The Universe: Search for ET

Ray Kurzweil, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak, and other experts will be featured on The “Universe: Search for ET,” kicking off a new series on the History Channel, “The Universe,” Tuesday, August 28 at at 9:00pm, 8:00 Central. “In a galaxy filled with a billion stars, in a universe filled with a hundred billion galaxies–are we alone? SETI–the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence–is a privately funded project using radio telescopes and optical telescopes to scan the stars for signals. NASA is planning missions to Mars, Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, to look for primitive, microbial life in ice concentrations. Whether we discover primitive or intelligent life, how will that knowledge impact humankind’s view of itself? Cutting-edge computer graphics are used to bring the universe down to earth to show what life would be like on other planets, and to imagine what kind of life forms might evolve in alien atmospheres.”

Site – http://www.history.com

Huge Hole Found in the Universe

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise. The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious “dark matter” that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale. Astronomers don’t know why the hole is there. “Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota.

Site – http://www.space.com

Google Earth given celestial view

The constellations of Andromeda, Hydra and Vulpecula are now just a mouse click away for amateur star-gazers, following the launch of Google Sky. The tool is an add-on to Google Earth, a program that allows users to search a 3D rendition of our planet’s surface. Sky will allow astronomers a chance to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies. Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

Site – http://news.bbc.co.uk

Online help sought to organize galaxies

Scientists need help sorting through an unusual digital photo album: pictures of about 1 million galaxies. They are asking volunteers on the Internet to help classify the galaxies as either elliptical or spiral and note, where possible, in which direction they rotate. It would be the largest galactic census ever compiled, something scientists say would provide new insight into the structure of the universe. “We’re in the golden era of astronomy,” said Bob Nichol, an astronomer at the University of Portsmouth in southern England. “We have more data than we can assimilate, and we need help.”

Site – http://www.cnn.com

World’s largest optical telescope to see first light

A huge new observatory, called the Great Canary Telescope, is set to open its eye to the sky on Friday. With a main mirror 10.4 metres across, it will effectively be the largest telescope for visible and infrared light in the world. The next largest are the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, US, which have main mirrors 10 metres across. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope near Fort Davis, Texas, US, and South African Large Telescope (SALT) near Sutherland, South Africa both have main mirrors 11.1 by 9.8 metres across, but because of the way they are constructed, only a patch 9.2 metres across can be used at any given time for observations.

Site – http://space.newscientist.com

Physicists Predict the Death of Cosmology

Physicists are now foretelling the death of cosmology, or the study of our universe, as we know it. Thankfully, cosmologists won’t be jobless for a couple trillion years. The universe is rapidly expanding–perhaps not rapidly enough to rip to shreds, but enough that distant galaxies will eventually be moving away faster than the speed of light. This much has been known for decades. Once all these galaxies blink out of existence, scientists ask in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, how will future intelligent beings study space if the human race’s knowledge is long gone? Will they be able to figure out if the Big Bang happened? Or rediscover relativity?

Site – http://www.space.com

The Jamess Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. JWST will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. JWST’s instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range. JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won’t fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once JWST is in outer space. JWST will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.

Site – http://www.jwst.nasa.gov

When Our Galaxy Smashes Into Andromeda, What Happens to the Sun?

When astronomers look into the night sky, almost every single galaxy is speeding away from us, carried by the expansion of the Universe. There’s one notable exception; though, the massive Andromeda galaxy (aka M31), which is speeding towards us at a rate of 120 km/s. And some time in the next few billion years, our two galaxies will collide and begin the lengthly process of merging together. Our Sun, and even the Earth should still be around, so it begs the question, what will happen to our Solar System?

Site – http://www.universetoday.com

At the Centre of the Milky Way

You’re looking at the heart of your own galaxy with X-ray specs. This photograph was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory, and shows the three massive star clusters that surround the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These star clusters have so many large, bright stars that the whole area blazes in the X-ray spectrum. This photo shows 1 million seconds of accumulated observing time by Chandra of these mysterious region of our galaxy.

Site – http://www.universetoday.com

Hubble Reveals Two Dust Disks Around Nearby Star

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two dust disks circling the nearby star Beta Pictoris. The images confirm a decade of scientific speculation that a warp in the young star’s dust disk may actually be a second inclined disk, which is evidence for the possibility of at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting the star.

Site – http://www.physorg.com

A Ruler to Measure the Universe

A team of astronomers led by Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel has published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky, encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion light-years deep into space, equivalent to 40 percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang.

Site – http://www.lbl.gov

Dark Matter First, Then a Galaxy

A new study from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that galaxies form within clumps of dark matter. This mysterious substance emits no light, but it does have mass, so it can pull on matter with its gravity. Astronomers believe there’s 5 times as much dark matter in the Universe as regular matter. This new Spitzer survey found that the amount of dark matter surrounding distant galaxies is surprisingly consistent.

Site – http://www.universetoday.com