Astro Blog

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/green-bank-west-virginia-quiet-zone.html Source:   By Dan Levin, The New York Times; Photographs by Annie Flanagan. Excerpt: GREEN BANK, W.Va. ...when a Facebook fad had people all over the globe dumping ice water on their heads a few summers ago, Charity Warder, now a senior at Pocahontas County High School, was late to the game. Sure, Charity has an iPhone, but she uses it mostly as a clock and a calculator. She makes phone calls from a landline, and she rarely texts her friends. Texting and driving? “It’s not a thing here,” she said. When Charity wants to get online at home, she sits at her family’s desktop computer, which has a broadband connection that is so sluggish, it takes minutes to load a YouTube video. ...Welcome to Green Bank, population 143, where Wi-Fi is both unavailable and banned and where cellphone signals are nonexistent. The near radio silence is a requirement for those living close to the town’s most prominent and dem...

Source:  Bryan Mendez, NASA WISE mission  Excerpt: Today NASA and the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE) Team have released the full-sky infrared observations of the sky. As part of this release, a down-sampled but very high resolution spherical image map of the infrared sky has been rendered from this dataset and is available for use! The image includes 3.4 (blue), 12 (green), and 22 micron (red) bands and has been cleaned to remove frame edge artifacts and the irregular traces of zodiacal emission. It is 19,000 x 9,500 pixels, which is ideal for all full-dome projection systems. You can find the image at the WISE website (along with an annotated version that highlights the locations of many objects of interest that have been released as images):  http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_thesky.html    Note that this image aligns with other full-sky infrared images that have been available for some time at:  http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/resources/inf...

Source:  NASA  Excerpt:  …Astronomers have found a new cosmic source for the same kind of water that appeared on Earth billions of years ago and created the oceans. The findings may help explain how Earth's surface ended up covered in water. New measurements ...show that comet Hartley 2... contains water with the same chemical signature as Earth's oceans.  www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/oct/HQ_11-338_Herschel_Comet_Water.html

Source:   Lance Knobel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Excerpt: Saul Perlmutter, a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley ... has been awarded this year’s Einstein Medal, presented by the Albert Einstein Society. The medal was awarded for “discovering the acceleration of the universe” through the observation of very distant supernovae. .In 1998 Perlmutter announced the ... landmark finding that the expansion of the universe is not slowing, as virtually all scientists expected, but accelerating. The cause of the acceleration has been dubbed dark energy, and is estimated to constitute nearly three-quarters of everything in the universe. The nature of dark energy remains unknown. www.berkeleyside.com/2011/02/23/berkeley-labs-perlmutter-wins-einstein-medal/

Source:   Paul Preuss, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Excerpt:  … the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) released the largest digital image of the sky ever made, and it’s free to all. The image has been put together over the last decade from millions of 2.8-megapixel images, thus creating a color image of more than a trillion pixels. ... so big and detailed that one would need 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at its full resolution. newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/01/11/sdss-largest-sky-image/  

Source:   NASA RELEASE: 10-318   Excerpt:  A team of astronomers, including two NASA Sagan Fellows, has made the first characterizations of a super-Earth's atmosphere by using a ground-based telescope. A super-Earth is a planet up to three times the size of Earth and weighing up to 10 times as much. ...The team determined the planet, GJ 1214b, is either blanketed with a thin layer of water steam or surrounded by a thick layer of high clouds. If the former, the planet itself would have an icy composition. If the latter, the planet would be rocky or similar to the composition of Neptune, though much smaller. ...Bean and his team observed infrared light as the planet crossed in front of its star. During such transits, the star's light filters through the atmosphere. Gases absorb the starlight at particular wavelengths, leaving behind chemical fingerprints detectable from Earth. This same type of technique has been used to study the atmospheres of distant "hot Jupiters,...

Source:   NASA News Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a baked object that could be called a "cometary planet" ... gas giant ... HD 209458b, ... orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping into space. Observations taken with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) suggest powerful stellar winds are sweeping the cast-off atmospheric material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail. …The planet, located 153 light years from Earth, weighs slightly less than Jupiter but orbits 100 times closer to its star than the Jovian giant ... zips around its star in a short 3.5 days. …Linsky and his team used COS to analyze the planet's atmosphere during transiting events. www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jul/HQ_10-167_Hubble_Finds_Planet.html  

Source:   NASA RELEASE: 09-222 Excerpt: NASA scientists have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon. Instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small. Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, also was found in the lunar soil. ... spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before. www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/sep/HQ_09-222_Moon_Water_Molecules.html