Gizmorama
November 22, 2010
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Good Morning,
German astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery
residing in our galaxy. They have found the first exo-planet,
which means that the planet did not originate in the Milky
Way. Check out all the details in the second article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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U.S. Army upgrades force tracking system
ARLINGTON, Va. - The U.S Army says it is proceeding with
technical upgrades to its force tracking system making it as
much ten times faster than the existing system. In a state-
ment, the Army said the new tracking system, Force XXI Battle
Command Brigade-and-Below, will include new next generation
software as well as a new, faster satellite network. The
Global Positioning System, satellite-guided system provides
military commanders and warfighters with location information
and data about friendly and hostile forces on the ground.
This facilitates coordination and synchronization of troops
during operations and helps reduce the risk of friendly fire
incidents. Users also can input and update operational graph-
ics, including obstacles and terrain features in the area and
the location of enemy troops. Bent on developing the system,
the Army said it was preparing to deploy the high-tech, high-
speed Blue Force Tracking 2, a force-tracking satellite-
communications network. Although difficult to compare, said
Lt. Col. Bryan Stephens, "it is roughly 10 times faster than
the existing BFT system." "BFT 2 is full duplex, which means
you can transmit and receive at the same time. It is an en-
tirely different architecture," said Stephens. The current
tracking system uses half-duplex capability, a term which
means that it has only one-way transmission and cannot re-
ceive and transmit at the same time, a U.S. Army statement
said. "BFT 2 data rates are exponentially faster than the
current BFT." The project plans to reach the level of nearly
160,000 tracking systems in the Army within a few years. The
system's prime contractor is Northrop Grumman and it aims to
shorten the distance information has to travel before
reaching command and control centers. "Today, if you transmit
your position-location information in theater operations, it
goes to a satellite and then to ground station. Then it is
transmitted to a Network Operations Center in the (United
States). The NOC sorts it all out and rebroadcasts. When you
deal with satellites, you are dealing with latency, as infor-
mation travels up and down a couple of different times," said
Stephens. "With the BFT 2 system, we changed that architec-
ture. Instead of going all the way to the NOC, information is
going up and down to a ground station. That is much different
than going through multiple satellite hops to get processed
at the NOCs." The tracking system isn't only incorporated
into ground combat vehicles, including tanks and personnel
carriers, it is also fitted on aircraft, such as the Apache
Longbow attack helicopter.
Planet 'alien' to Milky Way discovered
HEIDELBERG, Germany - European astronomers say they've
discovered the first "alien" exo-planet in our Milky Way,
one that originated outside our galaxy and was later captured
by it. Researchers writing in the journal Science say the
Jupiter-size planet is part of a solar system that once be-
longed to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by our own galaxy,
the BBC reported Thursday. The planet, HIP 13044 B, is
orbiting a star nearing the end of its life 2,000 light
years from Earth. Almost 500 exoplanets outside our Solar
System have been discovered, but all of those so far dis-
covered are indigenous to our own galaxy, the astronomers
say. HIP 13044 B is different because the planet circles a
sun in a group of stars called the "Helmi stream" which are
known to have once belonged to a separate dwarf galaxy that
was consumed by the Milky Way between six and nine billion
years ago. The planet would have been formed in the early era
of its own solar system before it was incorporated into our
galaxy, researchers say. "This discovery is very exciting,"
Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in
Heidelberg, Germany, said. "For the first time, astronomers
have detected a planetary system in a stellar stream of
extragalactic origin," he said. "This cosmic merger has
brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."
Ancient seaweeds could be oldest plants
FRESNO, Calif. - Two kinds of ancient seaweed growing more
than 650 feet under the ocean surface are "living fossils,"
a U.S. researcher says. Frederick Zechman of California
State University, Fresno, says they represent previously
unrecognized ancient forms of algae and could belong to the
earliest of all known green plants, diverging up to 1 billion
years ago from the ancestor of all plants. Zechman's team
studied the genetic makeup of the two algae belonging to
the scientific groups called Palmophyllum and Verdigellas.
They discovered that both types of algae belong to a distinct
new group of green plants, one that is incredibly ancient.
They are so different that they should be assigned their own
Order, a high level classification group, say the scientists.
"By comparing those gene sequences to the same genes in other
green plants, we have discovered that these green algae are
among the earliest diverging green plants ... if not the
earliest diverging lineage of green plants," Zechman told the
BBC. "That would put them in the ball park of over a billion
years old."
Astronomers confirm 'nearby' black hole
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The light from a supernova seen by an
amateur astronomer in 1979 may be hiding a black hole formed
when the massive star collapsed, U.S. astronomers say. Power-
ful instruments including NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory
have now observed the supernova located 50 million light
years from Earth and provided strong evidence of a black
hole hidden behind the light emitted from the explosion,
Britain's The Independent reported Thursday. Data from the
various observations revealed a strong reading of X-rays
from the supernova that remained steady from 1995 to 2007,
suggesting the object is a black hole being fed by material
falling back into it. "If our interpretation is correct, this
is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has
been observed," Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., says. Scientists
believe that such supernovas are in fact the most common way
that black holes are created, which is why the nearby dis-
covery is so interesting, Abraham Loeb of the Harvard center
says. "This may be the first time the common way of making
a black hole has been observed," he says. "However, it is
very difficult to detect this type of black hole birth be-
cause decades of X-ray observations are needed to make the
case," Loeb says
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