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Wobbling star found in Gaia-Hipparcos data confirmed to host exoplanet
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By NASA
Illustration of the main asteroid belt, orbiting the Sun between Mars and JupiterNASA NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope includes asteroids on its list of objects studied and secrets revealed.
A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge repurposed Webb’s observations of a distant star to reveal a population of small asteroids — smaller than astronomers had ever detected orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium — a size range in the main belt that has not been observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have been changed over time by collisions. That process is related to how some of them have escaped the main belt over the solar system’s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.
“We now understand more about how small objects in the asteroid belt are formed and how many there could be,” said Tom Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and co-author on the paper presenting the results. “Asteroids this size likely formed from collisions between larger ones in the main belt and are likely to drift towards the vicinity of Earth and the Sun.”
Insights from this research could inform the work of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames. ATAP works across disciplines to support NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office by studying what would happen in the case of an Earth impact and modeling the associated risks.
“It’s exciting that Webb’s capabilities can be used to glean insights into asteroids,” said Jessie Dotson, an astrophysicist at Ames and member of ATAP. “Understanding the sizes, numbers, and evolutionary history of smaller main belt asteroids provides important background about the near-Earth asteroids we study for planetary defense.”
Illustration of the James Webb Space TelescopeNASA The team that made the asteroid detections, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and professor of planetary science Julien de Wit, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing Webb images for the presence of asteroids that may have been inadvertently “caught on film” as they passed in front of the telescope. Using the new image processing technique, they studied more than 10,000 images of the star TRAPPIST-1, originally taken to search for atmospheres around planets orbiting the star, in the search for life beyond Earth.
Asteroids shine more brightly in infrared light, the wavelength Webb is tuned to detect, than in visible light, helping reveal the population of main belt asteroids that had gone unnoticed until now. NASA will also take advantage of that infrared glow with an upcoming mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor. NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.
The paper presenting this research, “Detections of decameter main-belt asteroids with JWST,” was published Dec. 9 in Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.
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By European Space Agency
Image: With the festive season approaching, even Earth-observing satellites are getting into the spirit, capturing a stunning compilation of European cities that resemble stars. View the full article
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By NASA
4 Min Read NASA Finds ‘Sideways’ Black Hole Using Legacy Data, New Techniques
Image showing the structure of galaxy NGC 5084, with data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory overlaid on a visible-light image of the galaxy. Chandra’s data, shown in purple, revealed four plumes of hot gas emanating from a supermassive black hole rotating “tipped over” at the galaxy’s core. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC, A. S. Borlaff, P. Marcum et al.; Optical full image: M. Pugh, B. Diaz; Image Processing: NASA/USRA/L. Proudfit NASA researchers have discovered a perplexing case of a black hole that appears to be “tipped over,” rotating in an unexpected direction relative to the galaxy surrounding it. That galaxy, called NGC 5084, has been known for years, but the sideways secret of its central black hole lay hidden in old data archives. The discovery was made possible by new image analysis techniques developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley to take a fresh look at archival data from the agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Using the new methods, astronomers at Ames unexpectedly found four long plumes of plasma – hot, charged gas – emanating from NGC 5084. One pair of plumes extends above and below the plane of the galaxy. A surprising second pair, forming an “X” shape with the first, lies in the galaxy plane itself. Hot gas plumes are not often spotted in galaxies, and typically only one or two are present.
The method revealing such unexpected characteristics for galaxy NGC 5084 was developed by Ames research scientist Alejandro Serrano Borlaff and colleagues to detect low-brightness X-ray emissions in data from the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope. What they saw in the Chandra data seemed so strange that they immediately looked to confirm it, digging into the data archives of other telescopes and requesting new observations from two powerful ground-based observatories.
Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy NGC 5084’s core. A dark, vertical line near the center shows the curve of a dusty disk orbiting the core, whose presence suggests a supermassive black hole within. The disk and black hole share the same orientation, fully tipped over from the horizontal orientation of the galaxy.NASA/STScI, M. A. Malkan, B. Boizelle, A.S. Borlaff. HST WFPC2, WFC3/IR/UVIS. The surprising second set of plumes was a strong clue this galaxy housed a supermassive black hole, but there could have been other explanations. Archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile then revealed another quirk of NGC 5084: a small, dusty, inner disk turning about the center of the galaxy. This, too, suggested the presence of a black hole there, and, surprisingly, it rotates at a 90-degree angle to the rotation of the galaxy overall; the disk and black hole are, in a sense, lying on their sides.
The follow-up analyses of NGC 5084 allowed the researchers to examine the same galaxy using a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum – from visible light, seen by Hubble, to longer wavelengths observed by ALMA and the Expanded Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico.
“It was like seeing a crime scene with multiple types of light,” said Borlaff, who is also the first author on the paper reporting the discovery. “Putting all the pictures together revealed that NGC 5084 has changed a lot in its recent past.”
It was like seeing a crime scene with multiple types of light.
Alejandro Serrano Borlaff
NASA Research Scientist
“Detecting two pairs of X-ray plumes in one galaxy is exceptional,” added Pamela Marcum, an astrophysicist at Ames and co-author on the discovery. “The combination of their unusual, cross-shaped structure and the ‘tipped-over,’ dusty disk gives us unique insights into this galaxy’s history.”
Typically, astronomers expect the X-ray energy emitted from large galaxies to be distributed evenly in a generally sphere-like shape. When it’s not, such as when concentrated into a set of X-ray plumes, they know a major event has, at some point, disturbed the galaxy.
Possible dramatic moments in its history that could explain NGC 5084’s toppled black hole and double set of plumes include a collision with another galaxy and the formation of a chimney of superheated gas breaking out of the top and bottom of the galactic plane.
More studies will be needed to determine what event or events led to the current strange structure of this galaxy. But it is already clear that the never-before-seen architecture of NGC 5084 was only discovered thanks to archival data – some almost three decades old – combined with novel analysis techniques.
The paper presenting this research was published Dec. 18 in The Astrophysical Journal. The image analysis method developed by the team – called Selective Amplification of Ultra Noisy Astronomical Signal, or SAUNAS – was described in The Astrophysical Journal in May 2024.
For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.
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Black Holes Ames Research Center Ames Research Center's Science Directorate Astrophysics Chandra X-Ray Observatory Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research General Hubble Space Telescope Marshall Astrophysics Marshall Science Research & Projects Marshall Space Flight Center Missions NASA Centers & Facilities Science & Research Supermassive Black Holes The Universe Explore More
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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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