Astronomy
The new Cosmic Origins Spectograph of the Hubble telescope has, for the first time, observed a planet being devoured by its star. The planet, 600 light-years away, named WASP-12b, is so close to its sun that it completes an orbit in just over 24 hours and is the hottest planet recorded with a surface temperature of 2800 F. A gas giant like Jupiter, It has stretched into an oblong shape and its atmosphere has ballooned and is pouring material onto the star. Astronomers have indentified chemical elements never before seen in planets outside our solar system. The absorption should be complete in 10,000,000 years.
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Photo: View of Earth taken by Rosetta last night as it came in for its swingby.
This morning, ESA's comet chaser Rosetta skimmed past Earth (2481 kilometers above Java) for a gravitational boost (the slingshot effect) to speed it on its way to its rendez-vous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta has now flown a little over 4500 million km of its 7100 million km journey to its destination comet. This was Rosetta’s fourth planetary swingby and the third and final swingby of Earth. It will meet asteroid (21) Lutetia in July and then go into deep-space hibernation in mid 2011 for the coldest part of its journey until a wake-up call in Spring 2014 as it approaches the comet.
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I feel lonely just thinking about it.
This morning, ESA's comet chaser Rosetta skimmed past Earth (2481 kilometers above Java) for a gravitational boost (the slingshot effect) to speed it on its way to its rendez-vous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta has now flown a little over 4500 million km of its 7100 million km journey to its destination comet. This was Rosetta’s fourth planetary swingby and the third and final swingby of Earth. It will meet asteroid (21) Lutetia in July and then go into deep-space hibernation in mid 2011 for the coldest part of its journey until a wake-up call in Spring 2014 as it approaches the comet.
Click here for more info and pics.
I feel lonely just thinking about it.
By using two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have tracked down a gigantic network of galaxies almost seven billion light-years away from Earth.
“Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe,” says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study. “In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies. The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called ‘cosmic web’, in which galaxies, embedded in filaments stretching between voids, create a gigantic wispy structure.”
Back in 2001, ESO decribed the structure this way: "It is "spongy", with galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spiders web." Now, that's something I can visualize easily.
Among these clumps most are ten times the size of the Milky Way, some however are one thousand times bigger. And the main galaxy cluster is ten thousand times the mass of the Milky Way.
“Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe,” says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study. “In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies. The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called ‘cosmic web’, in which galaxies, embedded in filaments stretching between voids, create a gigantic wispy structure.”
Back in 2001, ESO decribed the structure this way: "It is "spongy", with galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spiders web." Now, that's something I can visualize easily.
Among these clumps most are ten times the size of the Milky Way, some however are one thousand times bigger. And the main galaxy cluster is ten thousand times the mass of the Milky Way.