Astronomical News

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I want to put this post to talk about latest news around astronomy, Its a new astronomical news page......
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[رخساره روشنی]

On June 16, 2012 at 4:55 AM EDT, the combined effects of two coronal mass ejections from AR 1504, passed NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft on the way toward Earth's protective magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere. ACE is approximately 900,000 miles from Earth and can detect such incoming shocks about 30-45 minutes before they hit the magnetosphere.

Simulations performed at NASA Goddard's Space Weather Center indicate that the disturbance strongly compressed the magnetopause, ultimately to a minimum of approximately 24,000 miles from Earth's surface at 6:28 PM EDT. This is an altitude some 2,000 miles lower than spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit.

The changing shape of Earth's magnetopause also influenced the aurora, causing bright aurora to be seen at lower latitudes than normal, as low as Iowa, Nebraska, and Maryland.

for see movie of Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) click on this link : http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/6...BadlandsSD.jpg

[Saeed Jafari]

Data From NASA's Voyager 1 Point to Interstellar Future
06.14.12


This artist's concept shows NASA's two Voyager spacecraft exploring a turbulent region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our sun. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

Artist concept of NASA's Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Larger view Data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that the venerable deep-space explorer has encountered a region in space where the intensity of charged particles from beyond our solar system has markedly increased. Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion – that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system.

"The laws of physics say that someday Voyager will become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, but we still do not know exactly when that someday will be," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly. It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier."

The data making the 16-hour-38 minute, 11.1-billion-mile (17.8-billion-kilometer), journey from Voyager 1 to antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network on Earth detail the number of charged particles measured by the two High Energy telescopes aboard the 34-year-old spacecraft. These energetic particles were generated when stars in our cosmic neighborhood went supernova.

"From January 2009 to January 2012, there had been a gradual increase of about 25 percent in the amount of galactic cosmic rays Voyager was encountering," said Stone. "More recently, we have seen very rapid escalation in that part of the energy spectrum. Beginning on May 7, the cosmic ray hits have increased five percent in a week and nine percent in a month."

This marked increase is one of a triad of data sets which need to make significant swings of the needle to indicate a new era in space exploration. The second important measure from the spacecraft's two telescopes is the intensity of energetic particles generated inside the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. While there has been a slow decline in the measurements of these energetic particles, they have not dropped off precipitously, which could be expected when Voyager breaks through the solar boundary.

The final data set that Voyager scientists believe will reveal a major change is the measurement in the direction of the magnetic field lines surrounding the spacecraft. While Voyager is still within the heliosphere, these field lines run east-west. When it passes into interstellar space, the team expects Voyager will find that the magnetic field lines orient in a more north-south direction. Such analysis will take weeks, and the Voyager team is currently crunching the numbers of its latest data set.

"When the Voyagers launched in 1977, the space age was all of 20 years old," said Stone. "Many of us on the team dreamed of reaching interstellar space, but we really had no way of knowing how long a journey it would be -- or if these two vehicles that we invested so much time and energy in would operate long enough to reach it.”

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 are in good health. Voyager 2 is more than 9.1 billion miles (14.7 billion kilometers) away from the sun. Both are operating as part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, an extended mission to explore the solar system outside the neighborhood of the outer planets and beyond. NASA's Voyagers are the two most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to explore.

The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

More information about Voyager is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

[stargazer]

Readying Orion for Flight

by Roger Weiss

Image Credit: NASA/Eric Bordelon

www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2290.html

The NASA team at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans has completed the final weld on the first space-bound Orion capsule. The Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) Orion will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center for final assembly and checkout operations.The EFT-1 fli...ght will take Orion to an altitude of more than 3,600 miles, more than 15 times farther away from Earth than the International Space Station. Orion will return home at a speed of 25,000 miles, almost 5,000 miles per hour faster than any human spacecraft. It will mimic the return conditions that astronauts experience as they come home from voyages beyond low Earth orbit. As Orion reenters the atmosphere, it will endure temperatures up to 4,000 degrees F., higher than any human spacecraft since astronauts returned from the moon

[رخساره روشنی]

NASA Observes Fire

NASA satellites continue to provide coverage of the smoke and heat signatures generated from wildfires raging in the western United States. The Waldo Canyon Fire is threatening populated areas, and is located near Colorado Springs, Colo.

The MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the fire on June 26, 2012. Thick smoke, partially obscured by clouds, is visible blowing toward the northeast. The red outlines indicate hotspots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

This photo was taken from Garden of the Gods, looking North towards Glen Eyrie, Colorado and the ridges just west of Colorado Springs. There are neighborhoods on the east slopes of the ridge climbing up pretty high, which are the homes that were in the path of the fire yesterday, June 27, 2012. (Credit: Don Savage Photography, used with permission)
for see the more photo and the clip of this smoke click here : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fi...aldo-fire.html

[Saeed Jafari]

06.28.12 Cassini Finds Likely Subsurface Ocean on Saturn Moon

This artist's concept shows a possible scenario for the internal structure of Titan, as suggested by data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: A. Tavani › Full image and caption › Related animation
PASADENA, Calif. -- Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell.
Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the moon only 3 feet (1 meter) in height. Spacecraft data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet (10 meters) in height, which suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material. The finding appears in today's edition of the journal Science.
"Cassini's detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth," said Luciano Iess, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. "The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we've spotted another place where it is abundant."
Titan takes only 16 days to orbit Saturn, and scientists were able to study the moon's shape at different parts of its orbit. Because Titan is not spherical, but slightly elongated like a football, its long axis grew when it was closer to Saturn. Eight days later, when Titan was farther from Saturn, it became less elongated and more nearly round. Cassini measured the gravitational effect of that squeeze and pull.
Scientists were not sure Cassini would be able to detect the bulges caused by Saturn's pull on Titan. By studying six close flybys of Titan from Feb. 27, 2006, to Feb. 18, 2011, researchers were able to determine the moon's internal structure by measuring variations in the gravitational pull of Titan using data returned to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).
"We were making ultrasensitive measurements, and thankfully Cassini and the DSN were able to maintain a very stable link," said Sami Asmar, a Cassini team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The tides on Titan pulled up by Saturn aren't huge compared to the pull the biggest planet, Jupiter, has on some of its moons. But, short of being able to drill on Titan's surface, the gravity measurements provide the best data we have of Titan's internal structure."
An ocean layer does not have to be huge or deep to create these tides. A liquid layer between the external, deformable shell and a solid mantle would enable Titan to bulge and compress as it orbits Saturn. Because Titan's surface is mostly made of water ice, which is abundant in moons of the outer solar system, scientists infer Titan's ocean is likely mostly liquid water.
On Earth, tides result from the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun pulling on our surface oceans. In the open oceans, those can be as high as two feet (60 centimeters). While water is easier to move, the gravitational pulling by the sun and moon also causes Earth's crust to bulge in solid tides of about 20 inches (50 centimeters).
The presence of a subsurface layer of liquid water at Titan is not itself an indicator for life. Scientists think life is more likely to arise when liquid water is in contact with rock, and these measurements cannot tell whether the ocean bottom is made up of rock or ice. The results have a bigger implication for the mystery of methane replenishment on Titan.
"The presence of a liquid water layer in Titan is important because we want to understand how methane is stored in Titan's interior and how it may outgas to the surface," said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "This is important because everything that is unique about Titan derives from the presence of abundant methane, yet the methane in the atmosphere is unstable and will be destroyed on geologically short timescales."
A liquid water ocean, "salted" with ammonia, could produce buoyant ammonia-water liquids that bubble up through the crust and liberate methane from the ice. Such an ocean could serve also as a deep reservoir for storing methane.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. DSN, also managed by JPL, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions. Cassini's radio science team is based at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more information about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

[Saeed Jafari]

Hubble, Swift Detect First-Ever Changes in an Exoplanet Atmosphere
06.28.12

An international team of astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made an unparalleled observation, detecting significant changes in the atmosphere of a planet located beyond our solar system

.The scientists conclude the atmospheric variations occurred in response to a powerful eruption on the planet's host star, an event observed by NASA's Swift satellite

This artist's rendering illustrates the evaporation of HD 189733b's atmosphere in response to a powerful eruption from its host star. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope detected the escaping gases and NASA's Swift satellite caught the stellar flare. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/...tmosphere.html

[yperseusy]

Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”

The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today’s observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.

[Astronomy]

A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.

The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.


This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows five moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle marks the newly discovered moon, designated P5, as photographed by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 7. The observations will help scientists in their planning for the July 2015 flyby of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. P4 was uncovered in Hubble imagery in 2011. (Credit: NASA; ESA; M. Showalter, SETI Institute)

More Inforamtion

From: www.NASA.gov

[رخساره روشنی]

New Expedition 32 Trio Launches

The launch and docking of Expedition 32 coincides with the 37th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first docking of an American spacecraft with a Russian spacecraft. An Apollo spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center and a Soyuz 7K-TM vehicle from Baikonur Cosmodrome launched on July 15, 1975, then docked two days later.

for read more and see the vedio of this news please click on this link : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/st...ing/index.html

[stargazer]

Spectacular Views: The Moon Occults Jupiter

by Nancy Atkinson on July 16, 2012


Caption: July 15 2012 occultation, taken with Canon 550D on Newton 200/1200 mounted on NEQ6Pro. Credit: Andrei Juravle

Astrophotographers in Northern Africa, Europe and the Middle East were treated to a beautiful sight in the early morning hours of July 15, 2012. A lunar occultation of Jupiter took place just before dawn, as the waning crescent Moon slid in front of the planet Jupiter. Venus was hanging around nearby, too. Several astrophotographers were able to capture the event, and some got a bonus look at Jupiter’s Galilean moons, as well! Above is a lovely image by Andrei Juravle.
More below!

Caption: The Moon, Venus and Jupiter. Credit Thierry Legault.

Astrophotographer extraordinaire Thierry Legault took this great shot of Venus, Jupiter and the Moon from Saint-Cloud, France with a Canon 5D mark II and 135mm lens. But look closely: the satellites of Jupiter are visible:

Caption: A closer look reveals Jupiter’s moons! Credit: Thierry Legault.

And as always, you should check out Thierry’s website for more incredible images.

Caption: Jupiter and the Moon hover over Dolmabahce Mosque in Ankara, Turkey. Credit: Rasid Tugral.

Caption: Clouds nearly covered the view in Mombaroccio, Marche, Italy. Credit: Niki Giada.

Caption: A series of images of the Moon’s occultation of Jupiter as seen in Saida, Lebanon. Credit: astroZ1 on Flickr.

Caption: Occultation of Jupiter by the Moon as seen from Smolyan, Bulgaria. Credit: Zlatan Merakov.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/96301/s...#ixzz20lYnA8UY