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12 posts tagged stars
M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy in Dust and Stars
Image Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska, NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA
Explanation: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The aboveimage is a digital combination of a ground-based image from the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and a space-based image from the Hubble Space Telescope highlighting sharp features normally too red to be seen. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici. M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a whole group of galaxies. Astronomers speculate that M51’s spiral structure is primarily due to its gravitational interaction with a smaller galaxy just off the top of the image.
(via atomstargazer)
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Female Stars in the Galaxy of Science
As a double-winner of the Nobel Prize, Marie Curie brought global prestige to the Nobel institution in the early part of the Twentieth Century. But few names of Women scientists have been noticed, leave alone, celebrated in the annals of Nobel Prize history ever since. For instance, how many have heard of Dorothy Hodgkin who won the Chemistry Nobel in 1964 for determining the structures of important biochemical substances using X-ray techniques, and was a key figure in the famous Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs? And, how many have cared to know who Maria Goeppert-Mayer was? (She was a co-laureate of the Physics Nobel in 1963 tor findings related to nuclear shell structure, and remains the only woman after Marie curie, to have won the Nobel Prize in this category.)
Similar fundamental, anxious questions could be raised about Gerty Cori, the first Nobel Prize winning woman of America and the first female medical scientist to be inducted into the Nobel hall of fame (for identifying the course of catalytic conversion of glycogen), as well as Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian neurologist who co-win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986 (for discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor) and is the oldest living, longest-lived Nobel laureate today. (She completed 102 Years in April 2011).
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On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.
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The Average Color of the Universe
Credit: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU)
Explanation: What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color.
via NASA
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Distant rocky planet ‘could be future human home’
While Gliese 581d shows potential, it would take around 300,000 years to get there with current space traveling technology.
PARIS — A rocky world orbiting a nearby star has been confirmed as the first planet outside our solar system to meet key requirements for sustaining life, scientists said on Monday.
Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, they said.
It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbours.
Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star’s “Goldilocks zone”, where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.
“With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere — a likely scenario on such a large planet — the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall,” France’s National Centre for Scientific Research said in a press release.
More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light.
Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.
Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581’s roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g.
It leapt into the headlines last year as “Zarmina’s World,” after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth’s and was also close to the Goldilocks zone.
But that discovery has since been discounted by many. Indeed, some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.
Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet’s size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life.
It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be “tidally locked”, meaning that one side of it always faces the sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.
But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential.
Its atmosphere would store heat well, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas. And the red light from the star would also penetrate the atmosphere and warm the surface.
“In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface,” say the researchers.
For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would “still be a pretty strange place to visit,” the CNRS said.
“The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth.”
Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings.
A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.
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The Case of the Missing Dark Matter
A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.
Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it… up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.
A team of astronomers at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust… but no dark matter.
“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” said team leader Christian Moni Bidin of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”
Based on the team’s results, the dark matter halos thought to envelop galaxies would have to have “unusual” shapes — making their actual existence highly improbable.
Still, something is causing matter and radiation in the Universe to behave in a way that belies its visible mass. If it’s not dark matter, then what is it?
“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for,” Bidin said. “So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found.
“Our results contradict the currently accepted models. The mystery of dark matter has just became even more mysterious.”
(via quantumaniac)
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by Malcolm Sutherland
An explorer adventures into an unknown world, yet it seems that he has been there before…
music by Alison Melville and Ben Grossman, and foley by Leon Lo. Sound design / mix by Malcolm Sutherland.
The animation is all hand-drawn; a mix of drawing / pastels on paper and digital animation.
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Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked in an interview with TIME magazine, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” This is his answer.
the videos and photos combined in filmmaker’s work are from NASA, BBC and other…
follow this link for more info about this video and credits
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Astronomy picture of the day 14 March 2012
Explanation: It’s one of the baddest sunspot regions in years. Active Region 1429 may not only look, to some, like an angry bird — it has thrown off some of the most powerful flares and coronal mass ejections of the current solar cycle. The extended plumes from these explosions have even rained particles on the Earth’s magnetosphere that have resulted in colorful auroras. Pictured above, AR 1429 was captured in great detail in the Sun’s chromosphere three days ago by isolating a color of light emitted primarily by hydrogen. The resulting image is shown in inverted false color with dark regions being the brightest and hottest. Giant magnetically-channeled tubes of hot gas, some longer than the Earth, are known as spicules and can be seen carpeting the chromosphere. The light tendril just above AR 1429 is a cool filament hovering just over the active sunspot region. As solar maximum nears in the next few years, the increasingly wound and twisted magnetic field of the Sun may create even more furious active regions that chirp even more energetic puffs of solar plasma into our Solar System.
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