Kepler space telescope's field of view. Credit: NASA
Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains up to 400 billion stars and thanks to the Kepler mission, we can now estimate that every star in our galaxy has on average 1.6 planets in orbit around it.
This new video from our friends Tony Darnell and Scott Lewis focuses on the discoveries that the Kepler Space Telescope has made, which has opened up a whole new universe and a new way of looking at stars as potential homes for other planets. Only about 20 years ago, we didn’t know if there were any other planets around any other stars besides our own. But now we know we live in a galaxy that contains more planets than stars.
If you extrapolate that number to the rest of the Universe, it’s mind-blowing. According to astronomers, there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, stretching out into a region of space 13.8 billion light-years away from us in all directions.
And so, if you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 1024 stars. That’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros, or a septillion stars.
However, it’s been calculated that the observable Universe is a bubble of space 47 billion years in all directions… or it could be much bigger, possibly infinite. It’s just that we can’t detect those stars because they’re outside the observable Universe.
So, there’s a lot of stars out there.
As the video says, space telescopes give us “a glimpse of our humble place in the cosmic ocean.”
This artist's rendering shows NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in October, 2024. It'll have to contend with Jupiter's powerful radiation. Will a newly-found low-radiation path to Europa help? Image Credit: NASA/JPL
Forget Mars, the place we really want to go looking for life is Jupiter’s moon Europa. Dr. Mike Brown, a professor of planetary science at Caltech, explains what he finds so fascinating about this icy moon, and the potential we might find life swimming in its vast oceans. Continue reading “Why Europa?”
On July 23rd, 2012, Sally Ride died. As the first American woman in space and a true icon of the modern scientific era, her loss was felt all over the world. President Barack Obama said, “Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model. She inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars.” Ride’s, well, ride into space was wonderfully inspiring, but how many Americans ever read of Kathryn D. Sullivan, Anna Lee Fisher, or the dozens of other American women in space? Outside of space enthusiasts, few people know that the first woman in space was actually a Russian cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who visited the cosmos nearly 20 years before Ride! While Mae Jemison has reached international fame as a physician and the first African American women in space, few know of the African American women who came after her.
Thanks to our natural, but foolish, inclination to focus on “firsts” and benchmarks as if collecting trivia, it’s elusively easy to believe that these two or three women mentioned in our high-school science texts are the definitive ‘women of space’ and that’s that.
Hardly.
As accomplished author Karen Bush Gibson shows in her latest book, Women in Space: 23 Stories of First Flights, Scientific Missions, and Gravity-Breaking Adventures, space is certainly not an all boy’s club. Throughout the just over 200-page book, Gibson relates the successes and setbacks of nearly two dozen women from ten different countries who made history and forged a path for countless females to follow. Gibson’s book features photographs and nods to access additional learning resources, valuable for any interested reader in showing that this book is truly only just scratching the surface of women’s enormous impact on spaceflight.
Studies seem to pour in almost daily stating that the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields are increasingly male-dominated, so it’s refreshing to read about the women who overcame the stereotypes and prejudices and dared to go where so fewhad gone before. Gibson’s book offers an informative, introductory overview of a group of unfortunately under-appreciated heroes – as well as an exhilarating perspective which emphasizes that there is so much more to come.
Universe Today and Chicago Review Press are pleased to be able to offer two free copies of Women in Space to our readers. In order to be entered into the giveaway drawing, just put your email address into the box at the bottom of this post (where it says “Enter the Giveaway”) before Wednesday. February 26. If this is the first time you’re registering for a giveaway, you’ll receive a confirmation email immediately where you’ll need to click a link to be entered into the drawing. For those who have registered previously, you’ll receive an email later where you can enter this drawing.
Massive stars can devastate their surroundings, unleashing hot winds and blasting radiation. With a mass over 100 times heavier than the Sun and a luminosity a million times brighter than the Sun, Eta Carinae clocks in as one of the biggest and brightest stars in our galaxy.
The enigmatic object walks a thin line between stellar stability and tumultuous explosions. But now a team of international astronomers is growing concerned that it’s leaning toward instability and eruption.
In the 19th Century the star mysteriously threw off unusually bright light for two decades in an event that became known as the “Great Eruption,” the causes of which are still up for debate. John Herschel and others watched as Eta Carinae’s brightness oscillated around that of Vega — rivaling a supernova explosion.
We now know the star ejected material in the form of two big globes. “During the eruption the star threw off more than 10 solar masses, which can now be observed as the surrounding bipolar nebula,” said lead author Dr. Andrea Mehner from the European Southern Observatory. Miraculously the star survived, but the nebula has been expanding into space ever since.
Eta Carinae has been observed at the South African Astronomical Observatory — a 0.75m telescope outside of Cape Town — for more than 40 years, providing a wealth of data. From the start of observations in 1976 until 1998, astronomers saw an increase across the J, H, K and L bands — filters, which allow certain wavelength ranges of infrared light to pass through.
“This data set is unique for its consistency over a timespan of more than 40 years,” Mehner told Universe Today. “It provides us with the opportunity to analyze long-term changes in the system as Eta Carinae still recovers from its Great Eruption.”
In order to understand the longterm overall increase in light we have to look at a more recent discovery noted in 2005 when scientists discovered that Eta Carinae is actually two stars: a massive blue star and a smaller companion. The temperature increased for 15 years until the companion came very close to the massive star, reaching periastron.
This increase in brightness is likely due to an overall increase in temperature of some component of the Eta Carinae system (which includes the massive blue star, its smaller companion, and the shells of gas and dust that now enshroud the system).
After 1998, however, the linear trend changed significantly and the star’s brightness increased much more rapidly in the J and H bands. It’s getting bluer, which in astronomy, typically means it’s getting hotter.
However, it’s unlikely the star itself is getting hotter. Instead we are seeing the effect of dust around the star being destroyed rapidly. Dust absorbs blue light. So if the dust is getting destroyed, more blue light will be able to pass through the nebulous globes surrounding the system. If this is the case, then we’re really seeing the star as it truly is, without dust absorbing certain wavelengths of its light.
While the nebula is slowly expanding and the dust is therefore dissipating, the authors do not think it’s enough to account for the recent brightening. Instead Eta Carinae is likely rotating at a different speed or losing mass at a different rate. “The changes observed may imply that the star is becoming more unstable and may head towards another eruptive phase,” Mehner told Universe Today.
Perhaps Eta Carinae is heading toward another “Great Eruption.” Only time will tell. But in a field where most events occur on a timescale of millions of years, it’s a great opportunity to watch the system evolve on a human time scale. And when Eta Carinae reaches periastron in the middle of this year, tens of telescopes will be collecting its light, hoping to see a sudden turn of events that may help us explain this exotic system.
The paper has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available for download here.
Wow. It’s always amazing to get new views of familiar sky targets. And you always know that a “feast for the eyes” is in store when astronomers turn a world-class instrument towards a familiar celestial object.
Such an image was released this morning from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Astronomers turned ESO’s 2.2-metre telescope towards Messier 7 in the constellation Scorpius recently, and gave us the star-studded view above.
Also known as NGC 6475, Messier 7 (M7) is an open cluster comprised of over 100 stars located about 800 light years distant. Located in the curved “stinger” of the Scorpion, M7 is a fine binocular object shining at a combined magnitude of about +3.3. M7 is physically about 25 light years across and appears about 80 arc minutes – almost the span of three Full Moons – in diameter from our Earthly vantage point.
One of the most prominent open clusters in the sky, M7 lies roughly in the direction of the galactic center in the nearby astronomical constellation of Sagittarius. When you’re looking towards M7 and the tail of Scorpius you’re looking just south of the galactic plane in the direction of the dusty core of our galaxy. The ESO image reveals the shining jewels of the cluster embedded against the more distant starry background.
Messier 7 is middle-aged as open clusters go, at 200 million years old. Of course, that’s still young for the individual stars themselves, which are just venturing out into the galaxy. The cluster will lose about 10% of its stellar population early on, as more massive stars live their lives fast and die young as supernovae. Our own solar system may have been witness to such nearby cataclysms as it left its unknown “birth cluster” early in its life.
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Other stars in Messier 7 will eventually mature, “join the galactic car pool” in the main sequence as they disperse about the plane of the galaxy.
But beyond just providing a pretty picture, studying a cluster such as Messier 7 is crucial to our understanding stellar evolution. All of the stars in Messier 7 were “born” roughly around the same time, giving researchers a snapshot and a chance to contrast and compare how stars mature over there lives. Each open cluster also has a unique spectral “fingerprint,” a chemical marker that can even be used to identify the pedigree of a star.
For example, there’s controversy that the open cluster Messier 67 may actually be the birth place of our Sun. It is interesting to note that the spectra of stars in this cluster do bear a striking resemblance in terms of metallicity percentage to Sol. Remember, metals in astronomer-speak is any element beyond hydrogen and helium. A chief objection to the Messier 67 “birth-place hypothesis” is the high orbital inclination of the open cluster about the core of our galaxy: our Sun would have had to have undergone a series of improbable stellar encounters to have ended up its current sedate quarter of a billion year orbit about the Milky Way galaxy.
Still, this highlights the value of studying clusters such as Messier 6. It’s also interesting to note that there’s also data in what you can’t see in the above image – dark gaps are thought to be dust lanes and globules in the foreground. Though there is some thought that this dust is debris that may also be related to the cluster and may give us clues as to its overall rotation, its far more likely that these sorts of “dark spirals” related to the cluster have long since dispersed. M7 has completed about one full orbit about the Milky Way since its formation.
Another famous binocular object, the open cluster Messier 6 (M6) also known as the Butterfly Cluster lies nearby. Messier 7 also holds the distinction as being the southernmost object in Messier’s catalog. Compiled from Parisian latitudes, Charles Messier entirely missed southern wonders such as Omega Centauri in his collection of deep sky objects that were not to be mistaken for comets. We also always thought it curious that he included such obvious “non-comets” such as the Pleiades, but missed fine northern sky objects as the Double Cluster in the northern constellation Perseus.
Finding Messier 6: the view from latitude 30 degrees north before dawn in mid-February. Credit: Stellarium.
Messier 7 is also sometimes called Ptolemy’s Cluster after astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who first described it in 130 A.D. as the “nebula following the sting of Scorpius.” The season for hunting all of Messier’s objects in an all night marathon is coming right up in March, and Messier 7 is one of the last targets on the list, hanging high due south in the early morning sky.
Interested in catching how Messier 7 will evolve, or might look like up close? Check out Messier 45 (the Pleiades) and the V-shaped Hyades high in the skies in the constellation Taurus at dusk to see what’s in store as Messier 7 disperses, as well as the Ursa Major Moving Group.
And be sure to enjoy the fine view today of Messier 7 from the ESO!
Got pics of Messier 7 or any other deep sky objects? Send ’em, in to Universe Today!
The Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 16, 2009, just hours before the launch of STS-129. Credit: Elizabeth Howell
ORLANDO, FLORIDA – There’s something about this city that brings out the crazy travel planner in me. I visited here four times betting a shuttle would launch, luckily winning on three occasions. I also once took an epic bus trip from here as far south as Fort Lauderdale before zooming back north, looking at space exhibits up and down the coast.
This time, it was to catch the Vehicle Assembly Building tour before it was gone. Tours inside the iconic, huge structure — best known as the spot where the Apollo rockets and space shuttle went through final assembly before going to the pad — are closing down on Sunday (Feb. 23). Warned by Ken Kremer and others that soon the public couldn’t get inside, I booked a ticket late last month after the announcement was made.
I came in search of the past, but what I saw instead was the future — an agency preparing to hand over a launch pad to SpaceX, and at least part of an Orion spacecraft on the VAB floor, ready to be shipped to Langley, Virginia.
The floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a tour in February 2014. At left is an Orion spacecraft prototype readied for shipping to Langley, Virginia. Credit: Elizabeth HowellAtlantis suspended in the Vehicle Assembly Building during the shuttle era. Image credit: NASA
It’s hard to convey the size of one of the world’s largest buildings. It’s so big that it can form its own weather inside, without proper air conditioning. It stands almost twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, at 160 meters (525 feet) tall and 158 meters (518 feet) wide.
The 3.25-hectare (8-acre) building needed to be so huge to hold the 363-foot (111-meter) Apollo/Saturn vehicles in the 1960s and 1970s, and then was modified for use of the shuttle in the 1970s until just a few years ago.
What surprised me, however, was how narrow the main floor appeared. That’s because there are all of these catwalks on either side of the space for workers to get access to different parts of the spacecraft.
A view of scaffolding inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo taken in February 2014. Credit: Elizabeth Howell
Tours of this building were off-limits between 1978 and 2011, when the shuttle program was launching its vehicles in earnest. After the program retired, however, NASA opened the VAB and nearby facilities (including the Launch Control Center and Launch Pad 39A) up to visitors. As these areas are now being used by contractors and the Orion/Space Launch System, however, the agency is closing down public access so the work of getting to space can continue.
Meanwhile, we were lucky enough to glimpse at least part of an Orion spacecraft prototype ready for shipping to Langley, Virginia, with about a dozen people busily milling around it as it lay on the back of a tractor trailer. It’s unclear to me how much of the spacecraft was inside that package, but our tour guide told us it was the whole thing. Yes, the truck looked really tiny in the big building.
An Orion prototype spacecraft in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ready to be shipped to Langley, Virginia. Credit: Elizabeth Howell
Our group also had the chance to visit Launch Pad 39A, one of the two pads used in the Apollo program and also for shuttle. It was eerie to see the pad still in its shuttle configuration, complete with the clamshell-like structure that used to protect the vehicle from the weather until just prior to launch.
All that is going to be torn down for scrap shortly as SpaceX likely takes over the pad, our guide told us, and it’s unclear how long pad tours will continue. Likely those will be gone soon as well. Meanwhile, I took special delight standing in the “flame trench” where noxious chemicals from the launch used to flow. You certainly didn’t want to be close to this spot when a Saturn V or shuttle stack took off.
By the way, the first thing I thought of when I saw the huge pipes on the side of the picture below is the 1996 movie Apollo 13, which has a dramatic launch sequence that includes a neat pan across the coolant tubing. That’s about the time when I decided I wanted to see the VAB and launch pads, so it only took me 18 years to get out here.
Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, one of two locations where the shuttle went into space. Photo taken in February 2014. Credit: Elizabeth Howell
Although these tours are likely changing or closing, these steps are to get the complex ready for manned launches again, if the current plan and funding holds as NASA hopes.
In the meantime, there are other things to see at the center. The picture at the top of this article shows the Vehicle Assembly Building just before the launch of STS-129, my first experience seeing a shuttle rocket into space.
That shuttle happened to be Atlantis, which today is handily displayed nearby in the KSC Visitor Complex. Weird, I thought, as I looked at the immense vehicle’s bulk. The last time I saw you in November 2009, you were on your way to orbit and making a lot of noise.
I wonder how much things will change at KSC in the next four years.
The Atlantis space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in February 2014. Credit: Elizabeth Howell
ESA's Gaia spacecraft as seen by the VLT (Credit: ESO)
Gaia, ESA’s long-anticipated mission to map the stars of our galaxy (as well as do a slew of other cool science things) is now tucked comfortably in its position in orbit around Earth-Moon L2, a gravitationally stable spot in space 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) away.
Once its mission begins in earnest, Gaia will watch about a billion stars an average of 70 times each over a five-year span… that’s 40 million observations every day. It will measure the position and key physical properties of each star, including its brightness, temperature and chemical composition, and help astronomers create the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way ever.
But before Gaia can do this, its own position must be precisely determined. And so several of the world’s most high-powered telescopes are trained on Gaia, keeping track daily of exactly where it is up to an accuracy of 150 meters… which, with the ten-meter-wide spacecraft one and a half million kilometers away, isn’t too shabby.
Called GBOT, for Ground Based Orbit Tracking, the campaign to monitor Gaia’s position was first set up in 2008 — long before the mission launched. This allowed participating observatories to practice targeting on other existing spacecraft, like NASA’s WMAP and ESA’s Planck space telescopes.
The image above shows an image of Gaia (circled) as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) atop Cerro Paranal in Chile, one of the supporting observatories in the GBOT campaign. The images were taken with the 2.6-meter Survey Telescope’s 268-megapixel OmegaCAM on Jan. 23, 6.5 minutes apart. With just the reflected sunlight off its circular sunshield, the distant spacecraft is about a million times fainter than what your eyes could see unaided.
Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way. (ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier)
It’s also one the closest objects ever imaged by the VST.
Currently Gaia is still undergoing calibration for its survey mission. Some problems have been encountered with stray sunlight reaching its detectors, and this may be due to the angle of the sunshield being a few degrees too high relative to the Sun. It could take a few weeks to implement an orientation correction; read more on the Gaia blog here.
Of the billion stars Gaia will observe, 99% have never had their distances accurately measured. Gaia will also observe 500,000 distant quasars, search for brown dwarfs and exoplanets, and will conduct experiments testing Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Find out more facts about the mission here.
Gaia launched on December 19, 2013, aboard a Soyuz VS06 from ESA’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Watch the launch here.
An extraordinary jet trailing behind a runaway pulsar is seen in this composite image. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ISDC/L.Pavan et al, Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA Optical: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF
One of the fastest-moving pulsars ever observed is spewing out a record-breaking jet of high-energy particles that stretches 37 light years in length – the longest object in the Milky Way galaxy.
“We’ve never seen an object that moves this fast and also produces a jet,” said Lucia Pavan of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and lead author of a paper analyzing the object. “By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star.”
The pulsar, a type of neutron star, is has the official moniker of IGR J11014-6103, but is also known as the “Lighthouse nebula.” Astronomers say the pulsar’s corkscrew-like trajectory can likely be traced back to its birth in the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star. The curly-cue pattern in the trail suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top.
The team says that their findings suggest that “jets are common to rotation-powered pulsars, and demonstrate that supernovae can impart high kick velocities to misaligned spinning neutron stars, possibly through distinct, exotic, core-collapse mechanisms.”
The object was first seen by the European Space Agency satellite INTEGRAL. The pulsar is located about 60 light-years away from the center of the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-61A in the constellation of Carina. Its implied speed is between 4 – 8 million km/hr (2.5 million and 5 million mph), making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed.
IGR J11014-6103 also is producing a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds and trails behind it in a comet-like tail. This structure, called a pulsar wind nebula, has been observed before, but the Chandra data show the long jet and the pulsar wind nebula are almost perpendicular to one another.
Usually, the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving.
“We can see this pulsar is moving directly away from the center of the supernova remnant based on the shape and direction of the pulsar wind nebula,” said co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. “The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?”
One possibility requires an extremely fast rotation speed for the iron core of the star that exploded. A problem with this scenario is that such fast speeds are not commonly expected to be achievable.
“With the pulsar moving one way and the jet going another, this gives us clues that exotic physics can occur when some stars collapse,” said co-author Gerd Puehlhofer also of the University of Tuebingen.
A frame from the 'Quantum Entanglement Animated' video, via QuantumFrontiers.com
Confused by how particles can be in two places at once? Wondering how particles can instantly communicate with each other no matter what the distance? Quantum physics is a field of study that defies common sense at every turn, and quantum entanglement might lead the way in the defying common sense department. Entanglement is the unusual behavior of elementary particles where they become linked so that when something happens to one, something happens to the other; no matter how far apart they are. This bizarre behavior of particles that become inextricably linked together is what Einstein supposedly called “spooky action at a distance.”
This new video from PHD Comics provides a combination of live action and animation to try to explain entanglement.
“Not surprisingly, it was really hard to draw this video,” says animator Jorge Cham. “How do you depict something that has never existed before? And more importantly, do you draw alligators differently from crocodiles?”
Yes, that sentence actually makes sense when it comes to entanglement. And the advice at the end of the video from physicist Jeff Kimble is applicable to entanglement — and life in general — as well: “If you know what you’re doing, don’t do it…”
Somewhere in this image there should be a static point of light that is the asteroid 2000 EM26. Based on orbital data from NASA/JPL, this is where it should have been. Credit: Slooh
Yesterday evening you may have dropped by to watch Slooh’s live coverage of asteroid 2000 EM26 as it passed just 8.8 lunar distances of Earth. Surprise – the space rock never showed up! Slooh’s robotic telescope attempted to recover the asteroid and share its speedy travels with the world but failed to capture an image at the predicted position.
Now nicknamed Moby Dick after the elusive whale in Herman Melville’s novel of the same name, the asteroid’s gone missing in the deep sea of space. Earthlings need fear no peril; it’s not headed in our direction anytime soon. Either the asteroid’s predicted path was in error or the object was much fainter than expected. More likely the former.
Last night’s coverage attempt of 2000 E26’s close flyby of Earth
2000 EM26’s predicted brightness at the time was around magnitude 15.4, not bright but well within range of the telescope. Rather than throwing their hands up in the air, the folks at Slooh are calling upon amateur astronomers make a photographic search for the errant space rock in the next few nights.
Since the asteroid was last observed 14 years ago for only 9 days, it isn’t too surprising that uncertainties in its position could add up over time, shifting the asteroid’s position and path to a different part of the sky by 2014. According to Daniel Fischer, German amateur astronomer and astronomy writer, the positions were off by 100 degrees! As Paul Cox, Slooh’s Observatory Director, points out:
“Discovering these Near Earth Objects isn’t enough. As we’ve seen with 2000 EM26, all the effort that went into its discovery is worthless unless followup observations are made to accurately determine their orbits for the future. And that’s exactly what Slooh members are doing, using the robotic telescopes at our world-class observatory site to accurately measure the precise positions of these asteroids and comets.”
If a determined, modern-day Ahab doesn’t find this asteroidal Moby Dick, one of the large scale robotic telescope surveys probably will. Here’s a link to the NASA/JPL particulars including brightness, coordinates and distance for 2000 EM26.
Similar sized asteroids, including ones passing even closer to Earth, zip by every month. 2000 EM26 received a lot of coverage yesterday likely because it arrived near the time of the anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteorite fall over Russia. Though it remains scarce for now, eyes are on the sky to find the asteroid again and refine its orbit. Hopefully the beast won’t get away next time.
