Discovering A New Earth 430 Light Years Away

Astronomers Spy Earth-like Planet Forming Around Distant Star

Astrophysicists analyzing infrared images captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope found indications of a dust cloud surrounding a relatively young star. The star is 10 to 16 million years old, and analysis of the dust cloud suggests that it may coalesce and become a rocky planet like earth. It is located at a distance from the star that it may build an atmosphere, collect liquid water, and perhaps, in millions and millions of years, support life.

It took billions of years and the perfect conditions for our Earth to grow and form. Now, those same conditions can be seen in space, shaping a similar planet. Ivanhoe explains this exciting space discovery.

Far, far away, something amazing is brewing in space. Swirling around a giant star similar to our sun, astrophysicists have spotted the very early stages of a planet taking shape.

"What we think we're seeing is the actual formation of a planet -- terrestrial planet -- a rocky planet like the Earth, around the star," Carey Lisse, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., told Ivanhoe.

The Earth-like planet is about 430 light years away or 2.5x1015 miles from Earth. It's inside a huge dust belt -- bigger than our asteroid belt -- with enough dusty material to build a planet. "The material is forming at just the same distance, or close to the same distance where the Earth formed from the sun," Dr. Lisse says.

To find the planet, astronomers used images captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope. It looks for infrared light or heat radiating from the dusty materials. The images also confirm the rocky fragments forming the new planet are similar to materials found in the Earth's crust and core.

"So, the body that's going to form -- the planet that's going to form -- isn't going to be this gas giant with incredibly thick atmosphere," explains Dr. Lisse. It's going to be a rocky planet like Mars or Venus or the Earth."

There's also an outer ice belt circling the young planet, making it more likely that water could reach the new planet's surface … and maybe even life; but don't wait around for signs of life. The planet still needs another 100 million years before it's completely formed.

Astronomers say the star the new planet is spinning around is between ten and 16 million years old, which is the perfect age for forming Earth-like planets.

ABOUT THE SPITZER TELESCOPE: The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched on 25 August 2003. Spitzer detects the infrared energy radiated by objects in space. Most of this infrared radiation is blocked by the Earth's atmosphere and cannot be observed from the ground. Spitzer allows us to peer into regions of space that are hidden from optical telescopes.

Many areas of space are filled with vast, dense clouds of gas and dust that block our view. Infrared light, however can penetrate these clouds, allowing us to peer into regions of star formation, the centers of galaxies, and into newly forming planetary systems. Infrared also brings us information about the cooler objects in space, such as smaller stars which are too dim to be detected by their visible light, extrasolar planets, and giant molecular clouds. Also, many molecules in space, including organic molecules, have their unique signatures in the infrared.

WHAT IS INFRARED LIGHT? Infrared radiation is an invisible form of light that we usually detect as heat, like the sun shining on our face, or the warmth of a campfire. It has all the same properties as visible light: for example, it can be focused and reflected. The only difference is that it has a longer wavelength, which means we can't see it with the naked eye. Light is made of tiny particles called photons, and the wavelength tells us how fast those particles are vibrating. The shorter the wavelength, the faster the particles are moving. Shorter light waves look blue, and longer ones look red.

The wavelength of infrared light is so long that we can't see it at all. Any warm object gives off infrared radiation. By checking in the infrared spectrum, engineers can find heat leaks in buildings, doctors can find hidden tumors in the body, and biologists can locate diseased plants in a forest. Astronomers use infrared imaging to detect warm dust around new stars that are not yet "hot" enough to emit visible light.

The American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the video portion of this report.

To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out As Living Planet

How would planet Earth appear to outside or alien observers? (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli)With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life.

But what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet? Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life?

That’s the question at the heart of paper co-authored by a University of Florida astronomer that appeared recently in the online edition of Astrophysical Journal. The answer, the authors say, is a qualified “yes.” With a space telescope larger than the Hubble Space Telescope pointed directly at our sun, they say, “hypothetical observers” could measure Earth’s 24-hour rotation period, leading to observations of oceans and the chance of life.

“They would only be able to see Earth as a single pixel, rather than resolving it to take a picture,” said Eric Ford, a UF assistant professor of astronomy and one of five authors of the paper. “But that could be enough for them to identify our planet as one that likely contains clouds and oceans of liquid water.”

This research may sound whimsical, but it has a serious goal: to provide a road map for Earth-bound astronomers trying to study Earth-like planets — a task expected to become possible in coming decades as more powerful telescopes come on line, said Enric Palle, the lead author of the paper and an astronomer with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

For humans or curious aliens, observing planets is challenging for a number of reasons – habitable planets all the more so. The planet can’t be too close or too far away from its star, or its surface would scald or freeze. And, it must have a protective atmosphere like Earth’s.

Most planets found so far are much larger than Earth, which means they are likely hot gas planets similar to Jupiter, a profoundly uninhabitable place with no solid surface and atmosphere composed largely of hydrogen and helium.

But astronomers are beginning to plan how future space telescopes could directly detect planets much closer to Earth’s size and proximity to the sun. One challenge: To figure out how to use a planet’s light to recognize if its surface and atmosphere are Earth-like.

For Ford and his colleagues, the answer lies in probing how the Earth would appear to outside or alien observers.

Astronomers have long recognized that even a large telescope would need to observe Earth for several weeks to collect enough light to identify chemicals in the planet’s atmosphere. During these observations, the brightness of the Earth would change, primarily because of clouds rotating into and out of view. If astronomers could measure Earth’s rotation period, then they would know when a given part of the planet was in view. The hitch was that astronomers were unsure whether Earth’s seemingly chaotically changing cloud patterns would make it impossible for alien observers to determine this rotation rate.

Based on data retrieved from satellite observations of Earth, Ford and his colleagues created a computer model for the brightness of the Earth, revealing that on the global scale Earth’s cloud cover is remarkably consistent — with rain forests usually turning up cloudy, arid regions clear, and so on. As a result, extraterrestrial astronomers who watched Earth for a period of several months would notice repeating patterns – a bit like watching the spots on a spinning ball come into view and then disappear. From those repeating patterns, they could then deduce Earth’s 24-hour rotation period, Ford said.

That done, the “E.T.” astronomers could infer that anomalies in the pattern were caused by changing weather patterns, most prominently, clouds, he said. Although some uninhabitable planets are extremely cloudy, the repeated presence and absence of clouds indicates active weather. On Earth, this variability results in water turning from gas to a vapor and back again, so finding similar variability on another planet would be a reasonable indication of liquid water.

“Venus is always covered in clouds. The brightness never changes,” Ford said. “Mars has virtually no clouds. Earth, on the other hand, has a lot of variation.”

Not only that, but observers could likely also infer the presence of continents and oceans from Earth’s changing light pattern.

The research will be useful to astronomers designing the next generation of space telescopes because it provides an outline of the capabilities required for studying the surfaces of Earth-like planets, Ford said. He said it appears that zeroing in on Earth-like planets orbiting the nearest stars would require a telescope at least twice the size of the Hubble Space Telescope. Ford said he hopes that his research will help to motivate an ever larger space telescope that could search for Earth-like planets around many stars.

The other authors of the paper are P. Montañés-Rodríguez and M. Vazquez, both of the Instituto de Astrofisca de Canarias in Spain, and Sara Seager, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The IAC and UF are partners in the construction of the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands, which will start operations in 2008.

The research was funded in part by a Ramon y Cajal fellowship for Palle, by a Hubble fellowship and UF for Ford, and by a NASA grant for Seager.

Scientists Give A Hand(edness) To The Search For Alien Life

Light becomes polarized in detectable ways when reflected from chlorophyll and other chiral molecules necessary to life, so scientists working at NIST have built a device that can detect this polarization--potentially offering a way to find extraterrestrial life from great distances. Their device has already proved itself able to discern the polarized light scattered from the chlorophyll in leaves and also cyanobacteria (image), one-celled organisms that evolved early in the history of life on Earth. (Credit: Roger Burks (University of California at Riverside), Mark Schneegurt (Wichita State University), and Cyanosite (www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu))

Visiting aliens may be the stuff of legend, but if a scientific team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is right, we may be able to find extraterrestrial life even before it leaves its home planet—by looking for left- (or right-) handed light.

The technique the team has developed for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly. Rather, it could allow spaceborne instruments to see a telltale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain “chirality,” or handedness. A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behavior differs. Because many substances critical to life favor a particular handedness, Thom Germer and his colleagues think chirality might reveal life’s presence at great distances, and have built a device to detect it.

“You don’t want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that Earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is,” says Germer, a physicist at NIST. “But amino acids, sugars, DNA—each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.”

Many molecules not associated with life exhibit handedness as well. But when organisms reproduce, their offspring possess chiral molecules that have the same handedness as those in their parents’ bodies. As life spreads, the team theorizes, the landscape will eventually have a large amount of molecules that favor one handedness.

“If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,” Germer says. “But life’s self-assembly means they all would go one way. It’s hard to imagine a planet’s surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life.”

Because chiral molecules reflect light in a way that indicates their handedness, the research team built a device to shine light on plant leaves and bacteria, and then detect the polarized reflections from the organisms’ chlorophyll from a short distance away. The device detected chirality from both sources.

The team intends to improve its detector so it can look at pond surfaces and then landscape-sized regions on Earth. Provided the team continues to get good results, Germer says, they will propose that it be built into a large telescope or mounted on a space probe.

“We need to be sure we get a signal from our own planet before we can look at others,” he says. “But what’s neat about the concept is that it is sensitive to something that comes from the process behind organic self-assembly, but not necessarily life as we know it.”

Funding for this research was provided by STSI and the European Space Agency.

Single-molecule Nano-vehicles Synthesized: 'Fantastic Voyage' Not So Far-Fetched

Imagine producing vehicles so small they would be about the size of a molecule and powered by engines that run on sugar. To top it off, a penny would buy a million of them.
A new article published in the May 2009 issue of Scientific American asks readers to do just that.

The concept is nearly unthinkable, but it's exactly the kind of thing occupying National Science Foundation supported researchers at Penn State and Rice universities.

For several years, Ayusman Sen, who heads Penn State's department of chemistry, and his colleague Thomas E. Mallouk, director of the Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State, have investigated technologies that could realize these remarkable machines whose uses might include delivering medicine to specific tissue, accomplishing surgeries or communicating with the outside world from inside the human body.

Though researchers consistently have improved ways to build nano-machines, the stumbling block has been finding a way to power them. Shrinking energy producers--internal combustion engines, electric motors or jet engines--below millimeter dimensions is not an easy task, but researchers may be closer to a fantastic solution.

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, scientists shrink a submarine to microscopic size and inject it into the blood stream of a brilliant scientist, who has a blood clot forming in his brain. The nano-sized surgeons then set out to remove the blood clot.

Today, researchers can steer nano-machines, use them to convey cargo, and guide them using electromagnetic forces or chemical interactions. All of this, they say, makes the world seen in Fantastic Voyage not so far-fetched.

The article -- "How to Build Nanotech Motors" is available on the Scientific American web site at: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-build-nanotech-motors

Destination:Machu Pichu

Crop Circles

Lost Empire

Return to Everest

Four of the most accomplished climbers in the world have just one thing on their minds right now: conquering Mount Everest—again.

The team, sponsored by Eddie Bauer's First Ascent Clothing and Gear Line, began its ascent on March 30. Over the next two months, the climbers will make their way up the world's tallest mountain in dangerous conditions, fighting hypothermia, altitude sickness, and sheer physical exhaustion to achieve something few can boast.

Mountaineer Peter Whittaker gathered the group as part of a quest to continue his family legacy; he is the nephew of legendary explorer Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest in 1963. Joining Whittaker is Ed Viesturs, a veteran mountaineer who has summitted all 14 of the world's highest peaks without the aid of bottled oxygen; Dave Hahn, who is going for a record 11th Everest ascent; and Melissa Arnot, who is attempting to become the first female American to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.

Follow the team's progress up the mountain here through daily dispatches, photos, and videos—direct from Everest.

Painted Egypt Coffins Unearthed

Archaeologists in Egypt have found 53 rock tombs containing preserved mummies and vibrantly painted coffins dating back as far as 4,000 years.

http://itn.co.uk/news/0bba2695b9c1802b67c3eea34baa22cc.html

Unedited Transcript

Archaeologists in Egypt say they have discovered an ancient necropolis containing dozens of preserved mummies dating back as far as 4-thousand years in the oasis of Fayoum, south of Cairo.

Fifty-three tombs have been discovered cut into rock at a site southeast of the Illahun pyramids, containing colored wooden coffins.

SOUNDBITE (English) Abdel-Rahman El-Ayedi, Supervisor of Antiquities for Middle Egypt: "The importance of this discovery (is) that it will show the funeral, the development of the funeral architecture within this period of time. At the same time it will give us a clear idea of the burial customs of ancient Egyptians during this time. The tombs are very architectural in design, some of them are very simple in design, they consist of a shaft and a single burial chamber, and others are comprised (of) more than a burial chamber."

SOUNDBITE (English) Abdel-Rahman El-Ayedi, Supervisor of Antiquities for Middle Egypt: "Inside the tomb we found a lot of objects representing the funeral deposit or funeral gods, hundreds of pottery vessels and jars, alabaster jars, amulets, statues, wooden statues, (inaudible). The prevailing idea within Egyptologists, (is) that this site has been established by Senusret the Second, the 4th King of the 12th Dynasty."

The mummies were wrapped in linen, and the coffins were painted in several colors, including turquoise, terracotta and gold.

World's Largest Model Rocket Launch Is Blazing Success

Four stories tall, the world's largest model rocket blasts off on Saturday, April 25, 2009, in Price, Maryland.
At nearly four stories tall, the world's largest model rocket was only a tenth the size of a real rocket. But the craft's April 25 launch in Price, Maryland, was no small feat.A replica of a NASA Saturn V rocket, the massive model broke the world record for the tallest and heaviest model rocket that's ever been launched and recovered—36 feet (11 meters) and 1,648 pounds (750 kilograms), respectively.

After soaring to 4,441 feet (1,354 meters), the machine broke into several parts, as planned, and deployed parachutes before landing about a half mile (0.8 kilometer) from the launchpad, amid loud clapping from spectators.

The model's designer, Ohio auto-body specialist Steve Eves, is a child of the space race—"something that's stuck in my mind all these years," he said.

But Eves, 51, didn't get into high-power rocketry until the early 1990s. And when he did, he had no inkling how big his pet project would get, he said.

The giant model and Saturday's launch—attended by about 5,000 spectators—cost U.S. $30,000, much of it covered by donations.

(Also see: "'Jet Man' Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket.")

Eves planned the project as a tribute to the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first manned trip to the moon, which launched on July 16, 1969.

During 13 NASA missions in the 1960s and '70s, the original Saturn V rockets—still the most powerful in history—never failed. In Eves's eyes, that makes the Saturn V class "the greatest rocket that mankind has ever built."

Remembering seeing a Saturn V in person, Eves said: "Until you stood at the base of one those rockets, [you can't] imagine the courage it took" for people to take them into space. "It's mind-boggling."

Tikal's Pyramid

Tourists climb Tikal's Pyramid II to reach the Temple of the Masks. The site's pyramids, plazas, temples, and palaces were once an important center of Mayan civilization.Photograph by David Hiser/Getty Images

Guatemala, meaning land of trees, is a heavily forested and mountainous nation—and the most populous in Central America. The Pacific coast lowlands in the south rise to the volcanic Sierra Madre and other highlands, then the land descends to the forested northern lowlands, including the narrow Caribbean coast. The highlands, where most Guatemalans live, are temperate in climate compared to the tropical lowlands.

A thousand years ago the remarkable Maya civilization flourished, and its ruins dot the landscape. Today more than half of Guatemalans are descendants of the indigenous Maya peoples; most live in the western highlands and are poor subsistence farmers. By contrast the rest of the population are known as Ladinos (mostly mixed Maya-Spanish ancestry). Ladinos use Spanish and wear Western clothing, while Maya speak some 24 indigenous languages and retain traditional dress and customs. The more urbanized Ladino population dominates commerce, government, and the military. Guatemalan society grew increasingly polarized between a Ladino upper class and Maya lower class when guerrilla groups first formed in 1960 to fight for the poor majority. Warfare between guerrillas and government forces cost 200,000 lives and displaced half a million people. In September 1996 the government and the guerrillas agreed on terms to end the 36-year-long civil war.

The democratic government faces problems of crime, illiteracy, and poverty, but it is making progress in moving the economy away from coffee and agriculture toward manufacturing and tourism. Tikal, in northern Guatemala, may be the premier tourism site, with some 3,000 Maya buildings dating from 600 B.C. to A.D. 900. Tikal's Temple IV is the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Americas at 65 meters (212 feet).

Solar Wind Tans Young Asteroids

A new study published in Nature this week reveals that asteroid surfaces age and redden much faster than previously thought — in less than a million years, the blink of an eye for an asteroid. This study has finally confirmed that the solar wind is the most likely cause of very rapid space weathering in asteroids.
This fundamental result will help astronomers relate the appearance of an asteroid to its actual history and identify any after effects of a catastrophic impact with another asteroid.

“Asteroids seem to get a ‘sun tan’ very quickly,” says lead author Pierre Vernazza. “But not, as for people, from an overdose of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, but from the effects of its powerful wind.”

It has long been known that asteroid surfaces alter in appearance with time — the observed asteroids are much redder than the interior of meteorites found on Earth [1] — but the actual processes of this “space weathering” and the timescales involved were controversial.

Thanks to observations of different families of asteroids [2] using ESO’s New Technology Telescope at La Silla and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, as well as telescopes in Spain and Hawaii, Vernazza’s team have now solved the puzzle.

When two asteroids collide, they create a family of fragments with “fresh” surfaces. The astronomers found that these newly exposed surfaces are quickly altered and change colour in less than a million years — a very short time compared to the age of the Solar System.

“The charged, fast moving particles in the solar wind damage the asteroid’s surface at an amazing rate [3]”, says Vernazza. Unlike human skin, which is damaged and aged by repeated overexposure to sunlight, it is, perhaps rather surprisingly, the first moments of exposure (on the timescale considered) — the first million years — that causes most of the aging in asteroids.

By studying different families of asteroids, the team has also shown that an asteroid’s surface composition is an important factor in how red its surface can become. After the first million years, the surface “tans” much more slowly. At that stage, the colour depends more on composition than on age. Moreover, the observations reveal that collisions cannot be the main mechanism behind the high proportion of “fresh” surfaces seen among near-Earth asteroids. Instead, these “fresh-looking” surfaces may be the results of planetary encounters, where the tug of a planet has “shaken” the asteroid, exposing unaltered material.

Thanks to these results, astronomers will now be able to understand better how the surface of an asteroid — which often is the only thing we can observe — reflects its history.

Notes

[1] Meteorites are small fragments of asteroids that fall on Earth. While a meteorite enters the Earth's atmosphere its surface can melt and be partially charred by the intense heat. Nevertheless, the meteorite interior remains unaffected, and can be studied in a laboratory, providing a wealth of information on the nature and composition of asteroids.

[2] An asteroid family is a group of asteroids that are on similar orbits around the Sun. The members of a given family are believed to be the fragments of a larger asteroid that was destroyed during a collision.

[3] The surface of an asteroid is affected by the highly energetic particles forming the solar wind. These particles partially destroy the molecules and crystals on the surface, re-arranging them in other combinations. Over time, these changes give formation of a thin crust or irradiated material with distinct colours and properties.

Cassiopeia A: Colorful Aftermath Of A Violent Stellar Death

A new image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at the tattered remains of a supernova explosion known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A). It is the youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The new Hubble image shows the complex and intricate structure of the star's shattered fragments. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgement: Robert A. Fesen (Dartmouth College, USA) and James Long (ESA/Hubble))

A new image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at the tattered remains of a supernova explosion known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A). It is the youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The new Hubble image shows the complex and intricate structure of the star's shattered fragments.
The image is a composite made from 18 separate images taken using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and it shows the Cas A remnant as a broken ring of bright filamentary and clumpy stellar ejecta. These huge swirls of debris glow with the heat generated by the passage of a shockwave from the supernova blast. The various colours of the gaseous shards indicate differences in chemical composition. Bright green filaments are rich in oxygen, red and purple are sulphur, and blue are composed mostly of hydrogen and nitrogen.

A supernova such as the one that resulted in Cas A is the explosive demise of a massive star that collapses under the weight of its own gravity. The collapsed star then blows its outer layers into space in an explosion that can briefly outshine its entire parent galaxy. Cas A is relatively young, estimated to be only about 340 years old. Hubble has observed it on several occasions to look for changes in the rapidly expanding filaments.

In the latest observing campaign, two sets of images were taken, separated by nine months. Even in that short time, Hubble's razor-sharp images can observe the expansion of the remnant. Comparison of the two image sets shows that a faint stream of debris seen along the upper left side of the remnant is moving with high speed - up to 50 million kilometres per hour (fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 30 seconds!).

Cas A is located ten thousand light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Supernova explosions are the main source of elements more complex than oxygen, which are forged in the extreme conditions produced in these events. The analysis of such a nearby, relatively young and fresh example is extremely helpful in understanding the evolution of the Universe.

Youngest Supernova Remnant: Researchers 'Clear Away The Dust' To Get Better Look

A new mathematical model allows researchers to get a clearer picture of the galaxy's youngest supernova remnant by correcting for the distortions caused by cosmic dust. (Credit: Chandra X-ray Center/NASA/NC State U.)

Researchers at North Carolina State University have used a mathematical model that allows them to get a clearer picture of the galaxy's youngest supernova remnant by correcting for the distortions caused by cosmic dust.
Their new data provides evidence that this remnant is from a type Ia supernova -- the explosion of a white dwarf star -- and raises questions about the ways in which magnetic fields affect the generation of the remnant's cosmic ray particles.

NC State physicists Dr. Stephen Reynolds and Dr. Kazimierz Borkowski, with colleagues from Cambridge University and NASA, re-examined their original X-ray images of supernova remnant G1.9+0.3 in an attempt to glean more information about the remnant's origins, rate of expansion, and any cosmic particles that may have resulted from the explosion. Scientists know that supernovae create cosmic rays - fast-moving subatomic particles that play a role in the formation of stars - but they aren't sure how this occurs or what other functions the particles may serve.

"We knew the dust was a problem - it's why we never saw the original supernova light in Victorian times," Reynolds says. "Our high-powered orbiting telescopes use X-rays to take pictures of these objects, and the dust scatters these X-rays, so in order to get data that might be helpful to us, we first had to correct for the dust distortion."

A mathematical model allowed the scientists to deduce how many X-rays from each part of the remnant were scattered from another part. After this correction, they found that the "bright" and "dim" sides of the remnant had more and fewer of the highest-energy X-rays, respectively. Reynolds says that this pattern is best explained by a type Ia supernova, and that the difference in brightness corresponds to the level of synchrotronic X-rays present. Synchrotronic X-rays (like those produced by terrestrial synchrotron particle accelerators) are produced by high-energy cosmic particles, making this remnant one of the best examples of a cosmic ray accelerator that scientists have.

In addition, the location of the bright and dim sides point to the presence of a magnetic field that is affecting the remnant's acceleration process, and the distribution of cosmic rays.

The results were published in the April 20 edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"We use supernovae as flashbulbs across the universe ( a means to make assumptions about how the universe works," Reynolds says. "Shockwaves from the explosions and the fast-moving cosmic particles that come from them play roles in galaxy formation. If we can figure out how these particles are energized, and how magnetic fields affect them, we'll be able to answer all sorts of questions about our universe."

Most Distant Detection Of Water In The Universe

stronomers have found the most distant signs of water in the Universe to date. The water vapour is thought to be contained in a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy, named MG J0414+0534
Dr John McKean of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) will be presenting the discovery at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Hatfield on Wednesday 22nd April.

The water emission is seen as a maser, where molecules in the gas amplify and emit beams of microwave radiation in much the same way as a laser emits beams of light. The faint signal is only detectable by using a technique called gravitational lensing, where the gravity of a massive galaxy in the foreground acts as a cosmic telescope, bending and magnifying light from the distant galaxy to make a clover-leaf pattern of four images of MG J0414+0534. The water maser was only detectable in the brightest two of these images.

Dr McKean said, "We have been observing the water maser every month since the detection and seen a steady signal with no apparent change in the velocity of the water vapour in the data we've obtained so far. This backs up our prediction that the water is found in the jet from the supermassive black hole, rather than the rotating disc of gas that surrounds it."

The radiation from the water maser was emitted when the Universe was only about 2.5 billion years old, a fifth of its current age.

"The radiation that we detected has taken 11.1 billion years to reach the Earth. However, because the Universe has expanded like an inflating balloon in that time, stretching out the distances between points, the galaxy in which the water was detected is about 19.8 billion light years away," explained Dr McKean.

Although since the initial discovery the team has looked at five more systems that have not had water masers, they believe that it is likely that there are many more similar systems in the early Universe. Surveys of nearby galaxies have found that only about 5% have powerful water masers associated with active galactic nuclei. In addition, studies show that very powerful water masers are extremely rare compared to their less luminous counterparts. The water maser in MG J0414+0534 is about 10 000 times the luminosity of the Sun, which means that if water masers were equally rare in the early Universe, the chances of making this discovery would be improbably slight.

"We found a signal from a really powerful water maser in the first system that we looked at using the gravitational lensing technique. From what we know about the abundance of water masers locally, we could calculate the probability of finding a water maser as powerful as the one in MG J0414+0534 to be one in a million from a single observation. This means that the abundance of powerful water masers must be much higher in the distant Universe than found locally because I’m sure we are just not that lucky!" said Dr McKean.

The discovery of the water maser was made by a team led by Dr Violette Impellizzeri using the 100-metre Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany during July to September 2007. The discovery was confirmed by observations with the Expanded Very Large Array in the USA in September and October 2007. The team included Alan Roy, Christian Henkel and Andreas Brunthaler, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Paola Castangia from Cagliari Observatory and Olaf Wucknitz from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University. The findings were published in Nature in December 2008.

The team is now analysing high-resolution data to find out how close the water maser lies to the supermassive black hole, which will give them new insights into the structure at the centre of active galaxies in the early Universe.

"This detection of water in the early Universe may mean that there is a higher abundance of dust and gas around the super-massive black hole at these epochs, or it may be because the black holes are more active, leading to the emission of more powerful jets that can stimulate the emission of water masers. We certainly know that the water vapour must be very hot and dense for us to observe a maser, so right now we are trying to establish what mechanism caused the gas to be so dense," said Dr McKean.