The Event Horizon Telescope is an Earth-sized virtual telescope powerful enough to see all the way to the center of our Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole will allow astrophysicists to put Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to the test.

Astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields across the world will convene in Tucson, Ariz. on Jan. 18 to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous.

The conference is organized by Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, and Dan Marrone, an assistant professor of astronomy at Steward Observatory. “Nobody has ever taken a picture of a black hole,” Psaltis said. “We are going to do just that.”

(via Scientists Prepare to Take First-Ever Picture of a Black Hole | UANews.org)

NASA’s space probe Juno, outward bound for Jupiter, has sent pack a pic of the Earth-Moon system from 6 million miles away.

Via

Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. 

These images come from observations of Newton crater, at 41.6 degrees south latitude, 202.3 degrees east longitude, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In time, the series spans from early spring of one Mars year to mid-summer of the following year. The images have been adjusted to correct those taken from oblique angles to show how the scene would look from directly overhead. 

(via NASA - Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater)

Mars Rover Reaches Giant Crater After 3-Year Trek 

After nearly three years of dragging through the Martian dust, NASA’s Opportunity rover has reached the rim of an expansive and ancient crater.

Since leaving Victoria crater in August 2008, Opportunity has rolled 13 miles to reach the rim of 24-mile-wide Endeavour crater — the biggest of 11 craters the robot has visited. It’s the site of an ancient impact that shot out dark rocks onto the crater’s rim.

“We’re soon going to get the opportunity to sample a rock type the rovers haven’t seen yet,” said planetary scientist and Mars rover team member Matthew Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. “Clay minerals form in wet conditions so we may learn about a potentially habitable environment that appears to have been very different from those responsible for the rocks [found on] the plains.”

(via Wired.com)

Hubble discovers another moon around Pluto

These two images, taken about a week apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show four moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle in both snapshots marks the newly discovered moon, temporarily dubbed P4, found by Hubble in June. P4 is the smallest moon yet found around Pluto, with an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Pluto’s largest moon Charon is 648 miles (1,043 km) across. Nix and Hydra are roughly 20 to 70 miles (32 to 113 km) wide. The new moon lies between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, two satellites discovered by Hubble in 2005. It completes an orbit around Pluto roughly every 31 days. The moon was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28, 2011. The sighting was confirmed in follow-up Hubble observations taken July 3 and July 18. P4, Nix, and Hydra are so small and so faint that scientists combined short and long exposures to create this image of Pluto and its entire moon system. The speckled background is camera “noise” produced during the long exposures. The linear features are imaging artifacts. The tiny satellite was uncovered in a Hubble survey to search for rings around the frigid dwarf planet. The observations will help NASA’s New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)

(via Hubble discovers another moon around Pluto)

Fermi catalogue update shows ‘violent Universe’ changes

The catalogue that lists the most violent neighbourhoods in the Universe has been updated.

The Fermi space telescope captures gamma rays - the highest-energy light in nature, which hints at the cosmos’ most extreme conditions and processes.

The second Fermi catalogue represents a full two years of data, improving on the first edition’s 11 months.

It lists 1,873 gamma-ray sources; some 589 remain unidentified and could represent entirely new cosmic objects.

Dave Thompson, a Nasa astrophysicist who co-led the catalogue’s production, told BBC News that the effort was more than just an expanded list.

“The new catalogue is a new data set,” he said. “We’ve reanalysed all the data, reduced our background, developed new methods of analysis. We’re convinced that not only is this quantitatively a better catalogue - it’s qualitatively a better catalogue.”

It is also a snapshot from a slowly unfolding film of the Universe’s most extreme environments.

“It’s very important to understand that the gamma-ray sky is not static, it’s changing all the time,” explained Steven Ritz, deputy principal investigator for the Fermi mission’s Large-Area Telescope.

“Our great advantage with this facility is that we’re able to see the whole sky all the time; every three hours we’ve covered the whole sky, so there are interesting differences between the first year catalogue and the second and that speaks to the variability of the sky,” he told BBC News.

(via BBC News)

Interestingly, this link has a lot more great Hubble shots, and I recommend you go check it out.

scipsy:

NASA’s Great Observatories Examine the Galactic Center Region

(via apteryxrowi)

Roughly half an orbit of the ISS, from sunrise over Northern Europe to sunset south-east of Australia. The view is to the north of the station’s ground track. In the upper-left, is the tail of the Space Shuttle Discovery, which docked with the Space Station during the STS-131 mission. The animation begins with a view of snow-covered Norway and the Jutland Peninsula. Low clouds cover Central Europe.
The animation continues as the Station flies by Ukraine, eastern Russia, the Volga River, and then the Russian Steppes. South and east of the steppes, a dust storm comes into view over the Taklimakan Desert, followed shortly by the lake-studded Tibetan Plateau and the glaciers of the Himalayan Mountains. Smoke-shrouded lowlands hug the southern margin of the Himalaya. Smoke also covers much of South-east Asia, including the Irrawaddy Delta.

After the Space Station passes over the sapphire-blue South China Sea, the island of Borneo appears, followed by the open expanse of the Indian Ocean. A trio of coral reefs lies off the coast of Western Australia, which is studded with clouds. Australia’s arid interior is coloured myriad shades of red. As sunset nears, cloud shadows lengthen, highlighting their structure. Night falls as the Space Station crosses the terminator above the South Pacific.

First-Ever Photos of Space Shuttle Docked At Space Station

This is completely inspiring.

(via Popular Science)

Universe at a glance: Saggitarius A*: distance and mass estimates

Knowing distance to Sgr A* (Ro) is very important, because it sets the distance scale for every other distance within Milky Way. The total Galaxy’s mass, the Sun’s orbital velocity, and luminosities of distant stars rely upon the accurate measurement of Ro…

The recent advances in infrared astronomy, ,such as adaptive optics and imaging spectroscopy, allowed high-resolution imaging of the galactic center with 0.025” angular resolution, which corresponds to a spatial resolution less than 200 AU. With such instrumentation, the orbits of stars in vicinity of Sgr A* can be precisely measured. It is safely to say that Sgr A* provides all of the gravitational attraction in the nearby region, and the motion stars in close proximity is governed solely by this object. Therefore, direct observation of this motion can provide the mass and distance estimates for Sgr A*.

(via Universe At A Glance)

Image: A solar system family portrait, from the inside out

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has constructed the first portrait of our solar system by combining 34 images taken by the spacecraft’s Wide Angle Camera on Nov. 3 and 16, 2010.

The mosaic, pieced together over a period of a few weeks, comprises all of the planets except for Uranus and Neptune, which were too faint to detect.

On March 17, 2011, MESSENGER may become the first probe ever to orbit Mercury. Scientists hope orbital observations will provide new answers to how Earth-like planets, like Mercury, are assembled and evolve.

Provided by JPL/NASA (news : web)

In Your Face: Close-Up Look at Doomed Comet | Wired Science 

NASA’s Stardust-Next spacecraft flew past Comet Tempel 1 at 8:38 Pacific time Monday night, snapping photos as it sped by.

In 2005, the Deep Impact probe blew a crater into Tempel 1 with an 800-pound metal slug. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed an orbit around the sun, losing ice and other material to the sun’s hot glare along the way. The new images will give astronomers new insight into how a comet is slowly destroyed by the sun.

“This is something we’ve never been able to see before,” said principal investigator Joe Veverka of Cornell University in an interview on NASA TV during the flyby. “We know every time a comet comes close to the sun, it loses material. But we don’t know where those changes occur.”

Stardust-Next, which originally launched as “Stardust” in 1999, swooped within 124 miles of Tempel 1’s icy, dirty core at about 24,300 miles per hour.

The spacecraft took a total of 72 science images, 46 as it approached and 26 as it receded from the comet. As it approached, it snapped pictures once every 6 seconds.

 The new images started arriving at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, about three hours after the spacecraft made its closest approach. Each image took 15 minutes to download. The Stardust crew wanted to download the five closest images first, but an unknown error sent the photos in the order in which they were taken. The astronomers had to wait until 6 a.m. Tuesday Pacific time to get the good stuff.

Luckily, the images were everything the science team hoped for.

“If you ask me, was this mission 100 percent successful, in terms of the science? I would have to say no,” Veverka said in a press conference Feb. 15. “It was 1,000 percent successful!”

Stardust-Next shot photos of new terrain that had never been seen before, as well as areas on Tempel 1 that had been covered by Deep Impact. The images showed that several regions changed significantly over the past five years. One of the most interesting areas looks like a blanket of material that erupted from beneath the comet’s surface and flowed downhill. That flow is now receding due to erosion, Veverka said.

“It goes much against the idea that [comets are] just icy dirtballs where nothing has happened since their formation,” Veverka said. “Apparently a lot of things have happened.”

fuckyeahnebulas:

Cat’s Paw Nebula (6492x4692)