Space

Next Tuesday Nov. 8th at midnight GMT is a big day (or night) for space enthusiasts. The famous asteroid Yu55 takes its walk down the runway, as depicted here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/2005_YU55_approach_movie.gif. It will reach a visual brightness of 11th magnitude and should be easily visible. Using the Goldstone radar operating in a relatively new "chirp" mode could produce a shape model reconstruction with a resolution of as fine as 4 meters.Still trying to get the hang of this. Sorry about the premature withdrawal (we are working on new drugs for that). To continue with the two…

 Black holes are invisible but the forces they unleash cause some of the brightest phenomena in the Universe; quasars. The gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy and the Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to observe a quasar accretion disk, the brightly glowing disk of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy’s central black hole, which heat up and emit extremely bright radiation as they 'enter'. Result: Researchers were able to directly measure the disk’s size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc; a level of precision…

In a Nature paper published Oct. 26 by Sicardy et al from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, Pluto was promoted to the ninth largest body orbiting the Sun. Its evil dwarf doppelganger Eris, though very similar in size, was found to be slightly smaller and was therefore relegated back to the Kuiper Belt league. In a press conference, Pluto was accompanied by Uranus and Neptune. "I am glad the controversy has been put to rest", he noted. "But I still would like to be classified as a planet. We want to take on the mighty triumverate of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn."

As you circle Earth from your polar-orbiting perch 512 miles above, may your daily output of 4 terabytes of data enable the Science 2.0 community to help educate the masses about climate change. Godspeed.

 A 400 meter, C-type asteroid will pass within 0.85 lunar distances from the Earth on November 8, 2011.  The attached animated illustration shows the Earth and moon flyby geometry for November 8th and 9th when the object will reach a visual brightness of 11th magnitude and should be easily visible to observers in the northern and southern hemispheres. The closest approach to Earth and the Moon will be respectively 0.00217 AU and 0.00160 AU on 2011 November 8 at 23:28 and November 9 at 07:13 UT. Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 was discovered December 28, 2005 by Robert McMillan…

In November 2010, the distant dwarf planet Eris passed in front of a faint background star, an event called an occultation. Occultations provide the most accurate, and often the only, way to measure the shape and size of a distant Solar System body like Eris. Eris was identified as a large object in the outer Solar System in 2005. Its discovery was one of the factors that led to the creation of a new class of objects called dwarf planets by the IAU and the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet in 2006. Eris is currently three times further from the Sun than Pluto. The candidate star…

Astronomers are reporting that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe - which mean they can be made naturally by stars. Researchers write in Nature that an organic substance commonly found throughout the Universe contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components, compounds so complex that their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum.  Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms but this new discovery suggests that complex…

A new photo of a nearby star and its orbiting companion shows the planet has a temperature like a hot summer day in Arizona. Penn State Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kevin Luhman classifies this object as a 'brown dwarf,' an object that formed just like a star out of a massive cloud of dust and gas. But the mass that a brown dwarf accumulates is not enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions in its core, resulting in a failed star that is very cool. In the case of the new brown dwarf, the scientists have gaged the temperature of its surface to be between 80 and 160 degrees…

The Draconids (also called Giacobinids) are a meteor shower associated to comet Giacobini-Zinner (see below for a 100-year-old picture of the comet). While most years this shower passes unnoticed to all but few professionals and experts amateurs, yielding only very few meteors in the nights between October 6th and 10th, every once in a while the Draconids do put up a real show, producing hundreds, or even thousands of meteor streaks per hour in clear skies. This year is the right one: the Earth will pass through filaments of debris that the comet left in its passages of 1887-1926. According…

The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for astronomers. A lack of light pollution and anti-science hippies filing lawsuits has made Chile a new favorite spot for space science and the first image we got after ALMA opened its eyes is darn spectacular.  What we can't see with visible-light or infrared telescopes, ALMA can see just fine.  And the image below is with only 12 of its final 66 radio antennas.  It's fitting that the…