August 8, 2011

Good Morning,

One brilliant device discovers a whopping 96 star clusters in our own galaxy. Read all the details on these newly discovered clusters and why they hadn't been found before in the first article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Telescope reveals hidden star clusters

MUNICH, Germany - A telescope in Chile has detected 96 star clusters in our Milk Way galaxy previously unseen because they are hidden by galactic dust, astronomers said. The VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Paranal, Chile, used infrared detection to spot the star-forming clusters invisible to most sky surveys, a release from ESO headquarters in Munich said Wednesday. "This discovery highlights the potential of VISTA ... for finding star clusters, especially those hiding in dusty star-forming regions in the Milky Way's disc," study lead author Jura Borissova said. Most stars form in groups called open clusters but many such clusters form in the very dusty regions of the galaxy that diffuse and absorb most of the light young stars emit, the researchers said. "In order to trace the youngest star cluster formation we concentrated our search towards known star-forming areas," lead survey scientist Danti Minnitti said. "In regions that looked empty in previous visible-light surveys, the sensitive VISTA infrared detectors uncovered many new objects." The interstellar dust between the clusters and us makes them difficult to detect, astronomers said. "Compared to typical open clusters, these are very faint and compact objects -- the dust in front of these clusters makes them appear 10,000 to 100 million times fainter in visible light," Radostin Kurtev, another member of the team, said. "It's no wonder they were hidden."


Scientists seek multiple universes

LONDON - British physicists say the theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, just one of multiple bubble universes in a "multiverse," can now be tested. Scientists at University College London, Imperial College London and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics say the search is on for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang that could provide evidence of collisions between other universes and our own. Efforts to identify an efficient way to search for signs of such collisions have been hampered by the possibility the disc-like patterns in the radiation could be located anywhere in the sky and could be difficult to separate out from random patterns in the noisy background radiation data. "It's a very hard statistical and computational problem to search for all possible radii of the collision imprints at any possible place in the sky," researcher Hiranya Peiris said Wednesday in a UCL release. A new computer algorithm will allow the researchers to analyze huge amounts of background radiation data from a NASA probe, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. "The work represents an opportunity to test a theory that is truly mind-blowing: that we exist within a vast multiverse, where other universes are constantly popping into existence," Stephen Feeney, who created the powerful algorithm, said.


Rare crystals found in meteorite

TOHOKU, Japan - Japanese researchers say they found opal-like crystals in a meteor that fell in Canada in 2000, the first extraterrestrial discovery of such unusual crystals. Reporting the find in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, scientists from Tohoku University said the crystals may have formed in the primordial cloud of dust that produced the sun and planets of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago, an ACS release said Wednesday. Colloidal crystals such as opals, which form as an orderly array of particles, are of great interest for their potential use in new electronics and optical devices, researcher Katsuo Tsukamoto said. The formation of colloidal crystals in the so-called Tagish Lake meteorite implies that several significant conditions must have existed when they formed, the researchers said. "First, a certain amount of solution water must have been present in the meteorite to disperse the colloidal particles," the journal report said. "The solution water must have been confined in small voids, in which colloidal crystallization takes place. "These conditions, along with evidence from similar meteorites, suggest that the crystals may have formed 4.6 billion years ago."


Hospital tests wireless patient monitoring

ST. LOUIS - A U.S. hospital is testing a clinical warning
system that uses wireless sensors to track the vital signs
of at-risk patients and can inform nurses of a problem.
When fully operational, the system's wearable sensors will
take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute, transmitting the data to a base station, where computers will look for any signs of clinical deterioration and alert medical personnel, a release from Washington University in St. Louis said Thursday. The idea of the system, undergoing a feasibility study at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, is to create a virtual intensive care unit where the patients aren't wired to beeping machines but are free to move about, said Chenyang Lu, a computer scientist at Washington University who was the principal investigator for the prototype-network trial. "Overall, the prototype trial showed that wireless sensor networks can successfully monitor vital signs to support real-time detection of clinical deterioration in patients," Lu says.

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