Astronomers have discovered two of the most distant galaxies ever seen, when the Universe was only 700 million years old. The galaxies were first discovered as part of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field Survey, which looked into the distant Universe. Astronomers then did follow-on observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope to confirm their distance and age. The galaxies are between 50-300 million years old, and have only 1% of the mass of our own Milky Way.
Solscape
First 3-D Solar Imaging Mission Soars Into Space
NASA’s twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories mission, known as STEREO, successfully launched on Wednesday at 8:52 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. STEREO’s nearly identical twin, golf cart-sized spacecraft will make observations to help researchers construct the first-ever three-dimensional views of the sun.
https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/oct/HQ_06340_STEREO_launch.html
1.000 Sols For Spirit !
Yesterday, October 26, 2006, was Spirits 1.000th sol on Mars, that’s 910 sols longer than the mission was planned for. A sol is equal to 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds. The rover Spirit took a panorama of its winter home on the Martian surface. The 360-degree image is called the McMurdo panorama and comes from the Pancam on Spirit. The image approximates the natural colors on Mars.
Here’s the NASA story with a high resolution image of the McMurdo panorama:
‚McMurdo‘ Panorama from Spirit’s ‚Winter Haven‘
MESSENGER Heads Past Venus
NASA’s MESSENGER made its closest approach to Venus yesterday, coming within 2.990 kilometers of its surface. The spacecraft used this close encounter with Venus‘ gravity to alter its trajectory as it travels towards its final destination: Mercury. This won’t be the final encounter with our twin planet, though. MESSENGER will meet up with Venus again in June 2007. It’ll finally make its first encounter with Mercury in January 2008, but won’t be in a final orbit until March 2011.
MESSENGER Completes Venus Flyby
A Thousand Years After the Death of a Star
In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look into the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. A new composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/crab/
Star Ends Infancy Abruptly
Zooming in on a nearby young star called HD 141569A, astronomers using the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, discovered a hole in a disk of gas and dust encircling the star. The existence of this large gap, which is about the size of the orbit of Saturn, supports the theory that this young star ended its infancy abruptly by ionizing and pushing away the gas in the disk from which it was born.
https://www.subarutelescope.org/Pressrelease/2006/10/23/index.html
Belching Black Holes
Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have recently identified two quasars, or supermassive black holes, that may be on the verge of a colossal cosmic „belch“.
https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/feature06-34-belching-black-holes
Hubble Yields Direct Proof of Stellar Sorting in a Globular Cluster
Imagine trying to understand how a football game works based on just a few fuzzy snapshots of the game in play. Astronomers have faced this challenge when it comes to understanding the dynamics of the beehive swarm of stars in the globular star clusters that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy. Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars.
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2006/news-2006-33.html
Viking landers may have missed Martian life
NASA’s twin Viking spacecraft may have missed signs of life during their examination of the Martian surface 30 years ago. Researchers now say that the landers‘ experiments were not sensitive enough to find life and in any case may not have been able to spot the strange forms that Martian life might take. The results from Vikings‘ onboard experiments are confusing because some tests suggested the presence of organisms capable of digesting organic molecules. But heating the soil with a gas-chromatograph mass spectrometer to release these organic molecules found nothing, causing most scientists to rule out life. Now, a paper by Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the University of Mexico and others demonstrates that the mass spectrometer onboard Viking was incapable of detecting organic compounds even in Mars-like soils from various locations on Earth. This includes Chile’s Atacama desert, where other tests prove that living microbes are indeed present, and samples taken from Rio Tinto in Spain, which contain iron compounds similar to those detected in Mars soils by the Mars Exploration Rover „Opportunity“.
San Jacinto Fault Is Younger Than Thought
A detailed study of sedimentary rocks exposed along a portion of southern California’s San Jacinto fault zone shows the fault to be no older than 1.1 million to 1.3 million years and that its long-term slip rate is probably faster than previously thought. Researchers at three universities conducted a study of the earthquake-active region, funded by the National Science Foundation, concluding that sedimentation related to slip in the San Jacinto fault zone began about 1 million years ago, significantly later than predicted by previous models.
Slip Rate Of Southern California Fault May Be Faster Than Previously Believed