It seems that scientists are discovering young galaxies that are smaller in scale but contain as many stars as a more mature galaxy like the Milky Way:
“While these galaxies are small enough to fit within the central hub of our own Milky Way, they each contain as many stars as larger, more mature galaxies. The light we see from the densely packed galaxies dates to a time when the universe was relatively young, less than three billion years old.
Previously observed tiny galaxies from this time period had correspondingly small numbers of stars. But the newfound galaxies—each only about 5,000 light-years across—weigh in at about 200 billion times the mass of the sun.”
This is an amazing article, according to one scientist within ten years that we will have strategies that will allow us to re-grow the bones and functional tissue:
“The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good. Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print. How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder – or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.”
“Pressure is growing on NASA to speed up development of technologies that will allow astronauts to explore Mars, as envisioned by President George Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration. A new report echoes earlier concerns that sending astronauts to the Moon is dominating NASA’s agenda.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 26, 2008 in Science
When you stop and think about the idea of there only being 2,000 people some 70,000 years ago it’s amazing — you realize how fragile our existence is in this world:
“Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday. The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.”
“A Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut landed in northern Kazakhstan Saturday, 260 miles off its mark, Russian space officials said. Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said the condition of the crew — South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko — was satisfactory, though the three had been subjected to severe G-forces during the re-entry.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 17, 2008 in Science
I love all the breakthroughs that we’re seeing in astronomy these days, but the idea of taking the first steps to making interstellar travel excite the fanboy in me:
“Engineer Neil Wallace peers into a huge vacuum chamber designed to replicate – as far as possible – the conditions of space. Cryogenic pumps can be heard in the background, whistling away like tiny steam engines. Using helium gas as a coolant, they can bring down the temperature in the vacuum chamber to an incredibly chilly 20 Kelvin (-253C). The pressure, meanwhile, can drop to a millionth of an atmosphere. This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines – a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun.”
“A new stereo view of Phobos, the larger and inner of Mars’ two tiny moons, has been captured by a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took two images of Phobos 10 minutes apart on March 23. Scientists combined the images for a stereo view.
“Phobos is of great interest because it may be rich in water ice and carbon-rich materials,” said Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, Tucson. ”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 10, 2008 in Science
What’s amazing about this vehicle is that the living quarters being carried around by this lunar robot will weigh 15 tons. What’s great about this concept is that the same technology could be used to construct a base on Mars in advance of human explorers reaching the planet:
“NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site. In a 2005 report about its exploration plans, NASA said it wanted to set up a base at a fixed location on the Moon after initially returning humans there in 2020.
But a gargantuan robotic vehicle called ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) could change that. Measuring about 7.5 metres wide, with legs more than 6 metres long, the robot could act essentially like a turtle, carrying the astronauts’ living quarters around on its back. It was designed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, US, who are now testing two small-scale prototypes of the robot.”
While we have yet to make it to Mars, maybe in my lifetime we’ll spot another Earth? So far we’ve discovered 300 planets outside of our solar system so the odds are in our favor:
“Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun. Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.”
“A team of astronomers says it may have spotted the youngest planet ever found, boasting an age of less than 100,000 years old, and perhaps as young as 1600 years old. They say it bolsters a controversial theory that planets form very quickly, like stars – but other astronomers say the massive object may not be a planet at all but a ‘failed’ star, which explains its speedy birth.”
“EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS will probably never phone Earth in a way we can understand because they are unlikely to have evolved human-like intelligence. Australian National University astronomer Charley Lineweaver said no other organism on Earth had evolved with intelligence matching that of humans, so it was highly improbable an extra-terrestrial lifeform would think like we do or have built technologies like ours.
“If human-like intelligence were so useful, we should see many independent examples of it in biology and we could cite many creatures who had involved on independent continents to inhabit the intelligence niche,” Dr Lineweaver said. “But we can’t. Human-like intelligence seems to be what its name implies – species specific.” Although he was sure there was other life beyond Earth, he doubted there was intelligent life, such as that, pictured, from the film ET.”
“Earth may have a twin orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a new study suggests. University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri star system, our closest stellar neighbors.
Guedes’ model showed planets forming around the star Alpha Centauri B (its sister star, Proxima Centauri, is actually our nearest neighbor) in what is called the “habitable zone,” or the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.
The model also showed that if such planets do in fact exist, we should be able to see them with a dedicated telescope. “If they exist, we can observe them,” Guedes said.”
“Earth-based radar observations have produced a detailed 3D map of the Moon’s south polar region, revealing a dramatic and rugged landscape. The map will help NASA assess the site’s potential for setting up a base. NASA plans to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and wants to eventually set up a permanent base there. The Moon’s poles are considered particularly good locations for a base.
That’s because frozen water may be present in frigid, permanently shadowed craters at the poles, providing a crucial resource for astronauts. At the same time, some terrain at the poles may be permanently illuminated, providing prime spots to set up solar power stations.”
As a fanboy I count myself as a huge supporter of NASA, however I think it’s important to remind the more mundane minded among us that space program spin-off technology can be found in our everyday world. And to that end NASA has just launched a website called “Trace Space Back to You” which shows how you can find NASA R&D in every thing from toothpaste to tennis rackets.
“Google and X Prize officials have unveiled nine new privately funded teams that will compete for $30 million in the Google Lunar X Prize challenge, a race to the moon. “It’s not just a new mission,” Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said during Thursday’s announcement here at Google’s headquarters. “It’s a new way of doing business.”
The Google Lunar X Prize, unveiled last September, aims to encourage privately funded lunar exploration — just as the $10 million Ansari X Prize provided a jump start for space tourism three years ago. Private-sector moonshots could open the way to commercial ventures ranging from robotic mining operations to lunar hotels and virtual reality-TV expeditions.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 23, 2008 in Science
Currently only a few lucky fanboy (and fangurl) multimillionaires have had the pleasure of going on vacation in outer space, however according to this article the price may come to down to a mere $80,000 for a quick taste of the final frontier:
“Outer space will rocket into reality as “the” getaway of this century, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the University of Rome La Sapienza. In fact, the “final frontier” could begin showing up in travel guides by 2010, they predict.
“In the twenty-first century, space tourism could represent the most significant development experienced by the tourism industry,” says Prof. Fred DeMicco, ARAMARK Chair in UD’s Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management program.”
By the way the image of the Orion Space Plane from 2001: A Space Odyssey is from this great page on Martin Bower.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 21, 2008 in Science
I wish I was an astronaut! Shown above is a great photo taken by an astronaut aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis on February 18, 2008. Click on the image to see it as full size…
“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. Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy – a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across – is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 18, 2008 in Science
Shown above is a video of author George Dyson at the TED conference. Dyson wrote an amazing book on Project Orion, a massive, nuclear-powered spacecraft that could have taken us to Saturn in five years.
“The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by one of the US rovers on Mars’ surface. High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest microbes, a leading NASA expert says.
Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny. The observations were made by the US space agency’s Opportunity rover. It has spent months examining rocks on an ancient Martian plain.”
“A beautifully preserved fossil of a tiny pterosaur suggests that the giant pterodactyls that roamed the skies during the late Cretaceous period may have come from much smaller, tree-dwelling ancestors. The new fossil, which was discovered in 2004 in western Liaoning province, China, is about 120 million years old.
“This is a very, very complete specimen of an unusual little pterodactyl,” says Michael Caldwell, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. The new fossil also sheds some light on another mystery of pterosaur evolution – whether pterosaurs began to fly upwards from the ground, or whether they first climbed into trees and then began to glide downwards.”
Shown above is an education film from 1966 which was the high point of the space race between the US and the USSR. My favorite part of the film is the spaceship animation before the title sequence, I’d love to know who did the illustrations. Sadly the only credits on the film are for the production company which is credited as “a Dr Douglass Film” and my Google search produced no results when looking this up…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 27, 2008 in Science
As a kid I grew up looking at how much cooler the Concorde (or at least the early prototypes of it) looked next to the old fashioned jumbo jets of the era, I just sort of assumed that in the future supersonic air travel would rule the day. Well sadly it’s the year 2008 and the Concorde is history, although maybe supersonic air travel isn’t quite dead yet:
