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ASTR1001 Zog: The Second Data Release. Wagner, Bach and Hayden (IAP).
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Wagner, Bach and Hayden (IAP) • This group have been trying to measure a distance to the blue spots. They asked for and were awarded time on the Bubble Space Telescope to look for parallax in the blue spots. No parallax was found: the blue spots must therefore be more than about fifty light-years away. • Many individual stars in the Greater Milk Stain were also included in their image of the North Blue Spot. These stars also show no measurable parallax. They typically have measured fluxes of around 10-16 W m-2 nm-1 in the V band.
Gilbert and Sullivan • This group asked for long exposure images of the blue spots with the Bubble Space Telescope. The time assignment committee considered their request to be sensible, as many astronomers are facinated by these mysterious objects, and allocated 40 orbits of exposure to each blue spot.
Up close, both blue spots look quite similar to how they appear unmagnified. Neither breaks up into stars (at the 0.1 arcsecond resolution of the Bubble Space Telescope), though the North Blue spot image is full of stars from the Greater Milk Stain. • One surprise: under magnification, the North Blue Spot (the one within the Greater Milk Stain) has jets of fuzzballs, just like the South Blue Spot. • Another new result: many new jets of fuzzballs were found around both blue spots: jets too faint and small to have been seen before. These faint jets are slightly bluer in colour than the well known bright ones.
Diaz, Heston and Smythe (Ozford Uni) • This team, together with many collaborators, have been mapping the whole sky, using a special pair of wide field telescopes. • Such telescopes are called Schmidt telescopes, and use a special combination of lenses, mirrors and photographic plates to take photographs of a whopping 36 square degrees of the sky in one go. Two such telescope, the Palomarz and Anglo-Auztralian Schmidts, have been photographing the whole sky for ten years. They have taken these photographs, digitised them, and have used them to construct a complete digital map of the sky on 100 cd-roms.
The first result concerns the jets. With the all sky digital map they have been able to show that they extend out from the North Blue Spot as well as the South one: the northern jets have, until now, been lost in the midst of the Great Milk Stain. • Furthermore, the Jets seem to extend further out from the blue spots than anyone previously expected. As they get further from the spots, the gaps between fuzzballs get very large, but they can trace some jets out to five degrees from the blue spots!
The fuzzballs that lie in the jets are always very faint ones: they never see the famous bright fuzzballs like M23 or M86 in these chains. The jets with bright first members (the fuzzball furthest from the blue spot) tend to have a bigger gap between the first and second members. In the table below they’ve measured the declinations of the first four members of two jets. The first jet has the brighter first member.
They have counted fuzzballs as a function of their brightness. After calibrating their photographic map, they came up with a list of over a million fuzzballs: all the fuzzballs in the sky with fluxes greater than 10-19 W m-2 nm-1, anywhere in the sky. • The approximate number of fuzzballs as a function of their flux is listed in the table below.
The number of bright fuzzballs (Flux > 10-17 W m-2 nm-1) per unit area seems to be relatively uniform across the sky (though they do seem to be concentrations of fuzzballs in a few places). Fainter fuzzballs, however, are more common near declination +90 and -90. Near declination zero, the very faintest fuzzballs are only half as common as they are at the celestial poles.
Carter and Thoris (Helium Institute) • These researchers managed to persuade the Space Telescope Science Institute to take a really deep exposure of a random part of the sky. A really deep exposure takes a lot of Bubble time, so they were only given time to image one region of the sky. Furthermore, their data was made generally available to everyone as soon as it was taken: publicised as the Bubble Deep Field. • 40 orbits of Bubble time were used to image a small region of the sky at right ascension 0, declination 0, through each of three filters: B (0.39-0.5 m), V(0.45-0.55 m) and R (0.55-0.75 m). These were combined to produce a colour image of this region.
The Bubble Deep Field: 120 orbits exposure with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
They have counted fuzzballs as a function of their brightness. They then extrapolated their counts to the whole sky, assuming that the average density of fuzzballs in the BDF extends over the whole sky. Their field of view is too small to measure the space density of brighter galaxies, and the error bars on the number of galaxies in the first row is large.
Verdi and Puccini (Venesia Instiute) • Hearing of the recent remarkable discovery of jets around the North Blue Spot, this group used the William Herzchel Telescope to get spectra of the fuzzballs in one of these jets.
They obtained spectra of four fuzzballs from one of the biggest jets extending from the Northern Blue Spot, as shown below. B1 B2 B3 B4
All four fuzzballs had similar spectra: spectra resembling those of typical stars. Relative Flux Observed Wavelength (nm)
The only significant differences between the spectra were that the lines were shifted. All four fuzzballs were blueshifted - the blueshifts are listed below.
Strittmatter and Shu, Zteward Observatory • These two have led a consortium of 73 astronomers from fifteen countries in doing a massive X-ray and radio survey of the whole sky. • The radio observations were made with the Auztralia Telescope Compact Array in the south, and the Very Large Array in the north. Both groups combined to do an X-ray survey of the whole sky using the XMM satellite (X-rays do not penetrate the atmosphere).
The radio maps detected thousands of sources, most of them looking something like this. Blue is an optical image. Red is the radio map: showing twin jets extending away from a small faint fuzzball. • Most sources have radio fluxes of less than half a Jansky. The one spectacular exception is fuzzball M12, which has a colossal flux of 11 Janskys. • A Jansky is 10-26 W m-2Hz-1.
Here is an optical image of M12: far and away the most powerful radio source in the sky. Looks much like a normal fuzzball. It lies at coordinates RA 236.88, Dec 37.13.
In the radio it looks quite different, as can be seen in these three images, taken at different resolutions. It seems to have a jet of relativistic particles squirting out in both directions.
The second most powerful X-ray and radio source in the sky was Galaxy NFC64, an optically rather boring fuzzball that had been observed with the BST by Group 1 in the first round of observations. XMM detected 27 X-rays per second from it. • It was also a double radio source, though the two jets were of more similar brightness than those of M12.
The two blue spots were not strong X-ray or radio sources. • However, all the fuzzballs in one jet sticking out of the Southern Blue Spot were strong X-ray and radio sources. • The same applies to the Northern blue spot: all the fuzzballs in one jet sticking out of it were strong X-ray and radio sources.
The Radio and X-ray Jet • The other jets radiating from the blue spots did not emit strong radio or X-ray flux. No new jets were discovered, travelling in any direction. Published images were checked, and this jet seems similar to all the others optically. In the radio, all sources in both chains are double radio sources, similar to M12 and NFC64. All the radio axes point in the same way (roughly perpendicular to the direction of the jets). Details of the Southern Radio/X-ray Jet
Here are the details of the Northern Jet. As with the Southern Jet, the brightest source, which in both cases is the furthest from the Blue Spot, is called ‘A’, and the others are numbered in order as they approach the blue spots. There are many more members of both jets - only those from which more than 0.5 X-rays per second are detected are listed. Details of the Northern Radio/X-ray Jet
De Canis et al. • This group have been slowly and painstakingly searching for variable stars in the central regions of the Greater Milk Stain. • This is very difficult work as these stars are faint - the power of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), with its four 8m mirrors was required. • Stars pulsing with 2 hour periods were found. • They further seached for such pulsing stars in two of the brightest fuzzballs in the sky: M23 and M86. This observation required the Bubble Space Telescope. Once again, they were successful in finding stars with 2 hour pulsation periods.
Here is a table of the average peak brightness of the 2-hour pulsing stars in the three targets.
Smoot and Hawkins • These reseaarchers built a satellite to measure the microwave background radiation. • Using ground-based microwave telescopes, it was quickly established that a microwave background does indeed exist. • Their Cosmic Background Explorer satellite was launched to measure this background precisely. • The microwave background was rapidly discovered to vary in brightness across the sky. It is about 10% brighter in the direction of both blue spots than it is at Declination zero.
Here is an all-sky map of the microwave background. Declination zero is along the middle. Declination +90 is at the top and -90 is at the bottom. The intensity at declination +90 or -90 is 10% greater than that at Declination 0.
When this simple correlation with declination is removed from the data, some residual lumps are seen. These residual brightness patterns have an amplitude of about 0.001% (ie. the brightest bits are 0.001% brighter than the faintest bits). • Remarkably, the pattern of bright and dark regions looking towards Declination +90 and -90 are the same! The same structures are seen! • The structures do not seem to correlate with fuzzballs or the milkstains. 0 RA 0 RA 90 RA 90 RA +90 Dec: North -90 Dec: South
Fidelis and Semper • This group requested BST spectra of the objects found in the Bubble Deep Field, in particular the blue galaxy-like objects, the small red objects, and the objects that look like fuzzy balls. • The time allocation committee rejected this proposal: given that it took 120 orbits to even get an image of these things, obtaining spectra would require about 10,000 orbits - four years of exclusive BST time. The committee were not convinced that useful science would come out of this colossal investment of time. • The group did, however, persuade some collaborators with access to the Keck Telescope, Zog’s biggest ground-based telescope, to get spectra of a few of the brightest sources in the Bubble Deep Field. The small red objects were far too faint to obtain spectra, but a few ratty spectra were obtained of the brightest blue elongated things and the grey fuzzy balls.
The Bubble Deep Field: 120 orbits exposure with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
The blue, elongated things had featureless, blue spectra. No emission or absorption-lines were seen, but the signal-to-noise ratio of the spectra was so poor that this wasn’t really a surprise (these are very difficult things to get spectra of). Relative Flux 300nm 700nm Observed Wavelength (nm)
The faint fuzzy things had rather different spectra, though still pretty ratty. Here is a typical one. Relative Flux 600 900 300 Observed Wavelength (nm)
Walrus et al. • Walrus et al are experimental physicists. Hearing all the talk about strange geometries, they requested money to build an instrument to measure p. • Two instruments were built: one to measure it in the lab, and one to measure it on much larger scales in space (by bouncing lasers between spacecraft). • The ground-based experiment reported that p had its normal, expected value with a precision of 15 decimal places. • The space-based experiment measured p on a scale of 1012m, and once again found that it has its normal expected value, to an accuracy this time of 10 decimal places.
Gabriel, Nunn and Weekes (ANU) • Gabriel et al. requested an X-ray measurement of the famous radio source M12. • The observations were made, and a very strong emission was detected: 149 X-rays per second.
The European Zpace Agency (EZA) • EZA have long been concerned that not enough is known about nearby stars. The fundamental problem has always been measuring the distances to stars: unless you know the distance, everything else is very hard to determine. They recently launched the Hipparchoz satellite, designed to measure parallax with unprecedented precision to all stars within about 30 pc. • When its two year mission was completed, it took the team scientists another two years to process the vast amounts of data.
Parallax Measurements • Despite the enormous increase in precision, no parallax was measured for either blue spot. Likewise, no fuzzball showed parallax, and none of the stars in the GMS showed measurable parallax. • Over 7,000 nearby stars did, however, show parallax. Of particular interest were 4 pulsing stars with two hour periods. These stars were chosen because their spectra were very similar to the two-hour pulsing stars seen in the GMS and in other fuzzballs. • Parallaxes are measured in arcseconds (and arcsecond is 1/60 arcminutes. An arc-minute is 1/60 degrees). They represent the change in apparent position over half a Zog year (ie. The coordinates of the star change by this angle between two observations six months apart).
Radar Measurements • Radar pulses sent to Zog’s sun take 18 minutes 53.33 seconds to make the round trip to the sun and back. • The speed of light, as measured in Zoggian laboratories, is the same as it is on Earth.
