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

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

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

White Dwarf Caught Destroying a Large Asteroid

 

A Ceres-like asteroid is slowly disintegrating as it orbits a white dwarf star. Astronomers have spotted telltales signs of such an object using data from the Kepler K2 mission. It is the first planetary object detected transiting a white dwarf. Within about a million years the object will be destroyed, leaving a thin dusting of metals on the surface of the white dwarf.

During observations of the white dwarf WD 1145+017, astronomers noticed  the presence of several planetary pieces in orbit.   The total mass of debris is thought to be around the size of the asteroid Ceres in our solar system's main asteroid belt.

These small planetary husks, all having orbits of between 4.5 to 4.9 hours, are too small to be seen by themselves; but their presence became known when the researchers detected huge dust clouds trailing them in their orbits. Follow-up observations by ground-based observatories were used to decipher what elements are inside the debris.

read the complete article here

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

Super Saturn Discovered

One of the first discoveries after Galileo Galilee  built his telescope in 1610, was the  enormous Saturn's gigantic rings. Now, more than 400 years later, astronomers, using powerful optics, have discovered a much larger planet, some 400 light-years away from Earth, designated J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's. 

To give an idea on just how massive this Super-Saturn is If J1407b were in our solar system, it would dominate Earth's nightly sky.

If we could replace Saturn's rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon.      

The astronomers can not of course resolve the huge ring system.  But using a pair of very powerful optical devices with sixteen cameras total, they can observe the effect the rings have on a nearby star.

The star's designation is J1407 a yellow dwarf similar to our sun. Observing the light from J1407, astronomers watched as the star darkened and brightened over a 56 day period.  That's right!
With the enormous size of the rings, the eclipse the astronomers observed lasted 56 days!
 
Like its rings, J1407b is far larger than Saturn.  In truth not a planet at all but a brown dwarf, a size classification somewhere between a planet and a star, or sub-stellar.  Brown dwarfs are hot but they are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen. Brown dwarf bodies mass about 13 Jupiter masses for a low and 80 Jupiter masses for the upper limit.   

CNN article on Super Saturn   wikipedia Brown Dwarf article                                                                    

A More Refined Defination of the Distrabution of Galactic Super-Clusters Across the Universe

Superclusters  are areas in the universe that are densely packed with galaxies.  These are the biggest structures in the Universe.

Scientists have struggled to define exactly where one super-cluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space.

Run the short video below to get an idea of the problem and the unique solution the Hawaiian team formulated to demonstrate a solution.

 

Complete Adafruit article HERE

A Short Film on Hubble's Deep Field Experiment

A fan of the program sent in this link from Flixxy.com.  The link concerned the Ultra Deep Field project that astronomers performed with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope.   I have one of these photos hanging above my work area.   Every time I look at it, I am again amazed and stunned.  The incredible density of galaxies is hard to believe even when looking at the proof.

Check out the Flixxy video below:

Dry Jupiter-Like Exoplanets Discovered

How we understand planetary  formation may, quite possibly, be all wrong.  

At present, the disk accretion theory is the most popular, where dust particles begin coming together in the planetary disk.  As the clumps become larger they begin attracting more and more clumps to the point where planetesimals form.  As they become larger, they begin to pull gases out of the ring to form proto - atmospheres  made up of oxygen in the form of water vapor.  

All of this worked very well until:

  From the Sci-News.com article:

• A team of astronomers headed by Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of the Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy has found that the abundance of water vapor in the atmospheres of the three newly discovered hot Jupiters – HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b (Located between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth)  – is between ten and a thousand times less than what standard planet formation theories predict. 

This discovery really brings our understanding of planetary formation into question. 

These planets are classified as hot Jupiters with average temperatures between 1652 and 3992 degrees Fahrenheit. These were thought to be ideal candidates for detecting water vapor in their atmospheres.

(***I would like to interject something here.  Regardless  of the water vapor or the hot Jupiters and the disclaimer in the full article that Hubble didn't actually "see" the planets, is the fact that Hubble can see ANYTHING 900 light years away! That is so far away that the average calculator goes nuts and you get cryptic answers from scientific calc. or numbers like 5865696000000 for just 1 year of light travel.  That's 6 thousand trillion 700 billion miles more or less then times that by 900 years!  Can you even begin to wrap your head around such mind numbing numbers?  That is how powerful Hubble is.....What a fabulous tool and how lucky we are to be around in the years of it's operation.   Editor***)

Voyager Argument All Over Again.......

Yep, that's right.  The Voyager argument continues to rage on.  Has it or Hasn't it?  

According to NASA's JPL which continues to monitor Voyager:

• A paper recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters describes an alternate model for the interaction between the heliosphere ....... and the interstellar medium. It  proposes a test for whether Voyager 1 has, indeed, left the heliosphere.

NASA's Voyager project scientist, Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena explains:

• (the) models, which he and colleagues used to conclude that Voyager 1 entered interstellar space, predict that the density of interstellar wind outside the heliosphere is 40 times greater than the density of the solar wind inside.
• The observational data .... revealed a plasma density that was 40 times higher.  (So) they concluded that Voyager 1 had ... entered interstellar space around August 25, 2012.

However new models:

• (argue) that solar wind inside the heliosphere can be compressed to the point that the solar wind density inside is just as high as interstellar space outside. Therefore, Voyager 1 could still be inside.

If Voyager 1 is still inside the heliosphere, it should observe a reversal in direction of the solar magnetic field sometime before the end of 2015. 

Scientists at JPL will be looking carefully at the  data  coming in  over the next 18 months to see if Voyager picks up this change.

To read the complete NASA JPL article click HERE

Gliese 581 Goldilocks Planets May Not Be There!

In 2007, astronomers observing Gilese 581 found four planets of which 2 were in the "Goldilocks" zone.  In 2010 two more planets were added to the toll with planet 581g having the best odds of all of having life. 

However Paul Robertson, the leader of  a new research team, said,  his team found that the measurements used to detect planets could be affected by things like sunspots, leading false indications of  planets.

Robertson, using different spectrum,  have watched indications for some planets fade completely away while others brighten significantly.

Read the complete article HERE

How Pillars of Creation May Have Formed Using Computer Animation

In 1995, the Hubble space telescope trained its' optics on a cloud of gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula some 7 thousand light years from Earth. The resulting image became as iconic as the Apollo "Earth Rise" or Sagen's "Pale Blue Dot". That image became known as "The Pillars of Creation"

From the Space.Com article:

• Scientists think the "pillars" in the image ... formed as cooler interstellar gas was worn away by intense radiation and powerful winds from nearby massive stars......

The massive stars in question that may have formed the "Pillars" were O-type stars, more than 16 times more massive than the sun.  O-type also have surface temperatures over 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit.







Scott Balfour, an astronomer at Cardiff University, wanted to see if type O stars, forming inside such a cloud of gas and dust, could indeed form structures like the pillars.   Condensed 1.6 million years of cosmic history into several weeks of computing time:

• "The model neatly produces exactly the same kind of structures seen by astronomers in the classic 1995 image....." Balfour said in a recent statement.

Space.Com article HERE

Asteroids have rings, too?!

Wow, I think my head just exploded!  

Out between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune - orbits 10199 Chariklo, an asteroid-like object that's a little more than 90 miles in diameter.  It may be small, but Charriklo shares a feature similar to it's gas giant neighbors....rings.  

Astronomers think Chariklo has two flat, dense, thin rings, about 4.3 miles  and 2 miles in width, with a 5.5-mile gap between them.

Read the complete Pop Sci article HERE

The Milky Way May Have Formed Center Out!

Scientists studying how the Milky Way formed, using one of the worlds largest telescopes the 8-m VLT in Chile, have uncovered evidence that our galaxy formed from the center  out.

That evidence comes in the form of 'metallicity' or the amount of metal contaminants found in a star.  Older first generation stars are made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, which were the most common elements available shortly after the big bang.   But as the larger short lived stars aged out, the level of contamination metals rose with younger stars now having a higher levels than first generation stars.  

With this piece of the puzzle in hand, astronomers began a systematic study of stars with a wide range of  locations in the Galactic disc.   

Our star named Sol lays mid-way out along one of the Milk Way's spiral arms.   At this distance, it takes Sol roughly 250 million years to complete an orbit around the galactic center.    The researchers called this orbit the Sol Circle and look at stars both inside and outside the "circle" to determine their metallicity.  

From the Science Daily article:

• The team have shown that older, 'metal-poor' stars inside the Solar Circle ......The stars that lie in the outer regions of the Galactic disc -- outside the Solar Circle -- are predominantly younger...... 'metal-rich' stars.

For more, check out the Science Daily article HERE

"Hand of God" Nebula

A new photo released by NASA, captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. 

The image was created  as  spinning material interacts with magnetic fields, it glows with X-rays.  This of course is not the first time the nebula has be photographed.  Previously  it had been detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

From the article:

• The hand-shaped object is a pulsar wind nebula that was the result of a star that blew up in a supernova explosion 17,000 light-years away.

                   

Click HERE for the complete NASA article

Heard of puffed rice, right? How about a "puffed" planet....

NASA's Kepler space telescope, to date, had discovered a whole slew of planets orbiting around other stars.  The most recent of which is likely to be one of the strangest.  Located 200 light-years away, planet KOI-314c orbits it's primary, a red dwarf star, in 23 days.  KOI-314c's mass however is very close to that of Earth's but the weird thing is the planet's atmosphere which makes the planet appear 60% larger than Earth. 

Since the orbital period is only 23 days, the planet's  atmosphere is about 220 degrees Fahrenheit, above the boiling point of water, which makes life as we know it moot. 

Discovery of Earth sized exo-planets are extremely difficult especially if they are close in to their primary.  Read the Discovery article HERE for the complete explanation of the method used.

Half of Sol Type Stars May Be Binary?!

In a new study, astronomers have concluded that half of all sun like stars are in a multiple star system.   This comes from scientists using  the upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.   These conclusions from scientists that observed a previously unseen companion star.  

The standing theory as to how such a strange formation could have taken place is that the companion must have occurred as the primary star formed and then fractured into two separate bodies during formation.

John Tobin, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory stated that:

• "This fits the theoretical model of companions forming from fragmentation in the disk"
• The new observations add to a growing body of evidence supporting the disk-fragmentation idea.  This showed that disks are present early in the star formation process, a necessity for binary pairs to form through disk fragmentation.

For more, read the complete Daily Galaxy article HERE

Also Science 2.0 for some detailed information HERE

New Star Koi-351 Has Something Strangely Familiar Orbiting it

European Astrophysicists have uncovered something unexpected orbiting newly discovered star KOI-351.   This star has 7 planets, which in and of itself in unusual, but even more unexpected was the arrangement of these planets. 

The arrangement of planets around KOI-351 is remarkably similar to our own system with the small rocky planets close in and the gas giants in the outer orbits.

Astrophysicist Juan Cabrera commenting on the importance of the discovery said that it is a big step in the search for a twin to the Solar System (and a step closer) in finding a second Earth. 

Of course the placement of the planets is not completely ideal.  All the planets orbits fit inside of Earth own orbit with the gas giants where Earth's orbit resides in the solar system. 

Check out the Daily Galaxy article here

Earth Visible Supernova Possible in Next 50 Years?

According to THIS "The Daily Galaxy"  - 

• Astronomers  calculate: the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova in the Milky Way galaxy will be visible from Earth.  the odds are much better at nearly 100 percent that such a supernova would be visible to telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.

 The Daily Galaxy reports:

• A new study suggests that they have a solid chance of  detecting a supernova fast enough to witness what happens at the very beginning of a star going supernova. 
• Professor of astronomy at Ohio State,  Christopher Kochanek said, “We see all these stars go supernova in other galaxies, and we don’t fully understand how it happens. We think we know, we say we know, but that’s not actually 100 percent true...."

This Daily Galaxy article is really very good.   Check it out HERE

Rogue Planets!!

From The Daily Galaxy

In a huge cloud of gas and dust 4600 light years from Earth in the the Rosette Nebula exists tiny, round, dark clouds. Dubbed "globulettes" these strange formations have the right characteristics to form free-floating planets with no parent star.

• 
  
• The Rosette Nebula is home to more than a hundred of these tiny clouds. This observation from 
• Gösta Gahm, astronomer at Stockholm University. These structures are very small, each with diameter less than 50 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune with an estimate that most of them are of planetary mass, less than 13 times Jupiter’s mass. 

From the Article:

• Previous research has shown that there may be as many as 200 billion free-floating planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Until now scientists have believed that such “rogue planets”, which don’t orbit around a star, must have been ejected from existing planetary systems. New observations of tiny dark clouds in space point out another possibility: that some free-floating planets formed on their own.

Read complete article