The California Nebula

Since it's pretty hard to top the recent discovery of inflation, I thought I'd just post a pretty picture for my final blog.

From Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day

I first saw this Nebula at the Palomar Visitor's Center.  It is named the California Nebula because it roughly resembles the shape of California (obviously) and it was discovered by E.E. Barnard; the guy Barnard's Star is named after.  According to Wikipedia, the light of this nebula is caused by Balmer beta emission lines from photons that hit the gas from a nearby O7-star that then releases the photon again at visible wavelengths.  It is very hard to see this with no filters so Wikipedia recommends that you use a Balmer beta filter if you wish to see this for yourself.

Direct Evidence for Inflation Detected

Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, developers of the idea of inflation.

The article that I posted yesterday was confirmed today by various scientists announcing their discoveries.  Using the BICEP2 telescope, these scientists have confirmed B-mode polarization patterns on the cosmic microwave background.  The implication of this discovery is that it gives a lot of information about when inflation happened, which one cosmologist approximated at .5 * 10^-37 seconds after the big bang.
Another implication is that this discovery directly proves that gravity is quantized, which sounds like a bigger deal to me but the article says that this is minor compared to the first implication.  This is also the first detection of Hawking's radiation as well as "the first detection of gravitational waves’ action on matter other than their source".  It seems like this announcement/discovery might be big enough to win a Nobel Prize.

B-modes

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Possible Proof for Inflation to be Announced Tomorrow (Maybe)

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A press conference has been announced for Monday at the Havard Astrophysics center.  This website is speculating that they will announce some "Nobel Prize-worthy" evidence for the theory of cosmological inflation.  They speculate this because recently scientists at the South Pole telescope that detects microwaves might have detected some gravitational waves that originated from the big bang. 

The theory of inflation is way too complicated for me to understand but the gist of it seems to be that there are signals called B-modes which are emitted during the first 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000th (+- few orders of magnitude) of a second after the big bang.  Apparently researchers have found some signal with r = 0.2 (r is like the magnitude), which is more than they expected (r = 0.06).  They say that this bigger r value could affect galaxy formation more than previously expected.

On the article some scientist commented that if the press conference really does have evidence for inflation it could possibly lead to insight on quantum gravity.  While I have no idea what they're talking about, it seems to be a pretty important milestone in astrophysics, as well as physics in general.

Observations Show that O Class Stars in Orion Prevent Planet Formation of Nearby Protostars

Researchers from Canada and the US have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array to observe star formation in the Orion Nebula.  What they have found is that any young star that is within 0.1 light years of a O class star will have their surrounding dust be blown away by the photons emitted by the O class star.  This greatly hinders the formation of planets around these young stars, which means that there will be very few solar systems near O class stars.

 These stars from the Nebula form like the simulation showed in class when a large dust cloud reaches the Jeans mass.  The simulation showed that the largest stars formed first during the cloud collapse, so it makes sense that they would start disrupting the small stars before they had a chance to fully form their systems.  One of the Canadian scientists said that “Their energetic photons can quickly deplete a nearby protoplanetary disk by heating up its gas, breaking it up, and sweeping it away.”  I'm guessing this means that the photons from the O class star either impart some kinetic energy onto the gas and allow it to exceed the gravitational potential and escape, or it ionizes it and then emits neutrinos or something fancy.  Probably the former, but I wouldn't really know.

Overall I don't think these observations are really too groundbreaking, but merely a confirmation of something that makes a lot of sense theoretically. (Which is why they used "Death Star" in the title.)

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A picture of  two young stars and a O class star.  Apparently one of them is getting its dust blown away but I don't see it.