The Astronomy Thread

[Missourian]

Anyone see Progress 43P dock with the ISS?

Cloud cover here.

Too low in the sky tonight...13 degrees.

 

[Missourian]

No joy last night either...only 4 days left to see Progress 43p before it is scheduled to burn up upon re-entery on September 1st over the Pacific Ocean.

 

[Missourian]

Space Shuttle Discovery 360 degree VR cockpit simulation:

Space Shuttle Discovery - 360VR Images

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd wearin' his tin-foil hat in case it givin' off any supernova waves...

Supernova 'of a generation': how you can see it with binoculars
September 7, 2011 - A supernova in the nearby Pinwheel Galaxy is the closest supernova in 25 years. Situated near the Big Dipper, the SN 2011fe supernova can be seen with binoculars this week.

If you’ve got a decent pair of binoculars and clear skies, you’ll have a good view Wednesday night of the closest and brightest supernova display of the past 25 years. The supernova, named SN 2011fe, is the 136th seen by astronomers this year, but its proximity makes it significant not only for stargazers but to the scientific community. The event was first observed on Aug. 24, only hours after it first became visible from Earth. Located within the Pinwheel Galaxy, the explosion happened 21 million light-years away – a relatively small distance by astronomical standards. On the scale of astronomical magnitude, in which brighter objects have lower numbers, it was a 17.2 – about 1 million times too dim to be seen by the naked eye.

Since then, “the supernova of a generation,” has been brightening by the minute and will hit its peak this week, said Joshua Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, in a press release. By Friday, the supernova could hit magnitude 10, still below the 6.5-magnitude threshold to be seen with the naked eye, but visible with binoculars. The supernova was a Type Ia event, which means a white dwarf star began to siphon material from a nearby star until it became so massive that it exploded. These types of supernovae, in particular, are important to scientists because they are immensely bright, and so act as cosmic mile markers, helping astronomers calculate distances in space and the expansion of the universe.

Its relative nearness to Earth makes SN 2011fe doubly important. Its discoverers have predicted the supernova could become one of the most-studied in history. The last Type Ia supernova that occurred this close was in 1986, but it was obscured by dust, said Peter Nugent, an astrophysicist at the the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the team that located the event, in the press release. The last supernova that could be so well observed was in 1972. That occurred in the NGC 5253 galaxy and reached a magnitude of 8.5. By contrast, the last known supernovae within our galaxy, the Milky Way, were seen centuries ago, dating to 1604, 1572, and 1054. These objects were visible to the naked eye, with the most recent, known as Kepler's Supernova, reaching a magnitude of minus 2.5, meaning it was visible even in daytime.

SN 2011fe is located in the constellation Ursa Major, better known as the Big Dipper. "The easiest way to find it is to take the last two stars in the handle of the Big Dipper, form an equilateral triangle heading north and bang, you’ll find the Pinwheel Galaxy,” said Nugent. He said a pair of 80 mm binoculars would suffice to view the display, but a telescope with a lens measuring greater than three inches would be better. The supernova will begin to fade by the end of the week.

Source

 

[freedombecki]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOXVZo7KikE&feature=player_detailpage]NASA | X-Class: A Guide to Solar Flares - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&feature=player_detailpage"]Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux) - YouTube[/ame]
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[waltky]

'Invisible' Planet Discovered...

'Invisible' planet discovered with new technique
9/8/2011 - Kepler probe detects alien world by its gravitational influence on a neighbor

For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports. NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.

The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method — known as transit timing variation, or TTV — has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last. "My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Finding two new planets

The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light. Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius). Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.

MORE

 

[Missourian]

Track Juno's flight path using JPL Simulator.

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^^^ Juno's position 9/11/11 relative to Earth as viewed from Pioneer 11, .2 degree field of view.

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^^^ Juno's position 9/11/11 relative to the inner planet and the Sun as viewed from Pioneer 11, 2 degree field of view.


You can also track all the planets and moons and the Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizon, and other spacecraft, plus the comet Vesta positions at any date and time.



Here is the link :

NASA/JPL Solar System Simulator​

 

[waltky]

Granny says we don't need to be spendin' money for a new rocket in this economy...

Future NASA rocket to be most powerful ever built
14 Sept.`11 WASHINGTON – To soar far away from Earth and even on to Mars, NASA has dreamed up the world's most powerful rocket, a behemoth that borrows from the workhorse liquid-fuel rockets that sent Apollo missions into space four decades ago.

But with a price tag that some estimate at $35 billion, it may not fly with Congress. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and several members of Congress on Wednesday unveiled the Obama administration's much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System. The multibillion-dollar program would carry astronauts in a capsule on top, and the first mission would be 10 years off if all goes as planned. Unmanned test launches are expected from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in six years.

Calling it the "largest, most powerful rocket built," NASA's exploration and operations chief, William Gerstenmaier, said the rocket will be tough to construct. But when NASA does it, "we'll have a capability to go beyond low-Earth orbit like no other nation does here on Earth," he said in a telephone briefing Wednesday. The rocket resembles those NASA relied on before the space shuttle, but even its smallest early prototype will have 10 percent more thrust than the Saturn V that propelled Apollo astronauts to the moon. When it is built to its fuller size, it will be 20 percent more powerful, Gerstenmaier said. That bigger version will have the horsepower of 208,000 Corvette engines.

NASA is trying to remain flexible on where it wants to go and when. The space agency is aiming for a nearby asteroid around 2025 and then on to Mars in the 2030s. There could even be a short hop to the moon, but not as a main goal. All those targets require lots of brute force to escape Earth's orbit, something astronauts have not done since 1972. The far-from-finalized price tag may be too steep given federal budget constraints. "Will it be tough times going forward? Of course it is," Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said in a separate news conference. "We are in an era in which we have to do more with less — all across the board — and the competition for the available dollars will be fierce. But what we have here now are the realistic costs" verified by independent experts.

Although five senators of both parties who are leaders in science issues praised the plan in a joint press release, outside experts are skeptical that Congress will agree to such a big spending project. "In the current political environment, new spending is probably the most taboo thing in politics," said Stan Collender, a former Democratic congressional budget analyst. He put the odds of this getting congressional approval at "no better than 50-50 this year. There are going to be a lot of questions asking what kind of commitment we're going to be making here. You can find yourself with a rocket that no one wants to fire."

MORE

 

[ScienceRocks]

It is TIME to mine the MOON, Astroids and Mars for resources...It is insanity to remain on this one planet.

There is unlimited resources out there!!! Fearing about running out of resources on earth? Well there is your answer!

We don't have to worry NO more about being wiped out as a species as we will not have our egg's in one basket.

The knowledge we would gain from it would make it worth it alone.

Lets pull out of the middle east and close down those worthless bases...Lets put the money into something worth while. FUCK fighting the third world.

 

[American Horse]

'Invisible' Planet Discovered...

'Invisible' planet discovered with new technique
9/8/2011 - Kepler probe detects alien world by its gravitational influence on a neighbor

For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports. NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.

The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method — known as transit timing variation, or TTV — has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last. "My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Finding two new planets

The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light. Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius). Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.

MORE

This is scientifically interesting but only works in the cases of large Jupiter sized planets in close proximity to their suns where fast orbits yield quick results when other close-in planets are perturbed.

 

[Mr. H.]

This is a big deal -

In Chile desert, huge telescope begins galaxy probe - Yahoo! News

 

[Mr. H.]

Cool photo. Full size here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1110/fourmoons_cassini_1004.jpg

 

[American Horse]

It's interesting, but it is a picture of what?

Here's the Answer

Explanation: A fourth moon is visible on the above image if you look hard enough. First -- and furthest in the background -- is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and one of the larger moons in the Solar System. The dark feature across the top of this perpetually cloudy world is the north polar hood. The next most obvious moon is bright Dione, visible in the foreground, complete with craters and long ice cliffs. Jutting in from the left are several of Saturn's expansive rings, including Saturn's A ring featuring the dark Encke Gap. On the far right, just outside the rings, is Pandora, a moon only 80-kilometers across that helps shepherd Saturn's F ring. The fourth moon? If you look closely in the Encke Gap you'll find a speck that is actually Pan. Although one of Saturn's smallest moons at 35-kilometers across, Pan is massive enough to help keep the Encke gap relatively free of ring particles.

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - we all gonna die...

... get ready to bend over...

... an' kiss yer butt goo'bye...

Huge black hole eating worlds in Milky Way
November 05, 2011 - A supernova within the galaxy M100, that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood.

A supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is gradually destroying entire worlds on a daily basis, a new study has claimed. The study led by Dr Kastytis Zubovas from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said Sagittarius A, a giant black hole 26,000 light-years from Earth, flares up in spectacular daily displays of x-rays and infrared radiation after the cosmic cannibal. Writing on the pre-press website ArXiv.org, Zubovas and colleagues propose Sagittarius A, which is 4,000,000 times the mass of the Sun, is destroying planets and asteroids that have formed in a torus of dust and gas around the black hole, ABC Science reported.

They claim these clouds are a mixture of primordial chemicals and the remains of stars that have already been shredded by the black hole. That’s a similar environment to the proto-planetary disks around stars in which planets form. This hypothesis has raised the possibility that planetary systems could be evolving around the Milky Way’s central black hole in the same way that they would around a star.

While this region may be conducive to the formation of planets and asteroids, Zubovas and colleagues point out that it’s also an area where these bodies are destroyed as they move too close to the central black hole. When this happens, a burst of x-rays and infrared radiation a hundred times greater than normal background energy is detected coming from Sagittarius A, they report. But the radiation released as the planets and asteroids are destroyed is just a tiny fraction of the levels released when a star falls into the black hole, an event which is estimated to happen once every 100,000 years.

Source

 

[American Horse]

...the radiation released as the planets and asteroids are destroyed is just a tiny fraction of the levels released when a star falls into the black hole, an event which is estimated to happen once every 100,000 years.

it is a fascinating concept to consider for an exotic and bizarre environment for planetary development and evolution.

The "death spiral" is exceedingly slow considering the millions of stars there in the most populous region of the galaxy. Condidering that massive number,, on average, billions of years might easily pass before a planetary system was devoured. At that rate of destruction, life, even advanced life and civilizations might develop into foreordained destruction.

 

[freedombecki]

NASA Credit for image
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Nasa says Curiosity rover is 'Locked and loaded' for Saturday launch - on mission to hunt down life on Mars

• Part of $2,500,000,000 Mars science mission
• 500-ton rocket to carry car-sized rover to Mars
• 6-wheel vehicle to descend by parachute
• Landing site in clay-rich crater where life may once have thrived
• 10 sensors including X-Ray readers and robot arm for sampling soil

NASA describes its Mars Rover vehicle as "locked and loaded" in preparation for its Saturday lift-off, when a 500-ton Atlas rocket will carry the

Read more: NASA Curiosity rover to roam Mars to discover if life ever existed on the red planet | Mail Online​

Go, NASA!

 

[waltky]

Granny says smokin' dem space crystals is what makes Uncle Ferd think he's in luv with dem fat girls...

Impossible crystals are 'from space'
3 January 2012 - The minerals were the first reported naturally-occurring quasicrystals

Examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space, a study shows. Quasicrystals have an unusual structure - in between those of crystals and glasses. Until two years ago, quasicrystals had only been created in the lab - then geologists found them in rocks from Russia's Koryak mountains. In PNAS journal, a team says the chemistry of the Russian crystals suggests they arrived in meteorites. Quasicrystals were first described in the 1980s by Israeli researcher Daniel Schechtman, who was awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. Schechtman's ideas were initially treated with doubt or scorn by some of his peers, who thought the structures were "impossible".

Rule breaker

Quasicrystals break some of the rules of symmetry that apply to conventional crystalline structures. They also exhibit different physical and electrical properties. In 2009, Luca Bindi, from the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues reported finding quasicrystals in mineral samples from the Koryak mountains in Russia's far east. The mineral - an alloy of aluminium, copper, and iron - showed that quasicrystals could form and remain stable under natural conditions. But the natural process that created the structures remained an open question. Now, Dr Bindi, Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and others claim that tests point to an extra-terrestrial origin for the Russian minerals.

They used the technique of mass spectrometry to measure different forms - or isotopes - of the element oxygen contained in parts of the rock sample. The pattern of oxygen isotopes was unlike any known minerals that originated on Earth. It was instead closer to that sometimes found in a type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite. The samples also contained a type of silica which only forms at very high pressures. This suggests it either formed in the Earth's mantle, or was formed in a high-velocity impact, such as that which occurs when a meteorite hits the Earth's surface. "Our evidence indicates that quasicrystals can form naturally under astrophysical conditions and remain stable over cosmic timescales," the team writes in PNAS.

BBC News - Impossible crystals are 'from space'

 

[waltky]

Guess this supports the collision theory of the origin of the moon...

Scientists find ‘lunar’ mineral in Western Australia
Fri, Jan 06, 2012 - A mineral brought back to Earth by the first men on the moon and long thought to be unique to the lunar surface has been found in Australian rocks more than 1 billion years old, scientists said yesterday.

Named after Apollo 11’s 1969 landing site at the Sea of Tranquility, tranquillityite was one of three minerals first discovered in rocks from the moon and the only one not to be found, in subsequent years, on Earth. Australian scientist Birger Rasmussen said that tranquillityite had “long been considered as the moon’s own mineral” until geologists discovered it, by chance, in rock from resources-rich Western Australia. “In over 40 years it hadn’t been found in any terrestrial samples,” said Rasmussen, from Curtin University.

When the moon samples first came back Rasmussen said they were considered to be “extremely precious” and had been subjected to intense, detailed study when — ironically — their contents were “right here all the time.” “They were always part of Earth, they haven’t come from the moon,” he said of his work on the discovery, published in the journal Geology. “It tells you that broadly overall you have similar chemistries and similar processes operating on the moon as on Earth,” he said.

As well as being “quirky and surprising,” Rasmussen said the discovery also had important practical applications, with the mineral proving to be an excellent dating tool which had allowed scientists to pin down the rocks’ age. “We used this mineral ... to date the dolerite which has previously been undated, so that helped us understand the geological history,” he said. They were 1.07 billion years old, more ancient than rocks in the area had previously been thought to be, and Rasmussen said tranquillityite would be useful in dating similar rocks in the future. “I think it will be a lot more widespread than just the six locations we’ve found it so far,” he said of the rare mineral.

Scientists find ?lunar? mineral in Western Australia - Taipei Times

 

[American Horse]

NASA Radar Finds Ice Deposits at Moon's North Pole Additional evidence of water activity on moon


Mini-SAR map of the Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR) of the north pole of the Moon. Fresh, “normal” craters (red circles) show high values of CPR inside and outside their rims. This is consistent with the distribution of rocks and ejected blocks around fresh impact features, indicating that the high CPR here is surface scattering. The “anomalous” craters (green circles) have high CPR within, but not outside their rims. Their interiors are also in permanent sun shadow. These relations are consistent with the high CPR in this case being caused by water ice, which is only stable in the polar dark cold traps. We estimate over 600 million cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 1 metric ton) of water in these features. Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

Click to view a Larger version of the CPR Map of the North Pole of the Moon (1.4MB).