Gizmorama - January 13, 2014

Good Morning,

A Canadian astronomer claims that a newly discovered three-star system may yield clues to cosmic mysteries and even challenge Einstein's theory of General Relativity. I don't know much, but I know that you don't challenge Einstein, right?

Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Supernova remnant yields evidence of source of dusty galaxies --*
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Supernovas are thought to be a primary source of dust in galaxies, and U.S. astronomers say the remains of a recent supernova are full of freshly formed dust. Direct evidence of a supernova's dust-making capabilities has up to now been slim and cannot account for the copious amount of dust detected in young, distant galaxies, they said, but data from radio telescopes in Chile could explain how many galaxies acquire their dusty, dusky appearance. "We have found a remarkably large dust mass concentrated in the central part of the ejecta from a relatively young and nearby supernova," Remy Indebetouw with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the University of Virginia said. "This is the first time we've been able to really image where the dust has formed, which is important in understanding the evolution of galaxies." An international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to observe the glowing remains of supernova 1987A, which is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way about 168,000 light-years from Earth. They estimate the remnant now contains about 25 percent the mass of our sun in newly formed dust. "1987A is a special place since it hasn't mixed with the surrounding environment, so what we see there was made there," Indebetouw said. "The new ALMA results, which are the first of their kind, reveal a supernova remnant chock full of material that simply did not exist a few decades ago" from an Earth-observation standpoint, which saw the light from the exploding supernova reach the Earth in 1987. Such processes could account for the large amount of dust astronomers detect in the early universe, the researchers said. "Really early galaxies are incredibly dusty and this dust plays a major role in the evolution of galaxies," Mikako Matsuura of University College London said. "Today we know dust can be created in several ways, but in the early universe most of it must have come from supernovas. We finally have direct evidence to support that theory."


*-- Newly discovered multiple star system could challenge Einstein theory --*
VICTORIA, British Columbia - A newly discovered three-star system may yield clues to cosmic mysteries and even challenge Einstein's theory of General Relativity, a Canadian astronomer says. University of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs is part of an international team studying a system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar all packed within a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun. The pulsar, 4,200 light-years from Earth and spinning nearly 366 times per second, was found to be in close orbit with a white dwarf star and the pair are in orbit with another, more distant white dwarf, the researchers said. The three-body system offers the best opportunity yet to test a possible violation of a key concept in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the strong equivalence principle, which states that the effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body, they said. "By doing very high-precision timing of the pulses coming from the pulsar, we can test for such a deviation from the strong equivalence principle at a sensitivity several orders of magnitude greater than ever before available," Stairs said in a university release Monday. "Finding a deviation from the strong equivalence principle would indicate a breakdown of General Relativity and would point us toward a new, revised theory of gravity." When a massive star explodes as a supernova and its remains collapse into a superdense neutron star, some of its mass is converted into gravitational binding energy that holds the dense star together; the strong equivalence principle says that this binding energy will still react gravitationally as if it were mass, while several proposed alternatives to General Relativity hold that it will not. "This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions," study leader Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., said. "This is a fascinating system in many ways, including what must have been a completely crazy formation history, and we have much work to do to fully understand it."

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