Microsoft Launches WorldWide Telescope
From the world of competitive astronomical websites (isn’t the Internet grand?) comes this new offering from Microsoft, WorldWide Telescope. Like others before it Microsoft’s new offering allows users to explore planets and other celestial objects. You can also view/track objects from any place on earth and in any point in time. Of course as you might expect from Microsoft there’s more going on than that. There is a lot of imagery from NASA including the Mars rovers, Hubble telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are also ‘tours’ set up by expert astronomers or you can even save your own ‘5 year missions’.
Like with Google’s ‘The Sky’ or the open source Stellarium users must first download the free WorldWide Telescope software from Microsoft (windows only).
WorldWide Telescope (via BBC News)
Galaxies Collide
NASA has released a series of 59 new photographs to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. The images show galactic collisions in action and the peculiar shapes that result from the merging galaxies.
Galaxy collisions were more common in the early universe when the universe was smaller, so galaxies were closer together and therefore more likely to crash into each other. Even our own Milky Way contains debris from many smaller galaxies it has consumed over time. Currently the Milky Way is “eating” the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy.
The top predator galaxy is our giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, which is expected to devour the Milky Way in about two billion years. The future resulting elliptical galaxy has already been dubbed “Milkomeda.”
The World Sunlight Map
Two things we really like at Net-Warriors are cool images and cool technology and here’s an example of both. The World Sunlight map uses a combination of several satellite images, a DOD program that maps city lights and some very clever implementation to provide a computer generated approximation using real images to show what the earth looks like from space at the moment.
You can choose either a flat map or globe view and a few other variations. You can even embed it on your own web page if you wish.
The best way to summarize this site to quote the author himself – ‘While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us.’
(also if you have a little geek in you check out how it works).
Death Star Reborn
It’s a simple shape: a sphere with a concave dish set in the surface. In 1977, the shape was forever burned into our brain from the blockbuster movie Star Wars. The Death Star was a space station as large as a moon that housed the “ultimate weapon,” a planet-destroying laser.
Mental Floss has channeled our inner geek and produced a list of 6 things that resemble the Death Star. At left is Mimas, one of the inner moons of Saturn. It has an 80-mile-wide crater named Herschel, which certainly looks like the Death Star’s super laser. The uncanny resemblance is coincidental, however, as Star Wars was made several years before Mimas was photographed up close.
Biggest Black Hole Discovered
Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole in the universe. The black hole itself is the size of our entire galaxy and has a mass of 18 billion Suns. It’s six times larger than the previous record-holder.
The massive black hole is 3.5 billion light years away from Earth and sits at the heart of a quasar named OJ287. Quasars are extremely bright objects in which matter spiraling into a giant black hole emits large amounts of radiation.
Orbiting around the giant is a smaller black hole weighing only about 100 million Suns. The smaller hole orbits the giant every 12 years and comes close enough to punch through the disc of matter surrounding the larger black hole twice each orbit, causing a pair of outbursts that make the OJ287 quasar brighten suddenly.
Physicist Says Time Travel Likely
Time travel? Teleportation? No problem, says renowned physicist Michio Kaku, who is creating quite a stir with his new book, The Physics of the Impossible.”
Kaku believes the following inventions may become reality within the next century: teleportation (already possible for subatomic particles); telepathy (with brain implants); invisibility (already prototyped using light-bending materials); laser guns (existing, but currently too power-hungry to be practical in battle); force fields; and the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
Northern Lights in Iceland
The Northern Lights (or Aurora Borealis) are natural, colorful light displays, usually visible at night in the polar regions. The lights often appear as “curtains” of green that constantly evolve and change into all colors of the rainbow.
The sun ejects high-energy charged particles called ions that travel into space 300-1200 kilometers per second. This “solar wind” interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field in the upper atmosphere and glows in bright colors.
Sigurdur H Stefnisson has dozens of amazing photographs of the Northern Lights in Iceland. For this photo, Sigurdur says: “Iceland is within that belt where auroras are very common. Here Siggi captured this beautiful scene of the auroras in full swing, and the red color is caused by the solar particles hitting high altitude oxygen.”
Beachfront Property… on Mars!
This photo looks like a typical aerial shot over a serene beach in Tahiti. Except visitors to this "beach" would freeze in Mars -63° C (-81° F) atmosphere.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured images on Mars that suggest the Holden Crater shown in this picture once contained a calm body of water that could have harbored life.
There is still no conclusive evidence that life once existed on Mars, but this is one more clue to investigate in our continual search for life on other planets and perhaps warrants a future Mars Rover mission.
Top 10 Hubble Images
The Hubble is an optical telescope that orbits 370 miles (595 km) above the Earth. The telescope’s position in space enables it to take higher quality images of deep space than any ground-based telescope that must peer through the pollution and atmosphere on Earth. As a result, Hubble is able to capture spectacular images of very dark or distant objects that cannot be seen by telescopes on Earth.
The U.S. launched the Hubble in 1990, and though the Hubble has exceeded its estimated lifetime, many components are starting to fail, and the Hubble is expected to fall back to Earth sometime after 2010. So it seems like a good time to celebrate nearly 20 years of amazing space photography with this set of Top 10 Hubble Images.
Earth and Moon from Mars
If your problems seem huge, here’s a reminder of just how small we really are. This is an image of our Earth and Moon from the planet Mars.
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this photo on October 3, 2007. At the time, Earth was 88 million miles from Mars. You might be able to make out South America at the lower right.
