2014年11月30日 星期日
The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud
2014年11月29日 星期六
3D 67P
2014年11月28日 星期五
Portrait of NGC 281
Black Hole Friday
2014年11月27日 星期四
Galileo s Europa Remastered
Thankful for Saturn
I’m thankful for a lot of things in life — though appreciative might be a better word — but if I had to assess a list of astronomical gifts, then Saturn would be very high on that list.
This ridiculously gaudy bauble of the solar system never ceases to amaze me, filling my sciencey brain with wonder as it overwhelms my artsy brain with beauty.
So just to get you kickstarted for Thanksgiving, here are three portraits of Saturn for which we can all be grateful.
Up first: Rings and shadows.
This image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft in Aug. 14, 2014, shows nearly the entire face of the planet. That’s no small feat, given Saturn’s 116,000 km girth.
Cassini was almost directly above Saturn’s equator when it took this, so the rings, similarly latituded, are seen as a narrow ribbon around the planet. But that’s an illusion of perspective; the rings are 270,000 km across, a huge span. That’s revealed by their shadow on Saturn’s southern hemisphere; a series of concentric arcs darkening the cloud tops.
I like how different rings cast darker or lighter shadows. The inner C ring is sparse, but the main B ring is thick and broad. The A ring, outside of B, is slightly less dense, so the shadow is lighter. The gap between them is called the Cassini Division, and since there’s less stuff there, it appears as a bright band on Saturn (it doesn’t cast a shadow, really). You can also see the Encke division, the very narrow strip near the bottom of A’s shadow. The shadows are like the rings in reverse, both in brightness and order.
By the way, did you spot the moons Tethys (off to the right) and Mimas (just above the rings, to the lower right of center)?
Next up: Light and shadowplay.
Cooool. The images making up the video, taken by Hubble, are from 1995, when Saturn’s tilt brought the Sun shining almost directly along the plane of the rings. That’s how the moons (Enceladus, Mimas, Dione, and Tethys) can cast long shadows on them. The video shows about 9.5 hours in the life of moons, and you can see just how far they move in that short time, tugged by Saturn’s immense gravity.
Finally: Intermix.
This spectacular shot threw me for a moment. I had never see the clouds on Saturn mixing like that before; usually they stay separate. But this is an image taken using a filter that only allows red light through, where methane absorbs light. That means you’re seeing the very top of the clouds, where mixing of winds is more common. That vortex appears to be drawing material from the bright band next to it. It’s a good reminder that air is a fluid — literally, something that can flow.
Perhaps it’s a bit odd of me to be thinking of Saturn on a day like today, but you know what? I’ll take odd, if it means being able to appreciate the intense and wondrous beauty of the natural world… or worlds.
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2014年11月26日 星期三
Io and Callisto Mutual Event
Some Recent Views of Mars from Hubble
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NASA Coverage Set for Fifth SpaceX Resupply Mission to Space Station
November 26, 2014
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Join me in Washington, D.C. for a post-Thanksgiving Celebration of Planetary Exploration
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United Launch Alliance Answers Burning Questions about Orion's Rocket
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NASA's Sloppy FY 2014 Agency Financial Report
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International Space Station’s 3-D Printer
Synchronizing Calendars at NASA
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Does the Name Pavlof Ring a Bell?
In May 2013, the Aleutian island volcano Pavlof erupted mightily, blowing a stream of ash into the atmosphere and messing up airplane travel.
Last week, it was at it again. This eruption was even more violent than last year’s; the plume went nine kilometers into the air, and was hundreds of kilometers long. It was seen by the Landsat 8 satellite on Nov. 15:
There’s a weird beauty to such things, as awful as they can be. I see them, I suppose, like a rabbit sees a snake: morbid fascination (mixed with a small to fair dose of terror). Even though, in terms of human settlements, Pavlof is remote, it still can muck up airplane travel. Ash is made of fine but very jagged particles of pulverized rock and glass, and if it gets into an airplane engine it can jam it up but good.
That’s why, as I pointed out in last year’s article, we need the Alaska Volcano Observatory… which is generally under threat of a budget ax. That’s nuts, but then, that’s politics these days. When you have a group that denies the existence of everything around them, then dipping your toe into the Presidential election campaign by mocking volcano observatories probably seems downright sane in comparison.
It isn’t.
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A Rich Potpourri of Future Mission Concepts
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2014年11月25日 星期二
The Creature from the Red Lagoon
The Science of “Bennu’s Journey”
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NASA Airborne Campaigns Tackle Climate Questions from Africa to Arctic
November 25, 2014
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NASA is Fixing Year 2000 Compliance in Year 2014
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Field Report from Mars: Sol 3848 — November 20, 2014
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Close to the end for Venus Express
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In Pictures: Expedition 42 Crew Launches to Station
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2014年11月24日 星期一
NASA Wants To Be More Efficient. Just Kidding.
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Putin-backed RD-180 Markup Scheme Unveiled
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Lewis Peach
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NASA Sets Prelaunch Activities, Television Coverage for Orion Flight Test
November 24, 2014
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NASA Opens Cube Quest Challenge for Largest-Ever Prize of $5 Million
November 24, 2014
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NASA Announces a Challenge Before It Announces the Challenge
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2014年11月23日 星期日
Tornado and Rainbow Over Kansas
New Crew Arrives at Space Station to Continue Scientific Research
November 23, 2014
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More People Leave Earth for Space
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2014年11月22日 星期六
Solar Flare from a Sharper Sun
2014年11月21日 星期五
M1: The Crab Nebula
Quick update about our website
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Don't Miss This Great New Video About Europa
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More HSPD-12 Abuses at JPL
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NASA Announces New Opportunities for Public Participation in Asteroid Grand Challenge
November 21, 2014
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Lunar Polar Volatile Puzzle
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A Mission to Europa Just Got a Whole Lot More Likely
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2014年11月20日 星期四
LDN 988: Dark Nebula in Cygnus
NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for Ionospheric Connection Explorer
November 20, 2014
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NASA Selects Student Teams for High-Powered Rocket Challenge
November 20, 2014
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Goresat Gets Closer To Launch
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Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission Marks Ten Years of Discovery
NASA's Plan For Mars Is To Have No Plan for Mars
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How NASA Plans to Land Humans on Mars
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2014年11月19日 星期三
Bright Spiral Galaxy M81
Curiosity update, sols 782-813: Walking the outcrop at Pahrump Hills
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NASA Awards Agencywide Acquisition of Liquid Hydrogen Contract
November 19, 2014
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Remember Comet Siding Spring? Mars Orbiter Mission got photos, too
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SLS Has a New Name: Boeing Space Launch System
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2014年11月18日 星期二
Star Formation in the Tadpole Nebula
NASA Announces Early Stage Innovations Space Tech Research Grants
November 18, 2014
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NASA Teams with South Korean Agency to Further Improve Air Traffic Management
November 18, 2014
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Successful Flight Test of Shape Changing Wing Surface
2014年11月17日 星期一
The Double Dust Disks of HD 95086
Rosetta imaged Philae during its descent -- and after its bounce
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NASA Receives Fourth Consecutive Clean Audit Opinion
November 17, 2014
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NASA Television Coverage Set for Next International Space Station Crew Launch
November 17, 2014
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Mixing Paints
2014年11月16日 星期日
Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita
The Little Comet Lander That Could
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Epic 4K Sun Video, with Bonus Sunspot Tantrums
Not long ago, the ridiculously huge sunspot called Active Region 2192 ruled the face of the Sun. Bigger than Jupiter, it was easily seen by the (adequately protected) naked eye, and it was a distracting though extremely cool blemish during October’s solar eclipse.
A sunspot that big has a lot of storage space to stuff magnetic fields, and 2192 didn’t disappoint. Sunspots are essentially magnetic phenomena, and as the huge looping magnetic field lines in the spot tangled up, they sometimes violently snapped and reconnected, releasing their energy as solar flares. Dwarfing every nuclear bomb on Earth combined, the flares kept popping off as 2192 marched across the Sun’s disk, swept along with our star’s rotation.
From space, the Solar Dynamics Observatory keeps a close eye on the Sun, and watched in multiple wavelengths (think of them as colors) as 2192 did its thing. James Tyrwhitt-Drake, who has created interested scientific animations before, took 17,000 SDO images of the Sun in the ultraviolet, spanning Oct. 14 – 30, 2014, and created an astonishing video that shows 2192 in all its glory. The video is available in 4k resolution, if your bandwidth can choke that down, but it’s worth it to make this full screen:
The sound you hear is not real; it’s made from visible light data by SDO’s Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, which maps motions on the Sun’s surface, which was then converted into sound by solar astronomer Alexander Kosovichev.
In this view, south is up, so the Sun rotates right to left (I’m used to it the other way, but hey, in space there is no up, so fine). 2192 makes its appearance early on, announcing its presence with towering loops of magnetic energy over 200,000 km high — mind you, the Earth is a mere 13,000 km across — and dominates the view thereafter. It’s incredible.
You can watch as enormous prominences erupt away from it, hot hydrogen gas flowing along otherwise invisible magnetic field lines like beads on a wire. The gravity of the Sun is strong, and pulls the gas with a force nearly 30 times stronger than Earth’s gravity, but the magnetic field is strong, too, and the gas flows back to the Sun along curving, graceful paths. It’s mesmerizing.
As the Sun rotates, AR 2192 has come around again, returning on or about Nov. 12. But it decayed substantially when it was on the far side of the Sun from the Earth. It’s a shadow, so to speak, of its former self. It doesn’t look like it’ll last much longer. We may not get another spot like it for a long time; it was the biggest seen in decades. But the Sun is a complex beast, and predicting its behavior for things like this is a losing bet. We may not see another like 2192, or another might grow and swell into existence once again. We’ll have to wait and see.
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2014年11月15日 星期六
The Tulip in the Swan
Now Philae down to sleep
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Fixing Wallops
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Caltech Employee Lawsuit Involves Her Cat and an Israeli Spy
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2014年11月14日 星期五
Welcome to a Comet
Want Funding? Then Be a National Priority
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With New Horizons Ready to Wake Up, Scientists Prepare for Pluto Encounter
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NASA Opens Registration for 2015 Exploration Rover Challenge
November 14, 2014
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NASA Commercial Crew Partners Continue System Advancements
November 14, 2014
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Philae update: My last day in Darmstadt, possibly Philae's last day of operations
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Quick Philae Update
There’s more news this morning about Philae, the European Space Agency lander that is on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Recap: It set down on the comet yesterday, but the harpoons didn’t deploy. It bounced, twice, and came to rest a kilometer or so from the desired landing site. It’s not known precisely where it is, and it’s too small for the Rosetta spacecraft, still orbiting the comet, to easily find it.
Philae came to a rest on its side, unfortunately in a hole or an area surrounded by tall outcroppings. Because of this it’s not getting enough sunlight for its solar power cells to keep it charged. It has two batteries, but the instruments are using up that power rapidly. If nothing is done, it will run out of power soon.
If it does run out of power, all is not necessarily lost; as the comet nears the Sun the cells may receive enough charge to turn the lander back on. This is speculative, though.
The good news is the lander is working and taking data; dozens of high-res photos have been taken, for example, and are waiting to be transmitted up to Rosetta so they can be sent back to Earth. Contact between Rosetta and Philae is intermittent as the orbiter moves around the comet and the line of sight clears to the lander. The next good pass should be today around 21:00–23:00 UTC (16:00–18:00 Eastern).
I wondered yesterday if outgassing from the comet could dislodge Philae, but apparently it’s too dense for that to happen. One idea engineers are looking into is turning on the lander’s flywheel (a heavy, rapidly rotating disk that is used to rotate the lander)—Lander Manager Stephan Ulamec calls it “a very attractive idea”—which might provide enough torque to get Philae upright. There may not be enough power to spin it up though.*
I get the impression that, of course, people on the Philae team are disappointed at what happened, but are still really happy that it worked at all and got as far as it did. I keep hearing comments that anything they get now is “cream on top” of the amazing data they’ve already received. In other words, this mission was a success!
Let’s hope that the success it’s had so far is just the beginning, and not the end. And remember: Rosetta is still orbiting and going strong. That part of the mission has many months of discovery ahead of it.
*Correction, Nov. 14, 2014: This post originally misspelled the first name of Stephan Ulamec.
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Exploring the World's Protected Areas from Space
OIG: NASA Simply Does Not Have The Money to Do Everything
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2014年11月13日 星期四
Descent to a Comet
LightSail Gets Burn Wire Redesign for Round 2 of Vibration Tests
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NASA Awards NASA Balloon Operations Contract
November 13, 2014
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Sean O'Keefe's New Gigs
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Philae status, a day later
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Russia Says That China May Visit ISS
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Brief Philae "Morning After" update: First ÇIVA panorama from the surface
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Shmutz in Jupiter’s Pupik
I remember when I was in grad school, running a telescope observing lab. I was setting up the telescopes, and Jupiter was well placed in the sky, so I was using it to align the finderscopes and get things focused. By coincidence, one of its moons, Io, happened to be just on the edge of Jupiter’s broad face when I looked. Over the course of the three hour lab, we all took turns going back to that ’scope to see how much Io had moved. By another sheer coincidence, Io takes about three hours to cross Jupiter’s disk, so the transit ended just as the lab did.
It was mesmerizing. But it was nothing like this:
That’s how Hubble sees Jupiter, which is way better than my old (otherwise very nice) 25 cm ’scopes did. You can see the broad bands and swirly festooned storms all over its cloud tops. But what really gets you is the ridiculously huge Great Red Spot, big enough to swallow the Earth.
And as if even that isn’t cool enough, there’s a big black spot on it: That’s the shadow of the moon Ganymede, which happened to fall right across the Spot when the shot was taken.
Jupiter’s moons orbit the planet above its equator, and Jupiter has almost no axial tilt (unlike the Earth, where our spin axis is tipped about 24° to the plane of our orbit). That means Jupiter’s moons pass directly between the planet and the Sun every orbit, casting their shadows on the clouds (Jupiter doesn’t have a solid surface; we only see the top of its dense atmosphere, which is tens of thousands of kilometers deep).
I’ve seen moon shadows on Jupiter many times through telescopes, but I’ve never seen one throw its shadow over the Spot! That’s really cool. And what really strikes me is how big Ganymede’s shadow is compared with the Spot. There are two reasons for that: One is that Ganymede is big , 5,270 km across—bigger than the planet Mercury! So it casts a huge shadow.
But also, the Great Red Spot over the years has become somewhat less Great. It’s shrinking. In the past 40 years it’s lost more than 30 percent of its width, and no one knows why.
Incidentally, another mystery is why the Spot is red. Is it from material upwelling from deep within Jupiter's atmosphere, or is it from something else? A new study indicates that it might be due to gases and other material in the upper atmosphere of the planet that get smacked by solar ultraviolet light, changing their chemistry. In the lab, such a process has created a red gas similar to what's seen in the Spot. I can't say if it's conclusive, but it's an interesting step in solving this long-standing enigma.
Anyway, the picture above, released the week of Halloween, was being sold as “Spooky Shadow Play Gives Jupiter a Giant Eye.” I am a master observer of pareidolia, and I’m not buying this. It looks a little like an eye to me, but the placement and relative dimensions don’t look right. If pressed, I’d say it looks more like a jovian belly button.
So maybe, instead of using Hubble, they should have taken this picture with the Naval Observatory.
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2014年11月12日 星期三
PHILAE HAS LANDED! [UPDATED]
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Philae Attempts Comet Nucleus Landing
Phil Larson Departing OSTP
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China Hacked U.S. Weather Satellites - and NOAA Said Nothing
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NTSB Posts Update on Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Investigation
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Planetary Society is Both For and Against Human Spaceflight
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NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Arrives at Launch Pad, Hoisted onto Rocket Ahead of its First Spaceflight
November 12, 2014
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NASA Statement on Successful Rosetta Comet Landing
November 12, 2014
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Philae Has Landed on a Comet
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Orion Spacecraft Rolls Past the Vehicle Assembly Building
Philae update: Photo documentation of Philae's separation!
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Philae update: "Go" for landing, despite apparent failure of cold-gas jet system
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2014年11月11日 星期二
Orion in Gas, Dust, and Stars
ESA Refuses To Release Rosetta Imagery
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Philae update: First of four "go-no-go" decisions is a GO!
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When Worlds Collide, Rings Follow
A few days ago I posted a spectacular picture of a protoplanetary disk, a sprawling multi-ringed wheel of gas and dust swirling around a young, nearby star. I mentioned I had studied such objects before; it all started in the late 1990s when I was working on a Hubble Space Telescope camera called STIS. An astronomer named Carol Grady had observed several such disks around stars, and I helped calibrate and process the images.
And by coincidence, new Hubble images of several similar structures was just released… taken by STIS!
Quite the menagerie. Each image shows a ring around a different star, and the fierce light of the stars themselves has been blocked out so it doesn’t blow out the much fainter light from the rings.
However, unlike the disk image I wrote about last week, these are not protoplanetary disks. They’re dusty debris remnants, shaped more like rings than disks, probably caused by collisions of asteroids and/or comets (some of them quite large) orbiting these stars after planetary formation has already been well underway. In other words, these are somewhat older structures from 100 to 350 light years away.
What’s striking are the weird shapes. You might expect they’d be circular, symmetric, and flat. But they are anything but! The ring seen edge-on around HD 32297 appears to flare, like wings, as does the one around HD 61005. My first thought was that they’re moving through space, plowing through the thin material between the stars. That would blow the rings back a bit, warping them. The analysis done by the team that took the images agrees.
I was also struck by the asymmetry in the ring around HD 181327. Elliptical rings are usually actually circular, but we see them at an angle (like the rim of a drinking glass can look like an oval). But this ring is distorted, thicker and brighter on one side. If it’s from the collision of two objects, they must have been pretty large, and what’s left of the two bodies is probably in that larger thicker part, with the debris having spread out around the star. The ring is about 13 billion kilometers in radius (about three times the distance of Neptune to the Sun), which is pretty weird: You’d think space would be fairly empty that far from the star, and collisions rare. But there it is.
Interestingly, the inner edge of the ring is pretty sharp, when it would be expected to be fuzzy. That means there may be a planet too faint to see in these images, orbiting inside the ring, and gravitationally clearing out the debris closer to the star.
Clearly, other young solar systems have all sorts of behavior problems, and no two appear to be exactly alike. While that makes them somewhat harder to study (it’s nice to be able to categorize objects using similar characteristics) it also makes this more exciting. Surprises are always fun.
And it pleases me greatly to know that not only were these observations made using my old camera, but they were also taken by my old friends Glenn Schneider and the aforementioned Carol Grady, along with a handful of other astronomers with whom I worked in my Hubble days. It’s nice to see good scientists still doing good work.
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Report from Darmstadt: Philae status and early Rosetta results from DPS
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2014年11月10日 星期一
The Protoplanetary Disk of HL Tauri from ALMA
NASA Administrator, Ambassadors Brigety and Haslach Discuss Application of NASA Earth Science for Planning in African Union Nations
November 10, 2014
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NASA Signs Lease with Planetary Ventures LLC for Use of Moffett Airfield and Restoration of Hangar One
November 10, 2014
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In Pictures: Expedition 41 Crew Returns to Earth
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Planetary Science Community Split Over Asteroid Retrieval
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2014年11月9日 星期日
Expedition 41 Has Returned
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The Cat's Eye Nebula from Hubble
Space Station Crew Returns to Earth, Lands Safely in Kazakhstan
November 09, 2014
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Interstellar: The movie that deserves to be called “Gravity”
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China's Moon Plans
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Loss of Contact With STEREO Behind Spacecraft Continues
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2014年11月8日 星期六
Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 660
2014年11月7日 星期五
The Map of Dione
Hunting Binary Asteroids
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A Close Look at Interstellar's Spacecraft
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NASA Television to Provide Coverage of European Mission Comet Landing
November 07, 2014
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Mars Spacecraft Reveal Comet Flyby Effects on Martian Atmosphere
November 07, 2014
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An Early Preview of Orion's Maiden Voyage
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Astronaut Reid Wiseman Shares Earth Art While Preparing for Return
NASA Tests Revolutionary Shape Changing Aircraft Flap for the First Time
November 07, 2014
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BA Review: Interstellar
I love a good scifi blockbuster. I love them even more if they have big sweeping themes, thoughtful dialogue and concepts, and a story told elegantly.
Unfortunately, Interstellar doesn’t deliver on any of those levels for me.
Oh, it does have big ideas and big themes, but in my opinion it really failed to deliver on them. The story telling was confused, the concepts yelled instead of allowed to unfold, and the dialogue was clunky (even laughable at times).
And the science. Yeah, the science.
I wrote a (spoiler-laden) review of the flick, and it’s posted over at the Space: The Next Generation section of Slate .
I’ve been getting a fair amount of tweets about it, some of which accuse me of disliking the movie because I didn’t like the science. Actually, in the review I specifically talk about how I can ignore science if the story demands it, and that the bad science in Interstellar is very much not the reason I didn’t like it. I do spend a lot of the review on the science — and barely scratch the surface of the weird-for-no-reason science in the movie — but in the end, the movie failed me because of the weight of its own ponderousness. It set the bar high, and then walked under it.
I have no desire to stop anyone from seeing it, as I tend to ignore critics’ opinions myself. But if you do see it, then drop on by the review and see if you agree or not. All right all right all right.
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2014年11月6日 星期四
SH2-155: The Cave Nebula
NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Set to Roll out to Launch Pad for its First Flight
November 06, 2014
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NASA Rocket Experiment Finds the Universe Brighter Than We Thought
November 06, 2014
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Stunning Real Image of Planet Formation
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NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Captures Intense Space Weather
TPS at DPS: A Screening of Desert Moon, Advocacy with Casey Dreier, and a Sagan Lecture
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2014年11月5日 星期三
NGC 4762: A Galaxy on the Edge
NASA Television to Broadcast Return of Space Station Crew
November 05, 2014
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Philae landing preview: What to expect on landing day
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The Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections for NASA
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NASA to Discuss Science Findings of Oct. 19 Comet Flyby of Mars
November 05, 2014
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Rising Above Tragedy - It Has Happened Before
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