Hubble telescope discovers Galaxy-ripping quasar tsunamis in space - The Next Web

Quasar tsunamis discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope erupt in the most energetic outflows of material ever seen. This outpouring of energy wrecks havoc with galaxies in which these enigmatic objects reside, altering the evolution of these families of stars.

Quasars are energetic cores of galaxies, composed of supermassive black holes fed by vast quantities of gas, stars, and planets. These bodies are capable of emitting a thousand times as much energy as the entire galaxies which host the bodies.

Quasar winds push vast amounts of material away from the core of an energetic supermassive black hole at the core of a distant galaxy, in this artist’s conception. Image credit: NASA

These quasar winds push material away from the center of the galaxy, accelerating gas and dust at speeds approaching a few percent of the speed of light. The pressure pushes aside material which could otherwise collapse to form new stars, making stellar formation more difficult, reducing the number of new stars formed. This new study shows this process is more widespread than previously believed, altering star formation throughout entire galaxies.

“These outflows are crucial for the understanding of galaxies’ formation. They are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year. The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy,” Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech stated.

An image of the quasar RX J1131, taken in X-ray and optical wavelengths. Image credit: X-Ray: NASA/CXC/University of Michigan/R.C. Reis et. al. Optical: NASA/STScI

As the outflow blasts into interstellar material, it heats the medium to millions of degrees, setting the galaxy alight in X-rays. Energy pours out through the galaxy, producing a fireworks show for anyone capable of seeing it.

“You’ll get lots of radiation first in X-rays and gamma rays, and afterwards it will percolate to visible and infrared light. You’d get a huge light show, like Christmas trees all over the galaxy,” Arav explained.

Galaxies get blown away

I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and — in some mysterious way — significant. — R. J. Anderson

This study could explain several mysteries in astronomy and cosmology, including why the size of galaxies is related to the mass of the supermassive black holes at their centers. It may also explain why so few massive galaxies are seen throughout the Cosmos.

“Both theoreticians and observers have known for decades that there is some physical process that shuts off star formation in massive galaxies, but the nature of that process has been a mystery. Putting the observed outflows into our simulations solves these outstanding problems in galactic evolution,” said Jeremiah Ostriker, a cosmologist at Columbia and Princeton universities not involved with this current study. Below is a 3D animation video of a quasar by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Outflows from quasars were studied by astronomers using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, the only instrument capable of carrying out the needed observations in ultraviolet wavelengths.

A second outflow measured by researchers on this study increased its speed from 69 million kilometers (43 million miles) per hour to 74 million KPH (46 million MPH) over a period of three years. Models suggest that such outflows should have been common in the early Universe. Researchers on this study believe this material will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future.

Analysis of the data was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Supplements.

This article was originally published on The Cosmic Companion by James Maynard, an astronomy journalist, fan of coffee, sci-fi, movies, and creativity. Maynard has been writing about space since he was 10, but he’s “still not Carl Sagan.” The Cosmic Companion’s mailing list/podcast. You can read this original piece here.

Read next: Scientists are working on new ways to recycle chemicals from electronic waste

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2020-03-31 12:10:30Z
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Physicists weigh in on the origin of heavy elements - Phys.org

A look inside the ISOLDE Solenoid Spectrometer at CERN. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

A long-held mystery in the field of nuclear physics is why the universe is composed of the specific materials we see around us. In other words, why is it made of "this" stuff and not other stuff?

Specifically of interest are the physical processes responsible for producing heavy elements—like gold, platinum and uranium—that are thought to happen during neutron star mergers and explosive stellar events.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory led an international nuclear physics experiment conducted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that utilizes novel techniques developed at Argonne to study the nature and origin of heavy elements in the universe. The study may provide critical insights into the processes that work together to create the exotic nuclei, and it will inform models of stellar events and the early universe.

The nuclear physicists in the collaboration are the first to observe the neutron-shell structure of a nucleus with fewer protons than lead and more than 126 neutrons — "magic numbers" in the field of nuclear physics.

At these magic numbers, of which 8, 20, 28, 50 and 126 are canonical values, nuclei have enhanced stability, much as the noble gases do with closed electron shells. Nuclei with neutrons above the magic number of 126 are largely unexplored because they are difficult to produce. Knowledge of their behavior is crucial for understanding the rapid neutron-capture process, or r-process, that produces many of the heavy elements in the universe.

The r-process is thought to occur in extreme stellar conditions such as neutron-star mergers or supernovae. These neutron rich environments are where nuclei can rapidly grow, capturing neutrons to produce new and heavier elements before they have chance to decay.

This experiment focused on the mercury isotope ²⁰⁷Hg. The study of ²⁰⁷Hg could shed light on the properties of its close neighbors, nuclei directly involved in key aspects of the r-process.

"One of the biggest questions of this century has been how the elements formed at the beginning of the universe," said Argonne physicist Ben Kay, the lead scientist on the study. "It's difficult to research because we can't just go dig up a supernova out of the earth, so we have to create these extreme environments and study the reactions that occur in them."

To study the structure of ²⁰⁷Hg, the researchers first used the HIE-ISOLDE facility at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. A high-energy beam of protons was fired at a molten lead target, with the resulting collisions producing hundreds of exotic and radioactive isotopes.

They then separated ²⁰⁶Hg nuclei from the other fragments and used CERN's HIE-ISOLDE accelerator to create a beam of the nuclei with the highest energy ever achieved at that accelerator facility. They then focused the beam at a deuterium target inside the new ISOLDE Solenoidal Spectrometer (ISS).

"No other facility can make mercury beams of this mass and accelerate them to these energies," said Kay. "This, coupled with the outstanding resolving power of the ISS, allowed us to observe the spectrum of excited states in ²⁰⁷Hg for the first time."

The ISS is a newly-developed magnetic spectrometer that the nuclear physicists used to detect instances of ²⁰⁶Hg nuclei capturing a neutron and becoming ²⁰⁷Hg. The spectrometer's solenoidal magnet is a recycled 4-Tesla superconducting MRI magnet from a hospital in Australia. It was moved to CERN and installed at ISOLDE, thanks to a UK-led collaboration between University of Liverpool, University of Manchester, Daresbury Laboratory and collaborators from KU Leuven in Belgium.

Deuterium, a rare heavy isotope of hydrogen, consists of a proton and neutron. When ²⁰⁶Hg captures a neutron from the deuterium target, the proton recoils. The protons emitted during these reactions travel to the detector in the ISS, and their energy and position yield key information on the structure of the nucleus and how it is bound together. These properties have a significant impact on the r-process, and the results can inform important calculations in models of nuclear astrophysics.

The ISS uses a pioneering concept suggested by Argonne distinguished fellow John Schiffer that was built as the lab's helical orbital spectrometer, HELIOS — the instrument that inspired the development of the ISS spectrometer. HELIOS has allowed exploration of nuclear properties that were once impossible to study, but thanks to HELIOS, have been carried out at Argonne since 2008. CERN's ISOLDE facility can produce beams of nuclei that complement those that can be made at Argonne.

For the past century, nuclear physicists have been able to gather information about nuclei from the study of collisions where light ion beams hit heavy targets. However, when heavy beams hit light targets, the physics of the collision becomes distorted and more difficult to parse. Argonne's HELIOS concept was the solution to removing this distortion.

"When you've got a cannonball of a beam hitting a fragile target, the kinematics change, and the resulting spectra are compressed," said Kay. "But John Schiffer realized that when the collision occurs inside a magnet, the emitted protons travel in a spiral pattern towards the detector, and by a mathematical 'trick', this unfolds the kinematic compression, resulting in an uncompressed spectrum that reveals the underlying nuclear structure."

The first analyses of the data from the CERN experiment confirm the theoretical predictions of current nuclear models, and the team plans to study other nuclei in the region of ²⁰⁷Hg using these new capabilities, giving deeper insights into the unknown regions of nuclear physics and the r-process.

The results of this study were published in an article titled "First exploration of neutron shell structure below lead and beyond N = 126" on February 13 in the Physical Review Letters.

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Explore further

ISOLDE steps into unexplored region of the nuclear chart to study exotic isotopes

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More information: T. L. Tang et al, First Exploration of Neutron Shell Structure below Lead and beyond N=126, Physical Review Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.062502

Provided by Argonne National Laboratory

Citation: Physicists weigh in on the origin of heavy elements (2020, March 31) retrieved 31 March 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-03-physicists-heavy-elements.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

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2020-03-31 07:24:48Z
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NASA's Mars Rover Is Bringing 10.9 Million Names to the Red Planet - IGN - IGN

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover will be carrying more than 10.9 million names when it launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this summer on its voyage towards Jezero Crater, where it's expected to land on February 18, 2021. NASA confirmed on Thursday that 10,932,295 monikers and 155 essays had been etched onto a microchip aboard the rover in response to the 'Send Your Name to Mars' campaign, which invited people around the world to submit names and articles to ride aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet.

We are all in this together. Three chips with more than 10.9 million names you all sent in are coming with me to #Mars. https://t.co/Bsv1mqpxlA

I also carry a special message -- can you find it? pic.twitter.com/5UNgBWeEET

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 26, 2020

The successful entries were stencilled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, which were then attached to an aluminium plate affixed to the centre of the rover's aft crossbeam at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 16, 2020.

The chips were joined on the plate by a graphic of the Earth, Sun and Mars. "While commemorating the rover that connects the two worlds, the simple illustration also pays tribute to the elegant line art of the plaques aboard the Pioneer spacecraft and golden records carried by Voyagers 1 and 2," NASA said in a statement.

According to NASA, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has not yet affected the launch schedule of the Mars Perseverance rover. In fact, the team recently started to reconfigure the rover to ride atop the Atlas V rocket ahead of its launch from the facility near to Kennedy Space Center on July 17, 2020.

Upon reaching the Red Planet, the Perseverance rover will reportedly search for signs of past microbial life on the planet, characterize its climate and geology, and collect samples of the rocky terrain to bring back to Earth in an effort to pave the way for human exploration of Mars in the future.

The 25 Best Sci Fi Movies

For other exciting space discoveries and developments, check out the new method MIT engineers have identified to deflect asteroids, read about the mini-moon that was found to be orbiting Earth, and find out more about the sad fate that an asteroid belt may face in six billion years.Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

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2020-03-30 17:12:53Z
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NASA's Mars Helicopter makes last spin on Earth before before July launch - Space.com

NASA's next mission to Mars will carry what is meant to become the first aircraft to fly on another planet, and that experimental helicopter just spun its blades on Earth for the last time.

The Mars Helicopter is scheduled to launch in July with the new Mars rover, now dubbed Perseverance, as an add-on project to the primary Mars 2020 mission. NASA is still striving to meet that launch date despite continuing closures enacted to slow the spread of the serious respiratory disease COVID-19 caused by a new coronavirus.

All the components of the Mars 2020 mission are currently undergoing their final prelaunch tests at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Among those components are the cruise stage vehicle, which recently finished a test to confirm its mass properties, NASA said in a statement, and the helicopter.

Related: In photos: NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission to the Red Planet

Tests on the helicopter included spinning its blades for the last time before launch, during which it reached 50 rotations per minute in the testing airlock, according to the statement. If all goes well, the blades will next spin on Mars sometime in 2021, after the mission touches down in February.

Meeting the summer launch window for Mars 2020 is one of NASA's highest priorities even as much of the agency's centers have closed to on-site work in an attempt to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. Because of the tricky alignment of Mars and Earth, if the agency misses the launch window this summer, it will need to wait two years before it can try again. A Mars mission shared by the European Space Agency and Russia has already met that fate.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

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2020-03-30 16:42:03Z
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Peacock spiders show more of their colours - BBC News

OK, a lot of people don't like arachnids. But c'mon, these little guys are simply stunning.

Seven new peacock spiders have been described in the journal Zootaxa.

And just like their cousins in the Maratus genus, they all live in Australia and they all feature those amazing iridescent colours that the males will flaunt during courtship.

The man behind the descriptions is Museums Victoria's Joseph Schubert, a 22-year-old peacock spider specialist.

He's now written up 12 of the 85 known species in this group. He often gets sent specimens to identify, but also conducts fieldwork.

The names of the new species are Maratus azureus, Maratus constellatus, Maratus laurenae, Maratus noggerup, Maratus suae, Maratus volpei, and Maratus inaquosus. Most are from Western Australia,

"My favourite species would have to be Maratus constellatus," he said.

"I ventured all the way to Kalbarri to find this species which is about a seven-hour drive north of Perth. The patterns on the abdomen to me just look so much like Starry Night by van Gogh, hence the name constellatus which means starry in Latin.

"A few of the spiders in this paper were named after the people who had discovered them. A lot of the species are actually discovered by citizen scientists who'd documented the locality data and taken photos of the spiders and sent images to me. Considering how many peacock spider species have been discovered in the past few years, I certainly think that there are more out there to be found."

Peacock spiders are generally very small, about the size of a grain of rice. It's the males that sport the ostentatious colouring; females have a more mottled look made up of browns, blacks and beiges.

Males will wave their abdomens and legs during a courtship dance. Some even have flaps that can be extended like a fan - hence the association with peacock birds.

There has been a flurry of new species discoveries in recent years, and given their popularity it's likely many more previously unrecognised species will be identified in the future as people go looking for them.

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2020-03-30 15:18:24Z
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Meteorites reveal that Martian water came from different sources - CNN

Mars was likely a warm, wet planet billions of years ago before its atmosphere was slowly stripped down and whisked out into space -- leaving behind the thin atmosphere and frozen desert planet we know today.

But how did the water get to Mars in the first place? To understand that, researchers have to look at the layers of Mars. Like any planet, it has a core, mantle, crust and atmosphere.

Fortuitously, Martian meteorites contain samples of the planet's crust. The crust is also where the largest reservoir is estimated to be on Mars, containing 35% of the total estimated water beneath the surface.

The two well-known meteorites are known as Black Beauty and Allan Hills, and researchers studied thin slices of them to look into Mars' past, including how the planet formed and when water entered into the equation.

Their study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Black Beauty meteorite, which is estimated to be two million years old, formed and broke off of the planet when a massive impact hit Mars and laminated pieces of Martian crust together. This effectively also captured material from different points in the Martian timeline.

"This allowed us to form an idea of what Mars' crust looked like over several billions of years," said Jessica Barnes, study author and assistant professor of planetary sciences in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

When looking at the two meteorites, the researchers conducted a chemical analysis seeking out two types of hydrogen isotopes. Isotopes are the atoms that make up chemical elements.

They were specifically looking for "light hydrogen" and "heavy hydrogen," because the ratio of these two isotopes can be used to understand the origin of water traces found in rocks.

For example, on Earth, scientists can study rocks and determine a similar ratio of hydrogen isotopes in all of them that translates to ocean water.

But those values differ wildly in Martian meteorites, and none of them have been similar, the researchers said.

The Black Beauty and Allan Hills meteorites suggested two different sources of water on Mars, based on their isotopes.

"These two different sources of water in Mars' interior might be telling us something about the kinds of objects that were available to coalesce into the inner, rocky planets," Barnes said. "This context is also important for understanding the past habitability and astrobiology of Mars."

So how does that happen? It's all about the ingredients that made Mars in the first place.

Planetesimals were the building blocks of the planets that form our solar system today. They're made up of bits of gas and dust leftover from the formation of our sun. Over time, they grew in size and collided with one another, forming planets.

In the case of Mars, two different planetesimals with very different water content could have collided and never fully mixed, the researchers said.

This is very different than the previous theory about the formation of Mars, which suggested it was more like Earth. That theory stemmed from another Martian meteorite, but this one came from the planet's mantle. The mantle is the rocky subsurface layer between the core and crust.

"The prevailing hypothesis before we started this work was that the interior of Mars was more Earth-like," Barnes said. "So the variability in hydrogen isotope ratios within Martian samples was due to either terrestrial contamination or atmospheric implantation as it made its way off Mars."

Earth had a global magma ocean that helped create its core and atmosphere billions of years ago, as well as the plate tectonics that shaped the continents. Now, researchers believe that Mars formed differently than Earth.

The meteorites, combined with other previous data about Mars, including observations by the Curiosity rover, revealed three things.

In the Martian meteorites, the crust remained much the same over time. The isotopes suggested the atmospheric changes they knew happened over time on Mars. And the crust samples were wildly different from the mantle below it.

"Martian meteorites basically plot all over the place, and so trying to figure out what these samples are actually telling us about water in the mantle of Mars has historically been a challenge," Barnes said. "The fact that our data for the crust was so different prompted us to go back through the scientific literature and scrutinize the data."

During that analysis, the researchers discovered two different types of Martian volcanic rocks called shergottites. Some were enriched, and some were depleted, meaning they contained evidence of water bearing different hydrogen isotopes.

Together, they match the strange story told by the Martian meteorites and Mars' different water sources.

"It turns out that if you mix different proportions of hydrogen from these two kinds of shergottites, you can get the crustal value," Barnes said.

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2020-03-30 15:04:00Z
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A place that makes you ask the questions that really matter - BBC News

Visitors to Antarctica are often awed and humbled by its size, and its extreme climate. But it also caused the BBC's Justin Rowlatt to reflect on the human ability to solve problems together - and to feel hope for the future.

We take off from a glacier near McMurdo, the main US research centre in Antarctica, heading for the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

After an hour all you can see out of the small circular window is ice stretching to the far horizon.

An hour later, the same.

The following hour, no change…

You get the picture.

We finally land after three-and-a-half hours in the air.

The nearest human habitation - the US scientific base we flew from - is now as far from us as Moscow is from London… and there is only ice in between.

The sheer size of the ice sheet makes it almost impossible for visitors not to reflect on the insignificance of an individual human being.

"It makes you feel so small," is what everyone says.

But dig a bit deeper and you discover most people don't mean they feel a sense of threat; Antarctica doesn't belittle you.

In fact, lots of people find there is something reassuring about being in the presence of something so much bigger and stronger than they are.

Gabrielle Walker, the author of my favourite book about Antarctica, writes about this.

We all like to think we are important, she says. But that feeling brings a certain responsibility: if you are important you've got something to prove.

"Here you have nothing to prove because you can only submit," says Gabrielle.

You can't feel important in this vast place.

And if you aren't important then things become a lot simpler.

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Antarctica gives you the freedom to ask yourself the questions that really matter, she says.

What is important to me?

What should I be doing with my life?

Who do I really miss while I am here and why?

And who misses me?

Lots of people are probably asking similar questions as they hunker down at home in the face of the threat of the coronavirus.

But, when I finally get to the front of the enormous glacier that the scientists I'm accompanying are here to study, that sense of insignificance dissolves.

It feels like I've reached the front line of climate change: the place where the equilibrium that has held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years is beginning to slip and crash.

It is impossible to mistake the epic forces at work here.

It is like a scream of anguish caught in the single frame of a photograph.

The glacier is being torn and shattered.

In places the ice is almost a mile high and is collapsing into the sea at a rate of three miles a year along a front more than 100 miles long… and the whole process is accelerating.

Needless to say, this acceleration - which is affecting the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet - is the result of the global warming gases our lifestyles produce.

It explodes the impression that the ice here is overwhelming.

In fact, the opposite is true, we are overwhelming the ice.

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I am surprised how moved I am by what I've seen.

A colleague interviews me for a programme we are making and I burst into tears.

It takes me days to process my emotions.

I think about the chain of people who have made this expedition possible: the pilots and aircrew, the people back at the research station who sift the rubbish and cook the meals, the men and women who drive the trucks and groom the ice runways.

We wouldn't be here without them.

Or the people who agreed the project and signed the cheques.

Or the people who paid their taxes, raising the money in the first place.

Or, for that matter, my wife looking after the kids back home.

Our small team has only been able reach the front of this glacier because of a huge human enterprise.

It is only by coming together as a community that we can reach remote places like this and only by coming to places like this can we can understand what is happening to our world and what it is likely to mean for us all.

And, of course, it is only by coming together as a community that we can cut the emissions causing global warming.

I'm flying back to the research station at McMurdo when I feel a stir of something I haven't felt for a while - hope.

It is sometimes claimed that greed, violence and conflict are the key features of humanity, but that is wrong.

The defining human characteristic throughout history is actually our ability to co-operate.

Photographs by Jemma Cox, unless otherwise indicated

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READ: What is climate change? A really simple guide

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2020-03-30 13:31:48Z
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