Since the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe has converted 20% of its original matter into stars. This is according to a new survey by an international team of astronomers. Other than stars, a tiny fraction of non-primordial material is dust expelled from massive stars and supermassive black holes. The survey was made using the Millennium Galaxy Catalogue, which contains more than 10,000 large galaxies. It looks like the Universe will need another 70 billion years to use up all its original fuel.
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Book Review: Uncentering the Earth
Fighting the good fight. David meeting Goliath. Persevering against the odds. These phrases give images associated with a valiant struggle to succeed. William T. Vollmann in his book Uncentering the Earth shares his thoughts on the struggles of Nicholas Copernicus in relocating the Sun to the centre of the solar system. Though Copernicus did not undertake any physical fight, there certainly was conflict while he was promoting and publishing his ideas.
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Swirling Pinwheels Near the Heart of the Milky Way
Astronomers have gathered new data on a formation of stars called the Quintuplet cluster. These are a group of stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The new data comes from the W.M. Keck telescope, which gathered high resolution images of the stars. They appear to be massive binary stars near the end of their short lives, which are giving off huge amounts of gas and dust. These dust plumes are creating pinwheel-shaped spirals around the stars as they orbit each other.
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Planck Telescope Tested in Vacuum
ESA’s Planck space telescope recently spent two weeks in a chamber that simulates the vacuum and temperature of space. When it finally launches in 2008, the European spacecraft will explore the cosmic background radiation; the afterglow of the Big Bang. Engineers needed to make sure that its instruments will perform well under the harsh conditions of space, and so far, everything checks out. The various components of the mission will continue to be tested separately, and then tested together in the coming months.
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Hubble Reveals Dimmest Stars in a Nearby Cluster
New photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope show some of the faintest stars ever seen in a globular cluster. The cluster is NGC 6397, which formed almost right at the beginning of the Universe, nearly 12 billion years ago. This means the stars in the formation are made of the primordial material that formed shortly after the Bang Bang. These dim stars are white dwarfs that were once more massive versions of our own Sun. They cool at a very predictable rate, giving astronomers another way to calculate the age of the Universe.
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Atlantis Scheduled for August 27 Launch
NASA has announced that the space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off on August 27, 2006. If all goes well, the shuttle will blast off from Cape Canaveral at 2230 GMT (4:30 pm EDT) and return to the International Space Station, finally continuing its construction. Over the course of three spacewalks, the shuttle crew will install the P3/P4 truss onto the station, which contains a set of giant solar arrays, batteries, and electronics.
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STEREO Spacecraft Set for Launch
Get set to see the Sun… in thrilling 3-D! At the end of August, NASA will launch its twin STEREO spacecraft into orbit around the Sun, to provide the first stereoscopic views of coronal mass ejections. The spacecraft will be lofted into space on Thursday, August 31, to begin a 2-year mission; one spacecraft will fly ahead of the Earth in its orbit, and the other will tail back. With this 3-D view, scientists will be able to accurately track the direction and speed of coronal mass ejections, providing much better space weather forecast.
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Seasonal Jets Darken the Surface of Mars
Scientists now have an answer for the strange dark spots near the south polar ice caps on Mars. As the ice cap warms in spring, jets of carbon dioxide erupt, spraying dark material onto the surface. The discovery was made using the cameras on board NASA’s Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. They provided detailed images of the fan-shaped dark markings, which are typically 15 to 46 metres (50 to 100 feet) across, and can appear within a week.
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Astrophoto: Plato and the Alpine Valley by Mike Salway
For many years, there were three popular theories that tried to explain why Earth’s satellite hangs in our skies. One postulated that the Moon separated from Earth during our planet’s formation, another stated that it was captured when passing close by, and the third held that it formed in place with our planet out of the same material circling the Sun at the solar system’s birth. Each of these ideas had their own justifications but none of them provided all of the answers because each of them were well conceived, but, educated guesses.
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A Magnetically Backwards Sunspot
Astronomers have been waiting to see a very special kind of sunspot, and this week, they saw what they were hoping for: it was backward. It only lasted a few hours, but it reveals that the Sun’s next solar cycle could be getting underway. As the Sun moves through its 11-year cycle of solar maximum and minimums, the magnetic orientation of its sunspots reverses. Solar astronomers think that the upcoming Cycle 24 should be one of the stormiest in decades, producing many sunspots and powerful solar storms. The auroras should be beautiful.
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