Space and astronomy news
With new instruments, astronomers are filling in all the pieces that help to explain how planets form out of extended disks of gas and dust around newborn stars. This process seems to happen quickly, often just a few million years is all it takes to go from dust to planets. But astronomers have found one …
Continue reading “Podcast: Planetary Disk That Refuses to Grow Up”
With new instruments, astronomers are filling in all the pieces that help to explain how planets form out of extended disks of gas and dust around newborn stars. This process seems to happen quickly, often just a few million years is all it takes to go from dust to planets. But astronomers have found one proto-planetary disk that refuses to grow up. It’s 25 million years old, and still hasn’t made the transition to form planets. Lee Hartmann is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the lead author on the paper announcing the find.
There’s a new rumour going around the Internet. Maybe an excited friend has sent an email about a once in a lifetime chance to see Mars. Mars is going to make its closest approach on October 30th, 2005, and look bigger and brighter than it has in two years. Unfortunately, the closest approach actually happened two years ago, in August 2003, when the Earth and Mars were closer than they had been for 50,000 years.
This satellite view of Istanbul, taken by the ESA’s Envisat satellite, was taken using its Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). Radar doesn’t actually build up images in colour, it just measures different textures. So the colour in this image represents different times that the radar images were acquired. It’s possible to see the bridges that span the narrow Bosporus channel, dividing Europe and Asia. You can even see a few ships sailing up the channel as little points of light.
Which came first, galaxies or the supermassive black holes at their centre? Most cosmologists now think the two are inextricably linked, each depending on the other. And according to researchers, including famed astronomer Sir Martin J Rees, these supermassive black holes got big, fast. By reviewing quasar data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the team has calculated that many supermassive black holes had reached 1 billion times the mass of our Sun in a very short period of time. Even for the largest, most voracious black holes in the Universe, that’s an amazing feat.
NASA’s Opportunity rover is still working its way free from the sand trap it ran into a few weeks ago. Since it began trying to escape the dune, Opportunity has only moved 30 cm (11 inches), but operators think it’s just a matter of time before the rover finds more solid ground to grip onto. Once the rover gets free, it will turn around and analyze the sand dune to help figure out why this one was so sticky compared to the dozens it already drove over without any problem.
Launched from “Cape Kennedy” just 13 months of one another in 1972/73, Pioneer 10 and 11 are still up there though no longer kicking. But well before last phone home (in 2003 and 1995 respectively), the notes each pair played had changed pitch unexpectedly – they were slowly losing speed. Could the Pioneering Pair have been feeling a bit in the “dark” (as in “dark matter” or “dark energy”)? Were they having a “Solar Quadrupole” moment? Could n-dimensional “branes” be behind it? Or has “back-gravity” from behind the Sun played a role? Before things get too exotic, maybe there’s a simpler explanation.
When a 10-km (6-mile), dinosaur-killing asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, it released so much energy that it vaporized rock, which then fell like rain around the world. Scientists now think that these droplets of rock, called spherules, condensed out of a cloud of water vapour that surrounded the Earth shortly after the impact. They were able to trace the composition of the spherules back to the original Chicxulub impact crater, demonstrating that the material came from the Earth, and not the asteroid itself.
The 17th Progress cargo ship blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday, carrying two tonnes of supplies for the International Space Station and a special camera designed to inspect the Space Shuttle for damage. The Progress should reach the station by Wednesday, and dock in afternoon. The previous cargo ship, now filled with garbage, was detached from the station on Sunday, and will reenter and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere on March 9.
Experienced observers tend to think its all so very simple. Buying a scope, setting it up, and using it for the first time lies well behind them on the learning curve. But if you really think about it learning to use an astronomical telescope is no trivial matter. So after being prompted by one UT reader, Astro.Geekjoy’s Jeff Barbour decided to set down in word’s how to go about making a start of our High Art and Science. Sometime’s things aren’t as simple as they seem…