Super high energy particle falls to Earth, source a mystery | Digital Trends

techNovember 25, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Researchers have detected one of the highest-energy particles ever falling to Earth. Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that come from sources in space such as the sun, but this recent detection is more powerful than anything that can be explained by known sources in our galaxy or even beyond. The particle had an energy of 2.4 x 10²⁰eV, which is millions of times the energy of the particles produced in a particle collider.

Artist’s illustration of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray astronomy to clarify extremely energetic phenomena. Osaka Metropolitan University/Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige

The detection was made in May 2021 using a facility called the Telescope Array, located near Salt Lake City in Utah. It has 500 surface detectors which are spread over 300 square miles of desert, designed to detect cosmic ray events. It has observed more than 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays since 2007, but this was the most powerful one detected so far.

It is the second most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, only beaten out by one detected in 1991 which was named the Oh-My-God particle. The strange thing about these events is that the researchers have no idea where they are coming from.

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“The particles are so high energy, they shouldn’t be affected by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields. You should be able to point to where they come from in the sky,” said one of the researchers, John Matthews of the University of Utah, in a statement. “But in the case of the Oh-My-God particle and this new particle, you trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it. That’s the mystery of this—what the heck is going on?”

Even a big event like a supernova would be nowhere near powerful enough to produce particles like this, and the particle seemed to come from an empty area of space on the edge of the Milky Way called the Local Void. “These events seem like they’re coming from completely different places in the sky. It’s not like there’s one mysterious source,” said another of the researchers, John Belz. “It could be defects in the structure of spacetime, colliding cosmic strings. I mean, I’m just spit-balling crazy ideas that people are coming up with because there’s not a conventional explanation.”

The researchers hope to use upcoming facilities like an expansion to the Telescope Array to find and study more of these events and learn about their possible source. “It’s a real mystery,” said Belz.

The research is published in the journal Science.

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Stunning James Webb image shows the heart of our Milky Way | Digital Trends

techNovember 20, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Stunning James Webb image shows the heart of our Milky Way | Digital Trends

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the heart of our galaxy, in a region close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. The image shows a star-forming region where filaments of dust and gas are clumping together to give birth to new baby stars.

The image was captured using Webb’s NIRCam instrument, a camera that looks in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with shorter wavelengths shown in blue and cyan and longer wavelengths shown in yellow and red.

The full view of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C (Sgr C) region, along with some as-yet-unidentified features. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, S. Crowe (UVA)

This region is called Sagittarius C, and is located around 300 light-years away from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. For reference, Earth is located much further away from the galactic center, at a distance of around 26,000 light years from Sagittarius A*.

There are thought to be as many as 500,000 stars in the Sagittarius C region, including many young protostars, some of which will go on to become main-sequence stars like our sun. As stars form, they give off powerful stellar winds which blow away nearby material and prevent more stars from forming very close to them.

These outflows are illuminated in the infrared wavelength, and the cyan-colored patches in the image are created by ionized gas. The young stars give off a great deal of energy, which ionizes the hydrogen gas around them and makes them glow in the infrared.

However, there are actually even more stars in this area than can be seen in the image. The pockets of darkness scattered throughout the image aren’t blank but are dense clouds that are dark in the infrared, including a large dense area in the heart of the region.

There are still some surprises to be found in the image too, with some features that scientists need to study in more depth. “Researchers say they have only begun to dig into the wealth of unprecedented high-resolution data that Webb has provided on this region, and many features bear detailed study,” Webb scientists write. “This includes the rose-colored clouds on the right side of the image, which have never been seen in such detail.”

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NASA project turns images of space into music you can play | Digital Trends

techNovember 19, 2023 FranklinWilbur

NASA project turns images of space into music you can play | Digital Trends

For several years, NASA has been producing sonifications in which images of space are turned into soundscapes so that they can be enjoyed both by people who are vision impaired and by a general audience who are interested in experiencing space in a new way. Now, NASA has taken this concept one step further by turning an image of space into an original composition to be performed by a group of musicians.

The image used as the basis for the compositions is of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a bustling region of gas filaments, X-rays, and a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. The image combines data from Chandra, Hubble, and Spritzer to bring together data from the X-ray, visible light, and infrared wavelengths.

The Galactic Center sonification, using data from NASA’s Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, has been translated into a new composition with sheet music and score. Working with a composer, this soundscape can be played by musicians. Credit: Composition: NASA/CXC/SAO/Sophie Kastner: Data: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; IR: Spitzer NASA/JPL-Caltech; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida); Video Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Jubett & P. David

The project brought in composer Sophie Kastner to interpret the image into sheet music for instruments including strings, piano, flue, clarinet, and percussion.

“It’s like a writing a fictional story that is largely based on real facts,” said Kastner in a statement. “We are taking the data from space that has been translated into sound and putting a new and human twist on it.”

Kastner said she drew inspiration by focusing on portions of the image and creating soundscapes that reflected the contents of each region. “I like to think of it as creating short vignettes of the data, and approaching it almost as if I was writing a film score for the image,” said Kastner. “I wanted to draw listener’s attention to smaller events in the greater data set.”

Universe of Sound: Data to Music Translation

The Chandra team that has been working on the sonifications described the setting of the image to music as an extension of their work making space images accessible and intriguing to all.

“We’ve been working with these data, taken in X-ray, visible, and infrared light, for years,” said Kimberly Arcand, Chandra visualization and emerging technology scientist. “Translating these data into sound was a big step, and now with Sophie, we are again trying something completely new for us.”

This composition is a pilot, but the team hopes to create more compositions in the future inspired by other space images.

“In some ways, this is just another way for humans to interact with the night sky just as they have throughout recorded history,” says Arcand. “We are using different tools, but the concept of being inspired by the heavens to make art remains the same.”

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The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past

techNovember 12, 2023 FranklinWilbur

The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past

To make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as well as genealogy. By situating stars in time and place, astronomers can retrace history and infer how the Milky Way was built, piece by piece, over billions of years.

The first major effort to study the primordial Milky Way’s formation began in the 1960s, when Olin Eggen, Donald Lynden-Bell and Alan Sandage, who was Edwin Hubble’s former graduate student, argued that the galaxy collapsed from a spinning gas cloud. For a long time after that, astronomers thought that the first structure to emerge in our galaxy was the halo, followed by a bright, dense disk of stars. As more powerful telescopes came online, astronomers built increasingly precise maps and started refining their ideas about how the galaxy came together.

Everything changed in 2016, when the first data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite came back to Earth. Gaia precisely measures the paths of millions of stars throughout the galaxy, allowing astronomers to learn where those stars are located, how they move through space, and how fast they are going. With Gaia, astronomers could paint a sharper picture of the Milky Way—one that revealed many surprises.

The bulge is not spherical but peanut-shaped, and it’s part of a larger bar spanning the middle of our galaxy. The galaxy itself is warped like the brim of a beat-up cowboy hat. The thick disk is also flared, growing thicker toward its edges, and it may have formed before the halo. Astronomers aren’t even sure how many spiral arms the galaxy really has.

The map of our island universe is not as neat as it once seemed. Nor as calm.

“If you look at a traditional picture of the Milky Way, you have this nice spherical halo and a nice regular-looking disk, and everything is kind of settled and stationary. But what we know now is that this galaxy is in a state of disequilibrium,” said Charlie Conroy, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This picture of it being simple and well ordered has been really tossed out in the past couple of years.”

A New Map of the Milky Way

Three years after Edwin Hubble realized Andromeda was a galaxy unto itself, he and other astronomers were busy imaging and classifying hundreds of island universes. Those galaxies seemed to exist in a few prevailing shapes and sizes, so Hubble developed a basic classification scheme known as the tuning fork diagram: It divides galaxies into two categories, ellipticals and spirals.

Astronomers still use this scheme to categorize galaxies, including ours. For now, the Milky Way is a spiral, with arms that are the main nurseries for stars (and therefore planets). For a half-century, astronomers thought there were four main arms—the Sagittarius, Orion, Perseus, and Cygnus arms (we live in a smaller offshoot, unimaginatively called the Local Arm). But new measurements of supergiant stars and other objects are drawing a different picture, and astronomers no longer agree on the number of arms or their sizes, or even whether our galaxy is an oddball among islands.

“Strikingly, almost no external galaxies present four spirals extending from their centers to their outer regions,” Xu Ye, an astronomer with China’s Purple Mountain Observatory, said in an email.

Astronomers discover how tiny dwarf galaxies form fossils | Digital Trends

techNovember 9, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Astronomers discover how tiny dwarf galaxies form fossils | Digital Trends

Galaxies come in many different shapes and sizes, including those considerably smaller than our Milky Way. These smaller galaxies, called dwarf galaxies, can have as few as 1,000 stars, compared to the several hundred billion in our galaxy. And when these dwarf galaxies age and begin to erode away, they can transform into an even smaller and more dense shape, called an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy.

The Gemini North telescope has recently been studying more than 100 of these eroding dwarf galaxies, seeing how they lose their outer stars and gas to become ultra-compact dwarf galaxies or UCDs.

This illustration shows a dwarf galaxy in the throes of transitioning to an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy as it’s stripped of its outer layers of stars and gas by a nearby larger galaxy. Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies are among the densest stellar groupings in the Universe. Being more compact than other galaxies with similar mass, but larger than star clusters — the objects they most closely resemble — these mystifying objects have defied classification. The missing piece to this puzzle has been a lack of sufficient transitional, or intermediate objects to study. A new galaxy survey, however, fills in these missing pieces to show that many of these enigmatic objects are likely formed from the destruction of dwarf galaxies. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani

“Our results provide the most complete picture of the origin of this mysterious class of galaxy that was discovered nearly 25 years ago,” said one of the researchers, NOIRLab astronomer Eric Peng in a statement. “Here we show that 106 small galaxies in the Virgo cluster have sizes between normal dwarf galaxies and UCDs, revealing a continuum that fills the ‘size gap’ between star clusters and galaxies.”

While astronomers did predict that dwarf galaxies could become UCDs, they hadn’t observed many cases of one transforming into the other. So this study looked for these “missing links” to see how this transition occurred. They found that these in-between galaxies were most often located near larger galaxies, which stripped away stars and gas from the small dwarf galaxies to leave a UCD behind.

“Once we analyzed the Gemini observations and eliminated all the background contamination, we could see that these transition galaxies existed almost exclusively near the largest galaxies. We immediately knew that environmental transformation had to be important,” explained lead author Kaixiang Wang of Peking University.

These objects were spotted using data from sky surveys, which was followed up using observations from Gemini North. That allowed the researchers to pick out the small dwarf galaxies from the many background galaxies visible in the sky.

“It’s exciting that we can finally see this transformation in action,” said Peng. “It tells us that many of these UCDs are visible fossil remnants of ancient dwarf galaxies in galaxy clusters, and our results suggest that there are likely many more low-mass remnants to be found.”

The research is published in the journal Nature.

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Supermassive black hole is oldest even seen in X-rays | Digital Trends

techNovember 9, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Supermassive black hole is oldest even seen in X-rays | Digital Trends

Astronomers recently discovered the most distant black hole ever observed in the X-ray wavelength, and it has some unusual properties that could help uncover the mysteries of how the largest black holes form.

Within the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, which is hundreds of thousands or even millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. These huge black holes are thought to be related to the way in which galaxies form, but this relationship isn’t clear — and how exactly supermassive black holes grow so massive is also an open question.

The recently discovered black hole, in the galaxy UHZ1 located an incredible 13.2 billion light-years away, is a young one and its mass is currently similar to that of the galaxy in which it resides. It is visible thanks to the gravitational lensing effect of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, shown below, which has such huge mass that it bends spacetime and magnifies the distant galaxy to make it observable. It was located using the James Webb Space Telescope and then observed using then Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Astronomers found the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, in a galaxy dubbed UHZ1, using the Chandra and Webb telescopes. This composite image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 that UHZ1 is located behind, in X-rays from Chandra (purple) and infrared data from Webb (red, green, blue). Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said lead author of the research, Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in a statement. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.”

This black hole seems to have been born massive, which allowed it to reach a large mass even at a young age. “There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” explained another of the researchers, Andy Goulding of Princeton University.

The black hole is located within a pocket of superheated gas that is giving off X-rays, suggesting that it could have formed from the collapse of a cloud of gas. “We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” said fellow researcher Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University. “For the first time, we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”

The research is published in the journal Nature Astronomy, with other results published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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See the stunning first images taken by the Euclid telescope | Digital Trends

techNovember 8, 2023 FranklinWilbur

See the stunning first images taken by the Euclid telescope | Digital Trends

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first full-color images taken by Euclid, a space telescope that was launched earlier this year to probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Euclid will image a huge area of the sky to build up a 3D map of the universe, helping researchers to track the dark matter that is clustered around galaxies and the dark energy that counteracts gravity to push galaxies apart.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is part of the Orion constellation. About 1,375 light-years away, it is the closest giant star-forming region to Earth. With Euclid, which captured this image, scientists hope to find many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as baby stars. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Euclid is designed with a wide field of view, meaning it is unlike telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope which is designed to look in very high resolution at specific targets. Instead, Euclid looks over a large area to capture views that will cover one-third of the sky and contain billions of galaxies. Even so, Euclid is still powerful enough to see some targets in stunning detail, like this image of the famous Horsehead Nebula which is located 1,375 light-years away.

Primarily, though, Euclid will be used to look at galaxies on a larger scale, such as an image that shows the Perseus cluster. This cluster contains thousands of galaxies, with hundreds of thousands more galaxies visible in the background.

One of the first images captured by Euclid shows the Perseus cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies located 240 million light-years from Earth. The closest galaxies appear as swirling structures while hundreds of thousands of background galaxies are visible only as points of light. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“We have never seen astronomical images like this before, containing so much detail. They are even more beautiful and sharp than we could have hoped for, showing us many previously unseen features in well-known areas of the nearby Universe. Now we are ready to observe billions of galaxies, and study their evolution over cosmic time,” said René Laureijs, ESA Euclid Project Scientist, in a statement.

The spiral galaxy IC 342, located about 11 million light-years from Earth, lies behind the crowded plane of the Milky Way: Dust, gas, and stars obscure it from our view. Euclid used its near-infrared instrument to peer through the dust and study it. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Euclid’s preliminary test images were released in August this year, but soon after the telescope developed an issue with its guidance system. The instrument which was designed to lock onto stars was intermittently failing, causing errors. Fortunately, that issue was fixed with a software update in October, and the telescope is now able to capture these beautiful images of various targets.

The galaxy NGC 6822 is located 1.6 million light-years from Earth. Euclid was able to capture this view of the entire galaxy and its surroundings in high resolution in about one hour, which isn’t possible with ground-based telescopes or targeted telescopes (such as NASA’s Webb) that have narrower fields of view. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“Euclid’s first images mark the beginning of a new era of studying dark matter and dark energy,” said Mike Seiffert, Euclid project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is the first space telescope dedicated to dark universe studies, and the sheer scale of the data we’re going to get out of this will be unlike anything we’ve had before. These are big mysteries, so it’s exciting for the international cosmology community to see this day finally arrive.”

This sparkly image shows Euclid’s view of a globular cluster – a collection of gravitationally bound stars that don’t quite form a galaxy – called NGC 6397. No other telescope can capture an entire globular cluster in a single observation and distinguish so many stars within it. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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Siena Galaxy Atlas is a catalog of 400,000 nearby galaxies | Digital Trends

techOctober 22, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Siena Galaxy Atlas is a catalog of 400,000 nearby galaxies | Digital Trends

The universe is vast, likely containing trillions of galaxies — an almost incomprehensible number. But when we focus in on just the nearby galaxies to our Milky Way, we already see a large number and huge diversity of galaxies around us.

A nearby galaxy catalog, the Siena Galaxy Atlas (SGA), was recently updated and now includes almost 400,000 galaxies located within our cosmic neighborhood, and this treasure trove of data is available to the public for free.

A galactic collision of two galaxies that began more than 300 million years ago, NGC 520 is actually made up of two disk galaxies that will eventually merge together to form one larger, more massive system. NGC 520 was discovered by William Herschel in 1784 and is one of the largest and brightest galaxies in the Siena Galaxy Atlas. CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA Acknowledgments: PI: J. Moustakas (Siena College) Image Procesing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab) & M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

The data for the atlas comes from a set of surveys completed between 2014 and 2017, called the DESI Legacy Surveys. These used ground-based telescopes located in Chile and Arizona, including the Dark Energy Camera and others, to plot out the locations of galaxies spread across almost half of the night sky using both optical and infrared wavelengths.

“Nearby large galaxies are important because we can study them in more detail than any other galaxies in the universe; they are our cosmic neighbors,” said SGA project leader John Moustakas in a statement. “Not only are they strikingly beautiful, but they also hold the key to understanding how galaxies form and evolve, including our very own Milky Way galaxy.”

Optical mosaics of 42 galaxies from the SGA-2020 sorted by increasing angular diameter from the top-left to the bottom-right. Galaxies are chosen randomly from a uniform (flat) probability distribution in angular diameter. The horizontal white bar in the lower-left corner of each panel represents 1 arcminute and the mosaic cutouts range from 3.2 to 13.4 arcminutes. This figure illustrates the tremendous range of types, sizes, colors and surface brightness profiles, internal structure, and environments of the galaxies in the SGA. — Optical mosaics of 42 galaxies from the Siena Galaxy Atlas-2020 sorted by increasing angular diameter from the top-left to the bottom-right. Galaxies are chosen randomly from a uniform (flat) probability distribution in angular diameter. The horizontal white bar in the lower-left corner of each panel represents 1 arcminute and the mosaic cutouts range from 3.2 to 13.4 arcminutes. This figure illustrates the tremendous range of types, sizes, colors and surface brightness profiles, internal structure, and environments of the galaxies in the SGA. CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA/J. Moustakas

While there are plenty of projects looking at nearby galaxies, such as the Hubble Space Telescope project to image every known nearby galaxy, this atlas aims to provide consistent, accurate information across a massive range of hundreds of thousands of nearby galaxies.

“Previous galaxy compilations have been plagued by incorrect positions, sizes and shapes of galaxies, and also contained entries which were not galaxies but stars or artifacts,” NOIRLab astronomer Arjun Dey explained. “The SGA cleans all this up for a large part of the sky. It also provides the best brightness measurements for galaxies, something we have not reliably had before for a sample of this size.”

The researchers hope that the atlas will not only be useful for professional astronomers and scientists who are looking for a particular type of galaxy for their research, but also for amateur astronomers and enthusiastic stargazers who want to learn about what they are seeing through their telescopes.

“The public release of these spectacular data contained in the atlas will have a real impact not only on astronomical research, but also on the public’s ability to view and identify relatively nearby galaxies,” said Chris Davis, National Science Foundation program director for NOIRLab. “Dedicated amateur astronomers will particularly love this as a go-to resource for learning more about some of the celestial targets they observe.”

A paper about the atlas is published in The Astrophysical Journal and the data is available on the SGA website.

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Gaia discovers half a million new stars in Omega Centauri | Digital Trends

techOctober 13, 2023 FranklinWilbur

Gaia discovers half a million new stars in Omega Centauri | Digital Trends

This week saw the release of a treasure trove of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission, a space-based observatory that is mapping out the Milky Way in three dimensions. The newly released data includes half a million new stars and details about more than 150,000 asteroids within our solar system.

The overall aim of the Gaia mission is to create a full 3D map of our galaxy that includes not only stars, but also other objects like planets, comets, asteroids, and more. The mission was launched in 2013 and the data it collected is released in batches every few years, with previous releases including data on topics like the positions of over 1.8 billion stars.

ESA’s star-surveying Gaia mission has released a treasure trove of new data as part of its focused product release. Gaia explored Omega Centauri, the largest globular cluster that can be seen from Earth and a great example of a typical cluster. ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The new data release fills in some gaps from previous releases, particularly in areas of the sky that are densely packed with stars — such as the Omega Centauri globular cluster, shown above. The new view of this cluster shows 10 times as many stars as the previous data, with a total of 526,587 new stars identified.

“In Omega Centauri, we discovered over half a million new stars Gaia hadn’t seen before – from just one cluster!” said lead author Katja Weingrill of Germany’s Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in a statement. Gaia will now be used to study more clusters and to collect more detailed information on them.

Another key find in this release is a large number of gravitational lenses. This effect occurs when a massive object such as a galaxy cluster warps space-time, making light from more distant objects bend and acting like a magnifying glass. This allows researchers to see much more distant objects than they would be able to otherwise.

“Gaia is a real lens-seeker,” said co-author Christine Ducourant of France’s Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “Thanks to Gaia, we’ve found that some of the objects we see aren’t simply stars, even though they look like them. They’re actually really distant lensed quasars – extremely bright, energetic galactic cores powered by black holes. We now present 381 solid candidates for lensed quasars, including 50 that we deem highly likely — a gold mine for cosmologists, and the largest set of candidates ever released at once.”

Gaia wasn’t particularly designed to search for this kind of cosmology data, but it is turning up such findings as a bonus in its survey. “Although its key focus is as a star surveyor, Gaia is exploring everything from the rocky bodies of the solar system to multiply imaged quasars lying billions of light-years away, far beyond the edges of the Milky Way,” said Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA. “The mission is providing a truly unique insight into the universe and the objects within it, and we’re really making the most of its broad, all-sky perspective on the skies around us.”

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James Webb captures a stellar nursery in nearby dwarf galaxy | Digital Trends

techOctober 10, 2023 FranklinWilbur

James Webb captures a stellar nursery in nearby dwarf galaxy | Digital Trends

A gorgeous new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a stunning sight from one of our galactic neighbors. The image shows a region of star formation called NGC 346, where new stars are being born. It’s located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way.

The star-forming region of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) was previously imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, but this new image gives a different view as it is taken in the infrared wavelength by Webb instead of the optical light wavelength used by Hubble.

This new infrared image of NGC 346 taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) traces emissions from cool gas and dust. In this image, blue represents silicates and sooty chemical molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. More diffuse red emission shines from warm dust heated by the brightest and most massive stars in the heart of the region. Bright patches and filaments mark areas with abundant numbers of protostars. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Nolan Habel (NASA-JPL); Image Processing: Patrick Kavanagh (Maynooth University)

This image was taken using the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Webb’s instrument that operates in the mid-infrared range. Unlike the other three instruments, which operate in the near-infrared, MIRI is particularly suited to highlighting dust and the intricate structures that it forms. The colors here represent different processes, as red shows the warm dust that is heated by bright nearby stars, while the blue regions represent areas dominated by molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

You can see the contrast in how objects look at different wavelengths by comparing this image taken with MIRI to a previous James Webb image of the same region taken with its NIRCam instrument.

NGC 346, shown here in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a dynamic star cluster that lies within a nebula 200,000 light years away. Webb reveals the presence of many more building blocks than previously expected, not only for stars, but also planets, in the form of clouds packed with dust and hydrogen. — NGC 346, shown here in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a dynamic star cluster that lies within a nebula 200,000 light-years away. SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Nolan Habel (USRA), Laura Lenkić (USRA), Laurie E. U. Chu (NASA Ames)

This image focuses on the near-infrared, which is ideal for highlighting the presence of stars and the arcs of gas in the region, which is primarily hydrogen.

“By combining Webb data in both the near-infrared and mid-infrared, astronomers are able to take a fuller census of the stars and protostars within this dynamic region,” Webb scientists explain. “The results have implications for our understanding of galaxies that existed billions of years ago, during an era in the universe known as ‘cosmic noon,’ when star formation was at its peak and heavy element concentrations were lower, as seen in the SMC.”