Superfluid at core of neutron star

(Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/xx; Optical: NASA/STScI; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

Superfluid is a bizarre substance that can climb upward and escape airtight containers.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the first direct evidence for a superfluid, a bizarre, friction-free state of matter, at the core of a neutron star. Superfluids created in laboratories on Earth exhibit remarkable properties, such as the ability to climb upward and escape airtight containers. The finding has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities.

NASA Discovers Remarkable Six Planet Solar System

The star is sun-like. Five of the planets are smaller and orbit close to the star. The other planet is larger and orbits farther out.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it.

"Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it also validates a powerful new method to measure the masses of planets," said Daniel Fabrycky, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, who led the orbital dynamics analysis. Fabrycky and Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, are the lead authors of a paper on Kepler-11 published in the February 3 issue of Nature.

The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of the Earth. Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days, so they orbit within a region that would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system. The sixth planet is larger and farther out, with an orbital period of 118 days and an undetermined mass.

Runaway Star has brilliant bow shock

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)

A star, Zeta Ophiuchi, is flung from it's companion. You can see a brilliant bow shock in the above picture.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2011) — A massive star flung away from its former companion is plowing through space dust. The result is a brilliant bow shock, seen as a yellow arc in a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

Astronomy: High-Energy Surprises in 'Constant' Crab Nebula

Hubble Space Telescope Astronomy Poster Print

The Crab Nebula is considered a cornerstone of high-energy astrophysics. Astronomers are measuring its pulse.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2011) — The combined data from several NASA satellites has astonished astronomers by revealing unexpected changes in X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula, once thought to be the steadiest high-energy source in the sky.

"For 40 years, most astronomers regarded the Crab as a standard candle," said Colleen Wilson-Hodge, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who presented the findings Jan. 12, 2011 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. "Now, for the first time, we're clearly seeing how much our candle flickers."

Stunning New Images of the Universe

The images are from the 'Sloan Digital Survey'.

Via MSNBC News:

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Evidence for a surge in star birth

An artist's rendition of the core of one of the new SPIRE 'hot starburst' galaxies. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

About three billion years after the Big Bang there was a large surge in star formation.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2010) — A UK-led international team of astronomers have presented the first conclusive evidence for a dramatic surge in star birth in a newly discovered population of massive galaxies in the early Universe. Their measurements confirm the idea that stars formed most rapidly about 11 billion years ago, or about three billion years after the Big Bang, and that the rate of star formation is much faster than was thought.

The scientists used the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, an infrared telescope with a mirror 3.5 m in diameter, launched in 2009. They studied the distant objects in detail with the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) camera, obtaining solid evidence that the galaxies are forming stars at a tremendous rate and have large reservoirs of gas that will power the star formation for hundreds of millions of years. Read more here.

Ice Volcanoes on Titan?

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/University of Arizona)

It is hard to imagine an Earth-style volcano that spews ice instead of molten lava, but that is what scientists think NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found on Saturn's moon Titan.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 14, 2010) — NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found possible ice volcanoes on Saturn's moon Titan that are similar in shape to those on Earth that spew molten rock.

Topography and surface composition data have enabled scientists to make the best case yet in the outer solar system for an Earth-like volcano landform that erupts in ice. The results were presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"When we look at our new 3-D map of Sotra Facula on Titan, we are struck by its resemblance to volcanoes like Mt. Etna in Italy, Laki in Iceland and even some small volcanic cones and flows near my hometown of Flagstaff," said Randolph Kirk, who led the 3-D mapping work, and is a Cassini radar team member and geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Super-Earth: Steamy or Gassy?

Scientists are still unsure.

(PHYSORG)-In December 2009, astronomers announced the discovery of a super-Earth known as GJ 1214b. At the time, they reported signs that the newfound world likely had a thick, gaseous atmosphere. Now, a team led by Jacob Bean (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has made the first measurements of GJ 1214b's atmosphere. However, the measurements raise as many questions about the planet's atmospheric composition as they answer...

Researchers suggested three atmospheric possibilities for GJ 1214b. The most intriguing was a thick blanket of steam vaporized by the nearby star. (This option led to the nickname "waterworld," although it's too hot for an ocean.) The second option was a mini-Neptune with a rocky core surrounded by ices and a hydrogen/helium atmosphere. The third model has no equivalent in our solar system - a big, rocky world with a soupy mix of gases (mainly hydrogen) recently emitted by volcanoes.

Star Birth Rate Overestimated?

Astronomers think they have an explanation for "missing stars."

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2010) — In the local group of galaxies that also includes the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way, there are about 100 billion stars. According to astronomers' calculations, there should be many more. Now, physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland may have found an explanation for this discrepancy...

For years, astronomers worldwide have been looking for a plausible explanation for this discrepancy. In cooperation with Dr. Carsten Weidner from St. Andrews University, Dr. Pflamm-Altenburg and Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Bonn, may now have found the solution. It seems that so far, the birth rate has simply been overestimated. But this answer is not quite as simple as it sounds. Apparently, the error of estimation only occurs during periods of particularly high star production.

Amazing New Pictures of the Sun #science

And they were captured by an amateur astronomer. (video)

How Much Does a Planet Really Weigh?

Astronomers have figured out a new way to weigh planets using radio signals.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2010) — An international CSIRO-led team of astronomers has developed a new way to weigh the planets in our Solar System -- using radio signals from the small spinning stars called pulsars.

"This is first time anyone has weighed entire planetary systems -- planets with their moons and rings," said team leader Dr David Champion from Germany's Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie.

"And we've provided an independent check on previous results, which is great for planetary science."

Measurements of planet masses made this new way could feed into data needed for future space missions.

Astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date

(Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

One weighs 300 times the mass of the Sun.

Stars Just Got Bigger: A 300-Solar-Mass Star Uncovered

A Star is Born

Astronomers caught a glimpse of a future star just as it is being born out of the surrounding gas and dust, in a star-forming region similar to the one pictured above. (Photo: NASA, ESA)


Astronomers Witness the birth of a Star.

Astronomers Witness a Star Being Born

Jupiter is Missing a Stripe

Where did Jupiter's stripe go?



From ABC News:

One of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared, to the surprise of scientists who study the solar system's largest planet. "This is a big event," says planetary scientist Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "We're monitoring the situation closely and do not yet fully understand what's going on." The brown ring of clouds, known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), is twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long. Orton thinks the belt may not have disappeared, but could instead be hidden behind other clouds. Scientists say the belt has faded out before. (NASA)