Space News/UFO's Etc...(Discussion/Pics/Vids)

[ilan]

NASA’s Hubble finds universe is expanding faster than expected

This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious
parts of the universe that make up 95 percent of everything and don’t emit light,
such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation.

By STScl, Baltimore, Maryland, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland | Published: Friday, June 03, 2016

This illustration shows the three steps astronomers used to measure the universe's
expansion rate to an unprecedented accuracy, reducing the total uncertainty to 2.4 percent.
NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI)/A. Riess (STScI/JHU)

​

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the universe is expanding five to nine percent faster than expected.

“This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95 percent of everything and don’t emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation,” said Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland.

Riess’ team made the discovery by refining the universe’s current expansion rate to unprecedented accuracy, reducing the uncertainty to only 2.4 percent. The team made the refinements by developing innovative techniques that improved the precision of distance measurements to faraway galaxies.

The team looked for galaxies containing both Cepheid stars and type Ia supernovae. Cepheid stars pulsate at rates that correspond to their true brightness, which can be compared with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth to accurately determine their distance. Type Ia supernovae, another commonly used cosmic yardstick, are exploding stars that flare with the same brightness and are brilliant enough to be seen from relatively longer distances.

By measuring about 2,400 Cepheid stars in 19 galaxies and comparing the observed brightness of both types of stars, they accurately measured their true brightness and calculated distances to roughly 300 type Ia supernovae in far-flung galaxies.

The team compared those distances with the expansion of space as measured by the stretching of light from receding galaxies. The team used these two values to calculate how fast the universe expands with time, or the Hubble constant.

The improved Hubble constant value is 73.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec. (A megaparsec equals 3.26 million light-years.) The new value means the distance between cosmic objects will double in another 9.8 billion years.

This refined calibration presents a puzzle, however, because it does not quite match the expansion rate predicted for the universe from its trajectory seen shortly after the Big Bang. Measurements of the afterglow from the big bang by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite mission yield predictions for the Hubble constant that are five and nine percent smaller, respectively.

“If we know the initial amounts of stuff in the universe, such as dark energy and dark matter, and we have the physics correct, then you can go from a measurement at the time shortly after the Big Bang and use that understanding to predict how fast the universe should be expanding today,” said Riess. “However, if this discrepancy holds up, it appears we may not have the right understanding, and it changes how big the Hubble constant should be today.”

Comparing the universe’s expansion rate with WMAP, Planck, and Hubble is like building a bridge, Riess explained. On the distant shore are the cosmic microwave background observations of the early universe. On the nearby shore are the measurements made by Riess’ team using Hubble.

“You start at two ends, and you expect to meet in the middle if all of your drawings are right and your measurements are right,” Riess said. “But now the ends are not quite meeting in the middle and we want to know why.”

There are a few possible explanations for the universe’s excessive speed. One possibility is that dark energy, already known to be accelerating the universe, may be shoving galaxies away from each other with even greater — or growing — strength.

Another idea is that the cosmos contained a new subatomic particle in its early history that traveled close to the speed of light. Such speedy particles are collectively referred to as “dark radiation” and include previously known particles like neutrinos. More energy from additional dark radiation could be throwing off the best efforts to predict today’s expansion rate from its post-Big Bang trajectory.

The boost in acceleration could also mean that dark matter possesses some weird unexpected characteristics. Dark matter is the backbone of the universe upon which galaxies built themselves up into the large-scale structures seen today.

And finally, the speedier universe may be telling astronomers that Einstein’s theory of gravity is incomplete.

“We know so little about the dark parts of the universe, it’s important to measure how they push and pull on space over cosmic history,” said Lucas Macri of Texas A&M University in College Station.

The Hubble observations were made with Hubble’s sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and were conducted by the Supernova H0 for the Equation of State (SH0ES) team, which works to refine the accuracy of the Hubble constant to a precision that allows for a better understanding of the universe’s behavior.

The SH0ES team is still using Hubble to reduce the uncertainty in the Hubble constant even more, with a goal to reach an accuracy of one percent. Current telescopes such as the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, and future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an infrared observatory, and the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope (WFIRST), also could help astronomers make better measurements of the expansion rate.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, the estimates of the Hubble constant varied by a factor of two. In the late 1990s the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale refined the value of the Hubble constant to within an error of only 10 percent, accomplishing one of the telescope’s key goals. The SH0ES team has reduced the uncertainty in the Hubble constant value by 76 percent since beginning its quest in 2005.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Thanks ilan...

 

[iptv]

Expansion of the Universe is faster than previously thought

The Hubble constant, named after its discoverer American astronomer Edwin Hubble, is the rate at which objects in the universe expand over time. The new value is 66.53 (plus or minus 0.62) kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.26 million light-years). That means in 9.8 billion years the distance between cosmic objects will double.

That figure is 5 per cent more than data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and 9 per cent more than the readings from the now-defunct European Space Agency's Planck satellite mission.

So – science being science – the quest is now on to find out why. The boffins have narrowed it down to three possibilities.

Firstly, our calculation on the effects of dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy, which can't be detected on current instruments, is already causing the expansion of the universe and may have additional properties that theorists haven't accounted for.
The second option is that in the early period after the Big Bang, a new kind of subatomic particle burst out travelling at just under the speed of light. This would have sped up the expansion of the early universe and would explain the discrepancies in current theory.

"We know so little about the dark parts of the universe, it's important to measure how they push and pull on space over cosmic history," said Lucas Macri of Texas A&M University in College Station, a key collaborator on the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The third option is that Einstein's theories of gravitation are wrong, or at least in serious need of revision. That opens up a whole new can of worms. ®

 

[ilan]

New radio map of Jupiter reveals what's beneath colorful clouds
University of California - Berkeley | 2 June 2016
​

Using the upgraded Very Large Array, astronomers have produced a detailed radio map of the upper 100 kilometers of Jupiter's atmosphere, revealing the complex movement of ammonia gas that shapes the colorful clouds observed in the optical. The map will help understand how global circulation and cloud formation are driven by Jupiter's powerful internal heat source, and shed light on similar processes on giant planets in our solar system and around distant stars.

The VLA radio map of the region around the Great Red Spot in Jupiter's atmosphere shows complex upwellings
and downwellings of ammonia gas (upper map), that shape the colorful cloud layers seen in the approximately
true-color Hubble map (lower map). Two radio wavelengths are shown in blue (2 cm) and gold (3 cm),
probing depths of 30-90 kilometers below the clouds.
Credit: Radio: Michael H. Wong, Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Robert J. Sault (Univ. Melbourne).
Optical: NASA, ESA, A.A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley), and G.S. Orton (JPL-Caltech)
​

Astronomers using the upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico have produced the most detailed radio map yet of the atmosphere of Jupiter, revealing the massive movement of ammonia gas that underlies the colorful bands, spots and whirling clouds visible to the naked eye.

The University of California, Berkeley researchers measured radio emissions from Jupiter's atmosphere in wavelength bands where clouds are transparent. The observers were able to see as deep as 100 kilometers (60 miles) below the cloud tops, a largely unexplored region where clouds form.

The planet's thermal radio emissions are partially absorbed by ammonia gas. Based on the amount of absorption, the researchers could determine how much ammonia is present and at what depth.

By studying these regions of the planet's atmosphere, astronomers hope to learn how global circulation and cloud formation are driven by Jupiter's powerful internal heat source. These studies also will shed light on similar processes occuring on other giant planets in our solar system and on newly discovered giant exoplanets around distant stars.

"We in essence created a three-dimensional picture of ammonia gas in Jupiter's atmosphere, which reveals upward and downward motions within the turbulent atmosphere," said principal author Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy.

The map bears a striking resemblance to visible-light images taken by amateur astronomers and the Hubble Space Telescope, she said.

The radio map shows ammonia-rich gases rising into and forming the upper cloud layers: an ammonium hydrosulfide cloud at a temperature near 200 Kelvin (minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit) and an ammonia-ice cloud in the approximately 160 Kelvin cold air (minus 170 degrees Fahrenheit). These clouds are easily seen from Earth by optical telescopes.

Conversely, the radio maps show ammonia-poor air sinking into the planet, similar to how dry air descends from above the cloud layers on Earth.

The map also shows that hotspots -- so-called because they appear bright in radio and thermal infrared images -- are ammonia-poor regions that encircle the planet like a belt just north of the equator. Between these hotspots are ammonia-rich upwellings that bring ammonia from deeper in the planet.

"With radio, we can peer through the clouds and see that those hotspots are interleaved with plumes of ammonia rising from deep in the planet, tracing the vertical undulations of an equatorial wave system," said UC Berkeley research astronomer Michael Wong.

The final maps have the best spatial resolution ever achieved in a radio map: 1,300 kilometers.

"We now see high ammonia levels like those detected by Galileo from over 100 kilometers deep, where the pressure is about eight times Earth's atmospheric pressure, all the way up to the cloud condensation levels," de Pater said.

De Pater, Wong and their colleaugues will report their findings and highly detailed maps in the June 3, 2016 issue of the journal Science.

Prelude to Juno's arrival

The observations are being reported just one month before the July 4, 2016 arrival at Jupiter of NASA's Juno spacecraft, which plans, in part, to measure the amount of water in the deep atmosphere where the Very Large Array looked for ammonia.

"Maps like ours can help put their data into the bigger picture of what's happening in Jupiter's atmosphere," de Pater said, noting that her team will observe Jupiter with the VLA at the same time as Juno's microwave instruments are probing for water.

Key to the new observations was an upgrade to the VLA that improved sensitivity by a factor of 10, said Bryan Butler, a co-author and staff astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, which operates the VLA. "These Jupiter maps really show the power of the upgrades to the VLA."

The team observed over the entire frequency range between 4 and 18 gigahertz (1.7 -- 7 centimeter wavelength), which enabled them to carefully model the atmosphere, said David DeBoer, a research astronomer with UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory.

"We now see fine structure in the 12 to 18 gigahertz band, much like we see in the visible, especially near the Great Red Spot, where we see a lot of little curly features," Wong said. "Those trace really complex upwelling and downwelling motions there."

The observations also resolve a puzzling discrepancy between the ammonia concentration detected by the Galileo probe when it plunged through the atmosphere in 1995 -- 4.5 times the abundance observed in the sun -- and VLA measurements from before 2004, which showed much less ammonia gas than measured by the probe.

"Jupiter's rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe," said co-author Robert Sault, of the University of Melbourne in Australia. "But we have developed a technique to prevent this and so avoid confusing together the upwelling and downwelling ammonia flows, which had led to the earlier underestimate."

This research was supported by Planetary Astronomy and Outer Planets Research Program awards from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NRAO is a National Science Foundation facility operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Good stuff ilan...

 

[ilan]

Mystery Object Outshines Entire Milky Way Galaxy by 50 Times --
"We Don't Know What the Power Source Could Be"
The Daily Galaxy via Ohio State University | 9 June 2016

​

Astronomers were not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it's the most powerful supernova ever seen. In June of 2015, astronomers viewed a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns.

Even in a discipline that regularly uses gigantic numbers to express size or distance, the case of this small but powerful mystery object in the center of the gas ball is extreme. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. ASAS-SN-15lh, as the object is known, was twice as luminous as any previously seen, far brighter than any normal supernova, and outshone our entire Milky Way galaxy by 50 times.

The artist’s impression below shows what it would look like from an exoplanet 10,000 light-years away in its home galaxy.

The team reported that the object at the center could be a very rare type of star called a magnetar--but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits allowed by physics. An international team of professional and amateur astronomers spotted the possible supernova, now called ASASSN-15lh, when it first flared to life in June 2015.

​

The gas ball surrounding the object can't be seen with the naked eye, because it's 3.8 billion light years away. But it was spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN, pronounced "assassin") collaboration. Led by Ohio State, the project uses a cadre of small telescopes around the world to detect bright objects in our local universe.

Though ASAS-SN has discovered some 250 supernovae since the collaboration began in 2014, the explosion that powered ASASSN-15lh stands out for its sheer magnitude. It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than our sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy combined.

"We have to ask, how is that even possible?" said Krzysztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. "It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere."

"The honest answer is at this point that we do not know what could be the power source for ASASSN-15lh," said Subo Dong, lead author of the Science paper and a Youth Qianren Research Professor of astronomy at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. He added that the discovery "may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of superluminous supernova."

Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, offered one possible explanation. The supernova could have spawned an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar, a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a very strong magnetic field.

To shine so bright, this particular magnetar would also have to spin at least 1,000 times a second, and convert all that rotational energy to light with nearly 100 percent efficiency, Thompson explained. It would be the most extreme example of a magnetar that scientists believe to be physically possible. "Given those constraints," he said, "will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is a magnetar, then the answer is basically no."

The Hubble Space Telescope will help settle the question later this year, in part because it will allow astronomers to see the host galaxy surrounding the object. If the team finds that the object lies in the very center of a large galaxy, then perhaps it's not a magnetar at all, and the gas around it is not evidence of a supernova, but instead some unusual nuclear activity around a supermassive black hole.

If so, then its bright light could herald a completely new kind of event, said study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology. It would be something never before seen in the center of a galaxy.

Image Credit: NASA and Beijing Planetarium / Jin Ma

 

[ilan]

One-third of the world cannot see the Milky Way -- why that matters
By Jareen Imam, CNN | Updated 3:34 PM ET, Sat June 11, 2016

​

If you look up at the evening sky, there's a good chance you will not be able to see what your grandmother saw when she was a little girl.

That's because we're enshrouded in an artificial haze of light that is blocking the night sky, a phenomenon scientists call light pollution.

Scientists believe one-third of humanity cannot view the Milky Way — this includes 80% of Americans and 60% of Europeans because city lights are creating fogs of light pollution, according to a new study that published Friday in the journal of Science Advances.

The Milky Way sparkles over the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
​

An international team of scientists created a world atlas of artificial sky luminance that details how light pollution is permeating our planet. This light is obscuring our vision of the stars, celestial events and the Milky Way — the galaxy that contains our solar system.

Although there are a few patches of pristine dark sky still left in the world, 83% of the world's population and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under the bright glow of light pollution.

"This is a huge cultural loss with unforeseeable consequences in the future generations," scientist Fabio Falchi, one of the authors of the study, says. "Pristine night skies are a precious merchandise."

The most light-polluted country in the world is Singapore, the study finds.

"The entire population lives under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision," according to the study. This means people living in the country never have the chance to experience true darkness.

Here are other countries where more than half of their inhabitants are living under extremely bright skies, according to researchers. (The numbers denote the percentage of the population affected by light pollution.)

Kuwait (98%)
Qatar (97%)
United Arab Emirates (93%)
Saudi Arabia (83%)
South Korea (66%)
Israel (61%)
Argentina (58%)
Libya (53%)
Trinidad and Tobago (50%)

The countries with populations least affected by light pollution include Chad, Central African Republic, and Madagascar. More than three-quarters of people in these countries are living under pristine night sky conditions.

The dangers of too much light

The findings shows that light pollution is a global issue, and many countries are affected by a fog of artificial light. But light pollution doesn't just obscure our view of space.

This over-saturation can impact our culture, cause global ecological problems, pose public health issues and create wasteful energy spending, the researchers warn.

For instance, artificial light has a direct effect on human physiology and behavior. For instance, it can alter our circadian rhythm and affect production of some of our hormones, a 2007 medical study found. It can also disrupt our sleep cycle by suppressing melatonin creation and increasing cortisol levels — a hormone that is linked to stress.

Researchers found that people living in urban environments were the most affected by light pollution, but what is troubling is that the glow of city lights is creeping into unpopulated areas too.

This is important because artificial lights can negatively affect wildlife. For example, streetlights near shorelines can cause baby turtles who have just hatched to become disoriented and wander inland instead of into the ocean, causing them to die because of dehydration or exposure to predators, according to research by the Sea Turtle Conservancy.

So why has our world been overtaken by light pollution?

"Light pollution is also a consequence of the belief that artificial light increases safety on roads and prevents crimes, but this belief is not based on scientific evidence," the study states.

Saving the darkest skies

"It is always surprising to find out how in few decades of lighting growth we enveloped most of us in a light curtain that hide the view of the greatest wonder of nature, the universe itself," Falchi says.

In less than a 100 years, artificial lights have transformed the sky. Millions of children will never experience the Milky Way, according to the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), an organization combating light pollution.

Light pollution "robs us of the opportunity to experience the wonder of a natural night sky," according to the organization's site.

In order to persevere the world's limited patches of pristine night sky, IDA launched the International Dark Sky Places conservation program in 2001, which encourages communities to protect dark sites.

Some of these International Dark Sky Sanctuaries, which are the most remote and darkest places in the world, include the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy Observatory, which operates in the Elqui Valley of northern Chile and the Cosmic Campground, a site located in the Gila National Forest of western New Mexico.

The hazards of light pollution are slowly starting to be taken seriously by scientists, the study says.

There are ways to combat the haze of artificial light from overtaking our night skies. Researchers suggest communities experiment with new technology that limits the spread of light pollution, use minimum light for tasks, encourage the practice of shutting lights off when areas are not being used and limit the use of "blue" lights which can affect circadian rhythms and even vision.

The beauty of a pristine night sky can also influence people, Falchi says.

"I was pushed to study physics, ultimately, by the fact that I had the possibility 30 years ago to see a fairly good sky where I lived. Now, in the same place, the Milky Way is totally lost," he says.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

thanks ilan...

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

A bright disruption in Saturn's narrow F ring suggests it may have been disturbed recently. This feature was mostly likely not caused by Pandora (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) which lurks nearby, at lower right. More likely, it was created by the interaction of a small object embedded in the ring itself and material in the core of the ring. Scientists sometimes refer to these features as "jets."


Because these bodies are small and embedded in the F ring itself, they are difficult to spot at the resolution available to NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Instead, their handiwork reveals their presence, and scientists use the Cassini spacecraft to study these stealthy sculptors of the F ring.


This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 15 above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2016.


The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel.


The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.






Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute


Last Updated: June 13, 2016
Editor: Tony Greicius

 

[ilan]

Incredible view... Thanks, Cap!

 

[ilan]

How a global telescope could reveal black holes for the first time
By Anna Nowogrodzki | Published: Thursday, June 9, 2016
​

A new algorithm could finally reveal the splendors of a black hole. The MIT grad student who wrote it just needs a dozen radio telescopes worldwide to do it.

An illustration via NASA of what a black hole may look like. The stream of ejecta is the hot gas being swallowed by the event horizon.
M. Helfenbein, Yale University / OPAC.
​

Black holes are ready for their close-up, thanks to a new algorithm which could give astronomers a way to take the first image of a black hole by next spring.

Katie Bouman, an MIT graduate student in computer science, developed the algorithm, which essentially uses Earth as a giant radio wave dish. Bouman will present the research at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June.

The problem with capturing a picture of a black hole is that even the closest one, the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, is very, very far away. Any images taken before show the effects of the black hole, rather than the event horizon itself.

Radio waves are ideal signals for some reasons—they pass through solids, so they can reach Earth across such a vast distance—but they also have very long wavelengths. This means astronomers need a truly huge radio wave dish to capture enough waves to produce an image. To image something the size of the Milky Way black hole, Bouman explains, “You’d need a telescope the size of the Earth.”

That’s just what the Event Horizon Telescope project is trying to create, by collecting data from radio telescopes all over the world. The project currently includes six radio telescopes, but there are not enough radio telescopes in the world that can observe at the desired frequency (1.3mm), or even enough suitable sites in the world on which to build such telescopes. (They need to be on top of mountains and at sites that limit the interference of water vapor.) Bouman’s algorithm is designed to make up the difference.

To do this, her algorithm, called CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors), first combines the signals from three different telescopes. By using three, instead of two (which most others do), the delays to the radio waves caused by Earth’s atmosphere cancel each other out.

But even after that, “there’s an infinite number of images that will perfectly describe the data,” Bouman says. So the next step is to use the data to reconstruct an image that looks like an image. That may seem self-evident, but when images are broken up into tiny patches, Bouman explains, “oftentimes there’s a lot of repeating structure: flat patches, an edge.” She built a machine-learning algorithm that identified those repeating patches, called patch models, and used them to reconstruct images.

Amazingly, the algorithm worked when it was trained on any kind of image, astronomical or terrestrial.

“We can take images on your phone, we can take black hole simulation images, we can take images of cats,” says Bouman. “No matter if we trained on black hole images, celestial images, terrestrial images—the patch models that we learn are all similar enough that we ended up getting the same image back in the end.”

Multiple observatories will be used in the project, including the Sub Millimeter Array and James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona; the Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico; the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique in Spain; the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array and Atacama Pathfinder Experiment in Chile; the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica; and the NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array in France.

Bouman’s algorithm was better than previous ones at reconstructing an image from the measurements it would yield at different telescopes, and it was better at handling noise in the data. The real test will come in the spring of 2017, when telescopes will begin collecting the data that could stitch together into our first image of a black hole.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

THIS IS WHERE THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION WILL GO TO DIE
IN ONE OF THE MOST ISOLATED PLACES ON THE GLOBE, THE 'SPACECRAFT CEMETERY' PROVIDES A WATERY GRAVE

The cold void of the ocean floor is the closest thing Earthlings can come to the conditions of space. Nothing really lives there, and nothing ever visits. It’s freezing, dark and empty. However, off the coast of New Zealand, the Pacific Ocean is home to what may be the most exclusive scientific burial ground in the world: the so-called Spacecraft Cemetery has become the final resting place for hundreds of manmade space objects.
There are thousands of satellites and pieces of debris orbiting the Earth at any given moment, but what happens when they run out of fuel or complete their missions? Essentially, they need to get out of the sky and out of the way of other spacecraft.
The risk of leaving a large metal object the size of a car orbiting the Earth is, well, physics. The Earth’s mass creates a gravitational pull on anything in orbit around it, gradually dragging them closer and closer to Earth. Eventually, without proper disposal, all of the orbiting spacecraft (including the gigantic International Space Station) would threaten to come hurtling down on our heads.
The Spacecraft Cemetery has become the final resting place for hundreds of manmade space objects
Luckily, there are scientists who know how to prevent an Armageddon scene like this from happening. Space agencies around the world carefully plan out the re-entry of these large bodies, and they’ve even chosen a place on Earth where these spacecraft can go to safely rest, far from the likes of any humans.
Roughly 3000 miles off the Eastern coast of New Zealand, 2000 miles north of Antarctica, and 2.5 miles deep, the Spacecraft Cemetery is truly in the middle of nowhere. This isolated spot in the ocean is technically called the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility--the point on Earth farthest from any land mass. This spot was chosen for obvious reasons, as it greatly reduces the risk of human casualties from scorching hot space debris. (According to NASA’s Orbital Debris Office, any objects re-entering Earth’s atmosphere cannot exceed a 0.0001 chance of impact with humans, meaning that if the entry were to occur 10,000 times, there would only be one human casualty expected.)

To date, over 263 spacecraft have been crashed here since 1971, and the number is continually growing. The Spacecraft Cemetery's most famous resident is MIR, the 142-ton Russian space station. MIR was de-commissioned in 2001 and subsequently sent into what is called orbital decay, or spacecraft death. Other spacecraft in the graveyard range from rockets' secondary payloads to spy satellites, small Russian space stations, fuel tanks, and hundreds of cargo ships that carried supplies to astronauts in orbit.
Russian objects far outnumber every other space agency when it comes to the Pacific Ocean; there are more than 190 Russian objects alone. The US is next with 52 objects, then Europe with 8, Japan with 6, and finally SpaceX dropped its second stage here in September of 2014.
There is a roster of objects lined up to break up over this area, but the next big ticket item likely won’t make it there for another 12 years. The International Space Station will eventually crash into the Pacific Ocean upon its decommissioning, expected sometime around 2028.

Each line is an individual satellite or space debris and the dates in which they fell to Earth. Russia (shown in blue) has dropped the majority of objects into the Spacecraft Graveyard, but in recent years, the U.S. (red) has been catching up.

MIR was a massive object to bring back to Earth, requiring intensive calculations to make it back safely. By comparison, the ISS is four times larger, weighs almost 500 tons, and is the size of a football field. The scientists who have to plan the re-entry of the ISS acknowledge that the entry angle for this maneuver will have to be extremely precise but should result in all surviving debris ending up in the Pacific Ocean.
It will be a sad day when the ISS meets its demise in the cold waters of the Pacific. However, this incredibly complicated task is sure to create quite the spectacle. The re-entry of any spacecraft through the Earth’s atmosphere doesn't tend to leave anything in one pristine piece at the bottom of the ocean. It’s a pretty violent scene as the friction of the atmosphere heats metal up to thousands of degrees, forcing a once meticulously engineered craft to explode into pieces.
As the world's space agencies and private spaceflight companies continue to grow and launch things up, eventually those things must also come back down, and the Spacecraft Cemetery will be there to welcome them upon their fiery return.
The Spacecraft Cemetery is literally littered with a rich space history from NASA to Russia, Europe to SpaceX--it’s just too bad no one will ever get to visit.

By Shannon Stirone Posted June 13, 2016
popsci.com

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Looked nice tonight

 

[Marley]

i seen it when moon was coming up after that changed back

 

[anon2599]

Excellent! information ...as always Guy`s.

Thank you all.

Regards

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Excellent! information ...as always Guy`s.

Thank you all.

Regards

Thanks......

 

[ilan]

Dual Supernovae Light Up June Nights: Part 1
​

By: Bob King | June 8, 2016
​

Supernovae are popping up everywhere! Two stars flamed out millions of years ago and at least one is an easy catch right now in amateur telescopes.
​

​

Type Ia Supernova 2016coj in NGC 4125 is now bright enough to see in amateur telescopes.
You'll find it 11.7″ NE of the galaxy's nucleus. NGC 4125 lies about 72 million light-years from Earth.
William Wiethoff
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Recent years have seen a blizzard of new supernovae discoveries from dedicated robotic searches by both amateurs and professionals. If you have any doubt, David Bishop's excellent Bright Supernova site lists 3,471 reported in 2015. Already this year, we're up to 2,910!

Sorting through them to find visual candidates takes more time that it used to, but I'm not complaining. Among the ubiquitous 18th- and 19th-magnitude candidates there are always a few bright enough to spot in an 8-inch or larger telescope. On May 28th, two new exploding stars were discovered, SN 2016coj in NGC 4125 (a 10th-magnitude elliptical galaxy in Draco) and SN 2016cok in the bright spiral M66 in Leo, by the automated Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS).

SN 2016coj's initial brightness of ~15.5 magnitude didn't immediately shout "Hey, look at me!" But in recent days, the Type Ia supernova brightened steadily to its present magnitude of 13.6, making it fair game for 10-inch and even 8-inch telescopes.

Several nights back, I took a look at the host galaxy in my 15-inch (37-cm) reflector. Its location near a 6th-magnitude star a short distance north of the Big Dipper's bucket made the finding easy. When I used 142×, the supernova presented itself almost immediately as a "second nucleus" about 11.7″ northeast of the true nucleus, a tiny kernel of light buried in the galaxy's core. When the seeing steadied, the supernova stood out crisply, a sharp point compared to the slightly fuzzy galactic nucleus. Here before me eyes was the end of a life, a white dwarf blown to bits in a tremendously powerful explosion brought on by ... weight gain.
Out With a Bang

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This illustration shows the stages of a Type Ia supernova explosion like that in SN 2016coj.
From left: a white dwarf accretes matter from a close companion until it reaches a super-critical
state when it exceeds 1.4 solar masses; a thermonuclear explosion ensues, wiping out the star;
and an expanding cloud of debris is all that's left.
NASA / CXC / M. Weiss
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After feasting on its close companion star's atmospheric gases, the Earth-sized star accumulated enough material on its surface to exceed the Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.4 solar masses and undergo rapid gravitational collapse. Dire consequences followed as a runaway fusion reaction from the crushing heat and pressure raced through the star, destroying it in one titanic blast.

Since then, SN 2016coj has continued to brighten and should be an even easier target by the time you read this. Meanwhile, SN 2016cok in the familiar galaxy M66 in Leo has taken another path.
Another Dwarf Bites the Dust

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Supernova 2016cok (beween the tick marks) was discovered in the bright, nearby galaxy M66
in Leo on May 28th, the same day as SN 2016coj was discovered. Unlike the latter, SN 2016cok's
brightness has remained nearly constant at about magnitude +16.5. The new object is located 61″
east and 34″ south of the galaxy's nucleus in an outer spiral arm. East is up and north at right.
Gianluca Masi
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[ilan]

Dual Supernovae Light Up June Nights: Part 2
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By: Bob King | June 8, 2016
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Ordinarily, the words "supernova" and "M66" heard in the same sentence would make a deep-sky hunter's blood pressure spike. It was here in February 1989 SN 1989B peaked at 12th magnitude, within range of even a 4-inch. Given the galaxy's relative proximity to Earth of 36 million light-years, any supernovae there have the potential to become bright, but this one has so far remained faint.

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In a Type II supernova, an aging supergiant star runs out of nuclear fuel in its core,
leading to a sudden collapse followed by a rebounding shock wave that rips the star
apart. Some Type II events leave a neutron star or black hole remnant.
NASA / CXC / M. Weiss
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Discovered by Ohio State's All-Sky Survey Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) at magnitude +16.6, SN 2016cok hasn't gotten any brighter than +16.4 as of June 4th.

It may still be on the rise, though. According to a recent notification from The Astronomer's Telegram, the supernova's spectrum indicates it was caught a few days before maximum.

While a perfect target for astrophotographers, the star presents a tough visual challenge at the moment. Maybe a 24-incher can pry this one loose, but until it cracks magnitude +15.5, I'll be sitting on the sidelines watching with interest.

SN 2016cok is a Type IIp supernova involving the collapse and explosion of an evolved supergiant star. But instead of fading at the regular rate, the IIp variety slows or “plateaus” (hence the p) for many days before resuming its normal decline in brightness. Has the supernova already plateaued or does a "brighter future" lie ahead?
M66 Wide and Detailed

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This dual map will help you find the 9th-magnitude spiral galaxy M66 and SN 2016cok
located midway between the naked-eye stars Theta (θ) and Iota (ι) Leonis. The left
half shows a wide view, the right half is zoomed in. Stars at right shown to magnitude +7.5.
Bob King, Source: Stellarium
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You can keep track of the progress of both supernovae at the Bright Supernova site. Click and search for "M66" or "NGC 4125" or go out the next clear night and have a look for yourself. When it comes to stellar explosions, M66 is a real champ with five recorded supernovae to its name since 1973.
Explosion Over the Bowl

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Use the bowl of the Big Dipper to navigate to NGC 4125 and its bright supernova. Stars shown to magnitude +7.5.
Bob King, Source: Stellarium
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I wish you much success in your supernovae hunt. As you slowly twist the focusing knob to bring SN 2016coj into sharp focus, consider that this pinprick of light shines some five billion times brighter than the Sun while material within the expanding debris cloud rushes outward at 9,500 miles per second (15,300 km/s). How fortunate that you and I just happened to be around to see it 72 million years later.

 

[ilan]

An ocean for Pluto and a thinner ice shell on Enceladus
Plenty of good news for our ocean worlds!
By John Wenz | Published: Wednesday, June 22, 2016

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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Once, we thought earth was the only planet with oceans. But now, we're seemingly finding them everywhere in our solar system, including possibly the last place on anybody's mind: Pluto.

New evidence published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the icy dwarf planet may still have a liquid ocean lurking underneath its frozen exterior. Tectonic activity on the surface of Pluto, revealed by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, shows an absence of contraction in the surface. Contraction is the kind of thing that would be expected if the ocean had, at the depths it's believed to be at, frozen completely into a dense form of ice called Ice II. That seems to indicate it's liquid or at least slushy down there.

Radioactive elements in the core (along with some motion from the tug-o-war between Pluto and Charon) would keep the ocean warm. There's still some chance, though, that the ice crust of Pluto is thinner than anticipated, which would lead to formation of less dense forms of ice. But flows of nitrogen ices seem to come from much deeper below, placing the ice shell as much as 300 km (186 mi) from the surface. At those depths, if there was water, it would almost certainly form Ice II. That is, unless something made it not freeze.

Of course, we already know that Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is an ocean world, with warm water under the ice shell spewing into space thanks to the gravitational tug of Saturn. Pluto joins that pantheon now, along with worlds like Ganymede, Europa, and Titan. But unlike Pluto, new evidence seems to indicate that Enceladus may have a much thinner ice shell than once believed.

The research, also published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the crust at the south pole of Enceladus may be as little as 3 km (1.86 mi) deep. That would also make drilling under the ice shell a more distinct possibility for a future space probe, or to have an orbiter penetrate the ice shell with radar to find out more of what's going on down below. Previous measurements of the ice shell, which placed it as much, much thicker, didn't line up with gravitational data collected by the Cassini probe.

It's a lot of excitement for two small places in our solar system. Many astrobiologists already think Enceladus may be a high probability place to find life. But now that Pluto is on the radar, we're seeing that liquid water is even more abundant than we thought. On Earth, where there's water there's life. And now we have to recognize that there might be a chance for life on Pluto.