It Was There: It Was Not There: It Is Surely Not There Now: The Story of Fomalhaut b That Never Was

 

 

|| Monday: April 20: 2020 || ά. What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system, has now, seemingly, vanished from sight. Astronomers now suggest that a full-grown planet never existed in the first place. The NASA:ESA Hubble Space Telescope had, instead, observed an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles, caused by a titanic collision between two icy asteroid-sized bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, about 25 light-years from Earth.

“The Fomalhaut system is the ultimate test lab for all of our ideas about how exoplanets and star systems evolve.” said Mr George Rieke of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We do have evidence of such collisions in other systems but, none of this magnitude has ever been observed. This is a blueprint for how planets destroy each other.” The object was previously believed to be a planet, called, Fomalhaut b and was first announced in 2008, based on data, taken in 2004 and 2006.

It was clearly visible in several years of Hubble observations, that showed it as a moving dot. Unlike other directly imaged exoplanets, nagging puzzles with Fomalhaut b arose early on. The object was unusually bright in visible light but, did not have any detectable infrared heat signature. Astronomers proposed that the added brightness came from a huge shell or ring of dust, encircling the object, that, may have been, collision-related. Also, early Hubble observations suggested the object might not be following an elliptical orbit, as planets usually do.

“These collisions are exceedingly rare and so this is a big deal, that we, actually, get to see one.” said Mr András Gáspár of the University of Arizona. “We believe that we were at the right place at the right time to have witnessed such an unlikely event with the Hubble Space Telescope.”

“Our Study, which analysed all available archival Hubble data on Fomalhaut b, including, the most recent images, taken by Hubble, revealed several characteristics, that, together, paint a picture that the planet-sized object, may, never have existed in the first place,” said Mr Gáspár.

Hubble images from 2014 showed the object had vanished, to the disbelief of the astronomers. Adding to the mystery, earlier images showed the object to continuously fade over time. “Clearly, Fomalhaut b was doing things a bona fide planet should not be doing.” said Mr Gáspár.

The resulting interpretation is that Fomalhaut b is not a planet but, a slowly expanding cloud, blasted into space as a result of a collision between two large bodies. Researchers believe that the collision occurred not too long prior to the first observations taken in 2004. By now the debris cloud, consisting of dust particles around 01 micron 01:50th the diameter of a human hair, is below Hubble’s detection limit. The dust cloud is estimated to have expanded by now to a size larger than the orbit of Earth around our Sun.

Equally confounding is the fact that the object is not on an elliptical orbit, as expected for planets but, on an escape trajectory or, hyperbolic path. “A recently created massive dust cloud, experiencing considerable radiative forces from the central star Fomalhaut, would be placed on such a trajectory.” Mr Gáspár said. “Our model is naturally able to explain all independent observable parameters of the system: its expansion rate, its fading and its trajectory.”

Because Fomalhaut b is presently inside a vast ring of icy debris encircling the star, the colliding bodies were likely a mixture of ice and dust, like the cometary bodies, that exist in the Kuiper belt on the outer fringe of our solar system. Mr Gáspár and MR Rieke estimate that each of these comet-like bodies measured about 200 kilometres across. They, also, suggest that the Fomalhaut system, may, experience one of these collision events only every 200,000 years.

The researchers Mr Gáspár and Mr Rieke and other astronomers will, also, be observing the Fomalhaut system with the upcoming NASA:ESA:CSA James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021.

The Paper: New HST data and modelling reveal a massive planetesimal collision around Fomalhaut is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on pril 20, 2020.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
The team of astronomers in this study consists of A. Gáspár and G. Rieke of the University of Arizona, USA.
Caption: Image: ESA:NASA:M. Kornmesser
 

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Generations of Stars in NGC 300

|| Tuesday: May 28: 2019 || ά. This swirling palette of colours portrays the life cycle of stars in a spiral galaxy, known as, NGC300. Located some six million light-years away, NGC300 is relatively nearby. It is one of the closest galaxies beyond the Local Group, the hub of galaxies to which our own Milky Way galaxy belongs. Due to its proximity, it is a favourite target for astronomers to study stellar processes in spiral galaxies.

The population of stars in their prime is shown in this image in green hues, based on optical observations performed with the Wide Field Imager:WFI on the MPG:ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. Red colours indicate the glow of cosmic dust in the interstellar medium, that pervades the galaxy: this information is derived from infrared observations made with NASA’s Spitzer space telescope and can be used to trace stellar nurseries and future stellar generations across NGC 300.

A complementary perspective on this galaxy’s composition comes from data collected in X-rays by ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, shown in blue. These represent the end points of the stellar life cycle, including, massive stars on the verge of blasting out as supernovas, remnants of supernova explosions, neutron stars and black holes.

Many of these X-ray sources are located in NGC300, while others, especially, towards the edges of the image, are foreground objects in our own Galaxy or background galaxies, even, farther away. The sizeable blue blob immediately to the left of the galaxy’s centre is, especially, interesting, featuring two intriguing sources, that are part of NGC300 and shine brightly in X-rays.

One of them, known as, NGC300 X-1, is, in fact, a binary system, consisting of a Wolf-Rayet star, an ageing hot, massive and luminous type star, that drives strong winds into its surroundings and a black hole, the compact remains of what was once another massive, hot star. As matter from the star flows towards the black hole, it is heated up to temperatures of millions of degrees or more, causing it to shine in X-rays.

The other source, dubbed NGC300 ULX1, was, originally, identified as a supernova explosion in 2010. However, later observations prompted astronomers to reconsider this interpretation, indicating that this source, also, conceals a binary system, comprising a very massive star and a compact object, a neutron star or a black hole, feeding on material from its stellar companion.

Data obtained in 2016 with ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR observatories showed regular variations in the X-ray signal of NGC300 ULX1, suggesting that the compact object in this binary system is a highly magnetised, rapidly spinning neutron star or pulsar.

The large blue blob in the upper left corner is a much more distant object: a cluster of galaxies more than one billion light years away, whose X-ray glow is caused by the hot diffuse gas interspersed between the galaxies.

Caption: Image: ESA:XMM-Newton X-rays, MPG:ESO optical, NASA:Spitzer infrared: Acknowledgement: S Carpano, Max-Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics:::ω.
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