Universe Today

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Space Jam: Astronaut Sings Duet From the Space Station

Chris Hadfield in the Cupola of the ISS. Credit: NASA

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield participated in an annual event for Canadian music students from a unique location: a long-distance perch in the Cupola of the International Space Station. Before launching to the ISS in December, Hadfield wrote a song with Ed Robertson of the band Barenaked Ladies, and Friday morning the song premiered as Hadfield, Robertson and a school glee club sang together: Hadfield performed his part on the space station; Robertson did his in Toronto with the Wexford Gleeks. The song was part of Music Monday in Canada, and while today’s premiere was pre-recorded, in May, students across Canada will play the song live with Hadfield in space.

The song is called “I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing),” it begins with the words:

Eighteen-thousand miles an hour
Fueled by science and solar power
The oceans racing past
At half a thousand tons
Ninety minutes moon to sun
A bullet can’t go half this fast.

Music aficionados can find the sheet music here and here.

Hadfield plays the guitar and sings with a couple of bands on Earth. Before he began his Expedition on the ISS, he told Universe Today he would be doing as much singing as he could in space.

“Music is really important to me, ever since I’ve been a kid. I’ve always played guitar and sang,” he said, “and I’m really hoping to have the chance to sit weightless with the guitar on board and play music, and also record some of the music I’ve written.”

He also is working to finish some songs he started writing on Earth while living on the ISS, which he called “a particularly inspirational environment” and maybe write some news ones.

“We have all the recording equipment we need on board,” he said. “It is basic but it is good enough to be able to record and I’m hoping to record at least one full CD’s worth of original music up there. It’s neat – I’m writing with my brother who is a musician, and he pointed out that a lot of the traditional folk songs came from people who were the first on the frontier — the early explorers, sailors, miners, and the fishermen — the people who are involved in the day-to-day of a specific human experience. To think I might be involved in helping to write some of the first space faring music, music that people might play and sing as they leave Earth for Mars, it is an interesting time in history.”

This isn’t the first Earth-Space musical collaboration: in 2011 astronaut Cady Coleman did a flute duet with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Distant Star Goes Disco

Star-forming Region IC 348 Around Protostar LRLL 54361. Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Muzerolle (STScI), E. Furlan (NOAO and Caltech), K. Flaherty (University of Arizona/Steward Observatory), Z. Balog (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), and R. Gutermuth (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

A disco inferno in space? Astronomers have been keeping an eye on an unusual star that unleashes a burst of light every 25 days, like an extremely slow pulsating disco ball. Similar pulsating bursts of light have been seen before, but this one, named LRLL 54361 is the most powerful beacon ever seen.

Using the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, astronomers have solved the mystery of this star. It is actually two newly formed protostars in a binary system, doing a little disco dance of their own. And as they spin around each other on the smoky dance floor (actually a dense cloud of gas and dust), a blast of radiation is unleashed each time the stars get close to each other in their orbits. The effect seen by the telescopes is enhanced by an optical illusion called a light echo.

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a police strobe light. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Muzerolle (STScI), E. Furlan (NOAO and Caltech), K. Flaherty (University of Arizona/Steward Observatory), Z. Balog (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), and R. Gutermuth (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). — NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a police strobe light. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Muzerolle (STScI), E. Furlan (NOAO and Caltech), K. Flaherty (University of Arizona/Steward Observatory), Z. Balog (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), and R. Gutermuth (University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

The unusual thing is, while astronomers have seen this phenomenon before, called pulsed accretion, usually it is found in later stages of star birth – and not in such a young system or with such intensity and regularity.
Astronomers say LRLL 54361 offers insights into the early stages of star formation when lots of gas and dust is being rapidly accreted to form a new binary star.

“This protostar has such large brightness variations with a precise period that it is very difficult to explain,” said James Muzerolle of the Space Telescope Science Institute. His paper recently was published in the journal Nature.

Discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, LRLL 54361 is a variable object inside the star-forming region IC 348, located 950 light-years from Earth. Data from Spitzer’s dust-piercing infrared cameras showed unusual outbursts in the brightness, occurring every 25.34 days, which is a very rare phenomenon.

Based on statistical analysis, the two stars are estimated to be no more than a few hundred thousand years old.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the Spitzer observations and reveal the detailed stellar structure around LRLL 54361. Hubble observed two cavities above and below a dusty disk. The cavities are visible by tracing light scattered off their edges. They likely were blown out of the surrounding natal envelope of dust and gas by an outflow launched near the central stars. The disk and the envelope prevent the suspected binary star pair from being observed directly. By capturing multiple images over the course of one pulse event, the Hubble observations uncovered a spectacular movement of light away from the center of the system, the light echo optical illusion, where a sudden flash or burst of light is reflected off a source and arrives at the viewer some time after the initial flash.

A series of images taken by Hubble Space Telescope over a month show the pulse of light moving through the nebula. The light is illuminating the material around the stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

Muzerolle and his team hypothesized the pair of stars in the center of the dust cloud move around each other in a very eccentric orbit. As the stars approach each other, dust and gas are dragged from the inner edge of a surrounding disk. The material ultimately crashes onto one or both stars, which triggers a flash of light that illuminates the circumstellar dust. The system is rare because close binaries account for only a few percent of our galaxy’s stellar population. This is likely a brief, transitory phase in the birth of a star system.

Muzerolle’s team next plans to continue monitoring LRLL 54361 using other facilities including the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Telescope. The team hopes to eventually obtain more direct measurements of the binary star and its orbit.

Read Muzerolle’s paper (pdf)

Source: HubbleSite

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

NASA Satellite Snaps Winter Storm “Nemo”

GOES-13 satellite view of the eastern US on Feb. 8 (NASA)

Captured by NASA’s GOES-13 weather satellite on Friday, Feb. 8, this image shows the convergence of two massive low-pressure systems that are expected to bring high winds and up to 2–3 feet of snowfall across much of New England over the next 24 hours. This is the second and most powerful “nor’easter” of the season, and states in the region are preparing for the worst.

Acquired at 9:01 a.m. EST, the GOES image shows clouds associated with the western frontal system stretching from Canada through the Ohio and Tennessee valleys and down into the Gulf of Mexico. The comma-shaped low pressure system located over the Atlantic, east of Virginia, is forecast to merge with the front and create a powerful nor’easter, which The Weather Channel (in a recent move to name winter storms) has dubbed “Nemo.”

Watch a video of this process in action below.

*Snowfall forecasts for New England states (Weather Channel)*

At the time of this writing, the snow has begun to fall outside this writer’s house. Accumulations are less than an inch — but that’s soon to change! Many cancellations and closings have already been announced across the region, with people making apprehensive associations with the infamous Blizzard of ’78. It’s unlikely that as many people will be caught unprepared, though, especially since modern forecasting methods have dramatically improved over the past 35 years — due in no small part to space technology like NASA’s GOES (Geostationary Operational Environment Program) satellites.

Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 35,790 km (22,240 miles) the 4 operational GOES satellites keep a constant eye on the globe, providing the NOAA with accurate, real-time measurements of water vapor and land and sea temperature variations. See more GOES image data here.

In the path of Nemo? Here’s some tips on how to be prepared.

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Astrophotos: An Amazing Rush from the Sun

The Sun in H-Alpha with close-up on a rushing prominence on 02-07-2013. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.

“The Sun was amazing yesterday!” wrote John Chumack, one of our favorite astrophotographers, sending us these great shots of incredible prominences on the western limb, and one detached solar prominence, along with several filaments on the disk and 3 Sunspots!

You might get a “rush” from the close-ups of the large prominences blasting from the Sun. John shot these with a hydrogen alpha filter from his backyard in Dayton, Ohio. See more below:

Full disk of the Sun in Hydrogen Alpha Light on 02-07-2013. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.

John’s tools of the trade for these images were a Lunt 60mm/50F H-Alpha Solar telescope, DMK 21 AF04, 2x barlow, for close-up, 1/54 Sec exposure, 724 frames; a DMK 31 Camera for Full Disk, 1/387 second exposure, 561 Frames, Stacked in Registax 6.

Prominences from the Sun on 02-07-2013, with one detached prominence achieving liftoff! Credit and copyright: John Chumack. — Prominences from the Sun on 02-07-2013, with one detached prominence achieving liftoff!. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.

These Sun has been fairly active the past few days. Here’s a video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of a C9-class solar flare. produced from Active Region AR1667 on February 6, 2013:

And John wasn’t the only one imaging the active Sun in the last few days. Here’s another photo of the Sun captured by Paul Stewart in New Zealand.

Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

A Cosmic Seagull’s Star-Studded Wings

Bright stars and vast clouds of dust and gas illuminate the “wings” of the Seagull Nebula (ESO)

These glowing red clouds are just a small part of the wings of an enormous bird — the Seagull Nebula, a band of gas and dust 3,400 light-years away that shines from UV light radiating from hot newborn stars.

This image was made from observations with the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory in Chile. See the full wide-field view of the Seagull Nebula below.

Wide-field view of the Seagull Nebula. The white box is the area seen at top. North is up in this view. (ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin)

The Seagull Nebula (IC 2177) is a vaguely bird-shaped region of gas and dust clouds located between the constellations Canis Major and Monoceros. The detail image at the top of this article is located along the upper edge of the gull’s lower wing, and is separately cataloged as Sharpless 2-296.

The bright red glow is the result of ionized hydrogen energized by the radiation from the several hot, bright young stars seen in the image. H II regions like the Seagull Nebula are signs of ongoing star formation in a galaxy — in a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, these dust clouds are scattered throughout the arms. In fact, it was observations of such nebulae in the 1950s by Stewart Sharpless that helped determine the spiral structure of the Galaxy.

The silhouettes of dark, dense clouds closer to Earth block the red hydrogen glow from more distant areas of Sharpless 2-296.

Weekly Space Hangout: ScienceOnline 2013 Edition

This week, we broadcast the Weekly Space Hangout from the ScienceOnline 2013 conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fraser Cain, Nicole Gugliucci, Alan Boyle, and Amy Shira Teitel were on location in Raleigh, and then Scott Lewis and Dr. Thad Szabo reported from their offices.

This week, we talked about:

We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday on Google+ at 12:00 pm PST / 3:00 pm EST / 2000 GMT. You’ll want to circle Cosmoquest on Google+ to find out when we’re recording next. The audio for the Weekly Space Hangout is also released to the Astronomy Cast podcast feed.

February 8, 2013February 8, 2013 by Fraser Cain

Virtual Star Party for Feb. 3, 2013: Superbowl Sunday Edition

While Fraser was flying back from North Carolina, the Virtual Star Party Team came together for a rousing night of astronomy – even during the Superbowl. There were many views of amazing deep sky objects, including the Orion Nebula, Horsehead Nebula, Blue Snowball, Jupiter, the “37 Nebula”, Rosette Nebula, Crab Nebula, Eskimo Nebula, and much more. It was an action-packed evening.

Continue reading “Virtual Star Party for Feb. 3, 2013: Superbowl Sunday Edition”

February 8, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Less Than 1% of Exoplanet Systems Have Intelligent Life, Researchers Say

Recent findings say that Earth-like exoplanets could be all around us in our cosmic neighborhood. But how many would be home to intelligent life?

A new study estimates that fewer than 1% of transiting exoplanet systems host civilizations technologically advanced enough to send out radio transmissions that could be detected by our current SETI searches.

That equates to less than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy that would have intelligent life we could possibly communicate with. But even with those odds, there could be millions of advanced ET’s in the galaxy that we could phone, researchers say.

A group of astronomers, including Jill Tarter from the SETI Institute and scientists at the University of California, Berkeley used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of stars where the Kepler mission has found transiting exoplanets. These specific targets were chosen because they had exoplanets in the habitable zone around the star and there were either five or more exoplanets in the system, or there was super-Earths with relatively long orbits.

The search came up empty in detecting any signals.

“We didn’t find ET, but we were able to use this statistical sample to, for the first time, put rather explicit limits on the presence of intelligent civilizations transmitting in the radio band where we searched,” said Andrew Siemion from UC Berkeley.

The team looked for signals in the 1-2 GHz range which is the region we use here on Earth for our cell phones and television transmissions. Narrowing it down, the team looked for signals that cover no more than 5Hz of the spectrum since there is no known natural mechanism for producing such narrow band signals.

“Emission no more than a few Hz in spectral width is, as far as we know, an unmistakable indicator of engineering by an intelligent civilization,” the team said in their paper.

The telescope spent 12 hours collecting five minutes of radio emissions from each star. Most of the stars were more than 1,000 light-years away, so only signals intentionally aimed in our direction would have been detected. The scientists say that in the future, more sensitive radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array, should be able to detect much weaker radiation, perhaps even unintentional leakage radiation, from civilizations like our own.

The researchers said these results allows them to put limits on the likelihood of Kardashev Type II civilizations. The Karashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize. The team said that finding no signals implies that the number of these civilizations that are “noisy” in the 1-2GHz range must less than one in a million per sun-like star.

The team plans more observations with the Green Bank Telescope, focusing on multi-planet systems in which two of the planets occasionally align relative to Earth, potentially allowing them to eavesdrop on communications between the planets.

“This work illustrates the power of leveraging our latest understanding of exoplanets in SETI searches,” said UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, who heads the world’s longest running SETI project at the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. “We no longer have to guess about whether we are targeting Earth-like environments, we know it with certainty.”

Read the team’s paper.

Sources: UC Berkeley, MIT Technology Review

February 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Astronomy Without a Telescope Returns as E-Book: Win a Copy!

Longtime readers of Universe Today will remember the series “Astronomy Without a Telescope” written by the witty Steve Nerlich, who also mans the Cheap Astronomy podcast. We were thrilled when Steve started writing for us and his weekly AWAT series (or is that Eh? What?) has now been compiled into an e-book, an anthology of the best of these thoughtful discussions of modern astronomy and cosmology.

For the e-book, Steve has organized selections into categories ranging from speculations about alien biology to the ultimate fate of the Universe to the “Out in Left Field” section where many crazy theories about the cosmos are thoroughly discussed and debunked. The book is packed with spectacular images and hyperlinks to in-depth background articles that will satisfy both novice and expert. And as Steve says, this book is proof “that one can readily grasp much of humanity’s current understanding of the Universe without going anywhere near a telescope.”

This giveaway is now closed.

With clever titles such as “Is an Anomalous Anomaly a Normality?” and “Can a Really Fast Spacecraft Turn into a Black Hole?” Steve provides readers with an amusing but intelligent look at the Universe.

The book is available in several formats at a very reasonable price, but Steve has also graciously given Universe Today some editions to give away. In order to be entered into the giveaway drawing, just put your email address into the box at the bottom of this post before Monday, February 11, 2013. We’ll send you a confirmation email, so you’ll need to click the link in the email to be entered into the drawing.

If you don’t win a copy, you can get e-versions of the book for $3.99 USD at Amazon for Kindle , or at Lulu, or Kobo.

FYI on providing your email for the giveaway: We’re only going to use these email addresses for Universe Today giveaways/contests and announcements. We won’t be using them for any other purpose, and we definitely won’t be selling the addresses to anyone else. Once you’re on the giveaway notification list, you’ll be able to unsubscribe any time you like.

February 7, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Captain Kirk Hails the Space Station

Screenshot from the Canadian Space Agency's live UStream webcast of the Hadfield/Shatner event.

Ah, the nerdy joys of living in the 21st century! Chris Hadfield, an astronaut on board the International Space Station and William Shatner, who portrayed someone in space, were able to talk to each other live. After Captain Kirk opened hailing frequencies, Hadfield replied — using some Star Trek sound effects. Needless to say, when science fiction and reality collide like this, it is an epic day in nerdom.