Early nights cut teen obesity

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Kids who went to bed late and got up late were 1.5 times more likely to become obese. Image: JBryson/iStockphoto Research from the University of South Australia and published today in the leading international journal, SLEEP, shows that an early night may be a key factor in reducing obesity and improving fitness for teenagers. The study co-authored by postdoctoral fellow at UniSA, Dr Carol Maher and Professor Tim Olds examined the bedtimes and waking times of more than 2000 Australians aged between 9 and 16 years comparing their activity in their free time and their weight. The results showed that even with equal actual amounts of sleep, young people who went to bed early and woke early were likely to be slimmer and fitter that their counterpart night owls. “We found that kids who went to bed late and got up late were 1.5 times more likely to become obese and 2.9 times more likely to be physically inactive,” Dr Maher said. “The night owls more often spent their free time playing computer or video games, watching TV or engaged in other sedentary or screen-based activities. “While scientists have already made the connection between less sleep and poor health outcomes around obesity and fitness, what is interesting and new here is that the timing of sleep may be an important factor in predicting health in young people.” Dr Maher said given teenagers’ natural inclination to stay up and sleep in, the study may help to alert people to the dangers of taking that habit to extremes. “We know that evenings tend to be the time of day when there are more sedentary activity options,” she said. “The most attractive TV programming is in the evening and it is a time when people hop onto facebook or socially interactive online gaming options so the incentives are there for teenagers to stay up and stay sedentary. At the same time, when they sleep in they are missing the opportunities for sports and other physical activities that tend to be held or undertaken in the mornings.” The study showed young people who habitually went to bed early and woke up earlier than their late-sleeping contemporaries accumulated 27 minutes more moderate to vigorous physical activity per day. Night owls spent an average of 48 minutes longer playing video games, watching TV or engaging online than those who turned in early. In fact, on a broad scale, they replaced 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity with 30 minutes of sedentary behaviour each day. And in the line-up of indicators for poorer health outcomes, the night owls had higher Body Mass Index (BMI) scores and were more likely to be obese or overweight. The night owls were also more likely to live in major cities, come from lower SES households, work part time and have fewer brothers and sisters. “It is only when you do the research and unpack the dynamic relationships between health and habits that you find trends that can potentially be altered with modifications to behaviour and the social environment,” Dr Maher said. “The research may help to support education around teen-age health and give them the knowledge to improve their own health and well being.” Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

New way rids old unsafe tyres

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

“There is a world-wide need to address the issue of disposing of end-of-life tyres in a responsible, environmentally friendly manner." Image:Falcor_/iStockphoto A new recycling process could be the answer to alleviating the environmental burden of old tyres. Researchers with Deakin University’s Institute for Technology Research and Innovation worked with industry partner VR TEK Global to develop a new cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution for turning old tyres into high quality ingredients for the manufacture of new rubber products. “What we have developed is a significant breakthrough in tyre recycling that is superior to the current practices of shredding and burying tyres in landfill, burning tyres or recycling them into low quality materials of limited use,” explained Deakin research engineer Chris Skourtis. “Our process does not rely on chemicals and uses less power—making it more environmentally friendly. It also results in high quality ingredients that can replace virgin and synthetic rubbers in the manufacture of products such as new tyres, car parts, insulation materials, conveyor belts and ashphalt additive for roads.” Each year more than 20 million tyres in Australia, and one billion world-wide, reach the end of their working lives. Only a small percentage of these tyres are recycled with most making their way into landfill; placing a burden on the environment and human health. “There is a world-wide need to address the issue of disposing of end-of-life tyres in a responsible, environmentally friendly manner,” Mr Skourtis said. “Tyres simply dumped or placed in landfill are known to leach harmful chemicals into the environment; cause fires; and provide a perfect breeding ground for pests like mosquitoes and rats. “We have come up with a way of giving new life to old tyres that should eliminate the need for them to end up in landfill.” The Deakin researchers, led by Professor Qipeng Guo, developed a small scale facility at the University’s Waurn Ponds Campus to test and refine the recycling technology developed and patented by VR TEK Global. “We now have a technology that is far better than any other tyre recycling processes,” Mr Skourtis explained. “First, the tyres are segmented in a way that allows for each part to be treated differently which eliminates impurities and results in a higher quality end product. For example, the steel reinforcement in the tyre is separated without fragmenting, which is not common in current tyre recycling. “We have then created an efficient means of devulcanising and activating the tyres into rubber powders for recycling into rubber products. “Devulcanisation essentially reverses the chemical process used to create the tyres. This is normally done using environmentally harmful chemicals. We have developed a mechanical method that requires no chemicals. “We have also developed a way of using ozone gas to activate the rubber powder which makes it more compatible with other materials. This extends the usability of the powder for producing a wider range of rubber and plastic products than currently possible.” This breakthrough in tyre recycling technology is the result of four years of research and development between VR TEK Global and CSIRO and Deakin University. The project has been funded by the Federal Government (via the Advanced Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre) and the Victorian State Government (through the Victorian Centre for Advanced Materials Manufacturing). Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Peer pressure driving sexting

THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

"...if boys refrained from engaging in the activity they were labeled ‘gay’ or could be ostracized from the peer group. " Image: manley099/iStockphoto Both young men and women experience peer pressure to share sexual images via the new phenomenon of ‘sexting’, preliminary findings from a University of Melbourne study has found. ‘Sexting’ is the practice of sending and receiving sexual images on a mobile phone.  The study is one of the first academic investigations into ‘sexting’ from a young person’s perspective in Australia. The findings were presented to the 2011 Australasian Sexual Health Conference in Canberra. Ms Shelley Walker from the Primary Care Research Unit in the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne said the study not only highlighted the pressure young people experienced to engage in sexting, it also revealed the importance of their voice in understanding and developing responses to prevent and deal with the problem. “The phenomenon has become a focus of much media reporting; however research regarding the issue is in its infancy, and the voice of young people is missing from this discussion and debate,” she said. The qualitative study involved individual interviews with 33 young people (15 male and 18 female) aged 15 – 20 years. Preliminary findings revealed young people believed a highly sexualized media culture bombarded young people with sexualized images and created pressure to engage in sexting. Young people discussed the pressure boys place on each other to have girls’ photos on their phones and computers. They said if boys refrained from engaging in the activity they were labeled ‘gay’ or could be ostracized from the peer group. Both genders talked about the pressure girls experienced from boyfriends or strangers to reciprocate on exchanging sexual images. Some young women talked about the expectation (or more subtle pressure) to be involved in sexting, simply as a result of having viewed images of girls they know. Both young men and women talked about being sent or shown images or videos, sometimes of people they knew or of pornography without actually having agreed to look at it first. Ms Walker said ‘sexting’ is a rapidly changing problem as young people keep up with new technologies such as using video and Internet via mobile phones. The Australian Communication & Media Authority reported in 2010 that around 90 percent of young people aged 15-17 owned mobile phones. “Our study reveals how complex and ever-changing the phenomenon of ‘sexting’ is and that continued meaningful dialogue is needed to address and prevent the negative consequences of sexting for young people,” she said. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

ETV2 Teertha Yatra - Sri Sai Baba Mandir - Shaikpet - 02

Unbelievable!!

This is the case of 1 photographer taking photographs of a 2nd photographer.
The following photos were taken by Hans van de Vorst from the Netherlands at the Grand Canyon, Arizona .
The descriptions are his own.
The identity of the 2nd photographer is unknown.

Look carefully at the photographer.
He has a camera, a tripod and a plastic bag, either on his shoulder or in his left hand.
Only his right hand is available to grab the rock and the weight of his stuff is a problem.
He landed low - his right hand and right foot are slipping.
At this very moment, I took this shot.
He then pushed his body against the rock, waited for a few seconds, threw his stuff up on the flat rock , climbed up and walked away, presumably to a bathroom to change his shorts.
I know I had to change mine - and I was only watching !

 

Beyond Growth: Is investing in infrastructure good for people’s well-being?

SUBMITTED BY JORDAN SCHWARTZ 

In our last blog, we asked whether it is possible for an infrastructure investment in Latin America and the Caribbean  to hit the triple win: spur growth, aid societal well-being, and help the environment.

One young woman, on the World Bank Facebook page, posted this plea : "We as citizens have to demand these types of investments from our governments: modern roads, clean energy, investments that create employment without contaminating." ("Nosotros como ciudadanos tenemos que exigir ese tipo de inversiones a nuestros gobiernos: vías modernas, energía limpia que dé trabajo y no contamine.")

I take this as a signal that we should move beyond growth, so...

We explored the first linkage and found that the bonds are indeed strong between infrastructure investment and growth, both short-term and long-term. And while growth is crucial to poverty alleviation, growth can’t do the job alone. A more holistic view of development will help us to judge whether investment in infrastructure is good for society’s well-being. From both an economic and a personal perspective, we want to know if an investment is helping to include its users in the economy, to bring opportunity or advancement to its households.

One proxy of inclusiveness is income equality, and the research shows that, yes, larger stocks and higher quality infrastructure help improve the distribution of wealth. Although income equality tugs at our sense of fairness, as a sole indicator of inclusiveness it feels very indirect and somewhat impersonal. That is, money ain’t everything. For an investment to be truly inclusive, it needs to do something… to provide a service that makes people healthier and happier.

Although the application of Economic Impact Evaluation to the infrastructure sectors is in its infancy, we can see some linkages between infrastructure and development outcomes without stretching our imaginations beyond the evidence. We can say, with some confidence, that:

• Better public transport networks get us more reliable access to job markets and create cities with less congestion and pollution.


• Better water and sanitation mean less schistosemiasis (snail fever), diarrhea and infant health problems. 


• More reliable electricity means more time to study and learn, and the freedom to work out of the home.

All season roads mean better access to markets, schools and hospital… and to cheaper goods.

But does the average citizen paying fuel taxes, utility bills and bus fees think about these indirect impacts?

If not, what do the people want from infrastructure investment? It turns out the answer is tautological: We want the infrastructure service that the infrastructure is supposed to provide. During public consultations for a national Infrastructure Strategy in El Salvador not too long ago, an elderly man in the village of Villa Belen expressed this better than I could.

“The truth is that nobody would move to this town, because there is not a single basic service here. Those who are here now are truly desperate…we are on a boat with many problems, but if we abandon it, we will drown. If somebody would offer me money, I would take it and leave everything here. There is no light, no water, no basic services.”

Time after time, when the poor are asked what their priorities are, it is the infrastructure service itself that surfaces to the top.

The “well-being” of the poor is improved when they have household sewerage connections and running tap water they can trust. Period. Their lives are better when they have reliable electricity and when they can get get to a good road easily. Period. City dwellers want better public transport because they want better public transport. It means less waiting, less stress, more time for the important things in life. Studying the impact of infrastructure services is crucial to design and to investment prioritization.

But we don’t need regression analysis or experiments with control groups to grasp the truth of the importance of infrastructure services for the poor. They tell us themselves and, ultimately, this is the link between infrastructure and inclusiveness.

The Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of All Time

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Neuroscientists Record Novel Responses to Faces from Single Neurons in Humans

This figure shows the kind of stimuli used in the study: whole faces (left) and only partly revealed faces. According to the researchers, the surprising finding was that although neurons respond most strongly to seeing the whole face, they actually respond much less to the middle panel than to the far right panel, even though the middle panel is more similar to the whole face. (Credit: Ralph Adolphs, California Institute of Technology)

Science Daily  — Responding to faces is a critical tool for social interactions between humans. Without the ability to read faces and their expressions, it would be hard to tell friends from strangers upon first glance, let alone a sad person from a happy one. Now, neuroscientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), with the help of collaborators at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, have discovered a novel response to human faces by looking at recordings from brain cells in neurosurgical patients.

"The finding really surprised us," says Ueli Rutishauser, first author on the paper, a former postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and now a visitor in the Division of Biology. "Here you have neurons that respond well to seeing pictures of whole faces, but when you show them only parts of faces, they actually respond less and less the more of the face you show. That just seems counterintuitive."The finding, described in the journalCurrent Biology, provides the first description of neurons that respond strongly when the patient sees an entire face, but respond much less to a face in which only a very small region has been erased.

The neurons are located in a brain region called the amygdala, which has long been known to be important for the processing of emotions. However, the study results strengthen a growing belief among researchers that the amygdala has also a more general role in the processing of, and learning about, social stimuli such as faces.

Other researchers have described the amygdala's neuronal response to faces before, but this dramatic selectivity -- which requires the face to be whole in order to elicit a response -- is a new insight.

"Our interpretation of this initially puzzling effect is that the brain cares about representing the entire face, and needs to be highly sensitive to anything wrong with the face, like a part missing," explains Ralph Adolphs, senior author on the study and Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology at Caltech. "This is probably an important mechanism to ensure that we do not mistake one person for another and to help us keep track of many individuals."

The team recorded brain-cell responses in human participants who were awaiting surgery for drug-resistant epileptic seizures. As part of the preparation for surgery, the patients had electrodes implanted in their medial temporal lobes, the area of the brain where the amygdala is located. By using special clinical electrodes that have very small wires inserted, the researchers were able to observe the firings of individual neurons as participants looked at images of whole faces and partially revealed faces. The voluntary participants provided the researchers with a unique and very rare opportunity to measure responses from single neurons through the implanted depth electrodes, says Rutishauser.

"This is really a dream collaboration for basic research scientists," he says. "At Caltech, we are very fortunate to have several nearby hospitals at which the neurosurgeons are interested in such collaborative medical research."

The team plans to continue their studies by looking at how the same neurons respond to emotional stimuli. This future work, combined with the present study results, could be highly valuable for understanding a variety of psychiatric diseases in which this region of the brain is thought to function abnormally, such as mood disorders and autism.

Engineers 'Cook' Promising New Heat-Harvesting Nanomaterials in Microwave Oven

Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed new thermoelectric nanomaterials, pictured above, that could lead to techniques for better capturing and putting this waste heat to work. The key ingredients for making marble-sized pellets of the new material are aluminum and a common, everyday microwave oven. (Credit: Rensselaer/Ramanath)

Science Daily  — Waste heat is a byproduct of nearly all electrical devices and industrial processes, from driving a car to flying an aircraft or operating a power plant. Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed new nanomaterials that could lead to techniques for better capturing and putting this waste heat to work. The key ingredients for making marble-sized pellets of the new material are aluminum and a common, everyday microwave oven.

However, a team of researchers led by Ganpati Ramanath, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer, in collaboration with the University of Wollongong, Australia, have demonstrated a new way to decrease zinc oxide's thermal conductivity without reducing its electrical conductivity. The innovation involves adding minute amounts of aluminum to zinc oxide, and processing the materials in a microwave oven. The process is adapted from a technique invented at Rensselaer by Ramanath, graduate student Rutvik Mehta, and Theo Borca-Tasciuc, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering (MANE). This work could open the door to new technologies for harvesting waste heat and creating highly energy efficient cars, aircraft, power plants, and other systems.

Harvesting electricity from waste heat requires a material that is good at conducting electricity but poor at conducting heat. One of the most promising candidates for this job is zinc oxide, a nontoxic, inexpensive material with a high melting point. While nanoengineering techniques exist for boosting the electrical conductivity of zinc oxide, the material's high thermal conductivity is a roadblock to its effectiveness in collecting and converting waste heat. Because thermal and electrical conductivity are related properties, it's very difficult to decrease one without also diminishing the other.

"Harvesting waste heat is a very attractive proposition, since we can convert the heat into electricity and use it to power a device -- like in a car or a jet -- that is creating the heat in the first place. This would lead to greater efficiency in nearly everything we do and, ultimately, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," Ramanath said. "We are the first to demonstrate such favorable thermoelectric properties in bulk-sized high-temperature materials, and we feel that our discovery will pave the way to new power harvesting devices from waste heat."

Results of the study are detailed in a paper published recently by the journal Nano Letters.

To create the new nanomaterial, researchers added minute quantities of aluminum to shape-controlled zinc oxide nanocrystals, and heated them in a $40 microwave oven. Ramanath's team is able to produce several grams of the nanomaterial in a matter of few minutes, which is enough to make a device measuring a few centimeters long. The process is less expensive and more scalable than conventional methods and is environmentally friendly, Ramanath said. Unlike many nanomaterials that are fabricated directly onto a substrate or surface, this new microwave method can produce pellets of nanomaterials that can be applied to different surfaces. These attributes, together with low thermal conductivity and high electrical conductivity, are highly suitable for heat harvesting applications.

"Our discovery could be key to overcoming major fundamental challenges related to working with thermoelectric materials," said project collaborator Borca-Tasciuc. "Moreover, our process is amenable to scaling for large-scale production. It's really amazing that a few atoms of aluminum can conspire to give us thermoelectric properties we're interested in."

This work was a collaborative effort between Ramanath and Shi Xue Dou, a professor at the Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials at the University of Wollogong, Australia. Wollongong graduate student Priyanka Jood carried out the work together with Rensselaer graduate students Rutvik Mehta and Yanliang Zhang during Jood's one-year visit to Rensselaer. Co-authors of the paper are Richard W. Siegel, the Robert W. Hunt Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; along with professors Xiaolin Wang and Germanas Peleckis at the University of Wollongong.

This research is funded by support from IBM through the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center; S3TEC, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences; the Australian Research Council (ARC); and the University of Wollongong.

Scientists Release Most Accurate Simulation of the Universe to Date

The Bolshoi simulation reveals a cosmic web of dark matter that underlies the large-scale structure of the universe and, through its gravitational effects on ordinary matter, drives the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters. The image is a slice of the entire simulation, 1 billion light-years across and about 30 million light-years thick. (Credit: Stefan Gottlober (AIP))

Science Daily  — The Bolshoi supercomputer simulation, the most accurate and detailed large cosmological simulation run to date, gives physicists and astronomers a powerful new tool for understanding such cosmic mysteries as galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.

"In one sense, you might think the initial results are a little boring, because they basically show that our standard cosmological model works," said Joel Primack, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "What's exciting is that we now have this highly accurate simulation that will provide the basis for lots of important new studies in the months and years to come."

The simulation traces the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, including the evolution and distribution of the dark matter halos in which galaxies coalesced and grew. Initial studies show good agreement between the simulation's predictions and astronomers' observations.

Primack and Anatoly Klypin, professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, lead the team that produced the Bolshoi simulation. Klypin wrote the computer code for the simulation, which was run on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center. "These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy," Klypin said.

Primack, who directs the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center (UC-HIPACC), said the initial release of data from the Bolshoi simulation began in early September. "We've released a lot of the data so that other astrophysicists can start to use it," he said. "So far it's less than one percent of the actual output, because the total output is so huge, but there will be additional releases in the future."

The previous benchmark for large-scale cosmological simulations, known as the Millennium Run, has been the basis for some 400 papers since 2005. But the fundamental parameters used as the input for the Millennium Run are now known to be inaccurate. Produced by the Virgo Consortium of mostly European scientists, the Millennium simulation used cosmological parameters based on the first release of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). WMAP provided a detailed map of subtle variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang. But the initial WMAP1 parameters have been superseded by subsequent releases: WMAP5 (five-year results released in 2008) and WMAP7 (seven-year results released in 2010).

The Bolshoi simulation is based on WMAP5 parameters, which are consistent with the later WMAP7 results. "The WMAP1 cosmological parameters on which the Millennium simulation is based are now known to be wrong," Primack said. "Moreover, advances in supercomputer technology allow us to do a much better simulation with higher resolution by almost an order of magnitude. So I expect the Bolshoi simulation will have a big impact on the field."

The standard explanation for how the universe evolved after the Big Bang is known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, and it is the theoretical basis for the Bolshoi simulation. According to this model, gravity acted initially on slight density fluctuations present shortly after the Big Bang to pull together the first clumps of dark matter. These grew into larger and larger clumps through the hierarchical merging of smaller progenitors. Although the nature of dark matter remains a mystery, it accounts for about 82 percent of the matter in the universe. As a result, the evolution of structure in the universe has been driven by the gravitational interactions of dark matter. The ordinary matter that forms stars and planets has fallen into the "gravitational wells" created by clumps of dark matter, giving rise to galaxies in the centers of dark matter halos.

A principal purpose of the Bolshoi simulation is to compute and model the evolution of dark matter halos. The characteristics of the halos and subhalos in the Bolshoi simulation are presented in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is now available online. The authors are Klypin, NMSU graduate student Sebastian Trujillo-Gomez, and Primack.

A second paper, also accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and available online, presents the abundance and properties of galaxies predicted by the Bolshoi simulation of dark matter. The authors are Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez, Primack, and UCSC postdoctoral researcher Aaron Romanowsky. A comparison of the Bolshoi predictions with galaxy observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showed very good agreement, according to Primack.

The Bolshoi simulation focused on a representative section of the universe, computing the evolution of a cubic volume measuring about one billion light-years on a side and following the interactions of 8.6 billion particles of dark matter. It took 6 million CPU-hours to run the full computation on the Pleiades supercomputer, recently ranked as the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world.

A variant of the Bolshoi simulation, known as BigBolshoi or MultiDark, was run on the same supercomputer with the same number of particles, but this time in a volume 64 times larger. BigBolshoi was run to predict the properties and distribution of galaxy clusters and other very large structures in the universe, as well as to help with dark energy projects such as the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).

Another variant, called MiniBolshoi, is currently being run on the Pleiades supercomputer. MiniBolshoi focuses on a smaller portion of the universe and provides even higher resolution than Bolshoi. The Bolshoi simulation and its two variants will be made publicly available to astrophysical researchers worldwide in phases via the MultiDark Database, hosted by the Potsdam Astrophysics Institute in Germany and supported by grants from Spain and Germany.

Primack, Klypin, and their collaborators are continuing to analyze the results of the Bolshoi simulation and submit papers for publication. Among their findings are results showing that the simulation correctly predicts the number of galaxies as bright as the Milky Way that have satellite galaxies as bright as the Milky Way's major satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

"A lot more papers are on the way," Primack said.

This research was funded by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Space Telescopes Reveal Secrets of Turbulent Black Hole

Turbulent winds of gas swirl around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward toward the black hole, but another part is blown away. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

Science Daily  — Supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies swallow large amounts of gas. During this feast they spill a lot of their 'food', which is discharged in turbulent outbursts. An international team of astronomers has revealed some striking features of such an outburst around a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. They found a very hot 'convertor' corona hovering above the black hole and cold gas 'bullets' in hotter diffuse gas, speeding outwards with velocities up to 700 km/s.

Unlike popular belief, not all the matter around a black hole is swallowed up. A disc of infalling gas forms around the black hole. On the journey inwards the gas and dust emit large amounts of X-ray and UV radiation. This radiation can be so strong that it diverts a part of the gas inflow. It causes winds flowing outward with velocities up to several hundreds of km/s. An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Jelle Kaastra from the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research took the opportunity to observe and map such an extreme environment around one of the brightest supermassive black holes known to us. This 'monster' black hole -- in the distant galaxy Markarian 509 -- has a mass 300 million times that of the Sun.

Convertor corona

The Markarian 509 black hole is surrounded by a disc of gas shining bright in ultraviolet light. This emission varies in a synchronised way with emissions observed at the low end of the X-ray band, some 100s of times higher in energy than visible light. "The only way to explain this is by having gas hotter than that in the disc, a so-called 'corona', hovering above the disc," Jelle Kaastra says. "This corona absorbs and reprocesses the ultraviolet light from the disc, energising it and converting it into X-ray light. It must have a temperature of a few million degrees. Using five space telescopes, which enabled us to observe the area in unprecedented detail, we actually discovered a very hot 'corona' of gas hovering above the disc. This discovery allows us to make sense of some of the observations of active galaxies that have been hard to explain so far."

Cold gas bullets

The X-ray spectrum obtained with the Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS) of the space telescope XMM-Newton is the best obtained so far of such a system. It reveals unprecedented details of its gaseous environment. For the first time it has been possible to show that the outflow consists of at least five distinct components with temperatures ranging between 20.000 to a million degrees. The superb ultraviolet spectrum obtained by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph of the Hubble Space Telescope reveals that the coolest gas in the line of sight towards Markarian 509 has 14 different velocity components at various locations in the innermost parts of this galaxy. Thus far only seven velocity components were identified.

The combined X-ray and UV measurements demonstrate that most of the visible outflowing gas is blown off from a dusty gas torus surrounding the central region more than 15 light years away from the black hole. This outflow consists of dense, cold blobs or gas bullets embedded in hotter diffuse gas. "Even at a distance of 15 light years, the energy released near the black hole manages to blow off gas from the dusty torus that surrounds the disc of infalling gas," Kaastra says.

Signs of cosmic collision

Further outwards, the signatures of the interstellar gas of the host galaxy are seen. That gas is strongly ionised by the central X-ray source: atoms are stripped of some or most of their electrons when illuminated by the powerful flux of X-rays. Even further out, at hundred thousands of light years, the X-ray light shines through gas falling in towards Markarian 509 with speeds of 200 km/s. This gas may point at a collision with a smaller galaxy in the past, that may have triggered the activity of Markarian 509.

Space telescopes

Five large space telescopes were involved in this hundred days campaign that took place in late 2009. The heart of the campaign consisted of repeated visible, X-ray and gamma-ray observations with ESA's XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL satellites, which monitored Markarian 509 for six weeks. This was followed by long observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray satellite, using the Low Energy Transmission Grating, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope using the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Prior to these observations short snapshots to monitor the behaviour of the source at all wavelengths were taken with the Swift satellite.

The combined efforts of all these instruments and astronomers gave an unprecedented insight into the core of an active galaxy. Right in the middle of the campaign the source went into outburst. The physical changes due to this outburst could be followed over the electromagnetic spectrum from visible light to X-rays.

Papers

The international consortium responsible for this campaign consists of 26 astronomers from 21 institutes on 4 continents. The first results of this campaign will be published as a series of 7 papers in Astronomy and Astrophysics, titledMultiwavelength campaign on Mrk 509 (see below). More results are in preparation

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