mick laBriola

The Hubble Space Telescope has a lot to show in this week’s Picture of the Week. Its view here is studded with stars, many of which appear particularly large and bright thanks to their nearby locations in our own galaxy, and which feature the characteristic diffraction patterns caused by Hubble’s optics. Much further away — around 240 million light-years distant, in fact, in the southern constellation Telescopium — is the spiral galaxy IC 4709. Its swirling disc filled with stars and dust bands is beautifully captured, as is the faint halo surrounding it. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight, however: this is an active galactic nucleus (AGN).

If IC 4709’s core were just filled with stars, it would not be nearly so bright. Instead it hosts a gargantuan black hole, 65 million times the mass of our Sun. A disc of gas spirals around and eventually into this black hole, with the gas crashing together and heating up as it spins. It reaches such high temperatures that it emits vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light and beyond — in this case including X-rays. The AGN in IC 4709 is obscured by a lane of dark dust, just visible at the centre of the galaxy in this image, which blocks any optical emission from the nucleus itself. Hubble’s spectacular resolution, however, gives astronomers a detailed view of the interaction between the quite small AGN and its host galaxy. This is essential to understanding supermassive black holes in galaxies much more distant than IC 4709, where resolving such fine details is not possible.

This image incorporates data from two Hubble surveys of nearby AGNs that were identified by the Swift X-ray/UV telescope, as does the image from last week. Swift will collect new data on these galaxies — with an X-ray telescope, it’s possible to directly see the X-rays from IC 4709’s AGN breaking through the obscuring dust. ESA’s Euclid telescope — currently surveying the dark Universe in optical and infrared light — will also image IC 4709 and other local AGNs. The complementary use of space telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum is key to fully researching black holes and their impact on their host galaxies.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy is situated right of centre. It has a white, brightly-shining core, a glowing disc which is thick with swirling patterns of dark dust, and a faint halo around the disc. It is on a black background with some small, distant galaxies and some foreground stars around it. Six stars along the left side appear particularly large and bright, with two opposing sets of spikes surrounding each one.]

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.

After playing tenor saxophone and piano at school in Connecticut, Silver got his break on piano when his trio was recruited by Stan Getz in 1950. Silver soon moved to New York City, where he developed a reputation as a composer and for his bluesy playing. Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention. Their Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album contained Silver’s first hit, “The Preacher“. After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. Their public performances and frequent recordings for Blue Note Records increased Silver’s popularity, even through changes of personnel. His most successful album was Song for My Father, made with two iterations of the quintet in 1963 and 1964.

Several changes occurred in the early 1970s: Silver disbanded his group to spend more time with his wife and to concentrate on composing; he included lyrics in his recordings; and his interest in spiritualism developed. The last two of these were often combined, resulting in commercially unsuccessful releases such as The United States of Mindseries. Silver left Blue Note after 28 years, founded his own record label, and scaled back his touring in the 1980s, relying in part on royalties from his compositions for income. In 1993, he returned to major record labels, releasing five albums before gradually withdrawing from public view because of health problems.

As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including “Doodlin’“, “Peace“, and “Sister Sadie“, became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.

Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of the NGC 7771 group are interacting, making repeated close passages that will ultimately result in galaxy-galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale. The interactions can be traced by distortions in the shape of the galaxies themselves and faint streams of stars created by their mutual gravitational tides. But a clear view of this galaxy group is difficult to come by as the deep image also reveals extensive clouds of foreground dust sweeping across the field of view. The dim, dusty galactic cirrus clouds are known as Integrated Flux Nebulae. The faint IFN reflect starlight from our own Milky Way Galaxy and lie only a few hundred light-years above the galactic plane.

Paul Winter (born August 31, 1939 Altoona, PA) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He is a pioneer of world music and earth music, which interweaves the voices of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music. The music is often improvised and recorded in nature to reflect the qualities brought into play by the environment.

In 1967 he started the Paul Winter Consort, influenced by Heitor Villa-Lobos and other Brazilian music, to give ensemble playing and soloing equal importance, analogous to a democracy where every voice would count. He borrowed the name from English Elizabethan theater of the 16th and 17th centuries, when bands combined woodwinds, strings, and percussion, the same families of instruments he wanted to combine in his contemporary consort. With this group, he became one of the earliest creators of world music.

Recordings of humpback whales in 1968 influenced his music, and his desire to become an environment activist. In 1977, his album Common Ground was his first to incorporate sounds of whales, eagles, and wolves into his music. The Paul Winter Consort recorded during the 1960s and 1970s. Four albums for A&M were produced by Phil Ramone and Paul Stookey. Astronauts of Apollo 15 took the Consort’s album Road to the moon with them and named two craters after the songs “Ghost Beads” and “Icarus”. George Martin produced the album Icarus and considered it one of the best he produced. The band Oregon was formed by band members who worked on this album: Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, and Collin Walcott.

In the early 1980s, Winter began traveling to the Soviet Union. In 1984, he ventured as far as Lake Baikal in Siberia, and found it so beautiful that he returned to try to protect it. In 1984, he became friends with Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Winter took part in the U.S.–Soviet Space Bridge to encourage collaboration between Russians and Americans. On a tour of the Soviet Union in 1986, the Consort performed with the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble at Moscow University. During the next year the two bands recorded the album EarthBeat in Moscow and New York. It was the first album of music created together by Americans and Russians.

In 1980, Winter founded Living Music Records as a forum for his musical and ecological vision. The name alludes to his desire to make timeless music in natural acoustic spaces like stone churches, canyons, and barns.