Content about Astronomy

Image of the Week - What the Planck Telescope found

A new view of the Milky Way. (Click on image to enlarge.) Image courtesy European Space Agency

Last summer, iSGTW did a story on the launch of the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope into orbit. (See Countdown! World’s most sophisticated thermometer blasts off into space). Their goal was to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.After six months of collecting data and assembling a map, the 700-million euro observatory created the first full-sky image. It shows what is visible beyond Earth, on instruments sensitive to light at wavelengths much longer than human beings can see.In the foreground are large segments of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The bright horizontal line running the full width of the picture is the galactic plane, in which the sun and Earth reside. Above and below the galactic plane are streamers of cold dust, thousands of light-years long.“It's a spectacular picture; it’s

Feature - Black holes and their jets

This simulation depicts a black hole with a dipole as a magnetic field. This system is sufficiently orderly to generate gamma ray bursts that travel at relativistic speeds of over 99.9% the speed of light. (To see what happens with a more complex magnetic field, see the next video below!)
The black hole pulls in nearby matter (yellow) and sprays energy back out into the universe in a jet (blue and red) that is held together by the magnetic field (green lines).
The simulation was performed on the Texas Advanced Computing Center resources via TeraGrid, consuming approximately 400 000 service units.
Video courtesy of Jonathan McKinney and Roger Blandford.

Jets of particles streaming from black holes in far-away galaxies operate differently than previously thought, according to a study published recently in Nature.
High above the flat Milky Way galaxy, bright galaxies called blazars dominate the gamma-ray sky, discrete spots on the da

Feature: The grid that sifts for dark matter

Cryogenic Dark Matter Search detectors. The CDMS experiment uses five towers of six detectors each. Photo credit: Reidar Hahn.

Think of grid computing as a sieve that physicists use to sift out those rare events that might just be signs of dark matter — the mysterious substance that appears to exert gravitational pull on visible matter, accelerating the rotation of galaxies.
FermiGrid, the campus grid of Fermilab and the interface to the Open Science Grid, recently helped researchers from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment do just that: identify two possible hints of dark matter.
Dark matter has never been detected. And although the CDMS team cannot yet claim to have detected it, their findings have generated considerable excitement in the scientific community.
“This is a very intriguing result,” said Lauren Hsu, a CDMS researcher at Fermilab who announced the experiment’s results at a talk last Dec

Image of the week - What do these pictures have in common?

Photo courtesy SOHO

In answer to our question, all of these images are of our sun, and were taken by SOHO — the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a project that is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA to study the sun from its deep core to its outer corona and its solar wind. Many of the images were modeled using a synthetic modeling program that allows astronomers to determine the temperature of surface layers, the sun’s chemical composition, and the relative abundance of the various elements. Known as SYNTSPEC, the modeling program is run on Baltic Grid and Lit Grid. (Click to enlarge.) Image courtesy SOHO 

Feature - An unexpected bounty of Near Earth Objects

Image of a near-earth object detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The blue, red and green streaks show the object as it moves through three of the five SDSS filters over a period of five minutes. The two white objects are distant stars. Image courtesy Stephen Kent.

While scanning through images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory researcher Stephen Kent noticed something unusual — a few extended streaks scattered among the millions of point-like stars and galaxies.
Kent realized the streaks were produced by Near Earth Objects (NEOs), asteroids or extinct comets whose orbits bring them close to Earth — close enough that they could collide. They appear as streaks because the closer an object is to Earth, the more quickly it moves across our sky. That’s why the patterns of distant stars appear unchanged over the course of our lifetimes, whereas our closest neighborin

Image of the week - Space viewed through X-ray glasses

The Kepler supernova viewed through the Chandra X-ray telescope.
The different colors represent different energy X-rays. Red indicates low energy, due to the material around the star (mainly oxygen) which is heated up during the explosion. Blue represents the highest energy X-rays, which characterize the shock front of the explosion. The yellow and green parts are the different chemical elements produced as a result of the supernova. (Click on image to enlarge.) Courtesy NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.

Ever wondered what things would look like viewed through X-ray glasses? In a sense, this is what the telescope on NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory does when pointed towards the hottest parts of space. 
At right are the remnants of the supernova created when Kepler (a star named after the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler) exploded. It is one of the youngest and brightest recorded supernovae in our Mil

Feature – Grid helps to filter LIGO’s data

Workers at LIGO adjust the optic suspensions in situ. The suspension system is one of the physical measures LIGO takes to isolate the detector from false signals such as seismic activity. Courtesy of LIGO Lab.

Tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time may provide scientists with a way to study cosmic processes that are invisible to optical telescopes, such as the collision of two black holes.
In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted that such ripples, called gravitational waves, would be created when a mass accelerates. However, gravitational waves are so small – about one thousand times smaller than a proton – that even the relatively large ones generated by massive astrophysical events are very difficult to detect.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), which has sites in Washington and Louisiana, uses lasers to search for these minute cosmic ripples that carry information abou

Image of the week - Red, green and blue for a new view

NGC 253 was discovered in 1783 by astronomer Caroline Herschel and is the brightest member in the Sculptor group of galaxies. This is the nearest such galaxy collection to the so-called Local Group, which includes our own Milky Way. (Click on image to enlarge.) Created with IRSA On-Demand Image Mosaic Service and Montage v3.0

By combining different images taken on different instruments and at different wavelengths, grid-enabled Montage software can create all-new views of the stars — including NGC 253, also known as the “Silver Dollar Galaxy.”
At visible wavelengths, NGC 253 appears as a very dusty spiral galaxy viewed almost edge-on to our line of sight. The blue channel of this three-color image represents the visible view using B-band images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. At these wavelengths it is very difficult to see what the structure of the galaxy’s center looks like. Radiation at longer wavelength

Link of the week - Virtual Observatory round-up

NGC 9496, home to a supernova featured in one of the step-by-step Virtual Observatory guides.
Image courtesy of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma.

Imagine what your field could accomplish if everyone pooled their data into one massive computer grid.
That’s exactly what astronomers have accomplished, in the form of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The alliance works to develop standards that ensure interoperability, so that everyone can share data freely. Since the IVOA was founded in June 2002, a number of discoveries have been made using virtual observatory tools.
For instance, in April 2003, U.S. scientists discovered a previously unknown brown dwarf star during a trial run of their National Virtual Observatory. And in June 2004 European scientists discovered thirty powerful supermassive black holes using a virtual observatory to analyze data gathered by both the European Southern Observatory and N

Image of the week - Sunspot close-up

The interface between a sunspot’s umbra (dark center) and penumbra (lighter outer region) shows a complex structure with narrow, almost horizontal (lighter to white) filaments embedded in a background having a more vertical (darker to black) magnetic field. Farther out, extended patches of horizontal field dominate. For the first time, NCAR scientists and colleagues have modeled this complex structure in a comprehensive 3D computer simulation, giving scientists their first glimpse below the visible surface to understand the underlying physical processes. © UCAR, image courtesy Matthias Rempel, NCAR 

Using a supercomputer, an international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the US and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots. The resulting visuals capture both scientific detail and un-eart

Countdown! World’s most sophisticated thermometer blasts off into space

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Arianespace sent into orbit a scientific satellite known as the Planck scientific observatory, for the European Space Agency.  The launch process took the new instrument from the ground into space in less than an hour. Image courtesy ESA

On 1:12 pm on Thursday, May 14, the Planck satellite — arguably the world’s largest thermometer — lifted off from the European Space Agency’s launch pad in French Guiana.
The launch began with a 6-second vertical climb. The onboard computers optimized the motion of the rocket in real time, in order to minimize fuel consumption. The main stage engine took the launcher into an intermediate orbit before the end stage carried the payload into the final orbit. The main stage of the launcher fell back, just off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The launcher will remain at an altitude of about 852 kilometers travelling at about

Feature - Using simulations to learn about cosmic evolution and its connections to Earth’s history A still from a simulated animation of a Type 1a supernova. Click image to see a low-res version of the animation (avi format for Windows). It is also available in higher resoultion, in both avi and mpeg formats. 800x640 avi (Windows) or  mpeg (Mac)1024x819 avi or  mpeg 1280x1024 avi or mpeg Image and animation courtesy of flash.uchicago.edu. Robert Rosner, director of Argonne National Laboratory and professor at the University of Chicago, spoke Friday, February 13 at the AAAS conference in Chicago about the role of simulation in studying the origins and evolution of the universe.  What is matter? Where did it come from? What is the future of the universe? To answer these compelling questions, astrophysicists are trying to learn more about the physics of the big bang, and the origin of structure – the formation of the initial clumps of matter from the primordial soup. Computational tools and resources are