NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.

Astronomers exploring the disk of debris around the young star Beta Pictoris have discovered a compact cloud of carbon monoxide located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star. This concentration of poisonous gas – usually destroyed by starlight – is being constantly replenished by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies.

In fact, to offset the destruction of carbon monoxide (CO) molecules around the star, a large comet must be getting completely destroyed every five minutes, say researchers.

They suggest the comet swarm is most likely frozen debris trapped and concentrated by the gravity of an as-yet-unseen exoplanet.

This mystery ‘shepherd’ exoplanet – so-called for its capacity to corral the swarms of comets through its gravitational pull, like Jupiter in our own solar system – is likely to be about the size of Saturn.    

"Detailed dynamical studies are now under way, but at the moment we think this shepherding planet would be around Saturn's mass and positioned near the inner edge of the CO belt," said Mark Wyatt, from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who proposed the shepherd model – currently the favoured hypothesis because it explains so many puzzling features of the Beta Pictoris disk.

"We think the Beta Pictoris comet swarms formed when the hypothetical planet migrated outward, sweeping icy bodies into resonant orbits."

Paradoxically, the presence of carbon monoxide – so harmful to humans on Earth – could indicate that the Beta Pictoris planetary system may eventually be a good habitat for life. If there is CO in the comets, then there is likely also water ice – meaning that the cometary bombardment this system’s planets are probably undergoing could also be providing them with life-giving water.

The findings are published today in the journal Science Express.

The clump was discovered when an international team of astronomers, led by ALMA-based ESO astronomer Bill Dent, along with Wyatt, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to map the millimeter-wavelength light from dust and carbon monoxide molecules in the disk surrounding Beta Pictoris, a star located about 63 light-years away and only 20 million years old.

Beta Pictoris is considered one of the best examples of a typical young solar system, and hosts one of the closest and brightest debris disks known – making it an ideal laboratory for studying the early development of planetary systems. The latest findings that reveal a vast belt of carbon monoxide at the fringes of this system could help us understand what conditions were like during the formation of our own solar system.

Much of the carbon monoxide is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and the sun. The total amount of the gas observed exceeds 200 million billion tons – equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth’s oceans, say researchers.

The presence of all this gas is a clue that something interesting is going on because ultraviolet starlight breaks up CO molecules in about 100 years, much faster than the main cloud can complete a single orbit around the star. “So unless we are observing Beta Pictoris at a very unusual time, then the carbon monoxide we observed must be continuously replenished,” said Bill Dent, ESO astronomer based at ALMA and lead author on the paper.

The researchers calculate that a large comet must be completely destroyed every five minutes, and only an unusually massive and compact swarm of comets could support such an astonishingly high collision rate.

"Although toxic to us, carbon monoxide is one of many gases found in comets and other icy bodies," said team member Aki Roberge, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "In the rough-and-tumble environment around a young star, these objects frequently collide and generate fragments that release dust, icy grains and stored gases."

Because we view the disk nearly edge-on, the ALMA data cannot determine whether the carbon monoxide belt has a single concentration of gas or two on opposite sides of the star. Further studies of the gas cloud's orbital motion will clarify the situation, but current evidence favors a two-clump scenario, which in turn points to a shepherding planet.

In our own solar system, Jupiter's gravity has trapped thousands of asteroids in two groups, one leading and one following it as it travels around the sun. A giant planet located in the outer reaches of the Beta Pictoris system likewise could corral comets into a pair of tight, massive swarms.

Astronomers have already directly imaged one giant exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, with a mass several times greater than Jupiter, orbiting much closer to the star. While it would be unusual for a giant planet to form up to 10 times farther away, as required to shepherd the massive comet clouds, the hypothetical planet could have formed near the star and migrated outward as the young disk underwent changes. Indeed, this outward motion is needed to corral the comets.

If, however, the gas actually turns out to form a single clump, Wyatt’s recently graduated Cambridge PhD student Alan Jackson, also a co-author on the paper, suggested an even more violent alternative scenario. A crash between two Mars-sized icy planets about half a million years ago would account for the comet swarm, with frequent ongoing collisions among the fragments gradually releasing carbon monoxide gas.

Either way, Beta Pictoris clearly has a fascinating story to tell, say the scientists, one that could provide insight into the early development of our own solar system.

Latest research has uncovered a massive clump of carbon monoxide in a young solar system. The gas is the result of near constant collisions of icy comets – suggesting vast swarms of tightly packed comets in thrall to the gravitational pull of an as-yet-unseen exoplanet.

We think the Beta Pictoris comet swarms formed when the hypothetical planet migrated outwardMark WyattNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/F.ReddyAt the outer fringes of the system, the gravitational influence of a hypothetical giant planet (bottom left) captures comets into a dense, massive swarm (right) where frequent collisions occur.

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YesNews type: News

The link between the most mysterious stuff in the universe and fatal comet strikes on Earth is tenuous – but it would elegantly connect two open questions
    

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.

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Though fragile comet nuclei have been seen falling apart as they near the Sun, nothing like the slow breakup of an asteroid has ever before been observed in the asteroid belt. A series of Hubble Space Telescope images shows that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely one mile per hour. This makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision with another asteroid. A plausible explanation is that the asteroid is crumbling due to a subtle effect of sunlight. This causes the rotation rate to slowly increase until centrifugal force pulls the asteroid apart. The asteroid's remnant debris, weighing in at 200,000 tons, will in the future provide a rich source of meteoroids.

The science and mission operations teams looking after Rosetta have been hard at work in the six weeks since wake up on 20 January 2014. The post-wake-up period ending 2 March has been mainly dedicated to the preparation of the spacecraft for the up-coming payload commissioning phase.

Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole six billion light years from Earth is spinning extremely rapidly. This first direct measurement of the spin of such a distant black hole is an important advance for understanding how black holes grow over time.

A new innovative instrument called MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) has been successfully installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. MUSE has observed distant galaxies, bright stars and other test targets during the first period of very successful observations.

This new Hubble image shows spiral galaxy ESO 137-001, framed against a bright background as it moves through the heart of galaxy cluster Abell 3627. This cluster is violently ripping the spiral's entrails out into space, leaving bright blue streaks as telltale clues to this cosmic crime.

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Our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy lives in a comparatively quiet backwater region of the universe. This is not the case for galaxies crammed together inside huge clusters. As they zip around within a cluster, gas can be pulled from their disks due to a process called ram pressure stripping. Galaxy ESO 137-001 is one example. The star-city looks like it is "leaking" as it plunges through the Norma galaxy cluster.

This week, 1-8 March, is National Astronomy Week.

Join in by counting the number of stars you can see in Orion, which helps scientists measure light pollution:
http://www.astronomyweek.org.uk/?page_id=490


Star Count 2014 | National Astronomy Week 2014
www.astronomyweek.org.uk
NAW 2014 has joined forces with the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies to monitor the extent of light pollution.

As part of the tests to try and diagnose the stray light issue noticed in the first month of instrument commissioning, the Gaia operations team is making a series of spacecraft orientation changes.

The spacecraft was first tilted from 45 to 42 degrees and then to 0 degrees, that is, facing its sunshield directly at the Sun. Then the spacecraft was returned to 45 degrees.

Gaia tilt seen from Earth

Astronomers Peter Veres and Bryce Bolin, who were following a call for Earth-bound observations to improve the prediction of Gaia’s brightness under different viewing conditions, used the 2.24m  telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to capture Gaia’s tilt from 0 to 45 degrees on 27 February.

The resulting movie nicely illustrates the change in brightness of the spacecraft over a period of around half an hour (12:14:52 UT to 12:42:06 UT), as Gaia’s sunshield tilted away from the Earth. Gaia is the bright object in the centre of the movie and moves downwards.

Dave Tholen, who processed the images, said: “We started with 10 second exposures for the first 30 exposures, then increased the exposure time to 20 seconds to get images 31 to 35, then increased again to 40 seconds for images 36 to 40. The last three exposures were 80 seconds each.”

The observations also captured a main belt asteroid (2002 RS34) moving from top centre to the right of the field of view in the movie.

As for the issue of stray light, the data are still being analysed. The tilting process will be repeated again, at a much slower rate, in order to gather more information from on-board systems during the transition period.

National Astronomy Week starts tomorrow, and runs from 1-8 March.

Over 160 events are happening throughout the UK. There's a map and search tool on http://www.astronomyweek.org.uk/

See also our press release: https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/news-archive/254-news-2014/2404-observe-jupiter-up-close-during-national-astronomy-week


National Astronomy Week 2014
www.astronomyweek.org.uk
All eyes will be on the skies between 1st and 8th March 2014 when an array of fascinating celestial objects will be gathered in the night sky. Throughout the week, astronomical organisations and societies all over the UK will be holding a host of special observing events open to the public. This is ...

The Aurora Borealis, better known as the Northern Lights, is giving spectacular displays over parts of the UK, lighting up skies from Essex to south Wales.

A black hole is eating faster than a cosmic speed limit allows, suggesting that small black holes may play a larger role in galaxy evolution than realised
    

The science team sifting data from Nasa's Kepler space telescope says it has identified 715 new planets beyond our Solar System.

More than 700 possible planets found by a NASA telescope have been verified as real, and most live in scaled-down versions of our inner solar system
    

Today, NASA announced a breakthrough addition to the catalog of new planets. Researchers using Kepler have confirmed 715 new worlds, almost quadrupling the number of planets previously confirmed by the planet-hunting spacecraft. Some of the new worlds are similar in size to Earth and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars.

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This is a Hubble Space Telescope composite image of a supernova explosion designated SN 2014J in the galaxy M82, at a distance of approximately 11.5 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers using a ground-based telescope discovered the explosion on January 21, 2014. This Hubble photograph was taken on January 31, as the supernova approached its peak brightness.

NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.