Evidence and theory collide with galactic proportions. I have a morality tale to tell here, but first we have to do some science. The science is part of the moral, and it’s actually rather surprising and cool. And it was reading about the science that made me chuckle, because the moral to me — as a scientist myself — was pretty obvious, but I know to others it will be as opaque as black hole. Speaking of which… We know that at the heart of every big galaxy lies a supermassive black hole. There’s one at the center of our galaxy — tipping the cosmic scale at 4 million times the mass of the Sun! — and one in Andromeda.
In fact, looking for these monsters* was one of the key missions for building and launching the Hubble Space Telescope, a mission it had great success with. There be monsters here. Why those black holes are there, and so huge, is a matter of some discussion. When this happens, so it’s thought, matter in the form of gas, dust, and stars would also fall into the center, feeding the black hole. It’s a good story. Don't send bugs to Mars - opinion - 28 December 2010. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 A plan to send live microbes to the Red Planet's largest moon risks wrecking our search for extraterrestrial life, argues Barry E. DiGregorio WE HUMANS have a unique talent for contaminating pristine environments. We put millions of tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. We poison our soils, lakes, rivers and streams with chemical and radioactive waste.
We spill oil into our seas. Spacefaring nations have been sending unsterilised spacecraft to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, comets and asteroids for over 40 years. It wasn't always so. These lofty goals were enshrined in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, now signed by all spacefaring nations. Early spacecraft had to be thoroughly and expensively sterilised before they could be sent to the moon or planets. Numerous reports have debated whether terrestrial spores might be able to replicate and spread on Mars. That theory is tenuous at best. This is no small risk. Institute. David Black Selected as President and CEO at SETI Institute The SETI Institute has announced the selection of Dr. David Black as its new President and Chief Executive Officer. Black, who is President and CEO Emeritus of the Universities Space Research Association and Visiting Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, is a widely recognized researcher in the fields of star and planet formation, and the search for exoplanets.
Read More Boulder Clustering on Martian Polygonal Patterned Ground Travis Orloff (UC Santa Cruz) proposes a new mechanism for boulder clustering unique to Mars and uses observations of boulder clustering around impact features to place constraints on the timescale of boulder clustering. Read More Big Picture Science Radio Show - Since Sliced Bread Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! The 25-year-old Web, along with the Internet and the personal computer are among mankind’s greatest inventions.
But are they the biggest of all time? Wikileaks suspect Bradley Manning's health 'declining' 24 December 2010Last updated at 17:38 Bradley Manning served in Iraq The only person to visit Wikileaks suspect Pte Bradley Manning in custody other than his lawyer says his health has declined in the past four months. Pte Manning, a US soldier, is being held in solitary confinement in a high-security military prison at Quantico marine base, Virginia. US journalist David House, who has been visiting him since September, told the BBC World Service he looked "frazzled".
The Pentagon has denied it is mistreating Pte Manning. A Marine Corps spokesman said the military was keeping him "safe, secure and ready for trial". Pte Manning faces up to 50 years in jail if convicted of leaking secrets. The 23-year-old was arrested earlier this year and charged with stealing secret information. However, there has been no formal indictment and no date for a trial has been set, according to Mr House. 'Carpet burn' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteDavid HouseUS journalist 'Not co-operating'
Latest From Mars: Frosty Landscapes, Ancient Lakebed, Potential Landing Site. Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Richardson Crater Dunes, Partially Defrosted. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona A new batch of images has been released by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissaince Orbiter and –as usual — they are stunning. In the image above, there is a lot going on! Numerous dust devil tracks have left their criss-crossing marks on the dune field found in Richardson Crater. The dunes are covered by seasonal carbon dioxide frost, which has only partially defrosted, although the image was acquired late in Mars’ southern spring. See more of the “coolest” and latest Mars images from HiRISE below: Megabreccia at Holden Crater. This image shows what could have been a once-habitable ancient lake on Mars, and a never-before-seen impact “megabreccia” in Holden Crater. Holden Crater is an impact crater that formed within an older, multi-ringed impact basin called Holden Basin.
Frost Covered Gullies. Search for microscopic black hole signatures at the large hadron collider. Colony Worlds. Heart of the Milky Way. It's hard to be modest when you live in the Milky Way. Our galaxy is far larger, brighter, and more massive than most other galaxies. From end to end, the Milky Way's starry disk, observable with the naked eye and through optical telescopes, spans 120,000 light-years. Encircling it is another disk, composed mostly of hydrogen gas, detectable by radio telescopes. And engulfing all that our telescopes can see is an enormous halo of dark matter that they can't.
While it emits no light, this dark matter far outweighs the Milky Way's hundreds of billions of stars, giving the galaxy a total mass one to two trillion times that of the sun. Indeed, our galaxy is so huge that dozens of lesser galaxies scamper about it, like moons orbiting a giant planet. As a result of its vast size, the Milky Way can boast at least one planet with intelligent life. Science and Technology News, Science Articles | Discover Magazine. Exoplanets of the Week: A “Diamond Planet” and Gas Giant Quadruplets | 80beats. A couple of new exoplanets are leaving researchers scratching their heads in confusion. So bright, so vivid!
So prismatic! A planet called WASP-12b is the first planet that’s been found to have more carbon than oxygen in its atmosphere, unlike most planets in our solar system. In the paper published in Nature, researchers suggest that the gas giant probably has a carbon-based core. And all that carbon has set the researchers eyes a-sparkle with possibilities: The researchers say their discovery supports the idea there may be carbon-rich, rocky planets whose terrains are made up of diamonds or graphite. The alien planet was discovered in 2009 and is about 870 light-years away. “This study shows that there is this extreme diversity out there,” study lead author Nikku Madhusudhan, now of Princeton University, told SPACE.com. Gas giants breaking the (theoretical) rules Researchers have just discovered a fourth planet orbiting the HR 8799 star system.
Images: (1) NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Invisible Planetoids: The Search for Spock | Solar System. The knowledge that objects of some kind could comfortably carve out a life between Mercury and the sun was enough to keep some astronomers wondering. Perhaps the problem was that people had been thinking too big. Instead of a planet Vulcan, maybe it made more sense to look for a whole bunch of Vulcanettes. Or, as scientists have since named the members of this hypothetical population of asteroid-like objects, vulcanoids.
To refocus the search, the most likely location of these objects had to be pinpointed. These limitations define a ring of space that starts about 6.5 million miles from the sun and extends out to just under 20 million miles—an area comprising about 1 quadrillion square miles. Vulcanoids have a lower size limit, because very small things (think grains of dust) would be swept clean out of the innermost solar system by the wind of subatomic particles blowing off the sun’s surface. Earth-orbiting spacecraft might seem the next obvious vantage point. Exoplanet found… from another galaxy!! Today, astronomers announced that they have found a new exoplanet, a planet orbiting another star.
Nearly 500 exoplanets have been found in the past 15 years, so what’s the big deal, you may ask? The big deal is that this planet and star are from another galaxy! [Artist's impression of the alien planet; click to extragalaticate.] There is a whole lot of coolness going on here, so strap in. OK, first, this planet is in our own Milky Way galaxy. And there’s more. What this means, though, is that the star is already past its red giant stage. That’s important because the planet found orbits the star extremely close in, only a few million kilometers from its surface. That’s right: this planet from another galaxy also spent hundreds of thousands of years physically inside its star!
Holy wow! If that weren’t enough, a few billion years later, the planet’s star began to swell. Amazing. The implication of this star and planet is important as well. Now that’s changed. But they’re there. ESO/L. LHC Creates Cosmic Primordial Soup and Probes Strange Particle Jets | 80beats. Now that the Large Hadron Collider is smashing lead, the discoveries are coming fast and furious. Earlier this month CERN’s smashing machine switched from sending protons zinging around its ring to sending heavy lead ions at relativistic speeds. Those energetic collisions, the physicists now say, have allowed them to use the LHC’s ALICE experiment to glimpse quark-gluon plasma, the “primordial soup” present just after the Big Bang.
During this time, the Universe would have been so hot and energetic that the particles making up the elements we know today were unable to form, leaving the constituents to float “free” as a primordial soup. Quarks and gluons were only able to condense into larger particles when universal energy conditions were low enough. Hadrons (i.e. particles made from quarks; including baryons like neutrons and protons) were only allowed to form 10-6 seconds after the Big Bang. [Discovery News] Related Content: 80beats: Surprise! Image: CERN. Astronomers Find a Bevy of Exoplanets; Won’t Discuss Most Interesting Ones | 80beats. How to Settle, Once and for All, the Whole "What's a Planet?" Debate | New Planets. When I was a kid, I knew exactly what a planet was: It was something big and round, and it orbited the sun. There were nine such beasts in the celestial menagerie. We knew Pluto was a misfit—smallish, distant, and orbiting on a weird elliptical path—but we had no doubt it was part of the family.
The other planets certainly fit my description, and all was well. I didn’t even consider Ceres, one of the solar system’s oddballs. But if I had, I’m sure I would have thought, “Ceres is an asteroid! It’s the largest one, sure, and maybe it’s even round, but it’s just the biggest of a bunch of rubble out there between Mars and Jupiter. A planet it ain’t.” Ah, the naïveté of youth. “This whole word planet is just magical,” says Mike Brown, a planetary astronomer at Caltech.
The word matters a lot to scientists, too, as Brown can well attest. OK. Perhaps my naive definition—big, round, and orbiting the sun—isn’t such a bad place to start. But wait! OK, so a planet doesn’t need to orbit a star. Another exoplanet joins the HR 8799 family. In late 2008, astronomers announced the discovery of a multi-planet system orbiting the star HR 8799. The three planets were discovered the old-fashioned way: they were directly imaged!
[A gallery of all known directly-imaged exoplanets is at the bottom of this post, in fact.] The star is young (30 – 60 million years old), so the three planets are also young, and still glow with the leftover heat of their formation. In the infrared, they’re bright enough to be distinguished from their star in images. And now, follow-up observations using the monster Keck 10-meter infrared telescope have revealed a fourth planet: HR 8799 e: See it there? Some aspects of the planet are pretty easy to observe; given the distance (130 light years) to the star, we can measure the planet’s orbital size off the image; it’s about 2 billion kilometers out, a little bit closer in than the distance of Uranus from the Sun. The thing is, it’s not clear a planet of that mass can form that close to the star. SpaceX Blasts Its Dragon Space Capsule Into Orbit (UPDATE: Splashdown Success) | 80beats.
Penrose’s Cyclic Cosmology | Cosmic Variance. Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2010 – Runners Up. [1012.1995] First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation. Forests Might Be Detectable on Extrasolar Planets. Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Trees on an alien world? No, a dune field on Mars with sand flows. Credit: NASA/JPL/U of Arizona Excitingly, we’ve been able to detect the composition of atmospheres on a handful of planets orbiting other stars. But if next-generation space observatories go online within the next couple of decades, some scientists propose using a new technique to determine details such as tree-like multicellular life on extrasolar planets. While previous studies have discussed the likelihood of detecting life on exoplanets through signs of biogenic gases in the atmosphere, or seeing “glints” of light off oceans or lakes, those technique are limited in that, for example, biogenic gases could be signs of either single-celled or multicellular life – not providing much detail — and as we’ve seen from Titan, glints off planetary bodies do not necessarily come from water-filled lakes.
Lunar eclipse and winter solstice to coincide, first time since the year 1378. A similar lunar eclipse in Nov. 2003. The Moon may appear coppery red. Credit: Jim Fakatselis. How often do you get to witness an event that has not been seen since the year 1378, over half a millennium, 632 years ago? Of course, weather will make or break the viewing, and it appears the much of the west coast of the USA will be socked in with a significant winter storm at that time. click to enlarge Here’s the USA forecast for cloud cover. For those that can see it, the moon will likely appear as a deep coppery red, like this 2003 eclipse photo at left. From Science @ NASA, they write: Everyone knows that “the moon on the breast of new-fallen snow gives the luster of mid-day to objects below.”
See for yourself on Dec. 21st, the first day of northern winter, when the full Moon passes almost dead-center through Earth’s shadow. The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). Why red? Example: Image via Wikipedia Author: Dr. Like this:
Antimatter atom trapped for first time, say scientists. 17 November 2010Last updated at 13:07 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News Flashes of light were detected as the antimatter "annihilated" with matter Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say. Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second. Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter. The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics. The current "standard model" of physics holds that each particle - protons, electrons, neutrons and a zoo of more exotic particles - has its mirror image antiparticle.
The antiparticle of the electron, for example, is the positron, and is used in an imaging technique of growing popularity known as positron emission tomography. Slowing anti-atoms “Start Quote Early days. The Most Incredible Way To Learn About Neutrino Physics. Carl Sagan’s universal star power - Grand Traverse Insider - Morning Star Publishing.