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Showing posts with the label Cosmic

Cosmic Buckyballs Could Be Mysterious Infrared Light Source

Scientists may have just traced the source of some of the mysterious infrared emission detected from stars and clouds of interstellar dust and gas. This Unknown Infrared Emission Band (UIE) has baffled scientists for decades; According to a new theoretical work, at least some of these bands could be produced by highly ionized buckminsterfullerene, better known as buckyballs. “I am very honored to have played a part in the extremely complex quantum chemical investigations carried out by Dr Sadjadi that have produced these very exciting results,” said astrophysicist Quentin Parker of the Space Research Laboratory of the University of Hong Kong. “First they looked at the theoretical evidence that Fullerenes – Carbon 60 – can withstand very high ionization rates, and now this work shows the infrared emission signature of the species is a perfect match for some of the most prominent Unknown Infrared Emission features known. This will help re-strengthen this area of ​​research.” Buckminste

Astronomers describe the star birth web of the cosmic Tarantula Nebula

This composite image of the star-forming region of Doradus 30 — also known as the Tarantula Nebula — reveals areas of cold gas that could collapse to form stars. (Image credit: ESO, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Wong et al., ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey.) The newly released image of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, reveals thin, spiderweb-like strands of gas that reveal a dramatic battle between gravity and stellar energy that could give astronomers an idea of ​​how massive stars have shaped this star formation. regions and why they continue to be born in these molecular clouds. This high-resolution image of the Tarantula Nebula, located 170,000 light-years from Earth, consists of data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula is one of the brightest star-forming regions in our galaxy’s backyard. It’s also one of the most active in term

Cosmic tango: this extremely strange planet's orbit points to a violent and chaotic past

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If you close your eyes and imagine a planetary system orbiting a distant star, what do you see? For most people, such thinking gives rise to systems that mirror the Solar System: planets orbiting their parent stars in nearly circular orbits – rocky planets are closer together, and giants like Jupiter in the icy depths. However, the more we study the cosmos, the more we begin to realize that planetary systems like ours may be more the exception than the rule. Imagine a system with a single gas planet, slightly larger than Saturn, tracing the surface of its parent star in a very fast orbit. It is extremely hot and glows a dull red, baked in stellar radiation. Then imagine another, more distant giant planet, larger than Jupiter, moving on a distant and highly elongated orbit that makes it look more like a comet than a traditional planet. It doesn’t sound like home, does it? But that’s what we found. Introducing planetary system HD83443 The story of the HD83443 system begins in the late

Cosmic tango: this extremely strange planet's orbit points to a violent and chaotic past

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If you close your eyes and imagine a planetary system orbiting a distant star, what do you see? For most people, such thinking gives rise to systems that mirror the Solar System: planets orbiting their parent stars in nearly circular orbits – rocky planets are closer together, and giants like Jupiter in the icy depths. However, the more we study the cosmos, the more we begin to realize that planetary systems like ours may be more the exception than the rule. Imagine a system with a single gas planet, slightly larger than Saturn, tracing the surface of its parent star in a very fast orbit. It is extremely hot and glows a dull red, baked in stellar radiation. Then imagine another, more distant giant planet, larger than Jupiter, moving on a distant and highly elongated orbit that makes it look more like a comet than a traditional planet. It doesn’t sound like home, does it? But that’s what we found. Introducing planetary system HD83443 The story of the HD83443 system begins in the late

Cosmic tango: this extremely strange planet's orbit points to a violent and chaotic past

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If you close your eyes and imagine a planetary system orbiting a distant star, what do you see? For most people, such thinking gives rise to systems that mirror the Solar System: planets orbiting their host stars in nearly circular orbits – rocky planets are closer, and giants like Jupiter in the icy depths. However, the more we study the cosmos, the more we begin to realize that planetary systems like ours may be more the exception than the rule. Imagine a system with one gas planet, slightly larger than Saturn, tracing the surface of its parent star in a very fast orbit. It is extremely hot and glows a dull red, baked in stellar radiation. Then imagine another, more distant giant planet, larger than Jupiter, moving on a distant and highly elongated orbit that makes it look more like a comet than a traditional planet. It doesn’t sound like home, does it? But that’s what we found. Introducing planetary system HD83443 The story of the HD83443 system begins in the late 20th century, wh

Astrophysicists Think They've Found a Mysterious Source of High-Energy Neutrinos

Some of the brightest and most energetic objects in the Universe are the mystery source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, new research has confirmed. A comprehensive analysis has been convincing enough to link the galaxies that host the fiery cores known as blazars with these mysterious particles. It’s a result that provides a completely unexpected solution to a problem that has kept astrophysicists scratching their heads for years. “The results provide, for the first time, irrefutable observational evidence that the PeVatron blazar sub-sample is a source of extragalactic neutrinos and thus an accelerator of cosmic rays,” said astrophysicist Sara Buson of the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany. Neutrinos are the odd little things at the best of times. These subatomic particles are ubiquitous and are among the most abundant in the Universe. However, their mass is almost zero, they are electrically neutral, and they interact very little with anything else in the universe

We Finally Know Where The Highest Energy Cosmic Rays Come From: Blazars

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The way out in outer space is a class of objects called blazars. Think of them as extreme particle accelerators, capable of accumulating energy a million times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It turns out that they are the cause of one of the great astrophysical mysteries: what creates and propels neutrinos across the universe at such blazing fast speeds? It turns out that the answer has been there all along: the blazar pumps out neutrinos and cosmic rays. That was the conclusion of a group of astronomers led by Dr. Sara Buson of the Universität Wurzburg in Germany as they study data from a very unique facility on Earth: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Understanding the Origin of Speed ​​Demon Particles Neutrinos are quirky little ducks in the astrophysics zoo. They originate from cosmic ray interactions in the blazars and have a very small mass. Neutrinos do not interact with matter as they streak through the cosmos, meaning they tra

The cosmic time machine: how the James Webb Space Telescope allowed us to see the universe's first galaxies

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It’s been an exciting week with the release of amazing photos of our Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Images like the one below give us the opportunity to see distant, faint galaxies as they did more than 13 billion years ago. The field image in SMACS 0723 was taken with just a 12.5 hour exposure. The faint galaxy in this image emitted this light more than 13 billion years ago. NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI This is a great time to step back and appreciate our first class ticket to the depths of the Universe and how these images allow us to look back in time. These images also raise an interesting point about how the expansion of the Universe factors into the way we calculate distances on a cosmological scale. Modern time travel Looking back in time may sound like a strange concept, but that’s what space researchers do every day. Our Universe is bound by the rules of physics, with one of the best known “rules” being the speed of lig

The End of Cosmic Dawn: Finishing the Debate of Two Decades

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A schematic representation of a look into cosmic history provided by the bright glow of a distant quasar. Observing with a telescope (bottom left) allows us to gain information about the so-called reionization epoch (top right “bubble”) that followed the Big Bang phase (top right). Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science / MPIA (annotated) Astronomers determined the time when all of the neutral hydrogen gas between galaxies was produced by Big Bang The Big Bang is the leading cosmological model that explains how the universe as we know it began approximately 13.8 billion years ago. ” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{” attribute=””>Big Bang became fully ionized. A group of astronomers has robustly timed the end of the epoch of reionization of the neutral hydrogen gas to approximately 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. Reionization began when the first generation of stars formed after the cosmic “dark ages,” a long period when the Universe was filled with neutral gas alone witho