Category: Space


‘The sound of the big bang’ by John Cramer

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April 8, 2013

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Ten years ago when the WMAP data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) became available, John Cramer, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington, completed a Mathematica calculation to produce “the sound of the Big Bang.” Cramer decided to do the same thing with the new data from the ESA’s Planck Mission analysis of the CMB, which analyzes the temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background into angular frequency components or multipoles. The new frequency spectrum goes to much higher frequencies than did the WMAP analysis, and therefore offers a more “high-fidelity” rendition of the Sound of the Big Bang.

The simulation represents the first 760,000 years of evolution of the universe, as the emitted CBR rises and falls in intensity following the Planck profile; (3) The universe was expanding and becoming more of a “bass instrument” while the cosmic background radiation was being emitted. To put it another way, the expanding universe “stretches” the sound wavelengths and thereby lowers their frequencies. To account for this effect, the program shifts the waves downward in frequency to follow the expansion in the first 760 thousand years of the universe.
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Planck satellite: Maps detail Universe’s ancient light

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March 21, 2013

Temperature anomalies in Planck data

A spectacular new map of the “oldest light” in the sky has just been released by the European Space Agency.

Scientists say its mottled pattern is an exquisite confirmation of our Big-Bang model for the origin and evolution of the Universe.

But there are features in the picture, they add, that are unexpected and will require ideas to be refined.

The map was assembled from 15 months’ worth of data acquired by the 600m-euro (£515m) Planck space telescope.

It details what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB – a faint glow of microwave radiation that pervades all of space.

Its precise configuration, visible in the new Planck data, is suggestive of a cosmos that is slightly older than previously thought – one that came into existence 13.82 billion years ago.

Planck anomalies graphic

This is an increase of about 50 million years on earlier calculations.

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Hello Universe, This is ALMA

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March 15, 2013

Scientists hope the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, will allow astronomers to see back to the first moments after the universe was formed.

Built in the arid desert it is the world’s most powerful telescope, and the largest ground-based astronomy project on the globe. It is also the highest, at an altitude of 5,000 metres, and ALMA is now ready to probe the universe.

As well as hopes that ALMA may be able to answer where we come from, the telescope will search for alien life.

Rather than a single telescope it is made up of 66 giant antennae, ranging in diameter from seven to 12 metres, which gather radio waves from space rather than optical light. The information is then processed by a supercomputer.

ALMA can then work out how individual stars and planets are formed, scientists believe.

The international collaboration between Europe, East Asia and North America cost £950million, including around £65,000 from the UK

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Radiation ring around Earth mysteriously appears, then dissipates

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March 13, 2013

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High above Earth’s surface float two rings of energetic charged particles, and for about four weeks in September, they were joined by a third. The temporary ring may have formed in response to a solar shock wave that passed by Earth, researchers report online February 28 inScience.

The discovery could force scientists to revisit decades of ideas about the structure of the Van Allen belts, donut-shaped rings of radiation trapped in orbit by the planet’s magnetic field. Those revisions could improve predictions of space weather and scientists’ understanding of the space environment near Earth, resulting in better protection for manned and unmanned spacecraft that navigate those areas.

“It’s a very important discovery,” says Yuri Shprits of the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Over half a century after the discovery of the radiation belts, this most important region of space where most of the satellites operate presents us with new puzzles.”

Until the discovery, researchers thought the Van Allen belts always contained two zones of high-energy particles: an inner zone made mostly of protons and some electrons, and an outer zone dominated by electrons. A sparsely populated area separates the zones. The belts run from the top of the atmosphere, some 1,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, to as far as five or six Earth radii from the planet’s surface.

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Mars trip to use astronaut poo as radiation shield

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March 4, 2013

Is the Red Planet looking particularly brown today? <i>(Image: SpaceX/NASA)</i>

The man and woman aboard the Inspiration Mars mission set to fly-by the Red Planet in 2018 will face cramped conditions, muscle atrophy and potential boredom. But their greatest health risk comes from exposure to the radiation from cosmic rays. The solution? Line the spacecraft’s walls with water, food and their own faeces.

“It’s a little queasy sounding, but there’s no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding,” says Taber MacCallum, a member of the team funded by multimillionaire Dennis Tito, who announced the audacious plan earlier this week.

McCallum told New Scientist that solid and liquid human waste products would get put into bags and used as a radiation shield – as well as being dehydrated so that any water can be recycled for drinking. “Dehydrate them as much as possible, because we need to get the water back,” he said. “Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall.”

Food too, could be used as a shield, he said. “Food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding,” he said. This wouldn’t be dangerous as the food would merely be blocking the radiation, it wouldn’t become a radioactive source.

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Van Allen belt study reveals surprises

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March 1, 2013

Artists impression of the invisible Van Allen radiation belts. Credit: NASA

Researchers say data from NASA space probes has forced a revision of theories about radiation belts around the Earth just a few thousand miles above our heads.

Instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder have returned new finding on the Van Allen radiation belts — donut-shaped rings of electrons that encircle the Earth that were one of the first discoveries of the space age.

Two spacecraft launched in 1958 carrying instruments built by James Van Allen showed the presence of two distinct rings of high-energy electrons.

A new NASA mission was launched Aug. 30 to learn more about the belts, which are known to be hazardous to satellites, astronauts and technological systems on Earth.

Just a few days after launch, CU-Boulder researcher said, the instruments on board returned a shocking result: the formation of a third radiation belt.

The instruments initially showed the expected two Van Allen belts, but after a few days the outer ring appeared to compress into an intense, tightly packed electron band and a third, less compact belt of electrons formed further out, creating a total of three rings.

The middle “storage ring” persisted as the belt furthest away from Earth began to decay away until a powerful interplanetary shockwave traveling from the sun virtually annihilated both the storage ring and the rest of the outer belt.

In the following months the Van Allen radiation zones re-formed into the originally expected two-belt structure, researchers said.

“We have no idea how often this sort of thing happens,” CU-Boulder researcher Dan Baker said. “This may occur fairly frequently but we didn’t have the tools to see it.”

The findings could yield better understanding of how and when solar storms can wreak havoc on Earth, researchers said.

“Nature presents us with this event — it’s there, it’s a fact, you can’t argue with it — and now we have to explain why it’s the case,” Shri Kanekal at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. “Why did the third belt persist for four weeks? Why does it change? All of this information teaches us more about space.”

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Earth’s mantle helps hunt for fifth force of nature

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February 25, 2013

Earth could play a key role in a giant force experiment <i>(Image: Marc Airhart (University of Texas at Austin) and Steve Jacobsen (Northwestern University)</i>

Hey CERN, think you’ve got a big particle detector? Try using the entire Earth to hunt for a new fundamental force of nature.

So say Larry Hunter of Amherst College in Massachusetts, and colleagues. They have created a map of the spins of electrons deep within the Earth’s mantle, which could be used to reveal the as-yet-unseen force as well as the strange particles – known as “unparticles” – that might carry it.

Such an experiment could also yield new insights into the planet’s lower mantle, hundreds of kilometres below the surface.

We currently know of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The hypothetical fifth force can be thought of as a version of magnetism that does not weaken as quickly with distance.

Unparticle exchange

Electromagnetic fields are produced when two particles exchange virtual photons that pop in and out of existence. But some physicists think another kind of virtual particle could also be exchanged, giving rise to a fifth fundamental force.

One candidate is the unparticle, a mysterious entity dreamed up several years ago. It has an unusual trait: its mass varies depending on the way we measure it, due to a property called scale invariance. As a result, unparticle exchange would not drop off as quickly as electromagnetism with distance – potentially giving rise to measureable long-range effects.

Theory says this fifth force should tweak the amount of energy needed to flip the spin of an electron or neutron, due to interaction with another particle far away. Detectors have been set up to measure the effect of particles a few metres away on the spins of neutrons in the lab, but those have so far come up empty.

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We live in a busy universe: Best Video of 2012 DA14

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February 21, 2013

Colin Legg caught a meteor train and 2012 DA14

Here’s our vote for the best video from the February 15, 2013 passage of asteroid 2012 DA14. Geologist and astrophotographer Colin Legg in Australia captured the wonderful video below, in which he caught a decaying meteor train plus the asteroid 2012 DA14 moving in the same frame. He said it was “luck,” but if you’ve seen any of Colin’s other work in astrophotography, you know there was huge skill involved, too. He wrote:

I captured this footage starting 3.24 am from a dark sky site 350 km east of Perth. Just after camera rolling, a beautiful meteor burned across the sky, and amazingly, passed right through my camera’s field of view, lingering while the debris train swept up and out of view. In addition, the sky was also very busy swarming with countless man made satellites. The asteroid is the bright object at left moving down the screen.

I had to watch this video several times to be able to appreciate both the meteor train and the asteroid. One hint: everything except the large meteor and asteroid are man-made satellites. The longer streaks are faster-moving satellites in lower orbits.

The meteor train is that orange wisp left behind when a bright meteor shoots past. It’s on theright side of the screen.

The asteroid is moving down the left side of the screen. You might also notice a man-made satellite moving from left to right. That’s not the asteroid. The asteroid is brighter than that left-to-right moving satellite, and it moves top-to-bottom on the left side of the screen.

Fullscreen view recommended!

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Universe Has Finite Lifespan, Higgs Boson Calculations Suggest

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February 20, 2013

Universe Lifespan

Scientists are still sorting out the details of last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but add up the numbers and it’s not looking good for the future of the universe, scientists said Monday. ”If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters.

Lykeen spoke before presenting his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. ”It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” said Lykken, who is also on the science team at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. Physicists last year announced they had discovered what appears to be a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which is believed to give matter its mass. Work to study the Higgs’ related particles, necessary for confirmation, is ongoing.

If confirmed, the discovery would help resolve a key puzzle about how the universe came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago – and perhaps how it will end. ”This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said. ”A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us,” Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.

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Visualizing the Size of the Universe With a Grain of Sand

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February 11, 2013

The universe is so incredibly large that it’s difficult to know where to begin when trying to visualize its size. This video should help you get your head around that very problem.

Pete Edwards from the University of Durham, UK, does a good job of explaining things here—with a grain of sand as a frame of reference. If our entire solar system was the size of a grain of sand, the Milky Way would be 1000 times bigger than a cathedral in comparison. And if the Milky Way were the size of a grain of sand, the universe would be the size of a cathedral. So, yeah, the universe. Pretty large.

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The Overview Effect

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February 8, 2013

Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.

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Kepler Space Telescope Data Reveals Billions Of Earth-Like Planets Near Earth

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February 7, 2013

If ET phones home today, his long distance charge might not be as much as people believed when Steven Spielberg’s classic film came out three decades ago.

That’s because recent data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggests that billions of Earth-like planets are much closer than ever before imagined.

“The information we presented today will excite the general public because we now know that the nearest potentially Earth-like world is likely within 13 light years of the sun,” astronomer Courtney Dressing said in an email to The Huffington Post.

“Astronomically speaking, 13 light years is practically next door.”

While we don’t know if intelligent life exists on any of these planets, it raises the chances of that possibility.

The scientific team studied the huge number of red dwarf stars in our galaxy — stars that are smaller and have a longer life span than our own sun.

Just doing the math, the odds of Earth-like planets in our galaxy are, well, astronomical.

Scientists estimate 6 percent of the 75 billion red dwarf stars may have Earth-size planets orbiting them at a possible habitable distance. That works out to approximately 4.5 billion Earths out there.

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First Toy Multiverse Created in a Laboratory, Say Physicists

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January 31, 2013

Researchers exploit the strange properties of a liquid metamaterial to watch Minkowski spacetimes leap in out and of existence.

Metamaterials are synthetic substances with nanoscale structures that manipulate light. This ability to steer photons makes them the enabling technology behind invisibility cloaks and has generated intense interest from researchers.

The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.

Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiverse in which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.

Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.

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Chameleon Star Baffles Astronomers

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January 25, 2013

pulsar

Pulsars — tiny spinning stars, heavier than the sun and smaller than a city — have puzzled scientists since they were discovered in 1967.

Now, new observations by an international team, including University of Vermont astrophysicist Joanna Rankin, make these bizarre stars even more puzzling.

The scientists identified a pulsar that is able to dramatically change the way in which it shines. In just a few seconds, the star can quiet its radio waves while at the same time it makes its X-ray emissions much brighter.

The research “challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories,” the team writes in the Jan. 25 edition of the journal Science and reopens a decades-old debate about how these stars work.

Like the universe’s most powerful lighthouses, pulsars shine beams of radio waves and other radiation for trillions of miles. As these highly magnetized neutron stars rapidly rotate, a pair of beams sweeps by, appearing as flashes or pulses in telescopes on Earth.

Using a satellite X-ray telescope, coordinated with two radio telescopes on the ground, the team observed a pulsar that was previously known to flip on and off every few hours between strong (or “bright”) radio emissions and weak (or “quiet”) radio emissions.

Monitoring simultaneously in X-rays and radio waves, the team revealed that this pulsar exhibits the same behavior, but in reverse, when observed at X-ray wavelengths.

This is the first time that a switching X-ray emission has been detected from a pulsar.

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Two Merging Black Holes May Have Irradiated Earth Around AD 775

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January 21, 2013

According to a new study conducted by German astronomers Dr Valeri Hambaryan and Dr Ralph Neuhauser, an intense blast of high-energy radiation that struck our planet in the 8th century may have been caused by a nearby short gamma-ray burst, emitted by two merging stellar remnants – black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs.

In 2012, cosmic-ray physicist Prof Fusa Miyake from Nagoya University in Japan announced the detection of high levels of the isotope carbon-14 and beryllium-10 in tree rings formed in 775 CE, suggesting that a burst of radiation struck the Earth in the year 774 or 775.

Carbon-14 and beryllium-10 form when radiation from space collides with nitrogen atoms, which then decay to these heavier forms of carbon and beryllium. The earlier research ruled out the nearby explosion of a massive star as nothing was recorded in observations at the time and no remnant has been found.

Prof Miyake also considered whether a solar flare could have been responsible, but these are not powerful enough to cause the observed excess of carbon-14. Large flares are likely to be accompanied by ejections of material from the Sun’s corona, leading to vivid displays of the northern and southern lights, but again no historical records suggest these took place.

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Black holes growing faster than expected

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January 17, 2013

Existing theories on the relationship between the size of a galaxy and its central black hole are wrong according to a new Australian study.

The discovery by Dr Nicholas Scott and Professor Alister Graham, from Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, found smaller galaxies have far smaller black holes than previously estimated.

Central black holes, millions to billions of times larger than the Sun, reside in the core of most galaxies, and are thought to be integral to galactic formation and evolution.

However astronomers are still trying to understand this relationship.

Scott and Graham combined data from observatories in Chile, Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope, to develop a data base listing the masses of 77 galaxies and their central supermassive black holes.

The astronomers determined the mass of each central black hole by measuring how fast stars are orbiting it.

Existing theories suggest a direct ratio between the mass of a galaxy and that of its central black hole.

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Largest structure in universe found — and it’s mind-boggling

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January 15, 2013

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Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end.

The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered bysupermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that it challenges modern cosmological theory, researchers said.

“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe,” lead author Roger Clowes, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. “This is hugelyexciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.”

Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. For decades, astronomers have known that they tend to assemble in huge groups, some of which are more than 600 million light-years wide.

But the record-breaking quasar group, which Clowes and his team spotted in data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is on another scale altogether. The newfound LQC is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.

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We are the 4%

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December 27, 2012

Mass-energy distribution of the Universe

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Video of the Day: Breathtaking circumpolar stars

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December 19, 2012

Video of the Day: Breathtaking circumpolar stars

Photographer Vlad Lapadatescu used a 15-second exposure to take hundreds of images in France at an elevation of about 9,500 feet. He then combined them together to get this lovely shot. See Vlad’s timelapse video to see how the image was created.

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A new line of research hopes to drastically reduce the amount of energy required for warping space-time

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December 14, 2012

Alpha,_Beta_and_Proxima_Centauri.jpg

When, a few weeks ago, astronomers announced that an Earth-sized planet had been detected orbiting a Alpha Centauri B, a star in the closest system of stars to our own, and that this planet might, just might, mean that there is another planet, maybe another Earth-sized one, maybe, just maybe, in that magical distance from a sun that could give rise to life, and that all this was taking place right there in our galactic backyard, the next thought was inevitable: What if there is life there?

What if we, the people of the early 21st century, could be among the generation — the first and only of all the generations ever — that would be first to know that we were not alone?

But then there is the inevitable letdown: Even if we did find a planet in one of those nearby stars’ habitable zone and even, even, if we could detect an atmosphere that could harbor life, then what? Alpha Centauri may be the closest star system to Earth, but it’s still four light years away. Voyager 1, our farthest-traveled probe is moving at *38,000 miles per hour*, and after 35 years, it’s still in our solar system (barely). Moving at Voyager’s speed, it would take 700 *centuries* for a missionto reach Alpha Centauri. With speeds like that, we stand to become the first generation to know life is out there, and to not be able to know much more than that. The prospect is maddening.

Of course, our only hope would be to travel at much, much greater speeds. As MIT astronomer Sara Seager explained here at The Atlantic to Ross Andersen:

There are a lot of people who think we have the capabilities to get to a tenth of the speed of light. People are using that number as a benchmark of what they think is attainable, whether it’s with a solar sail or nuclear pulse propulsion. If we could achieve that speed, then we could get to Alpha Centauri in just over 40 years.

Whenever I give a talk to a public audience I explain the hazards of living on a spacecraft for 40 years, the fact that life could be extremely tedious, and could possibly even include some kind of induced hibernation. But then I always ask if anyone in the audience would volunteer for a 40+ year journey, and every single time I get a show of hands. And then I say “oh I forgot to mention, it’s a one way trip,” and even then I get the same show of hands. This tells me that our drive to explore is so great that if and when engineers succeed at traveling at least 10 percent of the speed of light, there will be people willing to make the journey. It’s just a matter of time.

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