NASA - NASA's Swift Produces Best Ultraviolet Maps of the Nearest Galaxies

Astronomers at NASA and Pennsylvania State University have used NASA's Swift satellite to create the most detailed ultraviolet light surveys ever of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies.

"We took thousands of images and assembled them into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy, resulting in the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths," said Stefan Immler, who proposed the program and led NASA's contribution from the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

 

New surveys conducted by NASA's Swift provide the most detailed overviews ever captured in ultraviolet light of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies to our own. Swift team member Stefan Immler, who proposed the imaging project, narrates this quick tour.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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Immler presented a 160-megapixel mosaic image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and a 57-megapixel mosaic image of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)at the 222nd American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis on Monday.

The new images reveal about 1 million ultraviolet sources in the LMC and about 250,000 in the SMC. The images include light ranging from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms, which is a range of UV wavelengths largely blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

Nearly a million ultraviolet sources appear in this mosaic of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which was assembled from 2,200 images taken by Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. The 160-megapixel image required a cumulative exposure of 5.4 days. The image includes light from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms -- UV wavelengths largely blocked by Earth's atmosphere -- and has an angular resolution of 2.5 arcseconds at full size. The LMC is about 14,000 light-years across. Slide your cursor over the image to compare the galaxy's appearance in optical light with this ultraviolet portrait.
UV image credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)
Visible image credit: Axel Mellinger, Central Michigan Univ.
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"Prior to these images, there were relatively few UV observations of these galaxies, and none at high resolution across such wide areas, so this project fills in a major missing piece of the scientific puzzle," said Michael Siegel, lead scientist for Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) at the Swift Mission Operations Center at the university in State College, Pa.

The LMC and SMC lie about 163,000 light-years and 200,000 light-years away, respectively, and orbit each other as well as our own Milky Way galaxy. The LMC is about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way and contains only 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass. The SMC is half the size of the LMC and contains about two-thirds of its mass.

Despite their modest sizes, the galaxies loom large in the sky because they are so close to us. Both extend far beyond the UVOT's field of view, which meant thousands of images were needed in order to cover both galaxies in three ultraviolet colors centered at wavelengths of 1,928 angstroms, 2,246 angstroms, and 2,600 angstroms.

This visible light mosaic shows the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud. Separated by about 21 degrees, the two galaxies are readily visible from the Southern Hemisphere as faint, glowing patches in the night sky. The LMC and SMC are the closest major galaxies to our own and lie about 163,000 and 200,000 light-years away, respectively.
Credit: Axel Mellinger, Central Michigan Univ.
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Viewing in the ultraviolet allows astronomers to suppress the light of normal stars like the sun, which are not very bright at such higher energies, and provides a clearer picture of the hottest stars and star-formation regions. No telescope other than UVOT can produce such high-resolution wide-field multicolor surveys in the ultraviolet. Swift's wide-field imaging capabilities provide a powerful complement to the deeper, but much narrower-field imaging power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The Swift mosaic of the Small Magellanic Cloud contains about 250,000 ultraviolet sources. The 57-megapixel image was assembled from 656 separate snapshots. The image has a total exposure time of 1.8 days, an angular resolution of 2.5 arcseconds at full size, and maps UV light at wavelengths between 1,600 and 3,300 angstroms. The SMC is about 7,000 light-years across.
Credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)
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To produce the 160-megapixel LMC mosaic, Swift's UVOT acquired 2,200 snapshots for a cumulative exposure of 5.4 days. The 57-megapixel SMC image comprises 656 individual images with a total exposure of 1.8 days.

Both images have an angular resolution of 2.5 arc seconds, which is a measure of their sharpness. Sources separated by this angle, which is equivalent to the size of a dime seen from 1mile away, are visible as distinct objects.

"With these mosaics, we can study how stars are born and evolve across each galaxy in a single view, something that's very difficult to accomplish for our own galaxy because of our location inside it," Immler said.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are readily visible from the Southern Hemisphere as faint, glowing patches in the night sky. The galaxies are named after Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who in 1519 led an expedition to sail around the world. He and his crew were among the first Europeans to sight the objects.

Pennsylvania State University manages the Swift Mission Operations Center, which controls Swift's science and flight operations. Goddard manages Swift, which was launched in November 2004. The satellite is operated in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va. International collaborators are in the United Kingdom and Italy, and the mission includes contributions from Germany and Japan.

Related Links

› Download high-resolution images and video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
› Penn State University's Swift Explorer iPhone App
› Feature: "An Image Gallery Gift from NASA's Swift"
› Penn State's "Cool UVOT Pictures" gallery
› Feature: "Swift Makes Best-ever Ultraviolet Portrait of Andromeda Galaxy"
› Axel Mellinger's Milky Way Panorama

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Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

(Text issued as NASA Headquarters release No. 13-169)

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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ESA - Space Science: X-raying stellar winds in a high-speed collision

 

XMM-Newton observation of the core of the very massive cluster Cyg OB2 located in the constellation of Cygnus, 4700 light-years from Earth. The cluster contains massive O-type stars that shine brightly in X-rays. Cyg OB2 #9 is seen as the bright star just below the central star, and in 2008 was determined to be a binary system. ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Swift space telescopes have now found evidence for the winds of these hot, massive stars colliding at the closest points of their orbits, resulting in a four-fold increase in X-ray emission. Hundreds of lower mass stars also fill the field of view, which spans nearly 22 x 16 arcminutes. 

Credits: ESA/G. Rauw

 Two massive stars racing in orbit around each other have had their colliding stellar winds X-rayed for the first time, thanks to the combined efforts of ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Swift space telescopes.

Stellar winds, pushed away from a massive star’s surface by its intense light, can have a profound influence on their environment.

In some locations, they may trigger the collapse of surrounding clouds of gas and dust to form new stars.

In others, they may blast the clouds away before they have the chance to get started.

Now, XMM-Newton and Swift have found a ‘Rosetta stone’ for such winds in a binary system known as Cyg OB2 #9, located in the Cygnus star-forming region, where the winds from two massive stars orbiting around each other collide at high speeds.  

Cyg OB2 #9 remained a puzzle for many years. Its peculiar radio emission could only be explained if the object was not a single star but two, a hypothesis that was confirmed in 2008.

At the time of the discovery, however, there was no direct evidence for the winds from the two stars colliding, even though the X-ray signature of such a phenomenon was expected.

This signature could only be found by tracking the stars as they neared the closest point on their 2.4-year orbit around each other, an opportunity that presented itself between June and July 2011.

As the space telescopes looked on, the fierce stellar winds slammed together at speeds of several million kilometres per hour, generating hot plasma at a million degrees which then shone brightly in X-rays.
 The telescopes recorded a four-fold increase in energy compared with the normal X-ray emission seen when the stars were further apart on their elliptical orbit.

“This is the first time that we have found clear evidence for colliding winds in this system,” says Yael Nazé of the Université de Liège, Belgium, and lead author of the paper describing the results reported in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“We only have a few other examples of winds in binary systems crashing together, but this one example can really be considered an archetype for this phenomenon.”

Unlike the handful of other colliding wind systems, the style of the collision in Cyg OB2 #9 remains the same throughout the stars’ orbit, despite the increase in intensity as the two winds meet.

“In other examples the collision is turbulent; the winds of one star might crash onto the other when they are at their closest, causing a sudden drop in X-ray emission,” says Dr Nazé.

“But in the Cyg OB2 #9 system there is no such observation, so we can consider it the first ‘simple’ example that has been discovered – that really is the key to developing better models to help understand the characteristics of these powerful stellar winds. ”

“This particular binary system represents an important stepping stone in our understanding of stellar wind collisions and their associated emissions, and could only be achieved by tracking the two stars orbiting around each other with X-ray telescopes,” adds ESA’s XMM-Newton project scientist Norbert Schartel.
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Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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Astronomy: NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers A New Black Hole In Our Galaxy

 


 

NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers a New Black Hole in our Galaxy

10.05.12

 

An X-ray outburst caught by NASA's Swift on Sept. 16, 2012, resulted from a flood of gas plunging toward a previously unknown black hole. Gas flowing from a sun-like star collects into a disk around the black hole. Normally, this gas would steadily spiral inward. But in this system, named Swift J1745-26, the gas collects for decades before suddenly surging inward. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers A New Black Hole In Our Galaxy

 

 

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole.

"Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's principal investigator, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This is really something we've been waiting for."

An X-ray nova is a short-lived X-ray source that appears suddenly, reaches its emission peak in a few days and then fades out over a period of months. The outburst arises when a torrent of stored gas suddenly rushes toward one of the most compact objects known, either a neutron star or a black hole.

The rapidly brightening source triggered Swift's Burst Alert Telescope twice on the morning of Sept. 16, and once again the next day.

Named Swift J1745-26 after the coordinates of its sky position, the nova is located a few degrees from the center of our galaxy toward the constellation Sagittarius. While astronomers do not know its precise distance, they think the object resides about 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy's inner region.

Ground-based observatories detected infrared and radio emissions, but thick clouds of obscuring dust have prevented astronomers from catching Swift J1745-26 in visible light.

The nova peaked in hard X-rays -- energies above 10,000 electron volts, or several thousand times that of visible light -- on Sept. 18, when it reached an intensity equivalent to that of the famous Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that serves as a calibration target for high-energy observatories and is considered one of the brightest sources beyond the solar system at these energies.

Even as it dimmed at higher energies, the nova brightened in the lower-energy, or softer, emissions detected by Swift's X-ray Telescope, a behavior typical of X-ray novae. By Wednesday, Swift J1745-26 was 30 times brighter in soft X-rays than when it was discovered and it continued to brighten.

"The pattern we're seeing is observed in X-ray novae where the central object is a black hole. Once the X-rays fade away, we hope to measure its mass and confirm its black hole status," said Boris Sbarufatti, an astrophysicist at Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, who currently is working with other Swift team members at Penn State in University Park, Pa.

The black hole must be a member of a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system, which includes a normal, sun-like star. A stream of gas flows from the normal star and enters into a storage disk around the black hole. In most LMXBs, the gas in the disk spirals inward, heats up as it heads toward the black hole, and produces a steady stream of X-rays.

But under certain conditions, stable flow within the disk depends on the rate of matter flowing into it from the companion star. At certain rates, the disk fails to maintain a steady internal flow and instead flips between two dramatically different conditions -- a cooler, less ionized state where gas simply collects in the outer portion of the disk like water behind a dam, and a hotter, more ionized state that sends a tidal wave of gas surging toward the center.

"Each outburst clears out the inner disk, and with little or no matter falling toward the black hole, the system ceases to be a bright source of X-rays," said John Cannizzo, a Goddard astrophysicist. "Decades later, after enough gas has accumulated in the outer disk, it switches again to its hot state and sends a deluge of gas toward the black hole, resulting in a new X-ray outburst."

This phenomenon, called the thermal-viscous limit cycle, helps astronomers explain transient outbursts across a wide range of systems, from protoplanetary disks around young stars, to dwarf novae -- where the central object is a white dwarf star -- and even bright emission from supermassive black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies.

Swift, launched in November 2004, is managed by Goddard Space Flight Center. It is operated in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., with international collaborators in the United Kingdom and Italy and including contributions from Germany and Japan.

For images related to this discovery and more information about Swift, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/QLlkCH

NASA

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Astronomy : NASA's Swift Narrows Down Origin of Important Supernova Class:

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Studies using X-ray and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Swift satellite provide new insights into the elusive origins of an important class of exploding star called Type Ia supernovae.

Three types of systems, illustrated here, may host Type Ia supernovae. The first two panels depict a white dwarf in a binary system accumulating matter transferred from a red supergiant companion many times the sun's mass (left) or similar to the sun (middle). The transferred matter is thought to accumulate on the white dwarf and ultimately cause it to explode. Swift data on dozens of supernovae essentially eliminate the first model. Mounting evidence suggests that some Type Ia supernovae occur when binary white dwarfs (right) merge and collide.

Credit: NASA/Swift/ Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State Univ.

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This image combines all Swift X-ray Telescope observations for 53 Type Ia supernovae. The images are stacked to align the supernovae at the center (circled in inset), giving a total effective exposure of 35.3 days -- the deepest-ever X-ray observation of Type Ia supernovae. Unresolved hot gas within the host galaxies produces the diffuse orange glow, while yellow and orange blobs reveal X-ray binaries in the host galaxies as well as foreground stars in our own. No additional X-ray emission is visible at the position of the stacked supernovae, placing strong limits on their host systems.

Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

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These images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) show the nearby spiral galaxy M101 before and after the appearance of SN 2011fe (circled, right), which was discovered on Aug. 24, 2011. At a distance of 21 million light-years, it was the nearest Type Ia supernova since 1986 but appeared too late for inclusion in the published studies. Left: View constructed from images taken in March and April 2007. Right: The supernova was so bright that most UVOT exposures were short, so this view includes imagery from August through November 2011 to better show the galaxy. Credit: NASA/Swift/Peter Brown, Univ. of Utah

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NASA'S Swift Narrows Down Origin of Important Supernova Class

WASHINGTON -- Studies using X-ray and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Swift satellite provide new insights into the elusive origins of an important class of exploding star called Type Ia supernovae.

These explosions, which can outshine their galaxy for weeks, release large and consistent amounts of energy at visible wavelengths. These qualities make them among the most valuable tools for measuring distance in the universe. Because astronomers know the intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovae, how bright they appear directly reveals how far away they are.

"For all their importance, it's a bit embarrassing for astronomers that we don't know fundamental facts about the environs of these supernovae," said Stefan Immler, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Now, thanks to unprecedented X-ray and ultraviolet data from Swift, we have a clearer picture of what's required to blow up these stars."

Astronomers have known for decades that Type Ia supernovae originate with a remnant star called a white dwarf, which detonates when pushed to a critical mass. The environment that sets the stage for the explosion, however, has been harder to pin down.

According to the most popular scenario, a white dwarf orbits a normal star and pulls a stream of matter from it. This gas flows onto the white dwarf, which gains mass until it reaches a critical threshold and undergoes a catastrophic explosion.

"A missing detail is what types of stars reside in these systems. They may be a mix of stars like the sun or much more massive red- and blue-supergiant stars," said Brock Russell, a physics graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and lead author of the X-ray study. In a competing model, the supernova arises when two white dwarfs in a binary system eventually spiral inward and collide. Observations suggest both scenarios occur in nature, but no one knows which version happens more often.

Swift's primary mission is to locate gamma-ray bursts, which are more distant and energetic explosions associated with the birth of black holes. Between these bursts, astronomers can use Swift's unique capabilities to study other objects, including newly discovered supernovae. The satellite's X-ray Telescope (XRT) has studied more than 200 supernovae to date, with about 30 percent being Type Ia.

Russell and Immler combined X-ray data for 53 of the nearest known Type Ia supernovae but could not detect an X-ray point source. Stars shed gas and dust throughout their lives. When a supernova shock wave plows into this material, it becomes heated and emits X-rays. The lack of X-rays from the combined supernovae shows that supergiant stars, and even sun-like stars in a later red giant phase, likely aren't present in the host binaries.

In a companion study, a team led by Peter Brown at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City looked at 12 Type Ia events observed by Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) less than 10 days after the explosion. A supernova shock wave should produce enhanced ultraviolet light as it interacts with its companion, with larger stars producing brighter, longer enhancements. Swift's UVOT detected no such emission, leading the researchers to exclude large, red giant stars from Type Ia binaries.

Taken together, the studies suggest the companion to the white dwarf is either a smaller, younger star similar to our sun or another white dwarf. The X-ray findings will appear in the April 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters; the ultraviolet results appear in the April 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

The ultraviolet studies rely on early, sensitive observations. As Brown's study was being written, nature provided a great case study in SN 2011fe, the closest Type Ia supernova since 1986. Early Swift UVOT observations show no ultraviolet enhancement. According to the findings in an unpublished study led also by Brown, this means any companion must be smaller than the sun. Swift data on SN 2011fe also figure prominently in unpublished studies led by Alicia Soderberg at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Preliminary results suggest that the explosion was caused by merging white dwarfs. Swift launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaborat

ion with Pennsylvania State University and other national and international partners. For images related to this story, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/swift
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ASTRONOMY: Researchers Detail How A Distant Black Hole Devoured A Star

Hi my Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco. Positions from Swift's XRT constrained the source to a small patch of sky that contains a faint galaxy known to be 3.9 billion light-years away. But to link the Swift event to the galaxy required observations at radio wavelengths, which showed that the galaxy's center contained a brightening radio source. Analysis of that source using the Expanded Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) shows that it is still expanding at more than half the speed of light. Credit: NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al.

Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. The first flares from the source likely coincided with the disk's creation, thought to have occurred when a star wandering too close to the black hole was torn apart. Credit: NASA/Swift/Penn State.

Images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-Ray telescopes (yellow and red) were combined to make this view of Swift J1644+57. Evidence of the flares is seen only in the X-ray image, which is a 3.4-hour exposure taken on March 28, 2011. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

This illustration steps through the events that scientists think likely resulted in Swift J1644+57. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Swift.

WASHINGTON -- Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.

"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."

Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event -- the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.

Burrows' study included NASA scientists. It highlights the X- and gamma-ray observations from Swift and other detectors, including the Japan-led Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument aboard the International Space Station.

The second study was led by Ashley Zauderer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It examines the unprecedented outburst through observations from numerous ground-based radio observatories, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) near Socorro, N.M.

Most galaxies, including our own, possess a central supersized black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass. According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees.

The innermost gas in the disk spirals toward the black hole, where rapid motion and magnetism create dual, oppositely directed "funnels" through which some particles may escape. Jets driving matter at velocities greater than 90 percent the speed of light form along the black hole's spin axis. In the case of Swift J1644+57, one of these jets happened to point straight at Earth.

"The radio emission occurs when the outgoing jet slams into the interstellar environment," Zauderer explained. "By contrast, the X-rays arise much closer to the black hole, likely near the base of the jet."

Theoretical studies of tidally disrupted stars suggested they would appear as flares at optical and ultraviolet energies. The brightness and energy of a black hole's jet is greatly enhanced when viewed head-on. The phenomenon, called relativistic beaming, explains why Swift J1644+57 was seen at X-ray energies and appeared so strikingly luminous.

When first detected March 28, the flares were initially assumed to signal a gamma-ray burst, one of the nearly daily short blasts of high-energy radiation often associated with the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole in the distant universe. But as the emission continued to brighten and flare, astronomers realized that the most plausible explanation was the tidal disruption of a sun-like star seen as beamed emission.

By March 30, EVLA observations by Zauderer's team showed a brightening radio source centered on a faint galaxy near Swift's position for the X-ray flares. These data provided the first conclusive evidence that the galaxy, the radio source and the Swift event were linked.

"Our observations show that the radio-emitting region is still expanding at more than half the speed of light," said Edo Berger, an associate professor of astrophysics at Harvard and a coauthor of the radio paper. "By tracking this expansion backward in time, we can confirm that the outflow formed at the same time as the Swift X-ray source."

Swift, launched in November 2004, is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is operated in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in N.M. and Orbital Sciences Corp., in Dulles, Va., with international collaborators in the U.K., Italy, Germany and Japan. MAXI is operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency as an external experiment attached to the Kibo module of the space station. For images and animations related to the studies, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/swift.
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