On April 6, 2009 the IYA Live Telescope was busy broadcasting from the Southern Galactic Telescope Hosting facility and fulfilling your “100 Hours of Astronomy” requests. Are you ready to take a look at the video that came from the adventure and to add it to our library? Then come along as we view Denny and Robby Bauer’s suggestion of NGC 4833…
The following factual information is a cut and paste from Wikipedia:
NGC 4833: Constellation – MUSCA
NGC 4833 is a globular cluster discovered by Abbe Lacaille during his 1751-1752 journey to South Africa, and catalogued in 1755. It was subsequently observed and catalogued by James Dunlop and Sir John Herschel whose instruments could resolve it into individual stars.
The globular cluster is situated in the very southerly constellation Musca at a distance of 21,200 light years from earth. It is partially obscured by a dusty region of the galactic plane. After corrections for the reddening by dust, evidence was obtained that it is in the order of 2 billion years older than globular clusters M5 or M92.
We would very much like to thank Denny and Robby Bauer for their suggestion of NGC 4833 and we hope you like the view! As always, you can visit the remote telescope by clicking on the IYA “LIVE Remote Cam” Logo to your right. We’ll be broadcasting whenever skies are clear and dark in Central Victoria! Enjoy…
On April 4, 2009 the IYA Live Telescope was busy broadcasting from the Southern Galactic Telescope Hosting facility and fulfilling your “100 Hours of Astronomy” requests. Are you ready to take a look at the video that came from the adventure and to add it to our library? Then come along as we view Jon Hanford’s suggestion of IC 2602: “The Southern Plieades”…
The following factual information is a cut and paste from Wikipedia:
IC 2602 – “The Southern Pleiades”: Constellation – CARINA
IC 2602 (also known as the Theta Carinae Cluster or Southern Pleiades) is an open cluster in the constellation Carina. It was discovered by Abbe Lacaille in 1751 from South Africa. The cluster is at a distance of about 479 light-years away from Earth and can be seen with the naked eye.
The Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) has an overall apparent magnitude of 1.9, which is 70% fainter than the Taurean Pleiades, and contains about 60 stars. Theta Carinae, the brightest star within the open cluster, is a third-magnitude star with an apparent magnitude of +2.74. All the other stars within the cluster are of the fifth magnitude and fainter. Like its northern counterpart in Taurus, the Southern Pleiades spans a sizeable area of sky, approximately 50 arcminutes, so it is best viewed with large binoculars or telescope with a wide-angle eyepiece. The cluster is thought to have the same age as the open cluster IC 2391, which has a lithium depletion boundary age of 50 million years old.
We would very much like to thank Jon Hanford for his request of IC 2602 and we hope you like the view! As always, you can visit the remote telescope by clicking on the IYA “LIVE Remote Cam” Logo to your right. We’ll be broadcasting whenever skies are clear and dark in Central Victoria! Enjoy…
Over the last few days the IYA Live Telescope broadcasting on “Galactic TV” has been busy fillling your requests and we’re ready to bring your first photos up on-line for you. We hope you had a chance to follow your object for several hours in the remote telescope! For Universe Today readers Jon Hanford, Ana Tomsa and Denny and Robby Bauer? Come on inside… Your requests have been fulfilled and your images are waiting!
IC 2602 or Southern Pleiades for Jon Hanford
NGC 2516 for Ana Tomsa
NGC 4833 for Denny and Robby Bauer
We hope you enjoy your image requests and they will become a part of the “IYA Live Telescope Library” link in the categories section to your right should you wish to recover them again in the future. Thank you so much for taking the time to become a part of our “100 Hours of Astronomy” celebration!!
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past carnivals of space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let Fraser know if you can be a host, and he’ll schedule you into the calendar.
Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.
Last week we examined the largest wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum: radio. This week we get a little smaller… but not too small! And look at the next step in the spectrum, the submillimeter. Astronomers have only recently began exploiting this tiny slice of the spectrum, but the payoff has been huge.
This week we wonder if you can made a black hole by accelerating a mass, but then can you un-make it again? Will the Earth ever be tidally locked to the Sun? And can dark matter crush an unsuspecting space ship?
If you’ve got a question for the Astronomy Cast team, please email it in to [email protected] and we’ll try to tackle it for a future show. Please include your location and a way to pronounce your name.
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Astronomers are very resourceful. When it comes to light, they use the whole spectrum – from radio to gamma rays. We see in visible light, but that’s just a tiny portion of the spectrum. Today we’re going to celebrate the other end of the spectrum; the radio end, where photons really stretch out their wavelengths.
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The possible path of the N. Korean launch, passing over Japan. First stage will drop into the Sea of Japan (AGI)
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Some time between April 4th-8th, North Korea will launch a communications satellite into orbit. Unsurprisingly there is huge scepticism being voiced by Japan, South Korea and the United States that the secretive military nation is in fact carrying out a test-launch of the Taepodong-2 ballistic missile system, mounting a “peaceful” satellite to disguise its real intention. If the world’s suspicions are correct, if successful, North Korea will have a means to deliver a possible nuclear strike as far as Hawaii or Alaska. Now the North Korean army has warned that if the launch is interfered with, they will attack “major targets” in Japan.
Oh dear, it sounds like it’s going to be a rough few days in the west Pacific…
A visualization of fairing separation after N. Korean rocket clears the atmosphere (Video still courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc. www.agi.com)North Korea’s neighbour, Japan, has warned that should the rocket start to fall toward the nation, they will attempt to intercept it using anti-missile Aegis destroyers at sea and Patriot guided-missile units on the land. This is what appears to have riled the North Koreans, prompting the Korean People’s Army (KPA) to issue a sabre-rattling statement saying, “If Japan recklessly ‘intercepts’ the DPRK’s (North’s) satellite for peaceful purposes, the KPA will mercilessly deal deadly blows not only at the already deployed intercepting means but at major targets.”
Unfortunately, North Korea has not proven itself to be a particularly “open” nation, so there is huge doubt that one of the nations in the “Axis of Evil” (a phrase coined by George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002) is simply deploying a peaceful satellite. N. Korea has long been developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, but any attempt by international inspectors to understand the scope of these claims have been unsuccessful. Also, previous rocket tests have provoked international outrage as they are seen as obvious attempts to intimidate neighbouring countries (principally Japan and South Korea) and demonstrated the nation is working on more sophisticated means to increase their military reach.
The satellite-carrying rocket will be directed to fly over Japan (Video still courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc. www.agi.com)Tensions are understandably high ahead of the launch, and some sources suggest that could be as early as Saturday (April 4th) as there are indications that fuelling activities are being carried out by Pyongyang. Spy satellite images appear to show there is indeed a satellite attached to the rocket, but the US and regional allies are under no illusions that such a launch would also test ballistic missile technology, violating the UN resolution passed in 2006 in response to the underground nuclear test and repeated missile launches. North Korea can expect severe treatment by the international community should this launch go ahead.
The US and regional allies will push for more sanctions will be put into place, further damaging international relations with North Korea. However, having signed an international space exploration treaty, North Korea appears to be hoping China and Russia will block any sanctions after launch, even though the launch directly violates the UN resolution. Russia has even urged North Korea’s neighbours not to take military action against the rocket launch.
Like most actions threatened by Pyongyang, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, but this is certainly a volatile situation…
Just when I was getting excited about the possibility of travelling to distant worlds, scientists have uncovered a deep flaw with faster-than-light-speed travel. There appears to be a quantum limit on how fast an object can travel through space-time, regardless of whether we are able to create a bubble in space-time or not…
First off, we have no clue about how to generate enough energy to create a “bubble” in space-time. This idea was first put on a scientific grounding Michael Alcubierre from the University of Mexico in 1994, but before that was only popularized by science fiction universes such as Star Trek. However, to create this bubble we need some form of exotic matter fuel some hypothetical energy generator to output 1045 Joules (according to calculations by Richard K. Obousy and Gerald Cleaver in the paper “Putting the Warp into Warp Drive“). Physicists are not afraid of big numbers, and we are not afraid of words like “hypothetical” and “exotic”, but to put this energy in perspective, we would need to turn all of Jupiter’s mass into energy to even hope to distort space-time around an object.
This is a lot of energy.
If a sufficiently advanced human race could generate this much energy, I would argue that we would be masters of our Universe anyway, who would need warp drive when we could just as well create wormholes, star gates or access parallel universes. Yes, warp drive is science fiction, but it’s interesting to investigate this possibility and open up physical scenarios where warp drive might work. Let’s face it, anything less than light-speed travel is a real downer for our potential to travel to other star systems, so we need to keep our options open, not matter how futuristic.
The space-time bubble. Unfortunately, quantum physics may have the final word (Richard K Obousy & Gerald Cleaver, 2008)Although warp speed is highly theoretical, at least it is based on some real physics. It’s a mix of superstring and multi-dimensional theory, but warp speed seems to be possible, assuming a vast supply of energy. If we can “simply” squash the tightly curled extra-dimensions (greater than the “normal” four we live in) in front of a futuristic spacecraft and expand them behind, a bubble of stationary space will be created for the spacecraft to reside in. This way, the spaceship isn’t travelling faster than light inside the bubble, the bubble itself is zipping through the fabric of space-time, facilitating faster-than-light-speed travel. Easy.
Not so fast.
According to new research on the subject, quantum physics has something to say about our dreams of zipping through space-time faster than c. What’s more, Hawking radiation would most likely cook anything inside this theoretical space-time bubble anyway. The Universe does not want us to travel faster than the speed of light.
“On one side, an observer located at the center of a superluminal warp-drive bubble would generically experience a thermal flux of Hawking particles,” says Stefano Finazzi and co-authors from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. “On the other side, such Hawking flux will be generically extremely high if the exotic matter supporting the warp drive has its origin in a quantum field satisfying some form of Quantum Inequalities.”
In short, Hawking radiation (usually associated with the radiation of energy and therefore loss of mass of evaporating black holes) will be generated, irradiating the occupants of the bubble to unimaginably high temperatures. The Hawking radiation will be generated as horizons will form at the front and rear of the bubble. Remember those big numbers physicists aren’t afraid of? Hawking radiation is predicted to roast anything inside the bubble to a possible 1030K (the maximum possible temperature, the Planck temperature, is 1032K).
Even if we could overcome this obstacle, Hawking radiation appears to be symptomatic of an even bigger problem; the space-time bubble would be unstable, on a quantum level.
“Most of all, we find that the RSET [renormalized stress-energy tensor] will exponentially grow in time close to, and on, the front wall of the superluminal bubble. Consequently, one is led to conclude that the warp-drive geometries are unstable against semiclassical back-reaction,” Finazzi adds.
However, if you wanted to create a space-time bubble for subluminal (less-than light speed) travel, no horizons form, and therefore no Hawking radiation is generated. In this case, you might not be beating the speed of light, but you do have a fast, and stable way of getting around the Universe. Unfortunately we still need “exotic” matter to create the space-time bubble in the first place…
Sources: “Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives,” Stefano Finazzi, Stefano Liberati, Carlos Barceló, 2009, arXiv:0904.0141v1 [gr-qc], “Investigation into Compactified Dimensions: Casimir Energies and Phenomenological Aspects,” Richard K. Obousy, 2009, arXiv:0901.3640v1 [gr-qc]
