June 18, 2012

Good Morning,

There was a lot of interesting stuff happening this past week in space-related news, so I decided to dedicate this issue to "the final frontier." The Hubble Space Telescope captures a spectacular galactic alignment while astronomers in Denmark find ample evidence to suggest more Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone... and to think that there are billions of galaxies!

Until Next Time,
Erin

Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments

P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new Gizmorama forum. Check it out here...
http://gizmorama.gophercentral.com
------------------------------------------------------------

Galaxies giving impression of collision

BALTIMORE - NASA says the Hubble Space Telescope has captured a chance alignment between two galaxies that mimics what a cosmic collision would look like. While the two galaxies look as if they are colliding, they are actually separated by tens of millions of light-years, or about 10 times the distance between our Milky Way and our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, the Space Telescopes Science Institute reported Thursday. The chance alignment of the two galaxies as seen from Earth provides a unique look at the silhouetted spiral arms of the closer face-on spiral, NGC 3314A, astronomers said. The motions of NGC 3314A and the second galaxy, NGC 3314B, show they are both relatively undisturbed and are moving in markedly different directions, indicating they are not on any collision course. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys produced the image from exposures taken in blue and red light of the air of galaxies that lie roughly 140 million light-years from Earth, in the direction of the southern hemisphere constellation Hydra.


X-ray space telescope launched

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA said it's successfully launched its NuSTAR X-ray observatory into orbit Wednesday after it was dropped from an aircraft over the central Pacific Ocean. An L-1011 "Stargazer" aircraft, operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., took off from Kwajalein Atoll with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope attached to Orbital's Pegasus XL rocket, both strapped to the belly of the aircraft. At noon EDT, the rocket dropped from the L-1011, free-falling for 5 seconds before firing its first-stage motor. About 13 minutes later, NuSTAR separated from the rocket, reaching its final low-Earth orbit, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Wednesday. "NuSTAR spread its solar panels to charge the spacecraft battery and then reported back to Earth of its good health," Yunjin Kim, the mission's project manager at JPL, said. "We are checking out the spacecraft now and are excited to tune into the high-energy X-ray sky." NuSTAR will detect the highest energy X-ray light from the cosmos, seeing through gas and dust to reveal black holes lurking in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as those hidden in the hearts of faraway galaxies, mission officials said. "With its unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution to the previously poorly explored hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum, NuSTAR will open a new window on the universe and will provide complementary data to NASA's larger missions, including Fermi, Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer," Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, said.


Study: More Earth-like planets possible

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Small, rocky planets similar to Earth may be more common in our Milky Way and other galaxies than previously thought, European astronomers say. While large numbers of Jupiter-like exoplanets have been found around stars with high concentrations of what astronomers term "metals," elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, smaller terrestrial planets don't need metal-rich stars to form, they said. "Small planets could be widespread in our galaxy, because they do not require a high content of heavy elements to form," study lead author Lars Buchhave of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark told SPACE.com. The researchers analyzed observations by NASA's Kepler planet-seeking space telescope of 226 planet candidates circling 152 stars. More than three-quarters of them are smaller than Neptune, and some of them are as small as the earth, they said. A study of the stars' spectra showed small, rocky worlds are associated with stars with a much broader range of metal content than those with giant planets. "Naively, one might think that the more material you have in the [protoplanetary] disk, the more likely you are to form [small] planets," Buchhave said. "What we see, though, is that small planets form around stars with a wide range in heavy element content, while the close-in Jupiter-type planets seem to predominantly form around stars with a higher metal content." The findings suggest Earth-size worlds may not be rare inhabitants of the Milky Way, which increases the possibility of life on other worlds, Buchhave said. "Since small planets could be widespread in our galaxy, the chances of life developing could be higher, simply because there could be more terrestrial-sized planets where life could evolve."


'Tropical' lake possible on Saturn moon

TUCSON - A long-lasting "tropical" lake of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan may be replenished by underground wells of hydrocarbons, U.S. astronomers report. While the Cassini spacecraft confirmed the presence of such lakes in Titan's polar regions in 2004, it had been unknown whether similar bodies could survive in the moon's marginally warmer lower latitudes -- its "tropics" -- without evaporating, they said. Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson analyzed Cassini data on sunlight reflected from Titan's tropical regions and found a highly reflective oval-shaped black feature almost a thousand square miles in area, NewScientist.com reported Wednesday. Its shape and color is consistent with a liquid methane lake, they said. If it is in fact a lake, it is long-lived, having persisted since at least 2004 through both rainy and dry seasons, suggesting it's unlikely to be just a big rain puddle but rather could be fed by hydrocarbon wells, the researchers said.

------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Viral Videos on the Net at EVTV1.com
http://www.evtv1.com/
EVTV1.com