Next Week’s Night Sky:
January 28th is the full moon. This is a wonderful time to take a good look at the moon through binoculars — you should be able to make out many fine and beautiful details!
Youngest Magnetar
Astronomers discovered the youngest member of a bizarre group of stars, known as magnetars, using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope in March of 2020. And now, further observations shed even more light on the exotic beast.
Magnetars are a special breed of already strange neutron stars. Remnants of supernovae, neutron stars are incredibly dense objects — second only to black holes — that compress more than a Sun’s worth of mass into a sphere only about as wide as a city. Magnetars, however, are a subset of neutron stars that sport the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields. The fields around these stars are roughly a million billion times stronger than the magnetic fields of Earth.
Hubble looks at the fireworks galaxy
Located some 25.2 million light-years away, the face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946 has been busy lately. In the last hundred years, astronomers have witnessed about 10 supernovae popping off in this galaxy alone, while our own Milky Way experiences just one or two supernovae per century. And thanks to the frequency of supernovae occurring in NGC 6946, many prefer to call it the Fireworks Galaxy.
But with death comes rebirth — and the numerous stellar nurseries within the Fireworks Galaxy support this notion. In the galaxy’s spiral arms, clouds of mostly hydrogen, and some heavier elements spewed out by previous supernovae, are congregating in safe spaces where newborn stars can gestate for millions of years. So, although NGC 6946 might appear to be losing stars at an alarming rate, it’s also quickly replacing them with the next stellar generation.
For the time being, it seems, the Fireworks Galaxy is still far from its Grand Finale.
New exoplanet in the making?
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope have spotted a concentration of warm dust and pebbles in a Mercury-like orbit around a star 330 light years away that may indicate the formation of a new planet.
The presumed exoplanet in waiting orbits the star HD 163296 where researchers previously found evidence for the formation of three large planets in a wide orbit.
Using the MATISSE instrument to combine and analyse light from the VLT’s four-telescope array, a team led by Jozsef Vargo of Leiden University focused on the inner region of a broad ring of warm, dusty debris orbiting the star and found one part of the disc was much brighter, or hotter, than the rest.
The “hot spot” orbits the star at roughly Mercury’s distance from the Sun, taking about one month to complete one revolution. The researchers plan future observations of additional stars with dust discs to learn more about exoplanet formation with an emphasis on those in which Earth-like planets might form.
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!