Gizmorama - December 2, 2013
Good Morning, Outer space seems to be very busy this time of year. The two stories I have for you today. The first reveals two galaxies masquerading as one and the second deals with a new era in astronomy.
Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
Erin****-- Two galaxies discovered masquerading as single cosmic object --*SOCORRO, N.M. - An object found in radio telescope searches masquerading as one galaxy is in fact two, closely superimposed in the sky, Canadian astronomers say. The discovery by the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array instrument in New Mexico allowed them to use the unusual alignment to learn otherwise-unobtainable facts about the nearer galaxy, they said. The more-distant galaxy, nearly 7 billion light-years from Earth but with strong radio emissions, lines up almost directly behind a closer one known as UGC 10288. In all previous images, the two galaxies had been blended together, astronomers said. "This changed the picture, quite literally," Judith Irwin, of Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, said. "It changed our understanding of the characteristics of UGC 10288, but also gave us an unexpected new tool for learning more about that galaxy." The alignment of a foreground galaxy with such a strongly-emitting background galaxy with extended jets probably is the first such alignment found, the astronomers said, and with its radio jets perpendicular to UGC 10288's disk it provides a valuable means of studying the nearer galaxy. "We can use the radio waves from the background galaxy, coming through the nearer one, as a way to measure the properties of the nearer galaxy," Jayanne English, of the University of Manitoba, said.
*-- Detection of cosmic neutrinos opens new era in astronomy --*BERKELEY, Calif. - A neutrino observatory buried at the South Pole has confirmed there are powerful particle accelerators somewhere in the universe, researchers say. High-energy neutrinos detected by the "IceCube" detector show those cosmic accelerators are 40 million times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider at Europe's CERN -- although what the cosmic accelerators are or where they are located is unknown, they said. "The IceCube Collaboration has announced the observation of 28 extremely high energy events that constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from outside our solar system," Spencer Klein of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a longtime member of the IceCube Collaboration, said. "These 28 events include two of the highest energy neutrinos ever reported, which have been named Bert and Ernie," he said in a Berkeley Lab release Thursday. Somewhere in the universe, the researchers said, something is accelerating particles to energies above 50 trillion electron volts and, in the cases of Bert and Ernie, exceeding one quadrillion electron volts. Human efforts with the CERN collider have accelerated particles to approximately 4 trillion electron volts. Electrically neutral and nearly massless, neutrinos travel through space in a straight line from their point of origin, passing through virtually everything in their path without being impacted. While IceCube, buried beneath almost a mile of ice, can't determine what cosmic accelerators are or where they're located, its results provide a compass that can suggest answers, researchers said. Early results point at active galactic nuclei, the enormous particle jets ejected by a black hole after it swallows a star, they said. "The 28 events being reported are diffuse and do not point back to a source," Klein said, "but the big picture tends to suggest active galactic nuclei as the leading contender with the second leading contender being something we haven't even thought of yet."
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