Category Astronomy/Space

M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, C. J. Horowitz. The Elasticity of Nuclear Pasta. Physical Review Letters, 2018

A team of scientists has calculated the strength of the material deep inside the crust of neutron stars and found it to be the strongest known material in the universe. Matthew Caplan, a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, and his colleagues from Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology, successfully ran the largest computer simulations ever conducted of neutron star crusts, becoming the first to describe how these break. “The strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysics problems, but isn’t well understood,” says Caplan.

Neutron stars are born after supernovas, an implosion ...

Artist’s conception of the Epsilon Indi system. The two brown dwarfs orbit their common center of mass, which in turn orbits the much more distant primary component, a Sun-like star. By mapping the orbital motion of the brown dwarfs, the team was able to determine their masses. Much like our Solar System’s giant planets, brown dwarfs are thought to have cloud belts that encircle the entire object and give it a striped appearance.
Credit: Illustration is by Roberto Molar Candanosa and Sergio Dieterich, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The line that separates stars from brown dwarfs may soon be clearer thanks to new work led by Carnegie’s Serge Dieterich...

This illustration shows a neutron star (RX J0806.4-4123) with a disk of warm dust that produces an infrared signature as detected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The disk wasn’t directly photographed, but one way to explain the data is by hypothesizing a disk structure that could be 18 billion miles across. The disk would be made up of material falling back onto the neutron star after the supernova explosion that created the stellar remnant.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and N. Tr’Ehnl (Pennsylvania State University)

An unusual infrared light emission from a nearby neutron star detected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could indicate new features never before seen...

The galaxy cluster Abell 370 was the first target of the BUFFALO survey, which aims to search for some of the first galaxies in the Universe.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Koekemoer, M. Jauzac, C. Steinhardt, and the BUFFALO team

New Hubble project provides wide-field view of the galaxy cluster Abell 370. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has started a new mission to shed light on the evolution of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. The BUFFALO survey will observe six massive galaxy clusters and their surroundings. The first observations show the galaxy cluster Abell 370 and a host of magnified, gravitationally lensed galaxies around it.

Learning about the formation and evolution of the very first galaxies in the Universe is crucial for our understanding of the cosmos...