Clipmarks | pokkets's 'astronomy' clips

Galaxy's second brightest star found

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:31:58 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Second to Eta Carina. If you've ever seen pictures of that you'd know second brightest isn't too bad.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Larry O'Hanlon

If you can't be the brightest star out of 100 billion, second brightest isn't bad - especially when you're one of the most dangerous.

That's just what astronomers have found, hidden in a flowery dust cloud near the centre of the Milky Way, according to their paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Named the 'Peony Nebula' star, it has been calculated to be as bright as 3.2 million suns. That's approaching the supremacy of the brightest known star in the galaxy, Eta Carina, which blazes at 4.7 million times our sun's light output.

The newfound super-bright star also takes on the mantle of perhaps being the second-most massive star in the galaxy, starting its life at more than 1000 times the mass of our sun. That's because stellar mass and brightness rise in tandem.

super-giant stars are very rare in the universe today. What's more, they live only a fraction as long as smaller stars - just a billion years compared to six billion or more.

World's nine largest science projects

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:40:08 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Interesting and simply put...

Clip Source: www.discoverychannel.ca

The world's nine largest science projects

1. Large Hadron collider at CERN

world's largest science project

was unveiled to unearth the so-called "God particle"

2. Next-stop, cold fusion?: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

built in southern France and promises to deliver the world's first sustained fusion reactions;

3. The finished International Space Station, circa 2011

the International Space Station will be the largest multinational engineering project of all time.

4. A 3,000-foot-tall "Solar tower" in the Australian outback

Dubbed the "Solar Mission Project", this scientific feat takes solar energy to new heights.

5. The largest-scale climate-change simulator on Earth

using the idle computer time of thousands of volunteers to crunch climate-change data.

6. James Webb Space Telescope

will launch into an ultra-high orbit 1.5 million km from Earth (compare that to the 500 km Hubble

7. The Svalbard "Doomsday" Seed Vault

8. Space elevator

ANTARES

Honorable mention

Tags: science, space exploration, nuclear physics, fission, fusion, solar power, astronomy, telescope

Dozens of 'Super Earths' Found

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:25:21 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: The recent batch of exoplanets were all spotted with the High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a 3.6-meter telescope and spectograph perched atop La Scilla mountain at the southern edge of Chile's Atacama Desert.

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

June 16, 2008 -- European astronomers on Monday said they had located dozens of giant planets in three distant solar systems.

The discovery suggests that at least one third of stars similar to our own sun harbor such planets, multiplying previous estimates by five.

A trio of these 'super-Earths' -- so-called because they are several times the mass of our own planet -- were detected orbiting a star known as HD 40307 some 42 light-years away.

"Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?" asked astronomer Michel Mayor of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory. "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress," he said in a statement.

The first planet outside our solar system was detected in 1995, and less than 280 of these exoplanets had been found before today's findings, unveiled at an astronomy conference in Nantes, France.

But a new generation of powerful instruments is almost certain to expand the list rapidly, say scientists.

Hubble Deep Field-The Most Important Image Ever Taken

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:42:44 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Astronomy is full of big numbers, that are way beyond what our brains are designed to imagine. This video, dedicated to Carl Sagan, uses the Hubble Deep Field image, to show why it's so hard to get the universe into perspective.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Found ! Missing matter in finger of gas

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:08:11 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

An orbital x-ray telescope has found a chunk of matter in the universe whose existence had long been theorised but evidence for which had been lacking, researchers say.

The two clusters of galaxies Abell 222 and Abell 223 are connected by a filament of so-called warm-hot intergalactic medium, gas that could be part of the universe's missing baryonic matter

The discovery made by European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope is part of so-called baryonic matter, which makes up less than 5% of the cosmos

The Dutch and German research is published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters

Most of the universe consists of matter and energy of an unknown nature, which astrophysicists call 'dark' and that's believed to be distributed in a web-like structure

Dark energy

accounts for some 72% the total, and dark matter, heavy particles still waiting to be discovered, accounts for around 23%

That leaves just 5% to comprise normal, or baryonic, matter

the category for

protons

neutrons

and electrons

Missing Matter Spotted by European Probe

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:06:28 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

An orbital X-ray telescope has found a chunk of matter whose existence had long been theorized, but evidence for which had been lacking, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday.

Twin Galaxy Clusters

The discovery made by ESA's XMM-Newton telescope is part of so-called baryonic matter, which comprises less than five percent of the cosmos.

Most of the universe consists of matter and energy of an unknown nature, which astrophysicists call "dark matter." It is believed to be distributed in a web-like structure.

The new claim is based on the observation of a pair of distant galaxy clusters, called Abell 222 and Abell 223, located 2.3 billion light-years from Earth.

Tags: science, astronomy, discovery

Black hole captured mid belch

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:36:59 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Julie Steenhuysen

Scientists say they have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets form.

Twisted magnetic fields propel and shape this jet of particles from a supermassive black hole

Supermassive black holes form the core of many galaxies and astronomers have long believed they are responsible for ejecting jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

But just how they do it has remained a mystery.

researchers led by Professor Alan Marscher of Boston University

Marscher's team aimed the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 radio telescopes, at the galaxy BL Lacertae

What they saw was a close up of this charged material winding in corkscrew fashion out of the supermassive black hole, behaving just as astronomers have predicted

We have gotten the clearest look yet at the innermost portion of the jet, where the particles actually are accelerated

Found ! 'Missing link' brown dwarf

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:28:57 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Scientists have often wondered how big a gas cloud had to be, before the collapse due to it's own gravity would turn it from a large planet into a small star. They have found gas giants, and brown dwarfs either side, but this is the closest to the line. There will probably be a few 'missing links', because beside the mass, the flash point could depend on what the clouds are made of.
Scientists always love it when they find something that needs a new category.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Scientists have located the coldest brown dwarf star ever observed, an important 'missing link' among these half-planet, half-star celestial bodies, a new study shows.

There are many types of brown dwarf, an example of which is seen surrounded by a swirling disc of planet-building dust. But this latest discovery is in a class of its own

So-called 'L dwarfs' have temperatures of 1200-2000°C, and are enveloped in clouds of dust and aerosols in their high atmosphere.

'T dwarfs' are cooler, and their atmosphere's contain methane

The brown dwarf, poetically named CFBDS J005910.83-011401.3, is sizzling hot by Earth standards, with a surface temperature of some 350°C.

French and Canadian astronomers made the discovery using two powerful telescopes in Hawaii and one in Chile, according to the study, to be published this month in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

it is far colder than any brown dwarf seen to date,

It constitutes a kind of missing link between small stars and giant planets

Thye Largest Star in the Universe ~ Visualized

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:19:16 GMT

clipped by: Tylast
clipper's remarks: Just click the picture & watch! Just have a couple min of patience to watch the pics.

Clip Source: www.techdo.com

But be patient because it’s worth the wait.

Here on planet Earth, we're completely oblivious to the grand scale of things in the universe. Much the way we perceive dust particles as being insignifcant, universally speaking we are not much more than this. The scale of things is mind blowing!

So how small are we really? Click to open an awesome image that explains visually how massive some celestial objects really are. The Largest Known Star might take a bit to load since it’s an animated gif.

The last star is called VY Canis Majoris, a hypergiant star located 5,000 light years from earth and is considered to be the largest star discovered in the universe.

Tags: space, astronomy

The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:12:51 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.

The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.

By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

LAW OF THE LEVER On triremes, the end oarsmen were the most effective.

“Think of the oar as a lever,” Prof. Mark Schiefsky of the Harvard classics department said. “Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight.”

The longer the lever arm on the rower’s side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.

This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise “Mechanical Problems,” from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes’ “On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures,” which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.

EARTHMOVER Archimedes said he could move the Earth if given a place to stand.

Dr. Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin as his day job and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun.

Tags: physics, ancient mechanics, science, classics, research, archimedes project

Plot of the Innermost Solar System, March 29, 2008

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:31 GMT

clipped by: mariana3
clipper's remarks: The plot below shows the current location of the major planets (Mercury through Mars) and the minor planets that are in the innermost region of the solar system.

Just in case you thought it's lonely out there in the space

Clip Source: cfa-www.harvard.edu

Tags: optional. separate by commas., astronomy, earth, geology, science, solarsystem

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Opportunity Finds More Evidence of Ancient Water - sol 1463-1470, March 5-13, 20

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:23:49 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

Opportunity has completed scientific studies of the undisturbed surface of a rock target informally named "Dorsal" in the "Gilbert" rock layer inside "Victoria Crater." Dorsal is a protruding fin of rock created by minerals deposited in cracks that remained in place long after the original rock eroded away because they were more resistant to weathering.

Data collected with the Mössbauer and alpha-particle X-ray spectrometers show that the fins in Gilbert contain large quantities of the mineral hematite. This iron-bearing mineral is also abundant in the frequently occurring, round concretions known as "blueberries" that are believed to have formed in water. Scientists have been looking for such pristine fins ever since Opportunity first noticed them back in "Eagle Crater," where the rover landed more than four years ago.

Tags: astronomy, mars, geology, science, solarsystem

Sun's having a party! - Watch out for the Auroras!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:57:47 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: www.spaceweather.com

SPACE WEATHER
NOAA Forecasts

Updated at: 2008 Mar 27 2203 UTC

FLARE	0-24 hr	24-48 hr
CLASS M	15 %	15 %
CLASS X	01 %	01 %

Geomagnetic Storms:
Probabilities for significant disturbances in Earth's magnetic field are given for three activity levels: active, minor storm, severe storm

Updated at: 2008 Mar 27 2203 UTC

Mid-latitudes

	0-24 hr	24-48 hr
ACTIVE	25 %	15 %
MINOR	10 %	05 %
SEVERE	05 %	01 %

High latitudes

	0-24 hr	24-48 hr
ACTIVE	30 %	20 %
MINOR	15 %	10 %
SEVERE	10 %	05 %

Tags: optional. separate by commas., astronomy, earth, science

Aurora Borealis in Marquette, Michigan

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:56:15 GMT

clipped by: mariana3
clipper's remarks: Spaceweather says:

"...Last night a gust of solar wind sent auroras rippling down from Canada into the United States. Shawn Malone sends this picture from Marquette, Michigan...
"There was a nice burst of aurora activity right after sunset," says Malone who captured the scene using his Canon 5D. "The thawing snowbanks in the foreground were not the most scenic, but I had to act quickly to catch the auroras."
The solar wind continues to blow and more geomagnetic storms are possible tonight. Northern (and not-so-northern) sky watchers should be alert for auroras."

Clip Source: www.spaceweather.com

Tags: optional. separate by commas., astronomy, earth, science

13.73 Billion Years - The Most Accurate Measurement of the Age of the Universe Yet

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:30:16 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: www.universetoday.com

NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has taken the best measurement of the age of the Universe to date. According to highly accurate observations of microwave radiation observed all over the cosmos, WMAP scientists now have the best estimate yet on the age of the Universe: 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years (that's an error margin of only 0.87%… not bad really…).

This microwave background radiation originates from a very early universe, just 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the ambient temperature of the universe was about 3,000 K. At this temperature, neutral hydrogen atoms were possible, scattering photons. It is these photons WMAP observes today, only much cooler at 2.7 Kelvin

These measurements refine our understanding about the structure of our universe around the time of the Big Bang and also help us understand the nature of the period of "inflation", in the very beginning of the expansion of the Universe.

Tags: optional. separate by commas., astronomy, science