Stellary Starry Universe

 

Scientists have been dreaming up ways to talk to aliens since the 19th century.

The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals – which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 – were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the current technology allowed – be it lamps, radios or lasers.

“You go with what you know,” said Steven Dick, NASA Chief Historian.

Are we alone?

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks argued over the existence of life on other planets, but the idea really took off after the Copernican revolution.

“Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth,” Dick said. [...]

 

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

Scientists push for a seven-year extension of the Cassini mission to Saturn.

San Francisco – As NASA scientists continue to report startling discoveries made during the Cassini spacecraft’s initial tour of Saturn, a plan is being drafted that would extend the mission through 2017.

Funding for the Cassini program is scheduled to end Sept. 30, 2010. However, the spacecraft remains in good shape and could continue to return valuable data for years to come, scientists say, provided NASA approves the necessary funding to extend Cassini’s tour. Mission officials are preparing to present their case for a seven-year extension to NASA headquarters next month.

“The things that is magic about seven more years is that Saturn will reach its northern hemisphere’s summer solstice,” said Robert Mitchell, Cassini program manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “When we arrived in June 2004, it was a little ways past the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice. If we could go seven more years, we would see nearly half of Saturn’s orbit.”

By monitoring Saturn during half of its 29-year trip around the sun, scientists hope to study the effect of seasonal changes on Saturn, its rings, and its moons Titan and Enceladus. Saturn’s orbit is tilted 27 degrees relative to its equator. Just as it does on Earth, that tilt creates distinct seasons for different areas of the planet. [...]

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

VLT Adaptive Optics shows stellar nurseries, black hole at center of nearby galaxy.

A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of our own Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.

The galaxy, dubbed NGC 253, is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. It is also known as the Sculptor Galaxy, because it is located in the Sculptor constellation.

The Sculptor Galaxy is a starbust galaxy, so-called because of very intense star formation there.

 

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

The leading idea falls apart under the turbulent forces. Gas-rich planets such as Jupiter and Saturn grew from a disk of dust and gas which eventually crumpled like a piece of paper under its own gravitational instability — or so one theory goes.

Now a computer simulation suggests that this idea falls apart under the turbulent forces within early protoplanetary systems.

The old, favored theory relies on the protoplanetary dust disk becoming denser and thinner until it reaches a tipping point, where it becomes gravitationally unstable and collapses into kilometer-sized building blocks that form the basis for gas giants. But 3D modeling has shown for the first time that turbulence prevents the dust from settling into the dense disk necessary for gravitational instability to work

“It has been known since the ’80s that there have been problems with that theory, but no one had gotten around to doing 3D simulations,” said Joseph Barranco, an astrophysicist at San Francisco State University in California. [...]

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

The new W2M communications satellite has failed just over a month after launch.

PARIS – The Eutelsat W2M telecommunications satellite – the inaugural product of a Euro-Indian commercial joint venture – has failed in orbit just five weeks after launch and is likely a total loss, industry officials said.

Paris-based Eutelsat, in a Jan. 28 statement, confirmed that W2M, launched Dec. 20, suffered “a major anomaly affecting the satellite’s power subsystem” and would not fulfill its role of replacing Eutelsat’s W2 satellite at the company’s 16 degrees east orbital position.

The W2 satellite at that orbital slot continues to work well, but is nearly 11 years old. Eutelsat said it now will replace W2 with the much larger W3B satellite scheduled for launch in mid-2010. [...]

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article