BMU Episode 465

Episode 465

This week I have two stories.

Opening Doors by Sean Mulroy and Handyman by Frank Banta.

 I start with Elton John's Rocketman, then head over for a few articles from the blog.

Astronomers have observed the most luminous galaxies in the universe. 10 bil 4 after big bang. Bigelow spacecraft module. Supergirl still has not been reserved. The Batman / Joker animation "The Killing Joke" is due out this summer and The Justice League vs Tean Titans is available as of this publication. Finally Adam Nemoy "For the Love of Spock" has released a trailer. Adam raised over 600 thousand dollars towards the final project. No time line yet, but I can not imagine it being too far out there.

Thanks to Mebbles for the update!

Here is the direct link to the program.   Press Here

A Research Team Has Discovered 854 Ultra-Dark Galaxies

A color image made with multi-band images from the Subaru Telescope.

 

 

 

 

 

A team of researchers from Stony Brook University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, have discovered 854 "ultra-dark galaxies" in the Coma Cluster.  The team analyzed data from the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope. The new discovery surpasses the 2014 discovery of 47 mysterious dark galaxies by more than 800 and seems to suggest that galaxy clusters are the key environment for the evolution of these mysterious dark galaxies.

A small region of 6 x 6 arc-minutes is cut out from large Coma Cluster images. Yellow circles show two of the 47 dark galaxies discovered last year, and green circles are the ones 

discovered in this new study.
Credit: NAOJ 

Read the complete Science Daily article, HERE

New Stars, in Time, Will Distroy Their Own Nursery

Check out this Space.com short video narrated by David Sky Brodie, featuring the cosmic gas cloud Gum 15 which  lies 3,000 light-years from Earth.   The nebula is playing nurse-maid to several super-massive stars that, when they enter their "young adult" stage will begin to tear Gum 15 apart.   Plus due to the fact that super massive stars have very short lives that when they exhaust their fuel, they will go supernova and the resulting explosion will take Gum 15 with them.

This new data comes from representatives with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which released  the    film and photo, from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile  July 2.

Goldilock Zone Redefined

The Goldilocks Zone, according to the Wikipedia, is: 

• In astronomy and astrobiology, habitable zone (more accurately, circumstellar habitable zone ) is the scientific term for the region around a star within which it is theoretically possible for a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure to maintain liquid water on its surface.

In the past this has been fairly easy to determine as, where ever the Earth was in reference to a yellow dwarf star, that was the habitual zone, and all other calculations could be made from this generality.  

Well Space.Com has an article that seems to throw a bit of a monkey wrench in to the mix.

In a recent article:

• Now scientists have redefined the boundaries of the habitable zone for alien planets, potentially kicking out some exoplanaets that were thought to fall within it, and maybe allowing a few that had been excluded to squeeze in.

What surprised me however was the redefined low end (how close a planet can be) for an Earth style system  was .99 AU.  Earth at 1 AU just barely makes the cut as a world almost too hot to maintain liquid water without it boiling away.  

Many astrobiologists are surprised at the closeness of Earth to the inside edge.  Plus with the new definition, many planets now fall into a to hot class not likely to harbor life.  

Read the Dvice article 

What tastes like raspberries & Smells of Rum?

Well according the the Guardian, the galactic center say astronomers!   It seems that in a search for complex molecules in the universe uncovered large "fruity" molecules.  

While exploring a large dust cloud in the Milky Way discovered ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their flavor and also makes up the smell of rum, the conclusion being that the center of the galaxy tastes mildly of fruit and alcohol.

Astronomers have be searching the vast dust cloud surrounding Sagittarius B2, which resides at the center of our galaxy, for amino acids.   Up to this point they have not had any luck finding the building block of life but discovering ethyl formate was interesting.  

Scientists caution that it takes many other molecules to make space raspberries or rum for that matter.

Another  chemical discovered in large amounts was the lethal chemical propyl cyanide  which leads one to suggest that tasting the center of the galaxy may "kill" you.  

read the complete article here

Thanks to listener Courtney for the link. 

Zoomable Milky Way Mosaic

Here is one short and sweet. Astronomers assembled hundreds of infrared photos of the milky way. All of them put together form a mosaic that is zoomable.

The utility was constructed using images from the nine gigapixel VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory.    This provided a dataset that contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies!  This gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy.

 You can find this browser based utility here  or click the top photo

Primordial Gas Clouds Identified - Left over Since the Time of the Big Bang

Astronomers from University of California, Santa Cruz and Saint Michael's College in Vermont, believe they have discovered two gas clouds that they describe as pristine relics unchanged since their formation only 2 billion years after the big bang itself.

What makes the structures even more unusual is their chemical makeup. The clouds are composed of gas that is of primordial composition. Gas as it was when produced during the first few minutes after the Big Bang.

Check it out at Physicsworld.com

Remmants of Atmosphere Discovered on Dwarf Planet

In an article in The Daily Galaxy - I read that scientists at California Institute of Technology

• have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10 is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice....

This suggests that:

• the planet may be covered in a thin layer of methane, ... remnants of an atmosphere
  

There is also evidence that this ancient frozen atmosphere is being slowly lost to space.

The planet, dubbed "Snow White" was discovered in 2007 and orbits the sun at the very edge of the Solar System and is about half the size of Pluto, making it the fifth largest dwarf planet.

Read the complete article here