ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Even small telescopes can make big discoveries.
Though the KELT North telescope in southern Arizona carries a lens no more powerful than a high-end digital camera, it’s just revealed the existence of two very unusual faraway planets.
One planet is a massive, puffed-up oddity that could change ideas of how solar systems evolve. The other orbits a very bright star, and will allow astronomers to make detailed measurements of the atmospheres of these bizarre worlds. (more…)
Hosted by world-renowned astrophotographer Adam Block at the UA’s Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, a group of sky and astronomy enthusiasts watched Venus cross the sun from the highest vantage point in Southern Arizona.
On Nov. 24, 1639, in the tiny village of Much Hoole not far from Liverpool, England, a poor farmer’s son and self-taught astronomer affixed a sheet of paper in front of a makeshift telescope pointed at the sun and waited.
Thirty-five minutes before sunset, a dark, round spot appeared right next to the bright disc that was the sun’s face projected on the paper, and made Jeremiah Horrocks, only 20 years old at the time, the first known human to predict, observe and record a transit – the passage of a planet across the sun as seen from Earth.
Almost 373 years later, a group of sky enthusiasts is gathered beneath the dome of one of the University of Arizona’s observatories on Mount Lemmon just north of Tucson, Ariz. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a “super-Earth” planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.
“Spitzer has amazed us yet again,” said Bill Danchi, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.”(more…)
Some of the most valuable “real estate” for humans isn’t on Earth at all but rather above the planet’s atmosphere, where all manner of human-made objects orbit. The problem is that those orbits are too crowded with dead satellites and debris, making new launches riskier.
Robert Winglee has spent years developing a magnetized ion plasma system to propel a spacecraft at ultra-high speeds, making it possible to travel to Mars and return to Earth in as little time as 90 days. The problem is that cost and other issues have dampened the desire to send astronauts to Mars or any other planet. (more…)
Complex organic compounds, including many important to life on Earth, were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the primordial solar system. Scientists at the University of Chicago and NASA Ames Research Center came to this conclusion after linking computer simulations to laboratory experiments.
Fred Ciesla, assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago, simulated the dynamics of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and the planets formed. Although every dust particle within the nebula behaved differently, they all experienced the conditions needed for organics to form over a simulated million-year period. (more…)
*Youths echo findings from International Youth Foundation report, which urges actions to help young people succeed.*
REDMOND, Wash. — March 27, 2012 — The numbers are staggering: Our planet has the largest youth population ever, with more than 1 billion people aged 15 to 24, and the figure is racing to 1.5 billion by 2035, according to “Opportunity for Action,” a new report being released today from the International Youth Foundation (IYF). The report shows that while some youths are succeeding, millions of others are not because they don’t have access to the necessary education, skills and opportunities.
Microsoft commissioned the “Opportunity for Action” report to bring attention to the urgency of the global youth opportunity divide — the gap between those who have access to a good education and the technology, skills and connections to be successful, and those who do not. No region of the world escapes the unsettling picture captured by the report. In Brazil, approximately 40 percent of firms have difficulty finding qualified staff to fill job vacancies due to low-quality education. In Asia, 70 percent of working youths are engaged in the agricultural sector, where jobs are seasonal and offer no protections or access to safety nets. And in sub-Saharan Africa, youths are grossly under-employed, leaving 72 percent of young people living on less than two dollars per day. (more…)
Washington, D.C. — Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth’s crust: the lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere. Understanding this boundary is central to our knowledge of plate tectonics and thus the formation and evolution of our planet as we know it today. A new technique for observing this transition, particularly in the portion of Earth’s mantle that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean basin, has led Carnegie and NASA Goddard scientist Nick Schmerr to new insight on the origins of the lithosphere and asthenosphere. His work is published March 23 in Science.
The lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, or LAB, represents the transition from hot, convecting mantle asthenosphere to overlying cold and rigid lithosphere. The oceanic lithosphere thickens as it cools over time, and eventually sinks back into the mantle at Earth’s so-called subduction zones. (more…)
A new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky with more than a half-billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission was unveiled by NASA Wednesday.
“Today WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community,” said Edward L. (Ned) Wright, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the mission’s principal investigator, who began working on the mission in 1998. (more…)
