Want to explore the Milky Way? A new visualization tool from Google called 100,000 Stars lets you take a tour of our cosmic neighborhood, and with a few clicks of your mouse you can zoom in, out and around and do a little learning along the way. Zoom in to learn the names of some of the closest stars; click on the names to find out more information about them.
Playing with it is great fun, and I’ve been experimenting with it for a while. The most important caveat about 100,000 Stars is that you need to run it in Chrome. It’s from the Chrome Experiment team, and it uses imagery and data from NASA and ESA, but the majority of what you are seeing are artist’s renditions.
The best way to get started is to click on the Take the Tour in the upper left hand corner.
But if you just want to zoom in, you can see the closest stars to us. The Sun is in the middle, and if you zoom in even further, you’ll see the Oort Cloud. Keep zooming in to find the planetary orbits (I was struck by how much zooming had to be done to get to the planets, giving a sense of scale).
It includes some nifty spacey-like music (provided by Sam Hulick, who video game fans may recognize as a composer for the popular space adventure series, Mass Effect) but if you’d rather explore in silence, hit your mute button.
What I enjoyed the most is moving my mouse up and down to see the 3-D effect of how everything fits together, providing a sense of the cosmic web that holds our universe together.
On this day in history, on November 14, 1969, Apollo 12 successfully launched to the Moon. But it wasn’t without a little drama. The weather that day at Cape Canaveral in Florida was overcast with light rain and winds. However, at 11:22 am EST, the spacecraft, carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean, blasted off into the clouds, in a seemingly perfect launch.
But thirty-seven seconds into launch, all hell broke loose.
“What the hell was that?” asked Gordon. Twenty seconds of confusion ensued, and then another disturbance occurred.
On the ground, the total solar eclipse of November 13/14, 2012 was only visible to only to observers in northern Australia. But ESA’s Sun-watching satellite Proba-2 enjoyed three partial eclipses from its vantage point in space.
During a total solar eclipse, the Moon moves in front of the Sun as seen from Earth, their alignment and separation such that the much closer Moon appears large enough to block out the light from the much more distant Sun.
Since Proba-2 orbits Earth about 14.5 times per day, it can dip in and out of the Moon’s shadow around the time of a solar eclipse. The constant change in viewing angle of Proba-2 meant that the satellite passed through the shadow three times during the eclipse yesterday, as shown in the video above.
ESA says the apparent noise in the movie results from high energy particles hitting Proba-2’s electronics as the spacecraft passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly. The dimming in the movie is an effect as part of the satellite’s orbit passes through the shadow of the Earth.
Proba-2 image of the solar disc taken during the total eclipse of July 2010, combined with ground-based images taken at the same time to reveal the exquisite details of the solar corona. Credit: ESA
Read more about Proba-2’s day of eclipses from ESA.
This artist’s impression shows the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/P. Delorme/Nick Risinger/R. Saito/VVV Consortium
Rogue planets – also known as free floating planets – are pretty intriguing. They are not orbiting a star but instead are wandering through the galaxy, having been either forcibly ejected from a solar system or having formed very early on in the Universe. While only a handful of these planets have been actually found, astronomers estimate these vagrant worlds could vastly outnumber stars. In fact, it’s been suggested there could be 100,000 times more rogue planets than stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone!
The latest rogue world to be found is exciting in that it is the closest such object to our Solar System so far. At a distance of about 100 light-years, its comparative proximity, along with the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail. Astronomers say this object gives them a preview of the exoplanets that future instruments will be able to find – and potentially take image of — around stars other than the Sun. But the planet also seems to be loosely tied to a roving group of stars, called the AB Doradus Moving Group.
The new rogue planet, with the ungainly name of CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 (CFBDSIR2149 for short), was found using the Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The astronomers, led by Philippe Delorme from the Institut de planétologie et d’astrophysique de Grenoble, CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier, France, are calling the object a rogue planet candidate for now, as they want to study it further to confirm its free-floating status.
Moving star systems are equally intriguing. The AB Doradus Moving Group is the closest such group to our Solar System, and the stars drift through space together in a pack. They are thought to have formed at the same time. If the new rogue planet actually is associated with this moving group, astronomers say it will be possible to deduce much more about it, including its temperature, mass, and what its atmosphere is made of. There remains a small probability that the association with the moving group is by chance.
The link between the new object and the moving group is the vital clue that allows astronomers to find the age of the newly discovered object. Without knowing its age, it’s not possible to know whether it is really a planet, or a brown dwarf, a “failed” star that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine.
This is the first isolated planetary mass object ever identified in a moving group, and the association with this group makes it the most interesting free-floating planet candidate identified so far.
This closeup of an image captured by the SOFI instrument on ESO’s New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory shows the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 in infrared light. This object, which appears as a faint blue dot at the centre of the picture, is the closest such object to the Solar System. Credit: ESO/P. Delorme.
“Looking for planets around their stars is akin to studying a firefly sitting one centimetre away from a distant, powerful car headlight,” said Delorme. “This nearby free-floating object offered the opportunity to study the firefly in detail without the dazzling lights of the car messing everything up.”
Free-floating objects like CFBDSIR2149 are thought to form either as normal planets that have been booted out of their home systems, or as lone objects like the smallest stars or brown dwarfs. In either case these objects are intriguing — either as planets without stars, or as the tiniest possible objects in a range spanning from the most massive stars to the smallest brown dwarfs.
“These objects are important, as they can either help us understand more about how planets may be ejected from planetary systems, or how very light objects can arise from the star formation process,” says Philippe Delorme. “If this little object is a planet that has been ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space.”
If CFBDSIR2149 is not associated with the AB Doradus Moving Group, the astronomers say it is trickier to be sure of its nature and properties, and it may instead be characterized as a small brown dwarf. Both scenarios represent important questions about how planets and stars form and behave.
“Further work should confirm CFBDSIR2149 as a free-floating planet,” said Delorme. “This object could be used as a benchmark for understanding the physics of any similar exoplanets that are discovered by future special high-contrast imaging systems, including the SPHERE instrument that will be installed on the VLT.”
This video shows an artist’s impression of the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9. In the first part of the sequence the planet appears as a dark disc in visible light, silhouetted against the star clouds of the Milky Way. This is the closest such object to the Solar System and the most exciting candidate free-floating planet found so far. It does not orbit a star and hence does not shine by reflected light; the faint glow it emits can only be detected in infrared light. In the final sequence we see an infrared view of the object with the central parts of the Milky Way as seen by the VISTA infrared survey telescope as background. The object appears blueish in this near-infrared view because much of the light at longer infrared wavelengths is absorbed by methane and other molecules in the planet’s atmosphere. In visible light the object is so cool that it would only shine dimly with a deep red colour when seen close-up.
Artist’s concept showing a dust disk around a binary system containing a white dwarf and a less-massive M (red) dwarf companion. (P. Marenfeld and NOAO/AURA/NSF)
Even though NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft — aka WISE — ran out of coolant in October 2010, bringing its infrared survey mission to an end, the data that it gathered will be used by astronomers for decades to come as it holds clues to some of the most intriguing and hard-to-find objects in the Universe.
Recently astronomers using WISE data have found evidence of a particularly curious disk of dust and gas surrounding a pair of stars — one a dim red dwarf and the other the remains of a dead Sun-sized star — a white dwarf. The origin of the gas is a mystery, since based on standard models of stellar evolution it shouldn’t be there… yet there it is.
The binary system (which has the easy-to-remember name SDSS J0303+0054) consists of a white dwarf and a red dwarf separated by a distance only slightly larger than the radius of the Sun — about 700,000 km — which is incredibly close for two whole stars. The stars orbit each other quickly too: once every 3 hours.
The stars are so close that the system is referred to as a “post-common envelope” binary, because at one point the outer material of one star expanded out far enough to briefly engulf the other completely in what’s called a “common envelope.” This envelope of material brought the stars even closer together, transferring stellar material between them and ultimately speeding up the death of the white dwarf.
The system was first spotted during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (hence the SDSS prefix) and was observed with WISE’s infrared abilities during a search for dust disks or brown dwarfs orbiting white dwarf stars. To find both a red (M) dwarf star 40-50 times the mass of Jupiter and a disk of dust orbiting the white dwarf in this system was unexpected — in fact, it’s the only known example of a system like it.
The entire mass of the dust (termed an infrared excess) is estimated to be “equivalent to the mass of an asteroid a few tens of kilometers in radius” and extends out to about the same distance as Venus’ orbit — just over 108 million kilometers, or 0.8 AU.
Why is the dust so unusual? Because, basically, it shouldn’t even be there. At that distance from the white dwarf, positioned just out of reach (but not terribly far away at all) anything that was within that zone when the original Sun-sized star swelled into its red giant phase should have spiraled inwards, getting swallowed up by the expanding stellar atmosphere.
Such is the fate that likely awaits the inner planets of our own Solar System — including Earth — when the Sun reaches the final phases of its stellar life.
So this requires that there are other sources of the dust. According to the WISE science update, “One possibility is that it is caused by multiple asteroids that orbit further away and somehow are perturbed close to the binary and collide with each other. [Another] is that the red dwarf companion releases a large amount of gas in a stellar wind that is trapped by the gravitational pull of its more massive white dwarf companion. The gas then condenses and forms the dust disk that is observed.
“Either way, this new discovery provides an interesting laboratory for the study of binary star evolution.”
WISE launched into space on Dec. 14, 2009 on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light with greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessors. From its polar orbit 525 kilometers (326 miles) in altitude it scanned the skies, collecting images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light. WISE took more than 2.7 million images over the course of its mission, capturing objects ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids relatively close to Earth before exhausting the supply of coolant necessary to mask its own heat from its ultra-sensitive sensors.
Inset: Infrared images of SDSS J0303+0054. (NASA/JPL and John H. Debes et. al.)
If you’ve been following the spectacular adventures of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover since the nerve wracking Sky Crane touchdown just 3 months ago, then PBS NOVA TV has a sweet treat in store for you – Viewer Alert !
Be sure to tune in Wednesday night Nov.14 at 9 PM EDT/PDT for the premiere broadcast of NOVA’s thrilling new documentary titled “Ultimate Mars Challenge” on your local PBS station. The highly acclaimed NOVA science series has been decorated with numerous major television awards.
Get a preview of the show by watching this short 30 second trailer below, featuring the top scientists and engineers who created and gave birth to the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission at NASA field centers and University’s and aerospace companies spread across the US and Europe – and then guided her to an unprecedented pinpoint landing beside a layered Martian mountain in search of the ingredients of life.
‘Ultimate Mars Challenge’ also features several Curiosity mosaics specially created for the program by the image processing team of Ken Kremer & Marco Di Lorenzo
And in case you miss the show or want to watch it again, check this PBS link to replay the video of episodes of NOVA.
Read this Program Description from PBS for complete details:
“Ultimate Mars Challenge gives viewers a front-row seat for the Curiosity’s thrilling landing as well as the spectacular discoveries to come. The most ambitious robotic geologist ever, Curiosity carries 10 new instruments that will advance the quest for signs that Mars might have once been suitable for life.
But no rover does it alone: Curiosity joins a team that includes the Mars Odyssey, Express, and Reconnaissance orbiters, along with the tireless Opportunity rover. As we reveal the dynamic new picture of Mars that these explorers are painting, we will discover the deep questions raised by forty years of roving Mars: How do we define life? How does life begin and what does it need to survive? Are we alone in the universe?
Why go back to Mars? Far from dead, Mars holds untold potential. Nearly half a century of Mars exploration has yielded tantalizing clues that Mars may once have harbored life—and may harbor it still.
The extraordinary landing of a revolutionary rover named Curiosity—which successfully touched down inside the Gale Crater—means we have wheels down on the planet once again, in the form of the most sophisticated robot ever to rove the Mars surface.
Will NASA’s bold mission and this marvel of technology answer some of our biggest questions and usher in a new golden age of exploration? NOVA goes behind the scenes on NASA’s quest to solve the riddles of the red planet”
Image Caption: Curiosity Self Portrait with Mount Sharp at Rocknest ripple in Gale Crater. Curiosity used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the robotic arm to image herself and her target destination Mount Sharp in the background. Mountains in the background to the left are the northern wall of Gale Crater. This color panoramic mosaic was assembled from raw images snapped on Sol 85 (Nov. 1, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
‘Ultimate Mars Challenge’ was produced by the Emmy award winning team of Jill Shinefield and Gail Willumsen at Gemini Productions in West Hollywood, California. Jill and Gail were on site at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., to cover the Aug. 5/6 touchdown inside Gale Crater. They say the show just wrapped production in early November, so it’s completely up-to-date through the first 90 Martian days, or Sols, of the 2 year prime mission.
On Nov. 9, Curiosity delivered her first soil sample to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite that is designed to detect organic molecules and help determine if Mars ever supported Martian microbial life – watch for my upcoming story.
Image caption: Curiosity looks back to her rover tracks and the foothills of Mount Sharp and the eroded rim of Gale Crater in the distant horizon on Sol 24 (Aug. 30, 2012). This panorama is featured on PBS NOVA Ultimate Mars Challenge’ documentary premiering on Nov. 14. The colorized mosaic was stitched together from Navcam images. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo
Check the PBS, NASA and JPL websites for mission details. Later this week on Nov. 16, I’ll be presenting a free public talk about the mission titled “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars (3-D)”, at Union County College in NJ, hosted by Amateur Astronomers Inc. (AAI) in Cranford, NJ. And the power is thankfully back on ! – in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Nov. 16: Free Public Lecture titled “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars (in 3 D)” and more by Ken Kremer at Union County College and Amateur Astronomers Inc in Cranford, NJ.
Dec 6: Free Public lecture titled “Atlantis, The Premature End of America’s Shuttle Program and What’s Beyond for NASA” including Curiosity, Orion, SpaceX and more by Ken Kremer at Brookdale Community College/Monmouth Museum and STAR Astronomy club in Lincroft, NJ
View of the eclipse from Clifton Beach in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Camilla the Rubber Chicken
Here are some images and video from the total solar eclipse from today, November 13/14, 2012 (depending on where you were), which was visible only from the northern part of Australia. The image above comes from Camilla_SDO, the mascot of the Solar Dynamics Observatory mission. “Clifton Beach was cheering during the totality and Diamond Ring,” Camilla tweeted.
We’ll be adding more images as they become available.
Here are some photos via Robert Hollow, education and public outreach specialist who traveled to Maitland Downs in Queensland, Australia with the “Under a Darkened Star” Student Astronomy Conference, sponsored by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO):
Totality from Maitland Downs. Credit: Robert Hollow/CSIRO.
An eclipsed Sun rises over a ridge in Maitland Downs, Queensland, Australia. Credit: Robert Hollow/CSIRO.
A ‘wedding ring’ at end of totality from Maitland Downs. Credit: Robert Hollow/CSIRO
A view of the Sun after totality through a refractor telescope. Credit: Robert Hollow/CSIRO
Screenshot from the webcast feed from Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, Australia at 20:30 UTC.
A montage of the Solar Eclipse, sent in by Julia, as seen from Adelaide, South Australia. Click to see a larger version.
Daniel Fischer traveled to Australia to watch the eclipse, and described the experience as “Pure drama with complicated clouds – slender solar crescents seen moments before C2 and after C3 but totality was invisible.” Here are a few of his images:
Eclipse watchers at Wangetti Beach in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Daniel Fischer.
Approaching totality, through the clouds at Wangetti Beach in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Daniel Fischer.
A sliver of a crescent, nearing totality with more clouds at Wangetti Beach in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Daniel Fischer.
Ian Musgrave from Adelaide, Australia traveled to Cairns in Queensland just for the eclipse, and was completely clouded out, but still took this interesting picture. “The sky went eerily dark, and the patch of sun on the sea went out,” he wrote on his blog. “Afterwards, the cloud went away just as the Sun appeared from behind the Moon. Amazing.”
Below is a group of images from Shahrin Ahmad, who wrote us, “With the weather in Cairns not promising, we decided to go inland to Mareeba, with a slightly shorter eclipse totality duration of 1 minute 39 seconds. We were lucky because the sky here was clear and free from clouds. With the Moon so low to the horizon, this eclipse seems ‘larger’ than usual, due to the Moon Illusion effect. It was certainly a spectacular eclipse!”
Diamond Ring effect seen at Mareeba. Credit: Shahrin Ahmad
Just moments before second contact. Credit: Shahrin Ahmad
Prominences, loops of plasma are seen emanating from the Sun’s limb during the eclipse. Credit: Shahrin Ahmad
Moonshadow. Credit: Shahrin Ahmad
More images from the webcasts:
Screenshot from the Panasonic feed from Fitzroy Island during totality.
Screenshot of NASA’s eclipse webcast feed just the Sun emerged from totality over Palm Cove, Australia. Via Jason Major.
Screenshot of the feed from Fitzroy Island at 20:18 UTC.
In this new video, SETI founder Frank Drake and astronomer Jill Tarter about why the search of the cosmos is important and needed. Visit SETI online to learn more about the search for signals of extraterrestrial life using radio telescopes on Earth and how you can help.
Watch live, even if you can’t be in northern Australia to see the total solar eclipse. The above feed is from the Slooh Space Camera team, live from Cairns, Australia – the only land site in the world to view totality. Slooh has a three-person crew at Cairns, including photographer Anjali Bermain, Astronomy Magazine’s Bob Berman, author of “The Sun’s Heartbeat”, and experienced astro-imager Matt Francis of the Prescott Observatory. Dr. Lucie Green, solar researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, will join the broadcast along with Slooh’s President, Patrick Paolucci, and Slooh’s Public Outreach Coordinator, Paul Cox.
Here’s a trailer from a new movie called “Europa Report” about a near-future mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, in search of extraterrestrial life. From the trailer, the film looks to be of extremely high quality, and it stars Sharlto Copley (District 9), with music score from composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica).
And while this is a sci-fi flick, the makers of “Europa Report” say they are trying to steep it in real science.
The PR for the film is just getting underway, but they have a realistic-looking website that appears to show webcam views from a spacecraft heading to Europa.
For decades, scientists have theorized the existence of liquid water oceans on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. We’ve recently discovered new, captivating evidence that these sub-surface oceans do exist and could support life.
We’ve sent six astronauts from space programs throughout the world on a three year journey to Europa to explore its oceans and confirm these findings.
We’re proud to be at the forefront of the effort to prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life within our solar system, within our lifetimes.
And yep, like any film about spaceflight, something has to go wrong during the mission.
The release date for the film has not yet been set.
