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Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit a common primary object. In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
But Mercury is not so well behaved. Its orbit already the most lopsided wildly changes shape. Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus. Then those two worlds MAY collide.
The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say. They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week. It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear. The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas. In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
Complex network
"It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states. "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning. Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy. Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
We lost power here a couple of hours ago, but it was after dark. I wonder whether it is related to your post, waltky.Strong solar storm to hit Earth ...
Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
7 March 2012 - A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes.
The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say. They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week. It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear. The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas. In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
Complex network
"It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states. "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning. Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy. Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
We lost power here a couple of hours ago, but it was after dark. I wonder whether it is related to your post, waltky.Strong solar storm to hit Earth ...
Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
7 March 2012 - A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes.
The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say. They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week. It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear. The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas. In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
Complex network
"It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states. "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning. Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy. Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
Beautiful! Here's another titled:
Star Icefall
Notice the pattern of star strings right of Orion's belt; they are remeniscent of the strings I captured from a Hubble image for my avatar.
"Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago, with little additional development since," Susan Kassin at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.
"The trend we've observed instead shows the opposite, that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period," she said.
Most galaxies go through a rough-and-tumble disorganized evolution before they settle into the rotating disk form seen in our Milky Way and other mature galaxies, astronomers said.
"Previous studies removed galaxies that did not look like the well-ordered rotating disks now common in the universe today," said co-author Benjamin Weiner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Read more: "Exciting" early years of galaxies described - UPI.com
The unnamed planet is in the Alpha Centauri star system, the nearest system to Earth, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “This result represents a major step towards the detection of a twin Earth in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. We live in exciting times!” said Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory and Centro de Astrofisica da Universidade do Porto in Portugal in a press release on the discovery.
Despite the excitement, scientists say the new planet’s climate likely would not be nearly as hospitable as Earth. “Its orbit is very close to its star and it must be much too hot for life as we know it,” said Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory and a co-author of the paper about the discovery. The newly discovered planet orbits a mere six million kilometers from its star, much closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
Alpha Centauri is the nearest stellar system to the earth’s solar system at only 4.3 light-years, making it one of the brightest objects in the southern skies. It is actually a three-star system made up of two stars similar to the Sun orbiting close to each other, Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant and faint red star known as Proxima Centauri.
MORE
Scientists have used a novel technique to probe the nature of dark energy some 10 billion years into the past. They hope it will bring them closer to an explanation for the strange force that appears to be driving the Universe apart at an accelerating rate. The method relies on bright but distant objects known as quasars to map the spread of hydrogen gas clouds in space. The 3D distribution of these clouds can be used as a tracer for the influence of dark energy through time. A scholarly paper describing the approach has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted on the arXiv.org preprint site. It is authored by the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) team, which uses the 2.5m Sloan Foundation Telescope in New Mexico, US, to make its observations of the sky.
The international group's new data is said to be a very neat fit with theory, confirming ideas that dark energy did not have a dominant role in the nascent Universe. Back then, gravity actually held sway, decelerating cosmic expansion. Only later did dark energy come to the fore. "We know very little about dark energy but one of our ideas is that it is a property of space itself - when you have more space, you have more energy," explained Dr Matthew Pieri, a BOSS team-member. "So, dark energy is something that increases with time. As the Universe expands, it gives us more space and therefore more energy, and at some point dark energy takes over from gravity to end the deceleration and drive an acceleration," the Portsmouth University, UK, researcher told BBC News.
The BOSS team used 48,000 distant quasars to "back-light" and map the distribution of clouds of hydrogen gas in the early Universe
The discovery that everything in the cosmos is now moving apart at a faster and faster rate was one of the major breakthroughs of the 20th Century. But scientists have found themselves grasping for new physics to try to explain this extraordinary phenomenon. A number of techniques are being deployed to try to get some insight. One concerns so-called baryon acoustic oscillations. These refer to the pressure-driven waves that passed through the post-Big-Bang Universe and which subsequently became frozen into the distribution of matter once it had cooled to a sufficient level. Today, those oscillations show themselves as a "preferred scale" in the spread of galaxies - a slight excess in the numbers of such objects with separations of 500 million light-years.
It is an observation that can be used as a kind of standard ruler to measure the geometry of the cosmos. The BOSS team has already done this using a large volume of galaxies that stretch some six billion light-years from Earth. But at greater distances - and hence deeper in cosmic time - these standard galaxies are simply too faint for the Sloan telescope to see. Instead, the BOSS team has used quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources) to help it map the cosmos. Quasars are far flung galaxies where a massive central black hole is driving the emission of huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation. These are visible to Sloan.
More BBC News - Quasars illustrate dark energy's roller coaster ride
http://news.yahoo.com/first-alien-earth-found-2013-experts-170808230.htmlWhile astronomers have found a number of exoplanets over the last few years that share one or two key traits with our own world such as size or inferred surface temperature they have yet to bag a bona fide "alien Earth." But that should change in 2013, scientists say. "I'm very positive that the first Earth twin will be discovered next year," said Abel Mendez, who runs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.
Planets piling up
Astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995. Since they, they've spotted more than 800 worlds beyond our own solar system, and many more candidates await confirmation by follow-up observations. NASA's prolific Kepler Space Telescope, for example, has flagged more than 2,300 potential planets since its March 2009 launch. Only 100 or so have been confirmed to date, but mission scientists estimate that at least 80 percent will end up being the real deal.
The first exoplanet finds were scorching-hot Jupiter-like worlds that orbit close to their parent stars, because they were the easiest to detect. But over time, new instruments came online and planet hunters honed their techniques, enabling the discovery of smaller and more distantly orbiting planets places more like Earth. Last December, for instance, Kepler found a planet 2.4 times larger than Earth orbiting in its star's habitable zone that just-right range of distances where liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, can exist.
The Kepler team and other research groups have detected several other worlds like that one (which is known as Kepler-22b), bringing the current tally of potentially habitable exoplanets to nine by Mendez' reckoning.
Zeroing in on Earth's twin
Unlike most Martian meteorites, NWA 7034, a dark, fist-sized rock that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2011, is thought to be from the planet’s surface, not deeper inside, and to date from a crucial time in its evolution. “Many scientists think that Mars was warm and wet in its early history, but the planet’s climate changed over time,” lead author Carl Agee, whose study was published in the US journal Science Express, told space.com.
Scientists believe NWA 7034 was formed from lava from a volcanic eruption on Mars around 2.1 billion years ago that cooled and hardened on the surface of the planet, possibly with the help of water. “Perhaps most exciting is that the high water content could mean there was an interaction of the rocks with surface water either from volcanic magma, or from fluids from impacting comets during that time,” co-author Andrew Steele said. “It is the richest Martian meteorite geochemically and further analyses are bound to unleash more surprises,” he said.
It took scientists several months to ascertain that the meteorite was indeed dislodged from Mars and not a space rock from the asteroid belt or from another planet. “The chemistry is consistent with a surface origin and an interaction with the Martian atmosphere,” Agee said.
The abundance of water molecules in the rock — about 6,000 parts per million, 10 times more than other known meteorites — suggest water activity persisted on the Martian surface during the time, known as the Amazonian epoch. “Our analysis of the oxygen isotopes shows that NWA 7034 is not like any other meteorites or planetary samples,” Agee said. More than 100 Martian meteorites have been discovered on Earth to date.
Martian meteorite could uncover planet?s secrets - Taipei Times
The Caltech team made this conclusion based on analyzing the planets orbiting the Kepler-32 star, which contains five planets and which the scientists say is representative of the vast majority of stars in our galaxy. Kepler-32 is classified as an M dwarf, and scientists say three out of every four stars in the galaxy are M dwarfs, also known as red dwarfs. "There's at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy—just our galaxy," says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "That's mind-boggling." Scientists say their estimate of 100 billion stars is conservative because it doesn’t take into account planets which may be orbiting further away from M dwarfs or planets orbiting other types of stars.
According to the scientists, Kepler-32’s five planets, which were detected by the Kepler space telescope, are similar in size to Earth. They are also similar to other planets discovered around other M dwarf stars. They all orbit very close to their star, no further than one-third the distance Mercury orbits our Sun. This is typical of M dwarf systems, Johnson said. While the planets may resemble Earth in size, the Kepler-32 system differs from the Solar System. The star is much cooler than the sun, has only five percent of its brightness and is only half the size. Johnson said an alternate headline for the discovery is just how much of a “weirdo” our own solar system is compared to the vast majority of systems in the galaxy.
A section of the Milky Way as seen by the Kepler telescope.
Still, the Kepler-32 star system does have what is called a “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist. In the Kepler-32 system, only the outermost planet is in that zone, but Johnson said it likely resembles Neptune and would likely not support life. Because of its orientation, Kepler-32 presents itself as a great opportunity to study as all the planets’ orbits are in a plane and can be viewed edge-on as they briefly block the light from the star. These small changes in light allow scientists to determine the planets’ characteristics such as size and orbital speed. "I usually try not to call things 'Rosetta stones,' but this is as close to a Rosetta stone as anything I've seen," Johnson says. "It's like unlocking a language that we're trying to understand—the language of planet formation."
Johnson said the next big question would be if any of the planets in the habitable zones around M dwarf stars could support life. “There are 20 different factors on Earth, and we don’t know how to rank them,” Johnson said. “Do we need a moon? It’s important. How critical? Do you have to have plate tectonics?” Johnson said those questions are best suited for climate scientists and geologists. “Until we have the ability to study those things, we won’t know if they’re hospitable,” he said. “If you were looking at our Solar System from an alien world, you might write a press release saying you’d discovered two planets in the habitable zone. Venus is in the habitable zone, but it’s not a good vacation spot.”
http://www.voanews.com/content/galaxy-100-billion-planets-caltech/1577962.html
Tell us your equipment for those two photo's please...
NASA says NGC 6872 is the largest spiral galaxy ever discoveredLocated about 212 million light-years from Earth, the massive spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has been known to astronomers for decades. But it wasn't until a recent survey of nearby star-forming regions that NASA scientists realized just how big it truly is. New data shows that, from tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, this galaxy measures a whopping 522,000 light-years across — making it more than five times the size of the Milky Way. NASA now says it's the largest spiral galaxy that has ever been discovered.
Astronomers were able to award NGC 6872 with this distinction by analyzing data acquired from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which is now located at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
While scanning the area around the galaxy, NASA scientists were taken aback at the volume of ultraviolet light coming from its younger stars — an indication that there was more to this galaxy than initially met the eye.
Scientists have announced the discovery of a spine-like structure within the Milky Way that might help explain the dynamics of galactic formation. The Milky Way is the spiral galaxy we live in and is one of billions of such vast pinwheel-like formations scattered throughout the universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Harvard University astronomy professor Alyssa Goodman is an expert on star formation. Not long ago, she and her colleagues at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were reviewing data of a dense cosmic cloud nicknamed Nessie by the scientist who first described it. Goodmans team saw a new feature, a long tendril of dust and gas, eight times longer, about 1,000 light years longer, than it was thought to be before.
Since we live inside the Milky Way, it can be difficult for us to determine its exact structure. Goodman says this is the first time that scientists have seen such a delicate piece of the galactic skeleton. What weve added to this is the idea that there might be these very sharp, dense features that we can pick out of the data and that that will just add another tool to the arsenal of trying to figure out the structure of the galaxy we live in. Computer simulations of galaxy formation show webs of filaments within spiral disks. It is very likely that the newly discovered Milky Way feature is one of these skeletal filaments. If we combine this information in a statistical way, we can probably build a pretty good 3-dimentional model of the galaxy, Goodman says. The new filament is likely made from high density gas, the type that forms stars.
The discovery is an interesting demonstration of whats called open science. Goodman and nine collaborators are writing the paper on the find, which the public can review as it evolves online at authorea.com. That means that as we work on the paper, which is about 90 percent done at this point, the whole world can see it. They can watch us work on it. Goodman presented her work at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California.
Source
Research astronomer Barry Welsh at the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory looks for these comets spinning in elliptical orbits around distant stars, leaving their trademark trails of star-lit gas and debris. The icy dirt balls - between just five kilometers and 20 kilometers across - emerge from massive discs of gas and dust around the stars, the raw material for new planets. Welsh said the exocomets are formed from these scraps left over from planet formation. This is like the missing link, the missing piece in the puzzle. And it reinforces all the planetary formation theories because all the planetary formation theories say you should end up with left-over comets and left-over big hunks of rock, asteroids, and that sort of thing, he said.
This view of comet Hartley 2 was taken by NASA's EPOXI mission during its flyby of the comet and was captured by the spacecraft's Medium-Resolution Instrument, November 4, 2010.
At the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long Beach, California, Welsh reported that he and his colleagues found spectrographic signatures of the six new exocomets orbiting six very young type-A stars, which are only about 5 million years old. Although not all the stars harbor exoplanets, the debris disk means they could be present. Welsh said it suggests that across the universe, exoplanets and exocomets co-exist, as they do in our own solar system. It looks as though they are quite common things.
Welsh said that if, as experts theorize, comets could have seeded the primordial earth with organic carbon material and water, then comets also may be the key to life elsewhere in the universe. If comets are universally distributed around, then you could say that the incidence of life could be higher on other planets than we ever thought. Back in our own solar system, comets continue to put on celestial shows for Earth-bound observers. People in the northern hemisphere will be able to see an unusual comet in late November of this year, with the highly anticipated appearance of Comet ISON. The newly-discovered comet is predicted to shine as brightly in the night sky as the full moon.
Source
Explanation:Cosmic bullets pierce the outskirts of the Orion Nebula, some 1500 light-years distant in this infrared close-up. Blasted out by energetic massive star formation the bullets, relatively dense, hot gas clouds about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit, are blue in the false color image. Glowing with the light of ionized iron atoms they travel at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, their passage traced by yellowish trails of the nebula's shock-heated hydrogen gas. The cone-shaped wakes are up to a fifth of a light-year long. The detailed image was created using the 8.1 meter Gemini South telescope in Chile with a newly commissioned adaptive optics system (GeMS). Achieving a larger field of view than previous generation adaptive optics, GeMS uses five laser-generated guide stars to help compensate for the blurring effects of planet Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists have shown how the insects will use the Milky Way to orientate themselves as they roll their balls of muck along the ground. Humans, birds and seals are all known to navigate by the stars. But this could be the first example of an insect doing so. The study by Marie Dacke is reported in the journal Current Biology. "The dung beetles are not necessarily rolling with the Milky Way or 90 degrees to it; they can go at any angle to this band of light in the sky. They use it as a reference," the Lund University, Sweden, researcher told BBC News. Dung beetles like to run in straight lines. When they find a pile of droppings, they shape a small ball and start pushing it away to a safe distance where they can eat it, usually underground.
Getting a good bearing is important because unless the insect rolls a direct course, it risks turning back towards the dung pile where another beetle will almost certainly try to steal its prized ball. Dr Dacke had previously shown that dung beetles were able to keep a straight line by taking cues from the Sun, the Moon, and even the pattern of polarised light formed around these light sources. But it was the animals' capacity to maintain course even on clear Moonless nights that intrigued the researcher. So the native South African took the insects (Scarabaeus satyrus) into the Johannesburg planetarium where she could control the type of star fields a beetle might see overhead.
Dung beetles manage to maintain straight roll paths even on moonless nights
Importantly, she put the beetles in a container with blackened walls to be sure the animals were not using information from landmarks on the horizon, which in the wild might be trees, for example. The beetles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected on to the planetarium dome, but coped just as well when shown only the diffuse bar of light that is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dr Dacke thinks it is the bar more than the points of light that is important. "These beetles have compound eyes," she told the BBC. "It's known that crabs, which also have compound eyes, can see a few of the brightest stars in the sky. Maybe the beetles can do this as well, but we don't know that yet; it's something we're looking at. However, when we show them just the bright stars in the sky, they get lost. So it's not them that the beetles are using to orientate themselves."
And indeed, in the field, Dr Dacke has seen beetles run in to trouble when the Milky Way briefly lies flat on the horizon at particular times of the year. The question is how many other animals might use similar night-time navigation. It has been suggested some frogs and even spiders are using stars for orientation. The Lund researcher is sure there will be many more creatures out there doing it; scientists just need to go look. "I think night-flying moths and night-flying locusts could benefit from using a star compass similar to the one that the dung beetles are using," she said. But for the time being, Dr Dacke is concentrating on the dung beetle. She is investigating the strange dance the creature does on top of its ball of muck. The hypothesis is that this behaviour marks the moment the beetle takes its bearings.
BBC News - Dung beetles guided by Milky Way
