A spectacular portrait of the galaxy Centaurus A has been captured by astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. This galaxy’s peculiar appearance—cloaked in dark tendrils of dust—stems from a past interaction with another galaxy, and its size and proximity to Earth make it one of the best-studied giant galaxies in the night sky.
The galaxy Centaurus A, which lies over 12 million light-years away in the direction of the southern-hemisphere constellation Centaurus (The Centaur), is the leading light of this striking image. This image provides a spectacular view of the luminous glow of stars and the dark tendrils of dust that hide the bright center of the galaxy. This dust is the result of a past galactic collision, in which a giant elliptical galaxy merged with a smaller spiral galaxy. As well as large amounts of gas and dust, Centaurus A’s dust lane contains widespread star formation, as indicated by the red clouds of hydrogen and by the large number of faint blue stars visible at each end of the dust lane.
The proximity and brightness of Centaurus A—it is one of the closest giant galaxies to Earth—make it one of the best-studied objects in the southern hemisphere night sky. Since its discovery in 1,826 scientists have studied the galaxy exhaustively with many different kinds of telescopes, revealing a variety of intriguing features. Radio telescopes reveal a colossal jet of matter spewing outward from the heart of the galaxy. This jet is accelerated to almost half the speed of light by a supermassive black hole at the center of Centaurus A, and its bright emissions at radio wavelengths make this galaxy one of the most prominent radio sources in the night sky. In fact, in July 2,021 the Event Horizon Telescope produced an image of a jet launching from the black hole in Centaurus A, which weighs in at 55 million times the mass of the Sun.
“Enormous clouds of gas are pulled into galaxies and used in the process of making stars,” said co-lead author Deanne Fisher, associate professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University in Australia.
On its way in it is made of hydrogen and helium. By using a new piece of equipment called the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, we were able to confirm that stars made from this fresh gas eventually drive a huge amount of material back out of the system, mainly through supernovas.
But this stuff is no longer nice and clean – it contains lots of other elements, including oxygen, carbon, and iron.
Physicists may have just detected a cloud of dark matter particles! It could also be primordial black holes, but either would be a major breakthrough.
Black holes are more than just massive objects that swallow everything around them – they’re also one of the universe’s biggest and most stable energy sources. That would make them invaluable to the type of civilization that needs huge amounts of power, such as a Type II Kardashev civilization. But to harness all of that power, the civilization would have to encircle the entire black hole with something that could capture the power it is emitting.
One potential solution would be a Dyson sphere – a type of stellar mega engineering project that encapsulates an entire star (or, in this case, a black hole) in an artificial sheath that captures all of the energy the object at its center emits. But even if it was able to capture all of the energy the black hole emits, the sphere itself would still suffer from heat loss. And that heat loss would make it visible to us, according to new research published by an international team led by researchers at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.
First-of-their-kind images of the magnetic field around a black hole may explain how the black hole shoots out a jet of energy and matter more than 5,000 light-years into space.
The new images come from the first black hole ever photographed, which sits at the center of Messier 87 a giant elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years away. In 2,017 an international collaboration of more than 300 researchers coordinated 11 radio telescopes around the globe to observe the center of M87. The resulting joint telescope was dubbed the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The result, released in 2,019 was an image of a black hole surrounded by a doughnut of glowing matter.
Now, a new analysis of the data reveals that the light in that glowing doughnut is partially polarized, meaning the light waves vibrate in a single plane. This is a signature of light that has passed through hot, magnetized space, and its presence means researchers can begin to map out the magnetic field at the edge of the black hole.
Physics World
An ultra-precise quantum sensor based on trapped beryllium ions is up to 20 times better at detecting weak electric fields than previous atomic devices. By introducing entanglement between the collective motion of the ions and their electronic spin, a collaboration led by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) demonstrated that the ion displacement sensitivity in the presence of an electric field was an order of magnitude greater than for classical protocols with trapped ions. With further improvements, the technology could even be used in the search for dark matter.
Quantum sensors can detect and measure signals that are undetectable with their classical counterparts. They are thus a promising tool in many areas of fundamental science, including biological imaging as well as physics. Of the many different systems being pursued as quantum sensors, trapped ions could be particularly favourable due to experimenters’ precise control over their parameters and their ability to introduce entanglement into the system.
The Ion Storage Group at NIST, led by John Bollinger, decided to exploit these properties for measuring very weak electric fields. “We realized our ion crystal can be incredibly sensitive to electric fields,” explains Kevin Gilmore, a former graduate research assistant at NIST and the lead author of a paper describing the research. “We found a protocol that exploits our ability to produce quantum entangled states and is very sensitive to small displacements of the ions driven by weak electric fields. It’s a neat demonstration of how quantum effects can be used to gain an advantage over classical systems.”
Circa 2020 o.o!
Researchers have created a miniature version of supernova shock waves in a lab here on Earth to solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.
When stars die and explode in supernovas, they create shock waves that emanate across the surrounding plasma. These powerful shock waves blast out cosmic rays, or highly energetic particles, out into the universe. The waves act almost like particle accelerators, pushing these particles out so fast that they approach the speed of light. However, scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how and why the shock waves accelerate these particles.
In ‘Flashes of Creation,’ author Paul Halpern tells the story of George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and their decades-long sparring match about the Big Bang.
Flashes of Creation Paul Halpern Basic Books, $30
The Big Bang wasn’t always a sure bet. For several decades in the 20th century, researchers wrestled with interpreting cosmic origins, or if there even was a beginning at all. At the forefront of that debate stood physicists George Gamow and Fred Hoyle: One advocated for an expanding universe that sprouted from a hot, dense state; the other for a cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Both pioneered contemporary cosmology, laid the groundwork for our understanding of where atoms come from and brought science to the masses.
In Flashes of Creation, physicist Paul Halpern recounts Gamow’s and Hoyle’s interwoven stories. The book bills itself as a “joint biography,” but that is a disservice. While Gamow and Hoyle are the central characters, the book is a meticulously researched history of the Big Bang as an idea: from theoretical predictions in the 1920s, to the discovery of its microwave afterglow in 1,964 and beyond to the realization in the late 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.