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Surface Features Detected on Pluto, Possible Polar Cap

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has detected surface features on Pluto, revealing bright and dark regions on the surface.

The images were captured in early to mid-April from within 70 million miles (113 million kilometers), using the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera on New Horizons. A technique called image deconvolution sharpens the raw, unprocessed images beamed back to Earth. New Horizons scientists interpreted the data to reveal the dwarf planet has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap.

“As we approach the Pluto system we are starting to see intriguing features such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole, starting the great scientific adventure to understand this enigmatic celestial object,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “As we get closer, the excitement is building in our quest to unravel the mysteries of Pluto using data from New Horizons.”

This image of Pluto and it largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on April 15, 2015. The image is part of several taken between April 12-18, as the spacecraft’s distance from Pluto decreased from about 69 million miles (111 million kilometers) to 64 million miles (104 million kilometers)

Also captured in the images is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, rotating in its 6.4-day long orbit. The exposure times used to create this image set – a tenth of a second – were too short for the camera to detect Pluto’s four much smaller and fainter moons.

Since it was discovered in 1930, Pluto has remained an enigma. It orbits our sun more than 3 billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) from Earth, and researchers have struggled to discern any details about its surface. These latest New Horizons images allow the mission science team to detect clear differences in brightness across Pluto’s surface as it rotates.

“After traveling more than nine years through space, it’s stunning to see Pluto, literally a dot of light as seen from Earth, becoming a real place right before our eyes,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “These incredible images are the first in which we can begin to see detail on Pluto, and they are already showing us that Pluto has a complex surface.”

The images the spacecraft returns will dramatically improve as New Horizons speeds closer to its July rendezvous with Pluto.

“We can only imagine what surprises will be revealed when New Horizons passes approximately 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface this summer,” said Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Source: Dwayne Brown, NASA

Image: NASA/JHU-APL/SwRI

NuSTAR Spots Mysterious Glow of High-Energy X-Rays at Our Galaxy Center

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has captured a new high-energy X-ray view (magenta) of the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy. The smaller circle shows the area where the NuSTAR image was taken — the very center of our galaxy, where a giant black hole resides. That region is enlarged to the right, in the larger circle, to show the NuSTAR data.

NASA’s NuSTAR has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays at the center of our Galaxy. Astronomers aren’t sure what the sources of the extra X-rays are, but one possibility is a population of dead stars.

Peering into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays that, according to scientists, could be the “howls” of dead stars as they feed on stellar companions.

“We can see a completely new component of the center of our galaxy with NuSTAR’s images,” said Kerstin Perez of Columbia University in New York, lead author of a new report on the findings in the journal Nature. “We can’t definitively explain the X-ray signal yet — it’s a mystery. More work needs to be done.”

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is bustling with young and old stars, smaller black holes and other varieties of stellar corpses – all swarming around a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*.

NuSTAR, launched into space in 2012, is the first telescope capable of capturing crisp images of this frenzied region in high-energy X-rays. The new images show a region around the supermassive black hole about 40 light-years across. Astronomers were surprised by the pictures, which reveal an unexpected haze of high-energy X-rays dominating the usual stellar activity.

“Almost anything that can emit X-rays is in the galactic center,” said Perez. “The area is crowded with low-energy X-ray sources, but their emission is very faint when you examine it at the energies that NuSTAR observes, so the new signal stands out.”

Astronomers have four potential theories to explain the baffling X-ray glow, three of which involve different classes of stellar corpses. When stars die, they don’t always go quietly into the night. Unlike stars like our sun, collapsed dead stars that belong to stellar pairs, or binaries, can siphon matter from their companions. This zombie-like “feeding” process differs depending on the nature of the normal star, but the result may be an eruption of X-rays.

According to one theory, a type of stellar zombie called a pulsar could be at work. Pulsars are the collapsed remains of stars that exploded in supernova blasts. They can spin extremely fast and send out intense beams of radiation. As the pulsars spin, the beams sweep across the sky, sometimes intercepting the Earth, like lighthouse beacons.

“We may be witnessing the beacons of a hitherto hidden population of pulsars in the galactic center,” said co-author Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, and principal investigator of NuSTAR. “This would mean there is something special about the environment in the very center of our galaxy.”

Other possible culprits include heavy-set stellar corpses called white dwarfs, which are the collapsed, burned-out remains of stars not massive enough to explode in supernovae. Our sun is such a star, and is destined to become a white dwarf in about five billion years. Because these white dwarfs are much denser than they were in their youth, they have stronger gravity and can produce higher-energy X-rays than normal. Another theory points to small black holes that slowly feed off their companion stars, radiating X-rays as material plummets down into their bottomless pits.

Alternatively, the source of the high-energy X-rays might not be stellar corpses at all, astronomers say, but rather a diffuse haze of charged particles, called cosmic rays. The cosmic rays might originate from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy as it devours material. When the cosmic rays interact with surrounding, dense gas, they emit X-rays.

However, none of these theories match what is known from previous research, leaving the astronomers largely stumped.

“This new result just reminds us that the galactic center is a bizarre place,” said co-author Chuck Hailey of Columbia University. “In the same way people behave differently walking on the street instead of jammed on a crowded rush hour subway, stellar objects exhibit weird behavior when crammed in close quarters near the supermassive black hole.”

The team says more observations are planned. Until then, theorists will be busy exploring the above scenarios or coming up with new models to explain what could be giving off the puzzling high-energy X-ray glow.

“Every time that we build small telescopes like NuSTAR, which improve our view of the cosmos in a particular wavelength band, we can expect surprises like this,” said Paul Hertz, the astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Publication: Kerstin Perez, et al., “Extended hard-X-ray emission in the inner few parsecs of the Galaxy,” Nature 520, 646–649 (30 April 2015); doi:10.1038/nature14353

Source: Felicia Chou, NASA

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

World’s biggest telescope will build its headquarters in the United Kingdom

An artist’s impression shows the proposed extension to SKA’s current building at Jodrell Bank.

The partners planning to build theSquare Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be by far the world’s biggest radio telescope, have passed up the chance of headquartering the organization in the historic Castello Carrarese in the northern Italian city of Padua and will instead move into a new purpose-built HQ at Jodrell Bank near Manchester, U.K., SKA’s current interim home.

At a meeting at Jodrell Bank yesterday, the 11 partners—Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—weighed up bids from the United Kingdom and Italy and came down in favor of the former. “Now we’ll begin formal negotiations with the United Kingdom to establish the headquarters at Jodrell Bank,” says SKA Director General Philip Diamond.

Italy was something of an underdog in the competition to host the SKA HQ, which began last year with an invitation to bid. Castello Carrarese was used as a prison for much of the 20th century and is now being renovated. Padua is also home to an observatory of Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics and a world-class university. Jodrell Bank is the site of Britain’s Lovell Telescope which, although built in 1957, remains the third largest steerable radio dish. The site is 30 kilometers from the university city of Manchester.

There was some surprise at a SKA council meeting in March when an advisory panel declared that both sites would fit the bill but favored the Italian bid. Diamond says the panel had only considered quantitative criteria such as the size of the building, Internet access, and the academic and local environments. “There were always going to be other factors,” he says, such as funding offered by the host country, rights and privileges offered to SKA as an international treaty organization, and tax advantages. “These were beyond the remit of the panel,” Diamond says.

The two countries were given more time to develop their bids, which were presented to the council yesterday at a special meeting. “Both offered substantial financial support,” Diamond says. The United Kingdom will be providing a total of £200 million to the project, including the HQ bid and its contribution to the phase I of construction from 2018 to 2023. “It’s a good package and was very attractive to members,” Diamond says. The Italian bid, he adds, was similar but put together differently.

Warning over the number of snakes in the UK after a ranger finds three venomous species

A wildlife ranger was stunned when she went on a country walk and discovered three venomous snakes – including a black adder.

Amanda McCormick stumbled across the snakes huddling under a tin sheet, and reminded dog owners to take care when out walking to help protect both dogs and the snakes.

The National Trust warden found a black and green male, a brown female and a completely black female adder – as well as a friendly grass snake – huddling under the metal sheet.

Amanda found the group as she was leading a walk through the North Downs near Dorking, Surrey, on April 16.

She said: “Over the years my volunteers and I have looked under many reptile tins, but we’ve never found such colour variation before.

“The black adder is an Edmond aberration.”

Only a very small number of adders are melanistic – the opposite of albino – because their skin contains too much of the dark-coloured pigment melanin, meaning they area completely black.

Amanda added: “You don’t see them very often so it’s very unusual to see three together, especially of such different colours.

“I’ve been on this site for seven years and I’ve never seen anything like it.

“Adders aren’t aggressive at all, and will try to escape if threatened.

“Only really stupid dogs are at risk, because they’re more likely to approach an adder than a person is.

“If people suspect their dog has been bitten by one, we urge them to seek veterinary advice.”

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