Science & Technology

Oldest-ever Gamma-ray Burst Detected

Science Daily
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:26 UTC

NASA's Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected. The blast, designated GRB 080913, arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away.

©NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

This image merges the view through Swift's UltraViolet and Optical Telescope, which shows bright stars, and its X-ray Telescope, which

"This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen," said the mission's lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's coming to us from near the edge of the visible universe."

Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the universe means looking back in time. GRB 080913's "lookback time" reveals that the burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began.

The star that caused this "shot seen across the cosmos" died when the universe was less than one-seventh its present age. "This burst accompanies the death of a star from one of the universe's early generations," says Patricia Schady of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, who is organizing Swift observations of the event.

New Sunspot!

SpaceWeather.com
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:24 UTC

©Pete Lawrence

A new sunspot is emerging in the sun's northern hemisphere. After several months of almost-relentlessly blank suns, "this is like a breath of fresh plasma," says photographer Pete Lawrence who sends this picture from Selsey, UK. The magnetic polarity of the emerging spot identifies it as a member of new Sunspot Cycle 24.

Mosquito causes buzz across the Pond

Gavin O'Connor
South Wales Echo
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:44 UTC

A device created by a South Wales inventor to disperse unruly youngsters is making a big buzz in the Big Apple.

The Mosquito, which targets gangs of loitering youths, projects a shrill noise audible only to teens and young adults.

It was created by Merthyr Tydfil inventor Howard Stapleton and has already hit the headlines in the UK for both upsetting civil liberties groups and pleasing shop owners.

Comment: Interesting how the police forces in the U.S. love to see citizens "fleeing" from them or their "toys."

Quite telling, actually.

Pulsating Stars Enable New Precise Determination Of Rotation Of The Milky Way

Science Daily
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:25 UTC

New, very precise measurements have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought. A remarkable result from the most successful ESO instrument HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent 'fall' of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves.

©ESO

Artist's impression of the local neighbourhood of the Sun and its setting within our galaxy, the Milky Way (see insert above). The figure shows the positions of some bright stars (in white) in the sky as well as the eight Cepheids used in the investigation (in blue). After the rotation of the Milky Way had been accounted for (red arrow), it seemed that the Cepheids were all 'falling' towards the Sun (blue arrows; these are not to scale: in reality the blue velocities are typically a factor one hundred smaller than the velocity around the Milky Way). New, very precise measurements with the HARPS instrument have shown that this apparent 'fall' is due to effects within the Cepheids themselves and is not related to the way the Milky Way rotates. The motion indicated by the blue arrows is thus an illusion. The scale of the image is given in light-years (ly).

Astrophysicists 'Weigh' Galaxy's Most Massive Star

Science Daily
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:21 UTC

Theoretical models of stellar formation propose the existence of very massive stars that can attain up to 150 times the mass of our Sun.

©CRAQ

Astrophysicists successfully "weighed" a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun. Located in the massive star cluster NGC 3603, the supermassive star system, known under the name of A1, has a rotation period of 3.77 days.

Until very recently, however, no scientist had discovered a star of more than 83 solar masses. Now an international team of astrophysicists, led by Université de Montréal researchers from the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ), has found and "weighed" the most massive star to date.

Olivier Schnurr, Jules Casoli and André-Nicolas Chené, all graduates of the Université de Montréal, and professors Anthony F. J. Moffat and Nicole St-Louis, successfully "weighed" a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun, waltzing with a companion of 89 solar masses, doubly beating the previous record and breaking the symbolic barrier of 100 solar masses for the first time.

MIT adds robotics, voice control to wheelchair

The New England Journal of Technology
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:09 UTC

MIT reports its researchers are developing a robotic, voice-driven wheelchair, which would allow a user to be able to tell the wheelchair to go to a specific location, rather than control every twist and turn.

What happened to the Big Bang machine?

Paul Rincon
BBS News
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:56 UTC

The fault that has shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be hugely disappointing for scientists and engineers following the successful "start-up" of the experiment.

Spacecraft on collision course with Earth

Mark Furman
KVAL
Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:55 UTC

©ESA

Better to burn out than fade away? For a celestial chunk of important space junk, the next few weeks will offer several faint glimpses of what will soon be a fireball.

An unmanned spacecraft that ferried cargo to the International Space Station will make a few more visible passes overhead before crash landing into the Earth's atmosphere on or around Sept. 29.

The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle launched March 9, 2008, and arrived at the International Space Station on April 3, where it remained docked while tons of cargo were off-loaded -- and tons of waste materials from the space station were loaded back onto the ATV.

Permafrost that lives up to its name: Ancient Canadian ice survived previous warm periods

Hannah Hoag
Nature
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:08 UTC

Undergound ice can last a long time

A 740,000-year-old wedge of ice discovered in central Yukon Territory, Canada, is the oldest known ice in North America. It suggests that permafrost has survived climates warmer than today's, according to a new study.

"Previously, it was thought that the permafrost had completely disappeared from the interior about 120,000 years ago," says Duane Froese, an earth scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who is the author of the study published today in Science. "This deep permafrost appears to have been stable for more than 700,000 years, including several periods that were warmer and wetter."

Dark matter 'bridge to nowhere' found in cosmic void

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:54 UTC

©A Zitrin

A line of 14 galaxies seems to be strung along a filament of dark matter. This image, reconstructed from observations from the 40-inch Wise Observatory telescope in Israel, shows the relative positions of the galaxies, which lie about 2 million light years away. Blue regions are where the most stars are forming.

More than a dozen galaxies seem to be lined up along a bridge of dark matter inside a region of nearly empty space. This 'bridge to nowhere' could shed light on how small galaxies formed in the early universe.

Galaxies in the universe are arranged in a lacy structure that contains many holes, or voids, that are largely bereft of galaxies. But the voids are not completely empty; astronomers expect they are criss-crossed by filaments of dark matter.

Now, astronomers have found a total of 14 galaxies that appear to be part of a dark matter bridge at least 1.5 million light years long.

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Jibrish

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Ruth

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Science & Technology

Oldest-ever Gamma-ray Burst Detected

New Sunspot!

Mosquito causes buzz across the Pond

Pulsating Stars Enable New Precise Determination Of Rotation Of The Milky Way

Astrophysicists 'Weigh' Galaxy's Most Massive Star

MIT adds robotics, voice control to wheelchair

What happened to the Big Bang machine?

Spacecraft on collision course with Earth

Permafrost that lives up to its name: Ancient Canadian ice survived previous warm periods

Dark matter 'bridge to nowhere' found in cosmic void

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