Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun. The sun, at 4.6 billion years old, predates all the other bodies in our solar system. But it turns out that much of the water we swim in and drink here on Earth is even older. A new model of the chemistry of the early solar system finds that up to half the water now on Earth was inherited from an abundant supply of interstellar ice as our sun formed. That means our solar system’s moisture wasn’t the result of local conditions in the proto-planetary disk, but rather a regular feature of planetary formation — raising hopes that life could indeed exist elsewhere in the universe. Dating Our Water To determine the age of our solar system’s water, researchers focused on its ratio of hydrogen to deuterium, called “heavy hydrogen” because it has an extra neutron.
Interstellar ice has a very high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen because it formed in very cold temperatures. But, confounding the matter, deuterium levels in the solar system’s water have also been rising ever since the sun formed. "Gravity will Eventually Create a Universe with Only a Few Mega-Galaxies" Massive galaxies in the Universe have stopped making their own stars and are instead cannibalising nearby galaxies, according to research by Australian scientists. Astronomers looked at more than 22,000 galaxies and found that while smaller galaxies were very efficient at creating stars from gas, the most massive galaxies were much less efficient at star formation, producing hardly any new stars themselves, and instead grew by eating other galaxies.
The iamge above shows IC 1101, a supergiant elliptical galaxy of approximately 6 million light-years across, which makes it the largest known galaxy discovered to date. It lies about 1.07 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin), and is made up of more than 100 trillion stars (for comparison, our Milky Way has about 300 billion stars), this galaxy is the extremely bright object at the center of Abell 2029, a massive cluster of thousands of galaxies. The Daily Galaxy via. What Is the Universe? Real Physics Has Some Mind-Bending Answers. Surprise! Monster Black Hole Found in Dwarf Galaxy.
Astronomers have just discovered the smallest known galaxy that harbors a huge, supermassive black hole at its core. The relatively nearby dwarf galaxy may house a supermassive black hole at its heart equal in mass to about 21 million suns. The discovery suggests that supermassive black holes may be far more common than previously thought. A supermassive black hole millions to billions of times the mass of the sun lies at the heart of nearly every large galaxy like the Milky Way. These monstrously huge black holes have existed since the infancy of the universe, some 800 million years or so after the Big Bang. Scientists are uncertain whether dwarf galaxies might also harbor supermassive black holes. "Dwarf galaxies usually refer to any galaxy less than roughly one-fiftieth the brightness of the Milky Way," said lead study author Anil Seth, an astronomer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Nature. 219 million stars: a detailed catalogue of the visible Milky Way. A new catalogue of the visible part of the northern part of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way, includes no fewer than 219 million stars. Geert Barentsen of the University of Hertfordshire led a team who assembled the catalogue in a ten year programme using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
Their work appears today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A density map of part of the Milky Way disk, constructed from IPHAS data. The axes show galactic latitude and longitude, coordinates that relate to the position of the centre of the galaxy. The mapped data are the counts of stars detected in i, the longer (redder) wavelength broad band of the survey, down to a faint limit of 19th magnitude. Although this is just a small section of the full map, it portrays in exquisite detail the complex patterns of obscuration due to interstellar dust. Credit: Hywel Farnhill, University of Hertfordshire. Media contact Science contacts Prof. Caption: Scientists Find Evidence of ‘Diving’ Tectonic Plates on Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Why Stephen Hawking Thinks the 'God Particle' Could End the Universe. Stephen Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that physicists would not discover the Higgs boson. After losing that bet when physicists detected the particle in 2012, Hawking lamented the discovery, saying it made physics less interesting.
Now, in the preface to a new collection of essays and lectures called "Starmus," the famous theoretical physicist is warning that the particle could one day be responsible for the destruction of the known universe. Hawking is not the only scientist who thinks so. The theory of a Higgs boson doomsday, where a quantum fluctuation creates a vacuum "bubble" that expands through space and wipes out the universe, has existed for a while. The Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the 'god particle,' much to the chagrin of scientists who prefer the official name, is a tiny particle that researchers long suspected existed. Universe doomsday The Higgs boson is about 126 billion electron volts, or about the 126 times the mass of a proton. Not all doom and gloom. Astronomers Discover Galaxy They Thought Couldn’t Exist | Science.
Astronomers have spotted one of the rarest and most extreme galaxy clusters in the universe and, behind it, an object that shouldn’t exist. Galaxy clusters are collections of galaxies that orbit one another and are the most massive objects in the universe. The newly discovered cluster, first detected by the Hubble space telescope, is over 500 trillion times the mass of the sun. It is located approximately 10 billion light-years away. Because looking out into the distant cosmos means also looking back in time, the cluster formed during an era when the universe was a quarter its present age.
The cluster, named IDCS J1426.5+3508, is extreme because during this period in cosmic history, massive collections of galaxies were just beginning to form. Only one other cluster of comparable size has been seen at this distance and it is a lightweight compared to IDCS J1426.5+3508. Adding to the object’s strangeness, a mysterious arc of blue light was seen just behind the galaxy cluster. Big Bang Was Actually a Phase Change: New Theory. How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so.
Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice. In the new study, lead author James Quach and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia say the hypothesis can be tested by looking for defects that would have formed in the structure of space-time when the universe crystallized.
The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old. "Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Quach said in a statement. "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystallises' into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Asteroid threat in 2032? Don't panic, but don't brush it off. A big asteroid sailed past Earth last month, and astronomers haven't yet totally excluded the possibility that it'll hit us when it comes around in 2032.
If the past is any guide, we won't have to worry about asteroid 2013 TV135 — but it's a reminder that we'll have to fend off a killer space rock one of these days. Ukrainian astronomers discovered 2013 TV135 just 10 days ago, well after the asteroid had its close encounter with Earth on Sept. 16. Actually, it wasn't all that close: The distance was 4.2 million miles (6.7 million kilometers), or about 17 times as far away as the moon. But based on the rough estimates of its orbital path, experts rated its chances of colliding with Earth during a follow-up encounter in 2032 at 1 in 63,000.
"To put it another way, that puts the current probability of no impact in 2032 at about 99.998 percent," Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Thursday in a statement. Latest Rosetta NavCam images reveal jets on Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Posted By Emily Lakdawalla Topics: Rosetta and Philae, pretty pictures, comets, amateur image processing, comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, explaining image processing ESA released another set of NavCam images of the comet today, and lo and behold, there are jets! We knew they were there, from an earlier OSIRIS image, but it's tremendously cool to see the comet behaving like a proper comet should.
Here is my version of the four-image composite: ESA / Rosetta / NavCam / Emily Lakdawalla Comet jets! A four-image mosaic of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by Rosetta on September 2, 2014 clearly shows at least two jets emanating from the "neck" region of the comet. Comets are a tricky but fun image processing challenge, because at lower phase angle (with the Sun more or less behind the spacecraft) the nucleus is much, much brighter than the coma. But this image doesn't tell the whole story. Before & after: Revealing Churyumov-Gerasimenko's jets See other posts from September 2014. Awesome Space Probe Map Shows Every Mission Now Exploring Our Solar System. Milky Way Found to Belong to a Supersize Supercluster [Video] The supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way is 100 times bigger in volume and mass than previously thought, a team of astronomers says.
They have mapped the enormous region and given it the name Laniakea — Hawaiian for 'immeasurable heaven'. Galaxies tend to huddle in groups called clusters; regions where these clusters are densely packed are known as superclusters. But the definition of these massive cosmic structures is vague. The new study, published in Nature1, describes a novel way to define where one supercluster ends and another begins. A team led by Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, charted the motions of galaxies to infer the gravitational landscape of the local Universe, and redraw its map. Cosmic speed The team used a database2 that compiles the velocities of 8,000 galaxies, calculated after subtracting the average rate of cosmic expansion. Frontiers in space This is a completely new definition of a supercluster. Underground Experiment Proves What Powers The Sun. Scientists have long believed that the power of the sun comes largely from the fusion of protons into helium, but now they can finally prove it.
An international team of researchers using a detector buried deep below the mountains of central Italy has detected neutrinos—ghostly particles that interact only very reluctantly with matter—streaming from the heart of the sun. Other solar neutrinos have been detected before, but these particular ones come from the key proton-proton fusion reaction that is the first part of a chain of reactions that provides 99% of the sun’s power. The results also show that the sun is a remarkably steady power source. Neutrinos take only 8 minutes to get from the sun’s core to Earth, so the rate of neutrino production that the team detected reflects the amount of heat the sun is producing today.
Researchers have been detecting neutrinos since the 1960s. Initially, a two-thirds deficit in the detection rate confused the results. Freaky Physics Experiment May Prove Our Universe Is A Two-Dimensional Hologram. Everyone knows the universe exists in three dimensions, right? Maybe not. For some time now serious physicists have been pondering the seemingly absurd possibility that three-dimensional space is merely an illusion--and that we actually live in a two-dimensional "hologram. " And now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois have launched a mind-blowing experiment to show once and for all what sort of universe we live in.
"We want to find out whether space-time is a quantum system just like matter is," Dr. Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, said in a written statement. According to quantum theory's uncertainty principle, it's impossible to know both the precise location and the exact velocity of a subatomic particle. The 21 scientists involved in the experiment will look for the jitter with the help of an exquisitely sensitive device known as a Holometer.
(Story continues below images.) A close-up of the Holometer at Fermilab. The Exoplanetary Epic: Giant Planets, Rocky Planets. "Are Habitable Worlds Common in the Milky Way?" --Unanalyzed Kepler Mission Data Holds the Answer. The Kepler Mission has left a gold mine of data for astronomers to analyze for years to come to find additional planets. Kepler switched into “safe mode” in May, after a gyroscope used to aim the telescope broke. At the time, its hunt for potentially habitable worlds, the mission was closing in on the answer.
To date. Kepler had discovered 3,548 possible planets to date, and 135 of them — some smaller than the Earth — have been validated by other observations, including the first Earth-sized worlds found outside our solar system, profoundly altering our sense of place in the universe. But hundreds or thousands more planets are in the pipeline, said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory, Kepler’s originator and principal investigator. “We’re going have to dig down hard to find those planets — we know we can do it,” Mr. Kepler’s enduring legacy will be its contributions to our knowledge about how common planets of various sizes are in other solar systems in the Milky Way. Strange Neutrinos from the Sun Detected for the First Time. Deep inside the sun pairs of protons fuse to form heavier atoms, releasing mysterious particles called neutrinos in the process. These reactions are thought to be the first step in the chain responsible for 99 percent of the energy the sun radiates, but scientists have never found proof until now.
For the first time, physicists have captured the elusive neutrinos produced by the sun’s basic proton fusion reactions. Earth should be teeming with such neutrinos—calculations suggest about 420 billion of them stream from the sun onto every square inch of our planet’s surface each second—yet they are incredibly hard to find. Neutrinos almost never interact with regular particles and usually fly straight through the empty spaces between the atoms in our bodies and all other normal matter. But occasionally they will collide with an atom and knock an electron loose, creating a quick flash of light visible to extremely sensitive detectors.
[1401.4318] Quantum Imaging with Undetected Photons. Explosive Solar Flare Spotted By Sun-Watching Spacecraft. The sun kicked off this week with an explosive solar flare that, while not aimed directly at Earth, may be a hotspot to watch over the next few days. The solar flare erupted on Sunday morning (Aug. 24) from an active sunspot known as AR2151. Two sun-watching spacecraft captured stunning video of Sunday's solar flare as it leapt off the surface of the sun at 8:16 a.m. EDT (1216 GMT). While sunpost AR2151 wasn't facing Earth at the time of the flare, it is a place to watch in the days and weeks ahead. "The responsible sunspot will turn toward Earth in the days ahead, boosting chances for geoeffective solar activity as the week unfolds," experts with the space weather website Spaceweather.com wrote on Sunday. Sunday's flare was an intense M5.6 solar eruption on the scale used by scientists to measure space weather events. M-class storms are about 10 times weaker than X-class flares, the most powerful storms on the sun, NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox wrote in a statement.
Weird Cell-Shaped Structure Discovered In Mars Meteorite. Is Dark Matter Made of Tiny Black Holes? Diamond Planet Found—Part of a "Whole New Class?" ScienceCasts: The Sun's Magnetic Field is About to Flip. Scientists Find Remnants of One of Universe's Oldest Stars—And It's Huge. "Einstein's Prediction" --Proof of Gravitational Waves' Existence Imminent. Five Reasons We Think Dark Matter Exists — Starts With A Bang!
Una posible huella de las primeras estrellas del universo / Fotografías / Multimedia. Strange Dark Matter Interactions Could Create Galactic Disks and Dark Light | Science. El enorme cometa 67P de la sonda Rosetta, comparado con una ciudad. Water on Earth and Moon May Have Common Origin. What do gravitational waves tell us about the Universe? › Ask an Expert (ABC Science) Attacking the spherical cow model of dark matter | Astrophysics. Supernovas May Create Weird 'Zombie Stars,' New Hubble Observations Suggest. El núcleo de la Luna sigue caliente por su interacción con la Tierra. 'Nuclear Pasta' in Neutron Stars: New Type of Matter Found. Our Solar System Coalesced From Giant Dust Cloud, Scientists Say. Por qué la misión Rosetta debería ponerte los pelos de punta. Rosetta Has Arrived, and the View is Astounding - ImaGeo. Rosetta Spacecraft Spots 'Face' On Comet In Deep Space.
Quásares: Monstruos en las profundidades del cosmos (Héctor Vives) All You Need to Know about Gravitational Waves. Pure Dumb Luck Saved Us from a Calamity in 2012 Sparked by One of the Strongest Solar Storms in Recorded History - ImaGeo. Quantum gravity takes singularity out of black holes - space - 29 May 2013. Curiosity Sol 706.
Cómo medir de forma directa que el universo se está acelerando. WorldAndScience: Two enormous galaxies colliding ... The Sun Is Eerily Quiet, And Scientists Aren't Sure Why. Black Holes May Explode Into 'White Holes' And Pour All Their Matter Into Space, Physicists Say. Black Holes May Explode Into 'White Holes' And Pour All Their Matter Into Space, Physicists Say. As Rosetta Nears its Rendezvous With a Comet, Use this Way Cool Interactive Model to See How it Got There - ImaGeo. Temblores en los cimientos del Cosmos | Frontera. Temblores en los cimientos del Cosmos | Frontera. Earth's Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now.
La estructura del universo como una interferencia cuántica | Investigación UPV/EHU. New Exoplanet Has Strange Companion. Grand Cosmological Claim Crumbles? Triple Monster Black Hole Discovered | Nat Geo Space. Messier Monday: The Most Concentrated Messier Globular, M75. Was Ancient Earth Like Jupiter's Super-Volcanic Moon Io? Moon is younger than first thought. Researchers publish enormous catalog of more than 300,000 nearby galaxies.
La Luna es 100 millones de años más joven de lo que se creía. Universe's baby pictures suggest a bubbly birth - life - 19 September 2013. Universe may be curved, not flat. Mars rover fails to find methane | Planetary Science. How About a Hug?! Nearby Galaxy Cluster Has Giant Plasma Arms | LiveScience. Dark Energy Survey Begins To Map Cosmos Using Powerful Camera At Chilean Observatory. Mysterious Mercury and Planetary Pareidolia: Photos. Water on Mars: Curiosity Rover Uncovers a Flood of Evidence | LiveScience. Researchers reveal Earth's habitable lifetime and investigate potential for alien life. Equinox Explained: Why Earth's Seasons Will Change on Sunday. How to Deflect a Killer Asteroid. Alien Moons Around Distant Planets Too Small For Life, Research Suggests.
Alien Moons Around Distant Planets Too Small For Life, Research Suggests.