Scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture these images of four nebulae - stars that have started to cast off their outer layers at the end of their 10 billion year lives. Our day our sun will also do the same thing but it won’t be in our lifetime, or anyone elses lifetime any time soon. These four nebula are about 7-8000 light-years away in the Milky Way. Two of the pictures of are included below…
This is ‘He 2-47′ which is also called the starfish. He 2-47 can be found in the southern constellation.
NGC 5315 is a nebula located in the constellation Circinus.
Astronomers have discovered several Earth-sized oceans of water that have fallen into a planet-forming region around an embryonic star. Dan Watson at the University of Rochester believes they are the first to find and see a brief stage of disk formation - the way in which a planetary system’s supply of water arrives. The discovery is the first-ever glimpse of material directly feeding a protoplanetary disk.
The star in question (IRAS 4B) lies in a picturesque nebula (NGC 1333) about 1000 light years away. It is one of a list of 30 of young protostars known. IRAS 4B is the only one of the thirty stars to show any sign of such material, as seen by the infrared spectrum of water vapor. The characteristics of IRAS4B’s infrared spectrum can be explained by material falling from the protostar onto a surrounding disk. This disk-accretion shock is the mechanism of the disks from which all planetary systems are thought to originate.
Among the details known so far for the rate of rainfall onto the disk, which is about 23 Earth masses per year. The area of the puddle is greater than the size of the orbit of Pluto.These results will help astronomers assess the planet-forming potential of IRAS4B’s disk. This in turn will help us learn about the earliest stages of our own solar system.
Want to search for new stars? Google Earth has released a new version that allows you to look at the galaxy and search for stars. The new program will let you virtually look at the sky from any location, then zoom in and fly around and search for stars. The images come from three main locations: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory and Hubble. You can find more about it here.
Astronomers have found a giant hole in the Universe a billion light-years across that is empty of normal matter such as stars and galaxies, as well as dark matter. Its the largest void ever found. Not only is this the biggest void ever found but scientists never expected to find one this size. Astronomers have known that (on large scales) the Universe has many voids that are empty of matter. But most of these voids are much smaller than the one found and the number of discovered voids has appeared to decrease as their size increases.
The Earth will cast a shadow that will creep across the surface of the Moon on early Tuesday morning, resulting in a total eclipse of the Moon. An eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun’s light. During the full eclipse, the moon will not be completely dark because some light still reaches it around the edges of the Earth. The eclipse will be visible in both North and South America, as well as in East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. The eclipse will not be visible in Europe or Africa. The lunar eclipse lasts about three and a half hours.
The colour of the Moon can vary considerably from one eclipse to another. A dark eclipse is caused by dust which filters and blocks much of the Sun’s light from reaching the Moon. Since no major volcanic eruptions have recently taken place recently the Moon will probably be a bright red or orange colour. The mid-eclipse will start at about 10:37 GMT, which corresponds to early evening in Sydney, Australia and a few hours before sunrise in Los Angeles, California.
I have no interest in becoming an astrophysicist but I find the concept of understanding space interesting. Black holes, in particular, are a great fascination. What are they? And what happens to all the stuff that is sucked into them?
To understand a black hole you have to understand that all matter is residing in an energy field. If that energy field were spread out wide and flat you would find that all matter (we know of) is on one side of the field and on the other side (scientists believe) is some sort of anti-matter. This field is commonly represented as something like a wide trampoline. As heavy-matter objects press down on the trampoline nearby objects slide towards them. If you’ve seen any programs on Einstein’s theory of relativity you will know what I am talking about. What they forget to mention is that the trampoline is a field of impossibly pure energy. To be exact, it isn’t energy, but a limit of energy.
Understanding this field is important. All stuff consists of a ratio of mass and energy. Now it is well known that mass and energy are the same thing, just in a different form. Your body is a mass but it also has a lot of energy. There is no such thing as mass with no energy. You are on the Earth and it is spinning very fast so you are moving. It is my theory that it is essentially impossible to achieve 100% energy. Stuff that is mostly energy resides very close to the aforementioned field. Stuff that is mostly mass resides far away from the field. You can get your mass closer to the field by moving but it isn’t enough of a change to notice anything.
Black holes are very massive and contain more energy than any star. Black holes make an incredible indention in the field and they are very close to it. To use a visual metaphor, just take any old garbage bag, pull it tight and press on one tiny spot with your finger - harder and harder. It stretches and stretches and then it breaks. Can the field supporting all of the energy and matter in space break? Why not? What would happen if it did? I began answering those questions by realizing that space is expanding. Why? What if the field isn’t just a flat field but a bubble? What if all of matter and energy is inside the bubble pressing out on it? What if something pokes a hole in that bubble? Wouldn’t it just make a new bubble? You get one bubble with bubbles growing off it. Then, bubbles can grow off those bubbles.
Now, it is easy to see what happens to the stuff that is sucked into a black hole. It just slips out of one bubble and into another. Exactly what happens isn’t too nice to think about. To make the jump, it must pass through, nearly touching, the field. Anything close to the field is nearly pure energy without any mass. Is it possible to convert mass to energy and then back to the same mass structure? Not that I know of. So, if you tried to jump through a black hole, all of your matter would be converted to energy and that energy would spew into the new bubble. Eventually, that energy will become high energy particles, which join into subatomic particles, which make atoms, which become parts of new things - just not you.
This all brings me back to the beginning of space - the Big Bang. Was it a bang or a pop? Is space just a bubble created by a black hole in another bubble? The only argument against it is the theory that the amount of matter in all of space is constant. Of course, nobody has ever actually went out and added up how much matter there is. There could be a little hole off in space somewhere that leaks energy in while black holes leak it back out. Eventually, the incoming hole will run out of energy to leak in. Then, all of our energy and matter will eventually leak out and all that will be left is a deflated bubble.
The Perseid Meteor shower will be visible through out the world this weekend. A new moon will aid star gazers as the sky will be very dark and shooting stars and meteors will be easier to spot.
When the Earth moves through space it often intersects with some dirt, and as the dirt cloud burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere, we get a beautiful flash of light - in this case the Perseid Meteor Shower The meteor shower will be easiest to see away from cities. This eliminates the possibility of light pollution. Under perfect conditions it is possible to see up to one meteor per minute.
Although these meteors appear to radiate from the star Perseus (thus their name) they can be seen anywhere. The Perseids are the most reliable of the meteor showers. Although you could see up to about 80 an hour about 60 an hour is more realistic. They are distinctive meteor showers and they move quite quickly with a flash of light. They are quite spectacular with long contrails. Occasionally you get a trail that carries on glowing for more than a minute.
The Perseid Meteor Shower is made up of dusty debris shed by Comet Swift-Tuttle, first discovered in 1862. Each year the Earth’s ploughs through the meteors, which burn up as they shoot through the upper atmosphere at more than 130,000 mph. Chinese has records of the Perseids which date back to 36AD.
Humankind has long looked to the stars in the hope of finding extraterrestrial life. In the middle and late 20th century, a telescope was on every boy’s Birthday and Christmas wishlist. But in the 21st century it seems that the mysteries of the universe hold few appeals for the minds of young children. Only rare astronomical events are popular these days. But most people, who were alive at the time, can still remember that unforgettable moment when man landed on the moon on July 20th, 1969. In 1994 the rare collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter was also a memorable moment.
Many of us still dream of travelling to the stars. Many also believe that we are not alone in the universe. Many people have claimed to have seen UFOs (Unidentified Flying Object), which is often dismissed as just being some kind of natural phenomenon. UFOs from ‘outer space’ have kept us interested in searching the stars for signs of life. There is documented evidence that people have claimed to have seen UFOs as far back as 1492.
But it wasn’t until 1992 that Nasa initiated a radio astronomy programme to be called SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). A year later it was shut down by Congress however the search for life in our galaxy and in the star continues today across the globe. But are there really alien civilizations out there? Just waiting for us to make contact? Or are we all alone in the vast expanse of the universe? a rock of life floating amid the debris of the big bang?
There is a well known story that in 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi was eating lunch with his fellow physicists Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York at the Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, US. According to Konopinski: “The topic being discussed was evidence of flying saucers. There ensued a discussion as to whether the saucers could somehow exceed the speed of light, and it was then that Fermi surprised us with the question: ‘But where is everybody?’” This question become known as Fermi’s Paradox and would divide the scientific community. Fermi realised that any civilisation with a modest amount of technology could rapidly colonise the entire Galaxy. Within a few million years, every star system could be brought under a single empire. This may sound a long time but in fact it’s quite short compared to the overall age of the Universe, which is about ten thousand million years old. If aliens were real, they would have had more than enough time to colonize the Galaxy.
But there is no clear indication that aliens are out there. This prompted Fermi to ask an obvious question: “Where is everybody?” Fermi believes that the fact that aliens don’t seem to be walking around our Galactic neighbourhood implies that there are no extraterrestrial anywhere at all in the Galaxy is considered to be a radical conclusion by some researchers.
In many ways, it is very difficult to imagine that we are alone in the universe. According to the Drake equation there are probably hundreds of thousands of alien civilisations in our Galaxy alone. The main purpose of the Drake equation is to quantify the uncertainty of the factors which determine the number of extra-terrestrial civilisations in the galaxy. In response to Fermi’s Paradox, many scientists believe that the reason humans have not made contact with aliens lies in our culture and the way we think.
We have no conception about how other cosmic civilisations are organised and how they look at our civilisation. We are a Type Zero civilization. Maybe we can answer these questions when we develop into a Type 1 civilization. So what are these civilization ‘types’? In 1964 astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a method for classifying how advanced a civilisation is. He called it the Kardashev Scale and he classified each civilisation into three types: Type I, a civilisation capable of harnessing all of the power available on a single planet; Type 2, which is a civilisation able to harness all of the power available from a ✰; and Type 3, a civilisation capable of harnessing the power available from a galaxy.
Over the years scientists have come up with a number of solutions to Fermi’s Paradox, but one of the most surreal is the Cosmic Quarantine Theory, put forward by cosmologist Edward Harrison. He suggests any alien civilisation bent on the intensive colonisation of other worlds would be driven by a territorial impulse. But such an aggressive nature would likely not fit with the immense technological prowess required to create interstellar travel. Such a civilisation would probably self-destruct long before it could reach for the ✰.
The most evolved civilisations in the star would notice any world that showed signs of a campaign of galactic conquest and destroy it. But we may be the highest evolved civilization throughout the star. Maybe humankind will tire of waiting to hear from ETs and begin a colonization process of its own. According to the theory of relativity we can’t travel faster than the speed of light. The trip to the nearest star would take at least eight years and a trip to the center of the galaxy would take about a hundred thousand years. In science fiction they overcome this by warping, or traveling through alternate dimensions. We dont have that ability.
In the theory of relativity you can travel back in time if you can travel faster than the speed of light. But there is one way that humans could colonize space without having to travel for hundreds of thousand of years: Von Neumann machines, or probe, meaning a self-replicating spacecraft.
Humankind could send out self-replicating spacecrafts to neighbouring star systems where it could extract raw materials from asteroids to create replicas of itself. These replicas would then be sent out to other star systems. But even if we do receive a signal from the star we should be wary of answering it until we have developed a bit further. We might be better off not meeting an advanced civilisation at our present stage of development.
Space shuttle Endeavour has blasted off from the Kennedy Space Centre for a new mission to the International Space Station. The booster rockets successfully separated about two and a half minutes after the shuttle blasted off. The purpose of Endeavour’s mission is to install a new beam for the station’s support structure. Astronauts have to replace a faulty gyroscope needed to keep the outpost in orbit. However it is the crew that has appeared to have captured the public’s imagination because the five-man, two-woman crew includes an elementary school teacher. Barbara Morgan is the first teacher to join a space mission since the failed 1986 Challenger mission. Ms Morgan trained 22 years ago as the backup to Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher who died on the failed 1986 Challenger mission. Civilian fliers were then banned from shuttles after the Challenger disaster but Ms Morgan has been with the astronaut corps since 1998.
The Phoenix Mars Mission blasted off Saturday, August 4th hoping to arrive on the Red Planet on May 25th 2008 to examine the northern polar region. The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first attempt by NASA to reach this water-ice region of Mars. A robotic arm will dig into ice believed to lie just below the dusty Martian surface. The purpose of the mission is to prove the history of water on Mars. The presence of ancient water would have been favorable for supporting life.