Astronomy // Current TV

Leonid Meteor Shower to Peak

November 14th, 2010 09:59 PM ET Leonid meteor shower peaks Wednesday A... more

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Mysterious Bubbles Fox Astronomers

Cambridge, MA, Nov 11 : NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a... more

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Planet of a Thousand Mysteries

ThunderboltsProject | September 10, 2010 David Talbott presents additional glimpses... more

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When Meteorites Fell From Mars

ThunderboltsProject | October 18, 2010 David Talbott continues his presentation on... more

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Jovian Shadows

Amateur astronomy alert for interesting event involving Jupiter this weekend

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Many Earth-Like Planets Orbit Sun-Like Stars

Many Earth-like planets orbit sun-like stars Nearly one-fourth of sun-sized stars,... more

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X-Ray Nova Caught at Moment of Eruption

A new X-ray emitting object in the Milky Way has been recently announced by the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) team and the Swift satellite astronomers. MAXI, a JapanAerospace Exploration Agency supported instrument, monitors the entire sky in the X-ray portion of the spectrum from its perch on the International Space Station module “Kibo”. On October 12th, MAXI noticed nothing out of the ordinary in a portion of the sky in the constellation Centaurus.

On October 17th, however, things started to brighten up in the region but were still dark enough that the team wanted to analyze their observations before announcing it to the world. By the 20th, they were able to confirm the X-ray source as something more unusual, and sent out an Astronomer‘s Telegram (ATel No.2959) at 2:00 a.m. EDT alerting other astronomers to the object.

The Swift satellite – in keeping with its name – began taking observations a mere nine hours later. Swift is equipped with an X-ray telescope, as well as an optical/ultraviolet telescope, and is designed to maneuver quickly to home in on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)

David Burrows, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and the lead scientist for Swift’s X-ray Telescope said in a press release, “The Swift observation suggests that this source is probably a neutron star or a black hole with a massive companion star located at a distance of a few tens of thousands of light years from Earth in the Milky Way…The contribution of Swift’s X-ray Telescope to this discovery is that it can swing into position rapidly to focus on a particular point in the sky and it can image the sky with high sensitivity and high spatial resolution.”

The object has been named MAXI J1409-619. The area of the sky that it was discovered in is not a known source of bright X-rays, though there were two dimmer objects located in the same area detected by the BeppoSAX X-ray survey on January 29th, 2000. One of the objects is consistent with the Swift observation, though this most recent flare-up made it almost 52 times brighter in the X-ray than previously observed.

X-ray novae are short-lived events, with an initial bright burst that falls off over a period of weeks or months. Their source is generally understood to be material falling into a black hole or accreting onto a neutron star.

This is not the first discovery made by the MAXI instrument. It detected another X-ray source on the 25th of September in the constellation Ophiuchus – named MAXI J1659-152.

http://www.universetoday.com/76559/another-x-ray-nova-detected-by-iss-swift/A new X-ray emitting object in the Milky Way has been recently announced by the... more

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Faraway (and Oldest Yet) Galaxy | 13 Billion Light Years Away | Photos | Video

October 20th, 2010 06:04 PM ET Stargazing: A visible comet, the most distant... more

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New Mystery behind Asteroid Collisions Discovered

Often in space asteroids collide with each other and astronomers found something... more

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Texas Milky Way Time Lapse (VIDEO) - The Daily Blender

Absolutely beautiful, an awesome sight! Wolfe Land Ranch, Comanche, Texas on June... more

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Found An Earth-like Planet, But Don't Get Too Excited

Gliese 581g is in the "the Goldilocks Zone" (Not too close to a star, so... more

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Found: An Earthlike Planet at Last

The star known as Gliese 581 is utterly unremarkable in just about every way you can... more

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How to Watch the Super Harvest Moon Twilight Show Today

Prepare for the Super Harvest Moon! For the first time in two decades, the Sun will... more

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The European Extremely Large Telescope will be built on a 3064m high mountain located in the Chilean Coast Range

The telescope's "eye" will be almost half the length of a soccer pitch... more

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NASA's Kepler Telescope Detects Possible Earth-Size Planet

August 26, 2010 Telescope Detects Possible Earth-Size Planet By KENNETH CHANG... more

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Solar System May Be 2 Million Years Older Than We Thought

Timescales of early Solar System processes rely on precise, accurate and consistent ages obtained with radiometric dating. However, recent advances in instrumentation now allow scientists to make more precise measurements, some of which are revealing inconsistencies in the ages of samples. Seeking better constraints on the age of the Solar System, Arizona State University researchers Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa analyzed meteorite Northwest Africa (NWA) 2364 and found that the age of the Solar System predates previous estimates by up to 1.9 million years.

By using a dating technique known as lead-lead dating, Bouvier and Wadhwa were able to calculate the age of a calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion (CAI) contained within the Northwest Africa 2364 chondritic meteorite. These CAIs are thought to be the first solids to condense from the cooling protoplanetary disk during the birth of the Solar System.
The study's findings, published online on August 22 in Nature Geoscience, fix the age of the Solar System at 4.5682 billion years old, between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates. This relatively small revision to the currently accepted age of about 4.56 billion years is significant since some of the most important events that shaped the Solar System occurred within the first ~10 million years of its formation.
"This relatively small age adjustment means that there was as much as twice the amount of iron-60, a certain short-lived isotope of iron, in the early Solar System than previously determined. This higher initial abundance of this isotope in the Solar System can only be explained by supernova injection," said Bouvier, a faculty research associate in the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "This supernova event, and possibly others, could have triggered the formation of the Solar System. By studying meteorites and their isotopic characteristics, we bring new clues about the stellar environment of our Sun at birth."
According to Meenakshi Wadhwa, professor in SESE and director of the Center for Meteorite Studies, "This work also helps to resolve some long-standing inconsistencies in early Solar System time scales as obtained by different high-resolution chronometers. However, there is certainly room for future studies. In particular, it will be important to conduct high precision chronologic investigations of CAIs from other pristine meteorites. We also need to understand the reasons for why the CAIs measured previously from two other chondritic meteorites, Allende and Efremovka, have yielded younger ages."
One significant aspect of this study is that it is the first published lead-lead isotopic investigation that takes into account the possible variation of the uranium isotope composition. Earlier work conducted in Wadhwa's laboratory by ASU graduate student Gregory Brennecka, in collaboration with SESE professor Ariel Anbar, has shown that the uranium isotope composition of CAIs, long assumed to be constant, can in fact be highly variable and this has important implications for the calculation of the precise lead-lead ages of these objects.

Using the relationship demonstrated by Brennecka and colleagues between the uranium isotope composition and other geochemical indicators in CAIs, Bouvier and Wadhwa inferred a uranium isotope composition for the CAI for which they reported the lead-lead age. Future work at ASU will focus on development of analytical techniques for the direct measurement of the precise uranium isotope composition of CAIs for which lead-lead isotopic investigations are being conducted.

"Our work can help researchers better understand the sequence of events that took place within the first few million years of the Solar system formation, such as the accretion and melting of planetary bodies," Bouvier said. "All these processes happened extremely rapidly, and only by reaching such a precision on isotopic measurements and chronology can we find out about these processes of planetary formation."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100825112300.htm

http://cosmicdiary.org/blogs/arif_solmaz/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/solar_system1.jpgTimescales of early Solar System processes rely on precise, accurate and consistent... more

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Black hole mystery by magnetic star discovery

The magnetar (magnetic star) is a rare discovery for astronomers and when studying the... more

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How To View The 2010 Perseids Meteor Shower At Its Peak

This year's Perseids will be the most spectacular in three years. Be sure you... more

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Who Was Holding the Camera? [video]

This is a the silliest video about the moon landing that you’ll see today. Okay,... more

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Monday Morning Asteroid Impact [video]

This video is an interesting artist’s conception of what an asteroid impact... more

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