|| Herbig-Haro211: 1,000 Light-Years From Earth This Bipolar Jet Travelling Through Interstellar Space at Supersonic Speeds in the Constellation Perseus: Giving the Glad Tiding That A Class-0 Proto-Star Is Growing ||

 

|| Sunday: September 17: 2023 || ά. This new James Webb Space Telescope image features Herbig-Haro 211:HH211, a bipolar jet, travelling through interstellar space at supersonic speed. At about 1,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus, the object is one of the youngest and nearest proto-stellar outflows, making it an ideal target for Webb. Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas, spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speed.

This spectacular image of HH211 shows an outflow from a Class 0 proto-star, an infantile analogue of our Sun when it was no more than a short-stretch of a tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 08% of the present-day Sun, which will, eventually, grow into a star like the Sun. Infrared imaging is powerful in studying newborn stars and their outflows, because such stars are invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed.

The infrared emission of the star’s outflows penetrates the obscuring gas and dust, making a Herbig-Haro object like HH211 ideal for observation with Webb’s sensitive infrared instruments. Molecules excited by the turbulent conditions, including molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, emit infrared light, that Webb can collect to map out the structure of the outflows.

The image showcases a series of bow shocks to the southeast, lower-left, and northwest, upper-right, as well as, the narrow bipolar jet, that powers them. Webb shows that this scene in unprecedented detail, roughly, 05-10 times higher spatial resolution than any previous images of HH211. The inner jet is seen to ‘wiggle’ with mirror symmetry on either side of the central proto-star. This is in agreement with observations on smaller scales and suggests that the proto-star, may, in fact, be an unresolved binary star.

Earlier observations of HH211 with ground-based telescopes showed giant bow shocks, moving away from us, northwest, and moving towards us, southeast, and cavity-like structures in shocked hydrogen and carbon monoxide respectively, as well as, a knotty and wiggling bipolar jet in silicon monoxide. Researchers have used these new observations to determine that the object’s outflow is relatively slow in comparison to more evolved proto-stars with similar types of outflows.

The research team measured the velocities of the innermost outflow structures to be, roughly, 80-100 kilometres per second. However, the difference in velocity between these sections of the outflow and the leading material, that they’re colliding with, the velocity of the shockwave, is much smaller. The researchers concluded that outflows from the youngest stars, like that in the centre of HH211, are mostly made up of molecules, because the comparatively low shock wave velocities are not energetic enough to break the molecules apart into simpler atoms and ions.

:::: Caption: At the centre is a thin horizontal multi-coloured cloud, tilted from bottom left to top right. At its centre is a dark brown cloud from which both outflows are spewing from. These outflows transition from colours of yellow:orange, to a light blue region, with prominent light pink features in the outer region: Image: NASA:ESA:Webb:CSA: T. Ray:Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies ::::ω::::

|| Readmore at thehumanion.com/Medicine.htm ||   reginehumanicsfoundation.com || 180923 ||

 

 

 

 

 

Hubble Finds Best Evidence for Elusive Mid-Size Black Hole

|| Thursday: June 18: 2020 || ά. New data from the NASA:ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided the strongest evidence yet for mid-sized black holes in the Universe. Hubble confirms that this intermediate-mass black hole dwells inside a dense star cluster. Intermediate-mass black holes:IMBHs are a long-sought missing link in black hole evolution. There have been a few other IMBH candidates found to date. They are smaller than the supermassive black holes, that lie at the cores of large galaxies but, are larger than stellar-mass black holes, formed by the collapse of massive stars. This new black hole is over 50,000 times the mass of our Sun.

IMBHs are hard to find. “Intermediate-mass black holes are very elusive objects and so it is critical to, carefully, consider and rule out alternative explanations for each candidate. That is what Hubble has allowed us to do for our candidate.” said Mr Dacheng Lin of the University of New Hampshire, Principal Investigator of the Study. Mr Lin and his team used Hubble to follow up on leads from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission:XMM-Newton, which carries three high-throughput X-ray telescopes and an optical monitor to make long uninterrupted exposures, providing highly sensitive observations.

“Adding further X-ray observations allowed us to understand the total energy output.” said team member Ms Natalie Webb of the Université de Toulouse in France. “This helps us to understand the type of star, that was disrupted by the black hole.” In 2006 these high-energy satellites detected a powerful flare of X-rays but, it was not clear, if, they originated from inside or outside of our galaxy. Researchers attributed it to a star being torn apart after coming too close to a gravitationally powerful compact object, like a black hole. Surprisingly, the X-ray source, named 3XMMJ215022.4−055108, was not located in the centre of a galaxy, where massive black holes, normally, reside. This raised hopes that an IMBH was the culprit but, first another possible source of the X-ray flare had to be ruled out: a neutron star in our own Milky Way galaxy, cooling off after being heated to a very high temperature. Neutron stars are the extremely dense remnants of an exploded star.

Hubble was pointed at the X-ray source to resolve its precise location. Deep, high-resolution imaging confirmed that the X-rays emanated not from an isolated source in our galaxy but, instead, in a distant, dense star cluster on the outskirts of another galaxy, just the sort of place astronomers expected to find evidence for an IMBH. Previous Hubble research has shown that the more massive the galaxy, the more massive its black hole. Therefore, this new result suggests that the star cluster, that is home to 3XMM J215022.4−055108, may be, the stripped-down core of a lower-mass dwarf galaxy, that has been gravitationally and tidally disrupted by its close interactions with its current larger galaxy host.

IMBHs have been, particularly, difficult to find because they are smaller and less active than supermassive black holes; they do not have readily available sources of fuel nor, do they have a gravitational pull, that is strong enough for them to be constantly drawing in stars and other cosmic material and producing the tell-tale X-ray glow. Astronomers, therefore, have to catch an IMBH red-handed in the relatively rare act of gobbling up a star. Mr Lin and his colleagues combed through the XMM-Newton data archive, searching hundreds of thousands of sources to find strong evidence for this one IMBH candidate. Once found, the X-ray glow from the shredded star allowed astronomers to estimate the black hole’s mass.

Confirming one IMBH opens the door to the possibility that many more lurk undetected in the dark, waiting to be given away by a star passing too close. Mr Lin plans to continue this meticulous detective work, using the methods his team has proved successful. “Studying the origin and evolution of the intermediate mass black holes will, finally, give an answer as to how the supermassive black holes, that we find in the centres of massive galaxies came to exist.” Ms Webb.

Black holes are one of the most extreme environments humans are aware of and so they are a testing ground for the laws of physics and our understanding of how the Universe works. Does a supermassive black hole grow from an IMBH? How do IMBHs themselves form? Are dense star clusters their favoured home? With a confident conclusion to one mystery, Mr Lin and other black hole astronomers find that they have many more exciting questions to pursue.

The Paper: The results are published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and were a result of the HST Program GO-15441: The international team of astronomers in this Study consists of D. Lin, J. Strader, A. J. Romanowsky, J. A. Irwin, O. Godet, D. Barret, N. A. Webb, J. Homan, and R. A. Remillard.

Caption: Image: ESA:Hubble: M. Kornmesser