Posted on by Jason Major

NASA’s Airborne Observatory Targets Newborn Stars

Infrared image of the W3A star cluster in Perseus. (SOFIA image -- NASA / DLR / USRA / DSI / FORCAST team Spitzer image -- NASA / Caltech - JPL.)

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(DING!) “The captain has turned off the safety lights – you are now free to explore the infrared Universe.”

Mounted inside the fuselage of a Boeing 747SP aircraft, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, is capable of searching the sky in infrared light with a sensitivity impossible from ground-based instruments. Cruising at 39,000 to 45,000 feet, its 100-inch telescope operates above 99% of the atmospheric water vapor that would otherwise interfere with such observations, and thus is able to pierce through vast interstellar clouds of gas and dust to find what lies within.

Its latest discovery has uncovered a cluster of newborn stars within a giant cloud of gas and dust 6,400 light-years from Earth.

The massive stars are still enshrouded in the gas cloud from which they formed, a region located in the direction of Perseus called W3. The Faint Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) instrument was able to peer through the cloud and locate up to 15 massive young stars clustered together in a compact region, designated W3A.

SOFIA's 747SP on the ground at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, CA. (NASA/Tony Landis)

W3A’s stars are seen in various stages of formation, and their effects on nearby clouds of gas and dust are evident in the FORCAST inset image above. A dark bubble, which the arrow is pointing to, is a hole created by emissions from the largest of the young stars, and the greenish coloration surrounding it designates regions where the dust and large molecules have been destroyed by powerful radiation.

Without SOFIA’s infrared imaging capabilities newborn stars like those seen in W3A would be much harder to observe, since their visible and ultraviolet light typically can’t escape the cool, opaque dust clouds where they are located.

The radiation emitted by these massive young stars may eventually spur more star formation within the surrounding clouds. Our own Sun likely formed in this same way, 5 billion years ago, within a cluster of its own stellar siblings which have all long since drifted apart. By observing clusters like W3A astronomers hope to better understand the process of star birth and ultimately the formation of our own solar system.

Read more on the SOFIA news release here.

The observation team’s research principal investigator is Terry Herter of Cornell University. The data were analyzed and interpreted by the FORCAST team with Francisco Salgado and Alexander Tielens of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands plus SOFIA staff scientist James De Buizer. These papers have been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Posted on by Jason Major

Astronomers Witness a Web of Dark Matter

Dark matter in the Universe is distributed as a network of gigantic dense (white) and empty (dark) regions, where the largest white regions are about the size of several Earth moons on the sky. Credit: Van Waerbeke, Heymans, and CFHTLens collaboration.

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We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t even interact with it… but dark matter may very well be one of the most fundamental physical components of our Universe. The sheer quantity of the stuff – whatever it is – is what physicists have suspected helps gives galaxies their mass, structure, and motion, and provides the “glue” that connects clusters of galaxies together in vast networks of cosmic webs.

Now, for the first time, this dark matter web has been directly observed.

An international team of astronomers, led by Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, used data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey to map images of about 10 million galaxies and study how their light was bent by gravitational lensing caused by intervening dark matter.

Inside the dome of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. (CFHT)

The images were gathered over a period of five years using CFHT’s 1×1-degree-field, 340-megapixel MegaCam. The galaxies observed in the survey are up to 6 billion light-years away… meaning their observed light was emitted when the Universe was only a little over half its present age.

The amount of distortion of the galaxies’ light provided the team with a visual map of a dark matter “web” spanning a billion light-years across.

“It is fascinating to be able to ‘see’ the dark matter using space-time distortion,” said Van Waerbeke. “It gives us privileged access to this mysterious mass in the Universe which cannot be observed otherwise. Knowing how dark matter is distributed is the very first step towards understanding its nature and how it fits within our current knowledge of physics.”

This is one giant leap toward unraveling the mystery of this massive-yet-invisible substance that pervades the Universe.

The densest regions of the dark matter cosmic web host massive clusters of galaxies. Credit: Van Waerbeke, Heymans, and CFHTLens collaboration.

“We hope that by mapping more dark matter than has been studied before, we are a step closer to understanding this material and its relationship with the galaxies in our Universe,” Dr. Heymans said.

The results were presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. Read the release here.

Posted on by Jason Major

Does Earth Have Many Tiny Moons?

This radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 was obtained on Nov. 7, 2011. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech.

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Look up in a clear night sky. How many moons do you see? Chances are, you’re only going to count to one. Admittedly, if you count any higher and you’re not alone, you may get some funny looks cast in your direction. But even though you may not be able to actually see them, there may very well be more moons out there orbiting our planet.

For the time being, anyway.

Today, Earth has one major moon in orbit around it. (Technically the Earth-Moon system orbits around a common center of gravity, called the barycenter, but that’s splitting hairs for the purpose of this story.) At one time Earth may have had two large moons until the smaller eventually collided into the larger, creating the rugged lump we now call the farside highlands. But, that was 4 billion years ago and again not what’s being referred to here.

Right now, at his moment, Earth may very well have more than the one moon we see in the night sky. Surprise.

Of course, it would be a very small moon. Perhaps no more than a meter across. But a moon nonetheless. And there could even be others – many others – much smaller than that. Little bits of solar system leftovers, orbiting our planet even farther out than the Moon we all know and love, coming and going in short-lived flings with Earth without anyone even knowing.

This is what has been suggested by researcher Mikael Granvik of the University of Helsinki in Finland. He and his colleagues have created computer simulations of asteroids believed to be occupying the inner solar system, and what the chances are that any number of them could be captured into Earth orbit at any given time.

Orbit of 2006 RH120, a confirmed TCO identified in 2006.

The team’s results, posted Dec. 20 in the science journal Icarus, claim it’s very likely that small asteroids would be temporarily captured into orbit (becoming TCOs, or temporarily captured objects) on a regular basis, each spending about nine months in up to three revolutions around Earth before heading off again.

Some objects, though, might hang around even longer… in the team’s simulations one TCO remained in orbit for 900 years.

“There are lots of asteroids in the solar system, so chances for the Earth to capture one at any time is, in a sense, not surprising,” said co-author Jeremie Vauballion, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory.

In fact, the team suspects that there’s most likely a TCO out there right now, perhaps a meter or so wide, orbiting between 5 and 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. And there could be a thousand smaller ones as well, up to 10 centimeters wide.

So if these moons are indeed out there, why don’t we know about them?

Put simply, they are too small, too far, and too dark.

At that distance an object the size of a writing desk is virtually undetectable with the instruments we have now.. especially if we don’t even know exactly where to look. But in the future the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) may, once completed, be able to spot these tiny satellites with its 3200-megapixel camera.

Once spotted, TCOs could become targets of exploration. After all, they are asteroids that have come to us, which would make investigation all the easier – not to mention cheaper – much more so than traveling to and back from the main asteroid belt.

“The price of the mission would actually be pretty small,” Granvik said. And that, of course, makes the chances of such a mission getting approved all the better.

Read more on David Shiga’s article on New Scientist here.

The team’s published paper can be found here.

Posted on by Jason Major

More “Hollowed Ground” on Mercury

MESSENGER captures image of curious "hollows" around a crater peak

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The latest featured image from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, soon to complete its first year in orbit around Mercury, shows the central peak of the 78-mile (138-km) – wide crater Eminescu surrounded by more of those brightly-colored surface features dubbed “hollows”. Actually tinted a light blue color, hollows may be signs of an erosion process unique to Mercury because of its composition and close proximity to the Sun.

First noted in September of last year, hollows have now been identified in many areas across Mercury. They showed up in previous images as only bright spots, but once MESSENGER established orbit in March of 2011 and began high-resolution imaging of Mercury’s surface it became clear that these features were something totally new.

The lack of craters within hollows seems to indicate that they are relatively young features. In fact, they may be part of a process that continues even now.

“Analysis of the images and estimates of the rate at which the hollows may be growing led to the conclusion that they could be actively forming today,” said David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

One hypothesis is that the hollows are formed by the sublimation of subsurface material exposed during the creation of craters, around which they are most commonly seen. Being so close to the Sun (29 million miles/46 million km at closest) and lacking a protective atmosphere like Earth’s, Mercury is constantly being scoured by the powerful solar wind. This relentless stream of charged particles may literally be “sandblasting” exposed volatile materials off the planet’s surface!

The image above shows an area approximately 41 miles (66 km) across. It has been rotated to enhance perspective; see the original image and caption here.

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Posted on by Jason Major

Beam Me Up, Obama: Conspiracy Theory Claims President Teleported to Mars

Was the 44th President of the United States a time-traveling teenage Mars explorer?

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Forget 2012 prophecies, Mayan calendars and lurking planets that go only by the name “X”… there’s an even kookier conspiracy theory in town, and it has to do with our nation’s fearless leader and his teenage teleportation adventures on Mars.

Yes, you read that right.

It seems that two government employees and self-professed time-travelers – er, “chrononauts” – Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings have come forth and named President Obama as one of their own, along with the current head of DARPA, Regina Dugan.

(DARPA, if you don’t know, is the agency responsible for keeping U.S. defense up-t0-date with advancements in technology. Begun as a response to the Sputnik program in the late 50s, DARPA finds ways to integrate cutting-edge tech developments into stuff the military might want.)

Basiago, a Washington state lawyer, says that he was part of a time travel program developed by DARPA in the 1970s code-named Project Pegasus. He and Stillings claim that both Obama and Dugan were in their “Mars training class” at California’s College of the Siskiyous in 1980, part of a group of 10 young adults chosen to travel to Mars via a top-secret teleportation “jump room”.

They also claim that the then-19-year-old Barack Obama went by the name “Barry Soetero”.

But wait, there’s more.

"I'll beam ya down Mister President but I'll have to see your birth certificate first." (Photo via startrek.com)

The two former chrononauts also said that they encountered the future president at secret U.S. bases on Mars, which he is said to have visited twice between the years 1981 and 1983. On one instance Basiago said he even exchanged words with Ob – uh, Soetero – en route to the “jump room” while on Mars.

“We’re here,” Basiago claims the young president-to-be said to him.

And the supposed reason for the secret teen task force’s Red Planet expedition? To “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence,” according to Basiago.

You know, to make good with the locals so there’d be no trouble when setting up camp.

White House officials have denied all allegations of the President’s Martian travels, or the existence of a Mars training class. But, of course, they would. 

And you thought the whole birther thing was a bit extreme? Wake up sheeple, this is some real crazy here. Chrononaut style.

Read more on Wired.com’s “Danger Room”.

 

Top image assembled by J. Major from NASA and Hubble images and a campaign photo of President Obama. Star Trek image from www.startrek.com. © 2010 CBS Studios Inc., All Rights Reserved.

Posted on by Jason Major

A Balanced Budget on Titan

Titan and Dione seen on December 10, 2011 by the Cassini spacecraft. (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major)

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It’s been said many times that the most Earthlike world in our solar system is not a planet at all, but rather Saturn’s moon Titan. At first it may not seem obvious why; being only a bit larger than the planet Mercury and coated in a thick opaque atmosphere containing methane and hydrocarbons, Titan sure doesn’t look like our home planet. But once it’s realized that this is the only moon known to even have a substantial atmosphere, and that atmosphere creates a hydrologic cycle on its surface that mimics Earth’s – complete with weather, rain, and gully-carving streams that feed liquid methane into enormous lakes – the similarities become more evident. Which, of course, is precisely why Titan continues to hold such fascination for scientists.

Now, researchers have identified yet another similarity between Saturn’s hazy moon and our own planet: Titan’s energy budget is in equilibrium, making it much more like Earth than the gas giant it orbits.

A team of researchers led by Liming Li of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston in Texas has completed the first-ever investigation of the energy balance of Titan, using data acquired by telescopes and the Cassini spacecraft from 2004 to 2010.

Energy balance (or “budget”) refers to the radiation a planet or moon receives from the Sun versus what it puts out. Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune emit more energy than they receive, which indicates an internal energy source. Earth radiates about the same amount as it receives, so it is said to be in equilibrium… similar to what is now shown to be the case for Titan.

Blue hazes hover high above thicker orange clouds over Titan's south pole (NASA/JPL/SSI)

The energy absorption and reflection rates of a planet’s – or moon’s! – atmosphere are important clues to the state of its climate and weather. Different balances of energy or changes in those balances can indicate climate change – global cooling or global warming, for instance.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Titan is a balmy world. At nearly 300 degrees below zero (F) it has an environment that even the most extreme Earth-based life would find inhospitable. Although Titan’s atmosphere is ten times thicker than Earth’s its composition is very different, permitting easy passage of infrared radiation (a.k.a. “heat”) and thus exhibits an “anti-greenhouse” effect, unlike Earth or, on the opposite end of the scale, Venus.

Still, some stable process is in place on Saturn’s moon that allows for distribution of solar energy across its surface, within its atmosphere and back out into space. With results due in from Cassini from a flyby on Jan. 2, perhaps there will soon be even more clues as to what that may be.

Read more about Earth’s changing energy budget here.

The team’s report was published in the AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters on December 15, 2011. Li, L., et al. (2011), The global energy balance of Titan, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L23201, doi:10.1029/2011GL050053.

Posted on by Jason Major

James Webb Mirrors Pass Deep-Freeze Exams

The James Webb Space Telescope mirrors have completed deep-freeze tests and are removed from the X-ray and Cryogenic test Facility at Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: Emmett Given, NASA Marshall

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The last of the 21 mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope have come out of deep freeze – literally! – and are now approved for space operations, a major milestone in the development of the next generation telescope that’s being hailed as the “successor to Hubble.”

“The mirror completion means we can build a large, deployable telescope for space,” said Scott Willoughby, vice president and Webb program manager at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. “We have proven real hardware will perform to the requirements of the mission.”

The all-important mirrors for the Webb telescope had to be cryogenically tested to make sure they could withstand the rigors and extreme low temperatures necessary for operating in space. To achieve this, they were cooled to temperatures of -387F (-233C) at the X-ray and Cryogenic Test Facility at Marshall Space Flight Center.

When in actual use, the mirrors will be kept at such low temperatures so as not to interfere with deep-space infrared observations with their own heat signatures.

JWST engineers anticipate that, with such drastic cooling, the mirrors will change shape. The testing proved that the mirrors would achieve the shapes needed to still perform exactly as expected.

“This testing ensures the mirrors will focus crisply in space, which will allow us to see new wonders in our universe,” said Helen Cole, project manager for Webb Telescope mirror activities.

Planned for launch in 2018, the JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of the Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on Earthlike planets.

Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope here.

Posted on by Jason Major

X-rays Unwrap a Poky Little Pulsar

A pulsar within a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud. X-rays are blue; optical data is red and green. (NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al.)

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For the first time astronomers have located a pulsar – the super-dense, spinning remains of a star – nestled within the remnants of a supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The image above, a composite of x-ray  and optical light data acquired by NASA’s Chandra Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, shows the pulsar shining brightly on the right surrounded by the ejected outer layers of its former stellar life.

The optically-bright area on the left is a large star-forming region of dust and gas nearby SXP 1062.

A pulsar is a neutron star that emits high-energy beams of radiation from its magnetic poles. These poles are not always aligned with its axis of rotation, and so the beams swing through space as the neutron star spins. If the Earth happens to be in direct line with the beams at some point along their path, we see them as rapidly flashing radiation sources… sort of like a cosmic lighthouse on overdrive.

What’s unusual about this pulsar – called SXP 1062 – is its slow rate of rotation. Its beams spin around at a rate of about once every 18 minutes, which is downright poky for a pulsar, most of which spin several times a second.

X-ray image of SXP 1062

This makes SXP 1062 one of the slowest known pulsars discovered within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy cruising alongside our own Milky Way about 200,000 light-years distant.

The supernova that presumably created the pulsar and its surrounding remnant wrapping is estimated to have taken place between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago – relatively recently, by cosmic standards. To see a young pulsar spinning so slowly is extra unusual since younger pulsars have typically been observed to have rapid rotation rates. Understanding the cause of its leisurely pace will be the next goal for SXP 1062 researchers.

Read more about SXP 1062on the Chandra photo album page.

 

Image credit: X-ray & Optical: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al.

Posted on by Jason Major

Underwater Neutrino Detector Will Be Second-Largest Structure Ever Built

Artist's rendering of the KM3NeT array. (Marco Kraan/Property KM3NeT Consortium)

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The hunt for elusive neutrinos will soon get its largest and most powerful tool yet: the enormous KM3NeT telescope, currently under development by a consortium of 40 institutions from ten European countries. Once completed KM3NeT will be the second-largest structure ever made by humans, after the Great Wall of China, and taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai… but submerged beneath 3,200 feet of ocean!

KM3NeT – so named because it will encompass an area of several cubic kilometers – will be composed of lengths of cable holding optical modules on the ends of long arms. These modules will stare at the sea floor beneath the Mediterranean in an attempt to detect the impacts of neutrinos traveling down from deep space.

Successfully spotting neutrinos – subatomic particles that don’t interact with “normal” matter very much at all, nor have magnetic charges – will help researchers to determine which direction they originated from. That in turn will help them pinpoint distant sources of powerful radiation, like quasars and gamma-ray bursts. Only neutrinos could make it this far and this long after such events since they can pass basically unimpeded across vast cosmic distances.

“The only high energy particles that can come from very distant sources are neutrinos,” said Giorgio Riccobene, a physicist and staff researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics. “So by looking at them, we can probe the far and violent universe.”

Each Digital Optical Module (DOM) is a standalone sensor module with 31 3-inch PMTs in a 17-inch glass sphere.

In effect, by looking down beneath the sea KM3NeT will allow scientists to peer outward into the Universe, deep into space as well as far back in time.

The optical modules dispersed along the KM3NeT array will be able to identify the light given off by muons when neutrinos pass into the sea floor. The entire structure would have thousands of the modules (which resemble large versions of the hovering training spheres used by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.)

In addition to searching for neutrinos passing through Earth, KM3NeT will also look toward the galactic center and search for the presence of neutrinos there, which would help confirm the purported existence of dark matter.

Read more about the KM3NeT project here, and check out a detailed article on the telescope and neutrinos on Popsci.com.

Height of the KM3NeT telescope structure compared to well-known buildings

Images property of KM3NeT Consortium 

Posted on by Jason Major

Titan’s Colorful Crescent

Titan's thick atmosphere shines in backlight sunlight

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Made from one of the most recent Cassini images, this is a color-composite showing a backlit Titan with its dense, multi-layered atmosphere scattering sunlight in different colors. Titan’s atmosphere is made up of methane and complex hydrocarbons and is ten times as thick as Earth’s. It is the only moon in our solar system known to have a substantial atmosphere.

Titan’s high-level hydrocarbon haze is nicely visible as a pale blue band encircling the moon.

Color image of Titan and sister moon Dione, seen by Cassini on Dec. 10. (NASA/JPL/SSI and J. Major)

At 3,200 (5,150 km) miles wide, Titan is one of the largest moons in the solar system – even larger than Mercury. Its thick atmosphere keeps a frigid and gloomy surface permanently hidden beneath opaque clouds of methane and hydrocarbons.

This image was made from three raw images acquired by Cassini on December 13. The raw images were in the red, green and blue visible light channels, and so the composited image you see here approximates true color.

This particular flyby of Titan (designated T-79) gave Cassini’s instruments a chance to examine Titan in many different wavelengths, as well as map its surface and measure its atmospheric temperature. Cassini passed by the giant moon at a distance of about 2,228 miles (3,586 kilometers) traveling 13,000 mph (5.8 km/sec). Read more on the flyby page here.

Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute. Edited by Jason Major.

See more color-composite images of Titan and other moons of Saturn on my Flickr set here.