Monday 2 September 2013

Astronomy: World's first interferometric image at 500 GHz with ALMA Band 8 receivers

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ALMA opens another window to the universe in the 500 GHz frequency band. Astronomers successfully synthesized the distribution of atomic carbon around a planetary nebula NGC 6302 in test observations with the ALMA Band 8 receiver.

via Science Daily

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The world's first interferometric image at 500 GHz with ALMA Band 8 receivers

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ALMA opens another window to the universe in the 500 GHz frequency band. Astronomers successfully synthesized the distribution of atomic carbon around a planetary nebula NGC 6302 in test observations with the ALMA Band 8 receiver, developed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). This is the first 500 GHz band astronomical image captured by a radio interferometer with unprecedentedly high resolution.



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Van Allen Probes mark first anniversary with new discoveries and new investigations

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One year after their launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Aug. 30, 2012, NASA's twin Van Allen Probes have already fundamentally changed how we understand the Van Allen radiation belts above our planet. Data from the probes have already led to several significant discoveries, some made just days after the special twin spacecraft soared into orbit. The mission has answered one long-standing question about the nature and behavior of the belts, and revealed that the outer belt can split into two separate belts.

via Science Daily

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NuSTAR delivers the X-ray goods

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NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is giving the wider astronomical community a first look at its unique X-ray images of the cosmos. The first batch of data from the black-hole hunting telescope was made publicly available Aug. 29, via NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, or HEASARC.

via Science Daily

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Writing the history of the 'Cosmic Dark Ages'

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For millions of years after the Big Bang, there were no stars, or even galaxies to contain stars. During these "Cosmic Dark Ages," neutral hydrogen gas dominated the universe. When clouds of primordial hydrogen gas started to collapse from gravity, they became stars. The infant stars' nuclear reactions emitted ultraviolet radiation, stripping the surrounding hydrogen atoms of their lone electrons, making them ionized.



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Brown dwarf companion stars

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(Phys.org) —Astronomers trying to understand how the Sun and Earth formed, and why they have their characteristic properties, have made progress on a closely related problem: the nature of the lowest mass stars, so-called "brown dwarfs." These stars have masses of less than about 8% of the Sun's mass. They are basically failed normal stars, and lack a sufficient force of gravitational contraction to heat up their interiors to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures needed for hydrogen burning (hydrogen burning fuels the Sun). Not surprisingly they are extremely faint and hard to detect, and as a consequence our understand of their evolution and interior properties is incomplete. Theorists predict that there could be as many brown dwarf stars as there are normal stars.



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i Phone MUFON radar cover iPhone 4/4S Covers

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Phoenix on Fires of the Flame Nebula in Orion Galaxy S3 Cover


Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous mobile phone cover with a stylized Rising Phoenix and featuring the spectacular star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter).

In views of this evocative object in visible light the core of the nebula is completely hidden behind obscuring dust, but in this VISTA view, taken in infrared light, the cluster of very young stars at the object’s heart is revealed. The wide-field VISTA view also includes the glow of the reflection nebula NGC 2023, just below centre, and the ghostly outline of the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) towards the lower right.

The bright bluish star towards the right is one of the three bright stars forming the Belt of Orion. The image was created from VISTA images taken through J, H and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.

The image shows about half the area of the full VISTA field and is about 40 x 50 arcminutes in extent. The total exposure time was 14 minutes and was the first to be released publicly from VISTA, the world’s largest survey telescope.

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Image code: hfflmnb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place