Source: Spitzer Space Telescope
Image credit: Spitzer Space Telescope
Astronomers have discovered bucket loads of buckyballs in space. They used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to find the little carbon spheres throughout our Milky Way galaxy -- in the space between stars and around three dying stars. What's more, Spitzer detected buckyballs around a fourth dying star in a nearby galaxy in staggering quantities -- the equivalent in mass to about 15 of our moons. (read more)
A bulge of elevated topography on the farside of the Moon - known as the lunar farside highlands - has defied explanation for decades. But a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that the highlands may be the result of tidal forces acting early in the Moon's history when its solid outer crust floated on an ocean of liquid rock. Since the Apollo 15 laser altimeter experiment, scientists have known that a region of the lunar far side highlands is the highest place on the Moon. Additionally, the far side has only highlands and no maria.
Image credit: NASA/JPL
This research was published on the issue 12, November 2010, of Science magazine by Ian Garrick-Bethell, Francis Nimmo and Mark A. Wieczorek. The group of international scientists found that perhaps the tidal processes of Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, can provide a clue. Like Europa’s icy crust that sits over an ocean of liquid water, the Moon’s crust once floated on a sub-surface ocean of liquid rock. So, could the same gravitational forces from Jupiter that influence Europa also apply to the Earth’s influence on the early Moon? Garrick-Bethell and his team found that the shape of the Moon’s bulge can be calculated by looking at the variations in tidal heating as the ancient lunar crust was being torn away from the underlying ocean of liquid magma.
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Credit:Hubble Site News Release STScI-2010-37
Hubble Helps Astronomers Map Dark Matter in Abell 1689. Image credit: HST
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope received a boost from a cosmic magnifying glass to construct one of the sharpest maps of dark matter in the universe. They used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to chart the invisible matter in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located 2.2 billion light-years away. The cluster contains about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass. Hubble cannot see the dark matter directly. Astronomers inferred its location by analyzing the effect of gravitational lensing, where light from galaxies behind Abell 1689 is distorted by intervening matter within the cluster.
Researchers used the observed positions of 135 lensed images of 42 background galaxies to calculate the location and amount of dark matter in the cluster. They superimposed a map of these inferred dark matter concentrations, tinted blue, on a Hubble image of the cluster. The new dark matter observations may yield new insights into the role of dark energy in the universe's early formative years. (read more)
Source: NASA/JPL News
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
NASA's EPOXI mission spacecraft successfully flew past comet Hartley 2 at 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) Thursday, Nov. 4. Scientists say initial images from the flyby provide new information about the comet's volume and material spewing from its surface.(read more)
Today is Carl Sagan Day — a chance to remember the legacy of one of the greatest science promoters ever.
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, author, cosmologist, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he advocated skeptical inquiry and the scientific method. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Sagan became world-famous for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. A book to accompany the program was also published.The series Cosmos became an inspiration for many children and young people that later on became astronomers.
Sagan also wrote the novel Contact, the basis for the 1997 film of the same name.
Credit: ESA/Herschel
Gravitational lenses in part of the Herschel-ATLAS survey field.
Image credit: ESA / SPIRE / Herschel-ATLAS / SJ Maddox
Astronomers using early data from one of the largest projects to be undertaken with the ESA Herschel Space Observatory have demonstrated that virtually all bright sub-millimetre galaxies in the distant Universe are subject to gravitational lensing, which amplifies their flux thus easing their detection and characterisation. Analysis of less than three per cent of the entire Herschel-ATLAS survey, which probes the distant and hidden Universe, yielded a first sample of five lensed galaxies and paves the way for the compilation, in the near future, of a rich catalogue of distant, star-forming and dust-obscured galaxies. The results are reported in the 5 November 2010 issue of Science. (Read more)
