Posts for 'General Information' Category

Experts identified it among a group of "monster" stars – whose size and brightness exceed what many scientists thought was possible Found within two young star clusters, NGC 3603 and RMC 136a, the stars weigh up to 300 times the mass of the Sun, a figure which doubles the previously accepted limit of solar mass. A researcher at the University of Sheffield discovered the monster stars using the European southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope.

The biggest star found, R136a1 within the R136a cluster, has a current mass of 265 solar masses, and it is thought its birthweight was as much as 320 times that of the Sun. It is also the most luminous star ever found, close to 10 million times that of the Sun. If R136a1 replaced the Sun at the centre of our solar system, it would outshine our star by as much as the Sun currently outshines the Moon.

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 A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed back into a tail, and they have even calculated what it looks like," said astronomer Jeffrey Linsky of the University of Colorado in Boulder, leader of the study.

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Look Up's calendar is bursting with space events through the rest of July, including star parties on the Mall, a celebration of Mars, and visits from astronauts. Astronomy Night on the Mall: Gaze through telescopes set up on the National Mall this Thursday night from 6 to 11 p.m. during this free astronomy event held just northeast of the Washington Monument.

View the Moon, Saturn, and even some deep sky objects with the help of volunteers from The National Capital Astronomers and the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. The evening is sponsored by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy and Hofstra University. It's a Star Party for the People!

Mars Day! at the National Air and Space Museum: We know most of you aren't really working that hard on Fridays in the summer, so head down to NASM this week for Mars Day! from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Events, lectures and demonstrations will teach you all about the red planet.

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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope to follow up on a NASA Chandra X-ray telescope observation, the most powerful pair of jets ever seen have been found bursting from a black hole of just a few solar masses. This so-called microquasar, located in the spiral galaxy NGC 7793 12 million light years away, is also blowing out a huge bubble of hot gas stretching 1,000 light years across – twice as large and ten times more powerful than any other known microquasar.

“We have been astonished by how much energy is injected into the gas by the black hole,” says lead author Manfred Pakull, who reports the discovery in this week's issue of the journal Nature. “This black hole is just a few solar masses, but is a real miniature version of the most powerful quasars and radio galaxies, which contain black holes with masses of a few million times that of the Sun.”

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If you ever read Skepchick, you already know of Surly Amy: skeptic, artist, photographer, and all around cool chick. I’m glad to have her as a friend. She also creates wonderful critical thinking jewelry she calls Surlyramics. These are ceramic necklaces and other accouterments with skeptical, scientific, and critical thinking phrases and drawings on them. They’re very cool, and wildly popular at meetings I’ve been to.

She and I have teamed up to create a limited edition Surlyramics Bad Astronomy pendant necklace. Each one is hand-formed and painted, and only 200 will be made. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. The reason we’re doing this is that when you order a Bad Astronomy Surly necklace for $20, half of that will be donated to the American Cancer Society. Our goal is to raise $2000 in honor of my friend Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and really nice guy  he’s the one who named an asteroid after me, as well as others for other skeptics and scientists.

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What do stars, planets and people have in common? According to the theory of electromagnetism, any electrical current gives rise to a magnetic field, which can be found in stars, planets (including Earth), and even human bodies.

Astronomers have found that magnetic fields pervade the universe through a combination of telescopic observations and theoretical modeling An international conference held at Western on May 17-19, entitled “Magnetic Fields: Core Collapse to Young Stellar Objects,” brought together 70 of the world’s leading researchers on magnetism in stars and star-forming regions.

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It's barely July and University of Redlands astronomer Tyler Nordgren is well into his summer book tour. It's not quite the glamorous trip he might have imagined -- swanky hotels with champagne and turn-down service are scarce on his schedule, and Oprah hasn't yet come knocking.

Instead, Nordgren is driving his RAV4 from one park to the next in the western United States. The SUV is loaded with camping gear, camera equipment and five boxes of copies of his book, "Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks."

"I thought once I wrote the book my job was done," Nordgren wrote in an e-mail last week. "I just waited for my publisher to book me on 'Oprah' or 'The Colbert Report,' then watch as the New York Times ran a review and the sales took off."

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A €450 million mission to measure the precise location of stars in the Milky Way may be threatened by bursts of radiation from the Sun, Physics World is reporting.

Gaia, as the spacecraft is known, is the latest in a series of astrometry satellites which will measure the positions of millions of stars in the galaxy. That might sound easy, given that ground-based surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have done the same with around a million galaxies.

But it's not. Stars in the Milky Way are generally too close to be measured using the traditional redshift method used to chart distant galaxies. Instead, Gaia will rely on relative motion, brightness and parallax (the slight change in apparent position of nearby stars at different times of year) to figure out how far away many of these stars are.

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The Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association’s monthly indoor meeting will be at 8 p.m. July 20 in Coykendall Science Building at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Speaker will be Louis J. Suarato, who was the development director for the Astronomy.

India has joined the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project, the next generation astronomical observatory that will be located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. This was announced by Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chauhan in California on Friday.

The observatory is scheduled to begin operations in 2018. Observer statu India has been granted observer status on the TMT Board. This is the first step to becoming a full partner in TMT, which will mean participating in the development and scientific use of what will be the world's most advanced and capable astronomical observatory, according to the press release by the TMT project team.

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