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