Posts tagged galaxy

South African politicians and scientists were jubilant Friday after a decision was announced to locate the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

But their joy was tinged with disappointment that South Africa’s bid for the entire project did not succeed. The decision was nonetheless seen as a major boost for South African science.

“The SKA will transform our view of the universe; with it we will see back to the moments after the Big Bang and discover previously unexplored parts of the cosmos.” said Dr. Michiel van Haarlem, interim director general of the SKA Organization, in a statement after the announcement of the decision in Amsterdam.

The $2-billion project will involve several thousand high-, mid- and low-frequency receiving dishes set over a huge geographical area in remote areas where there is little interference from mobile phone, radio, television and other signals. Combining all the signals from the SKA will form the equivalent of a radio telescope with a one-square kilometer dish, and will be 50 times more sensitive than any in existence, according to the SKA Organization.

The likelihood of the sites remaining quiet radio zones in the future was a key factor in their choice. The South African location is in the Karoo, in the country’s southwest. But dishes will be located across southern Africa and as far north as Ghana. The Australian location is a remote area of Western Australia with dishes to be located in other parts of the continent and in New Zealand.

According to the SKA Organization, astronomers will be able to  glimpse the formation and evolution of the first stars, and investigate the nature of gravity and whether there is life beyond Earth.

(Source: futurenow321)

A partnership between two U.S. aerospace companies could eventually bring passenger trips to private space stations, officials of the companies said. SpaceX, maker of the Dragon space capsule scheduled to take crews and supplies to the International Space Station, and Bigelow Aerospace said they have formed a partnership to market flights to Bigelow’s proposed private stations, looking for international customers that could include national space agencies, companies and universities, Florida Today reported Thursday.

“Both companies were founded to help create a new era in space enterprise,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement. “Together we will provide unique opportunities to entities whether nations or corporations wishing to have crewed access to the space environment for extended periods.” Las Vegas-based Bigelow says its proposed BA 330 inflatable habitats will provide usable volume larger than an ISS crew module with support for six crew members. Bigelow and the Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX said they would focus their marketing efforts on international customers, and Bigelow has already announced preliminary agreements with potential customers in Japan, Australia, Singapore, Sweden, Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Dubai.

(Source: futurenow321)

NASA’s first hard look at the protoplanet Vesta has given scientists an unprecedented view of its makeup, terrain and history and revealed that major activity on this ancient rock occurred far more recently than researchers had expected. Images sent back from NASA’s trailblazing Dawn spacecraft reveal the full size of a massive crater in the southern hemisphere and indicate that it may have been made just 1 billion years ago, well after Vesta formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, according to one of half a dozen studies published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. “We have been able to use a time machine and take our thoughts and understandings right back to the beginning,” said UCLA geophysicist Christopher Russell, the Dawn mission’s principal investigator.

(Source: futurenow321)

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) will gather key data as the $9bn (£5.5bn) observatory seeks to identify the first starlight in the Universe. The results of testing conducted at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK have just been signed off, clearing Miri to travel to America. James Webb regarded as the successor to Hubble is due to launch in 2018. It will carry a 6.5m primary mirror (more than double the width of Hubble’s main mirror), and a shield the size of a tennis court to guard its sensitive vision from the heat and strong light of our Sun. The observatory has been tasked with tracking down the very first luminous objects in the cosmos groupings of the first generation of stars to burst into life. To do so, Webb will use its infrared detectors to look deeper into space than Hubble, and further back in time to a period more than 13 billion years ago.

(Source: futurenow321)

Just two weeks after the huge “supermoon” wowed skywatchers around the world, the heavens will offer up another observing treat a solar eclipse on May 20 that should be visible from much of western North America. The May 20 event is what’s known as an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon blocks out most of the sun but leaves a ring of light visible around its circumference. It should be quite a spectacular sight for favorably placed and appropriately careful skywatchers throughout Asia, the Pacific region and parts of North America.

(Source: futurenow321)

The photo, released Wednesday, was taken by a European Southern Observatory telescope and shows 100,000 stars crowded together in Messier 55, a globular star cluster located roughly 17,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer). It is one of about 160 globular clusters orbiting the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy.

“As this formative period was just a few billion years , nearly all of the gas on hand was the simplest, lightest and most common in the cosmos: hydrogen, along with some helium and much smaller amounts of heavier chemical elements such as oxygen and nitrogen,” scientists with the European Southern Observatory wrote in a statement. Astronomers estimate the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. In contrast, our own star, the sun, formed only 4.6 billion years ago, and is made of more complex, heavier elements that were around at this later epoch.

(Source: futurenow321)

Light from an alien “super-Earth” twice the size of our own Earth has been detected by a NASA space telescope for the first time in what astronomers are calling a historic achievement. NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope spotted light from the alien planet 55 Cancri e, which orbits a star 41 light-years from Earth. A year on the extrasolar planet lasts just 18 hours. The planet 55 Cancri e was first discovered in 2004 and is not a habitable world. Instead, it is known as a super-Earth because of its size: The world is about twice the width of Earth and is super-dense, with about eight times the mass of Earth. But until now, scientists have never managed to detect the infrared light from the super-Earth world. “Spitzer has amazed us yet again,” said Spitzer program scientist Bill Danch of NASA headquarters in Washington in a statement today (May 8). “The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Astronomers have found four nearby white dwarf stars surrounded by disks of material that could be the remains of rocky planets much like Earth and one star in particular appears to be in the act of swallowing up what’s left of an Earthlike planet’s core.

The research, announced on Thursday by theRoyal Astronomical Society , gives a chilling look at the eventual fate that may await our own planet.

Since white dwarfs are the leftover cores of stellar-mass stars that have burnt through all their fuel, the material in their atmosphere is likely the leftover bits of planets. These worlds may have once been held in safe, stable orbits. But when their stars neared the ends of their lives, the stars may have expanded, possibly engulfing the innermost planets and disrupting the orbits of others.

(Source: futurenow321)