January 13, 2010 - Universe Today
Five-hundred light years away, worlds are colliding, and they're made of nothing we've ever seen.
Last week at the 215th American Astronomical Society meeting, UCLA astronomers announced that they had found warm dust – evidence for the violent collision of rocky planets – around a star called HD 131488. The strange thing is, the composition of the dust has little in common with the composition of rocky bodies in any other known system.
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Alien dust kicked up by baby planet collisions
January 12, 2010 - MSNBC
In the search for other planetary systems like Earth that are capable of hosting extraterrestrial life, scientists have come across some very alien systems indeed. But the latest ones have researchers truly perplexed.
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Infrared imaging and spectroscopic measurements of the system, performed by the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, showed the unusual chemical composition.
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Revealing the Explosive Heart of Eta Carinae
January 6, 2010 - U.S. News & World Report
Using adaptive optics to remove atmospheric blurring, Gemini Observatory released an image today showing previously hidden forensic secrets at the ballistic core of the Homunculus Nebula, part of the explosive Eta Carinae star system.
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Using adaptive optics to remove atmospheric blurring, Gemini Observatory released an image today showing previously hidden forensic secrets at the ballistic core of the Homunculus Nebula, part of the explosive Eta Carinae star system.
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Probing the Explosive History of Eta Car
January 4, 2010 - Universe Today
I can't seem to stop writing about Luminous Blue Variable (LBV) stars this week. And new research discussed at the AAS conference this week continues the trend. As part of a series of short talks on exploding stars, John Martin of the University of Illinois, Springfield spoke on his work with the LBV Eta Carinae.
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To probe the internal structure of the outburst Martin and his team used the Near Infrared Chronographic Imager (NICI) on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. The use of infrared allowed the team to peer through the dusty outer layers of the nebula which absorb visible light. The device also used a device to block the light from the central star allowing the team to look through the glare and more directly explore the surrounding structure.
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I can't seem to stop writing about Luminous Blue Variable (LBV) stars this week. And new research discussed at the AAS conference this week continues the trend. As part of a series of short talks on exploding stars, John Martin of the University of Illinois, Springfield spoke on his work with the LBV Eta Carinae.
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To probe the internal structure of the outburst Martin and his team used the Near Infrared Chronographic Imager (NICI) on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. The use of infrared allowed the team to peer through the dusty outer layers of the nebula which absorb visible light. The device also used a device to block the light from the central star allowing the team to look through the glare and more directly explore the surrounding structure.
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Parting Eta Carinae's clouds reveals more clouds
January 4, 2010 - ScienceNews
A new view of Eta Carinae, a nearby star system that is expected to explode as a supernova sometime in the next 10,000 years or so, reveals for the first time clouds of gas that were expelled by one of its stars.
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John Martin of the University of Illinois at Springfield reported new observations of Eta Carinae January 4 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Astronomers took the new images using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, at the Gemini South telescope in Chile. NICI, which was designed to find planets around other stars, uses a system called adaptive optics to cancel out blurring from the Earth’s atmosphere. This feature allowed Martin and his team to create the first visual images of the inner cloud, called the Little Homunculus Nebula. It shows up as a faint brightening around the central star.
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Monday, November 2, 2009
Most distant gamma-ray burst spotted
October 28, 2009 - Nature.com
Two teams have spied a huge blast from the far reaches of our early Universe. Such γ-ray bursts occur when certain massive stars violently explode. The latest burst happened a mere 630 million years after the Big Bang (that's 13.1 billion years ago) and is the youngest such blast to have been spotted — the previous record-beater happened 825 million years after the Big Bang.
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Tanvir's team used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the Gemini North 8-metre telescope, both on Hawaii, to track the burst from about 20 minutes after it was first seen. Strong winds, which can damage the telescope if it is in use, made it too dangerous to use UKIRT for long. "The weather was pretty bad that night," says Tanvir...
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Two teams have spied a huge blast from the far reaches of our early Universe. Such γ-ray bursts occur when certain massive stars violently explode. The latest burst happened a mere 630 million years after the Big Bang (that's 13.1 billion years ago) and is the youngest such blast to have been spotted — the previous record-beater happened 825 million years after the Big Bang.
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Tanvir's team used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the Gemini North 8-metre telescope, both on Hawaii, to track the burst from about 20 minutes after it was first seen. Strong winds, which can damage the telescope if it is in use, made it too dangerous to use UKIRT for long. "The weather was pretty bad that night," says Tanvir...
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Astronomical Artifact: Most Distant Object Yet Detected Carries Clues from Early Universe
October 28, 2009 - Scientific American
A violent explosion picked up by a NASA satellite earlier this year is the oldest object ever seen by astronomers, its light having been emitted some 13 billion years ago. At that time the universe was roughly 5 percent of its present age and the big bang was a fairly recent occurrence, having taken place just 600 million years earlier.
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[Image caption: A false-color image from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii shows the afterglow of GRB 090423 [circled], the most distant astronomical event yet observed.]