Great pic from NASA’s Image of the Day gallery:
Stars Adorn Orion’s Sword
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows what lies near the sword of the constellation Orion — an active stellar nursery containing thousands of young stars and developing protostars. Many will turn out like our sun. Some are even more massive. These massive stars light up the Orion nebula, which is seen here as the bright region near the center of the image.
Controversy over the discovery of Haumea
Wikipedia time. This article’s about the dwarf planet Haumea.
On December 28, 2004, Mike Brown and his team discovered Haumea on images they had taken with the 1.3 m SMARTS Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in the United States on May 6, 2004, while looking for what he hoped would be the tenth planet. … However, it was clearly too small to be a planet as it was significantly smaller than Pluto, and Brown did not announce the discovery. Instead he kept it under wraps, along with several other large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), until through additional observation he could better determine their natures. …
At around that time, Pablo Santos Sanz, a student of José Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía at Sierra Nevada Observatory in southern Spain, examined the backlog of photos that the Ortiz team had started taking in December 2002. He says that he found Haumea in late July on images taken on March 7, 9, and 10, 2003. In checking whether this was a known object, the team came across Brown’s internet summary, describing a bright TNO much like the one they had just found. Googling the reference number K40506A on the morning of July 26, they found the Caltech observation logs of Haumea, but according to their account, those logs contained too little information for Ortiz to tell if they were the same object. The Ortiz team also checked with the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which had no record of this object. Wanting to establish priority, they emailed the MPC with their discovery on the night of July 27, 2005, titled “Big TNO discovery, urgent”, without making any mention of the Caltech logs. The next morning they again accessed the Caltech logs, including observations from several additional nights. They then asked Reiner Stoss at the amateur Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca for further observations. Stoss found precovery images of Haumea in digitized Palomar Observatory slides from 1955, and located Haumea with his own telescope that night, July 28. Within an hour, the Ortiz team submitted a second report to the MPC that included this new data. Again, no mention was made of having accessed the Caltech logs. The data was published by the MPC on July 29.
This happened six years ago, how do I not remember any of this?
From the European Southern Observatory (ESO):
On Thursday 18 August, the sky above the Allgäu Public Observatory in southwestern Bavaria was an amazing sight, with the night lit up by two very different phenomena: one an example of advanced technology, and the other of nature’s dramatic power.
As ESO tested the new Wendelstein laser guide star unit by shooting a powerful laser beam into the atmosphere, one of the region’s intense summer thunderstorms was approaching — a very visual demonstration of why ESO’s telescopes are in Chile, and not in Germany. Heavy grey clouds threw down bolts of lightning as Martin Kornmesser, visual artist for the ESO outreach department, took timelapse photographs of the test for ESOcast 34. With purely coincidental timing this photograph was snapped just as lightning flashed, resulting in a breathtaking image that looks like a scene from a science fiction movie. Although the storm was still far from the observatory, the lightning appears to clash with the laser beam in the sky.
Immediately made this my desktop picture.
This is the sharpest image ever taken of the Apollo 12 landing site.
One of the details that shows up is a bright L-shape in the Apollo 12 image. It marks the locations of cables running from ALSEP’s central station to two of its instruments. Although the cables are much too small for direct viewing, they show up because they reflect light very well.
The higher resolution of these images is possible because of adjustments made to LRO’s [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter], which is slightly oval-shaped or elliptical. “Without changing the average altitude, we made the orbit more elliptical, so the lowest part of the orbit is on the sunlit side of the moon,” said Goddard’s John Keller, deputy LRO project scientist. “This put LRO in a perfect position to take these new pictures of the surface.”
The maneuver lowered LRO from its usual altitude of approximately 31 miles (50 kilometers) to an altitude that dipped as low as nearly 13 miles (21 kilometers) as it passed over the moon’s surface. The spacecraft has remained in this orbit for 28 days, long enough for the moon to completely rotate.
Check out NASA’s page for more, including photos of the Apollo 14 and 17 landing sites.
What if other planetary bodies orbited our world at the same distance as the moon?
Neato visualization.
Early Earth may have had two moons
Richard Lovett for Nature:
Earth once had two moons, which merged in a slow-motion collision that took several hours to complete, researchers propose in Nature today.
Both satellites would have formed from debris that was ejected when a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into Earth late in its formation period. Whereas traditional theory states that the infant Moon rapidly swept up any rivals or gravitationally ejected them into interstellar space, the new theory suggests that one body survived, parked in a gravitationally stable point in the Earth–Moon system.
…
The Moon’s visible side is dominated by low-lying lava plains, whereas its farside is composed of highlands. But the contrast is more than skin deep. The crust on the farside is 50 kilometres thicker than that on the nearside. The nearside is also richer in potassium (K), rare-earth elements (REE) and phosphorus (P) — components collectively known as KREEP. Crust-forming models show that these would have been concentrated in the last remnants of subsurface magma to crystallize as the Moon cooled.
What this suggests, [Erik] Asphaug says, is that something ‘squished’ the late-solidifying KREEP layer to one side of the Moon, well after the rest of the crust had solidified. An impact, he believes, is the most likely explanation.
Interesting new hypothesis by Erik Asphaug from UC Santa Cruz and Martin Jutzi of the University of Berne. It’s a neat idea, and it could be true, but we still don’t know enough about the formation of the Moon to know for sure. Hopefully we’ll learn more from future lunar missions.
Oh wait!
Here’s a video titled “A Journey into a Black Hole,” animated by Dr. Andrew Hamilton of the University of Colorado and written/narrated by Tony Darnell.
Astrophysics is a scary mofo.
Today, July 18, 2011, is John Glenn’s 90th birthday.
On Feb. 20, 1962 at 9:47 am EST, Glenn launched from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 14 to become the first American to orbit the Earth. In this image, Glenn enters his Friendship 7 capsule with assistance from technicians to begin his historic flight.
Fantastic photo from NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery. Click it to read the rest of the writeup and download it in bigger sizes.
Exoplanets without a star: galaxy teems with lonely Jupiters
Christopher Dombrowski, writing for Ars Technica:
[T]his week astronomers are announcing a truly unique and new class of exoplanets: Jupiter sized planets that are in extremely large orbits or completely unbound from a host star altogether. And there appear to be a lot of them, as these planets seem to be more common than main sequence stars.
I really wonder what it would be like to live on a moon of one of these planets. Without a nearby star, would the planet even be illuminated in the sky? Or would it simply be a dark disk blocking out starlight.