It's Full of Stars

Science Museum Oklahoma to commemorate Discovery shuttle

Science Museum Oklahoma will provide live coverage of Discovery, NASA’s Shuttle, being permanently moved to Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum at Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Va.

“Final Destination: Discovery’s Journey Ends,” will take place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17.

To commemorate Discovery’s final journey, the museum, 2100 NE 52, will be streaming live coverage of Discovery’s move from Florida, atop a Boeing 747 shuttle carrier aircraft, to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Virginia. The museum will also have multiple hands-on, space-based experiments and aerospace artifact stations available for guests with which to interact.

For more information, call in the U.S 602-6664, or visit www.sciencemuseumok.org.

BBC viewer and amateur astronomer discovers new exoplanet

The public push initiated on BBC Two’s Stargazing Live series to find planets beyond our Solar System has had an immediate result.

A viewer who answered the call has helped spot a world that appears to be circling a star dubbed SPH10066540.

The planet is described as being similar in size to our Neptune and circles its parent every 90 days.

Chris Holmes from Peterborough found it by looking through time-lapsed images of stars on Planethunters.org.

The website hosts data gathered by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, and asks volunteers to sift the information for anything unusual that might have been missed in a computer search.

“I’ve never had a telescope. I’ve had a passing interest in where things are in the sky, but never had any more knowledge about it than that,” Mr Holmes told BBC News.

“Being involved in a project like this and actually being the one to find something is a very exciting position.”

Astronomers Find Saturn’s Possible Cosmic Doppelgänger

By analyzing the silhouette of an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star some 420 light years from Earth, a team of astrophysicists has discovered an exoplanet that just might turn out to be Saturn’s cosmicdoppelgänger.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester University Eric Mamajek and graduate student Mark Pecaut studied data from the international SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) project.

They were looking at the star’s light pattern; periodic dimming is a telltale sign that a planet is passing in front of it. A spherical planet will dim a star’s light regularly. As seen from Earth, the star’s light will dim as the planet starts to cross it, getting darker until it reaches a point of maximum dimness – the point when the planet is directly between the Earth and the star. Then, the light will get brighter at the same pace as it previously dimmed.

But in December 2010, they noticed something odd. As they analyzed data gathered over a 54 day period in early 2007, the star 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 dimmed irregularly. The object passing in front of it couldn’t be a spherical planet, so what was it?

Weird Spiral Star Discovered —14-Billion-Miles Wide

Two spiral arms emerge from the gas-rich disk around SAO 206462, a young star in the constellation Lupus. This image, acquired by the Subaru Telescope and its HiCIAO instrument, is the first to show spiral arms in a circumstellar disk. The disk itself is some 14 billion miles across, or about twice the size of Pluto’s orbit in our own solar system.

This recent discovery of a star with spiral arms startled researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. SAO 206462 is more than four hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf.

Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto. But when they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms. Astronomers have seen spiral arms before: they’re commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of millions of stars spiral together around a common core. Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an individual star, however, is unprecedented.

The arms might be a sign that planets are forming within the disk.

Vela constellation, home of HD 85512 b.

Source: NASA.

Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (Maybe) Liveable

Sort of like Washington, D.C., in the summer:

“It would feel like a steam bath — hot, sticky and beyond uncomfortable.”

That’s how The Associated Press describes the way scientists are describing “HD 85512 b … a newly discovered planet about 35 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela.”

t’s the second planet outside our solar system that seems to be orbiting in “the habitable zone” around its star, according to the European Southern Observatory, which today (9/12) announced the discovery of HD 85512 b and more than 50 other plants around other stars. In that habitable zone, “water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right,” the ESC adds.

Asteroid spotter Hannah hopes for her name in the stars

A sixth-former who went on work experience to study astronomy and discovered two new asteroids is hoping to have one named after her.

Hannah Blyth was using a remote-controlled telescope to stare into the night sky when she helped spot 22 new asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

Fellow stargazers hope one will be named “Hannahblyth” after scientists in America confirm the discoveries.

The 18-year-old from Castleton, near Newport, was “totally amazed”.

“It’s an honour that there’s a rock out there which may one day have my name on it,” she said.

“I felt elated when I realised what I was looking at it - it was beyond my wildest dreams.

Summer placement

“It’s totally mind blowing.”

Miss Blyth was on a summer placement with the Faulkes Telescope Project, based at the University of Glamorgan, when she made the discoveries using robotic telescopes in Australia and on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

She was given coordinates to study the sky between Jupiter and Mars which would then direct the telescopes to take photographs of them.

Other astronomers working on the project looked at her images and realised her discoveries.

Take a 360 degree look at Discovery's flight deck!

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Discovery Prepares For Retirement

A short yet nice image gallery from popsci.com.

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# NASA

# discovery

Need no caption.

Source: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Facebook page.

Skywatcher Spots Astronaut Pee in Space

A fortuitous skywatching moment made for a beautiful image of the space shuttle Discovery in the night sky, even though what’s really happening in the picture is slightly less poetic.

What looked like a bright shooting star with a wide, curly tail is most likely Discovery performing a waste water dump while soaring in orbit near the end of its 39th and final mission.

Jens Hackmann of Weikersheim, Germany recorded the special moment in a short movie that appeared on Spaceweather.com. In the images and movie from March 8, Discovery is visible in the twilight skies over Europe, leaving a trail of what may be frozen, crystallized urine and waste water, disposed in preparation for the shuttle’s landing the next day. The liquid could also be exccess water from Discovery’s fuel cells.

Discovery Lands and Retires

About two hours after space shuttle Discovery’s final return from space, the crew of the shuttle and NASA officials took a few moments on the runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to mark the spacecraft’s accomplishments. Discovery spent a year in space during the course of its 39 missions, the first of which launched in August 1984. This shuttle carried NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and made both of the shuttle program’s return-to-flight missions. Its roster of astronauts includes Charles Bolden, now administrator of the space agency.

STS-133 Mission Statistics

Landed:
Wed., March 9, 2011, 11:47 a.m. EST

Landing Site:
Kennedy Space Center, Florida

Mission Elapsed Time:
12 days, 19 hours, 3 minutes, 53 seconds