It’s one thing to perform with your heart on your sleeve; it’s another to hold it aloft in triumph, as if presenting baby Simba to the world in The Lion King. Caws is unafraid to think big — the album’s title comes from a favorite saying of his father, a philosophy professor — but he’s even more interested in sketching out blueprints for lives worth living. Picking a best song on The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy takes some doing, but it may just be “Looking Through,” a quotable ode to joy and fearlessness in which Caws sings, “They say you die of shame, not cold, in the wild” shortly before asking, “Are you dancing? Are you dancing at all?”

Now seven albums into a 20-year career, Nada Surf relies on familiar ingredients throughout The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy, out Jan. 24: big guitars, beautiful vocal harmonies, generous affirmations. But a new Nada Surf record is formulaic the way springtime is formulaic: It’s always there to be counted on, and always an intoxicating arrival.

Professor David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics, is investigating the notebooks of Galileo from 400 years ago and believes that buried in the notations is the evidence that he discovered a new planet that we now know as Neptune.

A hypothesis of how to look for this evidence has been published in the journal Australian Physics and was presented at the first lecture in the 2009 July Lectures in Physics program at the University of Melbourne in the beginning of July.

If correct, the discovery would be the first new planet identified by humanity since deep antiquity.

Galileo was observing the moons of Jupiter in the years 1612 and 1613 and recorded his observations in his notebooks. Over several nights he also recorded the position of a nearby star which does not appear in any modern star catalogue.

“It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune. Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it,” Professor Jamieson says.

But a planet is different to a star because planets orbit the Sun and move through the sky relative to the stars. It is remarkable that on the night of January 28 in 1613 Galileo noted that the “star” we now know is the planet Neptune appeared to have moved relative to an actual nearby star.”

There is also a mysterious unlabeled black dot in his earlier observations of January 6, 1613, which is in the right position to be Neptune.

“I believe this dot could reveal he went back in his notes to record where he saw Neptune earlier when it was even closer to Jupiter but had not previously attracted his attention because of its unremarkable star-like appearance.”

If the mysterious black dot on January 6 was actually recorded on January 28, Professor Jamieson proposes this would prove that Galileo believed he may have discovered a new planet.

By using the expertise of trace element analysts from the University of Florence, who have previously analyzed inks in Galileo’s manuscripts, dating the unlabelled dot in his notebook may be possible. This analysis may be conducted in October this year.

“Galileo may indeed have formed the hypothesis that he had seen a new planet which had moved right across the field of view during his observations of Jupiter over the month of January 1613,” Professor Jamieson says.

“If this is correct Galileo observed Neptune 234 years before its official discovery.”

But there could be an even more interesting possibility still buried in Galileo’s notes and letters.

“Galileo was in the habit of sending a scrambled sentence, an anagram, to his colleagues to establish his priority for the sensational discoveries he made with his new telescope. He did this when he discovered the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. So perhaps somewhere he wrote an as-yet undecoded anagram that reveals he knew he discovered a new planet,” Professor Jamieson speculates.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.

“The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we’ve ever tasted,” said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time.”

Fink and his team members at Caltech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arizona are developing autonomous software and have built a robotic test bed that can mimic a field geologist or astronaut, capable of working independently and as part of a larger team. This software will allow a robot to think on its own, identify problems and possible hazards, determine areas of interest and prioritize targets for a close-up look.

The way things work now, engineers command a rover or spacecraft to carry out certain tasks and then wait for them to be executed. They have little or no flexibility in changing their game plan as events unfold; for example, to image a landslide or cryovolcanic eruption as it happens, or investigate a methane outgassing event.

“In the future, multiple robots will be in the driver’s seat,” Fink said. These robots would share information in almost real time. This type of exploration may one day be used on a mission to Titan, Mars and other planetary bodies. Current proposals for Titan would use an orbiter, an air balloon and rovers or lake landers.

In this mission scenario, an orbiter would circle Titan with a global view of the moon, with an air balloon or airship floating overhead to provide a birds-eye view of mountain ranges, lakes and canyons. On the ground, a rover or lake lander would explore the moon’s nooks and crannies. The orbiter would “speak” directly to the air balloon and command it to fly over a certain region for a closer look. This aerial balloon would be in contact with several small rovers on the ground and command them to move to areas identified from overhead.

“This type of exploration is referred to as tier-scalable reconnaissance,” said Fink. “It’s sort of like commanding a small army of robots operating in space, in the air and on the ground simultaneously.”

A rover might report that it’s seeing smooth rocks in the local vicinity, while the airship or orbiter could confirm that indeed the rover is in a dry riverbed — unlike current missions, which focus only on a global view from far above but can’t provide information on a local scale to tell the rover that indeed it is sitting in the middle of dry riverbed.

A current example of this type of exploration can best be seen at Mars with the communications relay between the rovers and orbiting spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. However, that information is just relayed and not shared amongst the spacecraft or used to directly control them.

“We are basically heading toward making robots that command other robots,” said Fink, who is director of Caltech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory, where this work has taken place.

“One day an entire fleet of robots will be autonomously commanded at once. This armada of robots will be our eyes, ears, arms and legs in space, in the air, and on the ground, capable of responding to their environment without us, to explore and embrace the unknown,” he added.

Papers describing this new exploration are published in the journal Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine and in the Proceedings of the SPIE.

Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS’s position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter. This result also increases the number of known low-mass planets by an impressive 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.

“HARPS is a unique, extremely high precision instrument that is ideal for discovering alien worlds,” says Stéphane Udry, who made the announcement. “We have now completed our initial five-year programme, which has succeeded well beyond our expectations.”

The latest batch of exoplanets announced today comprises no less than 32 new discoveries. Including these new results, data from HARPS have led to the discovery of more than 75 exoplanets in 30 different planetary systems. In particular, thanks to its amazing precision, the search for small planets, those with a mass of a few times that of the Earth – known as super-Earths and Neptune-like planets – has been given a dramatic boost. HARPS has facilitated the discovery of 24 of the 28 planets known with masses below 20 Earth masses. As with the previously detected super-Earths, most of the new low-mass candidates reside in multi-planet systems, with up to five planets per system.

In 1999, ESO launched a call for opportunities to build a high resolution, extremely precise spectrograph for the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. Michel Mayor, from the Geneva Observatory, led a consortium to build HARPS, which was installed in 2003 and was soon able to measure the back-and-forward motions of stars by detecting small changes in a star’s radial velocity – as small as 3.5 km/hour, a steady walking pace. Such a precision is crucial for the discovery of exoplanets and the radial velocity method, which detects small changes in the radial velocity of a star as it wobbles slightly under the gentle gravitational pull from an (unseen) exoplanet, has been most prolific method in the search for exoplanets.

In return for building the instrument, the HARPS consortium was granted 100 observing nights per year during a five-year period to carry out one of the most ambitious systematic searches for exoplanets so far implemented worldwide by repeatedly measuring the radial velocities of hundreds of stars that may harbour planetary systems.

The programme soon proved very successful. Using HARPS, Mayor’s team discovered – among others – in 2004, the first super-Earth (around µ Ara); in 2006, the trio of Neptunes around HD 69830; in 2007, Gliese 581d, the first super Earth in the habitable zone of a small star; and in 2009, the lightest exoplanet so far detected around a normal star, Gliese 581e. More recently, they found a potentially lava-covered world, with density similar to that of the Earth’s.

“These observations have given astronomers a great insight into the diversity of planetary systems and help us understand how they can form,” says team member Nuno Santos.

The HARPS consortium was very careful in their selection of targets, with several sub-programmes aimed at looking for planets around solar-like stars, low-mass dwarf stars, or stars with a lower metal content than the Sun. The number of exoplanets known around low-mass stars – so-called M dwarfs – has also dramatically increased, including a handful of super Earths and a few giant planets challenging planetary formation theory.

“By targeting M dwarfs and harnessing the precision of HARPS we have been able to search for exoplanets in the mass and temperature regime of super-Earths, some even close to or inside the habitable zone around the star,” says co-author Xavier Bonfils.

The team found three candidate exoplanets around stars that are metal-deficient. Such stars are thought to be less favourable for the formation of planets, which form in the metal-rich disc around the young star. However, planets up to several Jupiter masses have been found orbiting metal-deficient stars, setting an important constraint for planet formation models.

Although the first phase of the observing programme is now officially concluded, the team will pursue their effort with two ESO Large Programmes looking for super-Earths around solar-type stars and M dwarfs and some new announcements are already foreseen in the coming months, based on the last five years of measurements. There is no doubt that HARPS will continue to lead the field of exoplanet discoveries, especially pushing towards the detection of Earth-type planets.

This discovery was announced today at the ESO/CAUP conference “Towards Other Earths: perspectives and limitations in the ELT era”, taking place in Porto, Portugal, on 19-23 October 2009. This conference discusses the new generation of instruments and telescopes that is now being conceived and built by different teams around the world to allow the discovery of other Earths, especially for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The new planets are simultaneously presented by Michel Mayor at the international symposium “Heirs of Galileo: Frontiers of Astronomy” in Madrid, Spain.

The most ambitious attempt yet to trace the history of the universe has seen “first light.” The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), took its first astronomical data September 14-15 after years of preparations.

That night, astronomers used the Sloan Foundation 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to measure the spectra of a thousand galaxies and quasars, thus starting a quest to eventually collect spectra for 1.4 million galaxies and 160,000 quasars by 2014.

“The data from BOSS will be the best obtained on the large-scale structure of the universe,” said David Schlegel, principal investigator of BOSS at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. BOSS uses the same telescope as the original Sloan Digital Sky Survey, but equipped with new spectrographs to measure the spectra. “The new spectrographs are more efficient in infrared light,” said Natalie Roe, the instrument scientist for BOSS at the Berkeley Lab. “The light emitted by distant galaxies arrives at Earth as infrared light, so these improved spectrographs are able to look much farther back in time.”

The ability to look farther back in time is important in allowing BOSS to take advantage of a feature in the universe called “baryon oscillations.” Baryon oscillations began when pressure waves traveled through the early universe.

“Like sound waves passing through air, the waves push some of the matter closer together as they travel,” said Nikhil Padmanabhan, a BOSS researcher. “In the early universe, these waves were moving at half the speed of light, but when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, the universe cooled enough to halt the waves, leaving a signature 500 million light-years in length.”

“We can see these frozen waves in the distribution of galaxies today,” said Daniel Eisenstein, director of the SDSS-III at the University of Arizona. “By measuring the length of the baryon oscillations, we can determine how dark energy has affected the expansion history of the universe. That in turn helps us figure out what dark energy could be.”

“Studying baryon oscillations is an exciting method for measuring dark energy in a way that’s complementary to techniques in supernova cosmology,” said Kyle Dawson at the University of Utah, who is leading the commissioning of BOSS. “BOSS’ galaxy measurements will be a revolutionary dataset that will provide rich insights into the universe,” said Martin White, BOSS’ survey scientist at the Berkeley Lab.

BOSS’ first data were taken after many nights of clouds and rain. The first data came from a region of sky in the constellation Aquarius. “Looks like I’m in for a very hectic but extremely exciting first month on the job,” said Nic Ross who has just joined the Berkeley Lab.

The BOSS spectrographs will work with more than two thousand large metal plates that are placed at the focal plane of the telescope. These plates are drilled with the precise locations of nearly two million objects across the northern sky. Optical fibers plugged into a thousand tiny holes in each of these “plug plates” carry the light from each observed galaxy or quasar to BOSS’ new spectrographs.

Using these plug plates for the first light image should have been easy, but it didn’t quite turn out the way astronomers planned. “In our first test images, it looked like we’d just taken random spectra from all over,” Schlegel said. “After some hair-pulling, the problem turned out to be simple. After we flipped the plus and minus signs in the program, everything worked perfectly.”

The first public data release from SDSS-III is planned for December 2010 under the watchful eye of Mike Blanton at the New York University. “Making high-quality astronomical data available to all on the Web continues to revolutionize astronomical science and education by taking advantage of the talents of not just our team, but of all astronomers and also the general public.”

The image, which also shows Jupiter’s moon Io, was taken on July 20 Hawaii time (July 21 Universal Time) by the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea using adaptive optics to sharpen the image.

The spots are of interest to astronomers because Red Spot Jr. formed from the merger of three white spots only recently, between 1998 and 2000, and in December 2005 turned red like the much older Great Red Spot. While the new red spot is about the size of Earth, the Great Red Spot is nearly twice that diameter and has been circling the planet for at least 342 years.

The images captured by the second-generation Near Infrared Camera (NIRC2) on Keck II show that, though the two red spots are about the same color when seen in visible wavelengths, they differ markedly at infrared wavelengths. When the astronomers viewed the planet through a narrow-band filter centered on the 1.58 micron, near-infrared wavelength, Red Spot Jr., which was called Oval BA before it changed from white to red, was a lot darker, indicating that the tops of the storm clouds may be lower than those of the Great Red Spot. With more atmosphere above its cloud tops, more infrared light is absorbed by molecules like methane in the atmosphere.

“Red Spot Jr. is either not as high as the Great Red Spot, or it’s just not as reflective, that is, as dense,” said lead astronomer Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “These images will put some constraints on the altitude of Red Spot Jr.”

The Great Red Spot is thought to tower about 8 kilometers (5 miles) above the surrounding cloud deck. The fact that Red Spot Jr. turned red may indicate its swirling storm clouds are rising higher also, though apparently they are not as high as those of its larger companion, or the clouds are thinner.

Why the spots are red is a subject of great debate. Some people think the hurricane-like winds in the Great Red Spot, which can reach 400 miles per hour, dredge up material from deeper in the planet’s atmosphere that, when exposed to ultraviolet sunlight, turns red. One candidate is phosphine gas, PH3, which has been detected on Jupiter. Ultraviolet light might catalyze its conversion to red phosphorus, P4, according to one of the leading theories. Other, more complicated theories have phosphine interacting in the atmosphere with chemicals such as methane or ammonia to form complex compounds such as methylphosphane or phosphaethyne.

Recent studies, however, suggest that the red color also may be attributed to sulfur allotropes, that is, different molecular configurations, including chains and rings, of pure sulfur (S3-S20). The new work hypothesizes that ammonium hydrosulfide particles are carried upwards in the Great Red Spot and are broken up by ultraviolet light. Subsequent chemical reactions ultimately lead to long-chained sulfur allotropes , which can vary in color from red to yellow.

“The jury is still out on the exact processes that lead to the red coloration of the Great Red Spot – and Oval BA,” de Pater is quoted as saying in the August 2006 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Christopher Go, an amateur astronomer who first noticed the color change of Red Spot Jr., joined de Pater’s team earlier this year. He noted that during the close encounter between the two spots, Red Spot Jr. was squashed slightly, stretching in its direction of motion. The same thing happened in 2002 and 2004 when the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. passed one another, though then Junior was white.

The Great Red Spot rotates westward, opposite to the eastward rotation of the planet. Because alternating bands on the Jovian surface move in opposite directions, the adjacent Red Spot Jr. moves eastward. The planet rotates about once every 10 hours.

Another of de Pater’s colleagues, UC Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Philip Marcus, predicted several years ago that Jupiter’s climate was changing, based on the disappearance of the cyclonic storms or spots within the bands. The formation of Red Spot Jr. from three smaller storms is an example of this. The mixing of the atmosphere by these cyclones keeps the temperature about the same over the entire planet, he argued, so loss of this mixing will cause the equator to heat up and the poles to cool.

Earlier this year, on April 16, de Pater and her team captured near-infrared, ultraviolet and visible light photos of the planet using the Hubble Space. Telescope to look more closely at the two red spots. The observations with the Keck Telescope were a follow-up study to try to measure the speeds of the swirling winds in the spots. Jupiter’s brightness and size, however, confused the adaptive optics (AO) system, forcing the astronomers to miss some good shots of the planet as the guide star was being positioned optimally relative to Jupiter.

“This was probably the most challenging observation ever tried with the AO system at Keck,” said de Pater, referring to use of the laser guide star system next to an object as big and bright as Jupiter. Adaptive optics can take the twinkle out of an object caused by thermal motion in the atmosphere, but to do this well, the target must be near another bright object that can serve as a reference. For some of the images, Jupiter’s moon Io was used as the reference “star.” But until Io got close enough for this, a laser guide star was created near Jupiter to serve this purpose.

“This was our first attempt using the laser to obtain AO-corrected images of Jupiter’s surface,” said Dr. Al Conrad, a support astronomer at the Keck Observatory. “The technique shows promise and, if we perfect it, will provide us with many more opportunities to observe this fascinating, ever-changing object.”

The team, which included Keck observing support members Terry Stickel, David le Mignant and Marcos van Dam and UC Berkeley post-doc Michael Wong, also obtained a close-up of the two spots through a narrow-band filter centered on 5 microns, which samples thermal radiation from deep in the cloud layer. Both spots appear dark because the clouds completely block heat emanating from lower elevations, though narrow regions around the spots that are devoid of clouds show leakage of this heat out into space.

“These 5 micron images reveal details in the cloud opacity not seen at the other wavelengths and will help unravel the vertical structure of the spots,” Wong added. “The smooth, narrow arcs visible to the south of each spot probably result from the interaction between the spots and high-speed winds that are deflected around them.”

The resolution using both the narrow and wide views on the camera was about 0.1 arcseconds, or only half as good as can be obtained on a clear night with optimal seeing.

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates twin 10-meter telescopes located on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii and is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit corporation whose board of directors includes representatives from Caltech, the University of California and NASA.

The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy. One of the first steps towards this goal is to detect terrestrial planets around solar-type stars. Dedicated programs, using telescopes in space and on the ground, have yielded evidence for hundreds of planets outside of our solar system. The majority of these are giant, gaseous planets, but in recent years small, almost earth-mass planets have been detected, demonstrating that the discovery of Earth analogues — exoplanets with one Earth mass or one Earth radius orbiting a solar-type star at a distance of about 1 astronomical unit — is within reach.

A number of techniques are routinely employed in the search for exoplanets — spectroscopic radial velocity, astrometry, microlensing, photometric transits. Of these, the search for transits — the passage of the exoplanet in front of the parent star — provides unprecedented access to the planet’s physical properties. In particular, the combination of transit photometry and radial velocity measurements provides direct and accurate estimates of the planetary mass and radius, hence mean density. These parameters in turn provide tight constraints on the composition and physical structure of the planet and on the likelihood of the exoplanet being a true Earth analogue.

The CoRoT space mission employs the transit strategy in the search for exoplanets. Continuous observations, lasting about 150 days each, are made of two large (4 square degrees) regions towards the center and anti-center of the galaxy. During the first of these observation periods towards the anti-center (October 2007 to March 2008), 46 stars exhibited evidence for transits, among them CoRoT-7, a main-sequence, close-by (at a distance of 150 pc) solar-type star.

Investigation of the data, as described by Alain Léger and colleagues, provided compelling evidence for the presence of an exoplanet. The discovery was announced earlier this year at which time the analysis of CoRoT data had shown that CoRoT-7b has a diameter less than twice that of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet to date orbiting a main-sequence star. The CoRoT data also demonstrated that the planet is about 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from its parent star and orbits once every 20.4 hours.

Further progress, and in particular the determination of the planet mass, could only be made by obtaining accurate measurements of the variation in the velocity of the star caused by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. The need for ground-based support observations for CoRoT had always been envisioned, and time on the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) 3.6-m telescope at La Silla in Chile had been secured as a result of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) call for European co-investigators for CoRoT. Didier Queloz and colleagues describe how 70 hours of observations of the CoRoT-7 system with HARPS finally provided the sought-after result: CoRoT-7b is one of the lightest exoplanets detected to date with a mass five times that of the Earth. This puts CoRoT-7b firmly in the category of “super-Earth” – an exoplanet with a mass between that of Earth and gas giants.

Although about a dozen super-Earths have been detected, CoRoT-7b is the first for which both mass and radius estimates are available. Combining the radius estimates from CoRoT and the mass estimates from HARPS results in an exoplanet mean density of 5.5 g/cm3. There are only three other known planets with similar density — Earth, Mercury, and Venus (Mars is less dense) — which strongly suggests that the planet is a solid, rocky planet.

“We are coming tantalizing close to reaching the ultimate goal of detecting a true earth-like planet,” said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA CoRoT project scientist and member of the CoRoT science team. “This bodes well for future exoplanet search missions, such as the Cosmic Vision candidate, PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO).”

Next week marks the return of both a cosmic mystery and a great opportunity for amateur astronomers.

Starting in August, the normally bright star Epsilon (?) Aurigae in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer will begin to dim. After around 6 months, it’ll stay dim for about a year, then slowly brighten until it regains its usual shine. And, adding more confusion, in the middle of its darkest moment, Epsilon Aurigae will temporarily brighten almost two-tenths of a magnitude. This unusual light show happens every 27.1 years and has been a continual source of amazement to every new generation of stargazers.

Amateur astronomers can make significant contributions to this International Year of Astronomy by closely monitoring Epsilon Aurigae’s varying brightness. Even naked-eye observations will confirm its drop from a magnitude of 3.0 to 3.8, though more sophisticated tools would help, too. At this point, astronomers need all the help they can get.

The closest equivalent to this dimming and brightening is a binary star system eclipse: When one of the two stars passes in front of the other, the whole thing looks dimmer to us on Earth because only one of its star’s light reaches us, instead of the usual both. (Binary stars are typically so far away they appear as a single star to the naked eye.)

But binary eclipses usually occur every few days and last only hours, a far cry from the years-long activity of Epsilon Aurigae. And what of that surprising mid-eclipse peak in brightness? Some astronomers currently theorize Epsilon Aurigae may be a binary system where the companion star brings with it a huge accretion disk of dust and gas, blocking the main star’s light (the hole in the disk would account for the peak). Other models put two stars within that disk, making the whole thing a trinary system. Recent observations also suggest ongoing changes within the system, as might be consistent with a red giant evolving to a white dwarf.

This is one of the few genuine mysteries left to us in the galaxy, and it might be changing before our eyes. “[It's happening] on a time scale of decades rather than centuries or millions of years,” said Robert Stencel of the University of Denver. Each eclipse happens a little differently, so we never really know what to expect. This year’s observations might provide all the answers, or just leave us with new questions.

That’s why the amateur astronomers are so essential. “If we have people in Canada or Finland watching this thing during the high summer,” Stencel said, “they might be able to help us fill in some blanks.” So observers of the northern latitudes take note: Astronomers need you to help figure out Epsilon Aurigae’s mystery. With any luck, we’ll have it all figured out by next time, in 2036. And if not, well, we’re getting used to that.

University of Hawaii astronomer Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

“It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the Sun,” Goto said. “The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe.”

Knowledge of the host galaxies of supermassive black holes is important to understand the long-standing mystery of how galaxies and black holes have evolved together. Until now, studying host galaxies in the distant universe has been extremely difficult because the blinding bright light from the vicinity of the black hole makes it more difficult to see the already faint light from the host galaxy.

Unlike smaller black holes, which form when a large star dies, the origin of supermassive black holes remains an unsolved problem. A currently favored model requires several intermediate black holes to merge. The host galaxy discovered in this work provides a reservoir of such intermediate black holes. After forming, supermassive black holes often continue to grow because their gravity draws in matter from surrounding objects. The energy released in this process accounts for the bright light that these black holes produce.

To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new red-sensitive CCDs installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea. Satoshi Miyazaki of the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is lead investigator for the creation of the new CCDs and a collaborator on this project. “The improved sensitivity of the new CCDs has brought an exciting discovery as its very first result,” Miyazaki said

A careful analysis of the colors revealed that 40 percent of light around 9100 angstroms is from the host galaxy itself and 60 percent is from the surrounding ionized nebulae illuminated by the black hole.

“We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy forming together,” said Yousuke Utsumi from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies/NAOJ and a member of the project team. “This discovery has opened a new window for investigating galaxy-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the universe.”

The new method to create a tiny quantum sized black hole would allow researchers to better understand what physicist Stephen Hawking proposed more than 35 years ago: black holes are not totally void of activity; they emit photons, which is now known as Hawking radiation.

“Hawking famously showed that black holes radiate energy according to a thermal spectrum,” said Paul Nation, an author on the paper and a graduate student at Dartmouth. “His calculations relied on assumptions about the physics of ultra-high energies and quantum gravity. Because we can’t yet take measurements from real black holes, we need a way to recreate this phenomenon in the lab in order to study it, to validate it.”

In this paper, the researchers show that a magnetic field-pulsed microwave transmission line containing an array of superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs, not only reproduces physics analogous to that of a radiating black hole, but does so in a system where the high energy and quantum mechanical properties are well understood and can be directly controlled in the laboratory. The paper states, “Thus, in principle, this setup enables the exploration of analogue quantum gravitational effects.”

“We can also manipulate the strength of the applied magnetic field so that the SQUID array can be used to probe black hole radiation beyond what was considered by Hawking,” said Miles Blencowe, another author on the paper and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth.

This is not the first proposed imitation black hole, says Nation. Other proposed analogue schemes have considered using supersonic fluid flows, ultracold bose-einstein condensates and nonlinear fiber optic cables. However, the predicted Hawking radiation in these schemes is incredibly weak or otherwise masked by commonplace radiation due to unavoidable heating of the device, making the Hawking radiation very difficult to detect. “In addition to being able to study analogue quantum gravity effects, the new, SQUID-based proposal may be a more straightforward method to detect the Hawking radiation,” says Blencowe.