European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: ESO Photo Release eso1014

Today, ESO has unveiled an image of the little known Gum 19, a faint nebula that, in the infrared, appears dark on one half and bright on the other. On one side hot hydrogen gas is illuminated by a supergiant blue star called V391 Velorum. New star formation is taking place within the ribbon of luminous and dark material that brackets V391 Velorum’s left in this perspective. After many millennia, these fledgling stars, coupled with the explosive demise of V391 Velorum as a supernova, will likely alter Gum 19’s present Janus-like appearance.(read more)

For the last of our late winter early spring constellations, let’s take a look at Leo, the Lion.

Leo is one of the constellations that actually looks reasonably like what it’s supposed to represent.

The brightest star of this constellation, alpha Leo, is called Regulus (meaning: the little king), it’s a blue-white star and when viewed with binoculars or small telescopes a fainter companion star of can be seen.
At the tip of the lion's tail the blue-white star beta Leo, or Denebola, viewed through a telescope beta Leo seems to have an orange companion, but actually the two stars are far away from each other – it is an “optical” double as opposed to a real double star system.

Another excellent double is the binary gamma Leo, or Algieba (the lion's mane), this pair, consists of a orange-red giant and a yellow giant, a small telescope is sufficient to split gamma Leo into the single stars.

Leo contains many bright galaxies, of which Messier 65, Messier 66, Messier 95, Messier 96, Messier 105, and NGC3628 are the most famous.

Have an enjoyable lion hunting safari!!

Image credit John Walker

Source: ESO Science Release eso1012

For the first time, astronomers have made direct measurements of the size and brightness of regions of star-birth in a very distant galaxy, thanks to a chance discovery with the APEX telescope. The galaxy is so distant, and its light has taken so long to reach us, that we see it as it was 10 billion years ago. A cosmic "gravitational lens" is magnifying the galaxy, giving us a close-up view that would otherwise be impossible. This lucky break reveals a hectic and vigorous star-forming life for galaxies in the early Universe, with stellar nurseries forming one hundred times faster than in more recent galaxies. The research is published online today in the journal Nature.(read more)

Source: Space Daily

The Corot satellite strikes again with another fascinating planet discovery. This time, the newly discovered gas giant planet may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.

Very few planets are temperate enough to allow the presence of liquid water, but the newly discovered Corot-9b is one of them. It was found on 16 May 2008 and orbits its star every 95.274 days, a little longer than Mercury takes to go round the Sun. (read more)

Source: NASA Science News

Researchers who once confidently stated that the Moon was bone-dry are now thinking the unthinkable: The Moon has so much water, there's actually a "lunar hydrosphere." International spacecraft have recently discovered no fewer than three "flavors" of moonwater and no one knows when the discoveries will end. (read more)

Source: ESA

Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA's Planck satellite. Analyzing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.(read more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1011

Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and the ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have discovered the first “normal” exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. Designated Corot-9b, the planet regularly passes in front of a star similar to the Sun located 1500 light-years away from Earth towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake).(read more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1010

New ground-breaking thermal images obtained with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great
Red Spot, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and composition with its colour. (read more)

Source: Messenger

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently approved a proposal from the MESSENGER Science Team to confer names on 10 impact craters on Mercury. The newly named craters were imaged during the mission’s three flybys of Mercury in January and October 2008 and September 2009.

The IAU has been the arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since its inception in 1919. In keeping with the established naming theme for craters on Mercury, all of the craters are named after famous deceased artists, musicians, or authors.

“All of the newly named features figure importantly in ongoing analysis of Mercury’s geological history,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “The MESSENGER Science Team is pleased that the IAU has responded promptly to our latest request for new names, so that the identities of these craters in the scientific literature can be clearly conveyed.”

The newly named craters include:

• Bek, named for the chief royal sculptor (active c. 1340 B.C.) during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten, a Pharaoh of the 18^th dynasty of Egypt. Bek is credited with the development of the “Amarna Style,” the distinctive and often peculiar combination of the exceptionally mannered and the naturalistic.
• Copland, for Aaron Copland (1900-1990), an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition and is widely known as the dean of American composers.
• Debussy, for Claude Debussy (1862-1918), among the most important of French composers and one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music. He was a central figure in European music at the turn of the 20^th Century.
• Dominici, for Maria de Dominici (1645-1703), a Maltese sculptor and painter said to have made portable cult figures used for street processions on religious feast days.
• Firdousi, for Hakīm Abu'l-Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī (935-1020), a revered Persian poet and author of the Shāhnāmeh, the national epic of Persian people and of the Iranian world.
• Geddes, for Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955), an Irish stained-glass artist and member of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Her work represented a rejection of the Late Victorian approach, and she created a new view of men in stained glass windows, portraying them with close-shaven crew cuts.
• Hokusai, for Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), a Japanese artist and printmaker of the Edo period. He was Japan's leading expert on Chinese painting and is best-known as author of the woodblock print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic and internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s.
• Kipling, for Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), a British author and poet regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story. He is best known for his works of fiction, poems, and many short stories, including those in The Jungle Book (1894).
• Picasso, for Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work.
• Steichen, for Edward Steichen (1879-1973), an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917.

These 10 newly named craters join 42 other craters named since MESSENGER's first Mercury flyby in January 2008.

Link:
Press Release - Messenger

Source: Space Daily

Desktop experiments could point the way to dark matter discovery, complementing grand astronomical searches and deep underground observations. According to recent theoretical results, small blocks of matter on a tabletop could reveal elusive properties of the as-yet-unidentified dark matter particles that make up a quarter of the universe, potentially making future large-scale searches easier.(read more)

Source: ESA

The Phobos-Grunt landing site. Credit:ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Images from the recent flyby of Phobos, on 7 March 2010, are released today. The images show Mars’ rocky moon in exquisite detail, with a resolution of just 4.4 metres per pixel. They show the proposed landing sites for the forthcoming Phobos-Grunt mission.(read more)

Source: ESA

Artist’s representation of a human mission to Mars.
Image credit: NASA/ David Mattingly and Pat Rawlings.

A crew of six, including two Europeans, will soon begin a simulated mission to Mars in a mockup that includes an interplanetary spaceship, a Mars lander and a martian landscape. The Mars500 experiment, as long as a real journey to Mars, will be second to none as the ultimate test of human endurance.

Four ESA-selected Europeans, Belgian Jerome Clevers, Arc’hanmael Gaillard and Romain Charles from France and Colombian-Italian Diego Urbina, started the mission training at the end of February with the other crew-members at the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow. Two of these four candidates will be selected as European participants in Mars500. This first full-duration simulated mission to Mars will start in a special human habitat at IBMP in Moscow next summer.

The Mars500 name comes from the blueprint for a possible human Mars mission in the future using conventional propulsion: 250 days for the trip to Mars, 30 days on the martian surface and 240 days for the return journey, totalling 520 days. (read more)

Source: Science@NASA

In yesterday's issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun's Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.

"I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we've been experiencing," says Hathaway. "The high speed of the conveyor belt challenges existing models of the solar cycle and it has forced us back to the drawing board for new ideas."

The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle. (read more)

Source: SLAC - National Accelerator Laboratory

Jets of particles streaming from black holes in far-away galaxies operate differently than previously thought, according to a study published today in Nature. The new study reveals that most of the jet's light—gamma rays, the universe's most energetic form of light—is created much farther from the black hole than expected and suggests a more complex shape for the jet. (read more)

If you are looking for something interesting today this coming weekend why not try a Messier Marathon. A Messier marathon is an attempt, usually organized by amateur astronomers, to find as many Messier objects as possible during one night. The Messier catalogue was compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier during the late 18th century and consists of 110 relatively bright deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters). For more information take a look here www.richardbell.net/marathon.html or here http://deepskymap.org/ or even here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_marathon.

Happy hunting!

Image credit: SEDS, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space,

If you are looking for something interesting today this coming weekend why not try a Messier Marathon. A Messier marathon is an attempt, usually organized by amateur astronomers, to find as many Messier objects as possible during one night. The Messier catalogue was compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier during the late 18th century and consists of 110 relatively bright deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters). For more information take a look here www.richardbell.net/marathon.html or here http://deepskymap.org/ or even here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_marathon.

Happy hunting!

Image credit: SEDS, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space,

Source: Nature

Simulation of a particle collision at ATLAS (CERN).Credit: Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

Physicists have rooted through a morass of collisions to find the heaviest antimatter nucleus yet inside one of their particle accelerators.

Collisions between gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York, have yielded heavy isotopes of antihydrogen that include a subatomic particle known as an antistrange quark, which is heavier than less unusual up or down quarks.(read more)