The Oh of Pleasure – Ray Lynch
An evening pause:
Tag: astronomy
More info on the asteroid “flyby” of Earth this coming November 8
More information on the asteroid “flyby” of Earth this coming November 8.
“On November 8, asteroid 2005 YU55 will fly past Earth and at its closest approach point will be about 325,000 kilometers [201,700 miles] away,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “This asteroid is about 400 meters [1,300 feet] wide – the largest space rock we have identified that will come this close until 2028.”
Hubble and Swift show that asteroid debris came from collision
Space telescopes Hubble and Swift have proven that the debris that suddenly surrounded asteroid Scheila last year was caused by a collision.
Are astronomers finally going to push for a replacement for Hubble?
Astronomers are considering the merger two space missions to create a new optical/ultraviolet space telescope. The mission would be designed to do both deep cosmology and exoplanet observations.
The two communities would both like to see a 4–8-metre telescope in space that would cost in excess of $5 billion. “Our interests are basically aligned,” says [Jim Kasting, a planetary scientist at Pennsylvania State University]. Such a mission would compete for top billing in the next decadal survey of astronomy by the US National Academy of Sciences, due in 2020.
This story is big news, as it indicates two things. First, the 2010 Decadal Survey, released in August 2010, is almost certainly a bust. The budget problems at NASA as well as a general lack of enthusiasm among astronomers and the public for its recommendations mean that the big space missions it proposed will almost certainly not be built.
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Observations of Comet Hale-Bopp at 30 AU
In a paper published tonight on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website, astronomers described new observations of Comet Hale-Bopp at a distance of 30 astronomical units, or 2.8 billion miles, from the sun. Their conclusions:
- These observations were the most distant detection of any known comet.
- The comet’s starlike appearance and its drop in brightness since the last observations suggest that the comet has finally ceased, or is about to cease, all activity, and that they are now looking directly at the comet’s nucleus instead of the coma cloud surrounding it.
- Nonetheless, the comet is brighter than expected, which also suggests that a thin layer of new ice covers its surface and thus increases its albedo.
To quote the paper, “Observing Hale-Bopp in a completely frozen state would be extremely important because a thick coma was constantly present during the entire appariation [Ed. the fly-by of the Sun]. The coma obscured the nucleus which was not observed directly. Lack photometric data of the bared nucleus, its size — one of the most important input parameter in activity models — remains uncertain.”
SDO’S best Images from its first year
The best images from Solar Dynamics Observatory’s first year in space.
Scientists find previously unknown deposits of CO2 on Mars
Scientists find a gigantic and previously unknown deposit of CO2 at Mars’ south pole.
“We already knew there is a small perennial cap of carbon-dioxide ice on top of the water ice there, but this buried deposit has about 30 times more dry ice than previously estimated,” said Roger Phillips of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Phillips is deputy team leader for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Shallow Radar instrument and lead author of the report. . . . “When you include this buried deposit, Martian carbon dioxide right now is roughly half frozen and half in the atmosphere, but at other times it can be nearly all frozen or nearly all in the atmosphere,” Phillips said.
What this discovery means is that, depending on Mars’ orbital circumstances, its atmosphere can sometimes be dense enough for liquid water to flow on its surface.
Budget chaos at NASA causes ESA to halt work on its own Mars orbiter and rover
Sounds crazy, but it’s true: The budget chaos at NASA has caused the ESA to halt work on its own Mars orbiter and rover.
Saturn and Enceladus linked by electricity
Saturn and Enceladus linked by electricity.
Sift through Kepler data and find exoplanets
Got some spare time for original science? Volunteers wanted to sift through the Kepler data to find exoplanets.
Pluto’s atmosphere is expanding, and scientists don’t know why
Pluto’s atmosphere is expanding, and scientists don’t know why.
Pluto travels along a highly elliptical path and last passed closest to the sun in 1989. Many planetary scientists expected the atmosphere to shrink as the icy orb began receding from the sun’s warmth. The unanticipated expansion may be related to changes in the darkness of the orb’s surface a decade or so ago, which may have caused the surface ices to absorb more solar radiation and more efficiently evaporate. Or, Greaves suggests, long-term variations in the sun’s ultraviolet output, changes linked to the roughly 11-year cycle of solar activity, may be playing a role.
Could black trees blossom in a world with two suns?
An asteroid that winks
An asteroid that winks.
The WISE space telescope results go online
The WISE infrared space telescope results are now online, for anyone to search.
Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012. A predecessor to WISE, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), served a similar role about 25 years ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise, the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades.
You can hunt for new asteroids, comets, and galaxies here, with instructions on how to do it here.
Budget problems might delay JWST until 2018
The telescope that ate astronomy: More budget problems for the James Webb Space Telescope, with its launch likely delayed again until 2018.
Experiment fails to find dark matter
The uncertainty of science: An underground experiment in Italy has failed to detect dark matter, as theorized by scientists.
In a paper published online last night, the XENON100 researchers report three events detected during a 100-day run of the experiment last year that might have been due to dark matter1. However, as they expected to see between 1.2 and 2.4 background events — interactions mostly caused by a radioactive contaminant in the xenon — their result is statistically negative and therefore rules out the existence of many of the more strongly interacting and heavier WIMPs.
NASA backs out of space gravitational wave mission
NASA, crunched for money due to overages on James Webb Space Telescope, has cancelled its participation in the space gravitational wave mission LISA.
The strange fluctuating polar vortex over Venus’s pole
The strange fluctuating polar vortex over Venus’s south pole.
Kepler tracks the tiny light variations and oscillations of 500 stars
Kepler does asteroseismology on 500 sunlike stars. The data says that the theories of star formation need to be revised.
Newly discovered asteroid orbits in union with Earth
Newly discovered asteroid follows the Earth as it orbits the Sun, and has been doing it for a quarter million years.
Currently, three other horseshoe companions of the Earth are known to exist but, unlike 2010 SO16, these linger for a few thousand years at most before moving on to different orbits. Also, with an estimated diameter of 200–400 metres, 2010 SO16 is by far the largest of Earth’s horseshoe asteroids. The team has already used the Las Cumbres Observatory’s Faulkes Telescope in an on-going campaign to track the object and refine its orbit further. “It is not that difficult to spot with a medium-sized professional telescope”, says Dr Asher. “It will remain as an evening object in Earth’s skies for many years to come.”