all Giovanni Fazio stories

Cosmic jet looks like giant tornado in space

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:49 -0400

While examining a region where new stars are forming with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers found a surprise - an object that looks like a giant tornado in space. The apparent tornado is shaped by a cosmic jet packing a powerful punch as it plows through clouds of interstellar gas and dust. They released an image of the "tornado" Jan. 12, 2006, at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

"When I first saw the image of this tornado-like object, I was amazed," said Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "In the thousands of Spitzer images we've looked at, we've never seen anything like this before."

The "tornado" is actually a shock front created by a jet of material flowing downward through the field of view. A still- forming star located off the upper edge of the image generates this outflow. The jet slams into neighboring dust clouds at a speed of more than 100 miles per second, heating the dust to incandescence and causing it to glow with infrared light detectable by Spitzer. The triangular shape results from the wake created by the jet's motion, similar to the wake behind a speeding boat.

The outflow that powers the "tornado," designated Herbig-Haro 49/50, had been observed before, most recently using a ground-based telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Intrigued by the shock emission spotted at Cerro Tololo, astronomers then targeted Spitzer onto the region and were thrilled to see a spectacular spiral structure emerge.

"The helical morphology of the `tornado' makes it unique," said astronomer John Bally (University of Colorado), lead author on the research.

The scientists could only speculate about the source of the spiral appearance. Magnetic fields throughout the region might have shaped the object. Alternatively, the shock might have developed instabilities as it plowed into surrounding material, creating eddies that give the "tornado" its distinctive appearance.

A star that looks like a planet

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:39 -0400

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a remarkably small brown dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. The brown dwarf contains only about eight times the mass of Jupiter, making it one of the smallest known brown dwarfs.

Cool brown dwarf may give birth to planets

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:48:30 -0400

Solar systems like our own may be forming around dim stars scattered all over the Milky Way. It's possible that some of these systems could harbor planets with water and even life.
The likelihood of such a possibility has increased with the discovery of a disk of gas and dust orbiting a star only about 15 times more massive than Earth's planetary neighbor, Jupiter. Such stars carry the undignified name "brown dwarfs," because they never grow big enough to shine like a sun. But they could warm planets that form out of the encircling disk of stardust the way Earth and its neighbor planets formed around the sun.

Galactic collision reveals fate of Milky Way galaxy

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:35:12 -0400

Sixty-eight million light-years away, the Antennae galaxies are locked in a dance of death, with stars being ripped from their orbits and spiral arms being shredded into streamers that dangle in space. Several billion years from now, our home -- the Milky Way galaxy -- might look the same as the Andromeda galaxy smashes into it like a bulldozer through a condemned building. Yet this distant galactic collision we see today is not yielding death, but creating new life.

Picturing a universe that's out of sight

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:33:26 -0400

Giovanni Fazio, a senior physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, directed the design and construction of a camera that is looking beyond the visible universe to see planets, stars, and galaxies being born. On Aug. 25, 2003, he waited for the ignition of a Delta rocket, with extra boosters strapped to it, to blast his life's ambition into an orbit around the sun. The launch was successful, and since December 2003 the best-ever infrared images of the universe have started coming down from space. "They are so spectacular, they are worth the 20 years of heartbreaks," Fazio says. "I feel like a kid in a toy store. It's a science wonderland." The space telescope has been officially named the Spitzer Space Telescope in honor of Lyman Spitzer Jr., an astronomer who first proposed launching telescopes into space to rise above the veiling effect of moisture and dust in Earth's atmosphere. The telescope is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA facility in Pasadena, California.