From ESO-Cast and the European Southern Observatory. Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe.

Quasars are extremely bright, distant galaxies thought to be powered by supermassive black holes at their centers. These powerful beacons may help astronomers to probe the era when the first stars and galaxies were forming.

The quasar that has just been found is seen as it was only 770 million years after the Big Bang, at redshift 7.1. It took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach us.

Although more distant objects have been confirmed, such as a gamma-ray burst at redshift 8.2, and a galaxy at redshift 8.6, the newly discovered quasar is hundreds of times brighter than these. Among any other object bright enough to be studied in detail, this is the most distant by a large margin.

The next most-distant quasar is seen as it was 870 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 6.4). Similar objects further away cannot be found in visible-light surveys because their light, stretched by the expansion Continue reading The Most Distant Quasar Ever Discovered →

From NASA Astrophysics and Goddard Space Flight Center. In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair’s closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light.

The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense gamma-ray emission make this system irresistible to astrophysicists. Now, a team using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe the 2010 encounter reports that the system displayed fascinating and unanticipated activity.

Every 3.4 years, pulsar B1259-63 dives twice through the gas disk surrounding the massive blue star it orbits. With each pass, it produces gamma rays. During the most recent event, NASA’s Fermi observed that the pulsar’s gamma-ray flare was much more intense the second time it plunged through the disk. Astronomers don’t yet know why.

Few pairings in astronomy are as peculiar as high-mass binaries, where a hot blue-white star many times the sun’s mass and temperature is joined Continue reading Unexplained Gamma-Ray Pulsar →

Buzz Aldrin described the “Magnificent Desolation” of the lunar surface. Rarely do those words ring as true as in these recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Revel in the detail of these images, and the severity of the Lunar surface, then be thankful you’re relaxing on a green and blue world sheltered from the hostile environment of space.

These unbelievable new images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory would have seemed impossible just a short time ago. The details of the CME, or Coronal Mass Ejection, are fascinating as the gas flies off the solar surface and crashes back down.

A perfectly magical video from HubbleCast, with the famous Dr. J. The Andromeda Galaxy is revealed in unprecedented detail in four archive observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. They show stars and structure in the galaxy’s disc, the halo of stars that surrounds it, and a stream of stars left by a companion galaxy as it was torn apart and pulled in by the galaxy’s gravitational forces.

Images from Hubble Space Telescope have unparalleled image quality as a result of the telescope’s position above the atmosphere. Secondly, M 31 is closer to our own galaxy than any other spiral galaxy (so close that it can even be seen with the naked eye on a very dark night. And thirdly, these observations avoid the crowded centre of the galaxy, where the stars are closest together and hardest to separate from each other.

The resulting images offer a different perspective on a spiral galaxy. Far from being an opaque, dense object, Hubble reminds us that the dominant feature of a galaxy is the huge voids between its stars. Thus, these images do not only show stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (and a handful of bright Milky Way stars that are in the foreground): Continue reading Andromeda Stars in Your Eyes →

Here is rotating globe of Mars and we’re going to zoom in on the middle Southern latitudes, the part of Mars where we find these active slope features, and we’re zooming in on the Newton Basin crater here.

What you can see are lots of gullies. The active features that we’ve recently discovered are on the slopes that are facing mostly to the North to the equator.

What we see are much smaller scale features than gullies. You can see_an area of bedrock, a steep cliff here, and it’s from that bedrock that these dark features flow out.

Given the latitude and the slope aspect and particular the temperatures, it suggests that there’s a volatile involved here and the appropriate volatile for this temperature is water, probably salty water because sometimes these are active when it’s a little bit below the freezing point of pure water, salt lowers the melting point. And water on Mars should be salty; we know there’s lots of salts on Mars.

This is potentially actual water, in the liquid state, flowing on Mars today not millions of years ago. In late spring and into the summer is when these features form and fade. By late summer – early fall Continue reading Water Flows Discovered on Mars →

An international race is picking up speed… to see our universe for what it really is… and how it came to be. According to standard theory, the universe emerged from the explosive contact between subatomic particles of opposite charge. Scientists are now focusing their most powerful technologies on an effort to figure out how this happened.

Modern theories of the universe hang on the question: how did matter as we know it survive? And what happened to its birth twin… its opposite… a mysterious substance known as anti-matter?

A crew of astronauts is making its way to a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida… they’ll enter the space shuttle Endeavour… for the 134th, and second to the last, flight of the space shuttle.

Little noticed in the publicity surrounding the close of this storied program… is the cargo bolted into Endeavour’s hold. It’s a science instrument that some hope will become one of the most important scientific contributions of human space flight.

It’s a kind of telescope… though it will not return dazzling images of cosmic realms long hidden from view… the distant corners of the universe… or the hidden structure of black holes and exploding stars.

At the Continue reading The Riddle of Anti-Matter – PREVIEW →

From ESOCast with the famous Dr. J. In the pursuit of pristine skies, the European Southern Observatory operates its telescopes in the remote and arid landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

A top-class site for astronomical observations must meet several criteria. To begin with, of course, you need a sky that is free of clouds pretty much all year round. But in addition to that, you also need excellent atmospheric conditions, as well as very dry air with as little water vapor content as possible. And this is exactly the kind of environment that you find in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

The Chilean Coast Range. Here, the cold offshore Humboldt current creates a coastal inversion layer of cool air, which prevents rain clouds from developing. Often, a layer of fog is created, which rapidly disperses in the foothills above the desert. A view from the Paranal Observatory towards the Pacific Ocean clearly shows the top of the cloud layer.

Chilean coastal range Coastal clouds gathering at the foothills. In addition to the coastal inversion layer, a region of high pressure in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean creates circulating winds, forming an anticyclone, which helps to keep the climate of the Atacama dry.

The Continue reading In Search of Pure Dark Skies →

Watch this and other space videos at http://SpaceRip.com

From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Solar flares may seem like far-away events, but they can damage satellites and even ground-based technologies and power grids. Every 11 years, as the sun reaches its maximum activity they become bigger and more common, and that increases the chances that one will significantly affect Earth.

So what are these solar eruptions? A solar flare is basically an explosion on the surface of the sun ranging from minutes to hours in length. Large flares can release enough energy to power the entire United States for a million years. Flares happen when the powerful magnetic fields in and around the sun reconnect. They’re usually associated with active regions, often seen as sunspots, where the magnetic fields are strongest.

Flares are classified according to their strength. The smallest ones are B-class, followed by C, M and X, the largest. Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a ten-fold increase in energy output. So an X is 10 times an M and 100 times a C. Within each letter class, there is a finer scale from 1 to 9. C-class flares are too weak to Continue reading Extreme Solar Flares →

Explore one of the deepest mysteries about the origin of our universe. According to standard theory, the early moments of the universe were marked by the explosive contact between subatomic particles of opposite charge. Featuring short interviews with Masaki Hori, Tokyo University and Jeffrey Hangst, Aarhus University.

Scientists are now focusing their most powerful technologies on an effort to figure out exactly what happened. Our understanding of cosmic history hangs on the question: how did matter as we know it survive? And what happened to its birth twin, its opposite, a mysterious substance known as antimatter?

A crew of astronauts is making its way to a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Little noticed in the publicity surrounding the close of this storied program is the cargo bolted into Endeavor’s hold. It’s a science instrument that some hope will become one of the most important scientific contributions of human space flight.

It’s a kind of telescope, though it will not return dazzling images of cosmic realms long hidden from view, the distant corners of the universe, or the hidden structure of black holes and exploding stars.

Unlike the great observatories that were launched aboard the shuttle, it was not named Continue reading The Riddle of AntiMatter →