Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Major Astronomical Study confirms Mysterious-Dark Energy

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© Unknown
A mysterious dark energy which permeates space and increases the rate of expansion of the Universe was confirmed by a major astronomical survey Thursday. The BBC has reported that the study concluded that "Dark energy makes up some 74% of the Universe and its existence would explain why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate."

Telescope

Galactic 'Fountain of Youth' Flows in Hubble Photo

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© ESA/Hubble & NASAThis NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the edge-on profile of the slender spiral galaxy NGC 5775, which is surrounded by a halo of gas that astronomers suspect is kicked up by star explosions like a galaxy-size fountain.
A new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed what scientists have called a veritable galactic "fountain of youth," one that would turn the fictional pirate captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean films green with envy.

Journeying to the mythic Fountain of Youth is Sparrow's goal in Disney's latest installment in the adventure film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But the space fountain spotted by Hubble is no myth.

The new Hubble image shows the galaxy NGC 5775, which is located about 85 million light-years from Earth in a group of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. NGC 5775 is a spiral galaxy that is tilted away from Earth in such a way that only its edge is visible.

This edge-on position of the galaxy has allowed astronomers to spot a vast halo of hot gas around NGC 5775, but how the material actually got there is unclear, researchers said.

Info

Kepler Team Announces New Rocky Planet

Kepler-10c
© NASA/Ames/JPL-CaltechArtist's impression of Kepler-10c (foreground planet).
Today at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston, the Kepler team announced the confirmation of a new rocky planet in orbit around Kepler-10. Dubbed Kepler-10c, this planet is described as a "scorched, molten Earth."

2.2 times the radius of Earth, Kepler-10c orbits its star every 45 days. Both it and its smaller, previously-discovered sibling 10b are located too close to their star for liquid water to exist.

Kepler-10c was validated using a new computer simulation technique called "Blender" as well as additional infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This method can be used to locate Earth-sized planets within Kepler's field of view and could also potentially help find Earth-sized planets within other stars' habitable zones.

Info

Giant Black Hole's Massive Jets Get Extreme Close-Up in New Photo

Black Hole Jets
© SO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)Merging X-ray data (blue) from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with microwave (orange) and visible images reveals the jets and radio-emitting lobes emanating from Centaurus A's central black hole.

Energetic jets spewed forth from a galaxy's supermassive black hole got a close-up in their most detailed image ever taken by Earth radio telescopes.

The picture shows jets racing away at one-third the speed of light from a huge black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Most matter falling toward a black hole becomes trapped, but some matter at the base of the jets gets ejected outward at about one-third the speed of light. In this case, the black hole sits at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy.

"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

The matter in the jets has created a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes that each stretch almost a million light-years long. That makes the Centaurus A galaxy appear almost 20 times the size of a full moon when seen in radio waves, despite being 12 million light-years away from Earth.


Info

Earth's Past, Made Visible

Past Earths
© Planetary Habitability LaboratoryThe many faces of Earth in the last 750 million years.
The Visible Paleo-Earth (VPE), the first collection of photorealistic visualizations of our planet from space in the last 750 million years, was created by The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo). The VPE visualizations show in real true colors the changes of land and vegetation experimented by Earth in thirty frames starting from 750 million years ago to today. This was the period where simple life forms were restricted to the oceans, and later became complex and larger populating the land areas.

The VPE visualizations were constructed by combining the color images of Earth from NASA's Next Generation Blue Marble with the well-known global paleo reconstructions of Ronald Blakey from Northern Arizona University and Christopher Scotese from University of Texas at Arlington.

"Special care was taken in representing the presumed colors and brightness of the surface features of ancient Earth, but this is task with many artistic liberties due to our limited knowledge of those periods," says Prof. Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL and Principal Investigator of the project.

Saturn

Enceladus' electrical connection to Saturn

saturn
© jpl.nasa.govEnceladus 'Footprint' on Saturn

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spotted a glowing patch of ultraviolet light near Saturn's north pole that marks the presence of an electrical circuit that connects Saturn with its moon Enceladus. This newly discovered patch occurs at the "footprint" of the magnetic connection between Saturn and Enceladus and indicates electrons and ions accelerating along magnetic field lines. White boxes indicate the location of this footprint, which scientists have long predicted but never before seen.

Comment: See also:

Zap: Saturn, odd moon have electric link

The true origins of the electric comet theory

Electric Comet Theory: The Enduring - Yet Downplayed - Mysteries of Comets


Magnify

Superhuman Hearing Possible, Experiments Suggest

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© Wes C. Skiles/National GeographicDivers can hear better than people on land
Vibrating ear bones could someday boost hearing.

People may one day be able to hear what are now inaudible sounds, scientists say.

New experiments suggest that just vibrating the ear bones could create shortcuts for sounds to enter the brain, thus boosting hearing.

Most people can hear sounds in the range of about 20 hertz (Hz) at the low end to about 20 kilohertz (kHz) at the high end.

Twenty kHz would sound like a very high-pitched mosquito buzz, and 20 Hz would be what you'd hear if "you were at an R&B concert and you just stood next to the bass," explained Michael Qin, a senior research scientist at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Connecticut.

Telescope

Dark Energy Is Driving Universe Apart: NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Finds Dark Energy Repulsive

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© NASA/JPL-CaltechNew results from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope atop Siding Spring Mountain in Australia confirm that dark energy (represented by purple grid) is a smooth, uniform force that now dominates over the effects of gravity (green grid). The observations follow from careful measurements of the separations between pairs of galaxies (examples of such pairs are illustrated here).
A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The survey used data from NASA's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion. They contradict an alternate theory, where gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. According to this alternate theory, with which the new survey results are not consistent, Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Blake is lead author of two papers describing the results that appeared in recent issues of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn't be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time."

Beaker

New technique sheds light on the mysterious process of cell division

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© UnknownAfter the primitive model cell divides, one daughter cell inherits only one kind of lipid membrane (red) and most of the protein molecules (blue), while the other inherits two kinds of lipids (red and green)

University Park, Pennsylvania - Using a new technique in which models of primitive cells are constructed from the bottom up, scientists have demonstrated that the structure of a cell's membrane and cytoplasm may be as important to cell division as the specialized machinery -- such as enzymes, DNA or RNA -- that are found within living cells.

Christine Keating, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State, and Meghan Andes-Koback, a graduate student in the Penn State Department of Chemistry, generated simple, nonliving model "cells" with which they established that asymmetric division -- the process by which a cell splits to become two distinct daughter cells -- is possible even in the absence of complex cellular components, such as genes. The study, which will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, may provide important clues to how life originated from nonlife and how modern cells came to exhibit complex behaviors.

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Not So Dumb After All: Tyrannosaurus Rex Hunted in Bloodthirsty Packs, Researchers Claim

T-Rex Research
© Press AssociationLead researcher Dr Philip Currie with a Tyrannosaurid fossil. Scientists now believe the top predator was a highly-intelligent pack animal, despite being popularly depicted as a dangerous but dim-witted loner
Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives were more intelligent than previously thought and hunted in gangs which included young and older members, researchers have claimed.

Scientists believe they have evidence that the top predator dinosaurs were highly intelligent pack animals, despite T-rex being popularly depicted as a dangerous but dim-witted loner.

This is a myth that has grown up because for many years their fossil skeletons tended to be found on their own, researchers say.

The new theory follows an analysis of skeletons of the tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus bataar from 90 sites in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia.

Tarbosaurus, a cousin of T-rex that lived around 70 million years ago, was a two-legged predator up to 12 metres long and weighing five tonnes.

At least half a dozen of the animals appear to have belonged to a single social group, including adults and juveniles, that died together.