'Rainbow-Colored Palette' of Southern Hemisphere of Asteroid Vesta from NASA's Dawn Orbiter
This mosaic uses color data obtained by the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft and shows Vesta's southern hemisphere in false color, centered on the Rheasilvia impact basin, about 290 miles (467 kilometers) in diameter with a central mound reaching about 14 miles (23 kilometers) high. The black hole in the middle is data that have been omitted due to the angle between the sun, Vesta and the spacecraft. The green areas suggest the presence of the iron-rich mineral pyroxene or large-sized particles.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
The giant Asteroid Vesta is among the most colorful bodies in our entire solar system and it appears to be much more like a terrestrial planet than a mere asteroid, say scientists deciphering stunning new images and measurements of Vesta received from NASA’s revolutionary Dawn spacecraft. The space probe only recently began circling about the huge asteroid in July after a four year interplanetary journey.
Vesta is a heavily battered and rugged world that’s littered with craters and mysterious grooves and troughs. It is the second most massive object in the Asteroid Belt and formed at nearly the same time as the Solar System some 4.5 Billion years ago.
“The framing cameras show Vesta is one of the most colorful objects in the solar system,” said mission scientist Vishnu Reddy of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. “Vesta is unlike any other asteroid we have visited so far.”(...)
Read the rest of Rainbow of Colors Reveal Asteroid Vesta as More Like a Planet (989 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Credit: Wally Pacholka
However, conditions this year are not ideal with the presence of a waning gibbous Moon (which will be up from mid-evening until morning). But seeing meteors every few minutes is quite possible. Geminid meteors are often slow and bright with persistent coloured trails which can linger for a while after the meteor has burned up.
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© Adrian West for Universe Today, 2011. |
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This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by our very own Ray Sanders at his very own website, Dear Astronomer.
Click here to read the Carnival of Space #226 and this week’s spacey goodness.
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send and email to the above address.
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An artist's impression of a supermassive black hole. Image credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook
For years, astronomer Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy at The University of Texas at Austin have been hunting for black holes — the dense concentration of matter at the centre of galaxies. Earlier this year, they made a record-breaking discovery. They found a black hole weighing 6.7 billion times the mass of our Sun in the centre of the galaxy M87.
But now they shattered their own record. Combining new data from multiple observations, they’ve found not one but two supermassive black holes that each weigh as much as 10 billion Suns.(...)
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© Amy Shira Teitel for Universe Today, 2011. |
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he constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius (highlited) as mythical figures, near the center of the Milky Way. Credit: Southern Stars.com
You’ve probably heard of some of AWB’s project, such as The World at Night, Global Astronomy Month, and 100 Hours of Astronomy. AWB nobly works to foster understanding and goodwill across national and cultural boundaries by creating relationships through the universal appeal of astronomy. They provide and share resources, information and inspiration.
With all the great work they are doing, AWB needs some help to continue their outreach. “Interest and demand have really outstripped our start-up, volunteer, grass-roots organization,” AWB President Mike Simmons told Universe Today. “So we’re starting a fund-raising campaign that we hope will get us over the hump so we can keep up with all the opportunities there are.”
If you are considering getting an astronomy app for yourself or someone else for the holidays, consider SkySafari 3, the latest version of this popular app – and you can support AWB at the same time. But hurry – this offer ends on Dec. 8, 2011.
You can also support AWB even if you don’t need an app.
More info:
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Read the rest of Popular Astronomy App Supports Astronomers Without Borders (250 words)
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Artist concept of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. Credit Roscosmos.
Editor’s note: Dr. David Warmflash, principal science lead for the US team from the LIFE experiment on board the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, provides an update on the mission for Universe Today.
Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft is in no better position than it was a month ago, when it reached low Earth orbit on November 9 yet failed to ignite the upper stage engine that was to propel it to Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two small moons. Indeed, with an orbit measuring 204.823 kilometers at perigee (the low point) and 294.567 kilometers at apogee as of today, the spacecraft is well on its well to a fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere in early January if it cannot be rescued in the intervening time. But the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is not ready to give up on the probe yet, and have asked ESA to resume trying to contact Phobos-Grunt.
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Read the rest of Not Giving Up Yet: ESA Resumes Effort to Communicate with Phobos-Grunt (636 words)
© David Warmflash for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Aligning his camera on the same star for nine successive exposures, Sky & Telescope contributing photographer Akira Fujii captured this record of the Moon’s progress dead center through the Earth’s shadow in July 2000. Credit: Sky & Telescope / Akira Fujii
Are you ready for some good, old-fashioned observing fun? Although you might not want to get up early, it’s going to be worth your time. This Saturday, December 10, 2011, marks the last total lunar eclipse event for the western portion of the Americas until 2014. While a solar eclipse event has a very small footprint where it is visible, a lunar eclipse has a wide and wonderful path that encompasses a huge amount of viewers. “We’re all looking at this together,” says Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert. (...)
Read the rest of Lunar Eclipse – Saturday, December 10, 2011 (415 words)
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Coronal Mass Ejection as viewed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 7, 2011.
Image Credit: NASA/SDO
© Ray Sanders for Universe Today, 2011. |
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A video posted today by the team at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows two recent events on the Sun: a twisting prominence and the “eclipse” of a plasma eruption by the structure of a darker, cooler filament. Most impressive!
(...)
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© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Artist’s impression illustrating the formation process of massive stars. At the end of the formation process, the surrounding accretion disk disappears, revealing the surface of the young star. At this phase the young massive star is much larger than when it has reached a stable equilibrium, i.e., when arriving on the so-called main sequence. Copyright: Lucas Ellerbroek/Lex Kaper University of Amsterdam
It might be hard to believe, but massive stars are larger in their infant stage than they are when fully formed. Thanks to a team of astronomers at the University of Amsterdam, observations have shown that during the initial stages of creation, super-massive stars are super-sized. This research now confirms the theory that massive stars contract until they reach the age of equilibrium. (...)
Read the rest of Massive Stars Start Life Big… Really BIG! (451 words)
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A big eclipsed Moon over Indian Peaks in Colorado. Credit: Patrick Cullis
It was the final lunar eclipse of the year, and the last total lunar eclipse event for the western portion of the Americas until 2014, so skywatchers took advantage of clear skies, and many have shared their images and videos with Universe Today. Enjoy the views! For many of the images you can click on them and see larger versions on our Flickr group.
Above is a view in Colorado, taken by Patrick Cullis, showing the Indian Peaks with the eclipsing Moon setting overhead, taken during the lunar eclipse in the early morning hours of December 10, 2011. The Indian Peaks are a series of peaks on the continental divide near Boulder, Colorado. “The Moon set behind the continental divide right before totality, but it was still an awesome sight,” Cullis said.
Below is a video a to-die-for view of the eclipse over the Pacific Ocean.
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Read the rest of Skywatchers Share Lunar Eclipse Photos, Videos (241 words)
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A scale comparison chart showing lots of big stars - but note that after Rigel (frame 5) they are all red giants. When the Sun goes red giant it will become about the size of Arcturus (frame 4) - so maybe this kind of 'snapshot in time' comparison is misleading? Credit: Wikimedia.
You may have seen one of these astronomical scale picture sequences, where you go from the Earth to Jupiter to the Sun, then the Sun to Sirius – and all the way up to the biggest star we know of VY Canis Majoris. However, most of the stars at the big end of the scale are at a late point in their stellar lifecycle – having evolved off the main sequence to become red supergiants.
The Sun will go red giant in 5 billion years or so – achieving a new radius of about one Astronomical Unit – equivalent to the average radius of the Earth’s orbit (and hence debate continues around whether or not the Earth will be consumed). In any case, the Sun will then roughly match the size of Arcturus, which although voluminously big, only has a mass of roughly 1.1 solar masses. So, comparing star sizes without considering the different stages of their stellar evolution might not be giving you the full picture.(...)
Read the rest of Astronomy Without A Telescope – How Big Is Big? (554 words)
© Steve Nerlich for Universe Today, 2011. |
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A high-resolution infrared image of Dragonfish association, showing the shell of hot gas. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/GLIMPSE Team/Mubdi Rahman
At the University of Toronto, a trio of astronomers have been fishing – fishing for a copious catch of young, supermassive stars. What they caught was unprecedented… Hundreds of thousands of stars with several hundreds of these being the most massive kind. They hauled in blue stars dozens of times heavier than the Sun, with light so intense it ate its way through the gas that created it. All that’s left is the hollow egg-shell… A shell that measures a hundred light years across. (...)
Read the rest of In The Dragonfish’s Mouth – The Next Generation Of “SuperStars” (763 words)
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A composite image of the Whirlpool Galaxy (also known as M51). The green image is from the Hubble Space Telescope and shows the optical wavelength. The submillimetre light detected by SCUBA-2 is shown in red (850 microns) and blue (450 microns). The Whirlpool Galaxy lies at an estimated distance of 31 million light years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici Credit: JAC / UBC / Nasa
The stars and faint galaxies you see when you look up at the night sky are all emitting light within the visible light spectrum — the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see with our unaided eyes or through optical telescopes. But our galaxy, and many others, contain huge amounts of cold dust that absorbs visible light. This accounts for the dark regions.
A new camera recently unveiled at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii promises to figuratively shed light on this dark part of the universe. The SCUBA-2 submillimetre camera (SCUBA in this case is an acronym for Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array) can detect light at lower energy levels, allowing astronomers to gather data on these dark areas and ultimately learn more about our universe and its formation. (...)
Read the rest of New Submillimetre Camera Sheds Light on the Dark Regions of the Universe (599 words)
© Amy Shira Teitel for Universe Today, 2011. |
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2011 Geminids in the Winter Triangle. Image Courtesy of John Chumack
Have you been watching the Geminid Meteor Shower? With just hours to go before the peak, activity has been high – despite this year’s Moon! If you’d like to know more on the history of this meteor shower, then check out this great article by Adrian West. If you plan on watching and would like to do something cool and unusual, then step inside… (...)
Read the rest of Geminid Meteor Shower Reminder and There’s An App For That! (588 words)
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December 10 lunar eclipse by Joseph Brimacombe
Photographer Joseph Brimacombe created this stunning image of a ruddy Moon made during the total lunar eclipse of December 10, 2011. Images taken during the penumbral and total phases of the eclipse were combined to create a full-face image of the Moon in color. Beautiful!
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Read the rest of A Blood-Red Moon (98 words)
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An artists concept of the Phobos-Grunt Mission. Credit: Roscosmos
Editor’s note: Dr. David Warmflash, principal science lead for the US team from the LIFE experiment on board the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, provides an update on the mission for Universe Today.
It has been trapped in low Earth orbit for more than a month. So low is the orbit that it moves too fast to be contacted – unless controllers on the ground just happen to beam a signal at some unlikely angle. So short does its battery power last that it must be in sunlight while also in position to receive signals. Then, it must still have power to send telemetry back to the ground.
Even with these obstacles, Russia’s Phobos- Grunt probe did manage to communicate with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) antenna in Perth, Australia twice a couple of weeks ago, indicating that some of its systems were functioning. But subsequent attempts at communication have failed, despite the addition of ESA’s Canary Islands antenna at Maspalomas to the worldwide effort to reestablish control over the spacecraft.
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Read the rest of A Day in the Sun: Will It Make a Difference for Russia’s Phobos-Grunt? (381 words)
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Dawn Orbiting Vesta
This artist's concept shows NASA's Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta. The depiction of Vesta is based on images obtained by Dawn's framing cameras. Dawn is an international collaboration of the US, Germany and Italy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter successfully spiraled down today to the closest orbit the probe will ever achieve around the giant asteroid Vesta, and has now begun critical science observations that will ultimately yield the mission’s highest resolution measurements of this spectacular body.
“What can be more exciting than to explore an alien world that until recently was virtually unknown!” Dr. Marc Rayman gushed in an exclusive interview with Universe Today. Rayman is Dawn’s Chief Engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and a protégé of Star Trek’s Mr. Scott.
Before Dawn, Vesta was little more than a fuzzy blob in the world’s most powerful telescopes. Vesta is the second most massive object in the main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.(...)
Read the rest of Dawn swoops to lowest orbit around Vesta – Unveiling Spectacular Alien World (969 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Credit: Third Rock Radio/NASA
If you love space and love internet radio, as I do, then this is for you. NASA’s new internet music radio station, Third Rock, was just launched yesterday. With a New Rock/Indie/Alternative music format aimed toward younger, techie listeners, it will feature custom-produced content; a collaboration between NASA and RFC Media in Houston, Texas, it will be operated through a Space Act Agreement, at no cost to the government. As NASA explores space, Third Rock also explores new music, bringing the two together in a fun and unique way.
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© Paul Scott Anderson for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Scientist-astronaut Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt stands next to a huge, split lunar boulder during the third Apollo 17 extravehicular activity (EVA) at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), which transported Schmitt and Eugene A. Cernan to this extravehicular station from their Lunar Module (LM), is seen in the background. This image is a mosaic made from two pictures taken by Cernan. Image Credit: NASA/Eugene Cernan
On December 13, 1972, Apollo 17 Commander Eugene A. Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt made the final lunar EVA or moonwalk of the final Apollo mission. Theirs was the longest stay on the Moon at just over three days and included over twenty-two hours spent exploring the lunar surface during which they collected over 250 pounds of lunar samples.
To commemorate the thirty-ninth anniversary of this last EVA, NASA posted a picture of Schmitt on the lunar surface as its ’Image of the Day.’ (...)
Read the rest of The Thirty-Ninth Anniversary of the Last Moonwalk (553 words)
© Amy Shira Teitel for Universe Today, 2011. |
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The large scale cosmological mass distribution in the simulation volume of the MassiveBlack. The projected gas density over the whole volume ('unwrapped' into 2D) is shown in the large scale (background) image. The two images on top show two zoom-in of increasing factor of 10, of the regions where the most massive black hole - the first quasars - is formed. The black hole is at the center of the image and is being fed by cold gas streams. Image Courtesy of Yu Feng.
What fed early black holes enabling their very rapid growth? A new discovery made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University using a combination of supercomputer simulations and GigaPan Time Machine technology shows that a diet of cosmic “fast food” (thin streams of cold gas) flowed uncontrollably into the center of the first black holes, causing them to be “supersized” and grow faster than anything else in the Universe.
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Read the rest of Looking at Early Black Holes with a ‘Time Machine’ (756 words)
© Ray Sanders for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Configuration of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. Credit: NPO Lavochkin
Editor’s note: Dr. David Warmflash, principal science lead for the US team from the LIFE experiment on board the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, provides an update on the mission for Universe Today.
As last-ditch efforts to recover control of the unpiloted Phobos-Grunt spacecraft continue, officials, engineers, and scientists at the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) have shifted their focus to the issue of reentry. Launched November 9 by a Zenit-2 rocket on a mission to return a sample from Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two small moons, the spacecraft reached low Earth orbit. However, since the engine of the upper stage that was to propel it on a trajectory to Mars failed to ignite, the spacecraft continues to orbit Earth in a low orbit. Despite some limited success in communicating with Phobos-Grunt by way of tracking stations that the European Space Agency (ESA) operates in Perth, Australia, and Masplalomas, Canary Islands, the spacecraft remains stranded in an orbit whose decay will take the craft into the atmosphere sometime in early January.
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Read the rest of Russian Space Program Prepares for Phobos-Grunt Re-Entry (438 words)
© David Warmflash for Universe Today, 2011. |
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