Newly Discovered Galaxy Making Stars at a Prodigious Rate

Almost 13 billion years ago, light left a small cluster of stars and headed towards a collection of stars that one day would make up the Milky Way galaxy. When it finally reached us, the light proved to be one of the more startling discoveries of the year.

An indistinct blob collection of stars so incredibly distant that when light left it, the universe itself was only 750 million years older or a mere 5% of its' present age.

As fascinating as that is, galaxy GN-108036 continued to surprise. Because of the energy output of the small cluster scientists suspected at first a fairly large system which proved wrong. GN-108036 appears to be only 1/100th as massive but is producing stars 30 times faster than the Milky Way! This goes against all previous results. Clusters that young had never been found to be so bright and energetic.  Scientists using NASA's Hubble and Spitzer were  surprised by how bright the galaxy appeared.  Not only is it bright but extremely red shifted.  The redder an object is, the farther away it is and the faster it is traveling.  GN-108036's red shift is 7.2 which indicates extreme distance and speed, making it among only a handful of other galaxies so distant.

Bahram Mobasher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California who announced the discovery said that GN-108036 likely represents the ancestor of the more massive and evolved galaxies seen today.

NASA's site also adds:

• The galaxy was discovered and confirmed using the Subaru telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, respectively, both located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

NASA

Thanks to Dan for the heads up. 

LHC Finds Bottomonium

Dvice.com has an article about a recent discovery from the Large Hardron Colider of a particle they have labeled Bottomonium. Like the writer of the article says, you can't make this stuff up! Anyway, Bottomonium is a quark "particle" comprised of a bottom quark and it's anti bottom quark double. Usually you combine a normal particle with an anti-particle you would get instant annihilation. But in the sub-atomic world of the quark, the outward forces of the two particles trying to destroy each other can be off set by the same strong force that binds protons and neutrons. At least for a few hundred millionths of a second, ample enough time to study.

Particle physics predicted Bottomonium but this is the first it has been observed in the lab. The particle's name is "χb(3P)" which is pronounced "kye-bee three pee."

Wikipedia article on quarkonium

Frozen Lightsaber Battle

Here is a neat little shot of a flash mob gathering in Time Square 12/20/11 consisting of Sith Lords and Jedi in a freeze frame Light Saber battle that, to the surprise of bystanders, average people on the sidelines also took place in. It seems this was a promotional stunt for the game Star Wars: The Old Republic. Looked like fun!

Hexagon Finally Declassified

Wow, when Xnewsman drops a bombshell he drops a big one! Now I, as a general rule, don't often post about cold war politics or the skunkwurkz that went on during that period...but when I started reading a post from the Canadian Business page written by Helen O'Neill for the Associated Press that X sent me, I was transported as well as transfixed...how bout that for conflicting emotions! lol.

The article tells about a gathering of technical personnel, engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors, that worked for Perkin-Elmer Corp., an optical design company in Danbury Connecticut. These highly skilled men worked on an ultra top secret project called Hexagon KH-9 during the cold war era from the mic 60s to the late 80s designing cameras for spy satellites. The technicians were sworn to secrecy so stringent that none of their family members knew what they were working on and only those with extremely high government clearance had any idea what so ever.

The specs alone are stunning considering that the system was envisioned in the 60s and was 60 feet long, 30,000 pounds in weight and had to handle film transport speeds of 200 feet per second!  Putting something this size into Earth orbit even today is no mean feat.

Hexagon remained classified for 45 years which meant that many of the people who worked on the project took the secret of their involvement to their grave, the rest are only now speaking about what has to be one of the most fascinating projects to come out of the cold war.

Check out the article here  for a top notch read.  I really thought I was reading the opening pages of a spy novel - this was written so well.

And the WIKI article here
Truly facinating!

Beam Me Up episode 293 now online

Expect to be visited by three specters……oh yess…. Ok, this week on episode 293 of Beam Me Up, I manage to get about everything in that I thought would be fun and interesting.

The first story of the evening is episode two of In Plain Sight by Jason Kahn. We again join our favorite psychic detective, Jack Garrett as he once again find himself embroiled in mystery and intrigue.

The second story of the evening is the Skinflint Specters by Brian Thompson which is a retelling of A Christmas Carol in which everything is explainable……or is it?

And from the Beam Me Up blog, I review Infidel by Kameron Hurley which takes place on the planet Umayma, in a future so distance that the colony ship that brought settlers to a terraformed planet are eons rusted hulks and origin has faded into myth and legend.

NASA has discovered a black hole that sets a record for being one of the smallest ever discovered.

MIT research scientist Todd Rider says he’s developed a drug named Draco, which he says has successfully destroyed 15 different viruses in lab trials.

Scientists now of the opinion that detecting Parallel Universes might be impossible.