What drives a person to write an autobiography? Maybe being a central character in a world shaping event would do it, as with Winston Churchill. Perhaps it's purely to make money. I'm sure you can think of someone that falls into this category. Another motive could be, for the most part, a means of saying "Thanks for all those great times.". This is the way Patrick Moore comes across in his book,
Patrick Moore, The Autobiography. Without a trace of conceit, worldly drama or artificial pretension he happily writes about what is important to himself and of some of the events surrounding his time on Earth.
When Huygens landed on Titan, it saw river channels, beaches, islands and swirling fog. So Saturn's largest moon is definitely wet: not from water, but from liquid methane (aka natural gas). And if this methane can fall as rain, it's entirely possible that there could be rainbows, as the Sun's light passes through methane droplets. A methane rainbow would be a larger than a water rainbow because it bends light differently. Sunlight has trouble passing through Titan's hazy atmosphere, but you might be able to see an infrared rainbow with the right kind of camera.
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Scientists have captured an image of Saturn's magnetic field using a special instrument on board NASA's Cassini spacecraft called the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI). MIMI is able to measure how ions streaming from the Sun are pushed around by Saturn's powerful magnetic field, and create a 3-D image of the planet's surroundings. Using this instrument, the scientists discovered a powerful radiation field just inside Saturn's rings.
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Cassini has discovered oxygen ions in the atmosphere around Saturn's rings, suggesting that life isn't the only process that could produce it. Molecular oxygen, aka O2, is produced here on Earth as a byproduct of plant respiration - animals like us need it to survive. It was previously thought that O2 is so volatile that it needs the presence of life to occur in a planet's atmosphere. But on Saturn, this oxygen is generated and maintained by a reaction of the Sun's radiation and the icy particles in Saturn's rings.
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Here's a beautiful 1280x1024 wallpaper photo of Saturn taken by Cassini. Actually, this isn't a single photo, but a composite image built up of 126 separate images taken by Cassini over the course of 2 hours on October 6, 2004. The full resolution image is 8888x4544 pixels, and serves as the best picture of Saturn taken by Cassini so far. Features as small as 38 km (24 miles) across are visible at this resolution.
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Cassini discovered a large, bright and complex storm in Saturn's southern hemisphere in September 2004 which scientists dubbed the "Dragon Storm" because of its unusual shape. The Dragon Storm appears to be a long-lived storm which periodically flares up to produce dramatic white plumes which then subside. Cassini has also detected strong radio bursts generated by intense lightning storms.
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A few days ago we asked you to send in your Near-Earth asteroid questions for Dr. David J. Tholen from the University of Hawaii,
Institute for Astronomy. With the current full Moon brightening the night sky, he's got a little extra time on his hands, and rushed the answers back to us. What are the chances of an asteroid strike in our lifetime? How could we exploit asteroid minerals? Read on for his answers. Thanks to everyone who got involved, and to TheThorn from the
forum Community Support team for organizing this interview.
When Huygens plunged through Titan's atmosphere last month, the biggest telescopes here on Earth were trained on the moon. Some of the best images ever taken of Titan from Earth have been released by the European Southern Observatory. Since these images aren't constrained by the brief Cassini flybys, they can give scientists a better perspective of Titan's over a longer period. The images were taken at a specific wavelength of light that pierces through the methane haze surrounding Titan to show some of its surface features, which scientists can match up to Cassini's images.
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Scientists were surprised a few years ago when the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory discovered bursts of gamma rays weren't only coming from deep space - some are coming from the Earth too. Further observations from NASA's RHESSI satellite has shown that approximately 50 Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) emanate from our planet every day, blasting out gamma rays for about a millisecond. What causes these TGFs is still unknown, but scientists believe they're caused by the build-up of electrical charge at the tops of thunderclouds.
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Just before matter is gobbled up by a hungry black hole, it's hurtling around the monster at nearly the speed of light. This heats up the material and it can release a tremendous amount of energy as X-rays. Different elements release energy with a specific fingerprint that astronomers can detect. Researchers from Europe have measured iron as it hurtles around black holes and found a relativistic effect because it's moving so quickly. The team averaged out the X-ray light from 100 distant black holes to show the telltale signature of material about to be consumed by a black hole.
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Astronomers believe that a significant amount of our Universe is made up of mysterious dark matter (5 times more, in fact); it's invisible to every instrument, but can be detected because its gravity affects visible matter. Dark matter is usually found surrounding galaxies in an enormous halo, but British astronomers think they've found a whole galaxy just made of dark matter. The team used a radio telescope to observe the motion of a cloud of hydrogen atoms, and realized that it was spinning much too quickly, so must be largely composed dark matter to hold together.
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Amateur photographer
Paul F. Campbell took this picture of Jupiter from just outside his home in Washington, PA. Paul used a Meade ETX autostar in polar mode only, which has been supercharged by Dr. Clay Sherrod. The camera that I use is a Sac 7 CCD run by Astrovideo. The photo started out as a 1 minute video, with frames taken at 1/50 second. Paul then processed the video in registax 3 and then cleaned up the final photo in Adobe Photoshop. If you're an amateur astrophotographer, visit the
Universe Today forum and post your pictures, we might feature it in the newsletter.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has uncovered evidence for a massive sea of water ice in warm conditions near Martian equator. Since temperatures in this region can rise above freezing, it could be a good location to look for life. The frozen sea measures 800 x 900 km across (497 x 559 miles), varies up to 45 metres (150 feet) deep. Previous observations by Mars Express of methane levels do match up to this newly discovered ice, so it builds on the theory that there could be microbial life living underneath Mars' freeze dried and irradiated surface.
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Astronomers are finding supermassive black holes at the heart of nearly every galaxy they look at, and these monsters range in size depending on the size of their host galaxy. An international team of astronomers has turned up what seems to be the smallest supermassive black hole so far - only a million times the mass of our Sun - located at the centre of galaxy NGC 4395. Supermassive black holes can often be 100 times this mass, and NGC 4395 is one of a family of galaxies which tend to have very large black holes.
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Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Or are you a star? Perhaps you're a gargantuan galaxy, capricious globular cluster or a burgeoning supernova. When I'm not sure what's attracting my fancy late at night, then I can use Neil Bone's,
Deep Sky Observer's Guide to aid in identifying jewel-like sparkles in the sky so high.
There's no escaping the overwhelming light of the Moon, but who says we can't enjoy a bright star cluster? The M 41 awaits you! As the Moon goes full this week, we'll enjoy studying new lunar regions as well as learning a bit about Procyon, Capella and Rigel. Comet K4 LINEAR and Q2 Machholz are well positioned for viewing, but Southern Australia? You're in luck as the Moon occults Jupiter for you this coming weekend! So turn your eyes to the skies...
Because here's what's up!
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Experienced observers tend to think its all so very simple. Buying a scope, setting it up, and using it for the first time lies well behind them on the learning curve. But if you really think about it learning to use an astronomical telescope is no trivial matter. So after being prompted by one UT reader, Astro.Geekjoy's Jeff Barbour decided to set down in word's how to go about making a start of our High Art and Science. Sometime's things aren't as simple as they seem...
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Thanks to data gathered by Cassini and Huygens, scientists know that Titan's atmosphere contains significant amounts of ammonia - and this chemical could be responsible for the weathering on the moon's surface. Researchers from the University of Arizona believe that Cassini will eventually find that Titan has a layer of liquid ammonia-and-water underneath a solid crust of water ice. It's this liquid ammonia that could be creating the cryovolcanic flows discovered by Cassini on its first close Titan flyby in 2004.
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A massive gamma ray flare flashed so brightly in December that it briefly outshone the full Moon. Even though it occurred 50,000 light-years away, the flare demonstrated the power of these events, disrupting the Earth's ionosphere. The flare occurred on the surface of a rapidly spinning, highly magnetic neutron star called a magnetar, which can release tremendous amounts of energy through a process called magnetic reconnection. We're lucky the flare occurred so far away; if it had happened within 10 light-years, it could have destroyed the Earth's ozone layer.
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Astronomers from the University of Southampton have spotted the fastest spinning X-ray pulsar ever seen - it's rotating 600 times a second! The object, designated IGR J00291+5934, was first spotted as a bright X-ray object by the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL space telescope in December. Further analysis revealed that it's part of a binary system, siphoning material off of a companion star. The two stars orbit one another every 2.5 hours, separated by the distance of the Earth and the Moon.
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In the last month planet hunters have uncovered 12 new worlds orbiting other stars, bringing the total planet count to 145. Two European planet hunting teams have discovered 6 gas giants as part of the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Search (HARPS), and an American team uncovered 5 more using the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii. And a single, Pluto-sized planet was discovered orbiting a pulsar by Penn State's Alex Wolszczan and Caltech's Maciej Konacki.
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Just two days after visiting Titan, Cassini swept past another Saturnian moon: Enceladus. The spacecraft got within just 1,180 kilometers (730 miles) of the bright moon. Enceladus is unusual because of the high reflectivity of its surface, which resembles freshly fallen snow. But in this close-up view, the best ever taken, it has a much more wrinkled look. Enceladus is only 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
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As early as a billion years after the Big Bang, clusters of galaxies were already forming together according to observations made with the Subaru Telescope. This is much earlier than astronomers had expected, and shows that galaxies didn't need to fully form before they began organizing into clusters. A team from Japan studied hundreds of galaxies approximately 12.7 billion light years away and found that many were forming small clusters even as they were forming some of their first stars.
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In some ways, the bright auroras at Saturn's poles are very similar to our own Northern/Southern lights here on Earth. But in other ways, they're very different, and it's a mystery that has been puzzling astronomers since they were first discovered 25 years ago. Saturn's auroras can brighten for days (compared to minutes here Earth), and can stay still while the planet rotates underneath. Now scientists have used observations from Hubble and the Cassini spacecraft to develop a new theory about how Saturn's magnetic field interacts with the solar wind to produce its unusual auroras.
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft spotted a large impact crater on Titan during its flyby on Tuesday. The crater is 440 km (273 miles) wide, and has unusual parallel lines on it (researchers have nicknamed them "cat scratches"). It's believed that these lines could have been formed by winds, like sand dunes on Earth or Mars, but it's also possible that another geological process is at work.
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Amateur astronomy may very well be the most popular and quickly growing scientific hobby in the world today. This popularity undoubtedly has a basis in the fact that astronomy covers a lot of "turf". Meanwhile the existence of the Internet has made it possible for observers to share their love and knowledge of the sky while working together and advancing the state of the art. Finally, the fact that telescopes and binoculars are so readily available in great diversity of cost, quality, and capacity doesn't hurt either.
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its fourth flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on Tuesday. At its closest approach, the spacecraft swept past the surface at an altitude of only 1,580 km (982 miles). It took images that will help scientists study the moon's clouds, atmosphere and surface structures. NASA is also hoping Cassini will be able to spot where Huygens landed on Titan in January, to give researchers a better idea of the terrain that the probe landed in.
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Even though SMART-1 has only just reached the Moon, controllers with the European Space Agency have decided to extend its mission a year, wrapping up in August 2006. This will give the ion-powered spacecraft more time to map the Moon's surface in high resolution. Another benefit of stretching out the time frame is the fact that spacecraft will be placed into a more stable orbit, conserving its fuel. SMART-1 should arrive at its final science orbit by the end of February.
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Researchers have used the Chandra X-Ray Observatory to understand just how large supermassive black holes can get by performing a very detailed census of the mysterious objects. These are the gigantic black holes, with millions of times the mass of our Sun, that sit at the centre of almost every galaxy. The largest of them reach 100 million solar masses and gained this weight early - then they ran out of material to consume. The smaller holes, between 10 and 100 million solar masses, have been more frugal with the gas and dust they consume, and continue to grow to this day.
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From the big to the small, physicists want to know it all. But what good is this knowledge unless you can bring it together and make something of it? Michael Mallary in his book
Our Improbable Universe connects quarks to the likelihood of a deity and makes a lot of it. Sometimes rambling but always pertinent, his musings on subjects as diverse as multi-universes and the good fortune of having fissile material in the Earth's mantle makes for a very interesting and thought provoking read.
Scientists working with the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit believe it's discovered another rock that was affected by liquid water in the past. Dubbed "Peace", the rock contains more sulfate salt than any other rock Spirit has examined so far. Normally this sulfur is at the surface of the rock, but Peace has this material deep inside too. The scientists have two theories for how these sulfates formed, but both involve large amounts of liquid water.
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The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft took this image of the central region of the Valles Marineris. This 4,000 km (2,500 mile) long gash in the surface of Mars was probably created when the relatively nearby Tharsis bulge rose up from volcanic activity to a height of more than 10 km (6 miles). A similar situation exists here on Earth (on a smaller scale), at the Kenya rift in east Africa.
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Now who put that "Valentine" up there in the stars? Although the splendid IC 1805 will be lost to this week's Moon, there will be no shortage of things to view as we explore selenography with dorsa, mountains, impact craters and "hidden" surprises! With plenty of history as well as lunar features to tantalize all observers, we'll begin the week with a day of "love", and learn to love the Moon and all its amazing details by week's end. So get out your telescopes...
Because here's what's up!
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There should be relatively safe orbits within the swirling gas and dust of a newly forming solar system that could allow planets to gain mass without being destroyed. This is according to a new simulation developed by astronomers from the University of Indiana. They built a simulation that showed how gravitational instabilities form which can bring planets together quickly. New theories of planetary formation predict that large gaseous planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, need to hurry up and form before their material is blown away by the growing star.
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Astronomers from Carnegie and Caltech have pinpointed the exact location of the first gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift observatory on December 23, 2004. The team used the telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to watch the fading afterglow of the explosion in the constellation of Puppis. Three more bursts were detected in January, and they have also been studied by various telescopes around the world. Researchers are hoping they can use these intense explosions as a kind of flashlight, to illuminate distant objects which are normally too dark to study.
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The massive Ariane 5-ECA finally lifted off on Saturday, carrying two satellites into orbit, and demonstrating that the launcher is ready for business. The rocket blasted off from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana at 2103 GMT (4:03 pm EST), and deployed its payloads about 90 minutes later. The primary payload was the Spanish XTAR-EUR military communications satellite, but it was also carrying Sloshsat, a satellite designed to measure how liquids behave in microgravity. The Ariane 5-ECA can carry up to 10 tonnes to geostationary transfer orbit.
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Amateur photographer
John Chumack took this picture of Spiral Galaxy NGC-253, which is located in the constellation of Sculptor. The telescope was a Takahashi Epsilon 250mm and ST8XE CCD camera, on a Software Bisque Paramount ME, taken on Mount Joy, New Mexico, New Mexico Skies Resort. John operated the telescope remotely from Dayton, Ohio using Arnie Rosner's
Rent-A-Scope setup. John has been imaging the sky for 2 decades, and has an amazing collection of pictures at his website:
Galactic Images. If you're an amateur astrophotographer, visit the
Universe Today forum and post your pictures, we might feature it in the newsletter.
By tracing back the family tree of cyanobacteria, a researcher from Washington University in St. Louis believes these tiny organisms began life in fresh water, not salt water as most biologists theorized. Cyanobacteria use light, water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and biomass, and they probably got their start 2 billion years ago in fresh water, and then evolved to survive in saltier environments.
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The massive Ariane 5-ECA rocket is ready for its second flight this weekend, after its first attempt ended in destruction back in 2002. The 50m (160 ft) tall rocket is capable of carrying more than 10-tonnes into geostationary orbit. On this second test flight, the ECA is equipped with two satellites: the Spanish XTAR-EUR military communications satellite and SloshSat, which will see how fluids work in orbit. If everything goes well, the ECA should lift off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana on Saturday.
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Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have uncovered a surprising link between air pollution levels over land, and the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean. These tiny, but hardworking, aquatic plants carry out half the Earth's photosynthesis, and are responsible for removing tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Normal dust storms produce iron which the phytoplankton can't use, but when it's modified by sulfur dioxide pollution, the iron becomes soluble and can trigger phytoplankton growth.
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The inner planets in our solar system are largely made of rock, which are formed from silicon. But in a different solar system, with a different distribution of minerals, planets could be mostly formed from carbon instead. Inside these planets, where the heat and pressure are intense, this carbon would form layers of diamonds. Small versions of these planets fall to Earth all the time, in the form of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which contain different carbon compounds, such as carbides, organics and occasionally even diamonds.
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Astronomers have known for a few years now that there's a direct connection between the size of a galaxy and the supermassive black hole that lurks at its centre. Until recently, they haven't been sure why this relationship exists. A new computer simulation from the Max Planck Institute has shown that growing black holes release a blast of powerful energy that actually regulates the amount of star formation in the galaxy. The bigger the galaxy, the longer this takes to happen, so the black hole can become larger.
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This photograph of Mimas, one of Saturn's moons, shows a head-on view of its largest crater Herschel - making it look like the Death Star from the Star Wars series of movies. Mimas is only 398 kilometers (247 miles), so the impact that formed this crater probably nearly destroyed the moon. Herschel is 130 kilometers wide (80 miles), and has a tall central peak similar to many craters on our own Moon. Cassini took this image on January 16, 2005 at a distance of only 213,000 kilometers (132,000 miles).
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Born February 15, 1564, Galileo Galilee was a scientist, philosopher, mathematician, professor, optician, musician, painter, and father of three. Despite all these accomplishments, it is easy to conceive that - like many amateur astronomers of today - one of his greatest loves was to turn eye and telescope upon the wonders of the night sky. In this article by Astro.Geekjoy's Jeff Barbour we retrace a few of his steps and come to a deeper insight into the kinds of questions driving his personal quest for understanding.
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Radio telescopes around the world listened for signals from Huygens to measure wind speeds on Titan as the probe descended through its atmosphere last month. The telescopes discovered that winds on Titan are very weak near the surface, and then increase in intensity with altitude. Huygens passed through winds going nearly 435 kph (270 mph) at an altitude of 120 km (75 miles). Cassini was originally supposed to make these measurements, but there was a configuration problem with one of its receivers.
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NASA has released new colour images of Saturn's northern hemispheres taken by Cassini - and the Ringed Planet is looking a little blue. This blue colour of Saturn's atmosphere is probably linked to the cloud-free nature of the upper atmosphere, but imaging scientists still aren't really sure. Icy moon Mimas is set against the image, and a few large craters are visible on its surface. This image was taken on January 18, 2005, when the spacecraft was approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the dusty disc of planetary material surrounding an extremely low-mass brown dwarf. The failed star, called OTS 44, is only 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and is located 500 light-years away in the Chamaeleon constellation. Previously, the smallest brown dwarf known to have such a disc was twice as massive. Astronomers are now wondering if a habitable world could form around such a small, dim dwarf.
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Astronomers from Penn State and Caltech have found the smallest extrasolar planet yet, orbiting a pulsar 1,500 light-years away. The small planet - the fourth discovered around this pulsar - has 1/5th the mass of Pluto, and orbits approximately the same distance as the asteroid belt orbits the Sun. The pulsar is spinning quickly, and gives off pulses of radiation at a very regular rate. Fluctuations in the pulses can then be used to calculate the orbits of planets going around them down to the size of large asteroids.
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