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WASHINGTON — Dec 17, `07 — A powerful jet from a super massive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy, according to new findings from NASA observatories. This never-before witnessed galactic violence may have a profound effect on planets in the jet’s path and trigger a burst of star formation in its destructive wake.

Known as 3C321, the system contains two galaxies in orbit around each other. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory show both galaxies contain super massive black holes at their centers, but the larger galaxy has a jet emanating from the vicinity of its black hole. The smaller galaxy apparently has swung into the path of this jet.

This “death star” galaxy was discovered through the combined efforts of both space and ground-based telescopes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope were part of the effort. The Very Large Array telescope, Socorro, N.M., and the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) telescopes in the United Kingdom also were needed for the finding.

“We’ve seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we’ve seen one punch into another galaxy like we’re seeing here,” said Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leader of the study. “This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling.”

Jets from super massive black holes produce high amounts of radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal in large quantities. The combined effects of this radiation and particles traveling at almost the speed of light could severely damage the atmospheres of planets lying in the path of the jet. For example, protective layers of ozone in the upper atmosphere of planets could be destroyed.

Jets produced by super massive black holes transport enormous amounts of energy far from black holes and enable them to affect matter on scales vastly larger than the size of the black hole. Learning more about jets is a key goal for astrophysical research.

The effect of the jet on the companion galaxy is likely to be substantial, because the galaxies in 3C321 are extremely close at a distance of only about 20,000 light years apart. They lie approximately the same distance as Earth is from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

A bright spot in the Very Large Array and MERLIN images shows where the jet has struck the side of the galaxy, dissipating some of the jet’s energy. The collision disrupted and deflected the jet.

Another unique aspect of the discovery in 3C321 is how relatively short-lived this event is on a cosmic time scale. Features seen in the Very Large Array and Chandra images indicate that the jet began impacting the galaxy about one million years ago, a small fraction of the system’s lifetime. This means such an alignment is quite rare in the nearby universe, making 3C321 an important opportunity to study such a phenomenon.

It is possible the event is not all bad news for the galaxy being struck by the jet. The massive influx of energy and radiation from the jet could induce the formation of large numbers of stars and planets after its initial wake of destruction is complete. More at NASA.

Houston — Dec 05, ‘07 — On August 07, 2008, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand. Says NYTimes.

That, at least, is the plan.

Servicing Mission 4
NASA managers officially are targeting August 7, 2008, for the launch of the fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. During the 11-day flight, Atlantis’ seven astronauts will repair and improve the observatory’s capabilities through 2013.

Mission planners have been working since last fall, when the flight was announced, to determine the best time in the shuttle manifest to support the needs of Hubble while minimizing the impact to International Space Station assembly. NASA also will support a “launch on need” flight during the Hubble mission. In the unlikely event a rescue flight becomes necessary, shuttle Endeavour currently is planned to lift off from Launch Pad 39-B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. However, managers constantly are evaluating the manifest to determine the best mission options.

Shuttle missions beyond the Hubble flight, designated STS-125, still are being assessed. Shuttle and station program officials will continue to consider options for the remainder of the shuttle flights to complete construction of the space station by 2010, when the fleet will be retired. Those target launch dates are subject to change.

More at NASA, NYTimes.

WASHINGTON — Dec 03, ‘07 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — As the agency commemorates its 50th anniversary, NASA has launched “NASA.gov 5.0,” the first major redesign of its primary Web site in more than four years.

The new design goes beyond a cosmetic facelift. It features a new level of interactivity and customization, and provides the opportunity to comment on selected NASA stories, create personal playlists of favorite NASA videosand share agency content with social bookmarking sites on the Internet.

While adding new features, the site’s overall focus remains on providing the latest news, which is prominently displayed at the top of the page. Also, NASA imagery and videos have been given more prominence.

Visitors will notice a new navigation interface, with 10 topic areas covering the depth and breadth of NASA programs replacing three outdated
and overly broad categories. Web editors from around the agency will be able to contribute content.

Web managers have improved the new site’s search capability using Google’s Customer Search Engine to provide visitors with the same search
results they would get from Google’s public site. NASA has tools to apply “crowd wisdom” to search results by weighting findings according to how many previous searchers clicked on a particular link.

NASA revamped the customized “myNASA” feature to allow users to collect their favorite NASA Web content, including videos and news feeds, all in one location. NASA.

Nov 29, ‘07 — A developing star wrapped in a black cocoon of dust is seen sprouting giant jets in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The stellar portrait, seen in infrared light, offers the first glimpse at a very early stage in the life of an embryonic sun-like star — a time when the star’s natal envelope is beginning to flatten and collapse, and streams of gas are escaping. The observations will ultimately help astronomers better understand how stars and their planets form.

“This is the first time we’ve clearly seen a flattened envelope around a forming star,” said Leslie Looney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of a study about the star, called L1157, appearing Dec. 1 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Some theories had predicted that envelopes flatten as they collapse onto their stars and surrounding planet-forming disks, but we hadn’t seen any strong evidence of this until now.”

Stars are born out of thick clouds, or envelopes, of gas and dust that condense and collapse inward. As a star grows and feeds off the envelope, it spins faster and faster like a twirling ice skater. A disk of planet-forming material begins to take shape in orbit around the star, and jets of gas shoot up from above and below the disk to relieve the star’s accumulating pressure. Eventually, the original envelope falls onto the spinning disk, and the jets slow to a stop.

The regions where all the action takes place are dark and dusty, letting little visible light escape. For example, the embryonic star L1157 appears black in visible-light views. Spitzer’s infrared view of the star, on the other hand, penetrates the dusty haze, giving us a rare look at what our own solar system might have looked like when it was very young.

The bipolar jets shooting away from L1157 are enormous; light itself would take about nine months to travel the length of one jet. The color white shows the hottest parts of the jets, with temperatures around 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Most of the material in the jets, seen in orange, is roughly zero degrees on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales.

The flattened envelope around the fledgling star is perpendicular to the jets and appears deep black. This is because it is so thick with dust that even infrared light cannot escape. The envelope is big enough to engulf the equivalent of tens of thousands of mature solar systems similar to our own, while the planet-forming disk tucked inside cannot be seen in this photo – it is smaller than a pixel.

L1157 is located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. It is roughly 10,000 years old, and, according to astronomers’ estimates, will ignite to become a full-fledged star about the mass of our sun in a million years or so.

“Taking baby pictures of stars is not easy to do,” said Looney. “Now that we have a good picture, we can begin to ask questions about whether this star system and its potential planets will grow up to become like ours.”

Other authors of this study include John J. Tobin of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Woojin Kwan of the University of Illinois.

More at NASA.

PASADENA, Calif. — Nov 06, ‘07 — Astronomers have announced the discovery of a fifth planet circling 55 Cancri, a star beyond our solar system. The star now holds the record for number of confirmed extrasolar planets orbiting in a planetary system.

55 Cancri is located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer and has nearly the same mass and age as our sun. It is easily visible with binoculars. Researchers discovered the fifth planet using the Doppler technique, in which a planet’s gravitational tug is detected by the wobble it produces in the parent star. NASA and the National Science Foundation funded the research.

The newly discovered planet weighs about 45 times the mass of Earth and may be similar to Saturn in its composition and appearance. The planet is the fourth from 55 Cancri and completes one orbit every 260 days. Its location places the planet in the “habitable zone,” a band around the star where the temperature would permit liquid water to pool on solid surfaces. The distance from its star is approximately 116.7 million kilometers (72.5 million miles), slightly closer than Earth to our sun, but it orbits a star that is slightly fainter.

“The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons,” said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University and lead author of a paper that will appear in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal. “If there is a moon orbiting this new, massive planet, it might have pools of liquid water on a rocky surface.”

Fischer and University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Geoff Marcy, plus a team of collaborators discovered this planet after careful observation of 2,000 nearby stars with the Shane telescope at Lick Observatory located on Mt. Hamilton, east of San Jose, Calif., and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. More than 320 velocity measurements were required to disentangle signals from each of the planets.

“This is the first quintuple-planet system,” said Fischer. “This system has a dominant gas giant planet in an orbit similar to our Jupiter. Like the planets orbiting our sun, most of these planets reside in nearly circular orbits.”

“Discovering these five planets took us 18 years of continuous observations at Lick Observatory, starting before any extrasolar planets were known anywhere in the universe,” said Marcy, who contributed to the paper. “But finding five extrasolar planets orbiting a star is only one small step. Earth-like planets are the next destination.”

The planets around 55 Cancri are somewhat different from those orbiting our sun. The innermost planet is believed to be about the size of Neptune and whips around the star in less than three days at a distance from the star of approximately 5.6 million kilometers (3.5 million miles). The second planet is a little smaller than Jupiter and completes one orbit every 14.7 days at a distance from the star of approximately 18 million kilometers (11.2 million miles). The third planet, similar in mass to Saturn, completes one orbit every 44 days at a distance from the star of approximately 35.9 million kilometers (22.3 million miles). The newly discovered planet is the fourth planet. The fifth and most distant known planet is four times the mass of Jupiter and completes one orbit every 14 years at a distance from the star of approximately 867.6 million kilometers (539.1 million miles). It is still the only known Jupiter-like gas giant to reside as far away from its star as our own Jupiter is from our sun.

“This work marks an exciting next step in the search for worlds like our own,” said Michael Briley, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation. “To go from the first detections of planets around sun-like stars to finding a full-fledged solar system with a planet in a habitable zone in just 12 years is an amazing accomplishment and a testament to the years of hard work put in by these investigators.” More at NASA, University of California.

Two galaxies, containing a vast number of stars, swing past each other in a graceful dance choreographed by gravity, as seen by Hubble.
 

ESA News — Oct 30, ‘07 — The pair of galaxies collectively known as Arp 87 is among the hundreds of interacting and merging galaxies known in our nearby Universe. The Arp 87 pair was originally discovered and catalogued by astronomer Halton Arp in the 1970s. The ‘Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies’ is a compilation of astronomical photographs using the Palomar 200-inch Hale and the 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescopes.

The two main players comprising Arp 87 are NGC 3808 and its companion NGC 3808A. NGC 3808 is a nearly face-on spiral galaxy with a bright ring of star formation and several prominent dust arms. Stars, gas, and dust flow from NGC 3808, forming an enveloping arm around its companion. NGC 3808A is a spiral galaxy seen edge-on and is surrounded by a rotating ring that contains stars and interstellar gas clouds. The ring is situated perpendicular to the plane of the host galaxy disk and is called a ‘polar ring.’ 

As seen in other mergers similar to Arp 87, the corkscrew shape of the tidal material (or bridge of shared matter) between the two galaxies suggests that some stars and gas drawn from the larger galaxy have been caught in the gravitational pull of the smaller one. The shapes of both galaxies have been distorted by their gravitational interaction with one another.Arp 87 is in the constellation Leo, the Lion, approximately 300 million light-years away from Earth. These observations were taken in February 2007 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.  

Light from isolated blue, green, red, and infrared ranges was combined to form this color image.

Interacting galaxies often exhibit high rates of star formation. Many lines of evidence – colours of their starlight, intensity of emission lines from interstellar gas, far-infrared output from heated interstellar dust – support this fact. Some merging galaxies have the highest levels of star formation we can find anywhere in the nearby Universe. A major aspect of this excess star formation was properly revealed only when Hubble turned its imaging capabilities toward colliding galaxies. Among the observatory’s first discoveries was that galaxies with very active star formation contain large numbers of super star clusters – clusters more compact and richer in young stars than astronomers were accustomed to seeing in our galactic neighborhood 

Arp 87 is in the constellation Leo, the Lion, approximately 300 million light-years away from Earth. These observations were taken in February 2007 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Light from isolated blue, green, red, and infrared ranges was combined to form this colour image. More info & images at ESA.

GREENBELT, Md., Oct. 25, ‘07 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will use a new advanced technology network interface called “SpaceWire” that enables the components on the telescope to work more efficiently and more reliably with each other.

SpaceWire is a standard for high-speed communication links between satellite components. Originally developed by the European Space Agency, SpaceWire has been adopted and improved by a team at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) and Command and Data Handling (ICDH) engineering team has developed a small and very low power microchip that sends and receives SpaceWire signals at speeds of over 200 mega-bits per second.

The new higher bandwidth from SpaceWire enables the JWST ISIM to support the mission’s science instruments which employ 66 million detector pixels. This is the largest number of pixels ever used on a space telescope, and it will allow JWST to study more of the universe. Handling the large volume of data from these detectors presented a unique challenge for the JWST ICDH team. The development of this new network interface enables the JWST science instruments to realize their full scientific discovery potential, and will permit future NASA mission planners to consider use of more detectors with an even larger number of pixels to see even more of the universe.

SpaceWire is a standard for high-speed links and networks for use onboard a spacecraft, easing the interconnection of sensors, mass-memories and processing units. The SpaceWire standard provides many benefits. It helps facilitate the construction of high-performance onboard data handling systems, reduces system integration costs, increases compatibility between data handling equipment and subsystems, and encourages re-use of data handling equipment across several different missions.

To understand the benefit of SpaceWire, you can compare the speed of a dial-up modem to a high-speed broadband Internet connection. SpaceWire connects multiple spacecraft components on super-fast links to get a quicker result.

Goddard’s version of the SpaceWire technology has also dramatically accelerated the development of the JWST instrument electronics. The JWST ICDH team delivered the SpaceWire technology — which is packaged in a digital, low power (1.5W), high-speed (66Mbps) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) computer chip — to JWST partners including prime contractor Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Canadian Space Agency.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a 21st century space observatory that will peer back more than 13 billion years in time to understand the formation of galaxies, stars and planets and the evolution of our own solar system. It is expected to launch in 2013. The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The JWST