Artificial Intelligence Analyzes Gravitational Lenses 10 Million Times Faster

Artificial Intelligence Analyzes Gravitational Lenses 10 Million Times Faster:

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have for the first time shown that neural networks – a form of artificial intelligence – can accurately analyze the complex distortions in spacetime known as gravitational lenses 10 million times faster than traditional methods.

“Analyses that typically take weeks to months to complete, that require the input of experts and that are computationally demanding, can be done by neural nets within a fraction of a second, in a fully automated way and, in principle, on a cell phone’s computer chip,” said postdoctoral fellow Laurence Perreault Levasseur, a co-author of a study published today in Nature.

The team at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford, used neural networks to analyze images of strong gravitational lensing, where the image of a faraway galaxy is multiplied and distorted into rings and arcs by the gravity of a massive object, such as a galaxy cluster, that’s closer to us. The distortions provide important clues about how mass is distributed in space and how that distribution changes over time – properties linked to invisible dark matter that makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe and to dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Until now this type of analysis has been a tedious process that involves comparing actual images of lenses with a large number of computer simulations of mathematical lensing models. This can take weeks to months for a single lens.

But with the neural networks, the researchers were able to do the same analysis in a few seconds, which they demonstrated using real images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and simulated ones.

To train the neural networks in what to look for, the researchers showed them about half a million simulated images of gravitational lenses for about a day. Once trained, the networks were able to analyze new lenses almost instantaneously with a precision that was comparable to traditional analysis methods. In a separate paper, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team reports how these networks can also determine the uncertainties of their analyses.

“The neural networks we tested – three publicly available neural nets and one that we developed ourselves – were able to determine the properties of each lens, including how its mass was distributed and how much it magnified the image of the background galaxy,” said the study’s lead author Yashar Hezaveh, a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellow at KIPAC.

This goes far beyond recent applications of neural networks in astrophysics, which were limited to solving classification problems, such as determining whether an image shows a gravitational lens or not.

The ability to sift through large amounts of data and perform complex analyses very quickly and in a fully automated fashion could transform astrophysics in a way that is much needed for future sky surveys that will look deeper into the universe – and produce more data – than ever before.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), for example, whose 3.2-gigapixel camera is currently under construction at SLAC, will provide unparalleled views of the universe and is expected to increase the number of known strong gravitational lenses from a few hundred today to tens of thousands.

“We won’t have enough people to analyze all these data in a timely manner with the traditional methods,” Perreault Levasseur said. “Neural networks will help us identify interesting objects and analyze them quickly. This will give us more time to ask the right questions about the universe.”

Neural networks are inspired by the architecture of the human brain, in which a dense network of neurons quickly processes and analyzes information.

In the artificial version, the “neurons” are single computational units that are associated with the pixels of the image being analyzed. The neurons are organized into layers, up to hundreds of layers deep. Each layer searches for features in the image. Once the first layer has found a certain feature, it transmits the information to the next layer, which then searches for another feature within that feature, and so on.

“The amazing thing is that neural networks learn by themselves what features to look for,” said KIPAC staff scientist Phil Marshall, a co-author of the paper. “This is comparable to the way small children learn to recognize objects. You don’t tell them exactly what a dog is; you just show them pictures of dogs.”

But in this case, Hezaveh said, “It’s as if they not only picked photos of dogs from a pile of photos, but also returned information about the dogs’ weight, height and age.”

Although the KIPAC scientists ran their tests on the Sherlock high-performance computing cluster at the Stanford Research Computing Center, they could have done their computations on a laptop or even on a cell phone, they said. In fact, one of the neural networks they tested was designed to work on iPhones.

“Neural nets have been applied to astrophysical problems in the past with mixed outcomes,” said KIPAC faculty member Roger Blandford, who was not a co-author on the paper. “But new algorithms combined with modern graphics processing units, or GPUs, can produce extremely fast and reliable results, as the gravitational lens problem tackled in this paper dramatically demonstrates. There is considerable optimism that this will become the approach of choice for many more data processing and analysis problems in astrophysics and other fields.”

Credit: slac.stanford.edu

ALMA Finds Huge Hidden Reservoirs of Turbulent Gas in Distant Galaxies

ALMA Finds Huge Hidden Reservoirs of Turbulent Gas in Distant Galaxies:

ALMA has been used to detect turbulent reservoirs of cold gas surrounding distant starburst galaxies. By detecting CH+ for the first time in the distant Universe this research opens up a new window of exploration into a critical epoch of star formation. The presence of this molecule sheds new light on how galaxies manage to extend their period of rapid star formation. The results appear in the journal Nature.

A team led by Edith Falgarone (Ecole Normale Supérieure and Observatoire de Paris, France) has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to detect signatures of the carbon hydride molecule CH+ in distant starburst galaxies. The group identified strong signals of CH+ in five out of the six galaxies studied, including the Cosmic Eyelash (eso1012). This research provides new information that helps astronomers understand the growth of galaxies and how a galaxy’s surroundings fuel star formation.

“CH+ is a special molecule. It needs a lot of energy to form and is very reactive, which means its lifetime is very short and it can’t be transported far. CH+ therefore traces how energy flows in the galaxies and their surroundings,” said Martin Zwaan, an astronomer at ESO, who contributed to the paper.

How CH+ traces energy can be thought of by analogy to being on a boat in a tropical ocean on a dark, moonless night. When the conditions are right, fluorescent plankton can light up around the boat as it sails. The turbulence caused by the boat sliding through the water excites the plankton to emit light, which reveals the existence of the the turbulent regions in the underlying dark water. Since CH+ forms exclusively in small areas where turbulent motions of gas dissipates, its detection in essence traces energy on a galactic scale.

The observed CH+ reveals dense shock waves, powered by hot, fast galactic winds originating inside the galaxies’ star forming regions. These winds flow through a galaxy, and push material out of it, but their turbulent motions are such that part of the material can be re-captured by the gravitational pull of the galaxy itself. This material gathers into huge turbulent reservoirs of cool, low-density gas, extending more than 30 000 light-years from the galaxy’s star forming region.

“With CH+, we learn that energy is stored within vast galaxy-sized winds and ends up as turbulent motions in previously unseen reservoirs of cold gas surrounding the galaxy,” said Falgarone, who is lead author of the new paper. “Our results challenge the theory of galaxy evolution. By driving turbulence in the reservoirs, these galactic winds extend the starburst phase instead of quenching it.”

The team determined that galactic winds alone could not replenish the newly revealed gaseous reservoirs and suggests that the mass is provided by galactic mergers or accretion from hidden streams of gas, as predicted by current theory.

“This discovery represents a major step forward in our understanding of how the inflow of material is regulated around the most intense starburst galaxies in the early Universe,” says ESO’s Director for Science, Rob Ivison, a co-author on the paper. “It shows what can be achieved when scientists from a variety of disciplines come together to exploit the capabilities of the world's most powerful telescope.”

Credit: ESO

Heavy Stellar Traffic, Deflected Comets, and a Closer Look at the Triggers of Cosmic Disaster

Heavy Stellar Traffic, Deflected Comets, and a Closer Look at the Triggers of Cosmic Disaster:

As stars pass close by our solar system, they can nudge comets from the distant Oort cloud into the inner regions around the Sun. Thus, stellar encounters are an important factor in determining the risk of large cosmic impacts on Earth. Now, Coryn Bailer-Jones from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has used data from the ESA satellite Gaia to give the first systematic estimate of the rate of such close stellar encounters. Every million years, up to two dozen stars pass within a few light-years of the Sun, making for a near-constant state of perturbation. The results have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Comets colliding with Earth are among the more violent and extensive cosmic catastrophes that can befall our home planet. The best known such impact is the one which, 66 million years ago, caused or at least hastened the demise of the dinosaurs (although it is not known whether the blame in this case falls on a comet or an asteroid).

It must be said that, to the best of current knowledge, impacts with regional or even global consequences are exceedingly rare, and occur at a rate of no more than one per million years. Also, monitoring systems give us a fairly complete inventory of larger asteroids and comets, none of which is currently on a collision course with Earth.

Still, the consequences are serious enough that studies of the causes of comet impacts are not purely academic. The prime culprits are stellar encounters: stars passing through our Sun's cosmic neighborhood. The outskirts of our solar system are believed to host a reservoir of cold and icy objects – potential comets – known as the Oort cloud. The gravitational influence of passing stars can nudge these comets inwards, and some will begin a journey all the way to the inner solar system, possibly on a collision course with Earth. That is why knowledge of these stellar encounters and their properties has a direct impact on risk assessment for comet impacts.

Now, Bailer-Jones has published the first systematic estimate of the rate of such stellar encounters. The new result uses data from the first data release (DR1) of the Gaia mission that combines new Gaia measurements with older measurements by ESA's Hipparcos satellite. Crucially, Bailer-Jones modeled each candidate for a close encounter as a swarm of virtual stars, showing how uncertainties in the orbital data will influence the derived rate of encounters.

Bailer-Jones found that within a typical million years, between 490 and 600 stars will pass the Sun within a distance of 16.3 light-years (5 parsecs, to use a unit more common in professional astronomy) or less. Between 19 and 24 stars will pass at 3.26 light-years (1 parsec) or less. All these hundreds of stars would be sufficiently close to nudge comets from the Oort cloud into the solar system. The new results are in the same ballpark as earlier, less systematic estimates that show that when it comes to stellar encounters, traffic in our cosmic neighborhood is rather heavy.

The current results are valid for a period of time that reaches about 5 million years into the past and into the future. With Gaia's next data release, DR2 slated for April 2018, this could be extended to 25 million years each way. However, astronomers intending to go even further and search for the stars that might be responsible for hurling a comet towards the dinosaurs will need to know our home galaxy and its mass distribution in much more detail than we currently do – a long-term goal of the researchers involved in Gaia and related projects.

Credit: mpia.de

Physicists Propose New Theories of Black Holes from the Very Early Universe

Physicists Propose New Theories of Black Holes from the Very Early Universe:

UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe’s first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium. Two papers on their work were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe’s very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars.

Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics, and Eric Cotner, a UCLA graduate student, developed a compellingly simple new theory suggesting that black holes could have formed very shortly after the Big Bang, long before stars began to shine. Astronomers have previously suggested that these so-called primordial black holes could account for all or some of the universe’s mysterious dark matter and that they might have seeded the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of galaxies. The new theory proposes that primordial black holes might help create many of the heavier elements found in nature.

The researchers began by considering that a uniform field of energy pervaded the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Scientists expect that such fields existed in the distant past. After the universe rapidly expanded, this energy field would have separated into clumps. Gravity would cause these clumps to attract one another and merge together. The UCLA researchers proposed that some small fraction of these growing clumps became dense enough to become black holes.

Their hypothesis is fairly generic, Kusenko said, and it doesn’t rely on what he called the “unlikely coincidences” that underpin other theories explaining primordial black holes.

The paper suggests that it’s possible to search for these primordial black holes using astronomical observations. One method involves measuring the very tiny changes in a star’s brightness that result from the gravitational effects of a primordial black hole passing between Earth and that star. Earlier this year, U.S. and Japanese astronomers published a paper on their discovery of one star in a nearby galaxy that brightened and dimmed precisely as if a primordial black hole was passing in front of it.

In a separate study, Kusenko, Volodymyr Takhistov, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher, and George Fuller, a professor at UC San Diego, proposed that primordial black holes might play an important role in the formation of heavy elements such as gold, silver, platinum and uranium, which could be ongoing in our galaxy and others.

The origin of those heavy elements has long been a mystery to researchers.

“Scientists know that these heavy elements exist, but they’re not sure where these elements are being formed,” Kusenko said. “This has been really embarrassing.”

The UCLA research suggests that a primordial black hole occasionally collides with a neutron star — the city-sized, spinning remnant of a star that remains after some supernova explosions — and sinks into its depths.

When that happens, Kusenko said, the primordial black hole consumes the neutron star from the inside, a process that takes about 10,000 years. As the neutron star shrinks, it spins even faster, eventually causing small fragments to detach and fly off. Those fragments of neutron-rich material may be the sites in which neutrons fuse into heavier and heavier elements, Kusenko said.

However, the probability of a neutron star capturing a black hole is rather low, said Kusenko, which is consistent with observations of only some galaxies being enriched in heavy elements. The theory that primordial black holes collide with neutron stars to create heavy elements also explains the observed lack of neutron stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a long-standing mystery in astrophysics.

This winter, Kusenko and his colleagues will collaborate with scientists at Princeton University on computer simulations of the heavy elements produced by a neutron star–black hole interaction. By comparing the results of those simulations with observations of heavy elements in nearby galaxies, the researchers hope to determine whether primordial black holes are indeed responsible for Earth’s gold, platinum and uranium.

Credit: ucla.edu

Hubble Delivers First Hints of Possible Water Content of TRAPPIST-1 Planets

Hubble Delivers First Hints of Possible Water Content of TRAPPIST-1 Planets:

An international team of astronomers used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to estimate whether there might be water on the seven earth-sized planets orbiting the nearby dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. The results suggest that the outer planets of the system might still harbor substantial amounts of water. This includes the three planets within the habitable zone of the star, lending further weight to the possibility that they may indeed be habitable.

On 22 February 2017 astronomers announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, 40 light-years away. This makes TRAPPIST-1 the planetary system with the largest number of Earth-sized planets discovered so far.

Following up on the discovery, an international team of scientists led by the Swiss astronomer Vincent Bourrier from the Observatoire de l’Université de Genève, used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study the amount of ultraviolet radiation received by the individual planets of the system. “Ultraviolet radiation is an important factor in the atmospheric evolution of planets,” explains Bourrier. “As in our own atmosphere, where ultraviolet sunlight breaks molecules apart, ultraviolet starlight can break water vapor in the atmospheres of exoplanets into hydrogen and oxygen.”

While lower-energy ultraviolet radiation breaks up water molecules — a process called photodissociation — ultraviolet rays with more energy (XUV radiation) and X-rays heat the upper atmosphere of a planet, which allows the products of photodissociation, hydrogen and oxygen, to escape.

As it is very light, hydrogen gas can escape the exoplanets’ atmospheres and be detected around the exoplanets with Hubble, acting as a possible indicator of atmospheric water vapor. The observed amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by TRAPPIST-1 indeed suggests that the planets could have lost gigantic amounts of water over the course of their history.

This is especially true for the innermost two planets of the system, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c, which receive the largest amount of ultraviolet energy. “Our results indicate that atmospheric escape may play an important role in the evolution of these planets,” summarizes Julien de Wit, from MIT, USA, co-author of the study.

The inner planets could have lost more than 20 Earth-oceans-worth of water during the last eight billion years. However, the outer planets of the system — including the planets e, f and g which are in the habitable zone — should have lost much less water, suggesting that they could have retained some on their surfaces. The calculated water loss rates as well as geophysical water release rates also favor the idea that the outermost, more massive planets retain their water. However, with the currently available data and telescopes no final conclusion can be drawn on the water content of the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1.

“While our results suggest that the outer planets are the best candidates to search for water with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, they also highlight the need for theoretical studies and complementary observations at all wavelengths to determine the nature of the TRAPPIST-1 planets and their potential habitability,” concludes Bourrier.

Credit: spacetelescope.org

FINESSE Mission to Investigate Atmospheres of Hundreds of Alien Worlds

FINESSE Mission to Investigate Atmospheres of Hundreds of Alien Worlds:

One of NASA’s proposed missions, known as the Fast INfrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer (FINESSE) could greatly improve our understanding of extrasolar worlds. If selected for development, the spacecraft will investigate at least 500 exoplanet atmospheres, providing detailed information about climate processes on distant alien planets.

FINESSE has been recently chosen by NASA for concept studies and evaluations. It is one of the agency’s six astrophysics Explorers Program proposals that could be selected by 2019 to proceed with construction and launch.

The mission’s main objective is to study the processes that govern planet formation and global climate. It will investigate the mechanisms that establish atmospheric chemical composition and shape atmospheric evolution.

“FINESSE will spectroscopically observe the atmospheres of many hundreds of transiting exoplanets to measure their molecular abundances and thermal profiles,” Robert Zellem, FINESSE science team member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told Astrowatch.net.

In order to conduct the planned studies, FINESSE will use the transit method. It will measure how a planet’s atmosphere absorbs light from its host star as a function of wavelength. This will allow to infer the molecules in the planet’s atmosphere.

“By doing this for hundreds of planets, FINESSE will determine how planets form and the crucial factors that establish planetary climate,” Zellem said.

These observations will require a proper imaging system. That is why the FINESSE spacecraft will be equipped in a telescope with a 75-centimeter (29.5-inch) primary mirror and a spectrometer that will observe planets in the visible and infrared wavelengths (from 0.5 to 5 microns).

According to Zellem, wide spectral coverage will enable FINESSE to measure the abundances of molecules such as water, methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide as well as look for the presence of clouds and hazes.

Data collected by the spacecraft are expected to provide important information that could improve our knowledge about various exoplanets, from rocky terrestrial planets to gas giants like Jupiter. FINESSE could help us discover what these alien worlds are like, determining what makes them they way they are, and allowing this knowledge to be applied in the broader planetary context, including the search for life outside of our Solar System.

If selected for the development, FINESSE is targeted for the launch around 2023. Zellem hopes that during its operational lifetime of two years it will carry out important observations of even more than 1,000 extrasolar worlds.

“FINESSE has the capability in its two year mission to observe the atmospheres of over 1000 transiting exoplanets,” he concluded.

Small Asteroid 2017 QB35 Flies by Earth

Small Asteroid 2017 QB35 Flies by Earth:

A newly spotted asteroid, designated 2017 QB35, flew by Earth on Sunday, September 3, missing our planet at a distance of 0.93 lunar distances (LD), or 345,600 kilometers. The space rock flew by Earth at 8:40 UTC with a relative velocity of 4.1 km/s.

2017 QB35 was discovered on August 31, 2017 by the Mount Lemmon Survey (MLS), which uses a 1.52 m cassegrain reflector telescope at Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona. MLS is one of the most prolific surveys when it comes to discovering new NEOs. It has detected more than 50,000 minor planets to date.

2017 QB35 is an Aten-type asteroid with and an absolute magnitude of 29.3 and an estimated diameter between 2 and 8 meters. The object has a semimajor axis of 0.93 AU and an orbital period of 326 days.

Next close approach of 2017 QB35 will occur on June 4, 2025, when it will pass by our planet at a much larger distance of about 100 LD.

Currently, there are 1,803 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) detected, however none of them is on a collision course with our planet. PHAs are asteroids larger than 100 meters that can come closer to Earth than 19.5 LD.

Stellar Corpse Sheds Light on Origin of Cosmic Rays

Stellar Corpse Sheds Light on Origin of Cosmic Rays:

The origin of cosmic rays, high-energy particles from outer space unceasingly impinging on Earth, is among the most challenging open questions in astrophysics. Discovered more than 100 years ago and considered a potential health risk to airplane crews and astronauts, cosmic rays are believed to be produced by shock waves — for example, those resulting from supernovae explosions. The most energetic cosmic rays streaking across the universe carry 10 to 100 million times the energy generated by particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. New research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society sheds new light on the origin of those energetic particles.

"The new result represents a significant advance in our understanding of particle acceleration at shock waves, traditionally regarded as the main sources of energetic particles in the universe," said the study's lead author, Federico Fraschetti, a staff scientist at the University of Arizona's Departments of Planetary Sciences and Astronomy.

The Crab Nebula, remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed almost 1,000 years ago, is one of the best studied objects in the history of astronomy and a known source of cosmic rays. It emits radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays, ultraviolet and visible light, to infrared and radio waves. 

"Most of what we observe comes from very energetic particles such as electrons that did not yet leave the source," said Fraschetti. "Since we can only observe the electromagnetic radiation that they emit from the source itself, we rely on models to reproduce the radiation spectrum we see from the nebula."

The new study, co-authored by Martin Pohl at the University of Potsdam, Germany, revealed that the entire zoo of electromagnetic radiation streaming from the Crab Nebula can arise from a single population of electrons, previously deemed impossible, and that they originate in a different way than scientists have traditionally thought. 

According to the generally accepted model, once the particles reach the shock, they bounce back and forth many times due to the magnetic turbulence. During this process they gain energy — in a similar way to a tennis ball being bounced between two rackets that are steadily moving nearer to each other — and are pushed closer and closer to the speed of light. Such a model follows an idea introduced by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1949.

"The current models do not include what happens when the particles reach their highest energy," said Federico Fraschetti. "Only if we include a different process of acceleration can we explain the entire electromagnetic spectrum we see, and that tells us that while the shock wave still is the source of the acceleration of the particles, the mechanisms must be different."

At the heart of the Crab Nebula lies a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star originating from the explosion of a star a few times more massive than the sun. When it exploded, the star shredded its outer layers, creating the stunning colorscape that makes the Crab Nebula so popular with professional and amateur astronomers. The pulsar emits a wind of electrons and positrons traveling at what astrophysicists call relativistic speed — close to the speed of light. 

"Those particles are the fastest things in the universe," Fraschetti said. "Anything we experience in our everyday lives is very far from relativistic effects. But these highly energetic particles still need to be accelerated even more to produce the electromagnetic radiation that we see coming from the Crab Nebula."

That acceleration, scientists believe, happens at a boundary called the termination shock, where the particle wind slams into the cloud of gas and dust that the star blew off into space when it went supernova. 

Except that just when the particles become energetic enough to leave the system and become cosmic radiation, they go beyond the limits of the models traditionally used to account for the origin of cosmic radiation, Fraschetti and Pohl found. The authors conclude that a better understanding is needed of how particles are accelerated in cosmic sources, and how the acceleration works when the energy of the particles become very large.

Several NASA missions, including ACE, STEREO and WIND, are dedicated to studying the effects of shocks caused by plasma explosions on the surface of the sun as they travel to Earth. Scientists hope that results from those experiments may shed light on the mechanisms of acceleration in objects such as the Crab Nebula.

Credit: arizona.edu

Jupiter’s Aurora Presents a Powerful Mystery

Jupiter’s Aurora Presents a Powerful Mystery:

Scientists on NASA’s Juno mission have observed massive amounts of energy swirling over Jupiter’s polar regions that contribute to the giant planet’s powerful aurora – only not in ways the researchers expected.

Examining data collected by the ultraviolet spectrograph and energetic-particle detector instruments aboard the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, a team led by Barry Mauk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, observed signatures of powerful electric potentials, aligned with Jupiter’s magnetic field, that accelerate electrons toward the Jovian atmosphere at energies up to 400,000 electron volts. This is 10 to 30 times higher than the largest auroral potentials observed at Earth, where only several thousands of volts are typically needed to generate the most intense aurora -- known as discrete aurora -- the dazzling, twisting, snake-like northern and southern lights seen in places like Alaska and Canada, northern Europe, and many other northern and southern polar regions.

Jupiter has the most powerful aurora in the solar system, so the team was not surprised that electric potentials play a role in their generation. What’s puzzling the researchers, Mauk said, is that despite the magnitudes of these potentials at Jupiter, they are observed only sometimes and are not the source of the most intense auroras, as they are at Earth.

“At Jupiter, the brightest auroras are caused by some kind of turbulent acceleration process that we do not understand very well,” said Mauk, who leads the investigation team for the APL-built Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument (JEDI). “There are hints in our latest data indicating that as the power density of the auroral generation becomes stronger and stronger, the process becomes unstable and a new acceleration process takes over. But we’ll have to keep looking at the data.”

Scientists consider Jupiter to be a physics lab of sorts for worlds beyond our solar system, saying the ability of Jupiter to accelerate charged particles to immense energies has implications for how more distant astrophysical systems accelerate particles. But what they learn about the forces driving Jupiter’s aurora and shaping its space weather environment also has practical implications in our own planetary backyard.

“The highest energies that we are observing within Jupiter’s auroral regions are formidable. These energetic particles that create the aurora are part of the story in understanding Jupiter’s radiation belts, which pose such a challenge to Juno and to upcoming spacecraft missions to Jupiter under development,” said Mauk. “Engineering around the debilitating effects of radiation has always been a challenge to spacecraft engineers for missions at Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. What we learn here, and from spacecraft like NASA’s Van Allen Probes and Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) that are exploring Earth’s magnetosphere, will teach us a lot about space weather and protecting spacecraft and astronauts in harsh space environments. Comparing the processes at Jupiter and Earth is incredibly valuable in testing our ideas of how planetary physics works.” 

Mauk and colleagues present their findings in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal Nature.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft.

Credit: NASA

X-rays Reveal Temperament of Possible Planet-hosting Stars

X-rays Reveal Temperament of Possible Planet-hosting Stars:

A new X-ray study has revealed that stars like the Sun and their less massive cousins calm down surprisingly quickly after a turbulent youth. This result has positive implications for the long-term habitability of planets orbiting such stars.

A team of researchers used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to see how the X-ray brightness of stars similar to the Sun behaves over time. The X-ray emission from a star comes from a thin, hot, outer layer, called the corona. From studies of solar X-ray emission, astronomers have determined that the corona is heated by processes related to the interplay of turbulent motions and magnetic fields in the outer layers of a star.

High levels of magnetic activity can produce bright X-rays and ultraviolet light from stellar flares. Strong magnetic activity can also generate powerful eruptions of material from the star’s surface. Such energetic radiation and eruptions can impact planets and could damage or destroy their atmospheres, as pointed out in previous studies, including Chandra work reported in 2011 and 2013.

Since stellar X-rays mirror magnetic activity, X-ray observations can tell astronomers about the high-energy environment around the star. The new study uses X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton to show that stars like the Sun and their less massive cousins decrease in X-ray brightness surprisingly quickly.

Specifically, the researchers examined 24 stars that have masses similar to the Sun or less, and ages of a billion years or older. (For context, the Sun is 4.5 billion years old.) The rapid observed decline in X-ray brightness implies a rapid decline in energetic activity, which may provide a hospitable environment for the formation and evolution of life on any orbiting planets.

“This is good news for the future habitability of planets orbiting Sun-like stars, because the amount of harmful X-rays and ultraviolet radiation striking these worlds from stellar flares would be less than we used to think,” said Rachel Booth, a graduate student at Queen’s University in Belfast, UK, who led the study.

This result is different from other recent work on Sun-like and lower mass stars with ages less than a billion years. The new work shows that older stars drop in activity far more quickly than their younger counterparts.

“We’ve heard a lot about the volatility of stars less massive than the Sun, like TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri, and how that’s bad for life-supporting atmospheres on their planets,” said Katja Poppenhaeger, a co-author from Queen’s University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s refreshing to have some good news to share about potential habitability.”

To understand how quickly stellar magnetic activity level changes over time, astronomers need accurate ages for many different stars. This is a difficult task, but new precise age estimates have recently become available from studies of the way that a star pulsates using NASA’s Kepler and ESA’s CoRoT missions. These new age estimates were used for most of the 24 stars studied here.

Astronomers have observed that most stars are very magnetically active when they are young, since the stars are rapidly rotating. As the rotating star loses energy over time, the star spins more slowly and the magnetic activity level, along with the associated X-ray emission, drops.

“We’re not exactly sure why older stars settle down relatively quickly,” said co-author Chris Watson of Queen’s University. “However, we know it’s led to the successful formation of life in at least one case – around our own Sun.”

One possibility is that the decrease in rate of spin of the older stars occurs more quickly than it does for the younger stars. Another possibility is that the X-ray brightness declines more quickly with time for older, more slowly rotating stars than it does for younger stars.

A paper describing these results has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and is available online. The other co-authors are Victor Silva Aguirre from Aarhus University in Denmark and Scott Wolk from CfA.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations.

Credit: NASA

Earth as Hybrid Planet: New Classification Scheme Places Anthropocene Era in Astrobiological Context

Earth as Hybrid Planet: New Classification Scheme Places Anthropocene Era in Astrobiological Context:

For decades, as astronomers have imagined advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, they categorized such worlds by the amount of energy their inhabitants might conceivably be able to harness and use. They sorted the hypothetical worlds into three types according to a scheme named in 1964 for Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. A Type 1 civilization could manipulate all the energy resources of its home planet (a distant goal yet for Earth) and Type 2 all the energy in its star/planetary system. A super-advanced Type 3 civilization would command the energy of its whole home galaxy. The Kardashev Scale has since become a sort of gold standard for dreaming about possible civilizations beyond Earth.

Now, a team of researchers including Marina Alberti of the University of Washington has devised a new classification scheme for the evolutionary stages of worlds based on “non-equilibrium thermodynamics” — a planet’s energy flow being out of synch, as the presence of life could cause. The categories range from imagined planets with no atmosphere whatsoever to those with an “agency-dominated biosphere” or even a “technosphere,” reflecting the achievements of a vastly advanced, “energy-intensive technological species.”

Their paper, “Earth as a Hybrid Planet: The Anthropocene in an Evolutionary Astrobiological Context,” was published Sept. 6 in the journal Anthropocene. Lead author is Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. Alberti is a professor of urban design and planning in the UW College of Built Environments, and director of the college’s Urban Ecology Research Lab.

The new classification system, the researchers say, is a way of thinking about sustainability on a planetary scale in what is being recognized as the Anthropocene epoch — the geological period of humanity’s significant impact on Earth and its ecosystems. Alberti contends in her research that humans and the urban areas we create are having a strong, planetwide effect on evolution.

“Our premise is that Earth’s entry into the Anthropocene represents what might, from an astrobiological perspective, be a predictable planetary transition,” they write. “We explore this problem from the perspective of our own solar system and exoplanet studies.

“In our perspective, the beginning of the Anthropocene can be seen as the onset of the hybridization of the planet — a transitional stage from one class of planetary systems to another.”

That would be, in their scheme, Earth’s possible transition from Class IV — marked by a thick biosphere and life having some effect on the planet — to the final Class V, where a planet is profoundly affected by the activity of an advanced, energy-intensive species.

The classification scheme, the researchers write, is based on “the magnitude by which different planetary processes — abiotic, biotic and technologic — generate free energy, i.e. energy that can perform work within the system.”

• Class I represents worlds with no atmosphere at all, such as the planet Mercury and the Earth’s moon.
• Class II planets have a thin atmosphere containing greenhouse gases, but no current life, such as the current states of planets Mars and Venus.
• Class III planets have perhaps a thin biosphere and some biotic activity, but much too little to “affect planetary drivers and alter the evolutionary state of the planet as a whole.” No current examples exist in the solar system, but early Earth may have represented such a world — and possibly early Mars, if life ever flickered there in the distant past.
• Class IV planets have a thick biosphere sustained by photosynthetic activity and life has begun strongly affecting the planetary energy flow.

Alberti said, “The discovery of seven new exoplanets orbiting the relatively close star TRAPPIST-1 forces us to rethink life on Earth. It opens the possibility to broaden our understanding of coupled system dynamics and lay the foundations to explore a path to long-term sustainability by entering into a cooperative ecological-evolutionary dynamic with the coupled planetary systems.”

The researchers write, “Our thesis is that the development of long-term sustainable, versions of an energy-intensive civilization must be seen on a continuum of interactions between life and its host planet.”

The classifications lay the groundwork, they say, for future research on the “co-evolution” of planets along that continuum.

“Any world hosting a long-lived energy-intensive civilization must share at least some similarities in terms of the thermodynamic properties of the planetary system,” they write. “Understanding these properties, even in the broadest outlines, can help us understand which direction we must aim our efforts in developing a sustainable human civilization.”

In other words, they added, “If one does not know where one is going, it’s hard to get there.”

Co-author on the paper is Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany.

Credit: washington.edu

Accretion-Powered Pulsar Reveals Unique Timing Glitch

Accretion-Powered Pulsar Reveals Unique Timing Glitch:

The discovery of the largest timing irregularity yet observed in a pulsar is the first confirmation that pulsars in binary systems exhibit the strange phenomenon known as a ‘glitch’. The study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Pulsars are one possible result of the final stages of evolution of massive stars. Such stars end their lives in huge supernova explosions, ejecting their stellar materials outwards into space and leaving behind an extremely dense and compact object; this could either be a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole.

If a neutron star is left, it may have a very strong magnetic field and rotate extremely quickly, emitting a beam of light that can be observed when the beam points towards Earth, in much the same way as a lighthouse beam sweeping past an observer. To the observer on Earth, it looks as though the star is emitting pulses of light, hence the name ‘pulsar’.

Now a group of scientists from the Middle East Technical University and Başkent University in Turkey have discovered a sudden change in the rotation speed of the peculiar pulsar SXP 1062. These jumps in frequency, known as ‘glitches’, are commonly seen in isolated pulsars, but have so far never been observed in binary pulsars (pulsars orbiting with a companion white dwarf or neutron star) such as SXP 1062.

SXP 1062 is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way galaxy, and one of our nearest intergalactic neighbors at 200,000 light years away. Lead author of the study, Mr M. Miraç Serim, a senior PhD student working under the supervision of Prof Altan Baykal, said, “This pulsar is particularly interesting, since as well as orbiting its partner star as part of a binary pair, it is also still surrounded by the remnants of the supernova explosion which created it.”

The pulsar is thought to pull in the leftover material from the supernova explosion, feeding on it in a process known as accretion. The team believe that the size of the glitch is due to the gravitational influence of its companion star and this accretion of the surrounding remnant material, which together exert large forces on the crust of the neutron star. When these forces are no longer sustainable, a rapid change in internal structure transfers momentum to the crust, changing the rotation of the pulsar very suddenly and producing a glitch.

“The fractional frequency jump observed during this glitch is the largest, and is unique to this particular pulsar”, commented Dr Şeyda Şahiner, a co-author of the study. “The size of the glitch indicates that the interiors of neutron stars in binary systems may be quite different to the interiors of isolated neutron stars.”

This work was initially presented in 2017 at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science, which will be held next year in Liverpool jointly with the UK National Astronomy Meeting. The work will be followed up with NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission, launched in June this year – the team hope that the finding may lead to a better understanding of the interior of the neutron stars, putting new constraints on the neutron star equation of state.

Credit: ras.org.uk

Exchanges of Identity in Deep Space

Exchanges of Identity in Deep Space:

Like in a nail-biting thriller full of escapes and subterfuge, photons from far-off light sources, such as blazars, could go up against a continuous exchange of identity in their journey through the Universe. This is an operation that would allow these very tiny particles of light to escape an enemy which, if encountered, would annihilate them.

This is the phenomenon studied by a group of researchers from the University of Salento, Bari, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and SISSA thanks to brand new simulation models that reproduce the complexity of the cosmos as never before. Normally, very high energy photons (gamma rays) should "collide" with the background light emitted by galaxies transformed into pairs of matter and antimatter particles, as envisaged by the Theory of Relativity. For this reason, the sources of very high energy gamma rays should appear significantly less bright than what is observed in many cases.

A possible explanation for this surprising anomaly is that light photons are transformed into hypothetical weakly-interacting particles, "axions" which, in turn, would change into photons, all due to the interaction with magnetic fields. With these metamorphoses, a part of the photons would escape interaction with the intergalactic background light that would make them disappear. The importance of this process is emphasized by the study published on Physical Review Letters, which re-created an extremely refined model of the Cosmic Web, a network of filaments composed of gas and dark matter present throughout the Universe and of its magnetic fields. The aforementioned effects are now awaiting comparison with those obtained experimentally through Cherenkov Telescope Array new generation telescopes.

In this research, through complex and unprecedented computer simulations made at the CSCS Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, scholars have reproduced the so-called Cosmic Web and the magnetic fields associated with this to investigate the possibility, advanced from previous theories, that photons from a light source are transformed into axions, hypothetical elementary particles, on interacting with an extragalactic magnetic field. Axions could then be retransformed into photons by interacting with other magnetic fields. 

Researchers Daniele Montanino, Franco Vazza, Alessandro Mirizzi and Matteo Viel explain: "Photons from luminous bodies disappear when they encounter extragalactic background light (EBL). But if on their journey they head into these transformations as envisaged by these theories, it would explain why, in addition to giving very important information on processes that occur in the universe, distant celestial bodies are brighter than expected from an observation on Earth. These changes would, in fact, enable a greater number of photons to reach the Earth".

In the simulations made by scientists, thanks to the wealth of magnetic fields present in the Cosmic Web's filaments recreated with the simulations, the conversion phenomenon would seem much more relevant than predicted by previous models: "Our simulations reproduce a very realistic picture of the cosmos' structure. From what we have observed, the distribution of the Cosmic Web envisaged by us would markedly increase the probability of these transformations".

The next step in the research? To compare simulation results with the experimental data obtained through the use of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatories detectors, the new-generation astronomical observatories, one of which is positioned in the Canary Islands and the other in Chile, that will study the Universe through very high energy gamma rays.

Credit: sissa.it

Ultraviolet Light from Superluminous Supernova Key to Revealing Explosion Mechanism

Ultraviolet Light from Superluminous Supernova Key to Revealing Explosion Mechanism:

An international team of researchers has discovered a way to use observations at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths to uncover characteristics about superluminous supernovae previously impossible to determine, reports a new study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 3, 2017.

The team, led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Project Researcher Alexey Tolstov, studies stellar explosions called Superluminous Supernovae (SLSNe), an extra bright type of supernova discovered in the last decade that is 10 to 100 times brighter than ordinary supernovae. Recently, the team came upon Gaia16apd in a faint dwarf galaxy 1.6 billion light years away.

This SLSNe had an extraordinary UV-bright emission for a supernova of its kind, but no one could explain what explosion mechanism could produce that feature. Theorists have debated that Gaia16apd could fit one of three SLSNe scenarios. These are the pair-instability supernova, having a large mass of radioactive Nickel-56, or a magnetar-powered supernova where there would be a rapidly spinning and highly magnetized neutron star as an additional energy source, or a shock-interacting supernova where the supernova ejecta would interact with the surrounding dense circumstellar matter.

Researchers from Kavli IPMU therefore decided to simulate each model using multicolor radiation hydrodynamics to study light in different colors and ranges of wavelengths and see whether any of the simulations matched with the observed supernova. These simulations produced ultraviolet, visible-light and infrared light curves, photospheric radius and velocity, making it possible to investigate the appearance of the explosion at any wavelength.

Not only did they discover that Gaia16apd was most likely a shock-interacting supernova, Tolstov and his team found a way to model three different scenarios at UV wavelengths using the same numerical technique. In the future, their technique could help researchers in identifying the explosion mechanism of supernova they observe.

“The current study makes one more step to the understanding of the physics of superluminous supernova and helps to identify the scenario of the explosion. The observations and more detailed modeling of the peculiar objects similar to Gaia16apd are highly in demand to find out the nature of the phenomenon of superluminous supernovae,” said Tolstov.

The next step in their research will be to apply simulations on other SLSNe, and make more realistic models by considering the asymmetry of the explosion and physics of the magnetar-powered supernova.

Credit: ipmu.jp

Scientists Produce Unique Simulation of Magnetic Reconnection

Scientists Produce Unique Simulation of Magnetic Reconnection:

Jonathan Ng, a Princeton University graduate student at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has for the first time applied a fluid simulation to the space plasma process behind solar flares northern lights and space storms. The model could lead to improved forecasts of space weather that can shut down cell phone service and damage power grids, as well as to better understanding of the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions.

The new simulation captures the physics of magnetic reconnection, the breaking apart and snapping together of the magnetic field lines in plasma that occurs throughout the universe. The simulations approximate kinetic effects in a fluid code, which treats plasma as a flowing liquid, to create a more detailed picture of the reconnection process. 

Previous simulations used fluid codes to produce simplified descriptions of reconnection that takes place in the vastness of space, where widely separated plasma particles rarely collide. However, this collisionless environment gives rise to kinetic effects on plasma behavior that fluid models cannot normally capture.

The new simulation estimates kinetic behavior. “This is the first application of this particular fluid model in studying reconnection physics in space plasmas,” said Ng, lead author of the findings reported in August in the journal Physics of Plasmas.

Ng and coauthors approximated kinetic effects with a series of fluid equations based on plasma density, momentum and pressure. They concluded the process through a mathematical technique called “closure” that enabled them to describe the kinetic mixing of particles from non-local, or large-scale, regions. The type of closure involved was originally developed by PPPL physicist Greg Hammett and the late Rip Perkins in the context of fusion plasmas, making its application to the space plasma environment an example of fruitful cross-fertilization.

The completed results agreed better with kinetic models as compared with simulations produced by traditional fluid codes. The new simulations could extend understanding of reconnection to whole regions of space such as the magnetosphere, the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, and provide a more comprehensive view of the universal process.

Coauthoring the paper were physicists Ammar Hakim of PPPL and Amitava Bhattacharjee, head of the Theory Department at PPPL and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, together with physicists Adam Stanier and William Daughton of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Support for this work comes from the DOE Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and NASA. Computation was performed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, and the University of New Hampshire.

Credit: pppl.gov