2012 Meteor shower viewing times and information at Spacedex.com. European "Disco Ball" Probe to Test Einstein's Relativity. Launched today aboard the European Space Agency's new Vega rocket, a low-cost space probe will test Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity—and could do so better than a recent NASA mission that cost nearly a hundred times more, managers say.
In the mid-2000s, after more than 40 years of development, the $800-million Stanford University-led Gravity Probe B detected frame dragging. This effect, predicted by Einstein's theory, is caused by Earth's rotation dragging the fabric of space and time along with it. But because of a technical glitch, the NASA craft was able to measure frame dragging with an estimated accuracy of no better than 20 percent. Scientists working with the new Italian probe, which cost $10 million (U.S.) to build, hope to improve on those readings. LARES, for Laser Relativity Satellite, lifted off from a spaceport in French Guiana at 7 a.m., local time.
"Disco Ball" to Help Validate Einstein Don't Stop Testing General Relativity. Dwarf Galaxy Found Secretly Feasting on Smaller Dwarf. "It wasn't clear what it was" originally, study co-author Aaron Romanowsky , an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said of the mini galaxy. The small blob of stars was first spied in digitized photographic plates from the Digitized Sky Survey project.
The tiny galaxy went unconfirmed for five years because it's so very faint. The nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 4449, in the constellation Canes Venatici, is about 50 times brighter. Recently, though, Romanowsky and colleagues decided to follow up by capturing more detailed images of the dwarf galaxy and its neighboring smudge. An international team—including study leader David Martinez-Delgado of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and co-author Jay Gabany, an amateur astronomer—collected data from the Blackbird Observatory in New Mexico and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. (Related picture: "New ALMA Telescope Peers Into Galaxy Smashup.
" ) Astrophysical Journal Letters . Nature . Outer space. The boundaries between the Earth's surface and outer space, at the Kármán line, 100 km (62 mi) and exosphere at 690 km (430 mi).
Not to scale. There is no firm boundary where space begins. However the Kármán line, at an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level, is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping. The framework for international space law was established by the Outer Space Treaty, which was passed by the United Nations in 1967. This treaty precludes any claims of national sovereignty and permits all states to freely explore outer space. Discovery[edit] In ancient China, there were various schools of thought concerning the nature of the heavens, some of which bear a resemblance to the modern understanding.
The original Magdeburg hemispheres (lower left) used to demonstrate Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump (right) The earliest known estimate of the temperature of outer space was by the Swiss physicist Charles É.