Astro Blog

Source:   NSF Release 10-140 Excerpt: ...Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries.... The new pulsar--called PSR J2007+2722--is a neutron star that rotates 41 times per second ...in the Milky Way, approximately 17,000 light years from Earth.... www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp

Source:   National Academy Press The United States spends approximately $4 million each year searching for near-Earth objects (NEOs) to detect those that may collide with Earth and a small amount of funding investigating ways to protect the Earth from such a potential collision. The funding is insufficient in detecting the majority of NEOs that may present a tangible threat to humanity. In 2005, a Congressional mandate called for NASA to detect 90 percent of NEOs with diameters of 140 meters of greater by 2020. There is a need for detection of objects as small as 30 to 50 meters as these can be highly destructive.   Mitigation strategies include civil defense, "slow push" or "pull" of the asteroid, kinetic impactors and nuclear explosions.  books.nap.edu/catalog.php

Source:   Holly Hight, Cosmos Online Excerpt:  ...Rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars are similar to the earliest evidence of life on Earth – the ‘stromatolites’ of Western Australia – scientists said. “We have found a location on Mars that is very similar to an ancient part of the Earth that is known to have been inhabited,” said Adrian Brown of the SETI Institute in California.  …“The question that remains now is - we know Mars was habitable, but was it ‘inhabited’ by life?   www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3606/ancient-mars-rocks-may-be-remains-life

Source:   Discover Magazine   Excerpt: When I was a kid, Saturn had one big, flat ring system divided up into maybe three or four broad sections separated by gaps, and that was it. Turns out, we were wrong. Saturn has thousands of rings made up of billions upon billions of tiny ice particles. There aren’t just a handful of gaps, there are thousands of them, too, and there are moonlets in those gaps. Those tiny moons tug and pull on the rings, distorting them into weird and fantastic shapes. And "flat"? Not quite. The Cassini mission apparently delights in showing us just how wrong we were: [see photos in article] blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/02/the-tiny-moon-with-the-long-reach/

Source:  Kenneth Chang, New York Times Excerpt: Images suggest that Mercury was volcanically active well into its middle age, given that it formed 4.5 billion years ago with the rest of the solar system. www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20mercury.html

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: 10-170   Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- The first spacecraft designed by NASA to orbit Mercury is giving scientists a new perspective on the planet's atmosphere and evolution. ... MESSENGER conducted a third and final flyby of Mercury in September 2009 ... revealed the first observations of ion emissions in Mercury's exosphere, or thin atmosphere … and evidence of younger volcanic activity than previously recorded. ...During its first two flybys of Mercury, the spacecraft captured images confirming that the planet's early history was marked by pervasive volcanism. The spacecraft's third flyby revealed … cratered plains … younger than the basin they fill… the youngest volcanic deposits … yet found on Mercury,"  ... observations suggest the planet spanned a much greater duration volcanism than previously thought, perhaps extending well into the second half of solar system history."  www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jul/10-170_Messenger_New_...