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News of Venice, CA and Marina del Rey CA

NASA Targets May 2018 Launch for Mars InSight Mission

Posted by :reta On : March 16, 2016
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Note: This is a press release from JPL/NASA.

NASA has set a new launch opportunity, beginning May 5, 2018, for the InSight mission to Mars. InSight is the first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior of Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA has set a new launch opportunity, beginning May 5, 2018, for the InSight mission to Mars. InSight is the first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior of Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to study the deep interior of Mars is targeting a new launch window that begins May 5, 2018, with a Mars landing scheduled for Nov. 26, 2018.

InSight’s primary goal is to help us understand how rocky planets—including Earth—formed and evolved. The spacecraft had been on track to launch this month until a vacuum leak in its prime science instrument prompted NASA in December to suspend preparations for launch.

InSight project managers recently briefed officials at NASA and France’s space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), on a path forward; the proposed plan to redesign the science instrument was accepted in support of a 2018 launch.

“The science goals of InSight are compelling, and the NASA and CNES plans to overcome the technical challenges are sound,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The quest to understand the interior of Mars has been a longstanding goal of planetary scientists for decades. We’re excited to be back on the path for a launch, now in 2018.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will redesign, build and conduct qualifications of the new vacuum enclosure for the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), the component that failed in December. CNES will lead instrument level integration and test activities, allowing the InSight Project to take advantage of each organization’s proven strengths. The two agencies have worked closely together to establish a project schedule that accommodates these plans, and scheduled interim reviews over the next six months to assess technical progress and continued feasibility.

The cost of the two-year delay is being assessed. An estimate is expected in August, once arrangements with the launch vehicle provider have been made.

The seismometer instrument’s main sensors need to operate within a vacuum chamber to provide the exquisite sensitivity needed for measuring ground movements as small as half the radius of a hydrogen atom. The rework of the seismometer’s vacuum container will result in a finished, thoroughly tested instrument in 2017 that will maintain a high degree of vacuum around the sensors through rigors of launch, landing, deployment and a two-year prime mission on the surface of Mars.

“The shared and renewed commitment to this mission continues our collaboration to find clues in the heart of Mars about the early evolution of our solar system,” said Marc Pircher, director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre.

The mission’s international science team includes researchers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Budding Astropoets You’re On!

Posted by :reta On : March 2, 2016
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DISCOVER THE ASTROPOET IN YOU.
Have you ever looked up at the Moon or stars and said, “That’s so beautiful, I wish I could write a poem about it?” Well, now may be the time for you—or your children—to do just that, and you could win an international award in the process.

The global organization devoted to astronomy education, Astronomers Without Borders (www.astronomerswithoutborders.org), invites children and adults everywhere to submit poems to its annual AstroPoetry Contest. The contest, in three categories—children, young adults, and adults—is open for poetry submissions from now through April 30. Poems may be in any form, but should be related to astronomy, space, or the night sky. For details and the submission form, go to:

http://astronomerswithoutborders.org/gam/global-astronomy-month-2016/astroarts/astropoetry.html

As an example, here’s a poem from one of the Young Adult winners in AWB’s 2014 contest:

PLUTO
by Rachel Pribble, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

Pluto
Forgotten Planet
Isolated, neglected, frigid
Small but worthy rock
Planetoid

Classroom teachers are especially encouraged to use this contest as a student project, which would promote an imaginative mix of both English writing skills and scientific thinking. Good luck!

Antarctic Fungi Survive Martian Conditions On International Space Station

Posted by :reta On : February 29, 2016
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Note: This is a press release from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Antarctic-fungi-survive-Martian-conditions-on-the-International-Space-Station_image_380

The McMurdo Dry Valleys, located in the Antarctic Victoria Land, are considered to be the most similar earthly equivalent to Mars. They make up one of the driest and most hostile environments on our planet, where strong winds scour away even snow and ice. Only so-called cryptoendolithic microorganisms—capable of surviving in cracks in rocks—and certain lichens can withstand such harsh conditions.

A few years ago a team of European researchers traveled to these remote valleys to collect samples of two species of cryptoendolithic fungi: Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri. The aim was to send them to the International Space Station (ISS) for them to be subjected to Martian conditions and space to observe their responses.

The tiny fungi were placed in cells (1.4 centimeters in diameter) on a platform for experiments known as EXPOSE-E, developed by the European Space Agency to withstand extreme environments. The platform was sent in the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the ISS.

For 18 months half of the Antarctic fungi were exposed to Mars-like conditions. More specifically, they were placed in an atmosphere with 95% CO2, 1.6% argon, 0.15% oxygen, 2.7% nitrogen and 370 parts per million of H2O; and a pressure of 1,000 pascals. Through optical filters, some of the samples were subjected to ultraviolet radiation as if on Mars (higher than 200 nanometers) and others to lower radiation, including separate control samples.

“The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars,’ or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,” says Rosa de la Torre Noetzel from Spain’s National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), co-researcher on the project.

De la Torre explains that this work, published in the journal Astrobiology, forms part of an experiment known as the Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE), “with which we have studied the fate or destiny of various communities of lithic organisms during a long-term voyage into space on the EXPOSE-E platform.”

Gravity Waves and ET

Posted by :reta On : February 19, 2016
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Here is an article by Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer for SETI, regarding gravitational waves that were just verified.

gravitational-waves Image by NASA

By Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer for SETI
The other shoe has dropped.

After a century of speculation and a half-century of searching, science teams using instruments built by Caltech and MIT have made a discovery that will take up permanent residency in physics textbooks from now to the end of textbooks. They’ve found the gravity waves that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted must pervade the cosmos.

There’s little doubt that this experiment should be celebrated. It’s a triumph of perseverance and clever effort: the instrumentation involved is able to detect distortions amounting to a millionth of a billionth of a meter in a tube four kilometers long. That’s like measuring the distance to Mars with a precision greater than the thickness of a bacterium’s cell wall.

Once more, Einstein’s concept of space-time has been vindicated, and while pundits love to talk about how incomplete science is and how little those pointy-headed academics know, this discovery indicates that there are things we do know. Important things, such as the behavior of space and time.

This is a story about physics, of course. But although one seldom hears “extraterrestrial intelligence” and “space-time continuum” in the same breath (unless you’re a Dr. Who fan), there’s a perceived connection between the two subjects.

I often get correspondence from folks who think that listening for radio signals or looking for laser flashes are fundamentally flawed approaches to hunting down evidence for alien beings. The extraterrestrials, these people suggest, will have moved on to a more avant-garde communication mode: gravity waves.

There are, indeed, some positive arguments for aliens with a penchant for palaver to opt for gravity wave communication. Gravity waves can travel unhindered through the dusty material that suffuses interstellar space — unlike laser light. And gravity waves aren’t distorted and scattered by the ionized gas that clutters the cosmos — unlike radio waves.

In addition, you don’t have to aim your gravity wave detector in any particular direction: the waves go right through the Earth and reach you from everywhere.

But alas, there’s a serious downside.

The gravitational disturbance that produced this history-making detection was apparently the result of two colliding black holes. That’s not something you see every day. Yes, gravity waves are ubiquitous: they’re generated as the Moon orbits the Earth or for that matter whenever you wave your arms. But even the extremely sensitive instrumentation of LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is thoroughly unable to pick up these very local disturbances. It took a rare cosmic catastrophe to produce a space-time ripple large enough to be sensed.

So imagine a scenario in which every time you want to send a bit of information to another part of the universe, you have to slam together a pair of black holes. Not easy, and not cheap — especially if your goal is to send lots of information.

Also, many people (including, it must be said, Isaac Newton) have assumed that gravity waves travel at infinite speed. That would be a real plus for using them to communicate across the vast distances of the cosmos. But it’s not true: they travel no faster than light and radio. If the Sun were to evaporate right now, Earth would continue to orbit its ghost for another eight minutes before barreling in a straight line towards the galaxy’s nether regions.

Gravity waves may not be the communication mode of choice for intelligent beings, but they will eventually give us an entirely new way to study the cosmos, including its earliest history. That’s a real promise.

Meanwhile, there’s this philosophical uplift: Gravity waves have been as elusive as the Higgs boson, dark matter and dark energy. But they’re another cosmic phenomenon that has just moved from the category of “blackboard conjecture” to that of “experimentally demonstrated.” It’s an important day.

Ceres: Celebrating 215 Years of Planetary Discovery

Posted by :reta On : February 4, 2016
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Note: This is a press release from JPL.

dawn

New Year’s Day, 1801, the dawn of the 19th century, was a historic moment for astronomy, and for a space mission called Dawn more than 200 years later. That night, Giuseppe Piazzi pointed his telescope at the sky and observed a distant object that we now know as dwarf planet Ceres.

Today, NASA’s Dawn mission allows us to see Ceres in exquisite detail. From the images Dawn has taken over the past year, we know Ceres is a heavily cratered body with diverse features on its surface that include a tall, cone-shaped mountain and more than 130 reflective patches of material that is likely salt. But on that fateful evening in 1801, Piazzi wasn’t sure what he was seeing when he noticed a small, faint light through his telescope.

“When Piazzi discovered Ceres, exploring it was beyond imagination. More than two centuries later, NASA dispatched a machine on a cosmic journey of more than 3 billion miles to reach the distant, mysterious world he glimpsed,” said Marc Rayman, mission director and chief engineer for Dawn at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Piazzi was the director of the Palermo Observatory in Sicily, Italy, which has collected documents and instruments from the astronomer’s time, and published a booklet on the discovery of Ceres. According to the observatory, Piazzi had been working on a catalog of star positions on January 1, 1801, when he noticed something whose “light was a little faint and colored as Jupiter.” He looked for it again on subsequent nights and saw that its position changed slightly.

What was this object? Piazzi wrote to fellow astronomers Johann Elert Bode and Barnaba Oriani to tell them he had discovered a comet.

“I have presented this star as a comet, but owing to its lack of nebulosity, and to its motion being so slow and rather uniform, I feel in the heart that it could be something better than a comet, perhaps. However, I should be very careful in passing this conjecture to the public,” Piazzi wrote to Oriani.

By July 1801, Piazzi had calculating the object’s orbit and made public his observations, announcing it as a planet, and naming it “Ceres”—after the Roman goddess of agriculture, was also the patron deity of Sicily, where Piazzi then lived and worked.

The news was especially interesting to Bode because he had championed the Titius-Bode hypothesis: that the positions of planets in our solar system follow a specific pattern, which predicts each planet’s distance from the Sun. The pattern demanded that there be a planet, yet undiscovered, between Mars and Jupiter—and this is exactly where Ceres orbited.

In March 1802, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers discovered a second, similar object: Pallas. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, then wrote an essay proposing that both Ceres and Pallas represented an entirely new class of objects, which he named “asteroids.”

The door had opened for many more asteroids to be observed. The discoveries of Juno in 1804 and Vesta in 1807 reinforced Herschel’s notion that asteroids are a class of their own. Today, we know there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Now, as we commemorate the 215th anniversary of Ceres’ discovery, Dawn is observing the dwarf planet from its lowest orbit ever: 240 miles from the surface. The many craters and other features that Piazzi could not see with his telescope are being named after agricultural deities or festivals, extending the theme that Piazzi began with the name “Ceres.”

Planet Found — Number 9

Posted by :reta On : January 25, 2016
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Note: This is a press release from Caltech

Planet9

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the distant solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the Sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the Sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, Caltech’s Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”

Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets — a fact that Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system.”

Batygin and Brown describe their work in the current issue of the Astronomical Journal and show how Planet Nine helps explain a number of mysterious features of the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there,” says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. “For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete.”

The road to the theoretical discovery was not straightforward. In 2014, a former postdoc of Brown’s, Chad Trujillo, and his colleague Scott Shepherd published a paper noting that 13 of the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt are similar with respect to an obscure orbital feature. To explain that similarity, they suggested the possible presence of a small planet. Brown thought the planet solution was unlikely, but his interest was piqued.

He took the problem down the hall to Batygin, and the two started what became a year-and-a-half-long collaboration to investigate the distant objects. As an observer and a theorist, respectively, the researchers approached the work from very different perspectives—Brown as someone who looks at the sky and tries to anchor everything in the context of what can be seen, and Batygin as someone who puts himself within the context of dynamics, considering how things might work from a physics standpoint. Those differences allowed the researchers to challenge each other’s ideas and to consider new possibilities.

“I would bring in some of these observational aspects; he would come back with arguments from theory, and we would push each other. I don’t think the discovery would have happened without that back-and-forth,” says Brown. “It was perhaps the most fun year of working on a problem in the solar system that I’ve ever had.”

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not so far, far away…

Posted by :reta On : January 11, 2016
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Note: This is a press release from NASA/JPL.

Kepler

The fantasy creations of the “Star Wars” universe are strikingly similar to real planets in our own Milky Way galaxy. A super-Earth in deep freeze? Think ice-planet Hoth. And that distant world with double sunsets can’t help but summon thoughts of sandy Tatooine.

The most recently revealed exoplanet possessing Earth-like properties, Kepler-452b, might make a good stand-in for Coruscant—the high-tech world, seen in several Star Wars films, whose surface is encased in a globe-spanning city. Kepler-452b belongs to a star system 1.5 billion years older than Earth’s. That would give an advanced civilization more than a billion-year jump on us. The denizens of Coruscant not only have an entirely engineered planetary surface, but an engineered climate as well. On Kepler-452b, conditions are growing warmer as its star’s energy output increases—a symptom of advanced age. If this planet (which is 1.6 times the size of Earth) is truly Earth-like, some climate engineering might be needed there as well.

The planet Mustafar, scene of an epic duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in “Revenge of the Sith,” has a number of exoplanet counterparts. These molten, lava-covered worlds, such as Kepler-10b and Kepler-78b, are rocky planets in Earth’s size range whose surfaces could well be perpetual infernos.

The planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390, nicknamed “Hoth,” is a cold super-Earth, with a mass five times that of Earth and a surface temperature estimated at minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit. That most likely means no Hoth-style tauntauns to ride, or even formidably fanged abominable snowmen (aka wampas). Astronomers used an extraordinary planet-finding technique known as microlensing to find this world in 2005—one of the early demonstrations of this technique’s ability to reveal exoplanets. In microlensing, backlight from a distant star is used to reveal planets around a star closer to us

Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, is said to possess a harsh, desert environment, swept by sandstorms as it roasts under the glare of twin suns. Real exoplanets in the thrall of two or more suns likely have even harsher environments. Kepler-16b was the Kepler telescope’s first discovery of a planet in a “circumbinary” orbit—circling both stars, as opposed to just one, in a double-star system. This planet, however, is likely cold, about the size of Saturn, and gaseous, though partly composed of rock. It lies outside its two stars’ “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist, and its stars are cooler than our sun—all of which probably adds up to a lifeless Tatooine.

Endor, the forested realm of the Ewoks introduced in “Return of the Jedi.” is a moon orbiting a gas giant. Detection of exomoons—moons circling distant planets—is still in its infancy for scientists here on Earth. A possible exomoon was observed in 2014 via microlensing. It will remain forever unconfirmed, however, since each microlensing event can be seen only once. If the exomoon is real, it orbits a rogue planet, unattached to a star and wandering freely through space. The planet might have hung on to its moon after somehow being ejected during the early history of a forgotten planetary system.

The hunt for exomoons could actually have powerful implications in the search for life beyond Earth. If exomoons are shown to be potentially habitable, this would open another avenue for biology; habitable moons might even outnumber habitable planets. Could they have bustling ecosystems, with life forms even more exotic than Endor’s living teddy bears, swinging between trees Tarzan-style? Stay tuned.

Einstein’s Cross Under the Gravitational Microlens

Posted by :reta On : December 30, 2015
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Note: This is a press releasew from the Valencian Universities Network for the Promotion of Research, Development and Innovation (RUVID) in Spain.

Einstein_cross

A team of Spanish astrophysicists has obtained precise measurements for the innermost region of a disc of matter in orbital motion around a supermassive black hole in the lensed quasar known as Einstein’s Cross (Q2237-0305). It constitutes the most precise set of measurements achieved to date for such a small and distant object.

The researchers used microlensing to resolve the distorted images collected by the OGLE and GLITP gravitational microlensing projects, which have had their instruments trained on Einstein’s Cross for over a decade. By studying the variation in brightness of four different images (the four points of the ‘cross’), they have been able to obtain precise measurements of what is likely the innermost stable orbit of its accretion disc.

“Over recent years we have shown how microlensing allows us to analyze the structure of accretion discs in quasars, and now we have obtained precise measurements for a structure right at the innermost rim, potentially its last stable orbit before the black hole event horizon,” explains José Antonio Muñoz, lecturer at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universitat de València, who took part in this research alongside colleagues at the universities of Granada, Cadiz and the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute.

His colleague, Jorge Jiménez Vicente at the University of Granada, adds that “the big breakthrough here is that we have been able to do this for such a small disc, so far away—it is like being able to detect a one euro coin located over 100,000 kilometers away.”

Currently only one in every 500 quasars can be measured in this way. However, Jiménez Vicente points to a future, when large-scale monitoring programs (like the 8.4 meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope planned for northern Chile by 2022) are up-and-running, where “the detection of high magnification microlensing events like this one will be possible for thousands of quasars.”

Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them, quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our sun. These powerful dynamos, the brightest and most distant objects that can be observed, have fascinated astronomers since their discovery half a century ago.

A gravitational lens refers to a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant source and an observer that is capable of bending the light from the source, as it travels towards the observer. This effect is known as gravitational lensing and the amount of bending is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Einstein’s Cross (also known as quasar Q2237+030 or QSO 2237+0305) is a gravitationally lensed quasar that sits directly behind ZW 2237+030, Huchra’s Lens. Four images of the same distant quasar appear around a foreground galaxy due to strong gravitational lensing, which bends and splits the starlight, causing the single quasar to appear as four images.

The quasar’s redshift indicated that it is located about 8 billion light years from Earth, while the lensing galaxy is at a distance of 400 million light years. The apparent dimensions of the entire foreground galaxy are 0.87×0.34 arcminutes, while the apparent dimension of the cross in its centre accounts for only 1.6×1.6 arcseconds.

Einstein’s Cross is located in the constellation Pegasus.

Bob of “Looking Up” Column Checks Out “Venice Moon”

Posted by :reta On : December 18, 2015
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photo, Laura and Bob Eklund Laura and Bob Eklund.

Venice Update’s own Bob Eklund of Bob Eklund’s “Looking Up” column peeped at the “Venice moon” at the Venice library last Thursday.

The Venice Library hosted the Star Party, which is a group of astronomers who share their telescopes and knowledge to all those interested. These star gazers set up their telescopes wherever there is a “desire.”

Eklund learned of the Star Party via the Update and revealed that it was his son, Dana who, as a Young Adult Librarian at the LAPL Sylmar Library, started the library “Star Parties.”

“I went, and it was lovely (and cold). I got lost in Venice trying to find the library, would you believe — and after having hosted a star party there myself, not too many years ago. How we forget! I turned onto Abbott Kinney Blvd. (a fascinating shopping district) by mistake, but a helpful Venician pointed me back.

“It was a small party — one lovely telescope pointed at the moon and a small trickle of people, stopping to look as they went into the library. But lo and behold, the astronomer who had brought the telescope was Bob Alborzian, a good friend of mine. He had just given a star party the night before for my son Dana at the LAPL Sylmar branch library.

“Bob is the salt of the earth — a most kind, unselfish person who spends much of his life out on the sidewalks sharing the sky with the people. There must be a special place in heaven for his kind.

“I think the best part of the evening was talking with a half-dozen or so very interesting denizens of Venice, among those who stopped at the telescope to look up. Venice is definitely a special and very creative place (and hard to drive in at night if you’re not familiar with it)!”

According to Bob, he and his son started gazing when Dana was 13. “I bought a used telescope, which we both used, and we both joined an astronomy club that meets at Griffith. Within a year or two, he became much more skilled than I. Incidentally, I later met my present wife Laura through that club!

“Kind of carrying on a tradition, I guess. My grandfather worked for an observatory in Wisconsin, my uncle was an astronomer, and my mom used to get me out of bed at 2 am to watch the Perseid meteor shower when I was 6 years old.

“So far my granddaughter (age 12) hasn’t caught the astro-bug yet, but at least she (along with her mom) is a Star Wars fan.”

NASA’s Fermi Satellite Kicks off a Blazar-Detecting Bonanza

Posted by :reta On : December 18, 2015
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Note: This is a press release from NASA.


(Courtesty of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.)

A long time ago in a galaxy half the universe away, a flood of high-energy gamma rays began its journey to Earth. When they arrived in April, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope caught the outburst, which helped two ground-based gamma-ray observatories detect some of the highest-energy light ever seen from a galaxy so distant. The observations provide a surprising look into the environment near a super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center, and offer a glimpse into the state of the cosmos 7 billion years ago.

“When we looked at all the data from this event, from gamma rays to radio, we realized the measurements told us something we didn’t expect about how the black hole produced this energy,” said Jonathan Biteau at the Nuclear Physics Institute of Orsay, France. He led the study of results from the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a gamma-ray telescope in Arizona.

Astronomers had assumed that light at different energies came from regions at different distances from the black hole. Gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, were thought to be produced closest to the black hole.

“Instead, the multi-wavelength picture suggests that light at all wavelengths came from a single region located far away from the power source,” Biteau explained. The observations place the area roughly five light-years from the black hole, which is greater than the distance between our Sun and the nearest star.

The gamma rays came from a galaxy known as PKS 1441+25, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. Located toward the constellation Boötes, the galaxy is so far away its light takes 7.6 billion years to reach us. At its heart lies a monster black hole with a mass estimated at 70 million times the Sun’s.

As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, some of it forms dual particle jets that blast out of the disk in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Blazars are so bright in gamma rays because one jet points almost directly toward us, giving astronomers a view straight into the black hole’s dynamic and poorly understood realm.

In April, PKS 1441+25 underwent a major eruption. Luigi Pacciani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome was leading a project to catch blazar flares in their earliest stages in collaboration with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cerenkov experiment (MAGIC), located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Using public Fermi data, Pacciani discovered the outburst and immediately alerted the astronomical community. Fermi’s Large Area Telescope revealed gamma rays up to 33 billion electron volts (GeV), reaching into the highest-energy part of the instrument’s detection range. For comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts.

Following up on the Fermi alert, the MAGIC team turned to the blazar and detected gamma rays with energies ranging from 40 to 250 GeV. “Because this galaxy is so far away, we didn’t have a strong expectation of detecting gamma rays with energies this high,” said Josefa Becerra Gonzalez, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There are fewer and fewer gamma rays at progressively higher energies, and fewer still from very distant sources.”

The reason distance matters for gamma rays is that they convert into particles when they collide with lower-energy light. When a gamma ray encounters starlight, it transforms into an electron and a positron and is lost to astronomers. The farther away the blazar is, the less likely its highest-energy gamma rays will survive to be detected.