Birds and bats hold secrets for aerospace engineersNatural flyers like birds, bats and insects outperform man-made aircraft in aerobatics and efficiency. University of Michigan engineers are studying these animals as a step toward designing flapping-wing planes with wingspans smaller than a deck of playing cards.
A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second. But a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.
The roll rate of the aerobatic........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 2/4/2008 8:38:18 PM)
Stardust comet dust resembles asteroid materialsContrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system's early materials.
When the Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples from the comet Wild 2 in 2006, researchers knew the material would provide new clues about the formation of our solar system, but they didn't know exactly how.
New research by researchers at........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/24/2008 10:43:46 PM)
MESSENGER Mission flyby of MercuryNASA will point a power-packed $8.7 million University of Colorado at Boulder space instrument at some of the last unexplored terrain in the inner solar system when the MESSENGER spacecraft whips within 125 miles of Mercury's surface Jan. 14 at a mind-boggling 141,000 miles per hour.
Launched in August 2004, MESSENGER has already flown by Venus twice and will make the first of three flybys of Mercury next week before finally settling into........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/10/2008 10:56:20 PM)
Black Hole Light Echo ShowIt's well known that black holes can slow time to a crawl and tidally stretch large objects into spaghetti-like strands. But as per new theoretical research from two NASA astrophysicists, the wrenching gravity just outside the outer boundary of a black hole can produce yet another bizarre effect: light echoes.
"The light echoes come about because of the severe warping of spacetime predicted by Einstein," says Keigo Fukumura of NASA's Goddard........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/10/2008 10:21:21 PM)
Sunspot is harbinger of new solar cycleA new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late Thursday when the cycles first sunspot appeared in the suns Northern Hemisphere, NOAA researchers said.
This sunspot is like the first robin of spring, said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/7/2008 10:58:53 PM)
More data in search of extraterrestrial intelligenceThe longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.
Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/2/2008 10:42:06 PM)
Polarization technique focuses limelightAn international team of astronomers, led by Professor Svetlana Berdyugina of ETH Zurichs Institute of Astronomy, has for the first time ever been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Employing techniques similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare, the team of researchers were able to extract polarized light to enhance the faint reflected........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/27/2007 9:10:56 AM)
Anatomy of a cosmic birdUsing ESO's Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers [1] has discovered a stunning rare case of a triple merger of galaxies. This system, which astronomers have dubbed 'The Bird' - albeit it also bears resemblance with a cosmic Tinker Bell - is composed of two massive spiral galaxies and a third irregular galaxy.
The galaxy ESO 593-IG 008, or IRAS 19115-2124, was previously merely known as an interacting pair of galaxies at........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/20/2007 9:54:38 PM)
Sandia supercomputers offer new explanationThe stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest.
"The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought," says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. "That such a small object........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/18/2007 9:55:22 PM)
Ambitious Lunar MissionMIT will lead a $375 million mission to map the moon's interior and reconstruct its thermal history, NASA announced this week.
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission will be led by MIT professor Maria Zuber and will be launched in 2011. It will put two separate satellites into orbit around the moon to precisely map variations in the moon's gravitational pull. These changes will reveal differences in density of the........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/17/2007 9:07:51 PM)
Hazy red sunset on extrasolar planetA team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to detect, for the first time, good evidence of hazes in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star. The discovery comes after extensive observations made recently with Hubbles Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
The team, led by Frdric Pont from the Geneva University Observatory in Switzerland, used Hubbles ACS to make the first detection of hazes in the atmosphere........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/11/2007 10:36:27 PM)
Just flip-flop the position of Uranus and NeptuneQuick: Whats the order of the planets in the solar system? Need a little help? Maybe the following mnemonic rings a bell: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Up Nine Pizzas. Its useful for remembering the order of the planets today, but it wouldnt have been as useful in the past, and not just because the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to dwarf planet last year. The reason this mnemonic wouldnt have worked is because the planets........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/11/2007 8:23:29 PM)
The Solar System Is SquashedNASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin Voyager 1 into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.
However, Voyager 2 took a different path, entering this region, called the heliosheath, on August 30, 2007. Because Voyager 2 crossed the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 10 billion miles away........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/10/2007 10:54:23 PM)
Testing time for instrument on Hubble's successorA significant milestone for the Hubble Space Telescope successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is on course to be reached before Christmas with the testing of the verification model of the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
MIRI is one of four sophisticated instruments onboard which will study the early universe and properties of materials forming around new born stars in........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/6/2007 8:03:14 PM)
Cosmic ZoomApparently the inspiration for Powers of Ten, below is a YouTube version of Cosmic Zoom, directed by Canadian Eva Szasz, financed by the National Film Board of Canada........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/3/2007 8:02:58 PM)
Scientists solve cosmological puzzleHamilton, ON. November 29, 2007 Scientists using supercomputer simulations have exposed a very violent and critical relationship between interstellar gas and dark matter when galaxies are born one that has been largely ignored by the current model of how the universe evolved.
The findings, published recently in Science, solve a longstanding problem of the widely accepted model Cold Dark Matter cosmology which suggests there is much more........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/29/2007 10:27:08 PM)
Voyager 2 will reach major milestone in spaceUsing a computer model simulation, Haruichi Washimi, a physicist at UC Riverside, has predicted when the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed.
As per Washimis simulations, the spacecraft is set to cross the termination shock in late 2007-early 2008. To make this forecast, Washimi and colleagues used data........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/27/2007 9:05:11 PM)
The Moon and EuropeAs Rosetta closed in on Earth, swung by and then left on its course again, several instruments on the spacecraft were busy taking snaps. As it swung away, the OSIRIS camera also caught glimpses of the Moon.
The Moon was imaged with the OSIRIS Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) at 07:36 CET, about nine hours after Rosetta's closest approach to Earth.
OSIRIS has been designed to image faint objects, so a neutral density filter was placed in the........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/18/2007 9:05:44 PM)
How to make the brightest supernova eveA supernova observed last year was so bright--about 100 times as luminous as a typical supernova--that it challenged the theoretical understanding of what causes supernovae. But Stan Woosley, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had an idea that he thought could account for it--an extremely massive star that undergoes repeated explosions. When Woosley and two colleages worked out the detailed........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/14/2007 9:50:49 PM)
Rosetta right on track for Earth swing-byPreparations for Rosetta's Earth swing-by scheduled for tonight, 21:57 CET, are well underway. The manoeuvre executed on 18 October 2007 has been accurate enough to not require any additional trajectory corrections today.
This means that the most critical operational procedures for the success of the swing-by are now over. However, the operations teams are constantly on the watch to make sure that nothing disturbs the spacecraft's velocity........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/13/2007 9:51:00 PM)
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Listening for the cosmic symphony:Researchers hope that a new supercomputer being built by Syracuse University's Department of Physics may help them identify the sound of a celestial black hole. The supercomputer, dubbed SUGAR (SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), will soon receive massive amounts of data from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that was collected over a two-year period at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 2/10/2008 10:08:51 PM)
Critical ingredients for the soup of lifeAstronomers from Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have detected for the first time the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids in a galaxy some 250 million light years away.
Just add water! said Robert Minchin, an Arecibo astronomer on the project, who explained that methanimine and hydrogen cyanide are two of the basic ingredients of life, because when........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/14/2008 3:16:29 PM)
Neutron stars can be more massiveNeutron stars and black holes arent all theyve been believed to be.
In fact, neutron stars can be considerably more massive than previously believed, and it is more difficult to form black holes, as per new research developed by using the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Paulo Freire, an astronomer from the observatory, will present his research at the American Astronomical Society national meeting in Austin on........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/14/2008 3:12:01 PM)
NASA and Gemini Probe Mysterious Distant ExplosionUsing the powerful one-two combo of NASA's Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
"This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/8/2008 9:28:54 PM)
"Blue blobs" in space are orphaned clusters of starsHubble has revealed that mysterious "blue blobs" in a structure called Arp's Loop between M81 and M82 are blue clusters of stars less than 200 million years old with a number of stars as young as, and even younger than, 10 million years.
Finding blue blobs in space sounds like an encounter with an alien out of a science fiction movie. But the powerful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has resolved strange objects nicknamed "blobs" and found........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/8/2008 9:01:56 PM)
Stardust formed close to sunSamples of the material picked up during the NASA Stardust mission indicate that parts of the comet Wild 2 actually formed in an area close to the sun.
New research by an international collaboration including Livermore researcher Saša Bajt analyzed noble gases within Stardust samples.The helium and neon isotope analysis suggests that some of the Stardust grains match a special type of carbonaceous material found in meterorites; hence both........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/3/2008 8:39:16 PM)
White Dwarf Pulses Like a PulsarNew observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.
At least one white dwarf, known as AE Aquarii, emits pulses of high-energy (hard) X-rays as it whirls around on its........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 1/2/2008 10:36:25 PM)
COROT surprises a year after launchThe space-borne telescope, COROT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), has just completed its first year in orbit. The observatory has brought in surprises after over 300 days of scientific observations.
Pioneering precision measurement over long periods of time COROT is observing a large number of stars, up to 12 000, simultaneously, at a very high precision - unprecedented in ground-based astronomy. The key to the high-precision........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/20/2007 9:43:13 PM)
'Shot in the Dark' Star Explosion Stuns AstronomersA team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic explosion that seems to have come from the middle of nowhere - thousands of light-years from the nearest galaxy-sized collection of stars, gas, and dust. This "shot in the dark" is surprising because the type of explosion, a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is believed to be powered by the death of a massive star.
"Here we have this very bright burst, yet it's surrounded by darkness on all........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/18/2007 9:45:22 PM)
Mission heads for comet Hartley 2NASA has given a University of Maryland-led team of researchers the green light to fly the Deep Impact spacecraft to Comet Hartley 2 on a two-part extended mission known as EPOXI. The spacecraft will fly by Earth on New Years Eve at the beginning of a more than two-and-a-half-year journey to Hartley 2.
The EPOXI mission is actually two new missions in one. During the first six months of the journey to Hartley 2, the Extrasolar Planet........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/18/2007 8:40:26 PM)
Europa: A Closer Look Is PossibleJupiter's moon Europa is just as far away as ever, but new research is bringing researchers closer to being able to explore its tantalizing ice-covered ocean and determine its potential for harboring life.
"We've learned a lot about Europa in the past few years," says William McKinnon, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.
"Before we were almost sure that there was an ocean, but now the........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/13/2007 8:56:42 PM)
New discoveries about Northern LightsA fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power.
NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic ropes and witnessed small explosions in the outskirts of........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/11/2007 10:07:19 PM)
Surprises At Solar System's EdgeThe Voyager 2 spacecraft's Plasma Science instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, has turned up surprising revelations about the boundary zone that marks the edge of the sun's influence in space.
The unexpected findings emerged in the last few weeks as the spacecraft traversed the termination shockwave formed when the flow of particles constantly streaming out from the sun--the solar wind--slams into the surrounding thin gas that fills........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/10/2007 10:34:55 PM)
Searching for the missing matterMuch of the gaseous mass of the universe is bound up in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, as per a new supercomputer study by a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments -- which connect galaxy clusters -- hidden from direct observation in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/6/2007 3:43:45 PM)
How white dwarf stars get their 'kicks'University of British Columbia astronomer Harvey Richer and UBC graduate student Saul Davis have discovered that white dwarf stars are born with a natal kick, explaining why these smoldering embers of Sun-like stars are found on the edge rather than at the centre of globular star clusters.
White dwarfs represent the third major stage of a stars evolution. Like the Sun, each star begins its life with a long stable state where nuclear........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 12/4/2007 10:35:26 PM)
Researchers examine Einstein's theories on the universeEinsteins self-proclaimed biggest blunder his postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing) may not be such a blunder after all, as per the research of an international team of researchers that includes two Texas A&M University researchers.
The team is working on a project called ESSENCE that studies supernovae (exploding stars) to figure out if dark energy the accelerating........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/27/2007 10:27:08 PM)
A new window on the universeUsing new tools to look at the universe, says Patrick Brady, often has led to discoveries that change the course of science. History is full of examples.
Galileo was the first person to use the telescope to view the cosmos, says Brady, a UWM professor of physics. His observations with the new technology led to the discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter and lent support to the heliocentric model of the solar system.
Just such an opportunity........Go to the Astronomy-facts (Added on 11/18/2007 9:20:48 PM)
Hubble zooms in on heart of mystery cometThe NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has probed the bright core of Comet 17P/Holmes which, to the delight of sky watchers, mysteriously brightened by nearly a million-fold in a 24-hour period beginning October 23, 2007.
Astronomers have used Hubble's powerful resolution to study Comet Holmes' core for clues about how the comet brightened. The orbiting observatory's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) monitored the comet for several days,........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/15/2007 10:35:02 PM)
Planets forming in Pleiades star clusterRocky terrestrial planets, perhaps like Earth, Mars or Venus, appear to be forming or to have recently formed around a star in the Pleiades ("seven sisters") star cluster, the result of "monster collisions" of planets or planetary embryos.
Astronomers using the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope report their findings in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the premier journal in astronomy.
"This is the........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/15/2007 10:25:36 PM)
New Planet Discovered Around Nearby StarAstronomers funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced their discovery of a fifth planet around the nearby star 55 Cancri, making it the only star aside from the sun known to have five planets.
The research results have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Debra Fischer, assistant professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, said the fifth planet is within the........Go to the Astronomy-blog (Added on 11/13/2007 9:49:17 PM)
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