Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Hubble Catches Stars On The Move


Space Daily / SPX
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:19 UTC
Image
© NASA, ESA and Wolfgang Brandner (MPIA), Boyke Rochau (MPIA) and Andrea Stolte (University of Cologne)The core of the star cluster in NGC 3603 is shown in great detail in an image from the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) camera on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image is a colour composite of observations in the WFPC2 filters F555W (blue), F675W (green) and F814W (red). This view shows the second of two images taken ten years apart that were used to detect the motions of individual stars within the cluster for the first time. The field of view is about 20 arcseconds across.
By exploiting the exquisite image quality of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and comparing two observations made ten years apart astronomers have, for the first time, managed to measure the tiny motions of several hundred young stars within the central cluster of the star-forming region NGC 3603.

The team was surprised to find that the stars are moving in ways that are at odds with the current understanding of how such clusters evolve. The stars in the cluster have not "settled down" as expected.

With a mass of more than 10 000 suns packed into a volume with a diameter of a mere three light-years, the massive young star cluster in the nebula NGC 3603 is one of the most compact stellar clusters in the Milky Way [1] and an ideal place to test theories for their formation.
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Question

Abstracting Atlantis: Scientist Find Evidence of Mayan Underwater City

Maria Popova
The Huffington Post
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:13 UTC
In December 2009, Herald de Paris published a curious article about the likely discovery of a submerged city in the Western Caribbean. While the discovery could have tremendous implications for modern archaeology, the story remained, forgive the pun, largely under the radar.

Today, we sit down with architectural historian and archaeologist Jes Alexander, who spearheaded the research team, to get the first-hand details of what could be a piece of real-life Atlantis.

Atlantis_1
© The Huffington PostUnderwater City
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Meteor

Ancient 40-pound Meteorite Pulled From Ditch in Oregon


SPACE.com
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:11 UTC
Image
© Unknown
A seemingly normal rock found in a ditch along a stretch of road in north central Oregon has turned out to be a stone from outer space that travelled across millions of miles and billions of years to reach Earth, according to researchers studying the stone.

The 40-pound, cone-shaped space rock, which is about the size of a beach ball, was picked up by Donald Wesson and his wife Debbie during the fall of 1999 as they drove through Oregon's wheat country on their way home to Washington. It is the fifth meteorite to be found in the northwestern state.
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Question

Deep Sea Fish 'Mystery Migration' Across Pacific Ocean

Matt Walker
BBC Earth News
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:55 UTC
Deep Sea Creatures
© A.ARKHIPKINDeepwater travellers: A) deepwater slipskin and B) gonate squid
Deep sea fish species found in the north Pacific Ocean have mysteriously been caught in the southwest Atlantic, on the other side of the world.

It is unclear how the animals, a giant rattail grenadier, pelagic eelpout and deep sea squid, travelled so far.

Their discovery 15,000km from their usual home raises the possibility that deep sea currents can transport animals from one polar region to another.

Details are published in the journal Deep Sea Research part I.

"These findings were completely unexpected," says Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department, based in Stanley, on the Falkland Islands in the southwest Atlantic Ocean.

Since 1987, the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department has performed surveys of fish caught by commercial and research fishing trawlers travelling above the Patagonian Shelf and slope around the islands.

Commercial longline catches of Patagonian toothfish have also been examined.

Recently, these catches have brought to the surface animals previously unknown in the southwest Atlantic.
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Saturn

Mystery Space Object Hits Jupiter

Jesus Diaz
Gizmodo
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:33 UTC
Image
On the third week of July 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter's fiery atmosphere. NASA says that another "mystery space object" hit during the same week but 15 years later, leaving a bruise as big as the Pacific Ocean.

Judging by the series of images taken by Hubble's newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, the current theory is that the object was a 1,600-foot wide asteroid. Analysis of the angle and size of the bruise reveals that the mystery object possibly came from the Hilda belt, a group of 1,100 asteroids orbiting near Jupiter. [NASA via NASA Goddard Twitter]
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Binoculars

Russia Discovers World War II Nazi Arms Ship in Baltic


BBC News
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:40 UTC
Image
© BBC News
Russian authorities are preparing to remove a huge arsenal of shells from a sunken German World War II barge off the Baltic coast.

The wreck is just 1.5km (0.9 miles) from the shore, near the town of Baltiysk, and about 20m (66ft) down.

More than 10,000 shells containing explosives are on board, but without detonators, a Russian government official told the BBC.

The removal work could take two years, Maxim Vladimirov said.

The operation, involving 18 divers, is scheduled to begin later this month.
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Robot

Rise of the replicators

Tom Simonite
New Scientist
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:58 UTC
I am standing in a cold north London workshop looking expectantly at a bizarre metal and plastic contraption. An acrid smell drifts from the machine as a length of plastic is drawn into a barrel at its centre and heated up. The molten plastic squirts from a nozzle onto a platform moving beneath it, drawing a pattern. The nozzle also moves up and down to build the design upwards like an expert cake icer.

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Telescope

Giant glowing bubbles found around Milky Way

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:30 UTC
Image
© NASABubble time
Is the Milky Way blowing giant bubbles? A pair of gamma ray bubbles, shaped like an hourglass, seem to be spewing from the black hole we think lies at the centre of our galaxy. That is according to the latest maps from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Its large area telescope has been scanning the whole sky every three hours since June 2008.

The source of the bubbles is a mystery but it seems unlikely that dark matter is responsible. This was what Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first suspected when he looked at the maps with his colleagues last year.

But a new analysis with more Fermi data suggests that the gamma radiation traces out a pair of distinct bubbles that span some 65,000 light years from end to end - towering above the 2000-light-year-thick disc of the galaxy. Such a well-defined shape is inconsistent with dark matter, which you would expect to be smoothly distributed and produce a diffuse glow, from gamma rays produced after dark matter particles meet and annihilate each other. "We are pretty sure the majority of emissions are not from dark matter," says Finkbeiner's student Meng Su.
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Info

Florentine Codex, Great Intellectual Enterprise of 16th Century


artdaily.org
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:39 UTC
Image
© unknownBilingual and bicultural, this ancient encyclopedia was written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish.
Created under the orders of Bernardino de Sahagun by 20 tlacuilos or painters and 4 Indigenous masters, Florentine Codex is one of the greatest expressions of the Renascence in America.

Bilingual and bicultural, this ancient encyclopedia was written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish as a summary, and is integrated by 4,000 handwritten pages with 2,686 colored images; each book has a prologue where Sahagun places the work in its dimension and time.

Restorer Diana Magaloni had access to the original document at the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) in Florence, Italy, to deepen research: She refers that being as it is one of the most important Mexican pictographic documents guarded abroad, it must be included in the Mexican Digital Library.
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Magnify

Neanderthal man was living in Britain 40,000 years earlier than thought


Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:28 UTC
Neanderthal man was living in Britain at the start of the last ice age - 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists have said.

The country was previously assumed to have been uninhabited during this period.

''I couldn't believe my eyes when I received the test results,'' said Dr Wenban-Smith.

''We know that Neanderthals inhabited Northern France at this time, but this new evidence suggests that as soon as sea levels dropped, and a 'land bridge' appeared across the English Channel, they made the journey by foot to Kent.''
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