Northern Lights energy source discovered

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

New data from NASA’s Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun.

The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Results were presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting.

In March, the satellites detected a burst of Northern Lights over Alaska and Canada. During the two-hour light show, the satellites measured particle flow and magnetic fields from space.

To scientists’ surprise, the geomagnetic storm powering the auroras raced 400 miles in a minute across the sky. Angelopoulos estimated the storm’s power was equal to the energy released by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.

“Nature was very kind to us,” Angelopoulos said.

Although researchers have suspected the existence of wound-up bundles of magnetic fields that provide energy for the auroras, the phenomenon was not confirmed until May, when the satellites became the first to map their structure some 40,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Scientists hope the satellites will record a geomagnetic storm next year and end the debate about when the storms are triggered.

(Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science)

Episode1 – F.A.S.T. Far Above Space and Time .An Introduction Into the New Possibilities

Interesting video, CGI, Space Debris or real large space structures? The reader can judge.

Keanu Reeves is Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still Remake

We were the first ones to break the news that a Day the Earth Stood Still remake was on the way, and now we bring you the next bit of news related to the remake. The Matrix star Keanu Reeves has signed on to play Klaatu, the humanoid alien that lands on Earth. Production on the remake will likely begin in late fall this year or early 2008, meaning the expected release date of May 2008 is probably no longer true. Somewhat exciting news for this highly talked about remake, but is it the perfect choice?

As also confirmed via rumors early on, the film will be directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) with a script by David Scarpa. In the film, the alien Klaatu lands on Earth accompanied by an indestructible, heavily armed robot called Gort and delivers a warning to world leaders that their continued aggression will lead to annihilation by species watching from afar.

Is this the right move? Our original breaking news article had quite a bit of discussion in the comments about who would be perfect to play Klaatu and I don’t think Reeves name was ever mentioned. With a director, screenwriter, and now a star, how is this remake coming along? More Hollywood fodder or something actually entertaining in the works?

(Source: http://www.firstshowing.net)

Exoplanet – The Search for Habitable Planets around Red Giant Stars

A planet orbiting a giant red star in the constellation Perseus (the Greek hero who slew Medusa) has been discovered by an astronomy team led by Penn State’s Alex Wolszczan, who in 1992 discovered the first planets ever found outside our solar system. The new planet circles the giant star every 360 days and is located about 300 light years from Earth.

“After astronomers have spent more than 10 years searching for planets around Sun-like stars and discovering over 250 planets elsewhere in our galactic neighborhood, we still do not know whether our solar system’s properties, including life-supporting conditions on our planet, are typical or exceptional among solar systems throughout the Galaxy,” Wolszczan says. “The picture for now, based on the searches for planets around stars like our Sun, is that our planetary system appears to be unusual in a number of ways.”

The discovery resulted from an ongoing effort that the research team -a collaboration between astronomers at Penn State, Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland, the McDonald Observatory, and the California Institute of Technology- began three years ago to find Jupiter-mass planets around red-giant stars that are typically farther from Earth than those included in most other planet searches.

“This planet is the first one discovered by Penn State astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, and it is in one of the most distant of the ten published solar systems discovered around red-giant stars,” according to Lawrence Ramsey, a member of the discovery team and the head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State.

Astronomers now are branching out with different strategies for searching for planets, with the hope of more quickly detecting life elsewhere in the universe, of discovering all the possible kinds of solar systems, and of learning how they form around different kinds of stars. The Penn State team used one of these new strategies — searching for planets around giant stars, which have evolved to a later stage of life than our Sun’s.

“We have compiled a catalog of nearly a thousand giant stars that are candidates for hosting solar systems,” Wolszczan says. Because the method for discovering planets involves repeated measurements of their gravitational effect on the star they circle, and because planets around red giants can take years to make one orbit around the star, the research team is just now beginning to reap discoveries from years of systematic observations.

“It took us 3 years to gather enough data on over 300 stars to start identifying those that are good candidates for having planetary companions,” Wolszczan said. “This planet is just the first of a number of planet discoveries that this research program is likely to produce.”

One reason for studying red-giant stars is to understand how their habitable zones move farther out as the star’s radiating surface becomes bigger. Based on how long it took for life to develop on Earth, scientists speculate that there is more than enough time during a star’s giant phase for life to get a start somewhere in the evolving habitable zones. “In our solar system, places like Europa – a satellite of Jupiter that now is covered by a thick layer of water ice — might warm up enough to support life for more than a billion years or so, over the time when our Sun begins to evolve into a red giant, making life on Earth impossible,” Wolszczan said.

Another reason astronomers are trying to discover planets around different kinds of stars at different stages of stellar evolution is to find out how different kinds of planetary systems change when their stars become red giants and how they ultimately end their lives as burnt-out, shrunken white-dwarfs.

“We really are at the very beginning of this effort and it is going to take time to get a consistent picture of planetary formation and evolution,” Wolszczan says. “The more we learn, the greater the chance will be that sooner or later we will discover how ordinary or extraordinary is our home — the Earth’s solar system.”

Posted by Casey Kazan

Adapted from a Pennsylvania State University news release
“Planet Orbiting a Giant Red Star Discovered with Hobby-Eberly Telescope”

Related Galaxy posts:

Life from the Center of the Earth – The Shadow World of Our Hidden Biosphere

New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Mars Life

Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for “Super-Earths”

Adventures of a Planet Hunter

Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook Extraterrestrial Life

The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth

Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life

The Biological Universe -A New Copernican Revolution?

Jupiter’s Europa & the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

“42″: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Foreshadows Actual Weight of Universe!

Andromeda Galaxy & Its Mystery Core: Destined to Merge With the Milky Way?

Earth’s Twin Habitable?

Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes

(Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/can-red-dwarfs-.html)

Digital archive casts new light on Apollo-era moon pictures

Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the moon, the complete lunar photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible to both researchers and the general public on the Internet. A new digital archive – created through a collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston – is making available high-resolution scans of original Apollo flight films.

They are available to browse or download at: apollo.sese.asu.edu.

The digital scans are detailed enough to reveal photographic grain. Created from original flight films transported back to Earth from the moon, the archive includes photos taken from lunar orbit as well as from the lunar surface. This is the first project to make digital scans of all the original lunar photographs from NASA’s Apollo missions.

“This project fulfills a long-held wish of mine. It’ll give everyone a chance to see this unique collection of images as clearly as when they were taken,” says Mark Robinson, professor of geological sciences in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Robinson leads the ASU side of the Apollo image digitizing project. Separately, he is the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC (lroc.sese.asu.edu) – a suite of three separate, high-resolution imagers on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in October 2008.

The reason the original Apollo images have been so seldom accessed is that they are literally irreplaceable. Between 1968 and 1972, NASA made sets of duplicate images after each moon mission came back to Earth, placing the duplicate sets in various scientific libraries and research facilities around the world.

As a result, these second-generation copies (and subsequent copies of copies) are what scientists and the public have seen. The copied images are unsharp and over-contrasty compared to the originals, which have remained in deep-freeze storage at the Johnson Space Center. Even many lunar scientists have not seen or worked with them.

The Apollo digitizing project goes back to the original flight films and scans them in high-resolution detail to reveal their subtleties.

Robinson explains, “We worked with the scanner’s manufacturer – Leica Geosystems – to improve the brightness range that the scans record.” In technical terms, a normal 12-bit scan was increased to 14-bit, resulting in digital images that record more than 16,000 shades of gray.

“Similarly,” says Robinson, “to get all the details captured by the film, we are scanning at a scale of 200 pixels per millimeter.” This means, he says, the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 meter) wide.

Combining high resolution and wide brightness range produces very large raw image files, notes Robinson. For example, in raw form, the scans of the Apollo mapping (metric) camera frames, each 4.7 inches square, are 1.3 gigabytes in size.

“That’s bigger than most people want to look at with a browser,” says Robinson, “even if their browser and Internet connection are up to the job.” So the Web site uses a Flash-based application called Zoomify, which lets users dive deep into a giant image by loading only the portion being examined. Links are available on the site for downloading images in several sizes, up to the full raw scan.

The project will take about three years to complete and will scan some 36,000 images. These include about 600 frames in 35 mm, roughly 20,000 Hasselblad 60 mm frames (color, and black and white), more than 10,000 mapping camera frames, and about 4,600 panoramic camera frames.

“These photos have great scientific value, despite being taken decades ago,” says Robinson.

He adds, “I think they also give everybody a beautiful look at this small, ancient world next door to us.”

Source: Arizona State University

(Source: http://www.physorg.com/news105190869.html)

Real photos? Or those made in the Hollywood set? If any of you have time to go over these pictures, send me some feedback on them please NASA lost some important footage in the past. So is this one way to try to bring the public back to appreciating NASA? I tell you, it’s just another business, and one that is a waste for the most part IMO…

Climate catastrophes in the Solar System

The contrast: Venus, Earth and Mars

26 April 2007

Earth sits between two worlds that have been devastated by climate catastrophes. In the effort to combat global warming, our neighbours can provide valuable insights into the way climate catastrophes affect planets.

Modelling Earth’s climate to predict its future has assumed tremendous importance in the light of mankind’s influence on the atmosphere. The climate of our two neighbours is in stark contrast to that of our home planet, making data from ESA’s Venus Express and Mars Express invaluable to climate scientists.

Venus is a cloudy inferno whilst Mars is a frigid desert. As current concerns about global warming have now achieved widespread acceptance, pressure has increased on scientists to propose solutions.

The key weapon in a climate scientist’s arsenal is the climate model, a computer programme that uses the equations of physics to investigate the way in which Earth’s atmosphere works. The programme helps predict how the atmosphere might change in the future.

	“It seems that both Mars and Venus started out much more like Earth”

“To members of the public it must seem like climate models are crystal balls, but they are actually just complex equations” says David Grinspoon, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and one of Venus Express’s interdisciplinary scientists.

The more scientists look at those equations, the more they realise just how complicated Earth’s climate system is. Grinspoon puts the predicament like this: “In fifty or a hundred years, we will know whether today’s climate models were right but if they are wrong, by then it will be too late.”

To help increase confidence in the computer models, Grinspoon believes that scientists should look at our neighbouring planets. “It seems that both Mars and Venus started out much more like Earth and then changed. They both hold priceless climate information for Earth,” says Grinspoon.

The atmosphere of Venus is much thicker than Earth’s. Nevertheless, current climate models can reproduce its present temperature structure well. Now planetary scientists want to turn the clock back to understand why and how Venus changed from its former Earth-like conditions into the inferno of today.

Radiation from below the Venusian cloud deck

They believe that the planet experienced a runaway greenhouse effect as the Sun gradually heated up. Astronomers believe that the young Sun was dimmer than the present-day Sun by 30 percent. Over the last 4 thousand million years, it has gradually brightened. During this increase, Venus’s surface water evaporated and entered the atmosphere.

“Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas and it caused the planet to heat-up even more. This is turn caused more water to evaporate and led to a powerful positive feedback response known as the runaway greenhouse effect,” says Grinspoon.

As Earth warms in response to manmade pollution, it risks the same fate. Reconstructing the climate of the past on Venus can give scientists a better understanding of how close our planet is to such a catastrophe. However, determining when Venus passed the point of no return is not easy. That’s where ESA’s Venus Express comes in.

The spacecraft is in orbit around Venus collecting data that will help unlock the planet’s past. Venus is losing gas from its atmosphere, so Venus Express is measuring the rate of this loss and the composition of the gas being lost. It also watches the movement of clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. This reveals the way Venus responds to the absorption of sunlight, because the energy from the Sun provides the power that allows the atmosphere to move.

In addition, Venus Express is charting the amount and location of sulphur dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere. Sulphur dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is released by volcanoes on Venus.

	Fluvial surface features on Mangala Valles

“Understanding all of this will help us pin down when Venus lost its water,” says Grinspoon. That knowledge can feed into the interpretation of climate models on the Earth because although both planets seem very different now, the same laws of physics govern both worlds.

Understanding Mars’ past is equally important. ESA’s Mars Express is currently investigating the fate of the Red Planet. Smaller than the Earth, Mars is thought to have lost its atmosphere to space. When Martian volcanoes became extinct, so did the planet’s means of replenishing its atmosphere turning it into an almost-airless desert.

“What happened on these two worlds is different but would be disastrous for Earth”

“What happened on these two worlds is very different but either would be equally disastrous for Earth. We are banking on our ability to accurately predict Earth’s future climate,” says Grinspoon. Anything that can shed light on our own future is valuable. That is why the study of our neighbouring worlds is vital.

So, when planetary scientists talk of exploring other worlds, they are also increasing their ability to understand our own planet.

For more information:

David Grinspoon, Venus Express interdisciplinary Scientist and Curator of Astrobiology
Dept. of Space Sciences
Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Co. (USA)
Email: David.Grinspoon @ dmns.org

Håkan Svedhem, ESA Venus Express Project scientist
Email: Håkan.svedhem @ esa.int

(Source: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/SEM2EHMJC0F_2.html)

Scientists find water on extra-solar planet

Scientists have, for the first time, conclusively discovered the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System, according to an article appearing in Nature.

They made the discovery by analysing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star, in the Infrared using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Giovanna Tinetti, ESA fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, and colleagues from around the world, targeted planet HD 189733b, 63 light-years away, in the constellation Vulpecula.

The planet was discovered in 2005 as it dimmed the light of its parent star by some three percent when transiting in front of it.

Using Spitzer, Tinetti and the team observed the star, which is slightly fainter than the Sun, as its starlight dim at two infrared bands (3.6 and 5.8 micrometres).

Had the planet been a rocky body devoid of atmosphere, both these bands and a third one (8 micrometres), recently measured by a team at Harvard, would have shown the same behaviour.

Instead, as the atmosphere absorbed less infrared radiation at 3.6 micrometres than at the other two wavelengths indicating the presence of water vapour.

“Water is the only molecule that can explain that behaviour,” says Tinetti.

The presence of water vapour does not necessarily make it a good candidate in the search for planets that harbour life.

“This is a far from habitable world,” she adds.

HD 189733b is a ‘hot jupiter’, a gas giant that is roughly the size and mass of Jupiter but orbits very close to the star. These planets tend to have extensive atmospheres because heat from the nearby star gives them energy to expand.

HD 189733b’s atmospheric temperature is about 1000 Kelvin or higher, implying that the significant amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere cannot condense to fall as rain or form clouds.

That does not mean the atmosphere is sedate as the planet is gripped so tightly by the gravity of its star that one hemisphere constantly faces the star, heating the planet only on one side generating fierce winds sweeping from the day-side to the night-side.

“There are a thousand things to learn about these planets,” says Tinetti.

Although the planet is an unlikely candidate in the search for life, these results increase hopes for the detection of water on other rocky planets, which astronomers hope to discover in the near future.

(Source: http://pressesc.com/01184180642_water_extrasolar)

Scientists call for wider search for alien life

By Carl Zimmer

Sunday, July 8, 2007

NEW YORK: A panel of scientists convened by America’s leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call “weird life”: organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it.

“The committee’s investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth,” the scientists conclude in their report, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems,” published by the National Research Council.

Other experts hailed the report as an important rethinking of the search for life. “It’s going to help us a lot to make sure we go exploring with our eyes wide open,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars exploration program.

Starfish, sequoias, salamanders and the rest of Earth’s residents may seem very diverse, but they are surprisingly similar on the molecular scale. All species that scientists have studied need liquid water to survive, for example. Further, they all rely on DNA to carry genetic information, and they all use that information to build proteins from the same set of building blocks, known as amino acids.

NASA has long looked to life on Earth to guide its search for life on other worlds. Planets and moons that have hints of liquid water have been ranked high on the list of potential sites for life-detection missions.

But there is good reason to suspect that other kinds of chemistry could support life as well, the authors of the new report argue. Weird life could differ from life as we know it in small or big ways.

For example, while DNA uses phosphorus in its backbone, it might be possible to build a backbone out of arsenic instead. And life might exist in liquids other than water, perhaps ammonia or methane.

The report, which is posted on the Web site of the National Academies, www.nationalacademies.org, even explores the possibility of life based on silicon, not carbon, though Meyer, who had no role in the work, thinks that astrobiologists should limit their search to carbon-based life forms.

“When we look in the universe,” he said, “the only compounds we see with more than six atoms are all carbon chemistry. So there’s a hint that looking for carbon chemistry may be a better bet. There we have some idea of what to look for.”

The report calls for NASA and the National Science Foundation both to support research into weird life. Chemists need to investigate “the chemical possibilities for what forms life might take,” said one member of the committee, Steven Benner, a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, in Gainesville, Florida.

Scientists should also search Earth for weird life, the authors maintain. “There’s much about Earth life we don’t understand,” said the panel’s chairman, John Baross of the University of Washington.

Benner said there was “good evidence that the life we know on Earth was preceded by a weird form of life.” Early Earth life may have been based on RNA, a single-stranded form of DNA. Although DNA-based life may have out-competed earlier forms on the surface of the planet, RNA life may still exist in refuges. One potential hiding place is deep below the ocean floor.

“It’s an incredibly primordial world down there,” Baross said.

“If you’re going to look for remnants of an RNA world, those are the environments you want to go to.”

To find weird life, however, scientists will have to build new kinds of detectors. “There’s no question that the surveys of life on the planet we’ve done so far would have missed it,” Benner said.

The scientists also said the possibility of weird life should prompt NASA to reorder its future missions. They singled out Saturn’s moon Titan as particularly promising.

(Source: http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6553275)

What a waste of time and money again. Searching for microbes when we know we have been visited countless of times by off-planet cultures. Are they blindly dismissing the work Steven Greer and the Disclosure Project witnesses have done in the last 15 years or they are just so deeply rooted in their old scientific paradigm, they just can’t see the light?

Same goes with all the money wasted on rocket propulsion with the shuttle. God! Are we going to stop wasting all this money on old tech and start digging in the work Lockheed and SAIC and all those companies have black-shelved?

New, Revised Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Take your mind back to your early education, and tell me what galaxy it is that our Solar System inhabits? Your answer is, naturally, the Milky Way galaxy. However everything is not as it seems, according to a study coming out of the University of Massachusetts.

What they learned is that we’re not from the Milky Way galaxy, we come from the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!

The Two-Micron All Sky Survey, also known as 2MASS, was a massive astronomical undertaking to map the night sky. Begun in 1997 and completed in 2001, two telescopes (Mt. Hopkins Arizona in the Northern Hemisphere and Cerro Tololo/CTIO Chile in the Southern Hemisphere) targeted the night sky to catalogue all detected stars and galaxies.

The University of Massachusetts study has used the considerable data collected by 2MASS, and finally deciphered why it is that the Milky Way appears sideway in our night sky. The reason for this phenomenon will cause a massive shift in thinking and teaching; we’re not from the Milky Way galaxy, we come from the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.

Scientists have long been baffled by the sideways appearance of the Milky Way in our night sky, for if we were indeed a part of the Milky Way, everything would have been aligned accordingly, just as we are aligned with the 8 other planets in our system and our sun. The fact of the matter is the Milky Way galaxy is slowly but surely eating our own Sagittarius galaxy.

“We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalog of half a billion,” said co-author Michael Skrutskie, U.Va., professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the 2MASS project. “By tuning our maps of the sky to the ‘right’ kind of star, the Sagittarius system jumped into view.”

We’re not the only captives in this galactic struggle. Stars and star-clusters inhabiting the outer parts of the Milky Way galaxy have also been stolen by the larger of the two galaxies, drawn in by its significantly greater gravity. In fact, we are witnessing the end of a 2 billion year meal, in which the Milky Way has slowly consumed the smaller galaxy, and it looks as if Sagittarius has reached the end. “We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system,” said 2MASS Science Team member and study co-author Martin Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said it best, when he said that “… things are not what they seem.”

(Source: http://viewzone.com/milkyway.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS)

New, Revised Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Take your mind back to your early education, and tell me what galaxy it is that our Solar System inhabits? Your answer is, naturally, the Milky Way galaxy. However everything is not as it seems, according to a study coming out of the University of Massachusetts.

What they learned is that we’re not from the Milky Way galaxy, we come from the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!

The Two-Micron All Sky Survey, also known as 2MASS, was a massive astronomical undertaking to map the night sky. Begun in 1997 and completed in 2001, two telescopes (Mt. Hopkins Arizona in the Northern Hemisphere and Cerro Tololo/CTIO Chile in the Southern Hemisphere) targeted the night sky to catalogue all detected stars and galaxies.

The University of Massachusetts study has used the considerable data collected by 2MASS, and finally deciphered why it is that the Milky Way appears sideway in our night sky. The reason for this phenomenon will cause a massive shift in thinking and teaching; we’re not from the Milky Way galaxy, we come from the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.

Scientists have long been baffled by the sideways appearance of the Milky Way in our night sky, for if we were indeed a part of the Milky Way, everything would have been aligned accordingly, just as we are aligned with the 8 other planets in our system and our sun. The fact of the matter is the Milky Way galaxy is slowly but surely eating our own Sagittarius galaxy.

“We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalog of half a billion,” said co-author Michael Skrutskie, U.Va., professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the 2MASS project. “By tuning our maps of the sky to the ‘right’ kind of star, the Sagittarius system jumped into view.”

We’re not the only captives in this galactic struggle. Stars and star-clusters inhabiting the outer parts of the Milky Way galaxy have also been stolen by the larger of the two galaxies, drawn in by its significantly greater gravity. In fact, we are witnessing the end of a 2 billion year meal, in which the Milky Way has slowly consumed the smaller galaxy, and it looks as if Sagittarius has reached the end. “We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system,” said 2MASS Science Team member and study co-author Martin Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said it best, when he said that “… things are not what they seem.”

(Source: http://viewzone.com/milkyway.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS)

Most Massive Star Discovered

Most Massive Star Discovered By Andrea Thompson Staff Writer posted: 07 June 2007 12:59 pm ET

The most massive star known in the universe has been discovered and “weighed,” astronomers announced today.

The star, part of a binary system, topped the scales at 114 times the mass of the sun.

Though astronomers suspected that stars with masses up to 150 times the mass of the sun must exist, this discovery marks the first time a star has broken the 100-solar-mass barrier. The previous record holder was only a measly 83 solar masses.

The newly weighed star, known simply as A1, is the brightest hot star at the heart of a giant, but dense, young star cluster called NGC 3603, which lies 20,000 light-years from Earth. The star’s companion has a mass 84 times that of the sun.

These massive stars were “weighed” by inspecting their orbits with the Very Large Telescope and combining that data with eclipses observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Stars have a mass limit of 150 solar masses because above that, the pressure pushing outward from the star overwhelms the inward pull of gravity and causes the star to become unstable.

In the early universe, however, stars with masses up to several hundred times that of the sun are believed to have existed because the pressure in the stars was not as high because the heavier elements had not yet been “cooked” by the nuclear fusion taking place in the cores of stars.

The discovery was announced at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society.

(Source: http://www.space.com)

Welcome

Creation of this blog.
Tonight, I submitted my First Contact lecture to CSETI Coordinator, Debbie Foch.