How to See the Best Meteor Showers of 2010: Tools, Tips and 'Sav NASA JPL Home California Institute of Technology Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe. (Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. Related Link
Mysterious New Object Discovered in Space A strange and mysterious new object in space may the brightest and long-lasting "micro-quasar" seen thus far, a miniature version of the brightest objects in the universe. The object suddenly began pumping out radio waves last year in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, some 10 million light-years away. Its discovery was announced Tuesday. "The new object, which appeared in May 2009, has left us scratching our heads — we've never seen anything quite like this before," said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. M82 is a "starburst galaxy," one that churns out new stars at a prodigious rate. Most of these stars die in huge explosions, with supernovas occurring roughly every 20 to 30 years in M82. In comparison, the mystery object turned on very rapidly within a few days and has shown no sign of dying down, even after nearly a year. Quasars big and small More study needed
X-Ray Observations Find Evidence for "Missing Matter" in the Uni [/caption] From a Chandra press release: Scientists have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist’s impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the “missing matter” in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. The X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption spectrum of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. Source: Chandra Like this: Like Loading...
H2356-309 :: 11 May 10 Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. The X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. An X-ray spectrum of the background source is given in the inset, where the yellow points show the Chandra data and the red line shows the best model for the spectrum after including all of the Chandra and XMM data.
A hole in space… no really, an actual hole! | Bad Astronomy | Di Space is black. I mean, duh, right? But really, it’s black because it’s almost entirely empty, so even with stars scattered around, there’s nothing to light up. But some parts of space are bright: clouds of gas can be lit up by nearby stars, making them glow. However, just to make things more fun, there can be thicker patches of dust mixed in that block the light from the stars and gas behind them. NGC 1999 — seen here in a famous Hubble picture — has all these ingredients. A lot of the time those dense spots are where stars are being born, and the only way to see them is in the infrared. Here’s the Herschel image they got. Wait, what? So the astronomers followed up with more observations from the ground, and found something astonishing: it really is a hole, an actual empty region in the middle of a dense cloud! It turns out that the fault may lie in the stars themselves. NGC 1999 is a familiar object to a lot of astronomers. Surprises in science are the best results you can get.
Quantum space monster leaps from a gravity well - space - 17 May GRAVITY may have the power to create quantum monsters. A strong gravitational field can induce a runaway effect in quantum fluctuations in apparently empty space, resulting in a burgeoning concentration of energy that may explode stars or create black holes. So say Daniel Vanzella and William Lima at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Quantum phenomena are not thought to have any significant influence over processes on the astrophysical scale, such as the compression of gas clouds into stars. Now calculations by Vanzella and Lima suggest gravity can trigger a powerful reaction in the fluctuating quantum fields of forces in ...
Did Phoenix lose a wing? The Mars Phoenix lander touched down near the Red Planet’s north pole in May of 2008. It was designed to investigate the history of water on Mars, digging into the surface soil and examining the chemistry there. It had a limited design lifetime of only a few months, since the onset of Martian winter in the north made weather conditions too severe to continue operations. The hope was that NASA would be able to revive the lander once spring had sprung. The image on the left was taken in July 2008 with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows the lander in blue. The good news is it did a tremendous job in its mission, returning important data about the properties of the Martian surface. It’s funny: Mars missions tend to fail catastrophically before they even get there, or they get to Mars and seem to last forever. Space exploration is hard, damn hard. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Does dark matter come in two types? Contradictory results from experiments searching for dark matter can be resolved if the elusive dark stuff is made up of two types of particle, according to physicists in the US. The new theory could clear up a mystery that came to light in 2008, when the PAMELA collaboration released one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet for the direct detection of dark matter – a substance thought to make up over 80% of the universe's matter. PAMELA saw a bump in the abundance of cosmic anti-electrons, also known as positrons, thought to be generated as dark-matter particles annihilate. But there was no concordant signal for anti-protons, which should also be generated by the annihilation. That isn't the only problem. Lurking in the 'hidden sector' Now Daniel Feldman at the University of Michigan and colleagues at other US institutions think that they have found a way to join up these mismatching signals. Tantalizing hints The other particle would be an unconventional, hidden-sector WIMP.
Japanese Spacecraft Deploys First-Ever Solar Sail | Wired Scienc The unfurling of a Japanese solar sail, the first demonstration of a new space propulsion technology, went exactly according to plan. According toJAXA’s blog posts and photos from the event, the IKAROS spacecraft’s sail appears to be in place. It’s a big step in its attempt to travel driven only by sunlight. “This is the first sail ever deployed in space, and if they succeed in using it for solar-sail flight — it’ll still be a few weeks before we know that — it’ll be a milestone,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an organization dedicated to promoting space exploration, which is readying its own solar-sailing mission. A solar sail uses the pressure from photons striking its surface to push the spacecraft through space. Materially, the 650 square-foot sail is made of incredibly thin, aluminized plastic that’s only 0.0003 inches thick, a little thicker than spider silk, or about the diameter of a red blood cell. See Also:
Are We Living Inside a Black Hole July 23, 2010 § This is a new one. I don’t know about you, but I will have fun thinking abut this one this weekend. My definition of fun is different than most. “Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. via Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Astronomy, Cool, Puzzle, Quantum Mechanics, Science
Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe July 29, 2010 § This is one of the most exciting theories I have heard in a long time. I am going to tell you why and you are going to think I am even nuttier than you already do. But, as you know, I don’t care. One night after watching some documentary about Stephen Hawking and the black hole wars, I was lying in bed just contemplating the Universe. “I get it. Of course he groggily responded. “What the hell are you talking about?” I went on to explain that I had seen an image of the Universe. “A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Astronomy, Cool, Cosmology, Dark Energy, Space, Unified Field Theory, Universe