New images from the Japanese Subaru telescope show how a nearby young star ended its infancy rapidly. The star, called HD 141569A, has a hole in the disc of gas and dust surrounding it. Astronomers think that the star rapidly ionized its surrounding gas, and then pushed it away with its intense solar radiation. The gap is located about the same distance from the star as Saturn’s orbit, and it lends additional evidence to theories about how discs of material evolve around young stars.
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Spirit Celebrates 1,000 Days on Mars
NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover recently celebrated its 1000th day on the surface of the Red Planet. To celebrate the occasion, NASA used the rover to capture a full 360-degree panorama view of Mars from its vantage point. The rover has been perched on the side of a hill for the last few months, to ride out the Martian winter’ reduced light. Spirit and Opportunity were both expected to only last 90 days on the surface of Mars.
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MESSENGER Heads Past Venus, Next Stop: Venus
NASA’s MESSENGER made its closest approach to Venus today, coming within 2,990 kilometers (1,860 miles) of its surface. The spacecraft used this close encounter with Venus’ gravity well to alter its trajectory as it travels towards its final destination: Mercury. This won’t be its final encounter with our twin planet, though. MESSENGER will meet up with Venus again in June 2007. It’ll finally make its first encounter with Mercury in January 2008, but won’t be in a final orbit until 2011.
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Nearly a Thousand Years After the Death of a Star
In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look in the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. This composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
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Globular Clusters Sort their Stars
Globular clusters are regions of space where stars are densely packed together – 10,000 times more dense than our local stellar neighbourhood. New evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that globular clusters will sort out themselves out, hoarding more massive stars in the centre, and pushing the less massive stars out to the edges. Hubble captured images of globular cluster 47 Tucanae for nearly 7 years, allowing astronomers to carefully plot the positions of stars moving in the cluster, and then calculate how close they were to the centre.
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Black Holes About to Get Active Again
Astronomers have identified two distant supermassive black holes, or quasars, which might be about to get much brighter. New data from the Spitzer Space Telescopes show that the vicinities around the black holes could be backing up with excess matter – the black holes just can’t consume it fast enough to clear the space. When this happens, the matter heats up, and releases a tremendous amount of energy. Some theories propose that these explosions could be so powerful they stop star formation in a galaxy.
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Podcast: Getting Started in Amateur Astronomy
Got your eye on that $40 telescope at Walmart? Wait, hear us out first! Fraser and Pamela discuss strategies for getting into amateur astronomy – one of the most worthwhile hobbies out there. We discuss what gear to get, where to look, and how to meet up with other astronomy enthusiasts.
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What’s Up this Week: October 23 – 29, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Join us this week as we journey across the Cosmos on a voyage of discovery. We open with galaxies and bright globular clusters and end the week with the Moon. Grab your binoculars and telescopes and turn an eye to the sky, because….
Here’s what’s up!
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Mineral Discovery Could Explain Martian Landscape
A researcher from Queen’s University has uncovered a mineral that could help explain the mountainous landscape on Mars. Dr. Ron Peterson found that solution of epsomite (aka Epsom Salts) will crystallize after several days of sub-zero temperatures. If the crystals are rapidly melted, they create the familiar gullies and channels we see on Mars. Water might have interacted with Martian chemicals millions of years ago; when the surface layer melted, it produced the unusual surface features we see today.
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Cargo Ship Blasts Off for the Station
A new shipment of supplies is headed towards the International Space Station after this morning’s launch of a Russian-built Progress cargo spacecraft. The rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1341 GMT (9:41 am EDT), and reached orbit a few minutes later. It’s carrying 2.5 tons of food, air, water and other supplies, and will dock with the Zvezda module on the International Space Station on Thursday morning.
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