- StumbleUpon. Gamma-ray Bursts Realtime Sky Map in Silverlight. Scientists Now Know: We're From Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy! Scientists Now Know: We're Not From Here! Summary & comments by Dan Eden for Viewzone "This first full-sky map of Sagittarius shows its extensive interaction with the Milky Way," Majewski said. "Both stars and star clusters now in the outer parts of the Milky Way have been 'stolen' from Sagittarius as the gravitational forces of the Milky Way nibbled away at its dwarf companion. This one vivid example shows that the Milky Way grows by eating its smaller neighbors. " The study's map of M giants depicts 2 billion years of Sagittarius stripping by the Milky Way, and suggests that Sagittarius has reached a critical phase in what had been a slow dance of death.
"After slow, continuous gnawing by the Milky Way, Sagittarius has been whittled down to the point that it cannot hold itself together much longer," said 2MASS Science Team member and study co-author Martin Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts. "We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system. " Dan Eden. Dave. The-Observable-Universe.jpg (JPEG Image, 3850x1925 pixels) - Scaled (27%) Earth sounds space! Asteroids, Meteors & Comets. The Unsolved Mystery of Saturn's Hexagon -4 Times the Size of Earth. "Cassini is indebted to Voyager for its many fascinating discoveries and for pavingthe way for Cassini," says Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL, who started her career working on Voyager from 1977 to 1989.
"On Cassini, we still compare our data to Voyager's and proudly build on Voyager's heritage. " But the Voyager Mission left a few mysteries that Cassini has not yet solved. One of the most perplexing mysteries is Saturn's hexagpn. NASA scientists first spotted a hexagonal weather pattern when they stitched together Voyager images of Saturn's north pole.
Cassini has obtained higher-resolution pictures of the hexagon – which tells scientists it's a remarkably stable wave in one of the jet streams that remains 30 years later – but scientists are still not sure what forces maintain the object. After the sunlight faded, darkness shrouded the north pole for 15 years. The hexagon was originally discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Strongest evidence yet indicates Enceladus hiding saltwater ocean. This image shows icy spray spewing from Saturn's moon, Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute The new discovery was made during the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn , a collaboration of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Launched in 1997, the mission spacecraft arrived at the Saturn system in 2004 and has been touring the giant ringed planet and its vast moon system ever since. The plumes shooting water vapor and tiny grains of ice into space were originally discovered emanating from Enceladus -- one of 19 known moons of Saturn -- by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005.
The plumes were originating from the so-called "tiger stripe" surface fractures at the moon's south pole and apparently have created the material for the faint E Ring that traces the orbit of Enceladus around Saturn. During three of Cassini's passes through the plume in 2008 and 2009, the Cosmic Dust Analyser, or CDA, on board measured the composition of freshly ejected plume grains.
Saturn Moon Has Oxygen Atmosphere. An oxygen atmosphere has been found on Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea, astronomers announced Thursday—but don't hold your breath for colonization opportunities. For one thing, the 932-mile-wide (1,500-kilometer-wide), ice-covered moon is more than 932 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. For another, the average surface temperature is -292 degrees Fahrenheit (-180 degrees Celsius).
And at less than 62 miles (100 kilometers) thick, the newfound oxygen layer is so thin that, at Earthlike temperatures and pressure, Rhea's entire atmosphere would fit in a single midsize building. Still, the discovery implies that worlds with oxygen-filled air may not be so unusual in the cosmos. (Related: "Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common, Study Says. ") At about 327,000 miles (527,000 kilometers) from Saturn, Rhea orbits inside the planet's magnetic field. Knowing where and how oxygen exists in the universe may in turn help scientists plan future robotic and manned missions. Tempest-from-hell seen on Saturn. (PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.
On Dec. 5, 2010, Cassini first detected the storm that has been raging ever since. It appears approximately 35 degrees north latitude of Saturn. Pictures from Cassini's imaging cameras show the storm wrapping around the entire planet covering approximately 2 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers). The storm is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini during several months from 2009 to 2010.
"Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar," said Andrew Ingersoll, an author of the study and a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second. The storm's results are the first activities of a new "Saturn Storm Watch" campaign. The Sounds of Pulsars. A pulsar is a highly magnetised neutron star, with a radius of 10-15 km, having somewhat greater mass than the Sun which has a radius of approximately 1 million km. Radiation is beamed out along the magnetic poles and pulses of radiation are received as the beam crosses the Earth, in the same manner as the beam from a lighthouse causes flashes.
Being enormous cosmic flywheels with a tick attached, they make some of the best clocks known to mankind. These sounds directly correspond to the radio-waves emitted by the brightest pulsars in the sky as received by some of the largest radio telescopes in the world. To listen to the pulses of a radio pulsar, click on its arrow icon. Radio Waves spread into space. Most Amazing Time Lapse Video of Milky Way Ever Made. Seriously. | ShutterSalt - StumbleUpon.
Quark Star (update) Some of the strange stuff that is coming out about quark stars: 1) that quark stars may be connected to dark matter (or even dark energy?) Some dark matter might just be “strangelets” roaming the cosmos, blasted free from quark stars: or 2) That some smaller sized black holes may actually be quark stars: “Some black holes may actually be ‘quark stars’:” or 3) The light given off by a quark star is called bremsstrahlung emissions. “quark star: gives off dim light (called bremsstrahlung emission), emitted by a thin layer of electrons on its surface:” or 4) It takes about 1.6 minutes to from a quark star from a neutron star.
Like this: Like Loading... Darkest exoplanet spotted by astronomers. 12 August 2011Last updated at 11:09 By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News TrES-2b is literally darker, on average, than coal A dark alien world, blacker than coal, has been spotted by astronomers. The Jupiter-sized planet is orbiting its star at a distance of just five million km, and is likely to be at a temperature of some 1200C. The planet may be too hot to support reflective clouds like those we see in our own Solar System, but even that would not explain why it is so dark. The research will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The planet, called TrES-2b, is so named because it was first spotted by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey in 2006. It is about 750 light-years away, in the Draco constellation. It also lies in the field of view of the Kepler space telescope, whose primary mission is to spot exoplanets using extremely sensitive brightness measurements as far-flung worlds pass in front of their host stars.
Evolution of a massive Star.