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This site has a pretty nice demonstration of the Solar System. You can speed things up or slow them down and even go back in time to see how the planets move throughout the ages. It is slightly inaccurate since it still includes Pluto, but Pluto will always be a planet in my heart. It is also very interesting to see just how long it takes the outer planets to make a revolution around the Sun compared to the inner planets.

Site: Astro Tour

Tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes into operation at CERN and many people are freaking out that the world is going to end, but it won’t! What the LHC plans to do is collide proton streams and create particles that mimmick those that existed just after the Big Bang. There is the possibility that small blackholes will be created, but they would be smaller than a proton in size and quickly disperse out of existense. These types of collisions happen all of the time in the atmosphere, they are just putting them all in one place so they can collect data on the collision. One of the goals of the LHC is to finally find the God particle or Higgs Boson. However, no one should be concerned that the largest single thing ever made is going to destroy the world and all of us with it. The smartest engineers and physicists have been working on this project for decades now. If anything we should be happy with what things we can learn about the universe that we did not know the day before. Besides, the LHC does not go into full operation until October 21st, so we’ll have to wait for the world to end until then!

Link: Large Hadron Collider

It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more “provocative” than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface. This news comes just as the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) confirmed experimental evidence for the existence of water in the Mars regolith on Thursday. Whilst NASA scientists are not claiming that life once existed on the Red Planet’s surface, new data appears to indicate the “potential for life” more conclusively than the TEGA water results. Apparently these new results are being kept under wraps until further, more detailed analysis can be carried out, but we are assured that this announcement will be huge…

So why is there all this secrecy? According to scientists in communication with Aviation Week & Space Technology, the next big discovery will need to be mulled over for a while before it is announced to the world. In fact, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory science team for the MECA wet-chemistry instrument that made these undisclosed findings were kept out of the July 31st news conference (confirming water) so additional analysis could be carried out, avoiding any questions that may have revealed their preliminary results. They have also made the decision to discuss the results with the Bush Administration’s Presidential Science Advisor’s office before a press conference between mid-August and early September.

Full Article: Universe Today

Interesting finding again by the NASA team. The delayed announcement really isn’t to decide what information would be appropriate to unveil to society, it is just that it is very complex data and it takes some time to break it down. It would be further promising if simple life is found to show that Mars can support lifeforms and possibility of colonization increases. I personally look forward to see what they report.

Nasa’s Phoenix lander spacecraft has for the first time identified water in a sample of soil collected from the planet’s surface.

Scientists will now be able to begin studying the sample to see whether the planet was ever, or is, habitable.

The craft previously had problems transferring samples from its robotic arm to the onboard lab for analysis.

The success and the good condition of the craft mean the mission will be extended until the end of September.

Since it touched down on 25 June, the Phoenix lander has been studying the surface of Mars to investigate whether it has ever been capable of supporting life.

It has been studying soil with a chemistry laboratory, an oven called TEGA (Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument), a microscope, a probe and cameras.

Scientists told a press conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson that the planet had so far “proved itself to be interesting”.

“We’ve seen evidence for this water-ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted,” William Boynton, one of the researchers on the mission, explained.

Full Article: BBC

It’s great to see how successful the Phoenix Lander has been in just over a month of operation. This is very exciting news as we continue to make plans to visit the red planet. Hopefully the results will be promising and we can get manned missions to there very soon. Very good job NASA, money well spent!

US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon’s interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth’s satellite formed.

The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.

Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.

But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.

This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence.

The discovery came from lunar volcanic glasses, pebble-like beads collected and returned to Earth by the US Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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The team, from Brown University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Case Western Reserve University, used secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) technology to detect extremely minute quantities of water in glasses and minerals.

“We developed a way to detect as little as five parts per million of water,” said Erik Hauri, from the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC.

Full Article: BBC News

Pretty interesting news on our newest planetary neighbor. What implications this may hold as to whether or not their may have been life on the moon remains to be unseen. The article even points out that the water may have drifted to the poles and may remain there as ice.

After a 10 month journey to Mars, the Phoenix Landed has successfully touched down. Its mission is to study the history of water and also the habit potential of the soil on Mars. Congrats to the guys at NASA!

Source: NASA Mission Page

Additional mission information: University of Arizona

A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. The spot, along with new measurements of record-high wind speeds on Red Spot Junior, come at a time when the solar system’s largest planet is experiencing a time of global upheaval.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system.

It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. It is about the size of Earth.

Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. The observations were led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Full Article: NewScientist

I hadn’t even known about the Red Spot Jr. until I read this article. They look so small, but in reality they are enormous storms, it really is quite amazing what goes on in the universe. As for why they are red, it is suggested that when these storms get large enough they bring up materials such as phosphorus from further down on Jupiter’s atmosphere.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter — the protons and neutrons that make up atoms — but there also is an even larger amount of invisible “dark” matter.

“We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,” said Mike Shull of the University of Colorado, who helped lead the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The matter is spread as superheated oxygen and hydrogen in what looked like vast empty spaces between galaxies.

“It is kind of like a spider web. The gravity of the spider web is what produced what we see,” Shull said in a telephone interview. “It’s very thin. Some of it is very hot gas, almost a million degrees.”

This is where the dark matter comes in. The dark matter is heating up the gas, Shull said.

“Dark matter has gravity. It pulls the gas in,” Shull said. “This causes what I call sonic booms — shock waves. This shock heats it to a million degrees. That makes it even harder to see.”

Shull and colleagues said these webs of hydrogen and oxygen are too hot to be seen in visible light and too cool to be seen in X-rays.

Full Article: Yahoo!

It is quite remarkable how they have discovered this matter that has remained to elude many scientists for a while now. Even though the dark matter hasn’t been found itself, its affects have been found. However, since they have only found a partial amount of it, the search for the rest continues.

Scientists using a combination of radio and X-rays have found the most recent supernova remnant observed in our galaxy, located about 26,000 light-years from here. It’s the youngest, most energetic supernova we know and could shed light on just exactly how the stardust we’re made of — heavier elements and all — gets created. The finding also lends some support to astronomers’ calculations that there should be about three supernovae in our galaxy per century, although they still need to find dozens more similar supernova remnants to confirm their suspicions.

Full Article: Wired

This is a fairly significant discovery by the folks at NASA. It is a bit confusing in the terminology because this supernova exploded 26,140 years ago, but hit Earth 140 years ago, so that explains the discrepancy. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been finding an incredible amount of data from thousands of years in the past as well as evidence of the Big Bang itself, so it is nice to see it find things within our own galaxy and learn more about it. The press conference is a bit comical but on the nerdy side if you want to take a look at it on the Wired website.

Nuclear physics and Roman archaeology just don’t mix, or so you would think. But researchers at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padua, Italy, and a team of archaeologists have found a common goal: to raise 1500 ingots of lead from a Roman freighter which sank off the coast of Sardinia more than 2000 years ago.

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The physicists want the ancient lead for a practical reason. Lead is the best material for shielding delicate experiments which detect minute amounts of radiation, for example from the unusual kinds of radioactivity associated with double beta decay, or from the rare interaction of neutrinos – the ghost-like particles that are emitted from the Sun and pass through the Earth unheeded. Another experiment requiring shielding is the detection of particles of so-called dark matter – the material believed to hold the Universe together.

Such experiments are usually carried out deep underground in specially built installations, such as the Gran Sasso Laboratory near Rome. Here, 1400 metres of solid rock protect the detecting apparatus from high-energy cosmic rays raining through the atmosphere. Small amounts of radioactive materials in the rocks themselves, however, can interfere with the experiments, so the detector has to be surrounded by an additional lead shield.

Commercial lead has only tiny amounts of radioactive contaminants such as lead-210, but even this is enough to affect very sensitive experiments. However, the half-life of lead-210 is 22 years, which means that lead excavated a long time ago would have lost most of its radioactive component. In fact, physicists have sometimes relied on lead from old cannonballs for their experiments.

Lead that is 2000 years old would be expected to contain virtually no radioactive isotopes at all. The physicists, when they tested a small portion of a salvaged ingot, found this was the case.

Full Article: NewScientist

This article is rather old, but was just put online by NewScientist. Being able to detect neutrinos is very hard even for sophisticated equipment that we have today. I know of some facilities that use very sensitive equipment at the bottom of large water basins deep beneath the Earth, yey very few neutrinos are even detected. It is kind of neat to see old wreckage being put into use for current scientific research. There wasn’t any follow up article shown, but it would be interesting to find out whether or not this lead helped them in any way. If anyone knows of any further research, I’d love to hear it.