Spectacular collision of suns will create new star in night sky in 2022

At the beginning of the 3rd century civil war raged in Britain as the Roman emperor Septimius Severus sought to quell unrest in the north.

But unknown to the fighting cohorts and Caledonian tribes, high above their heads two stars were coming together in a huge cataclysmic explosion.

Now 1800 years later the light from that collision will finally arrive on Earth creating a new star in the night sky - dubbed the ‘Boom Star - in an incredibly rare event which is usually only spotted through telescopes.

Supermassive black hole spotted tearing star to shreds

As mysteries go, they don't come much bigger than this. What was the strange ultrabright flash in a distant galaxy, spotted last year? Some astronomers thought it was the brilliant blast from a particularly massive exploding star, while others suspected it was an entirely new cosmic object altogether.

Now new observations pin the blame on a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole, lurking in the centre of the galaxy, tearing a star apart.

The work, reported in Nature Astronomy, offers a plausible solution to the enigmatic event, including why it brightened after dimming, says Jeff Cooke, an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia who was not involved with the study.

'Alien Megastructure' Star Keeps Getting Stranger

The more scientists learn about "Tabby's Star," the more mysterious the bizarre object gets.

Newly analyzed observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope show that the star KIC 8462852 — whose occasional, dramatic dips in brightness still have astronomers scratching their heads — has also dimmed overall during the last few years.

"The steady brightness change in KIC 8462852 is pretty astounding," study lead authorBen Montet, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

"Our highly accurate measurements over four years demonstrate that the star really is getting fainter with time," Montet added. "It is unprecedented for this type of star to slowly fade for years, and we don't see anything else like it in the Kepler data."

Deepest Ever Look into Orion

VLT infrared images reveal unexpected horde of low-mass objects

An international team has made use of the power of the HAWK-I infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to produce the deepest and most comprehensive view of the Orion Nebula [1] to date. Not only has this led to an image of spectacular beauty, but it has revealed a great abundance of faint brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects. The very presence of these low-mass bodies provides an exciting insight into the history of star formation within the nebula itself.

The famous Orion Nebula spans about 24 light-years within the constellation of Orion, and is visible from Earth with the naked eye, as a fuzzy patch in Orion’s sword. Some nebulae, like Orion, are strongly illuminated by ultraviolet radiation from the many hot stars born within them, such that the gas is ionised and glows brightly.

We’ve found the oldest star in the known universe – and it’s right on our galactic doorstep

Astronomers have discovered the oldest living star in the (known) universe — and, remarkably, it’s situated right on our galactic doorstep, just 6,000 light years away, well within the Milky Way. The star, which has the abbreviated name of SM0313, was born 13.6 billion years ago — just 100 or 200 million years after the Big Bang (and a whopping 400 million years before the previous record breaker). It is believed that SM0313 is an elusive Population II star — a star that was formed from the remnants of one of the universe’s very first supernovae. By using SM0313′s spectrographic fingerprint as a baseline, we will hopefully be able to find more ancient stars, eventually allowing us to build up a better picture of what actually happened during (and before?) the Big Bang.

SM0313 (full designation SMSS J031300.36-670839.3) was first spotted by the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory’s SkyMapper Telescope, which is in the process of mapping out a billion stars, galaxies, and asteroids in the southern sky. The Magellan Telescopes in Chile then followed up with some high-resolution imagery. As the astronomers took a closer look at the images, they noticed something rather odd: SM0313 contains almost no iron — less than one ten millionth of the iron found in our local Sun, in fact



Read the entire article:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176497-weve-found-the-oldest-star-in-the-known-universe-and-its-right-on-our-galactic-doorstep

First-Ever Weather Map of Failed Star Reveals Patchy Alien Clouds

Scientists have created the first weather map of a space oddity known as a brown dwarf, revealing a rare glimpse at alien weather patterns on the failed, wannabe star.

The map shows the weather on the surface of WISE J104915.57-531906.1B (called Luhman 16B for short), the nearest brown dwarf to Earth at 6.5 light-years away. Scientists mapped the light and dark features of the failed star's surface, according to officials with the European Southern Observatory, whose Very Large Telescope in Chile contributed to the new science. You can take video tour of the brown dwarf and its weather map on SPACE.com.

Brown dwarfs are called failed stars because they are larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, yet still too small to produce nuclear fusion like a true star. Scientists have only found a few hundred of the odd objects, with the first confirmed 20 years ago, ESO officials said.

The North Star Polaris Is Getting Brighter

The North Star has remained an eternal reassurance for northern travelers over the centuries. But recent and historical research reveals that the ever-constant star is actually changing.

After dimming for the last few decades, the North Star is beginning to shine brightly again. And over the last two centuries, the brightening has become rather dramatic.

"It was unexpected to find," Scott Engle of Villanova University in Pennsylvania told SPACE.com. Engle investigated the fluctuations of the star over the course of several years, combing through historical records and even turning the gaze of the famed Hubble Space Telescope onto the star.

Scientists have known since the early 20th century that the familiar star was part of a pulsating class known as Cepheid variables; its variations were suspected as early as the mid-1800s. But unlike most Cepheid variables, the pulses of Polaris are very small.

"If it had not been so popular as the North Star, we likely wouldn't have known it was a Cepheid until modern times," Engle said.

In the early 1990s, scientists realized that the oft-lauded brightness of Polaris was beginning to decline. Engle and his group began to research the star around the beginning of 2000, when they found that the dropping brightness was on the rise again.

"It started increasing rather rapidly," Engle said.

Curious, the team began to search historical records to see what other measurements they could find. Combing through data from the past century, they compared the information on Polaris with observations of other celestial bodies from the same telescopes and details about the instruments to compare the relative brightness of Polaris over the years. They found that the star had grown brighter over the past hundred years.

Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/24439-north-star-polaris-getting-brighter.html

Surprising New Class of 'Hypervelocity Stars' Discovered Escaping the Galaxy

An international team of astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of "hypervelocity stars" -- solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery of this new set of "hypervelocity" stars was described at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week in Washington, D.C., and is published in the Jan. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"These new hypervelocity stars are very different from the ones that have been discovered previously," said Vanderbilt University graduate student Lauren Palladino, lead author on the study. "The original hypervelocity stars are large blue stars and appear to have originated from the galactic center. Our new stars are relatively small -- about the size of the sun -- and the surprising part is that none of them appear to come from the galactic core."

The discovery came as Palladino, working under the supervision of Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt was mapping the Milky Way by calculating the orbits of Sun-like stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive census of the stars and galaxies in a region covering nearly one quarter of the sky.

"It's very hard to kick a star out of the galaxy," said Holley-Bockelmann. "The most commonly accepted mechanism for doing so involves interacting with the supermassive black hole at the galactic core. That means when you trace the star back to its birthplace, it comes from the center of our galaxy. None of these hypervelocity stars come from the center, which implies that there is an unexpected new class of hypervelocity star, one with a different ejection mechanism."

Astrophysicists calculate that a star must get a million-plus mile-per-hour kick relative to the motion of the galaxy to reach escape velocity. They also estimate that the Milky Way's central black hole has a mass equivalent to four million suns, large enough to produce a gravitational force strong enough to accelerate stars to hyper velocities. The typical scenario involves a binary pair of stars that get caught in the black hole's grip. As one of the stars spirals in toward the black hole, its companion is flung outward at a tremendous velocity. So far, 18 giant blue hypervelocity stars have been found that could have been produced by such a mechanism.

Read the entire article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140109124945.htm

Violent 'weather forecast' for 'failed stars'

The first weather forecast for a brown dwarf is in - and it's not looking good up there.

Astronomers predict it will rain molten iron and "snow" hot sand, with lightning and hurricanes likely.

New observations with Nasa's Spitzer telescope reveal surprisingly turbulent storm clouds circling these "failed stars".

The weather report was given at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.

It is the most detailed ever for a world outside our Solar System.

"So let's all sing the forecast for our nearest brown dwarf: Let it snow (rocks) let it snow (sand) let it snow (gems)," said Prof Adam Burgasser of the University of California.

Brown dwarfs are "failed stars" which lack the mass to keep fusing atoms and blossom into fully-fledged suns.

They were known to be hot and hostile. But when astronomers pointed Spitzer at 44 different brown dwarfs, they were surprised to find almost half showed clear evidence of weather - dynamic storm systems with unpredictable patterns.

"This is not like Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The storms on brown dwarfs are much more violent and variable. This is weather, not climate," says Dr Aren Heinze, of Stony Brook University, New York.

Read the entire article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25647657