Earlier this year, astronomers watched a nova explosion blast off the surface of a white dwarf star in the system RS Ophiuchi. Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, RS Ophiuchi consists of a white dwarf and a red giant star locked in orbit – the white dwarf might actually be orbiting within the envelope of the red giant. But this nova was just the taste of what’s to come. The white dwarf is drawing material away from the red giant, and it will eventually gather enough mass to explode as a supernova.
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Is Proxima Centauri Flying Solo?
If you want to send an interstellar probe, you’re going to chose the closest star. And that would be Proxima Centauri, located only 4.2 light years away. Since they first calculated its distance, astronomers have always assumed that Proxima Centauri was part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. But recent calculations threw that assumption into doubt. Was its location purely a coincidence? Is Proxima Centauri flying solo through the Milky Way?
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Cluster Spacecraft Catch a Magnetic Reconnection
ESA’s Cluster spacecraft were in the right place at the right time on September 15, 2001. They flew through a region of the Earth’s magnetosphere at the exact moment that it reconfigured itself. The wealth of data will help scientists better model interactions between the Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind, as well as the magnetic fields around other stars and exotic objects with powerful magnetic fields.
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Genesis 1 Carrying a NASA Experiment
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable Genesis 1 habitat has a stowaway on board; an experiment for NASA called Genebox. This shoebox-sized experiment will allow NASA to measure the effects of near weightlessness on the genetic structure of microorganisms. Although this is the first Genebox, NASA is planning to launch several of them over the next few years as part of the Vision for Space Exploration.
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Astrophoto: The North American and Pelican Nebulae by Don Goldman
We live in a universe filled with galaxies. Galaxies are vast gravitationally bound aggregations of hydrogen gas clouds, stars that are produced when part of a cloud collapses under its own enormous weight, atoms that have been ionized by stellar radiation and dust formed from the remnants of previous stars that have either exploded or thrown off their outer layers during old age. Of these, the largest directly observable constituents are the hydrogen gas billows. Older terms survive within the astronomical lexicon. Any extended object in the sky (other than the Sun, Moon, planets and comets) has at one time or another been called a nebula. The root meaning, however, is cloud and it’s now most often used to reference places that contain gas and dust such as the view provided by the image accompanying this article.
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Explore Mars With Swarms of Rolling Minibots
MIT engineers and scientists are working on a strategy that could unleash a swarm of baseball sized robots onto the surface of Mars. These microbots would would be completely self contained with scientific instruments, and capable of rolling and hopping long distances on a mini fuel cell. One advantage to these rovers is that they could be sent into very dangerous locations – like lavatubes – since operators wouldn’t be too worried about losing a few.
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What’s Up this Week: July 17 – July 23, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! As the Moon slowly leaves the scene the observing heats up as we take a look at some of the Summer’s finest objects as we tour star clusters and nebula. Get out those telescopes and binoculars, because…
Here’s what’s up!
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Iani Chaos on Mars
This image captured by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft shows the Iani Chaos region on Mars, east of Valles Marineris. The region is dominated by large, heavily weathered mesas (flattened hills). On the left side of the image, these mesas are about 1 km tall and are up to 8 km wide. The terrain might have been formed by the collapse of the ground after subsurface water or ice was removed.
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Rhea Obscures Titan
In this photograph, Saturn’s moon Titan is partly obscured by smaller moon Rhea. The difference between the moons’ atmosphere is quite pronounced, as Titan has a thick smoggy atmosphere, while Rhea is airless. Cassini took this photograph on June 11, 2006 when it was approximately 3.6 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Rhea.
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Discovery’s Safely on the Ground
Discovery and its crew are safely back on the ground after a 13-day trip into space to visit the International Space Station. The shuttle detached from the station on Sunday, and then landed Monday morning in Florida at 1414 GMT (9:14 am EDT). After landing, the astronauts performed the traditional shuttle walkaround, and found the spacecraft surprisingly undamaged after its trip to space and back. The space shuttle Atlantis will be moved to the launch pad in early August to prepare for its upcoming mission to deliver a truss to the station.
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