- 2951 - QUASARS - and other strange stars. Hubble Space Telescope was recently focused on “NGC 6302“, known as the "Butterfly Nebula" to observe it across a more complete spectrum of light, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared, helping researchers better understand the mechanics at work in its technicolor "wings" of gas.
----------------------------- Predictions for the new year 2021:
- President Biden gets Congress authorization to raise debt whenever he wants. He discontinues term limits for his office. Medical staff promises he can live to 120 with new virus protections.
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- Ozone created by electric cars now killing millions in the seventh largest country in the world, Mexifornia , formerly known as California . White minorities still trying to have English recognized as Mexifornia's third language.
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- Spotted Owl plague threatens Mexifornia and northwestern United States crops and livestock.
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- Couple petitions Supreme court to reinstate heterosexual marriage.
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- Last remaining Fundamentalist Muslim dies in the American Territory of the Middle East (formerly known as Iraq , Afghanistan , Syria and Lebanon ).
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- Iran still closed off; physicists estimate it will take at least 10 more years before radioactivity decreases to safe levels.
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- France pleads for global help after being taken over by Jamaica
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- Castro’s brother finally dies at age 112; Cuban cigars can now be imported legally, but President Biden has banned all smoking.
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- George Z. Bush says he will run for President in 2036.
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- Postal Service raises price of first class stamp to $17.89 and reduces mail delivery to every other Wednesday only.
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- Biden government sponsors $75.8 billion study that concludes diet and exercise is the key to weight loss.
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- Biden oversees Massachusetts as state executes last remaining Conservative.
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- Supreme Court rules punishment of criminals violates their civil rights.
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- Average height of NBA players is now nine feet, seven inches. The basket height remains at 10 feet.
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- New federal law requires that all nail clippers, screwdrivers, fly swatters and rolled-up newspapers must be registered by January 2022.
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- Congress authorizes direct deposit of formerly illegal political contributions to campaign accounts.
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- IRS sets lowest tax rate at 75 percent.
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- Seventeen states still having trouble with voting machines. No one every learns who rally won the elections. Results just get published on FunnyBook, formerly Facebook
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------------------ 2951 - QUASARS - and other strange stars?
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- The 2019 Hubble observations highlight a new pattern of near-infrared emission from singly ionized iron, which traces an S-shape. This iron emission likely traces the central star system's most recent ejections of gas, which are moving at much faster speeds than the previously expelled mass.
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- The star, or stars, at its center are responsible for the nebula's appearance. In their death throes, they have cast off layers of gas periodically over the past couple thousand years. The "wings" of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. NGC 6302 lies between 2,500 and 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
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- As nuclear fusion engines, most stars live placid lives for hundreds of millions to billions of years. But near the end of their lives they can turn into crazy whirligigs, puffing off shells and jets of hot gas.
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- Astronomers have employed Hubble's full range of imaging capabilities to dissect such crazy fireworks happening in two nearby young planetary nebulas. “NGC 6303”” is dubbed the “Butterfly Nebula” because of its wing-like appearance. “NGC 7027” nebula, resembles a “jewel bug“, an insect with a brilliantly colorful metallic shell.
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- The researchers have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in jets and gas bubbles blasting off of the stars at the centers of both f these nebulas. Hubble is allowing the researchers to converge on an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the chaos.
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- The new multi-wavelength Hubble observations provide the most comprehensive view to date of both of these spectacular nebulas. By examining this pair of nebulas with Hubble's full, panchromatic capabilities, making observations in near-ultraviolet to near-infrared light.
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- The new Hubble images reveal in vivid detail how both nebulas are splitting themselves apart on extremely short timescales allowing astronomers to see changes over the past couple decades. Some of this rapid change may be indirect evidence of one star merging with its companion star.
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- The nebula NGC 7027 shows emission at an incredibly large number of different wavelengths, each of which highlights not only a specific chemical element in the nebula, but also the significant, ongoing changes in its structure.
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- The research team also observed the Butterfly Nebula, which is a counterpart to the "jewel bug" nebula: Both are among the dustiest planetary nebulas known and both also contain unusually large masses of gas because they are so newly formed.
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- Hubble's broad multi-wavelength views of each nebula are helping the researchers to trace the nebulas' histories of shock waves. Such shocks typically are generated when fresh, fast stellar winds slam into and sweep up more slowly expanding gas and dust ejected by the star in its recent past, generating bubble-like cavities with well-defined walls.
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- Researchers suspect that at the hearts of both nebulas are two stars circling around each other. Evidence for such a central "dynamic duo" comes from the bizarre shapes of these nebulas. Each has a pinched, dusty waist and polar lobes or outflows, as well as other, more complex symmetrical patterns.
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- A leading theory for the generation of such structures in planetary nebulas is that the mass-losing star is one of two stars in a binary system. The two stars orbit one another closely enough that they eventually interact, producing a gas disk around one or both stars. The disk is the source of out flowing material directed in opposite directions from the central star.
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- Similarly, the smaller star of the pair may merge with its bloated, more rapidly evolving stellar companion. This also can create out flowing jets of material that may wobble over time. This creates a symmetric pattern, perhaps like the one that gives NGC 6302 its "butterfly" nickname. Such outflows are commonly seen in planetary nebulas.
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- The suspected companion stars in NGC 6302 and NGC 7027 haven't been directly detected because they are next to, or perhaps have already been swallowed by, larger red giant stars, a type of star that is hundreds to thousands of times brighter than the Sun.
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- The Butterfly Nebula is like a lawn sprinkler spinning wildly, tossing out two S-shaped streams. At first it appears chaotic, but if you stare for a while, you can trace its patterns. The same S-shape is present in the Butterfly Nebula, except in this case it is not water in the air, but gas blown out at high speed by a star. And the "S" only appears when captured by the Hubble camera filter that records near-infrared emission from singly ionized iron atoms.
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- The S-shape directly traces the most recent ejections from the central region, since the collisions within the nebula are particularly violent in these specific regions of NGC 6302. The iron emission is a sensitive tracer of energetic collisions between slower winds and fast winds from the stars.
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- The fact that the iron emission is only showing up along these opposing, off-center directions implies that the source of the fast flows is wobbling over time, like a spinning top that's about to fall. So we need lawn sprinklers and spinning tops to visualize the nebula. Ok!
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- The 'Jewel Bug' Nebula NGC 7027 had been slowly puffing away its mass in quiet, spherically symmetric or perhaps spiral patterns for centuries until relatively recently. Something recently went haywire at the very center, producing a new cloverleaf pattern, with bullets of material shooting out in specific directions.
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- New images of NGC 7027 show emission from singly ionized iron that closely resembles observations made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2000 and 2014. The iron emission traces the southeast-to-northwest-oriented outflows that also produce the X-ray-emitting shocks imaged by Chandra.
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- Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Pōniuā`ena, which means "unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance" in the Hawaiian language.
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- Pōniuā`ena is only the second quasar yet detected at a distance calculated at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a blackhole twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era. The existence of these massive blackholes at such early times challenges current theories of how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the young universe.
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- Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe powered by their supermassive blackholes and since their discovery, astronomers have been keen to determine when they first appeared in our cosmic history.
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- By systematically searching for these rare objects in wide-area sky surveys, astronomers discovered the most distant quasar (J1342+0928) in 2018 and now the second-most distant, Pōniuā`ena (or J1007+2115, at redshift 7.515). The light seen from Pōniuā`ena traveled through space for over 13 billion years since leaving the quasar just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
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- Spectroscopic observations from Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory show the supermassive blackhole powering Pōniuā`ena is 1.5 billion times more massive than our Sun.
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- Pōniuā`ena is the most distant object known in the universe hosting a blackhole exceeding one billion solar masses.
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- For a blackhole of this size to form this early in the universe, it would need to start as a 10,000 solar mass "seed" blackhole about 100 million years after the Big Bang, rather than growing from a much smaller blackhole formed by the collapse of a single star.
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- How can the universe produce such a massive blackhole so early in its history? This discovery presents the biggest challenge yet for the theory of blackhole formation and growth in the early universe.
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- Current theory holds the birth of stars and galaxies as we know them started during the “Epoch of Reionization‘, beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang. The growth of the first giant blackholes is thought to have occurred during that same era in the universe's history.
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- The discovery of quasars like Pōniuā`ena, deep into the reionization epoch, is a big step towards understanding this process of reionization and the formation of early super massive blackholes and massive galaxies. Pōniuā`ena has placed new and important constraints on the evolution of the matter between galaxie’s intergalactic medium in the reionization epoch.
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- "Pōniuā`ena acts like a cosmic lighthouse. As its light travels the long journey towards Earth, its spectrum is altered by diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium which allowed astronomers to pinpoint when the Epoch of Reionization occurred.
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- In 2019, the researchers observed the object using “Gemini Observatory's GNIRS” instrument as well as “Keck Observatory's Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph” (NIRES) to confirm the existence of Pōniuā`ena. In case you want to learn more.
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- The Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph (NIRES) is a prism cross-dispersed near-infrared spectrograph built at the California Institute of Technology. Commissioned in 2018, NIRES covers a large wavelength range at moderate spectral resolution for use on the Keck II telescope and observes extremely faint red objects found with the Spitzer and WISE infrared space telescopes, as well as brown dwarfs, high-redshift galaxies, and quasars.
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December 28, 2020 QUASARS - and other strange stars 2951
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--------------------- --- Tuesday, December 29, 2020 ---------------------------
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