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India has unveiled plans to build two new optical-infrared telescopes and a dedicated solar telescope in the Himalayan desert region of Ladakh. The three new facilities, expected to cost INR 35bn (about £284m), were announced by the Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1 February.
First up is a 3.7 m optical-infrared telescope, which is expected to come online by 2030. It will be built near the existing 2m Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT) at Hanle, about 4500m above sea level. Astronomers use the HCT for a wide range of investigations, including stellar evolution, galaxy spectroscopy, exoplanet atmospheres and time-domain studies of supernovae, variable stars and active galactic nuclei.
“The arid and high-altitude Ladakh desert is firmly established as among the world’s most attractive sites for multiwavelength astronomy,” Annapurni Subramaniam, director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bangalore, told Physics World. “HCT has demonstrated both site quality and opportunities for sustained and competitive science from this difficult location.”
The 3.7-m telescope is a stepping stone towards a proposed 13.7 m National Large Optical-Infrared Telescope (NLOT), which is expected to open in 2038. “NLOT is intended to address contemporary astronomy goals, working in synergy with major domestic and international facilities,” says Maheswar Gopinathan, a scientist at the IIA, which is leading all three projects.
Gopinathan says NLOT’s large collecting area will enable research on young stellar systems, brown dwarfs and exoplanets, while also allowing astronomers to detect faint sources and to rapidly follow up extreme cosmic events and gravitational wave detections.
Along with India’s upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, a planned gravitational-wave observatory in the country and the Square Kilometre Array in Australasia and South Africa, Gopinathan says that NLOT “will usher in a new era of multi-messenger and multi-wavelength astronomy.”
The third telescope to be supported is the 2m National Large Solar Telescope (NLST), which will be built near Pangong Tso lake 4350m above sea level. Also expected to come online by 2030, the NLST is an advance on India’s existing 50cm telescope at the Udaipur Solar Observatory, which provides a spatial resolution of about 100 km. Scientists also plan to combine NLST observations with data from Aditya-L1, India’s space-based solar observatory, which launched in 2023.
“We have two key goals [with NLST],” says Dibyendu Nandi, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata, “to probe small-scale perturbations that cascade into large flares or coronal mass ejections and improve our understanding of space weather drivers and how energy in localised plasma flows is channelled to sustain the ubiquitous magnetic fields.”
While bolstering India’s domestic astronomical capabilities, scientists say the Ladakh telescopes – located between observatories in Europe, the Americas, East Asia and Australia – would significantly improve global coverage of transient and variable phenomena.
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A faint flash of infrared light in the Andromeda galaxy was emitted at the birth of a stellar-mass black hole – according to a team of astronomers in the US. Kishalay De at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute, and colleagues, noticed that the flash was followed by the rapid dimming of a once-bright star. They say that the star collapsed, with almost all of its material falling into a newly forming black hole. Their analysis suggests that there may be many more such black holes in the universe than previously expected.
When a massive star runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion it can no longer avoid gravitational collapse. As it implodes, such a star is believed to emit an intense burst of neutrinos, whose energy can be absorbed by the star’s outer layers.
In some cases, this energy is enough to tear material away from the core, triggering spectacular explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. Sometimes, however, this energy transfer is insufficient to halt the collapse, which continues until a stellar-mass black hole is created. These stellar deaths are far less dramatic than supernovae, and are therefore very difficult to observe.
Observational evidence for these stellar-mass black holes include their gravitational influence on the motions of stars; and the gravitational waves emitted when they merge together. So far, however, their initial formation has proven far more difficult to observe.
Mysterious births
“While there is consensus that these objects must be formed as the end products of the lives of likely very massive stars, there has remained little convincing observational evidence of watching stars turn into black holes,” De explains. “As a result, we don’t even have constraints on questions as fundamental as which stars can turn into black holes.”
The main problem is the low key nature of the stellar implosions. While core-collapse supernovae shine brightly in the sky, “finding an individual star disappearing in a galaxy is remarkably difficult,” De says. “A typical galaxy has a 100 billion stars in it, and being able to spot one that disappears makes it very challenging.”
Fortunately, it is believed that these stars do not vanish without a trace. “Whenever a black hole does form from the near complete inward collapse of a massive star, its very outer envelope must be still ejected because it is too loosely bound to the star,” De explains. As it expands and cools, models predict that this ejected material should emit a flash of infrared radiation – vastly dimmer than a supernova, but still bright enough for infrared surveys to detect.
To search for these flashes, De’s team examined data from NASA’s NEOWISE infrared survey and several other telescopes. They identified a near-infrared flash that was observed in 2014 and closely matched their predictions for a collapsing star. That flash was emitted by a supergiant star in the Andromeda galaxy.
Nowhere to be seen
Between 2017 and 2022, the star dimmed rapidly before disappearing completely across all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. “This star used to be one of the most luminous stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and now it was nowhere to be seen,” says De.
“Astronomers can spot supernovae billions of light years away – but even at this remarkable proximity, we didn’t see any evidence of an explosive supernova,” De says. “This suggests that the star underwent a near pure implosion, forming a black hole.”
The team also examined a previously-observed dimming in a galaxy 10 times more distant. While several competing theories had emerged to explain that disappearance, the pattern of dimming bore a striking resemblance to their newly-validated model, strongly suggesting that this event too signalled the birth of a stellar-mass black hole.
Because these events occurred so recently in ordinary galaxies like Andromeda, De’s team believe that similar implosions must be happening routinely across the universe – and they hope that their work will trigger a new wave of discoveries.
“The estimated mass of the star we observed is about 13 times the mass of the Sun, which is lower than what astronomers have assumed for the mass of stars that turn into black holes,” De says. “This fundamentally changes out understanding of the landscape of black hole formation – there could be many more black holes out there than we estimate.”
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