This is very, very exciting. 

Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space!

Last week, the company issued a somewhat cryptic announcement saying they “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. I predicted this meant they wanted to mine asteroids, and yes, I will toot my own horn: I was right. They’re holding a press conference Tuesday morning to officially announce they’re going asteroid hunting.

The company had a pretty fierce amount of credibility right off the bat, with several ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, and planetary scientists involved, as well as the backing of not one but several billionaires, including a few from Google… not to mention James Cameron. The co-founders of Planetary Resources are Peter Diamandis — he created the highly-successful X-Prize Foundation, to give cash awards to incremental accomplishments that will help achieve technological breakthroughs, including those for space travel — and Eric Anderson, X-Prize board member and Chairman of the Board of the Space Spaceflight Federation.

These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around.

(via Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it) 

NASA Satellite Finds Coldest, Darkest Stars Yet

Stars as cool as the human body found by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer offer astronomers the chance to study star formation and the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter, away from the light of more dazzling stars.

The WISE satellite, decommissioned this year, returned data revealing 100 new brown dwarfs, sometimes termed “failed” stars. Six of these are classified as cool Y’s.

Y dwarfs are the dimmest stars of the brown dwarf family, like all brown dwarfs, they are not massive enough to fuse atoms at their cores. Without the atomic energy that allows stars like our sun to burn for billions of years, brown dwarfs gradually cool, until they only emit infrared light.

One of the Y dwarfs found, WISE 1828+2650, now holds the record for chilliest star at 80 degrees Farenheit.

“The brown dwarfs we were turning up before this discovery were more like the temperature of your oven,” said Davy Kirkpatrick, a WISE science team member at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California in a press release.

“With the discovery of Y dwarfs, we’ve moved out of the kitchen and into the cooler parts of the house.”

(via Wired.com)

For a variety of obvious reasons, it’s impossible to reproduce the exact environment in which galaxies form. The lack of direct experimental tests for the models astrophysicists use creates a disconnect between what astronomers observe and theoretical work. However, that barrier is being broken down by a combination of high-powered lasers and a new understanding of how lab-scale experiments can be related to vastly larger systems such as galaxies.

Researchers at the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation de Lasers Intenses (LULI), along with colleagues at various universities, have successfully simulated the magnetic fields that form in early galaxies. Naively, there seems to be no correspondence between the experiment and the real astrophysical system. The lab set-up is very small, works on a very short time frame, and uses carbon rods and lasers; the real environment for galaxy formation is clouds of gas and dark matter, and the time-scale is hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, a magnetic field strength (along with other effects) has been observed in the lab that corresponds to that experienced by early protogalaxies.

(via Bringing galaxy-scale magnetic fields down to size in the lab)

The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, awarded just a few weeks ago, went to research on the light from Type 1a supernovae, which shows that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The well-known problem resulting from these observations is that this expansion seems to be occurring even faster than all known forms of energy could allow. While there is no shortage of proposed explanations – from dark energy to modified theories of gravity – it’s less common that someone questions the interpretation of the supernovae data itself.

In a new study, that’s what Arto Annila, Physics Professor at the University of Helsinki, is doing. The basis of his argument, which is published in a recent issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, lies in the ever-changing way that light travels through an ever-evolving universe.

“The standard model of big bang cosmology (the Lambda-CMD model) is a mathematical model, but not a physical portrayal of the evolving universe,” Annila told PhysOrg.com. “Thus the Lambda-CMD model yields the luminosity distance at a given redshift as a function of the model parameters, such as the cosmological constant, but not as a function of the physical process where quanta released from a supernova explosion disperse into the expanding universe.

“When the supernova exploded, its energy as photons began to disperse in the universe, which has, by the time we observe the flash, become larger and hence also more dilute,” he said. “Accordingly, the observed intensity of light has fallen inversely proportional to the squared luminosity distance and directly proportional to the redshifted frequency. Due to these two factors, brightness vs. redshift is not one straight line on a log-log plot, but a curve.”

As a result, Annila argues that the supernovae data does not imply that the universe is undergoing an accelerating expansion.

The principle of least time

As Annila explains, when a ray of light travels from a distant star to an observer’s telescope, it travels along the path that takes the least amount of time. This well-known physics principle is called Fermat’s principle or the principle of least time. Importantly, the quickest path is not always the straight path. Deviations from a straight path occur when light propagates through media of varying energy densities, such as when light bends due to refraction as it travels through a glass prism. 

The principle of least time is a specific form of the more generally stated principle of least action. According to this principle, light, like all forms of energy in motion, always travels on the path that maximizes its dispersal of energy. We see this concept when the light from a light bulb (or star) emanates outward in all available directions.

Mathematically, the principle of least action has two different forms. Physicists almost always use the form that involves the so-called Lagrangian integrand, but Annila explains that this form can only determine paths within stationary surroundings. Since the expanding universe is an evolving system, he suggests that the original but less popular form, which was produced by the French mathematician Maupertuis, can more accurately determine the path of light from the distant supernovae.

Using Maupertuis’ form of the principle of least action, Annila has calculated that the brightness of light from Type 1a supernovae after traveling many millions of light-years to Earth agrees well with observations of the known amount of energy in the universe, and doesn’t require dark energy or any other additional driving force.

(via A second look at supernovae light: Universe’s expansion may be understood without dark energy)

The photo of a nearby star and its orbiting companion — whose temperature is like a hot summer day in Arizona — will be presented by Penn State Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kevin Luhman during the Signposts of Planets conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Oct. 20, 2011.

A paper describing the discovery will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

“This planet-like companion is the coldest object ever directly photographed outside our solar system,” said Luhman, who led the discovery team. “Its mass is about the same as many of the known extra-solar planets — about six to nine times the mass of Jupiter — but in other ways it is more like a star. Essentially, what we have found is a very small star with an atmospheric temperature about cool as the Earth’s.”

Luhman classifies this object as a “brown dwarf,” an object that formed just like a star out of a massive cloud of dust and gas. But the mass that a brown dwarf accumulates is not enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions in its core, resulting in a failed star that is very cool. In the case of the new brown dwarf, the scientists have gauged the temperature of its surface to be between 80 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit — possibly as cool as a human.

(via Planet-sized object as cool as Earth revealed in record-breaking photo)

Astronomical delights

Machine translated: “English photographer Vincent Fournier ( Vincent Fournier ) during the last 5 years, removes [let’s say ‘uncovers’ here, okay translation-bot?] everything connected with space exploration.”

This is a beautiful and inspiring set of images dealing with the Russian Space Programme.

(via Esquire Magazine)

Berkeley Scientists Discover an “Instant Cosmic Classic” Supernova

A supernova discovered yesterday five days ago is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away — than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools.

The finding of such a supernova so early and so close has energized the astronomical community as they are scrambling to observe it with as many telescopes as possible, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Joshua Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, called it “the supernova of a generation.” Astronomers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, who made the discovery predict that it will be a target for research for the next decade, making it one of the most-studied supernova in history.

The supernova, dubbed PTF 11kly, occurred in the Pinwheel Galaxy, located in the “Big Dipper,” otherwise known as the Ursa Major constellation. It was discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which is designed to observe and uncover astronomical events as they happen.

“We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting brighter by the minute. It’s already 20 times brighter than it was yesterday,” said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who first spotted the supernova. Nugent is also an adjunct professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “Observing PTF 11kly unfold should be a wild ride. It is an instant cosmic classic.”

He credits supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy supercomputing center at Berkeley Lab, as well as high-speed networks with uncovering this rare event in the nick of time.

(via Berkeley Lab News Center)

Astronomers find ice and possibly methane on Snow White, a distant dwarf planet

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10—nicknamed Snow White—is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed from ancient, slush-spewing volcanoes. The new findings also suggest that the red-tinged dwarf planet may be covered in a thin layer of methane, the remnants of an atmosphere that’s slowly being lost into space.

“You get to see this nice picture of what once was an active little world with water volcanoes and an atmosphere, and it’s now just frozen, dead, with an atmosphere that’s slowly slipping away,” says Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor and professor of planetary astronomy, who is the lead author on a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters describing the findings. The paper is now in press.

Snow White—which was discovered in 2007 as part of the PhD thesis of Brown’s former graduate student Meg Schwamb—orbits the sun at the edge of the solar system and is about half the size of Pluto, making it the fifth largest dwarf planet. At the time, Brown had guessed incorrectly that it was an icy body that had broken off from another dwarf planet named Haumea; he nicknamed it Snow White for its presumed white color.

Soon, however, follow-up observations revealed that Snow White is actually one of the reddest objects in the solar system. A few other dwarf planets at the edge of the solar system are also red. These distant dwarf planets are themselves part of a larger group of icy bodies called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). As far as the researchers could tell, Snow White, though relatively large, was unremarkable—just one out of more than 400 potential dwarf planets that are among hundreds of thousands of KBOs.

(via PhysOrg.com)

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)

GeekDad Exclusive: Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space

Juno, a space probe that is being sent to Jupiter to study the fifth planet from the Sun, will carry a few unique stowaways. Thanks to a joint mission between NASA and Lego, there will be three very special Lego minifigs affixed to the spacecraft.

The figures, milled from aluminum, will accompany Juno on its five-year trip to Jupiter. When Juno arrives in 2016, the Lego likeness of the Roman god, Jupiter, his sister, Juno, and the Italian astronomer, Galileo, will be there to take in all the sights and bask in the immensity of the largest planet.

This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.

The brick company even underwrote the project, at a cost of $5,000 for each of the minifigs, which will soon become the farthest flying toys ever. The manufacture of the figures was a deliberate process to ensure the figures would not interfere with NASA’s sensitive measurements.

(via GeekDad | Wired.com)

Earth Had 2 Moons That Crashed to Form 1, Study Suggests

A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.

The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said.

(via Space.com)

Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light

It may be hard to imagine a planet blacker than coal, but that’s what astronomers say they’ve discovered in our home galaxy with NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

“Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint—this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered,” lead study author David Kipping said.

“If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets,” added Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(via National Geographic)

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)

scienceisbeauty:

On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam’s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

Source: A Moment Frozen in Time, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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)