Posts tagged space cadet
Neeeeed.
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The townspeople of Oakville, Washington, were in for a surprise on August 7, 1994. Instead of their usual downpour of rain, the inhabitants of the small town witnessed countless gelatinous blobs falling from the sky. Once the globs fell, almost everyone in Oakville started to develop severe, flu-like symptoms that lasted anywhere from 7 weeks to 3 months. Finally, after exposure to the goo caused his mother to fall ill, one resident sent a sample of the blobs for testing. What the technicians discovered was shocking – the globs contained human white blood cells. The substance was then brought to the State Department of Health of Washington for further analysis. With another startling reveal, they discovered that the gelatinous blobs had two types of bacteria, one of which is found in the human digestive system. However, no one could successfully identify the blob, and how they were connected to the mysterious sickness that plagued the town.
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Star Wars: The Old Republic
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Butterfly Nebula from Upgraded Hubble
Distance: 4,000 light years away
The bright clusters and nebulae of planet Earth’s night sky are often named for flowers or insects, and NGC 6302 is no exception. With an estimated surface temperature of about 250,000 degrees C, the central star of this particular planetary nebula is exceptionally hot though — shining brightly in ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This dramatically detailed close-up of the dying star’s nebula was recorded by the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: APOD NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
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Fifty new exoplanets discovered
Astronomers using a telescope in Chile have discovered 50 previously unknown exoplanets.
The bumper haul of new worlds includes 16 “super-Earths” - planets with a greater mass than our own, but below those of gas giants such as Jupiter.
One of these super-Earths orbits inside the habitable zone - the region around a star where conditions could be hospitable to life.
The planets were identified using the Harps instrument in La Silla in Chile.
The new findings are being presented at a meeting called Extreme Solar Systems in Wyoming, US, and will appear in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Lead author Dr Michel Mayor, from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, said the haul included “an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun”.
He added: “The new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating.”
Life markers
Of the new finds, a total of five planets have masses that are less than five times that of Earth.
“These planets will be among the best targets for future space telescopes to look for signs of life in the planet’s atmosphere by looking for chemical signatures such as evidence of oxygen,” said Francesco Pepe, from the Geneva Observatory, who contributed to the research.
The star HD 85512 lies some 35 light-years away and hosts a potentially habitable planet
One of the worlds, called HD 85512 b, is estimated to be only 3.6 times the mass of the Earth.
It is located at the edge of the habitable zone - the narrow strip around a star where liquid water can be present on the surface of a planet. Liquid water is considered essential for the existence of life.
Observations with Harps have also allowed astronomers to come up with an improved estimate of the likelihood that a star such as the Sun will host low-mass planets such as the Earth (as opposed to giants such as Jupiter).
They found that about 40% of such stars have at least one planet less massive than Saturn.
Harps (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) is a precision instrument known as a spectrograph that is installed on the 3.6m telescope at Chile’s La Silla Observatory.
The instrument searches for planets using the radial velocity method. This looks for spectral signs that a star is wobbling due to gravitational tugs from an orbiting planet.