Clipmarks | Astronomy Clips

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:17:51 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Scientists have determined the mass of the largest things that could possibly exist in our universe, and they don't appear in the Oprah studio audience.

New results have placed an upper limit on the current size of black holes - and at fifty billion suns it's pretty damn big. That's a hundred thousand tredagrams, and you'll never get the chance to use that word in relation to anything else.

While there's theoretically no upper limit on how big a black hole can be, there are hard limits on how big they could have become by now. The universe has only existed for a finite amount of time, and even the most voracious black hole can only suck in matter at a certain rate. The bigger the black hole, the bigger the gravitational field and the faster it can pull in matter - but that same huge gravitational gradient means that the same matter can release huge amounts of radiation as it falls, blasting other matter further away.

Tags: astronomy, cosmology

A Close-up of the Milky Way's Black Hole

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:01:15 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: www.universetoday.com

An international team of astronomers has obtained the closest views ever of what is believed to be a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers linked together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a virtual telescope more than 2,800 miles across that is capable of seeing details more than 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope. The target of the observations was the source known as Sagittarius A* ("A-star"), long thought to mark the position of a black hole whose mass is 4 million times that of the sun.

(...)
Read the rest of Astronomers Link Telescopes to Zoom In On Milky Way's Black Hole (498 words)

Tags: astronomy, space, galaxy, blackhole

Beautiful Alaskan Aurora

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:41:00 GMT

clipped by: mariana3
clipper's remarks: For a larger photo, go to original site and click on the image.

Clip Source: www.spaceweather.com

Last night (Sept. 2nd) in North Pole, Alaska, the sky turned green. "I didn't expect to see any Northern Lights, but there they were," says Bud Kuenzli, who opened the shutter of his Canon EOS 1D for 15 seconds and collected this photo:

In Alaska, this counts as a mild display, but it might herald a bigger show in the nights ahead. A solar wind stream is approaching Earth, due to hit late on Sept. 3rd or Sept. 4th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

Tags: astronomy, climate, aurora, sky, earth

Opportunity on the road again :)

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:20:36 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: www.spaceweather.com

Mars rover Opportunity is leaving Victoria Crater, and it's exiting the way it came in. Put on your 3D glasses and behold the new tracks beside the old:

Graphic artist Patrick Vantuyne created the anaglyph by combining left- and right-eye images from Opportunity's navigation camera.

"Making stereo images of Mars has become almost routine for me, but it's still a thrill to see something new in 3D, which is hardly visible in a single picture," says Vantuyne. As an example, he notes the clouds in the upper-right corner of the anaglyph. Gaze for a while into the sky and watch the fluff emerge: full-size image.

Tags: mars, solarsystem, astronomy, geology, science, space

Volcanic sunsets

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:18:57 GMT

clipped by: mariana3

Clip Source: www.spaceweather.com

This weekend, observers around Europe are reporting the same "volcanic sunsets" widely observed last week in North America.

"This was probably due to aerosols in the stratosphere spewed by the August 7th eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands."

Meanwhile, back in the USA, "the sky is on fire," reports Doug Zubenel of Kansas. "The colors tonight (Aug. 30th) were about as vivid as I have ever seen (photos)." One state away in Nebraska, Jerry Chab reports "the sky was white at the horizon and turned yellow, orange, red, purple, blue then finally black up high (photos). It was like a rainbow in clear skies!"

Tags: astronomy, climate, geology, volcano, sky, sunset

Random

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:34:20 GMT

clipped by: criticalsunshine
clipper's remarks: Random fact for 11.11 time

Clip Source: www.astrostyle.com

The Mayans
Our searches kept leading us to info on The Mayan Calendar. If you don't already know, the Mayans were an incredibly advanced, ancient Mexican civilization with extraordinary skills in astronomy and math. Their 26,000 year-old calendar officially ends on December 21, 2012 at (you guessed it) 11:11.

Tags: facts, random

Cosmic crash unmasks dark matter

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:56:16 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: It looks as if it is being seen through lots of little lenses. And each of these lenses represents a piece of dark matter.

Astronomers used the Chandra X-ray telescope to map ordinary matter in the merging clusters, mostly in the form of hot gas, which glows brightly in X-rays.

As the two clusters that formed MACSJ0025 merged at speeds of millions of kilometres per hour, hot gas in the two clusters collided and slowed down.

However, the dark matter kept on going, passing right through the smash-up.

The latest astronomical observations suggest that dark matter makes up some 23% of the Universe. Ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4%.

The remaining 73% is made up of another mysterious quantity; dark energy, which is responsible for speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Striking evidence has been found for the enigmatic "stuff" called dark matter which makes up 23% of the Universe, yet is invisible to our eyes.

The results come from astronomical observations of a titanic collision between two clusters of galaxies 5.7 billion light-years away.

Astronomers detected the dark matter because it separated from the normal matter during the cosmic smash-up.

The research team are to publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

They used the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes to study the object MACSJ0025.4-1222 - formed after an incredibly energetic collision between two large galaxy clusters.

Each of these large clusters contains about a quadrillion times the mass of our Sun.

A technique known as gravitational lensing was used to map the dark matter with Hubble.

If an observer looks at a distant galaxy and some dark matter lies in between, the light from that galaxy gets distorted.

Tags: science, astronomy

5 extremely cool research facilities

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:30:48 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Some more interesting stuff at site. Especially a short video on measuring gravitational waves.

Clip Source: deputy-dog.com

1. large helical device, gifu, japan

the phenomenal photo above shows superconducting coils within the large helical device in japan, a machine which holds the title of ‘largest superconducting stellarator in the world’.

2. odeillo solar furnace, odeillo, france

this brilliantly shiny oddity is the 8-storey high odeillo solar furnace in france: at present the largest on the planet.

using this method, temperatures can reach an unbelievably hot 3400°C.

3. atf fire research laboratory, maryland, usa

measuring a whopping 60ft x 60ft, this is the largest calorimetry hood on earth and is an essential part of the atf fire research laboratory.

4. ligo observatories, louisiana & washington, usa

ligo’s hanford observatory, one of 2 main facilities used by ligo to detect ‘ripples’ or gravitational waves in space-time.

5. arecibo observatory, arecibo, puerto rico

arecibo observatory in puerto rico contains the largest curved focusing dish on earth and is used for 3 main research purposes: radio astronomy

Tags: science, technology, research

Telescope spots monster galactic cluster

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:08:22 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: They theorize that the fact that it's 7.7 billion light years away (as far as they know) meant that it was before the acceleration due to dark energy made it impossible for galactic clusters that large to hold together.
It reminded me of a poem by Hughes Mearns.
'Antigonish'
As I was going up the stair,
I saw a star that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today,
I wish, that star would stay away.
(I thought I'd adjust it to cover Light years, and dark matter.)

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

A massive cluster of galaxies in deep space imaged spotted by an orbiting observatory can only be explained by the exotic phenomenon known as dark energy, say astronomers.

The huge galactic cluster, which appears as a blue cloud in this image, may help confirm the existence of dark energy

The observation was made by a team led by Georg Lamer of the Potsdam Astrophysics Institute, Germany, using the European Space Agency's (ESA) orbiting x-ray telescope XMM-Newton.

Their findings will appear in

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Intrigued by the indicators of scorching gases spewed out by x-ray sources, the team followed up by obtaining a deep exposure image of the region from a large binocular telescope in the Arizona desert.

Known by its catalogue number of 2XMM J083026+524133, the cluster's mass is about 1000 times that of our own galaxy and lies 7.7 billion light years from earth

in more recent times, massive galaxy clusters have lacked the gravitational glue to be able to form

Photo Shows Stars Born in Huge Cosmic Wombs By Jeanna Bryner

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:38:52 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: www.space.com

A glitzy new family portrait of a star-forming region supports a theory that the universe's most massive stars carve out these wispy wombs and thereby enable stellar embryos to take shape.

The infrared photograph, which will be detailed in the Dec. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, bolsters a long-held theory of star formation.

Clip Source: www.space.com

In the W5 star-forming region, the oldest stars (blue dots) reside at the centers of two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars). Younger stars (pink dots) line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The very youngest stars are forming in the white knotty areas, with heated dust (red) pervading the region's cavities. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Tags: astronomy, beauty

Spitzer Space Telescope Celebrates 5th Birthday With Portrait of Stellar Nursery

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:16:44 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Good pic.

Clip Source: cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

The team behind NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is celebrating the orbiting observatory's fifth birthday with a glittering, multigenerational picture of a star-forming region.

Stars young and old glitter in the Spitzer Space Telescope's latest infrared view of the W5 star-forming region. Click on the image for a larger version.

The new infrared view of the W5 region in the constellation Cassiopeia was unveiled today at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory as part of a celebration marking five years since Spitzer's launch in 2003. The view takes in an area of the sky equivalent to four full moons, 6,500 light-years from Earth, in one of our Milky Way's most picturesque stellar nurseries.

Tags: astronomy

Massive New Object Discovered at Edge of the Solar System

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:00:23 GMT

clipped by: xpersianx
clipper's remarks: Read the Rest story

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

The Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets believed to lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year from the Sun, which places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The Kuiper belt and scattered disc, the other two known reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, are less than one thousandth the Oort cloud's distance. The outer extent of the Oort cloud defines the boundary of our Solar System.

Objects in the Oort cloud are largely composed of ices such as water, ammonia and methane. Astronomers believe that the matter comprising the Oort cloud formed closer to the Sun, and was scattered far out into space by the gravitational effects of the giant planets early in the Solar System's evolution.

The cometary membrane of the Oort Cloud and Kupier Belt actively feeds water to the interior planets, with some 20 to 40 ton water-ice comets hitting the earth's atmosphere 5 to 30 times per minute.

Tags: astronomy, solar system

Moon transits Earth

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:58:34 GMT

clipped by: milmufmas

Clip Source: www.ridingwithrobots.org

The moon transits the Earth in a series of images taken recently by the Epoxi spacecraft from 31 million miles away in deep space. Viewing the Earth from such large distances provides good practice for remote sensing of alien worlds. Epoxi is the extended astronomy mission that is using the spacecraft from the Deep Impact comet-smashing expedition of 2005. Epoxi will also fly by comet Hartley 2 in 2010. Learn more.

Always Wonder

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:26:05 GMT

clipped by: klippety
clipper's remarks: Just awe and wonder, our home in the galaxy

Clip Source: planetary.org

Astronomy and Space Exploration in America's National Parks

Glacier National Park, Montana

Glaciers and the Cosmos

Click to enlarge >

Granite Park Chalet and the Milky Way
The very presence of the Milky Way high overhead prevents the skies above Glacier from being the darkest I have yet seen. The late hour of sunset and the proximity of bears keeps many people indoors and unable to appreciate the beauty of the night skies. I take the bear threat seriously; in all my wandering through Glacier at night, I have taken care never to be more than 15 yards from my car (or the front door of a nice warm chalet). Credit: Tyler Nordgren

Massive New Object Discovered at Edge of the Solar System

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:35:16 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Tags: astronomy, solar system