Celestial Dreaming in a Bit of Pipe Smoke

Zoom into the Pipe Nebula by using the zoom slider, or pan around the image by using the arrow icons on the toolbar or by click-dragging the image. You can also zoom into a particular area by double-clicking on your area of interest. Image credit: ESO. Zoomify by John Williams.

Images like this of the Pipe Nebula from the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory help me dream about the grandeur of the night sky and the richness of the star lanes that make up the Milky Way.

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Treasure Hunt for Cassini Reveals Tiny Moon Atlas

Saturn's tiny moon Atlas shines with the rings

Saturn’s tiny moon Atlas shines with the rings

While most eyes on Earth have been focused on the Red Planet and the eventful landing of the Curiosity Rover, other missions throughout the Solar System are delivering stunning vistas as well, such as this image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of tiny moon Atlas as it shines just above Saturn’s rings.

Can you find it?

Atlas, just 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) across, sits just above the ring plane in this image taken by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on April 16, 2012 at a distance of 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles). At this distance, Atlas appears as a small white dot. Atlas orbits Saturn between the main rings and the thin F ring.

Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004 and is now in its second extended mission called Cassini Solstice Mission. For the past two years, Cassini cruised in an equatorial orbit flying close over several moons including Titan and studying the planet’s iconic rings. Over the next three years, Cassini will hurtle high above the poles, sending the probe through the ring plane many times.

John Williams is a science writer and owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA’s Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A former contributing editor for Final Frontier, his work has appeared in the Planetary Society Blog, Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, Earth, MX Developer’s Journal, The Kansas City Star and many other newspapers and magazines.

A 360-Degree ‘Street View’ From Mars

360-degree panoramic image of the Martian landscape surrounding NASA’s Curiosity. Credit: Andrew Bodrov

After seeing all the amazing imagery so far from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, I know everyone wants to go there and take in the visual treats of Gale Crater. With the help of a 360-degree panorama you can virtually explore Curiosity’s landing site; sort of like a Martian version of Google’s Street View.

Take a martian minute to explore the panorama at 360pano.eu.

Photographer Andrew Bodrov stitched together images from Curiosity’s navigation cameras to create the panorama. “After seeing some of the stitches of Curiosity’s images at NASA’s website, I decided to stitch the panorama myself,” Bodrov told Universe Today.

He uses PTGui panoramic stitching software from New House Internet Services BV (http://www.ptgui.com) to create the 360-degree view of the mountains and sky surrounding the car-sized rover that successfully landed on Mars on August 6th.

“NASA has still not published enough source material to assemble a complete panorama in color,” Bodrov says. He used a color filter to make the images more representable. He also added that the sky and sun in the panorama were added in Adobe Photoshop. He used the size of the Sun seen in this spectacular image of a Martian sunset from NASA’s Spirit rover taken in 2005 as a guide.

While Bodrov says the high-resolution images themselves are amazing, just seeing a picture of another world is more inspiring. “It’s very nice to see the achievements of humanity which allows you to see a picture of another world,” he said.

Bodrov says he has more than 12 years experience creating panoramas including an awesome panorama (complete with sound) for the Russian Federal Space Agency of a Soyuz/Progress launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in August 2011.

Image caption: Planet Baikonur courtesy of Andrew Bodrov

Physicists Closing in on Understanding the Primordial Universe

Photo of the ALICE detector at CERN. Photo courtesy of CERN.

Slamming barely nothing together is bringing scientists ever-closer to understanding the weird states of matter present just milliseconds after the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang. This is according to physicists from CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, presenting their latest findings at the Quark Matter 2012 conference in Washington, DC.

By smashing ions of lead together within CERN’s lesser-known ALICE heavy-ion experiment, physicists said Monday that they created the hottest man-made temperatures ever. In an instant, CERN scientists recreated a quark-gluon plasma — at temperatures 38 percent hotter than a previous record 4-trillion degree plasma. This plasma is a subatomic soup and the very unique state of matter thought to have existed in the earliest moments after the Big Bang. Earlier experiments have shown these particular varieties of plasmas behave like perfect, frictionless liquids. This finding means that physicists are studying the densest and hottest matter ever created in a laboratory; 100,000 times hotter than the interior of our Sun and denser than a neutron star.

CERN’s scientists are just coming off of their July announcement of the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.

“The field of heavy-ion physics is crucial for probing the properties of matter in the primordial universe, one of the key questions of fundamental physics that the LHC and its experiments are designed to address. It illustrates how in addition to the investigation of the recently discovered Higgs-like boson, physicists at the LHC are studying many other important phenomena in both proton–proton and lead–lead collisions,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer.

According to a press release, the findings help scientists understand the “evolution of high-density, strongly interacting matter in both space and time.”

Meanwhile, scientists at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), say they have observed the first glimpse of a possible boundary separating ordinary matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the hot primordial plasma of quarks and gluons in the early Universe. Just as water exists in different phases, solid, liquid or vapor, depending on temperature and pressure, RHIC physicists are unraveling the boundary where ordinary matter starts to form from the quark gluon plasma by smashing gold ions together. Scientists are still not sure where to draw the boundary lines, but RHIC is providing the first clues.

The nuclei of today’s ordinary atoms and the primordial quark-gluon plasma, or QGP, represent two different phases of matter and interact at the most basic of Nature’s forces. These interactions are described in a theory known as quantum chromodynamics, or QCD. Findings from RHIC’s STAR and PHENIX show that the perfect liquid properties of the quark gluon plasma dominate at energies above 39 billion electron volts (GeV). As the energy dissipates, interactions between quarks and the protons and neutrons of ordinary matter begin to appear. Measuring these energies give scientists signposts pointing to the approach of a boundary between ordinary matter and the QGP.

“The critical endpoint, if it exists, occurs at a unique value of temperature and density beyond which QGP and ordinary matter can co-exist,” said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven’s Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, who leads the RHIC research program. “It is analogous to a critical point beyond which liquid water and water vapor can co-exist in thermal equilibrium, he said.

While Brookhaven’s particle accelerator cannot match CERN’s record-setting temperature conditions, scientists at the U.S Energy Department lab say the machine maps the “sweet spot” in this phase transition.

Image caption: The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy “sweet spot” for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

John Williams is a science writer and owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA’s Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A former contributing editor for Final Frontier, his work has appeared in the Planetary Society Blog, Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, Earth, MX Developer’s Journal, The Kansas City Star and many other newspapers and magazines.

Zoom into an Ancient and Fractured Martian Landscape

Mars! Martian meteorites make their way to Earth after being ejected from Mars by a meteor impact on the Red Planet. Image: NASA/National Space Science Data Center.
Mars! Martian meteorites make their way to Earth after being ejected from Mars by a meteor impact on the Red Planet. Image: NASA/National Space Science Data Center.

Peer at this new image of Mars’ Ladon Basin and you get some notion of the violence that took place during the early history of Mars.

ESA’s Mars Express imaged the southern part of the partially buried crater informally known as Ladon Basin. The basin is the site of an ancient impact which is about 440 kilometers (273 miles) across. On an earthly scale, Ladon Basin would stretch from London to Paris or fill up most of Colorado.

These zoomable images allows you to quickly zoom into whatever part of the picture you want to see close up. Just slide the scale (between the plus and minus sign) at the bottom of the application to zoom in.

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A Crinkle in the Wrinkle of Space-time

Albert Einstein’s revolutionary general theory of relativity describes gravity as a curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Mathematicians at University of California, Davis have come up with a new way to crinkle that fabric while pondering shockwaves.

“We show that spacetime cannot be locally flat at a point where two shockwaves collide,” says Blake Temple, professor of mathematics at UC Davis. “This is a new kind of singularity in general relativity.”

Temple and his collaborators study the mathematics of how shockwaves in a perfect fluid affect the curvature of spacetime. Their new models prove that singularities appear at the points where shock waves collide. Vogler’s mathematical models simulated two shockwaves colliding. Reintjes followed up with an analysis of the equations that describe what happens when the shockwaves cross. He dubbed the singularity created a “regularity singularity.”

“What is surprising,” Temple told Universe Today, “is that something as mundane as the interaction of waves could cause something as extreme as a spacetime singularity — albeit a very mild new kind of singularity. Also surprising is that they form in the most fundamental equations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the equations for a perfect fluid.”

The results are reported in two papers by Temple with graduate students Moritz Reintjes and Zeke Vogler in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Einstein revolutionized modern physics with his general theory of relativity published in 1916. The theory in short describes space as a four-dimensional fabric that can be warped by energy and the flow of energy. Gravity shows itself as a curvature of this fabric. “The theory begins with the assumption that spacetime (a 4-dimensional surface, not 2 dimensional like a sphere), is also “locally flat,” Temple explains. “Reintjes’ theorem proves that at the point of shockwave interaction, it [spacetime] is too “crinkled” to be locally flat.”

We commonly think of a black hole as being a singularity which it is. But this is only part of the explanation. Inside a black hole, the curvature of spacetime becomes so steep and extreme that no energy, not even light, can escape. Temple says that a singularity can be more subtle where just a patch of spacetime cannot be made to look locally flat in any coordinate system.

“Locally flat” refers to space that appears to be flat from a certain perspective. Our view of the Earth from the surface is a good example. Earth looks flat to a sailor in the middle of the ocean. It’s only when we move far from the surface that the curvature of the Earth becomes apparent. Einstein’s theory of general relativity begins with the assumption that spacetime is also locally flat. Shockwaves create an abrupt change, or discontinuity, in the pressure and density of a fluid. This creates a jump in the curvature of spacetime but not enough to create the “crinkling” seen in the team’s models, Temple says.

The coolest part of the finding for Temple is that everything, his earlier work on shockwaves during the Big Bang and the combination of Vogler’s and Reintjes’ work, fits together.

There is so much serendipity,” says Temple. “This is really the coolest part to me.
I like that it is so subtle. And I like that the mathematical field of shockwave theory, created to address problems that had nothing to do with General Relativity, has led us to the discovery of a new kind of spacetime singularity. I think this is a very rare thing, and I’d call it a once in a generation discovery.”

While the model looks good on paper, Temple and his team wonder how the steep gradients in spacetime at a “regularity singularity” could cause larger than expected effects in the real world. General relativity predicts gravity waves might be produced by the collision of massive objects, such as black holes. “We wonder whether an exploding stellar shock wave hitting an imploding shock at the leading edge of a collapse, might stimulate stronger than expected gravity waves,” Temple says. “This cannot happen in spherical symmetry, which our theorem assumes, but in principle it could happen if the symmetry were slightly broken.”

Image caption: Artist rendition of the unfurling of spacetime at the beginning of the Big Bang. John Williams/TerraZoom

Oldest Spiral Galaxy in the Universe Discovered

An artist’s rendering of galaxy BX442 and its companion dwarf galaxy (upper left)

Caption: An artist’s rendering of galaxy BX442 and its companion dwarf galaxy (upper left). Credit: Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics/Joe Bergeron

Ancient starlight traveling for 10.7 billion years has brought a surprise – evidence of a spiral galaxy long before other spiral galaxies are known to have formed.

“As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric,” said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of a study reported in today’s journal Nature. “The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?”

Galaxies today come in a variety of unique shapes and sizes. Some, like our Milky Way Galaxy, are rotating disks of stars and gas called spiral galaxies. Other galaxies, called elliptical galaxies, resemble giant orbs of older reddish stars moving in random directions. Then there are a host of smaller irregular shaped galaxies bound together by gravity but lacking in any visible structure. A great, diverse population of these types of irregular galaxies dominated the early Universe, says Shapely.

Light from this incredibly distant spiral galaxy, traveling at nearly six trillion miles per year, took 10.7 billion years to reach Earth; just 3 billion years after the Universe was created in an event called the Big Bang.

According to a press release from UCLA, astronomers used the sharp eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope to spy on 300 very distant galaxies in the early Universe. The scientists originally thought their galaxy, one of the most massive in their survey going by the unglamorous name of BX442, was an illusion, perhaps two galaxies superimposed on each other.

“The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding,” said David Law, lead author of the study and Dunlap Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Current wisdom holds that such ‘grand-design’ spiral galaxies simply didn’t exist at such an early time in the history of the universe.” A ‘grand design’ galaxy has prominent, well-formed spiral arms.

To understand their image further, astronomers used a unique, state-of-the-art instrument called the OSIRIS spectrograph at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano. The instrument, built by UCLA professor James Larkin, allowed them to study light from about 3,600 locations in and around BX442. This spectra gave them the clues they needed to show they were indeed looking at a single, rotating spiral galaxy.

While spiral galaxies are abundant throughout the current cosmos, that wasn’t always the case. Spiral galaxies in the early Universe were rare because of frequent interactions. “BX442 looks like a nearby galaxy, but in the early universe, galaxies were colliding together much more frequently,” says Shapely. “Gas was raining in from the intergalactic medium and feeding stars that were being formed at a much more rapid rate than they are today; black holes grew at a much more rapid rate as well. The universe today is boring compared to this early time.”

Shapely and Law think the gravitational tug-of-war between a dwarf galaxy companion and BX442 may be responsible for its futuristic look. The companion appears as just a small blob in their image. Computer simulations conducted by Charlotte Christensen, a postdoctoral student at the University of Arizona and co-author of the paper, lends evidence to this idea. Eventually, BX442 and the smaller galaxy likely will merge.

Shapley said BX442 represents a link between early galaxies that are much more turbulent and the rotating spiral galaxies that we see around us. “Indeed, this galaxy may highlight the importance of merger interactions at any cosmic epoch in creating grand design spiral structure,” she said.

Studying BX442 is likely to help astronomers understand how spiral galaxies like the Milky Way form, she added.

Caption 2: HST/Keck false color composite image of galaxy BX442. Credit: David Law/Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Stunning Starry Nights of Lincoln Harrison

[Spoiler] I guarantee that these spectacular swirls of color will have you wasting a good chunk of your Friday. But well worth it.

Victoria, Australia-based photographer Lincoln Harrison has been taking pictures for just two years. Harrison says his images are created by taking one shot during twilight and then up to 500 shots in complete darkness throughout the night. Harrison says most of his pictures are of star trails and landscapes usually around Lake Eppalock in Victoria, Australia.

“Locations are chosen in pretty much the same way as I would choose landscape locations,” says Harrison. “I just drive or walk around until I see something that looks good.”

After Harrison returns from his night shoot, he processes the image in Adobe Photoshop, stacking the images using the lighten and blend modes, to create his spectacular images. He then adds the twilight image, sometimes shot using HDR (High Dynamic Range) and a combination of layer masks.

His favorite? At the moment Wormhole. You can see more of his incredible images at his website or at 500px.com

We’d like to see your star trails. Send us your photos or post it on our Flickr page.

Image Caption: Resembling Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, a collage of star trails photos from Lincoln Harrison.

Image Caption: 256 by Lincoln Harrison

Image Caption: Lincoln Harrison’s Wormhole.

Dark Matter Filaments Bind Galaxies Together

A slim bridge of dark matter – just a hint of a larger cosmic skeleton – has been found binding a pair of distant galaxies together.

According to a press release from the journal Nature, scientists have traced a thread-like structure resembling a cosmic web for decades but this is the first time observations confirming that structure has been seen. Current theory suggests that stars and galaxies trace a cosmic web across the Universe which was originally laid out by dark matter – a mysterious, invisible substance thought to account for more than 80 percent of the matter in the Universe. Dark matter can only be sensed through its gravitational tug and only glimpsed when it warps the light of distant galaxies.

Astronomers led by Jörg Dietrich, a physics research fellow in the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts, took advantage of this effect by studying the gravitational lensing of galactic clusters Abell 222 and 223. By studying the light of tens of thousands of galaxies beyond the supercluster; located about 2.2 billion light-years from Earth, the scientists were able to plot the distortion caused by the Abell cluster. The scientists admit it is extremely difficult to observe gravitational lensing by dark matter in the filaments because they contain little mass. Their workaround was to study a particularly massive filament that stretched across 18 megaparsecs (nearly 59 million light-years) of space. The alignment of the string enhanced the lensing effect.

The team’s results were published in the July 4, 2012 issue of Nature.

“It looks like there’s a bridge that shows that there is additional mass beyond what the clusters contain,” Dietrich said in a press release. “The clusters alone cannot explain this additional mass.”

By examining X-rays emanating from plasma in the filament, observed from the XMM-Newton satellite, the team calculated that no more than nine percent of the filament’s mass could be made up of the hot gas. Computer simulations further suggested that just 10 percent of the mass was due to visible stars and galaxies. Only dark matter, says Dietrich, could make up the remaining mass.

“What’s exciting,” says Mark Bautz, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is that in this unusual system we can map both dark matter and visible matter together and try to figure out how they connect and evolve along the filament.”

Refining the technique could help physicists understand the structure of the Universe and pin down the identity of dark matter (whether it’s a cold slow-moving mass or a warm, fast-moving one. Different types would clump differently along the filament, say scientists.

Image caption: Dark-matter filaments, such as the one bridging the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223, are predicted to contain more than half of all matter in the Universe. (credit: Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich)

Rethinking the Source of Earth’s Water

Artist's impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)
Artist's impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)

Earth, with its blue hue visible from space, is known for its abundant water – predominately locked in oceans – that may have come from an extraterrestrial source. New research indicates that the source of Earth’s water isn’t from ice-rich comets, but instead from water-bearing asteroids.

Looking at the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, in frozen water, scientists can get a pretty good idea of the distance the water formed in the solar system. Comets and asteroids farther from the Sun have a higher deuterium content than ice formed closer to the Sun. Scientists, led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Conel Alexander, compared water from comets and from carbonaceous chondrites. What they found challenges current models in how the solar system formed.

Primeval Earth was a hot and dry place. Any water that may have formed with Earth was boiled away from the scorching crust. Ultraviolet light from the newly formed Sun stripped hydrogen atoms from the water molecules leaving no rain to fall back on the surface. Scientists believe that both comets and carbonaceous asteroids formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter, perhaps at the very fringes of the solar system, then moved inward bringing both water and organic material to Earth. If this were true, Alexander and his colleagues suggest that ice found in comets and the remnants of ice preserved in carbonaceous chondrites in the form of clays would have similar isotopic composition.

After studying 85 carbonaceous chondrites, supplied by Johnson Space Center and the Meteorite Working Group, they show in a paper released today by Science Express that they likely did not form in the same regions of the solar system as comets because they have much lower deuterium content. They formed closer to the Sun, perhaps in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And its that material that rained on early Earth to create the wet planet we know today.

“Our results provide important new constraints for the origin of volatiles in the inner solar system, including the Earth,” Alexander said. “And they have important implications for the current models of the formation and orbital evolution of the planets and smaller objects in our solar system.”

Image caption: Artist impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)

Image caption 2: This is a cross-section of a chondritic meteorite.