Googles stars

Did you know google Earth has its own stars?

The video is from Youtube.com

Astronomy class

     After ten weeks of taking this course, the first thing I can say is that I am glad to take it. I gained a lot more knowledge about astronomy and it also changed the way I look at it. Those pretty stars that I see every night aren't just a normal pretty stars too me anymore. Now I can tell or guess which star is which and I can estimate how far or how big they are. Overall, it is a very interesting course.  Unfortunately, I can not visit Palomar Observatory this weekend and I bet it would be pretty fun with lots of new things to learn.

Astronaut's training

     Have you ever wonder how is an astronaut became an astronaut? If you do then I might be able to answer that question for you. I am not really going to tell you about how is a person become an astronaut, but it is going to be more like how can astronaut get their trainings and what is the training going to be like.

     According to NASA, there are many stages for training that an astronaut has to go through. It usually take about two years to complete the process. In the earlier stage, applicants have to satisfy couple requirements before that can continue on with the process. Some of the requirements are "candidates are required to complete military water survival before beginning their flying syllabus, and become SCUBA qualified to prepare them for spacewalk training. Consequently, all Astronaut Candidates are required to pass a swimming test during their first month of training. They must swim 3 lengths of a 25- meter pool without stopping, and then swim 3 lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes with no time limit. They must also tread water continuously for 10 minutes wearing a flight suit..."NASA. Those are just a few that a well trained astronaut has to go through. 

     Now lets talk about some fun stuff, when I think of an astronaut I would imagine like a driver or a pilot but instead of driving a car or flying an airplane, an astronaut would control a spacecraft. So like a driver or a pilot, prior training is required before they get to move on. A test version of a spacecraft would be really help for astronauts that are in training. There is a test version of the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule, that is use to carry humans to International Space Station or other low Earth orbit destinations. According to "Astronauts check out Dragon Spacecraft Accommodation" article from NASA, "SpaceX's spacecraft currently is contracted to fly 12 cargo-only missions to the space station under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services Contract. In 2010, Dragon became the first commercially developed spacecraft to return from Earth orbit during a demonstration flight for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program." The SpaceX Dragon can also transport humans. 

     "There are very important systems that need to be in place before you can put humans in a spacecraft," said Jon Cowart, NASA's partner manager for SpaceX. 

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-11-057-JSC-astro_trng.pdf

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/dragon_accomm.html

Quasars acting as gravitational lenses?

     NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most popular telescopes in the world. The Hubble discovered some galaxies that's containing quasars. Now, lets talk a little bit about quasars. Quasar is also known as quasi-stellar radio source. It is a very energetic and distant active nucleus. According to the Universe Today, Jerry Coffey says "Quasars are the brightest and most distance objects in the universe as we know it. The term quasar has fallen out of common use by astronomers and they are now know as quasi-stellar because we now know that they are not true stars".

     Super massive black holes are the fuel that powered quasars. They are considered to one of the brightest objects in the universe and often outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies. A team of astronomers were put together to find these cases that are considered to be rare. These cases revolving around galaxy-quasar combinations acting as lenses.





Check out this article for further details.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/quasar-lens.html

Astronomy myths

     This week, I'm going to talk about myths. A lot of times, people would get confused or mixed up between myths and facts. So here are some myths that are flowing around in the astronomy world: more crimes occur at full moon, mars will look as big as the full moon, you can see the Great Wall of China from the moon...
     Lets talk about the first myth "More crimes occur at full moon". This myth has been flowing around for awhile and many still believes it. The reason behind this myth is that many police man and nurses have noticed that crimes increased during the full moon. But there is no proof or scientific data to back it up. Many scientists think that people tend to notice because the full moon state is  more easily to remember than many other states of the moon.
     "You can see the Great Wall of China from the moon", this is the myth I used to believed. The Great Wall of China is in such a great location that I would think that we can see it from the moon. The wall was built in a high landmark and because it is so big and so long that one would think they can see it from anywhere. The Great Wall is 8850 km long and 9.1 meters in width, which is not very wide and certainly a human would not be able to see it from the moon. The distance between the earth and the moon is 383,000 km, according to many scientists the object from earth has to be 113 km in length and width for human eyes to see it from the moon.
     There are many myths that is still flowing around, some are sounded as good as a fact but  don't let it fool  you.

Travel inside a black hole?

     I ran into this video and though it was pretty interesting and I want to share it. So, what would it be like to travel inside a black hole? I guess you will have to watch this video to find out.

5 rockets in 5 minutes

     You heard it right, Nasa will conduct  a mission to launch 5 rockets within 5 minutes on Sunday, March 18th. The mission has been delay for couple days due to weather. The purpose behind this mission to to find out the wind speed and wind direction at the edge of the space. So how does it work? They will be launching 5 rockets with 1 minute between each. Each rocket will release chemical tracers at about 60 miles up, those chemical tracers will create glowing clouds. It will help scientists to track high altitude winds and those winds can go up to as high as 300 mph. "These tracers will generate luminous milky white clouds that should be visible to folks on the ground from part of South Carolina up through Southern New England" researchers have said.
     Now lets talk more about these rockets, they are five unmanned rockets salvo. The mission called ATREX and they cost about $4 millions. According to some sources from Nasa, "The rockets being used for the mission are two Terrier-Improved Malemutes, two Terrier-Improved Orions and one Terrier-Oriole. All will fall harmlessly into the Atlantic after they release the trim ethyl aluminum. The chemical poses no threat to the environment or human health". So we know that chemical that they will be using is trim ethyl aluminum.
     If you want a good view, East Coast would be a good option. They will launch at night, because they sky is much clearer and researchers can have a clear view of those tracers.

This map of the United States' mid-Atlantic region shows the flight profile of NASA's five ATREX rockets.
Credit: NASA/Wallops

http://www.space.com/14939-nasa-5-rocket-launches-saturday-night.html

A look at the night sky

A photographer named Randy Halverson put a time lapse video together that took him months to film. The video you are about to see in the article were taken and shooting at the White river in central south Dakota, Arches National Park in Utah, Canyon of the Ancients area of Colorado, and Madison, Wisconsin. The back ground music is "Out of this world" by the composer named Bear McCreary. Enjoy the video.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/amazing-time-lapse-video-captures-night-sky-232027106.html

Animation Flight test of the Orion Spacecraft

This video is just a proposed plan, the flight will orbit the earth twice and it will try to reach the highest altitude that no human aircraft have ever reach. Enjoy the short video.

The video above is from Youtube.com by Nasa.

Supernova

Chandra X-ray photograph shows CAssiopeia A

     Once in awhile, you would hear people talking about supernova and for most people they would not know what is a supernova. So what is exactly a supernova?
   A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months. This is one of the reasons why many people would think supernova is something powerful or something really extreme. Supernovae can radiate more energy than our sun will in its entire lifetime. They are also the primary source of heavy elements in the universe.
     On average, a supernova will occur about once every 50 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. Put another way, a star explodes every second or so somewhere in the universe. According to Helium and Lead Observatory, there are two ways that a star can transform into a supernova. One way is that a star accumulates matter from a nearby neighbor until a runaway nuclear reaction ignites. The other way is that a star runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity.
     Some people might wondering how a star can die? Well, a star dies depends in part on its mass. Our sun, for example, does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Many scientists predicted the sun will run out of it nuclear fuel in a couple billion years, it will swell into a red giant that will likely vaporize our world before gradually cooling into a white dwarf. That is not a very good news for us.


http://www.space.com/6638-supernova.html

http://www.snolab.ca/halo/faq.html

Waterworld

NASA, ESA, and D. Agular (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

     Our universe is a place that is still very strange to us. There are still many undiscovered stars or planets and tons of unknown that are still hidden to us. At time, new discovery would create a spark in the astronomy community. Recently, scientists have discovered a new type of alien planet. It is a steamy waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus.
     Astronomers discovered planet GJ 1214b in December 2009,  it stands on it own class called exoplanet. It  is considered a watery world because observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggest that it's enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. GJ 1214b is located 40 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. " GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of, a huge fraction of its mass is made of water." Berta said, a leading astronomer from an international team of astronomers of the Harvard-Smith-sonian Center for Astrophysics. GJ 1214b is also known as the super-Earth, it is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. the super-Earth orbits a red dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometers, and its estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.
     There are many observations and predictions that Gj 1214b is composed mainly of water, it can be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in its atmosphere. They used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WDC3) to study GJ 1214b. Astronomers calculated its density, it is only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, while Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. We can see that GJ 1214b has much more water that Earth does, and much less rock.
     "The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like "hot ice" or "superfluid water". substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta said.


http://news.yahoo.com/type-alien-planet-steamy-waterworld-162802250.html

Telescopes, eyes of astronomers

     The picture above was taken from the LABOCA camera on the European Southern Observatory (ESO)- operated 12-meter Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope with measurements made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and others, to look at the way bright, distant galaxies are gathered together in groups or clusters.


     As you can see, it would required many telescopes to captured and calculated to produce a nice and clear image. Telescope has been a useful tool for many astronomers and play an important part in astronomy history. I'm going to go back many and many years to see how telescope was discovered and what make some telescopes so famous today.


     First thing first, we would have to ask ourself "What is a telescope and what is it do?".

A telescope is an instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation, such as visible light. According to Tammy Plotner's article, "The very first telescopes were believed to have began to appear around the year 1608 and were credited to opticians Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen as a type of spyglass. These early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece and the telescope simply slid inside itself to focus. Galileo greatly improved upon this design and is often credited as being the first to invent the first astronomical telescope". Our telescopes today are much more technology advance than the first one and it also comes in in many sizes and shapes. One of our most famous telescopes today is the Hubble Space telescope. In 1977, Congress approved the Hubble Space telescope project and it went into construction that same year. The final piece were put together in 1985, but it did launch until April 25, 1990 due to the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. 




Here is a great slide show of telescopes throughout history, provided by National Geographic. Take a look.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/telescopes/telescopes-interactive


http://www.universetoday.com/18210/telescope-history/

Universe and its unlimited space

   

     So last week, I have talked about what I would think an astronomer do. This week, I'm going to focus more on the important part of their studying field. The universe would be considered their studying field, so without the universe all the astronomers every where would be out of work.
When it's come to the universe, people would automatically think that it contains everything that are outside and beyond the earth limit. For most of the case, that would be true. The universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exits, including  all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space.


     I'm sure everyone has heard of "Big bang", according to the majority of scientists the big bang is when everything started. The universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense phase called the Plank epoch, in which all the matter and energy of the observable universe was concentrated. Many scientists believe and have suggested that our universe might be one among many universe that likewise exit.


     So how was the first star form? According to an article called "A brief history of the universe", it says "As the universe continued to expand and cool, the stage was now set for the first stars to form.  The tiniest fluctuations of density in the early universe were magnified as it aged, and gigantic clouds of atoms formed a filament-like network throughout the universe. Inside these clouds, the first generation of stars formed". After the first generation of stars, scientists believe that the universe would look pretty similar to what's it look like now. Over the the period of 10 billions years, many things have happened but the universe still very much stayed the same.



http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/cosmos_history.html

What do you think an astronomer does?

According to a dictionary, astronomy means the science that deals with the material universe beyond the earth's atmosphere. So an astronomer means a scientist that studies and deals with the material universe beyond the earth's atmosphere. Then we would ask a question: "What is there to studies or to deals with beyond the earth's atmosphere?", perhaps there are a whole lot more things going on beyond the earth's atmosphere than most of us thought it would be.
So what is the area beyond the earth's atmosphere and what do we call it? For most people, they called it space. So when we talk about space, stars, planets and galaxies would just pop in our heads. And when we talk about astronomers, we automatically think that they are scientists whose are studying about stars, planets and galaxies. For me, I think that is only 50% correct.
In my opinion, an astronomer would has a great knowledge about stars, planets, galaxies etc... They would basically know how is our universe work and what happened and why is it there etc... Also, an astronomer would have to be proficient with their tools that they use to look into the space which is their telescopes in observatory.
So what do I think an astronomer does? For the majority of astronomers are working in many observatories right now, I would think that they are still trying to figure out all the stars and planets and galaxies in our universe. They are also trying to discover new stars, new planets etc... But for the ultimate reason, they are trying to find a planet that has life like the earth that we live in right now. I'm sure we are all want to know if there is another planet can provide life like the earth do and we want to know is there another specie in that planet and for most of the time we called it alien.