Eternal Life of Stardust

The Eternal Life
of Stardust
Portrayed
In New
NASA Image
_______________________________________________________
ENLARGE Image IPAC NASA High Resolution
by Staff WritersPasadena CA (SPX) Sep 01, 2006

A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is helping astronomers understand how stardust is recycled in galaxies. The cosmic portrait shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy named after Ferdinand Magellan, the seafaring explorer who observed the murky object at night during his fleet's historic journey around Earth.

Now, nearly 500 years after Magellan's voyage, astronomers are studying Spitzer's view of this galaxy to learn more about the circular journey of stardust, from stars to space and back again.
"The Large Magellanic Cloud is like an open book," said Dr. Margaret Meixner of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. "We can see the entire lifecycle of matter in a galaxy in this one snapshot." Meixner is lead author of a paper on the findings to appear in the November 2006 issue of the Astronomical Journal.

The vibrant false-color image, a mosaic of approximately 300,000 individual frames, shows a central blue sea of stars amidst lots of colorful, choppy waves of dust.

Space dust is important for making stars, planets and even people. The tiny particles -- flecks of minerals, ices and carbon-rich molecules -- are everywhere in the universe. Developing stars and solar systems are constantly consuming dust, while older stars shed dust back into space, where it will one day provide the ingredients for new generations of stars.

Spitzer, an infrared observatory orbiting the sun, is extremely sensitive to the infrared glow of dust that arises when stars heat it up. The observatory's unprecedented view of the Large Magellanic Cloud offers a unique look at three stops on the eternal ride of dust through a galaxy: in collapsing envelopes around young stars; scattered about in the space between stars; and in expelled shells of material from old stars.

"The Spitzer observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud are giving us the most detailed look yet at how this feedback process works in an entire galaxy," said Meixner. "We can quantify how much dust is being consumed and ejected by stars."

In addition to dust, Spitzer's view reveals nearly one million never-before-seen objects, most of which are stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The hidden stars, both young and old, are embedded in layers of dust that block visible starlight but shine in infrared.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is one of a handful of dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way. It is located near the southern constellation Dorado, about 160,000 light-years from Earth. About one-third of the whole galaxy can be seen in the Spitzer image.

Astronomers believe that approximately six billion years ago, not long before our solar system formed, this dwarf galaxy was shaken up via a close encounter with the Milky Way. The resulting chaos triggered bursts of massive star formation similar to what is thought to occur in more primitive galaxies billions of light-years away. This and other distant-galaxy traits, such as an irregular shape and low abundance of metals, make the Large Magellanic Cloud the perfect nearby target for studying the faraway universe.

This research is part of a Spitzer Legacy program called Surveying the Agents of a Galaxy's Evolution, also known as Sage. The international Sage team includes more than 50 astronomers spread over the globe from Japan to the United States. The main data centers are located at: the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., led by Meixner; University of Arizona, Tucson, led by Gordon; and University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by Dr. Barbara Whitney.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Spitzer's infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer captured the new image. The camera was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Its principal investigator is Dr. Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The photometer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo.; the University of Arizona; and Boeing North American, Canoga Park, Calif. Its principal investigator is Dr. George Rieke of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Original Text: Space Daily 01 Sept: The Eternal Life Of Stardust Portrayed
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________

General Relativity Survives Gruelling Pulsar Test:
Einstein At Least 99.95 Percent Right
An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay.
________________________________

Here's a depiction of the double pulsar system currently being tracked by the international team of radio astronomers who discovered it, including Dr. Duncan Lorimer and Dr. Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University.

The pulsars are the remnants of two massive stars that burned out by way of supernova explosions. They measure just 12 miles across, but each weighs more than our own Sun. Note the "bend" in the space-time fabric from the sheer mass of the two bodies. Image courtesy of West Virginia University

The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Puppis. It consists of two massive, highly compact neutron stars, each weighing more than our own Sun but only about 20 km across, orbiting each other every 2.4 hours at speeds of a million kilometres per hour. Separated by a distance of just a million kilometres, both neutron stars emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that are seen as radio "pulses" every time the beams sweep past the Earth. It is the only known system of two detectable radio pulsars orbiting each other. Due to the large masses of the system, they provide an ideal opportunity to test aspects of General Relativity:

Gravitational redshift: the time dilation causes the pulse rate from one pulsar to slow when near to the other, and vice versa.
Shapiro delay: The pulses from one pulsar when passing close to the other are delayed by the curvature of space-time. Observations provide two tests of General Relativity using different parameters.
Gravitational radiation and orbital decay: The two co-rotating neutron stars lose energy due to the radiation of gravitational waves. This results in a gradual spiralling in of the two stars towards each other until they will eventually coalesce into one body.

By precisely measuring the variations in pulse arrival times using three of the world's largest radio telescopes, the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, the Parkes radio-telescope in Australia, and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA, the researchers found the movement of the stars to exactly follow Einstein's predictions. "This is the most stringent test ever made of General Relativity in the presence of very strong gravitational fields -- only black holes show stronger gravitational effects, but they are obviously much more difficult to observe", says Kramer.

Since both pulsars are visible as radio emitting clocks of exceptional accuracy, it is possible to measure their distances from their common centre of gravity. "As in a balanced see-saw, the heavier pulsar is closer to the centre of mass, or pivot point, than the lighter one and so allows us to calculate the ratio of the two masses", explains co-author Ingrid Stairs, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "What's important is that this mass ratio is independent of the theory of gravity, and so tightens the constraints on General Relativity and any alternative gravitational theories." adds Maura McLaughlin, an assistant professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV, USA.

Though all the independent tests available in the double pulsar system agree with Einstein's theory, the one that gives the most precise result is the time delay, known as the Shapiro Delay, which the signals suffer as they pass through the curved space-time surrounding the two neutron stars. It is close to 90 millionths of a second and the ratio of the observed and predicted values is 1.0001 +/- 0.0005 - a precision of 0.05%.

A number of other relativistic effects predicted by Einstein can also be observed. "We see that, due to its mass, the fabric of space-time around a pulsar is curved. We also see that the pulsar clock runs slower when it is deeper in the gravitational field of its massive companion, an effect known as "time dilation".

A key result of the observations is that the pulsar's separation is seen to be shrinking by 7mm/day. Einstein's theory predicts that the double pulsar system should be emitting gravitational waves - ripples in space-time that spread out across the Universe at the speed of light. "These waves have yet to be directly detected ", points out team member Prof. Dick Manchester from the Australia Telescope National Facility, "but, as a result, the double pulsar system should lose energy causing the two neutron stars to spiral in towards each other by precisely the amount that we have observed - thus our observations give an indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves."

Michael Kramer concludes; "The double pulsar is really quite an amazing system. It not only tells us a lot about general relativity, but it is a superb probe of the extreme physics of super-dense matter and strong magnetic fields but is also helping us to understand the complex mechanisms that generate the pulsar's radio beacons." He concludes; "We have only just begun to exploit its potential!"

Science Daily releases: 14th Sept 2006 Source: PPARC
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
Famous Quotes
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
Daniel J. Boorstin
_______________________________________________________