The newest cosmic mystery: four distinct high-energy flashes! (Is the Universe trying to get our attention?) Astronomers are calling them Fast Radio Bursts, but we have yet to determine their origins.

Radio astronomers detected the first burst about six years ago, but it seemed so strange that many people thought it was a fluke. Dan Thornton, a PhD student at England’s University of Manchester and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, decided to investigate. He spent the next six years looking for these strange flashes.

So far Thornton and his team have found four radio bursts. Astonishingly, the flashes—taken from only a small section of the sky—indicate that there should be one of these signals going off every ten seconds.

“The bursts last only a tenth of the blink of an eye,” explained Max-Planck Institute Director and Manchester professor, Michael Kramer. “With current telescopes we need to be lucky to look at the right spot at the right time. But if we could view the sky with ‘radio eyes’ there would be flashes going off all over the sky every day.”

Astronomers have ruled out terrestrial sources for the Fast Radio Bursts and the origins in the high galactic latitudes suggest that they originate from beyond the Milky Way.

The brightness and distance of the mysterious flashes also hint that they originated when the Universe was about half its current age. “They have come such a long way that by the time they reach the Earth, the Parkes telescope would have to operate for one million years to collect enough to have the equivalent energy of a flying mosquito,” said Thornton.

Co-author Professor Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, thinks that burst energies indicate that they come from events involving relativistic objects—maybe even from a type of neutron star called a magnetar. “Magnetars can give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does in 300,000 years and are a leading candidate for the burst.”

Astronomers have a lot more research to do before we can solve the radio burst puzzle, but the findings may also help crack some other astronomical mysteries. “We are still not sure about what makes up the space between galaxies, so we will be able to use these radio bursts like probes in order to understand more about some of the missing matter in the Universe,” said Ben Stappers, from Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

So these Fast Radio Bursts could even speed up cosmic discovery!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: Diceman Stephen West

Astronomers often describe Andromeda as a “sister galaxy” to our own Milky Way. It is relatively nearby, similarly sized, and comparably shaped. So what does it mean when we confirm that Andromeda is host to a “black hole bonanza”?

A black hole is born when a massive star collapses, resulting in a high concentration of gravity, so strong that light cannot even escape its pull. By definition, we can’t observe black holes directly, but astronomers can detect them if a close-orbiting star is pulled inside. Gravitational forces compress the star’s material, producing high-energy radiation in the process.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory followed the radiation trail to identify 26 new black hole candidates, the largest number found outside of the Milky Way to date. Follow-up observations by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory gave information useful for determining the nature of these black holes.

The first step in classifying Chandra’s findings: confirm the black hole sizes and locations. The process relies on perspective. In the same way a tall person standing far away can appear the same size as a short person much closer, objects in space can deceive us with their apparent size, so we need to look for additional clues. In the case of black holes, researchers saw bright and fast variability of X-ray emission to determine these 26 black holes are smaller “stellar mass” systems within Andromeda rather than supermassive black holes behind Andromeda.

As it turns out, neutron stars can look a lot like black holes from a distance, so researchers analyzed x-ray brightness and color. Neutron stars also emit x-ray radiation, but a black hole appears brighter—and a different color.

Eight of the black holes reside in globular clusters, concentrations of stars spherically distributed about the center of a galaxy that exist in both the Milky Way and Andromeda. However, astronomers have not yet discovered black holes in any of the Milky Way’s globular clusters.

“When it comes to finding black holes in the central region of a galaxy, it is indeed the case where bigger is better,” said co-author Stephen Murray of Johns Hopkins University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “In the case of Andromeda, we have a bigger bulge and a bigger supermassive black hole than in the Milky Way, so we expect more smaller black holes are made there as well.”

Perhaps the two galaxies aren’t as sisterly as we thought. The central bulge of Andromeda is larger, which explains why seven of the new candidates exist within 1,000 light years of Andromeda’s core.

Considering that we can only detect black holes when they are producing high-energy radiation, there must be more that we have not found yet—in both galaxies. Lead author Robin Barnard of CfA states, “While we are excited to find so many black holes in Andromeda, we think it’s just the tip of the iceberg, most black holes won’t have close companions and will be invisible to us.”

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

We have peered far into the Universe and vastly expanded our knowledge of distant realms. But interestingly enough, we are still refining our understanding of our own place within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Research into this question follows in the footsteps of many great names in astronomy: from Herschel to Hubble, and from Kapteyn to Kant, generations of astronomers helped to establish our understanding of our place in space.

Imagine, if you will, trying to take a picture of the United States from somewhere close to the center of it. (That’s right. Lots of corn fields.) You would have no way to observe the entire country at the same time. Astronomers face a similar challenge in observing our home galaxy: we live within the disc of the Milky Way, a long way from the center (about 7,600 parsecs or 25,000 light years) and only a small distance from the middle of the plane (27 parsecs or close to 88 light years), with thick lanes of gas and dust blocking our view. We can see other more distant galaxies and have discovered many shapes and types, so comparing ourselves to them can help us determine the approximate shape and layout of the Milky Way.

Dr. Alyssa Goodman and her team recently realized that a dark cool cloud dubbed “Nessie” in the constellation Ara might have some secrets to tell about the Milky Way. We have seen similar features in other spiral galaxies: slightly denser tubes of material that define long spiral arms. By studying this “bone” of our galaxy, we may soon be able to refine our map of home to an even greater degree. We reside just far enough from the plane of the Milky Way’s disc that we could perhaps one day find the rest of these bones and create an even better layout of our place in space.

This concept and more appear in Goodman’s Authorea paper, currently in development now for later publication. Amazingly, you can to read the paper online while the authors finalize it! Talk about science in action…

Josh Roberts is a program presenter and astronomer at the California Academy of Sciences. He also contributes content to Morrison Planetarium productions.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

Earth’s neighborhood just got a little larger.

Astronomers thought that Earth was located on a spur of an arm of the Milky Way… until data from the Very Long Baseline Array telescopes suggested that we could be located closer to the center.

While it’s simple to observe a bird’s-eye view of other galaxies, models of the Milky Way are inaccurate due to Earth’s limited vantage point. We are attempting to measure an entire galaxy using only Earth’s narrow perspective, and at the center of our galaxy is a large bulge, blocking about half of the Milky Way from view.

To make the best model possible, astronomers use a technique called parallax. Measurements are taken from locations on either side of the sun to give multiple perspectives of our location in the sky. Then, astronomers use trigonometry to calculate where we might reside in comparison to distant objects.

At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole, whose gravitational pull is capable of keeping 200–400 billion stars in orbit around the galaxy. Measurements from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that these stars are oriented in two arms that spiral around the black hole.

“Based on both the distances and the space motions we measured, our Local Arm is not a spur,” said Alberto Sanna, a postdoctoral fellow with the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIFR). “It is a major structure, maybe a branch of the Perseus Arm, or possibly an independent arm segment.”

Sanna and his colleagues presented their research this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting, held in Indiana.

Astronomers are creating increasingly accurate models of the Milky Way and every new finding tells us more about the entire universe.

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA

Hard to believe—they’re insects, not astronomers, for goodness sakes! As Discover mentions, the dung-dining coleopteran are in good company, navigation-wise:

Christopher Columbus traveled by following the stars, as did Harriet Tubman.

Some of the same Swedish researchers who tested dung beetles’ sense of direction and published last year, have now found that these brilliant beetles dabble in celestial navigation of a sort.

Publishing last week in Current Biology, the researchers tested one species of dung beetle, Scarabaeus satyrus, in a planetarium in Johannesberg. They found that the beetles used the entire Milky Way to guide their dung in a straight line to their destination. As Ed Yong notes in National Geographic:

If they left out this galactic stripe, or only added the 18 brightest stars, the beetles took much longer to find their way out.

The researchers were thorough, too. In their experiments, they gave the beetles caps to block the light from reaching their eyes. Once again, the beetles wandered from the most direct route.

The scientists believe that although the beetles’ eyes are too weak to distinguish individual constellations, they use the gradient of light to dark provided by the Milky Way to ensure they keep rolling their balls in a straight line and don’t circle back to competitors at the dung pile. The New Yorker offers a particularly charming description of the experiment.

Not sure, even with a ball of poop, I could navigate as well as dung beetles—day or night!

Image: Maria Dacke