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Closest Supernova in 25 Years Is a 'Cosmic Classic,' Astronomers Say

Supernova
© Peter Nugent and the Palomar Transient FactoryThe arrow marks PTF 11kly in images taken on the Palomar 48-inch telescope over the nights of, from left to right, Aug. 22, 23 and 24. The supernova wasn't there Aug. 22, was discovered Aug. 23, and brightened considerably by Aug. 24.

Astronomers have spotted the closest supernova in a generation - and in a week or so, stargazers with a good pair of binoculars might be able to see it, too.

The supernova, or exploded star, flared up Tuesday night (Aug. 23) in the Pinwheel Galaxy, just 21 million light-years from Earth. It's the closest star explosion of its type observed since 1986, and astronomers around the world are already scrambling to train their instruments on it.

Researchers said they think they caught the supernova, named PTF 11kly, within hours of its explosion.

"PTF 11kly is getting brighter by the minute. It's already 20 times brighter than it was yesterday," Peter Nugent, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement yesterday (Aug. 25).

"Observing PTF 11kly unfold should be a wild ride," added Nugent, who was the first person to spot the supernova. "It is an instant cosmic classic."

Binoculars

Underground River "Rio Hamza" Discovered 4km Beneath the Amazon

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© Frans Lanting/CorbisAn aerial view of the Amazon river.
Scientists estimate the subterranean river may be 6,000km long and hundreds of times wider than the Amazon

Brazilian scientists have found a new river in the Amazon basin - around 4km underneath the Amazon river. The Rio Hamza, named after the head of the team of researchers who found the groundwater flow, appears to be as long as the Amazon river, but hundreds of times wider.

The rivers of the Amazon basin constitute one of the largest drainage systems on the Earth, with a catchment area of more than 7 million square kilometres.

Both the Amazon and Hamza flow from west to east and are around the same length, at 6,000km. But whereas the Amazon ranges from 1km to 100km in width, the Hamza ranges from 200km to 400km.

The underground river starts in the Acre region under the Andes and flows through the Solimões, Amazonas and Marajó basins before opening out directly into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Arrow Down

Russian Spacecraft Falls from the Sky. Is the International Space Station in Trouble?

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© Rossiya 24 TV Channel/AP PhotoA Soyuz rocket booster carrying the Progress supply ship is launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Wednesday
The second embarrassing loss of a Russian space vehicle in a week spells trouble for Russia's space program and its ability to maintain the International Space Station.

An unmanned Russian space freighter, which was launched on a resupply mission to the International Space Station, careened out of control and blew up in a "thunderous fireball" over Siberia Wednesday.

The blast triggering a state of emergency over a wide region and calls into doubt Russia's ability to handle its space obligations in the post-space shuttle era.

"The explosion was so strong that for 100 kilometers glass almost flew out of the windows," Alexander Borisov, an official in the remote and mountainous Altai Republic, on the Mongolian border, where most of the debris from the destroyed Progress spaceship rained down, was quoted by RIA-Novosti as saying.

Russian media reported Thursday that none of the wreckage fell on populated areas, and 40 lumberjacks who'd been working in the affected zone were all safe and accounted for.

Telescope

Astronomers Discover Planet Made of Diamond

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© ReutersAn exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard in an undated image courtesy of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

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Possible Type-Ia Supernova in M101 Discovered

Messier 101 Supernova
© Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSFMessier 101
Thankfully it's a mostly Moon-free set of observing nights ahead, because there a possible Type-Ia Supernova in M101! If you're scrambling your brains to remember where it's at - think northern circumpolar and read on...

According to AAVSO Special Notice #250 P. Nugent et al. reported in Astronomical Telegram #3581 that a possible Type-Ia supernova has been discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory shortly after eruption in the galaxy M101 and has been designated "PTF11kly". The object is currently at a magnitude of 17.2, but may well rise by several magnitudes. The object is well placed within M101 for good photometry, and observations of this potential bright SNIa are strongly encouraged.

There are currently no comparison stars available in VSP for this field; please indicate clearly the comparison stars that you use for photometry when reporting observations to AAVSO. Please retain your images and/or photometry for recalibration when comparison star magnitudes are available.

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Amazon Expedition Discovers New Monkey

Titi Monkey
© Julio DalponteThe researchers discovered what appears to be a new species of Callicebus, or titi, monkey, with unique features on its head and tail.

A possible new species of monkey has been discovered during an expedition in an unexplored part of the Amazon in mid-western Brazil.

A specimen, which scientists know is a type of Callicebus, or titi, monkey has been turned over to experts at the Emílio Goeldi Museum in the Brazilian state of Para, where it will be studied and formally described.

"This primate has features on its head and tail that have never been observed before in other titi monkey species found in the same area," said Julio Dalpone, the biologist who discovered the monkey during the World Wide Fund for Nature-backed expedition.

The expedition found the monkey between the Guariba River and the Roosevelt River in the northwestern part of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

The 20-day expedition undertaken in December of 2010 explored four protected areas of the Guariba-Roosevelt Extractive Reserve, the Tucumã State Park and the Roosevelt River and Madeirinha River. It was intended to gather information to improve the management of these areas.

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Sex with Neanderthals Made Us Stronger

Neanderthal
© CorbisA replica of an old Neanderthal man at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany. New research suggest interbreeding with Neanderthals helped boost our species' immunity.

Mating with Neanderthals and another group of extinct hominids, Denisovans, strengthened the human immune system and left behind evidence in the DNA of people today, according new research.

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that modern humans who left Africa around 65,000 years ago mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans -- two archaic species that lived in Europe and Asia.

The study, which appears in this week's Science, is among the first to show how the interbreeding shaped modern human genes and the attributes they confer to us.

Peter Parham, a professor of cell biology, microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and his team focused their analysis on "HLA" genes, which are fast-evolving vital components of the human immune system.

"The modern human populations who left Africa to colonize other continents were likely to have been small groups who started off with limited HLA diversity and suffered further reduction of HLA diversity due to disease," Parham told Discovery News. "Interbreeding with archaic humans introduced additional HLA variants into the modern human population that increased their genetic viability and capacity to resist infection."

Beaker

Boffins Build Powerful Yet "Table-Top Size" Atom-Smasher

Suitcase plasma cannon collider surfs on friggin LASERS

Forget about mounting your lasers on the nearest shark, what you really want is a laser plasma accelerator you can put on your kitchen table.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have managed to create powerful electron beams from much, much, much smaller accelerators than before, which could be used as compact high-energy colliders for fundamental physics - doing the sort of research the Large Hadron Collider is doing right now.

The wee accelerators could also be used as "sources of intensely bright beams of light" for investigating new materials, biological structures and green chemistry. Or, presumably, for table-top disco lighting.

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British Men May Have a Hunter-Gatherer Past

British Guard
© skoggy, stock.xchngA member of the Queen's Guard outside of Buckingham Palace in London.
British men may trace their lineage back to hunter-gatherers, not farmers as had previously been suspected.

A new genetic lineage study finds that, contrary to previous research, British men do not descend from immigrant farmers who migrated west from the Near East around 10,000 years ago. Instead, the new study finds that a common Y-chromosome gene in today's British men traces back to hunter-gatherers who settled in Europe long before farming got popular.

In a study first published online in August 2010 in the European Journal of Human Genetics, researchers from the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Utah reported that a certain genetic mutation on the Y chromosome (male sex chromosome) was most common in the southeast of Europe and much less prevalent on the British Isles and other northwestern regions. This southeast-northwest pattern matched the spread of the Linearbandkeramik, or Linear Pottery, culture, a Neolithic culture known for their pottery kitchen dishes.

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'Jurassic Mother' Found in China

Juramaia
© Mark A. Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural HistoryEarly cousin. The restored skeleton and body of the Jurassic mammal Juramaia.

Way back in the Late Jurassic, 160 million years ago, your closest relative looked like a shrew. That's not an insult but an evolutionary truth that stems from a new fossil discovery that pushes back the earliest appearance of the peculiar group of mammals to which we, as well as many other mammal species, belong. During the heyday of the Jurassic dinosaurs, our own ancestors were just getting their start in the dark corners of the Mesozoic world.

Living mammals are split into three subgroups: the egg-laying monotremes; the pouched marsupials; and, the most diverse of all, placental mammals, which includes everything from humans to bats to whales. Each group diverged at different times, and determining when marsupials and placentals split from each other has been problematic. Fossil discoveries point to the Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago, whereas estimates made on genetic differences among living mammals suggest that the split happened even earlier.

Now the discovery of a partial skeleton of a small, shrewlike mammal, described online today in Nature, pushes back the date of the divergence by 30 million years, to 160 million years ago. Found in the famous fossil beds of Liaoning, China, the newly discovered little mammal has been named Juramaia sinensis, or "Jurassic mother from China."