ESA ExoMars Rover named after Italian Mars Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli

An instrument module set to land on Mars has been named "Schiaparelli" after the 19th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, European scientists say.

The entry, descent and landing demonstrator module will fly on the 2016 ExoMars mission, a joint endeavor between the European Space Agency and Russia's Roscosmos space agency.

Schiaparelli will make a controlled landing on Mars, entering the atmosphere at 13,000 mph and using parachutes and thrusters to brake to less than 10 mph before landing less than 8 minutes later, and ESA release said Friday.

The module will collect data on the atmosphere during entry and descent, and its instruments will perform local environment measurements at the landing site in a region of plains known as Meridiani Planum.

The module's name was chosen to honour Schiaparelli, who made telescopic observations of Mars, naming what he thought were seas and continents.

He also saw what he thought were linear features on the surface, calling them canali which in Italian means channels, but the word was later mistranslated to canals.

Despite the mistaken identification of martian features, Schiaparelli's work was the first systematic investigation of the Red Planet.

"Considering the importance of Giovanni Schiaparelli's pioneering observations of Mars, it was an easy decision to give his name to the ExoMars module that is paving the way to the further exploration of the Red Planet," Alvaro Gimenez Cañete, ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration (not the Spanish footballer)

Scottish Astronomer captures meteor trail against Aurora Borealis

A display of the Northern Lights over the Highlands and Islands of Scotland has been lit up by a fireball meteor.

Images of the aurora borealis were captured in clear skies on Monday night, including along the west coast and in the Western Isles.

The Northern Lights are generated when particle streams from the sun collide with atoms high up in the atmosphere.

Byron Griffiths, who lives on the Isle of Lewis, took one shot of the fireball as it fell through the sky.

Astronomer's Magnificent View of Omega Nebula

Officially catalogued as Messier 17 (M17) and NGC 6618, the nebula in this image is also called the Omega Nebula, the Swan Nebula, the Horseshoe Nebula and the Lobster Nebula. 

Former NASA scientist Fred Herrmann of Huntsville, Ala., sent this photo of the Omega Nebula to SPACE.com on Sept. 25, 2013. 

He used a Takahashi TOA-130 Telescope, STT-8300 Monochrome CCD Camera, and Ha and Oiii elemental filters to capture the image.

Credit: Fred Herrmann | Owl Mountain Observatory

The nebula featured in this beautiful image is officially catalogued as Messier 17 and NGC 6618, but it is called many different names, including the Swan Nebula, the Horseshoe Nebula, the Lobster Nebula and the Omega Nebula.

Located roughly 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer), Messier 17 is one of the youngest and most active hot beds of star formation within the Milky Way galaxy.

The nebula stretches 15 light-years in diameter, the center of which is packed with gas and dust, which are the raw ingredients from which new stars are born.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

Astronomer photographer Image: Bubble Nebula

Terry Hancock captured this cropped image of the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, from Down Under Observatory in Fremont, Mich. on the nights of Aug. 15, 16 and 18.

Credit: Terry Hancock

Humid, summer weather didn't burst one veteran astrophotographer's cosmic bubble when he spent three nights capturing this beautiful image of NGC 7635, also known as the Bubble Nebula.

Space photographer Terry Hancock took the photo from Down Under Observatory in Fremont, Mich. after 11 hours of exposure time on the nights of Aug. 15, 16 and 18.

"While the skies were clear the seeing conditions were quite poor due to high humidity," Hancock reported

Approximately 6 light-years wide, NGC 7635 is located roughly 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

Intense radiation and stellar winds from a nearby star created this delicate-looking bubble, which shines pink because of surrounding red, hot gas.

What Will First Photos of Black Holes Look Like?

A giant black hole is thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way, but it has never been directly seen. Now astronomers have predicted what the first pictures of this black hole will look like when taken with technology soon to be available.

In particular, researchers have found that pictures of a black hole ― or, more precisely, the boundaries around them ― will take a crescent form, rather than the blobby shape that is often predicted.

By modeling what these pictures will look like, scientists say they are preparing to interpret the photos that will become available from telescopes currently under construction.

"No one has been able to image a black hole," said University of California, Berkeley student Ayman Bin Kamruddin, who presented a poster on the research last week in Long Beach, Calif., at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

"So far it's been impossible because they're too small in the sky. Right now we're just getting some details about the structure, but we don't have an image yet."

This crescent-shape image is the best fit to observations of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, according to a January 2013 study.

CREDIT: Kamruddin/Dexter

Harvard Astronomer Pays Tribute to Van Gogh with Hubble Mosaic

One night, Harvard astronomer Alex Parker was camped out at the telescope for a spot of star-gazing, and found himself facing a long, dry period of waiting for the clouds to clear.

To pass the time, he started playing around with various images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and ended up assembling them into a colorful mosaic.

The resulting image? A recreation of Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting, "Starry Night".

Alex Parker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Institute for Theory and Computation, has created several astronomical videos on his own time and posted them on the Internet. 

His latest video depicts the 2,299 planet candidates Kepler has found since it began searching for planets around stars in 2009. 

According to sources "Parker used photo-mosaicing software to assemble the digital collage."

He had been thinking about using Hubble images to make a mosaic for awhile, since the telescope's 22nd anniversary was approaching; he just needed the right circumstances to find the time -- a cloudy night.

"Observing can be all over the map," Parker reported about his artistic endeavour. "You will be shut out by clouds on some nights, have to evacuate the mountain because of high winds and ice on other nights, and other times there isn't a moment to pause because you're taking data at such a high rate all night."

Night Sky Over Hungary's Historic Windmill

The crescent moon appears near Venus, Jupiter and the constellation Taurus. 

Astrophotographer Tamas Ladanyi took this image July 16, 2012 from Tés, a village in Veszprém, a county of Hungary, famous for its beautiful windmills.

CREDIT: Ladanyi Tamas / TWAN

Man will walk on Mars within a generation, says UK's Astronomer Royal

Lord Rees of Ludlow , UK's Astronomer Royal, said the NASA's Curiosity exploration mission, to determine whether MARS could have supported life at some time in it's past, was the first step in accessing Earth's nearest neighbour.

He said the exploration project could mark the start of the "post-human era" despite the risks associated with travelling into the solar system.

"It is foolish to claim, as some do, that mass emigration into space offers escape from Earth’s problems," he said, writing in the Times.

"But I believe, and hope, that some people living now will walk on Mars. Moreover, a century or two from now, small groups of intrepid adventurers may be living there or perhaps on asteroids quite independently from Earth."

Lord Rees predicted a "dramatic cultural and technological evolution" on the planet and beyond as scientists learn more about Mars.

"Perhaps the cosmos teems with life; on the other hand, our Earth could be unique among the billions of planets that surely exist," he added.

"That may be disappointing but would have its upside: it would entitle us to be less cosmically modest. Our tiny planet could then be the most important place in the galaxy. It could perhaps even be a seed from which life could spread through the entire galaxy.

"We may learn this century whether biological evolution is unique to our “pale blue dot”, or whether the wider cosmos teems with life — even with intelligence. As Curiosity trundles through Martian craters, we hope for some early clues."

Announcing the success of the mission, Charles Bolden, Nasa administrator, said it would "blaze a trail for human footprints on Mars".

The Heart Of Cygnus Fermi: A Cosmic-ray Cocoon

Cygnus X hosts many young stellar groupings, including the OB2 and OB9 associations and the cluster NGC 6910. 

The combined outflows and ultraviolet radiation from the region's numerous massive stars have heated and pushed gas away from the clusters, producing cavities of hot, lower-density gas.

In this 8-micron infrared image, ridges of denser gas mark the boundaries of the cavities. Bright spots within these ridges show where stars are forming today. Credit: NASA/IPAC/MSX.

The constellation Cygnus, now visible in the western sky as twilight deepens after sunset, hosts one of our galaxy's richest-known stellar construction zones.

Astronomers viewing the region at visible wavelengths see only hints of this spectacular activity thanks to a veil of nearby dust clouds forming the Great Rift, a dark lane that splits the Milky Way, a faint band of light marking our galaxy's central plane.

Located in the vicinity of the second-magnitude star Gamma Cygni, the star-forming region was named Cygnus X when it was discovered as a diffuse radio source by surveys in the 1950s.

Now, a study using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope finds that the tumult of star birth and death in Cygnus X has managed to corral fast-moving particles called cosmic rays.

Cosmic rays are subatomic particles - mainly protons - that move through space at nearly the speed of light. In their journey across the galaxy, the particles are deflected by magnetic fields, which scramble their paths and make it impossible to backtrack the particles to their sources.

Yet when cosmic rays collide with interstellar gas, they produce gamma rays - the most energetic and penetrating form of light - that travel to us straight from the source.

By tracing gamma-ray signals throughout the galaxy, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) is helping astronomers understand the sources of cosmic rays and how they're accelerated to such high speeds. In fact, this is one of the mission's key goals.

The galaxy's best candidate sites for cosmic-ray acceleration are the rapidly expanding shells of ionized gas and magnetic field associated with supernova explosions. For stars, mass is destiny, and the most massive ones - known as types O and B - live fast and die young.

They're also relatively rare because such extreme stars, with masses more than 40 times that of our sun and surface temperatures eight times hotter, exert tremendous influence on their surroundings.

With intense ultraviolet radiation and powerful outflows known as stellar winds, the most massive stars rapidly disperse their natal gas clouds, naturally limiting the number of massive stars in any given region.

Which brings us back to Cygnus X. Located about 4,500 light-years away, this star factory is believed to contain enough raw material to make two million stars like our sun.

Within it are many young star clusters and several sprawling groups of related O- and B-type stars, called OB associations.

One, called Cygnus OB2, contains 65 O stars - the most massive, luminous and hottest type - and nearly 500 B stars.

Astronomers estimate that the association's total stellar mass is 30,000 times that of our sun, making Cygnus OB2 the largest object of its type within 6,500 light-years. And with ages of less than 5 million years, few of its most massive stars have lived long enough to exhaust their fuel and explode as supernovae.

Intense light and outflows from the monster stars in Cygnus OB2 and from several other nearby associations and star clusters have excavated vast amounts of gas from their vicinities.

The stars reside within cavities filled with hot, thin gas surrounded by ridges of cool, dense gas where stars are now forming.

It's within the hollowed-out zones that Fermi's LAT detects intense gamma-ray emission, according to a paper describing the findings that was published in the journal Science.

Astronomer Captures NASA Mars Probe, in transit gloria!

Click on the image and download a short AVI show the NASA Mars Rover in transit.

'That's no asteroid, that's the Nasa Mars Rover Curiosity heading for Mars!'

Video captured by astronomer Gerhard Dangl 10 hrs post-launch

Australian Astronomers: Milky Way and Andromeda On Its Way To Become Old, Stagnant Galaxies

The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are in transition from being young and star-forming into old and stagnant galaxies

The Australian astronomers, led by Simon Mutch, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, sought to determine the colour the Milky Way and the nearby spiral Andromeda galaxy.

They found out that instead of the typical blue or red color which are signs of young, active galaxies, Milky Way and Andromeda are in a state of green.

"Green galaxies are commonly thought to represent galaxies which are undergoing the transition from being young, dynamic, energetic, star-forming blue galaxies to being old, lethargic red galaxies," Mutch told SPACE.com.

The astronomer added that the two galaxies will likely be unable to produce an active galactic nucleus or AGN, which is among the brightest radio signals in the universe and can be seen across great distances.

"Our finding that both the Milky Way and Andromeda are green suggests that there will be little cold gas left in both these galaxies when they merge sometime in the next 5 billion years or so," Mutch said.

The new color "provides us with an interesting open question as to what exactly is causing the Milky Way and Andromeda to be running out of fuel for producing new stars," he added.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal (July edition).

Carl Sagan inspired Art

When she lost her friend Cathy to cancer, artist Michele Banks set out to tell her friend’s story in the language she speaks most fluently and eloquently: painting. But she didn’t want it to be another “cancer painting.”

Instead, she found unlikely inspiration at the intersection of the deadly disease and Carl Sagan’s iconic, life-affirming idea that we’re all made of “star stuff” — she saw a striking parallel between supernovas and dividing cancer cells. The result is simply breathtaking.

I was reading about astronomer Carl Sagan, who often expressed the idea that humans are made of “star stuff”. That is, that all the basic elements of life on earth derive from “space debris” from the gigantic explosions of massive, ancient stars. This concept is at once so simple and so mind-boggling that it’s a struggle to absorb, much less to express artistically. I started looking around for ideas of how to visually portray the basic elements such as hydrogen, helium and nitrogen. Um. This is difficult, because you can’t see them. If you do a Google image search on Carbon, it comes up with a lot of gray-black cars. But when I thought about how the elements were released, I found supernovas. Not only are supernovas beautiful and awe-inspiring, they bear a strong resemblance to dividing cells, especially explosively dividing cancer cells.” ~ Michele Banks

Curiously, Sagan himself also had myelodysplastic syndrome, or “preleukemia,” and underwent three bone marrow transplants before losing the long and difficult fight in 1996. Banks reflects:

This painting, besides celebrating the cosmic connection that all living creatures share, goes out to Cathy and Carl. From the infinitely tiny cells deep in the marrow of their bones, to the billions of stars in the sky.”

You can find Banks on Twitter and her beautiful prints on Etsy.

Astronomers Find ‘Pristine’ Gas Formed Minutes After Big Bang

Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas in the same state as they were in just moments after the Big Bang.

Unlike everything else in the universe, the two clouds never combined with elements that were later formed in stars.

Instead, each consists only of the light elements that occurred in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago.

Nuclear reactions created the three lightest elements - hydrogen, helium, and a tiny amount of lithium - which stars then converted into heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen.

This new discovery is the first time astronomers have found a star or cloud made solely of these three lighter elements. All known stars and gas clouds contain at least a small amount of "metals", the term astronomers use to describe any element that is heavier than helium, including oxygen and carbon.

"As hard as we've tried to find pristine material in the universe, we have failed until now," says J Xavier Prochaska, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"This is the first time we've observed pristine gas uncontaminated by heavier elements from stars."

"It's quite exciting, because it's the first evidence that fully matches the composition of the primordial gas predicted by the big bang theory," says Michele Fumagalli of the University of California, Santa Cruz, lead author of a paper on the findings published online in Science today.

"Their chemical composition is unusual," says Fumagalli. "This gas is of primordial composition, as it was produced during the first few minutes after the Big Bang."

The researchers discovered the clouds of gas using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope at the M Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Previously, the lowest abundances of metals in the universe were around one-thousandth of the sun's "metallicity." At the other end of the scale, stars and gas with the highest metallicities are almost ten times that of the sun.

Shuttle Memories: Steve and Eileen Hawley

Shuttle Memories: Steve and Eileen, The Hawleys. Steve was deemed the unluckiest astronaut at launch time. He experienced 16 'scrubs' whereby he the launch was delayed 16 times for different reasons. It was reputed that on the final attempt Steve had to wear a brown bag over his head so that the Shuttle was not aware he was on board.

SN2008am Super-Luminous Supernova - Texas Astronomers

Astronomers led by graduate student Emmanouil "Manos" Chatzopoulos and Dr. J. Craig Wheeler of The University of Texas at Austin have found another extremely bright, rare supernova to add to the new class of exploding stars that University of Texas astronomers identified a few years ago. Supernova 2008am is one of the most intrinsically bright exploding stars ever observed.

The team's research reveals that this supernova is the brightest "self-interacting" supernova yet discovered. In this type of stellar explosion, the extreme brightness is caused by interaction between the explosion shockwave and a shell of material previously expelled from the star. This research is published in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Supernova 2008am is 3.7 billion light-years away. At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the Sun. It emitted enough energy in one second to satisfy the power needs of the United States for one million times longer than the universe has existed. In-depth studies of this supernova are helping the team to understand the science behind this new class of exploding stars.

The supernova was discovered by the ROTSE Supernova Verification Project (RSVP, formerly called the Texas Supernova Search), which uses the 18-inch robotic ROTSE IIIb Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory.

It was followed up by astronomers using some of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, as well as telescopes in space, in a variety of wavelengths. These include the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the Keck Telescope, PAIRITEL, the Very Large Array, and the Swift satellite.

Chatzopoulos' detailed analysis of the light from SN 2008am revealed that is not a pair-instability supernova, the explosion of a massive star the light from which is powered by radioactive decay. Rather, this supernova's extraordinary luminosity most likely comes from interaction between the debris from the star's explosion running into an envelope of gas around the star that the star had previously ejected. This model is called "circumstellar interaction."

The researchers suspect that the progenitor star for this supernova might have been of the type known as a "luminous blue variable." These massive stars puff off layers of material in episodes. The most famous example is Eta Carinae.

Prior to this discovery, the Texas Supernova Search's found the first two "brightest supernovae ever" in SN 2005ap and 2006gy. The group has found five of the dozen published examples of this new class of stars, which it has dubbed "super-luminous supernovae," or SLSNe.

SLSNe are about 100 times brighter than standard core-collapse supernovae, but extremely rare. Normal supernovae go off at a rate of about one per century in a galaxy; SLSNe may be more than a thousand times more rare.