Kategorie: Allgemein

Astronomers have discovered the strongest evidence yet found indicating that matter is being ejected by a medium-sized black hole, providing valuable insight on a process that may have been key to the development of larger black holes in the early Universe. The scientists combined the power of all the operational telescopes of the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to peer deep into the heart of the galaxy NGC 4395, 14 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Canes Venatici.
https://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/imbh/

Twenty years ago next month, the closest and brightest supernova in four centuries lit up the southern sky, wowing astronomers and the public alike. Ongoing observations of the exploded star, called supernova 1987A, provided important tests for theories of how stars die, but it also raised some new questions.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/01/09_LBV.shtml

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have created a stunning new image of one of the youngest supernova remnants in the galaxy. This new view of the debris of an exploded star helps astronomers solve a long-standing mystery, with implications for understanding how a star’s life can end catastrophically and for gauging the expansion of the universe.
https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/kepler/index.html

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers have learned that the gaseous outflow from one of the brightest super-sized stars in the sky is more complex than originally thought. The outbursts are from VY Canis Majoris, a red supergiant star that is also classified as a hypergiant because of its very high luminosity.
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2007/news-2007-03.html

A new image taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope depicts bright, blue, newly formed stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud. At the heart of the star-forming region lies star cluster NGC 602. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars is sculpting the inner edge of the outer portions of the nebula, slowly eroding it away and eating into the material beyond. The diffuse outer reaches of the nebula prevent the energetic outflows from streaming away from the cluster. Ridges of dust and gaseous filaments are seen towards the upper-left part of the image and towards the lower right-hand corner. Elephant trunk-like dust pillars point towards the hot blue stars and are tell-tale signs of their eroding effect. In this region it is possible with Hubble to trace how the star formation started at the center of the cluster and propagated outward, with the youngest stars still forming today along the dust ridges. The Small Magellanic Cloud, in the constellation Tucana, is 200.000 light-years from Earth.
https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2007/04/2042-Image.html

Amazon.com’s founder Jeff Bezos has a rocket company on the side called „Blue Origin“. What was going on within this company has been a huge secret for several years. Now we know more. The Blue Origin website has been updated with photos and videos of the new Goddard rocket, which blasted off on November 13, 2006, from the West Texas launch facility. For its maiden voyage, the rocket launched vertically, reached an altitude of 87 metres, and then landed back down vertically on the launch pad.
Blue Origin

On the night of December 15, 2006, the fourth and last-to-be-installed VLT Auxiliary Telescope (AT4) obtained its „First Light“. The first images demonstrate that AT4 will be able to deliver the excellent image quality already delivered by the first three ATs. It will soon join its siblings to perform routinely interferometric measurements.
Little Brother Joins the Large Family

NASA’s twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (STEREO) sent back their first images of the sun this week and with them a view into the sun’s mounting activity. One image shows the first coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by STEREO’s Ahead spacecraft, taken December 9. The other two images show the sun’s super-hot atmosphere. They were taken on December 4, the first day of imaging observations for the Ahead spacecraft. The false color images show a number of bright magnetic active regions, including one on the far left edge of the sun which later produced a series of high energy flares and CMEs.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/first_light.html

A small molecule makes stem cells able to reproduce and change. This simply structured molecule called SC1, which researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany, and their colleagues from California have discovered, encourages stem cells in the laboratory to renew themselves. As a result, the stem cells retain the ability to develop into many different types of cells.
MPI Press Release

MPI for Molecular Biomedicine