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A Newborn Star Gives Astronomers A Spectacular Show

February 11, 2016 By William Bland Leave a Comment

A newborn star gives astronomers a spectacular show with the help of a shiny blue nebula. The star named HD 97300 is located in the Chamaeleon Complex constellation at a distance of five hundred light years from Earth.

The incredible light show was spotted with the help of the La Silla Observatory of the European Space Observatory, situated in Chile. The researchers of ESO have recently released the beautiful footage that was captured with a MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope. The blue reflection nebula named IC 2631 is the result of the reflection of the star in dust particles. But this is not all that the nebula has to reveal.

It appears that the newborn star is not singular in the space area, but other cosmic objects could not be spotted through the thick cloud made of dust and gas. At the moment, HD 97300 is emitting a powerful light, which usually happens in this phase of the creation of a star, otherwise known as T Tauri. The moment will pass quickly, and its light is expected to soon fade away.

The newborn star will have small dimensions and has currently reached the youngest phase in its life. As it grows older, it will start fusing hydrogen with helium and thus lose some of its size. More stars are expected to appear in the Chamaeleon Complex constellation, since the area is full of the material that helps them be born.

Going back to the nebula, the celestial visual representation could not shine by itself, and thus needs the help of other illuminating objects to display a colorful show. Since it is made of interstellar dust, the nebula can easily reflect the stars’ light. However, the stars need to be quite close to it for their light to reach the nebula.

Unfortunately for the interstellar dust cloud, the stars cannot generate enough light to build an emission nebula that can emit light by itself. In order to do so, they would have to have higher temperatures that would give them the capability of ionizing gas and supporting the creation of such a nebula.

The scattering process of the material that surrounds nebulae usually gives them the blue color, and is the same as the one that renders red sunsets and blue skies. Scientists have discovered about five hundred nebulae. A newborn star gives astronomers a spectacular show, but there are many other events in the space sky that are even more breathtaking.

Image Source: Pasion Noticias

NASA Spacecraft Spots Possible Ice Cap On Pluto

April 30, 2015 By Bonnie Gleason Leave a Comment

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which is bound for Pluto, has spotted some surface features on the icy world, among them a possible polar cap.

NASA revealed Wednesday that with 60 million miles left to go before its encounter, which is scheduled to happen on July 14, 2015, New Horizons has already made some surprising observations, revealing light and dark spots on the surface of Pluto, which is now more than 32 times farther away from Earth than the Sun.

“We are starting to see intriguing features, such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole,” NASA science chief John Grunsfeld said in a statement, in reference to what scientists believe could be a polar ice cap.

In the photographs, Pluto seems to be just a highly pixelated small blob, but scientists can already see there is something very strange about its surface.

“It’s rare to see any planet in the solar system, at this low resolution, displaying such strong surface markings. If you had similar images of Mercury, or images of even Mars, you would not see the same kinds of big surface units going by as you do here on Pluto. That’s very promising,” New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a press conference.

Like Uranus, Pluto is tipped onto its side, and New Horizons has a constant view on one of its polar zones, which is shown in the images to be more brighter than other areas. Astronomers suspect the polar region is covered by a highly reflective ice cap of frozen nitrogen.

New Horizons has already spent almost 10 years in its journey toward Pluto. In the meantime, Pluto, which was once believed to be the ninth and farthest planet in the solar system, was recently demoted to “dwarf planet” status after researchers came across other similar icy space objects in the solar system’s back yard.

Also observable in the photographs is Pluto’s moon Charon, which orbits around the dwarf planet every 6.4 days. The moon seems to be just a little dot, but that’s still an impressive achievement considering the spacecraft’s distance from it, but also Charon’s size, which is about the size of Texas.

New Horizons will continue to send images with improved quality and greater detail, as it will reach its closest point with Pluto, at approximately 7,800 miles, on July 14.

Image Source: Planets For Kids

Astronauts Begin Yearlong Mission on Space Station

March 28, 2015 By Sandy Morton Leave a Comment

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut entered the International Space Station on Saturday, starting what is to be a yearlong mission away from Earth for two of them.

Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly will spend 342 days aboard the spatial laboratory, twice as long as a regular mission on the station. Russia’s Gennady Padalka will stay on board for six-months.

The three astronauts entered the Space Station eight hours after launching from Russia’s space facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. They were welcomed by American Terry Virts and Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov who has been aboard since November, along with Italian Samantha Cristoforetti.

The mission is NASA’s first attempt at a one-year spaceflight. Four Russians have spent a year or more in space, but it happened years ago, on the Soviet-built Mir space station.

The objective is to measure the effects of a extended period of weightlessness on the human body. The stay is regarded as a step toward possible missions to Mars.

Kelly, 51, and Kornienko, 54, will stay on board until next March. During this time, they will go through extensive medical experiments, while preparing the station for the arrival of new U.S. commercial crew capsules, which are due in 2017. Kelly will go on a few spacewalks, something she hasn’t done before.

The two men will supervise the arrival and departure of numerous cargo ships, as well as other Russian-launched space crews. They will also host singer Sarah Brightman, who will be on a “space tourist” trip in September.

Doctors are longing to learn what happens to Kelly and Kornienko once they surpass the regular six-month stay for space station tenants.

Bones, muscles and the immune system are weakened by weightlessness. Body fluids also shift towards the head in zero gravity, pressuring the brain and the eyes, but also impairing vision for some astronauts.

The yearlong stay will allow medics to evaluate whether such conditions are worsened by a long spell in space or whether they reach a point of equilibrium or even taper off.

As space experts look to longer missions, the International Space Station’s future seems to be ensured until at least 2024.

Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin had said that Russia aimed to exit the project in 2020, after tensions between Moscow and Washington erupted over Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine war.

Russian space agency director Igor Komarov said in a news conference in Baikonur that his agency and NASA have convened to continue using the station until 2024.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Planet Jupiter Destroyed The First Version Of Our Solar System

March 24, 2015 By Dustin Davis Leave a Comment

According to a new a study of Caltech’s planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin and by Gregory Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Jupiter was a wrecking ball for the ancient Solar System, which was made up by a number of super-Earths.

The new research states that that the system used to contain planets which were bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

“Our work suggests that Jupiter’s inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today,” said Batygin in a statement, adding that the discovery is filling some gaps in the understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

Researchers have been baffled by the low mass of the planets of in the Solar System. Most systems with a star of the dimension of our Sun have super-sized planets. This new theory explains how our planets, which are the remnants of bigger bodies, ended up to be so small.

Most planetary systems, which are different from ours, typically have one or more planets that are larger than Earth orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does, our closest world.

In the Solar System, there’s nothing closer to the Sun than Mercury except a little debris from near-Earth asteroids and lots

A scenario that explains the formation of Jupiter and Saturn suggests that Jupiter was migrating towards the Sun, but the movement stopped when the formation of Saturn pushed back the plane. The two scientists completed a set of simulations to observe what would have occurred if a set of planets near the Sun had formed before Jupiter got there.

The researches say that some rocky worlds were forming close to the Sun, and their bodies were becoming super-Earths, gathering dense gas and dust, but as Jupiter headed in towards the Sun, gravitational forces from the huge planet would have swept these planets and other asteroids into overlapping orbits, which destroyed them.

The remnants from the collisions headed towards the Sun.and this would have destroyed all newly-formed super-Earths. Some debris would become the source material for a second generation of the current smaller worlds.

The Jupiter crashing effect through the system is how smaller planets, like Earth , Mercury, Venus and Mars, with their more thinner atmospheres were formed.

Image Source: Wallpaper Kid

Ceres, The Dwarf Planet and Its Active Volcano

March 19, 2015 By William Bland Leave a Comment

The Dawn probe, which is studying dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, had offered some answers to what does Ceres’ famous bright spots may mean.

The data could bring light to a puzzle that has been baffling experts since their discovery, a few years ago.

The scientists analyzed the data collected by Dawn and determined that the spots grow brighter as the light shines on them. Scientists believe that sunlight heats up the ice from beneath the surface and this causes massive blasts, like a volcano.

New photographs from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft reveal the spots from different angles, as the large asteroid rotates around the sunlight. The pictures show the spots in all positions of Ceres, even when they are at the margin of the dwarf planet. So, the scientists were able to observe that the spots are relatively high above the surface.

Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany was taken by surprise by this: “What is amazing is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in the line of sight.”

The scientist in sin charge of the team for one of the Dawn cameras. The images were shown recently at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Ceres is thought to be more than a quarter made of ice, a disproportionate amount compared to most asteroids. Dawn’s objective is to find out where that ice is and what is its role in shaping the surface of the asteroid. One theory is that the ice is covered by a thin layer of soil. The ice may occasionally get to the surface buy ‘cryovolcanoes’, very much like magma does on Earh, pushed up by the internal pressures within.

The Dawn probe is currently orbiting Ceres, after it was caught by its gravity field on March 6. The spacecraft needs to gets closer to the asteroid in order to begin taking more detailed pictures of the asteroid’s surface.

Dawn’s principal investigator, Christopher Russell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes that by the end of the Dawn mission, the images captured by the spacecraft will solve the mystery.

Image Source: Sci News

Astronauts Return To Earth After 6 Months in Space

March 12, 2015 By Jac Hardy Leave a Comment

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday. They were on a 167-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Russian flight engineers Elena Serova and Alexander Samokutyaev returned to Earth in a capsule, which landed in a vertical upright position at 0807 (0207 GMT). The drop-off point was 92 miles southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan.

“Expedition 42 is back on Earth”, said a NASA commentator, adding that the landing procedure was done by the book. The capsule was charred on re-entry, but the first medical checks found nothing wrong with the three astronauts. They were imediately covered with blankets, to protect the trio from the steppe cold.

Serova, who was ending her first space mission and became the first Russian woman to serve on the International Space Station, was smiling as a doctor measured her pulse and blood pressure. The other two astronauts, Wilmore and Samokutyaev, were on their second space flight to the ISS, the $100 billion project which flies about 260 miles above Earth.

“Everything is fine. I am drinking real tea with lemon,” Samokutyaev said, while Wilmore added in Russian that he is glad to be back on Earth. The three astronauts were evacuated from the landing area with individual helicopters.

NASA astronaut Terry Virts is in command of the ISS. Along with him in the International Space Station are cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. They are scheduled to return home in mid-May.

Wilmore and Vrits have done three spacewalks in order to prepare parking spots for two commercial space taxis hired by NASA, which will begin to bring in astronauts to and from the station in 2017. According to NASA, the building operations will require three more spacewalks before the end of the year, in order to install docking ports for the new spaceships.

NASA and Russia will be doubling the mission time, trying to learn more about how the human body reacts to longer stays in space.

NASA astronaut Mark Kelly and Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko are due to spend a year aboard the station. They are scheduled to launch, along with cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, on March 27 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Image Source: NASA

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