Astro Blog

Source:   By Glen Roberts Jr., Berkeley Lab News Center. Excerpt: WFIRST will explore mysteries of dark energy, hunt for distant planets, retrace universe's history during 6-year mission. ...The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will launch into its six-year mission from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the mid-2020s. ...The telescope will be NASA’s next major astrophysics observatory following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. ...WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies. WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies.... http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/0...

Source:   By Adrian Cho, Science Excerpt: ...two massive black holes—the ultrastrong gravitational fields left behind by gigantic stars that collapsed to infinitesimal points—slowly drew together... spiraled ever closer, until, about 1.3 billion years ago, they whirled about each other at half the speed of light and finally merged. The collision sent a shudder through the universe: ripples in the fabric of space and time called gravitational waves. Five months ago, they washed past Earth. And, for the first time, physicists detected the waves, fulfilling a 4-decade quest and opening new eyes on the heavens. The discovery marks a triumph for the 1000 physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gigantic instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. ...Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but directly detecting them required mind-boggling technological prowess ...[sensing] a wav...

Source:   By Ian Sample, The Guardian. Excerpt: Astronomers investigating the odd alignment of rocks beyond Pluto have concluded that an undetected icy planet four times the size of Earth must exist. ...If the researchers have their sums right, the mysterious new world is 10 times more massive than Earth and up to four times the size. Nicknamed Planet Nine, it moves on an extremely elongated orbit, and takes a staggering 10,000 to 20,000 years to swing once around the sun. ...Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) calculate that the closest it comes to the sun is 15 times the distance to Pluto. It then heads into uncharted territory, 75 times further out than Pluto, or about 93 billion miles from the sun. A ray of light would take a week to get there. ...Chris Lintott... said ...“One very interesting thing is that the planet is predicted to be between Earth and Neptune in mass. We see lots of planets this size in our surveys of planets elsewhere in the g...

Source:   By Lee Billings , Scientific American Blog Excerpt: More than 30 worlds have new names drawn from world mythology, literature and history. ...The IAU’s NameExoWorlds contest, which began in July 2014, consisted of public and semi-private rounds of submissions and voting on names for 32 exoplanets and 15 host stars. ...The very first confirmed exoplanetary system, announced in 1992, consists of three rocky worlds orbiting a stellar remnant, a millisecond pulsar ignominiously named PSR 1257+12. Now, the pulsar is suitably called “Lich,” a name for an undead wizard from Greek, Dutch, and Norse folktales. Its three planets bear similarly spooky names drawn from ghostly mythological creatures—“Poltergeist,” “Phobetor” and “Draugr.” Pegasi 51, the first normal star found to host exoplanets, now has a more mellifluous name: “Helvetios,” a Latinized reference to the Helvetians, a tribe of Celts that lived in the Swiss Alps. The name nods to the Swiss astronomer...

Source:  NASA Feature Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0xkupKwjfM&feature=youtu.be Latest New Horizons Science Photos - http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/index.php Images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/pics/Very-Best-View-of-Pluto.png http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/pics/Very-best-view-of-Pluto-%28mosaic%29.jpg nasa.gov page for New Horizons - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-returns-first-of-the-best-images-of-pluto

Source:   By Sid Perkins, Science Excerpt: Miniplanets zooming through our early solar system passed close to our moon and tugged it into the strange, tilted orbit it has today, according to a new study. The findings solve a longstanding mystery and may also explain why Earth’s crust is unexpectedly rich in gold and platinum: When some of these small planets slammed into Earth, they delivered a payload of precious metals. Scientists have long debated the origin of the moon. The prevailing idea, first proposed decades ago, is that a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, flinging material into space that then coalesced into our only natural satellite. According to current models of that collision, the ring of debris that eventually became the moon should have ended up in a plane tilted no more than 1° from the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth orbits the sun, says Kaveh Pahlevan, a planetary scientist at Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. But in fact, the moon’s orbital in...

Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7. Excerpt: Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet, but rather than smash into the surface, it likely will be shredded and the pieces strewn about the planet in a ring like the rings encircling Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune  ...in 10-20 million years... that will persist for anywhere from one million to 100 million years, according to two young earth scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. In a paper appearing online this week in Nature Geoscience, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars. Just as earth’s moon pulls on our planet in different directions, raising tides in the oceans, for example, so too Mars tugs differently on different parts of P...