In the 1960s sci-fi television show “Lost in Space” a small family of would-be planetary colonists get off course and lost in our galaxy. But truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to
These are Hubble Space Telescope images of two massive clusters of galaxies named MOO J1014+0038 (left panel) and SPT-CL J2106-5844 (right panel). The artificially added blue color is translated from Hubble data that captured a phenomenon called intracluster light. This extremely faint glow traces a smooth distribution of light from wandering stars scattered across the cluster. Billions of years ago the stars were shed from their parent galaxies and now drift through intergalactic space. Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, James Jee (Yonsei University), Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Hubble Space Telescope Finds that Ghost Light Among Galaxies Stretches Far Back in Time
In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster.
The nagging question for astronomers has been: how did the stars get so scattered throughout the cluster in the first place? Several competing theories include the possibility that the stars were stripped out of a cluster’s galaxies, or they were tossed around after mergers of galaxies, or they were present early in a cluster’s formative years many billions of years ago.
A recent infrared survey from
Image of galaxy clusters MOO J1014+0038 (left panel) and SPT-CL J2106-5844 (right panel) captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, with color key, compass arrows, and scale bar for reference. This image shows near-infrared wavelengths of light. The color key shows which filters were used when collecting the light. The color of each filter name is the color used to represent the wavelength that passes through that filter. The compass graphic points to the object’s orientation on the celestial sphere. North points to the north celestial pole which is not a fixed point in the sky, but it currently lies near the star Polaris, in the circumpolar constellation Ursa Minor. Celestial coordinates are analogous to a terrestrial map, though east and west are transposed because we are looking up rather than down. The scale bar is labeled in light-years (ly) and parsecs (pc). A light-year is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. (It takes 100,000 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. A parsec is also a measure of length or distance. One parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years across. Note that the distance in light-years and parsecs shown on this scale bar applies to the galaxy cluster, not to foreground or background objects. Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, James Jee (Yonsei University), Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Stars can be scattered outside of their galactic birthplace when a galaxy moves through gaseous material in the space between galaxies, as it orbits the center of the cluster. In the process, drag pushes gas and dust out of the galaxy. However, based on the new Hubble survey, Jee rules out this mechanism as the primary cause for the intracluster star production. That’s because the intracluster light fraction would increase over time to the present if stripping is the main player. But that is not the case in the new Hubble data, which show a constant fraction over billions of years.
“We don’t exactly know what made them homeless. Current theories cannot explain our results, but somehow they were produced in large quantities in the early universe,” said Jee. “In their early formative years, galaxies might have been pretty small and they bled stars pretty easily because of a weaker gravitational grasp.”
“If we figure out the origin of intracluster stars, it will help us understand the assembly history of an entire galaxy cluster, and they can serve as visible tracers of dark matter enveloping the cluster,” said Hyungjin Joo of Yonsei University, the first author of the paper. Dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the universe, which holds galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, together.
If the wandering stars were produced through a comparatively recent pinball game among galaxies, they do not have enough time to scatter throughout the entire gravitational field of the cluster and therefore would not trace the distribution of the cluster’s dark matter. But if the stars were born in the cluster’s early years, they will have fully dispersed throughout the cluster. This would allow astronomers to use the wayward stars to map out the dark matter distribution across the cluster.
This technique is new and complementary to the traditional method of dark matter mapping by measuring how the entire cluster warps light from background objects due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
Intracluster light was first detected in the Coma cluster of galaxies in 1951 by Fritz Zwicky, who reported that one of his most interesting discoveries was observing luminous, faint intergalactic matter in the cluster. Because the Coma cluster, containing at least 1,000 galaxies, is one of the nearest clusters to Earth (330 million light-years), Zwicky was able to detect the ghost light even with a modest 18-inch telescope.
NASA’s
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster.
The nagging question for astronomers has been: how did the stars get so scattered throughout the cluster in the first place? Several competing theories include the possibility that the stars were stripped out of a cluster’s galaxies, or they were tossed around after mergers of galaxies, or they were present early in a cluster’s formative years many billions of years ago.
A recent infrared survey from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which looked for this so-called “intracluster light” sheds new light on the mystery. The new Hubble observations suggest that these stars have been wandering around for billions of years, and are not a product of more recent dynamical activity inside a galaxy cluster that would strip them out of normal galaxies.
The survey included 10 galaxy clusters as far away as nearly 10 billion light-years. These measurements must be made from space because the faint intracluster light is 10,000 times dimmer than the night sky as seen from the ground.
The survey reveals that the fraction of the intracluster light relative to the total light in the cluster remains constant, looking over billions of years back into time. “This means that these stars were already homeless in the early stages of the cluster’s formation,” said James Jee of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. His results are being published in the January 5 issue of Nature magazine.
Stars can be scattered outside of their galactic birthplace when a galaxy moves through gaseous material in the space between galaxies, as it orbits the center of the cluster. In the process, drag pushes gas and dust out of the galaxy. However, based on the new Hubble survey, Jee rules out this mechanism as the primary cause for the intracluster star production. That’s because the intracluster light fraction would increase over time to the present if stripping is the main player. But that is not the case in the new Hubble data, which show a constant fraction over billions of years.
“We don’t exactly know what made them homeless. Current theories cannot explain our results, but somehow they were produced in large quantities in the early universe,” said Jee. “In their early formative years, galaxies might have been pretty small and they bled stars pretty easily because of a weaker gravitational grasp.”
“If we figure out the origin of intracluster stars, it will help us understand the assembly history of an entire galaxy cluster, and they can serve as visible tracers of dark matter enveloping the cluster,” said Hyungjin Joo of Yonsei University, the first author of the paper. Dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the universe, which holds galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, together.
If the wandering stars were produced through a comparatively recent pinball game among galaxies, they do not have enough time to scatter throughout the entire gravitational field of the cluster and therefore would not trace the distribution of the cluster’s dark matter. But if the stars were born in the cluster’s early years, they will have fully dispersed throughout the cluster. This would allow astronomers to use the wayward stars to map out the dark matter distribution across the cluster.
This technique is new and complementary to the traditional method of dark matter mapping by measuring how the entire cluster warps light from background objects due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
Intracluster light was first detected in the Coma cluster of galaxies in 1951 by Fritz Zwicky, who reported that one of his most interesting discoveries was observing luminous, faint intergalactic matter in the cluster. Because the Coma cluster, containing at least 1,000 galaxies, is one of the nearest clusters to Earth (330 million light-years), Zwicky was able to detect the ghost light even with a modest 18-inch telescope.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared capability and sensitivity will greatly extend the search for intracluster stars deeper into the universe, and therefore should help solve the mystery.
More information:
Myungkook Jee, Intracluster light is already abundant at redshift beyond unity, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05396-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05396-4
Provided by
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Citation:
Hubble finds that ghost light among galaxies stretches far back in time (2023, January 4)
retrieved 5 January 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-01-hubble-ghost-galaxies.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Five months after I posted about a Chinese action game featuring aerial combat, I’ve got another cool one to show you. Despite the silly name, Project: The Perceiver is a melancholy political drama that gives me some Ghost of Tsushima vibes. But Project: The Perceiver moves beyond the standard Soulslike combat. And when I saw the main character running up the wall—that’s when I really started to pay attention.
Project: The Perceiver – Debut Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games
Most of the enemies are human, which means that the initial focus is on knowing how to parry attacks and smash their heads in with a rolling kick. As you accumulate experience, the protagonist can transform into flower blossoms and wall-jump his way across rotating platforms. I’m eager to see the full range of abilities when the game gets closer to launch.
Wuxia is a Chinese literary genre in which wandering heroes travel across China in order to fight for justice, and Project: The Perceiver fits well into that genre. The protagonist, who is later known as the Mask of Devotion is killed in a battle, his ruler is murdered, and he returns to life as a masked phantom, which makes it feel a bit like The Ghost of Tsushima. Devotion goes on to fight against the Mask of Umbra, a rebel who seems to enjoy indulging in a bit of moral philosophy. “This land belongs to all of its inhabitants,” the villain would say while battling the hero in a field of flowers. “Be it Liangs or Tangs, does it matter what the regime is called?” Like dang. We’re having ethics class in the middle of a life-or-death battle. I love it.
There’s just one problem—the localization is atrocious. The descriptions are flowery in a way that feels like they were translated too literally from Chinese. It’s difficult for me to parse what the translations are trying to tell me. The trailer is perfectly comprehensible, so I’m hoping that this was just a marketing flub.
Project: The Perceiver does not yet have a release date, though it’s confirmed for PlayStation 4 and 5. It’s unclear whether or not it will come to other platforms in the future.
About 47 million light-years from where you’re sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These “neutrinos” are also known as the elusive “ghost particles” that haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence.
Immediately after coming into being, bundles of these invisible bits plunge across the cosmic expanse. They whisk by bright stars we can see and zip past pockets of space teeming with marvels we’re yet to discover. They fly and fly and fly until, occasionally, they crash into a detector deep below the surface of the Earth.
The neutrinos’ journey is seamless. But scientists patiently wait for them to arrive.
Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 “high-energy neutrino emissions” coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. “Neutrino astronomy,” scientists call it.
It’d be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.
Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet’s atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube’s first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056.
With this newfound neutrino source, we’re entering a new era of the particle’s story. In fact, according to the research team, it’s likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can’t tell.
And if you wanted to stop a neutrino in its tracks, you’d need to fight it with a block of lead one light-year-wide — though even then, there’d be a fractional chance of success. Thus, harnessing these particles, NCG 1068’s version or not, could allow us to penetrate areas of the cosmos that’d usually lie out of reach.
Now what?
Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn’t even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe’s backstage.
They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we’re unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.
“The universe has multiple ways of communicating with us,” Denise Caldwell of the National Science Foundation and a member of the IceCube team, told reporters on Thursday. “Electromagnetic radiation, which we see as light from stars, gravitational waves that shake the fabric of space — and elementary particles, such as protons, neutrons and electrons spewed out by localized sources.
“One of these elementary particles has been neutrinos that permeate the universe, but unfortunately, neutrinos are very difficult to detect.”
In fact, even the galaxy NGC 1068 and its gargantuan black hole are typically obscured by a thick veil of dust and gas, making them hard to parse with standard optical telescopes and equipment — despite years of scientists trying to pierce its curtain. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could have a leg up in this case due to its infrared eyes, but neutrinos may be an even better way in.
Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.
“We are very lucky, in a sense, because we can access an amazing understanding of this object,” Elisa Resconi, of the Technical University of Munich and IceCube team member, said of NGC 1068.
It’s also notable that there are many (many) more galaxies similar to NGC 1068 — categorized as Seyfert galaxies — than there are blazars similar to TXS 0506+056. This means IceCube’s latest discovery is, arguably, a larger step forward for neutrino astronomers than the observatory’s seminal one.
Perhaps the bulk of neutrinos diffusing throughout the universe are rooted in NGC 1068 doppelgangers. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s far more to the merit of neutrinos than just their sources.
These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy.
First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. “We don’t understand how that happens,” Vandenbrouke said simply. Neutrinos could provide a way to study the regions around black holes.
Second is the general, yet persistent, conundrum of cosmic rays.
We don’t really know where cosmic rays come from either, but these strings of particles reach energies to and beyond millions of times higher than we can reach here on Earth with human-constructed particle accelerators like the one at CERN.
“We think neutrinos have some role to play,” Vandenbroucke said. “Something that can help us answer these two mysteries of black holes powering very bright galaxies and of the origins of cosmic rays.”
A decade to catch a handful
To be clear, IceCube doesn’t exactly trap neutrinos.
Basically, this observatory tells us every time a neutrino happens to interact with the ice shrouding it. “Neutrinos hardly interact with matter,” Vandenbrouke emphasized. “But they do interact sometimes.”
As millions of neutrinos shoot into the icy region where IceCube is set up, at least one tends to bump into an atom of ice, which then shatters and produces a flash of light. IceCube sensors capture that flash and send the signal up to the surface, notifications that are then analyzed by hundreds of scientists.
Ten years of light-flash-data allowed the team to pretty much map out where every neutrino seems to be coming from in the sky. It soon became clear there was a dense region of neutrino emissions located right where galaxy NGC 1068 is stationed.
But even with such evidence, Resconi said the team knew “it’s not the time to open the champagne, because we still have one fundamental question to answer. How many times did this alignment happen just by chance? How can we be sure neutrinos are actually coming from such an object?”
So, to make matters as concrete as possible, and really, truly prove this galaxy is spitting out ghosts, “we generated 500 million times the same experiment,” Resconi said.
Upon which, I can only imagine, a bottle of Veuve was popped at last. Though the hunt isn’t over.
“We are only beginning to scratch the surface as far as finding new sources of neutrinos,” Ignacio Taboada of the Georgia Institute of Technology and IceCube team member said. “There must be many other sources far deeper than NGC 1068, hiding somewhere to be found.”
About 47 million light-years from where you’re sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These “neutrinos,” otherwise known as the notoriously elusive “ghost particles,” haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence.
Immediately after coming into being, bundles of these invisible bits plunge across the cosmic expanse. They whisk by bright stars we can see and zip past pockets of space teeming with marvels we’re yet to discover. They fly and fly and fly until, occasionally, they crash into a detector deep below the surface of the Earth.
The neutrinos’ journey is seamless. But scientists patiently wait for them to arrive.
Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 “high-energy neutrino emissions” coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. “Neutrino astronomy,” scientists call it.
It’d be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.
Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet’s atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube’s first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056.
With this newfound neutrino source, we’re entering a new era of the particle’s story. In fact, according to the research team, it’s likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can’t tell.
And if you wanted to stop a neutrino in its tracks, you’d need to fight it with a block of lead one light-year-wide — though even then, there’d be a fractional chance of success. Thus, harnessing these particles, NCG 1068’s version or not, could allow us to penetrate areas of the cosmos that’d usually lie out of reach.
Now what?
Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn’t even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe’s backstage.
They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we’re unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.
“The universe has multiple ways of communicating with us,” Denise Caldwell of the National Science Foundation and a member of the IceCube team, told reporters on Thursday. “Electromagnetic radiation, which we see as light from stars, gravitational waves that shake the fabric of space — and elementary particles, such as protons, neutrons and electrons spewed out by localized sources.
“One of these elementary particles has been neutrinos that permeate the universe, but unfortunately, neutrinos are very difficult to detect.”
In fact, even the galaxy NGC 1068 and its gargantuan black hole are typically obscured by a thick veil of dust and gas, making them hard to parse with standard optical telescopes and equipment — despite years of scientists trying to pierce its curtain. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could have a leg up in this case due to its infrared eyes, but neutrinos may be an even better way in.
Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.
“We are very lucky, in a sense, because we can access an amazing understanding of this object,” Elisa Resconi, of the Technical University of Munich and IceCube team member, said of NGC 1068.
It’s also notable that there are many (many) more galaxies similar to NGC 1068 — categorized as Seyfert galaxies — than there are blazars similar to TXS 0506+056. This means IceCube’s latest discovery is, arguably, a larger step forward for neutrino astronomers than the observatory’s seminal one.
Perhaps the bulk of neutrinos diffusing throughout the universe are rooted in NGC 1068 doppelgangers. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s far more to the merit of neutrinos than just their sources.
These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy.
First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. “We don’t understand how that happens,” Vandenbrouke said simply. Neutrinos could provide a way to study the regions around black holes.
Second is the general, yet persistent, conundrum of cosmic rays.
We don’t really know where cosmic rays come from either, but these strings of particles reach energies to and beyond millions of times higher than we can reach here on Earth with human-constructed particle accelerators like the one at CERN.
“We think neutrinos have some role to play,” Vandenbroucke said. “Something that can help us answer these two mysteries of black holes powering very bright galaxies and of the origins of cosmic rays.”
A decade to catch a handful
To be clear, IceCube doesn’t exactly trap neutrinos.
Basically, this observatory tells us every time a neutrino happens to interact with the ice shrouding it. “Neutrinos hardly interact with matter,” Vandenbrouke emphasized. “But they do interact sometimes.”
As millions of neutrinos shoot into the icy region where IceCube is set up, at least one tends to bump into an atom of ice, which then shatters and produces a flash of light. IceCube sensors capture that flash and send the signal up to the surface, notifications that are then analyzed by hundreds of scientists.
Ten years of light-flash-data allowed the team to pretty much map out where every neutrino seems to be coming from in the sky. It soon became clear there was a dense region of neutrino emissions located right where galaxy NGC 1068 is stationed.
But even with such evidence, Resconi said the team knew “it’s not the time to open the champagne, because we still have one fundamental question to answer. How many times did this alignment happen just by chance? How can we be sure neutrinos are actually coming from such an object?”
So, to make matters as concrete as possible, and really, truly prove this galaxy is spitting out ghosts, “we generated 500 million times the same experiment,” Resconi said.
Upon which, I can only imagine, a bottle of Veuve was popped at last. Though the hunt isn’t over.
“We are only beginning to scratch the surface as far as finding new sources of neutrinos,” Ignacio Taboada of the Georgia Institute of Technology and IceCube team member said. “There must be many other sources far deeper than NGC 1068, hiding somewhere to be found.”
The Game Rating and Administration Committee of Korea has rated Syphon Filter 3 for PS5 [3,673 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/playstation/ps5″>PlayStation 5 and PS4 [24,132 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/playstation/ps4″>PlayStation 4, suggesting the PlayStation [41,355 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/playstation”>PlayStation title will soon join the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog.
Developed by Bend Studio [46 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/companies/sony-interactive-entertainment/bend-studio”>Bend Studio, Syphon Filter 3 first launched for PlayStation on November 6, 2001 in North America and November 30, 2001 in Europe.
Syphon Filter and Syphon Filter 2 are already available as part of the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog, and both Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow were previously rated in Korea.
A game titled Ghost Trick was also rated in Korea:
The publisher is listed as Gamepia, which also handles distribution for other Capcom [2,354 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/companies/capcom”>Capcom titles in Korea. The Resident Evil 4 (2023) [7 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/resident-evil-4-2023″>Resident Evil 4 remake, published by Gamepia, is included in today’s ratings.
The Ghost Trick rating’s code is “GC-CC-NP,” which used for PC [16,238 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/pc”>PC releases, while “GC-CC-NV” is used for console releases. However, GG-CC-NP ratings occur separately from GG-CC-NV ratings, even if a game is on multiple platforms. For example, today’s batch of GG-CC-NP-only ratings for multiplatform games includes Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion [5 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/crisis-core-final-fantasy-vii-reunion”>Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, Super Bomberman R 2 [1 article]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/super-bomberman-r-2″>Super Bomberman R 2, Various Daylife [3 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/various-daylife”>Various Daylife, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden [1 article]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/voice-of-cards-the-beasts-of-burden”>Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden, Persona 3 Portable [8 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/persona-3-portable”>Persona 3 Portable, Park Beyond [2 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/park-beyond”>Park Beyond, Cult of the Lamb [5 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/cult-of-the-lamb”>Cult of the Lamb, and more.
The rating could suggest some sort of re-release of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is planned. The Adventure [547 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/adventure”>adventure game originally launched for DS [54 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/nintendo/ds”>DS on June 19, 2010 in Japan, followed by January 11, 2011 in North America and January 14, 2011 in Europe. An iOS release via App Store followed on December 16, 2010 in Japan and February 2, 2012 worldwide.
The aftermath of a large star’s explosive death is seen in an image released on Monday by the European Southern Observatory, showing immense filaments of brightly shining gas that was blasted into space during the supernova.
Before exploding at the end of its life cycle, the star is believed to have had a mass at least eight times greater than our sun. It was located in our Milky Way galaxy about 800 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vela. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
The eerie image shows clouds of gas that look like pink and orange tendrils in the filters used by the astronomers, covering an expanse roughly 600 times larger than our solar system.
“The filamentary structure is the gas that was ejected from the supernova explosion, which created this nebula. We see the inside material of a star as it expands into space. When there are denser parts, some of the supernova material shocks with the surrounding gas and creates some of the filamentary structure,” said Bruno Leibundgut, an astronomer affiliated with the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The image shows the supernova remnants about 11,000 years after the explosion, Leibundgut said.
“Most of the material that shines is due to hydrogen atoms that are excited. The beauty of such images is that we can directly see what material was inside a star,” Leibundgut added. “The material that has been built up over many millions of years is now exposed and will cool down over millions of years until it eventually will form new stars. These supernovae produce many elements – calcium or iron – which we carry in our own bodies. This is a spectacular part of the path in the evolution of stars.”
The star itself has been reduced in the aftermath of the supernova to an incredibly dense spinning object called a pulsar. A pulsar is a type of neutron star – one of the most compact celestial objects known to exist. This one rotates 10 times per second.
The image represented a mosaic of observations taken with a wide-field camera called OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The data for the image was collected from 2013 to 2016, the ESO said.
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
CNN
—
Colorful, ghostly remnants drift in space where a massive star exploded 11,000 years ago.
The Vela supernova remnant, named after the Vela constellation, is all that remains after the star reached the end of its life.
Pink and orange gas clouds mark the spot 800 light-years away from Earth, making it one of the closest known features. (A light-year is about 6 trillion miles.)
When the star went supernova, shock waves moved through the surrounding layers of gas released by the star.
The energetic waves compressed the gas and created threadlike filaments that resemble wispy cobwebs.
In a new image of the Vela supernova remnant, captured by the VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the glowing threads of gas appear to shine due to heat from the shock waves.
The eerily beautiful sight where the star died was fittingly released on Halloween.
Within the remnant is a dense neutron star, or pulsar, which rapidly spins and releases beams of light like a celestial lighthouse — but it’s located just outside of the region shown in the image.
Nine full moons could fit within the detailed perspective, and the image only reflects part of the giant cloud.
The European Southern Observatory also shared detailed views of intriguing features within the mosaic. The 12 highlights zoom in on different aspects of the bright stars and gas clouds within the region.
The image, which contains 554 million pixels, was captured by the wide-field OmegaCAM on the telescope. The 268 million-pixel camera is capable of capturing images using several different filters that allow for varied wavelengths of light and colors — hence the magenta, blue, green and red colors in the image.
The VLT Survey Telescope is one of the largest telescopes that surveys the night sky using visible light, helping astronomers unlock the secrets of star formation and death.
Origin of ‘ghost particles’ is FOUND: Tiny objects that pass through our bodies and planets undetected are emitted from galactic nuclei fed by supermassive black holes in deep space
‘Ghost particles,’ or neutrinos, are particles that come from deep space
These particles do not have a mass and barely interact with matter
Scientists believe they originate from galactic nuclei fed by supermassive black holes
Blazar are known for emitting bright jets and wind and are speculated to also churn out cosmic rays
By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com
Published: | Updated:
Deep space ‘ghost particles’ likely originate from galactic nuclei fed by supermassive black holes, according to a new study that could unravel the mystery of these subatomic particles that formed before the universe.
Ghost particles, or neutrinos, have baffled scientists since they were first discovered in 1956 because they have no mass and barely interact with matter.
These tiny particles are without an electrical charge and race through the universe almost entirely unaffected by objects or natural forces, but they are the second most common particles Earth after photons.
The galactic nuclei, known as blazars, are galaxies with colossal black holes at their center and are positioned with their jets pointed directly at Earth.
A team of researchers led by University of Würzburg determined the source of ghost particles by cross-referring data of the particles’ paths and the location of University of Würzburg in the universe.
And they found 10 of 19 of the neutrino hotspots were from blazars.
The mission to unravel the mystery of ghost particles is vital because it will provide a better understanding to how matter evolved from simple particles into complex particles that created everything around us.
Scroll down for video
An artist’s impression of the active galactic nucleus where the ghost-like subatomic particle likely originated
At the center of most galaxies, including our own, sits a supermassive black hole that creates a disk of gas, dust and stellar debris around it.
As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, its gravitational energy can be transformed into light, making the centers of these galaxies very bright and resulting in them being called active galactic nuclei (AGN).
When a galaxy is situated in a way that its jets point toward Earth it is called a blazar and this is the running theory of what produces ghost particles.
This conclusion was determined by researchers who collected data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, which is the most sensitive neutrino detector on Earth, from 2008 and 2015.
The study determined ghost particles come from blazar by collecting data of the particles from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica (pictured)
This was then cross-referenced with BZCat, a catalog of more than 3,500 objects that are likely blazars.
The results showed that 10 out of the 19 IceCube hotspots located in the southern sky likely originated from blazars.
Dr Andrea Tramacere, a researcher in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva, said in a statement: ‘The discovery of these high-energy neutrino factories represents a major milestone for astrophysics.
‘It places us a step forward in solving the century-old mystery of the origin of cosmic rays.’
Scientists have been attempting to study the elusive particles since they were first predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1931.
Many believe they may hold the key to understanding parts of the universe that remain otherwise hidden from our view, like dark matter and dark energy.
The high-energy neutrino was first detected on September 22, 2017 by the IceCube observatory, a huge facility sunk a mile beneath the South Pole.
Here, a grid of more than 5,000 super-sensitive sensors picked up the characteristic blue ‘Cherenkov’ light emitted as the neutrino interacted with the ice.
The neutrino is thought to have been created by high-energy cosmic rays from the jets interacting with nearby material.
Professor Paul O’Brien, a member of the international team of astronomers from the University of Leicester, said: ‘Neutrinos rarely interact with matter.
‘To detect them at all from the cosmos is amazing, but to have a possible source identified is a triumph.
‘This result will allow us to study the most distant, powerful energy sources in the universe in a completely new way.’
It looks a bit like neon artwork from the ’80s. But what the image above really shows is much, much cooler.
It’s a star, and the first light image captured by the newest instrument on the Gemini South telescope, the Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTrograph, or GHOST. What it shows is the entire optical spectrum of light emitted by a star named HD 222925, in amazing resolution.
“This is an exciting milestone for astronomers around the globe who rely on Gemini South to study the Universe from this exceptional vantage point in Chile,” said Jennifer Lotz, director of Gemini Observatory.
“Once this next-generation instrument is commissioned, GHOST will be an essential component of the astronomer’s toolbox.”
The light we can actually see being emitted by stars is chock full of hidden details describing the distant sun’s features. It can show us whether a star is moving by how light shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, while variations in brightness can reveal internal oscillations, which can be analyzed by asteroseismologists.
The entire spectrum of the star also reveals what it’s made of, which in turn can be used to learn all sorts of things about it, such as how old the star is, and where it formed.
That’s because different elements absorb and re-emit light differently. When astronomers look at a star’s spectrum, they can look for brighter and dimmer wavelengths, and use that information to determine which elements are present in the star’s atmosphere.
You can see what the dimmer features, known as absorption lines, look like in the image below.
The labeled spectrum of HD 222925. (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/GHOST Consortium)
This technique was recently used on Hubble observations HD 222925, a really oddball star located around 1,460 light-years away. Spectral analysis revealed the most elements ever seen in a star’s atmosphere, a whopping 65 – most of which were heavy elements that can only form in extremely energetic events, such as a neutron star collision or supernova.
That means that HD 222925, which is in a very late stage at the end of its life, probably formed from a cloud that was rich in these elements in the first place, seeded by the deaths of stars that had come before it.
The new images from GHOST have not revealed anything new about the star – yet. The star was the target of the instrument’s ‘first light’, the first image taken by a new telescope to check the telescope is working, and how well. This allows scientists to make any necessary first adjustments to the instrument.
The commissioning phase comes next, in which scientists and technicians will put GHOST through its paces to make sure the instrument is performing as intended.
Once that stage is complete, and any further adjustments made, GHOST will be ready for scientific observation, probably around the first half of next year.
That will be something to look forward to. GHOST, which took 10 years to construct, is 10 times more powerful than Gemini’s other major optical spectrograph, GMOS. It is, scientists say, the most powerful and sensitive spectrograph of its kind currently in operation on comparable telescopes.
It’s expected that GHOST will be able to provide fascinating insights on stars identified as interesting targets by other telescopes and surveys, and deliver us many more stars, split into their constituent wavelengths – beautiful ‘star-bows’ that will hopefully unlock many hidden secrets of the Milky Way.
The images were published by NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory here.