Using the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), their team observed— for the first time ever— a narrow, spiral-shaped streamer of gas guided by magnetic fields, channeling matter from the surrounding cloud of a star-forming region in Perseus, directly onto a newborn binary star system.
Recent News
Astronomers Discover Fastest-Evolving Radio Signals Ever Observed from Black Hole Tearing Apart Star
An international team of astronomers has discovered the first radio-bright tidal disruption event (TDE) occurring outside a galaxy’s center using the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) Very Large Array (NSF VLA) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), along with several partner telescopes.
First-ever Detection of “Heavy Water” in a Planet-forming Disk
The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our Solar System.
IMAGE RELEASE: A New Look at the Crab Nebula
Astronomers produced this dramatic new, highly-detailed image of the Crab Nebula by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the long waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the extremely short waves seen by the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054, is some 6,500 light-years from Earth. At its center is a superdense neutron star, rotating once every 33 milliseconds, shooting out rotating lighthouse-like beams of radio waves and light — a pulsar. The nebula’s intricate shape is caused by a complex interplay of the pulsar, a fast-moving wind of particles coming from the pulsar, and material originally ejected by the supernova explosion and by the star itself before the explosion.
This image combines data from five different telescopes: The VLA (radio) in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-Ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple.
The new VLA, Hubble, and Chandra observations all were made at nearly the same time in November of 2012. A team of scientists led by Gloria Dubner of IAFE, the National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET), and the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina then made a detailed analysis of the newly-revealed details in a quest to gain new insights into the complex physics of the object. They are reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
New details from the study show interactions between fast-moving particles and magnetic fields similar to structures seen on the Sun, other features seen to appear at multiple wavelengths, and structures that may indicate features near the star before it exploded. Two separate jets of material from near the pulsar appear in the X-ray and the radio images.
“Comparing these new images, made at different wavelengths, is providing us with a wealth of new detail about the Crab Nebula. Though the Crab has been studied extensively for years, we still have much to learn about it,” Dubner said.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Recent News
Astronomers Spot Magnetically-Guided Streamer Funneling Star-Building Material into Newborn System in Perseus
Using the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), their team observed— for the first time ever— a narrow, spiral-shaped streamer of gas guided by magnetic fields, channeling matter from the surrounding cloud of a star-forming region in Perseus, directly onto a newborn binary star system.
Astronomers Discover Fastest-Evolving Radio Signals Ever Observed from Black Hole Tearing Apart Star
An international team of astronomers has discovered the first radio-bright tidal disruption event (TDE) occurring outside a galaxy’s center using the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) Very Large Array (NSF VLA) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), along with several partner telescopes.
First-ever Detection of “Heavy Water” in a Planet-forming Disk
The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our Solar System.