There Are More Stars than you can Imagine!

I love thought experiments like this.  Ones that instill awe and thought provoking as well. 

From PBS via the Kim Komando blog is a short film that once again amazes one to just imagine how many stars are visible vs how many are really in the field of view. 

As a gift one year, I received a copy of the deep field experiment which is totally amazing as to how many galaxies ARE out there, even in the most empty part of the sky.

Check it out, you too will be amazed!

Supernova May Indeed be the Stuff Planets Are Made of......

An international group of scientists, using data obtained from NASA's SOFIA, an infrared observatory, have concluded that  supernova do indeed output enough material for planetary formation.

The groups observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago. The cloud contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths.  

The researchers had evidence that a supernova’s outward-moving shock wave can produce huge amounts of dust. The question was - would the dust continue to spread, after encountering the interstellar medium - or be pushed back into the relative vicinity of the supernova. 

The team found that The dust survived the initial shock waves from the supernova event and continued "flowing into the interstellar medium where it can become part of the ...  material for new stars and planets..."

Check out the complete NASA article HERE

As Many As Half of all Stars May Reside Outside of Galaxies

Scientists from the U.S., Japan & Korea have released a study that concludes that as many as half of all stars may not be affiliated with a galaxy but instead may have been pushed out of their parent galaxy by mergers and collisions.

Individually, these stars are way too faint to be detected, but collectively they create a background of fluctuating near-infrared light.   This diffuse glow is as bright as all the known galaxies combined and may mean that galaxies do not have sharp edges but soft boundaries that spread out to connect to other galaxies.

Read the complete ABC News article HERE

What Stars Would We Visit First?

Once a really fast interstellar drive is produced and or human hibernation is perfected, there are a number of stars close to us that would be interesting. From the IO9 online blog:

• Astronaut Mae Jemison heads a group called the 100 Year Starship....(their goal) making interstellar travel a reality in 100 years. They've just produced this video, showing some of the stars that are "close" that are good candidates for visiting
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Hyper-velocity Ejected Star

Now here is another truly strange character - Ejected Stars or Rogue Stars if you like. These are stars that astronomers say are or were ejected from the MW galaxy.

It would seem however that this is an extremely difficult thing to do. Here is an excerpt of the Science Daily article that gives you an idea just HOW difficult.

• the primary mechanism (for ejecting stars from the milky-way galaxy) that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's core.

It seems that it is so difficult and thus so rare that only sixteen hyper-velocity stars have been verified, and even though they have enough speed to eventually leave the Milky Way all together, they are still "inside" the galaxy.

However this may not be the case completely. Here is another excerpt.

• Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hyper-velocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core.

Very strange indeed.  Here is the link to the rest of the Science Daily article

Picture shows Four runaway stars plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas and creating bright bow waves and trailing tails of glowing gas. The stars in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are among 14 young runaway stars spotted by the Advanced Camera for Surveys between October 2005 and July 2006 (from wikipedia.org)

A backyard planetarium

Now this is what I call dedication! I won't ruin it for you but just to tell you it's ubber geekie and if you are jealous....well you're just as geekie as I am, because next to wanting one myself is the wish I could be there every day! I love these little CBS News shorts!

Looking for Life in all the WRONG places....

Shaun sends in an article from NewScientist that suggests that we may be looking in all the WRONG places for life outside out own planet.

According to the article:

• The universe's best real estate for life may be around stars a little less massive than the sun, called orange dwarfs - These stars live much longer than sun-like stars, and have safer habitable zone. Orange dwarfs, massing between 50 and 80% that of the sun, have only a little bit more flare activity than sun-like stars and far less than longer lived red dwarf stars. Lower flare activity means less radiation stress on any life bearing planets plus they would also provide a haven for life for a much longer time – roughly double the 10-billion-year lifetime of a sun-like star.
• Moreover, they change very little in brightness compared to sun-like stars. Our own sun has brightened by about 30% since the solar system began, and will likely make Earth too hot for life in about 1 billion years, even though the sun will still have about 5 billion years of fuel left to burn.
  
• Another factor in Orange dwarfs favor for possible life supporting star systems, is that they are about three to four times as abundant as sun-like stars...

more

Breakthru shows that 1 in 3 solar type stars have planets!

From ScienceDaily : European astronomers have announced a remarkable breakthrough in the field of extra-solar planets. Using the HARPS instrument at the ESO La Silla Observatory, they have found a triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307. Moreover, looking at their entire sample studied with HARPS, the astronomers count a total of 45 candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. This implies that one solar-like star out of three harbors such planets. Since the discovery in 1995 of a planet around the star 51 Pegasi more than 270 exoplanets have been found. These planets were in the Jovian class like Saturn and Jupiter and about 1 in 14 stars had this class of planet. But now with better instrumentation, it's possible to spot planets 2 to 10 times the size of the Earth. This lends the question of just how many stars have planets. Up to this point, only short duration planets were being found (planets that orbit their primary very quickly). This new level of sensitivity will allow astronomers to look for longer duration planets which may ultimately show that virtually all solar class stars have planets.

Astronomers discovered the largest diamond of all times in space.

I found this article an interesting intellectual exercise. Why? Well, anyone that has studied even basic astronomy has heard about white dwarf stars and how they are formed, and what their makeup is like in latter stages of their life. Basically what I found interesting is that I understood the sequences of a star like our own or slightly larger going off main sequence. Going through it red giant stage and collapsing back to a white or brown dwarf. The cause is mostly running out of hydrogen and burning helium into carbon. (gross oversimplification, I know. ) Intellectually you know that this carbon has to be under extreme compression....but I just never went to the next logical step. What exactly is this compressed carbon....well in Pravda online (I know.... first time I ever ran across a straight science article here....one never knows) I saw a title that I just had to read. Astronomers discover largest diamond in space! Here are some excerpts, click on the article title to read complete story.

Astronomers discovered the largest diamond of all times in space. The weight is estimated at ten billion trillion trillion carats or five million trillion trillion pounds). The space diamond is virtually an enormous chunk of crystallized carbon, 4,000 kilometers in diameter. The stone is located at a distance of 50 light years from Earth, in the Constellation Centaurus. The "diamond" also known as BPM 37093, is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

Do you know the way to.....GLIESE?

GLIESE 581c has got to be the ultimate tourist destination. It is the first rocky planet beyond our solar system with anything like a pleasant climate. Imagine How mind-blowing would it be just to stroll along its beaches - surely it must have beaches - or watch the planet's red-dwarf sun setting in a scarlet blaze over the alien landscape. There's just one little problem - Gliese 581c is 20 light years away - over a million times the distance from Earth to the sun. Even at half the speed of light you'd spend the best part of 50 years cooped up in a smelly space capsule.

Shaun Saunders has sent in an article from New Scientist online magazine that explores some of the most interesting and practical methods that could make a trip to the stars closer.

Organic compound found in the stars

From Nature.com

Astronomers have found the largest (organic) molecule so far seen in interstellar space. The discovery, of an organic compound, suggests that the chemical building blocks of life may be more common in the Universe than had been previously thought. The discovery, along with that of three smaller organic molecules in the past year, opens up a suite of potential chemical reactions and products. It suggests that 'prebiotic' molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of protein, could form all over the Universe

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunder for the post

photo by NASA

Dwarf Star Gulps Giant To Form Supernova

New research proposes the formation of type 1a supernova

Science Daily — A team of European and American astronomers has announced the discovery of the best evidence yet for the nature of the star systems that explode as type Ia supernovae. The team obtained a unique set of observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Keck I 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. The researchers were able to detect the signature of the material that surrounded the star before it exploded. The evidence strongly supports the scenario in which the explosion occurred in a double-star system where a white dwarf is fed by a red giant.

(Credit: European Southern Observatory)

Tracing Our Sun’s Family Tree

Shaun Saunders sent me an interesting story from Space.com.

In the story, new research is going on, into the chemical composition of stars could identify our Sun's long lost family. Present theories suggest that our Sun was born in an open cluster some 4.6 billion years ago, growing alongside its sibling stars. An open clusters are loosely gravitationally bound groups containing up to a few thousand individual stars. These clusters formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud of gas and can have ages up to 10 billion years. Each cluster has a unique chemical composition. The rresult of which are that the member stars of each cluster shared the same chemical composition. Such chemical homogeneity is expected if all the stars are formed together within the same parent gas cloud, and as such, it should be possible to trace back which stars belonged in the same group as SOL even though the loose knit cluster separated billions of years ago.

click here for more of the article at Space.com