Universe Today

January 25, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Incredible Astrophoto: Thor’s Helmet in Canis Major

Thor’s Helmet Nebula (NGC 2359) in the constellation of Canis Major. Credit and copyright: Rolf Wahl Olsen.

At first glance, you might expect this beautiful image to be from a big ground-based observatory or even one of the space telescopes. But this image was taken by “amateur” astronomer Rolf Wahl Olsen. We’ve featured his work before, and he’s done amazing stuff – such as the first amateur image of another solar system — but even he says this latest image of an emission nebula might be his best image to date.

It’s a stunning look at what is known as Thor’s Helmet. This helmet-shaped feature (complete with wings!) is an emission nebula is located in the constellation of Canis Major, about 15,000 light years from Earth. The nebula is a large expanding bubble illuminated by a central star in its last stage of life — a massive Wolf-Rayet star which is shedding its outer layers of gas at an extremely high rate due to intense radiation pressure. Wolf-Rayet stars are thought to represent a brief stage of evolution near the end of life for giant super massive stars; the last unstable phase before the star explodes as a brilliant supernova.

The nebula is some 30 light years in diameter is embedded among a dense star field consisting of thousands of multi-colored stars, adding more beauty to the scene.

Thanks to Rolf for sharing this gorgeous image with Universe Today.

Here’s more details from Rolf:
Date: 8th, 14th, 19th December 2012 and 5th, 6th, 9th January 2013
Exposure: LRGB: 530:44:33:33m, total 10hrs 40mins @ -28C
Telescope: 10″ Serrurier Truss Newtonian f/5
Camera: QSI 683wsg with Lodestar guider
Filters: Astrodon LRGB E-Series Gen 2
Taken from his observatory in Auckland, New Zealand

A wider view:

Thor's Helmet in Canis Major. Credit and copyright: Rolf Wahl Olsen.

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.

January 25, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Dry Ice Drives Dramatic Changes on Mars

Mars may not be tectonically active but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing happening on the Red Planet’s surface. This video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows the dramatic seasonal changes that take place in Mars’ polar regions when the frozen carbon dioxide — called “dry ice” — coating the basalt sand dunes begins to thaw and cracks, releasing jets of sublimating CO2 gas that carry dark material upwards and outwards, staining the frozen surface of the dunes. Imagine what it would be like to be standing nearby when these jets erupt!

This process occurs around the upper latitudes of Mars every spring and is responsible for the dark (and sometimes light) mottled discolorations observed across sandy and dune-covered terrain.

Bright fans are created when surface conditions cause escaping CO2 gas to condense back onto the surface. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

If a prevailing wind happens to be blowing when the gases are escaping the cracks in the ice, whatever material they are carrying will be spread by the wind across the dunes in long streaks and fans. Read more about this process here.

“It’s an amazingly dynamic process. We had this old paradigm that all the action on Mars was billions of years ago. Thanks to the ability to monitor changes with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of the new paradigms is that Mars has many active processes today.”

– Candice Hansen, Planetary Science Institute

The images in the video were acquired by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and observing Mars in unprecedented detail for over six years. See more HiRISE images of the Martian surface here.

Video: NASA/JPL

January 25, 2013June 5, 2022 by Ken Kremer

Curiosity’s Robotic Arm Camera Snaps 1st Night Images

Image caption: This image of a Martian rock illuminated by white-light LEDs (light emitting diodes) is part of the first set of nighttime images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. The image was taken on Jan. 22, 2013, after dark on Sol 165. It covers an area about 1.3 inches by 1 inch (3.4 by 2.5 centimeters). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Curiosity’s high resolution robotic arm camera has just snapped the 1st set of night time images of a Martian rock of the now 5 1/2 month long mission – using illumination from ultraviolet and white light emitting LED’s. See the images above and below.

The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera is located on the tool turret at the end of Curiosity’s 7 foot (2.1 m) long robotic arm.

MAHLI took the close-up images of a rock target named “Sayunei” on Jan. 22 (Sol 165), located near the front-left wheel after the rover had driven over and scuffed the area to break up rocks in an effort to try and expose fresh material, free of obscuring dust.

“Sayunei” is at the site of the “John Klein” outcrop in “Yellowknife Bay” where the team hopes to commence the 1st rock drilling operations here in the coming days. Curiosity drove a few meters several sols ago to reach “John Klein”.

See below our Sol 157 mosaic showing the “John Klein” outcrop – where the rover snapped these night images of “Sayunei”.

Image caption: This image of a Martian rock illuminated by ultraviolet LEDs (light emitting diodes) is part of the first set of nighttime images taken by the MAHLI camera on the robotic arm. The image was taken on Jan. 22, 2013, after dark on Sol 165. It covers an area about 1.3 inches by 1 inch (3.4 by 2.5 centimeters). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

“The purpose of acquiring observations under ultraviolet illumination was to look for fluorescent minerals,” said MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. “These data just arrived this morning. The science team is still assessing the observations. If something looked green, yellow, orange or red under the ultraviolet illumination, that’d be a more clear-cut indicator of fluorescence.”

Analysis is still in progress to determine whether fluorescent minerals are present. Certain classes of organic compounds are also fluorescent.

MAHLI is an adjustable focus camera that works over a wide range. It can focus on targets just a few centimeters away or on distant objects like Mount Sharp, over 6 miles (10 km) away.

The LED’s surround the MAHLI lens.

Curiosity has discovered widespread evidence for the ancient flow of liquid water at “Yellowknife Bay” in the form of water bearing mineral veins, cross-bedded layering, nodules and spherical sedimentary concretions.

Ken Kremer

Image caption: Curiosity found widespread evidence for flowing water in the highly diverse, rocky scenery shown in this photo mosaic from the edge of Yellowknife Bay on Sol 157 (Jan 14, 2013). The rover will soon conduct 1st Martian rock drilling operation at flat, light toned rocks at the outcrop called “John Klein”, at center, the site where she is now located. ‘John Klein’ drill site and ‘Sheep Bed’ outcrop ledges to right of rover arm are filled with numerous mineral veins and spherical concretions which strongly suggest precipitation of minerals from liquid water. ‘Snake River’ rock formation is the linear chain of rocks protruding up from the Martian sand near rover wheel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

January 24, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

27 Years Ago: Voyager 2’s Visit to Uranus

Image of Uranus’ crescent taken by a departing Voyager 2 on January 25, 1986 (NASA/JPL)

27 years ago today, January 24, 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft sped past Uranus, becoming simultaneously the first and last spacecraft to visit the blue-tinged gas giant, third largest planet in the Solar System.

The image above shows the crescent-lit Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 from a distance of about 965,000 km (600,000 miles.) At the time the spacecraft had already passed Uranus and was looking back at the planet on its way outwards toward Neptune.

Although composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, trace amounts of methane in Uranus’ uppermost atmosphere absorb most of the red wavelengths of light, making the planet appear a pale blue color.

Image of the 1,500-km-wide Oberon acquired by Voyager 2 on Jan. 24, 1986 (NASA/JPL)

The second of NASA’s twin space explorers (although it launched first) Voyager 2 came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus on January 24, 1986, gathering images of the sideways planet, its rings and several of its moons. Voyager 2 also discovered the presence of a magnetic field around Uranus, as well as 10 new small moons.

Three moons discovered by Voyager 2 in 1986 (NASA/JPL)

Data gathered by Voyager 2 revealed that Uranus’ rate of rotation is 17 hours, 14 minutes.

At the time of this writing, Voyager 2 is 15,184,370,900 km from Earth and steadily moving toward the edge of the Solar System at a speed of about 3.3 AU per year. At that distance, signals from Voyager take just over 14 hours and 4 minutes to reach us.

See images from Voyager 2’s visit of Uranus here, and check out a video of the August 20, 1977 launch below along with more images from the historic Voyager mission’s “Grand Tour” of the outer Solar System.

January 23, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Don’t Tell Bones: Are We One Step Closer to “Beaming Up?”

It’s a crazy way to travel, spreading a man’s molecules all over the Universe…

While we’re still a very long way off from instantly transporting from ship to planet à la Star Trek, scientists are still relentlessly working on the type of quantum technologies that could one day make this sci-fi staple a possibility. Just recently, researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have reported ways to simplify the instantaneous transmission of quantum information using less “entanglement,” thereby making the process more efficient — as well as less error-prone.

(Because nobody wants a transporter mishap.)

In a paper titled Generalized teleportation and entanglement recycling, Cambridge researchers Sergii Strelchuk, Michal Horodecki and Jonathan Oppenheim investigate a couple of previously-developed protocols for quantum teleportation.

“Teleportation lies at the very heart of quantum information theory, being the pivotal primitive in a variety of tasks. Teleportation protocols are a way of sending an unknown quantum state from one party to another using a resource in the form of an entangled state shared between two parties, Alice and Bob, in advance. First, Alice performs a measurement on the state she wants to teleport and her part of the resource state, then she communicates the classical information to Bob. He applies the unitary operation conditioned on that information to obtain the teleported state.” (Strelchuk et al.)

In order for the teleportation to work, the process relies on entanglement — the remote connection between particles or individual bits of information regardless of the physical space separating them. This was what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” But getting particles or information packets entangled is no simple task.

“Teleportation crucially depends on entanglement, which can be thought as a ‘fuel’ powering it,” Strelchuk said in an article on ABC Science. “This fuel… is hard to generate, store and replenish. Finding a way to use it sparingly, or, ideally, recycling it, makes teleportation potentially more usable.”

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

Considering the sheer amount of information that makes up the also-difficult-to-determine state of a single object (in the case of a human, even simplistically speaking, about 10^28 kilobytes worth of data) you’re obviously going to want to keep the amount of entanglement fuel needed at a minimum.

Of course, we’re not saying we can teleport red-shirted security officers anywhere yet. But if.

Still, with a more efficient method to reduce — and even recycle — entanglement, Strelchuk and his team are bringing us a little closer to making quantum computing a reality. And it may very well take the power of a quantum computer to even make the physical teleportation of large-scale objects possible… once the technology becomes available.

“We are very excited to show that recycling works in theory, and hope that it will find future applications in areas such as quantum computation,” said Strelchuk. “Building a quantum computer is one of the great challenges of modern physics, and it is hoped that the new teleportation protocol will lead to advances in this area.”

(I’m sure Dr. McCoy would still remain skeptical.)

You can find the team’s full paper here (chock full of maths!) and read the article on ABC Science by Stephen Pincock here.

January 23, 2013December 23, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Noctilucent Clouds Imaged by Astronaut Chris Hadfield

Noctilucent clouds, also known as “night shining” clouds imaged by Chris Hadfield. Image credit: NASA

What a perspective! Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield captured this stunning image of noctilucent clouds above the Pacific South Ocean on January 5th, 2013. Also known as “night shining”, or noctilucent clouds, they form at the edge of much larger polar mesospheric clouds.

Polar mesospheric clouds form at an altitude of 76 to 85 kilometers, near the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere. The mesosphere is the layer of the atmosphere above the stratosphere (where airplanes fly), and the thermosphere is above that, where solar radiation causes a significant spike in temperature. (The Space Shuttle photo over on the right is positioned right between those two layers).

These clouds are typically seen between 70°-75° in latitude, and last for a season of 60-80 days during the late Spring and early Summer. The clouds themselves are made up of ice crystals which measure up to 100 nm in diameter. Scientists are still working out exactly what causes noctilucent clouds; they’re still a bit of a mystery. But their appearance has become more frequent, increasing in brightness and extent, so it’s possible they’re an indication of increasing climate change.

In this photograph, the Sun is below the horizon, and the ground is dark. Those clouds are still partially illuminated by the Sun, and so we see them with this ethereal wispy structure. Hadfield used a Nikon D35 camera with a 400 mm telephoto lens. At the very bottom of the image, you can see the pale orange color of the stratosphere.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (did I mention he’s Canadian?) launched to the International Space Station on December 19, 2012 to participate in Expedition 34. He has been returning wondering pictures and sharing them on Twitter and Google+.

Original Source: NASA Earth Observatory

January 23, 2013December 23, 2015 by Fraser Cain

In Orion, There Really is a Hole in the Sky

Clouds of cosmic dust in the region of Orion. Credit: ESO

A new image from ESO’s APEX instrument shows a cloud of gas and dust in the Orion region. Image credit: ESO

When astronomers see dark regions in nebula in visible light, they know there’s something going on. There’s got to be some kind of star forming activity pumping out material that obscures the view to the newly forming starts. Switch to infrared and you can peer through that intervening dust to see the young stars at work.

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile were surprised to see a dark region in the nebula NGC 1999, even in infrared, when the cause of the dark region should have been apparent.

Ooo, mystery.

These dark regions in nebulae have been observed for hundreds of years. Even William Herschel found one in the constellation Scorpius back in 1774.”Truly there is a hole in the sky here!” he noted. But it wasn’t a hole. It was a region where star formation is actively happening.

Under construction, nothing to see here, come back in a million years when the newly formed stars have generated powerful solar winds and are clearing out their stellar neighborhoods.

Here, I’ve attached an image of bok globules (dark nebulae in IC 2944), which can contain 2 to 50 solar masses of material contained within a volume of about a light-year. Often these dark regions can result in double or even multiple star systems.

But in the case of NGC 1999, astronomers used the APEX instrument to peer at this region in infrared; the perfect wavelength to see through all that dust.

And the hole, this dark region, was still there.

This is a widefield view of the region around NGC 1999. The nebula itself is right at the middle of this image, with the more famous Orion Nebula up at the top of the picture. Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

Thanks to multiple observations from different instruments, astronomers think they’ve puzzled out the nature of this dark hole. It’s actually a cavity carved out by the star V380 Orionis. It really is a dark hole in the nebula, and not a secret star forming region at all.

V380 Orionis is the brightest star in the region of NGC 1999 – it’s actually the brightest member of a triple star system. It’s got a surface temperature of about 10,000 Kelvin and contains about 3.5 times the mass of the Sun. Back in 2010, researchers uncovered that a powerful jet from V380 Ori is probably responsible for carving out this gap in the nebula.

Original Source: ESO News Release

P.S. Pixies running through my head as I’m writing this.

January 23, 2013April 26, 2016 by Elizabeth Howell

The Ocean is a lot Like Outer Space

A view of the Bathyscaphe Trieste in 1959. (U.S. NHHC)

Just about any space mission these days requires water training. Think of the countless hours astronauts spend in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center, practicing the steps to do spacewalks. Then there are the crews that actually live in the ocean for days at a time on NASA’s NEEMO missions.

Long before these “aquanauts” added flippers to their list of equipment, however, the U.S. Navy was busy exploring the depths of the ocean. Today – Jan. 23 – marks the anniversary of the Bathyscaphe Trieste’s descent to the bottom of the ocean in 1960. This was the first time a vessel, manned or unmanned, had reached the deepest known point of the Earth’s oceans, the Mariana Trench.

Trieste was at first operated by the French Navy, which operated it for several years in the Mediterranean Sea, but the US Navy purchased the Trieste in 1958.

Although two men took the ride down, all accounts say that it was an isolating experience. Jacques Piccard – well-known today for his exploration of the oceans – and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh descended about 11 kilometers (7 miles) to the bottom.

Lt. Don Walsh, USN (left) and Jacques Piccard (centre)
in the bathyscaphe Trieste. Via Wikipedia. — Lt. Don Walsh, USN (left) and Jacques Piccard (centre) in the bathyscaphe Trieste. Via Wikipedia.

Fighting with poor communications and high pressure – which cracked a window at 30,000 feet below the surface – the crew made their way to ocean floor. They worked in a tiny sphere only 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide, and according to the University of Delaware, the interior reached frigid temperatures of 7 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) during their successful descent and return.

Spaceflight and deep-ocean diving share many similarities, as this mission demonstrated. The early days of the space program had communications blackouts as spaceships flew between stations; this proved to be a near-disaster for the Gemini 8 crew in 1966 when their spacecraft spun out of control during a period with no voice connection to the ground.

Also, sustaining life is no less challenging in the water as it is in space. Humans require oxygen, pressure and a comfortable environment where they work. Crews in space have faced serious problems with all of these matters before – Mir suffered a partial depressurization in 1997, and the early days of the Skylab space station were rather hot until the astronauts could deploy a sunshade.

Walsh was not available for an interview with Universe Today due to travel, but in a 2012 BBC interview he noted that he had reserved confidence that they would make it to the bottom.

“I knew the machine well enough, at that point, to know that theoretically, it could be done,” Walsh recalled.

The mens’ feat would go unrepeated for decades, until in 2012 Hollywood director James Cameron made the descent again – alone, although certainly equipped with more modern technology. For comparison, only one American has flown solo in space since the 1960s; in 2004, Mike Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne into suborbital space twice as part of the Ansari X-Prize win.

January 23, 2013December 23, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Detailed View of Betelgeuse, on a Collision Course with a Nearby Wall of Dust

A photograph of the red supergiant Betelgeuse interacting with a mysterious dusty wall. Image credit: Herschel/ESA

Betelgeuse is one of my favorite objects to look at, partly because of its pure red color, and mostly because my imagination fills in the rest. That bright red star, the shoulder of Orion is a supergiant, with dozens of times the mass of the Sun, and ready to detonate as a supernova any day now (any day within the next few million years).

But look at Betelgeuse with a really powerful telescope, like the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope, and you’ll see something like this: the red supergiant Betelgeuse in all its glory, smashing its ferocious solar winds into its environment.

In this photograph, just released from the European Space Agency, you can see the powerful solar winds creating a bow shock around the star as it ploughs through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s. Closer into the star there are asymmetric structures, where the star shed material in fits and starts into its surroundings, like convective bubbles randomly popping to the top of a pot of boiling water.

It’s the interaction of this supergiant star and its surroundings that astronomers were attempting to unravel with their research, in a paper titled: The enigmatic nature of the circumstellar envelope and bow shock surrounding Betelgeuse as revealed by Herschel. Researchers from several European universities combined data from Herschel, the GALEX space observatory, WISE, and even radio wavelengths to study Betelgeuse and its environment. They studied the star, the bow shock, and the asymmetric clumps of material around it.

Over on the left-hand side of the photograph is a mysterious dusty wall structure that Betelgeuse is heading straight for. Because this dusty wall doesn’t curve, like the bow shock around Betelgeuse, astronomers don’t think it was caused by the star itself. According to the researchers:

The linear bar might be the edge of an interstellar cloud illuminated by Betelgeuse or a linear filament whose a possible origin is linked to the Galactic magnetic field. Since no curvature is present in the bar, we believe that the bar is not directly linked to a previous blue supergiant wind

Betelgeuse is, however, responsible for illuminating this structure, like a flashlight illuminating a nearby fog bank. And according the astronomer’s calculations, the star’s bow shock will collide with that wall in a mere 5,000 years, with the star itself following suit 12,500 years later.

Original Source: ESA News Release

January 22, 2013December 23, 2015 by Ken Kremer

NASA Stars at 2013 Presidential Inaugural Parade with Orion and Curiosity – Photos and Video

Image caption: Orion deep space crew capsule float passes in front of the White House at the Presidential Inaugural parade on Jan 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. Credit: NASA

NASA’s new Orion deep space crew capsule and sensational Curiosity Mars rover had starring roles at the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Parade held on Monday, Jan 21, 2013 in Washington D.C.

NASA photographers captured stunning photos and video (above and below) as Orion and Curiosity passed in front of the White House and the official reviewing stand – with President Obama & VP Joe Biden and their families and numerous dignitaries smiling and waving.

Beautiful weather shined though out the entire day’s festivities and into the early evening as full size models of Orion and Curiosity made their way thought the capitol streets to participate in the 2013 Inaugural parade.

NASA’s floats prominently placed near the front of the parade and seen on Live TV about 530 PM EDT as well as by about a million spectators on hand.

Image caption: Curiosity Mars rover float passes in front of the White House and reviewing stand at the Presidential Inaugural parade on Jan 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. Credit: NASA

The fantastically successful Curiosity rover is discovering widespread evidence for the ancient flow of liquid water on Mars.

The Orion multi-purpose capsule will take our astronauts back to the Moon and farther into deep space than ever before.

NASA is the ONLY federal agency asked to be in the inaugural parade. Curiosity led the way followed by Orion.

Video of full-size models of the Curiosity Mars rover and Orion, the multi-purpose capsule that will take our astronauts farther into space than ever, as they appeared in the Washington, D.C. parade on Jan. 21.

Accompanying the NASA vehicles were members of the Curiosity team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and current and former astronauts Alvin Drew, Serena Aunon, Kate Rubins, Mike Massimino, Lee Morin and Kjell Lindgren, as well as Leland Melvin, NASA’s associate administrator for Education, and John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for Science.

Be sure to check out NASA’s Flickr stream for many photos from the 2013 Inaugural Day festivities and parade – here and here

See my preview story – here

Ken Kremer