Space.com: The world's largest collection of radio telescopes is being tied together for 24 hours starting today to observe more than two hundred energetic galaxies known as quasars.
During those 24 hours, 35 telescopes on all seven continents will observe 243 distant quasars in an effort to improve the precision of the reference frame scientists use to measure positions in the sky.
Physics Today: A white dwarf star called V445 in the constellation of Puppis, that is digesting its closest neighbor, is a prime candidate to explode as a Type Ia Supernova, ejecting a large quantity of matter into space.
V445 Puppis has been under a two-year observation by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The star was discovered by a amateur Japanese astronomer when it became visible as a nova in November 2000. It is the only nova appearing that has no hydrogen and provides the first evidence for an outburst on the surface of a white dwarf dominated by helium.
"This is critical, as we know that Type Ia supernovae lack hydrogen and the companion star in V445 Pup fits this nicely by also lacking hydrogen," says Danny Steeghs, from the University of Warwick, and one of the key team members observing the star. A earlier paper by astronomers Mariko Kato and Izumi Hachisu that modeled the star's behavior suggested as much.
The shell—unlike any previously observed for a nova—is itself moving at about 24 million kilometers per hour. A thick disc of dust, which must have been produced during the last outburst, obscures the two central stars.
"As the white dwarf feeds on its companion, the captured gas accumulates on its surface until thermonuclear reactions begin, causing a massive explosion which ejects matter out into space at phenomenal speeds," says co-researcher Tim O'Brien, of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in the UK.
If the white dwarf continues to gain mass, "it will eventually reach a point where it will be ripped apart in a titanic supernova explosion and its cycle of outbursts will come to an end," adds O'Brien.
Type Ia supernovae are critical for studies of dark energy and for measuring distances in the universe.
V445 Puppis is over 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, implying that it is near its fatal limit to turn into a supernova.
Patrick Woudt, from the University of Cape Town, and the lead author of an Astrophysical Journal paper describing V445 Puppis says that "one of the major problems in modern astrophysics is the fact that we still do not know exactly what kinds of stellar system explode as a Type Ia supernova" which is "rather embarrassing."
"Whether V445 Puppis will eventually explode as a supernova, or if the current nova outburst has pre-empted that pathway by ejecting too much matter back into space is still unclear," Woudt adds. "But we have here a pretty good suspect for a future Type Ia supernova."
Related Link
The expanding bipolar shell of the helium nova V445 Puppis
BBC News: Astronomers may have found a way to identify those Sun-like stars most likely to harbour orbiting planets.
A survey of stars known to possess planets shows the vast majority to be severely depleted in lithium.
To date, scientists have detected just over 420 worlds circling other stars using a range of techniques.
Garik Israelian and colleagues tell the journal Nature that future planet hunts could be narrowed by going after stars with particular compositions.
Space.com: The amount of junk floating in space is getting out of hand and the US must step up its effort to control orbital trash, say experts.
The chief of US Strategic Command said Wednesday that America needs better tools to monitor the orbital debris that's up there and plan to avoid collisions with valuable satellites.
"We are decades behind where we should be, in my view," said Air Force General Kevin P. Chilton in a speech at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
Chilton called for more personnel and more sensors and equipment to study and combat the threat.
Nature News: The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM)—a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe's expansion—is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy, and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency.
In addition, scientists working on the JDEM designs have not presented a unified front, owing to disagreements over the best observational method to use at a time when an influential astrophysics panel is about to prioritize the next decade's best and most organized missions.
Related Link
Options given for the future of US particle astrophysics
Usatoday.com: The most likely explanation for what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years appears to be a giant clump of dark matter.
The dark matter is suspected to consist of enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.
Left behind by this cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the "Gould Belt," which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia's University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.
Physics Today: A Russian Rokot launcher has successfully taken off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome with Europe's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite on board.
SMOS, a small 658-kg satellite, will provide the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.
"Salinity is one of the drivers for the Thermohaline Circulation, the large network of currents that steers heat exchanges within the oceans on a global scale," says Volker Liebig, ESA's director of Earth observation programs. "Its survey has long been awaited by climatologists who try to predict the long-term effects of today's climate change."
The satellite was developed by ESA in cooperation with France's CNES and Spain's Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI).
Its only instrument is called the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS). The device works by connecting together 69 receivers mounted on three deployable arms to measure the temperature of the reflection of Earth's surface in the microwave frequency range. This temperature is linked to both the actual temperature of the surface and its conductive characteristics, which are in turn linked to soil moisture for land surface and to water salinity for sea surface.
"The data collected by SMOS will complement measurements already performed on the ground and at sea to monitor water exchanges on a global scale," says Liebig. "Since these exchanges—most of which occur in remote areas—directly affect the weather, they are of paramount importance to meteorologists."
SMOS is the second satellite launched under ESA's Earth Explorer program to gather new environmental data. It follows the Gravity and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), which was launched in March.
Next February, Cryosat-2 will be launched to measure the thickness of the ice sheets. This will be followed in 2011 by ADM-Aeolus—designed to study atmospheric dynamics—and the Swarm mission to monitor the weakening of Earth's magnetic field. Finally in 2013 the EarthCARE mission will study clouds and aerosols.
NPR: The NASA swift satellite has discovered the most distant γ-ray burst seen and the earliest astronomical object ever observed in cosmic history.
Two teams of scientists made the discovery, which they report in Nature.
Related Links
Astronomers detect most distant object ever seen
Related Nature Links
Most distant cosmic blast seen
A γ-ray burst at a redshift of z ≈ 8.2
An intergalactic race in space and time
GRB 090423 at a redshift of z ≈ 8.1
Science: For the past 5 years, Jerry Nelson and his colleagues at University of California have been working on plans for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)—whose primary mirror will be a glinting mosaic of 492 hexagonal segments.
An artist's concept showing the segmented primary mirror, which has 492 hexagonal segments arranged into an f/1 hyperboloidal mirror (credit: TMT)
Meanwhile, Roger Angel and his collaborators have set their sights on building the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMTO)—whose seven monolithic 8.4-meter mirrors, arranged like flower petals, will function as a primary mirror 24.5 meters in diameter.
Artist's concept showing the seven 8.4-meter mirrors. (credit: GMTO)
If the telescopes are built—TMT on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, GMT at Las Campanas—each will capture images up to 10 times sharper than today's best ground-based telescopes.
Both will shoot for the same scientific goals, looking at the first stars and galaxies, studying the formation of planets and stars, the growth of black holes, and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy. And both will cost between $700 million and $1 billion.
So far, neither telescope has come close to securing the total funding it needs, and if they are built with little federal support, the National Science Foundation would be hard pressed to provide the operating and maintenance costs.
Given the funding challenges, some astronomers say the two sides should join forces to build one telescope to rival the European Southern Observatory's proposed 42-meter segmented-mirror telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope.
Physics Today: Thirty-two new planets have been discovered using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), attached to the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.
The findings, presented at a conference in Porto, Portugal, raise the number of known so-called exoplanets to more than 400, of which HARPS has discovered 75.
HARPS has facilitated the discovery of 24 of the 28 planets known with masses below 20 Earth masses. As with the previously detected super-Earths, most of the new low-mass candidates reside in multi-planet systems, with up to five planets per system.
HARPS, which was installed in 2003, measures small changes in a star’s radial velocity—as small as 3.5 km/hour. The radial velocity fluctuates under the gravitational pull of an unseen exoplanet.
HARPS has already discovered the first super-Earth (around µ Ara); the trio of Neptune-sized planets around HD 69830; Gliese 581d, the first super-Earth in the habitable zone of a small star; and earlier this year, the lightest exoplanet so far detected around a normal star, Gliese 581e. More recently, they found a potentially lava-covered world, with density similar to that of Earth’s.
“These observations have given astronomers a great insight into the diversity of planetary systems and help us understand how they can form,” says HARPS team member Nuno Santos.
The team found three candidate exoplanets around stars that are metal-deficient. Such stars were originally thought to be less favorable for the formation of planets, which form in the metal-rich disk around the young star.
However, now that planets up to several Jupiter masses have been found orbiting metal-deficient stars, planet formation models will have to be revised.
Related press release
32 new exoplanets found
Various: In a talk entitled Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us, given to science writers attending the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual symposium, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin gave his opinion of what the LHC will discover.
The LHC will eventually attain sufficient energy to produce the Higgs boson, he says, but evidence of supersymmetry is a much more speculative possibility.
"If the Congress had not had the imbecility to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider [in 1993], it would have been discovered long ago here in Texas," says Weinberg in comments reported by Tom Siegfried of Science News.
"Many of us are terrified that the LHC will discover a Higgs particle and nothing more," Weinberg said. That would just confirm the standard model, which everybody believes already. It would not point the way to further progress in solving a deeper problem that physics faces—how to add gravity to the unified theory of the other forces.
Peter Woit of "Not Even Wrong" says that what he found interesting about Weinberg’s talk was that, "whatever Weinberg’s views on more speculative theories in physics such as extra dimensions or string theory landscape, he decided not to mention these at all in his talk."
"As a result, both questioners wanted to ask Weinberg about string theory, which he hadn’t talked about, not about the solid science he did talk about," says Woit.
String theory or superstring theory, is one of the candidates for unifying all the forces in the universe into one theory.
If the LHC creates new particles generated by supersymmetry, then clues to what makes up the bulk of dark matter in the universe would be found, which may give some tangible evidence to whether string theory is correct.
But string theory to this point has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence. Weinberg said:
"It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress... I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think that supersymmetry is the most likely place to look.""One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work... I mean I couldn’t say that it was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect."
"I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because... I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics... and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enough…"
Various: NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft last year to investigate the edges of the heliosphere—the insulating bubble the sun creates around the solar system. IBEX principal investigator David McComas talks to NPR's Ira Flatow on the first surprising results that were published by Science on Friday.
What did IBEX discover?
At the boundary of our Solar System, the interactions between solar wind particles and interstellar medium particles create Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs), particles with no charge that move very fast.
Some of the ENAs happen to be travel inwards through the Solar System toward Earth where IBEX can collect them. This region emits no light and so cannot be observed by conventional telescopes.
The five maps released by the group on Friday show that ENA's are not uniformly spread across the sky, which was the opposite of what was expected with the existing theoretical models of the heliosphere's behavior.
Instead there is there is an arc-shaped region in the sky that is creating a large amount of ENAs, showing up as a bright, narrow ribbon on the maps.
IBEX is also observing many more ENAs from smaller regions in the sky than researchers thought they would.
The ribbon appears to be produced by the alignment of magnetic fields outside our heliosphere. "These observations suggest that the interstellar environment has far more influence on structuring the heliosphere than anyone previously believed," says McComas on the IBEX site.
Related Science papers
Tying up the Solar System with a ribbon of charged particles
Global observations of the interstellar interaction from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)
Width and variation of the ENA flux ribbon observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer
Structures and spectral variations of the outer heliosphere in IBEX energetic neutral atom maps
Comparison of Interstellar Boundary Explorer observations with 3-D global heliospheric models
Direct observations of Interstellar H, He, and O by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer
Nature: Since the Big Bang, the Universe's initial expansion has been gradually slowed by the gravitational pull from the mass it contains. Most of this mass is in the form of invisible and mysterious dark matter. Today, however, the Universe seems to be re-accelerating under the influence of even weirder stuff dubbed dark energy.
Almost nothing is understood about either dark matter or dark energy—but both are many times more common than visible matter.
Tracking the expansion of the Universe, from which the relative amounts of dark matter and dark energy can be inferred, requires measuring the distances to galaxies. Distances have always been the bane of astronomy: there are no simple red and green glasses to extrude our two-dimensional picture of the sky into an expanding movie.
Three rival techniques are currently trying to establish themselves as the best probe of cosmological expansion: observations of exploding stars called type Ia supernovae, the focal lengths of gravitational lenses, and baryon acoustic oscillations.
Astronomer Richard Massey from Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy assess the advantages and disadvantages of the three techniques.
Related Link
Cosmology: Dark is the new black
Nature News: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has for twenty years used radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.
One of the most visible results of the experiments—since the facility upgraded its transmission power output from 1 to 3.6 megawatts—is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras.
The technique works by using the high-frequency radio waves to accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and thereby creating a glow.
In February last year, HAARP unexpectedly managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky. "This is the really exciting part—we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," said US Air Force Research Laboratory physicist Todd Pedersen to Nature's Naomi Lubick.
APS News: Restrictions imposed by the US Air Force on the use of lasers are significantly diminishing the utility of adaptive optics for studying the cosmos, according to a number of astronomers.
Science News: For all its tumult—erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes—the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe—a measure of its disorder—is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount.
But an analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates.
Science: After spending nearly 2 decades developing China's first space-based observatory, Li Tipei now fears that the project may never get off the ground.
The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) mission is scheduled for launch next year, but with the clock running down, Science has learned that no government agency has stepped forward to pay the estimated US$146 million to build the satellite—putting the mission in jeopardy.
"It would be a shame for the Chinese scientific community if the project dies prematurely," says Li, an astrophysicist and chief mission scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) and Tsinghua University.
NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.
But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.
Nature: The period with which the brightness of a pulsating star oscillates depends on the specific structure of its interior.
Using asteroseismology, astronomers can measure the temporal frequency spectra of pulsating stars—the seismograms of astronomers—to infer information about the stars' otherwise unobservable interior.
For example, rotating pulsating stars "sound" different from nonrotating stars: because rotating stars cannot preserve their spherically symmetric shape during pulsation, their temporal frequency spectrum is marked by nonradial modes of pulsation.
This property has allowed astronomers to measure the spin rates of pulsating white dwarfs—stellar remnants of relatively low-mass stars. But until this week, they hadn't been able to measure the internal rotation profiles of these stars.
In a paper in Nature S. Charpinet, G. Fontaine, and P. Brassard present the first evidence that a newly born white dwarf, dubbed PG 1159-035, rotates at the same rate for almost the entire depth of its body.
Related Link
Seismic evidence for the loss of stellar angular momentum before the white-dwarf stage
Nature News: India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh will visit the site of a proposed underground neutrino laboratory next month, to try to break the impasse between physicists and environmentalists over its construction.
The US$160 million India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012 to study the elusive particles known as neutrinos. But its construction is mired in controversy over the wisdom of locating the facility in prime elephant and tiger habitat at Singara in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, 250 kilometers south of Bangalore.
The Walrus: Installed on the second floor of a small building on the summit of Arizona's Mount Graham, Guy Consolmagno is multitasking. He's checking e-mail on his laptop and listening to the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on his iPod, all the while keeping an eye on a bank of computer monitors.
One floor up, nestled in a silvery-white dome, a telescope is trained on a potato-shaped chunk of rock and ice known as Haumea, which orbits the Sun some six billion kilometers from Earth. Thin clouds have been drifting overhead since sundown, but if they dissipate, the telescope's digital camera will record changes in Haumea's brightness as it tumbles through the outer reaches of the solar system, offering Consolmagno and fellow astronomers hints about the structure and evolution of our planetary family.
All this is typical fare for a scientist. What is perhaps surprising is that Consolmagno is also a Jesuit brother, that many of his colleagues are ordained priests, and that they're scanning the heavens with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope or, more affectionately, the "Pope scope." The state-of-the-art facility is part of the Vatican Observatory, established behind St. Peter's Basilica in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII at least partly to show that the Roman Catholic Church was not anti-science—an allegation that has persisted since Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition for claiming that the Earth moves.
Wired.com: When astronomers discovered COROT-7b in February, they couldn’t determine its mass because they didn’t have precise enough measurements of the velocity of its star. Now, using 70 hours of observation data from the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, scientists from the European Southern Observatory have calculated that the exoplanet is only about five times more massive than Earth.
Combined with the planet’s known radius, which is almost twice that of Earth, the new mass measurement makes COROT-7b the first exoplanet with a known density similar to Earth’s.
The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.
Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.
The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.
Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."
"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."
"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."
The Daily Telegraph: Tom Boles, 65, has seen 125 exploding stars, more than anyone else. The previous record—set by Bulgarian-born professor Fritz Zwicky, who identified 123 exploding stars before his death in 1974—stood for 36 years.
His latest discoveries were made on August 20 when he spotted supernova number 124, or "2009i"', followed by number 125 or "2009io" a few nights later, helping him to the record.
The painstaking task, which took him 13 years, has earned him the respect of the professional science community.
John Mason, from the British Astronomical Association, said Boles's achievement was unparalleled in the history of the organization.
NPR: Today, NASA released the first collection of views from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. Thanks to new imagers installed in May 2009 during a visit from the space shuttle Atlantis, Hubble can now see farther, clearer, and across a wider spectrum than ever before.
BBC News: The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.
When an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies."
The astronomers report their findings in the journal Nature.
Related Link
The remnants of galaxy formation from a panoramic survey of the region around M31
Mt. Wilson Observatory: Updated: 9/3/2009: The observatory has escaped serious damage although 40 ongoing research projects will have to be rescheduled, and all the delicate equipment will have to be checked for soot and dust damage. Some scientists had been waiting more than a year for observing time reports the LA Times.
Updated: 9/2/2009 Mount Wilson "is still in good shape" said Incident Commander Dietrich at a briefing this morning. The Californian fire brigades are reporting that the observatory should be safe for the time being.
Previous Report 9/1/2009
US Forest Servie Fire Dispatch has informed Hal McAlister, director of the Mt Wilson Observatory that as of 9:40 PDT this morning, ground crews were back at the Observatory. As of 8:00 am, air tankers were back in operation.
The dispatcher expressed his opinion that as long as the fire continues to press the mountain from one direction "you are going to make it."Furthermore, there is some light rain developing in places in the Los Angeles basin, and there is a possibility for some thunderstorm activity that could lead to dry lightning. The humidity is up and the temperature is a bit lower, so, all in all, things are looking more promising than they have in the last few days.
View from the observatory as of noon (PDT), Tuesday 1 September.
The latest news can be found here.
Meanwhile, the LA Times takes a look back at the history of the Mt. Wilson observatory. Astronomer Edwin Hubble for example, used the then-groundbreaking 100-inch Hooker telescope, to make two of the most surprising scientific discoveries of the 20th century: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and that it was expanding.
Related News Article
Historic Observatory Threatened By Calif. Wildfire NPR
Physics Today: The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. "The astronomical images taken at the site should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) and visiting professor to University of New South Wales (UNSW), who led the study.
The joint US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy: cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.
The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that is 4,053m high up on the Antarctic Plateau. Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory (81.5° S 73.5° E), the site (see picture above) is not the highest point on the Plateau but 144km away from it.
The highest point, called Dome A, is the site of an international robotic observatory and the proposed new Chinese 'Kunlun' base (80.37° S 77.53° E).
Last year, the AAO completed the first detailed study into the practical problems of building and running the proposed optical/infra-red PILOT telescope project in Antarctica. The 2.5-metre telescope will cost over AUD$10million and is planned for construction at the French/Italian Concordia Station at Dome C by 2012.
Ridge A is not only particularly remote but extremely cold and dry. The study revealed that the site has an average winter temperature of − 70°C.
It is also a site that is "so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all," says Saunders. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope there would equal or be far superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile," he adds.
Interest in Antarctica as a site for astronomical and space observatories has accelerated since 2004 when UNSW astronomers published a paper in the journal Nature confirming that a ground-based telescope at Dome C, another Antarctic plateau site, could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope.
Making use of this Antarctic sites will give Australian astronomers a chance to become major partners with Chinese or European efforts to build the first major Antarctic observatory says Saunders.
Related Links
Where Is the Best Site on Earth? Domes A, B, C, and F, and Ridges A and B
Exceptional astronomical seeing conditions above Dome C in Antarctica Nature
latimes.com: Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't probably exist.
The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.
Related Link
An orbital period of 0.94 days for the hot-Jupiter planet WASP-18b
Inside Science News Service: Like a person walking across a carpet, the international space station (ISS) accumulates a charge as it orbits the Earth as the ionosphere—the upper atmosphere that the ISS passes through—contains charged particles.
The interaction of charges in Earth's upper atmosphere with spacecraft surfaces have been studied for many years, but predicting how they will behave in a specific situation—such as an accumulation of excess charge on an airlock—is very difficult.
Furthermore, large differences in charging between two adjacent surfaces can lead to an arc discharge that can physically harm surfaces of the ISS, especially the thermal control coating. If such an arc discharge were to strike an astronaut, it could be very dangerous.
A new voltage-sampling device for monitoring the local electrical environment of the ISS has been successfully tested. The device, called the floating potential measurement unit, was built by scientists from Utah State University in Logan, Utah. One of the instrument team members, Aroh Barjatya of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, said that the peak measured voltage is about 35 volts which does not represent a significant threat for an arc-discharge. But as the space station increases in size as it achieves its final configuration, it could build up electrical current that could trigger an arc.
The ISS has a device called the plasma contactor unit that can mitigate and counter any charging hazard, and it can be used during spacewalks so that astronauts who touch an outer surface of the space station aren't in danger of arcing.
Barjatya said that a side benefit from the new voltage sampling device is that its measurements can be used to provide new "in situ" measurements for researchers who study the ionosphere.
Related Link
Data analysis of the Floating Potential Measurement Unit aboard the International Space Station
Disclaimer: Inside Science News Service is a service provided by the American Institute of Physics
NPR: Four centuries ago next week, Galileo publicly unveiled his first telescope. The world has been looking skyward ever since. Guy Raz talks with Robert Williams, the president of the International Astronomical Union, who once used the Hubble telescope to examine what appeared to be a blank patch of sky—and found about 3,000 galaxies.
Physics Today: An investigation by scientists of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration (see below right image) has put new constraints on on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang—the initial creation of the universe—by not finding anything.
Most of the information gathered on the Big Bang comes from measuring the existing ratios of elements in the universe, and from the cosmic microwave background, an electromagnetic radiation "echo" of the Big Bang found at radio wavelengths.
A similar "echo" of gravitational waves is still believed to exist in the universe as the "stochastic background," analogous to a superposition of many waves of different sizes and directions on the surface of a pond. The amplitude of this background is directly related to the parameters that govern the behavior of the universe during the first minute after the Big Bang.
Earlier measurements of the cosmic microwave background have placed the most stringent upper limits of the stochastic gravitational wave background at very large distance scales and low frequencies. The new measurements—taken over a two-year period between 2005 and 2007—by LIGO and Virgo directly probe the gravitational wave background in the first minute of its existence, at time scales much shorter than accessible by the cosmic microwave background.
The research, which appears in Nature, also constrains models of cosmic strings, objects that are proposed to have been left over from the beginning of the universe and subsequently stretched to enormous lengths by the universe's expansion; the strings, some cosmologists say, can form loops that produce gravitational waves as they oscillate, decay, and eventually disappear.
Gravitational waves carry with them information about their violent origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained by conventional astronomical tools. The existence of the waves was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. The LIGO and GEO instruments have been actively searching for the waves since 2002; the Virgo interferometer joined the search in 2007.
"Combining simultaneous data from the LIGO and Virgo interferometers gives information on gravitational-wave sources not accessible by other means. It is very encouraging that the first result of this alliance makes use of the unique feature of gravitational waves being able to probe the very early universe. This is very promising for the future," says Francesco Fidecaro, a professor of physics with the University of Pisa and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, and spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration.
The analysis used data collected from the LIGO interferometers, a 2-km and a 4-km detector in Hanford, Washington (left), and a 4-km instrument in Livingston, Louisiana (below right). Each of the L-shaped interferometers uses a laser split into two beams that travel back and forth down long interferometer arms. The two beams are used to monitor the difference between the two interferometer arm lengths.
According to the general theory of relativity, one interferometer arm is slightly stretched while the other is slightly compressed when a gravitational wave passes by.
The interferometer is constructed in such a way that it can detect a change of less than a thousandth the diameter of an atomic nucleus in the lengths of the arms relative to each other.
Because of this extraordinary sensitivity, the instruments can now test some models of the evolution of the early universe that are expected to produce the stochastic background.
"Since we have not observed the stochastic background, some of these early-universe models that predict a relatively large stochastic background have been ruled out," says Vuk Mandic, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.
"We now know a bit more about parameters that describe the evolution of the universe when it was less than one minute old," Mandic adds. "We also know that if cosmic strings or superstrings exist, their properties must conform with the measurements we made—that is, their properties, such as string tension, are more constrained than before."
This could be interesting, he says, "because such strings could also be so-called fundamental strings, appearing in string-theory models. So our measurement also offers a way of probing string-theory models, which is very rare today."
"This result was one of the long-lasting milestones that LIGO was designed to achieve," Mandic says. Once it goes online in 2014, Advanced LIGO, which will utilize the infrastructure of the LIGO observatories and be 10 times more sensitive than the current instrument, will allow scientists to detect cataclysmic events such as black-hole and neutron-star collisions at 10-times-greater distances.
"Advanced LIGO will go a long way in probing early universe models, cosmic-string models, and other models of the stochastic background. We can think of the current result as a hint of what is to come," he adds.
"With Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade to our instruments, we will be sensitive to sources of extragalactic gravitational waves in a volume of the universe 1,000 times larger than we can see at the present time. This will mean that our sensitivity to gravitational waves from the Big Bang will be improved by orders of magnitude," says Jay Marx of the California Institute of Technology, LIGO's executive director.
"Gravitational waves are the only way to directly probe the universe at the moment of its birth; they're absolutely unique in that regard. We simply can't get this information from any other type of astronomy. This is what makes this result in particular, and gravitational-wave astronomy in general, so exciting," says David Reitze, a professor of physics at the University of Florida and spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
Related Links
Gravity waves 'around the corner'
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration & The Virgo Collaboration. Nature 460, 990-994 (2009)
New Scientist: The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon—have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.
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The Economist: Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the Moon and jotting down what he saw (even though this had previously been accomplished by an Englishman, Thomas Harriot, using a Dutch telescope).
But 2009 is also the 400th anniversary of the publication by Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer, of “Astronomia Nova.”
This was a treatise that contained an account of his discovery of how the planets move around the Sun, correcting Copernicus’s own more famous but incorrectly formulated heliocentric description of the solar system and establishing the laws for planetary motion on which Isaac Newton based his work.
Physics Today: NASA's Kepler space telescope, which was launched in March, has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating that it is ready to look for new exoplanets.
The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations. Typically months or years of observations need to be made to detect exoplanets.
"As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene," said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters in Washington.
The results were published in Science magazine.
Kepler team members say these new data indicate the mission is indeed capable of finding Earth-like planets, if they exist. Kepler will spend the next three and a half years searching for planets.
The telescope will do this by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars, which occur when orbiting planets transit, or cross in front of, the stars.
"When the light curves from tens of thousands of stars were shown to the Kepler science team, everyone was awed; no one had ever seen such exquisitely detailed measurements of the light variations of so many different types of stars," said William Borucki, the principal science investigator and lead author of the paper.
The observations were collected from a planet called HAT-P-7, known to transit a star located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The planet orbits the star in just 2.2 days and is 26 times closer than Earth is to the Sun. Its orbit, combined with a mass somewhat larger than the planet Jupiter, classifies this planet as a "hot Jupiter." It is so close to its star, the planet is as hot as the glowing red heating element on a stove.
The Kepler measurements show the transit from the previously detected HAT-P-7. However, these new measurements are so precise, they also show a smooth rise and fall of the light between transits caused by the changing phases of the planet (see right image), similar to those of our Moon. This is a combination of both the light emitted from the planet and the light reflected off the planet. The smooth rise and fall of light is also punctuated by a small drop in light, called an occultation, exactly halfway between each transit. An occultation happens when a planet passes behind a star.
The new Kepler data can be used to study this hot Jupiter in unprecedented detail. The depth of the occultation and the shape and amplitude of the light curve show the planet has an atmosphere with a day-side temperature of about 2376 °Celsius. Little of this heat is carried to the cool night side. The occultation time compared to the main transit time shows the planet has a circular orbit. The discovery of light from this planet confirms the predictions by researchers and theoretical models that the emission would be detectable by Kepler.
The observed brightness variation is just one and a half times what is expected for a transit caused by an Earth-sized planet. Although this is already the highest precision ever obtained for an observation of this star, Kepler will be even more precise after analysis software being developed for the mission is completed.
"This early result shows the Kepler detection system is performing right on the mark," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. "It bodes well for Kepler's prospects to be able to detect Earth-size planets."
Related Link
Kepler’s Optical Phase Curve of the Exoplanet HAT-P-7b
New Scientist: Researchers hunting for the elusive neutrino typically trek to Antarctica, the Mediterranean, and Lake Baikal. But a growing number of projects are looking for the most energetic neutrinos by aiming radio telescopes at the moon.
A radio telescope aimed at the edge of the moon could potentially find these brief bursts of energy. But identifying these signals will not be easy. Neutrino collisions at ultra-high energies are rare; astronomers might expect to see just a handful in a month. Radio telescopes are also bombarded by other signals, including a host of man-made interference, that must be excluded.
But the moon's sheer size may make up for such limitations. "Size matters in this game. You have to catch those rare beasts," says Heino Falcke of Radboud University in the Netherlands
SPACE.com: The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission.
The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
Data from the ranging experiment has been used to learn—among other things—that the moon has a fluid core and is moving away from the Earth, and that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is accurate.
The instrument itself, called a lunar laser ranging reflector, was originally intended to accurately calculate the distance between the Earth and moon by measuring the round-trip time of a laser fired from Earth to a reflector on the instrument.
Physics Today: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.
The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view (see above) from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white.
The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.
"The fate of this black hole and others like it is an active area of research," said George Helou, deputy director of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Some theories hold that the black hole might quiet down and eventually enter a more dormant state like our Milky Way black hole."
The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars.
"The ring itself is a fascinating object worthy of study because it is forming stars at a very high rate," said Kartik Sheth, an astronomer at NASA's Spitzer Science Center.
In the Spitzer image, infrared light with shorter wavelengths is blue, while longer-wavelength light is red. The galaxy's red spiral arms and the swirling spokes seen between the arms show dust heated by newborn stars. Older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue. The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy.
"The companion galaxy that looks as if it's playing peek-a-boo through the larger galaxy could have plunged through, poking a hole," said Helou. "But we don't know this for sure. It could also just happen to be aligned with a gap in the arms."
This image was taken during Spitzer's "cold mission," which lasted more than five-and-a-half years. The telescope ran out of coolant needed to chill its infrared instruments on May 15, 2009. Two of its infrared channels will still work perfectly during the new "warm mission," which is expected to begin in a week or so, once the observatory has been recalibrated and warms to its new temperature of around 30 Kelvin.
Photo credit: TMT Observatory Corporation.
When completed in 2018, the TMT will enable astronomers to detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics.
The location was picked by conducting a global satellite survey for the best location, which was narrowed down to five sites for further ground-based studies of atmospheric stability, wind patterns, temperature variation, and other meteorological characteristics.
Last year the five sites were narrowed down to two—Mauna Kea and Cerro Armazones in Chile—for further evaluation and environmental, financial, and cultural impact studies.
"It was clear from all the information we received that both sites were among the best in the world for astronomical research," said Edward Stone, Caltech's Morrisroe Professor of Physics and vice chairman of the TMT board. "Each has superb observing conditions and would enable TMT to achieve its full potential of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe."
"In the final analysis, the board selected Mauna Kea as the site for TMT. The atmospheric conditions, low average temperatures, and very low humidity will open an exciting new discovery space using adaptive optics and infrared observations. Working in concert with the partners' existing facilities on Mauna Kea will further expand the opportunities for discoveries," said Stone.
Before construction can begin on Mauna Kea, the TMT must submit and have approved an application for a Conservation District Use Permit (CDUP) to the Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The TMT project is an international partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and ACURA, an organization of Canadian universities. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) joined TMT as a Collaborating Institution in 2008.
The TMT project has completed its $77 million design development phase with primary financial support of $50 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and $22 million from Canada. The project has now entered the early construction phase thanks to an additional $200 million pledge from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Caltech and the University of California have agreed to raise matching funds of $50 million to bring the construction total to $300 million, and the Canadian partners propose to supply the enclosure, the telescope structure, and the first light adaptive optics.
Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.
In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.
SPACE.com: History books tell us that the planet Neptune was found in the mid-1800s after years of speculation and search.
But in 1613, more than two centuries before Neptune was officially discovered, Galileo Galilei knew he had found it, according to a new theory by University of Melbourne physicist David Jamieson.
It has long been known that Galileo observed Neptune, but it was thought that he discounted the object as a star and gave it no further thought. But it turns out Galileo may have known the "star" had moved in relation to other stars, Jamieson reveals. That sort of movement would have caught Galileo's attention, since he knew that it was just the sort of thing planets did.
BBC News: Astronomers have revealed faint images of the two oldest and most distant supernovae to be discovered to date.
When a massive star effectively runs out of nuclear fuel, it explodes in a supernova—releasing all of its material into space.
The scientists described in the journal Nature how they gathered images of the exploding stars by monitoring the same galaxies over five years.
They used multiple images to pick out supernovae in the distant universe.
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Type IIn supernovae at redshift z approximately 2 from archival data
SPACE.com: Uranium exists on the Moon, according to new data from a Japanese spacecraft.
The findings are the first conclusive evidence for the presence of the radioactive element in lunar dirt, the researchers said. They announced the discovery recently at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
Wired.com: Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they’ve never been able to find one until now.
Astrophysicists identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, with a mass at least 500 times that of our Sun. Researchers from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France detected the middling hole in a galaxy about 290 million light-years from Earth.
Science News: A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers. The researchers base their findings on the recent discovery of one of the smallest and oldest black holes ever found.
The new limit is less than half that of previous limits on the length of an extra dimension, Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues report in a study posted online 30 June (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5351).
Science News: Scientists have generally assumed that the most energetic cosmic rays are primarily protons. That’s true even though heavier nuclei such as iron are more easily accelerated to high energies because of their greater electric charge.
Heavy nuclei, however, are also more fragile and the extraordinarily violent processes that rev them up to enormous energies can also cause these nuclei to fragment.
“Ask anybody what are the highest-energy [cosmic ray] particles, and they’d say ‘protons,’ ” says physics Nobel laureate James W. Cronin of the University of Chicago. But, as he announced 22 June at the Windows on the Universe meeting, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargüe, Argentina, has identified an abundance of iron nuclei at some of the highest energies its cosmic ray detectors can record.
Related Links
Studies of Cosmic Ray Composition and Air Shower Structure with the Pierre Auger Observatory
The Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum and Related Measurements with the Pierre Auger Observatory
Various: Cosmologist Adrian Melott has been researching for some time mass extinctions in the Earth's fossil records and linking them to astrophysical events.
Recently, Melott and Brian Thomas looked at the Ordovician extinction, which occurred 450 million years ago and resulted in the loss of 60% of marine invertebrates.
According to computer simulations and matched with the fossil record, they find that their data suggests that photons from a gamma-ray burst approximately over the South Pole (and no further than -75 degrees) caused the atmosphere's chemistry to change, doubling the level of ultraviolet-B solar radiation reaching the surface.
In this scenario parts of north China, Laurentia, and New Guinea—which lay north of the equator—should be a refuge from the ultraviolet effects, and show a different pattern of extinction in the "first strike" of the end-Ordovician extinction, if it was induced by such a radiation event.
Melott cautions that gamma-rays or x-rays may not be the main cause for extinction events but could be the trigger for tipping an already stressed environment into a catastrophic event.
In a broader article in SEED magazine Melott talks about his earlier research on cyclic mass extinctions.
There are at least 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record that fit a 62-million year cycle. Sometime ago Melott suggested that the solar-system's orbit around the Milky Way's center—which oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years, is the key—the galactic magnetic field protects the solar-system from extragalactic cosmic rays.
As the solar system "bobs" out of the galactic plane it becomes exposed to these cosmic rays which can cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash.
Related Links
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Related Physics Today article
Recent Nearby Supernovae May Have Left Their Marks on Earth May 2002
UC Santa Cruz: Astronomers Bülent Kiziltan and Stephen Thorsett of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have come up with a more accurate way to peg the ages of millisecond pulsars.
The standard method for estimating pulsar ages is known to yield unreliable results, especially for the fast-spinning millisecond pulsars, says Kiziltan.
"An accurate determination of pulsar ages is of fundamental importance, because it has ramifications for understanding the formation and evolution of pulsars, the physics of neutron stars, and other areas," he adds.
The standard approach to determine the "characteristic" or "spin-down" age of a pulsar is based on two parameters: the period between pulses and the rate at which they slow down. Kiziltan and Thorsett showed that this method may over- or under-estimate the age of a pulsar by a factor of 10 when applied to millisecond pulsars.
To improve the accuracy of the standard technique, they incorporated additional constraints that arise from the spin-up process and physical limits on the maximum spin period. "We modified the age calculations to be consistent with these constraints and showed that this approach can achieve estimates closer to the true age of the pulsar," Kiziltan says.
By including in their model previously ignored features such as the maximum possible rate of rotation and subtle shifts in the observed radio frequency due to a pulsar’s motion across the sky, the team finds that some millisecond pulsars are up to 10 times younger or 10 times older than earlier estimates suggest.
Science: Descending into the limestone valley where China has chosen to build its paramount telescope is a treacherous hike. So steep and vast is the depression that the few dozen villagers who live at the bottom rarely leave.
Scale is precisely what China is going for with the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), a massive instrument that the government hopes will thrust China to the forefront of radio astronomy.
This month, engineers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing will drill into this remote corner of Guizhou Province for a final round of geo-engineering studies before breaking ground later this year.
When FAST sees first light in 2014, it will measure more than five football fields in diameter, making it the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world.
Related Link
FAST web site (in Chinese)
SPACE.com: The inner workings of sunspots—those dark blotches that mark intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface—have long been a mystery, but a new computer simulation is providing a more realistic look inside them.
Understanding the complex dynamics that drive sunspots could help scientists better understand and predict the potential impacts on communications systems and climate patterns of the geomagnetic storms produced by these solar blights.
"This is the first time we have a model of an entire sunspot," said Matthias Rempel of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth's atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve."
Caltech/JPL: In this spoof of old TV action shows, Sean Astin, Osa Wallander, and Betty White search for a way to help the Spitzer Space Telescope after it runs out of coolant. The video was produced with the assistance of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Spitzer ran out of coolant on May 15 and as the video suggests, some of the instruments on the observatory will still be able to operate normally.
Science News: Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars visible to the naked eye, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.
The star, a red supergiant, has a radius exceeding the distance between the sun and Jupiter. The shrinkage corresponds to the star contracting by a distance equal to that between Venus and the sun, researchers reported June 9 at an American Astronomical Society meeting and in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Related Link
A systematic change with time in the size of Betelgeuse
Los Angeles Times: Cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena explains her work on the Hubble constant, used to measure the universe's expansion, to LA Times reporter John Johnson Jr. She was named a recipient of the Gruber Prize.
SPACE.com: There have been raging debates over the years as to whether there is frozen water on the moon or not.
Earlier today two NASA spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS impactor, blasted off on NASA's first mission to the moon in more than a decade.
Any ice they discover could not only answer some challenging questions about the geological history of the Moon, but also to support further space exploration.
SPACE.com: Cosmic debris stripped away from the wreck of colliding galaxies has been found by the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The debris fields could shed light on galaxy formation and starburst activity in the early universe by allowing astronomers to retrace the paths of the colliding galaxies before they merged.
"This is equivalent to finally being able to trace the skid marks on the road when investigating a car wreck," said team member Nick Scoville of the California Institute of Technology.
Science News: Astronomers report at an 8 June meeting of the American Astronomical Society that some of the biggest supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies are at least twice and possibly four times as heavy as previously estimated.
The findings come from new simulations by two independent teams of researchers, as well as new observations of stars whipping around a handful of supermassive black holes at the centers of massive galaxies no more than a few hundred million light-years from Earth.
NPR: NASA scientists Paul Goldsmith and Charles Lawrence discuss the space telescopes Herschel and Planck, which the European Space Agency launched last month. Herschel will investigate star and galaxy formation, and Planck will observe the residual glow of the newborn universe.
SPACE.com: Astronomers have directly measured the distance to a faraway galaxy, providing them with a yardstick that could help determine just how fast the universe around us is expanding.
"Measuring precise distances is one of the oldest problems in astronomy, and applying a relatively new radio astronomy technique to this old problem is vital to solving one of the greatest challenges of 21st century astrophysics," said team member Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in New Mexico, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany, the astronomers determined that the galaxy UGC 3789 is 160 million light-years from Earth.
Related Link
The megamaser cosmology project. I. very long baseline interferometric observations of UGC 3789 M. J. Reid et al 2009 ApJ 695 287-291
Science: In the century since the first distant galaxies were recognized, astronomers have learned much about how galaxies form and evolve.
But they still don't know to what extent a galaxy's properties are determined by its inner workings or through interactions with its surroundings—such as the Milky Way's potential collision with Andromeda in 3 billion years. In short, astronomers want to know how much of a galaxy's character is set by nature and how much by nurture.
To solve that puzzle, some astronomers are searching for rare galaxies well isolated from their neighbors. By comparing these loners to their more-gregarious brethren, researchers hope to tease apart the inherent inner workings of galaxies and the effects of interactions.
SPACE.com: "For the first time, astronomers have observed the phases of an extrasolar planet in visible light, as the world orbits around its star.
The planet, CoRoT-1b, was the first planet discovered by the French CoRoT (Convection Rotation and Planetary Transit) satellite about 2.5 years ago. It is about 1,600 light years away in the constellation Monoceros."
Science: In 1962, astronomers discovered a shining dot in the sky that appeared to be moving at an astonishing 47,000 kilometers per second, or one-sixth the speed of light. The velocity indicated that the object—named 3C 273—was a few billion light-years away, yet it was so bright it could have been a nearby star.
To study the object further, researchers delved into a trove of the astronomical past: a collection of photographic plates at Harvard University dating as far back as the 1860s. They spotted 3C 273 on some 600 photographs taken with a variety of telescopes over 70 years, some of them days apart.
The images showed fluctuations in the object's brightness on time scales as short as a week. Because the object could not be dimming or brightening faster than light could traverse it, the researchers inferred that in spite of being more luminous than a billion suns, the object had to be less than a light-week across—the size of the solar system. The finding helped characterize 3C 273 as a new type of object known as a quasar, one of the most powerful energy sources in the universe.
The discovery shows the value of historical sky observations, says Harvard astronomer Jonathan Grindlay, who is leading an initiative to scan the 500,000 plates in the university's collection and put them online. The project—called Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard (DASCH)—is part of a movement by a small but persistent group of astronomers to preserve, digitize, and study old astronomical photographs in hope of doing new science.
Related Physics Today articles
Astronomers Save Historic Plates (June 2003)
North Carolina institute offers to archive old astronomy data (March 2009)
SPACE.com: The Hubble Space Telescope appears to be working well after NASA put the 19-year-old observatory through a battery of tests after its final service mission by an astronaut repair crew.
Ed Weiler, NASA's science missions chief, said to reporters at a press conference that Hubble is in the midst of meticulous systems and calibration checks following the successful upgrades and repairs by Atlantis shuttle astronauts.
"All of those have gone beautifully," said Weiler. "Everything is going well, as far as I can tell."
The calibrations and electronics tests should run their course by the end of summer, with a new and improved Hubble once more ready for science observations in late August, Weiler said.
But there is another line of research that needs exploring: The overall impact of human-made orbital debris, solid and liquid propellant discharges, and other space age substance abuse that winds up in a high-speed dive through Earth's atmosphere.
There's a convenient toss-away line that is in vogue: that such space refuse simply "burns up"—a kind of out of sight, out of mind declaration.
What chemistry is involved given the high heating during reentry of space leftovers made of tungsten, beryllium, aluminum, and lots of composite materials? The impact of these materials on Earth's atmosphere—top to bottom—would seem worthy of investigation.
Once the handrail was removed, the astronauts were able to unscrew 111 fasteners of the protection plate, remove it, and replace the broken internal electronics. Due to the lost time spent on the handrail, the New Outer Blanket Layer, which will protect the HST from the environment, was not installed. NASA hopes to install it today.
In a few hours, astronauts John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel will conduct the final spacewalk to service and upgrade the HST. They will replace one of Hubble's original battery modules, launched with the telescope in 1990, and one of the three Fine Guidance Sensors, which lock onto guide stars and help to aim the telescope.
Update: Astronauts finish work on inside of Hubble: USA Today
Spacewalkers Michael Massimino and Michael Good left the space shuttle at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT) to resuscitate the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which failed after a power failure in 2004.
Various: Europe's Herschel and Planck telescopes have blasted into space on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana, reports the BBC. The far-infrared and submillimeter Herschel observatory is the largest telescope put into space. The Planck telescope will survey the cosmic microwave background.
Meanwhile the space shuttle Atlantis has captured the Hubble Space Telescope and started the first spacewalks to install the new Wide Field Camera 3 into the 19-year-old observatory. "It looks beautiful and in good shape," said astronaut John Grunsfeld to NASA ground control in Houston, Texas. However, a stubborn bolt attached to a grounding strap is causing the astronauts some difficulty, reports space.com.
ScienceNow: Apart from two wandering rovers, there's not much going on the martian surface these days. In fact, scientists believe the planet has been relatively dead for the past 3.5 billion years. But new research suggests that in at least one place, water gushed over Mars's surface less than 1 billion years ago. The finding increases the likelihood that life may have existed relatively recently there.
MSNBC: Gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away
ScienceNow: In a faraway corner of the universe, a crash of cosmic proportions is under way, cramming more than 1000 galaxies into a space normally reserved for a handful. It's also compressing and heating enormous quantities of intergalactic gas. Astronomers studying the phenomenon say what they learn about the pileup should improve their understanding about how the largest structures in the cosmos have evolved.
The discovery was made by watching subtle shifts in the light emanating from radio sources that sit at the hearts of far-away galaxie
Nature: Astronomers revise galaxy-formation models with the discovery that early galaxies could have grown fat -- fast.
MSNBC: The wonders of outer space get a double dose of worldwide exposure starting today – first with an event called "100 Hours of Astronomy," and then with the annual Yuri's Night celebration.
BBC: Europe is set to launch one of its most challenging space missions to date.
The New York Times: The space shuttle Discovery will remain on the ground until at least Sunday after a hydrogen leak scrubbed a launch attempt on Wednesday.
The research, currently available on arXiv, has been submitted to Nature for peer-review, but not everyone is convinced the group has found a supernova chemical fingerprint in the ice.
“The basic idea is an interesting one, but it’s way premature to accept these findings” at face value, comments Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England. “If the authors could show convincingly that they had supernovas, this would be exciting...But I think we are a long way from that.”
The New York Times: Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around theSun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.
Space.com: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has suffered an apparent glitch that has left the spacecraft in a protective safe mode and stalled science observations as it circles the red planet, the space agency announced
late Wednesday.
The malfunction occurred on Monday when the orbiter unexpectedly rebooted its main computer and entered safe mode, an automatic safeguard designed to protect the spacecraft from further damage when it detects a glitch.
Science: For better and for worse, Phoenix often wandered from its scripted mission on Mars, but there was some groundbreaking science behind the often distracting headlines.
BBC: The collision between a US and a Russian satellite in space highlights the growing importance of monitoring objects in orbit.
Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR
"It's been a superb flight," says David Pierce, chief of NASA's balloon programm at Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops facility in Virginia. "We're proving this is a viable platform." Balloon flights are a lot cheaper than satellites for conducting experiments, but the short time they remain aloft has been a drawback to long-term cosmic-ray and high- altitude atmospheric experiments.
This new balloon design suggests that a $50,000 balloon could replace a million-dollar spacecraft for short-to-medium-term research experiments.
ScienceNow: Astronomers today reported the discovery of a planet beyond our solar system that's just twice the diameter of Earth. But this new neighbor is far from habitable: CoRoT-Exo-7b is either a hellish world of erupting volcanoes and sizzling temperatures, or it's covered by a scalding ocean. Either way, the discovery could pave the way toward finding more Earth-sized alien worlds, some of which may actually be habitable.
Space.com: Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk at the heart of essentially all galaxies bigger than our own. Their powerful gravity should be luring in galactic matter, feeding the black holes' voracious appetites.
BBC: Europe will launch two flagship space telescopes this year, and three satellites that will acquire key data about ice, gravity, and soils on Earth.
Nature: The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is due to blast off in late 2011, two years later than originally planned. But so are several other missions that will require the use of an Atlas V rocket and the launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Squeezing MSL into the schedule could require buying a more powerful rocket, reworking the lander's heat shield for faster entry speeds, and hiring more workers to cut the time between launches. All this could add US$50 million to the cost of a mission whose budget has
already risen from $1.6 billion to more than $2.2 billion.
The balloon, which was launched on December 28, 2008, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, is 7 million cubic feet and is said to be the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully sealed balloon ever flown. When the project--which NASA is conducting in coordination with the National Science Foundation--is completed, the space agency should have a 22 million cubic foot balloon to work with.
NASA said that long-duration high-altitude balloon missions are far more cost-effective than satellites and that a chief benefit is that the instruments used can be easily retrieved and re-used.
The results suggest the Milky Way is roughly the same size as Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our local group.
What is more, it is moving 15% faster than earlier predictions.
NPR: On Christmas Eve in 1968, Americans turned on their TV sets to watch something unprecedented: a live broadcast from outer space.
BBC: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally spotted rocks on the Red Planet that bear carbonate minerals.
The New York Times: The same mystery force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, astronomers said Tuesday.
BBC: There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.
USA Today: Asteroid impacts, which have been fingered for killing off the dinosaurs and other mass extinctions, may have helped kick-start life in the first place, experiments by Japanese researchers suggest.
Science: South Korea's first very long baseline interferometry array is being completed this week. Linked to arrays in Japan and China, Korea's three instruments will fill out the densest network of its kind.
BBC: In 1572, a "new star" appeared in the sky which stunned astronomers and exploded ancient theories of the universe.
MSNBC: Machholz 1 is forcing astronomers to create a new class of comets.
The Washington Post: Staring at his computer screen in May, poking through images of the bright star Fomalhaut, astronomer Paul Kalas found himself staring at a tiny white dot. The dot appeared amid a great ring of dust circling the star. From one image to the next, the dot moved.
ScienceNow: Every few minutes, short-lived portals open on the dayside of Earth's magnetic field, new satellite observations reveal. During that time, Earth and the sun are locked in a magnetic tangle that could trigger the geomagnetic storms that occasionally bedevil satellite communications and electrical power systems on the ground.
MSNBC: Chandrayaan-1 successfully performed an orbit-raising maneuver
Los Angeles Times: The restarted telescope resumes sending pictures. But there's a new snag: A NASA repair team won't be sent to the aging craft until at least May.
MSNBC: Ancient rocks contain magnetic records about very early history of planets
NPR: Indians are divided over their nation's first space mission, an unmanned lunar probe launched early Wednesday. Critics say the moon mission is a waste of money in a country where so many are impoverished. Others see space as a path to competing in a high-tech world.
BBC: India is counting down to the launch of its first mission to the Moon.
BBC: NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) spacecraft has been launched into Earth orbit to study the edge of our solar system.
ScienceNow: Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of colliding galaxies, each harboring a supermassive black hole at its center. The existence of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang, suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so, they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought, and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets.
MSNBC: The revival of the Hubble Space Telescope started out going "exactly as we hoped," a NASA spokesman said, but engineers had to put a hold on the operation after they saw two anomalies in electronic systems onboard the telescope.
ScienceNow: Astronomers have discovered their first grab-bag comet. Radar observations of the small, icy nucleus of a comet known as Tuttle suggest that it consists of two clumps that touch each other, like the two halves of the number eight. "It's almost certainly a contact binary," says John Harmon of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, who presented his team's findings here this past weekend at the 40th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. The unexpected find opens up a window on the early history of our solar system.
The New York Times: Garrett Reisman was on his way to the formerly secret military base in Star City, Russia for several weeks of training, making his way through Kennedy Airport, when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven W. Lindsey, the head of NASA’s astronaut office.
Honolulu Star-Bulletin: A project on Maui aims to detect potentially hazardous comets and asteroids
This news story will be updated throughout the day.
At a press conference this morning 87-year-old Nambu said he was awakened by a telephone call from the academy. "I was surprised and honored. I didn't expect it. I've been told for many years that I was on the list (to get the award)," he said. "I had almost given up."
Nambu moved to the United States from Japan in 1952 and has worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.
In Japan, 64-year-old Kobayashi at his own press conference said "It's an honor to receive the prize for my work from long time ago."
In a separate news conference at his university, 68-year-old Maskawa said, "As a scientist, I'm not thrilled by the prize."
"I was happier when our findings were acknowledged [by the community] around 2002. The Nobel prize is a rather mundane thing."
In a review of Jeremy Bernstein's "The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics" (August 1989, page 65) Robert March recommends the book for giving Makoto "Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa the recognition they deserve, but rarely get, for anticipating the discovery of the third generation in their model of CP violation". After today that recognition will be widely known.
Passion for symmetry
The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level.
As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.
The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.
A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.
Related Physics Today Articles
The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter February 2003, page 30
Novel B Factories Close in on the Violation of CP Symmetry May 2001, page 17
At Last We Have an Undisputed Observation of `Direct' CP Violation in Kaon Decay May 1999, page 17
Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time-Reversal Symmetry February 1999, page 72
Broken Symmetry: Selected Papers of Y. Nambu (Review) October 1996, page 72
The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics (Review) August 1989, page 65
Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s November 1988, page 56
Flavor SU(3) Symmetries in Particle Physics April 1988, page 29
CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation October 1988, page 17
Neutral B Mesons Show Surprisingly Large Flavor Mixing August 1987, page 17
Related News Stories
American, 2 Japanese share Nobel Prize in Physics USA Today
Chicago Professor Shares In Nobel Prize PhysicsNPR
CNN: A new space race is officially under way, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating.
The project is a "space elevator," and some experts now believe that the concept is well within the bounds of possibility -- maybe even within our lifetimes.
MSNBC: Astronauts and other space experts are calling for the formation of new international organizations to monitor a threat that may not be as imminent as the current financial crisis but would be even more catastrophic: a cosmic collision with an asteroid or comet.
The New York Times: The latest findings from the Martian Arctic offer more hints of a wet past but paint a very arid present, scientists reported Monday.
And in a prelude to winter and the demise of NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander, snow has been spotted falling from the clouds above. As the Martian days shorten and temperatures drop, Phoenix’s solar panels will eventually not be able to produce enough energy to keep the spacecraft warm.
The New York Times: A problem that struck the Hubble Space Telescope on Saturday will delay the final space shuttle mission to service it, moving the launching from next month to next year, NASA officials said Monday.
Physics Today: After three dramatic failures, the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket has reached low Earth orbit. The fourth flight of the Falcon 1 rocket, which is built by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) lifted off at 4:15 p.m. (PDT) yesterday from the Reagan Test Site (RTS) on Omelek Island at the US Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. "This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull's-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake." The rocket is currently in an elliptical orbit of 500 km by 700 km, 9.2 degrees inclination.
Falcon 1 carried into orbit a payload mass simulator of approximately 165 kg (364 lbs), designed and built by SpaceX, specifically for this mission. Consisting of a hexagonal aluminum alloy chamber 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, the payload remains attached to the second stage as it orbits Earth.
This was the fourth launch of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle and second flight for the new SpaceX-developed Merlin 1C regeneratively-cooled engine. A "hold before liftoff" system was used to enhance reliability by permitting all launch systems to be verified as functioning nominally before launch was initiated. A single SpaceX-developed Kestrel engine powered the Falcon 1 second stage.
Space X, which was founded in 2002 (see Physics Today March 2005, page 30) is planning a family of launch vehicles intended to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of both manned and unmanned space transportation. The company is the only remaining winner of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition (COTS), that aims to develop a cargo delivery vehicle called Dragon to the international space station when the shuttle retires in 2010. Under the existing Agreement, SpaceX will conduct three flights of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for NASA, culminating in Dragon berthing with the ISS. NASA also has an option to demonstrate crew services to the ISS using the Falcon 9 / Dragon system. The first Falcon 9 will arrive at the SpaceX launch site (complex 40) at Cape Canaveral by the end of 2008 in
preparation for its maiden flight in 2009.
Nature: A small step toward a very grand vision
MSNBC: Phoenix Mars Lander catches whirlwinds as they zip past camera
Reuters: A gigantic explosion of a star halfway across the universe long ago aimed a burst of gamma rays directly at Earth, an international team of scientists said on Wednesday.
Reuters: The shuttle crew being dispatched to work on the Hubble Space Telescope faces a higher-than-usual chance of disaster due to orbital debris, the shuttle program manager said on Monday.
BBC: China will launch its third manned space mission in late September, state-run news agency Xinhua reports.
The Arlington, Va.-based NSF's interest in CubeSats stems from a recommendation in the June 2006 "Report of the Assessment Committee for the National Space Weather Program — an interagency initiative to speed improvement of space weather services."
One of the report's recommendations emphasized that agencies involved in space weather work should look into the feasibility of using micro-satellites with miniaturized sensors to provide cost-effective science and operational data sources for space weather applications such as: improving understanding of space weather, helping predict conditions in the space environment and measuring the physical processes that affect the state of the sun and solar wind, as well as impacts they have upon Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and upper atmosphere.
Science: In 1054 C.E., Chinese and Arab astronomers recorded the observation of a bright explosion in the sky. Now known to have been a supernova explosion, the remnant--the Crab nebula--still emits particles energized to extremely relativistic energies and radiates light at x-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths. In last week's Science magazine, a team of european astronomers report the discovery that the high-energy radiation (hard x-rays) from the Crab is polarized, yielding insights into the processes and mechanisms involved in making a dead star so active
BBC: Astronomers looking through the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the world's largest survey of galaxies, have found a new haul of objects closer to home - including one with a potentially exotic origin.
MSNBC: Satellite offers a modern look at how mankind watched the stars long ago
The object, known as 2006 SQ372, is starting the outward portion of a 22,500-year orbit that will take it 150 billion miles away from the Sun
NPR: Europe's space agency reached two milestones earlier this year. A European-built lab was installed at the International Space Station. Europe launched a robotic cargo vehicle that successfully docked with the station. The European Space Agency will be building more of those automated delivery trucks. And it's also thinking about converting the cargo vehicle into a crew vehicle that could take astronauts into orbit.
“In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly,” notes Adams in the August online Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The Guardian: The rover – the most sophisticated ever built – is due to explore Mars in 2015 as part of the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, but there are fears funding cuts will kill off Britain's contribution
Nature News: Representatives of nine national space agencies signed an agreement on 24 July to create an International Lunar Network, which aims to plant a system of six or more seismic stations on the Moon.
The New York Times: "The Universe in Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It" is a breezy behind-the-scenes account.
New York Times: The first stars in the universe were short-lived brutish monsters, and they changed the nature of the cosmos forever, blazing away a dark fog that had smothered space for 300 million years and beginning to enrich the cosmos with the stuff of life.
That is the news from a new computer simulation of the early years of the universe, performed by a group of astronomers led by Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan.
NPR: NASA's Phoenix lander has been on Mars for more than two months. It has sampled the soil, measured the weather and snapped thousands of pictures. One of its missions is to determine whether the Martian arctic is able to support life.
Nature News: Italian scientists are worried that a shake-up of the nation’s space agency will put commercial and defence interests ahead of research.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is in the process of replacing the president of the Italian Space Agency. He is removing the agency’s current head, astrophysicist Giovanni Bignami, and installing business executive Enrico Saggese, who heads the space division at Finmeccanica, Italy’s largest aerospace firm.
SPACE.com: An orbiting X-ray observatory has discovered an exploding star in the Milky Way which somehow escaped notice by the usual crowd of star gazers.
Calculations show that the star’s sudden brightness was clearly visible to the naked eye, but no one reported anything until the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope spotted an unexpected burst of cosmic X-rays.
The Register: This week the first annual Lunar Science Conference is being held at the NASA/AMES Research Center in Mountain View, California. It's being run by the newly-formed NASA Lunar Science Institute — whose job it will be make dust vapor studies look sexy while doling out $2m grants to teams of lucky researchers. Reporter Austin Modine irreverently
summarizes some of the discussions held at the conference over why NASA should head back to the Moon.
Space.com: With assembly of the International Space Station nearing completion, the major investors — the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan and Canada — are discussing ways to ensure that neither the U.S. Vision for Space Exploration nor the ostensible 15-year design life of some early station hardware forces an early retirement of the multibillion-dollar facility.
Space.com: Telescope mirrors made from lunar dust could help realize dreams of stargazing from the far side of the moon.
The New York Times: Will the Mars lander's next baking test of soil and ice be its last?
Scientists worry that it could be, thanks to an electrical glitch that threatens the $420 million quest to find the chemical ingredients for life near the Martian north pole.
Washington Post: NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are finalizing plans to fly the space shuttle this fall on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to repair and upgrade the orbiting observatory that revolutionized astronomy. The long-delayed servicing mission will be the last for the Hubble, NASA says, but it will allow the telescope to perform at its highest level ever for the remaining five or six years of its operating life.
Globe and Mail: The space telescope will be no bigger than a hefty suitcase and weigh just 65 kilograms, but the Canadian scientists behind the project say when the device is launched two years from now, it may well go on to save the world.
The $12-million Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, dubbed NEOSSat, is considered a world's first - designed specifically as an early warning system to pinpoint asteroids on a collision course with Earth. It will also detect space junk in the path of other orbiting satellites to prevent crashes that could shut down telecommunications - television, telephone, GPS and banking systems - around the globe.
The New York Times: The lopsided shape of Mars may well be a result of a cataclysmic impact of a Pluto-size meteor billions of years ago, three teams of scientists are reporting. That would suggest that the lowlands of Mars’s northern hemisphere are a single gigantic impact crater, the largest crater in the solar system.
New Scientist: A radio telescope that spans four continents has been set up for the first time.
In an observational run conducted in May, antennas in North America, South America, Europe and Africa all pointed in the same direction. Signals were fed by fibre optics to create real-time images at a hub in the Netherlands..
Recently, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico joined a project called Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI), which can make temporary radio telescopes that rival the size of the Earth.
Its size allows the array to image objects – like the bright 'afterglow' formed when a high-speed jet of matter from a gamma-ray burst slams into its surroundings – that just look like points to individual radio telescopes, says Chris Salter of Arecibo.
Nature: "Ice!" screams NASA's Phoenix lander.
USA Today: The identity of the mysterious dark matter thought to pervade the universe has eluded astrophysicists for decades. Now, for the first time a team hopes to look inside the sun for one of the prime candidates.
ScienceNow: The odds are improving that life exists beyond Earth. A European-U.S. team reports that a meteorite that formed billions of years ago and eventually crashed on our planet harbors two important components of RNA and DNA, the fundamental molecules of life. The findings could help explain how life got started on Earth, and they suggest that the ingredients for life have been liberally sprinkled throughout the solar system, if not the galaxy.
The New York Times: After days of struggling with sticky Martian dirt, the Phoenix Mars Lander has unexpectedly succeeded in getting its first soil sample into an onboard laboratory for analysis, jubilant NASA scientists said on Wednesday.
NPR: NASA has scheduled just 10 more space shuttle flights before retiring its fleet for good. But the space agency may have to add one more mission, to bring a seven-ton $1.5 billion physics experiment into space.
The Los Angeles Times In a series of maneuvers that sounds more like cooking class than research on Mars, scientists said Monday they would try one more time to shake bits of the clumpy Martian soil into a test oven on NASA's Phoenix lander before switching to a backup strategy that called for dribbling the soil into the oven.
NPR: NASA researchers spent nearly 40 years on Gravity Probe B, a satellite designed to test some of Albert Einstein's theories. As the $700 million project winds down, NASA is rejecting a request for another 18 months of funding.
[From NASA 'Gravity Probe B' Project Winds Down : NPR]
Science: In July 1967, US surveillance satellites looking for signs of a Russian nuclear test in space recorded two flashes of gamma radiation. Scientists quickly determined that the high-energy bursts did not come from a nuclear explosion, which would have generated a more sustained stream of gamma rays and also produced lower energy radiation detectable by other satellite instruments. Only years later did they realize that the flashes--named gamma ray bursts (GRBs)--originated in violent events deep in space. In scanning the heavens for an enemy secret, they had stumbled upon a cosmic one.
Now, researchers are opening the window wider with a new telescope designed to record gamma radiation several orders of magnitude higher in energy than current instruments can detect. NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Satellite Telescope (GLAST), scheduled for launch next month, will also be the first instrument of its kind to survey the entire sky several times a day, increasing the chances of finding and following extreme astronomical phenomena anywhere in the universe.
Science News: For all the hand wringing among physicists about the nature of dark energy, the invisible stuff that appears to be revving up the rate of cosmic expansion, a nagging possibility remains. Dark energy could be a cosmic mirage — if humans live in a special place in the universe with a peculiar distribution of matter.
But that scenario violates the Copernican principle, say theorists Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College and Albert Stebbins of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Named after the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who made the then heretical proposal that Earth does not have a favored, central position in the solar system, the principle states that humans are not privileged observers in the universe, but have just as good — or bad — a vantage point as any other observer in the cosmos.
“Although the Copernican principle may be widely accepted by fiat, it is imperative that such a foundational principle be proven,” Caldwell and Stebbins assert in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. The researchers suggest a concrete way to check once and for all whether our neck of the cosmic woods is different from other parts of the universe. Their test relies on observations of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang that bathes all parts of the universe.
Space.com: In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy.
Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction--a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
