Archive for the ‘Astrophysics’ Category
Herschel Space Observatory, ESA has discovered that supernovae can generate large amounts of interstellar dust. Along with the clouds of gas, this powder is the raw material that will be new stars, planets and ultimately life. This discovery may help solve one of the greatest enigmas of the early universe.
This discovery was made while Herschel studied radiation from cold dust in the large Magellanic Cloud, a small close to the Milky Way Galaxy. The cold dust emits radiation in the far infrared band, what makes that Herschel, designed specifically to study this frequency band, the perfect satellite to detect its presence.
Herschel noted a source of infrared radiation in the supernova 1987A, a stellar explosion detected by first time from the Earth in February 1987, and the closest to our planet for the past 400 years.
Since then, astronomers study how the supernova shock wave through the galaxy. Read the rest of this entry »
Unlike Earth, whose main training period lasted between 50 and 100 million years, Mars took only 2 to 4 million years to form, and that goes along with the fact that its mass and size are lower than those of our planet. This is the conclusion reached in a new study.
Nicolas Dauphas of the University of Chicago and Ali Pourmand of the University of Miami are the authors of this research.
In light of the conclusion of the study, the rapid formation of the red planet helps explain why it is so small. It had lasted longer training phase; Mars would probably have reached a mass and size comparable to those of Earth or Venus. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent observations of the Voyager 1 spacecraft reveal the existence of a region on the edge of the solar system where it slows down and cancels the radial velocity of the solar wind. The information, published in the journal Nature, casts doubt on previous ideas.
“Over the past 50 years and knew that the plasma peak of the wind blowing from the sun at 1.5 million miles per hour, could not continue forever beyond the orbits of the planets at some point would be against pressure of the magnetic field of the galaxy and would stop, and we now know that this happens about 17,000 million miles away”, tells Stamatios Krimigis, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University (USA) and lead author of the study published by Nature. Read the rest of this entry »
Herschel Space Telescope has detected the ESA strong dust storms leaving several galaxies. It has long been suspected that these currents may be strong enough to strip the galaxies of gas, slowing the process of star formation in its wake.
Herschel has encountered winds of extraordinary magnitude, the fastest blowing at a speed of more than 1,000 km/s, which amounts to 10,000 times faster than terrestrial hurricanes.
This is the first time that this phenomenon is observed unambiguously in a number of galaxies. It is a discovery of great importance, since stars form from interstellar gas and dust, so that these currents are stripping the galaxies of the raw materials they need to form new stars. These winds could reach sufficient magnitude to completely stop the evolution of stars that are in the process of formation. Read the rest of this entry »
The physics that prevails in the interior of neutron stars seems to defy the laws of gravity and other concepts, as evidenced by the examples found in recent research.
Neutron stars are superdense ‘corpses’ of massive star that exploded as supernovae. With all its mass covering an area of the size of a small town, its protons and electrons are built against each other, becoming neutron. A neutron star can be several times more dense than a normal nucleus. As for mass, a cup full of a neutron star material they will plague more than 500 million tonnes. This tremendous concentration of mass makes neutron stars in a ‘laboratory’ natural ideal for the study of the phases of matter more dense and exotic known by physics. Read the rest of this entry »
For a time, suspected that the accumulation of material in the hot young stars is not gradual, but that happens in separate episodes, resulting in this short but powerful energy emission of these stars. However, in the models of star formation, this has been largely ignored. Now, a team of astrophysicists offers a new vision of star formation through the development of advanced computer models to simulate the behavior of the young stars.
While the stars are young, are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, and grow by absorbing material in these disks through the process of accretion. Discs can be fragmented, which leads to the formation of smaller stars, planets and brown dwarfs. The latter are objects more massive than planets, but not enough to become stars. Read the rest of this entry »