Awesomeness Round-Up – 10/31/2011
- By Sara Mitchell
- October 31, 2011
- Comments Off on Awesomeness Round-Up – 10/31/2011
Sara’s note: Don’t forget to enter our costume contest! You’ve still got a few more days to snap a pic of your geeky, science-y costume… and win NASA goodies! More details at the link above.
Credit: David St. Louis
It’s been a busy couple of weeks in astronomy – big discoveries, the launch of NPP – but the biggest story about space may have been the huge geomagnetic storm on October 24th and the subsequent aurora seen all over the place! There are tons of photos that people have posted of the northern lights seen in their area. The coronal mass ejection that caused the event was powerful enough that aurora were seen at far lower latitudes than they are usually visible. Want to know more about the science behind the northern lights? Discovery News put together a nice feature about what causes aurora and what made this particular night’s so spectacular.
In the last round-up, we showed you the full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope that was assembled in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Now we’re going across the ocean to Germany, where thousands of visitors to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) open house had the opportunity to build a full-scale mock-up of Webb’s mirror! Over a four hour period, visitors carefully placed the 798 cardboard hexagons in a field next to the ESO headquarters. Visit the press release to view time lapse videos that show it all coming together!
Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Leiden Observatory
The last round-up also featured a surprising new discovery from the Herschel Space Observatory about the possible origins of Earth’s water in comets from the Kuiper Belt. Well, Herschel just released another watery story – but this one is about water vapor detected 175 light-years from Earth in the planet-forming disk around the star TW Hydrae! Researchers estimate that the disk contains enough water to fill thousands of Earth-sized oceans. The planets that eventually form from the disk are likely to receive that water… much as Earth likely did, from comets!
Credit: ESO/D. Minniti/VVV Team/S. Brunier/S. Guisard/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
Music: John Dyson
This zoom-in starts with a view of the southern Milky Way, passes some of our galaxy’s most gorgeous features, and ends up showing two recently-discovered globular clusters, as seen by the ground-based VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Globular clusters are a rare discovery, and often hard to see – especially when their light has to travel through the dust and gas in the center of our galaxy. It takes infrared observations to see through all that stuff and capture these interesting clusters of stars.
Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/CXC/SAO
It often takes more than one satellite, collecting data in different wavelengths and with different sorts of instruments, to solve the mysteries of the universe. In the image above, data from four satellites (two infrared, two X-ray) comes together to reveal the secrets of supernova RCW 86. Observed by Chinese astronomers in 185 A.D., this was the first supernova ever recorded. But it would take nearly 2,000 years for astronomers to figure out what type of supernova it was, and why its remains were larger than expected. Each satellite was able to contribute a piece of the puzzle, so scientists could see the big picture – a Type Ia supernova explosion that generated an enormous burst of material and energy. The image below shows just the infrared data of the supernova remnant from WISE and Spitzer.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Debbie Mccallum
Fall is well underway here at Goddard, and we wanted to share this lovely photo of the changing leaves around the small pond down the road. It’s a nice quiet place to think.
Finally, since it is Halloween – we’ll leave you with the top ten horrors of alien planets. Don’t say we didn’t warn you… these are some pretty scary places in the universe!
