Universe Today

March 28, 2008December 26, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

Under Construction: SpaceShipTwo, on Course for 2009 Testflight (Pictures)

It is really taking shape. The future of Virgin Galactic’s fleet of space tourism rockets is currently forming in a non-descript factory in the Mojave Desert, California. As if to prove that the Scaled Composite-design is not a pipe dream, pictures of the first commercial spaceflight vehicle have been released. It looks fairly crude and welded together, but this forms the bare bones of the worlds first viable hi-tech space tourism vehicle. All it needs now are some windows, seats, wings and an engine and we’re good to go!

It is as if Scaled Composites wanted to trump their competitor’s cards with proof that the SpaceShipTwo design is more than just a concept. It seems that everyone is claiming a portion of the space tourism industry, including economy class. Nancy covered XCOR’s press release (26th March) that the company was designing a smaller, cheaper, economy-class space plane, designed to take two people into low-Earth orbit (note: lower Earth orbit than Virgin Galactic’s design). Even the rocket builder Astrium has gotten in on the act, claiming that there will be a market for their mass-produced conventional space plane (18th March), releasing some uber-cool images and simulations of the craft in action.

So the economy-class market has been claimed by XCOR and Astrium has grabbed the “AirBus-in-space” mass-production market. But in the aim to prove that “the original and the best” concept is actually growing beyond the design phase and in full production, Scaled Composites are proving that their spaceship is one step closer than all their competitors: they’re building their spaceship right now.

To rub it in, one photo shows Burt Rutan sitting proudly inside the shell of the SpaceShipTwo cockpit proving they are accelerating production toward a 2009 test-run. These new images are from the production line in a factory in the Californian Mojave Desert.

SpaceShipTwo will carry six people into the lower limit of space and will experience a few minutes of weightlessness. The craft will be helped on its way by the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, giving the rocket a piggyback ride to 50,000 ft. At this height, SpaceShipTwo will be released and its rockets will blast to life taking the first tourists into space. You can find out more about SpaceShipTwo in a previous Universe Today story.

Source: Popular Mechanics

March 28, 2008May 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Why There’s More Matter Than Antimatter in the Universe

In the first few moments of the Universe, enormous amounts of both matter and antimatter were created, and then moments later combined and annihilated generating the energy that drove the expansion of the Universe. But for some reason, there was an infinitesimal amount more matter than anti matter. Everything that we see today was that tiny fraction of matter that remained.

But why? Why was there more matter than antimatter right after the Big Bang? Researchers from the University of Melbourne think they might have an insight.

Just to give you an idea of the scale of the mystery facing researchers, here’s Associate Professor Martin Sevior of the University of Melborne’s School of Physics:

“Our universe is made up almost completely of matter. While we’re entirely used to this idea, this does not agree with our ideas of how mass and energy interact. According to these theories there should not be enough mass to enable the formation of stars and hence life.”

“In our standard model of particle physics, matter and antimatter are almost identical. Accordingly as they mix in the early universe they annihilate one another leaving very little to form stars and galaxies. The model does not come close to explaining the difference between matter and antimatter we see in the nature. The imbalance is a trillion times bigger than the model predicts.”

If the model predicts that matter and antimatter should have completely annihilated one another, why is there something, and not nothing?

The researchers have been using the KEK particle accelerator in Japan to create special particles called B-mesons. And it’s these particles which might provide the answer.

Mesons are particles which are made up of one quark, and one antiquark. They’re bound together by the strong nuclear force, and orbit one another, like the Earth and the moon. Because of quantum mechanics, the quark and antiquark can only orbit each other in very specific ways depending on the mass of the particles.

A B-meson is a particularly heavy particle, with more than 5 times the mass of a proton, due almost entirely to the mass of the B-quark. And it’s these B-mesons which require the most powerful particle accelerators to generate them.

In the KEK accelerator, the researchers were able to create both regular matter B-mesons and anti-B-mesons, and watch how they decayed.

“We looked at how the B-mesons decay as opposed to how the anti-B-mesons decay. What we find is that there are small differences in these processes. While most of our measurements confirm predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, this new result appears to be in disagreement.â€

In the first few moments of the Universe, the anti-B-mesons might have decayed differently than their regular matter counterparts. By the time all the annihilations were complete, there was still enough matter left over to give us all the stars, planets and galaxies we see today.

Original Source: University of Melbourne News Release

March 28, 2008December 26, 2015 by Nicholos Wethington

Galaxy Zoo Results Show that the Universe Isn’t ‘Lopsided’

In July of last year, the doors of the online galaxy classification site Galaxy Zoo opened for business. The response? Tens of thousands of people logged-in to begin classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. If you’ve been one of the users madly clicking away at galaxies on the Zoo, this is what you’ve been waiting for: the first results have been submitted for publication, and it turns out that our Universe is, in fact, not ‘lopsided’.

One of the questions the Galaxy Zoo site is trying to answer seems simple: are most of the spiral galaxies in our Universe spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? The Universe is observed to be isotropic on large scales, meaning that any direction you look, it appears the same. If this is true, the ways that galaxies spin should be the same, and we should see just as many clockwise galaxies as counterclockwise ones, in every direction.

To definitively answer whether this is true means that a large number of the galaxies in our Universe needed to be analyzed. Computers, as much as they can do for us, just aren’t so good at recognizing patterns. They have a hard time distinguishing with high accuracy whether a galaxy is spinning one way or the other. Thankfully, the human brain is masterful at recognizing patterns. We do so every day when when look at a friend’s face and know who they are. Galaxy Zoo recruited the brains of over 125,000 people to help comb through almost a million galaxies recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a robotic telescope survey that is made available to scientists online.

When the first results started to come in, something seemed a bit odd: more counterclockwise galaxies were being reported than clockwise ones. Did this mean the Universe somehow formed more counterclockwise galaxies, or was it something funny with the way people were analyzing the data?

“You would need something pretty wacky to create the effect…Normally you talk to cosmologists and they have three responses to what’s going on. This one made their jaws drop,” said Chris Lintott, a member of the Galaxy Zoo team and a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.

News pieces on the project reported that the Universe was ‘lopsided’, and suggestions for the cause of this phenomenon ranged from the existence of a universe-wide magnetic field to a rethinking of the topology, or shape, of the Universe.

“People were very very critical when we released the data before completely analyzing the results to look for biases, but one thing we do with Galaxy Zoo is that we try to keep the process by which we’re doing the science as open as possible,” Lintott said.

After checking for biases in how users were classifying the galaxies, though, the explanation for the abundance of counterclockwise galaxies was found to exist on a smaller scale: right inside the human brain.

To test whether it was the Universe or the participants that were ‘lopsided’, the Galaxy Zoo team changed the images that people could classify. They inserted a ‘bias sample’ into the catalogue of galaxies on the site: a monochrome image, one image mirrored vertically and one mirrored diagonally for each of over 91,000 objects that were already classified.

If it was the Universe that was lopsided, the numbers in this sample should have switched around. In other words, if there were really more anticlockwise than clockwise galaxies, then there should have been more clockwise galaxies clicked on in this sample, when the image was flipped around. But the preference for anticlockwise galaxies stayed the same in the sample.

Why would people prefer to click on the “anticlockwise” button more often than the “clockwise” button? Either this is something odd about the human brain, in which given a choice between the two prefers one over the other, or there is something about the interface that is making people click on the anticlockwise button more often (i.e., people ‘like’ clicking on buttons toward the center of the screen).

Galaxy Zoo is far from finished with providing the public with an opportunity to participate in an ongoing research project. The site will enter a new phase in the coming months to better study both nature of galaxies and the workings of the human brain.

The first paper using the Galaxy Zoo data was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. If you want to get involved in the very addictive and fun project, you can sign up at www.galaxyzoo.org.

Source: Arxiv, phone interview with Chris Lintott

March 28, 2008December 26, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Break Up of Antarctic Ice Shelf

If anyone is denial about climate change possibly occuring on Earth, please take a look at this. This animation highlights the rapid loss of ice recently on the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Between February 28 and 29, 2008 an area of about 400 sq km disintegrated into large and small icebergs within 24 hours. As a result of the recent collapse, the remaining shelf, which totals about 14 500 sq km, is now only supported by a 6 km strip of ice. This strip is already rifted, and the remaining strip is in danger of breaking up as well.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula. Since the ice shelf is already floating, this event will not cause a rise in sea level. However, ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula are sandwiched by extraordinarily raising surface air temperatures and a warming ocean, making them important indicators for on-going climate change.

Thousands of years of accumulated and compacted snow on the Antarctic central plateau have formed a mighty ice sheet which flows under gravity towards the coastal plane. Along the coast the ice gradually floats on the sea â€“ to form massive ledges known as ice shelves. But as the temperature has increased, several ice shelves have broken up and disintegrated.

The images used for this annimation were taken by the ESA’s Envisat satellite. Within days of its launch, Envisat captured the disintegration of the Larsen-B ice shelf in Antarctica on 18 March 2002. Scientists estimate Larsen-B had been stable since the last ice age 12,000 years ago.

These images were acquired as part of ESAâ€™s support to the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, a large worldwide science programme focused on the Arctic and Antarctic.

Original News Source: ESA Press Release

March 28, 2008December 26, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Planet Formation Revealed?

ab-aurigaie-disc-of-material.thumbnail.jpg

One of the biggest unresolved questions of planet formation is how a thick disc of debris and gas surrounding young stars eventually evolves into a thin, dusty region with planets. This entire process, of course, has never actually been observed. But recently, and for the first time, a group of astrophysicists produced an image of material surrounding a star which seems to be coalescing into a planet.

The image was produced from a coronagraph attached to a telescope in Hawaii. It shows a horseshoe-shaped void in the disc of materials surrounding the star AB Aurigae, with a bright point appearing as a dot in the void.

“The deficit of material could be due to a planet forming and sucking material onto it, coalescing into a small point in the image and clearing material in the immediate surroundings,” said researcher Ben Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “It seems to be indicative of the formation of a small body, either a planet or a brown dwarf.”

A brown dwarf is considered a star that’s not massive enough to generate the thermonuclear fusion to create an actual star.

From what we know about planet formation, planets seem to be natural by-product of stars. But how does all this happen? Stars form when clouds of gas and dust contract under gravity, and if thereâ€™s enough compression and heat, sooner or later a nuclear reaction is triggered, and voilÃ : a star. If thereâ€™s any left-over material surrounding the young star, eventually the disc of dust and/or gas may congeal into planets. But the details of this process are unknown.

AB Aurigae is a well-studied star. It’s young, between one and three million years old, and can provide information on how stars and objects that orbit them form. And scientists hope that by studying this star, we can learn more about how planets form from the initial thick, gas-rich disk of debris that surrounds young stars. The observation of stars slightly older than AB Aurigae shows that at some point the gas is removed, but no one knows how this happens. AB Aurigae could be in an intermediate stage, where the gas is being cleared out from the center, leaving mainly dust behind.

“More detailed observations of this star can help solve questions about how some planets form, and can possibly test competing theories,” says Oppenheimer. And if this object is a brown dwarf, our understanding of them must be revamped as brown dwarfs are not believed to form in circumstellar materials, Oppenheimer said.

Original New Source: National Science Foundation Press Release

March 28, 2008December 26, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

13.73 Billion Years – The Most Precise Measurement of the Age of the Universe Yet

NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has taken the best measurement of the age of the Universe to date. According to highlyÂ precise observations of microwave radiation observed all over the cosmos, WMAP scientists now have the best estimate yet on the age of the Universe: 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years (that’s an error margin of only 0.87%… not bad really…).

The WMAP mission was sent to the Sun-Earth second Lagrangian point (L₂), located approximately 1.5 million km from the surface of the Earth on the night-side (i.e. WMAP is constantly in the shadow of the Earth) in 2001. The reason for this location is the nature of the gravitational stability in the region and the lack of electromagnetic interference from the Sun. Constantly looking out into space, WMAP scans the cosmos with its ultra sensitive microwave receiver, mapping any small variations in the background “temperature” (anisotropy) of the universe. It can detect microwave radiation in the wavelength range of 3.3-13.6 mm (with a corresponding frequency of 90-22 GHz). Warm and cool regions of space are therefore mapped, including the radiation polarity.

This microwave background radiation originates from a very early universe, just 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the ambient temperature of the universe was about 3,000 K. At this temperature, neutral hydrogen atoms were possible, scattering photons. It is these photons WMAP observes today, only much cooler at 2.7 Kelvin (that’s only 2.7 degrees higher than absolute zero, -273.15Â°C). WMAP constantly observes this cosmic radiation, measuring tiny alterations in temperature and polarity. These measurements refine our understanding about the structure of our universe around the time of the Big Bang and also help us understand the nature of the period of “inflation”, in the very beginning of the expansion of the Universe.

It is a matter of exposure for the WMAP mission, the longer it observes the better refined the measurements. After seven years of results-taking, the WMAP mission has tightened the estimate on the age of the Universe down to an error margin of only 120 million years, that’s 0.87% of the 13.73 billion years since the Big Bang.

“Everything is tightening up and giving us better and better precision all the time […] It’s actually significantly better than previous results. There is all kinds of richness in the data.” – Charles L. Bennett, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.

This will be exciting news to cosmologists as theories on the very beginning of the Universe are developed even further.

Source: New York Times

March 27, 2008December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Is Our Universe Ruled by Artificial Intelligence?

Science fiction is filled with unusual alien species. But apart from the occasional robot, biological life is running the show. But NASA scientist, Dr. Steven Dick, sees a future Universe that has evolved past biology. Where every intelligence is artificial. Consider the likelihood of a postbiological Universe.

Does intelligent life exist beyond Earth? It’s easily the most profound and challenging question that humans have ever asked. The consequences of discovering other intelligent life would ripple through every aspect of human society, and actually meeting another species would be even more challenging.

But are there abundant intelligent life forms out there? Or is the biological life on Earth just a stage? Just a single step towards our inevitable technological existence.

In a recent paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica, entitled The Post Biological Universe, Dr. Steven Dick notes how every search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that life will be biological. And yet, here on Earth we can see that intelligent life develops more and more sophisticated tools over time. And these tools will eventually lead to artificial intelligence that outstrips its makers.

If extraterrestrials are out there, they likely live in much older civilizations than ours, and have already transitioned through biology and into technology. The majority of worlds out there are already postbiological.

According to many scientists, it’s easy for civilizations to be older than us. The first metal rich stars with terrestrial planets could have formed a billion years after the Big Bang – 12.5 billion years ago. If intelligent life took another 5 billion years to evolve, just like it did here on Earth, that still means life could have been around for 7.5 billion years.

Plenty of time to evolve into intelligent life, and then transition into artificial intelligence.

Cultural advancement also seems to be an inevitable consequence of evolution. Not just humans, but many animals, such as chimpanzees have demonstrated that technology can be developed, improved and passed down from generation to generation.

Here’s a quote from the paper,

Hans Moravec, a highly respected AI pioneer and robotic expert at Carnegie-Mellon, predicted “What awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words ‘postbiological’ or even ‘supernatural’. It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artiï¬cial progeny.” Our machines, Moravec predicted, will eventually transcend us, and be “released from the plodding pace of biological evolution.”

How could this change the search for extraterrestrials? Well, when you’re looking for robots, you can look anywhere. Dr. Dick suggests that the SETI community consider the environmental tolerance of robots and the availability of resources beyond planets. AI will be looking for places that provide the most raw material and energy – think quasars, not habitable planets.

Postbiologicals probably have no interesting talking with us regular biologicals. But it might be possible for us to intercept their communications if we know what we’re looking for.

He also thinks that postbiologicals might be more interested in receiving our communications, that talking to us. We should consider very special messages that we might want to send out to the AI civilizations.

Of course, the difference between our minds and theirs might be so great that communication is impossible.

But it doesn’t hurt to try.

Original Source: Acta Astronautica

March 27, 2008December 26, 2015 by Mark Mortimer

Book Review: Rollback

The departures screen illuminates the stark, disillusioning truth. My connecting flight’s 3 hours delayed. Ahh, what is life but for living in the confines of a great, enclosed artificial space where I can watch countless others scurry from one portal to another. Letting luck rule, I meander to the nearest news stand. Fingers slowly trace along the spines, trying to sense the faintest presence of interest. They stop, almost automatically wrapping themselves about the sole piece with promise, the science fiction novel Rollback by Robert Sawyer. This time, fortune did add a nice silver lining to what might have been a very dull wait.

Sawyer’s novel has most elements that intrigue philosophers and scientists alike. Mainly, it’s got a success to the SETI search and the aliens show themselves to be quite bright. But this is no first contact. Rather, Sawyer has the two worlds communicate across a very long time span. Certainly tricky but not impossible. A light bound message can complete a two way trip in about 40 years. Hence, it’s possible and providential that one person can discern the alien language, compose a reply and be around to read the alien’s response. Yet, Sawyer doesn’t stop there. He adds life-lengthening techniques to enable some of his characters to have the potential for much longer lives. With this, the messages become both personal and representative of all Earth. In all, by dropping aliens and the fountain of youth into the lap of an astronomy professor from the University of Toronto, he really connects the science to the fiction for this story.

And, I must admit, I quite enjoy reading a story where I can place most of the locations. Having spent a number of years in Toronto, I know of the university, the subways, many of the mentioned streets and the wonderful weather! With Sawyer placing his action in this locale, I felt right at home. But as comfortable as that made me feel, Sawyer’s story did just the opposite in raising the hairs on the back of my neck. From it, I was wondering how and even if we should communicate with aliens. Or, how would we accommodate rejuvenation where parents become physically younger than their grandchildren? These questions get woven into a busy but pleasant fictional story of the family whose one member is the communications wizard and the remainder hang on for all they’re worth.

Perhaps you too might have a few hours at hand. Or maybe you’re curious about how science can really make a normal life, extraordinary. In either case, I recommend Robert Sawyer’s book Rollback. From it, the reader will readily see that science can combine with fiction to make a compelling and interesting story.

March 27, 2008December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Podcast: Questions about the Size, Shape and Centre of the Universe

As predicted, we had a huge number of listener questions after our puzzling trilogy about the nature of space itself. Is the Universe really a big donut? Could you see the same star in all directions? If the Universe is expanding, there must be an edge? Right? Listen in as we decrease the number of headaches by 5, and get a special bonus explanation you can use on the dark matter deniers in your life.

Click here to download the episode

Questions about the Size, Shape and Centre of the Universe – Show notes and transcript

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

March 27, 2008December 29, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Carnival of Space #47

Another new host for the Carnival of Space. This week, the carnival is playing over at “The Martian Chronicles”. And so, it’s taken on a very Martian theme. But there’s more than just plain old Mars, you’ll also learn about oceans across the Solar System, inflatable space stations, the hard to find (but easy to see) International Space Station, and more.

Click here to read the Carnival of Space #47

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 me know if you can be a host, and I’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.