Astronomers baffled by vanishing act in space

Last Updated: Friday, July 06, 2012, 17:12

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Tags: Space, Star, University of California San Diego

Washington: Astronomers have been baffled by an extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star disappearing mysteriously.

"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared. This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings," said Benjamin Zuckerman, study co-author and professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD).

"The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury," Zuckerman was quoted as saying in the journal Nature.

"It's like the classic magician's trick - now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, post-doctoral scholar at the UCSD, who led the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"

The cosmic vanishing act occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, according to a university statement.

"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis. "The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event."

Melis describes the star, designated TYC 8241 2652, as a "young analog of our sun" that only a few years ago displayed all of the characteristics of "hosting a solar system in the making," before transforming completely. Now, very little of the warm, dusty material thought to originate from collisions of rocky planets is apparent.

"Nothing like this has ever been seen in the many hundreds of stars that astronomers have studied for dust rings," Zuckerman said.

"This disappearance is remarkably fast, even on a human time scale, much less an astronomical scale. The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be wrong in some strange way."

Norm Murray, director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, who was not part of the research group, said: "The history of astronomy has shown that events that are not predicted and hard to explain can be game-changers."

Romance blooms in pursuit of physics

Subhro Maitra, TNN | Jul 6, 2012, 01.24AM IST

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Read more:Tata Institute for Fundamental Research|Suchandra Datta|Subir Sarkar|Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics|god particle

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Subir Sarkar and Suchandra Datta together in Italy.

KOLKATA: Love for physics got them together. And in between shuttling in and out of research laboratories in Europe and USA, Subir Sarkar and Suchandra Datta discovered they had more in common than just an affinity for matter and mass.
They fell in love at Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, got married after passing out, and have spent the better part of their marital life in pursuit of the God particle.
Subir and Suchandra are members of SINP's high-profile CMS group.
Their assignments have kept them apart for months, even years. While Sarkar worked at the CMS laboratory in Rome, Suchandra was stationed at Pisa. They would get to meet once a week. "When she worked in the USA, we could talk just once a week and wouldn't meet for months. Scientists don't have a social life. For the first 15 years of marriage, we hardly got to meet," said Sarkar.
They both did their masters at North Bengal University, where they realized they had developed a chemistry in the pursuit of physics. They both loved reading Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Samaresh Basu. Subir topped the university, Suchandra came second. Sharing a passion for research, they headed for TIFR in 1991 and got married in 1993.
"Initially, I had a reservation against their marriage", said Suchandra's mother Mamata Dutta. "It was not for Subir as groom. I rather feared that there would be an ego clash because they are in the same subject. But they proved me wrong." As always, they journeyed to Italy together.
"Once you chose research as a profession, you must sacrifice social life. We could not meet for months," said Subir. Whenever they got the chance, they ran off to villages in Italy. "That was all our enjoying together apart from our experiments", said Suchandra.
Doctoral and post doctoral degrees came all in the way of experiments. Staying in Italy for years and going to Chicago for months, have indeed done a lot for both of them. "Could we ever think that we could come across so many Nobel laurets at a time?", said Subir. Further the attitude of the Italians and the work atmosphere there never allowed them to look at themselves.
"But when we tried to come back after spending seven years in Italy, we found there was no job for us here," laughed Suchandra. None of the institutes or universities in India found them "suitable". Finally, thanks to the director of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, the couple could return home in 2011.
Embarrassed with the celebrity tag, Subir still laments, "The collection of Sagarmoy Ghosh is still not completed. Even the writings of Kamalkumar Majumder bought recently are untouched." They found time to scribble poems on Facebook. Suchandra, on the other hand, yearns to talk to her mother at home.

Found: Dark matter string between galaxy clusters

WASHINGTON: For the first time, astronomers have discovered a giant string of invisible dark matter across the universe between a pair of galaxy clusters. The universe is thought to be filled with such strings of dark matter, a mysterious substance that cannot be seen, only sensed through its gravitational pull.

Scientists have made many attempts earlier to find dark matter filaments, which are predicted by theories that suggest galaxy clusters form at the intersections of filaments . Dark matter is thought to make up 98% of all matter in the universe. Now, scientists find a giant filament that forms a bridge between two huge clusters called Abell 222 and Abell 223, which lie 2.7 billion light-years away.

"This is the first time (a dark matter filament) has been convincingly detected from its gravitational lensing effect," said Jorg Dietrich ,an astronomer at the University Observatory Munich in Germany.

"It's a resounding confirmation of the standard theory of structure formation of the universe. And it's a confirmation people didn't think was possible at this point," Dietrich said. Many astronomers thought detecting filaments would have to wait until telescopes became significantly more advanced, but Dietrich and his colleagues benefited from the rare spatial geometry of this cluster, which allowed them to detect signs of what's called weak gravitational lensing.