Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Serendipitous Observations Reveal Rare Event In Life Of Distant Quasar


Science Daily
Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:28 UTC
A bit of serendipity has given astronomers a surprise view of a never-before-observed event in the birth of a galaxy.
gas from a quasar
© University of Florida/Myda IamiceliUniversity of Florida and University of California-Santa Cruz astronomers are the first to discover the onset of a huge flow of gas from a quasar, or the super-bright core of an extremely remote young galaxy still being formed. The gas was expelled from the quasar and its enormous black hole sometime in the space of four years around 10 billion years ago -- an extremely brief and ancient blip that would have gone unnoticed were it not for two separate observational efforts. In this artist's depiction, the outflow of blue gas surrounds the black hole in the quasar.

University of Florida and University of California-Santa Cruz astronomers are the first to discover the onset of a huge flow of gas from a quasar, or the super-bright core of an extremely remote young galaxy still being formed. The gas was expelled from the quasar and its enormous black hole sometime in the space of four years around 10 billion years ago - an extremely brief and ancient blip noticed only by a sharp-eyed undergraduate and the unlikely convergence of two separate observational efforts.

"It was completely serendipitous," said Fred Hamann, a UF astronomy professor. "In fact, the only way it could have happened is through serendipity."

Quasars are enormously bright cores of very distant galaxies thought to contain "super-massive" black holes a billion times larger than our sun. They are seen only in the centers of very distant galaxies that formed long ago - galaxies whose light is just now reaching Earth after billions of years in transit. The quasar in question occurred about 10.3 billion years ago.
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Star

Solar Wind Stream To Hit Earth


Space Weather
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:18 UTC
Approximately nine days from now, a solar wind stream will hit Earth. That's a long-range forecast made possible for the first time by NASA's Stereo-B spacecraft. The stream is flowing from a coronal hole photographed this morning by the spacecraft's extreme ultraviolet telescope:
Image
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Telescope

A Brief Mystery: What are Short Gamma-ray Bursts?


NASA
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:23 UTC
For decades it was baffling. Out of the still night sky, astronomers peering through their telescopes would occasionally glimpse quick bursts of high-energy light popping off like flashbulbs at the far side of the universe.
An artist's concept of a gamma-ray burst.
© NASAAn artist's concept of a gamma-ray burst.

Astronomers now know what the longer-lasting GRBs are: the collapse and explosion of an ultra-massive star to form a black hole at its core, an explanation first proposed by Stan Woosley of the University of California in San Diego. But there's a second category of GRBs that still remains a mystery.

"The short-lived ones are very poorly understood. It's where the frontier [of research] is now," says Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for the GRB-detecting Swift satellite at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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Info

Big Bang experiment inaugurated despite glitch

Jonathan Lynn
Reuters
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:15 UTC
Geneva - The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) officially inaugurated its experiment to probe the origins of the universe on Tuesday, even though a technical hitch last month shut it down within days of starting.

Amid massive security, top scientists and ministers went to CERN's sprawling site on the French-Swiss border to mark the start of the biggest scientific experiment ever launched, which will investigate the building blocks of matter to understand what makes the universe tick.

"The greatest philosophers, the greatest mystics, the greatest poets have never ceased meditating on these mysteries -- the mystery of matter and the mystery of the creation of the universe," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said.

"These two intertwined questions have never stopped fascinating humanity," he told the inauguration ceremony.
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Info

Toxoplasma Parasite's Family Tree Traced


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:36 UTC
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist Ben Rosenthal is tracing the family tree of Toxoplasma gondii, one of the most widespread parasites of warm-blooded vertebrates. Understanding how T. gondii has evolved and disseminated will help parasitologists and public health officials improve methods for controlling the parasite in humans and animals.
Toxoplasma gondii
© Jitender P. DubeyAgricultural Research Service scientists are tracing the family tree of Toxoplasma gondii--one of the most widespread parasites of warm-blooded vertebrates to help improve methods for controlling the parasite.

Rosenthal is a zoologist at the ARS Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. He partnered with ARS microbiologist Jitender Dubey and biologist David Sibley at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine to analyze DNA snippets from 46 existing T. gondii strains found around the planet.

The team concluded that all of the current types arose from a common ancestor that lived at least 10 million years ago. This one strain gave rise to four ancient groups of T. gondii - two in South America, one in North America, and one with a global distribution.
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Info

Man's Best Friend Recruited In Hunt For Disease Genes


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:40 UTC
For centuries man has had a uniquely close relationship with dogs - as a working animal, for security and, perhaps most importantly, for companionship. Now, dogs are taking on a new role - they are helping in the hunt for genetic mutations that lead to diseases in humans.
dachshund
© iStockphoto/Meelis SilemA genetic mutation that results in a condition called day blindness that can affect dachshunds, and a similar condition can arise in humans.

"Dogs get very similar diseases to humans," said Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of Uppsala University in Sweden and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts. "If you ask a dog owner what sort of conditions their pets get, they will say cancer, allergies, eye diseases."

Lindblad-Toh was speaking at the European Science Foundation's 3rd Functional Genomics Conference, held in Innsbruck, Austria, on 1-4 October. Functional genomics describes the way in which genes and their products, proteins, interact together in complex networks in living cells. If these interactions are abnormal, diseases can result. The Innsbruck meeting brought together more than 450 scientists from across Europe to discuss recent advances in the role of functional genomics in disease.
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Telescope

Vast Stellar Nursery: Claret-colored Cloud With A Massive Heart


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:57 UTC
A new image released by ESO shows the amazing intricacies of a vast stellar nursery, which goes by the name of Gum 29. In the centre, a small cluster of stars - called Westerlund 2 - has been found to be the home of one of the most massive double star systems known to astronomers.
young stars Westerlund 2
© ESOThis image, based on data obtained with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) camera attached to the 2.2-m Max-Planck/ESO telescope through four different filters (B, V, R, and H-alpha), shows the amazing intricacies of the vast stellar nursery Gum 29. At its centre lies the cluster of young stars Westerlund 2. One object at the bottom of the cluster is in fact a system of two of most massive stars known to astronomers.

Gum 29 is a huge region of hydrogen gas that has been stripped of its electrons (ionised) by the intense radiation of the hot young stars located at its centre. Astronomers call this an HII (pronounced "H-two") region, and this particularly stunning example stretches out across space for over 200 light-years. The name stems from the fact that it is the 29th entry in the catalogue published by Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum in 1955.

Embedded deep within the huge, nebulous expanse of Gum 29, the relatively little known cluster of Westerlund 2 is clearly seen in the centre of this image. The latest measurements indicate that it lies at a distance of some 26 000 light-years from Earth, placing it towards the outside edge of the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way. The cluster's distance has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the past, as it is one of the parameters needed to understand this intriguing object. Westerlund 2 is very young too, with an age of only 1 - 2 million years.
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Magnify

Archaeologists Find Unique, Early US Relic Of African Worship


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:52 UTC
University of Maryland archaeologists have dug up what they believe to be one of the earliest U.S. examples of African spirit practices. The researchers say it's the only object of its kind ever found by archaeologists in North America - a clay "bundle" filled with small pieces of common metal, placed in what had been an Annapolis street gutter three centuries ago.
African bundle
© Brian Payne, University of MarylandHow the African bundle might have looked 300 years ago.

The bundle appears to be a direct transplant of African religion, distinct from hoodoo and other later practices blending African and European traditions.

"This is a remarkably early piece, far different from anything I've seen before in North America," says University of Maryland anthropologist Mark Leone, who directs the Archaeology in Annapolis project. "The bundle is African in design, not African-American. The people who made this used local materials. But their knowledge of charms and the spirit world probably came with them directly from Africa."
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Telescope

Cosmic Lens Reveals Distant Galactic Violence


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:15 UTC
By cleverly unraveling the workings of a natural cosmic lens, astronomers have gained a rare glimpse of the violent assembly of a young galaxy in the early Universe. Their new picture suggests that the galaxy has collided with another, feeding a supermassive black hole and triggering a tremendous burst of star formation.
Imaging a distant galaxy
© Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSFImaging a distant galaxy using a gravitational lens.

The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to look at a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years from Earth, seen as it was when the Universe was only about 15 percent of its current age. Between this galaxy and Earth lies another distant galaxy, so perfectly aligned along the line of sight that its gravity bends the light and radio waves from the farther object into a circle, or "Einstein Ring."

This gravitational lens made it possible for the scientists to learn details of the young, distant galaxy that would have been unobtainable otherwise.
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Pharoah

Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Governor's Palace In Turkey


Science Daily
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:11 UTC
Within the scope of an international rescue excavation project, a team of four archaeologists specialized in Middle Eastern affairs headed by Dr. Dirk Wicke (Institute of Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies) have unearthed parts of a Neo-Assyrian governor's palace dating back to the 9th to 7th century BCE in a two-month excavation program amongst the ruins on Ziyaret Tepe. The discoveries were extraordinary.
20 bronze vessels
© Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological ProjectDiscovery of a rare treasure trove of more than 20 bronze vessels under the paving stones in the courtyard.

The site in the south-east of Turkey (Diyarbakir province) is at risk from the construction of the Ilisu Dam. For several years now it has been investigated by teams from the universities of Akron (Ohio), Cambridge, Munich and Istanbul (Marmara University) in a joint excavation project. Sponsorship by the research funds of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2007 and 2008 gave its archaeologists the opportunity to become involved in this international and multi-disciplinary project. There are plans to continue the project for another three years.
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