That artist rendition above sure is freaky eh? Well probably not yet until you hear this: University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything from your north face fleeceto even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

Found near 300 million light years from Earth these black holes are at the centers of two galaxies.

“In the early universe, there were lots of quasars or active galactic nuclei, and some were expected to be powered by black holes as big as 10 billion solar masses or more,” said Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy. “These two new supermassive black holes are similar in mass to young quasars, and may be the missing link between quasars and the supermassive black holes we see today.”

“Voyager tells us now that we’re in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn’t have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like.”

An area of space little thought about by most I would assume. While we visualize solar systems, stars, and all the stuff orbiting around them, we often forget about all the open space in between these systems.

In the latest data, the direction of the magnetic field lines has not changed, indicating Voyager is still within the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. The data do not reveal exactly when Voyager 1 will make it past the edge of the solar atmosphere into interstellar space, but suggest it will be in a few months to a few years.

Fascinating research coming in the next few years I imagine if you are a working at
Veterinary Technician Jobs, or a budding astronomer.

University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin is a co-author of a paper on the findings published in the Oct. 21 edition of Science.
The researchers used the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on the orbiting Hershel Space Observatory to detect the chemical signature of water.

“This tells us that the key materials that life needs are present in a system before planets are born,” said Bergin, a HIFI co-investigator. “We expected this to be the case, but now we know it is because have directly detected it. We can see it.”

Now Spitzer has spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that strongly matches the contents of an obliterated giant comet. This dust is located close enough to Eta Corvi that Earth-like worlds could exist, suggesting a collision took place between a planet and one or more comets. The Eta Corvi system is approximately one billion years old, which researchers think is about the right age for such a hailstorm.

“We believe we have direct evidence for an ongoing Late Heavy Bombardment in the nearby star system Eta Corvi, occurring about the same time as in our solar system,” said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and lead author of a paper detailing the findings. The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Lisse presented the results at the Signposts of Planets meeting at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on Oct. 19

Obviously something observers will be very excited to watch. It’s sort of like watching the early years of our very own solar system. Using the Spitzer, which runs on much more than mobile batteries, they had this to say:

“We think the Eta Corvi system should be studied in detail to learn more about the rain of impacting comets and other objects that may have started life on our own planet,” Lisse said.

“At the hearts of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, lies a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the sun’s mass,” said Michael Koss, the study’s lead author at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland in College Park (UMCP). “Some of them radiate billions of times as much energy as the sun.”

This story is pretty jargony, but interesting. It would make much more sense to let the researchers explain it themselves so I won’t even attempt to BS my way through this and trying to act as if I am an expert by beating my head on stainless steel drums trying to think of easier ways to explain some of this. The full story is on the NASA website with a video showing a 22 second illustration of the black holes.
stainless steel drums

Image from NASA website. Full sized version here. Caption: Viewed in visible light, Markarian 739 resembles a smiling face, with a pair of bright cores underscored by an arcing spiral arm. The object is really a pair of merging galaxies. Data from Swift and Chandra reveal the western core (right) to be a previously unknown AGN; past studies already had identified an AGN in the eastern core. The two supermassive black holes are separated by about 11,000 light-years. The galaxy is 425 million light-years away. Credit: SDSS

On March 29, 2011, at 5:20 am EDT, MESSENGER captured a historic image of Mercury. The image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet.

Image from Science Daily.

Yup…that’s a photo.

Over the next three days, MESSENGER will acquire 1185 additional images in support of MDIS commissioning-phase activities. Scientists can break out their buy avo cigars. The year-long primary science phase of the mission will begin on April 4, and the orbital observation plan calls for MDIS to acquire more than 75,000 images in support of MESSENGER’s science goals

The traffic in the area was insane. The launch was at 4:50 PM ET and traffic into Cape Canaveral was backed up as early as 9 AM. Anyone leaving there was lucky to get home by 11 PM. So…the smart thing to do was to wander out to the beach from your hotel and start walking in that direction around 2-3 PM and see how close you could get. Probably about 10-15 miles was a good bet.

Of course the grand old Florida weather does not really cater to your desires on this day and you get hit with a nice overcast about 4 PM and the entire jaunt was rather uneventful.

What I saw was about 20 seconds of the launch before it hit the clouds. This consisted of the bright rocket flames and smoke that you could clearly see, and its ascent into the clouds where we saw no more. Normally, I was told that on a clear day you could see it go a crossed the the sky for a good 30-50 miles, but no such luck. We didn’t get to see the canisters drop, or anything. Rather disappointing. Guess I have to go get a tatoo removal since my “I saw the Discovery’s last launch” tatoo is sort of a lie…lol

Of course it was a good time talking to all the people around as the beaches were packed. We all expected more, but we had a good time anyways.

Apparently, the flare has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert.

Classified as a Class X flare, the Feb. 15 event also spewed billions of tons of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and ignited a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s magnetic field, said Baker, director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Such powerful ejections can cause a variety of socioeconomic and safety issues ranging from the disruption of airline navigation systems and power grids to the safety of airline crews and astronauts.

Good grief. I am flying tomorrow! I thought the impending ice storm and my low stock of Lipofuze for the beach was bad enough. Now a solar flare too? Oye…

“The sun is coming back to life,” said Baker, who chaired a 2008 National Research Council committee that produced a report titled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts.” For the past several years the sun has been in its most quiescent state since early in the 20th century, said Baker.

Radiation from the largest solar flare in four years is expected to reach Earth late on Thursday or Friday.

Such events can cause radio blackouts and interfere with communication satellites, but the most likely outcome this time will be brilliant Northern Lights displays, U.S. scientists said. You might not be able to use your blackberry curve?

NASA scientists on Monday reported an X-class solar flare, the first in more than four years. X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events that can trigger radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms.

It was one of a series of three solar flares and prompted speculation that a new solar cycle may be ramping up.

“This is one of the first real solar events of the next solar maximum — that is when you would see the highest number of solar flares,” said Brady O’Hanlon, a doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The new Space Security 2010 report released by the Space Security Index, an international research consortium, represented space debris as a primary issue. Similar recognition of the orbital trash threat also emerged in the U.S. national space policy unveiled by President Obama in June 2010.

Consideration of space debris as a major threat may cause the United States to take a more global view on the threat of space weapons, said Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force orbital analyst and now technical adviser for the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the sustainable use of space.

“This is an important realization, because before that much of the security focus was on threats from hostile actors in space,” Weeden explained. “This is the first [national policy] recognition that threats can come from the space environment and nonhostile events.”