Spring forward.
To delete this message, click the X at top right.

General Astronomy

User avatar
RVInit
Posts: 3830
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:48 am

General Astronomy

#1

Post by RVInit »

There's a lot of things that need to change. One specifically? Police brutality.
--Colin Kaepernick
User avatar
AndyinPA
Posts: 9853
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:42 am
Location: Pittsburgh
Verified:

General Astronomy

#2

Post by AndyinPA »

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... rida-coast
Nasa has confirmed the recovery of debris from the Challenger spaceship that exploded less than two minutes after its launch and killed all seven members onboard in 1986.

In Thursday’s announcement, the space agency said the “artifact” was discovered by a film crew that was in search of aircraft from the second world war off the east coast of Florida.

Divers found a human-made element that was covered in sand and, given the location was near Florida’s “space coast” where the mission was launched from, they reached out to Nasa.

“While it has been nearly 37 years since seven daring and brave explorers lost their lives aboard Challenger, this tragedy will forever be seared in the collective memory of our country,” the Nasa administrator, Bill Nelson, said in the statement. “For millions around the globe, myself included, 28 January 1986 still feels like yesterday.”
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
User avatar
Liz
Posts: 96
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:52 pm

General Astronomy

#3

Post by Liz »

It's a piece of the wing with heat shield tiles facing upwards... I think
Image
Michael Ciannili, program manager of the Apollo, Challenger, Columbia Lessons Learned Program, said he's confident it's the underside of the spacecraft.
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14351
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

General Astronomy

#4

Post by RTH10260 »

plase skip if you happen to be a Young Earther
Scientists Capture Radio Signal Sent From 9 Billion Light-Year Away From Earth
The findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ScienceEdited by Anjali Thakur
Updated: January 22, 2023 5:13 pm IST


Scientists have captured radio signals from a galaxy almost 9 billion light-years away from the Earth, space.com reported. This is the first time a signal like this has been received from such a distance.

Scientists detected the signals by a unique wavelength known as a "21-centimetre line" or the "hydrogen line," which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms.

"The astronomical distance over which such a signal has been picked up is the largest so far by a large margin. This is also the first confirmed detection of strong lensing of 21 cm emission from a galaxy", according to an IISc statement.

The findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Atomic hydrogen is the basic fuel required for star formation in a galaxy. When hot ionised gas from the surrounding medium of a galaxy falls onto the galaxy, the gas cools and forms atomic hydrogen, which then becomes molecular hydrogen, and eventually leads to the formation of stars, it was explained.

"Therefore, understanding the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time requires tracing the evolution of neutral gas at different cosmological epochs", the statement said.

Atomic hydrogen emits radio waves of 21 cm wavelength, which can be detected using low-frequency radio telescopes like the GMRT. Thus, 21 cm emission is a direct tracer of the atomic gas content in both nearby and distant galaxies, the PTI report said.

However, this radio signal is extremely weak and it is nearly impossible to detect the emission from a distant galaxy using current telescopes due to their limited sensitivity.

"Until now, the most distant galaxy detected using 21 cm emission was at redshift z=0.376, which corresponds to a look-back time - the time elapsed between detecting the signal and its original emission - of 4.1 billion years (Redshift represents the change in wavelength of the signal depending on the object's location and movement; a greater value of z indicates a farther object)," it said.

Using GMRT data, Arnab Chakraborty, a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and Trottier Space Institute of McGill University, and Nirupam Roy, Associate Professor, the Department of Physics, IISc, have detected a radio signal from atomic hydrogen in a distant galaxy at redshift z=1.29.

"Due to the immense distance to the galaxy, the 21 cm emission line had redshifted to 48 cm by the time the signal travelled from the source to the telescope," says Chakraborty. The signal detected by the team was emitted from this galaxy when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old; in other words, the look-back time for this source is 8.8 billion years.




https://www.ndtv.com/science/scientists ... th-3714532
User avatar
keith
Posts: 3705
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:23 pm
Location: The Swamp in Victorian Oz
Occupation: Retired Computer Systems Analyst Project Manager Super Coder
Verified: ✅lunatic

General Astronomy

#5

Post by keith »

RTH10260 wrote: Sun Jan 22, 2023 2:37 pm plase skip if you happen to be a Young Earther
Scientists Capture Radio Signal Sent From 9 Billion Light-Year Away From Earth
The findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ScienceEdited by Anjali Thakur
Updated: January 22, 2023 5:13 pm IST


Scientists have captured radio signals from a galaxy almost 9 billion light-years away from the Earth, space.com reported. This is the first time a signal like this has been received from such a distance.

Scientists detected the signals by a unique wavelength known as a "21-centimetre line" or the "hydrogen line," which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms.
:snippity:
Teach the controversy
Has everybody heard about the bird?
User avatar
much ado
Posts: 1382
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:42 pm
Location: The Left Coast

General Astronomy

#6

Post by much ado »

keith wrote: Sun Jan 22, 2023 3:43 pm
RTH10260 wrote: Sun Jan 22, 2023 2:37 pm plase skip if you happen to be a Young Earther
Scientists Capture Radio Signal Sent From 9 Billion Light-Year Away From Earth
The findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
:snippity:
Scientists detected the signals by a unique wavelength known as a "21-centimetre line" or the "hydrogen line," which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms.
:snippity:
Teach the controversy
Yeah, I noticed that too. It's as if it was written by a non-scientist.

This spectral line is only emitted by unbound neutral hydrogen atoms. All hydrogen on Earth is bound to something. Hydrogen gas on Earth is molecular hydrogen (H2), two hydrogen atoms bound to each other. So this line is used in radio astronomy without fear of being misled by terrestrial radiation.

From the Wikipedia article...
Discovery

During the 1930s, it was noticed that there was a radio "hiss" that varied on a daily cycle and appeared to be extraterrestrial in origin. After initial suggestions that this was due to the Sun, it was observed that the radio waves seemed to propagate from the centre of the Galaxy. These discoveries were published in 1940 and were noted by Jan Oort who knew that significant advances could be made in astronomy if there were emission lines in the radio part of the spectrum. He referred this to Hendrik van de Hulst who, in 1944, predicted that neutral hydrogen could produce radiation at a frequency of 1420.4058 MHz due to two closely spaced energy levels in the ground state of the hydrogen atom.

The 21 cm line (1420.4 MHz) was first detected in 1951 by Ewen and Purcell at Harvard University, and published after their data was corroborated by Dutch astronomers Muller and Oort, and by Christiansen and Hindman in Australia. After 1952 the first maps of the neutral hydrogen in the Galaxy were made, and revealed for the first time the spiral structure of the Milky Way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line
User avatar
Suranis
Posts: 5830
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:25 pm

General Astronomy

#7

Post by Suranis »

The signal said "B E S U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R H Y D R O G E N"
Hic sunt dracones
User avatar
Tiredretiredlawyer
Posts: 7541
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:07 pm
Location: Rescue Pets Land
Occupation: 21st Century Suffragist
Verified: ✅🐴🐎🦄🌻5000 posts and counting

General Astronomy

#8

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

CRUMMY COMMERCIAL!!!!!!!! :biggrin:
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14351
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

General Astronomy

#9

Post by RTH10260 »

Space dust from 4.2bn-year-old asteroid could hold key to preventing cataclysmic collisions with Earth
Rubble pile asteroid is almost as old as the solar system, a sign that it can withstand great shocks and may be difficult to destroy, research suggests

Donna Lu
Tue 24 Jan 2023 08.57 GMT

Tiny specks of dust from a “giant space cushion” almost as old as the solar system can provide new clues about how to avoid catastrophic asteroid collisions with Earth, research suggests.

Three tiny particles of dust – smaller than the diameter of a hair – collected from a 500-metre-long asteroid known as Itokawa show some of these space rocks are much older and tougher than previously thought.

The peanut-shaped Itokawa is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, one that could veer perilously close to Earth and could cause significant damage if it collided.

Technicians launch the mirror of the James webb telescope by crane
Webb telescope zooms in on planet beyond our solar system
Read more
A study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that Itokawa formed more than 4.2bn years ago, making it 10 times older than solid asteroids of a similar size. The solar system, in comparison, is 4.57bn years old.

Itokawa is a rubble pile asteroid, which forms when solid asteroids collide and the resulting fragments assemble into new structures. They are composed of rocks, dust, pebbles and a void, and held together by the gravitational pull of their various components.

Solid asteroids are thought to have a lifespan of several hundred million years, and are gradually ground down by constant collisions.



https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... with-earth
User avatar
Foggy
Dick Tater
Posts: 9554
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Fogbow HQ
Occupation: Dick Tater/Space Cadet
Verified: as seen on qvc zombie apocalypse

General Astronomy

#10

Post by Foggy »

They are composed of rocks, dust, pebbles and a void, and held together by the gravitational pull of their various components.
Nonsense. Horse patooties. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night. :nope:

Experiment: Gather some rocks, dust, pebbles, and a void. You can use Ron Johnson's or Lauren Bonobo's brain for the void.

Put them all in the same room and see whether they hold together and form an asteroid.

Oops. :blackeye:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14351
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

General Astronomy

#11

Post by RTH10260 »

Foggy wrote: Thu Jan 26, 2023 11:04 am
They are composed of rocks, dust, pebbles and a void, and held together by the gravitational pull of their various components.
Nonsense. Horse patooties. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night. :nope:

Experiment: Gather some rocks, dust, pebbles, and a void. You can use Ron Johnson's or Lauren Bonobo's brain for the void.

Put them all in the same room and see whether they hold together and form an asteroid.

Oops. :blackeye:
Bad idea, they would suddenly have something to rattle with :twisted:
User avatar
Foggy
Dick Tater
Posts: 9554
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Fogbow HQ
Occupation: Dick Tater/Space Cadet
Verified: as seen on qvc zombie apocalypse

General Astronomy

#12

Post by Foggy »

Well, you gotta get an empty container. :biggrin:

But the point is, asteroids are moving like eleventy thousand miles an hour through space, and they're held together by the gravity of DUST? And PEBBLES?

I'm familiar with dust, and rocks, and pebbles. I encounter those things on an irregular basis. Dust is tiny, and it has like ZERO GRAVITY. Because it consists of really tiny particles, each one of which has a measurable ZERO GRAVITY.

But that's plenty of gravity enough to hold an asteroid together in space at a gazillion miles an hour for a hundred million years, yep.

Don't hang noodles on my ears. :fingerwag:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14351
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

General Astronomy

#13

Post by RTH10260 »

Foggy wrote: Thu Jan 26, 2023 11:26 am Well, you gotta get an empty container. :biggrin:

But the point is, asteroids are moving like eleventy thousand miles an hour through space, and they're held together by the gravity of DUST? And PEBBLES?

I'm familiar with dust, and rocks, and pebbles. I encounter those things on an irregular basis. Dust is tiny, and it has like ZERO GRAVITY. Because it consists of really tiny particles, each one of which has a measurable ZERO GRAVITY.

But that's plenty of gravity enough to hold an asteroid together in space at a gazillion miles an hour for a hundred million years, yep.

Don't hang noodles on my ears. :fingerwag:
:confuzzled: a single object has no gravity in itself, gravity is a force among two objects. Even two dust particles will have gravity measured among them, the lighter one will be attracted to the more massive one. It's likely an exercise in physics calulations rather than actual possible measurement at that scale. Out in the outer space where nothing else disturbs the couple, they ought to by nature be attracted to themselves (is that space wide same sex attraction?), when they bond themselves, their "heavyweight" can attract the lighter minded. They even may find some sticky substance like H2O molecules to freeze them together.

:think: IANAL I am not a astrophysicist not do I play one on TV
User avatar
Foggy
Dick Tater
Posts: 9554
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Fogbow HQ
Occupation: Dick Tater/Space Cadet
Verified: as seen on qvc zombie apocalypse

General Astronomy

#14

Post by Foggy »

RTH10260 wrote: Thu Jan 26, 2023 12:38 pm ... a single object has no gravity in itself, gravity is a force among two objects. Even two dust particles will have gravity measured among them, the lighter one will be attracted to the more massive one. It's likely an exercise in physics calulations rather than actual possible measurement at that scale. Out in the outer space where nothing else disturbs the couple, they ought to by nature be attracted to themselves (is that space wide same sex attraction?), when they bond themselves, their "heavyweight" can attract the lighter minded. They even may find some sticky substance like H2O molecules to freeze them together.
That's what they want you to think.

Can they do a laboratory experiment with repeatable results like scientists do in real science that show gravity between two motes of dust? No, they cannot. Gravity isn't a force, it's a imaginary force.


I mean, honestly. I'm supposed to believe that there's a peanut-shaped conglomeration of just rocks, pebbles, dust, and Ron Johnson's brain, kilometers long, flying around the galaxy for untold millions and millions of years, all held together by gravity. It makes no sense, and I pay attention to the Universe. I read about this stuff. I think about it.

And the gravity of dust and pebbles is not enough, combined with the gravity of rocks and the gravity of Ron Johnson's brain. How would you get a thing like that started?
Out from under. :thumbsup:
User avatar
RVInit
Posts: 3830
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:48 am

General Astronomy

#15

Post by RVInit »

This is a really cool NASA site where you can look at some of our solar system objects and watch in real time their position relative to other solar system objects. The Mars page shows where the rovers and orbiters are if you watch long enough for it to rotate to put their location in view.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mars/overview/
There's a lot of things that need to change. One specifically? Police brutality.
--Colin Kaepernick
User avatar
Tiredretiredlawyer
Posts: 7541
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:07 pm
Location: Rescue Pets Land
Occupation: 21st Century Suffragist
Verified: ✅🐴🐎🦄🌻5000 posts and counting

General Astronomy

#16

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Cooooool!!!!
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
User avatar
Foggy
Dick Tater
Posts: 9554
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Fogbow HQ
Occupation: Dick Tater/Space Cadet
Verified: as seen on qvc zombie apocalypse

General Astronomy

#17

Post by Foggy »

That's totally awesome and highly addictive. I could spend a lot of time on the site.
Out from under. :thumbsup:
User avatar
Tiredretiredlawyer
Posts: 7541
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:07 pm
Location: Rescue Pets Land
Occupation: 21st Century Suffragist
Verified: ✅🐴🐎🦄🌻5000 posts and counting

General Astronomy

#18

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2 ... d-extended
The First Law of Thermodynamics has been revised and extended

The First Law of Thermodynamics is something that comes up all the time in Science Fiction.
...A simple formulation is: "the total energy in a system remains constant, although it may be converted from one form to another." Another common phrasing is that "energy can neither be created nor destroyed" (in a "closed system"). While there are many subtleties and implications, which may be more precisely captured in more complex formulations, this is the essential principle of the First Law.
It usually gets mentioned in some context where “mysterious unknown forces”, or “alien technology”, or some never before seen “natural phenomenon” is “doing something beyond our science” that is involving energy.

The last is what’s the case here: our science has gotten an upgrade. The universe is still running the same way (as far as we can tell), no laws of physics have been broken or bent. No amazing technology is about to appear. (At least not yet.)

But it’s a big deal that will only get bigger.

A February 22, 2023 story at Phys.org has the basic details:
Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, and graduate research assistant Hasan Barbhuiya, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are studying how energy gets converted in superheated plasmas in space.

Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, will revamp scientists' understanding of how plasmas in space and laboratories get heated up, and may have a wide variety of further applications across physics and other sciences.
note: this is not the plasma associated with blood. This is the plasma that is the fourth state of matter.

The basic understanding of the First Law dates back to the 1850s; in simplest form the energy in a closed system may change form, but the total amount remains constant. The qualification is, it has to be a system at equilibrium.

What Cassak and Barbhuiya have done is that they have figured out how to extend it to handle more complex situations, where a system is not at equilibrium. It’s going to take a while for all the implications to be understood and applied. From the press release about their work:
“We generalized the first law of thermodynamics for systems that are not in equilibrium,” Cassak said. “We did a pencil and paper calculation to find how much energy is associated with matter not being in equilibrium, and it works whether the system is close to or far from equilibrium.”

Their research has numerous potential applications. The theory will help scientists understand plasmas in space, which is important for preparing for space weather. Space weather occurs when huge eruptions in the solar atmosphere blast superheated plasma into space. It can cause problems like power outages, interruptions to satellite communications and the rerouting of airplanes.

“The result represents a really large step of our understanding,” Cassak said. “Until now, the state-of-the-art in our research area was to account for energy conversion only associated with expansion and heating, but our theory provides a way to calculate all the energy from not being in equilibrium.”

“Because the first law of thermodynamics is so widely used,” Barbhuiya said, “it is our hope that scientists in a wide array of fields could use our result.”

For example, it may be useful for studying low-temperature plasmas — which are important for etching in the semiconductor and circuit industry — as well as in other areas like chemistry and quantum computing. It might also help astronomers study how galaxies evolve in time.
How big is this?
...Likewise, the breakthrough he and Barbhuiya have made will change the landscape of plasma and space physics, a feat that doesn’t happen often.

“There aren’t many laws of physics — Newton's laws, the laws of electricity and magnetism, the three laws of thermodynamics, and the laws of quantum mechanics,” said Duncan Lorimer, professor and interim chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “To take one of these laws that has been around over 150 years and improve on it is a major achievement.”
Jackie Appel at Popular Mechanics has additional perspective on what this means.
...because it’s no longer 1850 and we’re trying to answer more detailed questions about the universe around us, researchers have long been trying to find a way to apply the first law to systems that are not in equilibrium. While you might [not] have to reckon with many of these systems in your day-to-day existence, they’re very common throughout the universe in such substances as space plasma—found everywhere from the tails of comets to the outer layers of stars.

...To the untrained eye, the solution will probably just look like a dense and confusing group of equations. But to a physicist, the mathematical description of these additional properties looks like opportunity. Potential applications of this work range from chemistry to circuitry and quantum computing to space weather.

This kind of adjustment in our understanding of the basic building blocks of physics doesn’t happen often, so when it does, it has the potential to hugely influence the field and those associated with it. It just goes to show that even centuries-old laws can become new again if we look at them hard enough.
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
User avatar
keith
Posts: 3705
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:23 pm
Location: The Swamp in Victorian Oz
Occupation: Retired Computer Systems Analyst Project Manager Super Coder
Verified: ✅lunatic

General Astronomy

#19

Post by keith »

Hey cool!

We might finally be only 20 years away from fusion power!
Has everybody heard about the bird?
User avatar
Sam the Centipede
Posts: 1831
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:19 pm

General Astronomy

#20

Post by Sam the Centipede »

keith wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 1:36 am Hey cool!

We might finally be only 20 years away from fusion power!
Ima gonna commute to my job at the fusion power palace in my flying car and watch my domestic robots prepare my dinner over the holographic link!
User avatar
Suranis
Posts: 5830
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:25 pm

General Astronomy

#21

Post by Suranis »

The 1,000-light-year-wide cosmic bubble around Earth
The Milky Way is blowing a star-forming bubble, and we’re in the middle of it.
By Christopher Cokinos | Published: Thursday, January 13, 2022


Star formation in the 500 light-years around Earth is being driven by a cosmic bubble known as the Local bubble, as seen in this artist's concept.

Think “bubbles,” and you may think “soap” or “gum.”

But not Catherine Zucker, currently a Hubble Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a former researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Zucker’s interest in bubbles is cosmic. And she and her collaborators have found new insights about a bubble in which our solar system sits.

Astronomers have long known about the 1,000-light-year-wide Local Bubble. In a new paper published Jan. 12 in Nature, Zucker and her co-authors describe it as “a cavity of low-density, high-temperature plasma surrounded by a shell of cold, neutral gas and dust.” But for years, astronomers were in the dark beyond that. The history of the Local Bubble, even its size, remained unknown.

Not anymore. Zucker and her team became accidental historians when, starting work on a different project, they found instead a kind of creation story of our local stellar neighborhood, and provided robust confirmation of the assumption that supernovae — the explosions of dying stars — lead to the birth of other stars. This happens when the blown-out materials recombine elsewhere due to the force of gravity.

Bubbly beginnings

What Zucker’s team found, according to their paper, was “that nearly all of the star-forming complexes in the solar vicinity lie on the surface of the Local Bubble and that their young stars show outward expansion mainly perpendicular to the bubble’s surface.” She calls it a “eureka moment.”

In other words, the young stars in our galactic neighborhood are almost all due to the expansive shock waves of a series of supernovae and that process of blown-out remains recombining to birth new suns and new solar systems. The bubble - which is actually shaped more like a piece of pipe cutting through the plane of the Milky Way – seems to have formed 14 million years ago from some 15 supernovae, and the triggered star formation that is still happening today.

The last such supernova took place about 2 million years ago, according to Zucker’s research — a finding that matches nicely with the previously reported deposition of cosmic iron in the Earth’s crust.

Zucker presented her team’s work virtually this week at a drastically scaled-back gathering of the American Astronomical Society, which was to have met in-person in Salt Lake City. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic upended those plans.

Zucker told Astronomy that while there are “tens of millions of ‘old’ stars [those that are more than 14 million years old] inside the Local Bubble,” there are “on the order of thousands of ‘young’ stars … on its surface that have been birthed by the supernovae.”

It just happens that the Sun and our solar system currently sit inside this bubble. According to the team, the Sun rolled into the Local Bubble about 5 million years ago — but it likely sat in other bubbles at other times.

“This work is most useful for providing the ‘big picture’ context for star and planet formation,” Zucker says. “One takeaway that might have been missed is that this study is really the tip of the iceberg. The Local Bubble is just the first bubble whose history we have mapped out — it's the easiest one to understand first, since it's the bubble in which our Sun currently resides. However, we have clues that not just single superbubbles, but the interactions of many superbubbles, are driving the formation of young stars near our Sun.”

Zucker compares the process to plowing snow. If one or more superbubbles is “piling up gas in the same region of space … we should get even more enhanced star formation at those intersecting surfaces.” And, in fact, one such bubble, called Perseus-Taurus, is interacting with our Local Bubble “at the site of the Taurus molecular cloud” — home to known protoplanetary disks.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia star-mapping mission was crucial in providing the precise data needed to discover the star-formation nuances of the Local Bubble — what Zucker has been calling an “origin story.”
Luckily, you don’t need access to high-end data to connect to this work. “The two clusters of stars that hosted the supernovae are still around and they are about 15 to 16 million years old,” says Zucker. “They currently lie near the edge of the Local Bubble's shell.” (At the time, the supernovae were getting underway, these clusters were in the thick of the action.)

You can point your telescope toward those local star-forming regions. One is in Taurus, the other is in Ophiuchus, home of the Ophiuchus Nebula. Looking into those areas gives you a chance to bear witness to the history and continuance of star birth in our Local Bubble.

Interested readers can also find cool data visualizations and more information at the team’s dedicated website.
Hic sunt dracones
User avatar
Tiredretiredlawyer
Posts: 7541
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:07 pm
Location: Rescue Pets Land
Occupation: 21st Century Suffragist
Verified: ✅🐴🐎🦄🌻5000 posts and counting

General Astronomy

#22

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Coooooool!!! I mean, HOT!
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
User avatar
Foggy
Dick Tater
Posts: 9554
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Fogbow HQ
Occupation: Dick Tater/Space Cadet
Verified: as seen on qvc zombie apocalypse

General Astronomy

#23

Post by Foggy »

Yeah, the problem with bubbles is, they eventually pop. :shock:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14351
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

General Astronomy

#24

Post by RTH10260 »

Stop chewing gum! ;)
User avatar
Suranis
Posts: 5830
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:25 pm

General Astronomy

#25

Post by Suranis »



The Juno probe is getting closer and closer to Io with its orbits. It will eventually get to around 930 miles, or 1500 kms. Still, amazing photos right now.
Hic sunt dracones
Post Reply

Return to “Astronomy”