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Hubble and Keck Team Up to F
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| Title |
Hubble and Keck Team Up to Find Farthest Known Galaxy in Universe |
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Astronomers Map a Hypergiant
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| Title |
Astronomers Map a Hypergiant Star's Massive Outbursts |
| General Information |
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, Kameula, Hawaii, astronomers have learned that the gaseous outflow from one of the brightest super-sized stars in the sky is more complex than originally thought. The outbursts are from VY Canis Majoris, a red supergiant star that is also classified as a hypergiant because of its very high luminosity. The eruptions have formed loops, arcs, and knots of material moving at various speeds and in many different directions. The star has had many outbursts over the past 1,000 years as it nears the end of its life. Read more: * The Full Story [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/03/full/ ] |
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Astronomers Map a Hypergiant
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| Title |
Astronomers Map a Hypergiant Star's Massive Outbursts |
| General Information |
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, Kameula, Hawaii, astronomers have learned that the gaseous outflow from one of the brightest super-sized stars in the sky is more complex than originally thought. The outbursts are from VY Canis Majoris, a red supergiant star that is also classified as a hypergiant because of its very high luminosity. The eruptions have formed loops, arcs, and knots of material moving at various speeds and in many different directions. The star has had many outbursts over the past 1,000 years as it nears the end of its life. Read more: * The Full Story [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/03/full/ ] |
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Astronomers Map a Hypergiant
…
| Title |
Astronomers Map a Hypergiant Star's Massive Outbursts |
| General Information |
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, Kameula, Hawaii, astronomers have learned that the gaseous outflow from one of the brightest super-sized stars in the sky is more complex than originally thought. The outbursts are from VY Canis Majoris, a red supergiant star that is also classified as a hypergiant because of its very high luminosity. The eruptions have formed loops, arcs, and knots of material moving at various speeds and in many different directions. The star has had many outbursts over the past 1,000 years as it nears the end of its life. Read more: * The Full Story [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/03/full/ ] |
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Astronomers Use Hubble and K
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| Title |
Astronomers Use Hubble and Keck to Identify Dwarf Galaxy |
| General Information |
What is a News Nugget? News Nuggets are bulletins from the world of astronomy. A team of astronomers at the University of California at Santa Barbara report that they have resolved a dwarf galaxy 6 billion light-years away. Weighing only 1/100 as much as our Milky Way Galaxy, the dwarf is much smaller than anything studied before in any detail at this distance. They report in the Dec. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal that the galaxy looks very similar to one of the dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster, which is located only 60 million light-years away. "We believe we may have identified the progenitors of local dwarf galaxies," says Tommaso Treu. "We see them as clearly as we would see dwarfs in the Virgo cluster using ground-based telescopes. The sharp view of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and the laser guide stars adaptive optics system on the W.M. Keck Telescope, were aimed at a natural lens in space, called a gravitational lens, to study the dwarf. The researchers took advantage of the fact that the distant dwarf galaxy lies behind a massive foreground galaxy that bends light rays much as a glass lens does. This gravitational lensing amplifies the image of the much farther dwarf galaxy, making it appear 10 times brighter and 10 times larger than it would normally be seen by either Hubble or Keck. |
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Astronomers Use Hubble and K
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| Title |
Astronomers Use Hubble and Keck to Identify Dwarf Galaxy |
| General Information |
What is a News Nugget? News Nuggets are bulletins from the world of astronomy. A team of astronomers at the University of California at Santa Barbara report that they have resolved a dwarf galaxy 6 billion light-years away. Weighing only 1/100 as much as our Milky Way Galaxy, the dwarf is much smaller than anything studied before in any detail at this distance. They report in the Dec. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal that the galaxy looks very similar to one of the dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster, which is located only 60 million light-years away. "We believe we may have identified the progenitors of local dwarf galaxies," says Tommaso Treu. "We see them as clearly as we would see dwarfs in the Virgo cluster using ground-based telescopes. The sharp view of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and the laser guide stars adaptive optics system on the W.M. Keck Telescope, were aimed at a natural lens in space, called a gravitational lens, to study the dwarf. The researchers took advantage of the fact that the distant dwarf galaxy lies behind a massive foreground galaxy that bends light rays much as a glass lens does. This gravitational lensing amplifies the image of the much farther dwarf galaxy, making it appear 10 times brighter and 10 times larger than it would normally be seen by either Hubble or Keck. |
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LkHa101: The Hole in the Dou
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LkHa101: The Hole in the Doughnut |
| Explanation |
You'd need a really big cup of coffee with this doughnut [ http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~gekko/ doughnut.html ] ... because the hole in the middle is about a billion kilometers across. Centered on the Sun, a circle that size would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In fact, this doughnut is known to surround a massive newborn star cataloged as LkHa 101 which lies in the constellation Perseus [ http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/perseus/ constell.html ]. Imaged in infrared light [ http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/newtop/whatsnew.html ], the tantalizing torus-shaped cloud of gas and dust [ http://stardust.wustl.edu/IDPIntro.html ] is slightly tilted to our view. The cloud's material may well be the ingredients for the formation of a distant solar system [ http://www.spaceart.org/lcook/extrasol.html ]. A bright source of ultraviolet light [ http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/ multiwavelength.html ], the hot young star itself is much fainter in the infrared and so not visible in this picture. Still, the star's presence is indicated as its intense stellar wind and radiation has apparently carved out the doughnut's hole. This premier close-up of a stellar system in formation was accomplished by adapting a powerful observational technique called interferometry [ http://www.sciam.com/2001/0301issue/0301armstrong.html ] to planet Earth's largest single mirror telescope, the 10 meter Keck [ http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636/ ]. |
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GRB 980703: A Reassuring Red
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GRB 980703: A Reassuring Redshift |
| Explanation |
In the old days, just over a year ago, astronomers had little idea of the true distance to gamma-ray bursts [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap961123.html ]. Did these enigmatic explosions [ http://www.sciam.com/0797issue/0797fishman.html ] occur in our outer Galaxy [ http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1995PASP%2E%2E107%2E1152L ], or in the outer Universe [ http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1995PASP%2E%2E107%2E1167P ]? Last May, a first telling distance measure was made - GRB 970508 [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970513.html ] showed an absorption line [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980713.html http://www.bc.kern.cc.ca.us/programs/sea/Astronomy/light/lightb.htm#A2.2 ] with a redshift [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/glossary.html#redshift ] of about 0.8 - indicating that this gamma-ray burst [ http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast19sep97_2.htm ] (GRB) was an enormous distance away. Skeptics [ http://www.sff.net/people/MBourne/W-Skeptic.htp ], however, are not always convinced by an unrepeated measurement. Since then, though, other tantalizing coincidences have occurred: GRB 971214 [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980507.html ] occurred unusually near a galaxy with the enormous redshift of 3.4, and GRB 980425 [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980508.html ] occurred unusually near a peculiar low-redshift supernova [ http://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/snr.html ]. Skeptics [ http://www.athenet.net/~jlindsay/SkepticQuotes.html ] were intrigued. Now, the potentially definitive implications of the above-pictured [ http://astro.caltech.edu/%7Egeorge/grb/grb980703.html ] optical transient might impress even the cautious. GRB 980703 [ http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/gcn3/139.gcn3 ]'s optical transient shows a well-measured redshift from both an absorption line " and " an emission line [ http://astro.gmu.edu/classes/a10695/notes/l03/l03s028.html ]: 0.97. The above negative highlights the uncommon transient source with the label "OT", while letters designate common comparison stars [ http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/gcn3/144.gcn3 ]. |
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