Always something new and exciting in space.
Cosmic Log/MSNBC
European astronomers have announced the discovery of more than 50 new planets beyond our solar system, including 16 that are just a notch above our own planet in mass. They say their record-breaking findings suggest that more than half of the stars like our sun possess planets, and that many of those worlds are less massive than Saturn.
The pick of the litter is a planet that's already been in the spotlight: HD 85512 b, a world at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth that's located 36 light-years away in the constellation Vela. HD 85512 b is the only one of the 16 super-Earths on today's list that is located in its star system's habitable zone. That's the area around a star where scientists believe water could exist in liquid form, which would make a rocky planet potentially livable.
HD 85512 b's status came to light a couple of weeks ago in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but the team behind the discovery provided more details about that super-Earth and the dozens of other worlds in papers presented today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Wyoming.
The findings came from the team behind the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, which is installed at the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Fifty new alien worlds revealed
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
First Oxygen Molecules Found in Orion Nebula
Have you ever checked out the Orion Nebula through a Telescope?
It is one of the most amazing objects to check out, and now that Oxygen has been confirmed there it is even more amazing.
International Business Times
Astronomers have found the first ever molecules of oxygen deep in space in a region of the Orion nebula with the Herschel Space Observatory, prompting searches to ensue in other star-forming regions.
Herschel, a mission under the European Space Agency (ESA) using infrared technology, is the first to confirm the existence of molecular oxygen, or two bonded oxygen atoms, rarely found in space though the Swedish Odin telescope spotted an unconfirmed molecule in 2007. This finding marks certainty regarding oxygen molecules in outer space, a phenomenon, though predicted, continued to puzzle astronomers.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
'Trojan' asteroid shares Earth's orbit
Amazing things are always found in space, not that asteroids are just amazing; but finding one in the same orbit as Earth in 2011, thats amazing.
With all the technology floating out in space, 2010 TK7 (the new Asteroids official name) is only just discovered.
AFP
PARIS — Earth is not alone in its orbit around the Sun - a small 'Trojan' asteroid sits in front of our planet and leads it, according to British science revue Nature, which published the discovery Thursday.
This diminutive asteroid has a diameter of just 300 metres but is called a Trojan because of its particular position in a stable spot either in front of a planet or behind it. Because the asteroid and planet are constantly on the same orbit, they can never collide.
Jupiter, Mars and Neptune also have Trojan asteroids accompanying them, as do two of Saturn's moons.
NASA scientists discovered the asteroid, which lies 80 million kilometres (50 million miles) from Earth, using its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.
Astronomers have long thought that Earth did have some Trojans but their discovery has proved elusive because of the difficulty of seeing them in daylight.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Exoplanet spotted in motion around its 'sun'
Always something new being found out in the field of Astronomy .
Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about nine times the mass of Jupiter, is one of only a few to be detected by direct imaging.
BBC
Astronomers say they have followed, for the first time, an extra-solar planet in orbit around a young white star.
The team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to track the motion of a gas giant Beta Pictoris b.
The planet's "sun" is also believed to be the youngest star to host a planet.
The find shows that Jupiter-like giants can form near stars in much shorter time-spans than previously thought, the scientists report in Science journal.
Astronomers have so far spotted some 450 extra-solar planets (exoplanets).
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
4 Mini Big Bangs Created .
Ahhh the stuff of Life !
The spooky science that a lot of people freak out about is happening at Cern , The Centre for Nuclear Research , France .
The good stuff you know recreating the Big Bang , Smashing sub Atomic Particles together at unimaginable speeds , A Black hole here A black hole there !
All leading to the worlds Demise as we know it , we are soon to be sucked into a Black hole or something not good for us , and that will be it , or something along those lines .
Either way Very interesting stuff !
GENEVA, March 30 (Reuters) - Physicists smashed sub-atomic particles into each other with record energy on Tuesday, creating thousands of mini-Big Bangs like the primeval explosion that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Scientists and engineers in control rooms across the sprawling European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva burst into applause as the $9.4 billion project to probe the origins of the cosmos scored its first big success.
"This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery," said CERN's director of research Sergio Bertolucci. "It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn't know existed."
"It just shows what we can do in pushing knowledge forward on where we came from, how the early universe evolved," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said, speaking, like Bertolucci, on a video relay from Tokyo.
Colourful images of the collisions, at the centre of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project which will continue for over a decade, were flashed onto screens across CERN.
CERN scientists say the images reflect what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang as matter and energy was spewed out, leading to the formation of galaxies stars and planets, and eventually the appearance of life.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Einstein Was Right: General Relativity Confirmed
Yes after all these years there still has been some doubt over Einsteins theory of Relativity .
And now we have another confirmation of how much of a Genius he really was !
A partial map of the distribution of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, going out to a distance of 7 billion light years. The amount of galaxy clustering that we observe today is a signature of how gravity acted over cosmic time, and allows us to test if general relativity holds over these scales. ( Redshift , Galaxies appear red in a spectrum , as they move away from us.)
Foxnews
Score one more for Einstein. A new study has confirmed his theory of general relativity works on extremely large scales.
The study was one of the first rigorous tests of this theory of gravity beyond our solar system. The research found that even over vast scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the equations of general relativity predict the way that mass pulls on other mass in the universe.
The new work also helps rule out a competing theory of gravity that seeks to do away with the need for bizarre concepts like dark matter and dark energy that have irked some scientists. This research indicates those pesky ideas may be here to stay.
What is relativity?
General relativity rocked the world of physics when Einstein first published his paper on the subject in 1915. The theory built on the traditional idea of gravity based on Isaac Newton's laws, but added fundamentally new concepts like the notion that mass deforms the shape of space-time. This means that objects and even light that move through space near a large mass will travel on a curved path. Furthermore, it means that mass can stretch or shrink time as well. For example, someone watching a black hole from a distance would observe a person falling into that black hole to fall extremely slowly.
