What happens when the Universe turns up the heat?

On average, today’s Universe is an extremely cold place.

At any epoch in our cosmic history, any observer will experience a uniform “bath” of omnidirectional radiation that originated back at the Big Bang. Note that the CMB isn’t just a surface that comes from one point, but rather is a bath of radiation that exists everywhere at once. As each new year passes, the CMB cools down further by about 0.2 nanokelvin, and in several billion years, will become so redshifted that it will possess radio, rather than microwave, frequencies.

In intergalactic space, only the Big Bang’s leftover glow substantially heats up matter.

Visible (left) and infrared (right) views of the dust-rich Bok globule, Barnard 68. The infrared light is not blocked nearly as much, as the smaller-sized dust grains (down to about half-a-micron across) are too little to interact with the long-wavelength light. At longer wavelengths, more of the Universe beyond the light-blocking dust can be revealed.

At 2.725 K above absolute zero, only places that actively cool themselves are colder.

A color-coded image of the Boomerang Nebula, as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The gas expelled from this star has expanded incredibly rapidly, causing it to cool adiabatically. There are places within it that are colder than even the leftover glow from the Big Bang itself, reaching a minimum of about ~1 K, or just a third of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background.

However, numerous mechanisms heat up the Universe’s matter.

The largest group of newborn stars in our Local Group of galaxies, cluster R136, contains the most massive stars we’ve ever discovered: over 250 times the mass of our Sun for the largest. The brightest of the stars found here are more than 8,000,000 times as luminous as our Sun. And yet, these stars only achieve temperatures of up to ~50,000 K, with white dwarfs, Wolf-Rayet stars, and neutron stars all getting hotter.

Stars, for example, produce radiation that strikes nearby gas and dust.

This far-infrared image of Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula, showcases a variety of neutral atoms heated to between 10 K (red) to 40 K (blue) by the stars that have already formed inside. Below the center of the image, the famed Pillars of Creation can be seen in far-infrared light, a unique view of this object thanks to the still unmatched capabilities of ESA’s Herschel observatory.

Heated to tens of degrees above absolute zero, it radiates throughout the far-infrared.

The famed Pillars of Creation inside the Eagle Nebula are a location where new stars are forming in a race against the evaporating gas. In the visible light view, at left, the new stars are largely obscured, while infrared light allows us to peer through the dust to the newly forming stars and proto-stars inside. Still cooler gas will radiate at longer wavelengths.

Closer to a newly forming star, the radiation carves out protoplanetary structures.

A sample of 20 protoplanetary disks around young, infant stars, as measured by the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project: DSHARP. Observations such as these taught us that protoplanetary disks form primarily in a single plane and tend to support the core accretion scenario of planet formation. The disk structures are seen in both infrared and millimeter/submillimeter wavelengths. We have recently learned that gaps begin to form in protoplanetary disks after ~0.5-2 million years, with younger disks displaying no such substructure. These disks tend to disappear and give way to debris disk systems after around ~10 million years. Debris disks can then persist for hundreds of millions of years.

Heated to hundreds of degrees, these protoplanetary disks radiate throughout the infrared.

The star forming region Sh 2-106 showcases an interesting set of phenomena, including illuminated gas, a bright central star that provides that illumination, and blue reflections off of gas that has yet to be blown away. The various stars in this region likely come from a combination of stars of many different pasts and generational histories, but none of them are pristine: they all contain significant quantities of heavy elements in them. That is one of the necessary ingredients for rocky planets and potential habitability.

Higher-energy phenomena, however, can lead to spectacular astronomical consequences.

The open star cluster NGC 290, imaged by Hubble. These stars, imaged here, can only have the properties, elements, and planets (and potentially chances-for-life) that they do because of all the stars that died before their creation. This is a relatively young open cluster, as evidenced by the high-mass, bright blue stars that dominate its appearance. Open star clusters, however, never live nearly as long as the age of the Universe.

The hottest, most massive young stars glow brilliantly in ultraviolet light.

Galaxies undergoing massive bursts of star formation expel large quantities of matter at great speeds. They also glow red, covering the whole galaxy, thanks to hydrogen emissions. This particular galaxy, M82, the Cigar Galaxy, is gravitationally interacting with its neighbor, M81, causing this burst of activity. Although the winds and ejecta are copious, this episode is not expected to completely “kill” the galaxy, as some gas will still persist after this episode completes.

The radiation heats gas to thousands of degrees, ionizing numerous atoms and molecules.

When the central star in a dying stellar system heats up to about temperatures of ~30,000 K, it becomes hot enough to ionize the previously ejected material, creating a true planetary nebula in the case of a Sun-like star. Here, NGC 7027 has just recently crossed that threshold, and is still rapidly expanding. At just ~0.1-to-0.2 light-years across, it is one of the smallest and youngest planetary nebulae known.

When electrons cascade down their energy levels, they give off a variety of emission signatures.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to the closest supernova of the last century, having occurred in 1987. The pink regions here are not artificial, but are signals of ionized hydrogen and active star formation, likely triggered by gravitational interactions and tidal forces. The pink regions specifically arise when electrons fall back onto ionized hydrogen nuclei, and transition from the n=3 to the n=2 energy level, producing photons of precisely 656.3 nm.

At a few thousand degrees, hydrogen ionizes, turning nebulae pink with emission lines.

Around a variety of stellar corpses and dying stars, doubly-ionized oxygen atoms produce a characteristic green glow, as electrons cascade down the various energy levels when heated to temperatures exceeding ~50,000 K. Here, the planetary nebula IC 1295 shines brilliantly. This phenomenon also helps color the so-called “green pea” galaxies, as well as Earth’s aurorae.

Above ~50,000 K, around dying stars, doubly ionized oxygen glows an eerie green.

This image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the location of different elements in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant including silicon (red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green) and iron (purple). Each of these elements produces X-rays within narrow energy ranges, allowing maps of their location to be created.

Colliding galaxies heat gas further, leading to X-ray emissions.

The X-ray (pink) and overall matter (blue) maps of various colliding galaxy clusters show a clear separation between normal matter and gravitational effects, some of the strongest evidence for dark matter. The X-rays come in two varieties, soft (lower-energy) and hard (higher-energy), where galaxy collisions can create temperatures ranging from several hundreds of thousands of degrees up to ~100 million K. Meanwhile, the fact that the gravitational effects (in blue) are displaced from the location of the mass from the normal matter (pink) shows that dark matter must be present. Without dark matter, these observations (along with many others) cannot be sufficiently explained.

But radiating neutron stars and black holes can shape entire galaxies.

The radio features shown here, in orange, highlight the giant radio galaxy Alcyoneus, as well as the central black hole, its jets, and the lobes at either end. This feature is the largest known in the Universe to correspond to a single galaxy, and makes Alcyoneus the largest known galaxy in the Universe at present. Although only radio and infrared features are shown here, it radiates in the high-energy portion of the spectrum as well.

Producing gamma-ray photons, the highest-energy there are, even the Large Hadron Collider can’t compete.

Fermi’s view of the gamma-ray sky reveals the emission from our own galaxy, from extragalactic objects, from pulsars, and, as highlighted here, from supernova remnants as well.

Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words. Talk less; smile more.