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President Obama calls for a plan to deal with extreme space weather
As President Barack Obama's administration enters its final stages, he's paying more attention to what's going on way, way above us than expected. Just days after the president outlined his vision for landing humans on Mars by the 2030s, he issued an executive order calling for a plan that would help the country -- and the systems that power it -- cope with seriously bad space weather.
Astronomers scan for disappearing stars
Scientists are adept at spotting stars, even very old ones. But what about stars that disappear? A handful of researchers, led by Uppsala University's Beatriz Villarroel, aims to find out. They've been comparing sky surveys to see if any light sources (usually stars) have disappeared between these scans. Out of the 300,000 sources in the study, they've found one that appears to have vanished without a trace.
Listen to the sounds of the Milky Way galaxy's oldest stars
You probably won't get to visit the most ancient stars in humanity's home galaxy, but you'll at least get to hear what they sounded like when they were young. University of Birmingham researchers have detected the acoustic oscillations of Milky Way stars that are about 13 billion years old, or not much younger than the galaxy itself. The trick was to use asteroseismology, or measuring the tiny pulses in brightness triggered by sound caught inside those stars. As you'll hear at the source link, they're not exactly hot summer jams -- these are ominous tones that are more likely to remind you of an emergency broadcast signal than anything else.
Unique white dwarf will help clarify what happens to dying stars
Researchers have discovered a white dwarf (a dead star), with an oxygen atmosphere surrounding it -- the first of its kind. Astronomers managed to pick up the star from spectral lines: colored trails that help show the composition of distant stars. Most white dwarfs have hydrogen or helium in their atmosphere, but this one was giving off a shade that corresponded to almost pure oxygen.
Hubble shows some of the galaxy's biggest, brightest stars
The Hubble Space Telescope still isn't done providing insights and pretty pictures -- far from it. Researchers have published a composite Hubble image showing the massive, extra-bright stars of the Trumpler 14 cluster, which sits 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula. It's dazzling, of course (NASA likens the stars to diamonds), but it's also a reminder that some celestial bodies lead short, intense lives. Many of the stars you see here are young (under 500,000 years old) blue-white variants burning so fiercely that they'll explode as supernovae within a few million years, rather than die relatively quietly over billions of years.
ICYMI: 3D-printed telescope, bird drone and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109{width:570px;display:block;} Today on In Case You Missed It: An open-source, 3D-printed telescope is being offered by the Open Space Agency so that hobbyists of all stripes can easily share their discoveries. The BionicBird drone flies by legit flapping its wings and I think I saw this in a movie once. And a video describing old musical tech has us all riveted: A behind-the-scenes view of the seven stories of pipes it takes to play the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ.
Here's your clearest view yet of star formation in the early universe
Spotting anything at the edge of the known universe is difficult, but scientists have just managed to get a surprisingly sharp view. They've used the ALMA telescope array's imaging and spectral info to visualize a galaxy about 11.4 billion light years away (2.4 billion years after the Big Bang) in unprecedented detail -- enough to see clumps of stars that were still forming at the time. The key was taking advantage of a special gravitational lensing effect, an Einstein ring, where Earth is in perfect alignment with both the target galaxy and an in-between galaxy distorting and magnifying the target's light. Researchers used modeling to correct for that distortion and see what the ancient celestial body really looked like. It's not a perfect picture (the intermediary galaxy's black hole is obscuring things), but it's still humanity's best peek yet at what was happening well before our planet even existed. [Image credit: ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ)/Y. Tamura (The University of Tokyo)/Mark Swinbank (Durham University)]
The Big Picture: Hubble peeks at the Milky Way's densest star cluster
Some parts of space are a little more crowded than others. The Arches Cluster, located 25,000 light-years from Earth, is currently the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way. For comparison, if you measured the distance between our sun and its nearest star, and used that as a radius for a section of the Arches Cluster, you would find more than 100,000 stars twinkling back at you. These balls of gas burn brightly -- NASA says 150 are among the brightest it's ever recorded -- which limits their natural lifespan to a few million years. Once their nuclear fuel has been depleted, they explode in breathtaking supernovas which create abnormally high volumes of heavy elements in the gas between the remaining stars. The image above was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in infrared; due to enormous dust clouds, the cluster is otherwise obscured and difficult to observe.
The Big Picture: Say hello to NASA's 'nastiest' star
NASA's "Nasty 1" isn't like other stars. Bigger than our Sun but barely older than humanity itself, this unusual celestial body sits just about 3,000 light years away from Earth. And while it's certainly similar to other Wolf-Rayet stars, which are identifiable by their lack of an outer hydrogen-rich sheath and exposed superheated helium core, those have never been observed in the Milky Way with an accretion disc like Nasty's. (See that thing above? That's an accretion disc.)
The Club Nintendo rewards program is closing down
Club Nintendo is closing down. What's Club Nintendo, you ask? That's probably why it's closing. The rewards program has been running since 2007, but outside of Japan it's never really captured the public's attention. It offers "Coins" (or "Stars," "Star Points" and "Points" in Europe and Japan) to gamers that register and fill out surveys on their purchases, which can then be exchanged for vouchers, trinkets and the occasional exclusive item -- like this awesome throwback SNES controller for Wii.
NASA is using machine learning to predict the characteristics of stars
With so many stars in our galaxy to discover and catalog, NASA is adopting new machine learning techniques to speed up the process. Even now, telescopes around the world are capturing countless images of the night sky, and new projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will only increase the amount of data available at NASA's fingertips. To give its analysis a helping hand, the agency has been using some of its prior research and recordings to essentially "teach" computers how to spot patterns in new star data.
We're (eventually) doomed: passing stars may rain comets on Earth
There are many things in space that can bring life on Earth to an end, whether they're wayward asteroids or the eventual death of our Sun. However, the chances of a calamitous event may well go up if the calculations of Max Planck Institute scientist Coryn Bailer-Jones are on the mark. He estimates that two orange dwarf stars, GL 710 and Hip 86505, could start messing with comet orbits as they approach our solar system. If they get close enough, their gravitational pull would send a torrent of comets our way and greatly increase the likelihood of an Earth-shattering kaboom.
Supercomputer gives most accurate picture yet of star formation
Scientists may finally have an answer to the question of why fewer stars than expected form out of interstellar material. So far, the best simulations have predicted that nearly all the matter in vast clouds of interstellar gases would eventually cool and become stars. However, only a small percentage actually does, so an international team led by CalTech has tried to create a more accurate model. They turned to a machine tailor-made for such simulations: the NSF-funded Stampede supercomputer. It turns out that star formation isn't just a local phenomenon; it's also affected by supernova explosions, radiation, stellar gases and even starlight.
The Big Picture: Galactic collision provides amazing X-ray light show
'Tis the season for holiday light shows, and two galaxies about 130 million light years from Earth got together to put on a display of their own. NGC 2207 and IC 2163, both part of the constellation Canis Major (the Great Dog), got cozy and the "ultraluminous X-ray sources" (ULXs) were on full display for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture. In this case, the light is created when matter is pulled from stars to a neutron star or black whole, generating X-rays during the heating process. What's pictured here is a composite image of the encounter with Chandra data in pink, details from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red and info from the Hubble Space telescope in red, green and blue (seen as blue, white, orange and brown). The interaction between galaxies also features "intense star formation" thanks to shock waves that spawn during the collision.
EVE Evolved: The Sleepers are coming!
Ever since the announcement of 100 new wormhole systems and the unique Thera wormhole hub system, some interesting things have been going on in EVE Online. A new star appeared in the night sky and began rapidly growing in brightness like a supernova, and curiously, the light from that star was able to be seen from every star system in New Eden simultaneously in clear violation of the laws of physics. Two days prior to the event, Sansha's Nation were seen scattering from an Incursion site and leaving the area without using wormholes, hinting that something big was happening in their home system. Combined with the intruiging story of Thera, this has had even non-roleplayers scrambling through the EVE lore to come up with theories about what's to come. Players slowly set apart picking the mystery to pieces, conducting a galaxy-wide search to find the origin of the bright star and sending people into the test server to get clues. The mystery intensified when players discovered that the star was likely near or within restricted Jove space, and soon after they began finding strange cloaked structures throughout known space. While observing these structures, players even found that an all-new form of Sleeper NPC called the Circadian Seeker was periodically warping into the site and using some kind of scanning beam on the cloaked structure. All of this comes in anticipation of the public release of the Rhea patch on Tuesday 9th, which will introduce hidden Sleeper sites in known space and kick off the arms race to discover tech 3 destroyers. In this lore-heavy edition of EVE Evolved, I look at everything we know of EVE's new Sleeper storyline event and try to figure out how it all fits together.
Half of the stars in our universe live in the space between galaxies
Hubble's deep field imagery is breathtaking, but what lies between those thousands of spiral-arm galaxies? More stars, of course. Data collected by CIBER rockets (Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment)show that as many as half of the stars in the universe are orphans -- suns that spun out of their home galaxies in the wake of celestial events that tore universe in twain. These stars live in the dark space between galaxies, bathing the universe in the dim "intra-halo" light that the CIBER rockets picked up.
Astronomers discover Earth-sized 'diamond' 900 light years away
The world's largest diamond, the Cullinan, is a tad over 3,100 carats uncut. Its estimated value is some $2 billion, and it only weighs about 1.37 pounds. That stone, while enormous relative to others like it, is but an invisible speck when up against the Earth-sized diamond discovered 900 light years from our planet. PSR J2222-0137, a pulsating companion to a white dwarf star located near the constellation Aquarius, has an incredibly low temperature of about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's the coldest such object that astronomers have ever detected -- so cool, in fact, that it's likely composed of crystallized carbon, much like the diamonds we treasure so greatly. Ultimately, while an exciting development, it would take 10 lifetimes traveling at the speed of light to reach this interstellar discovery, so don't expect an influx of those coveted clear jewels anytime soon. [Image credit: B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF]
Google Stars bookmarking app makes brief appearance on Chrome Web Store
Google's Stars bookmarking app showed up ever so briefly on the Chrome Web Store, and then disappeared again. The app, which was leaked early this month, seems to allow you to "star" web pages from Chrome's address bar. You'd then be able to organize them by folder and search them for content, with the results displayed in an "image-rich grid" as seen in the screencap above. Indeed, the app description in the store read: "Google Stars is the platform where everything you're already indicating interest in is saved. Initially, these will include your Chrome bookmarks, More integrations to come!" However, this particular release seems to be an accidental leak of the internal version, as it says "Thanks for dogfooding Google Stars" when we installed it. At this time, it looks as if the app has been pulled from the store. We've reached out to Google to find out more about what happened here, but it does seem like Stars could be close enough to final release if it's getting leaked out to the public. Update: Google gave us the following statement regarding the Stars app: "We're always experimenting with new features, but have nothing new to announce at this time."
NASA discovers star clusters like Orion may have formed from the outside in
Astronomers have long thought that star clusters form when clouds of gas and dust condense, constructing themselves from the center out. But as recent findings suggest, this might not be the case. Researchers combing through data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and using infrared telescopes have offered a different take. After studying two clusters -- NGC 2024 at the center of the Flame Nebula and the Orion Nebula Cluster -- evidence showed that the stars on the outside for the formations where actually the oldest. "Our findings are counterintuitive," said study head Konstantin Getman. "It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed." Other possible explanations? Well, stars could continue to form in the center due to density, or older stars could've been pushed to the outside thanks to interactions with others. For now, the team looks to expand its search for a similar age range in other clusters.
Google Stars leak reveals a new way to share and search your bookmarks
Google+ expert Florian Kiersch recently revealed that Google's testing a bookmarking app called "Stars," and just posted a video (embedded below) showing how it might work. The initial leak exposed certain features, like "starring" web pages from Chrome's address bar, organizing them by folder and searching content within the pages. Those searches would use suggestions and auto-complete like Chrome, displaying the results in an "image-rich grid." Now, a splash screen (above) has confirmed much of that. Kirsch's demo shows how you'd organize folders and set them to "public" for anyone to see or keep them confined to your Google+ Circles. Stars may arrive in the future as an app or extension on Chrome and would probably be embedded in other Google apps too -- assuming it survives the beta.
