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Hubble Space Telescope captures stunning red view of the Soul Nebula

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Holiday decorations may have come down already on Earth, but a nebula located 7,000 light-years away is keeping the festive spirit alive.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a stunning image of a small region of Westerhout 5, also known as the Soul Nebula, glowing red. The suffusion of red light is caused by H-alpha emission, which happens when very energetic electrons within hydrogen atoms lose energy, causing the release of this distinctive red light, Hubble representatives wrote in a description of the image.

This red light also reveals a range of fascinating features, such as a so-called free-floating evaporating gaseous globule (frEGG). Seen as a dark, tadpole-shaped region in the upper center left of the image, this frEGG is officially named KAG2008 globule 13 and J025838.6+604259. 

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time! 

The Soul Nebula, located 7,000 light-years from Earth, is infused with a red glow in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.  (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sahai)

This and other frEGGs belong to a special class of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which occur in nebulas when energetic radiation from young, hot stars ionizes surrounding gas by stripping away electrons. This causes the gas to disperse away from those bright stars in a process called photoevaporation, which may help to halt star formation in nebulas.

In EGGs, the gas is so dense that this photoevaporation process happens much more slowly than it does in surrounding regions of gas. This slower photoevaporation and the protection of gas from dispersal allow gas to remain dense enough to collapse and form protostars, which eventually go on to become full-fledged stars. This means astronomers are interested in frEGGs and EGGs because they are the areas of nebulas where star birth may have once taken place.

Astronomers discovered the existence of EGGs only recently. A prominent example of these structures is located at the tips of the Pillars of Creation in a 1995 Hubble image of the nebula. frEGGs are an even newer find; they are distinct from EGGs because they are detached from surrounding gas, giving them a distinct tadpole-like shape.

The Soul Nebula is the partner of another nebula that will have its image widely shared as Valentine’s Day approaches: the Heart Nebula. Officially known as IC 1805, the massive cloud of gas and dust is so named because the glowing hydrogen content makes it resemble a pink heart. At 7,500 light-years away, the Heart Nebula can be snapped by amateur astrophotographers, making it one of the most commonly shared space images around Feb. 14.

The “Heart and Soul” nebula complex forms a vast star-forming region that spans 300 light-years, with the two nebulas joined by a bridge of gas. Both nebulas are packed with bright stars that are just a few million years old, veritable infants compared with our nearly 5 billion-year-old sun. 

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Hubble captures stunning stellar duo in Orion Nebula 1,450 light-years away

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured a stunning new image of the bright variable star V 372 Orionis and a companion star.

The NASA and European Space Agency telescope snapped the stars, which lie in the Orion Nebula, a region of stellar formation located around 1,450 light-years away from Earth. 

The companion star is seen in the upper left corner. 

V 372 Orionis is a particular type of variable star known as an Orion Variable. 

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The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
(ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Bally, M. Robberto)

Patchy gas and dust of the Orion Nebulae are seen throughout the image. Orion Variables are commonly associated with diffuse nebulae. 

The image from the team overlays data from two of the telescope’s instruments — the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. 

The data at infrared and visible wavelengths were layered to reveal details of the area. 

An astronaut aboard the space shuttle Atlantis captured this image of the Hubble Space Telescope May 19, 2009.
(NASA)

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Notably, the diffraction spikes that surround the brightest stars of the image were formed when an intense point source of light interacted with the four vanes inside Hubble that support the telescope’s secondary mirror. 

In this April 13, 2017, photo provided by NASA, technicians lift the mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope using a crane at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
(Laura Betz/NASA via AP, File)

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Comparatively, those of the James Webb Space Telescope are six-pointed due to its hexagonal mirror segments and 3-legged support structure for the secondary mirror.  

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital. 

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Surprise asteroid photobombs Hubble telescope image, can you spot it?

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The four thin lines in the upper left corner of this image show an asteroid streaking across the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope just as it photographed a nearby galaxy. (Image credit: SA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully)

The Hubble Space Telescope caught an unexpected asteroid streaking across a field of distant galaxies.

In the image, released on Monday (Jan. 16) by the European Space Agency (ESA), the asteroid can be seen as a row of four thin consecutive lines captured in alternating shades of blue and orange spreading from the left upper corner toward the middle section of the image. 

The asteroid, ESA said in a statement (opens in new tab), is only a few kilometers (miles) wide, and part of our solar system. The other objects seen in the image, however, are far more distant. The Hubble Space Telescope took the image as part of a campaign focused on observing all of the nearest galactic neighbors of our galaxy, the Milky Way. 

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

When the project was proposed, only 75% of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors had their picture taken by Hubble, ESA said in the statement. To capture the remaining 25%, astronomers used gaps between longer observation campaigns in the telescope’s schedule. 

“The project was an elegantly efficient way to fill out some gaps not only in Hubble’s observing schedule, but also in our knowledge of nearby galaxies,” ESA said in the statement. 

The asteroid in the image appears as four separate streaks because the image consists of four exposures. Each line has a different color due to the filters used by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, which took the photographs.

Dominating the image is a small galaxy known as UGC 7938. Located some 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, UGC 7938 appears as a grainy, fuzzy cloud at the center of the image. The dwarf galaxy, characteristic for its irregularity, is a primitive type that astronomers believe was common in the early universe when galaxies started to form. 

All over the image, tens of background galaxies are scattered ranging from evolved spirals to simple ellipticals that have not yet developed a more intricate internal structure. The simple orange and white specks of light dotting the image are stars inside our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope records black hole contorting star into donut shape

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recorded a star’s final moments in detail as it was eaten by a black hole.

The agency said the process twisted the star into a donut-like shape in the process. 

When a star gets close enough, the gravitational grasp of the black hole violently rips it apart, belching out intense radiation in what is known as a “tidal disruption event.” 

Astronomers are using the telescope to better understand what happens, utilizing its powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the AT2022dsb “stellar snacking event.” 

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This sequence of artist’s illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. 2. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field. 3. The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))

The star is located nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004. 

Approximately 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. 

The agency recently reported that a high-energy space observatory spotted another such event in March 2021.

The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))

“We’re excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole,” Emily Engelthaler, of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. 

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For any given galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center, it’s estimated that stellar shredding happens only a few times over every 100,000 years.

This AT2022dsb event was first caught on March 1, 2022, by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, a network of ground-based telescopes. 

The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.
(Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))

The collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough due to ultraviolet spectroscopy over a period of time that is longer than normal.

“Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens,” Peter Maksym, of the Center for Astrophysics, explained. “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time.”

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The data are being interpreted as coming from the donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star. 

The area is known as a torus, swirling around a black hole in the middle.

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital. 

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While a Black Hole Shredded a Star, NASA’s Hubble Was Watching

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A black hole’s invisibility could be considered its greatest strength. Across the fabric of space, these silent beasts drink every drop of light trickling into their gravitational pulses, bottle these rays from the observable universe, and in darkness, wait for a helpless star to appear. Then, they attack. 

Now, scientists have announced NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope caught what comes next in such a cosmic nightmare — also known as a tidal disruption event, during which a black hole feasts on its prey, or “accretes” a star. Astronomers shared the news Thursday at an American Astronomical Society meeting. 

“Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright,” Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages.”

Caught in a chasm’s deathly gravitational embrace, this star’s spherical shape was seen aggressively mutated into a twisted strand of glowing matter. Before Hubble’s glassy eyes, the star was viciously ripped apart until it looked like a warped whirlpool of fairy dust, encircling its predator and leaving behind a flaming tail to illuminate the otherwise blank void of space. 

Aptly, this is sometimes referred to as a black hole “spaghettifying” matter because even the strongest of objects with the misfortune of treading too close to the gravitationally extreme pit gets turned to flimsy, noodly shreds.

This sequence of artist illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. 2. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field. 3. The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a doughnut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.


NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

Meanwhile, the black hole devoured its now-doughnut of a star — scientifically called a torus at this point — pulling in the tortured orb’s gasses while simultaneously spitting material out as though they’re bones of a scrumptious chicken dinner. For context, this torus is thought to be the size of our entire solar system.

“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. We’re seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that’s being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour,” Maksym said, which translates to 3 percent the speed of light. 

Not only is this huge because, well, it’s absolutely spectacular — but also because galaxies with quiet, or quiescent, black holes like the one Hubble analyzed are expected to devour a star only once every 100,000 years. 

“We really are still getting our heads around the event,” Maksym said.

https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/83e39f153aa6dbcadd26cc770c7a8b34b84e0f47/hub/2021/02/22/f6a49a2d-d464-468e-b42d-e6b6336df9e7/rippedtoshreds.gif?auto=webp&format=mp4&width=1200

A simulation of a star being ripped to shreds after it approaches a black hole. 


DESY, Science Communication Lab

But it didn’t look like a Hollywood movie

To be clear, Hubble didn’t literally capture footage of everything happening in real time. So no, this black hole didn’t look like the iconic Interstellar leviathan from the ‘scope’s vantage point. 

I mean, after all, this whole situation occurred some 300 million light-years away from Earth — which also means it happened about 300 million years ago, yet light from the event just reached our planet so we’re seeing it in what we call “the present.”

However, what Hubble did to catch this scene pretty much allows scientists to deduce what it would look like if we could somehow watch the details unfold like a film. 

The telescope’s powerful ultraviolet sensitivity was able to study light borne from the shredded star that traveled to Earth over millennia, and astronomers could basically trace all those light signals to draw out how the star contorted, crumpled and creased as it perished. 

You can watch an imagining of the event below, per the team’s calculations.

“There are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there’s a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra,” Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. “We’re excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole.” 

This event, formally dubbed AT2022dsb, was caught on March 1, 2022, by a network of ground-based telescopes called the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae. 

That piqued the interest of Hubble astronomers, who immediately moved to try to get some ultraviolet readings on the violent tidal disruption for as long as possible, to pin down as much information as possible of the star’s evolution as it grew ripped apart by the black hole. 

“You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole. And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see,” Maksym said. “This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

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Hubble finds hungry black hole twisting captured star into donut shape

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This sequence of artist’s illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. 2. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field. 3. The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation.

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star’s final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole.

These are termed “tidal disruption events.” But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter. There is a balance between the black hole’s gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out. In other words, black holes are messy eaters. Astronomers are using Hubble to find out the details of what happens when a wayward star plunges into the gravitational abyss.

Hubble can’t photograph the AT2022dsb tidal event’s mayhem up close, since the munched-up star is nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004. But astronomers used Hubble’s powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the shredded star, which include hydrogen, carbon, and more. The spectroscopy provides forensic clues to the black hole homicide.

About 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. NASA recently reported that several of its high-energy space observatories spotted another black hole tidal disruption event on March 1, 2021, and it happened in another galaxy. Unlike Hubble observations, data was collected in X-ray light from an extremely hot corona around the black hole that formed after the star was already torn apart.

“However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there’s a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra,” said Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole.” Changes in the doomed star’s condition are taking place on the order of days or months.






For any given galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center, it’s estimated that the stellar shredding happens only a few times in every 100,000 years.

This AT2022dsb stellar snacking event was first caught on March 1, 2022 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “Assassin”), a network of ground-based telescopes that surveys the extragalactic sky roughly once a week for violent, variable, and transient events that are shaping our universe. This energetic collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough for the Hubble astronomers to do ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer than normal period of time.

“Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens,” said Peter Maksym of the CfA. “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time.”

The Hubble spectroscopic data are interpreted as coming from a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star. This area, known as a torus, is the size of the solar system and is swirling around a black hole in the middle.

“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. We’re seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that’s being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light),” said Maksym. “We really are still getting our heads around the event. You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole. And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see. This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

The results were reported at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

More information:
aas.org/meetings/aas241

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Citation:
Hubble finds hungry black hole twisting captured star into donut shape (2023, January 13)
retrieved 13 January 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-01-hubble-hungry-black-hole-captured.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.



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Astronomers May Have Just Spotted the Universe’s First Galaxies

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Scientists just announced that they’ve detected what might be some of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe, a tantalizing discovery made thanks to NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope. 

“This is the first large sample of candidate galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope,” astronomer Haojing Yan said yesterday at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Yan, who is at the University of Missouri, led the newly published study. Because the more sensitive JWST can see further into deep space than its predecessor Hubble does, it essentially sees further back in time. In the new catalog of 87 galaxies astronomers have spotted using it, some could date back to about 13.6 billion years ago, just 200 million years after the Big Bang. That’s when the galaxies emitted the light that we’re seeing today—although those systems of stars, gas, and dust would have changed dramatically since then, if they still exist at all.

While scientists have studied other faraway galaxies that date back to when the universe was still young, the discoveries by Yan and his colleagues could break those records by a few hundred million years or so. But at this point, they are all still considered “candidate galaxies,” which means that their birthdates still need confirmation. 

Dating a galaxy can be a challenging matter: It involves measuring its “redshift,” how much the light it emits is stretched toward longer red wavelengths, which tells astronomers how fast the galaxy is moving away from us in the quickly expanding universe. That, in turn, tells astronomers the galaxy’s distance from Earth—or more exactly, the distance that the photons from its stars had to travel at the speed of light before reaching a space telescope near the Earth, like JWST. Light from stars in the most distant galaxy in this collection may have been emitted 13.6 billion years ago, likely fairly soon after the young galaxy came together. 

These newly estimated distances will have to be confirmed with spectra, which means measuring the light the galaxies emit across the electromagnetic spectrum and pinpointing its unique signatures. Still, Yan expects many of them to be correctly dated to the early days of the cosmos: “I’ll bet $20 and a tall beer that the success rate will be higher than 50 percent,” he said.

Yan’s team imaged these galaxies with JWST’s NIRCam at six near-infrared wavelengths. To estimate their distances, the astronomers used a standard “dropout” technique: Hydrogen gas surrounding galaxies absorbs light at a particular wavelength, so the wavelengths at which an object can or can’t be seen puts a limit on how far away it is likely to be. These 87 candidate galaxies mostly look like blobs that can only be detected in the longer (and therefore redder) near-infrared wavelengths detectable by NIRCam, which could mean they’re very distant, and therefore very old. 

However, it’s possible that some of them could be much closer than expected—which would mean they aren’t so old after all. For example, it could be that their light is just too faint to be detected at some wavelengths. Until Yan can collect more detailed data, he won’t know for sure.

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Hubble Space Telescope captures exquisite view of nearby star cluster

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A dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a stunning view of a nearby open cluster of stars that is slowly dissolving into the dwarf galaxy around it. 

The photo shows part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way that is just 200,000 light-years from Earth and the smaller partner of the slightly closer Large Magellanic Cloud, also a neighboring dwarf galaxy. Its proximity lets us observe it in such great detail that the Hubble Space Telescope can see a relatively tiny gathering of stars with remarkable clarity.

The new Hubble photo, which NASA and the European Space Agency released in December 2022, shows only a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud — an open cluster designated NGC 376. An open cluster is distinguished from a globular cluster by its more open, loosely bound structure, which allows us to identify individual stars even in its most tightly packed regions. Globular clusters, by contrast, are so dense that stars can be within a single light-year of each other and the light from the stars in their central regions blends together.

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

Although the Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, NGC 376 is only about 3,400 solar masses, so it is considerably less massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud itself. Located in the southern sky constellation Tucana, NGC 376 was first discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. 

According to a 2011 study in The Astrophysical Journal, NGC 376 has likely lost about 90% of its original stellar mass and is in the process of dissolving into the broader Small Magellanic Cloud. When that will happen isn’t clear, but the slow loss of star-forming gas and the gravitational pull from the rest of the Small Magellanic Cloud make the process inevitable.

The Hubble image was produced using data from two investigations — one using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and another employing both the ACS and Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.  

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Hubble finds that ghost light among galaxies stretches far back in time

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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: NASA, ESA, STScI, James Jee (Yonsei University)

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.

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). Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, James Jee (Yonsei University)

“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

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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.



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Sparkling Hubble Space Telescope photo shows globular cluster

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A sparkling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures the glow of thousands upon thousands of stars in an ancient globular cluster near the heart of the Milky Way. 

A globular cluster is a massive collection of stars pulled in close and tied together by their mutual gravitation, with many stars only a light-year or two away from their neighbors. The globular cluster in the new Hubble Space Telescope image, called Pismis 26, takes its name from astronomer Paris Pismis, who discovered the collection of stars at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico in 1959. 

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The stars in Pismis 26 take on a nearly spherical structure. The cluster appears to contain predominantly red stars, with a smattering of brighter blue stars along the edges. These colors are due, in part, to the cluster’s age, which is estimated at about 12 billion years, which means it contains many of the oldest stars in our galaxy, if not the universe. These stars are likely a much deeper red than the bright-blue ones that are typical of large, young, fast-burning stars that die out much sooner or the typical yellow star that straddles the line between the two.

The cluster is also heavily metallic, meaning that its stars contain higher levels of elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium than stars like the sun do. Particularly, scientists think these stars are rich in nitrogen, which also suggests that the globular cluster’s star population spans a range of ages, according to a NASA statement. 

Additionally, part of the cluster’s coloration comes from a phenomenon known as reddening, which is a result of dense stellar dust blocking shorter-wavelength blue light while allowing longer-wavelength red light to pass through more easily. 

Pismis 26 is located near the galactic bulge that surrounds Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. This part of the galaxy is especially dust-heavy, thanks to the presence of Sgr A* and its incredible gravity, as well as that of all the material surrounding it in the bulge and the dense sphere of stars it contains. 

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