study is that light pollution is increasing, notwithstanding the countermeasures purportedly put into operation to limit it,” says Fabio Falchi and Salvador Bará in a related release. “Awareness must greatly increase for artificial light at night to be perceived not as an always-positive thing, but as the pollutant it really is.”
South West News Service writer Mark Waghorn contributed to this report.
James Webb Space Telescope captures chaotic cosmic collision
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a pair of galaxies distorting each other as they merge in a great galactic get-together.
The ongoing cosmic collision imaged by Webb is known as II ZW 96. It is roughly 500 million light-years from Earth and located in the constellation Delphinus, according to a Nov. 30 NASA statement (opens in new tab).
The image was created by Webb bringing to bear its cutting-edge NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) payloads on II ZW 96 and details how the shape of both galaxies are being distorted by their respective gravitational attraction.
Related: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: The ultimate guide
NASA scientists note that the spiral arms of the lower galaxy have been twisted out of shape, while the bright cores of both galaxies are connected by the very bright tendrils of star-forming regions that made II ZW 96 such a tempting target for Webb.
The observation is a part of a wider effort by Webb to examine how galaxies evolve, focusing particular on nearby so-called Luminous Infrared Galaxies. These galaxies — of which II ZW 96 is an example — are particularly bright at infrared wavelengths, with luminosities more than 100 billion times that of the sun, according to NASA.
Merging galaxy system II ZW 96 is well known to astronomers and has been observed previously (opens in new tab) by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes.
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This Stunning Dark Nebula Looks Like a Cosmic Sentinel Watching The Stars : ScienceAlert
Look deep enough into the darkness of space, you’ll find all manner of shapes that stir the imagination. Keep staring, you’ll quickly learn that our Universe can be so much stranger and more wondrous than anything the human mind can dream of.
A recent image released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured just a small glimpse of that on a cosmic scale: a dark nebula 7 light-years long looking like a titanic lighthouse keeping watch over the cold, black void of space. Perhaps it’s a cyclopean giant seeking planets to devour. Or death itself, haunting the heavens, cloaked in shadow.
Far from a destroyer of worlds, this darkness represents something far more fertile.
The new image comes from ESO’s Very Large Telescope to celebrate the observatory’s 60th anniversary. The image’s eerie subject is the Cone Nebula, part of a larger complex 2,500 light-years away called NGC 2264 in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn).
It might not look like most other nebulae you’re accustomed to seeing, glowing brightly with a complex array of colors. That’s because not all nebulae are the same. Some reflect the light of nearby stars. Some, ionized by the stars within them, emit their own light.
And some, like the Cone Nebula, are dark, thick with dust that absorbs visible light. Only light at wavelengths invisible to the human eye, such as infrared and radio, can penetrate them.
Opaque nebulae of this type are known as molecular clouds. These include some of the most interesting nebulae to be found: places where baby stars are born. The dust is an efficient emitter of infrared light, which carries away thermal energy and causes the cloud to cool. Without the outward pressure supplied by heat, gravity overwhelms the clumps of the dust and gas and forces them together.
It’s these dense clumps form the seeds of stars; spinning, they draw in even more mass from the surrounding cloud, providing the growing protostar with the pressure needed to kick-start fusion in its core.
At a certain mass, the star produces what astronomers call feedback. Jets of plasma accelerated by the star’s magnetic field lines erupt from its poles, and powerful radiation pressure generated by the star’s ultraviolet light. Both contribute the a stellar wind that pushes away material from the baby star.
This is what gives the Cone Nebula its iconic shape. Baby stars, burning blue and hot (although appearing gold in color in the new image), are at the stage of their life where their feedback is blasting away at the dusty nebula. Similar processes carved out the famous Pillars of Creation structures within the Eagle Nebula.
Because infrared light can penetrate these dense clouds, instruments that can see the Universe in infrared light – such as the James Webb Space Telescope – are invaluable for revealing the particulars of the star formation processes that take place therein.
But visible light images, like the VLT’s, show details that disappear in other wavelengths. It’s only by studying the full spectrum that we can obtain a comprehensive understanding of everything at play in these enigmatic, fascinating structures.
You can download wallpaper-sized versions of the new image from the ESO website.
Colossal cosmic smokescreen studded with stars spotted by the Hubble telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a cosmic smokescreen located around 5,000 light-years from Earth – one light-year is more than 5.8 million miles.
The photograph features a star cluster within the rolling wall of dust and gas from the Lagoon Nebula, a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius.
The cluster, known as NGC 6530, includes at least 4,000 stars, making it one of the largest open clusters discovered.
These stars are nestled inside the swirling gasses of reds, blues and oranges of the nebula, one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible from mid-northern latitudes.
The cluster includes at least 4,000 starts, making it one of the largest in space
Hubble is a joint operation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which launched the telescope 1990.
It was first conceived in the 1940s, Hubble was initially called the Large Space Telescope.
‘Since launch, Hubble has overcome its troubled beginnings to perform innumerable science observations that have revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe,’ NASA shared in a statement.
‘From determining the age of the universe to observing dramatic changes on celestial bodies in our own solar system, Hubble has become one of humanity’s greatest scientific instruments.’
Astronomers studied NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
The team was looking for new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula.
However, during the investigation, researchers feasted their eyes on a stunning smokescreen of dust and clouds studded with bright stars.
‘Hubble’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — particularly with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) — has made it an indispensable tool for understanding starbirth and the origin of exoplanetary systems,’ researchers shared in a statement.
‘In particular, Hubble was crucial to investigations of the proplyds around newly born stars in the Orion Nebula.’
In February, NASA shared another Hubble image showing a ‘space triangle’ where two galaxies collide, leading to a tsunami of star birth.
The duo is collectively known as Arp 143, made up of the glittery, distorted star-forming galaxy NGC 2445, and the less flashy NGC 24444.
NGC 2445 has been distorted to appear triangular, with a flurry of bright lights as stars are formed rapidly from material shaken up by the collision.
US-based astronomers from the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle have analyzed the images captured by the 32-year-old observatory in low Earth orbit.
They explained that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm, where thousands of stars are bursting to life.
The galaxy is awash in starbirth because it is rich in gas, the fuel that makes stars, but has yet to escape the gravitational pull of partner NGC 2444, causing them to wage a cosmic tug-of-war, which NGC 2444 appears to be winning.
And in 2020, NASA and ESA announced they found evidence deep in Hubble’s data that suggests the formation of the first stars and galaxies occurred earlier than previously believed.
These stars are nestled inside the swirling gasses of reds, blues and oranges of the nebula, one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible from mid-northern latitudes
In February, NASA shared another Hubble image showing a ‘space triangle’ where two galaxies collide, leading to a tsunami of star birth
The new findings were uncovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, which astronomers used to study the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars, in the early universe.
The team probed the early universe from about 500 million to one billion years following the Big Bang by studying the cluster MACS J0416, nearly four billion light-years from Earth, and its parallel field with the Hubble.
Rachana Bhatawdekar of the ESA and the study’s lead said: ‘We found no evidence of these first-generation Population III stars in this cosmic time interval.’
This conclusion means these stars and the first galaxies are much older, as the Hubble could not identify them.
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is still working and has made more than 1.5 million observations since its mission began in 1990
The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
It is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889.
He is arguably most famous for discovering that the universe is expanding and the rate at which is does so – now coined the Hubble constant.
The Hubble telescope is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889 (pictured)
Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations since its mission began in 1990 and helped publish some 18,000 scientific papers.
It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude.
Hubble has the pointing accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s head on a dime roughly 200 miles (320km) away.
The Hubble telescope is named after Edwin Hubble who was responsible for coming up with the Hubble constant and is one of the greatest astronomers of all-time
Hubble’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across and in total is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long – the length of a large school bus.
Hubble’s launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo’s telescope.
Thanks to five servicing missions and more than 25 years of operation, our view of the universe and our place within it has never been the same.
Rare cosmic collision acted like one of the ‘factories of gold in the universe’
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An unusual bright blast of light detected by multiple telescopes in December 2021 was the result of a rare cosmic explosion that created a wealth of heavy elements such as gold and platinum.
The gamma-ray burst, called GRB 211211A, lasted about a minute. Gamma-ray bursts are considered among the strongest and brightest explosions in the universe, and they can range from a few milliseconds to several hours in length.
The duration of the burst hinted it was caused by the explosion of a massive star as it died in a supernova. But the aftermath of the gamma-ray burst was faint and faded more quickly than those created by supernovas, and astronomers analyzing the event also spied an excess of infrared light.
“There are a lot of objects in our night sky that fade quickly,” said Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and senior author and coauthor of one of four studies published about the event Wednesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“We image a source in different filters to obtain color information, which helps us determine the source’s identity. In this case, red color prevailed, and bluer colors faded more quickly. This color evolution is a telltale signature of a kilonova, and kilonovae can only come from neutron star mergers.”
Kilonovas are rare, massive explosions caused by the catastrophic collisions between neutron stars, which are the incredibly dense remnants of exploded stars, or collisions between neutron stars and black holes.
After determining that a kilonova created the infrared light, astronomers grew even more puzzled by the gamma-ray burst’s duration. Gamma-ray bursts caused by these rare explosions have only ever been observed to last less than two seconds, but this signal lasted for at least one minute.
“When we followed this long gamma-ray burst, we expected it would lead to evidence of a massive star collapse,” Fong said. “Instead, what we found was very different. When I entered the field 15 years ago, it was set in stone that long gamma-ray bursts come from massive star collapses. This unexpected finding not only represents a major shift in our understanding, but also excitingly opens up a new window for discovery.”
Neutron stars are compact cosmic objects, so researchers never expected them to contain enough material to create a gamma-ray burst that could last nearly a minute.
The explosion occurred in a galaxy about 1 billion light-years away from Earth. Since the event happened relatively close, astronomically speaking, astronomers used multiple telescopes to glean unprecedented detail.
“We found that this one event produced about 1,000 times the mass of the Earth in very heavy elements. This supports the idea that these kilonovae are the main factories of gold in the Universe,” said Dr. Matt Nicholl, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK and coauthor of one of the Nature Astronomy studies, in a statement.
The newly observed characteristics of this event are changing the way astronomers understand gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs.
“Such a peculiar GRB was the first of its kind ever detected,” said Bing Zhang, an astrophysics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coauthor of one of the Nature Astronomy studies, in a statement. “This discovery not only challenged our understanding of GRB origins, (but) it also requires us to consider a new model for how some GRBs form.”
Zhang’s team believes that the unique nature of the burst could have resulted from a likely collision between a neutron star and a white dwarf, or the Earth-size remnant that emerges when low-mass stars die.
The event has also helped answer some questions around the creation of the heaviest elements in the universe.
“Kilonovae are powered by the radioactive decay of some of the heaviest elements in the universe,” said Jillian Rastinejad, a doctoral student in astronomy at Northwestern and first author of one of the Nature Astronomy studies. “But kilonovae are very hard to observe and fade very quickly. Now, we know we can also use some long gamma-ray bursts to look for more kilonovae.”
The James Webb Space Telescope will enable astronomers to search for the emissions released by kilonovae using spectroscopy, or measuring different wavelengths of light.
“Unfortunately, even the best ground-based telescopes are not sensitive enough to perform spectroscopy,” Rastinejad said. “With the (Webb telescope), we could have obtained a spectrum of the kilonova. Those spectral lines provide direct evidence that you have detected the heaviest elements.”