Monday, January 5, 2009

Astronomy is truly a science that takes you places.  At one level, it has brought ME to Long Beach, CA to hear about the latest and greatest astronomy discoveries. At another level, it is bringing us (scientists, writers — and  ultimately our audiences) out to the most fascinating places in the cosmos.

“Where?” you ask.  How about the core of the Milky Way Galaxy? Q.D. Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst used the Hubble Space Telescope to make an infrared mosaic of the center of our galaxy.  It’s a beautiful panoramic view that takes in an area of space measuring 300 x 150 light-years.

This is a “false-color” image taken through a filter that reveals the glow of hydrogen gas heated by winds from new stars revealed as a new population of massive stars at the core. And the cool thing is that this is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the galactic core.

Astronomers are looking at this region to understand how massive stars form and what they do to their local enviroment during their tempestuous birth process. If we can understand how it works in OUR galaxy then we have insight into how it works in the cores of other galaxies, particularly the active ones.  Read more about this fascinating image at at the Space Telescope web site.

Now, looking at the center of the galaxy is difficult, since it’s shrouded in dust clouds. The good news is that we can plumb those depths using infrared and radio telescopes. Astronomers at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have used the Very Large Array in New Mexico to study young stars that really shouldn’t be there.

This is because the core of the galaxy is not a gentle creche where young stars should be able to form. It’s wracked with powerful radiation and gravitational tides stirred up by the four-million-solar-mass black hole that’s hidden at the core. It’s a place where stars go to get gobbled up, not get born.

So, nobody’s sure how a pair of protostars started to form at a spot only a few light-years from the galactic center. What this tells us is that this place, as wild as it might be, can still nurture star formation. Now astronomers will spend time figuring out how and why this is happening.

This scenario may suggest that star-forming clouds may be much denser than we thought.  For more information, check out the story here.

Continuing our look at the Milky Way, the folks at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory are looking at our galaxy using the Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope and what they’re finding is redefining what we know about our galactic home. Essentially, the Milky Way is rotating faster, is heavier, and is more likely to collide with other galaxies than we used to think.

You can read more about their findings at the link above, but just to give you an example of what they’ve found: at our location in the galaxy — some 28,000 light-years away from the core of the galaxy — we’re speeding along at 960,000 kilometers per hour (600,000 miles an hour).

A little closer to home, astronomers continue to focus attention (and detectors) on exoplanets — worlds circling other stars.

The white dwarf GD40 and five other similar type stars came in for some attention by Mike Jura of the University of California, who used the Spitzer Space Telescope to study the remains of asteroids chewed up as the stars went through their red giant phase and then shrank down to  become a white dwarf. That chewing action generated dust, which can be spotted with infrared-sensitive detectors. A star with MORE dust around it is “brighter” in infrared than a star with NO dust.

Ultimately, what their research suggests is that the same materials that made up our planet and other rocky worlds may be pretty common in the galaxy and the universe. You can read more about their work here.

One of the more intriguing stories is about how baby Jupiters form around other stars.

It turns out that, according to scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (who used the Spitzer Space Telescope to look at stars in the cluster NGC 2362 to detect infrared signatures of active planetary formation) a Jupiter-type planet has a pretty short time frame to form before the dynamics of the system shut off the process.

For our solar system, that means that Jupiter took only 2 to 3 million years to spring into being, whereas Earth took 20 to 30 million years to aggregate and solidify. Read more here.

Finally (for now, anyway), I got a press release detailing the upcoming WISE mission, which will provide a highly detailed all-sky survey in the infrared, from 3 to 25 microns. It’s supposed to launch in 2009 and will map the sky for at least seven months.  The scientists who use this instrument hope to find the most luminous galaxies in the universe, find the closest stars to the Sun, detect most of the asteroids in the Main Belt, and do a number of different studies of planetary discs around other stars.

Check out the WISE web site for more details.

Okay, there’s more to come, so stay tuned!