Orbit 17 +++ Space and beyond » telescope

NASA IMAX 3D movie features astonishing Hubble repair footage

galaxy17 — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 06:17:34 +0000

Coming to an IMAX theatre near you soon is this astonishing 3D movie film from NASA.

Served up in delicious high definition 3D, the film promises to take viewers on a, “journey through distant galaxies to explore the grandeur and mysteries of our celestial surroundings.”

NASA IMAX 3D movie features astonishing Hubble repair footageEven better, there’s some breathtaking footage capturing plucky astronauts embarking on five long spacewalks to fix the Hubble telescope.

The astronauts were trained to use the washing machine-sized IMAX camera in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab over the course of eight months

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Mysterious Distant Planet ‘Disappearing Before Our Eyes’

galaxy17 — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:19:07 +0000

Astronomers appear to have caught an exoplanet – a planet orbiting another star – in the middle of a cosmic vanishing act.

The planet, tagged CoRoT-7b, first hit the headlines last September when a team of astronomers confirmed the orb as the smallest exoplanet yet found. Its diameter is roughly 1.7 times that of Earth. Based on its size and mass, its density is similar to Earth’s, indicating that it is a rocky Earth-like orb.

But it wasn’t always this small. Scientists estimate that CoRoT-7b initially tipped the cosmic scales at 100 times more mass than Earth and orbited the star at a distance of about 2.3 million miles.

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KEPLER MISSION: Space Telescope Finds its First Extrasolar Planets, NASA in 2010

galaxy17 — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:12:13 +0000

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission is off to a precocious start. The first six weeks of observations recorded by the spacefaring telescope, combined with follow-up studies from the ground, have revealed five previously unknown extrasolar planets—one body roughly the size of Neptune and four low-density versions of Jupiter. All reside within roasting distance of their parent stars.
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The findings appear to reinforce hints from ground-based observations that stars have relatively few close-in planets with a mass between that of Saturn and Neptune, says Kepler scientist Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

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All four hot, Jupiter-like planets discovered by Kepler have densities lower than that predicted for such giant, gaseous planets. One of these bodies, Kepler-7b, has one of the lowest densities—0.17 grams per cubic centimeter—of any known extrasolar planet. (By comparison, Jupiter’s average density is 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter, slightly higher than that of water, but Jupiter lies much farther from the sun than does Kepler-7b from its star.)

Although Kepler began observations only in May 2009, its ability to find a variety of transiting planets has already lent considerable significance to something it did not detect: a planet less massive than Jupiter but considerably heavier than Neptune. (Saturn has about a third the mass of Jupiter.) In the standard model of planet formation, Sasselov notes, the recipe to make a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn requires that a rocky or icy core several times heavier than Earth must coalesce within the planet-forming disk around a young star.

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WOW: Herschel space telescope captures birth of stars

galaxy17 — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:15:45 +0000

The European Space Agency (Esa) has released stunning new pictures from the recently launched Herschel telescope. Credit: ESA

The pictures show star formation, and have been described as among the most important images obtained from space for decades.

Astronomers hope that, by analysing these images, they will be able to answer questions about how stars and galaxies are made.

Herschel is the largest astronomical telescope ever to be put into space.

It has captured images of previously invisible stardust. This is the stuff that galaxies, stars, planets and all life is made from, and scientists are studying it to follow the life cycle of the cosmos.

Bruce Swinyard, from the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, is a member of the research team that designed Herschel’s Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (Spire), one of the three scientific instruments that is providing the telescope’s eyes.

These three detectors allow Herschel to see far-infrared and sub-millimetre (radio) wavelengths of light, allowing it to peer through clouds of dust and gas and to see stars as they are born.