Tag: astronomy

WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

5:57 pm

Back from the dead: WISE sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, or NEOWISE, has taken its first set of test images since being reactivated in September after a 31-month-long hibernation, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 19). The space agency wants NEOWISE to resume its hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids, some of which could be promising targets for future human exploration.

We should note that NASA had shut down this functional space telescope even though the cost to use it to hunt asteroids would be relatively little. Cost was cited as the reason, but I suspect it was a combination of the vast overruns for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Obama administration’s puzzling hostility to science at NASA.

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Gaia, a astronomical space probe designed to pinpoint the location of a billion stars to map the Milky Way, was successfully launched today.

9:08 am

Gaia, a astronomical space probe designed to pinpoint the location of a billion stars to map the Milky Way, was successfully launched today.

This is an important spacecraft, but don’t expect to hear anything about its work now for a long time, as it will take a few years to accumulate the data involved and then a years beyond that to analyze it. Nonetheless, when Gaia’s work is finished we will have our first reasonably good map of the Milky Way, with the ability to project that map forward and backward in time.

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One scientist’s modeling of the early universe suggests to him that intelligent life could have evolved as early as 15 million years after the Big Bang.

9:23 am

Theories! One scientist’s modeling of the early universe suggests to him that intelligent life could have evolved as early as 15 million years after the Big Bang.

This is fun stuff, but entirely theoretical and not to be taken very seriously. We know with certainty as much about the early universe as a mouse understands Shakespeare. To predict accurately the nature or even existence of life at that time is stretching our knowledge considerably.

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Russia consolidates its space industry into one giant government-owned corporation.

5:20 pm

Russia consolidates its space industry into one giant government-owned corporation.

While the U.S. is working to increase the number of space companies and thus the competition to get into space, Russia is returning to its Soviet-era roots. This second story about this consolidation includes this telling quote:

The country is set to radically centralize its space industry in a bid to combat major inefficiencies and cut down on the misuse of funds under plans unveiled by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense and aerospace sectors.

This decision does not really bode well for Russia’s effort to compete on the open market. You never solve inefficiencies or cut costs by eliminating competition. Instead, the lack of competition encourages inefficiency and increased cost.

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Though this conclusion is not final, it appears that Comet ISON was destroyed today in its close fly-by of the Sun.

2:11 pm

Though this conclusion is not final, it appears that Comet ISON was destroyed today in its close fly-by of the Sun.

A sad end to what has been a cometary disappointment. First spotted while it was very far from the Sun, astronomers thus hoped that Comet ISON would blaze brightly when it got closer. Instead, it hardly brightened at all during its journey inward, barely reaching naked eye visibility in the last week. Now it appears to be gone forever.

Scientists will gain some knowledge from this comet, as it was a first time visitor to the inner solar system and thus provides information about the solar system’s beginnings. Nonetheless, for those of us that enjoy watching the beautiful things the heavens give us, this comet will always remain a dud.

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Comet ISON makes its close flyby of the sun today.

8:40 am

Comet ISON makes its close flyby of the sun today.

Three possible fates await Comet ISON, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“It could be tough enough to survive the passage of the sun and be a fairly bright naked-eye object in the early morning sky in the first week of December,” Yeomans said in a statement. “Or, the sun could actually pull it apart. The tidal forces could actually pull this comet apart and so it becomes several chunks rounding the sun and putting on a great show again in early December. Or, if the comet is very weak, it could break up into a cloud of dust and be a complete bust in December.”

So far the comet has been a big disappointment in terms of brightness. However, its flyby today will be interesting as scientists will get a chance to observe one of the largest sun-grazers they’ve ever seen do this.

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Using Kepler data, astronomers have discovered a solar system with seven planets and configured similar to our own, with rocky planets close to the star and gas giants farther away

9:20 am

Using Kepler data, astronomers have discovered a solar system with seven planets and configured similar to our own, with rocky planets close to the star and gas giants farther away.

The system is far more compact than ours, with the gas giants in orbits similar to Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

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New data suggesting the presence of granite on Mars also suggests that the planet is more geologically complex than previously believed.

9:17 am

The uncertainty of science: New data suggesting the presence of granite on Mars also suggests that the planet is more geologically complex than previously believed.

In my years of science writing, I can’t count the number of times I’ve written the phrase “more complex than previously believed.” For some reason, modern scientists seem to always assume that things will be simple, with one straight-forward answer. From gamma ray bursts to supernovae to planetary formation to whatever, the first example found and the first theory developed from that first example has repeatedly been expected to explain everything.

But that’s not how things work. Instead, the closer scientists have looked, the more complex and interesting things have always become. Many different things can cause gamma ray bursts. Supernovae come in many types. Solar systems don’t have to resemble ours. Everything is always more complex than you first believe.

Scientists would get things wrong less often if they simply kept this thought in mind, at all times.

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Comet ISON brightens to just within naked eye visibility.

5:50 pm

Comet ISON brightens to just within naked eye visibility.

“[T]he little but intensely condensed, globular cluster-looking comet was a whopping magnitude 5.4 — two full magnitudes brighter than just 24 hours ago! This makes for a three magnitude total rise since my observation on Monday.” In just 72 hours, Comet ISON increased nearly 16 times in brightness.

Don’t get too excited. Magnitude 5.4 would make it comparable to one of the dimmer stars in the night sky, while the description above indicates it looks less like a comet and more like a blob.

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The number of candidate exoplanets found by Kepler has now risen to 3,500.

11:09 am

Worlds without end: The number of candidate exoplanets found by Kepler has now risen to 3,500.

According to this new analysis, researchers estimate about 70% of stars are host to at least one planet, making planets a common cosmic occurrence. There are now 1,750 candidates that are super-Earth-size or smaller, and 1,788 are Neptune-size or larger. Only 167 of the 3,538 candidates are confirmed to be planets, but Kepler has a good track record: the vast majority of these are probably real.

Two dozen of these candidates are in the habitable zone, ten of which are thought to be close to Earth-sized.

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The accumulated evidence from the Chelyabinsk meteorite now suggests the risk of large asteroid impacts might be ten times greater than previously estimated.

12:07 pm

The accumulated evidence from the Chelyabinsk meteorite now suggests the risk of large asteroid impacts might be ten times greater than previously estimated.

The Chelyabinsk asteroid had approached Earth from a region of the sky that is inaccessible to ground-based telescopes. In the 6 weeks before the impact, it would have been visible above the horizon only during the daytime, when the sky is too bright to see objects of its size, says Borovička.

“The residual impact risk — from asteroids with yet-unknown orbits — is shifting to small-sized objects,” says Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and an author on the Nature papers.

Of the millions of estimated near-Earth asteroids 10–20 metres in diameter, only about 500 have been catalogued. Models suggest that an object the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid hits Earth once every 150 years on average, Brown says. But the number of observed impacts exceeding 1 kiloton of TNT over the past 20 years alone hints at an actual impact risk that may be an order of magnitude larger than previously assumed,

The data also now suggests that the Chelyabinsk asteroid was twice as big as previously thought, and that it had an almost identical orbit to a much larger already known asteroid.

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For its next science mission the European Space Agency (ESA) has now decided to give first priority to an X-ray space telescope.

9:17 am

For its next science mission the European Space Agency (ESA) has now decided to give first priority to an X-ray space telescope.

They have demoted a space-based gravity wave detector to second place. As is typical for ESA, the pace here is quite slow, as both missions are now scheduled for launch in 2028 and 2034, decades away.

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Sunrise tomorrow on the East Coast will be interesting, as the sun will rise in the middle of a partial solar eclipse.

8:40 am

Sunrise tomorrow on the East Coast will be interesting, as the sun will rise in the middle of a partial solar eclipse.

Technically speaking, the partial eclipse could be visible as far inland as, say, Tennessee. Sky & Telescope projects that 57 percent of the sun’s diameter could be covered over at sunrise in Boston, 48 percent in New York, 44 percent in Philadelphia, 35 percent in Washington, and 36 percent in Miami. But you’d have to have a clear view of a flat horizon — and no matter where you are on the East Coast, the partial eclipse will be over within an hour after sunrise.

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The first Earth-sized exoplanet, just discovered, makes no sense to scientists.

1:14 pm

The first Earth-sized exoplanet, just discovered, makes no sense to scientists.

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn’t exist. This scorching lava world circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one million miles – one of the tightest known orbits. According to current theories of planet formation, it couldn’t have formed so close to its star, nor could it have moved there. “This planet is a complete mystery,” says astronomer David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “We don’t know how it formed or how it got to where it is today. What we do know is that it’s not going to last forever.”

The planet itself is only 20 percent larger than the Earth, with a comparable density that suggests its composition is similar as well.

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Europe turns off Planck

8:32 am

Europe turns off Planck.

Planck operated four-and-a-half years, three times longer than originally planned. Launched in May 2009 on an Ariane 5 rocket shared with ESA’s Herschel telescope, Planck measured the cosmic fingerprint of the Big Bang, detecting subtle variations in background light originating 380,000 years after the genesis of the universe.

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