Electrons, Protons And Neutrons | Standard Model Of Particle Physics Best0fScience 2024-10-23 | Electrons, Protons And Neutrons | Standard Model Of Particle Physics
The Cosmic Time Machine Best0fScience 2014-05-02 | http://www.fb.com/ScienceReason ... The Cosmic Time Machine (Hubblecast 68). For this episode of the Hubblecast, the Hubble Space Telescope transforms into more than just a telescope — it becomes a time machine! How can Hubble look back in time to see the Universe as it was billions of years ago? Dr. J (Jochen Liske) explores the vast scale of our Universe, explaining how Hubble can be used to grasp cosmic distances, view very distant galaxies, and even explore our own past.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---Understanding the vast scale of the Universe is no mean feat. But Hubble has helped us to understand the skies around us: it has peered far away, to the very edges of the visible Universe, and taken snapshots of space as it appeared deep in the cosmic past, billions of years ago.The Universe is a very big, and very old, place. The distance and timescales involved in astronomy are sometimes difficult to wrap your head around. For example, we usually think of the Solar System as being a pretty big place; after all, it would take nearly 600 years to travel out to Neptune at the speed of an average passenger jet. But on a cosmic scale, the entire Solar System is just a tiny, tiny speck.As we can't travel to other galaxies or star systems and view them for ourselves, we rely on telescopes like Hubble. One of the main scientific justifications for building Hubble was to measure the size and age of the Universe. This task has produced some of the telescope's most iconic images, taken as Hubble peered into the faraway Universe to see what galaxies looked like in the past.So how is it possible that Hubble can look into the past? Because, just like a spacecraft, light also travels at a finite speed. At 300,000 kilometres per second, this speed is very high, but it is still finite. That means that, in principle, everything we see is a thing of the past. Now normally, in our everyday lives, it doesn't matter, because the distances are just too small. But when we look at the Moon, we see it as it was about 1 second ago. The Sun we see as it was about 8 minutes ago. For the nearest star, it's about 4 years, and the edge of our galaxy we see as it was about 100,000 years ago.As we look further, these thousands of years turn into millions, and even billions -- right back to when the Universe was very young. We see these galaxies as they were in the very distant past. Galaxies near to us are fully formed, seen as sleek spirals and smooth ellipticals. As we travel further back, we see toddlers that are rough around the edges, still in the middle of evolving into fully-grown galaxies.Nowhere is this seen better than in the Hubble Deep Field images. To create these images Hubble gazed at the same patches of sky for very long periods of time, gathering enough light to see extremely faint and very far away objects. These images show some of the most distant galaxies that have ever been observed, going back an incredible 13.2 billion years, to a time when the Universe was only about half a billion years old.This far back in time, our Milky Way may have just formed. However, the Earth only made an appearance just under 8.5 billion years later. The entire history of the Earth has taken place over just a third of the Universe's lifetime -- from the Earth's formation, to the emergence of dinosaurs, early life, and humans -- to the present day, where astronomers use Hubble to view some of the Universe's earliest inhabitants and explore our origins.So how do we know what these very distant galaxies look like today? Well, we can't know for sure. We do know, however, that the Universe, on very large scales, pretty much looks the same everywhere. That means that today these very distant galaxies will look very similar to the galaxies we observe in our local patch of the Universe around us. Vice versa, by looking at these distant galaxies we are also, in a way, observing our own past.Hubble is still searching the distant Universe for clues about how the Universe formed, and how it has evolved. Several of Hubble's surveys , for example CANDELS, CLASH, and GOODS, are scanning for distant supernova explosions, objects that are good celestial distance markers. Observations of distant supernovae led to the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, which earned three astronomers a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.Using Hubble, we can observe the Universe as it once was — going back to a time before the Sun, and perhaps even the Milky Way, had even formed. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched in 2018, will push this frontier even further, and will perhaps even allow us to observe the very first generation of galaxies to have formed in the Universe.Credit: ESA/Hubble
Caught in the Cosmic Web - Dark Matter Structure Revealed by Hubble Space Telescope Best0fScience 2012-10-16 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Dark matter filament studied in 3D for the first time! NASA/ESA Hubblecast 58: "Caught in the Cosmic Web - Dark Matter Structure Revealed by Hubble Space Telescope".In this episode of the Hubblecast, Joe Liske (aka Dr J) shows how a team of astronomers has used Hubble and a battery of other telescopes to discover the secrets of massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717. They have found that an invisible filament of dark matter extends out of the cluster. This is our first direct glimpse of the shape of the scaffolding that gives the Universe its structure. ---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have studied a giant filament of dark matter in 3D for the first time. Extending 60 million light-years from one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, the filament is part of the cosmic web that constitutes the large-scale structure of the Universe, and is a leftover of the very first moments after the Big Bang. If the high mass measured for the filament is representative of the rest of the Universe, then these structures may contain more than half of all the mass in the Universe.The theory of the Big Bang predicts that variations in the density of matter in the very first moments of the Universe led the bulk of the matter in the cosmos to condense into a web of tangled filaments. This view is supported by computer simulations of cosmic evolution, which suggest that the Universe is structured like a web, with long filaments that connect to each other at the locations of massive galaxy clusters. However, these filaments, although vast, are made mainly of dark matter, which is incredibly difficult to observe.The first convincing identification of a section of one of these filaments was made earlier this year. Now a team of astronomers has gone further by probing a filament's structure in three dimensions. Seeing a filament in 3D eliminates many of the pitfalls that come from studying the flat image of such a structure.• http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1215---Tags: caught cosmic web "dark matter" "dark energy" galaxy cluster universe astronomers nasa esa hubble space telescope structures mass "big bang" theory.
Next Generation Telescopes To Solve the Biggest Mysteries of the Universe Best0fScience 2012-10-03 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Building big - amazing telescopes of the future (ESOcast 48 with astronomer Joe Liske). Discover more about ESO's next generation of telescopes that will help in the quest to solve the biggest mysteries of the Universe.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---This episode of the ESOcast relates how ESO - based on experience gathered over the past fifty years as the most powerful observatory in history - is going to satisfy the eternal longing of astronomers: the construction of even bigger telescopes.The first of ESO's next generation telescopes is almost finished on the Chajnantor Plateau. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA), a joint project of Europe, North America and Asia, will be composed of 66 high-precision antennas when it becomes fully operational in 2013.Acting together as a giant telescope, ALMA will reveal the finest details of the cool Universe, spotting the birth of the first galaxies and peeking inside the dusty clouds of molecular gas - stellar nurseries where new stars and planets are born.While ALMA is nearly completed and already producing outstanding results, ESO's crowning jewel is still a few years away. The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be the world's biggest eye on the sky. Sporting a 39-metre main mirror, the E-ELT will dwarf every telescope that preceded it.The E-ELT will be a powerful tool to help to find life elsewhere in the Universe, by looking for biosignatures on the atmospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. The E-ELT will also be able to capture light from very faint and distant objects, revealing much about the early history of the Universe, when stars first began to shine.• http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann12069---Tags: telescopes alma eelt e-elt next generation future new mysteries space universe eso atacama large millimeter submillimeter array european extremely large telescope southern observatory astronomers.
NASAs Curiosity Finds Ancient Streambed - First Evidence of Water on Mars Best0fScience 2012-09-29 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA Mars Rover "Curiosity" finds remnants of an ancient streambed on Martian surface. Curiosity science team member Sanjeev Gupta explains how rounded pebbles spotted by the rover are convincing evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars and William Dietrich explores the relationship between river fans found in California's Death Valley on Earth and similar fans in Gale Crater on Mars.NASA's Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named "Hottah" after Hottah Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---NASA Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian SurfaceNASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence - images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels - is the first of its kind.Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow."From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it." The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called "Hottah" and "Link," with the telephoto capability of Curiosity's mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project's rover, touched down."Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient streambed," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded."The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow," said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover's main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life."A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment," said Grotzinger. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."• http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-305---Tags: mars rover curiositymartian water rivers ancient streambeds surface gale crater nasa mission evidence discovery science laboratory.
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field - Farthest Ever View of the Universe Best0fScience 2012-09-26 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubble eXtreme Deep Field - Farthest Ever View of the Universe. Hubble goes to the eXtreme to assemble farthest ever view of the Universe. Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) pushes back the frontiers of time and space.This video explains how astronomers meticulously assembled mankind's deepest view of the universe from combining Hubble Space Telescope exposures taken over the past decade. Guest scientists are Dr. Garth Illingworth and Dr. Marc Postman.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field.The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble's new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/37---Flight Through the Hubble eXtreme Deep FieldThis scientific visualization depicts a flight through the galaxies in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). Using measured and estimated distances for approximately three thousand galaxies, astronomers and visualizers constructed a three-dimensional model of the XDF galaxy distribution. The camera traverses more than thirteen billion light-years of space. For cinematic reasons, the exceedingly vast distances in the 3D model have been greatly compressed.Science Credit: G. Illingworth, P. Oesch, and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz)---Flight Through the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (2D Zoom and 3D Fly-Through Sequence)This video begins with a zoom into the small area of sky that the Hubble Space Telescope observed to construct the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF. The region is located in the southern sky, far away from the glare of the Milky Way, the bright plane of our galaxy. In terms of angular size, the field is a fraction the angular diameter of the full Moon, yet it contains thousands of galaxies stretching back across time.The video then depicts a flight through the galaxies in the XDF. Using measured and estimated redshifts for approximately three thousand galaxies, astronomers and visualizers constructed a three-dimensional model of the XDF galaxy distribution. The camera starts from Hubble's viewpoint, traverses more than thirteen billion light-years of space, and exits the data set past a "red dot" galaxy (or proto-galaxy) with a redshift of 7.82. For cinematic reasons, the exceedingly vast distances in the 3D model have been greatly compressed.---XDF Moon Comparison VideoThis video compares the angular size of the XDF field to the angular size of the full Moon. The XDF is a very small fraction of sky area, but it provides a "core sample" of the heavens by penetrating deep into space over a sightline of over 13 billion light-years. Several thousand galaxies are contained within this small field of view. At an angular diameter of one-half degree, the Moon spans an area of sky only one-half the width of a finger held at arm's length.---Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Estacion, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay and F. Summers (STScI)---Tags: hubble extreme deep field xdf ultra udf space telescope galaxies universe video 3d fly-through nasa.
Top 10 Images - Hubbles Hidden Treasures Unveiled Best0fScience 2012-08-23 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA/ESA Hubblecast 57: Top 10 Images - Hubble's Hidden Treasures Unveiled. In this episode of the Hubblecast, Joe Liske (aka Dr J) presents the winners of the Hidden Treasures image processing competition.In May 2012, Hubblcast asked members of the public to delve into Hubble's vast science archive to uncover pictures that had never been seen outside of the scientific community — and then to try their hand at processing the scientific data into attractive images. This episode presents the top ten images from the several thousand submitted.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---A couple of months ago, ESA invited you to have a look at Hubble's vast science archives. Although scientists work with the data all the time, the public don't get to see many of the amazing images that are stored in there. And so it was really great to see so many of you delving into the archive and finding thousands of hidden treasures.Producing the stunning pictures that Hubble is famous for isn't straightforward. Unlike your typical digital camera, which automatically sets things like contrast, exposures, colour balance and so on, Hubble is not optimised to produce aesthetically pleasing pictures. It's optimised for science. Turning these scientific images into amazing images of the cosmos is not easy, as all of these variables have to be tweaked by hand. That's called image processing -- and it is a mixture of science and aesthetics.In this episode, I'd like to show some of the most gorgeous pictures you entered into the Hidden Treasures image processing competition. The pictures you're about to see were all found and processed by members of the public.10th - IC 10 by Nikolaus Sulzenauer9th - Abell 68 by Nick Rose8th - NGC 1501 by kyokugaisha17th - PK 111-2.1 by Josh Barrington6th - SNR 0519-69 by Claude Cornen5th - M 96 by Robert Gendler4th - Chamaeleon I by Renaud Houdinet3rd - XZ Tauri by Judy Schmidt2nd - M 77 by Andre van der Hoeven1st - NGC 1763 by Josh LakeAs well as finding many beautiful observations that the public has never seen, you've really managed to impress us with your image processing skills. Congratulations: you have surprised us beyond our wildest imaginations!Credit/ESA/Hubblehttp://www.spacetelescope.org---Tags: hubble top 10 ten images photos cameras hidden treasures unveiled space telescope hubblecast.
Largest Sky Map Revealed: An Animated Flight Through the Universe Best0fScience 2012-08-13 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Largest Sky Map Revealed: An Animated Flight Through the Universe. The first public data release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Led by Berkeley Lab scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's BOSS is bigger than all other spectroscopic surveys combined for measuring the universe's large-scale structure.The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars, plus new information about objects in previous Sloan surveys (SDSS-I and II).---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins.There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth.SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant - and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.• http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/08/08/boss-sdss-dr9---Music: The Cinematic Orchestra - "Arrival of the Birds"---Tags: sky map flight universe boss spectroscopic survey structures stars galaxies nasa ultra deep field animation.
CURIOSITY HAS LANDED! First Images From Mars Best0fScience 2012-08-06 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA's most advanced Mars Science Rover "Curiosity" successfully touches down on Red Planet and sends back first pictures to Earth (shown in this video).---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain (Gale Crater) NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack."Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars. Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars - or if the planet can sustain life in the future," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030's, and today's landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal."Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. PDT Aug. 5, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life."The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph," said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. "My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission's team."Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover. More images are anticipated in the next several days as the mission blends observations of the landing site with activities to configure the rover for work and check the performance of its instruments and mechanisms."Our Curiosity is talking to us from the surface of Mars," said MSL Project Manager Peter Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "The landing takes us past the most hazardous moments for this project, and begins a new and exciting mission to pursue its scientific objectives."Confirmation of Curiosity's successful landing came in communications relayed by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and received by the Canberra, Australia, antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network.Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance. The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.• http://www.nasa.gov/mars• http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl• http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw---Tags: nasa mars rover curiosity landed landing touchdown first images pictures videos.
NASAs Mars Rover Curiosity: Historic Landing Best0fScience 2012-08-05 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA's Mars Mission: Weather on Mars looks great for huge rover landing tonight at Gale Crater on Mars: NASA's one-ton, nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity" will land on the red planet tonight.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---With Mars looming ever larger in front of it, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover are in the final stages of preparing for entry, descent and landing on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6, 5:31 a.m. UTC Aug. 6, 6:31 a.m. BST Aug. 6, 7:31 a.m. CEST Aug. 6).Curiosity remains in good health with all systems operating as expected. Today, the flight team uplinked and confirmed commands to make minor corrections to the spacecraft's navigation reference point parameters. This afternoon, as part of the onboard sequence of autonomous activities leading to the landing, catalyst bed heaters are being turned on to prepare the eight Mars Lander Engines that are part of MSL's descent propulsion system.As of 2:25 p.m. PDT (5:25 p.m. EDT), MSL was approximately 261,000 miles (420,039 kilometers) from Mars, closing in at a little more than 8,000 mph (about 3,600 meters per second).• http://www.nasa.gov---The gravitational tug of Mars is now pulling NASA's car-size geochemistry laboratory, Curiosity, in for a suspenseful landing in less than 12 hours."After flying more than eight months and 350 million miles since launch, the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is now right on target to fly through the eye of the needle that is our target at the top of the Mars atmosphere," said Mission Manager Arthur Amador of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.The spacecraft is healthy and on course for delivering the mission's Curiosity rover close to a Martian mountain at 10:31 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 5 PDT (1:31 a.m. Monday, Aug. 6 EDT). That's the time a signal confirming safe landing could reach Earth, give or take about a minute for the spacecraft's adjustments to sense changeable atmospheric conditions.The only way a safe-landing confirmation can arrive during that first opportunity is via a relay by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. Curiosity will not be communicating directly with Earth as it lands, because Earth will set beneath the Martian horizon from Curiosity's perspective about two minutes before the landing."We are expecting Odyssey to relay good news," said Steve Sell of the JPL engineering team that developed and tested the mission's complicated "sky crane" landing system. "That moment has been more than eight years in the making."A dust storm in southern Mars being monitored by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter appears to be dissipating. "Mars is cooperating by providing good weather for landing," said JPL's Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for Curiosity.Curiosity was approaching Mars at about 8,000 mph (about 3,600 meters per second) Saturday morning. By the time the spacecraft hits the top of Mars' atmosphere, about seven minutes before touchdown, gravity will accelerate it to about 13,200 mph (5,900 meters per second).NASA plans to use Curiosity to investigate whether the study area has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, including chemical ingredients for life."In the first few weeks after landing, we will be ramping up science activities gradually as we complete a series of checkouts and we gain practice at operating this complex robot in Martian conditions," said JPL's Richard Cook, deputy project manager for Curiosity.The first Mars pictures expected from Curiosity are reduced-resolution fisheye black-and-white images received either in the first few minutes after touchdown or more than two hours later. Higher resolution and color images from other cameras could come later in the first week. Plans call for Curiosity to deploy a directional antenna on the first day after landing and raise the camera mast on the second day.The big hurdle is landing. Under some possible scenarios, Curiosity could land safely, but temporary communication difficulties could delay for hours or even days any confirmation that the rover has survived landing.The prime mission lasts a full Martian year, which is nearly two Earth years. During that period, researchers plan to drive Curiosity partway up a mountain informally called Mount Sharp. Observations from orbit have identified exposures there of clay and sulfate minerals that formed in wet environments.• http://www.nasa.gov/mars---Tags: curiosity mars rover nasa science laboratory landing mission project spacecraft odyssey reconnaissance orbiter spirit frist pictures videos gale crater surface crash atmosphere red planet.
Is it the Higgs Boson? Best0fScience 2012-07-07 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... CERN/LHC Update: Is it the Higgs Boson? CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs bosonThe results presented on a press conference at CERN on 4 July 2012 are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data."We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage," said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, "but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.""The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found," said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. "The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.""It's hard not to get excited by these results," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. " We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data."The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.• http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR17.12E.html---CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel and Serbia are Associate Members in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.---Tags: "higgs boson" "higgs particle" higgs boson particle physics higgs-like cern lhc cms atlas experiments standard model physicists science scientists laboratory nuclear research lectures updates new videos video material interviews news journalists press conference server Rolf Dieter Heuer Joe Incandela Fabiola Gianotti Sergio Bertolucci "Peter Higgs".
What is the Higgs Boson? Has it been discovered yet? Best0fScience 2012-07-04 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... John Ellis, theoretical physicist: What is the Higgs Boson? Has it been discovered yet? CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---"It's hard not to get excited by these results," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. "We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data."The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic?The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure."We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."Positive identification of the new particle's characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.• http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR17.12E.html---Tags: higgs boson cern lhc atlas experiments found observed new fundamental particle physics standard model forces universe properties mysteries data july 2012.
Violent Stellar Flare Causes Dramatic Change on Faraway Planet Best0fScience 2012-06-29 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 56: Dramatic Change Spotted on a Faraway Planet. In this episode of the Hubblecast, Dr J (aka Dr Joe Liske) presents the latest discovery about HD 189733b, an exoplanet that has been repeatedly studied by Hubble.Observations taken in 2011 using Hubble and the Swift satellite showed a flare from the planet's parent star scorching the upper atmosphere and driving it off into space. This is the first time that clear change has been observed in an exoplanet's atmosphere. The observations give a tantalising glimpse of changing weather on planets outside our Solar System.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism---Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have seen dramatic changes in the atmosphere of a faraway planet. Just after a violent stellar flare bathed it in intense X-ray radiation, the scientists detected the planet's atmosphere furiously evaporating away. These violent events 63 light-years from Earth have given astronomers their first ever glimpse of the changing weather and climate on a planet outside our own Solar System.Planet HD 189733b has a blue sky, but that's where the similarities with Earth end. It's a huge gas giant similar to Jupiter, but it lies extremely close to its star, much closer than any planet in the Solar System lies to the Sun. This makes its climate exceptionally hot, with temperatures exceeding 1000ºC.A team of scientists used Hubble to observe the planet in 2010 and again in 2011, as it was silhouetted against its parent star. While backlit in this way, a planet's atmosphere imprints its signature on the starlight, allowing astronomers to decode what is happening on scales that would be far too tiny to image directly.The first set of observations actually ... didn't show much at all. The scientists had hoped to confirm what they had seen once before on another planet: the upper layers of the atmosphere gradually boiling off under the intense assault of the starlight. But Hubble's first observations of HD 189733b showed no trace of the atmosphere escaping.But if the first set of observations was pretty boring, the second set was anything but. Just before they began to observe with Hubble for the second time, the Swift satellite detected a huge flare coming from the surface of the star, giving off powerful radiation including atmosphere-frying X-rays. This was like a more violent version of the solar flares that disrupt communication satellites here on Earth.When the planet slid into view a few hours later, the changes were startling. Where they had seen a slumbering planet in 2010, they saw its atmosphere furiously boiling away in 2011. A plume of gas was evaporating off the planet, which was losing at least 1000 tonnes of gas from its atmosphere every second.The team believes that the spike in X-rays from the flare can probably explain the atmospheric evaporation spotted with Hubble. This type of radiation has enough energy to accelerate the particles in the atmosphere, which would drive them off the planet. There are other intriguing possibilities, though, which are all linked to the star's activity.For example it might be gradual seasonal variations in X-rays from the star, rather than the sudden effect of the flare, which drove the change between 2010 and 2011. This would be similar to the Sun's 11-year sunspot cycle.The team have fresh observations planned with Hubble and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope to help nail down exactly what triggered the atmosphere's evaporation. But regardless of the cause, this is the first time ever scientists have observed a clear change in an exoplanet's atmosphere.• http://www.spacetelescope.org---Keywords: exoplanets exoplanet extrasolar planets atmosphere HD 189733b dramatic change nasa esa hubble space telescope swift satellite observations sun star stellar flare surface space weather x-ray radiation solar system earth starlight astronomers scientists astrophysics astronomy videos.
Venus Transit 2012 - Ultra-high Definition View (NASA/ESA) Best0fScience 2012-06-06 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Ultra-high Definition View of the Venus Solar Transit 2012 (NASA SDO, ESA Proba-2).---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The first part of this video shows the transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 as seen from SWAP, a solar imager onboard ESA's PROBA2 microsatellite. SWAP, watching the Sun in EUV light, observes Venus as a small, black circle, obscuring the EUV light emitted from the solar outer atmosphere - the corona - from 19:45UT onwards. At 22:16UT - Venus started its transit of the solar diskThe bright dots all over the image ('snow storm') are energetic particles hitting the SWAP detector when PROBA2 crosses the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the protection of the Earth magnetic field against space radiation is known to be weaker.Note also the small flaring activity in the bright active region in the northern solar hemisphere as Venus passes over. Towards the end, you can see a big dim inverted-U-shape moving away from the Sun towards the bottom-right corner. This is a coronal mass ejection taking off.• http://blogs.esa.int/venustransit/ (Credit: ESA/ROB)---Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.• http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f0004_index.html (Credit: NASA/SDO)---Keywords: "Venus Transit" "Transit of Venus" 2012 NASA ESA Sun Solar Eclipse SDO Proba-2 Space Agency Astronomy Astrophysics Ultra High Definition View Full HD.
Viewing the Transit of Venus Best0fScience 2012-06-03 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science in Action: Viewing the Transit of Venus. Don't miss the June 5th Transit of Venus -- the next one won't occur until the year 2117! Here are some tips to view it safely.Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Science in Action strives to make science accessible for everyone and discuss its relevance in our everyday lives. We bring you science news through media screens and live chats on the museum floor, this Science Today website, podcasts, and monthly Nightlife programming. We gather and disseminate content through our partners, local programs, other media and Academy staff. And you.• http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday---A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun.The duration of such transits is usually measured in hours (the transit of 2004 lasted six hours). A transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon. While the diameter of Venus is almost four times that of the Moon, Venus appears smaller, and travels more slowly across the face of the Sun, because it is much farther away from Earth.Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities.The next transit of Venus will occur on 5 and 6 June 2012, and will be the last Venus transit this century; the prior transit took place on 8 June 2004. The previous pair of transits were in December 1874 and December 1882. After 2012, the next transits of Venus will be in December 2117 and December 2125.Venus transits are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observations of the 1639 transit, combined with the principle of parallax, provided an estimate of the distance between the Sun and the Earth that was more accurate than any other up to that time. In addition, the June 2012 transit will provide scientists with a number of other research opportunities, particularly the refinement of techniques to be used in the search for exoplanets.A transit of Venus can be safely observed by taking the same precautions used to observe the partial phases of a solar eclipse. Staring at the Sun without appropriate eye protection can quickly cause serious and often permanent eye damage.• http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus---Keywords: Venus Transit 2012 2117 Viewing Sun Earth Moon Eclipse Morning Evening Star Astronomy Astronomers Astronomical Phenomena Science Action California Academy of Sciences Calacademy
The Death of Stars Best0fScience 2012-05-31 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast Episode 52: The Death of Stars. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for looking deep into the past of the Universe. But it can also predict the future. Pictures made by Hubble over the years show us the fate of the Solar System: a troubling but beautiful preview of what will happen when the Sun runs out of fuel more than five billion years from now.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old — that's less than half way through its expected lifespan. By observing countless stars similar to the Sun, scientists now have a good idea of what will happen to the Solar System in the very distant future.Stars are balls of matter that produce energy mainly by fusing atomic nuclei of hydrogen, forming helium. When two nuclei fuse together, their combined mass is slightly less than the sum of the two original nuclei, and the difference is released as energy.That's where sunlight comes from ... and it's also the process that powers thermonuclear bombs. But while thermonuclear bombs use up their fuel in just a fraction of a second, stars are big enough to sustain nuclear fusion for millions or indeed billions of years before they too eventually run out of fuel.What happens next depends on the size of the star. Really big stars explode as supernovae after only a few million years while the smallest stars burn slowly enough to be virtually immortal: their expected lifespan is much longer than the present age of the Universe, meaning we've never seen one die.But for stars like the Sun, which have a lifespan measured in billions of years, astronomers have made many observations of what happens when the fuel supply runs out. They end with a whimper, not a bang. Here's how it goes — as revealed by Hubble observations of dozens of stars at different stages of evolution.First, the star swells up and cools down a little, becoming a so-called red giant. When the Sun does this, it will destroy the inner planets of the Solar System.Next, the outer layers are puffed out, forming a dense cloud of gas and dust that totally obscures the visible light from the star. This stage, called a pre-planetary, or protoplanetary nebula, is tough to observe as it's so faint — only dim infrared emissions from the dust cloud and reflected starlight let astronomers see anything at all. It's also a short period in stellar evolution, just a few thousand years long, so these objects are quite scarce.Hubble's images of pre-planetary nebulae show a wide variety of shapes, hinting at complex dynamics going on inside. The spiral structure of this nebula is particularly unusual, and is likely due to a binary star system shaping the cloud of gas and dust.As the star ejects its outer layers to form the cold pre-planetary nebula, the core of the star is left behind, leaving a small but very hot remnant. Over a period of a few thousand years, radiation from this hot leftover excites the gas in the pre-planetary nebula, eventually making it light up like a fluorescent sign.At this point, the faint pre-planetary nebula becomes a bright planetary nebula. In fact, these are bright enough that astronomers have long been able to see them, which explains their confusing name. Because they appear roughly spherical and have a greenish tinge when observed visually, astronomers using early telescopes found their appearance reminiscent of the planets of the Solar System.High resolution observations from modern telescopes including Hubble show that their shapes are often far from spherical, and the planet-like appearance is pretty dubious — but the name has stuck.Eventually, planetary nebulae fade to nothing as the gas and dust is diffused into space. All that remains is a tiny, dense and dim white dwarf — the ultimate destination of the Sun, billions of years from now. But for stars there is life after death. The matter puffed into space by planetary nebulae forms the building blocks for new generations of stars and planets.But for stars there is life after death. The matter puffed into space by planetary nebulae forms the building blocks for new generations of stars and planets.---Keywords: NASA ESA Hubble Space Telescope Future Past Universe Solar System Planets Earth Sun Stars nuclear fusion matter energy atomic nuclei hydrogen helium sunlight supernova red giants gas cloud planetary nebula science scientists astronomers astronomy
Hubble Space Telescope - The Best Images From Over Two Decades In Orbit Best0fScience 2012-05-14 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 54: 22 Years In Images. To celebrate the 22nd anniversary of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, this episode of the Hubblecast gives a slideshow of some of the best images from over two decades in orbit.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker• http://www.youtube.com/WissensMagazin---1990 Saturn: Among the first images to be sent back from Hubble after its launch in April 1990, this image of Saturn is good by the standards of ground-based telescopes, but slightly blurry.1991 Orion Nebula: Although not perfectly sharp, this early image of the Orion Nebula nevertheless shows the rich colours and structures of this bright star-forming region.1992 Herbig-Haro 2: Throughout the region of the Orion Nebula are numerous streamers of gas that come from newborn stars, known to astronomers as Herbig-Haro Objects. 1993 Messier 100: In late 1993, Hubble's teething problems were resolved in the first servicing mission. Before-and-after images of the core of spiral galaxy Messier 100 show how this dramatically improved the telescope's image quality.1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 hits Jupiter: Soon after the astronauts repaired Hubble during the first servicing mission, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. A similar impact on Earth 65 million years ago is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs.1995 Eagle Nebula: Hubble's image of the 'pillars of creation' in the Eagle Nebula is one of its most famous. These huge, dusty structures enshroud pockets of ongoing star formation.1996 NGC 6826: This image from 1996 shows a planetary nebula, which represents the other extremity of a star's life from the Eagle Nebula. Planetary nebulae form when Sun-like stars puff out their outer layers as they run low on fuel.1997 Mars: NASA's Mars Pathfinder probe was en route to Mars in 1997 while Hubble took this image.1998 Ring Nebula: Another planetary nebula, the Ring Nebula is one of the most famous.1999 Keyhole Nebula: The Keyhole Nebula, part of the larger Carina Nebula is another bright star-forming region.2000 NGC 1999: Not all nebulae glow brightly. NGC 1999 contains a dark patch silhouetted against a brighter background which reflects starlight.2001 ESO 510-G13: Hubble's image of this galaxy shows the dramatic deformations that can occur after collisions between galaxies. Although the immense distance between stars makes it vanishingly unlikely for stars to actually collide with each other, the tidal forces can warp and tear galaxies out of shape.2002 Cone Nebula: Further upgrades in 2002, including the installation of the Advanced Camera for Surveys increased resolution and picture quality again. Hubble's ultra-sharp image of the Cone Nebula demonstrates the new instrument's capabilities.2003 Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Usually astronomers know what they're going to look at when they plan their observations. For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, observed over 11 days between September 2003 and January 2004, they did not. Pointing the telescope at an extremely dark patch of sky devoid of nearby stars, this extremely long exposure was designed to see the most distant and faintest galaxies in the Universe.2004 Antennae Galaxies: The dramatic collision of two spiral galaxies is visible in this image of the Antennae Galaxies.2005 The Orion Nebula: This image of the Orion Nebula is one of the largest and most detailed ever made.2006 Messier 9: Globular clusters, roughly spherical collections of stars, contain some of the oldest stars in our Milky Way. Hubble's high resolution observations allow astronomers to discern individual stars right into the centre of these clusters.2007 NGC 4874: This image of NGC 4874, a galaxy in the Coma Cluster, was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys just two days before it suffered an electronic failure in January 2007. For the next two years, astronomers would have to make do with lower resolution images from Hubble's other cameras.2008 NGC 2818: This image of planetary nebula NGC 2818 dates from this period. It is worth noting that even with its capabilities constrained, Hubble was still able to produce images that compete with any telescope on the ground.2009 Bug Nebula: In 2009, astronauts travelled to Hubble for another servicing mission, which installed new and upgraded cameras. The Bug Nebula was one of the first images sent back: Hubble was back in business.2010 Centaurus A: Using its new instrumentation, Hubble peered into the heart of Centaurus A, a dramatically dusty galaxy.2011 Tarantula Nebula: This image of the Tarantula Nebula combines a mosaic of Hubble observations, which capture the detail and structure of the nebula, with observations of glowing hydrogen and oxygen from the European Southern Observatory's MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile, which provide colour.
VST - The New VLT Survey Telescope Best0fScience 2011-06-08 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 30: First Images from the VLT Survey Telescope - VST and OmegaCAM start work.This ESOcast introduces the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory. This new telescope has just made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky.The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart. It is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality.It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO's VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the Omega Nebula and the globular cluster Omega Centauri demonstrate the VST's power.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---A new telescope for mapping the skies is about to start work at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The VLT Survey Telescope, or VST, with the 268 megapixel OmegaCAM camera at its heart, is the latest addition to the observatory. It is the largest telescope in the world designed to survey the sky in visible light.The special thing about the VST is that it has a very wide field of view — about twice as broad as the full Moon. It's dedicated to mapping the skies both very quickly and with very high image quality. The VST is housed in an enclosure right next to the VLT Unit Telescopes on the summit of Cerro Paranal under the pristine skies of one of the best observing sites on the planet.Over the next few years the VST and its huge camera OmegaCAM will be busy making some very detailed maps of the southern skies and in this episode you'll get to see the very first released images from this brand new telescope.The VST is a visible light telescope that perfectly complements the VISTA infrared survey telescope. The unique combination of the VST and VISTA will allow many interesting objects to be identified that can then be studied in detail with the powerful telescopes of the VLT.The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre telescope equipped with an active optics system that keeps the two mirrors of the telescope perfectly aligned at all times in order to ensure the highest possible image quality. Now, at its core, behind huge lenses, lies the OmegaCAM camera which was built around no less than 32 CCD detectors which, together, create a whopping 268 megapixel image.The camera also contains some extra CCDs that help with the telescope guiding and the active optics system, as well as some absolutely enormous colour filters. Both the telescope and the camera were designed to take full advantage of the excellent observing conditions on Paranal.The VST will make three public surveys over the next five years. One survey, called KIDS, will image several regions of the sky away from the Milky Way. It will help astronomers understand more about dark matter, dark energy and galaxy evolution, and find many new galaxy clusters and high-redshift quasars. The VST ATLAS survey will cover a larger area of sky and will focus on determining the properties of dark energy. Like KIDS, it will also hunt for far-away galaxies and quasars.The third survey, VPHAS+, will image the central plane of the Milky Way to map the structure of the Galactic disc and its star-formation history. It will yield a catalogue of around 500 million objects and will discover many new examples of unusual stars at all stages of their evolution.The VST has just made its first release of images:The spectacular Omega Nebula, also known as Swan Nebula, is a region of gas, dust and hot young stars that lies in the heart of the Milky Way. The VST field of view is so large that the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts, is captured — and retains its superb sharpness cross the entire field.Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the sky. But the VST, with its very wide field of view, has no problem in capturing the whole object in a single image, including its very faint outer regions. This image contains about 300 000 stars and it highlights the impressive sharpness of the VST's images.The combination of large field of view, excellent image quality, and the very efficient operations scheme of the VST will produce an enormous wealth of information that will advance a number of different fields of astrophysics. Many astronomers — including myself, actually — are really looking forward to the first results from the VST surveys.Credit: ESO.
The North American Nebula Best0fScience 2011-05-29 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hidden Universe 35: The North American Nebula (Gallery Explorer)---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Seen here in visible light, the North American Nebula strangely resembles its namesake continent. Expanding our view to include infrared light, the dark dust lanes and concealed stars glow in red colors while the continental gas clouds shift to an ocean-like blue. Pushing entirely into the infrared spectrum, we see even more detail in the convoluted dust clouds.The ultraviolet glow from massive young stars heats the gas and sculpts the dust clouds into fantastic shapes throughout this composite of visible and infrared light. The hot gas, rendered in blue, fills the spaces between the denser dusty regions that appear red.This dramatic cluster of baby stars can only be found in infrared images. The stars are forming within dense dust filaments in the "Gulf of Mexico" region. The dusty cocoons around these protostars glow red in this expanded infrared view.A similar, though smaller, filament of baby stars can be found nearby, in an area known as the Pelican Nebula. Picking out the red protostars is easy in the full infrared view.Combining infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope with light from other parts of the spectrum gives astronomers a more complete picture of star formation. Each different combination of observations provides more insight into how one generation of stars can give rise to the next.Credits: The Spitzer Space Telescope is a NASA mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "HIdden Universe" is the result of a collaborative effort by the Education and Public Outreach team at the Spitzer Science Center (SSC), California Institute of Technology..
Hubble Spies On The Tarantula Nebula Best0fScience 2011-05-27 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 44: Hubble spies on the Tarantula NebulaThe Hubblecast's Joe Liske (Dr J) takes us on a tour of the Tarantula Nebula. Bright star forming gas clouds, super star clusters and supernova remnants are just some of the sights in this dramatic region of the night sky.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is a small companion galaxy of our own Milky Way. It can be seen with the naked eye, as a faint grey blotch in the constellation of Dorado.It's a favourite hunting ground for astronomers and it has been studied by many telescopes. Its most dramatic feature is the Tarantula Nebula, a bright region of glowing gas and energetic star formation. Hubble has produced a close-up view of this nebula, which reveals this dynamic region of our Universe in unprecedented detail.This part of the Tarantula Nebula is one of its most dynamic, showing the area around the supernova remnant NGC 2060. These wispy tendrils of dust and gas are the only visible remnant of a star which has exploded. After puffing out these smoky remains, the core of the star that formed NGC 2060 collapsed into a pulsar, which is a type of neutron star.The Tarantula nebula glows brightly because the atoms in its hydrogen gas are excited by the bright, newborn stars that have recently formed here.These toddler-stars shine forth with intense ultraviolet radiation that ionises the gas, making it light up red and green. The light is so intense that although around 170 000 light-years distant, and outside the Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula is nevertheless visible without a telescope on a dark night to Earth-bound observers.But the biggest and brightest stars in the Tarantula are actually just outside Hubble's field of view. This wider, but less detailed view of the Tarantula Nebula was taken with the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope, at La Silla Observatory in Chile. It shows the source of much of the Tarantula's light: the super star cluster RMC 136.So it wasn't in fact that long ago that astronomers were still debating whether this intense light came from a compact star cluster, or perhaps an unknown kind of super-star. It's only been in the past 20 years that we have been able to prove that it is indeed a star cluster — albeit one that hosts some of the most massive stars that have ever been observed.The Tarantula Nebula also hosts the supernova 1987a. Now, of all the supernovae that have been observed since the invention of the telescope, this one is by far the closest to us.Pulling further back, the size of the Tarantula Nebula relative to its host galaxy becomes clear. It is the brightest known star forming region in the local Universe and one of the most attractive spots in the night sky.Credit: ESA/Hubble.
CERN: The LHC MoEDAL Experiment Best0fScience 2011-03-12 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... CERN: The MoEDAL ExperimentThe Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC (MoEDAL) was the seventh detector to be approved by the LHC Management board. It will share the cavern at Point 8 with LHCb and will search for the massive stable (or pseudo-stable) particles, such as magnetic monopoles or dyons, produced at the LHC.---Please subscribe to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---AIMS OF THE MoEDAL EXPERIMENTIn 2010 the LHC opened up a new energy regime in which we can search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. The search strategy for exotics planned for the main LHC detectors can be extended with dedicated experiments designed to enhance, in a complementary way, the physics reach of the LHC.The MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC) project is such an experiment. The prime motivation of MoEDAL is to directly search for the Magnetic Monopole or Dyon and other highly ionizing Stable (or pseudo-stable) Massive Particles (SMPs) at the LHC.MoEDAL Nuclear Track Detectors (NTDs) will be able to record the tracks of highly ionizing particles with magnetic/electric charges greater than 3gD (≡ 206e), the detection of even one magnetic monopole or dyon that fully penetrated a MoEDAL NTD stack is expected to be distinctive.Another important area of physics beyond the Standard Model that can be addressed by MoEDAL is the existence of SMPs with single electrical charge which provide a second category of particle that is heavily ionizing by virtue of its small speed. The most obvious possibility for an SMP is that one or more new states exist which carry a new conserved, or almost conserved, global quantum number.For example, SUSY with R-parity, extra dimensions with KK-parity, and several other models fall into this category. The lightest of the new states will be stable, due to the conservation of this new parity, and depending on quantum numbers, mass spectra, and interaction strengths, one or more higher-lying states may also be stable or meta-stable.The third class of SMP which could be accessed by MoEDAL has multiple electric charge such as the black hole remnant, or long-lived doubly charged Higgs bosons. SMPs with magnetic charge, single or multiple electric charge and with Z/β (β=v/c) as low as five can, in principle, be detected by the CR39 nuclear track detectors, putting them within the physics reach of MoEDAL.THE MoEDAL DETECTORThe MoEDAL detector is comprised of an array of plastic Nuclear Track Detectors (NTDs) deployed around the (Point-8) intersection region of the LHCb detector, in the VELO (VErtex LOcator) cavern. The array consists of NTD stacks, ten layers deep, in Aluminium housings attached to the walls and ceiling of the VELO cavern.The maximum possible surface area available for detectors is around 25 m2, although the final deployed area could be somewhat less due to the developing requirements of the infrastructure of the LHCb detector. A more detailed description of the MoEDAL detectors and the track-etch detector technology, can be found in the MoEDAL TDRWhen a charged particle crosses a plastic nuclear track detector it produces damages at the level of polymeric bounds in a small cylindrical region around its trajectory forming he so-called latent track. The damage produced is dependent on the energy released inside the cylindrical region i.e. the Restricted Energy Loss (REL) which is a function of the charge Z and β=v/c (c the velocity of light in vacuum) of the incident highly ionizing particle (ion).The subsequent etching of the solid nuclear detectors leads to the formation of etch-pit cones. These conical pits are usually of micrometer dimensions and can be observed with an optical microscope. Their size and shape yield information about charge, energy and direction of motion of the incident ion.• http://web.me.com/jamespinfold/MoEDAL_site/Welcome.html---Produced by: CERN Video ProductionsDirector: CERN Video Productions© CERN 2010
Hubble And Black Holes Best0fScience 2011-02-28 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 43: Hubble and Black Holes.For centuries, scientists imagined objects so heavy and dense that their gravity might be strong enough to pull anything in - including light. They would be, quite literally, a black hole in space. But it's only in the past few decades that astronomers have conclusively proved their existence.Today, Hubble lets scientists measure the effects of black holes, make images of their surroundings and glean fascinating insights into the evolution of our cosmos.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---In science fiction, black holes are often portrayed as some kind of menacing threat to the safety of the whole Universe, like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up all of existence.Now, in this episode, we're going to separate the fiction from the facts and we're going to look at the real science behind black holes and how Hubble has contributed to it.Black holes come in different sizes. We've had solid evidence for the smaller ones since the 1970s. These form when a huge star explodes at the end of its life.As the outer layers are blown away, the star's core collapses in on itself forming an incredibly dense ball. For instance, a black hole with the same mass as the Sun would have a radius of only a few kilometres.These black holes won't suck you in unless you get very close to them though. In fact, contrary to popular belief, a black hole the size of the Sun doesn't actually exert any more gravitational pull than the Sun does. But these stellar black holes are just part of the story.Before Hubble was launched, astronomers had noticed that the centres of many galaxies were somehow much denser and brighter than they were expected to be. And so they speculated that there must be some kind of huge, massive objects lurking in the centres of these galaxies in order to provide the additional gravitational attraction.Now, could these objects be supermassive black holes, that is, black holes which are millions or even billions of times more massive than the stellar ones? Or was there perhaps a simpler, less exotic explanation, like giant star clusters?Frustratingly, at that time, telescopes just weren't quite powerful enough to see enough detail to solve the mystery. Fortunately, Hubble was on its way, along with a range of other high-tech telescopes. When the space telescope was being planned, the search for supermassive black holes was in fact one of its main objectives.Some of Hubble's early observations in the 1990s were dedicated to these dense, bright galactic centres. Where ground-based telescopes were just seeing a sea of stars, Hubble was able to resolve the details. In fact, around the very centres of these galaxies, Hubble discovered rotating discs of gas and dust.When Hubble observed the disc at the centre of a nearby galaxy, Messier 87, the astronomers saw that its colour was not quite the same on both sides. One side was shifted towards blue and the other towards red, and this told thescientists that it must have been rotating very quickly. This is because the wavelength of light is changed by the motion of an object emitting it. Think about how the pitch of an ambulance siren drops as it drives past you, because the sound waves are more spaced out as the vehicle moves away.Similarly, if an object is moving towards you, the light's wavelength is squashed, making it bluer; if it's moving away, it's stretched, making it redder. This is also known as the Doppler effect. So, by measuring how much the colours had shifted on either side of the disk, astronomers were able to determine its speed of rotation. And it turned out that this disk was spinning at a rate of hundreds of kilometres per second.This in turn allowed astronomers to deduce that, hidden at the very centre, there must be some kind of object which was two to three billion times the mass of our Sun — and this was very likely a supermassive black hole. Now, along with a lot of other observations, this was a key piece of evidence that led to the notion that there is a supermassive black hole lurking at the centre of most, if not all, giant galaxies, including our own Milky Way.So far, so good. But this work was almost 20 years ago — what does it tell us about cutting-edge science today? Well, the science of black holes has moved along a lot since then. The mystery now isn't whether they exist, but why they behave in the strange ways they do.For example, Hubble observations have helped to show that the mass of a black hole is closely related to the mass of its surrounding host galaxy. The bigger the black hole, the bigger the galaxy. Now the reason for this is totally unclear..
Life And Leisure At Paranal Observatory Best0fScience 2011-02-01 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 26: Life and Leisure at Paranal.The Sun sets at ESO's Paranal Observatory. Technicians and engineers have worked hard all day to prepare the European flagship facility, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), for astronomers to use. At night, scientists address some of the most important mysteries in the Universe with this superb science machine, observing the heavens in exquisite detail.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Paranal is dedicated to astronomical observation, but no one can work all the time, especially in these harsh conditions. Everyone at the observatory has leisure time, and enthusiastically pursues their hobbies during their free time.Paranal is a special place to work at. First of all, it is located in the very remote and arid Atacama Desert in Chile, and it takes hours to drive to the nearest city. Secondly, the work that needs to be performed there isn't exactly easy and the professional skills of the staff are constantly challenged by the incredible technical diversity of the Very Large Telescope (VLT).So this combination makes leisure activities an essential part of life for the staff, because it helps them to relax and to recover from their often highly stressful work.In this episode, we're going to follow three Paranal staff members: Fernando Salgado, Stéphane Guisard and Margaret Moerchen, to learn about both their jobs and their hobbies on Paranal.Fernando Salgado is an electronic engineer at Paranal. Together with his colleagues, Fernando tests and repairs the numerous electronic components of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to keep them in working order. This is often far from easy, and mastering the instrument's sheer complexity is a real challenge. During his free time, Fernando's great passion is playing the drums. And at Paranal, he plays as often as he can in the entertainment room of the Residencia to keep his skills up.He also frequently has jam sessions with colleagues and astronomers from all over the world in the entertainment room, expanding and improving his own musical experience. Amateur musicians frequently give spontaneous performances in the entertainment room, enriching the cultural life of everyone at the observatory.Stéphane Guisard is an optical engineer and leads the Paranal optics group, making sure that the Very Large Telescope has the best possible optical quality. This involves a lot of different tasks, including working on one of the VLT's huge main mirrors during a recoating operation. Stéphane's biggest hobby is astrophotography, and some of his images have been used in previous ESOcasts. But Stéphane is also a top-level water polo player.As his club is in far away Santiago, the pool of the Paranal Residencia helps him stay fit and keeps his feel for water at a competitive level. The pool of the Residencia is popular with many people, but Stéphane is certainly amongst the most frequent users.But the Paranal Residencia isn't the only place that offers a chance to relax. Next door to it, ESO has built a gym that offers a wide range of activities. Here, lots of people get together to form sports teams, and the gym hall definitely contributes a lot to the social climate at the observatory.Kick-off for a soccer game at the gymnasium. At about 2400 m above sea level, there's less oxygen in the air, making being in shape even more important for players. People who live and exercise regularly at the altitude don't have any trouble, however.In another room, several people practice yoga together, following the instructions of an experienced trainer.Others get in shape by using one of the many exercise machines of the sports hall. Again, the altitude and aridity of the site make exercise more difficult, but the machines still see a lot of use.The conditions at Paranal make it one of the best places in the world for astronomical observations.There are rarely any clouds and the climate is extremely dry in the Atacama Desert. Located at 2600 metres, the VLT can observe for over 320 nights per year. But it's exactly these harsh conditions that make Paranal a true challenge for the sports enthusiasts, especially outside, under the blazing desert sun. But there are people that are willing to face the challenge.There are many ways for people at Paranal to enjoy themselves during their free time, and to relax from their unique but demanding professional obligations. And after they've played, they are ready to continue the world-class work that astronomers have come to expect from Paranal..
Hubbles Greatest Hits Best0fScience 2011-01-27 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 42: Hubble's Greatest Hits.What makes a scientific discovery really important? It's partly down to how much scientists use the discovery in subsequent work — but it's also partly down to what inspires their imagination. In this episode, the Hubblecast talks to some leading astronomers about their favourite Hubble discovery.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---How do we know if a scientific discovery is really important, or somehow special?Well, when astronomers obtain a result, they usually write it up in an article for a scientific journal. And one way to know whether the result is important or not is to look at how often other astronomers refer to this article in their work.That's the simple answer anyway. But there's a human component too. Some results simply capture our imagination more than others, and that too is an important part of what makes a truly great discovery.In this episode, we're going to be talking to some leading astronomers who use the Hubble Space Telescope, and we're going to ask them about their favourite Hubble moments.Joe Liske: "There's so many discoveries that Hubble has made. Some that we knew we would make such as measuring the speed of the expansion of the Universe, verifying the existence of black holes, and then there's some that were completely unexpected. In fact, my favourite I think is one that when Hubble was launched, we didn't know about any extrasolar planets. So my favourite Hubble discovery if you will, is the measurement of the atmosphere of a planet around a nearby star, that was made by the STIS instrument. I think it really boggles the mind, or stimulates the imagination to think that here on Earth with a telescope in orbit, we can actually spy on other planets in other solar systems."Bob O'Dell: "My favourite Hubble discovery is of course one of my own! It was a surprise that should not have been a surprise. When we first looked at the Orion nebula, this region of nearby star formation, we found that we could actually see protoplanetary discs around many of the stars. Now, we should have expected to see this, we should have been looking for it, but we were looking for something else and found that. It was a wonderful feeling, to discover the protoplanetary disc. It was the closest thing to a 'heureka' moment that I have ever had in science. You look at the image and then suddenly everything comes together. You know exactly what you've seen. And you're seeing something that no-one else had ever seen before. It was wonderful."Laura Ferrarese: "I've done a lot of research with Hubble and in fact almost all my work has been done with or based on Hubble images. But perhaps my very favourite was this one galaxy that we observed very very early on. NGC 4261.And what we saw when we looked at this galaxy was that there is a very small disc of gas and dust at the centre and we could use the velocity of the gas in the disc to measure the mass of the central supermassive black hole. And that was one of the very first conclusive evidence for the presence of a black hole in a galaxy."Sandy Faber: "I think that my favourite Hubble discovery is based on aesthetics. And it's the imaging of these giant clusters of galaxies that show these beautiful gravitational lenses. The red cluster galaxies and the blue background galaxies. General relativity in action there, bending light and making images that are just stunning. I wish I had done that!"Monica Tosi: "I tend to favour the wonderful images that have allowed to obtain very tight and deep colour-magnitude diagrams, see how stars form and evolve in nearby galaxies."Joe Liske: "So clearly Hubble has made a lot of fantastic observations of the Universe during its lifetime. And I for one find it hard to pick what my favourite Hubble moment is. So one of my favourite Hubble achievements were the images Hubble took of planet Fomalhaut b. These were the first images of an extrasolar planet that were taken in optical light. And by using multiple observations, Hubble actually allowed us to watch this planet move on its orbit around its parent star. So another great Hubble moment were the images that it took of the so-called Bullet Cluster. These are actually two colliding clusters of galaxies that demonstrate beautifully the existence of dark matter. And then of course the Hubble Space Telescope measured the so-called Hubble constant, which is the expansion speed of the Universe. Hubble did this more precisely than was ever done before -- and of course this was one of the main reasons for building Hubble in the first place."• http://www.spacetelescope.org.
Swift Survey Finds Missing Active Galaxies Best0fScience 2011-01-21 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA's Swift Finds 'Missing' Active Galaxies.Most large galaxies contain a giant central black hole. In an active galaxy, matter falling toward the supermassive black hole powers high-energy emissions so intense that two classes of active galaxies, quasars and blazars, rank as the most luminous objects in the universe. Thick clouds of dust and gas near the central black hole screens out ultraviolet, optical and low-energy (or soft) X-ray light.Although there are many different types of active galaxy, astronomers explain the different observed properties based on how the galaxy angles into our line of sight. We view the brightest ones nearly face on, but as the angle increases, the surrounding ring of gas and dust absorbs increasing amounts of the black hole's emissions. ---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Most big galaxies contain big black holes. Not just big, supersized, with millions of times the sun's mass. Some of these black holes are actively devouring gas. This drives particle jets that can spew matter millions of light-years into space, and it also makes the holes a source of penetrating, or hard, X-rays. At these energies, the sky glows in every direction, even far away from bright sources.Astronomers have long suspected that active supermassive black holes in galaxies were responsible, but they just couldn't find enough of them to account for the X-ray glow — especially the peak of the energy spectrum. Now, astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite confirm that a largely unseen population of black-hole-powered galaxies is out there.There are so many that scientists say they might fully account for the cosmic X-ray background. What emission we detect from an active black hole is a function of how we see it — whether we're looking face-on and into one of it's jets, or viewing it from the side, through the disk of gas and dust that surrounds it.The brightest active black holes, which include quasars and blazars, are those we see face-on. But as the viewing angle increases, the surrounding disk absorbs increasing amounts of radiation. Astronomers have always assumed that many active galaxies were oriented edgewise to us, but because the disk of gas smothers most of their X-rays, these sideways black holes just weren't detected.And that's where Swift comes in. Since 2004, the satellites Burst Alert Telescope has been building up the largest, most sensitive X-ray map of the sky. Using these data, astronomers found that the most heavily absorbed galaxies create the energy peak in the cosmic X-ray background.What does it all mean? When the universe was about half its present age, about 7 billion years ago, galaxies crashed together more frequently and these collisions produced gas rich galaxies with heavily obscured black holes.The Swift survey shows that galaxy mergers helped activate these black holes by feeding them torrents of fresh gas. The new findings are consistent with idea that the X-ray background peaked around this time, when our own galaxy was young and before our solar system was born..
CERN Milestone: First Heavy Ions In The LHC Best0fScience 2011-01-19 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... CERN News: First heavy ions in the LHC.The LHC runs led ions for the first time, reaching unprecedented collision energy. Interviews with Jürgen Schukraft (ALICE spokesperson), Bolek Wyslouch (CMS run coordinator), Peter Steinberg (ATLAS Brookhaven National Laboratory), William Brooks (ATLAS Brookhaven National Laboratory).---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---First heavy-ion collisions in CMSThe CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has recorded its first Lead-Lead collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair, marking the start of its heavy ion research programme. Physicists around the world expect a wealth of new results and phenomena from these collisions, which occur at energies 14 times higher than previously achieved by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, Brookhaven, USA).At 11:20:56, on 8th November the LHC Control Centre declared stable colliding beams of heavy ions. CMS immediately detected the first collisions, each producing thousands of particles whose trajectories are reconstructed in the CMS silicon detectors and whose energies are measured in the calorimeters. Moments later, the data were analysed and the first images of these events were produced.• http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/News/2010/Lead-Collisions/index.html---CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco--Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.CERN's mission:• Research: Seeking and finding answers to questions about the Universe• Technology: Advancing the frontiers of technology• Collaborating: Bringing nations together through science• Education: Training the scientists of tomorrow.
The Art of Exoplanets Best0fScience 2010-12-24 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA/JPL-Caltech: Gallery Explorer - The Art of Exoplanets (Hidden Universe 34)While astronomers have identified over 500 planets around other stars, they're all too small and distant to fill even a single pixel in our most powerful telescopes. That's why science must rely on art to help us imagine these strange new worlds.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Even without pictures of these exoplanets, astronomers have learned many things that can be illustrated in artwork. For instance, measurements of the temperatures of many "Hot Jupiters," massive worlds orbiting very close to their stars, hint that their atmospheres may be as dark as soot, glowing only from their own heat.While "Hot Jupiters" would be relatively dark in visible light, compared to their stars, their brightness is proportionally much greater in the infrared. Illustrating this dramatic contrast change helps explain why the infrared eye of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope plays a key role in studying exoplanets.As our understanding evolves, so must the artwork. Astronomers found a blazing hot spot on the exoplanet Upsilon Andromedae b that at first, appeared to face towards its star. More data has revealed that the hottest area is actually strangely rotated almost 90 degrees away, near the day/night terminator.WASP 12b is as hot as the filament in a light bulb, and would be blazing bright to our eyes. Most interestingly, if it proves to have a strongly elliptical orbit, as first thought, calculations show it would be shedding some of its outer atmosphere into a gassy disk around its star.Computer simulations of HD 80606 b, constrained by global infrared measurements, are helping astronomers to better understand the details of how its atmosphere circulates. These computations can feed back into the artwork helping us produce more plausible illustrations.The closest known exoplanet is 10 light years away in the Epsilon Eridani system. Excess infrared light found here by Spitzer has led astronomers to conclude it also has two asteroid belts, hinting at the possibility of other small, rocky worlds.Perhaps the strangest known planetary system orbits the pulsar PSR B1257+12, the neutron star remnant of a supernova. Astronomers have detected three planets that either survived the explosion, or formed afterwards in this region filled with spinning magnetic fields and hostile radiation.Until the day we can explore other star systems as thoroughly as our own, exoplanet art inspired by the real science will help fill in the gaps in our imagination.• http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/.
Chasing Gamma-Ray Bursts At Top Speed Best0fScience 2010-12-17 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 25: Chasing Gamma-Ray Bursts at Top Speed - The VLT's Rapid Response Mode.This video podcast explains the ESO Very Large Telescope's Rapid Response Mode, which makes it possible to observe gamma-ray bursts only a few minutes after they are first spotted. As the optical afterglow of a gamma-ray burst fades extremely rapidly, observations must start as quickly as possible. And the Very Large Telescope has the capability to master this time critical issue better than any other telescope.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Light Dawns on Dark Gamma-ray BurstsGamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic events in the Universe, but some appear curiously faint in visible light. The biggest study to date of these so-called dark gamma-ray bursts, using the GROND instrument on the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla in Chile, has found that these gigantic explosions don't require exotic explanations. Their faintness is now fully explained by a combination of causes, the most important of which is the presence of dust between the Earth and the explosion.Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), fleeting events that last from less than a second to several minutes, are detected by orbiting observatories that can pick up their high energy radiation. Thirteen years ago, however, astronomers discovered a longer-lasting stream of less energetic radiation coming from these violent outbursts, which can last for weeks or even years after the initial explosion. Astronomers call this the burst's afterglow.While all gamma-ray bursts have afterglows that give off X-rays, only about half of them were found to give off visible light, with the rest remaining mysteriously dark. Some astronomers suspected that these dark afterglows could be examples of a whole new class of gamma-ray bursts, while others thought that they might all be at very great distances. Previous studies had suggested that obscuring dust between the burst and us might also explain why they were so dim."Studying afterglows is vital to further our understanding of the objects that become gamma-ray bursts and what they tell us about star formation in the early Universe," says the study's lead author Jochen Greiner from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich, Germany.NASA launched the Swift satellite at the end of 2004. From its orbit above the Earth's atmosphere it can detect gamma-ray bursts and immediately relay their positions to other observatories so that the afterglows could be studied. In the new study, astronomers combined Swift data with new observations made using GROND — a dedicated gamma-ray burst follow-up observation instrument, which is attached to the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla in Chile. In doing so, astronomers have conclusively solved the puzzle of the missing optical afterglow.What makes GROND exciting for the study of afterglows is its very fast response time — it can observe a burst within minutes of an alert coming from Swift using a special system called the Rapid Response Mode — and its ability to observe simultaneously through seven filters covering both the visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.By combining GROND data taken through these seven filters with Swift observations, astronomers were able to accurately determine the amount of light emitted by the afterglow at widely differing wavelengths, all the way from high energy X-rays to the near-infrared. The astronomers used this information to directly measure the amount of obscuring dust that the light passed through en route to Earth. Previously, astronomers had to rely on rough estimates of the dust content.The team used a range of data, including their own measurements from GROND, in addition to observations made by other large telescopes including the ESO Very Large Telescope, to estimate the distances to nearly all of the bursts in their sample. While they found that a significant proportion of bursts are dimmed to about 60--80 percent of the original intensity by obscuring dust, this effect is exaggerated for the very distant bursts, letting the observer see only 30--50 percent of the light. The astronomers conclude that most dark gamma-ray bursts are therefore simply those that have had their small amount of visible light completely stripped away before it reaches us."Compared to many instruments on large telescopes, GROND is a low cost and relatively simple instrument, yet it has been able to conclusively resolve the mystery surrounding dark gamma-ray bursts," says Greiner.• http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1049.
Changing Views of Pluto Best0fScience 2010-12-07 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubble's Universe Unfiltered 15: Changing Views of PlutoWhile it may seem that the astronomy community's views on Pluto changed radically with its reclassification in 2006, the truth is that our understanding of Pluto has always been shifting. This small, icy world in the distant reaches of the solar system is so difficult to observe that, even with Hubble's keen resolution, it only shows up as a few pixels in an image.Only with patience, lots of observations, and huge amounts of computing power have we been able to create approximate surface maps of Pluto and discover some surprising alterations to its surface. Improved imagery yields improved insight. We now comprehend Pluto's place within the solar system, and the exploration of that region has really just begun.Hubble's Universe Unfiltered is a collection of video podcasts. Each episode offers an in-depth explanation of the latest news story or image from the Hubble Space Telescope, presented by astronomer Frank Summers.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---NOTES* In the video podcast, I jokingly refer to "Percival Lowell's Greatest Mistakes" being 1.) the claim that Mars had a civilization using canals, and 2.) the prediction of a large planet beyond Neptune. Some may recognize this phrasing as an oblique reference to similar wording used in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. (If you're going to steal, steal from the best.) However, please do not interpret this humor as a general condemnation of Percival Lowell. The man had incredible zeal for astronomy and used his energy, time, and wealth to further its development. The Lowell Observatory in Arizona is a tremendous legacy with more than a century of observation, research, discovery and outreach.* It bothers me that Hubble's maps of Pluto are often labeled as images. I especially don't like to see that in textbooks, giving schoolchildren the false impression that we know more that we really do. The fact that our best images of Pluto are still pixilated carries with it a powerful message of the small size and great distance to this object. The solar system is vast and not yet fully explored. There are limits to our knowledge and new worlds to uncover. Let's accept the ugly truth and embrace it as a challenge to make more discoveries in the future.* Here's a question to ponder: If Pluto is a large, but otherwise typical member of a family of thousands of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), why did it take 63 years after Pluto's discovery to find the next one? While I can't answer this completely, here are three factors: size, color, and intense dedication. Most KBOs are tiny. Roughly a dozen or two have been detected so far with diameters one-half or larger that of Pluto. Most KBOs are dark. Pluto has bright frost covering enough of its surface to make it much, much brighter than other KBOs. Most observers are not Clyde Tombaugh. The patience, purpose, and skill, as well as the ever-important funding, to tackle a herculean task like that required to find Pluto is rare. When technology developed to find these small, dark objects without consuming excessive resources, the discoveries came quickly.* While it may take many years to get to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the New Horizons mission has done what science it could along the way. In addition to performing routine check-outs of its instruments, the spacecraft was able to make a number of observations during its flight past Jupiter (for a gravitational assist). One of my favorite solar system images ever is this image sequence of the eruption of the Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter's moon Io.Hopefully, such results are a sign of great things to come in 2015 and beyond.---RELATED HUBBLE PRESS RELEASESHubble Reveals Surface of Pluto for First Time• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/09Hubble Confirms New Moons of Pluto• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2006/09New Hubble Maps of Pluto Show Surface Changes• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/06---"Hubble's Universe Unfiltered" offers an in-depth explanation of the latest news story or image from the Hubble Space Telescope, presented by astronomer Frank Summers.Frank Summers is an astrophysicist at Hubble's Space telescope Science Institute, where he specializes in bringing astronomy discoveries to the public. He helps produce news and educational materials, gives public presentations, and creates science visualizations and animations.• http://hubblesite.org.
Hubbles New Miracle Camera Best0fScience 2010-11-21 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast Episode 40: Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) - Hubble's New Miracle CameraIn early 2009, a team of astronauts visited Hubble to repair the wear and tear of twenty years of operating in a hostile environment - and to install two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, and Wide Field Camera 3 - better known as WFC3.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is a combined ultraviolet, visible and infrared camera that dramatically extends Hubble's ability to image astronomical objects. With these new capabilities, Hubble is still pushing the boundaries of science after two decades in orbit.In episode 30 of the Hubblecast, we saw some of the very first pictures to come back from Wide Field Camera 3, Hubble's newest and most advanced instrument. Today we're going to look at some of the science behind these pictures. We'll find out how this remarkable new camera is helping Hubble to see the invisible, look far back in time and spot objects further away from us than ever before.WFC3 was installed on Hubble in place of WFPC2, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which for many years had been the main workhorse instrument on Hubble. Not only do the two instruments have very similar names, and look virtually identical, the capabilities of WFC3 are also in some respects just a tweaked version of those of its predecessor — although with sharper pictures and more sensitive light detectors. But on top of these incremental improvements, WFC3 also brings a whole battery of new functions to Hubble that are getting us astronomers really excited.WFC3 is actually two instruments in one: the ultraviolet and visible-light channel is WFPC2's replacement, cramming six times as many pixels into a similar field of view. As well as providing scientists with higher resolution observations than ever before, the pictures from this part of WFC3 are also Hubble's prettiest yet, revealing details never seen before through any telescope. But it is WFC3's infrared channel that is the real breakthrough.Infrared astronomy is getting a lot of attention right now. It's not just Hubble's new functions — ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope were all designed to work in this part of the spectrum too. One of the reasons for this is that studying the sky in the infrared allows astronomers to look at relatively cool objects that emit little or no visible light. An example of these are so-called protoplanetary nebulae — a cool gas envelope that gets thrown off by a certain type of star as its nuclear fuel supply runs low.Looking at these nebulae through an optical telescope is hard, as they barely emit any visible light, forcing astronomers to rely instead on faint reflected starlight to see anything at all. But protoplanetary nebulae shine far more brightly in the infrared part of the spectrum.Infrared imaging is also extremely useful for peering through interstellar dust clouds, which are impenetrable to visible light. The reason for this is similar to why sunsets are red. Just as particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light more than red, interstellar dust clouds block visible light more than infrared.Hubble has become famous for its striking visible-light pictures of huge clouds of interstellar dust and gas. But sometimes scientists want to know what's happening behind, or inside, the cloud of dust. Making infrared observations pulls away the veil and reveals the hidden stars.Until now, infrared imaging was challenging with Hubble. The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer, or NICMOS, did allow astronomers to study objects in infrared light in ways not possible from the ground, but it forced them to make a difficult choice. Because its images were small — only about 65 000 pixels in total, similar to a mobile phone screen — NICMOS could produce the sharpest images only if it concentrated on a very narrow field of view. Taking in a wider view came at the cost of losing much of the detail.Along with a much wider field of view and better sensitivity, WFC3's infrared channel has a million pixels, 15 times better than NICMOS, and similar to what you get on a computer screen. This means astronomers no longer have to compromise between how much of the sky they can observe, and how much detail they can study it in.These improvements mean Hubble is now far better at observing large areas of sky as well as very faint and very distant objects These are key for the science of cosmology, the study of the origins and development of the Universe.http://www.spacetelescope.org.
Planet From Another Galaxy Discovered Best0fScience 2010-11-19 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 24: First planet of extragalactic originAn exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our galaxy, the Milky Way, from another galaxy has been detected by a European team of astronomers using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The Jupiter-like planet is particularly unusual, as it is orbiting a star nearing the end of its life and could be about to be engulfed by it, giving clues about the fate of our own planetary system in the distant future.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Planet From Another Galaxy Discovered - The first planet of extragalactic originIn this episode we are going to find out how an act of galactic cannibalism has brought a planet from another galaxy within astronomers' reach.Astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighbourhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed. Now, however, a planet weighing at least 1.25 times as much as Jupiter has been discovered orbiting a star of extragalactic origin, even though the star now finds itself within our own galaxy.The star, which is known as HIP 13044, lies about 2000 light-years from Earth and is part of the so-called Helmi stream. This stream of stars originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy, which was devoured by our Milky Way in an act of galactic cannibalism six to nine billion years ago.Astronomers detected the planet by looking for tiny telltale wobbles of the star caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting companion. For these precise observations, the team used a high-resolution spectrograph called FEROS, attached to the 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.The planet, HIP 13044 b, is also one of the few exoplanets known to have survived its host star massively growing in size after exhausting the hydrogen fuel supply in its core — the Red Giant phase of stellar evolution.HIP 13044 b is near to its host star. At the closest point in its elliptical orbit, it is less than one stellar diameter from the surface of the star (or 0.055 times the Sun-Earth distance). and completes an orbit in only about 16 days. The astronomers hypothesise that the planet's orbit might initially have been much larger, but that it moved inwards during the Red Giant phase.Any closer-in planets may not have been so lucky. Astronomers suggest that some inner planets may have been swallowed by the star during the Red Giant phase.Although the Jupiter-like exoplanet has escaped the fate of these inner planets so far, the star will expand again in the next stage of its evolution. When this happens, the star may engulf the planet, meaning it may be doomed after all.The astronomers are now searching for more planets around stars near the ends of their lives. Their work may tell us about the fate of planets in the distant future of our own Solar System, as the Sun is also expected to become a Red Giant in about five billion years.---ESOcast is produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory. ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy designing, constructing and operating the world's most advanced ground-based telescopes.http://www.eso.org.
Highway Of Life: From Mammals To Primates Best0fScience 2010-11-14 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Evolution (Part 3): Highway of Life (Episode 3): From Mammals To Primates---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The earliest mammal-like reptiles, called pelycosaurs ruled the earth for about 40 million years, and gave rise to the therapsids...one step closer to mammals. Therapsids are the direct ancestor of mammals.But before we say good bye to reptiles, let's pause and look down their temporalhighway. Their descendants include the crocodilians, the dinosaurs and the birds. Back to our own road, Mammals are directly ahead.It is now 220 million years ago and the cynodonts have arrived on the scene. They have nearly all the features of mammals. Most early mammals were small and shrew-like animals that fed on insects. It is likely that they had a constant body temperature, milk glands for their young, and the beginning of a neocortex region of the brain. But this is also the era of the first dinosaurs, so our ancestors will have to wait for their turn to rule.125 million years ago, two new developments paralleled each other, marsupials and eutheria. The marsupials would give rise to kangaroos and their cousins, but our line lies with eutheria which have a placenta. The earliest eutheria resembled a small mouse.90 million years ago, we part lines with the ancestors of elephants and manatees, 85 million years ago, so long to the predecessors of horses, dogs and cats 75 million years ago, we part ways with mice and rodents. Primates are directly ahead.It is 65 million years ago and the dinosaurs just died. And a small animal that looked like a cross between a squirrel and a monkey becomes the ancestor of all primates. After a few million years, Old World Monkeys are clearly recognizable and, they have had a good run ever since. 25 million years ago the first of the lesser apes appeared..
Planetary Studies Best0fScience 2010-11-07 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA Goddard: Webb Telescope Planetary Studies.The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will study planetary bodies with our solar system and planets orbiting other stars to help scientists better understand how planets form and how they evolve.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---From our small world we have gazed upon the cosmic ocean for thousands of years. Ancient astronomers observed points of light that appeared to move among the stars. They called these objects planets, meaning wanderers, and named them after Roman deities - Jupiter, king of the gods; Mars, the god of war; Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture. The stargazers also observed comets with sparkling tails, and meteors - or shooting stars apparently falling from the sky.Since the invention of the telescope, three more planets have been discovered in our solar system: Uranus (1781), Neptune (1846), and Pluto (1930). Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. In addition, our solar system is populated by thousands of small bodies such as asteroids and comets. Most of the asteroids orbit in a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, while the home of comets lies far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the Oort Cloud.The four planets closest to the Sun - Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars - are called the terrestrial planets because they have solid rocky surfaces. The four large planets beyond the orbit of Mars - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - are called the gas giants. Beyond Neptune, on the edge of the Kuiper Belt, tiny, distant, dwarf planet Pluto has a solid but icier surface than the terrestrial planets.Nearly every planet - and some moons - has an atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere is primarily nitrogen and oxygen. Venus has a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with traces of poisonous gases such as sulfur dioxide. Mars' carbon dioxide atmosphere is extremely thin. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are primarily hydrogen and helium. When Pluto is near the Sun, it has a thin atmosphere, but when Pluto travels to the outer regions of its orbit, the atmosphere freezes and collapses to the planet's surface. In that way, Pluto acts like a comet.There are 146 known natural satellites (also called moons) in orbit around the planets in our solar system, ranging from bodies larger than our own Moon to small pieces of debris. Many of these were discovered by planetary spacecraft. Currently, another 21 moons are awaiting final approval before being added to our solar system's moon count.Some of moons have atmospheres (Saturn's Titan); some even have magnetic fields (Jupiter's Ganymede). Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. An ocean may lie beneath the frozen crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, while images of Jupiter's moon Ganymede show historical motion of icy crustal plates. Some moons may actually be asteroids that were captured by a planet's gravity. The captured asteroids presently counted as moons may include Phobos and Deimos, several satellites of Jupiter, Saturn's Phoebe, many of Uranus' new satellites, and possibly Neptune's Nereid.From 1610 to 1977, Saturn was thought to be the only planet with rings. We now know that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have ring systems, although Saturn's is by far the largest. Particles in these ring systems range in size from dust to boulders to house sized, and may be rocky and/or icy.Most of the planets also have magnetic fields which extend into space and form a magnetosphere around each planet. These magnetospheres rotate with the planet, sweeping charged particles with them. The Sun has a magnetic field, the heliosphere, which envelops our entire solar system.Ancient astronomers believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that the Sun and all the other stars revolved around the Earth. Copernicus proved that Earth and the other planets in our solar system orbit our Sun. Little by little, we are charting the Universe, and an obvious question arises: Are there other planets where life might exist? Only recently have astronomers had the tools to indirectly detect large planets around other stars in nearby solar systems.http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/index.cfm.
A Telescopes Wire To The World Best0fScience 2010-11-05 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 23: A telescope's wire to the world.Stretching 100 kilometres through Chile's harsh Atacama Desert, a newly inaugurated data cable is creating new opportunities at ESO's Paranal Observatory and the Observatorio Cerro Armazones. Connecting these facilities to the main Latin American scientific data backbone completes the last gap in the high-speed link between the observatories and Europe.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---EVALSO: A New High-speed Data Link to Chilean ObservatoriesThis new cable is part of the EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin American Southern Observatories) project, a European Commission FP7 co-funded programme co-ordinated by the University of Trieste that includes ESO, Observatorio Cerro Armazones (OCA, part of Ruhr-Universität Bochum), the Chilean academic network REUNA and other organisations. As well as the cable itself, the EVALSO project involves buying capacity on existing infrastructure to complete a high-bandwidth connection from the Paranal area to ESO's headquarters near Munich, Germany.Project co-ordinator Fernando Liello said: "This project has been an excellent collaboration between the consortium members. As well as giving a fast connection to the two observatories, it brings wider benefits to the academic communities both in Europe and Latin America."The sites of Paranal and Armazones are ideal for astronomical observation due to their high altitude, clear skies and remoteness from light pollution. But their location means they are far from any pre-existing communications infrastructure, which until now has left them dependent on a microwave link to send scientific data back to a base station near Antofagasta.Telescopes at ESO's Paranal observatory produce well over 100 gigabytes of data per night, equivalent to more than 20 DVDs, even after compressing the files. While the existing link is sufficient to carry the data from the current generation of instruments at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), it does not have the bandwidth to handle data from the VISTA telescope (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, see eso0949), or for the new generation of VLT instruments coming online in the next few years.This means that for much of the data coming from Paranal, the only practical way to send it to ESO Headquarters has been to save it onto hard drives and send these by airmail. This can mean a wait of days or even weeks before observations from VISTA are ready for analysis.Even with this careful rationing of the connection and sophisticated data management to use the connection as efficiently as possible, the link can get saturated at peak times. While this causes no major problems at present, it indicates that the link is reaching capacity.ESO Director General Tim de Zeeuw said: "ESO's observatory at Paranal is growing, with new telescopes and instruments coming online. Our world-class scientific observatories need state-of-the-art infrastructure."In the place of the existing connection, which has a limit of 16 megabit/s (similar to home ADSL broadband), EVALSO will provide a much faster 10 gigabit/s link — a speed fast enough to transfer an entire DVD movie in a matter of seconds.Mario Campolargo, Director, Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures at the European Commission, said: "It is strategically important that the community of astronomers of Europe gets the best access possible to the ESO observatories: this is one of the reasons why the European Union supports the deployment of regional e-infrastructures for science in Latin America and interlinks them with GÉANT and other EU e-infrastructures."The dramatic increase in bandwidth will allow increased use of Paranal's data from a distance, in real-time. It will allow easier monitoring of the VISTA telescope's performance, and quicker access to VLT data, increasing the responsiveness of quality control. And with the expanded bandwidth, new opportunities will open up, such as astronomers and technicians taking part in meetings via high-definition videoconferencing without having to travel to Chile. Moreover, looking forward, the new link will provide enough bandwidth to keep up with the ever-growing volumes of information from Paranal and Armazones in future years, as new and bandwidth-intensive instruments come into use.Immediate remote access to data at a distant location is not just about saving money and making the observatory's work more efficient. For unexpected and unpredictable events, such as gamma-ray bursts, there is often not enough time for astronomers to travel to observatories, and EVALSO will give experts a chance to work remotely on these events almost as if they were at the observatory.• http://www.eso.org.
A Runaway Star Best0fScience 2010-11-04 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubble's Universe Unfiltered (Episode 14): A Runaway Star.In order to get observing time on Hubble, an astronomer needs a well-thought-out plan of exactly what to observe and the science that may be learned. However, the universe is continually surprising us by providing unanticipated results. When a survey of a star-forming region found a star 90 times as massive as the Sun, located hundreds of light-years from its home, and speeding by at a quarter of a million miles per hour — well, that's a surprise that's worth investigating a bit further.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Hubble Catches Heavyweight Runaway Star Speeding from 30 DoradusA blue-hot star, 90 times more massive than our Sun, is hurtling across space fast enough to make a round trip from Earth to the Moon in merely two hours. Though the speed is not a record-breaker, it is unique to find a homeless star that has traveled so far from its nest. The only way the star could have been ejected from the star cluster where it was born is through a tussle with a rogue star that entered the binary system where the star lived, which ejected the star through a dynamical game of stellar pinball.This is strong circumstantial evidence for stars as massive as 150 times our Sun's mass living in the cluster. Only a very massive star would have the gravitational energy to eject something weighing 90 solar masses. The runaway star is on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus nebula, a raucous stellar breeding ground in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The finding bolsters evidence that the most massive stars in the local universe reside in 30 Doradus, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, is roughly 170,000 light-years from Earth.• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/14---Notes• This story derives from results of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument on Hubble. While famous for its awe-inspiring pictures, astronomers learn just as much from examining Hubble's spectral observations, especially in the ultraviolet region not observable from the ground. Ultraviolet light has shorter wavelengths and higher energies than the visible light seen by our eyes. Very massive stars produce higher energy emission, which has important spectral features to study in the ultraviolet region. You may not see spectra on the covers of magazines, but many of Hubble's most important results are based on these detailed graphs of emission versus wavelelength.• The Large Magellanic Cloud is one of the great wonders of the night sky. It is, however, located at 70 degrees south of the celestial equator and is only viewable by those in the southern hemisphere. Conversely, the stars of the Big Dipper are located about 55 degrees north of the celestial equator and are best viewed from the northern hemisphere. Although bearing the name of the explorer Magellan, this small galaxy has been a spectacular sight for anyone who has ever lived "down under." I hope to be able to travel there and see it myself one day. Even more spectacular would be the view from the stars of the LMC, looking back at our Milky Way Galaxy.• It has always struck me as a little strange that the largest star-forming region in our Local Group of galaxies, 30 Doradus, would be found in a dwarf galaxy. One would expect that the larger galaxies, like Andromeda, Triangulum, or the Milky Way, would have much more gas and dust available to make larger star-forming regions. The fact that a dwarf galaxy can make a huge star factory shows that size alone is not the determining factor. The creation of a star-forming region is also guided by the motions of the gas and dust, as well as the time available for it to collect into a vast cloud. In that sense, perhaps the calmer environment of a dwarf galaxy makes for the best place to harbor a giant starbirth cloud.• http://hubblesite.org.
Comets - Remnants Of The Beginning Best0fScience 2010-11-02 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA JPL: Comets - Remnants Of The Beginning.Comets are the most spectacular thing in the sky, at least, in the night time sky. Comets are important because they represent the leftover bits and pieces from the outer solar system formation process, which took place four and a half billion years ago. As the planets formed, the first thing you got was tiny clumps of dust in the inner solar system, and in the outer system, dust and ice.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Comets: Remnants of the BeginningThe comets are what made the cores of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But the planets are so hot that the chemistry changes completely, whereas the comets have remained frozen the entire time so that the chemistry is preserved. Comets are basically made up of a number of different regions; a dirty ice ball, relatively small and black. When it gets near the sun these ices start vaporizing, which forms a atmosphere. And then, when some of these dust particles are blown back away from the sun because of the pressure of sunlight, you form a dust tail and often a gas or ion tail.Comets and asteroids have always gotten bad press. The dinosaurs checked out 65 million years ago because of an asteroid impact. But what we don't hear about, is how important these objects are in terms of bringing the building blocks of life to the early planet. Comets almost certainly brought most of the organic material and much of the water to Earth.In a sense, we wouldn't even be here without comets and asteroids. Scientists like to put objects in boxes. Comets should look this way. Asteroids should look this way. But Mother Nature keeps knocking the boxes over and saying, no it doesn't look that way. The few comets that we've seen, they all are very different from one another. So the question is, are all these objects different from one another? The Epoxi mission is an extended mission for the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft. After we went past comet Temple 1 and drove an impactor into it, we spent a year or more observing extrasolar planets and we are now on target for a flyby of comet Hartley 2. Which is interesting in the sense that it's one of the smallest objects we've seen and it's thought to be active over 100% of its surface. If we understand the comets really well, it will tell us how all the planets got made. That's why we choose comets to study.---Epoxi: Mission to Comet Hartley 2The Epoxi Deep Impact mission was a mission to comet Tempel 1 to deliver an impactor in 2005. The instruments on the Deep Impact spacecraft were designed to be diagnostic in a flyby of a comet.We got some fascinating results from comet Tempel 1. But once we got past Tempel 1 we had plenty of fuel left, the spacecraft was healthy, then immediately everybody set to work on figuring out what new bodies we could get to. That's what led to the proposal to go to comet Hartley 2.It's really a good deal for NASA and the American public, to send a spacecraft to a whole new mission for a small fraction of what the new mission costs. We were able to retarget the spacecraft using a few flybys of Earth, take advantage of the gravity assist from Earth to retarget ourselves, change our trajectory just enough so that now we're able to get to comet Hartley 2 in November. Because this wasn't what the spacecraft was planned for, there's challenges and there's inevitably going to be surprises.The geometry of the Tempel 1 flyby was such that we could look at the comet, and take images at the same time that our high gain antenna was pointed at Earth. Because of the geometry of the Hartley 2 flyby, when we're pointed at the comet on approach, our high gain antenna can not see the Earth.So we cannot downlink data in real time. So we have to design everything, for one thing, to protect that imaging sequence to make sure that no matter what happens, we're able to recover and keep taking images. The things we will be looking for will be how different is the nucleus compared to the other comets that we've been to. What does the nucleus look like that makes it so active?Can we see which parts of the comet are emitting so much gas, and what's the nature of the chemicals, the compounds that are coming out of the comet? The excitement about studying comets is really driven by getting a better understanding of the early phases and early formation of our solar system.Comets essentially have been in the refrigerator since the beginning of the solar system and so when we explore these objects, we find out what they're made of, we get to look back to the beginning of the formation of the solar system. This mission is very economical and we're going to get science from this flyby opportunity.• http://www-a.jpl.nasa.gov.
The Most Distant Galaxy Ever Measured Best0fScience 2010-10-20 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 22: The most distant galaxy ever measured.An international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far. By carefully analysing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Clearing the Cosmic Fog: The Most Distant Galaxy Ever Measured"Using the ESO Very Large Telescope we have confirmed that a galaxy spotted earlier using Hubble is the most remote object identified so far in the Universe", says Matt Lehnert (Observatoire de Paris) who is lead author of the paper reporting the results. "The power of the VLT and its SINFONI spectrograph allows us to actually measure the distance to this very faint galaxy and we find that we are seeing it when the Universe was less than 600 million years old."Studying these first galaxies is extremely difficult. By the time that their initially brilliant light gets to Earth they appear very faint and small. Furthermore, this dim light falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum because its wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe — an effect known as redshift. To make matters worse, at this early time, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was not fully transparent and much of it was filled with a hydrogen fog that absorbed the fierce ultraviolet light from young galaxies.The period when the fog was still being cleared by this ultraviolet light is known as the era of reionisation. Despite these challenges the new Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered several robust candidate objects in 2009 that were thought to be galaxies shining in the era of reionisation. Confirming the distances to such faint and remote objects is an enormous challenge and can only reliably be done using spectroscopy from very large ground-based telescopes, by measuring the redshift of the galaxy's light.Matt Lehnert takes up the story: "After the announcement of the candidate galaxies from Hubble we did a quick calculation and were excited to find that the immense light collecting power of the VLT, when combined with the sensitivity of the infrared spectroscopic instrument, SINFONI, and a very long exposure time might just allow us to detect the extremely faint glow from one of these remote galaxies and to measure its distance."On special request to ESO's Director General they obtained telescope time on the VLT and observed a candidate galaxy called UDFy-38135539 for 16 hours. After two months of very careful analysis and testing of their results, the team found that they had clearly detected the very faint glow from hydrogen at a redshift of 8.6, which makes this galaxy the most distant object ever confirmed by spectroscopy. A redshift of 8.6 corresponds to a galaxy seen just 600 million years after the Big Bang.Co-author Nicole Nesvadba (Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale) sums up this work, "Measuring the redshift of the most distant galaxy so far is very exciting in itself, but the astrophysical implications of this detection are even more important. This is the first time we know for sure that we are looking at one of the galaxies that cleared out the fog which had filled the very early Universe."One of the surprising things about this discovery is that the glow from UDFy-38135539 seems not to be strong enough on its own to clear out the hydrogen fog. "There must be other galaxies, probably fainter and less massive nearby companions of UDFy-38135539, which also helped make the space around the galaxy transparent. Without this additional help the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog and we would not have been able to detect it", explains co-author Mark Swinbank (Durham University).Co-author Jean-Gabriel Cuby (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille) remarks: "Studying the era of reionisation and galaxy formation is pushing the capability of current telescopes and instruments to the limit, but this is just the type of science that will be routine when ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope — which will be the biggest optical and near infrared telescope in the world — becomes operational."• http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1041Research paper: Nature paper "Spectroscopic confirmation of a galaxy at redshift z58.6"• http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1041/eso1041.pdf.
Electromagnetic Spectrum: Microwaves Best0fScience 2010-10-16 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science@NASA: EMS Electromagnetic Spectrum (Episode 3) - MicrowavesElectromagnetic radiation which has a longer wavelength (between 1 mm and 30 cm) than visible light. Microwaves can be used to study the Universe, communicate with satellites in Earth orbit, and cook popcorn.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Measuring the electromagnetic spectrumYou actually know more about it than you may think! The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is just a name that scientists give a bunch of types of radiation when they want to talk about them as a group. Radiation is energy that travels and spreads out as it goes -- visible light that comes from a lamp in your house and radio waves that come from a radio station are two types of electromagnetic radiation. Other examples of EM radiation are microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays. Hotter, more energetic objects and events create higher energy radiation than cool objects. Only extremely hot objects or particles moving at very high velocities can create high-energy radiation like X-rays and gamma-rays.• http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html---Microwaves are electromagnetic waves with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz (0.3 GHz) and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF (millimeter waves), and various sources use different boundaries. In all cases, microwave includes the entire SHF band (3 to 30 GHz, or 10 to 1 cm) at minimum, with RF engineering often putting the lower boundary at 1 GHz (30 cm), and the upper around 100 GHz (3mm).Apparatus and techniques may be described qualitatively as "microwave" when the wavelengths of signals are roughly the same as the dimensions of the equipment, so that lumped-element circuit theory is inaccurate. As a consequence, practical microwave technique tends to move away from the discrete resistors, capacitors, and inductors used with lower frequency radio waves. Instead, distributed circuit elements and transmission-line theory are more useful methods for design and analysis.Open-wire and coaxial transmission lines give way to waveguides and stripline, and lumped-element tuned circuits are replaced by cavity resonators or resonant lines. Effects of reflection, polarization, scattering, diffraction and atmospheric absorption usually associated with visible light are of practical significance in the study of microwave propagation. The same equations of electromagnetic theory apply at all frequencies.While the name may suggest a micrometer wavelength, it is better understood as indicating wavelengths very much smaller than those used in radio broadcasting. The boundaries between far infrared light, terahertz radiation, microwaves, and ultra-high-frequency radio waves are fairly arbitrary and are used variously between different fields of study.Electromagnetic waves longer (lower frequency) than microwaves are called "radio waves". Electromagnetic radiation with shorter wavelengths may be called "millimeter waves", terahertz radiation or even T-rays. Definitions differ for millimeter wave band, which the IEEE defines as 110 GHz to 300 GHz.Above 300 GHz, the absorption of electromagnetic radiation by Earth's atmosphere is so great that it is effectively opaque, until the atmosphere becomes transparent again in the so-called infrared and optical window frequency ranges.• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave.
Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey Best0fScience 2010-09-28 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... GOODS - The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey: Great Observatories uncover black holes & hidden objects.ESOcast 21 / Hubblecast 39 (multicast): The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS)Today's telescopes study the sky across the electromagnetic spectrum. Each part of the spectrum tells us different things about the Universe, giving us more pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The most powerful telescopes on the ground and in space have joined forces over the last decade in a unique observing campaign, known as GOODS, which reaches across the spectrum and deep back into cosmic time.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---This is a very special "multicast". We'll be exploring a unique collaboration between some of the world's most powerful telescopes both on the ground and in space. Now, to do this, we've set up a similar collaboration between the ESOcast, the Hubblecast, the Spitzer Space Telescope's "Hidden Universe" (Dr Robert Hurt) and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory's "Beautiful Universe" (Megan Watzke).It's the combination of deep observations from many different telescopes that makes this project so important. The longer a telescope spends looking at a target, the more sensitive the observations become, and the deeper we can look into space. But to get the full picture of what's happening in the Universe, astronomers also need observations at a range of different wavelengths, requiring different telescopes. These are the key ideas behind the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or GOODS for short.The GOODS project unites the world's most advanced observatories, these include ESO's Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and many more, each making extremely deep observations of the distant Universe, across the electromagnetic spectrum. By combining their powers and observing the same piece of the sky, the GOODS observatories are giving us a unique view of the formation and evolution of galaxies across cosmic time, and mapping the history of the expansion of the Universe.Now, this is not the first time that telescopes have been used to give us extremely deep views of the cosmos. For example, the Hubble Deep Field is a very deep image of a small piece of sky in the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This revealed thousands of distant galaxies despite the fact that the whole field is actually only a tiny speck of the sky, about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.Now, with GOODS, many different observatories have brought their powers to bear on two larger targets, one centred on the original Hubble Deep Field in the northern sky, and one centred on a different deep target, the Chandra Deep Field South, in the southern sky. The main GOODS fields are each 30 times larger than the Hubble Deep Field, and additional observations cover an area the size of the full Moon.The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed the GOODS regions at optical and nearinfrared wavelengths, to detect distant starforming galaxies among other things. Now, Hubble spent a total of 5 days observing the fields, spread over five repeat visits. Each of these was separated from the previous one by about 45 days. Now, by spreading out the observations like this, Hubble was able to watch for new supernovae appearing over the months, providing key information for studying the expansion and acceleration of the Universe due to the mysterious dark energy.In the next couple of years, ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, currently under construction on the same plateau as APEX, will begin its first science observations. Also observing at submillimetre wavelengths, it will have much greater sensitivity than APEX, and resolution even better than Hubble. ALMA will revolutionise our understanding of the early Universe by revealing many more distant, dustobscured galaxies that cannot be seen at all by visible light and infrared telescopes.These projects are an excellent example of how great observatories are joining together, across the electromagnetic spectrum, to give us a more complete view of galaxies over the history of the Universe. Already, astronomers have written over 400 papers based on these data, with even more in the pipeline! And on top of that, the observations of the GOODS fields will continue in the future.These patches of the sky will be prime targets for the next generation of telescopes both on the ground and in space, and astronomers around the world use these data to learn new things about the Universe from them for many years to come ...• http://www.eso.org/public• http://www.spacetelescope.org.
Highway Of Life: The Ancestors Of All Mammals Best0fScience 2010-09-23 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Evolution (Part 3): Highway of Life (Episode 2): The ancestors of all mammals---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The evolution of mammals within the synapsid lineage (mammal-like-reptiles) was a gradual process that took approximately 70 million years, beginning in the mid-Permian. By the mid-Triassic, there were many species that looked like mammals, and the first true mammals appeared in the early Jurassic. The earliest known marsupial, Sinodelphys, appeared 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous, around the same time as Eomaia, the first known eutherian (member of placentals' "parent" group); and the earliest known monotreme, Teinolophos, appeared two million years later.After the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs (birds are generally regarded as the surviving dinosaurs) and several other mammalian groups, placental and marsupial mammals diversified into many new forms and ecological niches throughout the Tertiary, by the end of which all modern orders had appeared.From the point of view of phylogenetic nomenclature, mammals are the only surviving synapsids. The synapsid lineage became distinct from the sauropsid ("reptile") lineage in the late Carboniferous period, between 320 and 315 million years ago, and were the most common and largest land vertebrates of the Permian period.But in the Triassic period a previously obscure group of sauropsids, the archosaurs, became the dominant vertebrates and one archosaur group, the dinosaurs, dominated the rest of the Mesozoic era. These changes forced the Mesozoic mammaliforms ("nearly mammals") into nocturnal niches, and may have contributed greatly to the development of mammalian traits such as endothermy, hair and a large brain. Later in the Mesozoic mammals spread into other ecological niches, for example aquatic, gliding and even preying on dinosaurs.Most of the evidence consists of fossils. For many years fossils of Mesozoic mammals and their immediate ancestors were very rare and fragmentary, but since the mid 1990s there have been many important new finds, especially in China. The relatively new techniques of molecular phylogenetics have also shed light on some aspects of mammalian evolution by estimating the timing of important divergence points for modern species. When used carefully, these techniques often, but not always, agree with the fossil record.Although mammary glands are the signature feature of modern mammals, little is known about the evolution of lactation, and virtually nothing is known about the evolution of another distinctive feature, the neocortex region of the brain. Most study of the evolution of mammals centers around the development of the middle ear bones from components of the ancestral amniote jaw joint. Other much-studied aspects include the evolution of erect limb posture, a bony secondary palate, fur and hair, and warm-bloodedness.• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals---EVOLUTION IS REAL SCIENCE:1. Does The Evidence Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1R8w_QEvEU2. Vitamin C And Common Ancestryhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2N2lbb3dk3. Are We Descended From Viruses?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsWZCSMSSs4. Does The Fossil Record Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWVoXZPOCGk5. Where Are The Transitional Forms?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfTbrHg8KGQFACTS OF EVOLUTION:1. Introductionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43SskX-pEqA2. Universal Common Descenthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0UGpcea8Zg3. Good Design, Bad Designhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mtr3Cum74A4. Speciation And Extinctionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5kumHLiK4A5. How Fast Is Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XgeSi1EGkU6. What Can Embryos Tell Us About Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZmLYWEPGk7. The Molecules Of Lifehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvJFI3ChOUU8. Molecular Evolution: Genes And Proteinshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA7BE3mEb649. Retroviruses And Pseudogeneshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZvTmgCk1Lo.
Electromagnetic Spectrum: Radio Waves Best0fScience 2010-09-11 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science@NASA: EMS Electromagnetic Spectrum (Episode 2) - Radio WavesThe electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The "electromagnetic spectrum" of an object is the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by that particular object.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---MEASURING THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUMThe electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is just a name that scientists give a bunch of types of radiation when they want to talk about them as a group. Radiation is energy that travels and spreads out as it goes - visible light that comes from a lamp in your house and radio waves that come from a radio station are two types of electromagnetic radiation.Other examples of EM radiation are microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays. Hotter, more energetic objects and events create higher energy radiation than cool objects. Only extremely hot objects or particles moving at very high velocities can create high-energy radiation like X-rays and gamma-rays.• http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html---RADIO WAVESRadio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light. Like all other electromagnetic waves, they travel at the speed of light. Naturally-occurring radio waves are made by lightning, or by astronomical objects. Artificially-generated radio waves are used for fixed and mobile radio communication, broadcasting, radar and other navigation systems, satellite communication, computer networks and innumerable other applications.Different frequencies of radio waves have different propagation characteristics in the Earth's atmosphere; long waves may cover a part of the Earth very consistently, shorter waves can reflect off the ionosphere and travel around the world, and much shorter wavelengths bend or reflect very little and travel on a line of sight.Discovery and utilization: Radio waves were first predicted by mathematical work done in 1865 by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell noticed wavelike properties of light and similarities in electrical and magnetic observations. He then proposed equations, that described light waves and radio waves as waves of electromagnetism that travel in space. In 1887, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the reality of Maxwell's electromagnetic waves by experimentally generating radio waves in his laboratory. Many inventions followed, making practical the use of radio waves to transfer information through space.Propagation: The study of electromagnetic phenomena such as reflection, refraction, polarization, diffraction and absorption is of critical importance in the study of how radio waves move in free space and over the surface of the Earth. Different frequencies experience different combinations of these phenomena in the Earth's atmosphere, making certain radio bands more useful for specific purposes than others.Radio communication: In order to receive radio signals, for instance from AM/FM radio stations, a radio antenna must be used. However, since the antenna will pick up thousands of radio signals at a time, a radio tuner is necessary to tune in to a particular frequency (or frequency range). This is typically done via a resonator (in its simplest form, a circuit with a capacitor and an inductor). The resonator is configured to resonate at a particular frequency (or frequency band), thus amplifying sine waves at that radio frequency, while ignoring other sine waves. Usually, either the inductor or the capacitor of the resonator is adjustable, allowing the user to change the frequency at which it resonates.In medicine: Radio frequency (RF) energy has been used in medical treatments for over 75 years generally for minimally invasive surgeries and coagulation, including the treatment of sleep apnea.• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_waves.
Highway Of Life - The First 4 Billion Years Best0fScience 2010-09-07 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Evolution (Part 3): Highway of Life (Episode 1): The first four billion years---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---EVOLUTION IS REAL SCIENCE:1. Does The Evidence Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1R8w_QEvEU2. Vitamin C And Common Ancestryhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2N2lbb3dk3. Are We Descended From Viruses?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsWZCSMSSs4. Does The Fossil Record Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWVoXZPOCGk5. Where Are The Transitional Forms?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfTbrHg8KGQFACTS OF EVOLUTION:1. Introductionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43SskX-pEqA2. Universal Common Descenthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0UGpcea8Zg3. Good Design, Bad Designhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mtr3Cum74A4. Speciation And Extinctionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5kumHLiK4A5. How Fast Is Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XgeSi1EGkU6. What Can Embryos Tell Us About Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZmLYWEPGk7. The Molecules Of Lifehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvJFI3ChOUU8. Molecular Evolution: Genes And Proteinshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA7BE3mEb649. Retroviruses And Pseudogeneshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZvTmgCk1Lo.
Hubble In Popular Culture Best0fScience 2010-09-01 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Hubblecast 38: Hubble in popular culture - Inspiring People With Awe For The Universe.When Hubble was launched in 1990, every astronomer knew it had an opportunity to make profound breakthroughs in science. A few realised its potential as a tool for inspiring people with awe for the Universe. But could anyone have predicted how deeply Hubble would become embedded in popular culture?---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---In many ways the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is is the world's most sophisticated digital camera. Over the years, its photo album has featured many members of the cosmic family — ranging from baby stars to elderly galaxies.With all these amazing shots of space, it's easy to forget that Hubble is a superstar here on Earth, too. Hubble, for many people, has become a byword for "science".That's why, this summer, we asked you to send us your favourite examples of how Hubble has been used, or abused, in the daily life of us earthlings. We liked some of your suggestions so much that we wanted to share them.Hubble snapped this glowing planetary nebula, NGC 2818, ejected by a dying star more than 10 000 light-years away. But this scientific picture has also inspired art and design — for example this striking electric guitar.The guitar isn't the only example of how the world of music has taken to Hubble's stunning imagery — there was also the cover of this CD. The picture isn't Andromeda, as the name of the album implies... it's actually part of the Carina nebula, and it looks stunning here, photographed with Hubble's brand new WFC3 camera.Hubble also provided the cover to Pearl Jam's 2000 album "Binaural". This thought-provoking picture of the Hourglass Nebula has certainly made an impact -- appearing also in the film Angels and Demons, on the cover of "National Geographic" and in the computer game "Final Doom".Maybe Hubble gets under people's skin sometimes. No, not in tattoos... though we did see an intriguing Hubble tattoo among the entries. But Hubble's imagery has become so ubiquitous that it maybe influences us in ways we don't imagine.The logo of the Firefox Browser, for example. Is it a fox running round the world? Perhaps, but to one person it isn't. Were the designers influenced by Hubble's iconic picture of the light echo around the star V838 Monocerotis?In the world of fashion, too, Hubble has made its mark. Hubble's photo of the Orion Nebula decorated the designer clothes in Ruffian's collection for autumn/winter 2010--11. Designed by Brian Wolk and Claude Morais, they were inspired by depictions of the cosmos including Hubble photos of the Orion Nebula and Van Gogh's Starry Night.And in Second Life, one committed fan has turned Hubble photos, including NGC 3603 and the Cat's Eye Nebula, into this elaborate gown.The greatest entry of them all must be this one — My Hubble by artist Peter Hennessy, a life-sized replica of the Hubble Space Telescope, lovingly reproduced in wood.But maybe the most touching tribute of all to Hubble is how it has become so completely synonymous with great astronomy that even astronomers use its pictures as a visual shorthand for the Universe.To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the huge Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, the University of Manchester projected, what else, a Hubble video onto the radio telescope's huge dish -- turning it, for one night only, into the biggest cinema into the world.A tribute to Jodrell Bank -- but a tribute also to Hubble.• http://hubblesite.org.
Planetary Science: Exploring The Solar System Best0fScience 2010-08-29 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science@ESA (Episode 7): Planetary science - Exploring our backyard, the Solar System (Part 2)In this seventh episode of the Science@ESA vodcast series Rebecca Barnes continues to journey through the wonders of modern astronomy bringing us closer to home as we begin to explore the Solar System. We'll discover the scale and structure of the Solar System, find out why we explore it and introduce the missions launched on a quest to further investigate our local celestial neighbourhood.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Planetary science is the scientific study of planets (including Earth), moons, and planetary systems, in particular those of the Solar System and the processes that form them. It studies objects ranging in size from micrometeoroids to gas giants, aiming to determine their composition, dynamics, formation, interrelations and history.It is a strongly interdisciplinary field, originally growing from astronomy and earth science, but which now incorporates many disciplines, including planetary astronomy, planetary geology (together with geochemistry and geophysics), physical geography (geomorphology and cartography as applied to planets), atmospheric science, theoretical planetary science, and the study of extrasolar planets. Allied disciplines include space physics, when concerned with the effects of the Sun on the bodies of the Solar System, and astrobiology.There are interrelated observational and theoretical branches of planetary science. Observational research can involve a combination of space exploration, predominantly with robotic spacecraft missions using remote sensing, and comparative, experimental work in Earth-based laboratories. The theoretical component involves considerable computer simulation and mathematical modelling.Planetary scientists are generally located in the astronomy and physics or earth sciences departments of universities or research centres, though there are several purely planetary science institutes worldwide. There are several major conferences each year, and a wide range of peer-reviewed journals.• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_science---The Solar System is made up of the Sun and all of the smaller objects that move around it. Apart from the Sun, the largest members of the Solar System are the eight major planets. Nearest the Sun are four fairly small, rocky planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.Beyond Mars is the asteroid belt - a region populated by millions of rocky objects. These are left-overs from the formation of the planets, 4.5 billion years ago.On the far side of the asteroid belt are the four gas giants - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets are much bigger than Earth, but very lightweight for their size. They are mostly made of hydrogen and helium.Until recently, the furthest known planet was an icy world called Pluto. However, Pluto is dwarfed by Earth's Moon and many astronomers think it is too small to be called a true planet.An object named Eris, which is at least as big as Pluto, was discovered very far from the Sun in 2005. More than 1,000 icy worlds such as Eris have been discovered beyond Pluto in recent years. These are called Kuiper Belt Objects. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto and Eris must be classed as "dwarf planets".Even further out are the comets of the Oort Cloud. These are so far away that they are invisible in even the largest telescopes. Every so often one of these comets is disturbed and heads towards the Sun. It then becomes visible in the night sky.• http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=7.
A New Era In Exoplanet Science Best0fScience 2010-08-24 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESOcast 20: Richest planetary system discovered - A new era in exoplanet science (Release date: 24 August 2010).Astronomers using ESO instruments have discovered a remarkable extrasolar planetary system that has some striking similarities to our own Solar System. At least five planets are orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180, and the regular pattern of their orbits is similar to that observed for our neighbouring planets. One of the new extrasolar worlds could be only 1.4 times the mass of the Earth, making it the least massive exoplanet ever found. This video podcast explains how these faraway planets were detected and exactly what we know about them.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Astronomers using ESO's world-leading HARPS instrument have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. The researchers also believe the system has two other planets, one of which would have the lowest mass ever found, making the system similar to our own Solar System in terms of the number of planets. Furthermore, the scientists find that the location of the planets follows a regular pattern, as also seen in our own Solar SystemThe team of astronomers used the HARPS spectrograph, attached to ESO's 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. HARPS is an instrument with unrivalled stability and great precision, and the world's most successful exoplanet hunter. The astronomers, led by Christophe Lovis from the Geneva Observatory, studied the Sun-like star HD 10180 over a period of six years! This star is located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation Hydrus ("the Male Water Snake").Thanks to the 190 individual HARPS measurements, the astronomers detected the wobbles of the star caused by five or more planets. The five strongest signals correspond to planets with Neptune-like masses — between 13 and 25 Earth masses — which orbit the star in between 6 to 600 days. The astronomers have also strong reason to believe that two other planets are present. One would be a Saturn-like planet orbiting in 2200 days. The other, having a mass of only about 1.4 times that of the Earth would be the least massive exoplanet ever discovered. This suspected planet is very close to its host star and so it is likely to be very hot. One 'year' on this planet lasts only 1.18 Earth-days!The newly discovered Solar System is unique in several respects. First of all, with at least five Neptune-like planets lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, this system is more populated than our own Solar System in its inner region, and has many more massive planets there. Furthermore, the system probably has no Jupiter-like gas giant. In addition, all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits. Dynamical studies of the new system reveal complex interactions between planets and give us insights into its long-term evolution.Using the new discovery as well as data for other planetary systems, the astronomers discovered that the locations of the planets seem to follow a regular pattern — similar to the "Titius-Bode" law that exists in our Solar System. This could be a general signature of how planetary systems form. Another important result is that all very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars. These properties confirm current theoretical models.There is no doubt that this remarkable discovery highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet science: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets!!And with HARPS, European astronomers will be a driving force behind this transition.---ESOcast is produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory. ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy designing, constructing and operating the world's most advanced ground-based telescopes.• http://www.eso.org.
Global Warming Reduces Plant Productivity Best0fScience 2010-08-23 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... The past decade is the warmest on record since instrumental measurements began in the 1880s. Previous research suggested that in the '80s and '90s, warmer global temperatures and higher levels of precipitation - factors associated with climate change - were generally good for plant productivity. An updated analysis published this week in Science indicates that as temperatures have continued to rise, the benefits to plants are now overwhelmed by longer and more frequent droughts. High-resolution data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, indicate a net decrease in NPP from 2000-2009, as compared to the previous two decades.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---NASA: Climate Change - Plant Productivity in a Warming WorldEarth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight -- just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle."We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world," Running said."These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive -- as was documented for the 1980's and 1990's," said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program.Conventional wisdom based on previous research held that land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in Science led by then University of Montana scientist Ramakrishna Nemani (now at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.) showed that global terrestrial plant productivity increased as much as six percent between 1982 and 1999. That's because for nearly two decades, temperature, solar radiation and water availability -- influenced by climate change -- were favorable for growth.Setting out to update that analysis, Zhao and Running expected to see similar results as global average temperatures have continued to climb. Instead, they found that the impact of regional drought overwhelmed the positive influence of a longer growing season, driving down global plant productivity between 2000 and 2009. The team published their findings Aug. 20 in Science."This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth," Running said.The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, combined with growing season climate variables including temperature, solar radiation and water. The plant and climate data are factored into an algorithm that describes constraints on plant growth at different geographical locations.For example, growth is generally limited in high latitudes by temperature and in deserts by water. But regional limitations can very in their degree of impact on growth throughout the growing season.Zhao and Running's analysis showed that since 2000, high-latitude northern hemisphere ecosystems have continued to benefit from warmer temperatures and a longer growing season. But that effect was offset by warming-associated drought that limited growth in the southern hemisphere, resulting in a net global loss of land productivity."This past decade's net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity," Wickland said."Even if the declining trend of the past decade does not continue, managing forests and croplands for multiple benefits to include food production, biofuel harvest, and carbon storage may become exceedingly challenging in light of the possible impacts of such decadal-scale changes," Wickland said.• http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard• http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/newsroom/viewStory.php?id=1657.
The Missing Universe: Anti And Dark Matter Best0fScience 2010-08-20 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... ESA Space Science: Anti and Dark Matter Detective AMS - Searching for the missing Universe---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The purpose of the anti and dark matter detective AMS is to help scientists to better understand fundamental issues on the origin and structure of the Universe by observing antimatter and dark matter. As a by-product, AMS will gather a lot of other information from cosmic radiation sources on stars and galaxies millions of light years from our home galaxy. Not only astronomers, but also particle physicists are zealously waiting for AMS data.The AMS experiment is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and it involves international team composed of 56 institutes from 16 countries. ESA's partner in the AMS collaboration is the Agency's Directorate of Human Spaceflight. The first version of the experiment, AMS-01, was flown in June 1998 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and, after promising results the bigger and more capable version was accepted to be flown on the International Space Station (ISS).• http://www.esa.int/esaHS/SEMB808CS5G_index_0.html---What are 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'? The content of the Universe is widely thought to consist of three types of substance: normal matter, dark matter and dark energy.Normal matter consists of the atoms that make up stars, planets, human beings and every other visible object in the Universe. As humbling as it sounds, normal matter almost certainly accounts for the smallest proportion of the Universe, somewhere between 1% and 10%.The more astronomers observed the Universe, the more matter they needed to find to explain it all. This matter could not be made of normal atoms, however, otherwise there would be more stars and galaxies to be seen. Instead, they coined the term 'dark matter' for this peculiar substance precisely because it escapes our detection.At the same time, physicists trying to further the understanding of the forces of nature were starting to believe that new and exotic particles of matter must be abundant in the Universe. These would hardly ever interact with normal matter and many now believe that these particles are the dark matter. At the present time, even though many experiments are underway to detect dark matter particles, none have been successful. Nevertheless, astronomers still believe that somewhere between 30% and 99% of the Universe may consist of dark matter. Dark energy is the latest addition to the contents of the Universe. Originally, Albert Einstein introduced the idea of an all-pervading 'cosmic energy'; before he knew that the Universe is expanding. The expanding Universe did not need a 'cosmological constant' as Einstein had called his energy.However, in the 1990s observations of exploding stars in the distant Universe suggested that the Universe was not just expanding but accelerating as well. The only way to explain this was to reintroduce Einstein's cosmic energy in a slightly altered form, called 'dark energy'. No one knows what the dark energy might be.In the currently popular 'concordance model' of the Universe, 70% of the cosmos is thought to be dark energy, 25% dark matter and 5% normal matter.• http://www.esa.int/esaSC/index.html.
Exploring The Solar System Best0fScience 2010-08-16 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science@ESA (Episode 7): Exploring our backyard, the Solar System (Part 1)In this seventh episode of the Science@ESA vodcast series Rebecca Barnes continues to journey through the wonders of modern astronomy bringing us closer to home as we begin to explore the Solar System. We'll discover the scale and structure of the Solar System, find out why we explore it and introduce the missions launched on a quest to further investigate our local celestial neighbourhood.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---The Solar System is made up of the Sun and all of the smaller objects that move around it. Apart from the Sun, the largest members of the Solar System are the eight major planets. Nearest the Sun are four fairly small, rocky planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.Beyond Mars is the asteroid belt -- a region populated by millions of rocky objects. These are left-overs from the formation of the planets, 4.5 billion years ago.On the far side of the asteroid belt are the four gas giants - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets are much bigger than Earth, but very lightweight for their size. They are mostly made of hydrogen and helium.Until recently, the furthest known planet was an icy world called Pluto. However, Pluto is dwarfed by Earth's Moon and many astronomers think it is too small to be called a true planet.An object named Eris, which is at least as big as Pluto, was discovered very far from the Sun in 2005. More than 1,000 icy worlds such as Eris have been discovered beyond Pluto in recent years. These are called Kuiper Belt Objects. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto and Eris must be classed as "dwarf planets".Even further out are the comets of the Oort Cloud. These are so far away that they are invisible in even the largest telescopes. Every so often one of these comets is disturbed and heads towards the Sun. It then becomes visible in the night sky.http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=7.
Echoes Of A Supernova Best0fScience 2010-08-12 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... The Hidden Universe (Episode 20): Cassiopeia A - Echoes of a Supernova A supernova flash echoing through surrounding dust clouds has given astronomers a virtual time machine for studying the light from the explosion that nobody saw.This is the Hidden Universe of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, exploring the mysteries of infrared astronomy with your host Dr. Robert Hurt.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---It's the 17th century supernova that nobody saw, but telescopes in space and on Earth have teamed up to look back in time and study it today!When a massive star reaches its end of days it explodes dramatically and, for a few months, can outshine anything else in the galaxy. Earlier supernovas had been seen by many, often shining brighter than the planets. Of course with no witnesses, and no records, it's difficult to tell exactly what kind of supernova it was.A team led by astronomer Oliver Krause has, over the last few years, made a remarkable series of infrared observations of the region. These Spitzer Space Telescope images show shifting patterns of glowing dust beyond the remnant itself. These changes are so fast that they indicate motion at the speed of light!To get what's happening we have to remember that light moves fast, but in such a vast galaxy it still takes a while for it to get anywhere. Cassiopeia A (Cas A) itself is about 11,000 light-years away, which means today we're seeing what it looked like 11,000 years ago. But that's only part of the story.The light from a supernova can even take hundreds of years to reach surrounding dust clouds. Following the arrows of light it's clear we'll see the supernova flash first. The light echoing off of the dust clouds will later arrive at various times, delayed by hundreds of years from the original flash.So we're not seeing the dust move, we're seeing the light from the supernova move through the dust. Out there, the flash is about as bright as the full moon, which is enough to warm the dust slightly. Spitzer detects this brief boost in its thermal infrared glow.Now, knowing the location of the infrared light echo, Dr. Krause and his team went searching for a far more elusive visible-light echo. Using the powerful Subaru telescope in Hawaii they succeeded in measuring the very faint light of the supernova itself reflecting off the dust. The light echo has acted like an astronomical time machine, letting us study the original supernova using instruments that were beyond imagination in the 17th century.By matching its visible spectral signature to a wellstudied supernova in a nearby galaxy, Krause and his team have now identified it as a so-called Type IIb supernova. A Type IIb is fainter than the earlier Type Ib supernovas noted by Tycho Brahe in 1572 and Johannes Kepler in 1604. Interestingly, the Royal Astronomer Flamsteed noted a star near Cas A in August of 1680 with a brightness consistent with a Type IIb supernova at that distance. So maybe it was seen after all!But this light echo reveals more than just the supernova. The expanding flash also lets astronomers study the three-dimensional struct ure of the dust, illuminating it one slice at a time. If we combine the images, assigning colors to the observation dates, the result is a prismatic display of the 3D dust structure. The nearest dust is blue, and the most distant is red, while everything that stays constant is grey. We can see that interstellar dust lies in sheets and filaments, not, for instance, big, puffy clouds.This remarkable light echo around Cas A has led to a better understanding of both supernovas and interstellar dust, which itself is made of elements forged in previous generations of supernovas. This also marks the start of the third year of our Hidden Universe podcasts. On behalf of the staff of the Spitzer Science Center, I'd like to thank all of our viewers for making this and our other podcasts so successful. And keep watching, because there's a lot more to this hidden universe just waiting to be discovered!• http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/
Mechanisms Of Evolution: How Does Variety Give Rise To New Species? Best0fScience 2010-08-07 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Mechanisms of Evolution (Part 2): How does variety arise in the genomes of individuals and a group? How does variety give rise to new species?Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. In order for continuing evolution there must be mechanisms to increase or create genetic variation and mechanisms to decrease it. The mechanisms of evolution are mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, recombination and gene flow.---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---EVOLUTION IS REAL SCIENCE:1. Does The Evidence Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1R8w_QEvEU2. Vitamin C And Common Ancestryhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2N2lbb3dk3. Are We Descended From Viruses?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsWZCSMSSs4. Does The Fossil Record Support Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWVoXZPOCGk5. Where Are The Transitional Forms?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfTbrHg8KGQFACTS OF EVOLUTION:1. Introductionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43SskX-pEqA2. Universal Common Descenthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0UGpcea8Zg3. Good Design, Bad Designhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mtr3Cum74A4. Speciation And Extinctionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5kumHLiK4A5. How Fast Is Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XgeSi1EGkU6. What Can Embryos Tell Us About Evolution?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZmLYWEPGk7. The Molecules Of Lifehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvJFI3ChOUU8. Molecular Evolution: Genes And Proteinshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA7BE3mEb649. Retroviruses And Pseudogeneshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZvTmgCk1Lo---The Importance of Evolution in Biology"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -- Theodosius DobzhanskyEvolution has been called the cornerstone of biology, and for good reasons. It is possible to do research in biology with little or no knowledge of evolution. Most biologists do. But, without evolution biology becomes a disparate set of fields. Evolutionary explanations pervade all fields in biology and brings them together under one theoretical umbrella.We know from microevolutionary theory that natural selection should optimize the existing genetic variation in a population to maximize reproductive success. This provides a framework for interpreting a variety of biological traits and their relative importance. For example, a signal intended to attract a mate could be intercepted by predators. Natural selection has caused a trade- off between attracting mates and getting preyed upon. If you assume something other than reproductive success is optimized, many things in biology would make little sense. Without the theory of evolution, life history strategies would be poorly understood.Macroevolutionary theory also helps explain many things about how living things work. Organisms are modified over time by cumulative natural selection. The numerous examples of jury- rigged design in nature are a direct result of this. The distribution of genetically based traits across groups is explained by splitting of lineages and the continued production of new traits by mutation. The traits are restricted to the lineages they arise in.Details of the past also hold explanatory power in biology. Plants obtain their carbon by joining carbon dioxide gas to an organic molecule within their cells. This is called carbon fixation. The enzyme that fixes carbon is RuBP carboxlyase. Plants using C3 photosynthesis lose 1/3 to 1/2 of the carbon dioxide they originally fix. RuBP carboxlyase works well in the absence of oxygen, but poorly in its presence. This is because photosynthesis evolved when there was little gaseous oxygen present. Later, when oxygen became more abundant, the efficiency of photosynthesis decreased. Photosynthetic organisms compensated by making more of the enzyme. RuBP carboxylase is the most abundant protein on the planet partially because it is one of the least efficient.Ecosystems, species, organisms and their genes all have long histories. A complete explanation of any biological trait must have two components. First, a proximal explanation -- how does it work? And second, an ultimate explanation -- what was it modified from? For centuries humans have asked, "Why are we here?" The answer to that question lies outside the realm of science. Biologists, however, can provide an elegant answer to the question, "How did we get here?"• http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html .
The Electromagnetic Spectrum Best0fScience 2010-08-01 | http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Science@NASA: EMS (Episode 1) - An Introduction To The Electromagnetic Spectrum---Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:• http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience• http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV• http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker---Measuring the electromagnetic spectrumYou actually know more about it than you may think! The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is just a name that scientists give a bunch of types of radiation when they want to talk about them as a group. Radiation is energy that travels and spreads out as it goes-- visible light that comes from a lamp in your house and radio waves that come from a radio station are two types of electromagnetic radiation.Other examples of EM radiation are microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays. Hotter, more energetic objects and events create higher energy radiation than cool objects. Only extremely hot objects or particles moving at very high velocities can create high-energy radiation like X-rays and gamma-rays.The different types of radiation in the EM spectrum, in order from lowest energy to highest: Radio: Yes, this is the same kind of energy that radio stations emit into the air for your boom box to capture and turn into your favorite Mozart, Madonna, or Justin Timberlake tunes. But radio waves are also emitted by other things ... such as stars and gases in space. You may not be able to dance to what these objects emit, but you can use it to learn what they are made of.Microwaves: They will cook your popcorn in just a few minutes! Microwaves in space are used by astronomers to learn about the structure of nearby galaxies, and our own Milky Way!Infrared: Our skin emits infrared light, which is why we can be seen in the dark by someone using night vision goggles. In space, IR light maps the dust between stars.Visible: Yes, this is the part that our eyes see. Visible radiation is emitted by everything from fireflies to light bulbs to stars ... also by fast-moving particles hitting other particles.Ultraviolet: We know that the Sun is a source of ultraviolet (or UV) radiation, because it is the UV rays that cause our skin to burn! Stars and other "hot" objects in space emit UV radiation.X-rays: Your doctor uses them to look at your bones and your dentist to look at your teeth. Hot gases in the Universe also emit X-rays .Gamma-rays: Radioactive materials (some natural and others made by man in things like nuclear power plants) can emit gamma-rays. Big particle accelerators that scientists use to help them understand what matter is made of can sometimes generate gamma-rays. But the biggest gamma-ray generator of all is the Universe! It makes gamma radiation in all kinds of ways.• http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html.
