Tag: Star

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New Beginning by John Hawkhead

protostar flare
a new beginning
in the sonogram

by John Hawkhead

A protostar is a young star still gathering mass from its parent molecular cloud. The protostellar phase is the earliest the process of stellar evolution.

A sonogram is a picture made by ultrasound waves to show the inside of the human body, including in pregnancy assessment.

Further reading:

‘Protostar’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostar

‘Ultrasound’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

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Sun Trails by Joshua St. Claire

magnetic lines of force
radiating from the sun
contrails

by Joshua St. Claire

The movement of the charged particles of the sun’s plasma creates a powerful and complex magnetic field. The origin and evolution of the field is still an active area of research, but it’s proven to have an impact on the Earth. The periodicity of the intensity of the sun’s magnetic field has a demonstrable impact to the climate of Earth and solar flares pose a risk to electronics, as demonstrated by the Carrington Event of 1859.

Recently, stories circulated in the media saying that “a piece of the sun has broken off.” While these headlines were sensational, these observations underscore the fact that much of what happens in the sun and, by extension, other stars remains a mystery.

Further reading:

‘A Piece of the Sun Has Broken off and Formed a Strange Crown-like Vortex over It!’, The Weather Channel: https://weather.com/en-IN/india/space/news/2023-02-10-piece-of-sun-broke-off-and-formed-crown-like-vortex-over-it

‘Understanding the Magnetic Sun’, NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/understanding-the-magnetic-sun

‘The Carrington Event: History’s greatest solar storm’, Space.com: https://www.space.com/the-carrington-event

Author bio:

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant who works as a financial executive for a large non-profit in rural Pennsylvania, USA. His work in haiku and related forms has been published broadly. He was included in the 2022 Dwarf Stars Anthology, and he is the winner of the 2022 Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award.

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Young Star by petro c. k.

young star
accretion of dust
on a photo

By petro c. k.

When a star is just beginning to form, it collects a cloud of dust and particles that exist around it called a protoplanetary disk. It is thought the protoplanetary disk is connected to the star by a magnetic field, and the particles follow the field until they crash onto the surface of the growing star.

Studying and observing the phenomena of such dust in other stars gives new insights into how our own star, the sun – and our subsequent solar system – formed.

Further reading:

‘What Can a Young Star Teach Us about the Birth of Our Planet, Sun and Solar System?’, The Brink, Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/young-stars/

Author bio:

petro c. k. is a temporal being on a habitable rock spinning in space that tries to compress observations of an infinitesimally small section of the universe into haiku. You can catch up with petro on Twitter here: @petro_ck

Check out other sciku by petro c. k. here: ‘Saturn’s Moons’, ‘Marble’, and ‘Giggling’.

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The Dimming Forebear

Gaia. Rooting out
planetary impostures.
K’s false positives.

The Kepler Space Telescope was designed to discover earth-sized planets orbiting around other stars within our region of the Milky Way. Named after German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, it was launched in 2009 and retired on the 15th November 2018, the 388th anniversary of the death of its namesake in 1630.

During its lifetime the Kepler Space Telescope discovered 2,662 planets, something it achieved by observing 530,506 stars and looking for drops in their intensity that could indicate a planet passing in front of them. Among these planets were some that were the correct distance from their star and had the right size and atmospheric pressure to support liquid water at the planet’s surface. Other planets discovered orbited two stars instead of one, and ‘hot Jupiters’ – gas giants similar to Jupiter but orbiting in close proximity to their star.

Yet telescopes continue to advance technologically. The Kepler Space Telescope used a photometer to observe the stars in its field of view. The Gaia Space Observatory, launched in 2013, uses a photometer along with an astrometry instrument and a radial-vector spectrometer.

Now research by Niraula et al. (2022) suggests that three or even four of the planets identified by the Kepler Space Telescope aren’t planets at all but are in fact stars. The team was reviewing the planetary data produced by the Kepler Space Telescope and realised that with updated measurements from the Gaia Space Observatory the ‘planets’ Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b were far too large to be planets – each of them two to four times the size of Jupiter. The fourth ‘planet’, Kepler-747b, is 1.8 times the size of Jupiter, at the very top end of observed planets, but its far distance from its star suggests that its more likely to be a star itself than a planet.

Four out of over two and a half thousand discovered planets isn’t a large amount and certainly doesn’t take anything away from the incredible job that the Kepler Space Telescope did during its lifetime. Yet the new findings are hugely important for our knowledge and understanding of planets – by correcting this error the planet dataset is more accurate for those who are studying the population of planets as a whole.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ac4f64

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2M0437b

An ancient baby
in a stellar nursery.
Hot off the star press.

One of the youngest planets ever discovered has been recorded by a team of researchers working with the Subaru and Keck-2 telescopes on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai’i. The planet, 2M0437b, was first spotted in 2018 and has taken 3 years of observations to confirm.

Planet 2M0437b. The image was taken with the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea. Credit: Subaru Telescope and Gaidos, et al. (2021)

2M0437b is found, along with its parent star (2M0437), in a stellar ‘nursery’ called the Taurus Cloud and was formed several million years ago, around the same time as when the island it was observed from emerged above the ocean. In fact, the planet is so young it’s still hot from its formation, approximately the temperature of lava: 1400-1500K. The planet is a few times larger than Jupiter and has an orbit around its star that’s around 100 times as far as the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Subaru Telescope and Keck Observatory on Maunakea. Credit: University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy

The young planet can help further build our understanding of how planets form, and challenges some current explanations. As Gaidos et al. (2021) say “the discovery of a super-Jupiter around a very young, very low mass star challenges models of planet formation by either core accretion (which requires time) or disc instability (which requires mass).” Future observations with space telescopes such as the Hubble will help to provide more information about the infant planet and further build our knowledge of the universe.

Original research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08655

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Star evolution

Increased shutter speed
proves stellar structure theory.
Star evolution.

The stellar structure model describes the internal structure of a star. Now researchers have validated this model by taking photos of a cool subdwarf star using a high-speed camera, allowing them to predict the star’s future evolution.

Rebessa-Mansergas et al (2019) used HiPERCAM, a camera mounted on the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma. The camera is able to take a photo in five different colours simultaneously every millisecond (compared to every few minutes), allowing the researchers to get precise measurements of the star’s mass and radius – both validating the stellar structure model for the first time and allowing the researchers to forecast the star’s evolution.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0746-7

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Petite galaxy

Petite galaxy,

so young and oxygen-poor.

What can you tell us?

 

As the first galaxies formed they were chemically simple, composed of elements (hydrogen and helium) made during the first 3 minutes of the universe’s existence following the big bang. Oxygen and other complex elements formed later leading to the creation of oxygen-rich galaxies throughout the universe (like the Milky Way). In order to understand primordial galaxies astronomers need to observe oxygen-poor galaxies but finding such galaxies close enough for observation is extremely difficult.

Now a study by Izotov et al (2017) has found the most metal-poor dwarf star-forming galaxy known to date (J0811+4730), which has 9% less oxygen than any galaxy discovered so far. Observations of the young galaxy J0811+4730 could provide information about those galaxies formed during the early period of the universe as well as insights into how the early universe became re-ionized.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx2478