Astrophysics

In Soot I Sleep

Photo: T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, NOAO, AURA, NSF

Left to their own devices, deuterium atoms would attach themselves to cold specks of soot floating in interstellar gas clouds and remain there for eternity. In fact, deuterium has a great affinity for the buckyballs, bucky onions, bucky tubes, and other forms of carbon, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, comprising soot. It readily replaces hydrogen in these molecules. Deuterium atoms bond to interstellar soot so tightly it takes an encounter with a hot star or supernova explosion to pry them loose. Read more »

Flare Up!

Gamma-ray bursts signal the birth of a new black hole, whether it's created during the collapse of a massive star or via a merger between two compact objects such as neutron stars. Astrophysicists have determined that long gamma-ray bursts are associated with collapsing stars and short bursts are associated with binary mergers. In both cases, however, black-hole accretion powers the burst. Recently the Swift X-ray Telescope revealed another common feature: erratic X-ray flares in their afterglows. Swift has detected flare-ups in about half of the gamma-ray bursts it has observed so far. Read more »

Bubble Shock Trains

Black holes are pretty strange, sucking in not only nearby matter but also the space around it. These cosmic vacuum cleaners are powered by thin, gaseous accretion disks in orbit around them. Something drives the orbiting gas to spiral in toward the black hole, where all trace of it disappears forever into the singularity. One of the exciting challenges in astrophysics is to figure out the physics driving this process, which keeps black holes growing for billions of years after they're formed. Read more »

As the Sun Turns

Juri Toomre and his group concentrate their stellar research close to home – just 93 million miles away, to be precise. They want to answer the question: What dynamic processes occur deep within the Sun? To find out, they use a powerful combination of computer simulations and helioseismology (which analyzes sound waves produced by the Sun to probe its internal structure.) The researchers believe that working out the details of the Sun's internal structure should lead to explanations for the 22-year sunspot cycle and other regular surface features such as the Sun's consistent, but variable, rotation rate. Read more »

Bubbling Clusters of Galaxies

Galaxy clusters contain enormous clouds of gas whose cooling should result in the formation of a multitude of new stars. But that's not what NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is detecting. Instead there's a whole lot less gas cooling and new star formation than scientists had predicted. Perhaps the most mysterious discovery of all is that the clusters are humming – a low B-flat 57 octaves below middle C. The hum originates from ripples of sound waves washing through great galactic gas clouds surrounding supermassive black holes. Read more »

Spinning Out Stars & Planets

Scientists believe that planetary systems coalesce from disks of gas and dust orbiting a star. Similarly, stars can form within massive accretion disks orbiting a black hole. Determining the mechanisms that create stars and planets from these orbiting disks is a hot topic among astrophysicists, according to JILA Fellow Phil Armitage and colleagues W. K. M. Rice of the University of California, Riverside, and G. Lodato of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. Read more »

Cool Star Winds

We know a lot about cool stars because our Sun is one of them. However, we can't know for sure if cool stars produce winds (like the Sun does) without looking for evidence of such winds. Where stellar winds exist, they interact with hydrogen in the interstellar medium far from the star to produce tell-tale absorption in stellar ultraviolet spectral lines. The solar wind produces a similar spectral signature from interactions that occur hundreds of times further from the Sun than the Earth. The interactions are strongest in the hot, dense (red) region shown between the heliopause and the bow shock in the diagram on the right. Read more »

Illuminating the Cosmic Web

Understanding dark matter's role in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe is a central question in cosmology. Dark matter pervades the universe. Haloes of dark matter surround galaxies and galaxy clusters. Dark matter also forms filamentary structures that connect these haloes, forming a cosmic web, as illustrated on the right. Until recently, cosmologists tried to understand the distribution of galaxies with theoretical analyses using different-sized dark matter haloes containing zero, one, or more galaxies. Read more »

Surfing the Cosmic Shock Wave

Illustration of Dynamics of Supernova 1987A Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

For nearly 18 years, JILA Fellow Dick McCray has been studying the brightest supernova to light up Earth's night skies since the Renaissance. Read more »

Gone with the Wind

Giant gas planets don't often stay in orbit where they're formed. They often move closer to their star or, occasionally, further away. Seldom do they remain in almost circular orbits such as those of Jupiter and Saturn. In fact, all but one of the giant gas planets discovered around other stars are closer to their star than Jupiter is to the Sun. A fraction of these planets are even closer than Mercury! Read more »