Full Observatory Moon over Atacama, Chile ©

Milky Way with Airglow Australis

Credits: Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie, Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN

2024 January 27

Full Observatory Moon Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN)

Explanation: A popular name for January's full moon in the northern hemisphere is the Full Wolf Moon. As the new year's first full moon, it rises over Las Campanas Observatory in this dramatic Earth-and-moonscape. Peering from the foreground like astronomical eyes are the observatory's twin 6.5 meter diameter Magellan telescopes. The snapshot was captured with telephoto lens across rugged terrain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, taken at a distance of about 9 miles from the observatory and about 240,000 miles from the lunar surface. Of course the first full moon of the lunar new year, known to some as the Full Snow Moon, will rise on February 24.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240127.html

Webb proves galaxies transformed the early universe In the early universe, the gas between stars and galaxies was opaque – energetic starlight could not penetrate it. But 1 billion years after the big bang, the gas had become completely transparent. Why? New data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has pinpointed the reason: The galaxies’ stars emitted enough light to heat and ionize the gas around them, clearing our collective view over hundreds of millions of years. The results, from a research team led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland, are the newest insights about a time period known as the Era of Reionization, when the universe underwent dramatic changes. After the big bang, gas in the universe was incredibly hot and dense. Over hundreds of millions of years, the gas cooled. Then, the universe hit “repeat.” The gas again became hot and ionized – likely due to the formation of early stars in galaxies, and over millions of years, became transparent. Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain these transformations. The new results effectively pull back the curtain at the end of this reionization period. “Not only does Webb clearly show that these transparent regions are found around galaxies, we’ve also measured how large they are,” explained Daichi Kashino of Nagoya University in Japan, the lead author of the team’s first paper. “With Webb’s data, we are seeing galaxies reionize the gas around them.” These regions of transparent gas are gigantic compared to the galaxies – imagine a hot air balloon with a pea suspended inside. Webb’s data shows that these relatively tiny galaxies drove reionization, clearing massive regions of space around them. Over the next hundred million years, these transparent “bubbles” continued to grow larger and larger, eventually merging and causing the entire universe to become transparent. Lilly’s team intentionally targeted a time just before the end of the Era of Reionization, when the universe was not quite clear and not quite opaque – it contained a patchwork of gas in various states. Scientists aimed Webb in the direction of a quasar – an extremely luminous active supermassive black hole that acts like an enormous flashlight – highlighting the gas between the quasar and our telescopes. (Find it at the center of this view: It is tiny and pink with six prominent diffraction spikes.) As the quasar’s light traveled toward us through different patches of gas, it was either absorbed by gas that was opaque or moved freely through transparent gas. The team’s groundbreaking results were only possible by pairing Webb’s data with observations of the central quasar from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and the Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, both in Chile. “By illuminating gas along our line of sight, the quasar gives us extensive information about the composition and state of the gas,” explained Anna-Christina Eilers of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lead author of another team paper. The researchers then used Webb to identify galaxies near this line of sight and showed that the galaxies are generally surrounded by transparent regions about 2 million light-years in radius. In other words, Webb witnessed galaxies in the process of clearing the space around them at the end of the Era of Reionization. To put this in perspective, the area these galaxies have cleared is approximately the same distance as the space between our Milky Way galaxy and our nearest neighbor, Andromeda. Until now, researchers didn’t have this definitive evidence of what caused reionization – before Webb, they weren’t certain precisely what was responsible. What do these galaxies look like? “They are more chaotic than those in the nearby universe,” explained Jorryt Matthee, also of ETH Zürich and the lead author of the team’s second paper. “Webb shows they were actively forming stars and must have been shooting off many supernovae. They had quite an adventurous youth!” Along the way, Eilers used Webb’s data to confirm that the black hole in the quasar at the center of this field is the most massive currently known in the early universe, weighing 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. “We still can’t explain how quasars were able to grow so large so early in the history of the universe,” she shared. “That’s another puzzle to solve!” The exquisite images from Webb also revealed no evidence that the light from the quasar had been gravitationally lensed, ensuring that the mass measurements are definitive. The team will soon dive into research about galaxies in five additional fields, each anchored by a central quasar. Webb’s results from the first field were so overwhelmingly clear that they couldn’t wait to share them. “We expected to identify a few dozen galaxies that existed during the Era of Reionization – but were easily able to pick out 117,” Kashino explained. “Webb has exceeded our expectations.” Lilly’s research team, the Emission-line galaxies and Intergalactic Gas in the Epoch of Reionization (EIGER), have demonstrated the unique power of combining conventional images from Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) with data from the same instrument's wide-field slitless spectroscopy mode, which gives a spectrum of every object in the images – turning Webb into what the team calls a “spectacular spectroscopic redshift machine.” The team’s first publications include “EIGER I. a large sample of [O iii]-emitting galaxies at 5.3

APOD January 27, 2024 Full Observatory Moon A popular name for January's full moon in the northern hemisphere is the Full Wolf Moon. As the new year's first full moon, it rises over Las Campanas Observatory in this dramatic Earth-and-moonscape. Peering from the foreground like astronomical eyes are the observatory's twin 6.5 meter diameter Magellan telescopes. The snapshot was captured with telephoto lens across rugged terrain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, taken at a distance of about 9 miles from the observatory and about 240,000 miles from the lunar surface. Of course the first full moon of the lunar new year, known to some as the Full Snow Moon, will rise on February 24. ©Yuri Beletsky

Dolun Gözlemevi Ay

Günün Astronomi Görseli 27 Ocak 2024 Görsel & Telif: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN) Kuzey yarımkürede Ocak ayındaki dolunayın popüler adı Kurt Dolunayı‘dır. Yeni yılın ilk dolunayı olarak Las Campanas Gözlemevi‘nin üzerinde bu dramatik Dünya ve ay manzarasıyla yükseliyor. Gözlemevinin 6,5 metre çapındaki ikiz Magellan teleskopları astronomik gözler gibi ön planda…

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The ‘Barbenheimer Star’ - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-barbenheimer-star-technology-org/

The ‘Barbenheimer Star’ - Technology Org

Astronomy’s new blockbuster was announced in New Orleans during the 2024 American Astronomical Society meeting. Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) discovered evidence for what they call the “Barbenheimer Star”—an enormous ancient star that exploded in a way previously thought impossible, resulting in an unusual pattern of elemental ashes that left behind a trail of evidence still visible billions of years later.

The star J0931+0038, as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey camera in 1999. Image credit: Jordan Raddick and SDSS-V Colaboration

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says Alex Ji of the University of Chicago and SDSS, the study’s lead author. “Whatever happened back then, it must have been amazing. We nicknamed it the ‘Barbenheimer Star’ for its spectacular nucleosynthesis.”

Ji and colleagues didn’t see the Barbenheimer Star directly. Instead, they followed the trail back in time using a process called “stellar archaeology.”

Just as archaeologists use evidence found in the present to reconstruct the past, astronomers use evidence found in today’s stars to reconstruct conditions in the ancient universe. Today’s stars are like chemical time capsules—they preserve what a piece of the universe was like when the star was born.

“As we continue to map the sky, obtaining millions of spectra across the galaxy and extra-galactic black holes, astronomers are making great strides in adding to our understanding of how objects in the universe evolve,” said Joel Brownstein, research associate professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Physics & Astronomy and co-author of the study.

Brownstein is the head of data for SDSS and runs the Science Archive Server (SAS), which is hosted by the U’s Center for High Performance Computing. The SAS stores data transferred to Utah from the survey’s telescopes at Apache Point Observatory in North America and Las Campanas Observatory in South America.

To manage the massive data flow, Brownstein led the effort to manage the pipelines that run on the SAS, which perform the scientific data reductions for shepherding the raw data from the telescopes into usable information, known as spectra, for thousands of SDSS members to access and analyze.

“It’s like making a daily feast,” Brownstein said. “Only a few people might make the meal’s courses, but everyone sits down to dinner. A few people cook the pipelines, but millions of individual spectra and their associated parameters are consumed by thousands of people in the collaboration.”

The many collaborators can access the raw data at any time. Ji, the Barbenheimer Star paper’s lead author, initiated the analysis through the SAS platform.

“We’re all very closely working together. None of that would have been possible without Utah, without this central place where we can share ideas and look at each other’s output,” Brownstein said.

The trail of evidence began with a star that, at first glance, appears unremarkable. The star, called J0931+0038, is a distant, bright red star captured in an SDSS image way back in 1999. Twenty years later, the SDSS telescope turned once again to the star – this time in technicolor. The SDSS Milky Way Mapper program observed the star’s spectrum, which measures how much light the star gives off at different wavelengths. A spectrum can reveal many things about a star, such as its temperature and chemical composition—and it was chemistry that first led Ji and his team of stellar archaeologists to notice J0931+0038.

Stars are mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but they also incorporate some of the heavier elements, which were created in previous generations of stars and released into the universe in supernova explosions.

These heavier elements show up as prominent valleys in a star’s spectrum. The SDSS spectrum indicated that J0931+0038 had an unusually low amount of magnesium, prompting further follow up from the Magellan telescopes in Chile. When Ji and colleagues first viewed the follow up spectrum of J0931+0038, they were amazed.

“As soon as I saw the spectrum, I immediately emailed the rest of the team to talk about how to learn more,” Ji said.

(Left) Long ago, the supernova explosion of the Barbenheimer Star releases an unusual mix of chemical elements in to nearby gas clouds. (Right) Today, we can look at J0931+0038 to see that unusual mix of elements and reconstruct the history of the Barbenheimer Star. Image credit: University of Chicago/SDSS-V/Melissa Weiss

Several things made the star different from other stars: low abundances of elements with odd numbers on the periodic table like sodium and aluminum; a large amount of elements close to iron in the periodic table like nickel and zinc; and an overabundance of heavier elements like strontium and palladium.

“We sometimes see one of these features at a time, but we’ve never before seen all of them in the same star,” says Jennifer Johnson of the Ohio State University, another member of the stellar archaeology team.

So what made J0931+0038 look the way it looks? The star formed from the supernova remnant of whatever star was there before – and so its unusual composition means that the star that was there before must have also been highly unusual. It is that ancient, weird star whose remains we see preserved today that astronomers have nicknamed the “Barbenheimer Star.”

Which elements are left behind after a supernova explosion depend on the mass and chemical composition of the exploded star, and also on the details of how it exploded. Whatever the Barbenheimer Star was, it must have been a blockbuster—at least 50 to 80 times the mass of our sun. In fact, that ancient supernova must have been so massive that astronomers are surprised it could happen at all; previous theories predicted that such big stars should collapse straight into black holes, without creating a supernova first. As surprising as it is to learn that such a massive star could go supernova, even that doesn’t explain the full picture.

“Amazingly, no existing model of element formation can explain what we see,” says Sanjana Curtis of the University of California, Berkeley, co-lead of the published study. “It’s not just, ‘oh, you can tweak something here and there and it’ll work out’—the whole pattern of elements looks almost seems self-contradictory.”

The best way to resolve the apparent contradiction is for astronomers to take two approaches simultaneously. First, we need more and better computer simulations to make predictions about what happened with stars in the early universe to create the stars we see today. Second, we need more observations of today’s universe to provide evidence to evaluate the computer simulations. Considering that the SDSS team discovered evidence for the Barbenheimer Star the very first night they followed up their initial observations, we can expect many more blockbuster results in the coming years.

“The universe directed this movie, we are just the camera crew,” says Keith Hawkins of the University of Texas at Austin, the scientific spokesperson for the SDSS collaboration. “We don’t yet know how the story will end.”

Source: University of Utah

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One of a telescope operator’s primary jobs is to keep any stray light out of the instrument. Earthly and other unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic light from distant stars and galaxies. During more than a decade as a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Jane Rigby obsessed over minimizing light leaks — with extraordinary success. The sky looks darker to JWST than most anyone had hoped. Rigby herself, now the senior project scientist for JWST, is a source of light. “I remember the light in her eyes,” says astrophysicist Jane Charlton, who met Rigby the summer before her freshman year at Penn State and later advised her research. “Jane had incredible grades, but that’s not necessarily what I look for. The love of astronomy, and passion for that, is what I look for.” Nearly three decades later, Rigby’s palpable joy in discussing the success of JWST, which launched on December 25, 2021, has made her one of the public faces of the telescope. She presented the telescope’s first images at the White House and has given keynote speeches at some of the biggest astronomy meetings (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30). During public appearances, she often wears JWST-themed socks, scarves and pins. “I have JWST socks for pretty much every day of the week,” she says. She has also lit a path for queer astronomers, as well as others who are historically underrepresented in astronomy. Rigby has been out as part of the LGBTQ+ community since 2000, when she met her now-wife when they were both astronomy graduate students at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has devoted much of her career to holding the door open for others. “I didn’t grow up with any queer role models,” she says. “I hope I’m the last generation for which that’s true.” Focusing on the instruments Rigby remembers being asked to draw a favorite TV show in preschool. She used up an entire black crayon drawing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Her interest in space crystallized into a career plan at about age 12, after she saw Sally Ride speak at a local college. Ride, the first American woman in space, made Rigby want to be an astronaut. “I knew there were two paths to becoming an astronaut: a test pilot or a scientist,” she says. “And it was pretty clear that I was never going to be tall enough to fly the shuttle.” At 5 feet, 2 inches tall, she’s still two inches too short to have been a space shuttle pilot. If she couldn’t make it to space, she saw more potential in science than in flying planes. Rigby’s first experience using a telescope for research, as an undergraduate student at Penn State, was stymied by light leaks. She, Charlton and another student traveled to western Texas to use the telescope at the McDonald Observatory. They were looking to catch light from a distant quasar filtering through a diffuse and mysterious cloud of cosmic gas. These small, dense clouds appear to be packed with heavy elements from supernova explosions, but surprisingly, they’re not found in galaxies’ centers where a lot of stars are born and dying. “We were, at that time, trying to figure out what they were,” Charlton says. “As we still are.” After a night of guiding the telescope by hand, the group realized that light from something other than the quasar — maybe an alert light on an instrument panel — had flooded the telescope. The trio tracked it down, covered it with tape and tried again. The same thing happened night after night. Ultimately, they returned to Pennsylvania with no quasar data. “It didn’t work,” Rigby says. “But it was really fun. I was learning everything, trying to learn how the telescope worked.” Jane Rigby has had the opportunity to observe at many notable telescopes around the world, including the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, shown here around 2011.J. Rigby Since then, Rigby has used many major telescopes, from those at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to the Magellan telescopes in Chile to the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Along the way, her research developed a theme: investigating how galaxies grow and change along with the super­massive black holes hiding within. But her approach is less “How can I answer this burning question?” and more “What can I do with this shiny new instrument?” “I’m a very observational astronomer,” she says. “I will use any telescope I can get my hands on.” All that telescope time meant she was ready to join the JWST team when the opportunity came. “Because she had seen data from Spitzer and Hubble,” JWST’s precursors, says astronomer Matt Mountain of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., “she knew what she was looking for.” Meeting the James Webb Space Telescope Rigby began working on JWST in 2010, when she took a job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as the telescope’s deputy operations project scientist. One of the first things she did was read the report of an independent review panel that found that the telescope was mismanaged, over budget by billions of dollars and would launch years later than originally planned (SN: 11/11/10). “I’ve certainly been four years from launch multiple times,” she says. Before launch, most of her time was devoted to making sure that changes to the telescope’s design wouldn’t mess up the science. She imagined possible ways to use JWST and met with other team members to make sure the final telescope would deliver on those goals. Would the telescope materials glow or release gases that could freeze to the machine? Could JWST use two cameras simultaneously? Could it study moving targets, like asteroids within the solar system (SN: 11/5/22, p. 14)? “Because she is a working scientist who really wanted to use the data,” Mountain says, “she was an ideal choice for operations scientist,” a job she moved up to in 2018. “In these complex spaces, with all the engineering, the personalities, the politics at NASA, working with contractors, she always keeps her eye on the prize: What science are we trying to do?” Rigby bridged the divide between the science and engineering teams, helping them speak a common language. Her job has been “a lot of active listening and soft power, a lot of synthesizing and a dose of specialized technical expertise,” she says. “Oftentimes I’m the big-picture person in a room full of specialists.” Thousands of people worked on the James Webb Space Telescope, shown here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017.Desiree Stover/NASA Engineer Larkin Carey removes the cover that kept the telescope’s instruments safe from contaminants and stray light while it was being assembled and tested.CHRIS GUNN/NASA After the telescope launched, got in position and unfolded itself — “the six-month unwrapping of the Christmas present,” Rigby says — her job shifted to characterizing how well the telescope works. In practically every metric, it’s a dream come true. There’s better-than-expected image quality, higher sensitivity, faster response times and a longer potential mission lifetime than predicted before launch — and practically no light leaks. The telescope’s great golden mirrors are exposed to space, and light can scatter off dust grains on the mirrors, registering on images as faint, diffuse patterns the team calls “wisps” and “claws,” or a ghostly streak dubbed “the lightsaber.” But the mirrors proved remarkably dust-free, meaning the sky appears incredibly dark. “It’s not an accident that the telescope works so well,” she says. “That was careful work beforehand.” When asked about such successes, and her own, Rigby points to a huge amount of work by tens of thousands of people. “I understand the desire to humanize something that can seem really big and impersonal. But I don’t like the singling out,” she says. “I try to reflect it back to the team.” It took thousands of people and tasks to ensure JWST’s success. Engineer Larkin Carey, with Ball Aerospace, for example, cleaned every square centimeter of the telescope’s mirrors by hand with a tool like a shaving brush, Rigby says. With the telescope working so well, Rigby could turn her attention to the scientific questions. She helps lead an observing program called TEMPLATES, looking at galaxies whose light has been magnified by foreground objects to get a glimpse at how the galaxies form stars. At a June meeting in Albuquerque of the American Astronomical Society, Rigby shared how the TEMPLATES team found hydrocarbons, “the same stuff that smoke is made of,” in a galaxy whose light dates back more than 12 billion years — the furthest back in time such molecules had ever been seen. Early in July, Rigby became the senior project scientist for JWST; it’s her job to figure out how to get the most and best science out of the telescope. Research colleagues describe her as superhuman. “I don’t know how she does everything that she does, and does everything well,” says TEMPLATES collaborator Keren Sharon of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And Rigby’s enthusiasm is abundant: “She gets giddy,” Sharon says. “It could be about figuring out a bug, or discovering this super exciting thing about a galaxy that we didn’t know before … and she’s literally bouncing. Her face lights up.” With data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Rigby and colleagues found signs of hydrocarbons in this galaxy (red ring, shown in false color) more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. A second, closer galaxy (blue) lined up perfectly to magnify the light from the more distant one.J. SPILKER, S. DOYLE, NASA, ESA, CSA Opening doors for others Rigby wants anyone to be able to experience and pursue that enthusiasm. When she started attending American Astronomical Society meetings in the 1990s, she didn’t know there was a secret LGBTQ+ networking dinner. “You had to know it existed. That was a little closety. But it’s where people were.” At the time, there was a lack of protection from employment discrimination and no guarantee of institutional support for astronomers with same-sex partners. Rigby recalls accepting a fellowship at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., and immediately having to request health insurance benefits to cover her partner. “That’s awkward,” she says. “You want to be talking about your science and your telescope proposals, not how can I get health insurance for my family because we’re different.” Finding other LGBTQ+ astronomers was “a lifeline,” she says. These days, the meet-up at AAS is too big to go out to dinner. At a January 2023 meeting in Seattle, “we lost count at 120 people. We had to spill out into the hallway,” Rigby says. “That feels good.” Seeing queer astronomers like Rigby so far along in their careers was helpful to Traci Johnson, a data scientist who was a graduate student in astronomy in Sharon’s lab at the University of Michigan. Johnson identifies as lesbian and nonbinary and came out during graduate school. “I realized it is possible to be out, and be happy, and also have a really amazing career,” Johnson says. Rigby has taken an active role in encouraging inclusivity, though she seems to be up against the legacy of JWST’s namesake. Many astronomers have called for the telescope to be renamed because James Webb was NASA administrator at a time when the U.S. government fired employees for being gay. Rigby won’t comment on the telescope’s name. But her support for LGBTQ+ astronomers is clear. Rigby was a founding member of the AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, which works to promote equality for LGBTQ+ astronomers within the field; has co-organized conferences on making astronomy more inclusive; and authored a recent white paper urging the astronomy community to address diversity, inclusion and harassment. A current priority is making sure trans people feel safe and welcome. Rigby doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the gay astronomer.” She knows her contributions to astronomy extend far beyond any particular group. But she says the leadership skills, resilience and ability to shift her perspective that she has learned through living and organizing as a member of the LGBTQ+ community have made her a better astronomer. They’re skills she transfers to her role as a leader at NASA. “The whole vision is, you get to bring your authentic self to work,” she says. “And work embraces your authentic self.”

Gazing at the stars

Dennis Overbye, a science writer and reporter, recently posted a fascinating article on the telescopes of Las Campanas Observatory located on a plateau high in the Chilean Andes in the Atacama desert. It is one of the driest and darkest places in the world and thus an ideal place for building very large telescopes with which to peer into the depths of the cosmos. How large? Some of the telescopes…

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Giant Magellan Telescope to receive new investment worth USD 205 million

- By Elton Alisson , Agência FAPESP - 

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will receive new investment worth USD 205 million from the international consortium of institutions that are leading the project. The aim is to accelerate completion of the telescope.

According to press releases issued by the GMT’s lead institutions, the investment represents one of the largest funding rounds to date. The capital will be injected by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in Brazil, and five institutions in the United States: the Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, and Harvard University. All six are founding partners in the initiative to construct the most-powerful telescope ever engineered.

The investment will be used to manufacture the telescope’s 12-story steel structure, to continue progress on the seven primary mirrors, and to build one of the world’s most advanced scientific spectrographs. A spectrograph is a scientific instrument that breaks the light from a single material into its component colors so that scientists can analyze this spectrum and discover properties of the material.

“The funding is truly a collaborative effort from our founders. It will result in the fabrication of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a science instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before,” said GMT President Robert Shelton.

FAPESP will contribute USD 45 million via a special project led by Laerte Sodré Junior, a professor at the University of São Paulo's Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP).

This investment will ensure that Brazilian researchers will be able to use a corresponding percentage of the GMT’s operating time for their own observations and studies.

“We’re achieving outstanding success in the development of instrumentation for the GMT. The project’s systems engineering team is currently under our responsibility,” Sodré Junior said.

Next-generation telescopes

The GMT is under construction at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert, and will be part of a new generation of ground-based extremely large telescopes capable of unprecedented clarity and sensitivity in observing astrophysical phenomena such as the origins of the chemical elements and the formation of the first stars and galaxies.

The GMT's seven mirrors, each with a diameter of 8.4 m, will form an effective aperture of 25.4 m. It will be up to 200 times more powerful than existing research telescopes. It will have ten times the light-collecting area and four times the spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which was launched at the end of 2021. NASA began releasing images from the JWST in July 2022. 

The GMT's unprecedented angular resolution, combined with revolutionary spectrographs and high-contrast cameras, will work in direct synergy with the JWST to empower new scientific discoveries. It will be the next step in studying the physics and chemistry of the faintest light sources in space that the JWST will identify. This includes searching the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets for life, studying the first galaxies that formed in the universe, and finding clues that will unravel the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of the universe itself. 

“We’re working with some of the brightest engineers and scientists at the leading research institutions around the globe,” said Walter Massey, Chair of the GMT’s Board, former Director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and former Chair of Bank of America. “The recent contributions from our investing partners in the GMT are collectively pushing the boundaries of astronomy, making the future a reality, and allowing us to answer some key scientific questions.” 

Construction of the GMT has achieved significant progress over the last few years. Six of seven primary mirror segments have been cast in Tucson, Arizona. The third primary mirror segment has completed its two-year polishing phase and is undergoing final testing. Construction of a 3,700 square meter facility in Rockford, Illinois, to manufacture the telescope structure is complete. Production of the first adaptive secondary mirror is well under way in France and Italy, and the site in Chile is primed for the next stage of construction and pouring of the foundation. 

According to the press releases, this latest investment round positions the GMT to be one of the first in a new generation of extremely large telescopes. The telescope’s first use to take astronomical images (first light) is expected by the end of the decade. 

“Six like-minded founders of the GMT worked together to close the financial gap between the resources we have attracted to build the telescope and what is required to complete it,” said Eric Isaacs, President of Carnegie Institution for Science. “This investment will bring the telescope closer to first light and provide the world with transformational knowledge of our Universe. Carnegie is proud to have kickstarted the funding effort and to have worked closely with our peers.”

This text was originally published by FAPESP Agency according to Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. Read the original here.

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Header image: Funding from six institutions, including the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), will be used to accelerate completion of the GMT’s seven primary mirrors and scientific instrumentation. Credit: GMT.

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James Webb Telescope: a scientist explains what its first, amazing images show – and how it will change astronomy

Astronomers find 'gold standard' star in Milky Way -- LiveScience.Tech

In our sun’s community of the Milky Way Galaxy is a fairly intense star, and in it, astronomers have actually had the ability to determine the best variety of components in a star beyond our planetary system yet.

The research study, led by University of Michigan astronomer Ian Roederer, has actually recognized 65 components in the star, HD 222925. Forty-2 of the components recognized are heavy components that are noted along the bottom of the table of elements of components.

Identifying these components in a single star will assist astronomers comprehend what’s called the “rapid neutron capture process,” or among the significant methods by which heavy components in deep space were developed. Their outcomes are published on arXiv and have actually been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

“To the best of my knowledge, that’s a record for any object beyond our solar system. And what makes this star so unique is that it has a very high relative proportion of the elements listed along the bottom two-thirds of the periodic table. We even detected gold,” Roederer stated. “These elements were made by the rapid neutron capture process. That’s really the thing we’re trying to study: the physics in understanding how, where and when those elements were made.”

The procedure, likewise called the “r-process,” starts with the existence of lighter components such as iron. Then, quickly — on the order of a 2nd — neutrons are contributed to the nuclei of the lighter components. This produces much heavier components such as selenium, silver, tellurium, platinum, gold and thorium, the kind discovered in HD 222925, and all of which are hardly ever identified in stars, according to the astronomers.

“You need lots of neutrons that are free and a very high energy set of conditions to liberate them and add them to the nuclei of atoms,” Roederer stated. “There aren’t very many environments in which that can happen — two, maybe.”

One of these environments has actually been verified: the combining of neutron stars. Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of supergiant stars, and are the tiniest and densest recognized celestial things. The crash of neutron star sets triggers gravitational waves and in 2017, astronomers initially identified gravitational waves from combining neutron stars. Another way the r-process may happen seeks the explosive death of huge stars.

“That’s an important step forward: recognizing where the r-process can occur. But it’s a much bigger step to say, ‘What did that event actually do? What was produced there?” Roederer stated. “That’s where our study comes in.”

The components Roederer and his group recognized in HD 222925 were produced in either an enormous supernovae or a merger of neutron stars extremely early in deep space. The product was ejected and tossed back into space, where it later on reformed into the star Roederer is studying today.

This star can then be utilized as a proxy for what among those occasions would have produced. Any design established in the future that shows how the r-process or nature produces components on the bottom two-thirds of the table of elements need to have the very same signature as HD 222925, Roederer states.

Crucially, the astronomers utilized an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope that can gather ultraviolet spectra. This instrument was crucial in enabling the astronomers to gather light in the ultraviolet part of the light spectrum — light that is faint, originating from a cool star such as HD 222925.

The astronomers likewise utilized among the Magellan telescopes — a consortium of which U-M is a partner — at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to gather light from HD 222925 in the optical part of the light spectrum.

These spectra encode the “chemical fingerprint” of components within stars, and checking out these spectra enables the astronomers not just to determine the components consisted of in the star, however likewise just how much of a component the star consists of.

Anna Frebel is a co-author of the research study and teacher of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She assisted with the total analysis of the HD 222925’s component abundance pattern and how it notifies our understanding of the origin of the components in the universes.

“We now know the detailed element-by-element output of some r-process event that happened early in the universe,” Frebel stated. “Any model that tries to understand what’s going on with the r-process has to be able to reproduce that.”

Many of the research study co-authors become part of a group called the R-Process Alliance, a group of astrophysicists devoted to fixing the huge concerns of the r-process. This task marks among the group’s crucial objectives: determining which components, and in what quantities, were produced in the r-process in an unmatched level of information.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/05/10/astronomers-find-gold-standard-star-in-milky-way-livescience-tech/

JAMES WEBB MOSTRA COMO O UNIVERSO SAIU DA ESCURIDÃO

BAIXE O NOVO SPACE TODAY+ NO SEU CELULAR E FIQUE CONECTADO COM O UNIVERSO! É GRÁTIS!  https://www.spacetodayplus.com.br No início do universo, o gás entre as estrelas e as galáxias era opaco – a luz energética das estrelas não conseguia penetrá-lo. Mas 1 bilhão de anos após o big bang, o gás tornou-se completamente transparente. Por que? Novos dados do Telescópio Espacial James Webb da NASA identificaram o motivo: as estrelas das galáxias emitiram luz suficiente para aquecer e ionizar o gás ao seu redor, limpando nossa visão coletiva ao longo de centenas de milhões de anos. Os resultados, de uma equipe de pesquisa liderada por Simon Lilly, da ETH Zürich, na Suíça, são os mais recentes insights sobre um período conhecido como Era da Reionização , quando o universo passou por mudanças dramáticas. Após o big bang, o gás no universo era incrivelmente quente e denso. Ao longo de centenas de milhões de anos, o gás esfriou. Então, o universo clicou em “repetir”. O gás voltou a ficar quente e ionizado – provavelmente devido à formação das primeiras estrelas nas galáxias e, ao longo de milhões de anos, tornou-se transparente. Os pesquisadores há muito buscam evidências definitivas para explicar essas transformações. Os novos resultados puxam efetivamente a cortina no final deste período de reionização. “O Webb não apenas mostra claramente que essas regiões transparentes são encontradas em torno das galáxias, mas também medimos o tamanho delas”, explicou Daichi Kashino, da Universidade de Nagoya, no Japão, o principal autor do primeiro artigo da equipe. “Com os dados de Webb, estamos vendo galáxias reionizar o gás ao seu redor.” Essas regiões de gás transparente são gigantescas em comparação com as galáxias – imagine um balão de ar quente com uma ervilha suspensa em seu interior. Os dados de Webb mostram que essas galáxias relativamente pequenas levaram à reionização, limpando regiões massivas do espaço ao seu redor. Nos próximos cem milhões de anos, essas “bolhas” transparentes continuaram a crescer cada vez mais, eventualmente se fundindo e fazendo com que todo o universo se tornasse transparente. A equipe de Lilly visou intencionalmente um momento pouco antes do fim da Era da Reionização, quando o universo não era muito claro e nem opaco – continha uma colcha de retalhos de gás em vários estados. Os cientistas apontaram Webb na direção de um quasar – um buraco negro supermassivo ativo extremamente luminoso que age como uma enorme lanterna – destacando o gás entre o quasar e nossos telescópios. (Encontre-o no centro desta visualização: é minúsculo e rosa com seis picos de difração proeminentes.) À medida que a luz do quasar viajava em nossa direção através de diferentes trechos de gás, ela era absorvida pelo gás opaco ou movia-se livremente através do gás transparente. Os resultados inovadores da equipe só foram possíveis ao emparelhar os dados de Webb com as observações do quasar central do Observatório WM Keck, no Havaí, e do Very Large Telescope do European Southern Observatory e do Magellan Telescope no Observatório Las Campanas, ambos no Chile. “Ao iluminar o gás ao longo de nossa linha de visão, o quasar nos fornece informações abrangentes sobre a composição e o estado do gás”, explicou Anna-Christina Eilers, do MIT em Cambridge, Massachusetts, principal autora de outro artigo da equipe. Os pesquisadores então usaram o Webb para identificar galáxias próximas a essa linha de visão e mostraram que as galáxias são geralmente cercadas por regiões transparentes com cerca de 2 milhões de anos-luz de raio. Em outras palavras, Webb testemunhou galáxias no processo de limpeza do espaço ao seu redor no final da Era da Reionização. Para colocar isso em perspectiva, a área que essas galáxias limparam é aproximadamente a mesma distância que o espaço entre nossa galáxia, a Via Láctea, e nossa vizinha mais próxima, Andrômeda. Até agora, os pesquisadores não tinham essa evidência definitiva do que causava a reionização – antes do Webb, eles não tinham certeza do que exatamente era o responsável. Como são essas galáxias? “Eles são mais caóticos do que aqueles no universo próximo”, explicou Jorryt Matthee, também da ETH Zürich e principal autor do segundo artigo da equipe. “Webb mostra que eles estavam formando estrelas ativamente e devem ter disparado muitas supernovas . Eles tiveram uma juventude bastante aventureira!” FONTE: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-s-webb-proves-galaxies-transformed-the-early-universe #JAMESWEBB #UNIVERSE #DARKNESS

Milky Way with Airglow Australis

Credits: Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie, Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN

2023 March 7

Deep Field: The Large Magellanic Cloud Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN)

Explanation: Is this a spiral galaxy? No. Actually, it is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the largest satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The LMC is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy because of its normally chaotic appearance. In this deep and wide exposure, however, the full extent of the LMC becomes visible. Surprisingly, during longer exposures, the LMC begins to resemble a barred spiral galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud lies only about 180,000 light-years distant towards the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado). Spanning about 15,000 light-years, the LMC was the site of SN1987A, the brightest and closest supernova in modern times. Together with the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), the LMC can be seen in Earth's southern hemisphere with the unaided eye.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230307.html

Distant stars spotted for the first time in the vast Magellanic Stream

For nearly fifty years, astronomers have come up empty-handed in their search for stars within the sprawling structure known as the Magellanic Stream. A colossal ribbon of gas, the Magellanic Stream spans nearly 300 moon diameters across the Southern Hemisphere's sky, trailing behind the Magellanic Cloud galaxies, two of our Milky Way galaxy's closest cosmic neighbors.

Now, the star search is finally over. Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and colleagues have identified 13 stars whose distances, motion, and chemical makeup place the stars squarely within the enigmatic stream.

Locating these stars has now pinned down the true distance to the Magellanic Stream, revealing that it extends from 150,000 light-years to more than 400,000 light-years away. The findings pave the way to map and model the Magellanic Stream in unprecedented detail, offering new insights into the history and characteristics of our galaxy and its neighbors.

"The Magellanic Stream dominates the Southern Hemisphere's sky, and our work has at last found a stellar structure that people have sought for decades," says Vedant Chandra, a PhD student in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the CfA and lead author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal reporting the findings.

"With these results and more like them, we hope to gain a far greater understanding of the formation of the Magellanic Stream and the Magellanic Clouds, as well as their past and future interactions with our galaxy," said co-author Charlie Conroy, a Professor of Astronomy at the CfA and Chandra's advisor.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Visible to the naked eye as gauzy luminances, the Clouds have been known since antiquity. With the advent of increasingly powerful telescopes able to perceive phenomena too faint for our eyes to see, astronomers discovered a gigantic plume of hydrogen gas apparently cast out of the Clouds in the early 1970s.

Studies of the gas within this Magellanic Stream further showed the Stream to have two interwoven filaments, with one originating from each Cloud. These features suggest the gravity of the Milky Way might have pulled the Magellanic Stream out of the Clouds. Yet how exactly the Stream formed has remained challenging to nail down, partly because its presumed stellar component remains irksomely indiscernible.

Chandra came at this problem through an ambitious project started in 2021 for his PhD at the CfA. Chandra consulted with Conroy about interesting topic areas to study, and Conroy pointed Chandra to the uncharted frontier of the Milky Way. The scant stars dotting the galaxy's outskirts have been little studied because our solar system is smack dab in the starry disk of the Milky Way itself—akin to a concertgoer near the stage attempting to see somebody all the way out at the crowd's periphery.

Over the last decade, though, deep observational catalogs compiled by new instruments—especially the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft—have started to spy stellar objects that just might be these elusive frontier stars. With access granted to the 6.5m Magellan Baade Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile through the CfA and MIT, Chandra undertook a project to perform spectroscopy on 200 far-flung Milky Way stars, which, when completed, will be the largest such sample set to date.

Spectroscopy involves collecting enough light from an object to detect specific signatures imprinted within the light's color bands that, like fingerprints, uniquely identify individual chemical elements. These signatures thus disclose the chemical makeup of an object, speaking to its origins. In addition, the signatures shift based on the distance to an object, enabling astronomers to tell where an object, such as a star, is going and, correspondingly where it came from.

In the case of Chandra's study, the spectroscopic analysis revealed a set of 13 stars with distances and velocities that fall right within the range expected for the Magellanic Stream. Moreover, the stars' chemical abundances matched those of the Magellanic Clouds, for instance, by being distinctively deficient in the heavier elements astronomers call metals. "These 13 stars just fell right out of our dataset," says Rohan Naidu, co-author on the study and former CfA graduate student, currently a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

By obtaining solid distance and extent measurements of the Magellanic Stream via these stars, the researchers buttressed its origin story as a gravitational grab by the Milky Way. The researchers were additionally able to calculate the Stream's overall gas distribution with higher confidence compared to prior estimates. The distribution indicates that the Stream is actually about twice as massive as generally reckoned.

That result, in turn, presages a future full of new star formation in the Milky Way because the Stream is actively falling into our galaxy, according to previous observations. In this way, the Stream serves as a primary provider of the cold, neutral gas needed for making fresh Milky Way stars.

"The Magellanic Stream is the dominant source of stellar calories for the Milky Way—it's our breakfast, lunch, and dinner," says Ana Bonaca, a co-author on the study and former ITC postdoctoral fellow at the CfA, now a staff scientist at Carnegie Observatories. "Based on the new, higher mass estimates for Magellanic Stream, the Milky Way may end up packing on more pounds than initially thought."

Further studies of the Magellanic Stream should also help astronomers learn more about the composition of our galaxy. Because the Stream is thought to trace the past paths of the Magellanic Clouds, modeling the evolution of the relatively massive Large Magellanic Cloud via the Stream will improve measurements of the Milky Way's mass distribution.

Much of that mass is in the form of dark matter—a poorly understood, gravity-exerting substance. Better gauging the mass of our galaxy out in its distant hinterlands will aid in accounting for ordinary matter versus dark matter contents, constraining the possible properties of the latter.

"The beauty of having a vast stellar stream like the Magellanic Stream is that we can now perform so many astrophysical investigations with it," says Chandra. "As our spectroscopic survey continues and we find more stars, we're excited to see what other surprises the Galactic outskirts have in store for us."

TOP IMAGE....All-sky map of stars observed by the Gaia space observatory in 'galactic' coordinates, looking towards the center of the Milky Way. The neutral hydrogen gas of the Magellanic Stream is displayed in blue, spanning almost the entire southern sky. Red stars indicate the thirteen red giant stars Chandra et al. identified as members of the Magellanic Stellar Stream. Credit: Red giants: CfA/Vedant Chandra/Melissa Weiss. All-sky view: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); A. Moitinho/A. F. Silva/M. Barros/C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal. Magellanic Stream data: D. Nidever et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, Leiden-Argentine-Bonn Survey; Parkes, Westerbork, and Arecibo Observatories.

LOWER IMAGE....Artist's rendition of the Magellanic Stellar Stream. The Milky Way's nearest neighboring galaxies—the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds—are shown on the right side of the illustration. As these galaxies move to the right, the gaseous Magellanic Stream billows behind them, intertwining and stretching across the southern sky. The illustration also shows the 13 red giant stars discovered in the Magellanic Stellar Stream. Credit: CfA / Melissa Weiss

Too many to count: This image shows just a small section of a large photographic plate depicting hundreds of galaxies in or near the Virgo Cluster. It was made using the du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, in Chile, in 1980.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Allan Sandage, a onetime assistant to Hubble, and his collaborators conducted the first exhaustive survey of the Virgo Cluster, a bundle of galaxies that comprise the heart of the supercluster containing our own Milky Way. To do this, the astronomers made 67 enormous, 20-inch-square photographic plates, which together produced a catalogue of 2,096 galaxies. The image above shows just a small fraction of one plate, which Sandage made at Las Campanas Observatory, in Chile, in 1980. He painstakingly located and measured each galaxy one-by-one, noting their catalog number and magnitude directly onto the plate in red and green ink.