Next week’s night sky:
Tuesday is the last quarter moon. This is a great time to focus on the terminator to see minuscule detail in the surface of the moon. The terminator is the line that divides light from dark.
On Monday, December 14, the Geminids meteor shower peaks! This is usually the most spectacular meteor shower in December. Meteor rates can reach up to 120 meteors an hour! Combined with the new moon, this whoer should be a terrific finishing point for the astronomy of 2020.
Newborn Star tantrum
Located in the Milky Way some 1,350 light-years from Earth lies this stunning object, Herbig-Haro Jet HH 24. This bright splotch in the Orion B molecular cloud complex is a hotspot for newborn stars. It showcases a powerful jet of ionized gas (ejected by a young star) colliding with surrounding gas and dust. This is a trait of Herbig-Haro objects.
Hubble captured this dramatic image in 2015! It reveals a newborn star-forming within a giant cloud of cool molecular hydrogen. Such cool hydrogen clouds also tend to collapse due to gravity, forming a thick disk of rotating material around the newborn star. And as the star gobbles up this superheated material, some of it manages to escape by shooting from the star’s poles, heating any nearby gas to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.
Eventually, though, this region will settle down enough that planets will likely be born from the disk of material surrounding the young star.
SOFIA opens new windows on quasars and galactic evolution
Quasars are galaxies hosting supermassive black holes that radiate so much energy as they consume galactic debris that they heat up or expel gas that otherwise would be available for star formation, bringing the host galaxy’s growth to an end. But astronomers have now found a missing link of sorts, a so-called “cold quasar” in which star formation has managed to continue even in the presence of a ravenous supermassive black hole.
This shows researchers that the growth of active black holes doesn’t stop star birth instantaneously, which goes against all the current scientific predictions.
SOFIA lets researchers see into this brief window of time where the two processes can co-exist, making room for new theories to explain these processes.
To learn more, go here: [1908.04795] The Accretion History of AGN: A Newly Defined Population of Cold Quasars
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!