NASA Admits To Discovering 'Something Weird' Happening To Our Universe

The Hubble Space Telescope has reportedly reached a new milestone in its quest to measure the speed at which the universe is expanding, and it strongly suggests that something strange is going on in our cosmos.

Astronomers have recently utilised telescopes like Hubble to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding.

However, as the data were refined, a peculiar finding was made. There is a considerable gap between evidence from the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and the universe's current rate of expansion.

Scientists have been unable to explain the discrepancy. However, it shows that "something weird" is going on in our cosmos, which might be the product of undiscovered, new physics, according to NASA.

Hubble has spent the last 30 years collecting data on a set of "milepost markers" in space and time that can be used to trace the expansion rate of the cosmos as it moves away from us.

According to NASA, it has now calibrated more than 40 of the markers, allowing for even more precision than previously.

In a statement, Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, stated, "You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers."

He is the leader of a group of scientists who have released a new research paper detailing the largest and most likely last significant update from the Hubble Space Telescope, tripling the previous set of mile markers and reanalysing existing data.

The hunt for a precise estimate of how quickly space was expanding began when American astronomer Edwin Hubble saw that galaxies beyond our own appeared to be moving away from us – and moving faster the further away they are. Since then, scientists have been working to gain a deeper understanding of that growth.

In honour of the astronomer's effort, both the rate of expansion and the space telescope that has been studying it are named Hubble.

When the space telescope began gathering data on the universe's expansion, it was discovered to be faster than models had expected. Astronomers anticipate that it should be approximately 67.5 kilometres per second per megaparsec, plus or minus 0.5, while measurements suggest that it is closer to 73.

Astronomers have a one in a million probability of getting it incorrect. Instead, it implies that the universe's growth and expansion are more intricate than we previously thought, and that there is still much to discover about how the cosmos is changing.

The newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, which will soon send back its first observations, will be used by scientists to delve deeper into this difficulty. They should be able to see more recent, far-off, and detailed mileposts as a result.

Reference(s): NASA

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. 

During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

Weird Energy Beam Just Left A Galaxy Travelling At Five Times the Speed of Light And Hubble Caught It

Please welcome a skilled illusionist to the stage. 

The ultimate magic trick is being performed by an energy beam that emerges from galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a martini olive: it appears to be travelling faster than the speed of light.

Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87, and has been seen in many other galaxies since. 

It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

If you want to just enjoy the illusion from your seat in the audience, stop reading. Otherwise, I welcome you backstage for a look at how the trick works – and how it’s helping astronomers to understand the fate of entire galaxies.

Blobs that travel more quickly than the speed of light?

We’ve known about the jet of plasma shooting from the core of M87 since 1918, when astronomer Heber Curtis saw a ray of light connected to the galaxy. To be visible from so far away, it had to be huge – about 6000 light years long.

As modern astronomers now know, pretty much all galaxies have a central black hole that periodically draws in stars and gas clouds. When gas begins to swirl down the drain, it heats up and magnetic fields focus some of it into jets of hot plasma. These jets shoot out at velocities near to – but not faster than – the speed of light.

Cosmic uncertainty: Is the speed of light really constant?

If you were to aim a telescope into the sky towards M87, you would see that this lance of plasma is askew. Instead of pointing exactly into our line of sight, it’s angled a bit to the right.

To understand the illusion, picture a single glowing blob of plasma starting at the base of this path and emitting a ray of light, both of which travel towards Earth. 

Now wait 10 years. In that time, the blob has moved closer at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. That gives the rays emitted from that later position a few light years’ head start on the way to us.

If you compare the first and second images from Earth’s perspective, it looks like the blob has just moved across the sky to the right. 

But because the second position is also closer to us, its light has had less far to travel than it appears. That means it seems to have arrived there faster than it actually did – as if the blob spent those 10 years travelling at ludicrous speed.

One of several

The jet from M87 is more than just a curiosity, says Eileen Meyer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

All over the universe, outflows of energy from massive black holes can stop or start the formation of stars throughout galaxies. But it’s unclear how these outflows work and how much energy they contain.

It is difficult for faraway objects like galaxies to change noticeably over a short period of time, but jets like the one in M87 do so by appearing to move faster than light. 

This enables astronomers to calculate with great accuracy how quickly the plasma is travelling and, consequently, how powerful the process is. M87 is unique because, in comparison to other galaxies, it is quite close and simple to examine. 

Astronomers were able to observe this plasma ripple in 1999 using Hubble images of the jet acquired over a four-year period. Meyer extended that to 13 years of photos in 2013, and as if things weren't difficult enough, it appeared that the plasma may also be flowing in spirals resembling corkscrews.

Fresh results from Meyer, now being prepared for publication, extend that baseline again to a total of more than two decades and may offer new surprises. 

“Over 20 years, you know, things go bump in the night,” she says.

She still pauses occasionally to acknowledge the faster-than-light effect even though she is familiar with it. The majority of celestial objects we observe moving across the sky, such planets and comets, are in our vicinity. M87 is millions of light years away, though.

“We can see, over a human lifetime, things moving,” she says. “Which is crazy.”

Hubble Telescope Accidentally Discovers a MIND-BLOWING New Galaxy

Humankind is getting very good at looking deep into space: We have already seen two neutron stars colliding, we have encountered mysterious radio blasts and we are about to see, for the first time, the event horizon of a black hole. 

But there are still some surprises out there, right here in our own corner of the Universe.

Upon retaking the observations of a nearby globular cluster, the Hubble Space Telescope accidentally captured an unpublished galaxy. The newly discovered galaxy was named Bedin I - and is almost as old as the Universe.

The mission was to search for the weaker stars in NGC 6752, a globular cluster 13,000 light-years away within the halo of the Milky Way. But in the distance - about 30 million light-years away "ahead", about 2,300 times farther away than the star they were staring at - Bedin I was lurking.

Considering that our Local Group is about 10 million light years in diameter. If you think of it as a neighborhood, the distance of 30 million is like being in the same cosmic city.

Bedin I is tiny, isolated and old. It is only 3,000 light-years across, compared to the 100,000 light-years in the Milky Way, and is about 1,000 times weaker. It was classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Generally, spheroidal dwarf galaxies are companions of galaxies or larger systems, but not Bedin I. It is 2 million light-years from the nearest galaxy to be considered a "satellite galaxy."

Based on the light it emits, scientists were able to determine that the galaxy is very low in metals. And since the heavier elements, such as metals, were created in stars and propagated by the Universe after their death, this indicates that Bedin I has a very old population of stars.

It has been estimated that the galaxy is 13 billion years old, newer than the universe in about 800 million years. The low metal content implies that Bedin I has not had any new star formation since. This means that it is a kind of cosmic "living fossil" or time capsule, preserving the conditions of the primordial Universe.

Reference(s): ScienceAlert

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. 

During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. 

As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. 

The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

Hubble Telescope Spots Most Distant Star Ever Seen on Record, From 12 Billion Light Years Away

The light of a star that lived during the first billion years after the universe's beginning in the big bang has been detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - the farthest individual star ever observed to date.

The discovery represents a significant step back in time from the previous single-star record holder, which was discovered by Hubble in 2018. That star lived around 4 billion years ago, or 30 percent of the universe's present age.

The newly discovered star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, so we are viewing it when the cosmos was only 7% the age it is now. Clusters of stars nested within early galaxies are the tiniest things hitherto discovered at such a long distance.

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery in the journal Nature. Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”

Welch concluded that one feature of the galaxy is an extraordinarily magnified star he named Earendel, which means "dawn star" in Old English. The discovery has the potential to usher in a hitherto unknown era of very early star creation.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch explained. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know.”

“It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” Welch said.

When the Planets Align

According to the researchers, Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times brighter, rivalling the most massive stars known.

Even a dazzling, extremely high-mass star would be hard to detect at such a long distance without the natural magnification provided by WHL0137-08, a massive galaxy cluster located between us and Earendel. The galaxy cluster's bulk warps the fabric of space, forming a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and considerably amplifies light from distant objects behind it.

The star Earendel appears directly on, or quite close to, a ripple in the fabric of space due to a unique alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster. This ripple, known as a "caustic" in optics, gives maximum magnification and brightness. On a sunny day, the rippling surface of a swimming pool creates patterns of dazzling light on the bottom of the pool. The surface ripples work as lenses, focusing sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool bottom.

Because of this caustic, the star Earendel stands out from the ambient brilliance of its parent galaxy. Its radiance is multiplied a thousand times or more. At the moment, astronomers are unable to tell if Earendel is a binary star, despite the fact that most big stars have at least one smaller partner star.

Webb's confirmation

Astronomers anticipate that Earendel will remain highly amplified for many years. NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope will observe it. Webb's exceptional sensitivity to infrared light is required to learn more about Earendel because the universe's expansion causes its light to be stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths.

“With Webb we expect to confirm Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” said co-author Dan Coe at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, who made the discovery using the data collected.

These details will narrow down its type and stage in the stellar lifecycle, with scientists expecting it to be a “rare, massive metal-poor star,” Coe said.

Astronomers will be fascinated by Earendel's composition because it formed before the universe was filled with heavy elements created by successive generations of huge stars. If further research reveals that Earendel is only composed of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are thought to be the very first stars born after the big bang. While the likelihood is remote, Welch concedes it is alluring.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch of JHU, and Dan Coe of STScI

Reference(s): Nature

Hubble Just Confirmed The Largest Ocean World In Our Solar System And Its Not On Earth

"The Ganymede Ocean is believed to contain more water than Europa's," says Olivier Witasse, a project scientist working on ESA’s future Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE). “Six times more water in Ganymede’s ocean than in Earth's ocean, and three times more than Europa.” In March of 2020, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon --larger than Mercury and not much smaller than Mars.

Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, now retired assistant administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.”

Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system and the only moon with its own magnetic field. The magnetic field causes aurorae, which are ribbons of glowing, hot electrified gas, in regions circling the north and south poles of the moon. Because Ganymede is close to Jupiter, it is also embedded in Jupiter's magnetic field. When Jupiter's magnetic field changes, the aurorae on Ganymede also change, "rocking" back and forth.

Just as Saturn's moon, Dione is perennially overshadowed by Enceladus and Titan, Ganymede's fame is eclipsed by its sister ocean world, Europa, slated for flybys by NASA’s Europa Clipper mission in the 2020s.

Ganymede's cycles of auroral activity on the surface, detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, reveal oscillations in the moon’s magnetic field best explained by the internal heat-generating tidal sloshing of a huge ocean hundreds of kilometers below the surface. JUICE will fly by the moons at distances between 1000 and 200 kilometers, orbiting Ganymede for nine months, with the latter four months at an altitude of about 500 km. While the oceans of Jupiter's moons are likely buried at significant depth below their icy crusts, radar will be able to help piece together clues as to their complex evolution.

For example, it will explore Europa's potentially active regions and be able to distinguish where the composition changes, such as if there are local, shallow reservoirs of water sandwiched between icy layers. It will be able to find 'deflected' subsurface layers, which will help to determine the tectonic history of Ganymede in particular.

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

NASA Admits To Discovering 'Something Weird' Happening To Our Universe

The Hubble Space Telescope has reportedly reached a new milestone in its quest to measure the speed at which the universe is expanding, and it strongly suggests that something strange is going on in our cosmos.

Astronomers have recently utilised telescopes like Hubble to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding.

However, as the data were refined, a peculiar finding was made. There is a considerable gap between evidence from the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and the universe's current rate of expansion.

Scientists have been unable to explain the discrepancy. However, it shows that "something weird" is going on in our cosmos, which might be the product of undiscovered, new physics, according to NASA.

Hubble has spent the last 30 years collecting data on a set of "milepost markers" in space and time that can be used to trace the expansion rate of the cosmos as it moves away from us.

According to NASA, it has now calibrated more than 40 of the markers, allowing for even more precision than previously.

In a statement, Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, stated, "You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers."

He is the leader of a group of scientists who have released a new research paper detailing the largest and most likely last significant update from the Hubble Space Telescope, tripling the previous set of mile markers and reanalysing existing data.

The hunt for a precise estimate of how quickly space was expanding began when American astronomer Edwin Hubble saw that galaxies beyond our own appeared to be moving away from us – and moving faster the further away they are. Since then, scientists have been working to gain a deeper understanding of that growth.

In honour of the astronomer's effort, both the rate of expansion and the space telescope that has been studying it are named Hubble.

When the space telescope began gathering data on the universe's expansion, it was discovered to be faster than models had expected. Astronomers anticipate that it should be approximately 67.5 kilometres per second per megaparsec, plus or minus 0.5, while measurements suggest that it is closer to 73.

Astronomers have a one in a million probability of getting it incorrect. Instead, it implies that the universe's growth and expansion are more intricate than we previously thought, and that there is still much to discover about how the cosmos is changing.

The newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, which will soon send back its first observations, will be used by scientists to delve deeper into this difficulty. They should be able to see more recent, far-off, and detailed mileposts as a result.

Reference(s): NASA

Weird Energy Beam Just Left A Galaxy Travelling At Five Times the Speed of Light And Hubble Caught It

Please welcome a skilled illusionist to the stage. The ultimate magic trick is being performed by an energy beam that emerges from galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a martini olive: it appears to be travelling faster than the speed of light.

Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87, and has been seen in many other galaxies since. It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

If you want to just enjoy the illusion from your seat in the audience, stop reading. Otherwise, I welcome you backstage for a look at how the trick works – and how it’s helping astronomers to understand the fate of entire galaxies.

Blobs that travel more quickly than the speed of light?

We’ve known about the jet of plasma shooting from the core of M87 since 1918, when astronomer Heber Curtis saw a ray of light connected to the galaxy. To be visible from so far away, it had to be huge – about 6000 light years long.

As modern astronomers now know, pretty much all galaxies have a central black hole that periodically draws in stars and gas clouds. When gas begins to swirl down the drain, it heats up and magnetic fields focus some of it into jets of hot plasma. These jets shoot out at velocities near to – but not faster than – the speed of light.

Cosmic uncertainty: Is the speed of light really constant?

If you were to aim a telescope into the sky towards M87, you would see that this lance of plasma is askew. Instead of pointing exactly into our line of sight, it’s angled a bit to the right.

To understand the illusion, picture a single glowing blob of plasma starting at the base of this path and emitting a ray of light, both of which travel towards Earth. Now wait 10 years. In that time, the blob has moved closer at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. That gives the rays emitted from that later position a few light years’ head start on the way to us.

If you compare the first and second images from Earth’s perspective, it looks like the blob has just moved across the sky to the right. But because the second position is also closer to us, its light has had less far to travel than it appears. That means it seems to have arrived there faster than it actually did – as if the blob spent those 10 years travelling at ludicrous speed.

One of several

The jet from M87 is more than just a curiosity, says Eileen Meyer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

All over the universe, outflows of energy from massive black holes can stop or start the formation of stars throughout galaxies. But it’s unclear how these outflows work and how much energy they contain.

It is difficult for faraway objects like galaxies to change noticeably over a short period of time, but jets like the one in M87 do so by appearing to move faster than light. This enables astronomers to calculate with great accuracy how quickly the plasma is travelling and, consequently, how powerful the process is. M87 is unique because, in comparison to other galaxies, it is quite close and simple to examine. Astronomers were able to observe this plasma ripple in 1999 using Hubble images of the jet acquired over a four-year period. Meyer extended that to 13 years of photos in 2013, and as if things weren't difficult enough, it appeared that the plasma may also be flowing in spirals resembling corkscrews.

Fresh results from Meyer, now being prepared for publication, extend that baseline again to a total of more than two decades and may offer new surprises. 

“Over 20 years, you know, things go bump in the night,” she says.

She still pauses occasionally to acknowledge the faster-than-light effect even though she is familiar with it. The majority of celestial objects we observe moving across the sky, such planets and comets, are in our vicinity. M87 is millions of light years away, though.

“We can see, over a human lifetime, things moving,” she says. “Which is crazy.”