Space and Space Travel News

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Black hole mystery solved by magnetic star discovery
By Howard Falcon-Lang, 18 August 2010


Image..Image.Black hole mystery solved


The discovery of a rare magnetic star - or magnetar - is challenging theories about the origin of black holes. Magnetars are a special type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field. They are formed by gravitational collapse after the original, or progenitor star, dies and forms a catastrophic supernova.

For this newly discovered magnetar, astronomers calculated that the mass of the progenitor must have been at least 40 times greater than that of our Sun. Collapsing stars of this size should form a black hole. The fact that this one resulted in a neutron star, challenges established theory.

The study, led by Dr Ben Ritchie of the Open University, is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The new magnetar was found in an extraordinary star cluster known as Westerlund 1, located 16,000 light years away in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar). This region contains numerous massive stars. Dr Ritchie remarked that if the Earth was "located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon". (more)
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Yahoo News (D)

NASA released historic space images on Flickr
By Yahoo News, 31 August 2010


Image.> Flickr.com/photos/nasacommons


Image.Flickr: Dr. Robert Goddard at Clark University
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NASA Images

Mars makes closest approach to Earth


Image
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BBC News

Hurricane Igor seen strengthening from space
By BBc News, 15 September 2010


Image.Image.Video: Hurricane Igor as seen from the ISS in Space


Hurricane Igor has been pictured from the International Space Station as it passed over the northeast coast of South America. The Category 4 storm has 150mph winds and is heading towards Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The hurricane was filmed from the space station on Monday and again on Tuesday as the storm gathered strength. Footage and commentary provided by Nasa.
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Read more: Hurricane Igor gathers strengt
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Image.>>

Could 'Goldilocks' planet be just right for life?
By Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer – Sep 29, 2010


Image.Space: Mars moon revelation

An artist rendering by Lynette Cook, National Science Foundation, shows the new planet on the right. More photos » > Video: Scientists report most earth-like planet ever


WASHINGTON – Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right. Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere. It's just right. Just like Earth. "This really is the first Goldilocks planet," said co-discoverer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The new planet sits smack in the middle of what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, unlike any of the nearly 500 other planets astronomers have found outside our solar system. And it is in our galactic neighborhood, suggesting that plenty of Earth-like planets circle other stars. Finding a planet that could potentially support life is a major step toward answering the timeless question: Are we alone? Scientists have jumped the gun before on proclaiming that planets outside our solar system were habitable only to have them turn out to be not quite so conducive to life. But this one is so clearly in the right zone that five outside astronomers told The Associated Press it seems to be the real thing.

"This is the first one I'm truly excited about," said Penn State University's Jim Kasting. He said this planet is a "pretty prime candidate" for harboring life. Life on other planets doesn't mean E.T. Even a simple single-cell bacteria or the equivalent of shower mold would shake perceptions about the uniqueness of life on Earth. But there are still many unanswered questions about this strange planet. It is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star — 14 million miles away versus 93 million. It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days. And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark.

Temperatures can be as hot as 160 degrees or as frigid as 25 degrees below zero, but in between — in the land of constant sunrise — it would be "shirt-sleeve weather," said co-discoverer Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz. It's unknown whether water actually exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. But because conditions are ideal for liquid water, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes "that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent."

The astronomers' findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal and were announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday. The planet circles a star called Gliese 581. It's about 120 trillion miles away, so it would take several generations for a spaceship to get there. It may seem like a long distance, but in the scheme of the vast universe, this planet is "like right in our face, right next door to us," Vogt said in an interview. That close proximity and the way it was found so early in astronomers' search for habitable planets hints to scientists that planets like Earth are probably not that rare. Vogt and Butler ran some calculations, with giant fudge factors built in, and figured that as much as one out of five to 10 stars in the universe have planets that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zone.

With an estimated 200 billion stars in the universe, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said. However, Ohio State University's Scott Gaudi cautioned that is too speculative about how common these planets are. Vogt and Butler used ground-based telescopes to track the star's precise movements over 11 years and watch for wobbles that indicate planets are circling it. The newly discovered planet is actually the sixth found circling Gliese 581. Two looked promising for habitability for a while, another turned out to be too hot and the fifth is likely too cold. This sixth one bracketed right in the sweet spot in between, Vogt said.

With the star designated "a," its sixth planet is called Gliese 581g. "It's not a very interesting name and it's a beautiful planet," Vogt said. Unofficially, he's named it after his wife: "I call it Zarmina's World." The star Gliese 581 is a dwarf, about one-third the strength of our sun. Because of that, it can't be seen without a telescope from Earth, although it is in the Libra constellation, Vogt said. But if you were standing on this new planet, you could easily see our sun, Butler said. The low-energy dwarf star will live on for billions of years, much longer than our sun, he said. And that just increases the likelihood of life developing on the planet, the discoverers said. "It's pretty hard to stop life once you give it the right conditions," Vogt said.
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Online:

Image.Newly Discovered Planet May Be First Truly Habitable Exoplanet


The U.S. National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/fea ... ature.html
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Image.Photos: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010

Earth & space highly commended: Solstice Full Moon Rising at Sounion by Anthony Ayiomamitis. The rising full moon against the Temple of Poseidon (450-440 BC) in southern Greece on 26 June 2010. Captured in a single exposure, it took the photographer fifteen months to work out the exact time and distance at which to get the shot. The light balance required lasts for less than five minutes. Picture: Anthony Ayiomamitis


Image.Telegraph: Space shuttle Discovery's final mission delayed

People watch the space shuttle Discovery move to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Photo: AP
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Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut aboard the space station, uses Twitter to send pictures back to Earth

Image.Photos

The Space Station with the Earth's horizon behind it. Picture tweeted by Jose Hernandez, who flew on the Shuttle Discovery mission STS-128. Picture: http://twitpic.com/photos/Astro_Jose


Image.Photos

Millions of people use Twitpic to tweet photos to their Twitter followers. But few of these pictures are as spectacular as those uploaded to the site by Douglas H. Wheelock, who goes by the name @Astro_Wheels on Twitter. But then he has an almost unique vantage point - he is an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. Every couple of days, he tweets pictures to his followers. We present some of them here, but to see more, simply follow @Astro_Wheels on Twitter. He says: "Caught this image of the eye of the storm as we flew over Hurricane Earl" - Picture: @Astro_Wheels (Douglas H. Wheelock) / NASA
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.
Image.Photos

The Isles of Greece during a clear night pass over Europe. Athens shining brightly along the Mediterranean Sea
Picture: @Astro_Wheels (Douglas H. Wheelock) / NASA


Image

Astro Wheels says: "Of all the places on our glorious planet, few rival the brilliant colours of The Bahamas. Here is a view of our Progress-37 re-supply spacecraft, with the islands of The Bahamas as a backdrop" Picture: @Astro_Wheels (Douglas H. Wheelock) / NASA
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Space.gs

Planck spacecraft helps explain formation of the Universe.
European Space Agency, 07/05/10

ESA's Planck mission has delivered its first all-sky image. It not only provides new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang. "This is the moment that Planck was conceived for," says ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood. "We're not giving the answer. We are opening the door to an Eldorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our Universe came to be and how it works now.

The image itself and its remarkable quality is a tribute to the engineers who built and have operated Planck. Now the scientific harvest must begin." From the closest portions of the Milky Way to the furthest reaches of space and time, the new all-sky Planck image is an extraordinary treasure chest of new data for astronomers.


Image.high res.

- The microwave sky as seen by Planck. This multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky has been composed using data from Planck covering the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. The mottled structure of the CMBR, with its tiny temperature fluctuations reflecting the primordial density variations from which today's cosmic structure originated, is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map. The central band is the plane of our Galaxy. A large portion of the image is dominated by the diffuse emission from its gas and dust. The image was derived from data collected by Planck during its first all-sky survey and comes from observations taken between August 2009 and June 2010. This image is a low-resolution version of the full data set. To the right of the main image, below the plane of the Galaxy, is a large cloud of gas in our Galaxy. The obvious arc of light surrounding it is Barnard's Loop - the expanding bubble of an exploded star. Planck has seen whole other galaxies. The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 2.2 million light-years from Earth, appears as a sliver of microwave light, released by the coldest dust in its giant body. Other, more distant, galaxies with supermassive black holes appear as single points of microwaves dotting the image. Planck was built for ESA by the Prime Contractor Thales Alenia Space (Cannes, France) with contributions from space industry drawn from ESA's 18 Member States. Because of differing accounting procedures in the many bodies contributing, precise costings are impossible to give. However, the overall cost to ESA and its Member State institutions as well as cooperating agencies world- wide (including NASA and Canadian Space Agency) in round figures is 600 million euros. Credits: ESA/LFI and HFI Consortia


The main disc of our Galaxy runs across the centre of the image. Immediately striking are the streamers of cold dust reaching above and below the Milky Way. This galactic web is where new stars are being formed, and Planck has found many locations where individual stars are edging toward birth or just beginning their cycle of development. Less spectacular but perhaps more intriguing is the mottled backdrop at the top and bottom. This is the 'cosmic microwave background radiation' (CMBR). It is the oldest light in the Universe, the remains of the fireball out of which our Universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

While the Milky Way shows us what the local Universe looks like now, those microwaves show us what the Universe looked like close to its time of creation, before there were stars or galaxies. Here we come to the heart of Planck's mission to decode what happened in that primordial Universe from the pattern of the mottled backdrop. The microwave pattern is the cosmic blueprint from which today's clusters and superclusters of galaxies were built. The different colours represent minute differences in the temperature and density of matter across the sky. Somehow these small irregularities evolved into denser regions that became the galaxies of today.

The CMBR covers the entire sky but most of it is hidden in this image by the Milky Way's emission, which must be digitally removed from the final data in order to see the microwave background in its entirety. When this work is completed, Planck will show us the most precise picture of the microwave background ever obtained. The big question will be whether the data will reveal the cosmic signature of the primordial period called inflation. This era is postulated to have taken place just after the Big Bang and resulted in the Universe expanding enormously in size over an extremely short period. Planck continues to map the Universe. By the end of its mission in 2012, it will have completed four all-sky scans. The first full data release of the CMBR is planned for 2012. Before then, the catalogue containing individual objects in our Galaxy and whole distant galaxies will be released in January 2011. "This image is just a glimpse of what Planck will ultimately see," says Jan Tauber, ESA's Planck Project Scientist.


Image,high res.

This multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky has been composed using data from Planck covering the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. The mottled structure of the CMBR, with its tiny temperature fluctuations reflecting the primordial density variations from which today's cosmic structure originated, is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map. The central band is the plane of our Galaxy. A large portion of the image is dominated by the diffuse emission from its gas and dust. The image was derived from data collected by Planck during its first all-sky survey, and comes from about 12 months of observations. To the right of the main image, below the plane of the Galaxy, is a large cloud of gas in our Galaxy. The obvious arc of light surrounding it is Barnard's Loop - the expanding bubble of an exploded star. Planck has seen whole other galaxies. The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 2.2 million light-years from Earth, appears as a sliver of microwave light, released by the coldest dust in its giant body. Other, more distant, galaxies with supermassive black holes appear as single points of microwaves dotting the image. Derived from observations taken between August 2009 and June 2010, this image is a low-resolution version of the full data. Credits: ESA/LFI and HFI Consortia

- courtesy of European Space Agency
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BBC

Image

This Nasa image taken by the Hubble space telescope shows the effects of starlight on a cloud of gas and dust in the Pleiades star cluster.
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Image.>>

Alien Planet Discovered in Milky Way
BY Jay-ar Mendoza, Nov 19, 2010


Image


As planets go, HIP 13044B is one hell of a survivor. Astronomers say the planet—the first one originating from another galaxy ever found in the Milky Way—is part of a solar system that once belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was cannibalized by our own. The planet has already survived its elderly star's red giant phase, which left it with an unusual orbit that drew it to astronomers' attention.The intergalactic immigrant is the first concrete evidence that planets exist in other galaxies. "There's every reason to believe that planets are really quite widespread throughout the universe, not just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but also in the thousands of millions of others there are," one astronomer tells. "This is the first time we've got hard evidence of that." Researchers say the find provides clues about the likely fate of our own solar system.
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BBC

Cosmos may show echoes of events before Big Bang
By Jason Palmer, 27 November 2010


Image

- The variation in the background shifts sharply within the rings


Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted. Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events. The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low. The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.


Image.NASA's Wilinson Probe

- Launched to obtain full-sky images of 13 billion+ year old temperature fluctuations in CMB. Temperature differences correspond to "seeds" that grew to become stars and galaxies. Data help answer questions about age and geometry of Universe.


The ideas within it support a theory developed by Professor Penrose - knighted in 1994 for his services to science - that upends the widely-held "inflationary theory". That theory holds that the Universe was shaped by an unthinkably large and fast expansion from a single point. Much of high-energy physics research aims to elucidate how the laws of nature evolved during the fleeting first instants of the Universe's being. "I was never in favour of it, even from the start," said Professor Penrose. "But if you're not accepting inflation, you've got to have something else which does what inflation does," he explained to BBC News.


Image.BBC: Map reveals strange cosmos


"In the scheme that I'm proposing, you have an exponential expansion but it's not in our aeon - I use the term to describe [the period] from our Big Bang until the remote future. "I claim that this aeon is one of a succession of such things, where the remote future of the previous aeons somehow becomes the Big Bang of our aeon." This "conformal cyclic cosmology" (CCC) that Professor Penrose advocates allows that the laws of nature may evolve with time, but precludes the need to institute a theoretical beginning to the Universe. Continued...
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Gizmodo.com

How Would NASA Rescue An Astronaut Who Floated Away?
Sat, 11 Dec 2010


Image.Spaceref: NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 11 December 2010



What would happen if an astronaut started floating away from the International Space Station? How would NASA rescue them? Here's what they would do. It's never happened, and NASA feels confident that it never will. For one thing, astronauts generally don't float free. Outside the ISS, they're always attached to the spacecraft with a braided steel tether, which has a tensile strength of 1,100 pounds. If it's a two-person spacewalk, oftentimes the astronauts are also hooked to each other.

Should the tethers somehow fail, however, astronauts have an awesome backup plan: jetpacks! Each one wears what's called a Safer, for "Simplified Aid for Extra-vehicular activity Rescue," a backpack with built-in nitrogen-jet small joystick to propel himself back to the station. Of course, Safer is useful only if the astronaut is conscious. What if an astronaut gets bonked on the head, becomes untethered, and can't operate the jetpack? "A rescue effort could and would be undertaken by the second spacewalker and/or other members of the spacestation crew," says Michael Curie, a spokesman for NASA's space operations. He wouldn't speculate on the exact steps a rescue team would take, because they would depend on the circumstances. But he adds, "we are really happy with the tether-and-Safer approach."

Jim Oberg, a space journalist who worked at the space shuttle's mission-control center for 22 years and specialized in rendezvous procedures, weighs in on the options for rescue. The station's robotic arm, he explains, is usually not within range of where the astronauts work and moves too slowly to grab someone. The Soyuz vehicles need a full day to power up and undock. By then, the carbon dioxide filters in the astronaut's spacesuit would run out, asphyxiating him. And the ISS cannot redirect its positioning rocket quickly enough to catch up to a runaway astronaut.

In a worst-case situation, the only rescue option, according to Oberg, would be for a second astronaut to link together several tethers end-to-end, attach them to the station, and then use his Safer pack to jet over to his crewmate and haul him in. Certain conditions could make a rescue easier, he says. If an astronaut floated away more or less at a right angle from the station's orbit, orbital dynamics (which require too much math to explain here) dictate that he would float back toward the station in about an hour.
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Jackson sun: NASA prepares to launch $2.3B mission to Mars
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Image.Photos: Lunar Eclipse

The moon is seen over St. Patrick's Cathedral during a lunar eclipse, Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
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