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"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler", Albert Einstein
Browsing All Posts filed under »ASTROPHYSICS«
The orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2
Asteroid 1998 QE2 to Sail Past Earth Nine Times Larger Than Cruise Ship On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. And while QE2 is not of much interest […]
The most powerful particles in the Universe
May 17, 2013
a cosmic smash Wolfgang Bietenholz This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an abrupt suppression (a “cutoff”) above a specific huge energy. This is difficult […]
Bright explosion on the Moon
May 17, 2013
For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. “Lunar meteor showers” have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. They’ve just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the […]
Neutrinos from outer space open new eye in the sky
May 15, 2013
Fancy seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and enormous stellar explosions may give up their secrets now thatneutrinos from space can be detected. The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy. “We are witnessing the birth […]
Hubble Tells a Tale of Galactic Collisions
May 13, 2013
When we look into the distant cosmos, the great majority of the objects we see are galaxies: immense gatherings of stars, planets, gas, dust, and dark matter, showing up in all kind of shapes. This Hubble picture registers several, but the galaxy catalogued as 2MASX J05210136-2521450 stands out at a glance due to its interesting […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Finds Dead Stars …
May 10, 2013
… ‘Polluted with Planet Debris NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place– the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs. These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster […]
Can dark energy be gravitational waves?
May 4, 2013
Peter L. Biermann, Benjamin C. Harms The idea that dark energy is gravitational waves may explain its strength and its time-evolution. A possible concept is that dark energy is the ensemble of coherent bursts (solitons) of gravitational waves originally produced when the first generation of super-massive black holes was formed. These solitons get their initial […]
Birth of a black hole?
May 4, 2013
A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole. When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by […]
Herschel Completes Its ‘Cool’ Journey in Space
April 29, 2013
The Herschel observatory, a European space telescope for which NASA helped build instruments and process data, has stopped making observations after running out of liquid coolant as expected. The European Space Agency (ESA) mission, launched almost four years ago, revealed the universe’s “coolest” secrets by observing the frigid side of planet, star and galaxy formation. […]
Sir Martin Rees: Six ways to infinity… and beyond
April 29, 2013
1. Spotting distant planets that may sustain life will require a telescope larger than anything currently available. When it starts operation in the early 2020s, the European “Extremely Large Telescope”, with a mosaic mirror more than 39m across, will target for observation planets of similar size to Earth that are orbiting stars much like our […]
Secrets Of The Dark Universe: Simulating The Sky
April 26, 2013
An astonishing 99.6% of our Universe is dark. Observations indicate that the Universe consists of 70% of a mysterious dark energy and 25% of a yet-unidentified dark matter component, and only 0.4% of the remaining ordinary matter is visible. Understanding the physics of this dark sector is the foremost challenge in cosmology today. Sophisticated simulations […]
Einstein’s gravity theory passes toughest test yet
April 25, 2013
Record-breaking pulsar takes tests of general relativity into new territory Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope, along with radio telescopes around the world, to find and study a bizarre stellar pair consisting of the most massive neutron star confirmed so far, orbited by a white dwarf star. This strange new binary allows tests of […]
Herschel Links Water Around Jupiter to Comet Impact
April 24, 2013
Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter’s stratosphere, an intermediate atmospheric layer, was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which famously struck the planet in 1994. The findings, based on new data from the Herschel space observatory, reveal more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in […]
Pulsar interpretation for the AMS-02 result
April 20, 2013
Peng-Fei Yin, Zhao-Huan Yu, Qiang Yuan, Xiao-Jun Bi The AMS-02 collaboration has just published a high precision measurement of the cosmic positron fraction $e^+/(e^- + e^+)$, which rises with energy from $\sim 5$ GeV to $\sim 350$ GeV. The result indicates the existence of primary electron/positron sources to account for the positron excess. In this […]
NASA’s Kepler Discovers its Smallest ‘Habitable Zone’ Planets to Date
April 18, 2013
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has […]
Hawc gamma-ray telescope captures its first image
April 15, 2013
By Jason Palmer A new set of “eyes” to capture the Universe’s highest-energy particles and light has snapped its first image. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory or Hawc, high on a Mexican plain, now holds the record for the highest-energy light it can capture. The image – of the shadow cast by the Moon as […]
The distant cosmos as seen in the infrared
April 12, 2013
At some stage after its birth in the big bang, the universe began to make galaxies. No one knows exactly when, or how, this occurred. For that matter, astronomers do not know how the lineages of our own Milky Way galaxy and its stars trace back to those first galaxies and their first stars, but […]
Twist in dark matter tale hints at shadow Milky Way
April 11, 2013
THE HUNT for some of the most wanted stuff in the universe took a new twist this week with the first results from a high-profile, space-based dark matter detector. The results are inconclusive, but, if combined with recent theory, they hint at something exciting. Could the universe have a dark side, complete with its own […]
Hubble Sees Light and Dust in a Nearby Starburst Galaxy
April 6, 2013
Visible as a small, sparkling hook in the dark sky, this beautiful object is known as J082354.96+280621.6, or J082354.96 for short. It is a starburst galaxy, so named because of the incredibly (and unusually) high rate of star formation occurring within it. One way in which astronomers probe the nature and structure of galaxies like […]
Scientists to Io: Your Volcanoes Are in the Wrong Place
April 5, 2013
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, with hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains up to 250 miles high. However, concentrations of volcanic activity are significantly displaced from where they are expected to be based on models that predict how the moon’s interior is heated, according to NASA […]
First result from the AMS experiment
April 3, 2013
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) Collaboration announces the publication of its first physics result in Physical Review Letters. The AMS Experiment is the most powerful and sensitive particle physics spectrometer ever deployed in space. As seen in Figure 1, AMS is located on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) and since its installation […]
How Big Are Galaxies?
April 3, 2013
Read more http://www.universetoday.com/101185/how-big-are-galaxies/#more-101185
Saturn is Like an Antiques Shop, Cassini Suggests
March 27, 2013
A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggests that Saturn’s moons and rings are gently worn vintage goods from around the time of our solar system’s birth. Though they are tinted on the surface from recent “pollution,” these bodies date back more than 4 billion years. They are from around the time that […]
Gravity-less toy black hole solves cosmic puzzles
March 26, 2013
With a pull so strong not even light escapes, a black hole is defined by its gravity. But now a model that ignores gravity is proving surprisingly useful for pinning down how these cosmic giants work. Black holes are where big ideas in cosmology, such as gravity and quantum mechanics, collide. That makes them great […]
Martin Rees: From Mars to the Multiverse
March 24, 2013
A lecture given by the 2012 winner of the Isaac Newton medal, Professor Martin Rees, University of Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and chaired by Michael Rowan-Robinson, Imperial College.
Revealing the Cosmic Microwave Background with Planck
March 22, 2013
This animation illustrates the painstaking work performed by cosmologists in the Planck Collaboration to extract the Cosmic Microwave Background from the data collected by Planck. The first image in the sequence shows the sources of emission detected on the whole sky at the microwave and sub-millimetre wavelengths probed by Planck, which range from 11.1 mm […]
How Much Is a Supernova Worth?
March 22, 2013
If I had a nickel for every nickel you could make from the nickel in supernova SN1999em, I’d be very, very, VERY rich. If I were you, dear BABloggee, I’d be thinking, “What the what?” So let me explain. Well, let me explain in a minute. First, I want to introduce you to the gorgeous […]
NASA Voyager Status Update on Voyager1 Location
March 20, 2013
“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. […]
Double-Disk Dark Matter
March 12, 2013
JiJi Fan, Andrey Katz, Lisa Randall, Matthew Reece Based on observational tests and constraints on halo structure, dark matter is generally taken to be cold and essentially collisionless. On the other hand, given the large number of particles and forces in the visible world, a more complex dark sector could be a reasonable or even […]
How the transit of Venus changed cinematography
March 8, 2013
What better place to view a film about the transit of Venus than an 18th-century observatory? A once-in-a-lifetime experience, the opportunity for us to watch the planet traverse the face of the sun in June last year was the last this century and will not recur until 2117. To mark the occasion, Modern Art Oxford […]
The Moon’s Permanently Shadowed Regions
March 8, 2013
As you watch the Moon over the course of a month, you’ll notice that different features are illuminated by the Sun at different times. However, there are some parts of the Moon that never see sunlight. These areas are called permanently shadowed regions, and they appear dark because unlike on the Earth, the axis of […]
Giant Milky Way bubbles blown by black hole merger
March 8, 2013
A tiny galaxy that collided with the Milky Way spawned two huge bubbles of high-energy particles that now tower over the centre of our galaxy. This new model for the birth of the mysterious bubbles also explains discrepancies in the ages of stars at the galactic middle. In 2010, sky maps made by NASA’s Fermi […]
Hubble Finds Birth Certificate of Oldest Known Star
March 7, 2013
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that’s been around for a very long time. “We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age,” said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, […]
Discoveries Suggest Icy Cosmic Start for Amino Acids …
March 1, 2013
… and DNA Ingredients Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars. The scientists used […]
Greek Observatory Probes Ancient Star
February 28, 2013
Continuing a tradition stretching back more than 25 centuries, astronomers have used the new 2.3-m ‘Aristarchos’ telescope, sited at Helmos Observatory (2340m high) in the Pelοponnese Mountains in Greece, to determine the distance to and history of an enigmatic stellar system, discovering it to likely be a binary star cocooned within an exotic nebula. The […]
How Big is the Universe?
February 25, 2013
Future evidence for extraterrestrial life might come from dying stars
February 25, 2013
Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf’s planet much […]
World’s smallest space telescope
February 22, 2013
The smallest astronomical satellite ever built will launch shortly after 07:20 a.m. EST on Monday, 25 February 2013 as part of a mission to prove that even a very small telescope can push the boundaries of astronomy. The satellite was designed and assembled at the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) of the University of Toronto Institute […]
NASA Rover Confirms First Drilled Mars Rock Sample
February 21, 2013
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has relayed new images that confirm it has successfully obtained the first sample ever collected from the interior of a rock on another planet. No rover has ever drilled into a rock beyond Earth and collected a sample from its interior. Transfer of the powdered-rock sample into an open scoop was […]
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to release first results
February 18, 2013
By Jonathan Amos The scientist leading one of the most expensive experiments ever put into space says the project is ready to come forward with its first results. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was put on the International Space Station to survey the skies for high-energy particles, or cosmic rays. Nobel Laureate Sam Ting said […]
Hubble Catches a Side-on Spiral Streak
February 9, 2013
This thin, glittering streak of stars is the spiral galaxy ESO 121-6, which lies in the southern constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel). Viewed almost exactly side-on, the intricate structure of the swirling arms is hidden, but the full length of the galaxy can be seen — including the intense glow from the central bulge, […]
Particle Physics in the Sky
February 4, 2013
Much can be learned about hypothetical particles called axions by studying the evolution of massive stars. Read more: http://physics.aps.org
Curiosity Mars rover hammers into rock
February 4, 2013
The Mars rover Curiosity has used its drill system for the first time… Read more: www.bbc.co.uk
A joint analysis of the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox
February 2, 2013
Nikos Prantzos I propose a unified framework for a joint analysis of the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox, which enables a simultaneous, quantitative study of both of them. The analysis is based on a simplified form of the Drake equation and on a fairly simple scheme for the colonization of the Milky Way. It […]
A black-hole mass measurement …
January 31, 2013
… from molecular gas kinematics in NGC4526 Timothy A. Davis, Martin Bureau, Michele Cappellari, Marc Sarzi & Leo Blitz The masses of the supermassive black holes found in galaxy bulges are correlated with a multitude of galaxy properties, leading to suggestions that galaxies and black holes may evolve together. The number of reliably measured black-hole […]
Andromeda’s Colorful Rings
January 29, 2013
The ring-like swirls of dust filling the Andromeda galaxy stand out colorfully in this new image from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation. The glow seen here comes from the longer-wavelength, or far, end of the infrared spectrum, giving astronomers the chance to identify the very coldest dust […]
Betelgeuse braces for a collision
January 23, 2013
Multiple arcs are revealed around Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant star to Earth, in this new image from ESA’s Herschel space observatory. The star and its arc-shaped shields could collide with an intriguing dusty ‘wall’ in 5000 years. Betelgeuse rides on the shoulder of the constellation Orion the Hunter. It can easily be seen with […]
Black Hole Complementarity and the Harlow-Hayden Conjecture
January 22, 2013
Leonard Susskind Black hole complementarity, as originally formulated in the 1990′s by Preskill, ‘t Hooft, and myself is now being challenged by the Almheiri-Marolf-Polchinski-Sully firewall argument. The AMPS argument relies on an implicit assumption—the “proximity postulate—which says that the interior of a black hole must be constructed from degrees of freedom that are physically near […]
Astronomers measure nearby Universe’s ‘cosmic fog’
January 20, 2013
Researchers from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet (CNRS/École Polytechnique) have carried out the first measurement of the intensity of the diffuse extragalactic background light in the nearby Universe, a fog of photons that has filled the Universe ever since its formation. Using some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the southern hemisphere, the study was carried out […]
May 19, 2013
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