SUMMARY: A black hole is a cosmic abyss with gravity of such intensity that nothing, not even light, escapes it. Now, for the first time, a team of astronomers has released an image of the space anomaly, which is created when a star collapses. Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University and the World Science Festival provides context and talks to Judy Woodruff about this scientific breakthrough.
SUMMARY: China has become the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon, in territory previously untouched. The move signals China’s intent to broaden space exploration for purposes of both military achievement and scientific discovery. Miles O’Brien explains to William Brangham how China established communication with this remote area, which is characterized by enormous lunar craters.
SUMMARY: One conflict in the ongoing culture wars seems to suggest that science and religion cannot coexist peacefully.
Alan Lightman is a distinguished physicist and a novelist who teaches at MIT. Tonight, he shares his Humble Opinion on how to make space for both facts and spirituality.
SUMMARY: On Independence Day NASA's Juno spacecraft (NASA home page) reaches the largest planet in our solar system and is expected to transmit pictures the 1.8 billion miles back to Earth. But even more interesting than pictures, scientists hope to collect tons of data to help them understand Jupiter's formation — and our own. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien joins William Brangham.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): The holiday weekend is often a time for big blockbuster movies, and it's safe to say that concept has not been lost on NASA.
The space agency has just released a kind of movie trailer about what it hopes will be a nail-biting night on the Fourth of July. That's when the Juno spacecraft, which is going to fly closer to Jupiter than any spacecraft has before, is supposed to reach its destination. But getting to Jupiter comes with its own risks.
This is how NASA describes it in the trailer.
MAN: It's a monster. It's unforgiving. It's relentless. It's spinning around so fast its gravity is like a giant slingshot, slinging rocks, dust, electrons, whole comets. Anything that gets close to it becomes its weapon.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: OK, that got my attention.
Our science correspondent Miles O'Brien is here to spell out some more.
MILES O'BRIEN, Science Correspondent (NewsHour): William, I should have brought the popcorn.
(LAUGHTER)
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Exactly.
We have been to Jupiter before. NASA's been there a couple of times. What's different this time?
MILES O'BRIEN: Well, depending on how you count, we have had about 10 missions to Jupiter.
Most of them have been flybys, Voyager, Pioneer notable among them, New Horizons as well. We of course had the orbiting mission of Galileo, which began in the mid-'90s into the early 2000s, which did most science around Jupiter and its moons.
And that's the big treasure trove of data. And all the while, the Hubble telescope has captured a lot of interesting data from Jupiter. And in particular, back in 1994, you may recall when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, that fragment comet, struck Jupiter, Hubble got some amazing images of those impacts.
But all off this is skin-deep.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So what are we trying to learn this time?
MILES O'BRIEN: Well, there's a lot of things we can learn from Jupiter.
SUMMARY: NASA has found evidence of liquid water on Mars. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the inevitable question: Does this mean there could be some form of life on the red planet?
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally tonight: big news from outer space.
NASA today announced that it has found evidence of liquid water on Mars, at least during certain seasons of the Martian year. The discovery was made through satellite images, which revealed darkly shaded streaks on slopes of craters and hillsides. They darken and lighten over time as water seeps across the surface, and then evaporates.
For more on what it all might mean, I’m joined by science correspondent Miles O’Brien.
Hello again.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Judy, good to see you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, how do they know it’s water, Miles? They don’t — there hasn’t been a human there to look at it. They’re looking through satellites. What — how do they know?
MILES O’BRIEN: The HiRISE instrument, which is on the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is a very sophisticated instrument and has the ability to do spectral analysis.
So, it can actually look at how light moves through whatever is flowing there. And it gives unique signatures of water and in this case a lot of salt. It’s the salt that is the key here, because Mars is cold and has an atmosphere which is almost nonexistent. So, the idea of water flowing there is hard to imagine.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But this flies in the face of what scientists thought for a long time, or have they been building up to this?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, there is a huge body of evidence that Mars at one time was warm and wet, and we think probably a cushy birth for life.
So, we have been looking for evidence of ancient life, fossils, for example. There has always been this thought that maybe the water is underneath in an aquifer. Could it somehow rise to the surface on certain occasions in certain ways? That’s been a big question.
They first spotted these streaks back in 2010. It sure looked like water. But what would keep it flowing? And the key was, they found these percolates, these salts in there. It’s extremely salty water. Think of why do — how do we get snow off our roads in the winter? We use salt.
SUMMARY: We can't see dark matter, but scientists have made the largest map yet of the invisible material that helps make up the universe. Researchers used a dark energy camera and a large telescope to create a color-coded chart of just a small part of the cosmos. Jeffrey Brown talks to Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology about how they did it and why it matters.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Scientists have announced the creation of the largest map yet of the invisible material that helps make up the universe, what’s known as dark matter.
Jeffrey Brown explores some of the very cosmic questions around this story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): That’s worth saying again: We can’t see it, but we can apparently map it. What’s called dark matter is, in fact, everywhere, and it’s believed to play a crucial role in forming and holding together galaxies with its gravitational pull.
In findings announced Monday, researchers used a dark energy camera and a large telescope in Northern Chile to create this color-coded map, showing a small piece of the visible sky. Orange and red areas represent denser concentrations of dark matter. Blue areas are less dense.
And Sean Carroll joins us now to tell us about it. He’s a cosmologist and theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.
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| An undated artist's concept shows the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. |
New Horizons will come closest to the dwarf planet on July 14
A NASA spacecraft has emerged from hibernation in preparation for completing its nine-year, 2.9-billion mile journey to observe Pluto from up close, the space agency said.
Sending its signal at the speed of light, the New Horizons ship beamed a report down to Earth that it was back in active mode as of Dec. 6.
“Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we’d done many times before,” said Glen Fountain, the mission’s project manager. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”
After tests early next year, the spacecraft will collect data and images about Pluto and its surrounding moons. It will come closest to the dwarf planet on July 14.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): An amazing scientific search pushing the limits of what we know about the cosmos, the quest to see a black hole.
The “NewsHour's” Rebecca Jacobson went to Chile for this report.
SHEP DOELEMAN, Principal investigator, Event Horizon Telescope: Black holes are some of the most exotic objects in the universe. They come about when matter gravitationally collapses in on itself, and everything becomes pulverized and crushed down into a single point.
REBECCA JACOBSON (NewsHour): MIT astronomer Shep Doeleman is leading an international effort to understand black holes. These exotic objects are fundamental to our understanding of the universe. When stars, dust, and planets cross the event horizon surrounding the black hole, nothing, not even light, can escape. But no one has ever seen one.
Doeleman is trying to change that.
SHEP DOELEMAN, MIT: The Event Horizon Telescope project is really about seeing what we have always thought as unseeable.
REBECCA JACOBSON: But to boldly go where no telescope has gone before, scientists have to drive up a 16,500 foot-high mountain. This is the Atacama Large Millimeter, or ALMA, in Northern Chile. ALMA’s 66 antennas form the most powerful radio telescope in the world.
Each antenna weighs 100 tons, and they are so accurate, they can see a golf ball nine miles away. They will form the anchor for the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of observatories that will capture an image of a black hole for the first time.
ALMA’s antennas sit just 400 feet lower in elevation than Mount Everest’s North Base Camp. Before going up the mountain, we had to undergo rigorous physical testing, because working at this altitude is dangerous.
My blood pressure was a little too high, so we waited a few minutes to see if it would go down.
While his five colleagues were sleeping, astronaut Alexander Gerst photographed the International Space Station (ISS) at nighttime — and ended up with this enchanting series of images.
Gerst, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut from Germany, is coming to the end of the six-month long Blue Dot Mission — and will return to Earth on 10 November.
Gerst has been shooting his surroundings while working at ISS and these pictures are a spooky insight into the research center after hours; capturing the silent, floating world of living in space.
In October, the ESA reported Gerst left the relative safety of the station to venture into open space with NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman.
See the pictures
Existing medical techniques are laying the foundations for an ambitious research project to send astronauts into a deep sleep on a six-month journey to Mars, according to the engineer leading the study.
"There's technology being used in the medical community that could support this - there's a wealth of data out there to support it," John Bradford, president of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks, told FoxNews.com. "It's a big step, but it could be adopted for space flight."
The NASA-funded study began 12 months ago, and conjures up images of science fiction - putting astronauts into a deep sleep, or torpor, during the long six-month journey to Mars.
“I don’t think that we could go to Mars without something like this technology,” Bradford said. Putting the crew into a deep sleep, he explained, would significantly reduce the amount of supplies and infrastructure needed to support the long space journey, from food to onboard living space.
The study predicts that putting a spacecraft’s crew into torpor, or stasis state, would cut the mission requirements from 400 tons to 220 tons of equipment and supplies.
Bradford told FoxNews.com that the torpor could be achieved by a technique called therapeutic hypothermia, which is already used in hospitals, albeit for a much shorter time period.
Therapeutic, or protective, hypothermia lowers a patient’s body temperature to reduce the risk of tissue injury following, say, a cardiac arrest when blood flow is limited.
In the thermal management system envisaged by SpaceWorks, a tube inserted into an astronaut’s nasal cavity will emit a cooled gas, lowering their temperature by about 10 degrees. Low-dose drugs will also be administered to suppress their shiver reflex and ease their passage into a deep sleep.
"Other than the duration, the procedural aspects of this are pretty benign," said Bradford.
Technologies are already commercially available in this area, such as the RhinoChill IntraNasal cooling system, which is used to induce therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest.
However, SpaceWorks acknowledges that there's a lot more research needed before someone is placed in a six-month sleep. Up to now, the longest torpor induced by therapeutic hypothermia is 14 days, according to Bradford.
The engineer told FoxNews.com that, while the research aims to wake astronauts just once, at the end of their journey, other sleep durations may be used. The crew, he explained, could sleep in shifts, with each astronaut in torpor for about two weeks and then conscious for two days, ensuring that one crew member is always awake during the mission.
While in stasis state, astronauts would be fed intravenously with an aqueous solution of carbohydrates, amino acids, dextrose, and lipids, according to Bradford. "They would not have any solid waste - it would be strictly urine," he said, noting that a catheter would be used to dispose of the liquid.
The medical industry is also developing technologies such as infection-resistant IV lines that could prove useful during the flight to Mars, Bradford said.
The crew could be brought out of their torpor by turning off the cooling gas and shivering suppressant. "Nominally, it would take about two hours to wake somebody," said the SpaceWorks president. "It would probably take a couple of days [for the astronauts] to get [fully] acclimated - our testing will include cognitive tests to examine their mental faculties when they wake up."
Bradford estimates that a typical Mars mission will involve a six month journey, followed by a year and a half on the red planet, and a six month journey back to earth.
While NASA has successfully completed unmanned missions to Mars, such as the Curiosity rover, putting humans on the planet is a much more challenging endeavor. NASA, for example, has a 2035 target for landing humans on Mars, although SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted that people could be on Mars within 10 to 12 years.
SpaceWorks’ Bradford expects to see human Mars missions in 20 years, noting that the deep sleep research project is still in its infancy.
“There’s a ways to go,” he told FoxNews.com. “We have concluded the phase one effort, which is developing the initial design, the engineering details, and medical plausibility - we’re now looking at the next steps, which will be continued studies of the engineering challenges.”
Over the next five years, NASA and seven partner institutions will be taking on new projects to help paint a more complete picture about how life comes to be in the universe. The projects include preparing to bring back samples of the Martian terrain to Earth, investigating the role of comets and asteroids in delivering water and organic compounds around the solar system and researching how our own planet has managed to sustain life for so much of its history.
This week, NASA announced the winners of its seventh Cooperative Agreement Notice grant competition (CAN7), who will receive $50 million between them to conduct their research.
There are no plans to build a Starship Enterprise to hop from galaxy to galaxy in search of aliens among the projects, rather they will all take place here on Earth.
A team at the SETI Institute will be looking into the best ways to ensure that a planned 2020 NASA mission to bring back samples from Mars selects the ideal scoops of Maritan soil or rock and takes the best care of that precious cargo. Another project based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. will use natural hydrothermal chimney systems on our own planet as models to investigate how conditions on icy worlds such as Europa, Ganymede, and Enceladus might be able to support life.
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will examine the potential of how rocks might power life on planets such as Mars when their chemical energy is released through interaction with water. Others will look at how Earth’s history might hold key secrets to the search for E.T., like a University of California at Riverside project to examine the history of oxygen in our own atmosphere and oceans.
“The intellectual scope of astrobiology is vast, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth’s harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life,” said Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program.
Each project team will receive about $8 million and join five continuing astrobiology project teams already participating in the program at the University of Washington in Seattle; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now let’s turn to a space story that captured the world’s attention today, as India claims a triumph in its first mission to Mars.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Cheers erupted at the Indian Space Research Organization on word that the satellite named Mangalyaan, or Mars craft, had swung into Mars orbit.
Journalist Pallava Bagla was at mission control in Bangalore, and spoke with us via Google Hangout.
PALLAVA BAGLA: When it emerged from behind Mars and 12 minutes later the signal came that the main rocket engine had its stopped firing, oh, my God, I have never seen such happy faces in India.
HARI SREENIVASAN: India joins the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and the European Union as the only ones to land a spacecraft on the Red Planet or place one in orbit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi:
NARENDRA MODI, Prime Minister, India: History has been created today. We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved the near impossible.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The Indians pulled it off on the first try for just $75 million, less than it cost to make “Gravity,” the Oscar-winning blockbuster movie. But there have been debates over whether the money could be better spent in a country where millions live in wrenching poverty.
BRINDA ADIGE, Director, Global Concerns India: At one end of the spectrum, so much of money that is being spent to send a rocket out into outer space, when we know that here on Earth, in my country, there are children dying every day because they have no food to eat.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Still, the success in space proved inspirational for many, including schoolchildren who arrived in class early to watch the TV coverage.
STUDENT: It is a very big achievement for India. I mean, we are feeling very proud to be Indians, proud to be born in a country who can do anything.
HARI SREENIVASAN: India’s satellite followed close behind the U.S. MAVEN orbiter, which arrived at Mars on Sunday.
BRUCE JAKOSKY, Principal Investigator, MAVEN: We are on orbit of Mars, guys.
(LAUGHTER)
BRUCE JAKOSKY: And we have taken 11 years to get here, and now we get to do the science that we have been planning for all this time.
HARI SREENIVASAN: MAVEN cost nearly 10 times that of India’s satellite, but their missions are similar, to examine how the planet went from warm and wet to cold and dry.
SUMMARY: India’s successful first mission to Mars is a major accomplishment for that nation, in both scientific and budgetary terms. To understand the historic feat, India’s space program and where it fits into the American exploration of Mars, science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Hari Sreenivasan.
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Astronomers, who used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to look for water vapor in the atmosphere of three exoplanets, have found that the trio, orbiting stars similar to the sun, are surprisingly dry.
Astronomers previously believed that the three exoplanets, dubbed HD 189733b, HD 209458b and WASP-12b, were ideal candidates for harboring water vapor in their atmospheres. However, the planets, which have temperatures ranging between 1,500 degrees to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, were found to have very little water, compared to the amount predicted by standard planet-formation theories.
“Our water measurement in one of the planets, HD 209458b, is the highest-precision measurement of any chemical compound in a planet outside our solar system, and we can now say with much greater certainty than ever before that we've found water in an exoplanet,” Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, England and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “However, the low water abundance we have found so far is quite astonishing.”
The three exoplanets, also known as “hot Jupiters” are located between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers believe that the new results, published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could have major implications in the search for water on potentially inhabitable Earth-sized exoplanets.
“We have to revisit planet formation and migration models of giant planets, especially ‘hot Jupiters,’ and investigate how they're formed,” Madhusudhan said. “We should be prepared for much lower water abundances than predicted when looking at super-Earths.”
In order to determine the amount of water vapor in each of the planet's atmospheres, the astronomers used Hubble to observe the planets’ near-infrared spectrum, NASA said, adding that detecting water on transiting planets is almost impossible from the ground because of the amount of water in Earth's atmosphere, which contaminates the observation.
“There are so many things we still don't know about exoplanets, so this opens up a new chapter in understanding how planets and solar systems form,” Drake Deming of the University of Maryland, said in the statement. “The problem is that we are assuming the water to be as abundant as in our own solar system. What our study has shown is that water features could be a lot weaker than our expectations.”
Scientists believe that almost 14 billion years ago, the universe was a hot, dense place that rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. The idea that the universe underwent a rapid expansion is called inflation; the universe spread out and cooled down, forming atoms that later made gas, dust, stars and planets.
But what exactly happened at the start of the universe has been unconfirmed until now. With a radio telescope at the South Pole, scientists followed gravitational waves 13.8 billion years into the past and found the first direct evidence of the universe’s rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang. Scientists discussed their findings at a press conference Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“This is a totally new, independent piece of cosmological evidence that the inflationary picture fits together,” said theoretical physicist Alan Guth of MIT, who proposed the idea of inflation in 1980.
This is the first concrete evidence of gravitational waves, a phenomenon first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago. After major cosmic events like the merging of black holes or the Big Bang, gravity makes waves in spacetime that travel like ripples on a pond. These ripples travel at the speed of light, but Einstein thought they would be so feeble, they would be undetectable.
But scientists suspected that these ripples could still be found. Billions of years later, the waves are too weak to measure directly, so scientists have been looking for imprints left on the “cosmic microwave background”, a soup of elementary particles leftover from the Big Bang. A U.S.-led team, headed by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used a specialized radio telescope called BICEP2 (which stands for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) at the South Pole to hunt for the gravitational waves. The dry air, thin atmosphere and distance from cell phone and radio towers made the South Pole the ideal wave-hunting location.
The results will be submitted to a scientific journal this week for review and publication, said John Kovac of Harvard, who led the research project.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University said if the evidence of gravitational waves is confirmed, the discovery “gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning,” when it was less than one-trillionth of a second old, he told the Associated Press. He added that the results still need to be confirmed, but this study is the “best hope” of proving the universe’s early growth spurt.
“It’s just amazing,” he said. “You can see back to the beginning of time.”
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| Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon |
NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life.
The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said Tuesday that it would be launched in the mid-2020s.
Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When NASA sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be "a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system."
Past NASA probes have flown by Europa, especially Galileo, but none have concentrated on the moon, one of dozens orbiting Jupiter. Astronomers have long lobbied for a mission to Europa, but proposals would have cost billions of dollars.
Last year, scientists discovered liquid plumes of water shooting up through Europa's ice. Flying through those watery jets could make Europa cheaper to explore than just circling it or landing on the ice, said NASA Europa scientist Robert Pappalardo.
NASA will look at many competing ideas for a Europa mission, so the agency doesn't know how big or how much it will cost, Robinson said. She said a major mission goal would be searching for life in the strange liquid water under the ice-covered surface.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said going to Europa would be more exciting than exploring dry Mars: "There might be fish under the ice."
An amazing new photo of Saturn's north pole puts the planet's odd hexagon-shaped jet stream and dazzling rings on display.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft exploring Saturn and its moons snapped the photo — which NASA released Monday — as the probe flew 1.6 million miles above the ringed planet.
Cassini took its newest view of Saturn's polar vortex on Nov. 23, 2013, though the image itself was just released today. The hexagonal vortex is about 20,000 miles across and is a jet stream made up of 200 mph winds surrounding a huge storm, NASA officials have said. Scientists have not found another weather feature exactly like this anywhere in the solar system, space agency officials said. [See more amazing photos of Saturn's bizarre hexagon storm]
"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement in 2013. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries."
Saturn's hexagonal jet stream might be so long lasting because the planet is basically a giant ball of gas. Landmasses disrupt currents on Earth, but the storm remains stable on Saturn due to a lack of solid landforms, according to NASA.
Cassini has been able to image the strange feature since 2009 when Saturn's northern hemisphere became illuminated by the sun during the planet's northern spring, NASA officials said. Scientists used 128 of Cassini's images to create an incredible video of the hexagon-shaped jet stream last year.
Cassini isn't the first spacecraft to see Saturn's strange jet stream. NASA's Voyager mission first spotted the hexagon in the 1980s.
The $3.2 billion Cassini mission launched toward Saturn in 1997. It arrived at the ringed wonder in 2004 and has been sending back incredible photos of the planet and its moons since then. The probe is currently on an extended mission, and is expected to collect data until at least 2017, at which point it will burn up in Saturn's atmosphere.
"As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement in 2013.
I woke up to some great science news: A supernova has gone off in the nearby galaxy M82!
This is terribly exciting for astronomers. M82 is pretty close as galaxies go, less than 12 million light years away. That means we have an excellent view of one of the biggest explosions in the Universe, and we’ll be able to study it in great detail!
The supernova has the preliminary designation of PSN J09554214+6940260. I know, that’s awful—it’s based on the star’s coordinates—but it’ll get a name soon enough that’ll be easier on the eyes and brain.
And just to get this out of the way, we’re in no danger from this explosion. It’s far too far away. Also, you won’t be able to just go outside, look up, and see it. Right now it’s too faint to see without a telescope. But the good news is it appears to have been discovered about two weeks before it hits peak brightness. Supernovae get brighter over time before fading away, and this one may get as bright as 8th magnitude, which is within range of binoculars. Right now it’s at about 12th magnitude; the faintest star you can see with your naked eye is about mag 6 (note that the numbers run backwards; a bigger number is a fainter object).
M82 is in Ursa Major, well placed for viewing right now in the Northern Hemisphere. Universe Today has a map to show you how to find it.
Here’s a funny thing, too. The supernova itself is what we call a Type Ia, a dwarf explosion. Astronomers are still trying to figure out exactly what happens in a Type Ia explosion, but there are three competing scenarios. Each involves a white dwarf, the small, dense, hot core left over after a star turns into a red giant, blows off its outer layers, and essentially “dies.” One scenario is that the white dwarf is orbiting a second star. It siphons off material from the star and accumulates it on its surface. Eventually this material gets so compressed by the huge gravity of the white dwarf that it fuses, creating a catastrophic explosion that tears the star apart.
Another is that two white dwarfs orbit each other. Eventually they spiral in, merge, and explode. The third, which is a recent idea, is that there are actually three stars in the system, a normal star and two white dwarfs. Due to the complex dance of gravity, the third star warps the orbits of the two dwarfs, and at some point they collide head-on! This too would result in a supernova explosion. All three scenarios involve very old stars, since it can take billions of years for a normal star to turn into a white dwarf.
What’s funny about this is that the galaxy M82 is undergoing a huge burst of star formation right now, and that means lots of massive stars are born. These live short lives and also explode as supernovae (called Type II, or core collapse) though the mechanism is very different from that of the white dwarf explosions. You’d expect M82 to have more core collapse supernovae, but this new one is a Type Ia.
And that’s actually more good news. These supernovae tend to all explode with the same energy, so they behave the same way whether they are near or far. We can see them for billions of light years away, which means they can be used to measure the distances of galaxies that are very far away. It was this kind of exploding star that allowed astronomers to discover dark energy, in fact. This energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, making it grow more every day. We don’t know a whole lot about it—it was only announced in 1998—but we’re learning more all the time. A nearby Type Ia means we can learn even more about these explosions, and hopefully calibrate our understanding even better.
And that means we need observations! If you are an amateur astronomer, get images! And if you observed M82 recently, you may have “pre-discovery” images of it, taken before it was officially discovered. Those are critical for understanding the behavior of the supernova. If you do, report it to the CBAT (but make sure you read the instructions first; they don’t want images, just reports of magnitudes and so on).
Given the fact that it’s nearby, up high for so many observers, and caught so early, this may become one of the best-observed supernovae in modern times. I’m very excited this happened, and I hope to share more images and information with you soon!
SUMMARY: At the bottom of a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, scientists at one of the world's most sophisticated particle physics observatories are investigating one of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos: What is dark matter? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien helps to shed some light on the research at SNOLAB.
In almost every scifi movie worth re-watching, it seems that us humans are always less technologically advanced, dumber and only serve as a mere speed bump into an alien race eliminating humans to take over our planet and suck Earth dry of its resources. We're always the weaker ones in alien wars. Well, what if we're not? Tom Scott imagined a scenario where everyone else in the universe was afraid of humans. It's fantastic.
The premise of the video, Danger: Humans, is simple, it's a PSA from the Interstellar Safety Council notifying alien races how terrifyingly dangerous and awful humans can be. The video is perfect because it turns basic everyday things that humans do into something much more frightening (and completely true), like eating other life forms for sustenance. The PSA video also admits some of our weak points which is our need for oxygen and comedically, our self-delusion but it does stress that if humans reach another planet that has oxygen, we will take it over.
It's fascinating to imagine the other side in a scifi story, like if we were the aliens who invaded somebody else's home planet and wanted to take it over and not the other way around (as it is in most movies). It's a premise—humans as the bad guys—that should be explored in more movies and stories. We don't know what's out there, we don't know where we rank, so why can't we be the people most feared in the universe?
What looks like an X-ray of a hand is actually the remains of a star that has exploded 17,000 light-years away.
The astronomers who captured this image with a NASA space telescope are calling it the "Hand of God."
"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission.
What the image shows is a pulsar wind nebula, a dying star and the cloud of materials left over from the star after it exploded. The particles are interacting with nearby magnetic fields, causing the particles to glow in the image, according to NuSTAR.
It's unclear if the nebula looks like a hand because of the way the particles are interacting with the magnetic fields, or if the particles are actually shaped like a hand.
NuSTAR says the star itself is about 12 miles in diameter and is spinning at nearly seven times a second. As the star spins, it spews particles "upheaved during the star's violent death."
The NuSTAR space telescope was launched in June 2012 with the goal of observing black holes, dead and exploded stars and "other extreme objects," according to NuSTAR.
