Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe”

Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe” from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Betelgeuse, the red supergiant at the top of the constellation of Orion

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, and one of the largest and most luminous stars known. If the star were at the center of our solar system its surface might extend out to between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Current belief is that it is only a few million years old and there is some debate that it might even go supernova within  the lifespan of the human civilization.

What is so cool is that recently using interferometry, an image has been created by an international team led by an astronomer of l’Observatoire de Paris. There are clearly two bright spots whose size is equivalent to the Earth-Sun distance and they cover a large fraction of the surface.  It is an indication of the presence of the convection phenomenon which is a transport of heat by moving matter in a star.

Betelgeuse: The surface of Betelgeuse in near infrared at 1.64 micron in wavelength, obtained with the IOTA interferometer. The image has been reconstructed with two different algorithms, which yield the same details, of 9 milliarcseconds (mas). The star diameter is about 45 milliarcseconds. Copyright 2010 Haubois/Perrin (LESIA, Observatoire de Paris

Usually, even with our most powerful telescopes, most stars are unresolved dots. But because Betelgeuse is so big, it can be resolved using interferometry. This uses a number of telescopes to collect light and adds them together in such a way that extremely small objects (based on distance) can be resolved. Stunning image.

Here is a size comparison. You can barely see the sun in the image below.

Sun vs Betelgeuse Size comparison

Credit: Digitized Sky Survey, ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator Color Composite: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)

Explanation: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have intriguing and some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower left. The famous Orion Nebula itself lies off the bottom of this star field that covers an impressive 4.4×3.5 degrees on the sky. The color picture was composited from digitized black and white photographic plates recorded through red and blue astronomical filters, with a computer synthesized green channel. The plates were taken using the Samuel Oschin Telescope, a wide-field survey instrument at Palomar Observatory, between 1987 and 1991.

I also wanted to find a single image that gave some idea of how matter is clumped together into super clusters with massive gaps of mostly empty space. This image shows how the distribution of energy has changed as the universe evolves.

This illustration shows snapshots from a simulation representing the growth of cosmic structure when the universe was 0.9 billion, 3.2 billion and 13.7 billion years old, which it is now, evolving from a smooth state to one containing a vast amount of structure. (MPE/V.Springel)

Some basic facts:

Size of the universe? About 150Billion Light Years

Age of the Universe? 13.7 Billion Years old (roughly)

Observable Universe? 93 Billion Light Years

The Universe if FLAT (I need to give you a link for this one or you won’t believe me)

Click on the image and see the larger image. Or better yet click here for a zoomable version. The sheer number of galaxies is incredible….It will blow you away. The faintest objects visible now are about one billion times fainter than the dimmest visible objects seen with the naked eye. Its truely astronomical!

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 Team

“Hubble has now re-visited the Ultra Deep Field which we first studied 5 years ago, taking infrared images which are more sensitive than anything obtained before,” said Dr. Daniel Stark, a postdoctoral researcher from Cambridge University. “We can now look even further back in time, identifying galaxies when the Universe was only 5 percent of its current age – within 1 billion years of the Big Bang.”

“The expansion of the Universe causes the light from very distant galaxies to appear more red, so having a new camera on Hubble which is very sensitive in the infrared means we can identify galaxies at much greater distances than previously possible,” said Stephen Wilkins, from Oxford University.

Want to know where in the sky this image is taken from? Look below. In the centre of the image is the HDUF cross-hair. That the “empty” piece of sky….

Where in the Sky the HUDF image was taken

Paul  Doyle,  Dublin,  Ireland,  Europe, Earth, The Sol System, Local Star System, Orion Spur of the The Milky Way,  The Local Group in the Virgo Super Cluster.

I just thought it was fun, so I wanted to share it with you. Click on the first link to see a zoomable image in hi-res from wikipedia. I’ve broken it down on this page so you can see it in one location. Hope you like it!

Where in the Universe...

 Here is my address again….

Dublin Ireland

Dublin Ireland

Earth

Earth

The Solar System

The Local Star Group

Local Star Group

In the Orion Spur of the Milky Way

The Orion Spur in the Milky Way

Galactic Realm

The Local Group

The Local Group

The Virgo Super Cluster

Virgo Super Cluster

I watched a video by Carl Sagan recently where he discussed the nature of science. I may be over simplifying things a bit, but the basic message was that if we assume we cannot know something, this surely this only holds us back, and stops us looking.  Astronomy and cosmology dares to asks the big questions. Where did we come from.

The role of  science is to keep an open mind and to seek answers. Everything can be challenged and we need to evolve our understanding. We constantly redefine our understanding of the universe and the world around us.  Science doesn’t have all the answers, but it drives the process of questioning and learning.

So with that in mind I thought it would be fun to share a few of our current theories and observations. Maybe in 10 years I’ll remember to come back and take another look and see what has changed. I’m not trying to convince anyone that these facts are true or correct, but they reflect sciences current level of understanding (based on my research, but feel free to point out any errors!). I’ve tried to supply links to sites that discuss the science behind these claims so you can explore further.

The universe is approximately 13.7 Billion years old.

The universe is flat and has no edge in 3 dimensions and there is no center to the universe.

We can detect only 5% of all Matter and Energy that we believe exists.

We can only see .0000000000000000000000000001 of the light spectrum with our eyes.

Most of the matter in the universe was destroyed in the big bang when matter and antimatter annihilated each other.

The only thing that can travel faster than the speed of light is the expansion of the universe.

The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris; a red hypergiant star in the constellation Canis Major, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth

Most star systems contain two or more stars. Our system is the rarity. Polaris for example is a triple star system.

The universe spans 93 Billion light years containing 100 Billion Galaxies

We have found oxygen atmospheres around a white dwarf star, the size of Earth.

The Sun contains over 99.8 percent of the total material (mass) in our solar system, while Jupiter contains most of the rest.

The star “Lucy” in constellation Centaurus is actually a huge cosmic diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion carats.

Here is the video that inspired this article. Well worth a watch. Astronomy is better than fiction…. Enjoy.

The LHC, record breaker

The Large Hadron Collider sets a new world record. The LHC is now the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having just accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV on Monday  morning exceeding the 0.98 TeV world record held by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider since 2001. This is a mere 10 days since its restart this year.

“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”

“This is another fantastic milestone for the LHC,” said John Womersley, director of science programs at STFC. “To see such a complex project make progress at this impressive rate is testament to the tremendous efforts that have been made by all of those involved. I look forward to seeing the continued success of the LHC and to early 2010 when we can expect it to deliver the first data for physics analysis”.

The real fun begins when the LHC will attempta collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) in the first quarter of 2010.

Those objects close to us such as Alpha Centauri(a mear 4.3 light years away) are showing us an image of what they looked like about 4.3 years ago. So in theory we would not know if it exploded until the light from that explosion reached us 4.3 year after the fact.

What this means is that the further away we see an object, the further back into the past we are observing. This is where our telescopes come in. The further away an object is, the longer it has taken for that light to reach us, so the older the object.  Most things we observe are moving away due to the expansion of the universe.  This is seen as light changing color or being red shifted. As telescopes improve we get to see things further and further away. The furthest thing now observed is shown below (the red dot in the middle).

This is GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423 which occured over 13 billion years after the big bang, and is likely to be the explosion of one of the earliest stars in the universe. That makes it only about 670 million years after the big bang. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 Billion years old.

In an interview, Edo Berger with the Gemini Telescope was reported to say “This happened a little more than 13 billion years ago. We’ve essentially been able to find gamma ray bursts throughout the Universe. The nearest ones are only about 100 million light years away, and this most distant one is 13 billion light years away, so it seems that they populate the entire universe. This most distant one demonstrates for the first time that massive stars exist at those very high red shifts. This is something people have suspected for a long time, but there was no direct observational proof. So that is one of the cool results from this observation.”

So just how far back are we going to see?

Our current models of the universe actually requires the presence of Energy and Matter which we cannot find as shown in this pie chart.

Dark Matter Pie Chart