Down here on Earth we're protected by our planet's magnetic field from harmful radiation, but out in space, it gets a lot more dangerous. One particularly dangerous region are the Earth's Van Allen belts which astronauts have to pass through to get to the Moon and beyond. Researchers working in Antarctica have observed two rare space storms which drained electrons out of the Van Allen belt, and reformed it closer to Earth in a region that was thought to be free of radiation. This research will help scientists predict what kinds of solar storms will move this radiation around, and give astronauts time to prepare if they're caught in the open.

An unpiloted Progress cargo ship docked to the Zvezda module of the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering supplies to the crew of Expedition 11. The supplies include food, water, fuel, oxygen, air, clothing and experimental hardware. Also on board are spare parts for the Russian Vozdukh carbon dioxide removal system and the Elektron oxygen generator. The astronaut will try and repair the Elektron next week to bring it back into service.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! This week is a sure sign of the Fall season as we welcome back the "Harvest Moon". While Selene will be the major focus of our studies this week, we can still take the opportunity to enjoy double star Gamma Delphini, find out why Vega is so "hot", and have a look at variable Beta Lyrae. So, head out under the moonlit skies, because ...

Here's what's up!

What is your computer doing when you're not using it? If your answer is "nothing", then you need to put it to work in the name of science - finding aliens, detecting gravity waves, or predicting asteroid paths. Join the Universe Today and Bad Astronomy team, and compete with other teams worldwide to see who can help crunch the most data. We'd love to get your help.

September arrives and with it come all the sweet memories of anticipation, trepidation and expectation of new school years. These days, I relive these feelings through my children but many of my own emotions still lie close to the surface. There won't be any astronomy texts yet for my two young ones, but others may find on their list the introductory text by Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and SidneyWolff entitled Voyages to the Stars and Galaxies. For those so fortunate, a good memory may be more practical than a sweet memory, for this book is chalkfull of pertinent astronomical information.

How will the Universe end? Right now cosmologists have two equally distressing scenarios mapped out for the long term fate of the Universe. On the one hand, gravity might slow down the expansion of our Universe so that it coasts to a stop and possibly even collapses back down into a Big Crunch. On the other hand, the expansion of the Universe could continue indefinitely thanks to the acceleration of dark energy. We would face a cold, lonely future as other galaxies fade away into the distance. My guest today is Eric Linder from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and he's proposing experiments that could help us learn which of these two fates await us.

Saturn's moon Titan has long held a special fascination to astrobiologists. Its thick atmosphere is largely composed of nitrogen and organic molecules which are the building blocks of life. At a frigid -178 C (-289 F), however, it's much too cold to support life. But there could be some habitable locations on Titan, you just have to look carefully. Methane clouds around Titan indicate that it probably has an active cycle similar to the water cycle here on Earth. There could be areas where get warm enough on Titan for life to gain a foothold.

The time frame for the formation of new planets appears to be getting shorter than previously believed. Astronomers have discovered gaps in protoplanetary disks that suggest there are gas giants forming there. One star, GM Aurigae, is a younger version of our own Sun and the gap in its disk is at about the same location as our own gas giant planets. Since GM Aurigae is only 1 million years old, these results challenge the traditional theories that planets slowly formed over many millions of years.

An Italian team of astronomers have found a gamma ray burst that blew up 12.7 billion light-years away - the most distant ever seen. Astronomers have calculated that it exploded with 300 times more energy than our Sun will put out in its entire 10+ billion year lifespan. The blast was discovered by NASA's Swift satellite, which is dedicated to discovering these powerful explosions.

Astronomers have spotted a dusty disc around an old, dead star. This star is similar to what our own star will look like billions of years from now. What's unusual, however, is this dust cloud. It should have disappeared long ago; either sucked into the star, or blasted away by intense radiation. One theory is that a planet is still orbiting the dead star, and is continuously shedding material to create this dust.

The frame-filling view of Saturn's moon Rhea was taken by Cassini on August 1, 2005. Although in this image, Rhea looks quite similar to our Moon or the planet Mercury, it's actually covered in thick ice which would melt if it ever got as close to the Sun as Mercury. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across, and you can see one of its larger craters, Izanagi, near the middle of the moon.

When humans return to the Moon in the next decade, they'll be facing a dangerous combination of cosmic rays and solar flares. Astronauts will need to avoid getting too much radiation, so NASA is working to better understand risks. The upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will carefully measure and map the Moon's radiation environment. It will also have a special instrument designed to simulate how this radiation will affect the human body.

When Deep Impact excavated a crater in Comet Tempel 1, it released a spew of material that has existed since our Solar System first formed, billions of years ago. By analyzing this material, scientists have come up with better recipes for how to make planets, comets and asteroids. They were expecting to see water ice and silicates, but they were surprised to see materials like clay and carbonates (ingredient in seashells), since it was believed they required liquid water to form.

John Chumack took this picture of the crescent Moon and Mercury from Dayton, Ohio. John used a Canon 10D and 180mm lens at F5.6 on 400ISO for 1 sec. exposure while mounted on a tripod.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

Shevill Mathers took this picture of a recent solar prominence on the 4th, September from Tasmania, Australia.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

NASA and Sandia National Laboratories have been using a powerful solar tower to test new spacecraft materials. The tower reflects and focuses the Sun's radiation to blast spacecraft shields with the equivalent of 1,500 suns. This research effort is tied to a potential future mission to Saturn's moon Titan, which orbits in a very high-radiation environment. They have mimicked Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere for the tests, and the shield materials seem to have passed with flying colours.

Researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis have developed a "field guide" for planet hunters searching for other Earths. They modeled the chemistry of silicate vapour and steam rich environments, similar to the early stages when an Earthlike planet is forming. During this stage, the planet is covered with a magma ocean which vapourises. This is a very distinct moment in the lifetime of a planet, and should be detectable because silicon monoxide gas is easy to see in infrared and radio wavelengths.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the largest asteroid in the Solar System, Ceres, might have huge reserves of water ice under its surface. Ceres is approximately 580 miles (930 kilometers) across, and resides with many other asteroids in a belt of material between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres' crust shows evidence of water-bearing minerals. In fact, if Ceres is 25% water, it would have more fresh water than what we have here on Earth.

This is an image of the Biblis Patera volcano's caldera which was taken by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Biblis Patera is nearly 170 km (106 miles) long, 100 km (62 miles) wide, and its summit is 3 km (1.9 miles) high. The bowl-shaped caldera might have formed when a magma chamber collapsed during an eruption of the volcano.

Even though Deep Impact smashed into Comet Tempel 1 several months ago, scientists are still analyzing the data gathered before and after the collision. Very few close up pictures of comets have ever been taken, so the data gathered by Tempel 1 is very valuable, and sometimes surprising. The nucleus of Temple 1 has layers that show in topographic relief, ranging from smooth surfaces to impact craters. It's also extremely porous, which allows the surface to heat up and cool down almost instantly when hit by sunlight.

Cassini has found that Saturn, like the Earth, has many different kinds of clouds. Some are hazy bands, high up in the planet's atmosphere, while others seem to go much deeper. These deeper clouds live about 30 km (19 miles) under the cloud surface and seem to be isolated features that have different shapes, like ovals, donuts, and swirls. There are also dozens of "lanes" which go completely around the planet, similar to the bands which can be seen in many telescopes, but are much narrower.

Greetings, fellow Sky Watchers! While the Moon will figure prominently in our studies this week, let's start off with telescopic challenge - "Barnard's Galaxy". Do you only have binoculars? Don't worry, the NGC 6871 will surely please you. If you have eyes, then you're in luck as the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Spica dazzle the western skyline and Piscid meteor comes to call. So, get thee out under the stars and in the moonlight, because...

Here's what's up!

Cassini scientists have announced a host of new findings about Saturn's rings, including some new knotted structures in the planet's F ring. One of the major discoveries is that parts of Saturn's D ring (its innermost ring) have relocated and dimmed. In fact scientists have been able to track fairly significant changes between when Voyager first visited Saturn 25 years ago. The delicate G ring seems to contain faint arcs, which might be hiding additional planets. And most surprisingly, knots in the planet's F ring seem to be arranged like a coiled spring winding around the planet.

The ESA's Integral space observatory and NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer spacecraft have found a rapidly spinning pulsar in the process of consuming a neighbour. This discovery supports the theory that pulsars spin so quickly because they pick up material from a companion, which increases their mass. Pulsars were once stars more than 8 times as large as our Sun, but their intense gravity compacted them down to a size of about 20 km (12 miles) across.

In this photograph taken by Cassini, you can see the faint moon Pandora moving through Saturn's F ring. As a shepherd moon, Pandora and its partner Prometheus confine and shape the main F ring with its gravity. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across. This image was taken on August 2, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 610,000 kilometers (379,000 miles) from Pandora.

There's a long chain of events that led from the collapse of our local cloud of gas and dust to the evolution of life here on Earth. Exactly how each of these steps unfolded is still a bit of a mystery, but scientists know that a few atomic combinations were necessary: water, and organic compounds containing carbon. Dying stars are the source for this carbon, which they belch out, creating a kind of carbon soot. From there, this soot is blasted by intense radiation to create more than 100 different molecules, including fatty acids and simple sugars.

Photographs of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have been assembled into time-lapse movies that show the planet's dynamic atmosphere and satellites. This natural view image is what you'd see if you saw the planet with your own eyes.

After 5 years of construction, the Southern African Large Telescope is now online, and has captured its first images - the beautiful Lagoon Nebula, globular star cluster 47 Tucanae; and NGC6744. The observatory has a massive 10 x 11 metre hexagonal segmented mirror, and state of the art scientific instrumentation. This new observatory provides a good view into the southern skies, which are less covered than the northern hemisphere. More scientific instruments are still being installed, and should be completed within the next few months.

This beautiful photograph looks down at Saturn, and partially through its rings from the unlit side. Apart from being a pretty picture, scientists can use images like this to precisely measure the concentration of ring particles. If you look carefully, you can also see Saturn's tiny moon Atlas (32 km or 20 miles across), as a dark spot in front of the planet.

NASA's Spirit rover has reached the summit of Husband Hill, and is now taking some time to enjoy the view. After climbing for months, the hardy rover is now 106 m (348) feet higher than it was when it first landed. This view from above gives mission planners a chance to analyze the terrain in all directions and decide where to send Spirit next.

The ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope is allowing astronomers to study the formation history of entire galaxy clusters. By studying these largest structures in the Universe, astronomers will better understand how galaxies interacted with each other in the past and in the future.

I just wanted to let you know that Phil Plait (from Bad Astronomy) and I have decided to merge our two discussion forums together into one super forum. With a combined 11,000ish members this will create one of the largest space and astronomy-related communities on the Internet. Phil and I felt that our two communities were very similar, and there's a lot of overlap between members, topics, discussions, etc, that this merger just made sense. We'll both be very active in this new forum, and be sharing administrative responsibilities.

I'm going to be taking the Universe Today forum offline on the evening of Saturday, September 3rd, and then we'll be merging the forums together. Hopefully within 24-48 hours we'll have the new forum live and running. If everything goes well all the posts from both forums will be nicely shuffled into the new structure. You should be able to just log into the new forum as you did before. I'll provide more details about how to actually reach it once it's live.

Our two news sites will remain separate, so we're just merging the forums.

You can read more details about the merge over on the Bad Astronomy forum.

Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks!

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today

Astronomers have found a fast moving pulsar on a trajectory that'll take it completely out of the Milky Way. The object, called B1508+55, is located about 7,700 light-years from Earth. The incredibly sharp radio vision of the continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has tracked this pulsar moving at approximately 1,100 km/s (670 miles/s). By tracking its position back, the astronomers have calculated that it started out in the constellation Cygnus. A powerful nearby supernova explosion probably kicked it into its current trajectory.

This newest image released by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the star cluster Trumpler 14. This cluster is located about 9,000 light years away from Earth and contains about 1,600 stars. It has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the Milky Way. The bright stars in the cluster are very young - less than 1 million years old - and will explode within a few million more years as powerful supernovae.

Astronomers working with the Subaru telescope have found a massive proto-star with a protoplanetary disk surrounding it. The star contains approximately 7 times the mass of the Sun, and astronomers weren't sure if such large stars would gather protoplanetary disks in the same way that less massive stars form them, such as our Sun. One theory, that massive stars are formed by collisions and mergers with smaller stars has lost ground because of this discovery.

Managers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have intentionally turned off one of its working three gyroscopes to try and lengthen the lifespan of the aging instrument. These gyros allow Hubble to turn and point at new locations in the sky. Engineers have figured out several techniques that will allow Hubble to perform the same science, but with just two gyros. Hopefully this will give Hubble an additional 8-months of operation, extending its availability into 2008.

My guest today is Simon Singh, author of many science-related books including Fermat's Enigma, and The Code Book. His latest book, Big Bang, investigates the origins of the search for our place in an ever expanding Universe. Simon speaks to me from his home in London, England. I just want to apologize in advance for the murky audio quality - that's what you get when you call London from Canada through Skype. I've got an audio transcript that you can refer to if you're have trouble making out what Simon said.

In this extreme contrast view of Saturn's rings, has been created by NASA in order to search for spokes. These are ghostly lanes of dust that NASA's Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope have seen in the past - so far, though, Cassini has failed to get a picture of them. The spokes are probably invisible because the Sun's angle to the rings is relatively high. As Saturn's summer in the southern hemisphere moves into autumn, the spokes should become visible again.

After examining more than 4,000 galaxies in a recent survey, astronomers have discovered that most large galaxies are filled with old stars, It was expected that these large galaxies would be regularly ingesting smaller galaxies, creating bursts of star formation. Instead, however, it's the smaller, fainter galaxies which seem to have all the hot star formation. The large, red galaxies contain the bulk of the mass in the nearby Universe, but very little is understood about their formation or evolution.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered that the long cracks discovered on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus are actually quite young, between 10 and 1,000 years old. These findings support a previous discovery that Enceladus has a very active geology, and its surface features have been changing quite recently. These cracks act like vents, allowing ice and vapour to spew out. The fact that Enceladus is so active came as a surprise to scientists, as it's hard for an object this small to hold onto its heat.

What is the nature of the mysterious dark energy which is accelerating expansion of the Universe? In a recent study published in the Physical Review Letters, physicists are proposing two scenarios: thawing and freezing. In thawing, the expansion of the Universe should eventually come to a stop, and maybe even reverse. In "freezing", the acceleration should continue indefinitely. A new mission: the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) has been proposed by NASA and the US Department of Energy, and should be able to determine which of these two scenarios is correct.

Here's a picture of Saturn's moon Enceladus side by side with the United Kingdom, to show its actual size. Enceladus is only 505 km (314 miles) across, and it could comfortably fit within the states of Arizona or Colorado.

Dust from asteroids entering our atmosphere could affect the weather more than scientists previously believed, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature. An international team of researchers have studied the dust trail of an asteroid that burned up as it descended through the atmosphere above Antarctica. The 1,000 tonne asteroid formed a cloud of micron-sized particles large enough to influence the local weather in Antarctica.

The ozone hole above the South Pole has returned, and it's on track to be one of the biggest on record. At this time, the hole is the size of Europe, but it will probably continue growing during September - bigger holes appeared in 1996 and 2000. The size of the ozone hole and the time of its appearance depends on the weather conditions in the southern hemisphere.