Sinister Security: Milky Way

Space Breakthrough: Wormholes To Other Galaxies Could Exist In Milky Way

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Wormholes have long been considered to exist only in the realms of science fiction, but some physicists believe the theoretical portals could be real, and there could be one relatively close by.

Wormholes, which were predicted by Einstein in his theory of General Relativity, are areas where space and time are bent to manipulate the distance.

It would take a huge mass to produce the manipulation of spacetime, and no natural examples have ever been found.

However, experts from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, say they are possible, and could be hiding within dark matter inside the Milky Way.

Professor Paulo Salucci, said: "If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe, and we hypothesise the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself.
"But there's more. We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Just like the one we've all seen in the recent film ‘Interstellar'."

Scientists had believed any wormholes which exist in the universe could simply be the size of a pin prick.

However, the team of astrophysicists say the one in our galaxy could be big enough to fit a spaceship which could traverse the cosmos, as they would likely exist in other spiral galaxies.

Prof Salucci, continued: "Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility.”

The paper published in the Annals of Physics, read: "Our result is very important because it confirms the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies.

"Dark matter may supply the fuel for constructing and sustaining a wormhole. Hence, wormholes could be found in nature and our study may encourage scientists to seek observational evidence for wormholes in the galactic halo region."

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"Life Beyond the Milky Way!" --1st Planets Detected Outside Our Galaxy

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"We are very excited about this discovery. This is the first time anyone has discovered planets outside our galaxy," said Xinyu Dai, professor of physics and astronomy at University of Oklahoma. "These small planets are the best candidate for the signature we observed in this study using the microlensing technique. We analyzed the high frequency of the signature by modeling the data to determine the mass."

Until this study, there has been no evidence of planets in other galaxies. A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Using microlensing—an astronomical phenomenon and the only known method capable of discovering planets at truly great distances from the Earth among other detection techniques—OU researchers were able to detect objects in extragalactic galaxies that range from the mass of the Moon to the mass of Jupiter.

Dai with OU postdoctoral researcher Eduardo Guerras, made the discovery with data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope in space that is controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

While planets are often discovered within the Milky Way using microlensing, the gravitational effect of even small objects can create high magnification leading to a signature that can be modeled and explained in extragalactic galaxies.

"This is an example of how powerful the techniques of analysis of extragalactic microlensing can be. This galaxy is located 3.8 billion light years away, and there is not the slightest chance of observing these planets directly, not even with the best telescope one can imagine in a science fiction scenario," said Guerras. "However, we are able to study them, unveil their presence and even have an idea of their masses. This is very cool science."

For this study, OU researchers used the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The microlensing models were calculated at the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research.

A paper, "Probing Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies Using Quasar Microlensing," by Dai and Guerras on this study has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Image credit: With thanks to Gumroad.com

Provided by: University of Oklahoma

Article was originally published on Dailygalaxy.

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A Distant Supermassive Black Hole Emits Giant “Death Rays” Larger Than Our Galaxy

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Astronomers have released a new X-ray/radio composite image of the distant galaxy Pictor A, showing a huge jet of high-energy particles produced by a super-massive black hole. They were also able to determine how this jet, over three times the size of the Milky Way galaxy, produces such powerful X-ray emissions.

In the 2014 film Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey and friends were shown exploring a series of planets orbiting a super-massive (but relatively benign) black hole in a distant galaxy.

The black hole, called “Gargantua,” was supposed to have an event horizon—that is, a point of no return—about as large as the Earth’s orbit; nevertheless, Gargantua was depicted as fairly quiescent and neighborly.

But the reality of these colossal cosmic nightmares, as a recent image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows, is something very different.

The newly released picture shows the terrifying power of an actual super-massive black hole located in the galaxy Pictor A, some 500 million light years distant. This black hole is about 40 million times the mass of the Sun (that’s about 10 times larger than the black hole at the center of our own galaxy), and if it were to replace the Sun within our Solar System, its event horizon would swallow the orbits of both Mercury and Venus.

So it’s pretty big.

Unlike Gargantua, however, the Pictor A black hole is an energetic and ferocious beast, lashing out at the universe with all the considerable power at its disposal. The new image shows how the material being consumed by the black hole—stars, planets, interstellar gas, unwary astronauts (kidding)—releases a tremendous surplus of energy as it swirls around the event horizon in a massive accretion disk.

All of this unbridled energy is channeled into two immense jets of particles that pierce the intergalactic medium at nearly the speed of light. In fact, these particle beams are so powerful that the observed jet—which is pointed roughly in the direction of the Earth—maintains its integrity for a distance of nearly 300,000 light years.

That’s over three times the length of our own Milky Way galaxy!

Which just serves to underscore the unfathomable energies involved. The new image—which was compiled over 15 years from Chandra data, and is combined with radio imagery from the Australia Telescope Compact Array—also betrays a fainter “counterjet.” Because it is on the opposite side of the Pictor A galaxy, moving away from Earth, this counterjet is far less visible.

The radio data, which is red in the image (blue represents the Chandra data), also show two huge “radio lobes,” each many times larger than the Milky Way, caused by the jet interacting with intergalactic gas, and a blue X-ray “hotspot” on the far right, the result of shock waves produced by the jet.

Annotated image of the Pictor A galaxy and jets. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Hertfordshire/M.Hardcastle et al., Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA

The researchers who studied the new data were able to determine that the X-rays generated by the jets of the Pictor A super-massive black hole are most likely caused by what is called “synchrotron emission.” In this mechanism, X-rays are emitted by electrons caught up and spiraling around in powerful magnetic fields.

The process is not well understood, but it is believed that super-massive black holes also possess enormous magnetic fields, along which subatomic particles are accelerated to fantastic speeds, producing the polar jets so often observed emanating from quasars, radio galaxies, and other forms of active galactic nuclei.

They were also able to rule out a competing theory: the notion that electrons flung at near light-speed from the central black hole collide with photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Theoretically, such a collision should boost the CMB photons into the X-ray part of the spectrum. But the X-ray signatures did not match this scenario, effectively eliminating it from contention.

Whatever the case, it’s safe to assume there aren’t any inhabitable planets circling the super-massive black hole of Pictor A, and that even Matthew McConaughey would think twice before exploring the environment of this monster.

References: Chandra X-ray Observatory

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This 9-Gigapixel Image—With 84 MILLION Stars—Of The Milky Way Will Give You Goosebumps

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Have you ever seen a 9-gigapixel map of the Milky Way Galaxy? The jaw-dropping image contains around 84 million stars and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The original image has 24.6 gigabytes. How would I define it? COSMIC LOVE.

This is just one SMALL part of the massive 9-gigapixel image. Image credit ESO.

The image below shows a breathtaking view of the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen by the VISTA telescope from the European Space Agency.

With the naked eye, you’d probably see the center of the Milky Way—with countless stars and cosmic dust clouds—occupying a small patch of a few inches.

However, thanks to the VISTA telescope we got one of the most detail portraits of the Milky Way EVER produced which has allowed astronomers to catalog a staggering 84 million stars.

After seeing this image, ask yourself... Are we alone in the Milky Way?

The above image is just a small, reduced—thumbnail version of the original image which has a mind-boggling resolution of 108,500×81,500—or if you prefer 9 giga-pixels, occupying 24.6 gigabytes. If for some reason you want to download the 24.6-gigabyte image you can do so by clicking here.

Check out the ENTIRE 9-gigapixel image—and zoom in on those stars—by clicking here. This image is simply too big to be displayed at full resolution and is best appreciated using the zoom tool.

In order to obtain this image, ESO’s VISTA telescope—which stands for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy—snapped thousands of images of the sky after which astronomers compiled them into one 9 giga-pixel mosaic. The Vista telescope is one of the LARGEST visible and near infrared telescopes on the planet, and it just showed us how cool it really is which this mind-bending image.

The image you are seeing is crystal clear because the VISTA telescope boasts a stunning infrared camera which enables it to peer through the dust clouds that obscure the view of other telescopes.

In order to understand how powerful the VISTA telescope really is, here below is a comparison between an image of the Milky Way—the same image—as seen from an infrared telescope and a visible telescope.

Pretty amazing right ? Just imagine what else is out there? The Milky Way galaxy is really unique, it’s beautiful and this image makes you love our cosmic home even more, right?

But this image wasn’t taken just for aesthetic purposes. In fact, this massive image has allowed scientists and astronomers to identify numerous cosmic objects in space that are worth researching further. This image allowed astronomers to identify 84 million stars in the Milky Way.

Our cosmic home—the Milky Way—is part of a supermassive structure interconnected by over 800 galaxies located at around 1000 million light years away. Our galaxy is part of an intergalactic highway that stretches some 500 million light years across and contains around 100,000,000,000,000,000 Suns, dubbed by scientists as Laniakea.

Oh and, just a fun fact here, did you know that astronomers maintain that there are around 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. Astronomers argue that just inside our Milky Way Galaxy, there are some 400 BILLION STARS.

Image credit: ESO

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NASA Just Detected A Strange, Strong Signal From Deep Inside the Milky Way --"May Reveal the Dark Side of Our Universe"

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NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory has observed very strange and distinctive X-ray signal coming from our Milky Way Galaxy that researchers believe can help them in proving the existence of the mysterious dark side of the universe. That is the claim of US scientists who analyzed the energy spectrum of X-rays.

The data was gathered by NASA’s Chandra satellite who found more X-ray photons with a particular energy than would be expected if they were generated by the decay of dark matter particles, say the researchers. This is not the first time that scientists have seen extra photons with an energy of about 3,500 electronvolts (3.5 keV) in the spectra recorded by X-ray satellites.

The researchers found that the strength of their 3.5 keV signal was consistent with data from NASA’s X-ray satellite, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuStar). With no obvious interference within the satellite itself, the researchers concluded that the signal is unlikely to be caused by instrumental noise.

"This result is very exciting," said Dr Abazajian, a cosmologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the research. "It makes it more likely that the line is due to dark matter, which makes up more than 80% of all the mass in the Universe. As its name suggests, it gives off no light, but reveals its presence through the gravitational pull it exerts on stars within galaxies.

The latest research, which targets relatively light particles of dark matter, has been carried out by Nico Cappelluti of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Connecticut, US, and colleagues.

His colleague, Esra Bulbul of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the first scientist to spot an anomalous line at 3.5 keV, when looking at the X-ray spectra of large numbers of galaxy clusters in 2014. Researchers elsewhere have seen a line with the same energy in spectra from a variety of other objects, including the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, which are thought to be enveloped in a bubble of dark matter.

The researchers are heartened by the fact that four different satellites have now seen the same signal but are not ready to claim discovery of dark matter because, they say, it is still possible that their result is a statistical fluke - that the Chandra Observatory just happened to snare more X-rays with an energy of 3.5 keV than it did others.

"As we collect more and more X-ray data, the evidence for the 3.5 keV line is growing and growing," said Cappelluti.

Astrophysicists have been scanning the Milky Way for years for the photons generated when dark matter particles either annihilate with one another or decay. The so-called weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are believed by some researchers to be responsible for unusual emissions of gamma rays seen coming from the center of the Milky Way. While others think sources such as pulsars are probably the cause.

To establish whether dark matter could be the source, they compared Chandra's spectra to those of X-rays from the center of the Milky Way that had been detected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite. As expected, they found the signal in the latter to be stronger, given that dark matter should be densest where there are more stars as found in the galactic center.

The researchers also ruled out a couple of alternative astrophysical sources for the signal: photons emitted either when very large black holes suck in material from their surroundings or when ions of sulphur take electrons from hydrogen in the centre of galaxy clusters. "We found that our result is consistent with previous results if you assume the cause to be dark matter," said Bulbul.

Others, however, urge caution. Dan Hooper, a particle theorist at Fermilab near Chicago, points out that a number of other studies have failed to see the line, including one by a group analysing data from the Japanese space agency's (Jaxa) ill-fated Hitomi X-ray satellite that malfunctioned just over a month after launch in February 2016, but managed to collect enough data to disprove a previously claimed sighting of the 3.5 keV line in the Perseus galaxy cluster.

"The new paper claims a modest detection," said Dr Hooper, "but it doesn't sway me very strongly at this point."

Christoph Weniger, a theoretical astroparticle physicist at the University of Amsterdam, is a little more upbeat, reorting to the BBC that the new research "adds yet another piece to the 3.5 keV puzzle".

He said that the signal might be due to a hypothetical particle known as the sterile neutrino, which would decay into an X-ray photon and a normal neutrino. But he stressed the need for more data to "confirm or reject the dark matter hypothesis".

Via DailyGalaxy

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A Supermassive Black Hole Is Heading Earth’s Way At 110 Km Per Second

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NASA Detects "Powerful Signals From The Center Of The Milky Way And Andromeda Galaxy" -- May Be Evidence Of The Mysterious Dark Side Of The Universe

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NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found a signal at the center of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy that could indicate the presence of the mysterious dark side of the universes known as dark matter. The signal is similar to one seen by Fermi at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Surprisingly, the latest Fermi data shows the gamma rays in Andromeda -- also known as M31 -- are confined to the galaxy's center instead of spread throughout. To explain this unusual distribution, scientists are proposing that the emission may come from several undetermined sources. One of them could be dark matter, an unknown substance that makes up most of the universe.

The image of the Milky Way above, shown in visible light, superimposes a gamma-ray map of the galactic center from NASA's Fermi. Raw data transitions to a view with all known sources removed, revealing a gamma-ray excess hinting at the presence of dark matter.

The Milky Way's galactic center teems with gamma-ray sources, from interacting binary systems and isolated pulsars to supernova remnants and particles colliding with interstellar gas. It's also where astronomers expect to find the galaxy's highest density of dark matter, which only affects normal matter and radiation through its gravity. Large amounts of dark matter attract normal matter, forming a foundation upon which visible structures, like galaxies, are built.

No one knows the true nature of dark matter, but WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, represent a leading class of candidates. Theorists have envisioned a wide range of WIMP types, some of which may either mutually annihilate or produce an intermediate, quickly decaying particle when they collide. Both of these pathways end with the production of gamma rays -- the most energetic form of light -- at energies within the detection range of Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT).

When astronomers carefully subtract all known gamma-ray sources from LAT observations of the galactic center, a patch of leftover emission remains. This excess appears most prominent at energies between 1 and 3 billion electron volts (GeV) -- roughly a billion times greater than that of visible light -- and extends outward at least 5,000 light-years from the galactic center.

Hooper and his colleagues conclude that annihilations of dark matter particles with a mass between 31 and 40 GeV provide a remarkable fit for the excess based on its gamma-ray spectrum, its symmetry around the galactic center, and its overall brightness. Writing in a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review D, the researchers say that these features are difficult to reconcile with other explanations proposed so far, although they note that plausible alternatives not requiring dark matter may yet materialize.

"Dark matter in this mass range can be probed by direct detection and by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so if this is dark matter, we're already learning about its interactions from the lack of detection so far," said co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. "This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time."

The researchers caution that it will take multiple sightings – in other astronomical objects, the LHC or in some of the direct-detection experiments now being conducted around the world -- to validate their dark matter interpretation.

A Fermi 2015 study was an example of innovative techniques applied to Fermi data by the science community, said Peter Michelson, a professor of physics at Stanford University in California and the LAT principal investigator. "The Fermi LAT Collaboration continues to examine the extraordinarily complex central region of the galaxy, but until this study is complete we can neither confirm nor refute this interesting analysis."

While the great amount of dark matter expected at the galactic center should produce a strong signal, competition from many other gamma-ray sources complicates any case for a detection. But turning the problem on its head provides another way to attack it. Instead of looking at the largest nearby collection of dark matter, look where the signal has fewer challenges.

Dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way lack other types of gamma-ray emitters and contain large amounts of dark matter for their size – in fact, they're the most dark-matter-dominated sources known. But there's a tradeoff. Because they lie much farther away and contain much less total dark matter than the center of the Milky Way, dwarf galaxies produce a much weaker signal and require many years of observations to establish a secure detection.

For the past few years, the LAT team has been searching dwarf galaxies for hints of dark matter. The published results of these studies have set stringent limits on the mass ranges and interaction rates for many proposed WIMPs, even eliminating some models.

There's about a one-in-12 chance that what they saw in 2015 in the dwarf galaxies is not even a signal at all, but a fluctuation in the gamma-ray background, explained Elliott Bloom, a member of the LAT Collaboration at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. If it's real, the signal should grow stronger as Fermi acquires additional years of observations and as wide-field astronomical surveys discover new dwarfs. "If we ultimately see a significant signal," he added, "it could be a very strong confirmation of the dark matter signal claimed in the galactic center."

Via NASA Goddard; A. Mellinger, CMU; T. Linden, Univ. of Chicago

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The Milky Way -- "Could Harbor A Spacetime Tunnel The Size Of The Galaxy Itself Hiding In Dark Matter"

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Astrophysicists from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, speculated in a 2015 study that wormholes, predicted by Einstein in his theory of General Relativity as areas where space and time are bent to manipulate the distance, are possible, and could be hiding within dark matter inside the Milky Way. But, It would take a huge mass to produce the manipulation of spacetime, and no evidence of their existence has ever been found. Based on their theory, our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel) and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable."

"If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there's more," explains Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist with SISSA and a dark matter expert. "We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Salucci is among the authors of the paper published in Annals of Physics.

Although space-time tunnels (or wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges) have only recently gained great popularity among the public thanks to Christopher Nolan's sci-fi film, they have been the focus of astrophysicists' attention for many years.

"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility." Can it ever be tested experimentally? "In principle, we could test it by comparing two galaxies -- our galaxy and another, very close one like, for example, the Magellanic Cloud, but we are still very far from any actual possibility of making such a comparison."

To reach their conclusions the astrophysicists combined the equations of general relativity with an extremely detailed map of the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way: "the map was one we obtained in a study we carried out in 2013," explains Salucci. "Beyond the sci-fi hypothesis, our research is interesting because it proposes a more complex reflection on dark matter."

As Salucci points out, scientists have long tried to explain dark matter by hypothesizing the existence of a particular particle, the neutralino, which, however, has never been identified at CERN or observed in the universe. But alternative theories also exist that don't rely on the particle, "and perhaps it's time for scientists to take this issue 'seriously'," concludes Salucci. "Dark matter may be 'another dimension', perhaps even a major galactic transport system. In any case, we really need to start asking ourselves what it is."

"Our result is very important because it confirms the possible existence of wormholes. But there's more. We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Just like the one we've all seen in the film ‘Interstellar'."

Scientists had believed any wormholes which exist in the universe could simply be the size of a pin prick. However, the team of astrophysicists say the one in our galaxy could be big enough to fit a spaceship which could traverse the cosmos, as they would likely exist in other spiral galaxies.

"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility,” Salucci observed.

Via SISSA

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A Never-Before-Seen, 167-Million Pixel Map of the Milky Way

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From Garching near Munich, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have published a new picture of the Milky Way, sharper and more detailed than any other image before it, with a staggering 167 million pixels.

Taking advantage of the unique and irreplaceable characteristics of the Telescope, the Atlasgal survey managed to come up with a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense has along the galactic plane of the Milky Way, noted for being the place where he majority of a galaxy’s mass lies.

The breathtaking image of the Milky Way was taken with the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The publication on Wednesday celebrated the completion of the full mapping of the galactic plane from the southern hemisphere, a European project called ESO ATLASGAL (Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy).

The Apex has allowed astronomers to study the cold universe, gas and dust and other cosmic objects that are only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

Located at 5100 meters above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, is the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope. The altitude and extremely dry atmosphere make the Atacama region in Chile a prime site for astronomers who look at the sky, in hopes of answering many enigmas behind our origins and purpose on this planet.

According to reports from the European Space Agency’s website, “The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way”.

The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves. This is the sharpest such map yet made, and complements those from recent space-based surveys. The pioneering 12-metre APEX telescope allows astronomers to study the cold Universe: gas and dust only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

The region seen in the breathtaking image is of particular interest for astronomers as it includes numerous areas of star formation. The process that lasted for three years covers 420 square degrees of the sky, with each image tile having a resolution of 3.5 megapixels.

‘Atlasgal maps the dust, which traces the hydrogen, but there are many other elements out there, which is why we are following up with other observations using Apex and other telescopes,’ said Carlos De Breuck, ESO APEX Programme Scientist from Germany.

To browse the entire image (at a resolution of 167 million pixels), please visit the following link by clicking –> here

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Scientists Say—At Least ONE Advanced Alien Civilization May Exist In The Milky Way

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Based on their research, scientists have demonstrated the possibility that at a galactic scale there is at least ONE extraterrestrial civilization that has the necessary means of communication with Earth in our galaxy—the Milky way.

Controversy or not but… American scientists Luis A. Anchordoqui, Susanna Weber and Jorge F. Soriano demonstrated the possibility that an alien civilization capable of communicating with humans exists in the Milky Way Galaxy, according to an article published on the website of the University of Cornell.

Experts based their research on the Drake formula in order to estimate the number of civilizations in our galaxy—the Milky Way—likely to possess technology that could intercept or transmit radio emissions.

According to their calculations, at a galactic scale, there is at least ONE extraterrestrial civilization that has the necessary means of communication with Earth.

Furthermore, scientists compare the number of planets where there could be advanced civilizations capable of contact with the rate of birth of celestial bodies that are within the habitable zone around their star.

However, scientists note that powerful gamma ray bursts could endanger the existence of alien life.

According to experts, the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), which are preparing for a historic launch, will allow them to verify the results of their work.

And while scientists say that at least one alien civilization may exist out there, they have explained that the fact that the percentage of intelligent alien civilizations in the Milky Way is extremely small—about 0.5% when compared to the total number of alien civilizations that may exist in the Universe, which is something that significantly complicates their search for our cosmic neighbors.

This fact, according to them, is one of the reasons why we have not yet found aliens to this day.

Searching for clues leading to the discovery of other civilizations, according to Soriano and his colleagues, will only be possible in the future when scientists discover more of Earth’s “twin” planets.

In the research paper the scientific trio notes:

“A new arsenal of data will certainly provide an ideal testing ground to improve our understanding about: (i) the occurrence of exoplanets in the habitable zone, (ii) the early star formation rate models, and (iii) the GRB phenomenology. The past few years have witnessed the discovery of more and more rocky planets that are larger and heftier than Earth.”

“Finding the Earth-twins is a higher order challenge, because these smaller planets produce fainter signals and hence only a few have been discovered. Technology to detect and image Earth-like planets has been developed for use of the next generation space telescopes. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life.”

“The NASA roadmap will subsequently continue with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and perhaps the proposed Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope – Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST-AFTA) early in the next decade. The ability to detect alien life may still be years or more away, but the quest is underway.”

In 2016, scientists adapted the Drake Equation with data from NASA’s Kepler satellite on habitable planets in the cosmos. Researchers modified the Drake Equation from detailing the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that exist now, to about the chance of our civilization being the only one ever existed.

The research indicates that unless the odds of intelligent life forms evolving on habitable planets are extremely low, life on Earth is not the only one that evolved to an advanced stage.

Scientists explain that the chance of an advanced civilization developing would need to be less tan one in 10 trillion, for our civilization to be the only intelligent one in the known universe.

(H/T arXiv)

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For The First Time, Astronomers Caught a Black Hole Spewing Out Matter Twice

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Black holes don't just sit there munching away constantly on the space around them. Eventually they run out of nearby matter and go quiet, laying in wait until a stray bit of gas passes by.

Then a black hole devours again, belching out a giant jet of particles. And now scientists have captured one doing so not once, but twice - the first time this has been observed.

The two burps, occurring within the span of 100,000 years, confirm that supermassive black holes go through cycles of hibernation and activity.

It's actually not as animalistic as all that, since black holes aren't living or sentient, but it's a decent-enough metaphor for the way black holes devour material, drawing it in with their tremendous gravity.

But even though we're used to think how nothing ever comes back out of a black hole, the curious thing is that they don't retain everything they capture.

When they consume matter such as gas or stars, they also generate a powerful outflow of high-energy particles from close to the event horizon, but not beyond the point of no return.

"Black holes are voracious eaters, but it also turns out they don't have very good table manners," said lead researcher Julie Comerford, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"We know a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps."

The black hole in question is the supermassive beast at the centre of a galaxy called SDSS J1354+1327 or just J1354 for short. It's about 800 light-years from Earth, and it showed up in Chandra data as a very bright point of X-ray emission - bright enough to be millions or even billions of times more massive than our Sun.

The team of researchers compared X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray observatory to visible-light images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and found that the black hole is surrounded by a thick cloud of dust and gas.

"We are seeing this object feast, burp, and nap, and then feast and burp once again, which theory had predicted," Comerford said. "Fortunately, we happened to observe this galaxy at a time when we could clearly see evidence for both events."

That evidence consists of two bubbles in the gas - one above and one below the black hole, expulsions particles following a meal. And they were able to gauge that the two bubbles had occurred at different times.

The southern bubble had expanded 30,000 light-years from the galactic center, while the northern bubble had expanded just 3,000 light-years from the galactic center. These are known as Fermi bubbles, and they are usually seen after a black hole feeding event.

From the movement speed of these bubbles, the team was able to work out they occurred roughly 100,000 years apart.

So what's the black hole eating that's giving it such epic indigestion?

Another galaxy. A companion galaxy is connected to J1354 by streams of stars and gas, due to a collision between the two. It is clumps of material from this second galaxy that swirled towards the black hole and got eaten up.

"This galaxy really caught us off guard," said doctoral student Rebecca Nevin.

"We were able to show that the gas from the northern part of the galaxy was consistent with an advancing edge of a shock wave, and the gas from the south was consistent with an older outflow from the black hole."

The Milky Way also has Fermi bubbles following a feeding event by Sagittarius A*, the black hole in its center. And, just as J1354's black hole fed, slept, then fed again, astronomers believe Sagittarius A* will wake to feed again too.

The research was presented at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and has also been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Galaxy SDSSJ1354+1327 (NASA , ESA, and J. Comerford [University of Colorado-Boulder])

This article was originally posted on ScienceAlert. Click here to read it.

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10 Weird Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About the Milky Way

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On a dark night, the dense plane of the Milky Way winds like a ribbon across the sky. On a really dark night, in areas free from light pollution, that ribbon becomes so intensely spangled with stars that it’s possible to see the dark, dusty clouds of dust and gas deep in space that blot out their light. Those clouds are so prominent that Australia’s Aboriginal people saw them create the shape of an emu.

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Our galactic home is one of trillions of galaxies in the universe. Astronomers have been ardently studying them for almost a century, ever since Edwin Hubble discovered that neighboring Andromeda was not just another nearby dusty nebula, but a galaxy in its own right. And yet, humans are still trying to unravel the secrets of our galactic home and how it fits in the tapestry of the universe.

“I would love to see a movie in time of the assembly of the Milky Way,” says Jay Lockman of the Green Bank Observatory, who presented new observations about our galaxy this week at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland.

Here are some of the fun, weird facts and questions we have about the 13.6-billion-year-old space oddity we inhabit.

The Milky Way Is (Mostly) Flat

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Our galaxy is, on average, a hundred thousand light-years across but only a thousand light-years thick. Within this flattened (though somewhat warped) disc, the sun and its planets are embedded in a curving arm of gas and dust, putting the solar system about 26,000 light-years away from the galaxy’s turbulent core. A bulge of dust and stars swaddles the galactic center, looking like a dollop of whipped cream plopped on both sides of a pancake.

Earth Is 18 Galactic Years Old

The solar system is zooming through interstellar space at around 500,000 miles an hour. Even at that rate, it takes about 250 million years to travel once around the Milky Way. The last time our 4.5-billion-year-old planet was in this same spot, continents fit together differently, dinosaurs were just emerging, mammals had yet to evolve, and the most profound mass extinction in the planet’s history—an event called the Great Dying—was in progress.

There’s a Monster Black Hole in the Galaxy’s Middle

Called Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole weighs in at more than four million times the mass of the sun. We’ve never seen this object directly—it’s hidden behind thick clouds of dust and gas. But astronomers have been able to follow the orbits of stars and gas clouds near the galactic center, which allowed them to infer the mass of the cosmic heavyweight hiding behind the curtain. It’s thought that supermassive black holes are parked in the cores of most galaxies, and some are feeding on nearby matter so greedily they shoot out jets of powerful radiation visible from millions of light-years away.

You can take a spin through the Milky Way’s chaotic center courtesy of a new animation released at the AAS meeting.

The Milky Way Won’t Live Forever

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In about four billion years, the Milky Way will collide with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. The two spiral galaxies are currently hurtling toward each other at 250,000 miles an hour. When they do smash into one another, it won’t be as cataclysmic as you might imagine—Earth will likely survive, and very few stars will actually be destroyed. Instead, the newly formed mega-galaxy will offer a night skyscape with a spectacular blend of stars and streamers unlike anything we see today.

Our Sun Is One Star among Several Hundred Billion

There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Or is it 300 billion? Or 400 billion? That’s right—we don’t actually know how many stars are in our galaxy. Many of them are dim, low-mass stars that are hard to detect over vast cosmic distances, and there are massive clouds obscuring the bulge of stars nearest to Sagittarius A*. Astronomers have estimated the total number of stars based on the Milky Way’s mass and brightness, but more precise numbers are still elusive.

We’re Surrounded By a Dark Halo

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The Milky Way is embedded in a clump of dark matter that is far larger and more massive than the galaxy itself. In the late 1960s, astronomer Vera Rubin inferred the presence of these invisible halos around galaxies when she observed that stars near the edge of Andromeda were whipping around the galaxy’s center at speeds that should send them flying off into space. And yet, they weren’t, meaning that some sort of cosmic glue held everything together. That glue, we now know, is dark matter.

He Hang Out With Ancient Stars

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The Milky Way is also surrounded by more than 150 ancient groups of stars, some of which are among the oldest in the universe. Called globular clusters, these primordial stellar conglomerates live in the Milky Way’s halo and orbit the galactic center. Each is crammed with hundreds of thousands of stars. Also hanging around the Milky Way are dozens of satellite galaxies; most of these are tough to see, but the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds glisten each night in the southern sky.

The Galaxy Is an Island in a Stream of Stars

The Milky Way eats galaxies that come too close. Over the years, scientists studying the galaxy’s fringe have detected some two dozen faint streamers of stars that are the remnants of galaxies past. These ghostly stellar rivers formed when the Milky Way’s more powerful gravity ripped apart smaller galaxies, leaving behind glittering strands of leftovers. At the AAS meeting, the Dark Energy Survey team announced that it had detected 11 more of these streamers, some of which have been given Aboriginal names.

The Galactic Center Is Blowing Hot Air

The Milky Way is blowing massive bubbles of extremely hot gas and energetic particles. Stretching far above and below the galactic plane, these so-called Fermi bubbles balloon straight out of the galaxy’s center, fueled by a wind blowing at two million miles an hour. Unknown until 2010, it’s not entirely clear why the bubbles exist, but scientists think they could be linked to the frenzy of star death and formation in the region around Sagittarius A*.

Gas Clouds Are Fleeing the Galaxy

Observed recently with the Green Bank Telescope, more than a hundred hydrogen gas clouds are zooming away from the galaxy’s core at 738,000 miles an hour. Scientists studying the deserting swarm say the clouds can act as tracers for the powerful processes that produce the giant Fermi bubbles.

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A Massive Structure, Stretching 2.3 Light-Years At The Center Of Our Galaxy Puzzles Astronomers

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The gigantic structure of 2.3 light-years in length near a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A * baffles astronomers.

It turns out that at the center of our galaxy, at around 26,000 light years from Earth, lies a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A *, four million times more massive than the Sun.

This cosmic monster is not the only one lurking in that region of space.

Astronomers have discovered another gigantic structure located in close proximity, which measures a stunning 2.3 light-years across.

While astronomers have absolutely no clue what it is, they’ve managed to snap a pretty good picture of the ‘structure.’

In 2016, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University reported the discovery of an unusual ‘filament’ near the center of the Milky Way.

Now, a year later, another team of astronomers has used a state-of-the-art technique to produce the highest quality image of this mysterious structure.

“With our enhanced image, we can now follow this filament much closer to the Galaxy’s central black hole, and it is now close enough to indicate to us that it must originate there,” said Mark Morris of the University of California, LosAngeles, who led the study.

“However, we still have more work to do to find out what the true nature of this filament is.”

Despite the fact that astronomers aren’t sure what it is, there are three main theories.

The first is that the massive structure is the product caused by high-velocity particles ejected from the supermassive black hole.

A black hole can produce a vertical rotating magnetic field tower that approaches or even coils in the event horizon, the point of no return for approaching matter.

Within this structure, particles would accelerate and produce radio emissions as they spiral around the lines of the magnetic field and away from the black hole.

Another possibility is that the strange filament is a cosmic chain of theoretically not yet detected objects, that are long and extremely thin and transport mass and electrical currents. Pretty awesome, right?

Previously, scientists had predicted that the cosmic strings, if they existed, would migrate to the centers of galaxies.

If the string moves close enough to the black hole, it can be captured when a part of the string crosses the event horizon.

The third theory is that the position and direction of the filament that lines up with the black hole are just coincidental overlaps, and there is no real association between the two. Basically, there’s nothing there.

This would imply that this structure is similar to dozens of other known filaments that are farther from the center of the galaxy.

However, such a coincidence is quite unlikely to happen by chance say astronomers.

“Part of the thrill of science is stumbling across a mystery that is not easy to explain,” said co-author Jun-Hui Zhao of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “While we don’t have the answer yet, the path to finding it is fascinating. This result is motivating astronomers to build next-generation radio telescopes with cutting-edge technology.”

Source: Cosmic Filament Probes Our Galaxy’s Giant Black Hole

Image Credit: A radio image from the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array showing the center of our galaxy. The mysterious radio filament is the curved line located near the center of the image, & the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is shown by the bright source near the bottom of the image. Image Credit: NSF/VLA/UCLA/M. Morris et al.

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Here’s Your Chance To Take A 360-Degree Tour Of The Milky Way

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A stunning new visualization by NASA lets you explore massive stars, and supermassive black holes located at the heart of the Milky Way. Explore, like never before, our cosmic neighborhood and enjoy this journey which is unlike any other you’ve ever taken.

A new visualization with data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory of NASA and other telescopes provides a 360-degree virtual journey to the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This stunning new project allows viewers to control their own exploration of the fascinating environment of massive volatile stars and the powerful gravity around monster black holes that lie at the center of the Milky Way.

Our planet, the pale blue dot is located some 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy.

While humans can not physically travel there—at least not yet with our current technology—scientists have been able to study this region using data from powerful telescopes that can detect light in a variety of ways, including X-rays and infrared light.

The visualization also uses infrared data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

From the point of view of the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A, the viewer can see around 25 Wolf-Rayet stars (flashing white objects) while continually eject stellar winds (scale from black to red to yellow).

These winds collide with each other, and then part of this material (yellow spots) spirals towards Sagittarius A.

NASA’s visualization shows two simulations, each of which starts around 350 years ago and covers 500 years.

The first visualization shows Sagittarius A in a quiet state, while the second contains a more violent Sagittarius A that expels material, which deactivates the accumulation of agglomerated material (yellow spots) that is so prominent in the first part.

Karl Jansky discovered evidence of black holes at the center of our galaxy in 1931 when he identified radio waves coming from the region.

If one day, scientists actually managed to snap an image of Sagittarius A, it would serve as a crucial test for Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, and could even be used to rewrite our understanding of physics.

Einstein proposed that light would be caused by gas and dust accelerating at incredible speeds, and being torn apart. This would suggest that black holes might actually look like a series of Golden rings.

Project leader Sheperd Doeleman from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts told the BBC: “As I’ve said before, it’s never a good idea to bet against Einstein, but if we did see something that was very different from what we expect we would have to reassess the theory of gravity. I don’t expect that is going to happen, but anything could happen and that’s the beauty of it.”

Image Credit.

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France is Launching a Mini Satellite to Probe a Mysterious Planet System in Our Milky Way

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France is set to launch a champagne box-sized mini satellite into Earth orbit on Friday to study a mysterious, juvenile planet system in our Milky Way galaxy, mission controllers said. The PicSat orbiter's target is the massive star Beta Pictoris (above), some 60 light years from Earth in the southern constellation of Pictor (The Painter's Easel), and its planet Beta Pictoris b—a gassy giant, discovered in 1984, with a mass about 1.8 times that of our Sun.

Beta Pictoris is young in astronomical terms—only about 20 million years old compared to the Sun's 4.5 billion years, surrounded by a huge disc of gas and dust—the materials from which planets, asteroids and comets are formed—making it an ideal subject for studying the mechanism by which solar systems evolve.

Built at the Paris Observatory's LESIA laboratory, with European backing, PicSat is due to be launched in the early-morning hours of Friday on an Indian PSLV rocket.

It will orbit our planet at an altitude of some 500 kilometers (310 miles), hoping to learn more about Beta Pictoris b by observing the next time it transits its host star, appearing as a dot on the bright surface as seen from Earth's perspective.

This once-in-18-year transit is expected some time in 2018, mission leader Sylvestre Lacour, an astrophysicist at France's CNRS research institute, told AFP.

"We are not 100-percent sure that the transit will happen" during PicSat's one-year lifetime, he said, as "the orbit of Beta Pictoris b is not well-known." If not, "we will observe other, secondary objects orbiting the star."

By measuring how much light a planet blocks out as it transits its star, astronomers can glean details about its size and the composition of its atmosphere. PicSat measures 10x10x30 centimeters (4x4x12 inches), "the size of a champagne box", said Lacour. It comes equipped with a telescope for fact-gathering, and solar panels to power all its systems. Weighing in at 3.5 kilogrammes (7.7 pounds), the satellite's power consumption is a mere 5 W, similar to that of an economical light bulb.

Beta Pictoris b is about 16 times larger and 3,000 times more massive than Earth, with days lasting about eight hours. It orbits its star at a distance eight times that of Earth to the Sun. In 2014, scientists said it spins at a breakneck speed of some 25 kilometers per second (90,000 kph or 56,000 miles per hour).

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Puzzling Galaxy Discovered -- "Missing a Central Supermassive Black Hole"

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The beautiful spiral galaxy visible in the center of the image is known as RX J1140.1+0307, a galaxy in the Virgo constellation imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and it presents an interesting puzzle. At first glance, this galaxy appears to be a normal spiral galaxy, much like the Milky Way, but first appearances can be deceptive!

It is commonly accepted that the center of nearly every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole. Their size often defies imagination, with millions, sometimes billions, of solar masses. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has a four million solar mass black hole located at its center, about 27,000 light years from Earth. Most of these black holes are dormant, but a few per cent are 'active' meaning that they are devouring material from their host galaxy, forming an accretion disc that feeds the black hole.

As the material spirals through the disc toward the event horizon, it gains fantastic speed and releases vast amounts of energy. As a result, some of the disk material does not fall in because its speed achieves escape velocity. This material is slung around to one of the poles and expelled as a powerful jet traveling near the speed of light.

The size of a supermassive black hole appears to have a direct correlation to its host galaxy. Almost a decade ago, researchers calculated that the mass of a supermassive black hole appeared to have a constant relation to the mass of the central part of its galaxy, known as its bulge. This 1 to 700 relationship supports the notion that the evolution and structure of a galaxy is closely tied to the scale of its black hole.

The largest supermassive black hole ever found contains up to 21 billion times the mass of the sun, and resides in the incredibly dense Coma Cluster, which includes more than 1,000 identified galaxies.

The close-up view shown above was taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows Galaxy NGC 1068 at the doughnut disk of gas and dust surrounding its supermassive black hole in the clearest form yet. NuSTAR's high-energy X-rays eyes were able to obtain the best view yet into the hidden lair of the galaxy's central, supermassive black hole. The most massive black holes in the universe are often encircled by thick, doughnut-shaped disks of gas and dust. This deep-space doughnut material ultimately feeds and nourishes the growing black holes tucked inside.

The Milky Way galaxy, like most large galaxies, has a supermassive black hole at its center, but some galaxies are centered on lighter, intermediate-mass black holes. RX J1140.1+0307 shown below is such a galaxy -- in fact, it is centered on one of the lowest black hole masses known in any luminous galactic core.

What puzzles scientists about this particular galaxy is that the calculations don't add up. With such a relatively low mass for the central black hole, models for the emission from the object cannot explain the observed spectrum. There must be other mechanisms at play in the interactions between the inner and outer parts of the accretion disk surrounding the black hole.

European Space Agency

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

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The Far Side Of Our Galaxy Has Been "Seen" For The First Time Ever

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Being unable to see the wood for the trees is a fairly common idiom, though we could just as easily say we can't see the Milky Way for the stars. Thanks to recent research based on an old astronomy trick, we now have a more accurate idea of where objects are on the other side of the galaxy, filling in key details to the map of our own cosmic backyard.

As familiar as the night sky might be, sitting smack bang in the middle of our own galaxy makes it a little harder to get a complete picture of how it looks from the outside. The fact it's a flattened disc doesn't help matters much; the best we can do is find ways to measure the relative positions of stars and plot them on a 3D map.

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But how do we know how far away a star is? Those twinkling nuclear furnaces come in all manner of sizes and luminosities, so astronomers can't use brightness to determine stellar distances. To make their record-breaking measurement, astronomers from the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US used an astronomy technique that dates back nearly 180 years.

Stellar parallax was first used in 1838 by the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel to measure the distance to a star in the constellation Cygnus. His measurement of 10.3 light years was about a light year off; not bad for a guy with a simple telescope, keen eyes, and some sharp trigonometry skills. The basics are fairly straightforward; hold up a forefinger close to your face and close one eye. Then open it, and close the other.

Image result for The Far Side Of Our Galaxy Has Been

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Repeat this with your finger held at a distance. The apparent change in your finger's position as you look at it with each eye depends on how far away it is from your face. You'd need your eyes to be pretty far apart to detect the shifts in something as distant as a star. Fortunately as the Earth orbits the Sun, we get just that. A dozen light years away is virtually just over the galactic back fence. To get to see more of the galaxy, we need a telescope with a much sharper focus.

Hubble's wide field camera manages a bit better, but even that can only manage to determine the relative shift in a star's position if it's within 10,000 light years. Our galaxy's diameter is estimated to be ten times that size. In this latest analysis, the astronomers were able to measure the distance to a group of stars literally on the other side of the Milky Way, a mind-blowing 66,000 light years away from Earth.

This nearly doubles the previous record of just over 36,000 light years achieved in 2013. Both of these distances were measured using a piece of technology called the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). In simple terms, the VLBA consists of 10 large antennas separated out over thousands of kilometres between North America, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, making up one single, giant eye.

That allows astronomers to detect a shift in a star's position equivalent to the diameter of a baseball on the surface of the Moon. The observations were made several years ago, in 2014 and 2015, detecting light from a region in space where new stars were being born. Surrounding clouds of water and methanol molecules amplified their radiance across the incredible distance, helping them to shine through the thick fog of dust that blocks a lot of the light.

“Most of the stars and gas in our galaxy are within this newly-measured distance from the Sun. With the VLBA, we now have the capability to measure enough distances to accurately trace the galaxy's spiral arms and learn their true shapes,” says researcher Alberto Sanna from the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “This means that, using the VLBA, we now can accurately map the whole extent of our galaxy.”

We shouldn't hold our breath for an accurate Google Milky Way any time soon – the researchers estimate we're still a decade off having a fairly complete picture. Still, a selfie the size of a galaxy should be well worth the wait.

This research was published in Science.

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Puzzling Galaxy Discovered -- "Missing a Central Supermassive Black Hole"

The Far Side Of Our Galaxy Has Been "Seen" For The First Time Ever

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