Latest news with #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope
Time of India
3 hours ago
- Science
- Time of India
Birth of planet captured: Astronomers share rare glimpses of newborn planet about 1,300 light-yrs away
For the first time, a team of researchers has captured the birth of a planet around a star beyond our Sun. The observations captured the very beginnings of planet formation , a rare glimpse into the cosmic process that gives rise to Earth-like planets around a star. Observations were made using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to capture the formation of a new planetary system. Scientists detected the formation of the first specks of planet-building material around a baby star named HOPS-315 , located about 1,300 light-years away. HOPS-315 is considered a 'proto-star', meaning it's in the earliest stage of stellar evolution. These young stars are often surrounded by protoplanetary discs - rotating clouds of gas and dust where planets are born. This image shows jets of silicon monoxide (SiO) blowing away from the baby star HOPS-315. (Pic credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/M. McClure et al.) by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like New Apartments Just Listed – Take a Look Apartments | Search Ads Learn More Undo "For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our Sun," said Melissa McClure, lead author of the study from Leiden University in the Netherlands. The findings were published in the journal Nature . The team found evidence of silicon monoxide (SiO) gas and solid crystalline minerals in the disc surrounding HOPS-315. This suggests that planet-forming materials are beginning to condense from gas into solid particles, an evolutionary phase in the birth of planets. "This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disc — or anywhere outside our Solar System," said Edwin Bergin, co-author and professor at the University of Michigan, USA. The discovery unveils a never-before-seen phase in planet formation and opens a new window into studying how planetary systems like our own come into being.
Metro
4 hours ago
- Science
- Metro
Astronomers just casually witnessed the birth of a new solar system
Astronomers have witnessed the creation of a solar system for the first time. Data captured by the ALMA telescope in Chile and the James Webb Space Telescope showed planets forming around a star in the first record of its kind. The findings, detailed in a study published on Wednesday, showed how scientists observed a gaseous plate being formed around a star – the first step in the birth of a new solar system. Professor Melissa McCure from the Leiden University in the Netherlands said: 'For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our Sun.' The new solar system is being formed around a baby or 'proto' star named HOPS-315 located some 1300 light-years from Earth. Scientists believe the unique sighting can paint a picture of how our solar system was formed, as well as help us better understand the planetary formation process. Merel van't Hoff, of Purdue University in the USA, who co-authored the study, said the nascent planetary system resembles what our solar system would have looked like when it was beginning to form. She said: 'This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our Solar System.' A solar system is formed from solid material within meteorites, which condense and then bind themselves together. More Trending The pieces of matter begin to form tiny planets or 'plantesimals' before they form larger full size planets. The first minerals around HOPS-315 were detected by the James Webb Space Telescope, before the ALMA Telescope was used to identify exactly where they originated. ESO astronomer Elizabeth Humphreys, who manages the European ALMA Programme Manager said she was 'really impressed' with the study. She said: 'It suggests that HOPS-315 can be used to understand how our own Solar System formed. This result highlights the combined strength of JWST and ALMA for exploring protoplanetary discs.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: France's new rocket Baguette One to go where no baker has gone before MORE: Felix Baumgartner's chilling last Instagram post moments before he died mid-air MORE: A new world may have been discovered beyond Neptune
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes
Astronomers using data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a spectacular cosmic object they're calling the "Infinity Galaxy." The site of an epic head-on collision between two galaxies, it could harbor the secrets to how the heaviest black holes in the universe, the supermassive black holes found at the hearts of galaxies, are born and reach their unbelievable masses — masses extreme enough to organize trillions of stars around them. "Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in," Pieter van Dokkum, lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement about the work. "As an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole," van Dokkum added. "So, this system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there." The singularity-studded object was found by searching through public data collected in the COSMOS-Web survey, which is designed to document the evolution of galaxies, with data gathered on 800,000 realms and counting. In an image taken with the Webb, two bright spots represent the nuclei of each of the two colliding galaxies, both surrounded by their own ring of stars. This lends it the shape of an infinity symbol, hence its memorable name. What's most striking, though, is what appears between them, revealed in follow-up observations: an enormous supermassive black hole swimming in a sea of ionized gas. It's estimated to contain a mass equivalent to a million times that of our own Sun — and it's still actively growing. "It likely didn't just arrive there, but instead it formed there. And pretty recently," van Dokkum said. "We think we're witnessing the birth of a supermassive black hole — something that has never been seen before." This could be some of the most compelling evidence yet of black holes forming by directly collapsing into a singularity from a huge, heavy cloud of gas. The origins of supermassive black holes are one of the great mysteries of cosmology. They undeniably exist, forming the heart of the largest galaxies, including our own Milky Way — but how they form and gain such unbelievable heft is still hotly debated; the heaviest black holes may weigh hundreds of billions of solar masses. The most well-known way that black holes are born is through the collapse of a very massive star that explodes in a supernova. This might spawn a black hole with several to a hundred times the mass of the Sun, maybe even a thousand. Then, give one of these stellar-mass black holes hundreds of millions to billions of years to devour matter that falls into it, or merge with other black holes, and it might reach a supermassive stature. Astronomers, however, have observed black holes boasting millions of solar masses while existing just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which simply isn't enough time for one to reach its size by gradually accreting matter. That points to another possibility called the "heavy seed theory," explains van Dokkum, "where a much larger black hole, maybe up to one million times the mass of our Sun, forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud." This would've been facilitated by the hot conditions of the early universe, allowing a gas cloud to collapse into one large object instead of forming numerous smaller stars. "It's not clear that this direct-collapse process could work in practice," van Dokkum said. But there's compelling reason to believe that the Infinity Galaxy is home to a black hole born through this exact process. The best clue is the central supermassive black hole's velocity, which matches up with the surrounding gas, strongly suggesting it formed right where we're seeing it. If it formed elsewhere in the cosmos and barged into the mix, the velocity would be significantly higher. What astronomers think happened, then, is that when the constituent two galaxies collided, the gas contained in them compressed to form a "dense knot," van Dokkum said, "which then collapsed into a black hole." "We can't say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole," van Dokkum concluded. "But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we're seeing a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the competing explanations." More on black holes: Scientists Detect Sign of Something Impossible Out in Deep Space Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers Discover Uncommon Way for Black Holes to Form
Artist's rendering of the James Webb Telescope in space Credit - Getty Images/iStockphoto NASA's James Webb Space Telescope continues to deliver the goods. Launched on Christmas Day, 2021, it has since sent back a storm of dazzling images and a trove of good science. Now Webb has done it again. As NASA reports, two astronomers working with raw Webb data the space agency periodically makes available to researchers, have found evidence of a fast-growing black hole in an unexpected place and formed in an unexpected way. What the two astronomers—Pieter van Dokkumum of Yale University and Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen—found was a pair of spiral galaxies that collided in space. Each galaxy has a black hole at its center that was already present before the collision and which emit a red glow surrounded by a ring of light and matter, giving the overall formation the shape of the infinity symbol. Van Dokkum and Brammer nicknamed the pair the Infinity Galaxy. What surprised them was that the formation was also home to a third, larger, supermassive black hole—one with the mass of perhaps one million suns. This black hole was not in the center of one or the other galaxy as a supermassive black hole should be, but rather in the mashup of dust and gasses between them. 'Everything is unusual about this galaxy,' said Van Dokkum, in an extensive description he wrote for NASA. 'Not only does it look strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in.' Just how the object formed is unknown, but Van Dokkum and Brammer have two theories, called the 'light seeds' and 'heavy seeds' scenarios. In the light seeds version, a star explodes and its core collapses, forming a black hole with a mass of perhaps 1,000 suns. Over time, other nearby stars collapse and form their own black holes and finally all of the bodies merge to form one supermassive black hole. But that theory has a problem. 'The merger process takes time,' Van Dokkum says, 'and Webb has found incredibly massive black holes at incredibly early times in the universe—possibly even too early for the process to explain them.' That doesn't mean the light seeds scenario doesn't ever play out, but it does mean that it's not as common as astronomers may believe. In the heavy seeds scenario a supermassive black hole forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud. In the case of the Infinity Galaxy, this occurred during the collision, when the galactic gas was shocked and compressed by the violence of the cosmic crackup. 'This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then compressed into a black hole,' Van Dokkum says. That process is also called a direct collapse black hole. Not only did a supermassive black hole form from this collision, that black hole is still growing. Radio and X-ray emissions confirmed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and by the ground-based Very Large Array, confirm that the black hole is still pulling in prodigious amounts of dust and gas from its surroundings. Van Dokkum and Brammer prefer the heavy seeds scenario to explain what they found since it would be such a natural result of a galactic collision. 'By looking at the Infinity Galaxy, we think we have pieced together a story of how this could have happened here,' says Van Dokkum. But they concede that other, less likely occurrences could explain the supermassive black hole. For one thing, the body between the two galaxies in the Infinity Galaxy might be a runaway black hole that was ejected from its parent galaxy and is now passing through the Infinity Galaxy, and just happened to have been spotted by the Webb telescope during this relatively brief interregnum. Alternatively, the supermassive black hole might be at the center of a third galaxy that happens to be in the foreground of the same area of sky as the Infinity Galaxy. If that third galaxy were a dwarf galaxy, it might be faint enough that only the superheated gas and dust surrounding the black hole would be visible. But the researchers don't expect those theories to be borne out. If the black hole were a runaway, the velocity of the gasses flowing into it would likely be different from the velocity of the gasses in the Infinity Galaxy. While they haven't yet measured the speed of the gasses, they expect them to be similar. The idea that the black hole lies at the center of a dwarf galaxy can be dismissed almost out of hand since dwarf galaxies typically don't form black holes that big. All that is enough for the astronomers to claim at least a cautious victory in their discovery. 'We can't say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole,' says Van Dokkum. 'But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we're seeing a newborn black hole while eliminating some of the competing explanations.' Write to Jeffrey Kluger at Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers spot the exact moment a new planet system is being born around an alien star
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. For the first time ever, scientists have captured incredible images of an alien star system being born. The image shows the very earliest moments of planet formation, when hot minerals are just beginning to solidify around a distant star, according to a statement. The researchers published their findings July 16 in the journal Nature. Two telescopes worked together to reveal outflows of hot minerals around HOPS-315, which is a baby star like our sun roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth. Initially, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted "stuff coming from close to the star, but it wasn't in the planet-forming region," study co-author Edwin Bergin, a star formation specialist at the University of Michigan, told Live Science. His team then used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is a set of antennas in the Chilean desert, to trace the outflow back to the protoplanetary disk — the dense disk of matter around a young star, where clumps of gas and dust can collapse into larger objects like planets. "Then that unlocked everything," Bergin said. It's the first time that planet-forming solids have ever been detected, he said – which could help researchers better understand how our own solar system was born. Related: Scientists discover rare planet at the edge of the Milky Way using space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein Our solar system came into existence roughly 4.5 billion years ago in a cloud of gas and dust. As our sun formed and evolved, other materials gradually condensed into small solids, which grew by colliding and accreting into asteroids and comets, then in some cases, planetesimals and planets. The very earliest phases of this process are tough to spot in other systems, Bergin said, and the phase lasts just 100,000 to 200,000 years, he noted. But learning more about what happens in this moment is crucial, because when minerals begin to condense, organics also form. The new image shows carbon monoxide – represented in orange – blowing away from the star in a butterfly-shaped outflow, with a blue jet of silicon monoxide shining like an alien spine. A disk of gaseous silicon monoxide surrounding the area was also revealed, just as the gas was solidifying into silicates. Related stories —Scientists discover rare planet at the edge of the Milky Way, using space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein —'Eyeball' planet spied by James Webb telescope might be habitable —Our sun may be overdue for a 'superflare' stronger than billions of atomic bombs, new research warns Earth and similar rocky planets like it formed as silicates and carbon came together, Bergin explained. Other research using ancient meteorites – formed in this same era – show these space rocks are full of crystalline minerals, containing silicon monoxide. These solids are always moving about in the hot and windy conditions of a young star system, creating a rich environment for rocks to bind to each other. "The story of planetary formation is the story of motion and movement," Bergin noted. The researchers are hoping to use ALMA again to probe other young star systems that may have similar outflows, he added.
