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Hubble Finds Dead Stars 'Polluted' with Planet Debris
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By NASA
ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Windhorst, W. Keel This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a spiral galaxy, named UGC 10043. We don’t see the galaxy’s spiral arms because we are seeing it from the side. Located roughly 150 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens, UGC 10043 is one of the somewhat rare spiral galaxies that we see edge-on.
This edge-on viewpoint makes the galaxy’s disk appear as a sharp line through space, with its prominent dust lanes forming thick bands of clouds that obscure our view of the galaxy’s glow. If we could fly above the galaxy, viewing it from the top down, we would see this dust scattered across UGC 10043, possibly outlining its spiral arms. Despite the dust’s obscuring nature, some active star-forming regions shine out from behind the dark clouds. We can also see that the galaxy’s center sports a glowing, almost egg-shaped ‘bulge’, rising far above and below the disk. All spiral galaxies have a bulge similar to this one as part of their structure. These bulges hold stars that orbit the galactic center on paths above and below the whirling disk; it’s a feature that isn’t normally obvious in pictures of galaxies. The unusually large size of this bulge compared to the galaxy’s disk is possibly due to UGC 10043 siphoning material from a nearby dwarf galaxy. This may also be why its disk appears warped, bending up at one end and down at the other.
Like most full-color Hubble images, this image is a composite, made up of several individual snapshots taken by Hubble at different times, each capturing different wavelengths of light. One notable aspect of this image is that the two sets of data that comprise this image were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023! Hubble’s longevity doesn’t just afford us the ability to produce new and better images of old targets; it also provides a long-term archive of data which only becomes more and more useful to astronomers.
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By NASA
Michelle Dominguez proudly displays her award at the Women of Color STEM Conference in Detroit, Michigan, October 2024.NASA Dorcas Kaweesa holding her award at the Women of Color STEM Conference in Detroit, Michigan, October 2024. NASA In October 2024, Michelle Dominguez and Dorcas Kaweesa from the Ames Aeromechanics Office were each awarded as a “Technology Rising Star” at the Women of Color STEM Conference in Detroit, Michigan. Rising Star awards are for “young women, with 21 years or less in the workforce, who are helping to shape technology for the future.” Ms. Dominguez is a Mechanical Systems Engineer working on rotorcraft design for vertical-lift vehicles such as air taxis and Mars helicopters. Dr. Kaweesa is a Structural Analysis Engineer and Deputy Manager for planetary rotorcraft initiatives including Mars Exploration Program and Mars Sample Return. More information on this award is at https://intouch.ccgmag.com/mpage/woc-stem-conference-awardees .
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By European Space Agency
For the first time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has detected and ‘weighed’ a galaxy, in the early Universe, that has a mass that is similar to what our Milky Way galaxy’s mass might have been at the same stage of development. Found at around 600 million years after the Big Bang, this lightweight galaxy, nicknamed the Firefly Sparkle, is gleaming with star clusters – 10 in total – that researchers examined in great detail. Other galaxies Webb has detected at this period in the history of the Universe are significantly more massive.
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By NASA
Artist’s concept depicts new research that has expanded our understanding of exoplanet WASP-69 b’s “tail.” NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) The Planet
WASP-69 b
The Discovery
The exoplanet WASP-69 b has a “tail,” leaving a trail of gas in its wake.
Key Takeaway
WASP-69 b is slowly losing its atmosphere as light hydrogen and helium particles in the planet’s outer atmosphere escape the planet over time. But those gas particles don’t escape evenly around the planet, instead they are swept into a tail of gas by the stellar wind coming from the planet’s star.
Details
Hot Jupiters like WASP-69 b are super-hot gas giants orbiting their host stars closely. When radiation coming from a star heats up a planet’s outer atmosphere, the planet can experience photoevaporation, a process in which lightweight gases like hydrogen and helium are heated by this radiation and launched outward into space. Essentially, WASP-69 b’s star strips gas from the planet’s outer atmosphere over time.
What’s more, something called the stellar wind can shape this escaping gas into an exoplanetary tail.
The stellar wind is a continuous stream of charged particles that flow outwards into space from a star’s outer atmosphere, or corona. On Earth, the Sun’s stellar wind interacts with our planet’s magnetic field which can create beautiful auroras like the Northern Lights.
On WASP-69 b, the stellar wind coming from its host star actually shapes the gas escaping from the planet’s outer atmosphere. So, instead of gas just escaping evenly around the planet, “strong stellar winds can sculpt that outflow in tails that trail behind the planet,” said lead author Dakotah Tyler, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, likening this gaseous tail to a comet’s tail.
Because this tail is created by the stellar wind, however, that means it’s subject to change.
“If the stellar wind were to taper down, then you could imagine that the planet is still losing some of its atmosphere, but it just isn’t getting shaped into the tail,” Tyler said, adding that, without the stellar wind, that gas escaping on all sides of the planet would be spherical and symmetrical. “But if you crank up the stellar wind, that atmosphere then gets sculpted into a tail.”
Tyler likened the process to a windsock blowing in the breeze, with the sock forming a more structured shape when the wind picks up and it fills with air.
The tail that Tyler and his research team observed on WASP-69 b extended more than 7.5 times the radius of the planet, or over 350,000 miles. But it’s possible that the tail is even longer. The team had to end observations with the telescope before the tail’s signal disappeared, so this measurement is a lower limit on the tail’s true length at the time.
However, keep in mind that because the tail is influenced by the stellar wind, changes in the stellar wind could change the tail’s size and shape over time. Additionally changes in the stellar wind influence the tail’s size and shape, but since the tail is visible when illuminated by starlight, changes in stellar activity can also affect tail observations.
Exoplanet tails are still a bit mysterious, especially because they are subject to change. The study of exoplanet tails could help scientists to better understand how these tails form as well as the ever-changing relationship between the stellar and planetary atmospheres. Additionally, because these exoplanetary tails are shaped by stellar activity, they could serve as indicators of stellar behavior over time. This could be helpful for scientists as they seek to learn more about the stellar winds of stars other than the star we know the most about, our very own Sun.
Fun Facts
WASP-69 b is losing a lot of gas — about 200,000 tons per second. But it’s losing this gaseous atmosphere very slowly — so slowly in fact that there is no danger of the planet being totally stripped or disappearing. In general, every billion years, the planet is losing an amount of material that equals the mass of planet Earth.
The solar system that WASP-69 b inhabits is about 7 billion years old, so even though the rate of atmosphere loss will vary over time, you might estimate that this planet has lost the equivalent of seven Earths (in mass) of gas over that period.
The Discoverers
A team of scientists led by Dakotah Tyler of the University of California, Los Angeles published a paper in January, 2024 on their discovery, “WASP-69b’s Escaping Envelope Is Confined to a Tail Extending at Least 7 Rp,” in the journal, “The Astrophysical Journal.” The observations described in this paper were made by Keck/NIRSPEC (NIRSPEC is a spectrograph designed for Keck II).
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By Space Force
The U.S. Air Force Academy unveiled a plaque for its first Artemis Moon Tree — an American Sweetgum sapling grown from seeds that orbited the moon on NASA’s Artemis I mission.
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