Astronomy blog

August 26, 2010, 11:02 PM CT

Two Planets Transiting Same Star

NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet transiting the same star.

Today's announcement of the discovery of the two planets, Kepler 9b and 9c, is based on seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars being monitored for subtle brightness changes as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Scientists designated the sun-like star Kepler-9.

The inner world, Kepler 9-b, orbits its star every 19.2 days at a distance of 13 million miles, while the outer world orbits once in 38.9 days at a distance of 21 million miles. (In comparison, Mercury has an orbital period of 88 days.) They orbit nearly in resonance, with the inner planet completing two orbits for every one of the outer planet. Both are Saturn-sized gas giants, with the inner world weighing in at 0.25 Jupiter mass (80 Earths) while the outer world is a slimmer 0.17 Jupiter mass (54 Earths).

"This is the first confirmed system of more than one planet transiting the same star," said Matthew Holman, a Kepler Mission scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. Scientists confirmed the multiple transits with radial velocity observations conducted at the W.M Keck Observatory in Hawaii......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

August 25, 2010, 6:55 AM CT

Pulverized Planet Dust

Tight double-star systems might not be the best places for life to spring up, as per a newly released study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory spotted a surprisingly large amount of dust around three mature, close-orbiting star pairs. Where did the dust come from? Astronomers say it might be the aftermath of tremendous planetary collisions.

"This is real-life science fiction," said Jeremy Drake of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. "Our data tell us that planets in these systems might not be so lucky -- collisions could be common. It's theoretically possible that habitable planets could exist around these types of stars, so if there happened to be any life there, it could be doomed."

Drake is the principal investigator of the research, reported in the Aug. 19 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The particular class of binary, or double, stars in the study are about as snug as stars get. Named RS Canum Venaticorums, or RS CVns for short, they are separated by only about two million miles (3.2 million kilometers), or one-fiftieth the distance between Earth and our sun. The stellar pairs orbit around each other every few days, with one face on each star perpetually locked and pointed toward the other......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

August 25, 2010, 6:54 AM CT

Amazing new sun images

NJIT Distinguished Professor Philip R. Goode and the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) team have achieved "first light" using a deformable mirror in what is called adaptive optics at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). Using this equipment, an image of a sunspot was published yesterday on the website of Ciel et l'Espace, as the photo of the day: http://www.cieletespace.fr/node/5752.

"This photo of a sunspot is now the most detailed ever obtained in visible light," as per Ciel et l'Espace. In September, the publication, a popular astronomy magazine, will publish several more photos of the Sun taken with BBSO's new adaptive optics system.

Goode said that the images were achieved with the 1.6 m clear aperture, off-axis New Solar Telescope (NST) at BBSO. The telescope has a resolution covering about 50 miles on the Sun's surface.

The telescope is the crown jewel of BBSO, the first facility-class solar observatory built in more than a generation in the U.S. The instrument is undergoing commissioning at BBSO.

Since 1997, under Goode's direction, NJIT has owned and operated BBSO, located in a clear mountain lake.

Typically the mountain lake is characterized by sustained atmospheric stability, which is essential for BBSO's primary interests of measuring and understanding solar complex phenomena utilizing dedicated telescopes and instruments......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

August 19, 2010, 7:18 AM CT

Ancient Galaxy Cluster Still Producing Stars

Much like quiet, middle-aged baby boomers peacefully residing in some of the world's largest cities, families of some galaxies also have a hidden wild youth that they only now are revealing for the first time, as per research by astronomers at Texas A&M University.

In ongoing observations of one of the universe's earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of scientists led by Texas A&M's Dr. Kim-Vy Tran has discovered that a significant fraction of those ancient galaxies are still actively forming stars.

Tran, an assistant professor in the Texas A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy and member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, and her team have spent the past four months analyzing images taken from the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS), essentially looking back in time nearly 10 billion years at a high red-shift cluster known as CLG J02182-05102. Mere months after first discovering the cluster and the fact that it is shockingly "modern" in its appearance and size despite being observed just 4 billion years after the Big Bang, the Texas A&M-led team was able to determine that the galaxy cluster produces hundreds to thousands of new stars every year - a far higher birthrate than what is present in nearby galaxies......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

August 11, 2010, 7:44 PM CT

Spotting Stellar Nurseries

Astronomers scanning the skies as part of ESO's VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey have now obtained a spectacular picture of the Tarantula Nebula in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This panoramic near-infrared view captures the nebula itself in great detail as well as the rich surrounding area of sky. The image was obtained at the start of a very ambitious survey of our neighbouring galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, and their environment.

The leader of the survey team, Maria-Rosa Cioni (University of Hertfordshire, UK) explains: "This view is of one of the most important regions of star formation in the local Universe - the spectacular 30 Doradus star-forming region, also called the Tarantula Nebula. At its core is a large cluster of stars called RMC 136, in which some of the most massive stars known are located".

ESO's VISTA telescope [1] is a new survey telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile (eso0949). VISTA is equipped with a huge camera that detects light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, revealing a wealth of detail about astronomical objects that gives us insight into the inner workings of astronomical phenomena. Near-infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light and so we cannot see it directly for ourselves, but it can pass through much of the dust that would normally obscure our view. This makes it especially useful for studying objects such as young stars that are still enshrouded in the gas and dust clouds from which they formed. Another powerful aspect of VISTA is the large area of the sky that its camera can capture in each shot......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

August 11, 2010, 7:31 PM CT

Dark-matter search plunges

This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground.

The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these chambers.

Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter in the universe. Although invisible to telescopes, scientists can observe the gravitational influence that dark matter exerts over galaxies.

"There is a lot more mass than literally meets the eye," said Collar, Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. "When you look at the matter budget of the universe, we have a big void there that we can't explain".

Likely suspects for what constitutes dark matter include Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) and axions. Theorists originally proposed the existence of both these groups of subatomic particles to address issues unrelated to dark matter.

"These seem to be perfect to explain all of these observations that give us this evidence for dark matter, and that makes them very appealing," Collar said......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

July 16, 2010, 7:12 AM CT

Refining a cosmic clock

Physicists will soon have a better measure of the age of our galaxy, thanks to experiments described in a trio of papers appearing in the journal Physical Review C The papers report on experiments at the CERN neutron time-of-flight (n_TOF) facility and the Karlsruhe Van de Graaff accelerator that clarify the processes that affect the abundance of the element osmium-187. The element is created when rhenium-187 decays. Because rhenium-187 was produced in the first stellar explosions after the birth of the galaxy, measuring the amounts of rhenium-187 and osmium-187 we observe today can provide an estimate of the galaxy's age. In effect, the elements act as a cosmic clock that started ticking when the galaxy was born.

Unfortunately, there are various processes that can affect the amounts of osmium we measure. Uncertainties in our understanding of those processes have limited the accuracy of the cosmic clock to more than a billion years. The CERN and Karlsruhe experiments involve firing pulses of neutrons into an osmium target to determine how frequently the element is likely to capture neutrons and convert to another material. The data the scientists collected has reduced uncertainties in the rhenium-osmium cosmic clock to less than a billion years, allowing a better estimate of our roughly 14 billion year old galaxy......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

July 16, 2010, 7:04 AM CT

An unusual cosmic lens

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have discovered the first known case of a distant galaxy being magnified by a quasar acting as a gravitational lens. The discovery, based in part on observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, is being published July 16 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics

Quasars, which are extraordinary luminous objects in the distant universe, are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies. A single quasar could be a thousand times brighter than an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars, which makes studies of their host galaxies exceedingly difficult. The significance of the discovery, the scientists say, is that it provides a novel way to understand these host galaxies.

"It is a bit like staring into bright car headlights and trying to discern the color of their rims," says Frdric Courbin of EPFL, the main author on the paper. Using gravitational lensing, he says, "we now can measure the masses of these quasar host galaxies and overcome this difficulty".

As per Einstein's general theory of relativity, if a large mass (such as a big galaxy or a cluster of galaxies) is placed along the line of sight to a distant galaxy, the part of the light that comes from the galaxy will split. Because of this, an observer on Earth will see two or more close images of the now-magnified background galaxy......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

July 13, 2010, 6:53 AM CT

Image of cosmic concoction

Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liquids, are silhouetted against a colourful background of glowing gas in this newly released Hubble image. The star-forming region NGC 2467 is a vast cloud of gas mostly hydrogen that serves as an incubator for new stars. Some of these youthful stars have emerged from the dense clouds where they were born and now shine brightly, hot and blue in this picture, but a number of others remain hidden.

The full beauty of this object and hints of the astrophysical processes at work within it are revealed in this super-sharp image from Hubble. Hot young stars that recently formed from the cloud are emitting fierce ultraviolet radiation that is causing the whole scene to glow while also sculpting the environment and gradually eroding the gas clouds. Studies have shown that most of the radiation comes from the single hot and brilliant massive star just above the centre of the image. Its fierce radiation has cleared the surrounding region and some of the next generation of stars are forming in the denser regions around the edge.

One of the most familiar star-forming regions is the Orion Nebula, which can be seen with the naked eye. NGC 2467 is a similar but more distant example. Such stellar nurseries can be seen out to considerable distances in the Universe, and their study is important in determining the distance and chemical composition of other galaxies. Some galaxies contain huge star-forming regions, which may contain tens of thousands of stars. Another dramatic example is the 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

July 8, 2010, 7:02 AM CT

Newborn Stars Discovered

A wave of massive star formation appears poised to begin within a mysterious, dark cloud in the Milky Way. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a secluded birthplace for stars within a wispy, dark cloud named named M17 SWex. The dark cloud is part of the larger, parent nebula known as M17, a vast region of our galaxy with a bright, central star cluster. "We believe we've managed to observe this dark cloud in a very early phase of star formation before its most massive stars have ignited," said Penn State astronomer Matthew Povich, a postdoctoral fellow and the main author of a study published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The new research could shed light on the question of how and when massive stars form.

Though astronomers first discovered the dark cloud in the Sagittarius constellation more than 30 years ago, it took the keenness of the Spitzer telescope's instruments to spot the hidden stellar nursery within. Spitzer's infrared vision has shown that M17 SWex is among the closest to Earth and also among the Milky Way's busiest star-making factories, with 488 newly forming stars. More than 200 will become blue-white class B stars, larger and hotter than our Sun. "Most of the stars we've detected are relatively bright," said Povich. "So we predict the actual number of stars forming in M17 SWex is over 10,000, since the fainter stars cannot be detected with the current observations"......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

June 30, 2010, 6:42 AM CT

Zapping Titan-like atmosphere with UV rays

The first experimental evidence showing how atmospheric nitrogen can be incorporated into organic macromolecules is being reported by a University of Arizona team.

The finding indicates what organic molecules might be found on Titan, the moon of Saturn that researchers think is a model for the chemistry of pre-life Earth.

Earth and Titan are the only known planetary-sized bodies that have thick, predominantly nitrogen atmospheres, said Hiroshi Imanaka, who conducted the research while a member of UA's chemistry and biochemistry department.

How complex organic molecules become nitrogenated in settings like early Earth or Titan's atmosphere is a big mystery, Imanaka said.

"Titan is so interesting because its nitrogen-dominated atmosphere and organic chemistry might give us a clue to the origin of life on our Earth," said Imanaka, now an assistant research scientist in the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "Nitrogen is an essential element of life".

However, not just any nitrogen will do. Nitrogen gas must be converted to a more chemically active form of nitrogen that can drive the reactions that form the basis of biological systems.

Imanaka and Mark Smith converted a nitrogen-methane gas mixture similar to Titan's atmosphere into a collection of nitrogen-containing organic molecules by irradiating the gas with high-energy UV rays. The laboratory set-up was designed to mimic how solar radiation affects Titan's atmosphere......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

June 24, 2010, 11:06 PM CT

Widespread Glacial Meltwater Valleys on Mars

Planetary researchers have uncovered telltale signs of water on Mars - frozen and liquid - in the earliest period of the Red Planet's history. A new claim, made public this month, is that a deep ocean covered some of the northern latitudes.

But the evidence for water grows much more scant after the Noachian era, which ended 3.5 billion years ago. Now Brown University planetary geologists have documented running water that sprang from glaciers throughout the Martian middle latitudes as recently as the Amazonian epoch, several hundred million years ago. These glaciofluvial valleys were, in essence, tributaries of water created when enough sunlight reached the glaciers to melt a thin layer on the surface. This, the Brown scientists write, led to "limited surface melting" that formed channels that ran for several kilometers and could be more than 150 feet wide.

The finding is "more than 'Yes, we found water,'" said Caleb Fassett, postdoctoral research associate in geological sciences and main author of the paper published in Icarus. "What we see now is there's this complex history of different environments where water is being formed".

Caleb Fassett Fassett, with Brown research analyst James Dickson, professor James Head III, and geologists from Boston University and Portland State University, analyzed 15,000 images snapped by the Context Camera (CTX) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to compile the first survey of glaciofluvial valleys on Mars. The survey was sparked by a glaciofluvial valley that Dickson, Fassett, and Head spotted within the Lyot crater, located in the planet's middle latitudes. The team, in a paper last year in Geophysical Research Letters, dated that meltwater-inspired feature to the Amazonian......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

June 24, 2010, 10:58 PM CT

Was Venus once a habitable planet?

ESA's Venus Express is helping planetary researchers investigate whether Venus once had oceans. If it did, it may even have begun its existence as a habitable planet similar to Earth.

These days, Earth and Venus seem completely different. Earth is a lush, clement world teeming with life, whilst Venus is hellish, its surface roasting at temperatures higher than those of a kitchen oven.

But underneath it all the two planets share many striking similarities. They are nearly identical in size and now, thanks to ESA's Venus Express orbiter, planetary researchers are seeing other similarities too.

"The basic composition of Venus and Earth is very similar," says Håkan Svedhem, ESA Venus Express Project Scientist. Just how similar planetary researchers from around the world will be discussing in Aussois, France, where they are gathering this week for a conference.

One difference stands out: Venus has very little water. Were the contents of Earth's oceans to be spread evenly across the world, they would create a layer 3 km deep. If you were to condense the amount of water vapour in Venus' atmosphere onto its surface, it would create a global puddle just 3 cm deep.

Yet there is another similarity here. Billions of years ago, Venus probably had much more water. Venus Express has certainly confirmed that the planet has lost a large quantity of water into space......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

June 13, 2010, 10:37 PM CT

Ancient ocean may have covered one-third of Mars

A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, as per a newly released study conducted by University of Colorado at Boulder scientists.

The CU-Boulder study is the first to combine the analysis of water-related features including scores of delta deposits and thousands of river valleys to test for the occurrence of an ocean sustained by a global hydrosphere on early Mars. While the notion of a large, ancient ocean on Mars has been repeatedly proposed and challenged over the past two decades, the newly released study provides further support for the idea of a sustained sea on the Red Planet during the Noachian era more than 3 billion years ago, said CU-Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille, main author on the study.

A paper on the subject authored by Di Achille and CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Brian Hynek of the geological sciences department appears in the June 13 issue of Nature Geoscience Both Di Achille and Hynek are affiliated with CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

More than half of the 52 river delta deposits identified by the CU scientists in the newly released study -- each of which was fed by numerous river valleys -- likely marked the boundaries of the proposed ocean, since all were at about the same elevation. Twenty-nine of the 52 deltas were connected either to the ancient Mars ocean or to the groundwater table of the ocean and to several large, adjacent lakes, Di Achille said......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

May 21, 2010, 7:12 AM CT

Brightest galaxies tend to cluster in busiest parts of universe

For more than a decade, astronomers have been puzzled by bright galaxies in the distant universe that appear to be forming stars at phenomenal rates. What prompted the prolific star creation, they wondered. And what kind of spatial environment did these galaxies inhabit?

Now, using a super-sensitive camera/spectrometer on the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers - including a UC Irvine team led by Asantha Cooray - have mapped the skies as they appeared 10 billion years ago.

The UCI researchers discovered that these glistening galaxies preferentially occupy regions of the universe containing more dark matter and that collisions probably caused the abundant star production.

"Thanks to the superb resolution and sensitivity of the SPIRE [Spectral & Photometric Imaging Receiver] instrument on Herschel, we managed to map in detail the spatial distribution of massively star-forming galaxies in the early universe," said Cooray, associate professor and Chancellor's Fellow in physics & astronomy. "All indications are that these galaxies are. crashing, merging and possibly settling down at centers of large dark-matter halos".

This information will enable researchers to adapt conventional theories of galaxy formation to accommodate the strange, star-filled versions......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

April 2, 2010, 7:00 AM CT

Active galaxy's 'smokestack plumes'

If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope maps gamma rays, radiation that typically packs 100 billion times the energy of radio waves. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of a number of astrophysicists, Cen A's plumes show up clearly in the satellite's first 10 months of data. The study appears in Thursday's edition of Science Express.

"This is something we've never seen before in gamma rays," said Teddy Cheung, a Fermi team member at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "Not only do we see the extended radio lobes, but their gamma-ray output is more than ten times greater than their radio output." If gamma-ray telescopes had matured before their radio counterparts, astronomers would have instead classified Cen A as a "gamma-ray galaxy".

Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy. "A hallmark of radio galaxies is the presence of huge, double-lobed radio-emitting structures around otherwise normal-looking elliptical galaxies," said Jrgen Kndlseder, a Fermi collaborator at the Center for the Study of Space Radiation in Toulouse, France. "Cen A is a textbook example"......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 25, 2010, 7:59 PM CT

Hubble confirms cosmic acceleration

A group of astronomers [1], led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory, conducted an intensive study of over 446 000 galaxies within the COSMOS field, the result of the largest survey ever conducted with Hubble. In making the COSMOS survey, Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the Universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard Hubble. It took nearly 1000 hours of observations.

In addition to the Hubble data, scientists used redshift [2] data from ground-based telescopes to assign distances to 194 000 of the galaxies surveyed (out to a redshift of 5). "The sheer number of galaxies included in this type of analysis is unprecedented, but more important is the wealth of information we could obtain about the invisible structures in the Universe from this exceptional dataset," says co-author Patrick Simon from Edinburgh University.

In particular, the astronomers could "weigh" the large-scale matter distribution in space over large distances. To do this, they made use of the fact that this information is encoded in the distorted shapes of distant galaxies, a phenomenon referred to as weak gravitational lensing [3]. Using complex algorithms, the team led by Schrabback has improved the standard method and obtained galaxy shape measurements to an unprecedented precision. The results of the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics........ Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 22, 2010, 7:49 PM CT

Sharpest view ever of star factories

Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. They observed that the distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, is making new stars 250 times faster than our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

They also pinpointed four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy, each over 100 times brighter than locations (like the Orion Nebula) where stars form in our Galaxy. This is the first time that astronomers have been able to study properties of individual star-forming regions within a galaxy so far from Earth.

"To a layperson, our images appear fuzzy, but to us, they show the exquisite detail of a Faberge egg," said Steven Longmore of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Longmore is an author of the paper describing these findings, which was reported in the March 21st Nature online.

Due to the time it takes light to travel to us, we see the galaxy as it existed just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. It was Milky Way-sized at the time. If we could see it today, 10 billion years later, it would have grown into a giant elliptical galaxy much more massive than our own.

"This galaxy is like a teenager going through a growth spurt," said Mark Swinbank of Durham University, main author on the paper. "If you could see it today as an 'adult,' you'd find the galactic equivalent of Yao Ming the basketball player"......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 22, 2010, 7:43 PM CT

Early galaxy went through teenage growth spurt

Researchers have found a massive galaxy in the early Universe creating stars like our sun up to 100 times faster than the modern-day Milky Way.

The team of international researchers, led by Durham University, described the finding as like seeing "a teenager going through a growth spurt".

Due to the amount of time it takes light to reach Earth the researchers observed the galaxy as it would have appeared 10 billion years ago just three billion years after the Big Bang.

They found four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy known as SMM J2135-0102. Each region was more than 100 times brighter than star-forming regions in the Milky Way, such as the Orion Nebula.

They say their results, published online today (Sunday, March 21), in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, suggest that star formation was more rapid and vigorous in the early Universe as galaxies went through periods of huge growth.

The findings, funded by the Royal Astronomical Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, provide a unique insight into how stars formed in the early Universe, the researchers added.

Main author Dr Mark Swinbank, in the Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University, said: "This galaxy is like a teenager going through a growth spurt. If you could see it today as an adult you'd find the galactic equivalent of the football player Peter Crouch......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 17, 2010, 7:56 PM CT

Discovery of a New Planet

An international team of scientists, including several who are affiliated with UC Santa Barbara, has discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The finding is reported in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature.

The planet, called CoRoT-9b, was discovered by using the CoRoT space telescope satellite, operated by the French space agency, The Centre National d'Études Spatiales, or CNES. The newly discovered planet orbits a star similar to our sun and is located in the constellation Serpens Cauda, at a distance of 1500 light-years from Earth.

The European-led discovery involved 60 astronomers worldwide. The team included UCSB postdoctoral fellow Avi Shporer, who also works with the UCSB-affiliated Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), based in Goleta, California. Three more LCOGT researchers -- Tim Lister, Rachel Street, and Marton Hidas -- also contributed.

"CoRoT-9b is the first transiting extrasolar planet that is definitely similar to a planet in our solar system, namely Jupiter," said Shporer. "What is special about this planet is that it transits a star, and it is a temperate planet. It has great potential for future studies concerning its physical characteristics and atmosphere." The planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but may contain up to 20 Earth masses of heavier elements including rock and water under high pressure. It thus may be very similar to the solar system's giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 15, 2010, 8:08 PM CT

White Dwarf Star System Exceeds Mass Limit

An international team led by Yale University has, for the first time, measured the mass of a type of supernova believed to be long to a unique subclass and confirmed that it surpasses what was thought to bean upper mass limit. Their findings, which appear online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, could affect the way cosmologists measure the expansion of the universe.

Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae-the violent explosions of dead cores of stars called white dwarfs-as a kind of cosmic ruler to measure distances to the supernovae's host galaxies and, as such, to understand the past and future expansion of the universe and explore the nature of dark energy. Until recently, it was thought that white dwarfs could not exceed what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a critical mass equaling about 1.4 times that of the Sun, before exploding in a supernova. This uniform limit is a key tool in measuring distances to supernovae.

Since 2003, four supernovae have been discovered that were so bright, cosmologists wondered whether their white dwarfs had surpassed the Chandrasekhar limit. These supernovae have been dubbed the "super-Chandrasekhar" supernovae.

Now Richard Scalzo of Yale, as part of a collaboration of American and French physicists called the Nearby Supernova Factory, has measured the mass of the white dwarf star that resulted in one of these rare supernovae, called SN 2007if, and confirmed that it exceeded the Chandrasekhar limit. They also discovered that the uncommonly bright supernova had not only a central mass, but a shell of material that was ejected during the explosion as well as a surrounding envelope of pre-existing material. The team hopes this discovery will provide a structural model with which to understand the other supermassive supernovae......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 12, 2010, 8:17 AM CT

Shocking recipe for making killer electrons

Take a bunch of fast-moving electrons, place them in orbit and then hit them with the shock waves from a solar storm. What do you get? Killer electrons. That's the shocking recipe revealed by ESA's Cluster mission.

Killer electrons are highly energetic particles trapped in Earth's outer radiation belt, which extends from 12 000 km to 64 000 km above the planet's surface. During solar storms their number grows at least ten times and they can be dislodged, posing a threat to satellites. As the name suggests, killer electrons are energetic enough to penetrate satellite shielding and cause microscopic lightning strikes. If these electrical discharges take place in vital components, the satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable.

On 7 November 2004, the Sun blasted a solar storm in Earth's direction. It was composed of an interplanetary shock wave followed by a large magnetic cloud. When the shock wave first swept over the ESA-NASA solar watchdog satellite SOHO, the speed of the solar wind (the constant flow of solar particles) suddenly increased from 500 km/s to 700 km/s.

Shortly afterwards, the shock wave hit Earth's protective magnetic bubble, known as the magnetosphere. The impact induced a wave front propagating inside the magnetosphere at more than 1200 km/s at geostationary orbit (36 000 km altitude) around Earth. The quantity of energetic electrons in the outer radiation belt started to increase too, as per Cluster's RAPID instruments (Research with Adaptive Particle Imaging Detectors). Cluster's four satellites sweep around an elliptical orbit, coming as close as 19 000 km and going out as far as 119 000 km......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

March 12, 2010, 7:24 AM CT

Sample from asteroid 'time capsule'

Meet asteroid 1999 RQ36, a chunk of rock and dust about 1,900 feet in diameter that could tell us how the solar system was born, and perhaps, shed light on how life began. It also might hit us someday.

"This asteroid is a time capsule from before the birth of our solar system," said Bill Cutlip of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., one of the leaders of Goddard's effort to propose a mission called OSIRIS-REx that will return a sample from RQ36.

If selected, Goddard will provide overall mission management for OSIRIS-REx, working with the Principal Investigator, Dr. Michael Drake, Director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, who will lead the OSIRIS-REx team. Lockheed Martin Space Systems will build the spacecraft.

"You can't underestimate the value of a pristine sample," Cutlip added. Meteorites, pieces of asteroids that break away and plunge to Earth, are "toasted on their way through Earth's atmosphere," Cutlip explained. "Once they land, they then soak up the microbes and chemicals from the environment around them".

"With a pristine sample particularly one from an asteroid type not available in NASA's meteorite collections researchers will learn more about the time before the birth of our solar system, the initial stages of planet formation, and the source of organic compounds available for the origin of life," said Dr. Joseph Nuth of NASA Goddard, OSIRIS-REx Project Scientist......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 11, 2010, 8:15 AM CT

Mapping the Milky Way

At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy.

Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer researchers and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world's second fastest supercomputer.

The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Today, MilkyWay@Home has outgrown even this famous project, in terms of speed, making it the fastest computing project on the BOINC platform and perhaps the second fastest public distributed computing program ever in operation (just behind Folding@home).

The interdisciplinary team behind MilkyWay@Home, which ranges from professors to undergraduates, began the formal development under the BOINC platform in July 2006 and worked tirelessly to build a volunteer base from the ground up to build its computational power......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

February 3, 2010, 2:23 PM CT

Merging galaxies create a binary quasar

Astronomers have found the first clear evidence of a binary quasar within a pair of actively merging galaxies. Quasars are the extremely bright centers of galaxies surrounding super-massive black holes, and binary quasars are pairs of quasars bound together by gravity. Binary quasars, like other quasars, are believed to be the product of galaxy mergers. Until now, however, binary quasars have not been seen in galaxies that are unambiguously in the act of merging. But images of a new binary quasar from the Carnegie Institution's Magellan telescope in Chile show two distinct galaxies with "tails" produced by tidal forces from their mutual gravitational attraction.

"This is really the first case in which you see two separate galaxies, both with quasars, that are clearly interacting," says Carnegie astronomer John Mulchaey who made observations crucial to understanding the galaxy merger.

Most, if not all, large galaxies, such as our galaxy the Milky Way, host super-massive black holes at their centers. Because galaxies regularly interact and merge, astronomers have assumed that binary super-massive black holes have been common in the Universe, particularly during its early history. Black holes can only be detected as quasars when they are actively accreting matter, a process that releases vast amounts of energy. A leading theory is that galaxy mergers trigger accretion, creating quasars in both galaxies. Because most of such mergers would have happened in the distant past, binary quasars and their associated galaxies are very far away and therefore difficult for most telescopes to resolve......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

January 28, 2010, 0:19 AM CT

Student-built satellite

A tiny communications satellite designed and built by University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates has been selected as one of three university research satellites to be launched into orbit in November as part of a NASA space education initiative.

The three satellites, dubbed "CubeSats" because of their shape, were built by CU-Boulder, Montana State University and Kentucky Space, which is a consortium of state universities. CubeSats are roughly four inches on a side, have a volume of about one quart and weigh about 2.2 pounds. The satellites are being flown as part of NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellite, or ELaNA, mission, said Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, or COSGC, which is headquartered at CU-Boulder.

The CU-Boulder satellite, named Hermes, was designed, built and tested by roughly 100 COSGC students on the CU-Boulder campus -- nearly all undergraduates -- over a period of about two and one-half years, said Koehler. The goal of the mission is to improve communications systems in tiny satellites through on-orbit testing of a high data-rate communication system that will allow researchers and engineers to downlink large quantities of information.

"This is great news for the students and for the Colorado Space Grant Consortium," said Koehler. "This is a homegrown CU-Boulder satellite and these students have pushed the capabilities of communication systems by integrating them into a very tiny satellite." Based in the CU-Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science, COSGC is funded by NASA and is a statewide organization involving 16 colleges, universities and institutions around Colorado......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

January 25, 2010, 8:15 AM CT

New Research On Star Formation

"Crazy" and "cool" are two of the words Michigan State University astronomer Megan Donahue uses to describe the two distinct "tails" found on a long tail of gas that is thought to beforming stars where few stars have been formed before.

Donahue was part of an international team of astronomers that viewed the gas tail with a very long, new observation made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and detailed it in a paper published this month in the publication Astrophysical Journal.

"The double tail is very cool - that is, interesting - and ridiculously hard to explain," said Donahue, a professor in MSU's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "It could be two different sources of gas or something to do with magnetic fields. We just don't know".

What is also unusual is the gas tail, which is more than 200,000 light years in length, extends well outside any galaxy. It is within objects such as this that new stars are formed, but commonly within the confines of a galaxy.

"This system is really crazy because where we're seeing the star formation is well away from any galaxy," Donahue said. "Star formation happens primarily in the disks of galaxies. What we're seeing here is very unexpected".

This gas tail was originally spotted by astronomers three years ago using a multitude of telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the SOuthern Astrophysical Research telescope, a Chilean-based observatory in which MSU is one of the partners. The new observations show a second tail, and a fellow galaxy, ESO 137-002, that also has a tail of hot X-ray-emitting gas......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

January 25, 2010, 0:01 AM CT

Differences between Ganymede and Callisto

Differences in the number and speed of cometary impacts onto Jupiter's large moons Ganymede and Callisto some 3.8 billion years ago can explain their vastly different surfaces and interior states, as per research by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute appearing online in Nature Geoscience Jan. 24, 2010.

Ganymede and Callisto are similar in size and are made of a similar mixture of ice and rock, but data from the Galileo and Voyager spacecraft show that they look different at the surface and on the inside. A conclusive explanation for the differences between Ganymede and Callisto has eluded researchers since the Voyager Jupiter encounters 30 years ago.

Dr. Amy C. Barr and Dr. Robin M. Canup of the SwRI Planetary Science Directorate created a model of melting by cometary impacts and rock core formation to show that Ganymede and Callisto's evolutionary paths diverged about 3.8 billion years ago during the Late Heavy Bombardment, the phase in lunar history dominated by large impact events.

"Impacts during this period melted Ganymede so thoroughly and deeply that the heat could not be quickly removed. All of Ganymede's rock sank to its center the same way that all the chocolate chips sink to the bottom of a melted carton of ice cream," says Barr. "Callisto received fewer impacts at lower velocities and avoided complete melting"......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:36:26 GMT

Meteorite hits doctor's office

Of course, it happened with a doctor’s office, what else? An excerpt from the Washington Post report:

“The floor just outside examination room No. 2 — about 10 feet from where Ciampi had been doing paperwork — was littered with small pieces of wood, plaster and insulation. Upon inspection, more debris lay inside the room. He saw three chunks of stone on the floor that together formed a rock about the size of a tennis ball, with a glassy-smooth surface. Then he saw a hole about the size of the rock in the tile ceiling, and a tear in the maroon carpet where the rock had landed,” writes Paul Duggan of the Washington Post.

Posted by: Bertalan      Read more     Source