What Planet Was First to be Viewed With a Telescope

 

You know by now that my humor tends to be a bit off color:

Case in point is from Elite Facts.  They report that the very first planet to be viewed with a telescope was Uranus, 

Think about it for a bit......

The rest of this list can be had on YouTuve HERE

Astronomers have observed the most luminous galaxies ever seen in the universe

Using the 50-meter diameter Large Millimeter Telescope, located on the summit of Sierra Negra, a 15,000-foot extinct volcano in the central state of Puebla, one of Mexico’s highest mountains, astronomers have observed what they are calling “outrageously luminous” galaxies, because there is no scientific terms apply.

The newly observed galaxies are about 10 billion years old and were formed only about four billion years after the Big Bang.

The galaxies brightness is due in part to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing that magnifies light passing near massive objects, making them look about 10 times brighter than they really are.

For the complete article click HERE

NASA Hopes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe With WFIRST 'scope

Contributor Barry sent in this article from NASA.

NASA is formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the
universe with the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

WFIRST has a view 100 times bigger than that of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.  This will aid
researchers unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the
cosmos. It may also aide in discovering new worlds, suitable for life, outside our solar system.

For a complete look at the full NASA article, click HERE

How to See a Black-hole With a Small Telescope

Blackholes are one of the most mysterious and powerful objects in the universe. Plus, due to their nature, all but invisible.

Scientists traditionally have used x-ray or gamma ray telescopes in hopes of locating new singularities.

Unfortunately these installations are large and expensive, well outside the capabilities of the back yard astronomer.

Now, according the the original Gizmodo article, a new study suggests that we could accomplish the same thing with

nothing more than a standard, optical 8-inch telescope.

This hat trick is accomplished by one of the most common black hole - an X-Ray binary consisting of a massive dead star that proceeds to absorb all the material in it's vicinity.   This leads to the emission of huge amounts of X-Rays, but a new discovery shows that the X-Ray binary also emits a small amount of low - level light, but well within the capabilities of a modest backyard telescope.

Using data from a nearby black hole (V404 Cygni which had a recent flickering event) the black hole was show to emit low-energy photons which makes the singularity "flicker" and visible to even modest telescopes.

Video  of  V404 Cygni flickering

Complete Gizmodo article

Spitzer Notices Cosmic Smash-up

Scientists studying star NGC 2547-ID8 witnessed a  huge amount of new dust between  August 2012 and January 2013.  Speculation has it that two very large asteroids collided in that system. 

While asteroid collisions have been observed by Spitzer before, this is the first time scientists have collected data before and after a smashup - offering a glimpse into the process of making planets like ours.

Check out the NASA site for the complete article HERE

3D Printed Telescope?!

Wow, what a weird co-incident! Justin, one of my anime guys and I were talking about the effects and the possibility of 3D printing and up comes this article from the Adafruit blog concerning NASA's experimenting with a complete 3D build of a telescope.

 NASA Aerospace Engineer Jason Budinoff  aims to complete the telescope by the end of the fiscal year, and afterwards, the entire assembly will undergo vigorous testing to assure that it is space worthy.

Read the rest of the very interesting addafruit 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.

Air Force Engineer Invents new way to Track Space Debris

AF Engineer Richard Rast has taken on a formidable task, in hopes of keeping present and future astronauts, and their equipment, safe. 

As you might remember, one of my soapbox subjects has been the amount of space debris in orbit around the Earth.  There is roughly 500,000 pieces of debris, all traveling at 17 thousand miles per hour, capable of doing significant damage to astronauts and the vital hardware that is orbiting as well. 

Rast's system could be a low cost augment to the present method which rely on expensive telescopes, radar systems and considerable manpower for analysis.  Rast's method uses small telescopes who's images are then converted to "movies".  From here he :

• uses the human eye’s sensitivity to detect variations between frames to separate man-made objects from the star background and identify objects the size of just a few centimeters.  (from the Washington Post article HERE)

 Read the complete article HERE

Planck Deep Space Telescope Retired

 

Launched in 2009 and instrumental in determining the true age of the universe, which was 80 million years older that scientists had estimated,  the Planck telescope is being retired.  

Planck  spent all of it's working life in deep space behind a super cooled detector, which, along with it's sister scope the Herschel Space Observatory, its primary function was to study some of the most ancient photons thought to have been created at the time of the big bang.  

Herschel went offline in April of this year, but Planck continued on until its supply of liquid helium coolant expired, at which time the scientists operating Planck agreed that the scope had reached the end of its operational life.  

Planck will now be moved into a parking orbit around the sun.    The the final deactivation command was sent to Planck on 23 October 2013.

To read more:  Gizmodo  and The Wikipedia

World's Bigest Telescope Now Online

With the arrival of the 54th—and for those of you that have been counting, the final—12-meter wide

radio telescope, means that the single largest telescope,  can finally begin exploring the cosmos with a full complement of  dishes.

For those of you in caves for the past decade, the telescope in question is the Atacama Large Millimeter Array  or ALMA, an absolutely huge radio telescope array, will provide an unprecedented view of interstellar space.   How unprecedented you might ask?  Well with all the dishes now online, ALMA could spot something the size of a golf-balls at about eight miles.  ALMA will give astronomers looks inside stellar nurseries where giant clouds of dust and gas  create  new stars as well as provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array is as you might guess located in the Atacama desert of northern Chile  on the Chajnantor plateau at about 16500 foot altitude.  ALMA will consist  of 66 12-meter and 7-meter diameter radio telescopes (54 will be 12-meter dishes with the remaining to be made up of smaller dishes).   The telescope was designed to look at the millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths.  ALMA can change it's "band" of viewing by clever movement of the antenna arrays.  The antennas can be moved across the desert with distances from 500 feet to 10 miles, giving ALMA a  variable "zoom" lens, if you would. 

Gizmodo article

SOFIA Observatory Observes Massive Star Formation

Researchers using the airborne SOFIA have observed the most detailed infrared images yet of a

massive star condensing within a dense cloud of dust and gas.

The star,  commonly known as G35. It is one of the most massive known of its' type and is located  8,000 light-years from Earth.

As fantastic as this discovery is, the SOFIA platform is even more interesting.

SOFIA started its' life as a 747 wide body built in 1977 and delivered to Pan American Airways where it remained a commercial carrier for pan am until 86 when United purchased the plane keeping it flying until 1995 when United moved the plane to storage.

In 1997 the plane was purchased by Universities Space Research Association for use as an airborne observatory.  NASA purchased the platform from USRA in the same year.

In 1998, Raytheon designed and installed an 18  by 13.5 foot wide  door in the aft port side of the aircraft's fuselage.  This door can be opened in-flight to give  access to the sky.  Access in this instance comes in the form of a 2.5-meter  infrared  reflector telescope, which has an over-sized, 2.7 meter diameter primary mirror.

There is much more at NASA and at Wikipedia

All-Wavelengths Galactic Center Photo

It seems that beautiful pics of galactic structures are a dime a dozen.  But this one just caught my eye.  

This is what the Wired Blog said about the pic:

• In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy 
• Each telescope's contribution is presented in a different color: Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. They outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars. Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments. Blue and violet represents the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center

• It truly is a fascinating image.  What is even more amazing is the fact that the composite photo covers.  This whole photo covers just 1/2 of a degree, about the width of the full moon.

Oldest Super Nova Explosion discovered

From the Daily Galaxy magazine:

• Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest supernova ever detected -- a massive star that exploded 11 billion years ago.
• Prior to this discovery, NASA’s Swift Observatory had detected a 13-billion-year-old gamma-ray burst.... but this latest discovery marks the first confirmation of a full-on star explosion.

First thing this shows is that the first 2 billion years, the Universe was a VERY busy place. It was a hot dense and inhospitable as you could imagine.

Film of the ALMA Telescope

Higher than any other ground based observatory, located in Chile, is the new ALMA milimeter wave length telescope. Only about a third of the dishes in the array are installed as of yet, but ALMA is the most powerful scopes of it's type. By 2013 all of it's 66 dishes will be installed, bringing ALMA to full power, but early results from the already onsite dishes are already giving us an idea of what is to come.

Check out the short film on the scope.

ALMA Opens Its Eyes from NRAO Outreach on Vimeo.

A Star Cooler than Boiling Water?

In a discovery that blurs the definition of what is a large planet and what is a small star comes a story from IO9 which details the discovery of a weird little beastie called a brown dwarf. We have known for some time that one of these strange little stars exists virtually in our backyard 63 light-years distant. But recently it's become clearer hows strange some of them are. Most of course are hardly larger than Jupiter. This means that Hydrogen fusion can not take place. (a mass 60 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter is needed) Brown dwarfs are often very dense animals. Though they may be about the size of Jupiter, they are many times more dense. It really is difficult to call them stars at all. The Spitzer telescope has uncovered a few brown dwarfs that are at most 16 Jupiter masses. Stranger still is their internal temperature is well below that of boiling water and one labeled WD 0806-661B may have a temperature of just 86 degrees Fahrenheit! How many hot days have you heard someone say "it's hotter than the surface of a star out today!" and now it could be a true statement! LOL.

Check out the rest of this weird article on the IO9 blog HERE

Star with bad dietary choices

Yahoo News posts an article with data from Hubble about a star caught in the act of devouring its' own planet. The planet, WASP-12b, located about 600 light-years from Earth is more than 300 times the size of Earth and is so close to its' primary that it orbits the star in less than 24 hours.

The planet is hellish. The planet's surface temperature is the highest of any planet in the Milky Way -- around 1,500 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Extreme tidal forces have distorted the planet into a football shape. These forces have raised the internal temperature so high that it has ballooned the atmosphere several times larger than Jupiter which the parent star siphons off. This process will probably continue over the next ten million years at which time the star will completely devour the planet.

Thanks to Tim Sayell for the post

Baloon Launched Observatory Destroyed

In a spectaular crash, today in Alice Springs, a territory of in northern Australia, over 2 million dollars in a painstakingly built telescope. The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), a gamma-ray telescope was to be carried aloft by a huge helium balloon.

The research balloon was built by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas was expected to haul its two-telescope payload up to an altitude of about 120,000 feet, but failed to lift the payload more than a few feet at which time the payload crashed back to earth and was dragged several hundred of feet.

View the raw film of the crash here
Original Space.com article here Lots of images

Thanks to Tim Sayell for the link

Astronauts & Spacecraft captured by Amateur Astronomer

Shaun Saunders sends in a link to Wired which documents a site with absolutely amazing space photography. The site is called Telescopic Spaceflight Images and was produced and is hosted by Ralf Vandebergh.

Ralf writes on the web page about the images:

• Images are obtained by the use of a 25cm (0.25m) Newtonian reflecting telescope. Tracking is accomplished fully manually using a second smaller scope at low magnification. The best results occur mostly at times when lighting angle, viewing angle, distance and other factors for viewing the objects were favorable. But, as the site's author puts it, often it was surprise and happenstance obtaining quality shots.

Whatever the case, I love the results!

Wired article

Free Telescopes....well almost

Shaun Saunders and I must have discovered this at the same time. So, let me pose a question to you. Are you fascinated by the night sky? Do you know the name of a few of the constellations and know where the ecliptic is? Do you have a small telescope, but wish you could afford something really massive? Have I got a sweet deal for you. How about something in the 14 inch range, robotic control that will output pictures to you, so you never have to spend another freezing night bent over an eye piece? Oh and its free. Whats the catch? Well you have to share. What we came across was several telescopes that are remotely controlled and are accessed by the internet. You point them, take pictures and then download your output. And we are not talking about toys here people. No, these are the real deal, upwards of 14 inches of raw telescopic enjoyment. Here is the WIRED page that describes the installations and where to log on to get started. In most cases your allowed to use these machines for free, in some cases, your asked for a donation for the pictures you take.

Telescopes

Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers

Astronomers studying archival data from an Australian radio telescope have discovered a powerful, short-lived burst of radio waves that they say indicates an entirely new type of astronomical phenomenon. This burst appears to have originated from the distant Universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole. The startling discovery came as WVU undergraduate student David Narkevic re-analyzed data from observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud made by the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power - equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.