Student Alert: GRAIL Naming Contest – Essay Deadline November 11, 2011

  

Attention K - 12 US Students

NASA announces student Essay Naming Contest for the twin GRAIL Lunar spaceships (picture below). The essay writing contest is open to students in Grades K - 12 at schools in the United States. Submission Deadline is November 11, 2011. GRAIL A & B are twin science robots that will explore the gravity field of the moon like never before. Credit: NASA

Student Alert ! – Here’s your once in a lifetime chance to name Two NASA robots speeding at this moment to the Moon on a super science mission to map the lunar gravity field. They were successfully launched from the Earth to the Moon on September 10, 2011. Right now the robots are called GRAIL A and GRAIL B. But, they need real names that inspire. And they need those names real soon. The goal is to “capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration”, says NASA – the US Space Agency.

NASA needs your help and has just announced an essay writing contest open to students in Grades K – 12 at schools in the United States. (...)

Read the rest of Student Alert: GRAIL Naming Contest – Essay Deadline November 11 (660 words)

ScienceDaily  -Astronomers using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have captured rare data of a flaring black hole, revealing new details about these powerful objects and their blazing jets.

Scientists study jets to learn more about the extreme environments around black holes. Much has been learned about the material feeding black holes, called accretion disks, and the jets themselves, through studies using X-rays, gamma rays and radio waves. But key measurements of the brightest part of the jets, located at their bases, have been difficult despite decades of work. WISE is offering a new window into this missing link through its infrared observations.

"Imagine what it would be like if our sun were to undergo sudden, random bursts, becoming three times brighter in a matter of hours and then fading back again. That's the kind of fury we observed in this jet," said Poshak Gandhi, a scientist with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He is the lead author of a new study on the results appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "With WISE's infrared vision, we were able to zoom in on the inner regions near the base of the stellar-mass black hole's jet for the first time and the physics of jets in action."

The black hole, called GX 339-4, had been observed previously. It lies more than 20,000 light-years away from Earth near the center of our galaxy. It has a mass at least six times greater than the sun. Like other black holes, it is an ultra-dense collection of matter, with gravity that is so great even light cannot escape. In this case, the black hole is orbited by a companion star that feeds it. Most of the material from the companion star is pulled into the black hole, but some of it is blasted away as a jet flowing at nearly the speed of light.

"To see bright flaring activity from a black hole, you need to be looking at the right place at the right time," said Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE snapped sensitive infrared pictures every 11 seconds for a year, covering the whole sky, allowing it to catch this rare event."

Observing the jet's variability was possible because of images taken of the same patch of sky over time, a feature of NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission. WISE data enabled the team to zoom in on the very compact region around the base of the jet streaming from the black hole. The size of the region is equivalent to the width of a dime seen at the distance of our sun.

The results surprised the team, showing huge and erratic fluctuations in the jet activity on timescales ranging from 11 seconds to a few hours. The observations are like a dance of infrared colors and show that the size of the jet's base varies. Its radius is approximately 15,000 miles (24,140 kilometers), with dramatic changes by as large as a factor of 10 or more.

"If you think of the black hole's jet as a firehose, then it's as if we've discovered the flow is intermittent and the hose itself is varying wildly in size," Poshak said.

The new data also allowed astronomers to make the best measurements yet of the black hole's magnetic field, which is 30,000 times more powerful than the one generated by Earth at its surface. Such a strong field is required for accelerating and channeling the flow of matter into a narrow jet. The WISE data are bringing astronomers closer than ever to understanding how this exotic phenomenon works.

A video showing variations of the black hole jet, as seen via WISE observations, is online athttp://www.astro.isas.jaxa.jp/~pgandhi/wise_gx339/wise_blackhole_anim.html.

Poshak Gandhi is supported by the JAXA International Top Young Fellowship program. Other authors of the paper include: A.W. Blain of the University of Leicester, United Kingdom; D.M. Russell and S. Markoff of the University of Amsterdam; P. Casella of the University of Southampton, United Kingdom; J. Malzac of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Université de Toulouse, France; S. Corbel of Université Paris Diderot and Commissariat à l'énergie atomique Saclay, France; P. D'Avanzo of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Italy; F.W. Lewis of Faulkes Telescope Project, Wales; M. Cadolle Bel of the European Space Astronomy Centre, Spain; P. Goldoni of Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie, France and Commissariat à l'énergie atomique Saclay, France; S. Wachter of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.; D. Khangulyan of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; and A. Mainzer of JPL.

JPL manages and operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode after it scanned the sky twice, completing its main objectives. The mission was selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah; and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. More information is online athttp://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu andhttp://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

STAR GAZING INVITATION

DAG is orgnizing free stargazing gathering at Zubair Camp on 23th Sept, all are invited, the event will include general astronomy talk and discussion on threats of Comets, observation of planet Jupiter, we start 8:30PM geathering at Lulu village, 9 PM starting program at camp, 12 AM closing.

 please come down with your friends and families.

CONTACT

Hasan Ahmad

Dubai Astronomy Group

FOR DETAILS

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Courtesy

A supernova — discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory — is the closest of its kind found in almost 40 years. It will not be visible to the naked eye in a week or two.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helped find a “holy grail” Wednesday night when they discovered a supernova relatively close to Earth.

The supernova — discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory, a four-year-long survey operated from the Palomar Observatory in California — is the brightest and closest of its kind found in almost 40 years. It is located in the Pinwheel Galaxy, just over 20 million light years away.

“You can’t hope to find something like this,” said survey team leader Peter Nugent, a scientist at Berkeley Lab and campus adjunct professor of astronomy.

“Literally the last time something like this happened, I was a freshman in college. Something like this, you just don’t bank on it.”

He said the program usually finds several supernovae nightly, but nothing as close or bright as this discovery.

The project involves a collaboration between institutions, including UC Berkeley, the Berkeley lab and Oxford University. The project takes about 40 gigabytes of digital images nightly, covering about 600 square degrees of the sky, or 1,200 Earth moons. The data is then transferred from the observatory to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley lab. Researchers compare past and recent images and search for any differences in the pictures.

According to Brad Cenko, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and a collaborator in the survey, the project had two main goals — to identify transient sources like supernovae and novae to improve other studies in the field and to find new variable phenomena that have never been seen.

“This is a pretty rare occurrence,” Cenko said. “It would fall more in that latter category (of goals) — that needle in a haystack, very rare but very rewarding discovery.”

Nugent said that the program received data from the observatory on the supernova, and within hours, other collaborators on the project were sent coordinates for follow-up observations. The first spectra of the explosion were observed by telescopes in the Canary Islands by Oxford collaborators, followed by telescopes at the Lick Observatory in California and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

In the aftermath of the supernova’s initial explosion, it will continue to get brighter, according to Joshua Bloom, a collaborator with the project and an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. He added that in a week or two, while the supernova will not be visible to the naked eye, it will be bright enough to be detected by individuals with a small telescope.

“In that sense, it opens up the possibility for amateurs to get involved,” Bloom said. “It’s not just an esoteric supernova that somebody with the biggest telescope can observe — it’s a supernova for everybody.”

This sighting will give researchers a better understanding of the progenitor solar system from which the supernova developed. Additionally, researchers will be able to make some key observations about the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

Researchers will continue to study the supernova as it brightens and expands. However, because of its current proximity to the sun, the supernova will only be visible for about one more month before it will be hidden from view for three months. Because it is so close to Earth, observation can then continue periodically for over a decade until it eventually fades away.

“It’s kind of quickly on its way to becoming a classic supernova,” Bloom said. “This is just the beginning of what’s going to be a very long affair with a very close-by explosive event.”