Latest news with #NOIRLab
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Space photo of the day for May 30, 2025
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A bright meteor, also called a fireball, is seen falling into Earth's atmosphere. From the perspective of the camera, it appears in the sky above the dome of Kitt Peak National Observatory. Kitt Peak National Observatory is in the Sonoran Desert, in Tucson, Arizona. The area was chosen for its access to dark skies and its altitude — over a mile (2.1 kilometers) above sea level — placing the telescope above most of our planet's thick atmosphere. According to NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), which, like, Kitt Peak is a project of the National Science Foundation, a meteor streak has to be brighter than how the planets appear in the sky (an apparent magnitude of –4 or brighter) to be considered a "fireball." You can read more about meteors and learn when meteor showers are expected this year. You can also read more about Kitt Peak National Observatory.
CBS News
13-05-2025
- Science
- CBS News
Universe will die "much sooner than expected," new research says
Could dark energy cause the universe to collapse? The universe is poised to die much faster than previously thought, according to new research by Dutch scientists. But there's no great need to panic. We still have 10 to the power of 78 years before it happens — that's a one with 78 zeroes. However, that is a major revision from the previous estimate of 10 to the power of 1,100 years, notes the research paper from Radboud University, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. "The final end of the universe is coming much sooner than expected but fortunately it still takes a very long time," said lead author Heino Falcke. A trio of scientists at Radboud set out to calculate when the most "durable" celestial bodies — white dwarf stars — would eventually die out. They based their calculations on Hawking radiation, named after celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking. Hawking postulated in the mid-1970s that black holes leak radiation, slowly dissolving like aspirin in a glass of water -- giving them a finite lifetime. The Radboud scientists extended this to other objects in the universe, calculating that the "evaporation time" depends on density. This enabled them to calculate the theoretical dissolution of the longest-lasting body, the white dwarf. "By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we can unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation," said co-author Walter van Suijlekom. Humankind needn't worry too much about the end of the universe. Unless we escape planet Earth, we'll be long gone. Scientists think that our sun will be too hot for life in about a billion years, boiling our oceans. In about eight billion years, our star will eventually expand towards the Earth, finally gobbling up our by-then barren and lifeless planet and condemning it to a fiery death. Shedding light on dark energy The research comes just weeks after scientists released new findings that may also shed light on the fate of the universe. Researchers in March said new data shows dark energy — a mysterious force that makes up nearly 70% of the universe — may actually be weakening. If dark energy is constant, an idea first introduced by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity, scientists say our universe may continue to expand forever, growing ever colder, lonelier and still. If dark energy ebbs with time, the universe could one day stop expanding and then eventually collapse on itself in what's called the "Big Crunch." "Now, there is the possibility that everything comes to an end," said cosmologist and study collaborator Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki of the University of Texas at Dallas. "Would we consider that a good or bad thing? I don't know." This image provided by NSF's NOIRLab shows the trails of stars above Kitt Peak National Observatory, where a telescope is mapping the universe to study a mysterious force called dark energy. NSF's NoirLab via AP Other efforts around the globe have an eye on dark energy and aim to release their own data in the coming years, including the European Space Agency's Euclid mission and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Launched in 2023, the ESA's $1.5 billion Euclid space telescope is equipped with a near-perfect 3-feet 11-inch-wide primary mirror and two instruments: a 600 megapixel visible light camera and a 64-megapixel infrared imaging spectrometer. The telescope's field of view is roughly twice the size of the full moon.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astroforensics Reveals Surprise Twist in Death of Planet Swallowed by Star
A surprise twist has emerged in the tale of an exoplanet that was devoured by its star. Rather than the star expanding to engulf the poor defenseless world, the world itself was complicit in its demise, falling in towards the star on a spiraling orbit of doom. The finding, revealed through observations from JWST, offers some insight into the evolution of planetary systems, and the wild ways they can behave. "Because this is such a novel event, we didn't quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction," says astronomer Ryan Lau of NOIRLab in the US. "With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own." The event first caught the attention of astronomers in 2020, when a star 12,000 light-years away suddenly blazed with light, brightening by a factor of 100 before rapidly fading again. By carefully analyzing all the possibilities, scientists concluded that the event, named ZTF SLRN-2020, could only be the result of a star scarfing down one of its exoplanets. This is a Big Deal. It was the first time astronomers had observed a star devouring one of its orbiting worlds, opening what we thought was a window into the final stages of the life of a planetary system as a Sun-like star puffs up into a red giant and engulfs the exoplanets orbiting it. "We are seeing the future of the Earth," astrophysicist Kishalay De of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said at the time. Only, well, that turns out not to have been the case at all. Lau and his colleagues turned JWST's mid-infrared and near-infrared instruments to the star to reveal a completely different story. When a star is just living its life, fusing atoms in its core to make heavier elements, it exists on the main sequence stage of a star's lifetime. When a Sun-like star starts to run out of its fuel, it puffs up into a red giant. It becomes hotter, brighter, larger: an unstable giant on the brink of death. Any worlds within range would be toast; the Sun, scientists believe, might puff up as far as the orbit of Mars when it reaches the red giant phase in a few billion years. However, when looking at the star responsible for ZTF SLRN-2020, JWST's mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) found that this star was nowhere near as bright as it should be if it was at the red giant phase. Rather, its brightness was consistent with a K-type star around 70 percent of the mass of the Sun, an orange dwarf with a main sequence lifespan up to 70 billion years. In other words, it's a smallish, dimmish, coolish star that's still comfortably sitting on the main sequence. There's no puffing, there has been no puffing, and there will be no puffing for a long time. Which means that the exoplanet had to have died some other way. There's a category of exoplanets out there that can explain it. A surprising number of 'hot Jupiters' exist in the Milky Way. These are Jupiter-sized worlds that are orbiting their stars extremely closely – too close to have been able to form there. We have even seen hot Jupiters on such close orbits that they are evaporating, creating long tails of material as they whirl around their star. This could be one of the earliest stages of devourment: the exoplanet loses mass, its orbit decays further, and it ultimately slams into the star and dies. This is what Lau and his colleagues think happened with ZTF SLRN-2020. A Jupiter-sized world was on a close orbit, closer than that of Mercury, that gradually decayed over millions of years, until it reached the point of total devastation. "The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment," says astronomer Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The planet, as it's falling in, started to sort of smear around the star." Eventually, it disappeared into the star, leaving behind a puff of gas that cooled into cold molecular gas. Observations with NIRSpec revealed something unexpected, though. Closer to the star than the cool gas was a cloud of hot molecular gas that contained molecules such as carbon monoxide and phosphine. The carbon monoxide, in particular, was interesting: it bore a powerful resemblance to the carbon monoxide seen in the planet-forming disks of dust that surround baby stars. What its presence at a planetary death means remains to be studied. "This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we've observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down," Lau says. "We hope this is just the start of our sample." The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. Striking Evidence of Water Imbalance on The Moon Hints at a Collision 21 Heartwarming Images Reveal The Human Side of Life in Space 'Hidden Galaxies' Exposed by Deep Sky Map Could Solve Energy Mystery
Asharq Al-Awsat
13-04-2025
- Science
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Quite Dramatic End to a Planet Swallowed by its Host Star
In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet getting swallowed by its host star. Based on the data at the time, they believed the planet met its doom as the star puffed up late in its lifespan, becoming what is called a red giant. New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope - sort of a postmortem examination - indicate that the planet's demise happened differently than initially thought, according to Reuters. Instead of the star coming to the planet, it appears the planet came to the star, with disastrous consequences – a death plunge after an erosion of this alien world's orbit over time, researchers said. The end was quite dramatic, as evidenced by the aftermath documented by Webb. Reuters wrote that the orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, observed hot gas likely forming a ring around the star following the event and an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. 'We do know that there is a good amount of material from the star that gets expelled as the planet goes through its death plunge. The after-the-fact evidence is this dusty leftover material that was ejected from the host star,' said astronomer Ryan Lau of the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal. The star is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The star is slightly redder and less luminous than our sun and about 70% of its mass. The planet is believed to have been from a class called 'hot Jupiter's' - gas giants at high temperatures owing to a tight orbit around their host star. 'We believe it probably had to be a giant planet, at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, to cause as dramatic of a disturbance to the star as what we are seeing,' said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Jupiter is our solar system's largest planet. The researchers believe that the planet's orbit had gradually deteriorated due to its gravitational interaction with the star, and hypothesized about what happened next. 'Then it starts grazing through the atmosphere of the star. At that point, the headwind of smashing through the stellar atmosphere takes over and the planet falls increasingly rapidly into the star,' MacLeod said. 'The planet both falls inward and gets stripped of its gaseous outer layers as it plows deeper into the star. Along the way, that smashing heats up and expels stellar gas, which gives rise to the light we see and the gas, dust and molecules that now surround the star,' MacLeod said. But they cannot be certain of the actual fatal events. 'In this case, we saw how the plunge of the planet affected the star, but we don't truly know for certain what happened to the planet. In astronomy there are lots of things way too big and way too 'out there' to do experiments on. We can't go to the lab and smash a star and planet together - that would be diabolical. But we can try to reconstruct what happened in computer models,' MacLeod said. None of our solar system's planets are close enough to the sun for their orbits to decay, as happened here. That does not mean that the sun will not eventually swallow any of them. About five billion years from now, the sun is expected to expand outward in its red giant phase and could well engulf the innermost planets Mercury and Venus, and maybe even Earth. During this phase, a star blows off its outer layers, leaving just a core behind - a stellar remnant called a white dwarf. Webb's new observations are giving clues about the planetary endgame. 'Our observations hint that maybe planets are more likely to meet their final fates by slowly spiraling in towards their host star instead of the star turning into a red giant to swallow them up. Our solar system seems to be relatively stable though, so we only have to worry about the sun becoming a red giant and swallowing us up,' Lau said.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Webb telescope documents alien planet's death plunge into a star
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) -In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet getting swallowed by its host star. Based on the data at the time, they believed the planet met its doom as the star puffed up late in its lifespan, becoming what is called a red giant. New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope - sort of a postmortem examination - indicate that the planet's demise happened differently than initially thought. Instead of the star coming to the planet, it appears the planet came to the star, with disastrous consequences - a death plunge after an erosion of this alien world's orbit over time, researchers said. The end was quite dramatic, as evidenced by the aftermath documented by Webb. The orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, observed hot gas likely forming a ring around the star following the event and an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. "We do know that there is a good amount of material from the star that gets expelled as the planet goes through its death plunge. The after-the-fact evidence is this dusty leftover material that was ejected from the host star," said astronomer Ryan Lau of the U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal. The star is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The star is slightly redder and less luminous than our sun and about 70% of its mass. The planet is believed to have been from a class called "hot Jupiters" - gas giants at high temperatures owing to a tight orbit around their host star. "We believe it probably had to be a giant planet, at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, to cause as dramatic of a disturbance to the star as what we are seeing," said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Jupiter is our solar system's largest planet. The researchers believe that the planet's orbit had gradually deteriorated due to its gravitational interaction with the star, and hypothesized about what happened next. "Then it starts grazing through the atmosphere of the star. At that point, the headwind of smashing through the stellar atmosphere takes over and the planet falls increasingly rapidly into the star," MacLeod said. "The planet both falls inward and gets stripped of its gaseous outer layers as it plows deeper into the star. Along the way, that smashing heats up and expels stellar gas, which gives rise to the light we see and the gas, dust and molecules that now surround the star," MacLeod said. But they cannot be certain of the actual fatal events. "In this case, we saw how the plunge of the planet affected the star, but we don't truly know for certain what happened to the planet. In astronomy there are lots of things way too big and way too 'out there' to do experiments on. We can't go to the lab and smash a star and planet together - that would be diabolical. But we can try to reconstruct what happened in computer models," MacLeod said. None of our solar system's planets are close enough to the sun for their orbits to decay, as happened here. That does not mean that the sun will not eventually swallow any of them. About five billion years from now, the sun is expected to expand outward in its red giant phase and could well engulf the innermost planets Mercury and Venus, and maybe even Earth. During this phase, a star blows off its outer layers, leaving just a core behind - a stellar remnant called a white dwarf. Webb's new observations are giving clues about the planetary endgame. "Our observations hint that maybe planets are more likely to meet their final fates by slowly spiraling in towards their host star instead of the star turning into a red giant to swallow them up. Our solar system seems to be relatively stable though, so we only have to worry about the sun becoming a red giant and swallowing us up," Lau said.
