SPACE

$3.5M grant to Georgia State will fuel space research across the globe

New funding for GSU’s CHARA Array allows astronomers to conduct research through an open-access application system.

Georgia State University

$3.5M Grant to Georgia State Will Fuel Space Research Across the Globe — image:
Research conducted at the CHARA Array is focused on studying the astrophysical properties of stars in extremely fine detail.
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Credit: Courtesy: Georgia State University

ATLANTA — A new three-year, $3.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation will foster new research at Georgia State’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array by astronomers from around the world.

The grant will fund open-access time at the CHARA Array through the NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NSF NOIRLab). The program offers astronomers the opportunity to apply for observing time at the CHARA Array to investigate all kinds of objects in the sky. Research conducted at the array is focused on studying the astrophysical properties of stars in extremely fine detail.

“We are thrilled to host these international teams of scientists to use the facilities here at the CHARA Array,” said Gail Schaefer, director of the array. “This program brings together collaborators who can share their expertise and achieve new milestones in most areas of contemporary astronomy, and specifically to the field of stellar astrophysics.”

Georgia State’s CHARA Array interferometer at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California combines the light of six telescopes spread across the mountaintop. While the views through each telescope are relatively small, when combined, they achieve the spatial resolution of a much larger telescope. This configuration gives the CHARA Array the sharpest eyes in the world for visible and infrared wavelengths.

The six domes of the CHARA Array house individual telescopes that act together to create an equivalent as large as the entire Mount Wilson Observatory grounds.

The demand for time on the CHARA Array has been extremely high due to its significance as a resource for the international research community. With the new National Science Foundation grant, the program will make 100 nights per year available to the global research community via an application system. CHARA staff members also provide scientific and technical support to assist new users at the array.

CHARA Director and Regents' Professor of Physics and Astronomy Douglas Gies said the new funding will allow astronomers to fulfill plans to explore stars in exquisite detail.

“The National Science Foundation award is the key to open the array to the best ideas about new avenues for research,” he said. “There will be remarkable new results coming soon about stars, planets and distant active galaxies.”

It has been nearly 15 years since CHARA first offered access to the array to the general community in 2010. Initially, only a limited number of 10 nights per year were available through a trial program. Thanks to its success, CHARA has been able to expand the program for open competition through NOIRLab. To date, more than 400 astronomers have led observational programs at CHARA through the open-access program.

“CHARA runs the best optical and infrared interferometer in the world and delivers the highest resolution observations possible at these wavelengths,” said Nigel Sharp, a program director in NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences. “It is exciting to see that such observations can be delivered routinely and that CHARA’s sought-after capabilities are now available to non-experts in the research community.”

mes of the CHARA Array house individual telescopes that act together to create an equivalent as large as the entire Mount Wilson Observatory grounds.

Credit

Courtesy: Georgia State University/CHARA Array

Already, the program has led to exciting breakthroughs including detailed images of the surfaces of nearby stars, new high-resolution images of a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, the first images of a nova as it exploded, the sharpest images of young planet-forming disks around stars and evidence that groups of stars can tear apart their planet-forming disk, leaving it with tilted rings.

“We anticipate significant impact through the open-application program supported by the National Science Foundation,” said Donald Hamelberg, Georgia State’s interim vice president for research and economic development. “This program not only fosters scientific collaboration but also attracts renowned scientists from across the globe to conduct groundbreaking research using the CHARA Array."

Thanks to the layout of the telescopes, the length of its baselines and the range of wavelengths covered by its beam combiner cameras, the CHARA Array is uniquely powerful for milliarcsecond imaging research. For example, the array can measure objects as small as a dime as viewed from a distance of 6,000 miles.

The CHARA Array is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and Georgia State University through the College of Arts & Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. For more information about Georgia State University research and its impact, visit research.gsu.edu.

NASA’s Webb peers into the extreme outer

galaxy

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Astronomers have directed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists call this region the Extreme Outer Galaxy due to its location more than 58,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center. (For comparison, Earth is approximately 26,000 light-years from the center.)

A team of scientists used Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to image select regions within two molecular clouds known as Digel Clouds 1 and 2. With its high degree of sensitivity and sharp resolution, the Webb data resolved these areas, which are hosts to star clusters undergoing bursts of star formation, in unprecedented detail. Details of this data include components of the clusters such as very young (Class 0) protostars, outflows and jets, and distinctive nebular structures.

These Webb observations, which came from telescope time allocated to Mike Ressler of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, are enabling scientists to study star formation in the outer Milky Way in the same depth of detail as observations of star formation in our own solar neighborhood.

“In the past, we knew about these star forming regions but were not able to delve into their properties,” said Natsuko Izumi of Gifu University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, lead author of the study. “The Webb data builds upon what we have incrementally gathered over the years from prior observations with different telescopes and observatories. We can get very powerful and impressive images of these clouds with Webb. In the case of Digel Cloud 2, I did not expect to see such active star formation and spectacular jets.”

Stars in the Making

Although the Digel Clouds are within our galaxy, they are relatively poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This composition makes them similar to dwarf galaxies and our own Milky Way in its early history. Therefore, the team took the opportunity to use Webb to capture the activity occurring in four clusters of young stars within Digel Clouds 1 and 2: 1A, 1B, 2N, and 2S.

For Cloud 2S, Webb captured the main cluster containing young, newly formed stars. This dense area is quite active as several stars are emitting extended jets of material along their poles. Additionally, while scientists previously suspected a sub-cluster might be present within the cloud, Webb’s imaging capabilities confirmed its existence for the first time.

“We know from studying other nearby star-forming regions that as stars form during their early life phase, they start emitting jets of material at their poles,” said Ressler, second author of the study and principal investigator of the observing program. “What was fascinating and astounding to me from the Webb data is that there are multiple jets shooting out in all different directions from this cluster of stars. It’s a little bit like a firecracker, where you see things shooting this way and that.”

The Saga of Stars

The Webb imagery skims the surface of the Extreme Outer Galaxy and the Digel Clouds, and is just a starting point for the team. They intend to revisit this outpost in the Milky Way to find answers to a variety of current mysteries, including the relative abundance of stars of various masses within Extreme Outer Galaxy star clusters. This measurement can help astronomers understand how a particular environment can influence different types of stars during their formation.

“I’m interested in continuing to study how star formation is occurring in these regions. By combining data from different observatories and telescopes, we can examine each stage in the evolution process,” said Izumi. “We also plan to investigate circumstellar disks within the Extreme Outer Galaxy. We still don’t know why their lifetimes are shorter than in star-forming regions much closer to us. And of course, I’d like to understand the kinematics of the jets we detected in Cloud 2S.”

Though the story of star formation is complex and some chapters are still shrouded in mystery, Webb is gathering clues and helping astronomers unravel this intricate tale.

These findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal.

The observations were taken as part of Guaranteed Time Observation program 1237.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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Journal

The Astronomical Journal

DOI

10.3847/1538-3881/ad4e2e

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Article Title

Overview Results of JWST Observations of Star-forming Clusters in the Extreme Outer Galaxy

SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk

By Joey Roulette, Reuters

Polaris Dawn astronauts Anna Menon (L), Scott "Kidd" Poteet (2L), Jared Isaacman (2R) and Sarah Gillis (R). Photo: SpaceX/AFP

A group of private astronauts is set to carry out the first private spacewalk in orbit on Thursday from a SpaceX capsule, testing a new line of spacesuits in the company's riskiest mission yet.

A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees have been orbiting Earth aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon since their pre-dawn launch from Florida on Tuesday for the Polaris Dawn mission, the Elon Musk-led company's latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.

The spacewalk is slated to begin at 2:23am ET (0623 GMT / 6.23pm NZT) at 700km in altitude, with two astronauts venturing outside Crew Dragon while the other two remain inside. The capsule will be completely depressurised, and the whole crew will need to rely on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen.

Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payment company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars based on Crew Dragon's roughly US$55 million (NZ$89m) per-seat price for other flights.

The others in Polaris include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.
Farthest since Apollo

The Crew Dragon spacecraft throughout Wednesday circled Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped orbit as shallow on one end as 190km and stretching out as far as 1400km, the farthest in space humans have travelled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.

The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700km position and adjust its cabin pressure to prepare for the spacewalk, more formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said in a social media post on Wednesday evening.

"The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit's pressurised mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA," it said.

During the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the Crew Dragon tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon stay inside the cabin.

Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past. There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing's Tiangong space station.

The first US spacewalk was in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, and used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurised, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.

The private Polaris astronauts during the mission will be key subjects for a range of scientific research into how the human body reacts to deep space, adding to decades of astronaut health studies enabled by government astronauts on the ISS.

Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, since 2021 has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for NASA. The agency seeded development of the capsule under a program meant to establish commercial, privately built US vehicles capable of ferrying US astronauts to and from the ISS.

Boeing's Starliner capsule was also developed under that NASA program, but it is farther behind. Starliner launched its first astronauts to the ISS in June in a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule coming back empty, leaving its crew on the space station for a Crew Dragon capsule to fetch next year.

- Reuters

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