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First surprise from mission to Mercury: signs of water Thursday, July 3, 2008 8:43 PM By Kevin Mayhood THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Mercury facts Diameter: 3,032 miles Magnetic field: only rocky planet other than Earth with an active magnetic field Density: densest planet in solar system; 5.3 times denser than water Distance from sun: average of 36 million miles Distance from Earth: 50 million to 200 million miles Messenger facts Distance Messenger will travel: 4.9 billion miles as the spacecraft circles the sun 14 times before slowing enough to enter Mercury's orbit Size: 56 inches tall, 73 inches wide and 50...

Australian astronomers may have found a solution to how far-away Jupiter and Saturn drive the sun's solar cycle. In a paper published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, astronomer Dr Ian Wilson and colleagues from the University of Southern Queensland, suggest Jupiter and Saturn affect the sun's movement and its rotation, and hence its sunspot activity. Every 11 years the sun undergoes a period of intense solar activity, marked by flares, coronal mass ejections and sunspots. This period is known as the solar maximum and occurs twice each solar, or Hale, cycle. "The sun can be thought...

This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago. Newswise — A delicate ribbon of gas floats eerily in our galaxy. A contrail from an alien spaceship? A jet from a black-hole? Actually this image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago. On or around May 1, 1006 A.D., observers from Africa to Europe to the Far East witnessed...

Here are a few past APODs (Astronomy Picture of the Day) that I've collected over the years. They really are incredible. However, some make take awhile to download, especially if you're on dial-up. Hope you enjoy them... Orion Spitzer:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0608/orion_spitzer_f.jpg NGC-2174:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/NGC2174_lrg.jpg M-42:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0601/m42_hst_f.jpg Orion Cradle:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0701/orioncradle_hallas_r.jpg Wisps Surrounding the Horsehead Nebula:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080406.html Markarian's Eyes:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0706/NGC4438_NGC4435_crawford_r.jpg Carina Nebula Panorama from Hubble:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0704/carina_hst_big.jpg Bullet Pillars in Orion:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0703/bullets_gemini_big.jpg The Rosette Nebula:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0702/rosette_gendler_big.jpg For individual descriptions of these images, go to the APOD archive page and run a search on the selected image's title:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Colorful Mystery Here's a new, truer-color rendering of the Voorwerp (lower center). Although it looked blue on the Sloan photo, the object actually now appears to be fairly green, observes Keel, who performed spectral analses of the huge mystery cloud.W. Keel Nearly a year ago, astronomers at several universities recruited citizen scientists to help them catalog distant galaxies that had recently been photographed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A high-school physics teacher in the Netherlands who was participating in this project, known as Galaxy Zoo, appears to have scored a major coup. She brought a weird blue...

As the full moon rises this Wednesday evening, June 18, many people will be fooled into thinking it's unusually large. The moon illusion, as it's known, is a trick in our minds that makes the moon seem bigger when it's near the horizon. The effect is most pronounced at full moon. Many people swear it's real, suggesting that perhaps Earth's atmosphere magnifies the moon. But it really is all in our minds. The moon is not bigger at the horizon than when overhead. The illusion will be particularly noticeable at this "solstice moon," coming just two days before summer starts...

HEAVENLY TRIANGLE: Ringed planet, first-magnitude star, crescent moon. Add them all together and you get a heavenly triangle visible tonight. Look up after sunset for Saturn, Regulus and the Moon in scalene formation. http://spaceweather.com/ [note: First, all of this is naked-eye visible (no, you do not need to remove your clothes to see it!). Next, Saturn (in the diagram above) is the large blue dot. They apparently forgot to label it. Saturn will appear brighter and somewhat 'yellowish' compared to the nearby white star Regulus just to its lower right (Saturn is brighter than the star). Mars, a bit further...

Enlarge ImageFresh look.Recent surveys of the Milky Way show it contains a prominent central bar feature (bottom), distinguishing it from other galaxies of the classic spiral variety (top).Credit: (top) NASA/Spitzer Space telescope (bottom) NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech) The Milky Way Gets a Facelift By Phil BerardelliScienceNOW Daily News03 June 2008Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that the Milky Way is missing two...

<p>Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.</p> <p>As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.</p>

New red spot appears on Jupiter Feature may be an indicator of global climate change on the planet. In what's beginning to look like a case of planetary measles, a third red spot has appeared next to its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot, Jr. — in the turbulent jovian atmosphere. This spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds. The new spot was previously a white, oval-shaped storm. The change to a red color indicates...

While peering at her computer screen four months ago, astronomer Alicia Soderberg expected to see the small glowing smudge of a month-old supernova. But what she and her colleague saw instead was a strange, extremely bright, five-minute burst of X-rays. With that observation, they became the first astronomers to catch a star in the act of exploding. "For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once-in-a-lifetime, event," said Soderberg, a Hubble and Carnegie Princeton Fellow at Princeton University. The discovery, detailed in the May 22 issue of the...

Enlarge ImageYounger than it looks. Astronomers compared radio (left, blue) and x-ray images (red) of this supernova remnant to determine that the explosion had occurred only 100 years before.Credit: NRAO (radio)/Chandra (x-ray) U.S. and British astronomers have located the youngest known remnant of an exploding star in the Milky Way. The discovery might help researchers understand why our galaxy seems to have so few supernovas and where the raw materials of planets and life came from. The Milky Way is a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy, except for a shortage of supernova activity. These titanic explosions, which mark the deaths...

International scientists have used flowing water to simulate a black hole, testing Stephen Hawking's theory that black holes are not black after all. The researchers, led by Professor Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews and Dr Germain Rousseaux at the University of Nice, used a water channel to create analogues of black holes, simulating event horizons. An event horizon is the place in the channel where the water begins to flow faster than the waves. The scientists sent waves against the current, varied the water speed and the wavelength, and filmed the waves with video cameras. Over several...

Computer users now can fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies as an astronomer would, with Tuesday's introduction of the Worldwide Telescope by Microsoft. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander...

Earth 'noise' could attract alien invaders 03 May 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. No matter how quiet we try to be now it's too late to prevent alien invaders. So says Alexander Zaitsev of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics in Moscow, Russia, who points the finger at astronomers. For 40 years, astronomers have fired microwaves off objects to chart near-Earth space and track the movement of close asteroids - and these signals are traceable back to us. By comparison, Zaitsev says, dedicated transmissions - often described as "shouting into an unknown jungle" - are a mere whisper....

POSTCARDS FROM THE FUTURE Sometime in the near future, humankind will set foot again on the Moon. As part of NASA's New Vision for Space Exploration, they will build a permanent base on the moon, to test, research and invent new technologies for manned missions to Mars and beyond. The task will not be easy - there will be danger and hardships and broken lives, but these modern-day pioneers would have it no other way. Because for all the hardships that they must endure, they know that the Grand Vision extends beyond them - that they are but a small...

A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe. The team, called Dama, from “DArk MAtter,” and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth’s passage through a “wind” of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun....

HiRISE image of Stickney Crater on Phobos. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Stickney crater is almost half the diameter of Phobos itself. Why did the impact not shatter this small moon? The color picture above is a composite from two pictures taken about 10 minutes apart in order to give the 3-dimensional aspect. A recent Picture of the Day described some of the large-scale formations on Phobos, especially Stickney Crater, but this more dramatic picture, which has recently become available, deserves another showing because it portrays the distinctive features of an Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) event with greater clarity. The...

A telescope on the far side of the moon could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed. "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — no stars, no galaxies," said Kurt Weiler, senior astronomer at the U.S. Naval...

Although I suspect that intelligent life is rare in the cosmos, I’m playing little more than a hunch. So it’s interesting to see that Andrew Watson (University of East Anglia) has analyzed the chances for intelligence elsewhere in the universe by looking at the challenges life faced as it evolved. Watson believes that it took specific major steps for an intelligent civilization to develop on Earth, one of which, interestingly enough, is language. Identifying which steps are critical is tricky, but in the aggregate they reduce the chance of intelligence elsewhere. A linguist at heart, I wasn’t surprised with the...

Is this a planet in the making? A gap in the dust circling a young star in the constellation Auriga may mark where material is condensing into a planet, 11 astronomers led by Ben R. Oppenheimer of the American Museum of Natural History say in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The group used an Air Force surveillance telescope at Haleakala Observatories on the Hawaiian island of Maui and a special camera to examine a region near the star AB Aurigae, corresponding to the scale of our own solar system, that had not been observed before at...

For decades, Soviet schoolchildren flocked to the Moscow Planetarium to gaze at the stars. Now plans to reopen the landmark silver-domed structure, shut for repairs 14 years ago, are mired in a struggle for control of an institution situated on a pricey patch of real estate. The conflict took a startling turn Wednesday when staffers say about 20 uniformed men forced their way onto the grounds, beat an unarmed employee and proclaimed that a new boss was in charge. It was a development that longtime director Igor Mikitasov described as a hostile takeover, Russian style. In the struggle for property...

An astronaut, Don Pettit, has put together a 10-minute movie of what cities look like at night as seen from space. He shot these images while he was Science Officer aboard ISS Expedition 6 about 5 years ago. He recently posted this on YouTube.This video "Cities at Night; an Orbital Tour Around the World" is a video made from digital still images.A bit of trivia.... most of the music during the movie is from royalty-free clips from Adobe Auditions, but for the Australian sequences, Don played his own didgeridoo that he had with him in space aboard ISS. As you...

TRIPLE FLYBY ALERT: Space shuttle Endeavour has undocked from the International Space Station and the two spaceships are now orbiting Earth in tandem. This sets the stage for a series of rare *triple* flybys, which many sky watchers will be able to observe on Tuesday, March 25th. It's a triple because three spacecraft are involved. First to appear is the European Space Agency's Jules Verne cargo carrier flying 2000 kilometers ahead of the ISS-Endeavour combo. Jules Verne is about as bright as a 1st magnitude star. Four minutes later, and even brighter, the space shuttle and space station follow Jules...

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a so-called "ring of dark matter" circling a galaxy cluster. Does dark matter exist? Or is electricity a better explanation for the structure of the universe? {Galaxy Cluster CL0024+17 with an overlay showing a supposed dark matter ring. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins University)} In a recent announcement, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) reported the discovery of something in deep space that seems to confirm previously inferred observations of "dark matter." Although "dark matter" cannot be seen or detected by instruments, its...

NASA/JPL-Caltech An artistic rendering of a very young star encircled by a disk of gas and dust. The winking star has sand in its eye. Back in 2002, astronomers from Wesleyan University concluded that a star brightening and waning in an unusual 48-day rhythm was dipping in and out of stuff swirling around the star in a so-called protoplanetary disk. At the time one astronomer called the system “a Rosetta stone,” for understanding how planets form. Now, after six more years of observation with an international group of astronomers, led by William Herbst of Wesleyan, researchers say they know what...

Thanks to a lucky break and an overactive galaxy, astronomers have for the first time caught a massive star in the act of exploding. An X-ray outburst recently recorded by NASA's Swift satellite suggests that researchers began viewing the violent demise of a star in the galaxy NGC 2770 just a few seconds after the first X rays arrived at Earth, and hours before the first visible-light fireworks. Most supernovas aren't identified until they generate an outpouring of visible light, long after key information about the size and other properties of the collapsing star has vanished. The new finding suggests...

Earth may have a twin orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a new study suggests. University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri star system, our closest stellar neighbors. Guedes' model showed planets forming around the star Alpha Centauri B (its sister star, Proxima Centauri, is actually our nearest neighbor) in what is called the "habitable zone," or the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. The...

Earth could be in for a neighborhood dispute with a death star, according to an Australian astronomer. A spectacular rotating pinwheel system just down the astronomical road from Earth — 8,000 light years away — includes an unstable Wolf-Rayet star that could explode. Eight years ago, WR104 was discovered in the constellation Sagittarius by Sydney University astronomer Peter Tuthill. A Wolf-Rayet star is the last step on the way to a supernova — the explosion of a star at the end of its life. Images from the Mauna Kea in Hawaii telescope show that every eight months the two stars...

Enlarge ImageGrowing pains. This artist's conception shows a neutron star known as a magnetar crackling with extremely powerful magnetic activity.Credit: Gregg Dinderman/Sky & Telescope "When you hear hoofbeats," the old saying goes, "think horse, not zebra." But what if your horse suddenly grows zebra stripes? That's the predicament astronomers faced when a star they were observing--a rapidly spinning remnant of a supernova called a pulsar--started emitting powerful bursts of x-rays considered the hallmark of a much-rarer object called a magnetar. The finding strongly suggests that pulsars, also known as neutron stars, and magnetars are linked and paves the way...

Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old. The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence...

I saw not only Atlantis and the International Space Station flyover my neighborhood tonight, but I also saw the spy satellite scheduled for missile destruction on Thursday/ Michelle Obama, eat your heart out. This is one proud American.

The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago. In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth. But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth,...

Space Weather News for Feb. 17, 2008 http://spaceweather.com DOUBLE FLYBY: If all goes according to plan, space shuttle Atlantis will undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday morning, Feb. 18th, at approximately 4:30 am EST. This is good news for sky watchers across North America who will be able to witness a rare double flyby on Monday evening. Atlantis and the ISS will appear as a tight pair of lights, as bright as Jupiter or Venus, gliding in tandem across the twilight sky--an unforgettable sight. Favored cities include Los Angeles, New Orleans, Dallas, Jackson (MS), Pensacola, Philadelphia, Reno,...

http://www.heavens-above.com/main.aspx?lat=34.052&lng=-118.243&loc=Los+Angeles&alt=115&tz=PST

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets. “It looks like a scale model of our solar system,” said Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. Dr. Gaudi led an international team of 69 professional and amateur astronomers who announced the discovery in a news conference with reporters. Their results are being published Friday in the journal Science. The discovery, they said, means...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

On the night of Feb. 20, the full moon will pass into Earth's shadow in an event that will be visible across all of the United States and Canada. The total lunar eclipse will be made even more striking by the presence of the nearby planet Saturn and the bright bluish star, Regulus. Eclipses in the distant past often terrified viewers who took them as evil omens. Certain lunar eclipses had an overwhelming effect on historic events. One of the most famous examples is the trick pulled by Christopher Columbus.

An asteroid at least 500 feet long will make a rare close pass by Earth next week, but there is no chance of an impact, scientists reported Thursday. The object, known as 2007 TU24, is expected to whiz by Earth on Tuesday with its closest approach at 334,000 miles, or about 1 1/2 times the distance of Earth to the moon. The nighttime encounter should be bright enough for medium-sized telescopes to get a glimpse, said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which tracks potentially dangerous space rocks. However, next week's asteroid...

Perfectly Aligned Galaxies Found For the First Time John Roach for National Geographic NewsJanuary 11, 2008 Astronomers have found three galaxies in a never before seen perfect alignment—a discovery that may help scientists better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy believed to dominate the universe. The three galaxies are like beads on a string, one directly behind the other, scientists announced yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. This makes the massive galaxy closest to Earth appear nestled in a pair of circular halos known as Einstein rings. The phenomenon occurs because the...

The quasar OJ287 contains two black holes (this slightly dated illustration lists the larger black hole's mass as 17 billion Suns, though researchers now estimate it is 18 billion Suns). The smaller black hole crashes through a disc of material around the larger one twice every orbit, creating bright outbursts (Illustration: VISPA) The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever...

Meteors' mysterious origin traced to 1490 event 15:50 07 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby Last week's Quadrantid meteor shower was probably debris from a deep-space explosion that went off in the late 15th century, new observations reveal. The meteors, which return every January, were observed more closely than ever before when a group of 14 astronomers tracked them for nine hours on a flight from California, US, to the North Pole. They found that the shower peaked at around 0200 GMT on Friday, matching a prediction made by Peter Jenniskens of NASA. He based his prediction on the...

Also what is the difference between a reflector and refractor? Which is best?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has donated ten million dollars to help build a 400-million dollar high-powered telescope in Chile, media here reported Saturday. Another Microsoft alumnus, Charles Simonyi, has donated 20 million dollars to the project, according to news reports. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is expected to be operational as of 2015, is to be used by primarily by universities, laboratories and private groups. The mountainside observatory in northern Chile, equipped with a high-power digital lens and built at an altitude of more than 2,500 meters above sea level, will be capable of taking detailed photos of supernovas,...

This image shows newly discovered "hot spot" on Saturn's north pole and the mysterious hexagon that encircles the pole. Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/Oxford University Despite more than a decade of winter darkness, Saturn's north pole is home to an unexpected hot spot remarkably similar to one at the planet's sunny south pole. The source of its heat is a mystery. Now, the first detailed views of the gas giant's high latitudes from the Cassini spacecraft reveal a matched set of hot cyclonic vortices, one at each pole. While scientists already knew about the hot spot at Saturn's south pole from...

The Quadrantid meteor shower is due to reach maximum in the predawn hours of Friday, Jan. 4. The Quadrantids are notoriously unpredictable, but if any year promises a fine display, this could be it.

Full moon near Mars on December 23 Earth & Sky Radio Series with hosts Deborah Byrd, Joel Block, Lindsay Patterson and Jorge Salazar. Sunday, December 23, 2007 For us in the U.S., the full moon is tonight. And if you look outside you’ll see this full moon near a blazing reddish light in our sky. It’s the planet Mars. Flying through space at 18 miles per second, Earth is about to go between the sun and Mars. Earth will pass between Mars and the sun tomorrow. So the distance between us and Mars is now about at its least for...

Mars will be unusually bright this Christmas Eve and the moon will be shining full — a development that might make Santa Claus rethink his need for Rudolph's red nose. That idea, from Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer, made us wonder if retooling a certain reindeer song is the best way to explain it to the kids: Mars is a red-tinged planet With a very shiny glow And if you look to see it You will find the moon in tow. The red planet will shine brighter because it will be directly opposite the sun, reflecting the most...

Enlarge ImageIce or dust? Could the bright areas in this image be a young and active martian glacier?Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Even though orbiters have eyed it from space and landers have rumbled across its surface, Mars still has more secrets to reveal. Two findings emerged this week: the possibility of an active glacier far from the planet's poles and evidence that sulfur--not carbon--was the element driving the planet's warmer climate long ago. Both discoveries could force some rethinking about martian evolution and dynamics--and maybe even provide insights about Earth's past. The glacier discovery was announced Wednesday by...

FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News) ― The Star of Bethlehem has befuddled scholars throughout the ages. Now, a Texas law professor claims to have scientific proof that the Star was real, and not purely biblical myth. He has another major discovery as well, which resulted from his study of the Star. Texas A&M adjunct law professor Frederick Larson began researching the Star after putting up a nativity scene for his daughter. The lawyer in him, Larson said, required him to investigate what it was that he was putting up in his front yard. Beginning with the book of Matthew, he...