Universe Today

One of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth has simulated the interiors of low mass stars, helping scientists understand their evolution. As these stars exhaust their hydrogen fuel, they eject helium into their surrounding neighbourhood. But the quantities of this ejected helium didn't match observations by telescopes. This new simulation shows that stars can actually destroy some of this helium inside the star, instead of ejecting it into space.
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Finally some good news for the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA announced a new space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the aging space telescope. This fifth and final visit to Hubble is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2008. Astronauts will install two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will help probe large-scale structures in the Universe, and the Wide Field Camera 3, a very sensitive instrument capable of seeing from infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths.
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Dress warmly, gather some friends and family, and head outside to watch sand burn in the upper atmosphere. There's nothing like a good meteor shower. Fraser and Pamela explain this beautiful phenomenon: what causes them, the best storms and showers to watch for, and different types of meteors you might see.
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Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! The Moon has returned again to the night sky and what perfect timing. Be sure to give your visiting "trick or treat" monsters a view of the lunar surface. Or better yet? Comet SWAN! Mid-week also brings on the Taurid meteor shower along with plenty of history and other objects to explore. It's time to set sail on the wings of the night, because…

Here's what's up!
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Modern physics! Who knows where it's going? Objects so small that we can never see them. Strings that vibrate with the resonance of life. A universe so big and growing, yet starting from no more than a dot. Surely all this is too much! Not so. Marcus Chown in his book, 'The Quantum Zoo - A Tourist's Guide to the Neverending Universe' provides simple analogies and fun derivations to bring sense to all this. After all, physics is simply the science of observation, so there shouldn't be anything holding back an inquisitive person.
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NASA announced today that it will be extending Deep Impact's mission, giving it a chance to visit another comet. The mission made big news when it slammed an impactor spacecraft into Comet Tempel 1 in July, 2005. NASA had hoped they could steer the spacecraft past another comet, to continue its scientific discoveries. Mission planners chose Comet Boethin as the spacecraft's next target, which it should be able to reach in December, 2008.
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This beautiful view of Saturn was taken by Cassini when it was looking through the dark side of the planet's rings. The diagonal slice through the photo is Saturn's shadow falling across the rings. Cassini took this image on September 11, 2006 when it was approximately 1.1 million kilometres (700,000 miles) from Saturn.
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This Spitzer photograph contains several nebulae located in the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The dark, snake-like nebula at the upper left contains dozens of huge newborn stars, some with 50 times the mass of our Sun. The red sphere in the image is a supernova remnant. Before it exploded, the central star probably played a role in the creation of the dark nebulae in the region.
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In June of 1889, about one year before his untimely death, the brilliant Dutch post-impressionist, Vincent Van Gogh, furiously completed The Starry Night while staying at the Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole, a mental asylum located in Southern France. The painting depicts a humble village nestled between the blue tranquility of undulating hills and a magical sky filled with comet shaped clouds and cartwheeling stars the size of Ferris wheels. Even though Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, this priceless work of art has become an icon. In it he captured a childlike wonder that adults can recognize for who has not stood outside and been swayed by twinkling stars celebrating overhead. Beautiful deep space images can elicit similar excitement from astronomical enthusiasts. However, the photographers who produce them are more interested in the stars when they are peaceful.
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Astronomers have discovered gamma rays streaming from the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. These gamma rays have energy levels of more than a million million times the energy of visible light. Fortunately, these rays are stopped by our atmosphere. A special instrument called H.E.S.S., located in Namibia, can detect when these rays strike our atmosphere, and trace back the source. Astronomers have determined that a region not much larger than our Solar System around the black hole is responsible for this outpouring of gamma rays; the black hole is acting like a cosmic particle accelerator.
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This incredible photograph shows Saturn's potato-shaped Janus, posing above the planet's cloudy atmosphere. Janus is only 181 kilometers (113 miles) across, and it shows the scars of many impacts with other objects in the Solar System. Like Saturn's other smaller moons, Janus could be covered with a layer of fine, dust-sized icy material. Cassini took this photo on September 25, 2006 when it was only 145,000 kilometers (90,000 miles) from Janus.
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The strange variable star V838 Monocerotis flared up nearly 5 years ago, and astronomers have been trying to figure out what's going on ever since. As the light from the flare up propagates out from the star, it illuminates the surrounding cloud of dust. This light reflects off the dust, and we see this echo here on Earth. This latest photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the changes that have happened over the last year. One interesting feature are the whorls and eddies in the dust, which could be caused by powerful magnetic fields.
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A powerful new instrument for finding extrasolar planets is about to launch: COROT (Convection Rotation and planetary Transits). Developed by the European Space Agency, COROT will search for planets using the transit method; it will be able to detect the slight drop in brightness as a planet moves in front of its parent star. If the observatory performs as expected, it should be able to detect rocky worlds just a few times larger than the Earth. COROT is scheduled to launch in December, 2006.
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An unpiloted Progress 23 cargo ship docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, delivering a new load of supplies. On board the ship is more than 2 tonnes of food, air, fuel, water and additional equipment. There was a bit of a glitch with the docking, however. Flight controllers weren't able to confirm if an antenna on the spacecraft was fully retracted before it docked. After a 3-hour delay, they finally gave the command to partially dock the spacecraft. Further latches will be closed on Friday to complete the docking operation.
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NASA's solar-observing STEREO spacecraft were carried into space Wednesday evening, atop a Boeing Delta II rocket. STEREO, aka the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories, are two nearly identical observatories that will help construct 3-dimensional views of the Sun and its stormy environment. Over the next few months, the spacecraft will perform a series of maneuvers so that one travels ahead of the Earth in orbit, and another trails behind the planet. This will give a view of the Sun from two different vantage points.
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A new photograph from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows how supernova remnant Cassiopeia A evolved over time. The original star contained 15 to 20 times the mass of our Sun, and was made up of concentric shells of elements. The lightest elements, like hydrogen, were in the outermost shell, while the heaviest elements sunk to the centre. The shells of exploded material match up quite well with the original layers in the star before it detonated as a supernova.
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How did the dinosaurs die? It's a question scientists have been trying to figure out since their fossils were first discovered. Most believe that it was a giant asteroid that stuck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, and ended the dinosaurs' reign on Earth. But evidence is mounting that the asteroid strike might have just been the final killing blow. The previous 500,000 years were unpleasant too, with multiple meteor strikes, severe volcanism, and rapid climate change.
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Princeton researchers have discovered a colony of bacteria that lives more than 3 km (2 miles) underground. This bacteria lives completely cut off from the biosphere on the surface of the Earth, and derives its energy from the radioactive decay of rocks underground. By finding life in these extreme conditions, scientists are expanding their understanding of what kinds of habits can support life.
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This Cassini image shows the dark gaps in Saturn's A ring, which are caused by a collection of moons. Even though these moons max out at a few dozen kilometres across, they have enough gravity to pull particles out of the ring orbit as they pass by. Cassini took this photograph on September 11, 2006 from a distance of 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn.
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Astronomers have discovered two of the most distant galaxies ever seen, when the Universe was only 700 million years old. The galaxies were first discovered as part of the Hubble Space Telescope's Deep Field Survey, which looked into the distant Universe. Astronomers then did follow-on observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope to confirm their distance and age. The galaxies are thought to be between 50-300 million years old, and have only 1% of the mass of our own Milky Way.
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New images from the Japanese Subaru telescope show how a nearby young star ended its infancy rapidly. The star, called HD 141569A, has a hole in the disc of gas and dust surrounding it. Astronomers think that the star rapidly ionized its surrounding gas, and then pushed it away with its intense solar radiation. The gap is located about the same distance from the star as Saturn's orbit, and it lends additional evidence to theories about how discs of material evolve around young stars.
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NASA's Spirit Mars Exploration Rover recently celebrated its 1000th day on the surface of the Red Planet. To celebrate the occasion, NASA used the rover to capture a full 360-degree panorama view of Mars from its vantage point. The rover has been perched on the side of a hill for the last few months, to ride out the Martian winter' reduced light. Spirit and Opportunity were both expected to only last 90 days on the surface of Mars.
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NASA's MESSENGER made its closest approach to Venus today, coming within 2,990 kilometers (1,860 miles) of its surface. The spacecraft used this close encounter with Venus' gravity well to alter its trajectory as it travels towards its final destination: Mercury. This won't be its final encounter with our twin planet, though. MESSENGER will meet up with Venus again in June 2007. It'll finally make its first encounter with Mercury in January 2008, but won't be in a final orbit until 2011.
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In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look in the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. This composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
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Globular clusters are regions of space where stars are densely packed together - 10,000 times more dense than our local stellar neighbourhood. New evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that globular clusters will sort out themselves out, hoarding more massive stars in the centre, and pushing the less massive stars out to the edges. Hubble captured images of globular cluster 47 Tucanae for nearly 7 years, allowing astronomers to carefully plot the positions of stars moving in the cluster, and then calculate how close they were to the centre.
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