Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe

Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe

WASHINGTON – The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.
Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.
"We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said in a news conference.
Until NASA's Hubble telescope was repaired and upgraded last year, the farthest back in time that astronomers could see was about 900 million years after the Big Bang, Illingworth said. Hubble has been key in helping determine the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years, ending a long scientific debate about a decade ago.
As far back as Hubble can see, it still doesn't see the first galaxies. For that, NASA will have to rely on a new observatory, the $4.5 billion James Webb telescope, which is set to launch in about four years.
"We are on the way to the beginning," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History. "Every step closer to the beginning tells you something you did not know before."
The new Hubble picture captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed amid closer, newer and more evolved ones. The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13 billion years.
Tyson, who was not involved in the Hubble image research, said most people only like their own baby pictures, but Hubble's photo is different: "These are the baby pictures for us all, hence the widespread interest."
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On the Net:
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Chandra Images by Date 2009

Chandra Images by Date: 2009

17 Dec 09
G292.0+1.8
Supernova remnants representing two different types of supernova explosions.

17 Dec 09
Kepler's Supernova Remnant
Supernova remnants representing two different types of supernova explosions.

10 Dec 09
NGC 6872
A pair of colliding galaxies at a distance of about 180 million light years from Earth.

23 Nov 09
Crab Nebula
The remnants of a star that exploded and that appeared in Earth's sky almost a thousand years ago.

10 Nov 09
Galactic Center
The core of the Milky Way at a distance of some 26,000 light years from Earth.

04 Nov 09
Cassiopeia A
A supernova remnant in the Milky Way with a neutron star at its center.

22 Oct 09
JKCS041
A galaxy cluster located about 10.2 billion light years from Earth.

06 Oct 09
NGC 6240
A galaxy about 330 million light years from Earth.

22 Sep 09
Galactic Center
A 400 by 900 light-year mosaic of images located about 26,000 light years from Earth.

14 Sep 09
Hydra A
A galaxy cluster about 840 million light years from Earth.

27 Aug 09
Cygnus X-1
A black hole in close orbit around a blue supergiant star.

12 Aug 09
Cepheus B
A cloud of molecular hydrogen in the Milky Way about 2,400 light years from Earth.

23 Jul 09
E0102-72.3
Officially known as 1E0102.2-7129, a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

09 Jul 09
Stephan's Quintet
A group of galaxies that is located about 280 million light years from Earth.

26 Jun 09
RCW 86
A supernova remnant in the Milky Way, about 8,200 light years from Earth.

24 Jun 09
Lyman Alpha Blobs
Giant reservoirs of hydrogen gas about 10 billion light years away.

09 Jun 09
SNR 0104-72.3
A supernova remnant located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 190,000 light years from Earth.

28 May 09
HDF 130
A supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, about 10 billion light years away.

14 May 09
3C305
A galaxy, about 600 million light years away, with a supermassive black hole at its center.

29 Apr 09
Galactic X-ray Ridge
A ridge-like structure near the center of the Milky Way of X-ray emission discovered by earlier telescopes.

16 Apr 09
MACSJ0717.5+3745
One of the most complex galaxy clusters, located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth.

03 Apr 09
PSR B1509-58
(B1509)
A 1700-year-old pulsar and its nebula, located about 17,000 light years from Earth.

25 Mar 09
GRS 1915+105
A stellar-mass black hole with about 14 times the Sun’s mass in the Milky Way.

11 Mar 09
NGC 4194
A galaxy lies about 110 million light years away

26 Feb 09
PSR J0108-1431
The oldest pulsar detected in X-rays at a distance of about 770 light years from Earth.

18 Feb 09
Tycho's Supernova Remnant
The hot, expanding debris of a supernova observed in 1572.

10 Feb 09
M101
A face-on spiral galaxy about 22 million light years from Earth.

30 Jan 09
Centaurus A
An active galaxy at a distance of 10 million light years from Earth.

27 Jan 09
NGC 604
The largest region of star formation in the nearby galaxy M33

06 Jan 09
Cassiopeia A
The supernova remnant that was Chandra's "First Light" has been observed over time.

06 Jan 09
Cassiopeia A
A multiwavelength three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of a supernova remnant has been created.

Major Milestones In X-ray Astronomy

Major Milestones In X-ray Astronomyby WKT June 6, 2002 :: In September, 1949, a team led by Herbert Friedman of the Naval Research Laboratory detected weak X-ray emission from the solar corona, the hot outer layers of the Sun's atmosphere. Their experiment consisted of a collection of small Geiger counters aboard a captured German V-2 rocket. It took more than a decade before a greatly improved detector discovered X-rays coming from sources beyond the solar system. In 1962, a team of scientists under the direction of Riccardo Giacconi at American Science and Engineering in Cambridge, MA., used a small X-ray detector aboard an Aerobee rocket to discover Scorpius X-1, the first source of X-rays outside our solar system. Forty years later, over 100,000 X-ray sources have been detected, the most distant of which is 13 billion light years from Earth. This extraordinary leap in sensitivity has been due, in large part, to the development of telescopes that can focus X-rays.
Flash Versionof Timeline The first imaging X-ray telescope was made by Giacconi and collaborators. It was flown on a small sounding rocket in October 1963 and made crude images of hot spots in the upper atmosphere of the sun. This telescope was about the same diameter and length as the optical telescope Galileo used in 1610. Over a period of 380 years, optical telescopes improved in sensitivity by 100 million times from Galileo's telescope to the Hubble Space Telescope. Remarkably, the Chandra X-ray Observatory represents a comparable leap in sensitivity over Giacconi's 1963 telescope, yet it took only 36 years!

Nasa tests Aberdeenshire find for life on Mars clues

Nasa tests Aberdeenshire find for life on Mars clues
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Nasa scientists test Macaulayite in an Aberdeenshire quarry for Mars clue
Scientists from space agency Nasa are testing a mineral only found in one corner of Scotland to see if it can provide clues about life on Mars.
Macaulayite is only believed to exist at a quarry at the foot of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire.
Researchers think it could be the same mineral which gives the planet its red colour.
Samples have now been sent to a testing centre in California in an attempt to verify its presence.
Macaulayite was discovered by researchers from Aberdeen's Macaulay Institute in the late 1970s.

Tests are being carried out on Macaulayite found in Aberdeenshire
The mineral is formed in the presence of water so if it does occur on the surface of Mars it could provide proof the planet can sustain life.
It is formed from granite which has been weathered by tropical climates from before the last Ice Age.
The team which found it was led by mineralogist Jeff Wilson, who is now retired.
Dr Wilson told BBC Scotland: "It is exciting because this particular mineral contains water.
"It's a very fine grain mineral and water is bound to the inner surfaces.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the occurrence of water on Mars. We don't know but it could be associated with this mineral."
The US space agency Nasa is conducting tests on Macaulayite.
Dr Janice Bishop, a Mars specialist from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, said: "All life forms as we know it require liquid water so if we can actually find periods of time or places on the planet where there was standing water then the chance of life having formed increase greatly."
Only limited data has been collected about the surface of Mars, through orbiters and probe landings.

Cool find in hunt for exoplanets

Cool find in hunt for exoplanets
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The planet, called GJ758B, may well have a sister, GJ758C
Astronomers have published an image of the coolest planet outside our solar system that has been pictured directly.
The new find is more similar to our own Solar System than prior pictured exoplanets, in terms of the parent star's type and the planet's size.
However, the surface temperature is a scorching 280-370C, and could still prove to be a brown dwarf star.
The results, published in Astrophysical Journal, were obtained by a new camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
Among more than 400 known exoplanets, only 10 have been imaged directly, rather than detecting them via measurements of their parent stars' light or movement.
The task is notoriously difficult, akin to discerning a match next to a floodlight at a distance of kilometres.
One good turn
The new HiCIAO camera makes it possible to spot exoplanets next to their parent stars through a process called angular differential imaging.
In this approach, successive pictures are taken when a target star is directly overhead in the sky and possible exoplanets appear to rotate around it; any specks of light due to the measurement stay put and can be subtracted.
In two observations in May and August, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy focused the telescope on GJ758, a star about 50 light-years away.
They found a so-called gas giant planet of a mass somewhere between 10 and 40 times that of Jupiter, in an oval-shaped orbit around the star.

Exoplanets are tough to picture directly, but methods are being refined
It is presently at a distance about the same as between our Sun and Neptune. Because of the elliptical orbit, its average distance from its host star is about one-and-a-half times that between our Sun and Pluto.
Because it remains so hot despite the considerable distance from its star, the researchers believe it is still in the process of contracting.
As is the case with many potential exoplanets of that estimated mass, GJ758B may be a brown dwarf star.
"We can see how warm this thing is but we don't know for how long it has cooled, because we don't know the age of the system - that's the tricky part," said Markus Janson, one of the authors on the paper now at the University of Toronto.
Knowing the age as well as the temperature of GJ758B will help determine exactly how massive it is, and thereby if it is in fact a planet or a brown dwarf.
"One thing we want to do is to examine the star, because determining the properties of the star is the easiest way to determine the age of the star," he told BBC News.
However, the August observation turned up another interesting possibility.
"We also want to follow up on another candidate in the system that can be seen in the images, but we have to see if it's actually bound to the star, or whether it's something that's just there by chance."
The team will continue its measurements on the parent star and investigate the second candidate - GJ758C - in the spring of 2010.

The discovery of sharp resonance states in exotic, proton emitting, nuclei.

The discovery of sharp resonance states in exotic, proton emitting, nuclei.Little is known about the structure of unstable, proton emitting, nuclei.These nuclei can be produced during stellar explosions in the cosmos, andlive only for a very small fraction of second before they disintegrateinto more stable products. Nowadays, they are also produced and detectedin experiments made in large modern nuclear physics laboratories that areequipped with radioactive ion beams. Such elusive nuclei rapidly decay byemitting one (and sometimes two) protons, and for this reason areindicated as nuclei that lie outside of the so-called proton drip line.A recent publication (1) reports results of an experiment at the GSIlaboratory in Darmstdtat, Germany that showed the existence of excitedunstable states in two such nuclei, Fluorine-15 and Neon-16. Contrary tothe ground level characterized by a broad resonance with short life, theseexcited states have half-lives sufficiently long that they can beidentified as sharp resonances. Of note is that they have excitationenergy of several MeV, establishing that such particle unstable systemscan have an observable set of levels just as do the many known, particlestable nuclei.The existence of such narrow resonances in particle unstable nuclei, andin Fluorine-15 in particular, was predicted (2) three years ago by amethod of calculation put forward by nuclear theoreticians of the INFN,sez. di Padova, in collaboration with colleagues from Australia, Canadaand South Africa. To implement the method (an algebraic solution ofsystems of coupled equations for the problem of nuclear scattering andreactions) expertise in high performance computing was employed. Theexistence of sharp resonances in the spectra of radioactive, andspecifically of proton (and, may-be, of neutron) emitting nuclei, opensnew and interesting perspectives on the way the nuclei, that we observe atpresent in our Universe, have been formed.(1) Physical Review C (Rapid Communication) 79, 061301 (2009).(2) Physical Review Letters, 96, 072502 (2006).

Supernova may be in a new class

Supernova may be in a new class
Oddball stellar explosion doesn’t match known outbursts
By Ron Cowen
July 18th, 2009; Vol.176 #2 (p. 9)
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Just in time for July 4, astronomers say they have found a new type of stellar firecracker.
Stars that die an explosive death generally fall into two categories: young, massive stars that collapse under their own weight and hurl their outer layers into space, and older, sunlike stars that undergo a thermonuclear explosion. But the stellar explosion recorded in January 2005 and known as SN 2005E doesn’t fit either class, according to a new analysis reported online June 11 at arXiv.org.
The explosion ejected only a small amount of material — the equivalent of 0.3 solar masses — and erupted in the halo of an isolated galaxy, a region devoid of any star formation. These findings suggest that the explosion, or supernova, did not arise from the collapse of a massive star, report study coauthors Hagai-Binyamin Perets and Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and their colleagues. A massive star would have cast off much more material and would have erupted in a star-forming region. Since stellar heavyweights are so short-lived, they can’t move far from their birth site.
On the other hand, the researchers note, the explosion’s dimness and the abundance of elements forged in the eruption indicate it was not a typical thermonuclear explosion. Spectra show that the debris from the outburst contains five to 10 times more calcium than observed in any other known stellar explosion and probably contains a high abundance of radioactive titanium-44.
“In my experience, there’s lots of strange supernovas out there … but it really does look like this one might be something different,” comments theorist Andrew MacFadyen of New York University.
The authors of the paper declined to be interviewed because they had submitted the report to Nature. In their article, they report that the erupting oddball matches a model in which a compact star called a white dwarf nabs a thick layer of helium from a companion star. The star would then undergo a thermonuclear explosion that would destroy the helium but leave the rest of the white dwarf intact. By contrast, in a common type of supernova known as a type 1a supernova, a white dwarf made up mostly of carbon and oxygen blows itself to smithereens after stealing matter from a companion.
Perets, Gal-Yam and their collaborators report that SN 2005E resembles a few other peculiar supernova, notably an explosion found last year and known as SN 2008ha.
“Both of these objects have very low luminosity, low velocity [of debris] and strong calcium lines,” says Rober Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Kirshner, along with some of the collaborators on the SN 2005e study, is a coauthor of a study on SN 2008ha set to appear in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal.
The conclusions of both papers suggest a weak thermonuclear explosion, although the study of SN 2005E is more far-reaching, Kirshner says. “My guess is that the same interpretation would probably work for both,” he says.
Because both SN 2005E and SN 2008ha are so faint, telescopes may have failed to detect other similar explosions, comments MacFadyen. Supernovas are known to seed galaxies with an assortment of heavy elements. If the number of explosions in the new class is large enough, they may be an important contributor to this process. It’s a well-known story how supernovas produce these elements, “but there’s always room for adding new players to the team,” says MacFadyen