Really Rocket Science

Time Lapse From Space – Literally. The Journey Home. from Fragile Oasis on Vimeo.

Great video by American astronaut — and SUNY Oneonta graduate — Ron Garan…

The video shows his first attempt at time-lapse photography, suggested by his photography instructor Katrina Willoughby. He set up a Nikon D3S camera in the Cupola windowed observatory to take about 500 pictures at 3-second intervals. The project continued using D3S and D2XS cameras.

All the sequences that appear in the video were shot by either Garan or Fossum. It shows the space station’s orbits around the Earth, though the photography seems to speed up the motion.

The breath-taking sights seen on the video include the world from central Africa to Russia, Europe to the Middle East and footage of the United States. It also includes hurricanes Katia and Irene and several lightning storms.

It is set to the music of Peter Gabriel, featuring his songs “Downside Up” and “Down To Earth.”

Stephen Hawking was wrong. He bet Kip Thorne at CalTech that Cygnus X-1 did not contain a black hole. Now we know for sure, with scientists having done a complete description.

Here’s how…

Though Cygnus X-1 has been studied intensely since its discovery, previous attempts to measure its mass and spin suffered from lack of a precise measurement of its distance from Earth. Reid led a team that used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a continent-wide radio-telescope system, to make a direct trigonometric measurement of the distance. Their VLBA observations provided a distance of 6070 light-years, while previous estimates had ranged from 5800-7800 light-years.

Armed with the new, precise distance measurement, scientists using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, and visible-light observations made over more than two decades, calculated that the black hole in Cygnus X-1 is nearly 15 times more massive than our Sun and is spinning more than 800 times per second.

“This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed and how fast it was spinning,” Reid said. “Getting a good measurement of the distance was crucial,” Reid added.

“We now know that Cygnus X-1 is one of the most massive stellar black holes in the Milky Way,” said Jerry Orosz, of San Diego State University. “It’s spinning as fast as any black hole we’ve ever seen,” he added.

In addition to measuring the distance, the VLBA observations, made during 2009 and 2010, also measured Cygnus X-1′s movement through our Galaxy. That movement, the scientists, said, is too slow for the black hole to have been produced by a supernova explosion. Such an explosion would have given the object a “kick” to a much higher speed.

That top image would make a really good, big print.

A 400-meter wide Near-Earth asteroid will be cutting it close tomorrow. Will you be able to see it? Yes, but it won’t be easy.

Astro Guyz explains…

Closest approach to Earth occurs at 11:29 UTC/06:29 EST at about 202,000 miles distant, placing it high to the south west for observers on the US Eastern Seaboard. (Don’t forget to “fall back” to Standard time on Sunday, November 6^th; you wouldn’t want to miss seeing the asteroid because of  an anachronistic convention, but I digress..)  At its closest approach, 2005 YU₅₅ will glide along at one degree every 7 minutes, easily noticeable after a few minutes of observation at low power. I plan to target selected areas with my GOTO mount, sketch the field, then watch for changes. I may also take some wide-field piggyback stills with the DSLR, but mostly, this one will just be fun to watch. The asteroid will pass through the constellations Aquila, Delphinus, and Pegasus as it heads westward. Interestingly, 2005 YU₅₅ passes within a degree of Altair centered on 6:07:30PM EST only 27 minutes after local sunset, and also makes a very close pass of the star Epsilon Delphini during closest approach. These both make good visual “anchors” to aim your scope at during the appointed time and watch. Keep in mind, the charts provided are rough and “Tampa Bay-centric…” on an approach as close as this one, two factors muddle the precise prediction coordinates of the asteroid; one is the fact the gravitational field of the Earth will change the orbit of 2005 YU55 slightly, and two is that the position will change due to the position of the observer on the Earth and the effect of parallactic shift. Many prediction programs assume the Earthly vantage as a mere point in space, fine for positioning deep sky objects but not so hot for ones passing near the planet. A good place to get updated coordinates is JPL Horizons website which lets you generate an accurate ephemeris for your exact longitude latitude and elevation.

I like pulsars and I love how our friends at NASA GSFC explain it — with animation.

An international team of scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form.

At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits electromagnetic energy at periodic intervals. A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. This matter is so compressed that even a teaspoonful weighs as much as Mount Everest.

“With this new batch of pulsars, Fermi now has detected more than 100, which is an exciting milestone when you consider that, before Fermi’s launch in 2008, only seven of them were known to emit gamma rays,” said Pablo Saz Parkinson, an astrophysicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a co-author on two papers detailing the findings.

One group of pulsars combines incredible density with extreme rotation. The fastest of these so-called millisecond pulsars whirls at 43,000 revolutions per minute.

Millisecond pulsars are thought to achieve such speeds because they are gravitationally bound in binary systems with normal stars. During part of their stellar lives, gas flows from the normal star to the pulsar. Over time, the impact of this falling gas gradually spins up the pulsar’s rotation.

The strong magnetic fields and rapid rotation of pulsars cause them to emit powerful beams of energy, from radio waves to gamma rays. Because the star is transferring rotational energy to the pulsar, the pulsar’s spin slows after this transfer is completed.

Typically, millisecond pulsars are around a billion years old. However, in the Nov. 3 issue of Science, the Fermi team reveals a bright, energetic millisecond pulsar only 25 million years old.

The object, named PSR J1823−3021A, lies within NGC 6624, a spherical collection of ancient stars called a globular cluster, one of about 160 similar objects that orbit our galaxy. The cluster is about 10 billion years old and lies about 27,000 light-years away toward the constellation Sagittarius.

Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) showed that eleven globular clusters emit gamma rays, the cumulative emission of dozens of millisecond pulsars too faint for even Fermi to detect individually. But that’s not the case for NGC 6624.

“It’s amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object. It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it’s emitting energy. It’s a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home,” said Paulo Freire, the study’s lead author, at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

J1823−3021A was previously identified as a pulsar by its radio emission, yet of the nine new pulsars, none are millisecond pulsars, and only one was later found to emit radio waves.

Despite its sensitivity, Fermi’s LAT may detect only one gamma ray for every 100,000 rotations of some of these faint pulsars. Yet new analysis techniques applied to the precise position and arrival time of photons collected by the LAT since 2008 were able to identify them.

“We adapted methods originally devised for studying gravitational waves to the problem of finding gamma-ray pulsars, and we were quickly rewarded,” said Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Allen co-authored a paper on the discoveries that was published online today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Great work by astronomers Adam Kraus (University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and Michael Ireland (Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory) in finding the youngest planet ever.

“LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found, about 5 times younger than the previous record holder,” said Kraus. “This young gas giant is being built out of the dust and gas. In the past, you couldn’t measure this kind of phenomenon because it’s happening so close to the star. But, for the first time, we’ve been able to directly measure the planet itself as well as the dusty matter around it.”

Kraus will be presenting the discovery at an Oct. 19 meeting at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The meeting follows the acceptance of a research paper on the discovery by Kraus and Ireland by The Astrophysical Journal.

The optical sleight of hand used by the astronomers is to combine the power of Keck’s Adaptive Optics with a technique called aperture mask interferometry. The former is the use of a deformable mirror to rapidly correct for atmospheric distortions of starlight. The latter involves placing a small mask with several holes in the path of the light collected and concentrated by a giant telescope. With that, the scientists can manipulate the light waves.

“It’s like we have an array of small mirrors,” said Kraus. “We can manipulate the light and cancel out distortions.” The technique allows the astronomers to cancel out the bright light of stars. They can then resolve disks of dust around stars and see gaps in the dusty layers where protoplanets may be hiding.

“Interferometry has actually been around since the 1800s, but through the use of adaptive optics has only been able to reach nearby young suns for about the last 7 years.” said Dr. Ireland. “Since then we’ve been trying to push the technique to its limits using the biggest telescopes in the world, especially Keck.”

The discovery of LkCa 15 b began as a survey of 150 young dusty stars in star-forming regions. That led to the more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

“LkCa 15 was only our second target, and we immediately knew we were seeing something new,” said Kraus. “We could see a faint point source near the star, so thinking it might be a Jupiter-like planet we went back a year later to get more data.”

In further investigations at varying wavelengths, the astronomers were intrigued to discover that the phenomenon was more complex than a single companion object.

“We realized we had uncovered a super Jupiter-sized gas planet, but that we could also measure the dust and gas surrounding it. We’d found a planet at its very beginning” said Kraus.

Drs. Kraus and Ireland plan to continue their observations of LkCa 15 and other nearby young stars in their efforts to construct a clearer picture of how planets and solar systems form.

Mirrors. Go figure.

Want to know how this was done? Get the details.

WTF is HUDF? Hubble Ultra Deep Field, KWIM?

It’s the deepest ever. Seriously:

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken,[1] looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang), and it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In August and September 2009, the Hubble’s Deep Field was expanded using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.[2]

Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the image covers 11.0 square arcminutes. This is just one-seventieth the solid angle subtended by the full moon as viewed from Earth, smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere.

This would look good on your wall.

Missed the images from Mars over the last three years? Don’t worry, there’s a video.

If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting Mars, buckle up: The following video of NASA’s Mars Opportunity Rover crawling the surface of the red planet between September 2008 and August 2011 is about as close as you’re going to come at this point.

Opportunity’s panoramic still-image camera captured 309 photos as the rover crawled 13 miles to get from Martian Victoria to another, larger crater, the 14-mile-diameter Endeavor, where the rover is currently still located, busy inspecting Martian rocks. The still images were then stitched together to create the video slideshow. A soundtrack was also added by taking data from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding it up by 1,000 times to achieve an audible frequency.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Dune (1984), you’ll recall the dramatic worm sightings when you see the Mars terrain…

Good show, I say!

Today’s Daily Mail (U.K.) writes of Damian Peach, Astronomer Photographer of the Year (2010)…

From detailed solar flares to an amazing image of Jupiter and two of its moons, this tour of our solar system has been captured by an amateur British astronomer in his back garden.

Damian Peach, an electronic engineer from Selsey, West Sussex, has spent the last ten years documenting the changing face of our solar system.

Spending a relatively modest £10,000 on a high-speed telescope and electrical equipment, Mr Peach’s crystal clear images are good enough to rival those of Nasa and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

So much so that in 2010, he became the only Briton to win the prestigious Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Award for his composite photograph of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede and Io, orbiting the stormy surface of the gas giant.

Mr Peach said: ‘It’s just fantastic that it’s possible to do something like this from your own back garden.

‘This has been made possible by recent leaps in technology. These days surprisingly good results are possible with small telescopes and low cost webcams.

‘The results possible for home astronomers now were not achievable until the 1990s by even the largest telescopes on Earth.

‘The resolution possible with large amateur telescopes could now be considered of a professional quality in what the images reveal on the planets.’

Great job, mate!

You can skip this step and go directly to the million-dollar images the space agencies put out, and get a monster-size print for a few bucks.

Today’s image comes to us courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope…

This composite image of NGC 281 contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple) with infrared observations from Spitzer (red, green, blue). The high-mass stars in NGC 281 drive many aspects of their galactic environment through powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, “boiling it away” into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas and dust, as seen on the left side of the image. These structures likely contain newly forming stars. The eventual deaths of massive stars as supernovas will also seed the galaxy with material and energy.

Read more about NGC 281.

动画演示“天宫一号”发射全过程

China’s Tiangong-1 is set to launch into low-earth orbit today, with the hopes of some day building a space station to rival the ISS.

Do they have a plan to dominate space? Not really. Dr. Morris Jones of Australia explains all in Space Daily…

This module is a small space laboratory with a single docking port. It is not the first module of a large Chinese space station, as some media reports are saying.

Tiangong 1 will test some of the technologies that will be used to build a large Chinese space station in the future, but it is not even a prototype of the modules that will be used to build the station.

Tiangong 1 will be used as a rendezvous and docking target for the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft, which will launch before the end of this year. China has never docked two spacecraft before. Shenzhou 8 will stay docked with Tiangong 1 for about three weeks, and will then send its descent module to a soft landing back on Earth.

If all has gone well with this flight, we can expect Shenzhou 9 to fly to Tiangong 1 in 2012, this time with astronauts aboard. They will live aboard the laboratory and their docked Shenzhou spacecraft for a short mission, then come home. Later in 2012, the Shenzhou 10 mission will also fly to Tiangong 1, delivering its second (and probably final) crew.

At this stage, we don’t know how many astronauts will be aboard Shenzhou 9 or 10. A maximum of three crewmembers can fly aboard one of these spacecraft. It’s possible that there will be two or three astronauts on these expeditions. At least one of the missions is expected to carry China’s first female astronaut.

Tiangong 1 is a vital step in China’s quest to develop a space station, but it must be seen as an intermediate program. Two more Tiangong laboratories are expected to be launched by China in the years ahead, gradually testing more technology for the space station.

Tiangong 3 is expected to have more than one docking port, and will possibly see another regular Tiangong module docked with it before a crew is launched there.

When China’s space station is finally assembled in orbit around 2020, the Tiangong spacecraft will see a new lease of life. It will be refitted to serve as a cargo carrier, delivering food and other supplies to the astronauts aboard the space station.

Yes, it’s a wonderful program, and we’ve been waiting a long time to see Tiangong fly. But please don’t confuse it with the next step in China’s space program. When the final space station is built, it will eclipse the modestly sized Tiangong laboratory in terms of size, performance and achievements.

Good luck!