Astronomy.com - Interactive Star Charts, Planets, Meteors, Comets, Telescopes 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. 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 Quasars are found in the center of galaxies and contain supermassive black holes. However, this newfound object seems to lie roughly 100 light years from M82's heart ?
Neil deGrasse Tyson Neil deGrasse Tyson (/ˈniːəl dəˈɡræs ˈtaɪsən/; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the educational science television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. Early life[edit] Tyson was born as the second of three children in the borough of Manhattan in New York City and was raised in the Bronx.[1] His mother, Sunchita Marie (Feliciano) Tyson, was a gerontologist, and his father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, was a sociologist, human resource commissioner for the New York City mayor John Lindsay, and the first Director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited.[3][4] Career[edit] In 2001, US President George W.
The Second Law and Energy | MIT World How to See the Best Meteor Showers of 2010: Tools, Tips and 'Sav NASA JPL Home California Institute of Technology Dimensions Home A film for a wide audience! Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension. Mathematical vertigo guaranteed! Click on the image on the left to watch the trailer ! Free download and you can watch the films online! The film can also be ordered as a DVD. This film is being distributed under a Creative Commons license. Now with even more languages for the commentary and subtitles: Commentary in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. Film produced by: Jos Leys (Graphics and animations) Étienne Ghys (Scenario and mathematics) Aurélien Alvarez (Realisation and post-production)
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. 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. This result supports predictions that about half of the normal matter in the local Universe is found in a web of hot, diffuse gas composed of the WHIM. Source: Chandra Like this: Like Loading...
One Sad Monkey » Carl Sagan What lady could resist my turtleneck? I was listening to the love story between Carl Sagan and his third and final wife Anne Druyan from an episode in Radiolab. I kept playing it again and again because there this gigantic gap in the story that seems to require a giant cognitive leap that I just couldn’t make. Carl was on his second marriage with his wife Linda Salzman with which he had a child with. Anne Druyan was in a serious relationship with a man and the two couples were friends. Here is the story as written by Anne Druyan in the Epilogue of Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium with a few minor edits by me. In the early spring of 1977, Carl was invited by NASA to assemble a committee to select the contents of a phonograph record that would be affixed to each of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft… Here was an opportunity to send a message to possible beings of other worlds and times. What message did she leave him? Carl and Anne Oh Snap!
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. 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 of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. This result supports predictions that about half of the normal matter in the local Universe is found in a web of hot, diffuse gas composed of the WHIM.
Bad Astronomy Well now, this is an interesting discovery: astronomers have found what looks like a "super-Earth" – a planet more massive than Earth but still smaller than a gas giant – orbiting a nearby star at the right distance to have liquid water on it! Given that, it might – might – be Earthlike. This is pretty cool news. We’ve found planets like this before, but not very many! And it gets niftier: the planet has at least five siblings, all of which orbit its star closer than it does. Now let me be clear: this is a planet candidate; it has not yet been confirmed. The star is called HD 40307, and it’s a bit over 40 light years away (pretty close in galactic standards, but I wouldn’t want to walk there). Massive planets tug on their star harder, so they’re easier to find this way. In this case, HD 40307 was originally observed a little while back by HARPS, and three planets were found. We don’t know how big the planet is, unfortunately. That’s exciting because of the prospect for life.
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. 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. Credits: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI), ESA/HOPS Consortium
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. That's the domain of gravity, which in turn is not supposed to be much affected by quantum events, like an elephant unaware of the microbes on its skin. In only a few exotic cases, such as singularities inside black holes, do gravity and quantum-level forces influence the same processes. 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. Many such attempts have failed, and we may now know why: new images show the lander may be damaged. 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.
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. If the PAMELA signal was indeed evidence for annihilation, the dark matter involved would be of a type that would never show up in direct-detection experiments, such as CDMS-II, located in a mine in Minnesota, US. Lurking in the 'hidden sector' Tantalizing hints