Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was

It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.

Titan’s organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times
more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas
reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain
from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

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US Government is Threatening to shut Down Arecibo Observatory

I just can't belive how bad our government is; From Pharyngula:

Where could we possibly find $4 million?

Category: Politics • Science

Posted on: September 23, 2007 4:00 AM, by PZ Myers

Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we're throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let's just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?

What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.

The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.

Shall we trade three years of science for less than an hour's worth of war? That sounds like a no-brainer to me. The observatory doesn't even kill anybody in normal operation. Or is that considered a strike against it?

Cassini-Huygens

Planetary Systems

Are Planetary Systems Filled to Capacity? (part 2) :: Astrobiology Magazine - earth science - evolution distribution Origin of life universe - life beyond :: Astrobiology is study of earth science evolution distribution Origin of life in universe terrestrial

Are Planetary Systems Filled to Capacity? (part 2)
Stellar Evolution Summary (Aug 20, 2007): In this essay, Steven Soter examines computer experiments that simulate the gravitational interactions among planets over billions of years. These models suggest that the solar system is only marginally stable and is dynamically full, or nearly so. Adding another planet between the existing ones would make the system unstable, resulting in a collision or ejection of a planet.

Pharyngula

Pharyngula

I wonder if it now feels terrible to have one's stupidity and ignorance a matter of public record ("theory" does not mean what he thinks it means), and to have so thoroughly overreached one's intellectual capacity that it will be emblematic of the Republican corruption of science policy for years to come? Or perhaps (and perhaps more likely) Mr Deutsch is basking in the high regard of his know-nothing peers in this administration, who probably think smacking a scientist with a Bible is a clever retort.

If there were justice, Deutsch's political career would be dead now, and he'd have to make a living selling aluminum siding in Topeka. I fear he's just improved his standing in the Republican party.
I also don't think Deutsch is the exception. The rot runs deep.

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There's more at Bad Astronomy and Stranger Fruit.

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Add Cosmic Variance to the list. I think you're going to see a growing righteous fury among scientists on this.

Bad Astronomy Blog ? Blog Archive ? Outrage at attacks on NASA science

Bad Astronomy Blog ? Blog Archive ? Outrage at attacks on NASA science

You may have read the New York Times article on January 29 about a NASA scientist who was gagged by the government about his reports on global warming (the link requires a free registration). Dr. Jim Hansen, a top NASA scientist, had interview requests about his work with global warming denied by a NASA public affairs officer by the name of George Deutsch. While Deutsch works for NASA, he is actually a presidential appointee who worked for President Bush and Vice President Cheney during the 2004 elections.

Got this so far? Deutsch had this position as NASA public relations specialist given to him by the current administration, and according to Dr. Hansen he used it to suppress information about global warming. This issue was important enough to NASA officials that Mike Griffin, NASA’s Administrator, sent an email on Friday, Feb. 3 to all NASA employees (and which is now posted on the NASA website) saying that "It is not the job of public-affairs officers to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."

I agree wholeheartedly, of course, and I also want to make clear that I think that scientific suppression is not representative of the demeanor in general at NASA, nor of NASA’s Public Affairs Office as a whole. In fact, the NYT article makes this clear, stating "[Hansen] and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings [of "dire consequences" if they talked about global warming] came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters" (emphasis mine; in the article Dr. Hansen clearly also strongly disagrees with policy statements by the other PAO political appointee, Dean Acosta).

But now let’s get to the next part. In the February 4 issue of the NYT, the plot thickens (all the following quotations are from that article). Other scientists have come forward and talked about how political appointees have tried to suppress or alter other information from NASA in order to make it conform to the President’s party line.

Overview

Overview of IceCube:

" IceCube is a one-cubic-kilometer international high-energy neutrino observatory being built and installed in the clear deep ice below the South Pole Station.
IceCube will open unexplored bands for astronomy, including the PeV (1015 eV) energy region, where the Universe is opaque to high energy gamma rays originating from beyond the edge of our own galaxy, and where cosmic rays do not carry directional information because of their deflection by magnetic fields. The instrument may, for example, answer the question of whether the fascinating multi-TeV photons originating in the Crab supernova remnant and near the supermassive black holes of active galaxies are of hadronic or electromagnetic origin. IceCube will provide a totally novel viewpoint on the multi-messenger astronomy of gamma ray bursts, which have been identified as a possible source of the highest energy particles in nature.
IceCube also occupies a unique place in the multi-prong attack on the particle nature of dark matter, with unmatched sensitivity to cold dark matter particles approaching TeV masses. As a particle physics experiment with the capability to detect neutrinos with energies far beyond those produced at accelerators, IceCube will join the race to discover supersymmetric particles and the topological defects created in grand unified phase transitions in the early universe. The detection of cosmic neutrino beams would open the opportunity to study neutrino oscillations over Megaparsec baselines. "

The Planetary Society

The Planetary Society

WDS

WASHINGTON VISUAL DOUBLE STAR CATALOG

Everything Space: Astronomy and Space News, Chat, Forums, Videos

Everything Space: Astronomy and Space News“There are thought to be millions of these WIMPs going through our bodies every second,” Newburg adds. “Because they are weakly interacting, detectors designed to look for them might detect only a few a day. The reason we think these WIMPs exist is that we see the effects of some unknown and unseen mass pulling at the stars of the Milky Way through gravity. Though each WIMP is very small, there are so many of them that their mass accounts for 90% of the mass in our galaxy. It is quite extraordinary to me that we might live in a sea of these barely-detectable particles, and that we scientists see this as the most likely explanation for our observations of the heavens.”

“Because the Earth is much more dense than the Milky Way galaxy, the WIMPs have very little effect on the gravity we feel, and as far as we know our lives are not directly affected by the tiny particles.”

RedNova - Your Sky Tonight - Astronomy Information and Education

RedNova - Your Sky Tonight - Astronomy Information and Education: "What Stars are in Your Sky Tonight?" Nice!

Astronomy

Astronomy: "Astronomy's New Grail: The $1 Billion Telescope
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: December 30, 2003"

ESA - Mars Express - Merry Christmas from Mars:Mars Express enters orbit around the Red PlanetContact awaited with Beagle 2 on the surface

ESA - Mars Express - Merry Christmas from Mars:Mars Express enters orbit around the Red PlanetContact awaited with Beagle 2 on the surface: "25 December 2003
ESA PR 84-2003. This morning, after a journey lasting 205 days and covering 400 million kilometres, the European Mars Express space probe fired its main engine at 03:47 CET for a 37-minute burn in order to enter an orbit around Mars. This firing gave the probe a boost so that it could match the higher speed of the planet on its orbit around the Sun and be captured by its gravity field, like climbing in a spinning merry-go-round. This orbit insertion manoeuvre was a complete success."

Mauna Kea telescope gets world's biggest camera

Mauna Kea telescope gets world's biggest camera A massive new camera on the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope on Mauna Kea likely will lead to the discovery of more new moons around the planets in our solar system.

University of Hawai'i planetary astronomers have been rendering science textbooks obsolete every few months with a series of discoveries. Several months ago, UH Institute for Astronomy experts found a previously unknown moon orbiting Jupiter, bringing the giant planet's total to 40 moons. The same team found 11 Jupiter moons earlier last year, and 11 others the year before that.

A few weeks ago, three new moons around Neptune were announced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics using a telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope atop Mauna Kea.

The research will be further aided by the French-built Megacam, part of a larger instrument called Megaprime, that can take images with 350 million pixels. That's more than 100 times more powerful than some of the better digital cameras on the market, which take images that max out at about 3 million pixels. (A pixel is the smallest possible element of an image.)

The Megacam is the biggest camera in the world and will be able to capture immense swaths of sky at one time, said astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre. He said Megaprime, which is in final testing and should begin regular astronomy within a few days, can view an area of sky that is one degree square

Distant Ring of Stars Found Around the Milky Way Hidden from view behind stars and gas on the same visual plane as the Milky Way, this ring of stars is approximately 120,000 light years in diameter, says Heidi Newberg, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rensselaer and a co-lead investigator on the project. Traveling from Earth at the speed of light, it would take 40,000 light years to reach the ring.

ABCNEWS.com : Astronomers Find Oldest Star The first generation of stars that formed from the gas and dust cast outward by the explosion were massive, fast-burning and short-lived. When they exploded as supernovae they began tainting the universe with the first doses of heavier elements, which astronomers call metals. This debris formed stars like HE0107-5240, scientists said

Astronomy News

Evidence Found for New Form of Ultra-Dense Matter

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 10:45 am ET
10 April 2002

Story first posted at 10:03 a.m., April 10, 2002
Astronomers announced Wednesday the discovery of evidence for a new state of matter heavier than any previously known, equivalent in density to stuffing all of Earth into an auditorium.
The apparent discovery, made with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, provides support for a two-decade-old theory suggesting the existence of so-called "strange quark stars." The findings were discussed at a press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C.
The research involved two stars expected to be neutron stars, remnants of exploded stars that are composed primarily of neutrons and would be very dense. One of the stars, however, was found to be much smaller than expected.
"It is too small to be explained by the theory that governs neutron stars," said Jeremy Drake, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Drake and his colleagues examined a star called RXJ-1856. It was found to be about 1.2 million degrees Fahrenheit (700,000 degrees Celsius) and has a diameter of roughly 7 miles (11.3 kilometers). Drake said it's possible they measured a hot spot, but he thinks it's more likely that the observations are correct and the theory of neutron stars needs revision.
A paper on the work will appear in the June2

The other object, called 3C-58, became a new star in the sky in the year 1181, when it exploded. According to neutron star theory, some of the material collapsed into a dense core, while the rest was cast off into space.

Now, more than eight centuries later, researchers observed the remaining core with certain expectations about how much it should have cooled off. The star' temperature is less than a million degrees Celsius, far below what was expected.

"Our observations suggest that the core of this star is made of a new kind of exotic material," said David Helfand, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University in New York. "It appears that neutron stars are not made of pure neutrons after all."

Instead, each of the stars in the two new studies may contain exotic particles called quarks.

Michael Turner, a widely respected cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said both studies appear to show that Nature is able to produce forms of matter that scientists have been unable to create in laboratories.

Quarks are thought to be fundamental building blocks of matter. But they have never been observed alone, instead always existing together as the components of other matter. If they were liberated inside a star, they could theoretically be compressed into a smaller sphere, researchers said.

The results "suggest the existence of a new state of matter that's made of undifferentiated quarks," Turner said. "If this is indeed the case, then astronomers have provided us with a stunning insight on quarks."

Turner said powerful telescopes like Chandra are making it more and more possible to use the universe as a laboratory to study Nature's tiniest phenomena.

Norman Glendenning is one of those researchers who has been unable to isolate quarks in a lab. The senior scientist emeritus at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said that if the observations are correct, then RXJ-1856 appears to be made only of quarks, and as so it would have a sharp edge, not the gradual fuzzy outer surface typical of neutron stars and other stars.

"If all that is so, this star is in a class quite by itself and will be an astonishing discovery of fundamental significance," Glendenning said.

And there may be deeper implications to the two discoveries.

If the work is correct, "it will tells us that there were two paths that the universe might have taken" at inception, Glendenning said. The other universe, had it developed instead, might have been limited in the sorts of matter that were created.

"It made all the difference in the world that the universe evolved along one path and not the other, or else we would not be here to contemplate its wonders," Glendenning said.

Anne Kinney, director of the Astronomy and Physics Division at NASA's Office of Space Science, cautioned, "I'd like to emphasize that this is evidence for, not proof of, a new form of matter."