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| Blue Light | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Sep 22 2005, 09:29 PM (238 Views) | |
| Dark Phoenix | Sep 22 2005, 09:29 PM Post #1 |
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"Deep in space there is a mysterious blue light that has stumped astronomers for years. Now they have solved one part of the mystery and in the process have raised new questions. "Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have identified the source of a mysterious blue light surrounding a supermassive black hole in our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. The blue light is coming from a disk of hot, young stars. These stars are whipping around the black hole in much the same way as planets in our solar system are revolving around the sun. Astronomers are perplexed about how the pancake-shaped disk of stars could form so close to a giant black hole. In such a hostile environment, the black hole's tidal forces should tear matter apart, making it difficult for gas and dust to collapse and form stars. The observations, astronomers say, may provide clues to the activities in the cores of more distant galaxies. "By finding the disk of stars astronomers have collected what they say is ironclad evidence for the existence of the supermassive black hole. The evidence has helped astronomers rule out all alternative theories for the dark mass in Andromeda's core, which scientists have long suspected was a black hole. 'Now that we have proven that the black hole is at the center of the disk of blue stars, the formation of these stars becomes hard to understand,' Ralph Bender of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany said in a news release. 'Gas that might form stars must spin around the black hole so quickly that star formation looks almost impossible. But the stars are there,' he added. "'Seeing these stars is like watching a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. You know it happened but you don't know how it happened,' said Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. He and a team of astronomers, led by Bender and John Kormendy of the University of Texas in Austin, made the Hubble observations. As far back as 1995, Hubble revealed a strange blue light in Andromeda's core that astronomers said might have come from a single, bright blue star or perhaps from a more exotic energetic process. Follow-up observations with Hubble in 1998 suggested that the light is a cluster of blue stars. These latest observations reveal that the blue light consists of more than 400 stars that formed in a burst of activity about 200 million years ago. The stars are tightly packed in a disk that is only a light-year across. The disk is nested inside a ring of older, redder stars, seen in previous Hubble observations. The research findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal." For photos, visit http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/.../2005/26/image/ |
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3:43 AM Jul 11