Space
How many ways can you describe an object?
If you look at an apple, you might estimate its weight, shape and color but beyond that it is difficult. We are unable to describe the chemical composition of its flesh.
Something similar also applies to astronomical objects, like neutron stars. We might describe their size, or as the thing in which Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, was forged, but describing neutron stars at the nuclear physics level is extremely complex, and several complicated equations of state have been proposed. However, to date there is no agreement as to which is the correct (or the…
An international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-meter Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, to make a surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.
The La Silla Observatory is located at the outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile and at an altitude of 2400 metres. Like other observatories in this geographical area, La Silla is located far from sources of light pollution and, like…
A research team has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of tau Boo b, a "hot Jupiter" planet outside our solar system.
The team applied a Doppler technique to the infrared to directly detect tau Boo b and demonstrate the presence of water in its atmosphere. Tau Boo b orbits the nearby star tau Boötis, 51 light years away. Unlike our Jupiter, which is fairly cold and has an orbital period of about 12 years, the hot Jupiter tau Boo b orbits its star every 3.3 days and is heated to extreme temperatures by its proximity to the star. Under these conditions, water will exist as a high…
2 million images collected by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, which went into space in 2003, have been stitched together to create a 360 degree portrait of the Milky Way.
We'd show it here, except you would actually need a billboard as big as the Rose Bowl Stadium to view it," said Robert Hurt, an imaging specialist at NASA's Spitzer Space Science Center in Pasadena. "Instead, we've created a digital viewer that anyone, even astronomers, can use."
Our galaxy is a flat spiral disk; our solar system sits in the outer one-third of the Milky Way, in one of its spiral arms. When we look…
The world's leading particle collider experiments, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have joined forces. Scientists from the four experiments involved — ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero — announced their joint findings on the mass of the top quark today at the Rencontres de Moriond international physics conference in Italy.
They pooled their data analysis power to arrive at a new world's best value for the mass of the top quark of 173.34 plus/minus 0.76 GeV/c2.
Experiments at the LHC and the Tevatron are the only ones that have ever seen top quarks —the heaviest…
Scientists have discovered a new, persistent structure in one of two radiation belts surrounding Earth - high-energy electrons in the inner Van Allen radiation belt display a persistent pattern that resembles slanted zebra stripes.
Surprisingly, this structure made of high-energy electrons is produced by the slow rotation of Earth, previously considered incapable of affecting the motion of radiation belt particles, which have velocities approaching the speed of light.
Scientists had previously believed that increased solar wind activity was the primary force behind any structures in our…
New evidence gathered by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury solves an apparent enigma about Mercury's evolution.
The data indicate the tiny planet closest to the sun, only slightly larger than earth's moon, has shrunk up to 7 kilometers in radius over the past 4 billion years, much more than earlier estimates. Older images of surface features indicated that, despite cooling over its lifetime, the rocky planet had barely shrunk at all. But modeling of the planet's formation and aging could not explain that finding.
Paul K. Byrne and Christian Klimczak at the Carnegie Institution of…
Did our two Viking landers find life on Mars in 1976? Astonishingly, thirty seven years later, we still haven't sent anything to Mars able to answer this question for sure. None of our spacecraft since Viking would be able to spot life which we now know exists in the driest deserts on Earth, and only one of the experiments on Viking had this capability. There are hypotheses about what they found, but no definite proof.
A few years back, to everyone's complete surprise, Joseph Miller, specialist in rhythms of life, spotted smooth daily cycles in the data from 1976, strongly…
Hank |
BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, is an experiment that used almost 100 detectors to scan the sky at microwave frequencies ( 100 GHz and 150 GHz, angular resolutions of 1.0° and 0.7°) in order to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
From their location (near competing experiments) at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station they have been working toward what sounds like a simple goal - to try and get firm evidence of the cosmic microwave background at the moment after the Big Bang. The hypothesis of an inflationary epoch - …
There's a cosmic war happening between
highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars in the Orion Nebula
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The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) study the often deadly relationship between highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars…