Space Scan

The cosmos never ceases to amaze us with its sheer size and splendor. The star studded sky above us and the vast unexplored eternity that lay beyond us have always captured both human mind and human heart. While the glitz and shine of the stars and the spectacular celestial aura have drawn us towards them, it is impossible to deny that our space programs are barely at a stage of infancy, with 99.9% of the universe still left unexplored. It is this magic of finding something new each day, each moment, each time you point your telescope in to the sky that hold our imagination and ignites our senses. The universe around us is so kind that you can randomly look at any part of it and it still will give you a surprise or two. You can call that either our luck or our sheer ignorance.

In 2004, people saw comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacking into Jupiter. It was pretty cool. Now, scientists are even more excited that an asteroid speeding at 8 miles per second is on its way to hit planet Mars. Even though it is predicted that there is only 1 in 75 chances of hitting the Red Planet, this would leave a heck of a dent were it to hit.

It allows scientists to get some good data and images with that they could study better about the planet. Named 2007 WD5, the asteroid is likely to hit Mars by the end of January next year.

The 400 light-years away open cluster in the constellation of Taurus and among the nearest to the Earth — Pleiades — seems to be ever happening, now that small, rocky planets may be in the making in the cluster!

It is all happening around one of the hundreds of stars — known as HD 23514 — in the Pleiades cluster and interestingly, the forming planets could resemble either Earth or Mars! The star is found to be surrounded by an extraordinary number of hot dust particles, and these perhaps are the planets’ building blocks, researchers believe.

Our solar system is by far the largest of about 130 planetary systems that exist. There are stars other than the sun such as 55 Cancri and mu Ara around which planets have been found to orbit. The 55 Cancri is about 41 light-years away from solar system, in the constellation of cancer.

A new fifth planet has been found to be revolving around the 55 Cancri star making it the only quintuple planetary system other than our own solar system. However, the 55 Cancri is much older and dimmer, than the sun, with only 58% of the sun’s luminosity. Researchers contemplate that the new planet should be 45 times the mass of earth and around half the size of Saturn. The discovery has been made and announced by a team from UC Berkeley and Carnegie planet search team. UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy said

Recently, the scientists monitored the sky for what they call ‘teenager galaxies’. It is extremely hard to find young galaxies because they are just a tiny spot in the sky. Nevertheless, the scientists managed to locate these young guys in space with their massive telescopes. A group of international researchers discovered and identified 27 pre galactic fragments. These are supposedly the young building blocks of big galaxies in the universe.

Cambridge University scientist Martin Haehnelt used European Southern Observatory’s very large telescope to keep an eye on part of the universe. The monitoring was done for a constant 92 hours. Apparently, the scientists think that the galaxies are formed when smalled chunks of spatial objects get together. The Cambridge researchers did manage to locate the smaller proto galaxies in the universe.

When our human mind was still busy exploring the various fascinating aspects of the universe, new and more mysterious things outside it awaits our attention. The concepts of parallel universe and life forms existing on other planets have got their share of our interests.

However, the next big discovery on the astronomical scene is that of the massive hydrogen gas cloud which is speeding towards our galaxy — The Milky Way. This cloud of hydrogen gas is known as the Smith’s cloud, named after the scientist who first discovered it in 1963.

Till date, it was not clear as to if the cloud has emerged from the Milky Way or is coming towards it until recently, when the scientists confirmed that the latter was true. When measured with the help of the Green Bank Telescope, the cloud was found to be 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide.

Out of the various experiments conducted in space, the space tether experiment conducted by a team of students calling themselves YES2 is probably the most interesting and record breaking experiment. The primary idea was to create a space tether that will help the folks in space deliver parcels back to earth. The tether was built to be 19.7 mile long and Foton M3 spacecraft was responsible for uncoiling this tether in space.

So, essentially a mail delivery system is what these people designed. Even though the tether system broke the record of longest man made object flown in space, the experimental project was a failure. Due to a ‘technical snag’, the system failed. The extremely imperative telemetry data of the system stopped functioning.

When we look at the star filled night sky most of us do not realize we are looking back in time. The stars, planets and other matters in the space separated from us by tens, hundreds and thousands of light years, shows the history of the cosmic objects when the light from it started to travel from it towards the earth. Hidden among the cosmic wonders is the history of the origin of the universe waiting to be unraveled to humankind. It will not be long when astronomers can actually witness the big bang and the beginning of creation of the universe.

Astrophysicists are optimistic that the new technologies will aid them in opening new vistas on the origin of the universe and its complexities. In a series of articles published in the latest edition of Science, leading astrophysicists have explained how new technologies are helping them to unravel the cosmic web theory by which the universe is held together by dark matters.

Dark matters are difficult to be traced, as they do not reflect light waves. New technologies capable of analyzing radio waves are capable of detecting these mysterious dark matters that hold galaxies together with their gravitational attraction. In 2013 James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in the space that scientists expect will help in detecting neutral hydrogen - the remnants of the ingredients from which the first stars were born.

In 2011, the European Space Agency will launch its GALA experiment by which the stars in the universe will be mapped and their motions measured. Another important discovery the astrophysicists are waiting for is the tracking of the cosmic baryons in space using high-resolution ultra-violet optics. Baryons are protons and atomic nuclei that are present in every object big or small from stars to the tiniest insect on earth. The missing baryons will help resolve all arguments on the standard cosmological model.

Source: raw story
image:many universes

In 1990, when the Hubble space telescope was launched in space, the orbiting telescope opened a new era of cosmic information. Since then, it has been an astounding source of information with its most splendid breathtaking pictures of inner space objects and events. However, with the passing of time, Hubble’s machineries also started aging and the death knell of the telescope was heard. Nevertheless, Hubble enthusiasts had in the end succeeded in their mission of rescuing the telescope from abandonment.

The American Astronomical Society has announced in Austin, Texas that astronomers would undertake a spacewalk in August this year, to install a cosmic-origin spectrograph and replace Hubble’s wide-field camera with a more advanced third generation wide-field camera.

For centuries, men have wondered whether we are alone in this universe or there are other living beings similar to us in the giant cosmos. While science fictions have delved into the world of extra-terrestrials, but astronomers are yet to discover anything close to it. In a new study presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, astronomers say that they are optimist about finding a large number of earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy and even in galaxies in the vicinity of Milky Way. The evidence of the existence of a large number of Sun-like stars with discs of cosmic dust around them suggests existence of a large number of planetary systems. The cosmic dusts are rocky debris, the by-products of planets formed by collision and merging of giant rocks.

NASA’s Kepler mission due to be launched next year is expected to bring news about the undiscovered worlds. The precondition for the existence of life lies in the earth-like planets lying at the right distance from its parent star so that its surface is not too hot or too cold to support liquid water, the zone astronomer’s call the ‘Goldilock’s zone’.