Group items tagged

Earth observation data have increased considerably over the last decades with satellite sensors collecting and transmitting back to Earth several terabytes of data per day. This data acquisition rate is a major challenge to existing data management, exploitation and dissemination approaches used by various agencies such as ESA, NASA and European national space agencies. To make the available petabytes of EO data easily accessible by an even larger group of end user applications, TELEIOS will design and implement a Virtual Earth Observatory by building on the following state of the art technologies:

LAWA will federate distributed FIRE facilities with the rich Web repository of the European Archive, to create a Virtual Web Observatory and use Web data analytics as a use case study to validate our design. The outcome of our work will enable Internet-scale analysis of data, and bring the content aspect of the Internet on the roadmap of Future Internet Research. In four work packages we will extend the open-source Hadoop software by novel methods for wide-area data access, distributed storage and indexing, scalable data aggregation and data analysis along the time dimension, and automatic classification of Web contents.

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Ten years ago today, NASA launched the Chandra X-Ray Observatory aboard the space shuttle Columbia. And it has provided stunning images from the high-energy

See colourful images from deep space captured by Nasa's x-ray observatory since 1999.

A new project to create a 3D map of space so large that scientists can find a 500 million-light-year-size remnant from the early universe inside it began operation last month. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey opened its eyes to the universe, taking in data from hundreds of galaxies and quasars in the constellation Aquarius, from its perch on the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Eventually, it will image two million galaxies and quasars.

Captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and combined with data from infrared and optical telescopes, this image shows the farthest galaxy cluster ever detected. Designated JKCS041, the cluster is located 10.2 billion light-years from Earth, beating the previous distance record by a billion light-years. Astronomers think JKCS041 formed just about as early as was feasible.

The most distant known galaxy cluster has been discovered with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The cluster, known as JKCS041, is located about 10.2 billion light-years away and is observed as it was when the universe was only about a quarter of its present age. It beats the previous record holder, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, by about a billion light-years.

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the universe, Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang of the University of Hong Kong have discovered, suggesting that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present. The organic substance they found contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components that are so complex, their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms. Unidentified radiation from the universe The researchers investigated an unsolved phenomenon: a set of infrared emissions detected in stars, interstellar space, and galaxies, known as "Unidentified Infrared Emission features." From observations taken by the Infrared Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope, Kwok and Zhang showed that the astronomical spectra have chemical structures that are much more complex that previously thought. By analyzing spectra of star dust formed in exploding stars called novae, they show that stars are making these complex organic compounds on extremely short time scales of weeks, and ejecting it into the general interstellar space, the region between stars. "Our work has shown that stars have no problem making complex organic compounds under near-vacuum conditions," says Kwok. "Theoretically, this is impossible, but observationally we can see it happening." Most interestingly, this organic star dust is similar in structure to complex organic compounds found in meteorites. Since meteorites are remnants of the early Solar System, the findings raise the possibility that stars enriched the early Solar System with organic compounds. The early Earth was subjected to severe bombardments by comets and asteroids, which potentially could have carried organic star dust. Whether these delivered organic compounds played any role in the development of l

ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2011) - The HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile is the world's most successful planet finder [1]. The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA.