The Pithy Amateur Astronomer

"Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star."

Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news199635354.html

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news199594786.html

Astronomers Find Planets in Unusually Intimate Dance around Dying Star

Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been found over the past decade and a half, most of them solitary worlds orbiting their parent star in seeming isolation. With further observation, however, one in three of these systems have been found to have two or more planets. Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other's gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.

A few strikingly humorous arguments as why the Moon landings weren't faked. Enjoy!

Thought I would share these findings. I am going to attempt to make this sometime in the future. Enjoy!

http://www.scopemaking.net/dobson/dobson.htm

A neat invention from NASA with a use that can be applicable for every day life.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1714.html

Making Home a Safer Place

One day homeowners everywhere may be protected from deadly carbon monoxide fumes, thanks to a device invented at NASA's Langley Research Center. The device uses a new class of low-temperature oxidation catalysts to convert carbon monoxide to non-toxic carbon dioxide at room temperature and also removes formaldehyde from the air. The catalysts initially were developed for research involving carbon dioxide lasers.

Earlier this week, a Solar Eclipse took place and could best be seen from Easter Island. Below is a cool picture associated with that eclipse.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1715.html

The View From Easter Island

On July 11, 2010, the new moon passed directly in front of the sun, causing a total solar eclipse in the South Pacific. In this image, the solar eclipse is shown in gray and white from a photo provided by the Williams College Expedition to Easter Island and was embedded with an image of the sun’s outer corona taken by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the SOHO spacecraft and shown in red false color. LASCO uses a disk to blot out the bright sun and the inner corona so that the faint outer corona can be monitored and studied. Further, the dark silhouette of the moon was covered with an image of the sun taken in extreme ultraviolet light at about the same time by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The composite brings out the correlation of structures in the inner and outer corona.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Williams College Eclipse Expedition

An interesting read. I think it is amazing how equipment can pick up so much information at such a great distance.

Source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/brightest-x-rays-blind-telescopes-100714.html

Record-Breaking X-Ray Blast Blinds Space Observatory Briefly

By Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 14 July 2010 05:16 pm ET

A violent cosmic explosion has unleashed the brightest blast of X-rays ever detected from distant space, a signal so bright it temporary blinded the NASA space telescope assigned to spot it.

The powerful explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, was detected by NASA's Swift observatory, scientists announced Wednesday. Gamma-ray bursts are narrow beams of intense radiation shot out when stars explode in supernovas. In addition to gamma-ray light, they also produce X-rays and other forms of radiation, including visible light.

This recent event, dubbed GRB 100621A, was particularly powerful.

"This gamma-ray burst is by far the brightest light source ever seen in X-ray wavelengths at cosmological distances," said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows, lead scientist for Swift's X-ray Telescope. [Swift's gamma-ray burst photo]

Unprecedented brightness

The onslaught of light in X-ray wavelengths, which are shorter than visible light wavelengths, quickly overwhelmed the detector when it impacted June 21.

"The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down," said Phil Evans, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who wrote parts of Swift's X-ray-analysis software. "So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn't count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami."

Light from this explosion traveled through space for 5 billion years before slamming into Swift, overwhelming its X-ray camera. The observatory, launched in November 2004, was designed specifically to hunt for gamma-ray bursts, though scientists didn't count on a blast quite so strong.

"The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented," said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

GRB 100621A was the brightest blast of X-ray light since Swift's X-ray telescope began observing in 2005.

"Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be," Gehrels said.

One for the record books

After the shutdown, Swift quickly got back online, and scientists were able to recover the data the observatory acquired during the onslaught. The observations allowed astronomers to learn more about these mysterious explosions, including just how bright they can be.

Swift's measurements showed that the burst emitted 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its short period of greatest brightness. That's more than 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky – a neutron star that releases a steady 10,000 X-ray photons per second.

"When I first saw the strange data from this burst, I knew that I had discovered something extraordinary," Evans said. "It was an indescribable feeling when I realized, at that moment, that I was the only person in the whole universe who knew that this extraordinary event had occurred. Now, after our analysis of the data, we know that this burst is one for the record books."

Gamma-ray bursts focus most of their energy in the short-wavelength, high-frequency range of X-rays and gamma-rays. In fact, they don't stand out at all in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, emitting only a middling amount of light compared to other objects in the sky.

When a very massive star runs out of fuel and reaches the end of its life, it will collapse into an extremely dense black hole. This event releases an explosion of energy, including some that gets channeled into beams of gamma-ray and X-ray light.

Earlier I posted a mosaic celebrating APOD's 15th birthday. Now they have released a mosaic of The Blue Marble.

It is very neat to look up close and try to identify the various images used to compile this mosaic.

Source: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100713.html
Credit: Apollo 17 Crew, NASA; Photographic Mosaic & Digital Copyright: Rob Stevenson

Explanation: Welcome to Planet Earth, the third planet from a star named the Sun. The Earth is shaped like a sphere and composed mostly of rock. Over 70 percent of the Earth's surface is water. The planet has a relatively thin atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. This picture of Earth, dubbed Blue Marble, was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 and features Africa and Antarctica. It is thought to be one of the most widely distributed photographs of any kind. Here, the world famous image has been recast as a spectacular photomosaic using over 5,000 archived images of Earth and space. With its abundance of liquid water, Earth supports a large variety of life forms, including potentially intelligent species such as dolphins and humans. Please enjoy your stay on Planet Earth.  

The Galileo craft is long since departed from our presence but that doesn't mean much can't be learned.

I was browsing through the NASA site and found some sounds that the spacecraft recorded. I recommend this as something to listen to. The sounds are haunting and mesmerizing.

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sounds.html

Source: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/18jun_newhorizons/

The probe New Horizons wakes up for a bit of instrument testing. I am very anxious to see the findings this probe will come up with for Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects (KBO).

This is the fastest probe ever launched, traveling 1 million miles a day. The solar system is so vast that it will take another 5 years for the probe to reach its destination.