The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Monday, June 11, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
NASA'S SPITZER FINDS FIRST OBJECTS BURNED FURIOUSLY
FROM: NASA
WASHINGTON -- The faint, lumpy glow from the very first objects in the
universe may have been detected with the best precision yet using
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The objects could be wildly massive
stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen
individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of
what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.
The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in
quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.
"These objects would have been tremendously bright," said Alexander
"Sasha" Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new paper appearing in The
Astrophysical Journal. "We can't yet directly rule out mysterious
sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe,
but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a
glimpse of an ancient epoch. Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for
NASA's upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what
and where these first objects were."
Spitzer first caught hints of this remote pattern of light, known as
the cosmic infrared background, in 2005, and again with more
precision in 2007. Now, Spitzer is in the extended phase of its
mission, during which it performs more in-depth studies on specific
patches of the sky. Kashlinsky and his colleagues used Spitzer to
look at two patches of sky for more than 400 hours each.
The team then carefully subtracted all of the known stars and galaxies
in the images. Rather than being left with a black, empty patch of
sky, they found faint patterns of light with several telltale
characteristics of the cosmic infrared background. The lumps in the
pattern observed are consistent with the way the very distant objects
are thought to be clustered together.
Kashlinsky likens the observations to looking for Fourth of July
fireworks in New York City from Los Angeles. First, you would have to
remove all the foreground lights between the two cities, as well as
the blazing lights of New York City itself. You ultimately would be
left with a fuzzy map of how the fireworks are distributed, but they
would still be too distant to make out individually.
"We can gather clues from the light of the universe's first
fireworks," said Kashlinsky. "This is teaching us that the sources,
or the "sparks," are intensely burning their nuclear fuel."
The universe formed roughly 13.7 billion years ago in a fiery,
explosive Big Bang. With time, it cooled and, by around 500 million
years later, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take
shape. Astronomers say some of that "first light" may have traveled
billions of years to reach the Spitzer Space Telescope. The light
would have originated at visible or even ultraviolet wavelengths and
then, because of the expansion of the universe, stretched out to the
longer, infrared wavelengths observed by Spitzer.
The new study improves on previous observations by measuring this
cosmic infrared background out to scales equivalent to two full moons
-- significantly larger than what was detected before. Imagine trying
to find a pattern in the noise in an old-fashioned television set by
looking at just a small piece of the screen. It would be hard to know
for certain if a suspected pattern was real. By observing a larger
section of the screen, you would be able to resolve both small- and
large-scale patterns, further confirming your initial suspicion.
Likewise, astronomers using Spitzer have increased the amount of the
sky examined to obtain more definitive evidence of the cosmic
infrared background. The researchers plan to explore more patches of
sky in the future to gather more clues hidden in the light of this
ancient era.
"This is one of the reason's we are building the James Webb Space
Telescope," said Glenn Wahlgren, Spitzer program scientist at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "Spitzer is giving us tantalizing clues,
but James Webb will tell us what really lies at the era where stars
first ignited."
Other authors are Richard Arendt of Goddard and the University of
Maryland in Baltimore; Matt Ashby and Giovanni Fazio of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.; and
John Mather and Harvey Moseley of Goddard. Fazio led the initial
observations of these sky fields.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., manages the
Spitzer Space Telescope mission for the agency's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the
Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science
Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at
Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
VENUS VERSUS THE SOL
FROM: NASA
This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows Venus as it nears the disk of
The sun on June 5, 2012. Venus’s 2012 transit will be the last such event until 2117. Photo: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
RIPPLES IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE EJECT BLACK HOLE FROM A GALAXY
FROM: NASA
GIANT BLACK HOLE KICKED OUT OF HOME GALAXY
WASHINGTON -- Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive
black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of
several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra
X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged
with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from
gravitational wave radiation.
"It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions
of times the mass of the sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked
out of a galaxy at enormous speed," said Francesca Civano of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the new
study. "But these new data support the idea that gravitational waves
-- ripples in the fabric of space first predicted by Albert Einstein
but never detected directly -- can exert an extremely powerful
force."
Although the ejection of a supermassive black hole from a galaxy by
recoil because more gravitational waves are being emitted in one
direction than another is likely to be rare, it nevertheless could
mean that there are many giant black holes roaming undetected out in
the vast spaces between galaxies.
"These black holes would be invisible to us," said co-author Laura
Blecha, also of CfA, "because they have consumed all of the gas
surrounding them after being thrown out of their home galaxy."
Civano and her group have been studying a system known as CID-42,
located in the middle of a galaxy about 4 billion light years away.
They had previously spotted two distinct, compact sources of optical
light in CID-42, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
More optical data from the ground-based Magellan and Very Large
Telescopes in Chile supplied a spectrum (that is, the distribution of
optical light with energy) that suggested the two sources in CID-42
are moving apart at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour.
Previous Chandra observations detected a bright X-ray source likely
caused by super-heated material around one or more supermassive black
holes. However, they could not distinguish whether the X-rays came
from one or both of the optical sources because Chandra was not
pointed directly at CID-42, giving an X-ray source that was less
sharp than usual.
"The previous data told us that there was something special going on,
but we couldn't tell if there were two black holes or just one," said
another co-author Martin Elvis, also of CfA. "We needed new X-ray
data to separate the sources."
When Chandra's sharp High Resolution Camera was pointed directly at
CID-42, the resulting data showed that X-rays were coming only from
one of the sources. The team thinks that when two galaxies collided,
the supermassive black holes in the center of each galaxy also
collided. The two black holes then merged to form a single black hole
that recoiled from gravitational waves produced by the collision,
which gave the newly merged black hole a sufficiently large kick for
it to eventually escape from the galaxy.
The other optical source is thought to be the bright star cluster that
was left behind. This picture is consistent with recent computer
simulations of merging black holes, which show that merged black
holes can receive powerful kicks from the emission of gravitational
waves.
There are two other possible explanations for what is happening in
CID-42. One would involve an encounter between three supermassive
black holes, resulting in the lightest one being ejected. Another
idea is that CID-42 contains two supermassive black holes spiraling
toward one another, rather than one moving quickly away.
Both of these alternate explanations would require at least one of the
supermassive black holes to be very obscured, since only one bright
X-ray source is observed. Thus the Chandra data support the idea of a
black hole recoiling because of gravitational waves.
These results will appear in the June 10 issue of The Astrophysical
Journal.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the
Chandra Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge,
Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
SPACEX DRAGON CAPSULE RETURNS TO EARTH AFTER FIRST COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO SPACE STATION
FROM: NASA
HOUSTON -- SpaceX's Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean
at 11:42 a.m. EDT a few hundred miles west of Baja California,
Mexico, marking a successful end to the first mission by a commercial
company to resupply the International Space Station.
"Congratulations to the teams at SpaceX and NASA who worked hard to
make this first commercial mission to the International Space Station
an overwhelming success," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.
"This successful splashdown and the many other achievements of this
mission herald a new era in U.S. commercial spaceflight. American
innovation and inspiration have once again shown their great strength
in the design and operation of a new generation of vehicles to carry
cargo to our laboratory in space. Now more than ever we're counting
on the inventiveness of American companies and American workers to
make the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit
destinations accessible to any and all who have dreams of space
travel."
The Dragon capsule will be taken by boat to a port near Los Angeles,
where it will be prepared for a return journey to SpaceX's test
facility in McGregor, Texas, for processing. Some cargo will be
removed at the port in California and returned to NASA within 48
hours. The remainder will be returned to Texas with the capsule.
The capsule delivered to the station 1,014 pounds of supplies
including experiments, food, clothing and technology. On its return
trip to Earth, the capsule carried science experiments that will be
returned to researchers hoping to gain new insights provided by the
unique microgravity environment in the station's laboratories. In
addition to the experiments, Dragon returned a total of 1,367 pounds
of hardware and cargo no longer needed aboard the station.
Dragon's journey to the space station was SpaceX's second
demonstration mission under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation
Services (COTS) Program, which provides investments to stimulate the
commercial space industry in America. The mission began May 22 as the
capsule launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida
aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Following a series of tests of its
maneuverability and abort systems, the capsule was grappled and
berthed to the space station by the crew members of Expedition 31
aboard the orbiting complex.
In the next several weeks, NASA will evaluate the Dragon capsule's
mission performance to close out remaining COTS milestones. Once that
work is completed NASA and SpaceX will set the target date for the
company's first full cargo mission.
In addition to fostering the development of new American cargo
vehicles, NASA also is helping spur innovation and development of new
spacecraft and launch vehicles from the commercial industry to
develop safe, reliable and cost-effective capabilities to transport
astronauts to low Earth orbit and the space station.
NASA also is developing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System
(SLS), a crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket that will provide an
entirely new capability for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
Designed to be flexible for launching spacecraft for crew and cargo
missions, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth
orbit and enable new missions of exploration across the solar system.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
NASA'S PEGASUS
Pegasus Fairing Removed
Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus XL rocket is viewed over the Pegasus payload fairing, positioned part in and part out of the environmental enclosure in Orbital’s hangar on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Half of the Pegasus fairing has been removed from around NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft. Access to the spacecraft is needed for compatibility testing to verify communication with a tracking station in Hawaii.
Image credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin, VAFB
April 10, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
NASA PREPARING TO LAUNCH ITS NEWEST X-RAY TELESCOPE ARRAY CALLED NUSTAR
NASA PREPARING TO LAUNCH ITS NEWEST X-RAY EYES
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR,
is being prepared for the final journey to its launch pad on
Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. The mission will study
everything from massive black holes to our own sun. It is scheduled
to launch no earlier than June 13.
"We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a
fundamentally new high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much
deeper and crisper images than before," said Fiona Harrison, the
NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., who first conceived of the
mission 20 years ago.
The observatory is perched atop an Orbital Sciences Corporation
Pegasus XL rocket. If the mission passes its Flight Readiness Review
on June 1, the rocket will be strapped to the bottom of an aircraft,
the L-1011 Stargazer, also operated by Orbital, on June 2. The
Stargazer is scheduled to fly from Vandenberg Air Force Base in
central California to Kwajalein June 5-6.
On launch day, the Stargazer will take off and at around 11:30 a.m.
EDT (8:30 a.m. PDT) will drop the rocket, which will then ignite and
carry NuSTAR to a low orbit around Earth.
"NuSTAR uses several innovations for its unprecedented imaging
capability and was made possible by many partners," said Yunjin Kim,
the project manager for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "We're all really excited to see
the fruition of our work begin its mission in space."
NuSTAR will be the first space telescope to create focused images of
cosmic X-rays with the highest energies. These are the same types of
X-rays that doctors use to see your bones and airports use to scan
your bags. The telescope will have more than 10 times the resolution,
and more than 100 times the sensitivity, of its predecessors while
operating in a similar energy range.
The mission will work with other telescopes in space now, including
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which observes lower-energy X-rays.
Together, they will provide a more complete picture of the most
energetic and exotic objects in space, such as black holes, dead
stars and jets traveling near the speed of light.
"NuSTAR truly demonstrates the value that NASA's research and
development programs provide in advancing the nation's science
agenda," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director.
"Taking just over four years from receiving the project go-ahead to
launch, this low-cost Explorer mission will use new mirror and
detector technology that was developed in NASA's basic research
program and tested in NASA's scientific ballooning program. The
result of these modest investments is a small space telescope that
will provide world-class science in an important but relatively
unexplored band of the electromagnetic spectrum."
NuSTAR will study black holes that are big and small, far and near,
answering questions about the formation and physics behind these
wonders of the cosmos. The observatory will also investigate how
exploding stars forge the elements that make up planets and people,
and it will even study our own sun's atmosphere.
The observatory is able to focus the high-energy X-ray light into
sharp images because of a complex, innovative telescope design.
High-energy light is difficult to focus because it only reflects off
mirrors when hitting at nearly parallel angles. NuSTAR solves this
problem with nested shells of mirrors. It has the most nested shells
ever used in a space telescope, 133 in each of two optic units. The
mirrors were molded from ultra-thin glass similar to that found in
laptop screens and glazed with even thinner layers of reflective
coating.
The telescope also consists of state-of-the-art detectors and a
lengthy 33-foot (10-meter) mast, which connects the detectors to the
nested mirrors, providing the long distance required to focus the
X-rays. This mast is folded up into a canister small enough to fit
atop the Pegasus launch vehicle. It will unfurl about seven days
after launch. About 23 days later, science operations will begin.
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft
was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va. Its
instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL;
University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley); Columbia
University in New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; and ATK Aerospace
Systems in Goleta, Calif. NuSTAR will be operated by UC Berkeley,
with the Italian Space Agency providing its equatorial ground station
located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at
Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer
Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
Friday, June 1, 2012
HUBBLE OBSERVES GALAXY 4980
FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ARMED WITH SCIENCE
Written on MAY 27, 2012 AT 7:10 AM by JTOZER
A Spiral Galaxy in Hydra
This image from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 4980, a spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Hydra. The shape of NGC 4980 appears slightly deformed, something which is often a sign of recent tidal interactions with another galaxy. In this galaxy’s case, however, this appears not to be the case as there are no other galaxies in its immediate vicinity.
The image was produced as part of a research program into the nature of galactic bulges, the bright, dense, elliptical centers of galaxies. Classical bulges are relatively disordered, with stars orbiting the galactic center in all directions. In contrast, in galaxies with so-called pseudobulges, or disc-type bulges, the movement of the spiral arms is preserved right to the center of the galaxy.
Although the spiral structure is relatively subtle in this image, scientists have shown that NGC 4980 has a disc-type bulge, and its rotating spiral structure extends to the very center of the galaxy.
A galaxies’ bright arms are the location of new star formation in spiral galaxies, and NGC 4980 is no exception. The galaxy’s arms are traced out by blue pockets of extremely hot newborn stars are visible across much of its disc. This sets it apart from the reddish galaxies visible in the background, which are distant elliptical galaxies made up of much older, and hence redder, stars.
This image is composed of exposures taken in visible and infrared light by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image is approximately 3.3 by 1.5 arcminutes in size.
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