Pulse. JSC Digital Image Collection. Exploring the Universe. Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light. It may be hard to imagine a planet blacker than coal, but that's what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA's Kepler space telescope. Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study. "Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint—this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said.
"If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets," added Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Related: "Earth Farthest From Sun on Fourth of July—So Why So Hot? ") NASA's Planet Detector Black Planet Spurs Dimmest of Dimming. Asteroid near miss: Too close for comfort.
It is called 2012 KT42. It was discovered on Monday. It passed by Earth on Tuesday. It is a new asteroid. Fortunately, it did not hit and fortunately, it was only four metres wide, meaning that even if it had entered the atmosphere, it would have disintegrated. 2012Kt42, 14,000 kilometres away. 2012 Kt42 does, though, pose an eye-opener as to what could happen, and shows us how near we are to waking up one morning on a different planet. It gets worse... A larger one, 45 metres in diameter, is expected to pass near Earth in 2013, this one being called 2012 DA14, whose orbit will be so close it will pass closer to the Earth than many satellites. 2012 DA14, it is discovered, has been with us for a long time, has an orbit length of 366.24 days and is expected to pass over our planet twice per year, at a distance of 24,000 kilometres, considered perfectly safe by astronomers. Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey Pravda.Ru.
Paranal, zodiacal light and Milky Way. Watching asteroids and comets to avoid impact. Dangers posed by asteroids are among the issues discussed during the third international meeting of the top-level representatives in charge security currently underway in Saint-Petersburg. The report on countering asteroid and meteorites threats is to be made by Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) representative. Space strikes back… and again While today asteroids do not bother Earthlings as they did only a few billions of years ago, encounters still occur.
Thanks to their tiny dimensions, the impact is almost always a short flash in the upper atmosphere. Very rarely the remnants of the space bodies reach the Earth, and thanks to the uneven density of Earth’s population, only a tiny share of them land in the vicinity of humans. Still, asteroids are regarded today as one of the most serious global threats. Then, the effects of the possible rendezvous were estimated. While the threat is already known, the possible remedy is only being discussed. Count, touch, and strike. A comet comes calling. A comet has appeared in the Northern Hemisphere. The Emerald Comet was first seen in 2009 by the Australian, Robert McKnight , who predicted that the S2009R1 - the scientific name of the Comet, will enter the Solar system, and in June this year, come close to the earth. Mr. McKnight’s forecast has been proven correct and the heavenly visitor is streaming toward the Earth.
On June 15th, it will come very close to the Northern Hemisphere and then start moving away from the earth, says Victor Shor, a senior employee of the St. Petersburg Institute of Applied Astronomy. "The Comet is moving along the light hyperbolic orbit and poses no danger to earth since it will pass the earth at a distance of 170 million kilometers. Every appearance of a Comet attracts the attention of Astronomers.
Internet helps to discover stars. A supernova has been discovered in a remote galaxy by an amateur astronomer. A student at a higher educational establishment in Moscow did this while he was hundreds of kilometers away from the telescope in the city of Kislovodsk and maintaining links with it through the Internet. The discovery was made by a student of the Institute of Steel and Alloys, Pavel Balanuts. In fact, this is his third discovery, and he considers it as an ordinary event: "When I saw it I realized immediately for sure that this was a supernova," says Pavel Balanuts. The Kislovodsk robot, which helped Pavel Balanuts to make another discovery, is part of a "Mobile Astronomical System of Robot-Telescopes" or "MASTER".
"We built five observatories in two years, and all of them are robotized," says Vladimir Lipunov. The compact telescope "MASTER" opens its cupola by itself and tracks a target in a necessary sector of the sky in a few seconds. Project Share has expanded to include news from the galaxies. | Project Share. Sites/default/files/StarDate_sample_issue.pdf. Dark Matter: Seeing the Invisible. Svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003900/a003916/MultiYr_seaIce_1980_Lg.0130.tif.
HubbleSite - The James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's next orbiting observatory and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. A tennis court-sized telescope orbiting far beyond Earth's moon, Webb will detect infrared radiation and be capable of seeing in that wavelength as well as Hubble sees in visible light. Infrared vision is vital to our understanding of the universe.
The furthest objects we can detect are seen in infrared light, cooler objects that would otherwise be invisible emit infrared, and infrared light pierces clouds of dust, allowing us to see into their depths. Webb will unleash a torrent of new discoveries, opening the door to a part of the universe that has just begun to take shape under humanity's observations. Webb Telescope: Stay Connected. Cubic-paranal-gegenschein-guisard - Panorama of the Chilean night sky. This Quicktime interactive panorama movie shows the night sky over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile and reveals its incredible richness and beauty.
To launch the panorama please click the link on the right under QuickTime VR. To navigate this dual landscape and starscape, left-click on the image and continue pressing the button as you drag the mouse in the direction you would like to see. To zoom in and out, press "shift" or "ctrl". Moving towards the right, the panorama shows the Milky Way band blazing over the horizon. Ascending the mountain that comes into view, one sees ESO’s Very Large Telescope array and the red beam of its Laser Guide Star. Another interactive panorama also taken from Paranal on a different night and with the constellations highlighted is available at: Happy viewing. Credit: Black Holes: Stranger Than Fiction. Tiny Planet, Tiny Moons. The Solar System: Pluto.
After 76 years of glory, the small ball of rock and ice known as Pluto was relegated to the solar system backwaters in 2006 when astronomers dropped it from the list of planets. Instead, it's simply the most famous member of the Kuiper Belt, a broad doughnut-shaped ring of objects that extends outward from just inside the orbit of Neptune, the most distant planet. Because it is so far from the Sun, astronomers had a hard time measuring Pluto's size. Astronomers finally got it right in the 1980s, after James Christy discovered a companion object. By watching Pluto and the companion, named Charon, eclipse each other, they measured Pluto's diameter at about 1,400 miles -- about one-third less than the diameter of Earth's Moon.
Pluto is basically a ball of frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide wrapped around a small core of rock. When it passes closest to the Sun, as it did in 1989, some of its surface ice vaporizes, giving Pluto a thin, cold atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Dwarf planet Eris reveals its secrets. Scientists consider it an event when they get a chance to reveal the secrets on the periphery of our Solar System.
In fact, a few days ago they had a rare opportunity to make the parameters of Eris more precise. This is the most massive dwarf planet in the Solar System, which rotates around the sun far away from the orbits of main planets. Scientists initially described it as the Solar System’s tenth planet. Several observatories in the western hemisphere prepared to observe a stellar occultation by Eris, but only three telescopes in Chili, which fell into the stripe of the shadow of Eris, could watch it.
“Since all stars ate located far away, light coming from them can be considered almost parallel,” says Vladimir Surdin. Astronomers have discovered over one thousand objects on the periphery of the Solar System. It’s impossible to study in detail the dwarf planets using telescopes that give only their blurred images. Milky Way to inevitably merge with Andromeda Nebula – NASA. Northern hemisphere gets ready to Moon-gaze. New type of supernova found. Chile telescope yields Omega pictures. Unknown comet may threaten Earth. Astronomers discover "diamond planet"
New black hole spotted. Open Tree of Life Project Draws In Every Twig and Leaf. New Data on Higgs Boson Is Shrouded in Secrecy at CERN. A team of physicists gathered in a room at on Friday to begin crunching new data from the this year. And they will be at it all week. What they are seeing nobody knows. What they are looking for is the beginning to the end of the longest and most expensive manhunt in the history of physics, one that has involved several generations of larger and larger particle accelerators: the spoor of a hypothetical particle that endows other elementary particles with mass.
Known as the , it is the cornerstone of modern physics, but confirmation of its existence has eluded scientists for 40 years. In December, scientists went into a qualified tizzy when two teams of physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, outside Geneva, reported hints — but only hints — of a bump in their data that could be the boson. The new data will show whether that was a fluke or whether they are really on the road to discovering the long-lost boson, physicists say. This, all agree, is the boson’s last stand.
What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? Www.astrosociety.org/uitc No. 6 - Fall 1986 © 1986, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94112 What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? The Search for Planets Around Other Stars Activity Corner Now that the recent outbreak of "Halley fever'' has died down and the media have returned to reporting the escapades of Hollywood's stars, what should we tell our students about the past year of comet investigation? What did we learn from the eight spacecraft that explored the comet from nearby and far away and from the hundreds of ground-based instruments that were pointed at the icy visitor whose passage occasioned so much interest? While much of the data analysis and interpretation is still underway at universities and observatories around the world, we wanted to begin sharing some of the highlights of the discoveries with Universe in the Classroom readers.
The Core of the Comet A Scale Model for Halley's Comet. Electric Moon Pushes The Solar Wind.
Mysterious Radiation Burst Recorded in Tree Rings. ©Nasa Auroras are seen when bursts of charged particles hit Earth's atmosphere — but there is no record of these occurring at the same time as the 14C increase in tree rings. Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between ad 774 and ad 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the ad 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation.
Their study is published online in Nature today1. Exactly what that event was, however, is more difficult to determine. Deep Impact: Small Telescope Science Program (STSP) Deep Impact's comet-watching telescope is blurred. Deep Impact's comet-watching telescope is blurredBY JUSTIN RAYSPACEFLIGHT NOWPosted: March 25, 2005 The largest telescope ever launched into deep space is out of focus, NASA acknowledged Friday, but scientists say it still should collect the sharpest pictures of a comet's icy heart during a violent encounter July 4. The 11.8-inch telescope is flying aboard the Deep Impact spacecraft, which will fire an 800-pound projectile into the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1 to burst through the crust coating the comet's core, form a stadium-sized crater and offer an unprecedented glimpse at ancient ices packed beneath the surface. Known as the High-Resolution Instrument, the telescope will deliver light simultaneously to both a multispectral camera and an infrared spectrometer to photograph the crater and study the gases and dusts blown out of the comet during the impact.
The $330 million Deep Impact mission was launched January 12 from Cape Canaveral. Deep Impact (spacecraft) Deep Impact was a NASA space probe launched on January 12, 2005. It was designed to study the interior composition of the comet 9P/Tempel, by releasing an impactor into the comet. At 5:52 UTC on July 4, 2005, the impactor successfully collided with the comet's nucleus.
The impact excavated debris from the interior of the nucleus, allowing photographs of the impact crater. The photographs showed the comet to be more dusty and less icy than had been expected. Upon the completion of its primary mission, proposals were made to further utilize the spacecraft. Deep Impact mission patch The mission's Principal Investigator was Michael A'Hearn, an astronomer at the University of Maryland.
Spacecraft overview The spacecraft consists of two main sections, the 370-kg (815-lb) copper-core "Smart Impactor" that impacted the comet, and the "Flyby" section, which imaged the comet from a safe distance during the encounter with Tempel 1.[7] Cameras of the flyby spacecraft, HRI at right, MRI at left. What Have We Learned About Halley's Comet? Giant black hole kicked out of home galaxy. (Phys.org) -- Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour.
New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation. "It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of the sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed," said Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the new study. "But these new data support the idea that gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of space first predicted by Albert Einstein but never detected directly -- can exert an extremely powerful force.
" Civano and her group have been studying a system known as CID-42, located in the middle of a galaxy about 4 billion light years away.