Science & Technology

Odd Orbits Mark Discovery of New Alien Planets

CBS News
Mon, 23 May 2011 17:05 UTC

© Jason Rowe and Kepler team
This illustration shows all 1,235 of the potential alien planet candidates NASA's Kepler mission has found to date. The planets are pictured crossing front of their host stars, which are all represented to scale.

Alien solar systems with multiple planets appear to be common in our galaxy, but most of them are quite different than our own, a new study finds.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope detected 1,235 alien planet candidates in its first four months of operation. Of those, 408 reside in multiple-planet systems, suggesting that our own configuration of multiple worlds orbiting a single star isn't so special.

What may be special, however, is the orientation of our solar system's planets. Some of them are tilted significantly off the solar system's plane, while most of the Kepler systems are nearly as flat as a tabletop, researchers said.

The Invisible iPhone

Kate Greene
Technology Review, MIT
Mon, 23 May 2011 14:20 UTC

© Hasso Plattner Institute
Point and click: The “imaginary phone” determines which iPhone app a person wants to use by matching his or her finger position to the position of the app on the screen.

A new interface lets you keep your phone in your pocket and use apps or answer calls by tapping your hand.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone - instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm, software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

Baudisch and his team envision someone doing dishes when his smart phone rings. Instead of quickly drying his hands and fumbling to answer, the imaginary phone lets him simply slide a finger across his palm to answer it remotely.

Why are Supermassive Black Holes at Galactic Cores Spinning Faster than Ever in the History of the Universe?

The Daily Galaxy
Tue, 24 May 2011 13:43 UTC

British astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centers of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr. Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

There is strong evidence that every galaxy has a massive black hole in its center that has masses of between a million and a billion Suns. They cannot be seen directly, but material swirls around the black hole in a so-called accretion disk before its final demise. That material can become very hot and emit radiation including X-rays that can be detected by space-based telescopes whilst associated radio emission can be detected by telescopes on the ground.

Twin jets are often associated with black holes and their accretion disks. There are many factors that can cause these jets to be produced, but the spin of the supermassive black hole is believed to be important. However, there are conflicting predictions about how the spins of the black holes should be evolving and until now this evolution was not well understood.

Major Astronomical Study confirms Mysterious-Dark Energy

Elvira Veksler
Business 2 Community
Tue, 24 May 2011 10:37 UTC

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."

Galactic 'Fountain of Youth' Flows in Hubble Photo

Space
Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00 UTC

© ESA/Hubble & NASA
This 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.

Kepler Team Announces New Rocky Planet

Jason Major
Universe Today
Mon, 23 May 2011 15:45 UTC

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.

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

Space.com
Mon, 23 May 2011 13:00 UTC

© 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.

Earth's Past, Made Visible

Astrobiology Magazine
Mon, 23 May 2011 13:26 UTC

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.

Enceladus' electrical connection to Saturn

NASA/JPL/University of Colorado/Central Arizona College
Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:20 UTC

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.

Superhuman Hearing Possible, Experiments Suggest

Ker Than
National Geographic News
Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00 UTC

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.

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Jibrish

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beherenow

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rbeltz48

The Duke gave the credit for the Royal family's decades-long interest in the environment to his late grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, who he...

LadyRad

Science & Technology

Odd Orbits Mark Discovery of New Alien Planets

The Invisible iPhone

Why are Supermassive Black Holes at Galactic Cores Spinning Faster than Ever in the History of the Universe?

Major Astronomical Study confirms Mysterious-Dark Energy

Galactic 'Fountain of Youth' Flows in Hubble Photo

Kepler Team Announces New Rocky Planet

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

Earth's Past, Made Visible

Enceladus' electrical connection to Saturn

Superhuman Hearing Possible, Experiments Suggest

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