Lifeboat Foundation

Keep tabs on the storied space telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been responsible for some of the most exciting astronomical finds in history and while research time with Hubble is highly sought after, anyone can check what the storied telescope is currently pointed at whenever they like.

Most of the time, casual observers only hear about select Hubble observations when NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA) shares them, whether that be through blogs or on Twitter. For example, the photo above is of spiral galaxy M91, which was observe by Hubble and shared on the NASA blog today. This galaxy is of interest because it hides a gigantic supermassive black hole at its core. In a 2009 study, astronomers found that it weighs somewhere between 9.6 and 38 million times as much as the Sun.

Continue reading “You Can See What Hubble is Photographing in Real Time” »

Scientists have discovered two supermassive black holes, locked together in a final, terrible spiral. They’re about to collide. And when they do, it will shake the fabric of spacetime itself.

Combing through decades of radio telescope observation data, a team of Caltech astronomers discovered a radio pattern from the deep sky unlike anything ever observed before. It was a flickering point of light, a blazar some nine billion light-years away. Every five years, it waxed and waned in brightness in a perfect sine wave, like clockwork. But that’s not what made it special. What made it special is where the signal diverged from the pattern. Over nearly fifty years, this point of light had obeyed a clockwork cycle of five-year pulses — except for the twenty years where it didn’t.

Five other observatories confirmed the readings, including the University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory, MIT’s Haystack Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Metsähovi Radio Observatory in Finland, and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space satellite. This was no error.

In this one-hour public lecture Josh Frieman, director of the Dark Energy Survey, presents an overview of our current knowledge of the universe and describe new experiments and observatories. Over the last two decades cosmologists have made remarkable discoveries: Only 4 percent of our universe is made of ordinary matter — atoms, molecules, etc. The other 96 percent is dark, in forms unlike anything with which we are familiar. About 25 percent is dark matter, which holds galaxies and larger-scale structures together and may be a new elementary particle. And 70 percent is thought to be dark energy, an even more mysterious entity which speeds up the expansion of the universe. Josh Frieman is senior staff scientist at the Fermilab and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of 300 scientists from 25 institutions on 3 continents, which built and uses a powerful 570-Megapixel camera on a telescope in Chile to carry out a 5-year survey of 300 million galaxies and thousands of supernovae to probe dark energy and the origin of cosmic acceleration.

Bizarre, Evolutionary Missing Link Uncovered in Hubble Deep Survey of Galaxies The universe is so saturated with galaxies that even the weirdest things can go unnoticed for years after Hubble Space Telescope “deep-exposure” observations are taken. In sort of an intergalactic Where’s Waldo, an international team of astronomers uncovered in Hubble archival data a mysterious red dot nearly in the middle of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North). As innocuous as it looks, it could be a rare missing link between some of the very earliest galaxies and the birth of supermassive black holes. The object, referred to as GNz7q, existed when the universe was just a toddler, only 750 million years after the big bang. The mixture of radiation from the object cannot be attributed to star formation alone. The best explanation is that it is a growing black hole shrouded in dust. Given time, the black hole will emerge from its dusty cocoon as a brilliant quasar, an intense beacon of light at the heart of an early galaxy. The pioneering Hubble telescope has provided a unique target for NASA ’s James Webb Space Telescope to use its spectroscopic instruments to study objects like GNz7q in unprecedented detail.

How we came to exist is best stated in the Barenaked Ladies’ lyric “It All Started with the Big Bang,” the moment that space-time began.

Inflatons, gravitons, and Dark Matter are the story that is emerging immediately following The Big Bang.

John Abbruzzese, On using the multiverse to avoid the paradoxes of time travel, Analysis, Volume 61, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 36–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/61.1.36.

But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

“The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence,” Cacciapaglia said.

In contrast, other proposed dark matter candidates — such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions and neutrinos — might also be felt by their very subtle interactions with other forces and fields.

The image from the Hubble Space Telescope shared this week shows a “serpentine” galaxy with winding, snake-like spiral arms, and is appropriately enough located in the constellation of Serpens, or The Snake. Technically known as NGC 5,921, the galaxy is located 80 million light-years away.

The galaxy NGC 5,921 is a type called a barred spiral galaxy, like our Milky Way. The bar refers to the strip of bright light across the center of the galaxy, which is a region of dust and gas where many stars are born — hence why it glows brightly. Around half of known galaxies have bars, and researchers think that they develop as galaxies get older and dust and gas are drawn in toward their center by gravity.

The image was taken as part of a Hubble study into how the supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies relate to the stars within them. Hubble used its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument to take the image, which was combined with data from the ground-based Gemini Observatory.

If the W’s excess heft relative to the standard theoretical prediction can be independently confirmed, the finding would imply the existence of undiscovered particles or forces and would bring about the first major rewriting of the laws of quantum physics in half a century.

“This would be a complete change in how we see the world,” potentially even rivaling the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson in significance, said Sven Heinemeyer, a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid who is not part of CDF. “The Higgs fit well into the previously known picture. This one would be a completely new area to be entered.”

The finding comes at a time when the physics community hungers for flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the long-reigning set of equations capturing all known particles and forces. The Standard Model is known to be incomplete, leaving various grand mysteries unsolved, such as the nature of dark matter. The CDF collaboration’s strong track record makes their new result a credible threat to the Standard Model.