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Mars Base

Hubble Space Telescope Passes Major Science Milestone | Hubble 10,000th Science Paper |... - 0 views

www.space.com/cope-10000-science-papers.html

scibyte25

shared by Mars Base on 09 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Hubble Space Telescope has crossed a major milestone, accumulating 10,000 science papers based on its observations
  • After 21 years
  • it's actually in the best shape of its life
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • last space shuttle servicing mission was in May 2009.
  • Papers describing discoveries in nearly every field of astronomy and cosmology have been published based on data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • conducted by scientists in more than 35 countries
  • most papers written by researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain
  • Hubble's top five most referenced papers are on
  • The search for distant supernovas used to characterize dark energy
  • The precise measurement of the universe's rate of expansion
  • The apparent link between galaxy mass and central black hole mass
  • Early galaxy formation in the Hubble Deep Field
  • The evolutionary models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs
  • 10,000th Hubble science paper
  • announces the discovery of the faintest supernova ever associated with a cosmic explosion called a long-duration gamma-ray burst, which spews high-energy radiation into space when a star dies
  • The first science paper based on Hubble data came about six months after the telescope's launch
  • a paper on observations of the center of galaxy NGC 7457, where scientists suspected a huge black hole lurked
Mars Base

NASA - Hubble to Use Moon as Mirror to See Venus Transit - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...transit-mirror.html

scibyte48 venus transit

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 12 - No Cached
  • image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5-6.
  • Hubble Space Telescope
  • Hubble cannot look at the sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth's moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet’s atmospheric makeup.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars
  • astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus's atmosphere
  • test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earth-like planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star. , Venus is an excellent proxy because it is similar in size and mass to our planet.
  • use an arsenal of Hubble instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, to view the transit in a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. During the transit, Hubble will snap images and perform spectroscopy, dividing the sunlight into its constituent colors, which could yield information about the makeup of Venus's atmosphere.
  • observe the moon for seven hours, before, during, and after the transit
  • compare the data
  • need the long observation because they are looking for extremely faint spectral signatures
  • Only 1/100,000th of the sunlight will filter through Venus's atmosphere and be reflected off the moon.
  • astronomers only have one shot at observing the transit, they had to carefully plan how the study would be carried out
  • Hubble will need to be locked onto the same location on the moon for more than seven hours
  • roughly 40 minutes of each 96-minute orbit of Hubble around the Earth
Mars Base

Was the real discovery of the expanding universe lost in translation? - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...stronomy-hubble-whodunnit.html

scibyte21

shared by Mars Base on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century may have been credited to the wrong person. But it turns out to have been nobody's fault except for that of the actual original discoverer himself.
  • Hubble reported that the universe is uniformly expanding in all directions.
  • Hubble never got a Nobel Prize for this discovery
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Hubble did get the most celebrated telescope of modern history named after him
  • Hubble published his landmark paper in which he determined the rate of expansion of the universe in 1929
  • based on the apparent recessional velocities (deduced from redshifts) of galaxies, as previously measured
  • discovered that Lemaître omitted the passages himself when he translated the paper into English!
  • Hubble's analysis showed that the farther the galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be receding
  • But Lemaître's discovery went unnoticed because it was published in French, in a rather obscure Belgian science journal
  • Lemaître's work was later translated and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When published in 1931, some of Lemaître's own calculations from 1927, of what would be later called the Hubble Constant, were omitted!
  • The fact that paragraphs were missing from the translated paper has been known (although not widely) since 1984
  • two years earlier, a Belgian priest and cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, published very similar conclusions, and he calculated a rate of expansion similar to what Hubble would publish two years later
  • did not find advisable to reprint the provisional discussion of radial velocities which is clearly of no actual interest, and also the geometrical note, which could be replaced by a small bibliography of ancient and new papers on the subject
  • was not at all obsessed with establishing priority for his original discovery. Given that Hubble's results had already been published in 1929, he saw no point in repeating his more tentative earlier findings again in 1931
Mars Base

Nearby Ancient Star is Almost as Old as the Universe - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-almost-as-old-as-the-universe

scibyte84

shared by Mars Base on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • A metal-poor star located merely 190 light-years from the Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old, which implies that the star is nearly as old as the Universe
  • results emerged from a new study
  • Such metal-poor stars are (super) important to astronomers because they set an independent lower limit for the age of the Universe
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • can be used to corroborate age estimates inferred by other means
  • In the past, analyses of globular clusters and the Hubble constant
  • yielded vastly different ages for the Universe, and were offset by billions of years
  • based on the microwave background and Hubble constant, but it must have formed soon after the big bang
  • Within the errors, the age of HD 140283 does not conflict with the age of the Universe, 13.77 ± 0.06 billion years
  • Metal-poor stars can be used to constrain the age of the Universe because metal-content is typically a proxy for age
  • Heavier metals are generally formed in supernova explosions, which pollute the surrounding interstellar medium.
  • Stars subsequently born from that medium are more enriched with metals than their predecessors
  • each successive generation becoming increasingly enriched
  • HD 140283 exhibits less than 1% the iron content of the Sun, which provides an indication of its sizable age.
  • had been used previously to constrain the age of the Universe, but uncertainties tied to its estimated distance (at that time) made the age determination somewhat imprecise
  • obtain a new and improved distance for HD 140283 using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), namely via the trigonometric parallax approach
  • distance uncertainty for HD 140283 was significantly reduced by comparison to existing estimates, thus resulting in a more precise age estimate for the star
  • The reliability of the age determined is likewise contingent on accurately determining the sample’s metal content
  • analyses of globular clusters and the Hubble constant yielded vastly different ages for the Universe
  • discrepant ages stemmed partly from uncertainties in the cosmic distance scale
  • determination of the Hubble constant relied on establishing (accurate) distances to galaxies
  • One of the key objectives envisioned for HST was to reduce uncertainties associated with the Hubble constant to <10%, thus providing an improved estimate for the age of the Universe
  • the mean implying an age near ~14 billion years
  • Determining a reliable age for stars in globular clusters is likewise contingent on the availability of a reliable distance
  • the study reaffirms that there are old stars roaming the solar neighborhood which can be used to constrain the age of the Universe
Mars Base

Auroras Seen on Uranus For First Time - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...s-auroras-science-space-hubble

AprMedia scibyte43 hubble uranus

shared by Mars Base on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Two fleeting, Earth-size auroral storms were imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope as they flared up on the dayside of the gas giant in November 2011. (
  • Auroras tend to surround a planet's poles, where magnetic field lines converge and funnel incoming charged solar particles into the planet's atmosphere. There, the particles collide with air molecules, making the molecules glow
  • Scientists tried unsuccessfully to detect auroras on Uranus in 1998 and 2005
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • team learned of an impending solar storm directed toward Uranus, which sits about 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) from Earth.
  • timed their Hubble observations specifically to coincide with the solar storm, and about six weeks later, Hubble spotted the auroras flaring up in Uranus's upper atmosphere
  • the other seven planets, Uranus's magnetic axis is 60 degrees off from its spin axis
  • spin axis itself has a bizarre 98-degree tilt relative to the solar system's orbital plane
  • , the planet seems to roll around on its side as it orbits the sun.
Mars Base

How to find hidden treasures in the archive | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

www.spacetelescope.org/...archive

scibyte40 esa hubble Contest

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • How to find hidden treasures in the archive
  • The main interface to get at the Hubble data is the Hubble Legacy Archive website.
  • search box lets you look for objects based on their name or coordinates
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • advanced search option is useful to restrict the search to specific instruments (cameras) on Hubble
  • recommend narrowing your search to give only results from ACS, WFC3 and WFPC2 – Hubble’s general purpose cameras.
  • Universe is a big place
  • there are many, many objects which Hubble has never studied
  • not all of Hubble’s observations are images
  • most observations are only released to the public a year after they have been made
  • scientists get the first chance to work with their data. These are marked “proprietary data, no preview”.
  • several options for how to display the results
  • easiest is to click on the images tab, which gives you preview images of all the results
  • Another useful view is the footprints tab, which shows the location of Hubble’s images overlaid on an image of the part of the sky where they are located
  • in most cases) offer an option to open the interactive display
  • opens the interactive tool which you can use to look at the image in more detail, and carry out basic image processing such as adjusting the zoom and changing the contrast and colour balance
  • lets you save your work as a JPEG.
  • process is entirely browser-based, and you need no special software
  • You can also download the data in FITS format
  • can then use
  • FITS Liberator
  • Photoshop
  • more sophisticated image processing
Mars Base

Hubble directly observes the disc around a black hole - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...11-hubble-disc-black-hole.html

scibyte20 black holes quasar

shared by Mars Base on 06 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole
  • Scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole.
  • the team measured the disc's size and studied the colours (and hence the temperatures) of different parts of the disc
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy, the team measured the disc's size and studied the colours (and hence the temperatures) of different parts of the disc.
  • Until now, the minute apparent size of quasars has meant that most of our knowledge of their inner structure has been based on theoretical extrapolations, rather than direct observations.
  • show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon
  • Quasars — short for quasi-stellar objects — are glowing discs of matter that orbit supermassive black holes, heating up and emitting extremely bright radiation as they do so.
  • These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.
  • using the stars in an intervening galaxy as a scanning microscope to probe features in the quasar's disc that would otherwise be far too small to see
  • As these stars move across the light from the quasar, gravitational effects amplify the light from different parts of the quasar, giving detailed colour information for a line that crosses through the accretion disc.
  • the team were able to reconstruct the colour profile across the accretion disc
  • allowed the team to measure the diameter of the disc of hot matter, and plot how hot it is at different distances from the centre
  • Quasars' physical properties are not yet well understood
  • This new ability to obtain observational measurements is therefore opening a new window to help understand the nature of these objects."
Mars Base

Hubble Treasures Contest: iPad And iPod Touch Up For Grabs | Video | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ad-ipod-touch-grabs-video.html

scibyte40 hubble

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Over a million observations of the Universe have been made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Spacetelescope.org is asking the public to sift through the archives, adjust the colors of their favorite photos with an online tool, and submit to the contest
  • Over a million observations of the Universe have been made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Spacetelescope.org is asking the public to sift through the archives, adjust the colors of their favorite photos with an online tool, and submit to the contest
  • Spacetelescope.org
Mars Base

Hubble's Hidden Treasures 2012 | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

www.spacetelescope.org/...hiddentreasures

scibyte40 hubble esa Contest

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Since 1990, Hubble has made more than a million observations
  • the most stunning are in our Top 100 gallery and iPad app.
  • Searching Hubble’s archive for hidden treasures is a lot of fun, and it’s pretty straightforward, even if you don’t have advanced knowledge
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • prepared some tutorials to get you started with searching the archive
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012: Find and tweak Hubble observations using a set of simple online tools. It’s easy and fun, and anyone can take part. Top prize: Apple iPod Touch and goodies
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012 Image Processing: Find Hubble observations and then process them using professional astronomical imaging software. An extra challenge for amateur astronomers or people keen to learn about astronomical image processing. Top prize: Apple iPad and goodies
  • you’re playing with real data from the world’s most famous astronomical observatory
Mars Base

Pluto Has a Fifth Moon, Hubble Telescope Reveals | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/fth-moon-hubble-discovery.html

scibyte54 PlutoMoons

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • new moon has been discovered orbiting Pluto, scientists announced
  • July 11
  • discovery comes almost exactly one year after Hubble spotted Pluto's fourth moon, a tiny body currently called P4
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Pluto's other moons are Charon, Nix, Hydra and P4. Charon is by far the largest, measuring 648 miles (1,043 kilometers) across. Nix and Hydra range between 20 and 70 miles (32 to 113 km) wide, while P4 is thought to be 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km) across. 
  • concern about hazards is going up," he added, referring to the collision risk New Horizons will face when it cruises by Pluto in a few years
  • provisionally named S/2012 (134340) 1, though it's also going by the moniker P5
  • P5 appears to be irregularly shaped, with a diameter between 6 and 15 miles (10 to 24 km). It zips around Pluto at an average distance of 29,000 miles (47,000 km
  • Charon was first spotted in 1978, 48 years after the discovery of Pluto. Nix and Hydra were found by Hubble in 2005
  • Pluto orbits 3.65 billion miles (5.87 billion km) from the sun on average, about 39 times farther away than Earth does
  • The inventory of the Pluto system we're taking now with Hubble will help the New Horizons team design a safer trajectory for the spacecraft
Mars Base

NASA Mulling Missions for Donated Spy Telescopes | National Reconnaissance Office | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/llite-telescopes-missions.html

scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes
  • SA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
  • More than 60 serious proposals came
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • in, the most promising of which were presented in early February
  • The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture
  • cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency
  • the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view
  • Seven big ideas
  • Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • Exoplanet observatory
  • General-purpose faint object explorer
  • Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
  • Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch
  • they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.
  • no instruments on these two telescopes — just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures
  • It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure
  • there's no guarantee that it will be
  • the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And
Mars Base

ScienceShot: Hubble Spots Auroras on Uranus - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...shot-hubble-spots-auroras.html

AprMedia scibyte43 hubble uranus

shared by Mars Base on 18 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • auroral glows in the atmosphere above our planet can flicker for hours
  • those seen on the planet's sunlit side—apparently last for only a couple of minutes
  • Researchers caught their first glimpse of the brief auroras from our planet's neighborhood with the Hubble Space Telescope in November 2011, 3 months after a strong gust in the solar wind raced past Earth on its way to Uranus
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Previously, scientists had observed the planet's auroras only once, during a Voyager flyby in 1986
  • instruments had a much better view of the glows
  • lasted longer, covered a larger area, and festooned the unlit side of Uranus
  • other factors were different
  • planet's rotational axis was pointed almost directly at the sun
  • in 2011 the axis lay almost perpendicular to the flow of solar wind
  • new observations should help scientists better understand Uranus's odd magnetic field, whose axis is both offset from the center of the planet and tilts at an angle of 60° from the rotational axis.
Mars Base

Join the 2012 Hubble's Hidden Treasures Competition | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

spacetelescope.org/...ann1203

scibyte40 esa hubble

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • hidden in Hubble’s huge data archives are still some truly breathtaking images that have never been seen in public
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures
  • inviting the public into Hubble’s vast science archive to dig out the best unseen Hubble images
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • you could win an iPod Touch in our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Competition.
  • Download the data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, process using powerful open-source software such as the ESO/ESA/NASA FITS Liberator and make a beautiful image for our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Contest Flickr group.
  • you’ll be in with a chance to win an iPad.
  • Both parts of the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition close on 31 May 2012
  • The best datasets that you identify will also be featured as future pictures of the week and photo releases on spacetelescope.org.
Mars Base

What is image processing? | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

www.spacetelescope.org/...imageprocessing

scibyte40 hubble Contest esa

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • What is image processing?
  • Hubble takes pictures which capture many more colours and gradations of light and dark than the human eye (or consumer digital cameras) can see
  • are also quirks in how its cameras work
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • designed to make scientifically useful observations rather than being optimised for pretty pictures.
  • most of these quirks have already been corrected in the data you find in the archive,
  • images are still scientific data rather than photographs like those from a normal digital camera
  • still contain far more information than the eye can see.
  • beautiful Hubble images that we all know have all been extensively tweaked and optimised by hand, in order to reveal as much of the data as possible
  • brightening the glowing gas in nebulae or compressing the dynamic range of galaxy images so that the core and spiral arms can both be seen equally clearly
  • Image processing is the name for this process of selecting data, adjusting colour, contrast and dynamic range to reveal the hidden detail in Hubble’s scientific data.
Mars Base

February 19 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on February 19th, died, and ev... - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...2_19.htm

scibyte120 LookingBackFeb

shared by Mars Base on 15 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In 1924, Edwin Hubble wrote a letter to Harlow Shapley, which he concluded by saying, “...the distance [to the Andromeda nebula] comes out something over 300,000 parsecs.” Hubble discussed in the letter his measurement of the magnitudes of the Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda nebula he had found and confirmed. He used their measured characteristics to calculate their distance, definitely about a million light years from our Solar System. This was the evidence that Andromeda was a separate galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. This was the first proof of an “island universe.” After collecting more data, Hubble sent a paper read on 1 Jan 1925 to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Meanwhile, Shapley remained unconvinced, as when he debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920.
  • Hubble notifies Shapley of Andromeda distance
Mars Base

2013 in science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...2013_in_science

scibyte114 2013YearInReview

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to
  • Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone
  • 13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease
  • ...101 more annotations...
  • 17 January – NASA announces that the Kepler space observatory has developed a reaction wheel issue
  • 2 January A study by Caltech astronomers reports that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least one planet per sta
  • 3 January
  • 8 January
  • 20 January – Scientists prove that quadruple-helix DNA is present in human cells
  • 25 January
  • An international team of scientists develops a functional light-based "tractor beam", which allows individual cells to be selected and moved at will. The invention could have broad applications in medicine and microbiology
  • 30 January – South Korea conducts its first successful orbital launch
  • 6 February
  • Astronomers report that 6% of all dwarf stars – the most common stars in the known universe – may host Earthlike planets
  • Scientists discover live bacteria in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Whillans
  • American scientists finish drilling down to the subglacial Lake Whillans, which is buried around 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) under the Antarctic ice
  • 10 February NASA's Curiosity Mars rover uses its onboard drill to obtain the first deep rock sample ever retrieved from the surface of another plane
  • 15 February A 10-ton meteoroid impacts in Chelyabinsk, Russia, producing a powerful shockwave and injuring over 1,000 people
  • 28 February
  • Astronomers make the first direct observation of a protoplanet forming in a disk of gas and dust around a distant sta
  • A third radiation belt is discovered around the Eart
  • 1 March – Boston Dynamics demonstrates an updated version of its BigDog military robot
  • 3 March – American scientists report that they have cured HIV in an infant by giving the child a course of antiretroviral drugs very early in its life. The previously HIV-positive child has reportedly exhibited no HIV symptoms since its treatment, despite having no further medication for a year
  • researchers replace 75 percent of an injured patient's skull with a precision 3D-printed polymer replacement implant. In future, damaged bones may routinely be replaced with custom-manufactured implants
  • 7 March
  • A study concludes that heart disease was common among ancient mummies
  • 11 March
  • 12 March NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence that conditions on Mars were once suitable for microbial life after analyzing the first drilled sample of Martian rock, "John Klein" rock at Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. The rover detected water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chloromethane and dichloromethane. Related tests found results consistent with the presence of smectite clay minerals
  • 14 March CERN scientists confirm, with a very high degree of certainty, that a new particle identified by the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012 is the long-sought Higgs boson
  • 18 March
  • NASA reports evidence from the Curiosity rover on Mars of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples, including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in the veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock.[177] Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 cm
  • 27 March – A potential new weight loss method is discovered, after a 20% weight reduction was achieved in mice simply by having their gut microbes altered.
  • NASA scientists report that hints of dark matter may have been detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
  • 3 April
  • 15 April A functional lab-grown kidney is successfully transplanted into a live rat in Massachusetts General Hospital
  • 18 April – NASA announces the discovery of three new Earthlike exoplanets – Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-69c – in the habitable zones of their respective host stars, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69. The new exoplanets, which are considered prime candidates for possessing liquid water and thus potentially life, were identified using the Kepler spacecraft
  • 21 April The Antares rocket, a commercial launch vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, successfully conducts its maiden flight
  • After years of unpowered glide tests, Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo hybrid spaceplane successfully conducts its first rocket-powered fligh
  • 29 April
  • 1 May IBM scientists release A Boy and His Atom, the smallest stop-motion animation ever created, made by manipulating individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunnelling microscope
  • A new study finds that children whose parents suck on their pacifiers have fewer allergies later in life
  • NASA reports that a reaction wheel on the Kepler space observatory may be malfunctioning and may result in the premature termination of the observatory's search for Earth-like
  • 15 May
  • 16 May Water dating back 2.6 billion years, by far the oldest ever found, is discovered in a Canadian mine
  • 27 May Four-hundred-year-old bryophyte specimens left behind by retreating glaciers in Canada are brought back to life in the laboratory
  • 29 May
  • Russian scientists announce the discovery of mammoth blood and well-preserved muscle tissue from an adult female specimen in Siberia
  • A new treatment to "reset" the immune system of multiple sclerosis patients is reported to reduce their reactivity to myelin by 50 to 75 percent
  • 4 June
  • During the Shenzhou 10 mission, Chinese astronauts deliver the country's first public video broadcast from the orbiting Tiangong-1 space laboratory
  • 20 June
  • China's Shenzhou 10 manned spacecraft returns safely to Earth, having conducted China's longest manned space mission to date
  • 26 June
  • 20 June
  • 20 June
  • 6 July
  • Scientists report that a wide variety of microbial life exists in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok, which has been buried in ice for around 15 million years. Samples of the lake's water obtained by drilling were found to contain traces of DNA from over 3,000 tiny organisms
  • 15 July
  • ASA engineers successfully test a rocket engine with a fully 3D-printed injector
  • 19 July
  • NASA scientists publish the results of a new analysis of the atmosphere of Mars, reporting a lack of methane around the landing site of the Curiosity rover
  • Earth is photographed from the outer solar system. NASA's Cassini spacecraft releases images of the Earth and Moon taken from the orbit of Saturn
  • 29 July – Astronomers discover the first exoplanet orbiting a brown dwarf, 6,000 light years from Earth
  • exoplanet
  • 7 January
  • Astronomers
  • report that "at least 17 billion" Earth-sized exoplanets are estimated to reside in the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 20 February
  • NASA reports the discovery of Kepler-37b, the smallest exoplanet yet known, around the size of Earth's Moon
  • 10 June
  • Scientists report that the earlier claims of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a star close to our Solar System, may not be supported by astronomical evidence
  • 25 June – In an unprecedented discovery, astronomers detect three potentially Earthlike exoplanets orbiting a single star in the Gliese 667
  • 11 July For the first time, astronomers determine the true colour of a distant exoplanet. HD 189733 b, a searing-hot gas giant, is said to be a vivid blue colour, most likely due to clouds of silica in its atmosphere
  • NASA announces that the failing Kepler space observatory may never fully recover. New missions are being considered
  • 15 August
  • Phase I clinical trials of SAV001 – the first and only preventative HIV vaccine – have been successfully completed with no adverse effects in all patients. Antibody production was greatly boosted after vaccination
  • 3 September
  • 12 September NASA announces that Voyager I has officially left the Solar System, having travelled since 1977
  • NASA scientists report the Mars Curiosity rover detected "abundant, easily accessible" water (1.5 to 3 weight percent) in soil samples
  • 26 September
  • In addition, the rover found two principal soil types: a fine-grained mafic type and a locally derived, coarse-grained felsic type
  • mafic
  • as associated with hydration of the amorphous phases of the soi
  • perchlorates, the presence of which may make detection of life-related organic molecules difficult, were found at the Curiosity rover landing site
  • earlier at the more polar site of the Phoenix lander) suggesting a "global distribution of these salts
  • Astronomers have created the first cloud map of an exoplanet, Kepler-7b
  • 30 September
  • 8 October The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"
  • 16 October Russian authorities raise a large fragment, 654 kg (1,440 lb) total weight, of the Chelyabinsk meteor, a Near-Earth asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013, from the bottom of Chebarkul lake.
  • Researchers have shown that a fundamental reason for sleep is to clean the brain of toxins. This is achieved by brain cells shrinking to create gaps between neurons, allowing fluid to wash through
  • 17 October
  • 22 October – Astronomers have discovered the 1,000th known exoplanet
  • 4 November - Astronomers report, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars
  • 5 November – India launches its first Mars probe, Mangalyaan
  • The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has made the first discovery of very high energy neutrinos on Earth which had originated from beyond our Solar System
  • 21 November
  • 1 December – China launches the Chang'e 3 lunar rover mission, with a planned landing on December 16
  • 3 December – The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence of water in the atmospheres of five distant exoplanets: HD 209458b, XO-1b, WASP-12b, WASP-17b and WASP-19b
  • 9 December NASA scientists report that the planet Mars had a large freshwater lake (which could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life) based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater
  • 12 December NASA announces, based on studies with the Hubble Space Telescope, that water vapor plumes were detected on Europa, moon of Jupiter
  • 14 December – The unmanned Chinese lunar rover Chang'e 3 lands on the Moon, making China the third country to achieve a soft landing there
  • 18 December
  • nomers have spotted what appears to be the first known "exomoon", located 1,800 light years away
  • 20 December – NASA reports that the Curiosity rover has successfully upgraded, for the third time since landing, its software programs and is now operating with version 11. The new software is expected to provide the rover with better robotic arm and autonomous driving abilities. Due to wheel wear, a need to drive more carefully, over the rough terrain the rover is currently traveling on its way to Mount Sharp, was also reported
Mars Base

April 25 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on April 25th, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/4_25.htm

scibyte127 LookingBackApr

shared by Mars Base on 20 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Hubble Space Telescope
  • In 1990, the $2.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in space from the Space Shuttle Discovery into an orbit 381 miles above Earth. It was the first major orbiting observatory, named in honour of American astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble. It was seven years behind schedule and nearly $2 billion over budget. In orbit, the 94.5-in primary mirror was found to be flawed, giving blurred images and reduced ability to see distant stars. However, correcting optics were successfully installed in 25 Dec 1993. The telescope 43-ft x 14-ft telescope now provides images with a clarity otherwise impossible due to the effect of the earth's atmosphere. Instrument packages capture across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Mars Base

Ancient Quasar Shines Brightly, But All the Galaxy's Stars Are Missing - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-the-galaxys-stars-are-missing

scibyte69 quasar

shared by Mars Base on 24 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Quasars have been the best and most easily observed beacons for astronomers to probe the distant Universe
  • one of the most distant and brightest quasars is providing a bit of a surprise
  • Astronomers studying a distant galaxy, dubbed J1148+5251 and which contains a bright quasar, are seeing only the quasar and not the host galaxy itself
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • has been thought that the quasar has been feeding on a handful of stars every year in order to bulk up to its size of three billion solar masses over just a few hundred million years. But where are all the stars
  • Near infrared views with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 are only providing hints of what might be taking place
  • galaxy is so enshrouded with dust that none of the starlight can be seen
  • only the bright, blaring quasar shines through
  • most early galaxies contain hardly any dust
  • the early universe was dust-free until the first generation of stars started making dust through nuclear fusion
  • quasar was first identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the follow-up submillimeter observations showed significant dust but not how and where
  • If you want to hide the stars with dust
  • make lots of short-lived massive stars earlier on that lose their mass at the end of their lifetime
  • used Hubble to very carefully subtract light from the quasar image and look for the glow of surrounding stars.
  • remarkable
  • Hubble didn’t find any of the underlying galaxy
  • Because we don’t see the stars, we can rule out that the galaxy that hosts this quasar is a normal galaxy
  • It’s among the dustiest galaxies in the universe
  • so widely distributed that not even a single clump of stars is peeking through
Mars Base

Hubble Reveals Curious Auroras on Uranus - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...eals-curious-auroras-on-uranus

AprMedia scibyte43 hubble uranus

shared by Mars Base on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • an international team of astronomers
  • spotted two instances of auroras on the distant planet… once on November 16 and again on the 29th.
  • Uranus — which has an 84-year-long orbit
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Further investigations of Uranus’ auroras and magnetic field can offer insight into the dynamics of Earth’s own magnetosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, which in turn affects our increasingly technological society.
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