Supermassive breakthrough: Scientists now know how fast a black hole spins. Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [Original] Pursuit of Light: NASA and Moby Capture the Magic of the Cosmos.
Is this what heaven looks like? Hubble. By Ruth Whitehead Published: 15:31 GMT, 28 April 2012 | Updated: 16:31 GMT, 28 April 2012 It looks like the gateway to heaven - but this stunning image taken by the Hubble Telescope has captured the dramatic phase of a dying star's lifespan when it runs out of nuclear fuel and emits beams of light like searchlights. Swansong in light: this Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of the brief but dramatic phase in a star's life when it runs out of nuclear fuel It's called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage and this image shows the Egg Nebula, which was the first preplanetary nebula to be discovered, less than 40 years ago.
NASA and the European Space Agency, who run the telescope, explained that over a few thousand years the hot remains of the aging star in the centre of the nebula, or cloud of dust, heat it up, 'excite' the gas, and make it glow. At the centre of the image, hidden in the thick dust cloud, is the nebula’s central star. Audacious & Outrageous: Space Elevators. Inspired partly by science fiction, NASA scientists are seriously considering space elevators as a mass-transit system for the next century. Listen to this story (requires RealPlayer) Sept. 7, 2000 -- "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard NASA's Millennium-Two Space Elevator. Your first stop will be the Lunar-level platform before we continue on to the New Frontier Space Colony development. The entire ride will take about 5 hours, so sit back and enjoy the trip. Does this sound like the Sci-Fi Channel or a chapter out of Arthur C.
Above: Artist Pat Rawling's concept of a space elevator viewed from the geostationary transfer station looking down along the length of the elevator toward Earth. David Smitherman of NASA/Marshall's Advanced Projects Office has compiled plans for such an elevator that could turn science fiction into reality. "This is no longer science fiction," said Smitherman. "The system requires the center of mass be in geostationary orbit," said Smitherman.
Web Links. Astronomers Discover a Planet Made Of Water. Supernova Eta Carinae's Great Eruption: Supermassive Star By Space Telescope Science Institute | Technology. Space scientists have caught a delayed glimpse of a cosmic blast that dazzled observers when it was seen from Earth more than 150 years ago. Astronomers are trying to unravel the mystery of an event known as the Great Eruption, in which a super-massive star 7,500 light years away began spewing out unusually large amounts of light.
It caused the star, called Eta Carinae, to appear as the second-brightest star in the sky for several years in the mid-1800s. Now, experts have been able to create new images of that violent blast, using a new technique that involves taking readings of delayed light that bounced off stellar dust and is only now reaching our solar system. Armin Rest, of America's Space Telescope Science Institute, which carried out the study published in the Nature journal, said the images could help them get to the bottom of what caused the Great Eruption.
He said: "It's as if nature has left behind a surveillance tape of the event, which we are now just beginning to watch. " Lunar Calendar 2012. New Satellite Takes Spectacular High-Res Image of Earth | Wired Science. NASA released this incredible new high-res image of the Earth, taken by the recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. The image, which centers on North and Central America, has been nicknamed "Blue Marble 2012" after the famous "Blue Marble" image (below) taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The original Blue Marble, featuring the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, is one of the most well recognized photographs of all time. Suomi NPP is designed to help improve weather forecasts and increase scientists' understanding of long-term climate change.
Originally called the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, the probe was renamed Jan. 24 in honor of the late Verner E. The Suomi satellite compiled this enormous image from small sections that it photographed over the course of Jan. 4, and the pictures were later stitched together.
You can download the full image in extremely high resolution (8,000 x 8,000 pixels!). StarTram. Hypothetical StarTram spaceport. The launch tube stretches into the distance to the East on the right (eventually curving up many kilometers away), next to the power plant which charges the SMES. RLVs return to land on the runway. History[edit] A track on test model scale for lower velocity magnetic launch assist. A prior concept for likewise a maglev horizontal launch assist system but at far lesser velocity: MagLifter. A StarTram design was first published in a 2001 paper[3] and patent,[4] making reference to a 1994 paper on MagLifter.
Developed by John C. Subsequent design modifies StarTram into a generation 1 version, a generation 2 version, and an alternative generation 1.5 variant.[1] Description[edit] Generation 1 System[edit] The Gen-1 system proposes to accelerate unmanned craft at 30 g through a 130-kilometer (81 mi) long tunnel, with a plasma window preventing vacuum loss when the exit's mechanical shutter is briefly open, evacuated of air with an MHD pump. Challenges[edit] News. How to See a Supernova This Weekend From Your Backyard | Wired Science. New Scientist Standalone Player. How Fast is the Universe Expanding? Largest, oldest water mass in universe spotted - Technology & science - Space - Space.com. Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth.
The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said. "Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of the universe," study co-author Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland said in a statement. "This discovery pushes the detection of water one billion years closer to the Big Bang than any previous find. " Studying a distant quasar Quasars are the most luminous, most powerful and most energetic objects in the universe.
Watch 30 Years of the Space Shuttle In One Single Launch. Scientists Punch a Hole in the Fabric of Time with a "Time Cloak" One is a neuron. The other is the structure of the universe. - convozine.com. Neuron-galaxy.jpg (1008×633) Multimedia - Video Gallery. Four Planets Now Rising Together Before Sunrise | Planet Alignment Sky Maps & Skywatching Tips | Planets & Stars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus & Mars. Last week, six planets and the crescent moon formed a line of glowing objects in the predawn sky. This week Mercury takes the spotlight as it reaches maximum elongation from the sun with Venus, Mars and Jupiter close by. This grouping of planets will look very different depending on the location from which you view them. They will be best seen from the Southern Hemisphere because at this time of year the ecliptic, the line in the sky along which the sun travels, is almost vertical, placing the dawn planets high above the horizon as shown in this sky map of Mercury and its companions.
The same group of planets, viewed a few hours earlier from Boston, appears to lie much closer to the horizon, because in the Northern Hemisphere the spring morning ecliptic lies low and close to the horizon. This sky map of the four planets shows their low-lying configuration as viewed from Boston. How to see the four planets Venus will be joined by Jupiter about 5 to 10 minutes later. Moving planetary targets. Interactive 3D model of Solar System Planets and Night Sky. MESSENGER’s first picture from Mercury orbit! "There are Possibly Trillions of Earths Orbiting Red Dwarfs" Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum says that the red dwarfs they have discovered are over 10 billion years old, which means they've had enough time for complex life to develop and evolve, summarizing about research recently conducted at Hawaii's Keck Observatory that discovered that the number of stars in the universe is triple what was previously thought.
Red dwarfs are the most common stars in the Milky Way, accounting for three fourths of its stellar population. And like our Sun, red dwarfs generate energy by converting hydrogen into helium at their centers; however, the stars have less mass---between 8 and 60 percent of the solar value---so they are smaller, fainter, and cooler than the Sun. Until recently, red dwarf stars were not detectable in galaxies outside our own nearby cluster because they are relatively small and dim.
Thus, researchers were not able to comprise a total number of red dwarfs present in the universe. Casey Kazan Sources: discovery.com sciencemag.org. The mathematician who first theorized about infinity died in a mental institution. George Cantor first worked out the basic ideas about infinity in 1890. His theories were criticized at first, but now are accepted as one of the foundations of modern mathematics.
Among other things, Cantor first showed that there are different types of infinity and that a given set has exactly as many positive numbers as there are positive even numbers (while conventional wisdom would suggest that there are twice as many positive numbers than positive even numbers). This brilliant mathematician battled depression throughout much of his life, and died in 1918 in an institution. His work was initially received with harsh criticism, before finding acceptance in the mathematical community. Though some of his findings about infinity were certainly mind-boggling, his mental state likely had more to do with the criticism he received for his work than the concept of infinity itself!
Learn more about infinity. Wonders of the Solar System. What would it look like to fall into a black hole? - space - 01 April 2009. Video: Falling into a black hole would be a one-off sightseeing trip, so this simulation, calculated by Andrew Hamilton and his team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is a safer option Falling into a black hole might not be good for your health, but at least the view would be fine. A new simulation shows what you might see on your way towards the black hole's crushing central singularity. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole. Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time.
They follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy. Horizontal ring Information paradox More From New Scientist. 0110012v2. Time travel and Einstein's theory of relativity made easy. Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? : Pharyngula. No. No, no, no. No no no no no no no no. No, no. Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it’s not an organization noted for scientific acumen.
But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I’ve mentioned Cosmology before — it isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It is not an auspicious beginning. But could it be that by some clumsy accident of the author, a fabulously insightful, meticulously researched paper could have fallen into the hands of single-minded lunatics who rushed it into ‘print’?
So let’s look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus. Otherwise, this work is garbage. MIT Paper Works out Paradox; Fry may not be own Grandfather - The Blogs at... It would appear that longstanding and tricky paradox of time travel, that one who travels backward in time could conceivably influence it to the point where the time travel couldn’t have happened is dead. All hail the longstanding and tricky paradox. This, the “grandfather paradox,” is so named because of the thought experiment used to illustrate it. A time traveler could theoretically go back in the past and murder his own grandfather, which would render the time traveler non extant, and thus would lead to the paradox of the time traveler never having been able to go back in time in the first place.
Pudding. The same holds true in a less dramatic fashion for subatomic particles like quarks and photons, which hold a much higher likelihood of ever traveling into the past, based on the strange, spooky behavior they’ve demonstrated for the people who’ve studied and been alarmed by them thus far. This little conundrum made time travel fundamentally dangerous, if not impossible. Clavius: Environment - radiation and the van allen belts. This general charge is usually made by people who don't understand very much at all about radiation. After witnessing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tragedy of Chernobyl it is not surprising that the idea of radiation should elicit an intuitively fearful reaction.
But when you understand the different types of radiation and what can be done about them, it becomes a manageable problem to avoid radiation exposure. This is a common method of argument that attempts to prove something that can't be proven, by disproving something else. In this case the reader is compelled to accept the conspiracy theory and all its attendant problems and improbabilities, simply on the basis that no matter how difficult, absurd, or far-fetched a particular proposition may be, if it's the only alternative to something clearly impossible then it must -- somehow -- have come to pass. The false dilemma is only convincing if the supposedly impossible alternative is made to seem truly impossible. Van Allen radiation belt. This video illustrates changes in the shape and intensity of a cross section of the Van Allen belts Van Allen radiation belts (cross section) A radiation belt is a layer of energetic charged particles that is held in place around a magnetized planet, such as the Earth, by the planet's magnetic field.
The Earth has two such belts and sometimes others may be temporarily created. The discovery of the belts is credited to James Van Allen and as a result the Earth's belts bear his name. Discovery[edit] Kristian Birkeland, Carl Størmer, and Nicholas Christofilos had investigated the possibility of trapped charged particles before the Space Age.[3] Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 confirmed the existence of the belt in early 1958 under James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. Research[edit] Jupiter's variable radiation belts The Van Allen Probes mission successfully launched on August 30, 2012.[6] The primary mission is scheduled to last two years with expendables expected to last four.
Causes[edit] Time travel and Einstein's theory of relativity made easy.