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Giant, Strange Ring Mystifies Astronomers
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Vatic Note:
This mystifies me as well. What the heck is it? It reminds me of the ring of fire in our Pacific ocean rim with all those volcanoes, but this is much much different. Well, read and see what you think? My only suspicion comes with NASA involvement since that space agency has now been put under the military, so who knows. NASA has been caught lying in the past and messing with photos on the net, so take this for what its worth.
Giant, Strange Ring Mystifies Astronomers
/space/2014/06/giant-strange-ring-mystifies-astronomers-2480380.html?utm_campaign=&utm_source=direct-b4in.info&utm_term=http%3A%2F%2Fb4in.info%2FgaPZ&utm_content=beforeit39snews-verticalresponse&utm_medium=verticalresponse
by Alton Parrish, Before its news, June 15, 2014
“We have looked at NGC 7538 with Herschel and identified 13 massive, dense clumps where colossal stars could form in the future,” said paper lead author Cassandra Fallscheer, a visiting assistant professor of astronomy at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and lead author of the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. “In addition, we have found a gigantic ring structure and the weird thing is, we’re not at all sure what created it.”
Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Whitman College
The cool, dusty ring has an oval shape, with its long axis spanning about 35 light-years and its short axis about 25 light-years. Fallscheer and her colleagues estimate that the ring possesses the mass of 500 suns. Additional data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, further helped characterize the odd ovoid. Astronomers often see ring and bubble-like structures in cosmic dust clouds. The observations were taken as part of the Herschel OB Young Stellar objects (HOBYS) Key Programme. The “OB” refers to the two most massive kinds of stars, O-type and B-type. These bright blue, superhot, short-lived stars end up exploding as supernovas, leaving behind either incredibly dense neutron stars or even denser black holes. Stars of this caliber form from gassy, dusty clumps with initial masses dozens of times greater than the sun’s; the 13 clumps spotted in NGC 7358, some of which lie along the edge of the mystery ring, all are more than 40 times more massive than the sun. The clumps gravitationally collapse in on themselves, growing denser and hotter in their cores until nuclear fusion ignites and a star is born. For now, early in the star-formation process, the clumps remain quite cold, just a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. At these temperatures, the clumps emit the bulk of their radiation in the low-energy, submillimeter and infrared light that Herschel was specifically designed to detect. As astronomers continue probing these budding O-type giants in NGC 7358, the follow-up observations with other telescopes should also help in solving the puzzle of the humongous, dusty ring. “Further research to determine the mechanism responsible for creating the ring structure is necessary,” said Fallscheer. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. While the observatory stopped making science observations in April 2013, after running out of liquid coolant as expected, scientists continue to analyze its data. NASA’s Herschel Project Office is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel’s three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical community.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Source: http://vaticproject.blogspot.com/2014/06/giant-strange-ring-mystifies-astronomers.html
