Our daily universe: coldest star?

Astronomers recently discovered perhaps the coldest known star in our viewable universe. So cold, in fact, that it’s thought to be about the same temperature as a cup of hot tea or about 212 degree Fahrenheit. By star standards, that’s extremely chilly. The Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit by comparison.

Here’s an article from space.com and a photo:

CREDIT: ESO/L. Calçada - This artist’s impression shows the pair of brown dwarfs named CFBDSIR 1458+10. Observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and two other telescopes have shown that this pair is the coolest pair of brown dwarfs found so far. The two components are both about the same size as the planet Jupiter.

Our daily universe IV: Jewel Box cluster

NASA/ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

Explanation from the European Southern Observatory:

This image is a “close-up” view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 4755, or the Jewel Box cluster. Several very bright, pale blue supergiant stars, a solitary ruby-red supergiant and a variety of other brilliantly coloured stars are visible in the image, as well as many much fainter ones, often with intriguing colours. The huge variety in brightness exists because the brighter stars are 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun, while the dim points are less than half the mass of the Sun. This is the first image of an open galactic cluster with imaging extending from the far ultraviolet to the near-infrared.

Did you catch that? The brighter stars in this photo are 15-20 times the mass of the Sun.

Our daily universe III

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope delivers for us this picture of the center of our galaxy.

A view from the bustling center of our galactic metropolis. Spitzer Space Telescope offers us a fresh, infrared view of the frenzied scene at the center of our Milky Way, revealing what lies behind the dust. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Here’s an article and brief explanation from Science Daily:

In this Spitzer image, the myriad of stars crowding the center of our galaxy creates the blue haze that brightens towards the center of the image. The green features are from carbon-rich dust molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are illuminated by the surrounding starlight as they swirl around the galaxy’s core. The yellow-red patches are the thermal glow from warm dust. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dust are associated with bustling hubs of young stars. These materials, mixed with gas, are required for making new stars.

The brightest white feature at the center of the image is the central star cluster in our galaxy. At a distance of 26,000 light years away from Earth, it is so distant that, to Spitzer’s view, most of the light from the thousands of individual stars is blurred into a single glowing blotch. Astronomers have determined that these stars are orbiting a massive black hole that lies at the very center of the galaxy.

The region pictured here is immense, with a horizontal span of 2,400 light-years (5.3 degrees) and a vertical span of 1,360 light-years (3 degrees). Though most of the objects seen in this image are located near the galactic center, the features above and below the galactic plane tend to lie closer to Earth.

The image is a three-color composite, showing infrared observations from two of Spitzer instruments. Blue represents 3.6-micron light and green shows 8-micron light, both captured by Spitzer’s infrared array camera. Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer. The data is a combination of observations from the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) project, and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer Galactic survey (MIPSGAL).

Our daily universe II

Assuming there’s a clear sky wherever you’re located, the moon will appear 14 percent larger than normal tonight.

According to Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.:

The last full Moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993. I’d say it’s worth a look.

One side of the moon (the perigee side) is simply going to come closer to Earth than normal, and the event is expected to have no effect on tides.

Here’s a video:

Our daily universe I

I’ve been thinking about starting a series of posts like this for a few days. I will periodically, or daily if possible but probably not likely, feature one of the many breathtaking shots being delivered to us from the Hubble telescope and other telescopes from around the world, or alternately, I’ll feature a story about some new area of space exploration or discovery. I was interested in such a series because I think it can remind us how immensely small we humans are, and nay, how immensely small Earth itself is compared to the sprawling and often hostile world outside of our own cozy atmosphere.

The well-established fact by now is that elements that find their beginnings in the cores of stars and other objects in space are also found right here on Earth (iron for instance), so much so that humans not only share a common bond with, say, monkeys, birds and fish (through the engine of evolution by natural selection), but that we share a common bond with the entire universe! This sort of makes the meager miracles and such in the Bible seem wholly unimpressive when compared with the sheer magnificence and majesty of the cosmos. And it’s that kernel of truth that once made astrophysicist [[Neil deGrasse Tyson]] deliver one of the most powerful “sermons” I have ever heard, in or out of church.

Here is the Tyson’s speech, and what follows is my first entry in this series, the [[Crab Nebula]].

Here is the Crab Nebula, the only remnant of a supernova that can be seen with a mid-range telescope:

A Giant Hubble Mosaic of the Crab Nebula
Source: Hubblesite.org

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, all that remains of a tremendous stellar explosion. Observers in China and Japan recorded the supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, in 1054.

[Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)]

((http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire/pr2005037a/))

Here is a video about the Crab Nebula:

Huge news from the cosmos

I learned about this a couple weeks ago, but as folks can see from the long tenure John Milton enjoyed at the top of this site, I haven’t devoted as much time to writing as usual as of late. More on that in another post.

But for now, one of the most significant discoveries, at least in my lifetime, was made in late September, when astronomers found the only planet besides Earth that is the right size and in the correct position to support life.

Credit: Lynette Cook; This illustration offers a glimpse of the Gliese 581 system from the perspective of planet G.

Orbiting around a red dwarf star in what is known as the Goldilocks Zone some 20 light years away, the planet known as Gliese 581g exists in an area of its galaxy that is neither too close or too far away from the star to foster ideal temperatures for life. According to Carnegie Institute astronomer Paul Butler,

This is really the first ‘Goldilocks’ planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface. …

Everything we know about life is that it absolutely requires liquid water. The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it’s not too hot, not too cold …  and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool.

As we know, Gliese 581g does have water on it, and some scientists think it most probably has liquid water, given the temperate weather conditions. It’s believed that the average temperature range varies between -84 to -49 F with no atmospheric effects added in, while the numbers jump to -35 to 10 F with greenhouse gas effects figured in. That sounds pretty chilly, but half, or more, of the planet’s surface is on the dark side sitting away from its sun, while the bright side could, as I’ve read, approach as high as 160 F.

Either way, it’s  a huge leap forward for science and for those interested in the question of whether life exists on other planets. Remember, of course, that when we say “life,” we don’t mean highly developed mammals like humans or apes, but most likely, we are referring to microbes and other simpler forms. With this discovery and others like it that have turned up water sources elsewhere in the cosmos, perhaps the only question that remains is: Not whether some form of life exists elsewhere, but how long will it be until we, in fact, discover it too?

Solar powered

The photo below illustrates quite well the point I was making about Earth’s near insignificance when compared to the grand scale of other objects in space, and indeed, the universe itself. If I had created things, I think I probably would have made the Sun closer to Earth and much less astronomically disproportionate to the size of our planet, such that a mere solar flare could not in an instant, vaporize us all. As one can see here, a wave of solar gas jutting out from the Sun is many, many times longer than the entire diameter of our planet. The Earth obviously isn’t that close to the sun. It was added to the photo to show scale. Here’s more pictures Life and Getty.

Credit: Getty

[Caption: OCTOBER 25: Astronomers at the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured this image of a solar prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on October 25, 2002. Two large prominences were spotted and one is shown here with the Earth in scale to demonstrate the immense size of this solar phenomenon. (Photo by SOHO/ESA/NASA/Getty Images)]

Pale Blue Dot photo turns 20

I didn’t catch it earlier, but Feb. 13 2010 marked the 20th anniversary of the now-famous Pale Blue Dot photograph taken from the Voyager 1 some 3.7 billion miles away from Earth. The faint blue speck to the right and inset, that’s our planet.

Credit: From Voyager 1

I found this site today, which references the anniversary and an extraordinary and humbling quote from former author and astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996):

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

[Original caption: This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken byVoyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters – violet, blue and green – and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.]

And I feel fine …

Credit: University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is a picture of what scientist believe was a meteor that possibly came between Earth and the Moon on April 14. It was visible in five Midwestern states that night. Here is what James Lattis, University of Wisconsin Space Place Director, had to say about it in a USA Today story:

Even something relatively small, like the size of a golf ball, will light up the sky when it comes through. They tend to disintegrate completely while they’re still many miles above the earth.

The video was bizarre enough to watch, invoking in my mind, scenes from various catastrophe movies, namely Armageddon and Deep Impact, and if I was driving in one of these states that night and saw such a scene, I would be bracing for impact! Scientists believe the meteor was part of the Gamma Virginids shower, but one would imagine that we would have had some forewarning that such an object would come that close to Earth. Did they not detect it? Are sky-altering events so common so as not to atleast let the rest of us in on it? I would think so. Regardless, here is the video, including a few different perspectives:

Doomsday Clock to strike midnight in 2012?

Like its doomsday-foretelling predecessors (The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact and others — here’s an apparent exhaustive list), the new movie 2012 gives us a taste of the end of days, this time via a prophecy that the Sun and Earth align with the center of the galaxy, which, consequently, is an annual occurrence, as NASA reminds us, which happens each December. It’s called the winter solstice.

But we shouldn’t let annoying little scientific facts get in the way of giving us a good scare. Since its initial setting in 1947 at 11:53 p.m., the actual Doomsday Clock, maintained by the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has teetered on the brink for half a century, varying between 11:43 p.m.in 1991, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and 11:58 p.m. in 1953, when the same two countries tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other. Suffice it to say, relations between the U.S. and Russia will probably determine our fate, at least our fate based on international relations. Here’s a graphical look at our past potential dates with destiny:

Graph showing the changes in the time of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From wikipedia.org.

Graph showing the changes in the time of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From wikipedia.org.

The movie 2012, however, provides, not an international breakdown, but a cosmic episode on the scale of a gamma ray burst, a black hole eating up the Earth or a comet colliding with Earth that is based on Mayan soothsayers’ opinions on when the world will come to a combustible end. According to an essay in The New York Times, folks are being scared out of their boots by supposed end of days foretellings.

NASA astronomer David Morrison said he’s gotten numerous letters and e-mails from folks wondering how they should prepare for the end.

“I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money,” Dr. Morrison said. “There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck [or for any other reason, religion included].”

Dr. Morrison said he had been getting about 20 letters and e-mail messages a day from people as far away as India scared out of their wits. In an e-mail message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012.

It’s unclear to me why people are giving so much credibility to prophecies written by ancient people with no more insight into future events — in truth, far less — than you or I. This is a culture which regularly performed human sacrifices and worshiped the Sun, and did both simultaneously, in fact. Four people would hold the human being down on a stone by all fours, while another stabbed the person and pulled out its still-beating heart, so that the sacrificial human got to see its own thumping life in someone else’s hand before the cheering masses. True, the Mayans were highly developed — civilized would be a misnomer — people in their ability to build great structures, but to give any credence whatsoever to a prophecy told under such an archaic belief system is just as arcane. One can only wonder: were these supposed phophecies handed down from the ball of hydrogen gas being worshiped 93 million miles away?

The above essay notes, though there’s not much to be concerned about regarding the year 2012, we still have plenty potential realities to confront, not the least of which are real natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamies and climate change and manmade ones like nuclear proliferation. Although, if we insist on worrying ourselves with some sort of crisis hurling toward us from the cosmos, one might consider learning more about the asteroid Apophis, set to cruise under our satellite orbits, about 22,000 miles from Earth, on Friday the 13th in April 2029. Or, just go see the movie.