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Gaia Satellite to Chart One Billion Stars

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The Milky Way blazes above the European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities at Mount Paranal in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Paranal hosts the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical observatory, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and is home to two new telescopes for large imaging surveys currently under construction, the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). Both are expected to “take up duty” in the 2009-2010 timeframe. This photograph shows an edge-on view of the Milky Way’s glowing plane slicing across the night sky, laced by bands of dust and dark gas. Taken with a digital camera using a three-minute exposure, the photograph also reveals a bit of action on the ground. To the left, a vehicle with its parking lights on stops lets out a passenger. Though bathed by the light of the Milky Way, the high-altitude desert remains quite dark. To illuminate the rightward path to the underground entrance ramp of the ‘Residencia’, where staff and visitors stay, the passenger takes along a small flashlight, seen as a squiggly bright line. In the lower right, the glass dome on the Residencia’s roof reflects the starry sky overhead. One of our Milky Way’s galactic satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, is seen hanging above the Residencia in the lower right corner of the image.A new satellite launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on December 19 is set to survey the skies for answers to some of the most compelling questions about our galaxy.  Gaia satellite is designed to watch one billion of the Milky Way’s estimated 100 billion stars.  Its measurements of the stars’ distances and movements will have unprecedented precision.

After almost two decades of planning, the ESA launched the satellite from the European spaceport in French Guiana.  The satellite, which was originally named as an acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, was later revised to reference a Greek goddess who is the daughter of Chaos and mother of everything.

This $1 billion mission is tasked with prospecting our star-brimmed galaxy for data points that will furnish the largest ever three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.  Scientists will be able to run this map like a time-lapse film, taking it backwards to the galaxy’s origins and spinning it forward to trace how the Milky Way came to be.  It will help answer questions like:  What forces produced the galaxy’s layout?  What events shaped its architecture?  How has the Milky Way maintained its spiral shape for billions of years?

Gaia is designed to orbit the sun for five years.  During this time, it will pass each of the billion stars it watches about 70 times.  It will gather enough data to fill 1.5 million CD ROMS.

Some of this data will be shared through Project Supernova.  In this project, the Gaia team plans to ask citizen astronomers to look through their own telescopes, observe the phenomena Gaia has just seen, upload their own pictures and weigh in on what it is.

The data from Gaia will also help furnish a catalogue of the dangerous class of asteroids known as Apollo asteroids.  Not much is known about these asteroids, as they are obscured by the sun’s light, but they are worthy of concern.  The asteroid that landed in remote Russia last winter was part of this classification.  By providing more insight on these dangerous asteroids, scientists posit that Gaia could even save lives.

(Via CS Monitor)

When you wish upon 100,000 stars

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The Creative Sandbox, by Google, has gifted us mortals with a 3D interactive journey through space to over 100,000 stars in our galactic neighborhood.  “100,000 Stars” shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars. The galaxy view is an artist’s rendition based on NGC 1232, a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. Zoom-in for a closer view of 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. Creative Sandbox derives its data from multiple sources, including the NASA’s 1989 Hipparcos mission.

Embark to 100,000 Stars at https://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/. Equip yourself for the trip on your Mac, Windows or Linux with a Web-GL-compatible, Google Chrome browser.

Watching 100,000 Stars feels good.  To see beyond our smog- or light-polluted sky and see what’s out there, beyond our world. View a trailer of what you will experience:

Kepler finds two more “Tatooine” planets

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Sharing the Light of Two Suns: This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
Sharing the Light of Two Suns: This artist’s concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

The hits just keep on coming.

Less than a year after NASA’s Kepler telescope found the first “Tatooine-like” planet, news came this week that the same revolutionary telescope has found not one but two more planets orbiting the same two stars, 4,900 light-years from Earth.

Tatooine is a fictional planet in the Star Wars universe. It was the home of Luke Skywalker and orbited two suns, which could be seen setting in an early scene in “A New Hope.”

This latest discovery, in the constellation Cygnus, is the first time we’ve been proof that more than one planet could exist in orbit around two stars. These circumbinary planets are a testament to the diversity of our universe.

“In contrast to a single planet orbiting a single star, the planet in a circumbinary system must transit a ‘moving target.’ As a consequence, time intervals between the transits and their durations can vary substantially, sometimes short, other times long,” said Jerome Orosz, associate professor of astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the paper. “The intervals were the telltale sign these planets are in circumbinary orbits.”

The planets were found in the Kepler-47 system. The stars eclipse each other every 7.5 days from our vantage point. The first one is similar to the sun but only 84 percent as bright. The second is 1/3 the size of the sun and only about 1 percent as bright.

The closest planet, dubbed Kepler-47b, orbits in about 50 days. It’s hot and about three times the size of Earth. The outer planet, Kepler-47c, orbits every 303 days. It is in the “habitable zone,” where liquid water is thought to exist on the surface, but scientists think the planet is a gas giant, and not hospitable to life.

“Unlike our sun, many stars are part of multiple-star systems where two or more stars orbit one another. The question always has been — do they have planets and planetary systems? This Kepler discovery proves that they do,” said William Borucki, Kepler mission principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “In our search for habitable planets, we have found more opportunities for life to exist.”

Hubble discovers two colliding star clusters

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The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered two massive star clusters that are colliding in space, NASA announced.

The clusters, located in the Tarantula Nebula, are about 170,000 light years away from Earth. They are inside a the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits our own Milky Way.

Scientists believe that one of the clusters is about a million years older than the second. They believe that the gravitational interaction between the two clusters created a lot of so-called “runaway stars,” or stars that are moving away from the region they originated in at a high rate of speed.