Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

An atmosphere is what makes life on Earths surface possible, regulating our climate and sheltering us from damaging cosmic rays. But although telescopes have counted a growing number of rocky planets, scientists had thought most of their atmospheres long lost.

However, a new study by University of Chicago and Stanford University researchers suggests a mechanism whereby these planets could not only develop atmospheres full of water vapor, but keep them for long stretches. Published March 15 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research expands our picture of planetary formation and could help direct the search for habitable worlds in other star systems.

Our model is saying that these hot, rocky exoplanets should have a water-dominated atmosphere at some stage, and for some planets, it may be quite a long time, said Asst. Prof. Edwin Kite, an expert in how planetary atmospheres evolve over time.

As telescopes document more and more exoplanets, scientists are trying to figure out what they might look like. Generally, telescopes can tell you about an exoplanets physical size, its proximity to its star and if youre lucky, how much mass it has. To go much further, scientists have to extrapolate based on what we know about Earth and the other planets in our own solar system. But the most abundant planets dont seem to be similar to the ones we see around us.

What we already knew from the Kepler mission is that planets a little smaller than Neptune are really abundant, which was a surprise because there are none in our solar system, Kite said. We dont know for sure what they are made of, but theres strong evidence they are magma balls cloaked in a hydrogen atmosphere.

Theres also a healthy number of smaller rocky planets that are similar, but without the hydrogen cloaks. So scientists surmised that many planets probably start out like those larger planets that have atmospheres made out of hydrogen, but lose their atmospheres when the nearby star ignites and blows away the hydrogen.

But lots of details remain to be filled out in those models. Kite and co-author Laura Schaefer of Stanford University began to explore some of the potential consequences of having a planet covered in oceans of melted rock.

Liquid magma is actually quite runny, Kite said, so it also turns over vigorously, just like oceans on Earth do. Theres a good chance these magma oceans are sucking hydrogen out of the atmosphere and reacting to form water. Some of that water escapes to the atmosphere, but much more gets slurped up into the magma.

Then, after the nearby star strips away the hydrogen atmosphere, the water gets pulled out into the atmosphere instead in the form of water vapor. Eventually, the planet is left with a water-dominated atmosphere.

This stage could persist on some planets for billions of years, Kite said.

There are several ways to test this hypothesis. The James Webb Space Telescope, the powerful successor to the Hubble Telescope, is scheduled to launch later this year; it will be able to conduct measurements of the composition of an exoplanets atmosphere. If it detects planets with water in their atmospheres, that would be one signal.

Another way to test is to look for indirect signs of atmospheres. Most of these planets are tidally locked; unlike Earth, they dont spin as they move around their sun, so one side is always hot and the other cold.

A pair of UChicago alumni have suggested a way to use this phenomenon to check for an atmosphere. Scientists Laura Kreidberg, PhD16, and Daniel Koll, PhD16now at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and MIT, respectivelypointed out that an atmosphere would moderate the temperature for the planet, so there wouldnt be a sharp difference between the day sides and night sides. If a telescope can measure how strongly the day side glows, it should be able to tell whether theres an atmosphere redistributing heat.

Citation: Water on hot rocky exoplanets. Kite and Schaefer, Astrophysical Journal Letters, March 11, 2021.

Funding: NASA.

Continued here:
There might be many planets with water-rich atmospheres - UChicago News

Every day the news is rich with death or, at the least, deadly downers. But this week, we dramatically touched down on Mars, with a rhino-sized buggy, to drive about in search of life.

Does the NASA mission all but pay for itself by cheerfully asking one of the big questions: are we alone?

If were not and theres a yet-to-be discovered microbe clinging on to pitiful existence deep down in the distant red dirt then apart from the geez factor, whats in it for the rest of us back on Earth?

In recent years, most of the heavy lifting in exploring the universe has been done by new generation telescopes gathering beautiful, mystifying images from stars and planets a few hundred lights years away.

The Hubble Telescope alone has made discoveries so unusual as to overturn the expectations and understanding of cosmologists. When NASA talked about the Hubble seeing the ghost light from dead galaxies, astronomy seemed wrapped up in mysticism.

Just last week, new data from the Hubble led to the first measurement of the extent of a collection of black holes in a core-collapsed globular cluster.

And think of all those thousands of exoplanets 4352 confirmed so far orbiting faraway stars. Touted so often as potential homes for when humankind has irreversibly ruined itself, and yet hopefully developed interstellar transportation that can get us to a nurturing elsewhere.

So many of those planets are almost, but never quite right, for sustaining life and, after a while, too many for regular folk to take an interest in.

In short, Earthlings are overdue a meaningful space adventure not too far from home. Something vaguely human that might give us the feels and answers a simple question.

Glen Nagle is public outreach manager at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, part of NASAs Deep Space Network.

Mr Nagle told The New Daily there were a range of reasons for going in search of alien life. One is that its certainly a fundamental question we ask ourselves as human beings: are we alone?

It began, he said, around our ancestral fires, looking at the skies, conjuring up ideas of gods to keep us company and fill up the mystery of what else is out there.

Plus, for NASA and other space agencies, theres a side benefit to asking that question: Its an easy one for people to understand.

Not just for mums and dads, but for politicians who put up the money.

That might sound cynical but its true in a way, Mr Nagle said. You could talk about all the great science thats being done on the mission: the materials science, the atmospheric studies.

But really, they (the politicians) , are asking the same question youre asking: whats in it for us?

And answering that fundamental question is important because it touches on philosophy, theology, our overall place in the universe.

CAT scans, scratch-resistant glasses, LEDS, landmine removal technology camera phones and the damn internet are just some examples of technology that were developed by NASA and used first in space exploration. Wireless headsets, memory foam, better quality artificial limbs and freeze-dried food also. See more here.

As Glen Nagle puts it: The real benefitis the technology created to find that life.

One of the breakthrough gadgets being carried by the Perseverance rover is PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) an instrument that looks at the very fine scale structure of rocks and soil.

Developed by an Australian scientist, Dr Abigail Allwood, formerly of the University of Queensland Technology (UQT), now at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, PIXL is a tool the size of a tissue box, doing the work of a big laboratory.

Technology like that has uses on earth, said Mr Nagle. When were looking for bio-hazards in soil or looking for diseases in our plants, instead of needing a big lab,you have a small instrument that can do the work on the end of a robot arm.

Go Aussies. See more here about UQTs involvement on the mission.

The history of space exploration has been dogged by one big question: couldnt all that money be spent on much needed social infrastructure or medical research closer to home.

The Apollo moon landings were as contentious as much as they were celebrated. One of the most famous critiques was given by the Black poet Gil Scott Heron in Whitey On The Moon:

I cant pay no doctor bill.(but Whiteys on the moon)Ten years from now Ill be payin still.(while Whiteys on the moon)

How many poorer Americans might feel similarly today about the Perseverance rover project, conceived in 2012 and costing US2.4 billion? Glen Nagle said Americans spend that amount on feeding their pets every 10 days.

The total cost of the project cost each American the price of a cup of coffee.

Sounds about right. But once you start talking about money, questions of meaning and the big picture feel a little tainted.

Perhaps the space mission to remember is Apollo 8, when man first orbited the moon and photographed for the first time an Earthrise: our planet coming over the lunar horizon. The image is credited with starting the environment movement.

This was at the end of 1968, a terrible year: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, race riots, protests against the Vietnam War which was going nowhere.

Of all the letters of congratulations received by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the one that mattered most was one that read: You saved 1968.

Which suggests that sometimes, what these missions give us Earthlings, is a little boost, a little hope.

Read more:
The search for life on Mars: Whats in it for Earthlings? - The New Daily

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (in its eXtreme version) is the deepest view of the universe yet obtained and will be, until JADES takes over. It stretches approximately 13 billion light-years and includes approximately 10,000 galaxies. It took 11.3 days for the Hubble Space Telescope to collect these ancient photons. Try downloading the largest version and zoom in on different sections. Were seeing these galaxies as they were billions of years ago. How might they look today? Image via NASA/ ESA/ S. Beckwith (STSci)/ HUDF team.

Astronomers announced a new deeper-than-ever sky survey this month (January 15, 2021), to be conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble telescopes successor, scheduled for launch in October of this year. The new survey is abbreviated JADES, which is short for James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The survey will be like the Hubble Deep Fields, but deeper still. Its main goal is to see far away in space and thus far back into the very young universe and image it just at the end of the so-called Cosmic Dark Ages, that is, at the time when gas in the universe went from being opaque to transparent. This is also the time when the very first stars were forming very large, massive and bright stars in a veritable firestorm of star birth when the young universe was less than 5% of its current age.

The 2021 lunar calendars are here. Order yours before theyre gone!

The Webb telescope will be located near the second Lagrange point a relatively stable region of space, gravitationally speaking, known as L2 some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. To conduct the new survey, the Webb telescope will be staring at a small point of space for nearly 800 hours (approximately 33 days) to be able to see fainter objects than those ever seen before and thus to find the first generation of galaxies. Astronomers want to know, among other things, how fast did these galaxies form, and how fast did their stars form? They also want to look for the very first supermassive black holes, which are thought to lie at the hearts of nearly all large galaxies, including our Milky Way.

The long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been postponed a number of times for a variety of reasons, most recently because of effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the formal successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but is equipped with instrumentation able to image further into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble could.

This capability also makes it a worthy successor to the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope which recently went into retirement.

What makes the infrared part of the spectrum so important for surveys like JADES? If you look really deep, you will also look back in time, and the farther back in time you look, the more redshifted the galaxies are (the farther away they are, the faster they move away from us, and the more their light has been shifted towards the red part of the spectrum). This means that the light we want to observe, originally in the optical (visible) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, might not even show much in the optical part anymore. Instead, its been shifted to longer wavelengths, into the infrared regime.

In other words, the use of infrared cameras is necessary to be able to see the light from the first generation of galaxies. Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said:

Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. Were trying to investigate those early periods. We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity thats needed to study these early galaxies.

In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope was built specifically for this purpose. Up to now, infrared images are much less resolved less clear than optical images, because of their longer wavelength. With its much larger collecting area, the Webb will be able to image, in infrared, at the same resolution detail that Hubble could obtain in the optical part of the spectrum.

Get ready for a whole new set of mind-blowing images of the universe, this time in the infrared, from Webb!

After having successfully deployed its solar panels precisely as its supposed to do once its in space the Webb telescope is shown here ready for the final tests on December 17, 2020, at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. Then it will be packed up and transported to French Guyana, to be launched on October 31, 2021, via an Ariane V rocket. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.

The use of deep field surveys is a young science, for two reasons. First, astronomers didnt have the right instrumentation before Hubble to do them. Second, its also because no one initially knew the result of staring into a piece of empty space for a long time. Such a long stare into the unknown would require valuable observation time, and if this long observation didnt produce any results, it would be considered a waste.

But in 1995, Robert Williams, then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), which administrates the Hubble telescope, decided to use his directors discretionary time to point the Hubble toward a very small and absolutely empty-looking part of the sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear. There were no stars visible from our Milky Way (or extremely few), no nearby galaxies visible in the field, and no visible gas clouds. Hubble collected photons for 10 consecutive days, and the result, the Hubble Deep Field, was a success and a paradigm changer: A patch of sky about as small as the eye of George Washington on an American quarter (25-cent coin) held out at arms length, showed a 10 billion-light-years-long tunnel back in time with a plethora of galaxies around 3,000 of them at different evolutionary stages along the way. The field of observational cosmology was born.

This was done again in 1998 with the Hubble telescope pointed to the southern sky (Hubble Deep Field South), and the result was the same. Thus we learned that the universe is uniform over large scales.

Next was the installation of a new, powerful camera on Hubble (the Advanced Camera for Surveys) in 2002. The incredible Hubble Ultra Deep Field was acquired in 2004, in a similarly small patch of sky near the constellation Orion, about 1/10 of a full moon diameter (2.4 x 3.4 arc minutes, in contrast to the original Hubble Deep Fields north and south, which were 2.6 x 2.6 arc minutes). And so our reach was extended even deeper into space, and even further back in time, showing light from 10 thousand galaxies along a 13-billion-light-years-long tunnel of space. If youll remember that the universe is about 13.77 billion years old, youll see this is getting us really close to the beginning!

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was the most sensitive astronomical image ever made at wavelengths of visible (optical) light until 2012, when an even more refined version was released, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, which reached even farther: 13.2 billion years back in time.

The JADES survey will be observed in two batches, one on the northern sky and one on the southern in two famous fields called GOODS North and South (abbreviated from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey).

Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA), explained:

We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. Theyve been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do.

View larger. | Look closely. Every single speck of light in this image is a distant galaxy (except for the very few ones with spikes which are foreground stars). This telescopic field of view is part of the GOODS South field. Its one of the directions in space thatll be observed in JADES, a new survey that aims to study the very first galaxies to appear in the infancy of the universe. Image via NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope/ James Webb Space Telescope site.

The GOODS fields have been observed with several of the most famous telescopes, covering a great wavelength range from infrared through optical to X-ray. They are not fully as deep (the observations dont reach as far back) as the Ultra Deep Field, but cover a larger area of the sky (4-5 times larger) and are the most data-rich areas of the sky in terms of depth combined with wavelength coverage. By the way, the first deep field, HDF-N, is located in the GOODS north image, and the Ultra deep field/eXtreme (dont you love these names?) is located in the GOODS south field.

There are a large number of ambitious science goals for the JADES program pertaining to the composition of the first galaxies, including the first generation of supermassive black holes. How these came about at such an early time is a mystery. As well, the transition of gas from neutral and opaque to transparent and ionized, something astronomers call the epoch of reionization, is not well understood. JADES team member Andrew Bunker, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is also part of the ESA team behind the Webb telescope, said:

This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe. We want to understand what caused it. It could be that its the light from very early galaxies and the first burst of star formation It is kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the Big Bang.

People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far.

But, hopefully, not for much longer!

Bottom line: JADES is an ambitious new deep sky survey to be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope, once launched. It will reach further back in time and space than any survey before, to study the very first generation of galaxies after the universe transitioned from opaque to transparent.

Read the original:
JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields - EarthSky

It was a tough year here on Earth, but 2020 was a bright spot for space exploration. SpaceX sent its futuristic Starship to new heights, three countries launched Mars missions, and robots grabbed debris from the moon and an asteroid.

Next year promises more, including a planned launch of the Hubble Space Telescopes successor.

Perhaps its no surprise then that space themes are having a moment in home decor. When so many of us Earthlings are stuck at home because of the pandemic, space imagery can add a sense of adventure or whimsy to rooms, walls and ceilings.

Ive done outer space, and starry skies, says New York interior designer Patrice Hoban. My clients love using stars as a backdrop in nurseries. Ive also worked with glow-paint to add an extra pop to kids rooms and home theaters.

She sticks tiny glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling; the light can last for hours. Its the closest thing Ive found to being in a planetarium, she says.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project.

Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red, she says.

Or create your own galaxy wall, she says. Paint a blue wall, then use some watered-down white paint to splatter it with fine droplets. You may just create some new constellations.

She suggests adding fun, space-agey lamps, and vintage NASA posters.

Outer space has inspired designers for decades. In the 1960s, the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with the development of space age-y, synthetic materials, led to a surge in futuristic furniture like molded plastic chairs and Sputnik-shaped lighting.

These days, you can download artwork directly from NASA: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/, or find it at retailers like Red Bubble, Etsy and Zazzle.

Magana also suggests making a letter board with a space-themed quote like Neil Armstrongs famous One small step for man phrase.

Much of the astronomy-themed art in the marketplace would be striking in any room. There are lunar graphics on canvas at Target. Tempapers got constellation wallpapers, but if you cant do wallpaper, consider Kenna Sato Designs constellation decals for walls or ceilings.

Galaxy Lamps has a sphere that looks like a planetoid. Charge it up with the included USB and cycle through 16 colors with three lighting modes. Theres a moon version, too. And at Beautiful Halo, find a collection of rocket-ship ceiling fixtures.

German designer Jan Kath has created a rug collection called Spacecrafted inspired by imagery of gas clouds and asteroid nebulae from the Hubble telescope.

Studio Greytak, in Missoula, Montana, has designed a Jupiter lamp out of the mineral aragonite, depicting the whirling, turbulent gases of the planet. And theres the Impact table, where a chunk of desert rose crystals is embedded with cast glass, as though a piece of asteroid had plunged into a pool.

Zodiac wall decals and a Milky Way throw rug can be found at Project Nursery. There are hanging mobiles of the planets and of stars and clouds, at both Crate & Kids and Pottery Barn Kids.

A glow-in-the-dark duvet cover printed with the solar system is also at PBK, but if youre ready to really head to the stars, check out Snurk Livings duvet set. The studio, owned by Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo, has designed the set photoprinted with a life-size astronaut suit.

Creating a night sky on the ceiling of a home theater seems to be popular; Houzz has hundreds of examples for inspiration.

Maydan Architects in Palo Alto, California, designed one for a recent project.

Our clients grandfather was the owner of multiple movie theaters, says Mary Maydan. One of them had a retractable ceiling that enabled guests to experience the starry sky at night. When our client decided to build their home theater, this installation was actually fulfilling a lifelong dream.

The ceiling isnt retractable, but has an eight-paneled fixture depicting the Milky Way and a shooting star.

It provides very soft light and was intended to be kept on during the screening of the movie and create a magical experience, says Maydan.

View original post here:
Space-themed decor brings the heavens indoors | MAD Life | heraldbulletin.com - The Herald Bulletin

A few short years after NASA got money for the successor to the Hubble telescope, they told Congress that 11 years would not be enough time to build it. They told the public they couldn't put a telescope into space by 2002, even though that was more time than it took to start from nothing and have living breathing humans walk on the moon.

The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the NASA manager who oversaw that moon landing. Were he alive today he'd probably wish they had chosen Gene Kranz for the name instead. He'd certainly be skeptical that modern NASA can do any Big Science. Cute robots on Mars, sure, but not big stuff like this.

It's not new for NASA claims to be the subject of skepticism. The U.S Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) placed NASA on its High Risk list in 1990, and they never left it.

The reason is as old as government funding; underselling costs while overselling short schedules.

NASA pioneered space travel and right after that they pioneered creating projects that were Too Big To Fail. Meaning government will have dumped so much money we have to lose more to get anything at all. Corporate CEOs know you don't 'throw good money after bad' but most politicians have never worked for companies, and they aren't risking their jobs losing fortunes.

Once upon a time, there was skepticism about this stuff, but now there is only critical thinking about programs begun by the other side. Democrats refuse to not lose their minds about solar and wind mirages, but the Clinton administration happily canceled the Superconducting Supercollider and the Strategic Defense Initiative because they were started by Reagan. President Obama did the same thing to George W. Bush's Constellation program. Yet JWST, started during the Clinton years, somehow survived despite being a boondoggle than all three combined.

The question journalists should be asking is, will it work at all? Hubble didn't work at first, but it was close enough to be easily fixable. NASA will be lucky if this even goes up this year, after 25 years of hearing about it, but if something goes wrong it could take 40 years to get a team there to fix it. And if Republican presidents of the future do what the last two Democracts did and cancel programs just because their predecessors' names are on them, humans will never go into real space again.

I get the benefit if it does work, but go ahead and put me in your Twitter mentions claiming I hate science for being skeptical of government failures stretching back decades, but with all of the missteps and an internal confidence level that never rose above 50 percent it would work, it is time for the science community to shuck off politics and stop embracing centralized authority as the best way to do things. It isn't. It's a challenge to find anything centralized government has done well. But go ahead and try in a comment and I will note how much money it has cost and how a smarter approach would have been better.

See original here:
19 Years Late And 800% Over Budget, Will The James Webb Space Telescope Finally Launch? - Science 2.0

Kim Cook Associated Press

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, says she picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project. Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, says she picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project. Base your color

Photo: Dustin Walker Photography | Fernish (via AP)

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, says she picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project. Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, says she picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project. Base your color

Space-themed decor brings heavens indoors

It was a tough year here on Earth, but 2020 was a bright spot for space exploration. SpaceX sent its futuristic Starship to new heights, three countries launched Mars missions, and robots grabbed debris from the moon and an asteroid.

Next year promises more, including a planned launch of the Hubble Space Telescopes successor.

Perhaps its no surprise then that space themes are having a moment in home decor. When so many of us Earthlings are stuck at home because of the pandemic, space imagery can add a sense of adventure or whimsy to rooms, walls and ceilings.

Ive done outer space, and starry skies, says New York interior designer Patrice Hoban. My clients love using stars as a backdrop in nurseries. Ive also worked with glow-paint to add an extra pop to kids rooms and home theaters.

She sticks tiny glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling; the light can last for hours. Its the closest thing Ive found to being in a planetarium, she says.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project.

Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red, she says.

Or create your own galaxy wall, she says. Paint a blue wall, then use some watered-down white paint to splatter it with fine droplets. You may just create some new constellations.

She suggests adding fun, space-agey lamps, and vintage NASA posters.

Outer space has inspired designers for decades. In the 1960s, the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with the development of space age-y, synthetic materials, led to a surge in futuristic furniture like molded plastic chairs and Sputnik-shaped lighting.

These days, you can download artwork directly from NASA at solarsystem.nasa.gov, or find it at retailers like Red Bubble, Etsy and Zazzle.

Magana also suggests making a letter board with a space-themed quote like Neil Armstrongs famous One small step for man phrase.

Much of the astronomy-themed art in the marketplace would be striking in any room. There are lunar graphics on canvas at Target. Tempapers got constellation wallpapers, but if you cant do wallpaper, consider Kenna Sato Designs constellation decals for walls or ceilings.

Galaxy Lamps has a sphere that looks like a planetoid. Charge it up with the included USB and cycle through 16 colors with three lighting modes. Theres a moon version, too. And at Beautiful Halo, find a collection of rocket-ship ceiling fixtures.

German designer Jan Kath has created a rug collection called Spacecrafted inspired by imagery of gas clouds and asteroid nebulae from the Hubble telescope.

Studio Greytak, in Missoula, Montana, has designed a Jupiter lamp out of the mineral aragonite, depicting the whirling, turbulent gases of the planet. And theres the Impact table, where a chunk of desert rose crystals is embedded with cast glass, as though a piece of asteroid had plunged into a pool.

Zodiac wall decals and a Milky Way throw rug can be found at Project Nursery. There are hanging mobiles of the planets and of stars and clouds, at both Crate & Kids and Pottery Barn Kids.

A glow-in-the-dark duvet cover printed with the solar system is also at PBK, but if youre ready to really head to the stars, check out Snurk Livings duvet set. The studio, owned by Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo, has designed the set photoprinted with a life-size astronaut suit.

Creating a night sky on the ceiling of a home theater seems to be popular; Houzz has hundreds of examples for inspiration.

Maydan Architects in Palo Alto, California, designed one for a recent project.

Our clients grandfather was the owner of multiple movie theaters, says Mary Maydan. One of them had a retractable ceiling that enabled guests to experience the starry sky at night. When our client decided to build their home theater, this installation was actually fulfilling a lifelong dream.

The ceiling isnt retractable, but has an eight-paneled fixture depicting the Milky Way and a shooting star.

It provides very soft light and was intended to be kept on during the screening of the movie and create a magical experience, says Maydan.

See original here:
Space-themed decor brings heavens indoors - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

Opened in 1973 in a Portable Classroom Donated by the Brevard County School BoardFLORIDA CRACKERS are cattle ranchers with techniques specific to the Florida pine and scrub lands. By cracking a whip they herd cattle while seated on Cracker horses, sturdy equines bread for cattle work. Learn more about a unique lifeway that has endured from early Spanish settlers to the present day at the museum. (Cracker Cow Hunt, Casper McCloud)

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA The Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, located at 2201 Michigan Avenue in Cocoa, is tucked away in a quite residential neighborhood and features two wings of indoor exhibits.

The entire museum complex consists of a 14,750 square foot facility with parking for 75 cars, a pavilion with four picnic tables, and a beautiful 22-acre nature preserve that backs up to the Eastern Florida State College Planetarium.

Through curation and display, visitors to the museum can explore the unique history of Brevard County from Ice Age fossils to the Space Age Hubble telescope, it have something for everyone.

The Brevard Museum is also now home to the Florida Historical Society Archaeological Institute whose mission, in hand with the museum, is to educate the public about Florida archaeology through research, publication and outreach.

Museum Home to Extensive Collection of Antiques, Historic Artifacts

In the late 1960s a group of local citizens saw the need to preserve the unique history and pre-history of Brevard County located on Floridas east coast.

Forming a Friends of the Brevard Museum organization, their efforts and dedication led to the establishment of the museum, which opened to the public in 1973 in a portable classroom donated by the Brevard County School Board.

A permanent facility was dedicated in 1978 with funding provided by the Grace and Albert Taylor trust.

Settling in the east central Florida area in 1895, Grace and Albert contributed greatly to the development of Brevard County. Grace in particular was interested in preserving the history and natural beauty of the area.

When she passed away in 1945 she left a bequest specifically for the development of a museum to to preserve these early lifeways.

Today, in addition to many milestones and moments in Brevard County history, the museum is home to an extensive collection of her antiques and historic artifacts.

Interest in the museum continued to grow and funds for further construction were secured through a partnership between the state and local community, allowing a second wing with a connecting lobby to be built in 1992.

The original Taylor Wing is now home to the museums Ice Age exhibit featuring fully articulated skeletons of a mastodon, giant ground sloth and saber tooth cat.

This wing also has a hands-on Imagination Station for the young and young at heart, with a simulated rocket capsule, tree house and cave.

Explore Floridas Past with the Brevard Museums Exhibits

The Brevard Museum features two wings of exhibits representing Brevard Countys rich and diverse history. Click on the links below for a sneak-peak at some of the images that will whet your appetite to stop in to learn the rest of Brevards exciting story.

Lesson plans are under development for many of the museums exhibits, call 321-632-1830 for more information.

The newest chapter in the museums history began in September of 2014 when the Florida Historical Society, located at 435 Brevard Avenue in Cocoa Village, became the museums parent organization.

Many changes have occurred, and will continue to occur, under this new umbrella. If you havent seen the Brevard Museum in the past year, you havent seen the Brevard Museum.

Be sure to come on out and see these great exhibits:

The Ice Age

Windover Archaeological Site

Cape Canaveral Lighthouse and special 150th anniversary exhibit

Pioneer Homestead

Citrus Industry

Florida Cracker Culture

Florida East Cost Railway

Grace & Albert Taylor

Hubble Space Telescope: Eye on the Universe

Butterfly Garden

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By: Tech Desk | New Delhi | Updated: September 17, 2020 10:08:28 amNASA Hubble telescope (Image: NASA)

The mysterious world of space has still not been deciphered by the gaze of human beings on Earth. As a matter of fact, NASA in its consistent efforts, developed the Hubble telescope in the 1990s to observe eye-catching happenings in the universe and since then for every second, its doing that quite persistently.

Recently, the US-based space agency announced that it can showcase which new galaxy it captured, what unusual did it notice about our stars, solar system and planets and what patterns of ionized-gases it observed, on any specific day. So users can use the new tool to check what Hubble captured on your birthday, but for any specific year.

Check out the too here

We decided to take a random day of every month over the decades to list the cosmic mayhem in the space.

The telescope, on this day, captured the disintegration of an ancient comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami while it approaches towards the sun. It was one of the clearest views of a breaking icy comet.

This was an astounding capture as the telescope snapped the collusion of two dwarf galaxies one of which is I Zwicky 18 with another one on its upper right. This led to the formation of a new star.

On this day, a disc surrounding a star Beta Pictoris, which was discovered in 1984, was found to be constituted by two planets, light-scattering dust and debris.

Hubble captured some colourful patterns of gases in black hole powered galaxy which is known as Circinus Galaxy. These gases depicted a cauldron of vapours, concentrated in two disks of the galaxy.

This day marked the capturing of Galaxy Cluster Abell 2744 which is 3.5 billion light-years away and has several clusters of small galaxies in it. It also poses a strong gravitational field which acts as a lens to reflect the light of almost 3,000 background galaxies.

The telescope took a snapshot of Neptune which is the most distant planet. The image of the planet revealed the formation of high-altitude clouds composing of methane ice crystals.

On this day, the collision between two galaxies UGC 06471 and UGC 06472 which are 145 million light-years away from the earth was captured. The collision eventually led to the formation of a larger galaxy.

Triangulum Galaxy was snapped depicting the specific areas of star birth with a bright blue light spreading across the galaxy in beautiful nebulas of hot gas.

Hubble clicked the picture of Galaxy ESO 243-49, which had a medium-sized black hole. The 20,000 suns sized black hole was positioned on a glacial plane of the galaxy.

The telescope captured an encounter of a comet named C/2013 A1 with Mars. The Comet Siding Spring passed with a distance of just 87,000 miles to that of Mars.

Gum 29 a vibrant stellar being ground, which is 20,000 light-years away, consisting of a giant cluster of 3,000 stars was captured by the telescope. This behemoth cluster of stars is called Westerlund 2.

The snapshot of Southern Ring Nebula was recorded which did show two stars a bright white star and a fainter dull star at the centre of the nebula where the dull star was indeed creating the whole nebula.

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The galaxy, officially known as NGC 2442, has been nicknamed the Meathook Galaxy due to its irregular features. Two coiling arms appear to stretch out from its core, creating a winding, snake-like effect. Viewed from Earth, the galaxy sits in the southern constellation of Volans, the Flying Fish.

Snapped by NASA's Hubble telescope, the galaxy is located a mind-boggling 50 million light-years away.

In more earthly terms, NGC 2442 is located some 293,931,270,000,000,000,000 miles away.

The galaxy measures about 75,000 light-years across and its shape is attributed to an encounter with a smaller galaxy.

And one of its dusty spiral arms was host to a supernova eruption that flared up in March 2015.

READ MORE:Earth and Mars gearing up for close approach: Can I see Mars now?

The supernova 2015F was unusually bright, enough to be seen with a small telescope.

And although the supernova was detected only five years ago, it erupted back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

It then took the light from the explosion tens of millions of years to reach us.

The supernova was most likely a Type Ia explosion - a type of stellar supernova driven by a white dwarf star.

Supernovas are the biggest and most devastating explosions in the known Universe.

This unbalanced the star and triggered runaway nuclear fusion

European Space Agency (ESA)

The blasts are so big they can momentarily outshine their galaxies.

Astronomers divide supernovas into Type I and Type II blasts.

In this case, the eruption was triggered by a white dwarf star feeding on stellar matter beyond critical mass.

The European Space Agency (ESA), which operates Hubble with NASA, said: "The white dwarf was part of a binary star system and siphoned mass from its companion, eventually becoming too greedy and taking on more than it could handle.

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"This unbalanced the star and triggered runaway nuclear fusion that eventually led to an intensely violent supernova explosion.

"The supernova shone brightly for quite some time and was easily visible from Earth through even small telescopes until months later."

The supernova remnant, SN2015F, is now too dim to see without a large telescope.

NASA said: "A supernova burns for only a short period of time, but it can tell scientists a lot about the universe.

"One kind of supernova has shown scientists that we live in an expanding universe, one that is growing at an ever-increasing rate.

"Scientists also have determined that supernovas play a key role in distributing elements throughout the universe.

"When the star explodes, it shoots elements and debris into space.

"Many of the elements we find here on Earth are made in the core of stars."

Read more:
NASA news: Meathook Galaxy where star died in nuclear blast caught by Hubble telescope - Daily Express

Posted on Aug 22, 2020 in Astronomy, Science

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere, said Carl Sagan. So, imagine a galaxy filled with tens of millions of black holes and dark, lifeless island worlds rogue, free-floating planets unmoored from the gravity and the life-giving light of an alien star. It is now is becoming increasingly apparent that the Milky Way may be just such a galaxy. An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planetsplanets that float in space without orbiting a sunthan there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.

This gives us a window into these worlds that we would otherwise not have, said Samson Johnson, at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study. Imagine our little rocky planet just floating freely in spacethats what this mission will help us find.

The Roman Telescope

The study calculated that NASAs upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find hundreds of rogue planets in the Milky Way. Identifying those planets, Johnson said, will help scientists infer the total number of rogue planets in our galaxy. Rogue, or free-floating, planets are isolated objects that have masses similar to that of planets. The origin of such objects is unknown, but one possibility is they were previously bound to a host star.

The Invisible Galaxy 100 Million Black Holes Lurking in the Milky Way

The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldnt even know it, said Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy and distinguished university scholar at Ohio State and a co-author of the paper. We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do.

The Roman telescope, named for NASAs first chief astronomer who was also known as the mother of the Hubble telescope, will attempt to build the first census of rogue planets, which could, Johnson said, help scientists understand how those planets form. Roman will also have other objectives, including searching for planets that do orbit stars in our galaxy.

That process is not well-understood, though astronomers know that it is messy. Rogue planets could form in the gaseous disks around young stars, similar to those planets still bound to their host stars. After formation, they could later be ejected through interactions with other planets in the system, or even fly-by events by other stars. Or they could form when dust and gas swirl together, similar to the way stars form.

The Roman telescope, Johnson said, is designed not only to locate free-floating planets in the Milky Way, but to test the theories and models that predict how these planets formed.

Search Will Span 24,000 Light Years of the Milky Way

Johnsons study found that this mission is likely to be 10 times more sensitive to these objects than existing efforts, which for now are based on telescopes tethered to the Earths surface. It will focus on planets in the Milky Way, between our sun and the center of our galaxy, covering some 24,000 light years.

There have been several rogue planets discovered, but to actually get a complete picture, our best bet is something like Roman, he said. This is a totally new frontier.

The mission, which is scheduled to launch in the next five years, will search for rogue planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing. That technique relies on the gravity of stars and planets to bend and magnify the light coming from stars that pass behind them from the telescopes viewpoint.

This illustration shows a rogue planet drifting through the galaxy alone. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Gravitational Microlensing Einsteins General Relativity

This microlensing effect is connected to Albert Einsteins Theory of General Relativity and allows a telescope to find planets thousands of light-years away from Earthmuch farther than other planet-detecting techniques. Because microlensing works only when the gravity of a planet or star bends and magnifies the light from another star, the effect from any given planet or star is only visible for a short time once every few million years. And because rogue planets are situated in space on their own, without a nearby star, the telescope must be highly sensitive in order to detect that magnification.

The study estimates that this mission will be able to identify rogue planets that are the mass of Mars or larger. Mars is the second-smallest planet in our solar system and is just a little bigger than half the size of Earth.

Johnson said these planets are not likely to support life. They would probably be extremely cold, because they have no star, he said. (Other research missions involving Ohio State astronomers will search for exoplanets that could host life.) Studying them will help scientists understand more about how all planets form, he said.

If we find a lot of low-mass rogue planets, well know that as stars form planets, theyre probably ejecting a bunch of other stuff out into the galaxy, he said. This helps us get a handle on the formation pathway of planets in general. As many as six billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to new estimates

Source: Samson A. Johnson et al. Predictions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Galactic Exoplanet Survey. II. Free-floating Planet Detection Rates, The Astronomical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aba75b , iopscience.iop.org/article/10. 847/1538-3881/aba75b

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via The Ohio State University

Image credits: NASA

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Island WorldsA Totally New Frontier of Exoplanets - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel