Posted on by Jason Major

Chandra Spots a Black Hole’s High-Speed Hurricane

Artist's impression of a binary system containing a stellar-mass black hole called IGR J17091-3624

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Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have reported record-breaking wind speeds coming from a stellar-mass black hole.

The “wind”, a high-speed stream of material that’s being drawn off a star orbiting the black hole and ejected back out into space, has been clocked at a staggering 20 million miles per hour — 3% the speed of light! That’s ten times faster than any such wind ever measured from a black hole of its size!

The black hole, dubbed IGR J17091-3624 (IGR J17091 for short), is located about 28,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. It is part of a binary system, with a Sun-like star in orbit around it.

“This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five hurricane,” said Ashley King from the University of Michigan, lead author of the study. “We weren’t expecting to see such powerful winds from a black hole like this.”

IGR J17091 exhibits wind speeds akin to black holes many times its mass… such winds have only ever been measured coming from black holes millions or even billions of times more massive.

“It’s a surprise this small black hole is able to muster the wind speeds we typically only see in the giant black holes,” said co-author Jon M. Miller, also from the University of Michigan.

Illustration of Cygnus X-1, another stellar-mass black hole located 6070 ly away. (NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

Stellar-mass black holes are formed from the gravitational collapse of stars about 20 to 25 times the mass of our Sun.

“This black hole is performing well above its weight class,” Miller added.

IGR J17091 is also surprising in that it seems to be expelling much more material from its accretion disk than it is capturing. Up to 95% of the disk material is being blown out into space by the high-speed wind which, unlike polar jets associated with black holes, blows in many different directions.

While jets of material have been previously observed in IGR J17091, they have not been seen at the same time as the high-speed winds. This supports the idea that winds can suppress the formation of jets.

Chandra observations made two months ago did not show evidence of the winds, meaning they can apparently turn on and off. The winds are thought to be powered by constant variations in the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the black hole.

The study was published in the Feb. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Illustration credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss. Source: Chandra Press Room.

Posted on by Jason Major

Degas: a Crater Painted Blue

MESSENGER wide-angle camera image of Degas crater

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This image, acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft on December 12, 2011, reveals the blue coloration of the 32-mile (52-km) -wide Degas crater located in Mercury’s Sobkou Planitia region.

Degas’ bright central peaks are highly reflective in this view, and may be surrounded by hollows — patches of sunken, eroded ground first identified by MESSENGER last year.

Such blue-colored material within craters has been increasingly identified as more of Mercury’s surface is revealed in detail by MESSENGER images. It is likely due to an as-yet-unspecified type of dark subsurface rock, revealed by impact events.

The slightly larger, more eroded crater that Degas abuts is named Brontë.

The image was acquired with MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), using filters 9, 7, 6 (996, 748, 433 nanometers) in red, green, and blue, respectively.

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

Posted on by Jason Major

A Mardi Gras Moon Crossing

SDO AIA image of the Sun and Moon at 14:11 UT on Feb. 21, 2012

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The Sun seems to be glowing in traditional Mardi Gras colors in this image, made from three AIA channels taken today at approximately 14:11 UT (about 9:11 a.m. EST) as the Moon passed between it and the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. Looks like it’s that time of year again!

During portions of the year, the Moon transits the Sun on a regular basis from the perspective of NASA’s SDO spacecraft, which lies within the Moon’s orbit. When this happens we are treated to an improvised eclipse… and it gives SDO engineers a way to fine-tune the observatory’s calibration as well.

Here are more AIA views of the same event captured in different wavelengths:

Lunar transit on 2-21-12; AIA 304
Lunar transit on 2-21-12; AIA 193
Lunar transit on 2-21-12; AIA 4500

…and here’s an interesting image taken in HMI Dopplergram:

HMI Dopplergram image of transit

While the AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly) images the Sun in light sensitive to different layers of its atmosphere, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) studies oscillations in the Sun’s magnetic field at the surface layer.

Watch a video of the path of this lunar transit, posted by the SDO team here.

And if you happen to be reading this as of the time of this writing (appx. 10:06 a.m. EST) you can keep up with the latest images coming in on the SDO site at http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/.

It’s Mardi Gras and the Moon doesn’t want to miss out on any of the fun!

Images courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams. Hat-tip to Mr. Stu Atkinson who called the AIA alert on Twitter.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

More Details from Hubble Reveal Strange Exoplanet is a Steamy Waterworld

GJ1214b, shown in this artist’s view, is a super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

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Would Kevin Costner’s character in the movie “Waterworld” be at home on this exoplanet? The planet GJ 1214b was discovered in 2009 and was one of the first planets where an atmosphere was detected. In 2010, scientists were able to measure the atmosphere, finding it likely was composed mainly of water. Now, with infrared spectra taken during transit observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists say this world is even more unique, and that it represents a new class of planet: a waterworld underneath a thick, steamy atmosphere.

“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” said Zachary Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

GJ 1214b is a super-Earth — smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth — and is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter. That gives it a volume 20 times as great as Earth yet it has less than seven times as much mass, so it’s actually kind of a lightweight. This world is also hot: it orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometers, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

Berta and a team of international astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study GJ 1214b when it crossed in front of its host star. During such a transit, the star’s light is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, giving clues to the mix of gases.

“We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world,” Berta said.

Hazes are more transparent to infrared light than to visible light, so the Hubble observations help to tell the difference between a steamy and a hazy atmosphere. They found the spectrum of GJ 1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths, or colors. The atmospheric model most consistent with the Hubble data is a dense atmosphere of water vapor.

Since the planet’s mass and size are known, astronomers can calculate the density, of only about 2 grams per cubic centimetre. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimetre, while Earth’s average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre. This suggests that GJ 1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock.

As a result, the internal structure of GJ 1214b would be extraordinarily different from that of our world.

“The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’, substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta said.

Theorists expect that GJ 1214b formed further out from its star, where water ice was plentiful; later the planet migrated inward towards the star. In the process, it would have passed through the star’s habitable zone, where surface temperatures would be similar to Earth’s. How long it lingered there is unknown.

GJ 1214b is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer), and just 40 light-years from Earth. Scientists say it will be a prime candidate for study by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch later this decade.

This article was updated on Feb. 23

Read the team’s paper (pdf).

Source: ESA Hubble

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Timelapse: Atacama Starry Nights

The Atacama Desert of Chile has been called “an astronomer’s paradise,” with its stunningly dark, steady and transparent skies. It is home to some of the world’s leading telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located on Paranal. Babak Tafreshi, an astronomer, journalist and director of The World at Night (TWAN) is creating a series of timelapse videos from Paranal, and this is his latest. Just beautiful. You can see more at his Vimeo page.

Posted on by Ray Sanders

Recent Geologic Activity on the Moon?

Newly detected series of narrow linear troughs are known as graben, and they formed in highland materials on the lunar farside. These graben are located on a topographic rise with several hundred meters of relief revealed in topography derived from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) stereo images (blues are lower elevations and reds are higher elevations). Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian Institution

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Recent images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera provide evidence that the lunar crust may be pulling apart in certain areas. The images reveal small trenches less than a kilometer in length, and less than a few hundred meters wide. Only a small number of these features, known as graben, have been discovered on the lunar surface.

There are several clues in the high-resolution images that provide evidence for recent geologic activity on the Moon.

The LROC team detected signs of contraction on the lunar surface as early as August of 2010. The contractions were in the form of lobe-shaped ridges known as lobate scarps. Based on the data, the team suggests the widely-distributed scarps indicate the Moon shrank in diameter, and may be continuing to shrink. Interestingly enough, the new image data featuring graben presents a contradiction, as they indicate lunar crust being pulled apart and theorize that the process that created the graben may have occurred within the past 50 million years.

“We think the Moon is in a general state of global contraction due to cooling of a still hot interior, said thomas Watters from the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. “The graben tell us that forces acting to shrink the Moon were overcome in places by forces acting to pull it apart. This means the contractional forces shrinking the Moon cannot be large, or the small graben might never form.”

Based on the size of the graben, the forces responsible for contraction of the lunar surface are assumed to be fairly weak. It is further theorized that, unlike the early terrestrial planets, the Moon was not completely molten during its early history.

“It was a big surprise when I spotted graben in the farside highlands,” said Mark Robinson, LROC Principal Investigator at Arizona State University. “I immediately targeted the area for high resolution stereo images so we could create a 3-dimensional view of the graben. It’s exciting when you discover something totally unexpected. Only about half the lunar surface has been imaged in high resolution. There is much more of the Moon to be explored.”

If you’d like to learn more about the recently discovered graben on the moon, you can watch a short video by Thomas Watters below:

To learn more about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, visit: http://www.lroc.asu.edu/

Source: Arizona State University News

Posted on by VirtualAstro

A Beginner’s Guide to Photographing The International Space Station (ISS)

Long Exposure Photograph of the ISS Credit: Mark Humpage

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If you have seen the International Space Station (ISS) pass over a few times with your own eyes, (here’s our guide on seeing it) you may want to have a go at photographing it.

Photographing the ISS is very worthwhile and gratifying. There are two basic methods; one being easy and the other being a little more difficult. Both methods are incredibly rewarding and good results can be obtained fairly quickly, once you have mastered the basics.

Method 1:

Discovery and ISS pass over the UK on March 7, 2011, captured by Will Gater.

You will need a DSLR camera or another type of camera which is capable taking long exposures. Incredibly important is having a tripod or somewhere you can place your camera without it getting vibrations or movement.

Find out when and where the ISS will be passing over your location and choose a part of the sky the ISS is passing through at which you can point your camera.

Experiment with your camera settings, to get colours and exposures correct beforehand and do a couple of long exposure test shots of anything from 15 to 60 seconds. You can do shorter or longer exposures but this is up to you, depending your equipment and how artistic you want to be.

This method will produce a long white streak or line, which will show the path taken of the International Space Station as it passes over. This is the most common method for amateurs.

Method 2:

The ISS and shuttle Discovery during the STS-131 mission. Credit: Ted Judah

You will need a telescope, a webcam, and a strong mount or tripod. Set up your telescope and mount, along with webcam with a laptop and make sure of the time and where the ISS will be passing over your location.

In this method we will use the telescope to magnify and see the ISS up close while recording a movie (AVI). We will then stack the frames of the recorded movie in a specialist image enhancing program such as Registax.

Insert your WebCam into the telescope focusing tube using an adapter (available from astronomy stores) and connect the cables to your laptop. When the ISS is due, start recording and track the space station using a finder scope or computerized mount.

The difficult part of this method is tracking the ISS and keeping it in the field of view of the telescope while recording the video file. It is recommended that you set your mount in “Alt/ Az” mode or use a Dobsonian telescope so that you have free movement of telescopes optical tube assembly. You will basically be using the telescope as a giant video camera and you need to keep the ISS in shot for as long as possible.

This method is very difficult as the ISS has been magnified highly while moving very quickly and can be easily lost out of the field of view, or there can be too much movement (shaking) in the video. This method requires much practice.

Once you have been able to get a video of the ISS passing over, you can feed your video file into software such as RegiStax and the program will sort each individual frame, removing bad frames and stacking good frames to create a very clear image.

This method is fantastic for creating close up images with detail on the International Space Station; you can also see docked spacecraft. You can also use this method for trying to image other Earth-orbiting satellites, too.

The ISS and shuttle Discovery as captured -- and annotated -- by Thierry Legault

It would be great to see your ISS photographs, so please send them into us via our Flickr site. Good luck!

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Dramatic Rocket Launch Into an Aurora

A two-stage Terrier-Black Brant rocket arced through aurora 200 miles above Earth as the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA) mission investigated the underlying physics of the northern lights. Stage one of the rocket has just separated and is seen falling back to Earth. Photo by Terry E. Zaperach, NASA.

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Over the weekend, a two-stage sounding rocket launched into a sky shimmering with green aurora. On board were instruments that will help shed new light on the physical processes that create the Northern Lights and further our understanding of the complex Sun-Earth connection.

“We’re investigating what’s called space weather,” said Steven Powell from Cornell University. “Space weather is caused by the charged particles that come from the Sun and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. We don’t directly feel those effects as humans, but our electronic systems do.”

The rocket launched on Feb. 18, 2012 from the Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska. The rocket sent a stream of real-time data back before landing some 200 miles downrange shortly after the launch.

Instruments sampled electric and magnetic fields that are generated by the aurora. While the Sun heads toward solar maximum, emissions from the Sun are more likely to head Earth’s way and cause more interference with GPS transmissions, satellite internet and other signals.

“We are becoming more dependent on these signals,” Powell said. “This will help us better understand how satellite signals get degraded by space weather and how we can mitigate those effects in new and improved GPS receivers.”

Other instruments studied charged particles in Earth’s ionosphere that get sloshed back and forth by a specific form of electromagnetic energy known as Alfvén waves. These waves are thought to be a key driver of “discrete” aurora – the typical, well-defined band of shimmering lights about six miles thick and stretching east to west from horizon to horizon.

These waves are akin to a guitar string when “plucked” by energy delivered by the solar wind to Earth’s magnetosphere high above.

“The ionosphere, some 62 miles up, is one end of the guitar string and there’s another structure over a thousand miles up in space that is the other end of the string,” said Marc Lessard, who worked with graduate students from the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center to monitor the launch. “When it gets plucked by incoming energy we can get a fundamental frequency and other ‘harmonics’ along the background magnetic field sitting above the ionosphere.”

The rocket was a 46-foot Terrier-Black Brant model that was sent right through the aurora 350 km (217 miles) above Earth.

This is not the first sounding rocket flight from Poker Flats to launch into an aurora. In 2009 two rockets flew through aurorae to help refine current models of aurora structure, and provide insight on the high-frequency waves and turbulence generated by aurorae.

Sources: University of New Hampshire, Cornell University

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Carnival of Space #237

Carnival of Space. Image by Jason Major.

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It’s been awhile since Universe Today has hosted the Carnival of Space, so we’re happy to be home for this edition of space news from various space blogs and news sites from the past week. Just grab some cotton candy and step inside the Carnival!

Ian O’Neill at Discovery Space News explains how one of the world’s smallest nations may have found a low-cost solution to one of the world’s biggest space problems. Read “Swiss to Grab World’s Biggest Space Problem by its Junk” for the all janitorial-like details.

Ian also wrote his second op-ed on Al Jazeera English: When will “Earth 2.0” be found? Ian says that allthough we are living in a historic time, the specter of budget cuts may stifle the search for a true “Earth-like” world.

Brian Wang from Next Big Future has a few of entries this week: In the first one he discusses how new estimate that there are about 100,000 larger than Pluto sized objects per star. Interestingly, if those were evenly distributed in a volume of about 1 light year than there would be one every 2200 AU (astronomical units, distance from earth to the Sun is one AU). 2200 AU is about 2 light weeks.

Next he writes on how Elon Musk plans to IPO Spacex in 2013. The Solar City IPO in a couple of month could catapult Musk into the ranks of the world’s billionaires. He owns a 26 percent stake in Tesla valued at more than $650 million, after adjusting for collateralized shares. His 25 percent of SolarCity would be valued at $375 million at the valuation the company is seeking. Musk owns more than 70 million shares of closely held rocket maker SpaceX. Recent transactions in the private market have pegged his stake in SpaceX at about $875 million.

And thirdly, Brian takes a look at Obama’s proposed budget will keep most NASA funding. Mars exploration would be cut but the big waste of money would be the Space Launch System which still would have funding.

On his blog The Venus Transit, Gadi Eidelheit has posted a great collection of Earth from Space photos as taken from various space missions in the last 50 years.

Universe Today’s Ray Sanders has his own blog called Dear Astronomer, and this week he shows a special Valentine’s Day message from our Moon, courtesy of Mark Robinson and the LROC team at Arizona State University.

Bill Dunford also discusses the NASA budget, and howwith exploration funding under threat, will lovers of science fiction be among the voices for science? As always, Bill has some great images from planetary missions included in the article

Astroblogs, Ian Musgrave submitted two articles this week. First he takes a look at The Kepler-20 Exoplanetary System in Celestia and secondly, he has an interesting discussion of all the people panicing over 2012. How should we deal with these contrarians?

Chris Dann at WeirdWarp writes about the the planet called Kepler 16 that was discovered some time ago, but two new planets called Kepler 34 and Kepler 35 have just been found. Each of these planets revolve around their own double Suns.

A great blog is Astronomy Word of the Week, and this week’s word discusses (AstroWoW) what do solar systems and see saws have in common? The astronomy word of the week is barycenter!

Tapani Isomäki at Links Through Space discusses how this year Venus is the Planet to follow! “You have the phases of Venus through out spring until 5-6 of June where it will transit the disc of our Sun. This evening star (at the moment) is coming into conjonction with Jupiter and in the twillight the bright “star” looks fabulous. Follow us on Links Through Space these coming weeks for a complete cover of VENUS 2012! It’s phases, transit, whereabouts. For you people who has a telescope, Venus is a easy target but still full of surprises and I would say Challenging!”

Paul Scott Anderson wrote a great article for us here on Universe Today, discussing how scientists have found new clues about the interiors of ‘Super-Earth’ exoplanets, and he provides an overview of it on his own blog, The Meridiani Journal.

Alan Boyle from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has a couple great ones this week: Black hole survives a galaxy wreck, where aAstronomers have reconstructed what they think is a galactic crash scene, with a rare breed of black hole left behind amid a dwarf galaxy’s wreckage. The Hubble Space Telescope played a key role in the accident investigation. Also, with a romantic gesture, The Sun sends Earth a valentine, where a mild solar storm swept over our planet just in time for Valentine’s Day, sparking another wave of wonderful northern lights.

And finally, from me, I’d like to point you in the direction of the live interview I did with astronomer Mike Brown via a Google+ Hangout On Air, the second of our live interview series.

That’s it for this week’s Carnival! If you’re interested in looking back, here’s the complete list that we have on UT or the archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the Carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send and email to the above address.

Posted on by Jason Major

Bright Peaks, Dark Shadows

MESSENGER image of Mercury's Amaral crater

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The 68-mile (109-km) -wide Amaral crater on Mercury reveals its brightly-tipped central peaks in this image, acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft on Feb. 4, 2012. Long shadows are cast by the crater’s peaks and rugged rim (north is to the left.)

The image was acquired as a high-resolution targeted observation with MESSENGER’s Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC) on its Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS).

Amaral’s bright peaks were first spotted during MESSENGER’s first flyby of Mercury in Jan. 2008. With a smooth floor, visible ejecta and small secondary craters, Amaral appeared noticeably younger than the heavily cratered surface around it.

Amaral's "blue" peaks seen in a color-enhanced global image acquired Jan. 14, 2008.

Its central peaks also attracted astronomers’ interest, as they were seen to possess a striking blue hue in color-enhanced images that likely indicates rocks with different composition from the surrounding surface.

Amaral’s peaks resemble those of the slightly larger crater Eminescu, which is now known to contain recently-discovered features called hollows. It’s not yet known if Amaral also contains hollows, but it’s suspected that they may be present on the tips of the peaks.

The crater is named after Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral. She lived from 1886 to 1973 and is considered to be one of the leading Latin American modernist painters.

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