What are White Holes?

By on Sep 17, 2013 in Cosmology | 3 comments

What are White Holes?     White holes are one of the most interesting concepts in math. Maybe you’ve heard of them or perhaps this is your first time. Let’s answer the question what are white holes? A white hole is essentially the reverse of a black hole. Where a black hole sucks in matter faster than the speed of light a white hole expels matter and still attracts matter (we’ll talk about that in a second). Before I go any further a white hole is still hypothetical and it may always be hypothetical. The reason a white hole was introduced is because it can be proven in mathematics. Think about the balance of 1 and -1. When you balance equations in mathematics the other side of the equation is the opposite. In a black hole there is an event horizon that if any matter crosses this event horizon line then there is no going back. A white hole also has this event...

Deep Impact Spacecraft Still Not Sending Back Any Signal

By on Sep 16, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

Deep Impact Spacecraft Still Has no Signal or Communication Coming Back     Well seems like there are major problems happening with NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission of Deep Impact is to survey comets as well as observe them close up. The spacecraft was launched in 2005 and has traveled 7.58 billion kilometers (4.7 billion miles) in total thus far. Deep Impact mission controllers have been trying to establish a connection with the spacecraft for quite some time now. The last time there was a connection was on August 8th 2013. The mission controllers believe that there was some anomaly that has caused the spacecraft to continually reboot itself. This means there is very little hope that this anomaly will go away. The spirit rover on Mars had a similar issue but in the end a line of code that allowed the rover to boot up without flash memory saved it. Now the two...

The Strangest Creature in Space Called Cometary Globule CG4

By on Sep 15, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

The Strangest Creature in Space Called Cometary Globule CG4     This is one of the strangest looking “creature” objects in space. It almost looks like this is about to gobble up a galaxy. This is known as a cometary globule or CG4. This is a star forming region that could produce several suns like our own. Cometary Globule CG4 is located 1,300 light years away from Earth and its head is about 1.5 light years across. The actual size including the tail is about 8 light years long. The head is illuminated by the stars that are forming. The red that is glowing in the head is super charged hydrogen. The galaxy you see on the right is actually at least 100 million light years away from CG4. The cometary globule in this image has ruptured and reasons for this are still unknown. Even though CG4 looks like a comet it is certainly much different. There isn’t a lot of...

The Largest Known Population of Globular Star Clusters

By on Sep 13, 2013 in Astonishing Discoveries | 0 comments

The Largest Known Population of Globular Star Clusters     Hubble has discovered the largest known population of globular star clusters in the universe thus far. It may not seem like it at first but the photo shows 160,000 star clusters! To give you some perspective our Milky Way galaxy has about 150 star clusters. What does observing star clusters do for us exactly? Well studying globular star clusters helps astronomers understand the formation of galaxies. Not only that but it also leaves clues of how much dark matter these clusters hold. Globular clusters actually formed in the first 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang. This system that you are looking at right now is located 2.25 billion light-years away! It’s hard to imagine that distance but it holds the record of farthest system observed by Hubble.     Now how do these scientists know how much dark...

It’s Official Voyager 1 has Finally Reached Interstellar Space

By on Sep 12, 2013 in Breaking News | 0 comments

It’s Official Voyager 1 has Finally Reached Interstellar Space!     For a long time now there has been quite the debate over whether Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space. It’s clearly out of the solar system and the last barrier is the heliopause before Voyager 1 is truly in interstellar space. Here’s a breakdown of the voyage.     The 36 year old spacecraft is approximately 19 billion kilometers (12 billion miles) from our sun. Interestingly Voyager 1 has shown data that it has been traveling through plasma or ionized gas which is present between stars. This is quite the historic event for mankind to have a working spacecraft reach interstellar space. Voyager 1 first felt the increased pressure when it reached the heliosphere. What was shocking was when the plasma was analyzed they found that the spacecraft was bathed in plasma 40 times denser...

Frog has Last Laugh with Epic Photobomb During LADEE Launch

By on Sep 12, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

Frog Photobombs LADEE’s Launch     On Friday September 6 the NASA mission LADEE or  Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer was launched into space to study the moon and get a more detailed look at the Moon’s atmosphere. Well LADEE wasn’t the only thing in the spotlight. A frog was caught in the middle of the launch (unfortunately) and is now immortalized in this photo. However why was the frog there in the first place? Was it by accident or did he just hop along to find what the fuss was all about? Well as it turns out the launchpad at the Wallops/Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport actually has a high-volume water deluge system which is basically a pool that activates during the launch to protect the launch pad from damage. For more information check out Universe Today’s post.

Record Number of Black Holes Found in Andromeda (M31)

By on Sep 10, 2013 in Astonishing Discoveries | 0 comments

Andromeda Holds the Record of Most Black Holes Found in a Galaxy Other than Our Own Milky Way     Andromeda or M31 is one of the most famous galaxies in astronomy. It’s located 2.5 million light years away and it’s on a collision course with our galaxy the Milky Way. NASA’s Chandra observatory has been observing the universe in the x-ray wavelength and discovering black holes all across the universe. For the last 13 years with 152 observations Chandra has been able to add 26 new black holes to the previous 9 identified in Andromeda. Just think about that for a second. 35 total black holes. Each one of those black holes was caused by a star that was 5-10 times the mass of our Sun and collapsed into a black hole. Let’s take a closer look at Andromeda in x-ray vision.     This Chandra image shows 28 of the 35 black holes in Andromeda. Just seven...

Strange Brown Dwarf as Hot as Your Oven

By on Sep 6, 2013 in Astonishing Discoveries | 1 comment

Strange Brown Dwarf as Hot as Your Oven!     Astronomers gain interesting insight on these failed stars or brown dwarf stars. Brown dwarf stars are essentially star like bodies that have a mass larger than a planet but too small to trigger nuclear fusion and ignite into a full fledged star. These stars are born with very little heat and can produce temperatures from 260 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (125 and 175 degrees Celsius). Their mass can be anywhere from 5 to 20 times the size of Jupiter. Scientists have even discovered a brown dwarf star so cold that even the human body temperature is warmer. However, since they are cold and small it prompts a difficult task to astronomers to accurately measure how dim, big, and far away these stars are. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope scientists have been able to discover 8 brown dwarfs with precise distances. This helped them...