Mystery Feature Surrounds Star: It's a (Dust) Trap!

Dust. It’s insignificant to us, or at most, a nuisance. Dust is that little bit of nothing in our daily lives. Dust collects on things that are old or forgotten. Dust has a bad name on Earth, while elsewhere in the Universe, it turns out to be a key ingredient of the life cycles of stars and planets.

The proliferation of exoplanet discoveries over the last two decades has also been accompanied by a greater understanding of how planets form around stars. Truly,  planets come from star dust, or the left over material from the gravitational collapse of a gas cloud into a hot, nuclear powered furnace. The actual details of how this occurs, however, is still literally shrouded in mystery.

One often needs a radio or infrared telescope to peer through the dark, dusty regions around forming stars and planetary systems. Sometimes, these instruments can be used to view the dust itself, which holds valuable information about the physics involved.

Above is a new image from that famous new telescope in the Chilean desert, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA. While still in its commissioning phases, it was used to resolved a “cashew-shaped” feature of dust around the star Oph IRS 48, 390 light-years away from Earth.

The lead author of the paper is Nienke van der Marel, a Ph.D. student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. He expressed initial skepticism at the strange feature, but the sharpness and sensitivity of ALMA, even without its full complement of antennas, made it clear that the “dust trap” was real.

Such a trap, or vortex or bump, of material has been theorized as a way of solving the problems of how tiny dust grains clump together for form larger dust grains, and eventually larger and larger structures to form planets. Somehow, over just a few short million years, these need to go from dust to pebbles to boulders to worlds without self-destructing first. The action of a large gas giant in the system could create such a dust trap by gravitational interactions, thus allowing a safe space for the clumps to form. Previous observations of the forming planetary system show a gap in the disk of gas and dust, indicative of a large planet that has already begun to clear out its orbit.

The cartoon model of Oph IRS 48 gives a clear picture of the current working model. The blue of the disk represents the gas seen in observations of the carbon monoxide molecule. The brown indicates everything from small dust grains to larger pebbles, shown to be larger within the dust trap. These are “herded” together in a sense by the young, still-forming planet believed to be in the disk’s gap.

Read more at Discovery News

Our Sun Lives in a Glitzy Galactic Boulevard

Throughout human history philosophers, theologians, and scientists assumed Earth was the center of the universe. Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe was used to prepare astrological charts for over 1,500 years. (No wonder the astrologers couldn’t make any successful predictions!)

The Copernican model of a sun-centered universe took hold only 400 years ago. And, less than 100 years ago, many astronomers thought that the sun was in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Fast-forward to today and astronomy textbooks all show our sun and solar system residing in a ho-hum back-ally neighborhood of the galaxy. We live halfway between the galactic core and the galactic center, on the edge in a region called the Orion Spur that is nestled between two major spiral arms.

But this week a cutesy press release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., announced that “our Solar System’s Milky Way neighborhood just went upscale.”

A high-resolution radio probe of our galaxy shows that the sun presently lives in the middle of a much larger structure the radio astronomers have dubbed the Local Arm. We’re still nestled between the inner Sagittarius Arm and beefy outer Perseus Arm, but our stellar byway has more muscle now.

This has been a tricky bit of interstellar cartography because we live inside the pancake-shaped galaxy. Dust clouds and star clouds block the view of most of the galaxy in visible light. But radio and infrared light can penetrate the dusty smog and see clear across the galaxy.

In 2008, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observations led to a remapping of the Milky Way that showed two major arms, Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus, attached to the ends of a thick central bar. Two other spiral arms, Norma and Sagittarius, were demoted to minor arms because they are less distinct. The major arms consist of the highest densities of both young and old stars. The minor arms are primarily filled with gas and pockets of star-forming activity.

From 2008 to 2012 radio astronomers mapped our galactic neighborhood using the precision Very-Long Baseline Array, ten radio telescopes spanning over 5,000 miles. The array yields images as sharp as what would be provided by a single continent-sized dish antenna.

With this capability astronomers were able to use straightforward trigonometric parallax (using Earth’s orbit as the baseline) to measure distances to nearby star-forming regions. The radio telescopes didn’t look directly at stars but picked up emissions of water and methanol molecules that boost microwave frequencies.

The sun is just passing through the Local Arm along a 250 million year orbit about the galactic center. Still, we need a better name than Local Arm. That’s as mundane as the Local Group — the name for the backwater neighborhood of galaxies that we inhabit.

It’s a little too early and presumptive to call it the Federation Arm, as Trekkies might like. The easiest name with some gravitas would be the Orion Arm, which is already being used. Because it looks like our stellar arm does a dog-leg off of the Perseus Arm, how about the name Canis-Cruris Arm? (Latin for dog-leg.) The constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog, is alongside Orion in the winter sky.

Read more at Discovery News

New North America Viking Voyage Discovered

Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests.

The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World.

"This area of Notre Dame Bay was as good a candidate as any for that first contact between the Old World and the New World, and that's kind of an exciting thing," said Kevin Smith, deputy director and chief curator of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University.

Evidence of the voyage was discovered by a combination of archaeological excavation and chemical analysis of two jasper artifacts that the Norse used to light fires. The analysis, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Honolulu, suggests the jasper used in the artifacts came from the area of Notre Dame Bay.

The jasper artifacts were found L'Anse aux Meadows and the Norse explorers likely set out from that outpost. They would've headed due south, traveling some 143 miles (230 kilometers) to Notre Dame Bay. When they reached their destination Norse would have set foot in an area of Newfoundland that modern-day researchers know was well inhabited.

"This area of Notre Dame Bay archaeologically the area of densest settlement on Newfoundland, at that time, of indigenous people, the ancestors of the Beothuk," a people who, at the time, lived as hunter-gatherers, Smith told LiveScience.

Aside from likely encountering the ancestral Beothuk, the Norse would probably have been impressed by the landscape itself. The coastline had fjords, inlets and offshore islands, with lots of forests. Birds, sea mammals and fish also would have been plentiful.

"For anyone coming from the nearly treeless islands of the North Atlantic, this would have potentially been a very interesting zone," Smith said. "There are a lot of trees; there's a lot of opportunities for cutting things down; it's a bit warmer; it's an interesting mix of resources," Smith said.

For any Norse voyagers who had been to Norway, it would have been familiar. It still would have made an impression though, since the lands the Norse had occupied in their journey across the North Atlantic tended to be more barren.

Researchers don't know the specifics about the contact between the Norse and the ancestral Beothuk on this voyage, presuming it actually happened. It could have been a peaceful encounter, although the Norse sagas also tell of hostile meetings with people in the New World. Also, while the possible meeting likely would have been one of the earliest Old World-New World encounters, researchers don't know if it was the very first.

Norse matches

The two jasper artifacts were key pieces of evidence that helped the researchers unravel the existence of the voyage.

The larger, and more recently excavated of the two, was found in 2008, only 33 feet (10 meters) away from an ancient Norse hall. The discovery was made by Priscilla Renouf, a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and Todd Kristensen, who is now a graduate student at the University of Alberta.

"You can think of these almost as the matches of the Vikings," Smith said. The Norse would have struck them against a steel fire starter to make sparks to start a fire, he explained. As time passed, and after being struck against steel repeatedly, the jasper fire starters wore down and were thrown out.

The chemical composition of jasper varies depending on where it was obtained. To figure out where the larger jasper fire starter came from, Smith, Thomas Urban of Oxford University, and Susan Herringer of Brown University's Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World looked for the outcrops in the New (or Old) World chemically matched it. They compared the fire starter with geological samples using a handheld X-ray florescence device that can detect the chemical signature of jasper.

The results suggested the jasper originated from the area of Notre Dame Bay, somewhere along a 44-mile-long (71 km) stretch of the coast. The closest chemical match was to a geological sample from modern-day Fortune Harbor.

The second, smaller jasper piece was unearthed in the 1960s in excavations carried out by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, who discovered L'Anse aux Meadows. Different tests run on this piece suggested in 1999 that it also came from the Notre Dame Bay area. At the time Smith couldn’t prove it was used as a fire starter, but now believes it likely is.

Exploring the New World

Ever since the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows nearly 50 years ago, archaeologists and historians have been trying to uncover the story of Norse exploration in the New World.

Previous research has revealed the presence of butternut seeds at L'Anse aux Meadows, indicating the Norse made a trip to the Gulf of St. Lawrence or possibly even a bit beyond. Additionally, Norse artifacts (and possibly a structure) have been discovered in the Canadian Arctic, indicating a trading relationship with the indigenous people there that might have lasted for centuries.

Read more at Discovery News

Boom! Super Seismo-Sonic Earthquakes Are Real

The inner workings of bizarre and potentially dangerous earthquakes that break the seismic sound barrier have now for the first time been confirmed in laboratory experiments with real rocks, report scientists in today’s issue of the journal Science.

What are called supershear earthquakes are strange events in which the rupturing fault breaks faster than certain seismic waves can travel, creating a sort of seismic mach cone that fires out the end of a fault’s rupture zone -- the part of the fault that breaks loose allowing two rock surfaces to jerk past each other. That cone and the waves that follow can cause inordinately severe shaking, out of proportion to the earthquake's magnitude.

“It’s like the (seismic) waves are propagating along and all of a sudden it steps on the accelerator,” explained Eric Dunham, an assistant professor and seismological researcher at Stanford University who has done modeling work on supershear waves.

The waves behind the weird phenomenon are called shear waves, which normally are relatively slow seismic waves that move over the surface in a manner similar to ocean waves. These are the waves that are felt as rolling and shaking motions after the initial shock of normal earthquakes. The initial shock is another, much faster, kind of wave that behaves more like pressure waves that make sound in the air.

In a supershear earthquake, however, the shear waves are created very quickly when a long fault, like the San Andreas, breaks loose faster than the speed shear waves normally travel. When this happens the shear waves mach cone is created that can reach the same speed as the pressure waves, explained the paper’s lead author, François Passelègue of the Geology Laboratory at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

“The main additional hazard due to supershear earthquakes is that there are two big wave arrivals,” Passelègue told Discovery News. To someone riding out such a quake, the first thing to arrive would be the sharp pressure wave, but instead of the rolling shear waves following it, the powerful supershear mach cone would arrive and shake the ground in a direction parallel to the fault zone that created it. Then, soon after, a second shear wave would hit with ground motions at right angles to the fault zone. “This sudden change in the direction of the dominant ground motions is dramatic for buildings.”

Read more at Discovery News

Ireland's Ancient Link to Volcanism Found

Sláinte (a Gaelic toast) to the Irish monks! They not only preserved the knowledge of ancient Greece in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, they also logged a 1200 year climate record of the Emerald Isle from 431 to 1649 CE in the Irish Annals. The writings of those meteorology-minded monks were recently used to correlate volcanic activity to intense cold snaps in Ireland.

The monks wrote the Irish Annals as a record of religious feast days and major events, but the clerics also noted extreme cold weather events, such as heavy snow or prolonged ice cover on lakes.

For example in the Annals of Connacht from 1465 CE: “Exceeding great frost and snow and stormy weather this year, so that no herb grew in the ground and no leaf budded on a tree until the feast of St. Brendan [May16].”

The monks kept up their observations through the Black Plague and Viking raids, but stopped after English invaders suppressed the traditional culture of Ireland during the Tudor conquest in the 1600s.

“It’s clear that the scribes of the Irish Annals were diligent reporters of severe cold weather, most probably because of the negative impacts this had on society and the biosphere,” Francis Ludlow of Harvard University said in a press release.

Ludlow was lead author of a study that paired Irish weather observations with volcanic eruptions. The scientists dated historic volcanic activity using info from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project about volcanic residues trapped in Greenland’s glaciers. The study was published in Environmental Research Letters.

For example, Ludlow’s team found that the eruption of the Peruvian volcano, Huaynaputina, in 1600 was associated with a few years of hard winter in Ireland. Chinese records also showed a cold winter after than eruption, according to a study published in the International Journal of Climatology.

Read more at Discovery News

Oldest Human Tumor Found in Neanderthal Bone

The oldest human tumor ever found — by more than 100,000 years — has been discovered in the rib of a Neanderthal.

The bone, excavated more than 100 years ago in Croatia, has been hollowed out by a tumor still seen in humans today, known as fibrous dysplasia. These tumors are not cancerous (they don't spread to other tissues), but they replace the weblike inner structure of a bone with a soft, fibrous mass.

"They range all the way from being totally benign, where you wouldn’t recognize them, to being extremely painful," said David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas who reported the finding along with his colleagues today (June 5) in the journal PLOS ONE. "The size of this one, and the bulging of it, probably caused the individual pain."

Unusual bone

The Neanderthal rib fragment measures just more than an inch long (30 millimeters). It was first unearthed between 1899 and 1905 in a cave known as the Krapina rock shelter in Croatia. This site held more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. Many of the bones display signs of trauma, and quite a few show post-mortem cutting marks, perhaps indicating cannibalism or some sort of ritual reburial.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were a human species closely related to modern humans (Homo sapiens). They died out approximately 30,000 years ago, though not without apparently interbreeding with Homo sapiens: Many modern-day humans carry Neanderthal DNA, suggesting the two species had sex.

In the 1980s, University of Pennsylvania researchers X-rayed the entire collection of bones found at Krapina, and they published a book in 1999 showing each radiograph. Most of those X-rays were quite high-quality, said Janet Monge, the keeper of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, who participated in that project and the current study.

But there was one exception: One little rib fragment appeared "burned out" in the X-ray image, an overexposure that turned out to be due to the loss of inner bone in the specimen.

Now, the study researchers have returned to the rib, subjecting it to higher-quality X-rays and to microCT (computed tomography) scanning, which is similar to -- but higher-resolution than -- the types of scans doctors use to detect bone trauma in living patients.

Ancient tumor

The new images reveal a hollow shell, with an empty cavity where a network of inner "spongy bone" should be. (This spongy bone is so named because it's full of holes where blood vessels sneak through.)

"We do see it in human patients today," Monge told LiveScience. "It's exactly the same kind of process and in the same place."

Fibrous dysplasia is caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation in the cells that produce bone, according to the Mayo Clinic. In some cases, the tumors are small and asymptomatic. In other cases, they cause pain and weakness. Because the researchers have only an isolated rib from this particular Neanderthal, they can't say whether his or her other bones would have been affected.

Previously, the oldest known tumors came from Egyptian mummies and dated back only 4,000 years or so. (A 1,600-year-old tumor containing teeth was found in the pelvis of an ancient Roman corpse.) That makes the Neanderthal tumor, at about 120,000 years old, the most ancient "by a lot!" Monge said.

In many ways, the Neanderthal tumor is a needle-in-a-haystack find, Frayer said.

"People of that time didn't live as long as they did today; plus, there weren't very many of them compared to the Egyptians and people today," he told LiveScience. "So finding evidence of tumors and evidence of cancers, is -- I don't know if I want to say ‘lucky’ -- but there isn't a lot of evidence for it."

Read more at Discovery News

Early Human Ancestor Primate Tiny, Scrappy

The oldest known fossil primate skeleton, dating to 55 million years ago reveals that one of our earliest ancestors was a scrappy tree dweller with an unusual combination of features.

The discovery, made in central China's Hubei Province and reported in the journal Nature, strengthens the theory that Asia was the center of primate evolution. The new species, Archicebus achilles, also suggests that our earliest ancestors were very small.

"Archicebus was a tiny primate weighing less than 1 ounce," co-author Daniel Gebo of Northern Illinois University told Discovery News. "It would easily fit in the palm of your hand. Its eye orbits were not large, suggesting it was active during the daytime."

He added, "Archicebus likely bounced and climbed around the canopy, being entirely arboreal, looking for food items out on the terminal branches of trees. It had incredibly long legs and was an adept leaper. Think of little lemurs moving through the branches of trees within a rainforest setting."

Analysis, including state-of-the-art Synchrotron CT scanning, determined that the skeleton of Archicebus is about 7 million years older than the oldest fossil primate skeletons known previously, which include Darwinius from Germany and Notharctus from Wyoming.

The tiny primate lived close to the evolutionary divergence between the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans (collectively known as anthropoids) and the lineage leading to living tarsiers.

Gebo thinks the split might have happened as "each lineage tried to make themselves anatomically and ecologically different to avoid direct competition with each other, since this leads to extinction."

Given its root placement on the primate family tree, Archicebus had a mish-mash of characteristics.

"Archicebus is a quite odd creature," lead author Xijun Ni of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Discovery News. "It has many features that support its tarsiform (like tarsiers) affinity, but also has many features typically seen in anthropoids."

It had the feet of a small monkey, but the arms, legs, skull and teeth of a very primitive primate. The researchers were surprised that it had such small eyes. Modern tarsiers have some of the largest eyes, relative to body size, in the animal kingdom. They allow the tiny primates to see well at night.

Although Archicebus hailed from Asia, the earliest known humans came from Africa.

"This suggests that a primitive anthropoid colonized Africa from Asia, and from these early African anthropoids all later catarrhines (monkeys, apes and humans) evolved," Gebo said.

As for the small size of Archicebus, other mammal lineages often started small and evolved to be bigger over time. The phenomenon is known as "Cope's Rule." No one is entirely sure why this happened among mammals, but the environment must have only supported such a size in terms of climate, food sources and other factors.

Read more at Discovery News

The Battle for Earth's Early Oceans

Stromatolites ruled the fossil record for 2 billion years. The squishy, sticky mounds of communal-living microbes dominated shallow-water environments everywhere on Earth during life's early days. Then, long before algae-munching animals appeared 550 million years ago, stromatolites mysteriously plummeted in number.

Now scientists think they've found a possible culprit: another microbe called foraminifera. A billion years ago, these two single-celled species battled for supremacy in the world's oceans, and stromatolites lost, according to a study published May 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We'll never be able to prove what happened back in the Proterozoic, but we've at least shown there's a potential explanation," said Joan Bernhard, lead study author and a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass.

Early ocean throw-down

Stromatolite mounds grow tall when waves cover the top layer of algae with mud or sand and a new algae layer covers the sunlight-choking sediment. The trapped sediments turn into distinctive rippled fossils. But the wavy layers disappear beginning about a billion years ago, replaced by thrombolites — clumpy, jumbled microbial mats.

Researchers suspect the decline is due to a change in ocean chemistry or the sudden appearance of a creature that found the stromatolites especially tasty — though there's no fossil evidence for this.

Bernhard said DNA evidence triggered her suspicion that forams (short for foraminifera) were guilty of turning stromatolites into thrombolites. Foraminifera are tiny organisms, usually the size of a sand grain, that grow hard shells. Their shells don't show up in the fossil record until just before the Cambrian period, about 550 million years ago. However, DNA evidence called a molecular clock suggests the first forams were shell-free, and evolved 400 million years earlier. (Without their shells, evidence of these early forams was less likely to survive in the fossil record.)

The rise of the forams thus neatly coincides with the demise of stromatolites, but a real-world test was needed to back up this idea. Bernhard and her colleagues collected modern stromatolites from the Bahamas, one of the few remaining spots where the microbial mounds survive today, and threw them in the ring with forams to see who came out the victor.

In this corner we have…

In a lab, the researchers seeded the stromatolites with forams from the same Bahamas bay. Ever so slowly, the foraminifera fanned out their hairlike pseudopods into the algae layers. Pseudopods help forams eat, move and explore their environment. After six months, the effect was devastating for the stromatolites. Their layers were scrambled. But during a control experiment, in which forams were treated with a chemical that kept them from using their pseudopods, the stromatolites were still pristinely layered at the end of the test. The team also found forams living in thrombolites from the Bahamas, supporting their hypothesis that forams turn stromatolites into thrombolites.

Read more at Discovery News

Kepler Stars (And Planets) Are Bigger Than Thought

A team checking up on results from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope finds that most of Kepler's target stars -- and therefore any orbiting planets -- are bigger than expected. The discovery makes the search for small, Earth-like worlds more difficult.

The team used a relatively large ground-based telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to probe 268 stars of the nearly 3,000 target stars Kepler was watching.

The telescope, which was launched in 2009, last month lost use of its pointing system and currently is not operating. Troubleshooting efforts remain under way.

The telescope works by measuring slight changes in the amount of light coming from selected sun-like stars. The idea is that some planets passing by will temporarily blot out a smidgen of light, relative to the telescope's line of sight. The percentage of light blocked relates directly to the size of a transiting planet or planets.

For example, a telescope positioned to peer into our solar system would see about 1 percent of the sun's light dimmed during Jupiter's transits.

"If we want to know the radius of the planet very accurately, we need to know the radius of the star that that planet transits. It's as simple as that," astronomer Steve Howell, with NASA's Ames Research Center, said at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis this week.

Howell and colleagues found that most of the Kepler stars they studied were slightly larger than original estimates and about one-quarter of the stars were at least 35 percent larger than expected.

"That means the exoplanets are larger than we thought," Howell said, adding that Kepler's confirmed planets, which currently number 132, would have had follow-up work done to accurately pinpoint the host stars' sizes.

The analysis, however, is relevant to the 2,740 planet candidates still awaiting confirmation.

By implication, the new results reduce the number of potential Earth-size planets found by Kepler, noted astronomer Mark Everett, with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which operates the Kitt Peak telescopes, among others.

Another implication of the research is that bigger stars' so-called "habitable zones" -- the regions where orbiting planets could have surface temperatures suitable for liquid water, a condition believed to be necessary for life -- are farther away than original estimates because bigger stars are brighter and radiate more heat.

"You would need to have planets that are in slightly longer period orbits to stay in the habitable zone," of stars that are slightly bigger than expected, Howell said.

It also means that some planets believed to be rocky worlds, based on how close they are to their parent stars, may actually be icy, gas bodies.

Read more at Discovery News

Hubble Captures Huge Explosion on Faraway Star

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers a rare look at an enormous stellar eruption, allowing them to map out the aftermath of such blasts in unprecedented detail.

Hubble photographed an April 2011 explosion in the double-star system T Pyxidis (T Pyx for short), which goes off every 12 to 50 years. The new images reveal that material ejected by previous T Pyx outbursts did not escape into space, instead sticking around to form a debris disk about 1 light-year wide around the system.

This information came as a surprise to the research team.

"We fully expected this to be a spherical shell," study co-author Arlin Crotts of Columbia University said in a statement. "This observation shows it is a disk, and it is populated with fast-moving ejecta from previous outbursts."

The erupting T Pyx star is a white dwarf, the burned-out core of a star much like our own sun. White dwarfs are small but incredibly dense, often packing the mass of the sun into a volume the size of Earth.

T Pyx's white dwarf has a companion star, from which it siphons off hydrogen fuel. When enough of this hydrogen builds up on the white dwarf's surface, it detonates like a gigantic hydrogen bomb, increasing the white dwarf's brightness by a factor of 10,000 over a single day or so.

This happens again and again. T Pyx is known to have erupted in 1890, 1902, 1920, 1944, and 1966, in addition to the 2011 event.

Such recurrent outbursts are known as nova explosions. (Nova is Latin for "new," referring to how suddenly novas appear in the sky.) Novas are distinct from supernovas, even more dramatic blasts that involve the destruction of an entire star.

The new study clarifies just what happens to the material ejected by such outbursts.

"We've all seen how light from fireworks shells during the grand finale will light up the smoke and soot from shells earlier in the show," co-author Stephen Lawrence of Hofstra University said in a statement. "In an analogous way, we're using light from T Pyx's latest outburst and its propagation at the speed of light to dissect its fireworks displays from decades past."

The study represents the first time the area around an erupting star has been mapped in three dimensions, researchers said.

The new Hubble Space Telescope observations also help refine the distance to T Pyx, pegging it at 15,600 light-years from Earth. (Past estimates have ranged between 6,500 and 16,000 light-years.)

Read more at Discovery News