Latest news with #NSFNOIRLab
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
James Webb Spots Disturbing Sight: Entire Planet Sinking Into Star
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope appear to have made the first-ever direct observation of a star swallowing a planet. Clearly the stellar host was the culprit of this gruesome crime. Acts of "planetary engulfment" occur when a star enters its red giant stage — as our own Sun is fated to do — in a period near the end of its stellar evolution in which it slowly cools and puffs outward, dooming any world it eventually touches. But the astronomer's new study published in The Astrophysical Journal suggests otherwise. They discovered signs that it was actually the ill-fated planet that charged headlong into its own star, in an act of planetary suicide. "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," said lead author Ryan Lau, an astronomer at the NSF NOIRLab in Arizona, in a statement about the work. Residing some 12,000 light years away, researchers first spotted signs of the star, ZTF SLRN-2020, engulfing a planet in 2023. The telltale was a bright flash of light that betrayed the presence of dust, likely the remains of a disemboweled quondam world. What's more, early evidence suggested that the star was like our Sun, and was entering into its red giant stage. It was coming together. By all accounts, they had caught ZTF SLRN-2020 red handed, and decided to get a second look with the James Webb. "If this was the first directly detected planetary engulfment event, what better target is there to point at?" Lau told Science. Using the orbital observatory's Mid-Infrared Instrument, though, they made a surprising discovery. The star was simply not bright enough to be a red giant, blowing the case wide open. If it wasn't a red giant, then it couldn't have puffed outward to swallow anything. Instead, the team believes that the planet was a Jupiter-sized world that orbited close to the star to begin with, perhaps even closer than Mercury orbits our Sun. Disruptions in the tidal forces between the two bodies led the planet to be nudged inward over millions of years. "The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere," said coauthor Morgan MacLeod, a Harvard astrophysicist, in the statement. "Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment." As it met its face, the planet took a chunk out of its star, too, blasting some of its outer layers into space with the impact. Eventually, the ejecta cooled into a ring of cold dust encircling the star. But the bloodstain pattern doesn't quite add up. In another twist, the researchers also found another circumstellar ring of hot molecular gas even closer to the star, resembling a planet-forming region more than it does the vestiges of a vaporized world. In any case, there's a lot for the astronomers to chew on. Is this what the crime scene of a planetary engulfment typically looks like? And is this a more common form of demise than the red giant hypothesis? "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 said in the statement. "We hope this is just the start of our sample." More on Webb discoveries: Fearless James Webb Telescope Stares Down "City Killer" Asteroid That Had Been Feared to Strike Earth
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Found 300 of Some of the Rarest Black Holes in the Universe
Intermediate-mass black holes—somewhere between stellar-mass and supermassive—are the rarest type of black hole in the universe. 300 of these elusive black holes were recently observed by NSF NOIRLab's DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument). While some are the active galactic nuclei of dwarf galaxies, most are thought to have been the seeds of what are now supermassive black holes. Some black holes are supermassive beasts up to tens of billions of times the mass of our Sun. Then, there are stellar-mass black holes, which top out at a few solar masses. So... what fills the void in between? One of the rarest types of black holes in the universe are intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). Sometimes referred to as 'missing link' black holes, these cosmic gaping maws—which can be anywhere from about 100 to 100,000 solar masses in size—have proved difficult to find. Recently, however, NSF NOIRLab's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has been able to detect 300 more of them. DESI also detected active black holes in many dwarf galaxies, which are exactly what they sound like—rather small black holes with only a handful of stars (if you could call thousands to several billion a handful) scattered around. Only between 100 and 150 IMBHs were known, until now. Using the new data, a research team led by Ragadeepika Pucha from the University of Utah wanted to find out what intermediate-mass black holes can tell us about black hole formation. Supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which lurk in the centers of enormous galaxies like our own, destroy and consume so much material and expel so much energy that they are fairly obvious. Both the Milky Way's supermassive black hole (Sagittarius A*) and the monster at the heart of the galaxy M83 were able to be imaged because of the extreme brightness of their accretion disks. Black holes of lower mass, however, don't devour nearly as much. As a result, they are harder to make out—though, it does help if a smaller black hole is actively feeding at the time of observation, as the energy given off as it rips stars apart makes it easier to spot. 'When a black hole at the center of a galaxy starts feeding, it unleashes a tremendous amount of energy into its surroundings, transforming into what we call an active galactic nucleus,' Pucha said in a press release. 'This dramatic activity serves as a beacon, allowing us to identify hidden black holes in these small galaxies.' While Pucha's team was expecting most of the newly discovered IMBHs to be the active galactic nuclei (AGNs) of dwarf galaxies, that turned out not to be the case. Only 70 intermediate-mass black holes were associated with dwarf galaxies, judging by where their energy emissions came from. This is a surprise, considering how closely IMBHs are associated with dwarf galaxies (Given their size, it makes sense that their AGNs would be black holes of intermediate mass). But surprises are like candy to scientists, as they offer opportunities to ask questions that the experts may never have even thought to pose. After finding out the remaining IMBHs were not in dwarf galaxies, the researchers want to continue investigating these mysterious objects. They think that at least some of these black holes could be supermassive black hole seeds that might help explain the origins of the SMBHs we see in the universe today. SMBHs form by accretion, meaning that they accumulate more and more mass over time—either through standard 'eating' or through mergers with other black holes—until they reach a size that can hold a galaxy together. But these gigantic black holes had to start somewhere, and one of the leading theories for what their seeds may have been is IMBHs. Because the IMBHs observed by DESI are so distant, the team was able to see them as they were billions and billions of years ago, since that is how long their light took to reach Earth. As a result, it is possible that some of these objects have evolved into SMBHs by now, and studying their origins could tell us a lot about their evolution. 'As we cannot directly observe their formation with our current telescopes, we focus on their imprints on the local universe,' Pucha and her team said in a study recently posted to the preprint server arXiv. 'Most of these early black holes grow via accretion and mergers into the SMBHs we see today.' DESI, which will be scanning the sky for five more years, is expected to observe around 40 million galaxies and quasars during its lifespan. If it's already found 300 examples of one of the universe's greatest mysteries, who knows what else it will find. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Researchers find largest black hole jet from early universe
Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Researchers said on Thursday that they had discovered twin-lobed radio jets they suspect were formed when the universe was 1.2 billion years old, stretching at least twice the length of the Milky Way galaxy. Scientists added, however, that the black hole fueling the quasar producing the jets is small compared to other black holes, equaling 450 million suns. The discovery was made by the Gemini North telescope, located in Hawaii. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by the NSF NOIRLab astronomers, researchers said their observations have gained new insights into when the first jets formed in the universe and how they impacted the evolution of galaxies. "Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars," said Anniek Gloudemans, team leader and researcher said in a statement. "This seems to indicate that you don't necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such a powerful jet in the early universe." Previously discovered radio jets in the early universe had been attributed to noise from the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang creation of the universe. That background radiation, though, typically lessened with greater distance. "It's only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it's really far away," Gloudemans said. "This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths."
