The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

Antarctica Meteorite Hints at Extraterrestrial Origins for Prebiotic Molecular Evolution

 

Ammonia found in a carbon-containing meteorite from Antarctica adds to a growing body of evidence that meteorites may have played a key role in the development of life here. The NASA image above  below was released early this year, when researchers reported that meteorites may have also delivered Earth’s first left-hand amino acids.

“Given that meteorites and comets have reached the Earth since it formed, it has been proposed that the exogenous influx from these bodies provided the organic inventories necessary for the emergence of life," said lead researcher Sandra Pizzarello, of Arizona State University.

Image of the Day: Star Birth --Gloria in Excelsis

Infant stars glowing gloriously in this infrared image of the Serpens star-forming region, located approximately 848 light-years away in the Serpens constellation. The reddish-pink dots are baby stars deeply embedded in the cosmic cloud of gas and dust that collapsed to create the stars. Dusty disks of cosmic debris that may eventually form planets surround the infant stars. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA

"Black Holes Glow Like a Hot Body" --Stephen Hawking

The mathematician Louis Crane proposed a scifi-like scenario back in 1994 that billions of years in the future, after all the stars have burned out, that small black holes could be created to generate heat and guarantee survival of the species.

Stephen Hawking's great discovery was that the mysterious regions in space we call black holes radiate heat through quantum effects. Hawking has said that "black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow." Hawking's famous theory says that the temperature of a black hole varies inversely to its mass.

The Red Arc -Blast Wave of an Ancient Massive Star

New images from ESA's Planck space observatory reveal the forces driving star formation and give astronomers a way to understand the complex physics that shape the dust and gas in our Galaxy. Where earth-bound optical telescopes see only black space, Planck's microwave eyes reveal myriad glowing structures of dust and gas. Now, Planck has used this ability to probe the Orion region -a cradle of star formation, some 1500 light-years away.

The image covers much of the constellation of Orion. The nebula is the bright spot to the lower centre. The bright spot to the right of centre is around the Horsehead Nebula, so called because at high magnifications a pillar of dust resembles a horse's head.

Colonization of Space Looms --Nuclear Power Plant for Settlements on Moon, Mars & Beyond

The first nuclear power plant being considered for production of electricity for manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets may really look like it came from outer space. "The main point is that nuclear power has the ability to provide a power-rich environment to the astronauts or science packages anywhere in our solar system and that this technology is mature, affordable and safe to use," says James E. Werner of the Idaho National Laboratory

Will the Giant Star Betelgeuse Go HyperNova?

 

Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, could burst into its supernova phase and become as bright as a full moon - and last for as long as a year. The massive star is visible in the winter sky over most of the world as a bright, reddish star, could explode as a supernova anytime within the next 100,000 years.

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been.

Evolution of Galaxies --A New Discovery

A team of scientists, led by Michael Rauch from the Carnegie Observatories, has discovered a distant galaxy that may help elucidate two fundamental questions of galaxy formation: How galaxies take in matter and how they give off energetic radiation. Their work will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

During the epoch when the first galaxies formed, it is believed that they radiated energy, which hit surrounding neutral hydrogen atoms and excited them to the point where they were stripped of electrons. This produced the ionized plasma that today fills the universe. But little is known about how this high-energy light was able to escape from the immediate surroundings of a galaxy, known as the galactic halo. The galaxies we observe today tend to be completely surrounded by gaseous halos of neutral hydrogen, which absorb all light capable of ionizing hydrogen before it has a chance to escape.

Rauch and his team, using the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory and archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope, discovered a galaxy with an extended patch of light surrounding it. The objects appearance means that roughly half of the galaxy's radiation must be escaping and exciting hydrogen atoms outside of its halo.

The key to the escape of radiation can be found in the unusual, distorted shape of the newly observed galaxy. It appears that the object had recently been hit by another galaxy, creating a hole in its halo, allowing radiation to pass through.

"The loss of radiation during galactic interactions and collisions like the one seen here may be able to account for the re-ionization of the universe", Rauch said. "This galaxy is a leftover from a population of once-numerous dwarf galaxies. And looking back to a time when the universe was more dense, crashes between galaxies would have been much more common than today."

The new observation also helps scientists better understand the flow of inbound matter, from which a galaxy originally forms. In the present case, the escaping ionizing radiation illuminated a long train of incoming gas, which is feeding new matter into the galaxy. The existence of such structures had been predicted by theory, but they had not been seen previously because they barely emit any light of their own.


The Daily Galaxy via The Carnegie Institution

Image of the Day: The Haunting Beauty of NGC 3190 --A Deadly Supernova Factory

This magnificent galaxy inspires us, again, to ask: does advanced life exist there? The fact that we have no proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may simply mean that intelligent civilizations have all too finite lifetimes. NGC 3190 is a spiral galaxy of unbearable beauty in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. In 2002, astronomers uncovered one supernova in March in the southeastern part and then another team uncovered a second supernova on the other side two months later -sure destroyers of vicinity-based life.

EcoAlert: Realtime Tracking of Near-Earth Asteroids & Comets --It Could Save the Planet

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter, which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. Shoemaker-Levy 9 was the first comet discovered to be orbiting a planet, Jupiter, instead of the sun.

This enlargement of a 1993 Hubble Space Telescope image above shows the brightest nuclei in a string of approximately 20 objects that comprise Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it hurtled toward its July I994 collision with Jupiter.

NASA's Massively Multiplayer Space-Exploration Game Now Online

NASA’s massively multiplayer online game, Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond,  launched with a hail of publicity in 2009 but very quiet since, is looking for pledges from supporters on the microfunding site, offering up access to the game’s beta in return, as well as a few other perks.

AMMB takes place in the year 2035. Mankind has started settling the Solar System. Real science,technology, engineering, mathematics and physics content is infused throughout the AMMB universe. Astronauts may pick from severalcharacter classes, including severaltypes of Engineer, Physicists, andPilots. AMMB is currently being developedusing the Unreal Engine 3 platform.

The game will be set in the Arthur C. Clarke Astronaut Academy Station, which the Kickstarter page describes as “Hogwarts in space.” Players will be able to “uncover secrets about a threat to civilization as we know it, and build you and your team a high-tech inventory of space gear including a home base, somewhere out there.”