First extra-solar earth like planets discovered

The Kepler space telescope has found two planets approximately 1000 light years from Earth that are similar in size to our planet, and potentially able to support life, even if in their past. See BBC News.

Saturn's Aurora

The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn has observed an effect similar to the aurorae on Earth due to a flow of electrons between the planet and its moon Enceladus. This effect was previously observed, again by Cassini, between Jupiter and its moon Io.

See BBC News.

Discovery of extrasolar "earths"

Scientists have discovered multiple candidate planets that may support life, using the Kepler space telescope.

See BBC Website.

Voyager first spacecraft to reach edge of Solar System

NASA has announced that the Yoyager 1 spacecraft, launched originally in 1977 to survey Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, has observed evidence that it is on the verge of the heliopause at the edge of the solar system. Currently the spacecraft is 17.4 billion kilometers from Earth, is travelling at approximately 17 km per second and is sending signals that require 14 hours to reach Earth.

See BBC Website and NASA/JPL

Talk: "The High Speed Universe"

Professor Vik Dhillon from the University of Sheffield will give a talk here in Kevin Street on Wednesday 4th Februrary entitled 'The High Speed Universe'. The talk concerns high time-resolution astronomical measurements and is sponsored by the Institute of Physics (IoP) as part of their college lecture series.

Professor Dhillon's talk will take place at 4pm in Room KE G-007 and is open to everyone. The talk should be of particular interest to any students taking astronomy/astrophysics modules.

"Fossil imprint" of Tycho Brahe's 1572 supernova reported in Nature.

'In 1572, a "new star" appeared in the sky which stunned astronomers and exploded ancient theories of the universe.

Now the supernova recorded by Tycho Brahe has been glimpsed again, by Max Planck Institute scientists. They used telescopes in Hawaii and Spain to capture faint light echoes of the original explosion, reflected by interstellar dust. This "fossil imprint" of Tycho's famous supernova is reported in Nature.

The study will help solve a 400-year-old mystery over the nature of the celestial event which captivated observers across the globe.'

The link below has a movie as well as further details.

See BBC News.

Phoenix Mars Lander live info page

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down today and a live feed of information is now available on NASA websites.

See thetext.

Unforeseen problems with prospective moon dwellers

NASA research on the Earth's magnetic field has uncovered a bit of a problem for future moon dwellers. It turns out that during the full moon, the moon is strongly whipped by the Earth's magnetotail, causing violent dust storms and electromagnetic activity which could have serious consequences for any surface dwellers or at best will require careful planning and a lot more cost to deal with than has been considered up to now.



At full moon, the moon passes through an oscillating "plasma sheet" — hot ionised gas particles trapped in the tail. Being hot, the electrons are fast moving with high kinetic energy and these electrons impact all over the moon's surface giving the moon a net negative charge. On the moon's dayside this effect is mitigated by the photoelectric effect due to sunlight, where photons release electrons from the surface, reducing the negative charge. But on the night side, the electronic charge stays built up and can accumulate to a relative potential of thousands of volts.

You may ask how did NASA not know this?
Well it had been seen before but it seems none of the Apollo missions never landed at full moon so there's been no direct experience of the effect to date. The effect was first noticed in 1968, when the Surveyor 7 lander photographed a strange glow on the horizon after dark, but nobody knew what it was.

See Space.com.

Astronomy Evening Course being planned

Would you like to learn about the Sun, planets, stars and galaxies, comets and meteor showers, and learn how to use a telescope to observe the universe around you?

The School of Physics at the Dublin Institute of Technology is planning an evening course to provide adult education for the beginner amateur astronomer. No prior experience is necessary and the evening class will focus on constellations easily seen in the skies over Ireland. See here for contact details

See DIT Physics Astronomy Evening Course.

Massive black hole found by Finnish Astronomers

Astronomers from Finland have "weighed" a monster celestial object 18 billion times more massive than the Sun - six times larger than the previous record.

The black hole, known as OJ287, is orbited by a smaller black hole, which allowed its mass to be measured by analysing the orbit. The finding also enabled the researchers to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity for the first time in a strong gravitational field.

See BBC News.

Light wormholes

Allan Greenleaf of the University of Rochester in New York describes how electromagnetic wormholes for the instantaneous transmission of light could be created theoretically, in an analogous way to the construction of wormholes in space-time.

See Nature Physics.

Star collision forms supernovae?

Two articles in this weeks edition of Nature predict that the most luminous supernova ever recorded (SN2006gy) either resulted from the collisions of two massive stars, or the collision of material ejected by two or more stars. This challenges current thinking of supernovae formation through the collapse of massive stars.

See Zwart et al, Woosley et al both from Nature.

"Starquake" reveals neutron star's magnetic field

Neutron stars can have powerful magnetic fields around them, resulting in the name 'magnetars'. These fields could in theory rip the star apart momentarily releasing the huge amounts of x-ray energy sometimes seen from these objects. A neutron star with a magnetic field 6000 trillion times that of the earth has recently been discovered in the constellation Sagittarius which has had some very large recent "quakes" that have been observed by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft.

See New Scientist.

Surviving the end of the world

Recent research by a group of European and US Physicists demonstrates that, in the case of one extrasolar planet orbiting around a red-giant star in Pegasus, it is in fact possible to survive the red-giant expansion of a star.

See Nature.

Scientists seek help in hunting for galaxies

A new project known as Galaxy Zoo is calling on members of the public to log on to its website and help classify one million galaxies.

The hope is that about 30,000 people might take part in a project that could help reveal whether our existing models of the Universe are correct.

See BBC News.

Ghostly ring provides strong evidence for dark matter

A ring-shaped distribution of mass in a galaxy cluster five billion light-years from Earth is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter. This is the claim of physicists from the US and Europe, who have used data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to see how gravity is bending the light around the cluster. Unlike previous searches in other galaxy clusters, this would be the first time dark matter has been seen isolated in its own separate structure.

See PhysicsWeb.

Hot Aliens

Scientists from the US have for the first time estimated the likely dayside-nightside temperature range of an extrasolar planet, a Jupiter-sized object 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula (near the Dumbbell Nebula).

See Nature and Exoplanet Encyclopedia.

Stereo Sun

NASA has released the first 3-D images of the Sun, obtained using the STEREO satellites. This will help predict the onset of solar ejections in the future and aid in the protection of earth based electronics systems.

See NASA Website.

Astronomers Find First Earth-like Planet in Habitable Zone

Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, an exoplanet with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and capable of having liquid water. Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered a super-Earth about 5 times the mass of the Earth that orbits a red dwarf, already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet. The astronomers have also strong evidence for the presence of a third planet with a mass about 8 Earth masses.

See ESO Website.