Looking for a space-themed way to say “Happy Holidays!” to your family and friends? How about some printable holiday cards with Hubble images? Every card features fabulous astronomical objects… and when you go to download a card, you’ll find links to articles about related Hubble discoveries! The ornaments above feature Mars, the Whirlpool Galaxy, the star LL Ori, and several nebulae – the Cone Nebula, the Orion Nebula, the Retina Nebula, the Eskimo Nebula, the Bubble Nebula, and the Crab Nebula. Can you tell which is which? Read more »
Bill Nye the Science Guy paid a visit to NASA Goddard on Thursday, September 9th, 2011, and while he was here he checked out some James Webb Space Telescope hardware and talked to some of the project’s scientists.
There’s a great Flickr set of photos of his visit – but we thouht this one of him doing something many of us do, a phone self-portrait, was really fun.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Bill Hrybyk
Here’s another of him with the Webb model:
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Bill Hrybyk
In additional Webb news, all of its mirrors are not only polished, but coated in gold! (This is something that optimizes the mirror for infrared observations.) It’s a microscopically thin coating and completing this on all the mirrors is a big milestone for the project! You can read more at the NASA feature.
As Maggie mentioned in her intriguing post last week, things have been quite busy around here recently. So here is a bit of a catch-up edition of your weekly Awesomeness Round-Up. Enjoy!
Historically, astronomy has always required a great deal of patience as astronomers spent long, cold nights at the telescope, but that was only the beginning. NASA’s Chandra satellite exercised even more extreme measures of patience while it stared at a tiny patch of sky for more than six weeks in order to observe the incredibly faint galaxies visible in the Chandra Deep Field South (pictured below). Chandra’s team announced last week that they had examined over 200 distant galaxies as they were approximately 800 to 950 million years after the Big Bang, finding that black holes were far more common in the early Universe than was ever previously suspected. These baby black holes will have continued to evolve into today’s supermassive black holes over the Universe’s 13 billion year lifetime.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Hawaii/E.Treister et al; Infrared: NASA/STScI/UC Santa Cruz/
G.Illingworth et al; Optical: NASA/STScI/S.Beckwith et al
Want to see NASA Goddard in 3D? Get out your glasses and check out this really cool YouTube video showing the Center and some of the work that goes on here.
One of the things we do a lot of at NASA Goddard is build satellites. Many, many missions have come through here to be either constructed, or tested, or both!
But did you know that you can build your own versions of many of these missions? Ok, maybe they won’t be life-sized, but some of these paper models are pretty cool! We’ve featured a few of them in this post.
First up is the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a small X-ray satellite that allows scientists to studying the timing of objects like neutron stars and black holes.
The Chandra X-ray satellite just found the youngest nearby black hole. At 30 years old, it’s the remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.
“If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed,” said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. who led the study. For more information, check out the web feature on NASA.gov.
There’s also a good Washington Post article about this discovery.
This recently released image is basically a map of dark matter. It shows the distribution of the dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, which contains an amazing number of galaxies (about 1000) and trillions (!) of stars. Abell 1689 is 2.2 billion light-years from Earth.
What is dark matter? It’s invisible and actually accounts for most of the universe’s mass. Since it’s invisible Hubble can’t see it directly but astronomers can infer its location by analyzing the effect of gravitational lensing. That is, the light from the galaxies behind Abell 1689 is distorted by intervening matter within the cluster. The observed positions of 135 lensed images of 42 background galaxies were used by researchers to figure out the location and amount of the dark matter in the galaxy cluster. This map of inferred dark matter concentrations (tinted blue) was superposed on an image of the cluster taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in 2002. How do they know this effect is real? Well, if the cluster’s gravity came only from the visible galaxies, the lensing distortions would be much weaker. The map reveals that the densest concentration of dark matter is in the cluster’s core.
This past week marked a major milestone in mankind’s exploration and understanding of comets – the EPOXI mission flew just 700 km from the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 and snapped some amazing images! This close pass will give researchers incredible new insight into the structure of comets. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Hubble also took a look at Hartley 2. Numerous fantastic images and more information on the mission at the EPOXI site, and nice summaries of the mission available from Phil Plait and The Planetary Society.
This week’s round-up will be a quick one – we just got back from attending the Blogworld & New Media Expo, and our brains are exploding with ideas for new things to do for Blueshift! But plenty of news-worthy things happened while we were gone, because astronomical discoveries wait for no one! We’ll kick off with this dramatic new trailer for the James Webb Space Telescope! It’s going back… to the beginning!
Last week, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team announced that they had spotted something that had never been seen before – gamma rays coming from a nova. Back in March, Japanese amateur astronomers saw a dramatic change in a star in Cygnus and informed the professional astronomy community. Swift took a look, then Fermi, and they figured out the reason for the sudden increase in brightness: V407 Cyg, the white dwarf in a binary star system, erupted in an enormous thermonuclear explosion. It took a few months to examine the data and confirm their results, but now scientists are ready to share their discovery. Check out the animation above!
Links | Maggie Masetti | 
December 22, 2011 5:01 pm | 
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