We’ve celebrated the birth of new stars, but the stellar lifecycle doesn’t end there. Stars like our Sun will spend billions of years fusing together hydrogen and pumping out energy. And when the fuel runs out, their death is as interesting as their birth. This week Fraser and Pamela trace out this stellar evolution, and explain what the future holds for stars, large and small.
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NASA Announces Long Term Plans for the Moon
NASA announced new details about its lunar ambitions today, providing details about other nations will get involved in a return to the Moon, and the concept of a future lunar base. The Global Exploration Strategy involved 1,000 people from 14 space agencies, non-governmental agencies, and commercial companies. The Lunar Architecture Team decided that the best spot for a permanent lunar base would be at one of the Moon’s poles, which is bathed in eternal sunlight.
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NASA’s Spirit Rover… From Space
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is peering down at spacecraft on the surface of Mars again. This time it’s turning its optics on the Spirit Rover and the two Viking Landers that reached the surface of Mars in 1976. Scientists understand the terrain from ground level, so these high resolution images will help them understand the context of what the rovers and landers see around them. The view is so detailed that scientists can identify specific rocks that were seen by the Viking landers more than 30 years ago.
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What’s Up this Week: December 4 – December 10, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! While things are cooling down in the northern hemisphere, they’re heating up for the south as our “friends down under” are up for two meteor showers this week. We’ll have a look a double stars, the distant Neptune, and practice judging stellar magnitudes. Be sure to read closely, because there just might be a suprise or two hidden in here! So, turn an eye to the sky because…
Here’s what’s up!
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First Negatively Charged Space Molecules Discovered
Until now, all the molecules discovered in space were either neutral or positive in charge. But astronomers have turned up a rare negative molecule called C6H-. Molecules like this are thought to be extremely rare in space, because the ultraviolet light radiated from stars easily knocks electrons off molecules, changing their polarity. The molecule was discovered in the vicinity of two nebulae by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
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Organic Material Found in an Ancient Meteorite
NASA researchers have discovered organic material inside a meteorite the recently fell in Canada’s Tagish Lake. The meteorite is especially valuable because scientists collected it shortly after it crashed in 2000, ensuring it wasn’t contaminated by local bacteria. The meteorite seems to contain many small hollow organic globules, which probably formed in the cold molecular cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to the Solar System. Meteorites like this have been falling to Earth for billions of years, and probably seeded the early planet with organic material.
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The Great Observatories View Supernova Remnant N49
Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer – NASA’s three Great Observatories – teamed up to create this beautiful photograph of supernova remnant N49. Under visible light, this is the brightest remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It has a strange lopsided shape; unusual because most supernova remnants are spherical. The new data from the triplet of telescopes have revealed that the strange shape is happening because the remnant is expanding into a region of denser gas on one side.
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Measuring the Shape of Supernove Explosions
Type 1a supernovae are used to measure distance in the Universe because they explode with the same brightness, detonating when a white dwarf star consumes a specific amount of material from a binary companion. The accuracy of these distance measurements depends on the shape of the blast. New research indicates that Type 1a supernovae explosions start out clumpy and uneven, but a second, spherical blast overwhelms the first creating a smooth residue. This sets the limits of uncertainty on distance measurements that use Type 1a supernovae.
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Discovery Launch Planned for December 7
NASA senior managers have picked December 7 for the next launch for the space shuttle Discovery. If all goes well, STS-116 will blast off at 9:35 pm local time (0235 GMT December 8) carrying 7 astronauts, and return to the International Space Station. This time, the construction job will be to install a new section of the station’s girder-like truss, and activate its power and cooling systems.
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Podcast: HiRise View of Mars
If you want to get a good view of something, you’ll want a big telescope, or you want to get close. NASA has decided to both, equipping its new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with the largest spacecraft telescope ever built, and then flying it closer to Mars than any previous spacecraft. This telescope is called the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, and returning the most detailed images ever seen of the Martian surface. Dr. Alfred McEwen from the University of Arizona is the Principal Investigator on the HiRise instrument, and he joins me from Tuscon Arizona.
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