Monster Black Hole

Super massive black holes lurk at the center of every large galaxy. These cosmic behemoths can be millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Determining just how massive, however, has been daunting, especially for spiral galaxies and their closely related cousins barred spirals.

via daily galaxy.com

Saturn awesome ring

On Saturn, the rings tell you the season. On Earth, today marks a solstice, the time when the Earth's spin axis tilts directly toward the Sun. On Earth's northern hemisphere, today is the Summer Solstice, the day of maximum daylight. Since Saturn's grand rings orbit along the planet's equator, these rings appear most prominent -- from the direction of the Sun -- when the Saturn's spin axis points toward the Sun. Conversely, when Saturn's spin axis points to the side, an equinox occurs and the edge-on rings are hard to see. In the featured montage, images of Saturn over the past 11 years have been superposed to show the giant planet passing from southern summer toward northern summer. Although Saturn will only reach its northern summer solstice in 2017 May, the image of Saturn most analogous to today's Earth solstice is the bottom most one.

bright spots on ceres

The new photos from NASA's Dawn spacecraft resolve Ceres' bright spots into numerous points of varying sizes. But researchers still don't know what the spots are.The $473 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Ceres and Vesta, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is about 590 miles (950 km) wide, while Vesta's diameter is 330 miles (530 km).

via space.com

About the Milky Way

The Milky Way Galaxy is an immense and very interesting place. Not only does it measure some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter, it is home to planet Earth, the birthplace of humanity. Our Solar System resides roughly 27,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust particles called the Orion Arm.

 To know more go to -http://www.universetoday.com/22285/facts-about-the-milky-way/

Bright Galaxy Reveals Signs of First Stars in the Universe

Astronomers have found what looks like a population of the very first stars ever formed in the universe, forged from hydrogen created in the Big Bang.

via-space.com

One Big Black Hole - 140 Million Times Our Sun’s Mass!

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile ‘weighed’ a a barred spiral galaxy (NGC 1097) about 45 million light years from Earth. The 'scale' measured the distribution of two molecules, hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and formylium (HCO+), and comparing them to mathematical models.


via-hthttp://www.space.com/29699-one-big-black-hole-140-million-times-our-suns-mass-video.html

Did Comet Crashes Help Spark Earth Life?

  Life as we know doesn't actually belong to earth 'cause there was only water on earth  and there was life.
It is said to have come to earth through comets. In fact even water was is said to have come on earth when the comets crashed the earth.

            Billions of years ago, comets may have ferried life-sustaining water to our planet's surface, but that may not be all that we should thank these dirty snowballs for. Researchers are simulating comet impacts to see if they might help proliferate the left-handedness in molecules that life on Earth depends upon.

There is evidence from meteorite studies that amino acids may have been delivered to Earthfrom space.

"There is interest in how these building blocks came to be on primordial Earth," says Jennifer Blank of the SETI Institute.

She and her colleagues study comets as a second avenue for depositing these biological compounds on Earth. Their current work, which is supported by NASA's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, is looking at how the fire and brimstone of a comet impact may benefit the formation of complex molecules of a particular handedness.

Primordial Lab

Life on Earth uses 20 amino acids to build up the thousands upon thousands of different proteins that perform a myriad of cell functions. Astrobiologists often focus on the origins of amino acids in order to understand where life may have come from.

One of the first experiments aimed at reproducing the primordial Earth and its chemistry was undertaken by Stanley Miller in 1953. He was able to synthesize amino acids using lightning-like discharges in a reducing atmosphere of methane, ammonia and water ? similar to what exists on Jupiter.

Since that pioneering work, researchers have come to believe that Earth's early atmosphere was in fact more oxidative, containing mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

"Without the reducing atmosphere, the Miller mechanism becomes much less efficient atproducing amino acids," Blank says.

One way to get around this is to make the amino acids in space and have them come crashing down on-board meteorites and comets. There is ample evidence that meteorites carry amino acids. And just recently, an amino acid was discovered in comet material brought back by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

Blank and her colleagues were curious as to what happens to these biomolecules when the "space capsule" they are riding in smacks into the Earth.

The team has focused their work on comets, rather than meteors. Although comets are less prevalent in the inner solar system, they have a few possible advantages over their dry rocky counterparts when it comes to delivering biologically relevant material to a planet's surface.?

First of all, a comet impact is thought to be less harsh than that of a meteorite because comets are less dense, which means their impact generates lower temperatures and pressures. Blank says that the blow would be further softened on a comet arriving at an oblique angle.

The second advantage of comets is that they carry water, which is key for the chemical reactions that beget life. When the comet lands, its ice melts, forming a little puddle near the crash site.

"Comets give you all the ingredients, like a compact evolution kit," Blank says.

Of course, the primordial Earth was stocked with its own water, but "if a comet or meteor were to land in the ocean, any interesting chemistry would quickly be diluted away," says co-investigator George Cooper of NASA Ames. A comet impact on dry land would give the organic molecules on board the chance to amplify their numbers in the localized puddle.

Like Shooting Comets in a Barrel

To simulate a comet hitting pay dirt, Blank and her colleagues fire a bullet into a metal container the size of a can of beans. In this scenario, the container is the comet and the bullet is the hard ground. Inside the container is a small chamber about as big as a quarter, in which the scientists place a liquid sample of organic molecules.

"It's not super high-tech, but it is rather involved as far as the structural complexity is concerned," Blank explains.?

She and her colleagues take special care to ensure that the metal container doesn't leak from the impact. Afterwards, they carefully drill down to the chamber and draw out their "shocked" liquid sample.

In 2001, the team reported that amino acids placed in the comet simulator were still intact following the impact, which surprised other scientists.

"It's the coolest thing," Blank recounts. "People told us, 'Nothing is going to survive, so why should we fund you?'"

Normally, the 1,000-degree-temperatures inside the smashed "comet" would destroy any amino acids. But Blank believes the temperature rises and falls too fast for the molecules to react. There is also enormous pressure of 10,000 atmospheres that may be preventing the breakdown of compounds.

However, the amino acids did more than just survive the crash. They also started bonding together to form short chains up to 5-amino-acids long.

This comet-induced bonding may have played a role in the origin of life. Typically, there is an energy barrier that prevents amino acids from latching together. Indeed, organisms require enzymes to overcome this barrier when putting together their proteins. But enzymes themselves are proteins, so there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you build up proteins before you have proteins to help build them up?

It is perhaps conceivable that a comet impact fused together the first rudimentary protein pieces (called "peptides") and thereby got the whole ball rolling.

Blank's group is now running simulations to see if they can model how the energy barrier to amino acid bonding changes under the high temperature and pressure of a comet impact.

Molecular Crash-Test Dummies

The scientists are also planning to do more comet crash tests. They will be looking at sugars, which play an important part in the structure of DNA and RNA. And they will be looking at amino acids again, this time studying whether the handedness of comet passengers might be affected by the impact.

In regard to the handedness, Blank thinks there might be a difference in how the amino acids hook up together during the impact. Left-handed amino acids may form chains more readily with other left-handed amino acids, rather than with right-handed ones.

Such a preference, if it exists, might be able to enhance a slight overabundance of one hand (a so-called enantiomeric excess) in the original comet material. This might explain why organisms only use left-handed amino acids to form proteins.

"It will be a great discovery if they can get definite evidence as to formation of sugars, peptides, or enantiomeric excess," says Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan, who was not involved with this work.

He says the one concern will be contamination of the sample with the left-handed biology we are already familiar with. He suggests using amino acids made with carbon-13, so that any subsequent contamination with normal carbon-12-based amino acids will be easy to detect.

pluto time

Pluto orbits on the fringes of our solar system, billions of miles away. Sunlight is much weaker there than it is here on Earth, yet it isn't completely dark. In fact, for just a moment near dawn and dusk each day, the illumination on Earth matches that of noon on Pluto.
  Nobody knows exactly what it would look like--that's one reason the New Horizons mission to Pluto is so exciting. But there are a few things we do know. The sun would be about 1,000 times dimmer than it appears on Earth. Instead of a big yellow disc, the sun would look more like other stars, with one big difference: it would still be much, much brighter than anything else in the sky. Pluto has a thin atmosphere that would scatter the light, but probably not enough to make a bright sky like we see on Earth or Mars.
But it wouldn't be completely dark. In fact, if you stood on Pluto at noon you would have enough light to easily read a book. That's in part because your eyes are very good at automatically adjusting to different levels of light. If you had a camera, to get a clear picture of the landscape you'd want to adjust the settings for a longer exposure time or a wider aperture in order to capture as much light as possible. You'd have plenty of time to work on it: one full day on Pluto takes about 153 hours, and because of its axial tilt and very long seasons, parts of Pluto can remain lit for years at a time.
You can see for yourself how much light there is on Pluto. If you go outside on a clear day a few minutes after sunset or a few minutes before sunrise, that's about how much sunlight there is on Pluto at noon.
The New Horizons team has specifically designed and prepared the spacecraft's cameras for the light conditions at Pluto, so they'll be ready to capture whatever the mysterious dwarf planet and its moons have in store.
What else would affect the light on Pluto?
On Earth, the amount of light you see depends on the weather and other atmospheric conditions. We don't know much for sure yet about what kind of weather Pluto might have. One thing you'd definitely notice in Pluto's sky would be its moon Charon. Pluto has five moons (that we know of so far) but Charon is by far the biggest. It's so large compared to Pluto that instead of Charon going around Pluto like our moon goes around the Earth, Pluto and Charon orbit each other like a double planet. Charon is tidally locked in its orbit with Pluto in such a way that it can only be seen from one side of Pluto, similar to the way we can only see one side of our moon from Earth. If you were on that side of Pluto, Charon would sometimes be very bright in the skies overhead.
In fact, when New Horizons flies by in July it will photograph some areas on the night side of Pluto that will be illuminated only by Charon moonshine.

fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, released to commemorate a quarter century of exploring the solar system and beyond since its launch on April 24, 1990.

Mars once had life proved!!

             In a pioneering feat, researchers have discovered glass deposits on  mars,Providing  a delicate window into the possibility of past life on mars.
   Using data from NASA`a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the team from brown university detected glass deposits within impact craters on mars formed in the  searing heat of violent impact.
   Previous research has shown that ancient bio signatures can be preserved in the impact glass.
"knowing this' we wanted to go look for them on Mars and that is what we did here. Before this paper, no one has been able to definitively detect them on the Martian surface," said Kevin Cannon, PhD student at Brown University. Cannon and co-author professor Jack Mustard showed that large glass deposits are present in several ancient, yet well-preserved craters scattered across the surface of Mars.

Over the last few years, a number of studies have shown that, here on our planet, ancient bio signatures can be preserved in impact glass. One of those studies found organic molecules and even plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago in Argentina.

Scientists suggested that similar processes might preserve signs of life on Mars, if indeed they were present at the time of an impact.

In a new study, Prof Jack Mustard and PhD student Kevin Cannon, both from Brown University, used orbital remotely sensed data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which flies aboardNASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to investigate spectral signatures of Martian impact sites – geologic units that were formed during impacts.                                                                                 The glass-rich impactites the team has identified have been preserved on billion-year timescales, old enough to date back to more clement surface conditions on Mars.

Their preservation is likely due to the current cold and dry surface environment; therefore, fossilisation in glass, as proposed previously, seems to be a promising target to search for possible ancient Martian biological activity.

“The metastable glass has been preserved by the cold and dry Martian climate during the Amazonian period (2.9-3.3 billion years ago to present), and this preservation – as confirmed here across the planet – provides a means to trap signs of ancient life on the accessible Martian surface.”

   Knowing that impact glass can preserve ancient sign of life opens a potential new strategy in the search for martian life.

     "We think these could be interesting targets for future exploration. In fact, we have a particular spot in mind" the author from brown university said.
  The research was published online in the journal geology.

Deposits of impact glass have been preserved in Martian craters, including Alga Crater, shown here. In color coding based on analysis of data from the CRISM instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, green indicates the presence of glass; blues are pyroxene; reds are olivine. This view shows Alga Crater’s central peak, which is about 3 miles (5 km) wide within the 12-mile (19-km) diameter of this southern-hemisphere crater. The information from CRISM is shown over a terrain model and image based on observations by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The vertical dimension is exaggerated by a factor of two. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / JHUAPL / University of Arizona.

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Nasa tools to predict solar stroms

nasa scientist including one of indian origin has developed new model can help predicts solar geomagnetic - storms which can cause  telecommunication dusruption and power outraged 24 hours in advance.
    solar magnetic storms may be caused by a giant cloud of solar particles called coronal mass ejections in the opposite direction of earth's magnetic field.
  if a cme or  coronal mass ejection in the same direction and answers that is pointer pointing from south to north the  cme will slide by without much effect.
     Currently scientists don't have much advance notice of how a Cme`s magnetic field are arranged. They can only measure the field of CME`a passes over satellite close to earth.
      Ultimately, the model can describe how the CME will be configured as it approaches earth, and even which parts if the CME will have fields pointed in which direction.

NASA "flying saucers" deploys partially.

    NASA launched a giant ballon on Monday carrying a kind of "flying saucers"that will test technologies for landing on mars, but it's outsized parachute only partly deployed.
The aircraft fitted with the largest parachute ever constructed was launched from a military base in Hawaii. The massive helium ballon rose for about three hours,according to NASA, which broadcast the event live.
     The test vehicle was carried by balloon to about 120000 feet.
  This mission is designed to test entry and descent technology on the form of a donut-shaped airbag and a supersonic parachute that can be deployed while the vehicle is travelling several times the speed of sound.

galaxy NGC 7715

Is this galaxy jumping through a giant ring of stars? Probably not. Although the precise dynamics behind
 the featured image is yet unclear, what is clear is that the pictured galaxy, NGC 7714
, has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision with a neighboring galaxy. This smaller neighbor, NGC 7715
, situated off to the left of the featured frame, is thought to have charged right through NGC 7714
. Observations indicate that the golden ring pictured
 is composed of millions of older Sun-like stars that are likely co-moving with the interior bluer stars. In contrast, the bright center of NGC 7714
 appears to be undergoing a burst of new star formation. NGC 7714 is located about 100 million light years
 away toward the constellation of the Fish (Pisces
). The interactions
 between these galaxies likely started about 150 million years ago
 and should continue for several hundred million years more
, after which a single central galaxy
 may result.

Mangalyaan to black out for 15 days

From June 8 to 22, the sun will block mars  from earth mapping communication with the  satellite

   Starting Monday, the country's low cost mars mission that is in a rendezvous with the red planet for an extended period will enter the "black-out" phase snapping communication with the satellite.
     From June 8to 22, the sun will block out mars from the earth snapping communication with the satellite.

mars's mystery cloud baffles scientists

A mystery is brewing on Mars: Amateur astronomers spotted enormous plumes erupting off the Red Planet's surface, leaving scientists puzzled.

More than 155 miles (250 kilometers) high and hundreds of miles across, the baffling plumes were spotted by amateur astronomers in the spring of 2012. The plumes reflect sunlight, which means they could be made of water ice, carbon dioxide ice or dust. But clouds made of those materials would be hard to explain with current models of the Martian atmosphere, scientists say.

Images of Mars from the last 20 years reveal that shorter plumes, reaching heights of about 62 miles (100 km), occasionally flare up from the planet's surface. An image by the Hubble Space Telescope from 1997 revealed another abnormally high plume, similar to the one seen in 2012, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Any thing can turn into black hole!

   The Schwarzchild Radius or quantum radius is the radius of a sphere such that, if all the mass of an object were to be compressed within that sphere, the escape velocity from the surface of the sphere due to its gravity would equal the speed of light, essentially making the object a black hole.
For example, if you want to create a black hole the size of a peanut, you would need to crush an object the size of our Earth.  

This 4 minute clip brilliantly depicts some known black holes at different scales.
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Rose nebula

A cluster of newborn stars herald their birth in this interstellar  commemorative picture obtained with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These bright young stars are found in a rosebud-shaped (and rose-colored) nebulosity known as NGC 7129. The star cluster and its associated nebula are located at a distance of 3300 light-years in the constellation Cepheus.

A recent census of the cluster reveals the presence of 130 young stars. The stars formed from a massive cloud of gas and dust that contains enough raw materials to create a thousand Sun-like stars. In a process that astronomers still poorly understand, fragments of this molecular cloud became so cold and dense that they collapsed into stars. Most stars in our Milky Way galaxy are thought to form in such clusters.

The Spitzer Space Telescope image was obtained with an infrared array camera that is sensitive to invisible infrared light at wavelengths that are about ten times longer than visible light. In this four-color composite, emission at 3.6 microns is depicted in blue, 4.5 microns in green, 5.8 microns in orange, and 8.0 microns in red. The image covers a region that is about one quarter the size of the full moon.

  

Info...from -Nasa's site photojournal

inflation theory

According to the theory of inflation, the early Universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Cosmologists introduced this idea in 1981 to solve several important problems in cosmology.

One of these problems is the horizon problem. Assume, for a moment, the Universe is not expanding. Now imagine a photon was released very early in the Universe and travelled freely until it hits the North Pole of the Earth. Now imagine another photon was released at the same time, but "opposite" to the first one. It will hit the Earth at the South Pole. Could these two photons exchange any information from the time when they are released? Clearly not, because the time required to send information from one photon to the other would be two times the age of the Universe. The photons are causally disconnected. They are outside of each other's horizon.

These photons could not have communicated with each other unless inflation took place during the very early Universe

However, we observe that photons from opposite directions must have communicated somehow, because the cosmic microwave background radiation has almost exactly the same temperature in all directions over the sky.

This problem can be solved by the idea that the Universeexpanded exponentially for a short time period after the Big Bang. Before this period of inflation, the entire Universe could have been in causal contact and equilibrate to a common temperature. Widely separated regions today were actually very close together in the early Universe, explaining why photons from these regions have (almost exactly) the same temperature.

A simple model for the expansion of the Universe is to consider the inflation of the balloon. A person at any point on the balloon might consider themselves to be at the centre of the expansion, as all neighbouring points are getting further away.

As the balloon inflates, the distances between objects on the surface of the balloon increases

During inflation, the Universe expanded by a factor of about e⁶⁰=10²⁶. This number is a one followed by 26 zeros. It transcends normal political/economic discussions of inflation.

Quantum fluctuations

Let's suppose that before inflating the balloon, I write a message on the surface of the balloon which is so tiny that you cannot read it. Inflating the balloon will make the message readable for you. This means that inflation acts as a microscope, which magnifies what was written on the initial balloon.

In a similar manner we are able to observe quantum fluctuations that were created at the beginning of inflation. The expansion of the Universe during the inflationary epoch serves as a huge microscope that magnifies quantum fluctuations, corresponding to a scale less than 10^-28cm, to cosmological distances. This leaves imprints in the cosmic microwave background radiation (hotter and colder regions) and in the distribution of galaxies.

Inflation works as a cosmic microscope to see the quantum fluctuations in the very early Universe

Using classical physics, the evolution of the inflationary Universe is homogeneous - each spatial point evolves exactly the same way. However, quantum physics introduces some uncertainty in the initial conditions for the different spatial points.

These variations act as seeds for structure formation. After the inflationary period, when fluctuations are amplified, the density of matter will vary slightly from place to place in the Universe. Gravity will cause the more dense regions to start contracting, leading to the formation of galaxies.

Probing the early Universe

The figure below shows how the image of quantum noise may appear imprinted on the cosmic microwave background. Red and blue denote hot and cold variations of the temperature, measured by the WMAP satellite over seven years. Comparing the statistics of the measured data with our theoretical calculations shows very good agreement.

WMAP

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