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Scientists have measured the spin rate of a massive black hole to be more than half the speed of light. The black hole, RX J1131-1231, is six billion light years away from earth and being able to calculate its spin rate will help in understanding how black holes form.
Rubens Reis from the University of Michigan and his colleagues measured the spin of the black hole. He said high spin rate of the black hole is a clear indicator that it is voraciously feeding on its neighbor galaxies. It is producing a luminous quasar by absorbing the gas surrounding it.
Black holes have such a strong gravitational pull that even light cannot escape them. However, the scientists were able to figure out the spin rate of the monster black hole after looking at the X-rays coming from the inner edge of the accretion disk.
The scientists caught a giant elliptical galaxy between the quasar of the black hole in question. Earth acted as a type of natural telescope because of the known phenomenon, gravitational lensing. Similar to lens or mirrors that bend and direct light, objects equivalent to the size of galaxies are able to warp light passing near them
For the first time, astronomers have used the same imaging technology found in digital cameras to take a photo of a planet outside our Solar System with a ground-based telescope.
University of Arizona researchers have taken images of a planet outside our Solar System with an Earth-based telescope using essentially the same type of imaging sensor found in digital cameras, instead of an infrared detector. Although it still has a long way to go, this new method brings astronomers a step closer to obtaining direct images of Earth-like planets from the visible part of the light spectrum.
"This is an important next step in the search for exoplanets, because imaging in visible light instead of infrared is what we likely have to do if we want to detect planets that might be suitable for harbouring life," said Jared Males, lead author on a report to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Even though the image was taken at a wavelength just beyond human eye visibility, the use of a digital camera-type imaging sensor – known as a charge-coupled device (CCD) – opens up the possibility of imaging exoplanets in visible light, which has not been possible with Earth-based telescopes until now. So far, all Earth-based images taken of exoplanets close to their stars have been infrared images, which detect the planets' heat. This limits the technology to gas giants – massive, hot planets, still young enough to shed heat. In contrast, older and possibly habitable planets that have cooled since their formation don't show up in infrared images as readily, and to image them, astronomers will have to rely on cameras capable of detecting visible light.
ESO's Very Large Telescope has revealed the largest yellow star—and one of the 10 largest stars found so far. This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1,300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star. Observations spanning over 60 years also indicate that this remarkable object is changing very rapidly.
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), Olivier Chesneau (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, France) and an international team of collaborators have found that the yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is absolutely huge—1300 times the diameter of the Sun and much bigger than was expected. This makes it the largest yellow star known. It is also in the top ten of the largest stars known—50% larger than the famous red supergiant Betelgeuse—and about one million times brighter than the Sun.
"The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise," says Chesneau. "The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut."
NASA's Project Morpheus nailed it again today with yet another successful free flight of their prototype lander, soaring higher, faster, and farther than ever before! Go Morpheus!
The FF9 test, which occurred at 3:41 p.m. EDT at Kennedy Space Center, saw the 2,300-lb (1000-kg) Morpheus craft rise to a height of 580 feet (177 meters) and travel 837 feet (255 m) downrange at 30 mph (48 km/h). After the 85-second flight the craft set down almost exactly on target—only about a foot (.3 m) off.During today's test flight the oxygen-and-methane-propelled Morpheus could have cleared the Washington Monument.
We present the results of a survey aimed at discovering and studying transiting planets with orbital periods shorter than one day (ultra--short-period, or USP, planets), using data from the {\em Kepler} spacecraft. We computed Fourier transforms of the photometric time series for all 200,000 target stars, and detected transit signals based on the presence of regularly spaced sharp peaks in the Fourier spectrum. We present a list of 106 USP candidates, of which 18 have not previously been described in the literature. In addition, among the objects we studied, there are 26 USP candidates that had been previously reported in the literature which do not pass our various tests. All 106 of our candidates have passed several standard tests to rule out false positives due to eclipsing stellar systems. A low false positive rate is also implied by the relatively high fraction of candidates for which more than one transiting planet signal was detected. By assuming these multi-transit candidates represent coplanar multi-planet systems, we are able to infer that the USP planets are typically accompanied by other planets with periods in the range 1-50 days, in contrast with hot Jupiters which very rarely have companions in that same period range. Another clear pattern is that almost all USP planets are smaller than 2 R⊕, possibly because gas giants in very tight orbits would lose their atmospheres by photoevaporation when subject to extremely strong stellar irradiation. Based on our survey statistics, USP planets exist around approximately (0.51±0.07)% of G-dwarf stars, and (0.83±0.18)% of K-dwarf stars.
After sending cargo towards the International Space Station, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket used for the flight will return nearly immediately after liftoff and return and fire its engines for the second time. The burn will allow the rocket to reenter the atmosphere in controlled flight, without breaking up and disintegrating on the way down as most booster rockets do.
The launch was delayed to March 30th.
Shows how the public and private sector can work towards better!
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the theorized dramatic expansion of the universe that put the "bang" in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, new research suggests.
If it holds up, the landmark discovery — which also confirms the existence of hypothesized ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves — would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.
Scientists are close to announcing the first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone around its parent star.
Astronomer Thomas Barclay, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, culled data collected by the Kepler space telescope to ferret out a five-planet system, the outermost of which circles toward the outer edge of its star’s habitable zone, according to reports posted Wednesday on Twitter by astronomers attending the Search for Life Beyond the Solar System conference in Tucson, Ariz.
The Most Horrific Alien Planets In Our Galaxy
The outermost planet has a radius that is estimated to be 1.1 times as big as Earth’s, Nick Ballering, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona, and scientist Jessie Christiansen, with the Ames Research Center, wrote in separate posts on Twitter.
That planet would have one third more gravity than Earth with the same density, any reports on mass?
No sorry but you stated GRAVITY and NOT weight of an object on the surface. Gravity is a direct consequence of mass. The weight you are on the surface is another story altogether and is impossible to calculate without the planets radius.It's counter-intuitive, but mass doesn't equal gravity. Mass is the measure of inertia, and has nothing to do with weight. Like 'theory' it's a scientific term that's almost always used incorrectly. To calculate your weight on an alien world the formula's:
Mm / r2 = F (weight)
The two "M's" on top are your mass and the planet's mass. The "r" below is the distance from the center of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the force gets bigger if they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you travel.
For instance, you may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth, you should weigh 318 times what you weigh at home. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size as the Earth. But, Jupiter is 11 times the radius of the Earth, so you are 11 times further from the center. This reduces the pull by a factor of 112 resulting in about 2.53 times the pull of Earth on you.
Your Weight on Other Worlds | Exploratorium
Reading previous announcement about exoplanet's this question comes up a lot 'how much would we weight there?' so the mass-weight issue is a common thing to look up
Scientists have spotted a new dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system. It's a kind of pink ice ball that's way out there, far beyond Pluto.
Astronomers used to think this region of space was a no man's land. But the new findings suggest that it holds many small worlds and there are even hints of an unseen planet bigger than Earth.
"We used to think there's just not much out there. But it turns out there are some interesting things," says Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at the Gemini Observatory, a big telescope on a mountaintop in Chile.
Until now, the only object detected in that part of our solar system was a dwarf planet called Sedna, after an Inuit goddess said to live in the frigid Arctic Ocean. That discovery was made a decade ago, and since then scientists have wondered: Is Sedna alone?
"Because you never know, if you just find one thing, is it just some strange oddity, or is it actually the first of many more objects?" Trujillo says.
The trouble is, looking for them has been hard. These distant things don't emit their own light. Light from the sun has to travel billions of miles out there, reflect off the object and then come billions of miles back. Along the way, some light gets lost.
In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent pictures back to Earth depicting an icy Saturnian moon spewing water vapor and ice from fractures, known as "tiger stripes," in its frozen surface. It was big news that tiny Enceladus—a mere 500 kilometers in diameter—was such an active place. Since then, scientists have hypothesized that a large reservoir of water lies beneath that icy surface, possibly fueling the plumes. Now, using gravity measurements collected by Cassini, scientists have confirmed that Enceladus does in fact harbor a large subsurface ocean near its south pole, beneath those tiger stripes.
"For the first time, we have used a geophysical method to determine the internal structure of Enceladus, and the data suggest that indeed there is a large, possibly regional ocean about 50 kilometers below the surface of the south pole," says David Stevenson, the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech and an expert in studies of the interior of planetary bodies. "This then provides one possible story to explain why water is gushing out of these fractures we see at the south pole."
Stevenson is one of the authors on a paper that describes the finding in the current issue of the journal Science. Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome is the paper's lead author.
Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.
While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.
"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."
Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.
Scientists say they have discovered what could be the birth of a new moon in the rings of Saturn.
Informally named Peggy, the object would become the 63rd moon in Saturn's orbit - if confirmed.
The evidence comes from a black-and-white image of the outermost ring captured by the Cassini spacecraft.
"Witnessing the birth of a tiny moon is an exciting, unexpected event," said Linda Spilker of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Scientists noticed a bump or distortion on the edge of the ring that they believe indicates the presence of some kind of object.
It is estimated that Peggy may be about a kilometre (half a mile) in diameter and it is almost certainly made of ice.
MELBOURNE, Fla. -- A SpaceX cargo capsule is on its way to an Easter Sunday rendezvous with the International Space Station after a Friday afternoon blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
SpaceX's 208-foot Falcon 9 roared from its pad at 3:25 p.m. EDT with 1.3 million pounds of thrust, disappearing into overcast skies about 80 seconds after liftoff.
Ten minutes later the Dragon capsule separated from the rocket's upper stage, deployed power-generating solar arrays and began to chase down the station.
You are aware of course that Obama with support of the Democrats stripped NASA of anyway to reach orbit or space? We must hire private enterprise to deliver materials to the space station and must use Russia to send people into space.
We have no space vehicle and no plans to make another. Ohh did I mention that Obama and the democrats cut NASA's budget to the bone?
