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Supernova Countdown: Giant Star Could Explode Any Day Now

Michael D. Lemonick
Time.com
Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:48 UTC
Image
© N. Smith / J.A. Morse (U. Colorado) et al. / NASA
About 165 years ago, Eta Carinae mysteriously became the second brightest star in the sky. In 20 years, after ejecting more mass than our sun, it unexpectedly faded
When the sun finally dies some 5 billion years from now, the end will come quietly, the conclusion of a long, uneventful life. Our star will, in a sense, go flabby, swelling first, releasing its outer layers into space and finally shrinking into the stellar corpse known as a white dwarf.

Things will play out quite differently for a supermassive star like Eta Carinae, which lies 7,500 light-years from Earth. Weighing at least a hundred times as much as our sun, it will go out more like an adolescent suicide bomber, blazing through its nuclear fuel in a mere couple of million years and exploding as a supernova, a blast so violent that its flash will briefly outshine the entire Milky Way. The corpse this kind of cosmic detonation leaves behind is a black hole.
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Info

Ancient Plants Resurrected from Siberian Permafrost

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:01 UTC
Resurrected Plant
© David Gilichinsky, PNAS
One of the plants regenerated from Pleistocene Age fruit tissue.

Thirty thousand years after their burial on the Siberian tundra, immature fruits have been cultivated into small, weedy plants - the oldest successful regeneration of a living plant from ancient tissue.

The plants, Silene stenophylla, grew and produced lacy white flowers. When fertilized, the ancient plants fruited and produced viable seeds of their own.

"This is very exciting," said Jane Shen-Miller, a University of California, Los Angeles biologist who was not involved in the study. "These tissues are viable after, say, 30,000 years. That is very, very interesting."

Shen-Miller led an earlier project that germinated and grew a 1,300-year-old lotus seed from northern China. Another group of researchers germinated a 2,000-year-old palm date seed from Israel in 2005, the oldest germinating seed known to date.
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Beaker

First test-tube hamburger ready this fall: researchers

Deborah Jones
Agence-France Presse
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:52 UTC
Image
The world's first "test-tube" meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post's aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

The ingredients for his first burger are "still in a laboratory phase," he said, but by fall "we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger."
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Telescope

X-Rays Illuminate the Interior of the Moon


ScienceDaily
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:00 UTC
Image
© NASA
Buzz Aldrin placing a seismometer on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.
Unlike Earth, our Moon has no active volcanoes, and the traces of its past volcanic activity date from billions of years ago. This is surprising because recent Moonquake data suggest that there is plenty of liquid magma deep within the Moon and part of the rocks residing there are thought to be molten. Scientists have now identified a likely reason for this peaceful surface life: the hot, molten rock in the Moon's deep interior could be so dense that it is simply too heavy to rise to the surface like a bubble in water. For their experiments, the scientists produced microscopic copies of moon rock collected by the Apollo missions and melted them at the extremely high pressures and temperatures found inside the Moon. They then measured their densities with powerful X-ray beams.

The results are published in the journal Nature Geoscience on 19 February 2012.

The team was led by Mirjam van Kan Parker and Wim van Westrenen from VU University Amsterdam and composed of scientists from the Universities of Paris 6/CNRS, Lyon 1/CNRS, Edinburgh, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.

Five decades after the Apollo missions, the formation and geological history of the Moon still hold many secrets. The astronauts not only returned 380 kg of Moon rocks to Earth but also placed many scientific instruments on the lunar surface. Last year, NASA scientists published a new model for the make-up of the interior of the Moon, using Moonquake data from these Apollo-era seismometers. Renee Weber and her colleagues claim that the deepest parts of the lunar mantle, bordering on the small metallic core, are partially molten, by up to 30 per cent. In Earth, such bodies of magma tend to move towards the surface leading to volcanic eruptions. If the deep interior of the Moon contains so much magma, why don't we see spectacular volcanic eruptions at its surface?
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Telescope

Gamma-ray bursts' highest power side unveiled by Fermi telescope


PhysOrg
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA
Artist's illustration of one model of the bright gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B.
Detectable for only a few seconds but possessing enormous energy, gamma-ray bursts are difficult to capture because their energy does not penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. Now, thanks to an orbiting telescope, astrophysicists are filling in the unknowns surrounding these bursts and uncovering new questions.

The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, launched on June 11, 2008. As part of its mission, the telescope records any gamma-ray bursts within its viewing area.

"Fermi is lucky to measure the highest energy portion of the gamma-ray burst emission, which last for hundreds to thousands of seconds -- maybe 20 minutes," said Péter Mészáros, Eberly Chair Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, Penn State.

Most gamma-ray bursts occur when stars that are more than 25 times larger than our sun come to the end of their lives. When the internal nuclear reaction in these stars ends, the star collapses in on itself and forms a black hole. The outer envelope of the star is ejected forming a supernova.

"The black hole is rotating rapidly and as it is swallowing the matter from the star, the rotation ejects a jet of material through the supernova envelope," said Mészáros.

This jet causes the gamma-ray burst, which briefly becomes the brightest thing in the sky. However, unlike supernovas that radiate in all directions, gamma-ray bursts radiate in a very narrow area, and Fermi sees only jets ejecting in its direction. This, however, is the direction in which they send their highest energy photons. Any gamma-ray bursts on the other side of the black hole or even off at an angle are invisible to the telescope.
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Magnify

Study Says Insecticide Used with GM Corn Highly Toxic to Bees

Ken Roseboro
The Organic & Non GMO Report
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:35 UTC
Image
© The Organic & Non GMO Report
Sierra Club, US bee and honey groups urge EPA to ban clothianidin

An insecticide used as a seed treatment on genetically modified corn and other crops has been found to be highly toxic to honey bees, according to a study published recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

The study may be a key to solving the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder that has decimated bee populations over the last five years, causing losses of 30% and more of honey bee colonies every year since 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Comment: For a more in depth look at What is killing the bees? read the following articles carried on SOTT.NET:

Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Document Shows It Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees

Beekeepers Suggest Pesticide is Destroying Insect Colonies

Bayer in the Dock Over Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder

Germany Suspends Pesticide Approvals After Mass Death Of Bees

Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health
The decline of bees has been in the headlines for several years, and theories to explain their deaths abound. But perhaps there is not just one single cause. University of California San Diego professor of biology James Nieh studies foraging, communication and health of bees. "I would say it's a combination of four factors; pesticides, disease, parasites, and human mismanagement," says Nieh. Bees might be weakened by having a very low level of exposure to insecticides or fungicides, making them more susceptible if they are attacked by viruses or parasites. "It's kind of like taking a patient who is not doing so well - very weak, poor diet, exposing them to pathogens, and then throwing more things at them. It's not surprising that honeybees are not very healthy."

One class of pesticides, neonicotinoids in particular has received a lot of attention for harming bees. In late 2010, the EPA came under fire from beekeepers and pesticide watchdog organizations. This happened when Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald spoke out about how the EPA allowed clothianidin to be used without any proof it was safe and despite the fact that the EPA's own scientists believed it "has the potential for toxic risk to honey bees, as well as other pollinators."


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Beaker

Study Finds One Percent of Human Genes Switched Off

Kate Kelland
Reuters
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
A researcher performs a DNA test
Scientists studying the human genome have found that each of us is carrying around 20 genes that have been completely inactivated, suggesting that not all switched-off genes are harmful to health.

A team at Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is developing a new catalogue of so-called "loss-of-function" (LoF) gene variants to help identify new disease-causing mutations, and say their work will help scientists better understand the normal function of human genes.

Working as part of larger study called the 1000 Genomes Project, the team developed a series of filters to identify common errors in the human genome, which maps the entire genetic code.

"The key questions we focused on for this study were how many of these LoF variants were real and how large a role might they play in human disease," said Daniel MacArthur of the Sanger Institute, who worked on the team.

The researchers looked at nearly 3,000 possible LoF variants in the genomes of 185 people from Europe, East Asia and West Africa. Their findings were published in the journal Science on Thursday.
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Info

Unusual Minor Planet 2011 YU75

Nick Howes, Giovanni Sostero and Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Observatory
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:43 UTC
This unusual minor planet was discovered by the Spacewatch sky survey on 2011, Dec. 26. It moves along a very eccentric orbit (perihelion close to Mars, aphelion nearly 3 AU away from Saturn). Currently it's about 1 AU from Earth and 2 AU from the Sun, approaching its perihelion, scheduled for the end of April 2012 (q= 1.7 AU). Since it moves along a nice comet-like track (a= 7.5 AU, e= 0.77, Incl.= 16.7 deg), we decided to insert it in our wish-list of interesting targets, in order to check if it's going to develope any perceptible sign of cometary activity (coma and/or tail) while approaching the Sun.

On 2012, Feb 17.4 we aimed the "Faulkes Telescope South" 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD at Siding Spring (Australia) to this target, and collected on it twelve R-filtered exposures, 30-seconds each. Stacking these images through "Astrometrica" along the expected proper motion of 2011 YU75, we get a nice starlike object (magnitude ~19) at its expected position. Its FWHM was the same of the nearby field stars (about 1.2-arcsec) and no traces of coma/tail was visible to us, in spite of several image processing routines we applied on it. So we can conclude that, at least through the analysis of the images we collected, at this time 2011 YU75 shows no detectable outgassing activity. Below you can see our follow-up image. Click on it so see a larger version.

2011 YU75
© Remanzacco Observatory
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Telescope

Rare Black Hole Survives Galaxy's Destruction

Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:58 UTC
Image
© NASA, ESA, and S. Farrell
This spectacular edge-on galaxy, called ESO 243-49, is home to an intermediate-mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy.
Like a fossil hinting at a long-gone animal, a black hole is offering clues about a now-destroyed galaxy that may once have existed around it.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently spied a cluster of young blue stars surrounding a rare mid-weight black hole that suggests the black hole was once at the center of a dwarf galaxy. Astronomers think this galaxy was torn apart by the gravity of a larger host galaxy that it orbited.

The violent encounter would have stripped away most of the dwarf galaxy's stars, but it also could have compressed the gas around its central black hole, triggering a new wave of star formation. It is these new stars that Hubble recently saw signs of.

The observations suggest that the young stars must be less than 200 million years old, meaning the collision between the parent galaxy and its dwarf likely occurred around that time.
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Telescope

From Earth's Water to Cosmic Dawn: New Tools Unveiling Astronomical Mysteries


PhysOrg
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Artist's Conception of Dusty Disk Around Young Star TW Hydrae.
Two new and powerful research tools are helping astronomers gain key insights needed to transform our understanding of important processes across the breadth of astrophysics. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the newly-expanded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) offer scientists vastly improved and unprecedented capabilities for frontier research.

The cutting-edge research enabled by these powerful telescope systems extends from unlocking the mysteries of star- and planet-formation processes in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, to probing the emergence of the first stars and galaxies at the Universe's "cosmic dawn," and along the way helping scientists figure out where Earth's water came from.

A trio of scientists outlined recent accomplishments of ALMA and the Jansky VLA, both of which are in the "early science" phase of their development, as construction progresses toward their completion. The astronomers spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia.

One exciting area where the two facilities are expected to unlock longstanding mysteries is the study of how new stars and planets form, in our own Milky Way Galaxy and in its nearby neighbors.
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