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noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:51:00 +0000

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Blushing Pluto? Dwarf planet takes on a ruddier hue: NASA

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:01:00 +0000

Pluto, the dwarf planet on the outer edge of our solar system, has a dramatically ruddier hue than it did just a few years ago, NASA scientists said Thursday, after examining photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

They said the distant orb appears mottled and molasses-colored in recent pictures, with a markedly redder tone that most likely is the result of surface ice melting on Pluto's sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole.

The remarkable color shift, which apparently took place between 2000 and 2002, confirms that Pluto is a dynamic world undergoing dramatic atmospheric changes and not simply a ball of ice and rock, according to scientists at the US space agency.

Full story...

Source: Yahoo!/AFP
Image credit: NASA/Yahoo!/AFP

Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:59:00 +0000

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe - just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.

Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.

These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.

Full story...

Source: Yahoo! News/AP
Image credit: NASA

Nasa's Kepler planet-hunter detects five worlds

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:52:00 +0000

Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope has detected its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our Solar System. The observatory, which was launched last year to find other Earths, made the discoveries in its first few weeks of science operations.

Although the new worlds are all bigger than our Neptune, the US space agency says the haul shows the telescope is working well and is very sensitive. The exoplanets have been given the names Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b.

They were announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC. The planets range in size from an object that has a radius four times that of Earth, to worlds much bigger than even our Jupiter. And they all circle very close to their parent stars, following orbits that range from about 3.2 to 4.9 days.

This proximity and the fact that the host stars are themselves much hotter than our Sun means Kepler's new exoplanets experience an intense roasting.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science News
Image credit: NASA/BBC

'Significant' amount of water found on Moon

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:31:00 +0000

A camera on the probe shows the ejecta plume about 20 seconds after impact

Nasa's experiment last month to find water on the Moon was a major success, US scientists have announced. The space agency smashed a rocket and a probe into a large crater at the lunar south pole, hoping to kick up ice. Scientists who have studied the data now say instruments trained on the impact plume saw copious quantities of water-ice and water vapour. One researcher described this as the equivalent of "a dozen two-gallon buckets" of water. The near-infrared spectrometer on the LCROSS probe that followed the rocket into the crater detected water-ice and water vapour. The ultraviolet-visible spectrometer provided additional confirmation by identifying the hydroxyl (OH) molecule, which arises when water is broken apart in sunlight.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science News
Image credit: JPL NASA/BBC

An exoplanet with an extremely tilted orbit raises interest

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:51:00 +0000

Two teams of astronomers have found a planet outside the solar system that might be orbiting backwards compared to its star’s rotation, a discovery that could shed light on how unique the relatively perfect alignment of our solar system is compared to that of other planetary systems.

By measuring the rotation of the parent star of HAT-P-7b, a planet discovered in 2008, the two teams, including one led by MIT assistant professor of physics Joshua Winn and the other by Norio Narita at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, found that the orbit is tilted by at least 86 degrees with respect to the star’s equator. The drastic misalignment of the exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, suggests that it is either rotating over both poles of its star or actually rotating backwards, a phenomenon that does not occur in our solar system and that could help explain why life thrives here.

Full story...

Source: MIT News
Image credit: Simon Albrecht/MIT

Spitzer Observes a Chaotic Planetary System

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:51:00 +0000

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this infrared image of a giant halo of very fine dust around the young star HR 8799.

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity. Young planets circling the star are thought to be disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

The star, called HR 8799, was in the news last November 2008, for being one of the first of two stars with imaged planets. Ground-based telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system, all three being roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter. Another imaged planet was also announced at the same time around the star Fomalhaut, as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Both HR 8799 and Fomalhaut are younger and more massive than our sun.

Full story...

Source: NASA News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Frost-Covered Phoenix Lander Seen in Winter Images

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:42:00 +0000

Winter images of NASA's Phoenix Lander showing the lander shrouded in dry-ice frost on Mars have been captured with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The HiRISE camera team at the University of Arizona, Tucson, captured one image of the Phoenix lander on July 30, 2009, and the other on Aug. 22, 2009. That's when the sun began peeking over the horizon of the northern polar plains during winter, the imaging team said. The first day of spring in the northern hemisphere began Oct. 26.

Full story...

Source: NASA News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA probe detects changing season on Mercury

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:48:00 +0000

A NASA spacecraft has spotted what appears to be changing seasons on Mercury and found much more iron on the surface of the small, rocky planet than previously thought.

The MESSENGER probe made the observations during its third flyby of Mercury on Sept. 29, when it took a host of measurements and images of the innermost planet's surface and atmosphere. Only about half of the planned measurements were made because of a data glitch that affected the spacecraft during the flyby.

The $446 million probe's third flyby brought it within 142 miles (228 km) of Mercury's surface to cover more uncharted terrain, leaving 98 percent of the planet now mapped. The flyby was also a gravity assist meant to guide the spacecraft into orbit around the planet in 2011.

Full story...

Source: Space.com
Image credit: NASA

Stellar blast from 13.1 billions light year detected

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:48:00 +0000

The redness of the afterglow is indicative of the event's distance

Astronomers have confirmed that an exploding star spotted by Nasa's Swift satellite is the most distant cosmic object to be detected by telescopes. In the journal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 billion light-years away.

The massive star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang. UK astronomer Nial Tanvir described the observation as "a step back in cosmic time". Professor Tanvir led an international team studying the afterglow of the explosion, using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii.

The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is an example of one of the most violent explosions in the Universe. It is thought to have been associated with the cataclysmic death of a massive star - triggered by the centre of the star collapsing to form a "stellar-sized" black hole.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science
Image credit: AJ Levan/NR Tanvir/BBC

Most distant galaxy cluster discovered

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:51:00 +0000

The youngest and most distant galaxy cluster yet has been discovered by scientists 10.2 billion light years away, a billion further than the previous record. The JKCS041 galaxy cluster, discovered by combining x-ray data from NASA with optical and infrared telescopes, is viewed as it was when the universe was a quarter of its current age.

Galaxy clusters are the universe's largest collections of items held together by gravity, and scientists hope the discovery of one at such an early stage will help them discover more about how the universe evolved.

Full story...

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Image credit: NASA/Telegraph.co.uk

Astronomers do it Again: Find Organic Molecules Around Gas Planet

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:36:00 +0000

Peering far beyond our solar system, NASA researchers have detected the basic chemistry for life in a second hot gas planet, advancing astronomers toward the goal of being able to characterize planets where life could exist. The planet is not habitable but it has the same chemistry that, if found around a rocky planet in the future, could indicate the presence of life.

Swain and his co-investigators used data from two of NASA's orbiting Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, to study HD 209458b, a hot, gaseous giant planet bigger than Jupiter that orbits a sun-like star about 150 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. The new finding follows their breakthrough discovery in December 2008 of carbon dioxide around another hot, Jupiter-size planet, HD 189733b. Earlier Hubble and Spitzer observations of that planet had also revealed water vapor and methane.

Full story...

Source: Physorg.com
Image credit: Physorg.com

Largest Ring Around Saturn Discovered by Spitzer

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:53:00 +0000

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.

The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

Full Story...

Source: JPL/NASA News Release
Image credit: JPL/NASA

Hell planet where rock falls as rain found

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:33:00 +0000

An artist's impression of COROT-7b, where pebbles fall as rain

COROT-7b, an alien planet where a rain of pebbles falls from clouds of rock vapour into lakes of molten lava, has been found by astronomers. Computer models of COROT-7b, a planet orbiting an orange dwarf star in the constellation Monoceros, 490 light years away, suggest that the world has a surface temperature hot enough to boil rock.

The research, by scientists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, conjures up a vision of hell. COROT-7b, a rocky planet around twice the size of the Earth but of similar density, is only 1.6 million miles from its star: 23 times closer than the innermost planet in our solar system, Mercury, is to the Sun.

This proximity means that the planet is gravitationally locked, like the Moon to the Earth, so that one side of the planet always faces the star.So while its far side is in perpetual freezing darkness - around 50 degrees above absolute zero - its near side is a balmy 2,800C.

While scientists are not sure of the exact chemical makeup of the planet, the sheer temperatures mean that whatever it is, the rocky ground will boil, forming a mineral atmosphere. And when cold fronts move in, small pebbles will condense and form rain and hail, just like water on Earth.

COROT-7b was discovered by the European Space Agency space telescope COROT in February, but the Washington University researchers were the first to model its atmosphere.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Image credit: EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY

NASA Spacecraft Sees Ice on Mars Exposed by Meteor Impacts

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:24:00 +0000

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from approximately half a meter to 2.5 meters (1.5 feet to 8 feet). The craters did not exist in earlier images of the same sites. Some of the craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere. One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it is water-ice.

The finds indicate water-ice occurs beneath Mars' surface halfway between the north pole and the equator, a lower latitude than expected in the Martian climate.

Read News Release here
Source: NASA's News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL

It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:38:00 +0000

This Mini-RF image from NASA's powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows radar imagery of the lunar south pole, a potential reservoir for hidden water ice, in new images released Sept. 17, 2009.

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.

Full story...
Source: Space.com
Image credit: NASA/APL/LPI/Space.com

NASA's Spitzer Spots Clump of Swirling Planetary Material

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:28:00 +0000

This artist's conception shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet-forming disk.

Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.

Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust. Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. To the astronomers' surprise, the light varied in unexpected ways, and in as little time as one week. Planets take millions of years to form, so it's rare to see anything change on time scales we humans can perceive.

One possible explanation is that a close companion to the star -- either a star or a developing planet -- could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star.

Full story...
Source: NASA/JPL News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New Views of Our Milky Way Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:55:00 +0000

New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk.

The close-up views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer. Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over 29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky Way's center.

The vista reveals an area of the sky spanning from the constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Scorpius. Running through the image is the dusty track of the Milky Way's disk - the dense Frisbee shape that contains the spiral arms of the galaxy. Colorful nebulae - including the pink cloud of the Lagoon Nebula (also known as Messier 8) - where furious star formation is occurring - dot the scene.

Source: Yahoo News!
Image credit: REUTERS/Stephane Guisard/ESO/Handout

Scientists Complete First Geological Global Map Of Jupiter's Satellite Ganymede

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 04:08:00 +0000

Scientists have assembled the first global geological map of the Solar System's largest moon – and in doing so have gathered new evidence into the formation of the large, icy satellite.

Wes Patterson, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, led a seven-year effort to craft a detailed map of geological features on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. Patterson and a half-dozen scientists from several institutions compiled the global map – only the third ever completed of a moon, after Earth's moon and Jupiter's cratered satellite Callisto – using images from NASA's historic Voyager and Galileo missions.

Full story...
Image credit: Europlanet Media Centre

First great snapshots from new vision of Hubble space telescope

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:37:00 +0000

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life. The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments. NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

More new Hubble images...

Source: NASA press release
Images credit: NASA JPL

Newfound Moon May Be Source of Outer Saturn Ring

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:38:00 +0000

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc. Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring.

The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular. Images can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

Full story...

Image credit: JPL/NASA

Shadow of Saturn's moons

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 07:46:00 +0000

The shadow of the moon Janus dwarfs the shadow of Daphnis on Saturn's A ring in this image taken as the planet approached its August 2009 equinox.

Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) orbits in the A ring's Keeler Gap and, along with the moon's attending edge waves, can be seen casting a short shadow in the top left quadrant of the image. Equinox has exposed shadows cast by these edge waves, or vertical structures of ring material created by Daphnis' gravity.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is not pictured here, but the moon's shadow stretches across the A ring from the center of the image to near the Encke Gap on the left of the image. The Cassini Division appears bright on the right of the image.

The novel illumination geometry created around the time of Saturn's August 2009 equinox allows out-of-plane structures and moons orbiting in or near the plane of Saturn's equatorial rings to cast shadows onto the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. To learn more about this special time and to see movies of moons' shadows moving across the rings, see Moon Shadow in Motion and Weaving a Shadow.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 11, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 491,000 kilometers (305,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 26 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel.

Image credit: JPL NASA

Newfound Planet Might Be Near Death

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:52:00 +0000

This artist's impression depicts an exoplanet similar to the newly discovered WASP-18b. As seen from the planet, the host star spans an angle of more than 30 degree and hovers menacingly at a fixed position in the sky.

A newly discovered planet that whips around its star in less than a day may have been found mere cosmic moments before its demise.

The planet, WASP-18b, is one of the "hot Jupiter" class of planets that are huge in size (10 times the mass of Jupiter in this case), but orbit very close to their stars. Their very existence was surprising to astronomers when the first of them were found a few years back. Now they've become common discoveries.

But this scorched, gaseous world is only one of two known exoplanets that orbits its star in less than one Earth day (0.94 days to be exact). Coupled with its hefty mass, this leads to strong gravitational tugs between the planet and its star, WASP-18. (WASP stands for the Wide Angle Search for Planets, run by several universities in Britain.)

Full story...
Image credit: C. CARREAU/ESA/Nature
News source: livescience.com

Amateur Captures Solar Eclipse on Jovian Moons

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:02:00 +0000

On August 16th, Philippine astrophotographer Christopher Go used a modern 11-inch Celestron telescope to photograph Io casting its shadow on Ganymede. "I captured this rare event through a hole in the clouds," says Go. "It was a lucky clearing!"

In the movie, Io and Ganymede reveal themselves as fully-formed worlds with surface markings and a spherical shape. Io's circular shadow cuts a dark swath across Ganymede, transforming that giant moon (it is larger than Mercury) into a succession of crescents rarely seen by observers. Indeed, as far as we know, no telescope on Earth or space has ever photographed one of Jupiter's moons casting its circular shadow so clearly across another.

Source: Spaceweather.com

NASA Researchers Make First Discovery of Life's Building Block in Comet

noreply@blogger.com (kinzi) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:49:00 +0000

NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

Elsila is the lead author of a paper on this research accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The research will be presented during the meeting of the American Chemical Society at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington, DC, August 16.

Full Story...
Image credit: NASA