New Exhibition, Website Guide Visitors through the Evolving Universe

The cosmos constantly changes. Stars are born, live out their lives, and die – sometimes calmly, sometimes explosively. Galaxies form, grow, and collide dramatically. A new exhibition and website, developed jointly by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, reveal the dynamic and evolving universe through breathtaking photographs and informative captions.

“The Evolving Universe” explores how the stars, galaxies and universe undergo the same stages as life on Earth: from birth, to maturity and, eventually, to death. This remarkable journey from present-day Earth to the far reaches of space and time will be on view in the museum in Washington, D.C., through July 7, 2013.

A worldwide audience also can experience the exhibition through its website, located at www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/evolving-universe. All of the images featured in the museum gallery can be downloaded in high-resolution jpegs or PDFs formatted in poster size.

Full Story: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2011/pr201132.html

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Ground- & Space-Based Observations Yield New Planet Kepler-21b

The NASA Kepler Mission is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-size planets in or near the “habitable zone,” the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist, and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. It now has another planet to add to its growing list. A research team led by Steve Howell, NASA Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of the earth’s radius and a mass no greater that 10 earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8 day period. With such a short period, and such a bright star, the team of over 65 astronomers (that included David Silva, Ken Mighell and Mark Everett of NOAO) needed multiple telescopes on the ground to support and confirm their Kepler observations. These included the 4 meter Mayall telescope and the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The accompanying figure shows the size of the Kepler field, seen over Kitt Peak.

With a period of only 2.8 days, this planet, designated Kepler-21b, is only about 6 million km away from its parent star. By comparison Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has a period of 88 days and a distance from the sun almost ten times greater, or 57 million km. So Kepler 21b is far hotter than any place humans could venture. The team calculates that the temperature at the surface of the planet is about 1900 K, or 2960 F. While this temperature is nowhere near the habitable zone in which liquid water might be found, the planet’s size is approaching that of the earth.

Full Story: http://www.noao.edu/news/2011/pr1108.php

Homer Glen, IL, Becomes 3rd Int’l Dark Sky Community

The Village of Homer Glen, Illinois, became the world’s third International Dark Sky Community on 21 November. Located 30 miles southwest of Chicago, Homer Glen’s proximity to a major city presented large challenges but also valuable opportunities to raise awareness on the negative effects of wasteful outdoor lighting.

A primary goal of the International Dark Sky Places program is to improve sky quality relative to an area, and Homer Glen has worked hard to provide a respite to the famously excessive lighting of Chicago. Sky glow prohibits astronomical quality skies, but Homer Glen’s statewide leadership and education campaign for smart lighting policy has earned the recognition of this prestigious award.

Work in Homer Glen is — hands down — the initiator of the dark sky movement for the entire state of Illinois. The Village passed the state’s first stand-alone lighting ordinance in 2007, and its promotion of Earth Hour attracted the support of then-Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn, who commended Homer Glen for its “environmentally friendly” outdoor lighting ordinance in 2008 during a ceremony held jointly by representatives of IDA and the World Wildlife Fund.

Full Story: http://astronews.us/2011-11-30-1159.html

365 Days of Astronomy Podcast to Continue in 2012

The award-winning 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is proud to announce the project will continue for yet another year – its fourth consecutive year — and is now accepting sign-ups for participants for more podcasts in 2012.

365 Days of Astronomy (which will last 366 days in 2012, a leap year) is a legacy project of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), and in 2009 was a major project of the IYA. All the podcast episodes are written, recorded and produced by people all around the world.

“During the past three years, we’ve shared astronomy with the world, and we’ve heard from many different voices in astronomy – from professionals and amateurs to those who just enjoy the all the incredible discoveries and beautiful images of our Universe,” said Nancy Atkinson, who is now an advising producer for the project.

Full Story: http://365daysofastronomy.org/2011/11/29/breaking-365-days-of-astronomy-podcast-to-continue-in-2012/

AstroNews Is Now On Diaspora!

Diaspora, an alternative to Facebook, has just opened up and allowed users to sign up for accounts – so I went ahead and created one for AstroNews 🙂

You can find it at https://joindiaspora.com/u/astronews

Enjoy!

Astronomer David Levy’s Logbooks Now Online

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) in conjunction with Jarnac Observatory is pleased to announce the launch of the David Levy Logbooks archive. The project offers full and free access to digital facsimiles of over sixteen thousand observing sessions by David H. Levy chronicling more than half a century of astronomical exploration and discovery: http://www.rasc.ca/logbooks/levy

Dr. David H. Levy, co-discoverer of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, is one of the most acclaimed amateur astronomers of our time. He is the discoverer or co-discoverer of twenty two comets and more than 150 asteroids, and is the first person to have discovered comets visually, photographically, and electronically. Dr. Levy is a well-known popularizer of astronomy, who has spent a lifetime advancing the active engagement of others in the rich cultural pursuit of astronomy by personal example and through live appearances, and print and electronic media. The conviction that astronomical observation, both recreational and scientific, provides a way to discover more about our place in the universe and to better know ourselves is shared by Dr. Levy and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), an organization of which he has been a member for nearly as long as he has been an astronomer.

Full Story: http://astronews.us/2011-11-29-1228.html

Coverage Set For Next Soyuz Crew Launch And Docking

Fresh off the arrival of three new crew members at the International Space Station, the next trio of residents is set to launch to the outpost Dec. 21. NASA Television will cover prelaunch activities, launch and docking to the orbital laboratory during the next several weeks.

Expedition 30 NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Russian Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers are scheduled to launch at 7:16 a.m. CST on Dec. 21 (7:16 p.m. local time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in their Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft to begin a two-day trip to the station. They are set to dock to the station’s Rassvet module at approximately 9:20 a.m. on Dec. 23.

Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers will join Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank of NASA and Russian Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who have been on the station since Nov. 16. Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers will remain on the station until May as members of the Expedition 31 crew.

Full Story: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/nov/HQ_M11-241_Exp_30_coverage.html

Puzzle Piece for Confirming Dark Matter Seems Unlikely Fit

In 2008, the European-Russian satellite PAMELA scanned the cosmic ray spectrum and picked up something curious — an excess of antimatter positrons. It was a startling discovery, in part because it could have been a sign of the existence of dark matter, long pursued by the worldwide physics community.

Now, in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, and originally published on the Internet physics archive, researchers with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University are confirming the previous detection, and that the excess seems to grow at higher energies in the spectrum, which is consistent with many theories about how dark matter might produce positrons.

Full Story: http://www.kavlifoundation.org/kavli-news/KIPAC-earth-magnetic-dark-matter

Fermi Reveals a Cosmic-Ray Cocoon in Cygnus

Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration/I. A. Grenier and L. Tibaldo

The constellation Cygnus, now visible in the western sky as twilight deepens after sunset, hosts one of our galaxy’s richest-known stellar construction zones. Astronomers viewing the region at visible wavelengths see only hints of this spectacular activity thanks to a veil of nearby dust clouds forming the Great Rift, a dark lane that splits the Milky Way, a faint band of light marking our galaxy’s central plane.

Located in the vicinity of the second-magnitude star Gamma Cygni, the star-forming region was named Cygnus X when it was discovered as a diffuse radio source by surveys in the 1950s. Now, a study using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope finds that the tumult of star birth and death in Cygnus X has managed to corral fast-moving particles called cosmic rays.

Cosmic rays are subatomic particles — mainly protons — that move through space at nearly the speed of light. In their journey across the galaxy, the particles are deflected by magnetic fields, which scramble their paths and make it impossible to backtrack the particles to their sources.

Full Story: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/cygnus-cocoon.html

Instrument to Shine Light on Mars Habitability

New Mexico, November 28, 2011—With the successful launch of the Mars Science Laboratory on Saturday, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers and scientists from the French space institute IRAP are poised to begin focusing the energy of a million light bulbs on the surface of the Red Planet to help determine whether Mars was or is habitable.

The international team of space explorers that launched the Mars Science Laboratory last week is relying in part on an instrument originally developed at Los Alamos called ChemCam, which will use blasts of laser energy to remotely probe Mars’s surface. The robust ChemCam system is one of 10 instruments mounted on the mission’s rover vehicle, named Curiosity.

Full Story: http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/los_alamos_instrument_to_shine_light_on_mars_habitability.html