Stellary Starry Universe

 

LONDON: An intense star-forming region that produces a combined mass of more than one thousand solar masses a year has been found 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.

The so-called ‘hyper-starburst’ is part of a young, quasar-containing galaxy. Because it is so far away, we can only see how the galaxy appeared far into the past, when the universe was less than a billion years old.

Limits of physics

This fledgling galaxy produces 1,000 times more star matter than our galaxy, and within a diameter of just 4,000 light-years, compared with the Milky Way’s 100,000 light-years.

It helps confirm a theory that young galaxies can grow massive very rapidly.

“The star-forming rate we observed is as high as it gets,” said lead author Fabian Walter, a astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “Physics wouldn’t allow a higher star-formation rate.” [...]

 

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article

 

 

Comet Lulin is approaching Earth for a 38-million-mile close encounter later this month. The green double-tailed comet is putting on a fine show for backyard telescopes and could soon become visible to the unaided eye.

 

February 4, 2009: In 1996, a 7-year-old boy in China bent over the eyepiece of a small telescope and saw something that would change his life–a comet of flamboyant beauty, bright and puffy with an active tail. At first he thought he himself had discovered it, but no, he learned, two men named “Hale” and “Bopp” had beat him to it. Mastering his disappointment, young Quanzhi Ye resolved to find his own comet one day.

And one day, he did.

Fast forward to a summer afternoon in July 2007. Ye, now 19 years old and a student of meteorology at China’s Sun Yat-sen University, bent over his desk to stare at a black-and-white star field. The photo was taken nights before by Taiwanese astronomer Chi Sheng Lin on “sky patrol” at the Lulin Observatory. Ye’s finger moved from point to point–and stopped. One of the stars was not a star, it was a comet, and this time Ye saw it first. [...]

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

New images of Titan reveal the extent of methane lakes.

It’s been raining liquid methane on Titan. That’s according to an analysis of just-released images revealing a possible new lake in the south polar region of Saturn’s largest moon.

Measuring about 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) across, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and about 40 percent the diameter of Earth. It is the only moon in the solar system with a dense, planet-like atmosphere (10 times denser than Earth’s).

The possible new lake showed up in images taken in 2005 by the Cassini spacecraft’s Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS). Cassini’s photos taken in 2004 of that same region didn’t show such a dark spot.

Scientists think the most plausible explanation for the sudden appearance is a lake filled by recent rainfall. [...]

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

A private photographer has used NASA’s Mars technology to create a 1,474 megapixel panoramic photo of President Obama’s inauguration. The interactive mega-snapshot has become an international sensation, viewed by more than two million people in 186 countries.

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article