New data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are giving astronomers a sense of how protoplanetary disks might act as a brake to slow stellar rotation. Young stars spin very quickly, often completing a rotation in less than a day. They could spin even faster, but something is slowing them down. Spitzer gathered data on 500 young stars in the Orion Nebula. The fastest spinning stars don’t have planetary disks around then. It might be that the magnetic field of the star interacts with the planetary disk, slowing the star down.
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A Glimpse at the Future of Our Sun
A team of astronomers recently used Arizona’s Infrared-Optical Telescope Array (IOTA) of three linked telescopes to peer 4 billion years into the future, when our Sun balloons up to become a red giant star. The three instruments act as a powerful interferometer, providing a view that would only be possible with a much larger instrument. They observed several red giant stars – the eventual fate of our Sun – and discovered their surfaces to be mottled and varied, covered with enormous sunspots.
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NASA Assigns STS-122 Crew
NASA today announced the astronaut assignments for the upcoming STS-122 space shuttle mission, tentatively scheduled for October 2007. The commander will be Stephen N. Frick, and the pilot will be Alan G. Poindexter. The mission specialists will be Rex J. Walheim, Stanley G. Love, Leland D. Melvin and European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel. During this mission, the space shuttle will deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station.
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Earthlike Regions on Titan
New radar images of Titan show surprisingly familiar terrain on Saturn’s largest moon. The radar images show a strip 4,500 km (2,796 miles) long, straight through the Xanadu region. Some images show hills, valleys and dark sand dunes cut by river networks – the similarity to Earth is striking. Of course, Titan is so cold it can’t be water; these rivers are probably formed by liquid methane or ethane. Cassini will return to Titan on Saturday, July 22 and capture images of the northern latitudes.
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At the Centre of the Milky Way
You’re looking at the heart of your own galaxy with X-ray specs. This photograph was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory, and shows the three massive star clusters that surround the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These star clusters have so many large, bright stars that the whole area blazes in the X-ray spectrum. This photo shows 1 million seconds of accumulated observing time by Chandra of these mysterious region of our galaxy.
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Powerful Explosion is a Taste of What’s to Come
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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