Galaxies Are Either Asleep or Awake

Galaxies Are Either Asleep or Awake

  8:26:00 PM    Science Lover

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Astronomers have probed into the distant universe and discovered that galaxies display one of two distinct behaviors: they are either awake or asleep, actively forming stars or are not forming any new stars at all.

Bluer galaxies are actively "awake" and forming stars, 
while redder galaxies have shut down and are "asleep." 
(Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the 
HUDF team)

Scientists have known for several years that galaxies in the nearby universe seem to fall into one of these two states. But a new survey of the distant universe shows that even very young galaxies as far away as 12 billion light years are either awake or asleep as well, meaning galaxies have behaved this way for more than 85 percent of the history of the universe. (Looking at galaxies farther away is like looking back in time when they were much younger, because of how long it takes the light they emit to reach us here on Earth.)

"The fact that we see such young galaxies in the distant universe that have already shut off is remarkable," said Kate Whitaker, a Yale University graduate student and lead author of the paper, which is published in the June 20 online edition of the Astrophysical Journal.



In order to determine whether the galaxies were asleep or awake, Whitaker and her colleagues fabricated a new set of filters, each one sensitive to different wavelengths of light, which they used on a 4-meter Kitt Peak telescope in Arizona. They spent 75 nights peering into the distant universe and collecting light from 40,000 galaxies ranging in distance from the nearby universe out to 12 billion light years away. The resulting survey is the deepest and most complete ever made at those distances and wavelengths of light.

The team deciphered the galaxies' dual behavior based on the color of the light they emit. Because of the physics of star formation, active, wakeful galaxies appear bluer, while the light emitted by passive, sleepy galaxies tends toward the redder end of the spectrum.

The researchers found that there are many more active galaxies than passive ones, which agrees with the current thinking that galaxies start out actively forming stars before eventually shutting down.

"We don't see many galaxies in the in-between state," said Pieter van Dokkum, a Yale astronomer and another author of the paper. "This discovery shows how quickly galaxies go from one state to the other, from actively forming stars to shutting off."

Whether the sleeping galaxies have completely shut down remains an open question, Whitaker said. However, the new study suggests the active galaxies are forming stars at rates about 50 times greater than their sleepy counterparts.

"Next, we hope to determine whether galaxies go back and forth between waking and sleeping or whether they fall asleep and never wake up again," van Dokkum said. "We're also interested in how long it takes galaxies to fall asleep, and whether we can catch one in the act of dozing off."

Other authors of the study include Ivo Labbé (Leiden University and Carnegie Observatories); Gabriel Brammer (Yale University and European Southern Observatory); Mariska Kriek (Princeton University and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics); Danilo Marchesini (Tufts University); Ryan Quadri and Marijn Franx (Leiden University); Adam Muzzin, Rachel Bezanson, Kyoung-Soo Lee, Britt Lundgren, Erica Nelson, Tomer Tal and David Wake (Yale University); Rik Williams (Carnegie Observatories); Garth Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory); and Gregory Rudnick (University of Kansas).

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Refined Hubble Constant Narrows Possible Explanations For Dark Energy

Refined Hubble Constant Narrows Possible Explanations For Dark Energy

  8:49:00 PM    Science Lover

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This is a Hubble Space Telescope photo of the spiral galaxy NGC 3021. This was one of several hosts of recent Type Ia supernovae observed by astronomers to refine the measure of the universe's expansion rate, called the Hubble constant. Hubble made precise measurements of Cepheid variable stars in the galaxy, highlighted by green circles in the four inset boxes. These stars pulsate at a rate that is matched closely to their intrinsic brightness. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Riess (STScI and JHU))

Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent.

The new value for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or Ho (after Edwin Hubble who first measured the expansion of the universe nearly a century ago), is 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec (error margin of ± 3.6). The results agree closely with an earlier measurement gleaned from Hubble of 72 ± 8 km/sec/megaparsec, but are now more than twice as precise.

The Hubble measurement, conducted by the SHOES (Supernova Ho for the Equation of State) Team and led by Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University, uses a number of refinements to streamline and strengthen the construction of a cosmic "distance ladder," a billion light-years in length, that astronomers use to determine the universe's expansion rate.

Hubble observations of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables in a nearby cosmic mile marker, the galaxy NGC 4258, and in the host galaxies of recent supernovae, directly link these distance indicators. The use of Hubble to bridge these rungs in the ladder eliminated the systematic errors that are almost unavoidably introduced by comparing measurements from different telescopes.

Riess explains the new technique: "It's like measuring a building with a long tape measure instead of moving a yard stick end over end. You avoid compounding the little errors you make every time you move the yardstick. The higher the building, the greater the error."

Lucas Macri, professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M, and a significant contributor to the results, said, "Cepheids are the backbone of the distance ladder because their pulsation periods, which are easily observed, correlate directly with their luminosities. Another refinement of our ladder is the fact that we have observed the Cepheids in the near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum where these variable stars are better distance indicators than at optical wavelengths."

This new, more precise value of the Hubble constant was used to test and constrain the properties of dark energy, the form of energy that produces a repulsive force in space, which is causing the expansion rate of the universe to accelerate.

By bracketing the expansion history of the universe between today and when the universe was only approximately 380,000 years old, the astronomers were able to place limits on the nature of the dark energy that is causing the expansion to speed up. (The measurement for the far, early universe is derived from fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, as resolved by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, WMAP, in 2003.)

Their result is consistent with the simplest interpretation of dark energy: that it is mathematically equivalent to Albert Einstein's hypothesized cosmological constant, introduced a century ago to push on the fabric of space and prevent the universe from collapsing under the pull of gravity. (Einstein, however, removed the constant once the expansion of the universe was discovered by Edwin Hubble.)

"If you put in a box all the ways that dark energy might differ from the cosmological constant, that box would now be three times smaller," says Riess.

"That's progress, but we still have a long way to go to pin down the nature of dark energy."

Though the cosmological constant was conceived of long ago, observational evidence for dark energy didn't come along until 11 years ago, when two studies, one led by Riess and Brian Schmidt of Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the other by Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, discovered dark energy independently, in part with Hubble observations. Since then astronomers have been pursuing observations to better characterize dark energy.

Riess's approach to narrowing alternative explanations for dark energy--whether it is a static cosmological constant or a dynamical field (like the repulsive force that drove inflation after the big bang)--is to further refine measurements of the universe's expansion history.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, the estimates of the Hubble constant varied by a factor of two. In the late 1990s the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale refined the value of the Hubble constant to an error of only about ten percent. This was accomplished by observing Cepheid variables at optical wavelengths out to greater distances than obtained previously and comparing those to similar measurements from ground-based telescopes.

The SHOES team used Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to observe 240 Cepheid variable stars across seven galaxies. One of these galaxies was NGC 4258, whose distance was very accurately determined through observations with radio telescopes. The other six galaxies recently hosted Type Ia supernovae that are reliable distance indicators for even farther measurements in the universe. Type Ia supernovae all explode with nearly the same amount of energy and therefore have almost the same intrinsic brightness.

By observing Cepheids with very similar properties at near-infrared wavelengths in all seven galaxies, and using the same telescope and instrument, the team was able to more precisely calibrate the luminosity of supernovae. With Hubble's powerful capabilities, the team was able to sidestep some of the shakiest rungs along the previous distance ladder involving uncertainties in the behavior of Cepheids.

Riess would eventually like to see the Hubble constant refined to a value with an error of no more than one percent, to put even tighter constraints on solutions to dark energy.

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