Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Rise of the Radio Phoenix
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1540/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is
Rise of the Radio Phoenix
Do you know the story of the phoenix? The phoenix is a mythical golden bird that, according to various myths, lives for 5 hundred to 14 hundred years. When it grows old and frail, it bursts into flames and is reborn from its own ashes to begin the cycle again.
The Greek phoenix is equivalent to the Egyptian bird god Bennu, which is also a symbol of rebirth, which may have been inspired in the New Kingdom by a now-extinct species of large grey heron. This is the same Bennu for which the rocky asteroid 101955 Bennu is named.
The OSIRIS-REx NASA mission, currently slated to launch in September of next year, 2016, will visit that very asteroid in 2019. It’s a sample return mission and will return to Earth in September of 2023.
Bennu is a Type B carbonaceous asteroid that is called “primitive” because it has had little to no change happen to it since it was formed. Studying it will help us understand the origins of the solar system and its carbon-based rock will give us a window into the distribution of elements that are necessary for life.
492 meters in diameter, Bennu has 8 low-probability potential Earth impacts next century, not exceeding a cumulative total probability of .037% for all 8 events. Nothing to loose any sleep over…
The multinational science team will also study the non-gravitational effects, such as the Yarkovsky effect, that can change its orbit, which could change the likelihood of an impact.
Studying the asteroid’s physical properties will also be done for NASA’s impact avoidance planning. The PI or Principal Investigator on the mission is the University of Arizona’s Dr. Dante Lauretta.
You’ll hear LOTS about OSIRIS-REx in the coming year, so keep listening to 365 Days of Astronomy for more on the mission!
Anyway…
It’s not often that fairy tales come to life, particularly not tales as dramatic as that of the phoenix. But the Universe holds many wonders and astronomers have just witnessed a long-dead region of space “coming back to life”.
Much like the mythical phoenix!
This real-life fairy tale begins billions of years ago, when a distant supermassive black hole burst violently into life. It began to blast out enormous jets of high-energy particles.
The jets were so powerful that their particles spread out over hundreds of thousands of light years, creating a bright shining cloud.
For many millions of years the cloud shone proudly & brightly across space, mostly not in the light we see with our eyes though, but in radio light. Until eventually the cloud got cold, ran out of energy and faded into darkness again.
…But the story doesn’t end there.
Many years later another violent event occurred near this giant cloud when two clusters of galaxies crashed into each other.
The collision sent out a shock wave so powerful that it re-energized the electrons in the gas there. This additional energy caused the cloud to once again shine, albeit in radio light. The radio phoenix has been reborn.
The galaxy cluster is called Abell 1033 and is in the constellation Leo Minor, which is just north of the constellation Leo. It rises in the east before dawn this time of year, the fall.
A portrait of this reignited radio phoenix can be seen in the album artwork for today’s episode, along with an illustration from 1697 of the mythological phoenix. The astronomical image that you see there is a combination of radio, visible light and X-ray images, a so-called multiwavelength image.
The purple part is a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the X-rays that are emitted by hot gasses, and the radio is the green, imaged by the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands and the NRAO’s VLA, the Karl Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
The blue areas are a map of the density of matter in the region, made from an analysis of the optical image, and the white bits are that optical image, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made at the Apache Point Observatory, near Sunspot, New Mexico.
The radio phoenix itself is the horizontal green blob just below the center of the purple part of the picture.
Hey, Here’s A Cool Fact:
Many astronomical objects emit radio waves, but this wasn’t discovered until 1932! Your own body and the buildings around you radiate in the radio part of the electromagnetic band as well.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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