Mathematicians at the University of Sheffield have identified that magnetic super tornadoes, more than 1000 mph wide, and spinning at 6000 mph, draw energy out into the corona, amplifying its temperature to millions of kelvin.
This magnetic tornado phenomenon could be used on Earth to produce energy in large quantities, but with negligible danger of pollution.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-space-tornadoes-power-atmosphere-sun.html
If you'd asked me to draw a map of all the space agencies around the world, i would *not* have drawn that many on it!
"For any space nerd, that would be the ultimate global trek, to visit every space agency in the world. With all the NASA and Russian centers and all the various countries in ESA, your trip would include 198 locations around our planet!"
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-awesome-space-agencies-world.html
[video] An international team has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to directly catch the faint glow from the planet Tau Boötis b, in the infra red range.
Tau Boötis b is a Jupiter-sized planet, orbiting a star 50 light years away and visible to the naked eye, but does not pass between its star and Earth.
This is why it was one of the first to be identified using the radial velocity method, whereby its mass was observed to cause its host star to wobble, during its orbit.
Because Tau Boötis b does not pass between its star and us, its atmospheric composition could not be inferred from the way it attenuated solar light, on its journey here.
"But now, after 15 years of attempting to study the faint glow that is emitted from hot Jupiter exoplanets, astronomers have finally succeeded in reliably probing the structure of the atmosphere of Tau Bootis b and deducing its mass accurately for the first time."
"By tracing the changes in the planet's motion as it orbits its star, the team has determined reliably for the first time that Tau Bootis b orbits its host star at an angle of 44 degrees and has a mass six times that of the planet Jupiter in our own Solar System."
Spectroscopy for the win!
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-technique-enables-scientists-elusive-exoplanet.html
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-planet-weighing-technique.html
Another fascinating exoplanet, this week: HD 189733b (I know - they have catchy names!)
HD 189733b was seen by Hubble to flare up, developing a tail, much like a comet, which must have involved a massive amount of energy, because the evaporating gas was emitted at thousands of tonnes per second.
"Despite the extreme temperature of the planet, the atmosphere is not hot enough to evaporate at the rate seen in 2011. Instead the evaporation is thought to be driven by the intense X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet radiation from the parent star, HD 189733A, which is about 20 times more powerful than that of our own Sun. Taking into account also that HD 189733b is a giant planet very close to its star, then it must suffer an X-ray dose 3 million times higher than the Earth."
The team concluded that the planet was struck by a solar flare, which ripped some of the planet's atmosphere away, and propelled it into space. That's the cost of orbiting so close to your parent star! (Just one thirtieth of the distance between Earth and our Sun)
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-hd-189733b-exoplanet-atmosphere.html
And yet more exoplanets: 'Exoplanetary bedfellows make odd couple'
"When Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his team looked at data from the Kepler space telescope, they found a rocky planet with a radius 1.5 times greater than Earth's, orbiting within a cosmic whisker of a gassy planet with a radius 2.5 times larger still. The pair are 20 times closer than Earth and Venus"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428713.200-astrophile-exoplanetary-bedfellows-make-odd-couple.html
And just when you thought the astronomy stuff had dried up!...
A mysterious object has been spied in the region of a supernova remnant called SNR MSH 11-16A
The evidence seems to point toward it being a pulsar, but it's travelling at an immense speed of ~6 million miles per hour, and... it has a tail!
It can be seen, in the composite photograph, as a green blob, with the tail pointing back towards the supernova remnant.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-speediest-pulsar.html
[video] A vast cloud of gas is due to fall onto the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way, some time around the middle of 2013.
The gas cloud has accelerated, in recent years, and is now travelling at 8,000,000 km per hour.
As it gets closer, the tidal forces around the black hole will stretch the cloud out into a long, thin strand, and then tear it apart.
These observations will help us infer the nature of black holes in general, and the particular one at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, in which we reside.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-gas-cloud-collide-galaxy-black.html
'Scientists discover that Milky Way was struck some 100 million years ago, still rings like a bell'
Observations of a perturbation in the Milky Way's galactic disk bear the hallmarks of a galactic collision, 100 million years ago, with either one of the mini-galaxies that surround the Milky Way, or a similarly massive blob of dark matter.
"The discovery is based on observations of some 300,000 nearby Milky Way stars by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Stars in the disk of the Milky Way move up and down at a speed of about 20-30 kilometers per second while orbiting the center of the galaxy at a brisk 220 kilometers per second. Widrow and his four collaborators from the University of Kentucky, the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have found that the positions and motions of these nearby stars weren’t quite as regular as previously thought."
"Scientists know of more than 20 visible satellite galaxies that circle the center of the Milky Way, with masses ranging from one million to one billion solar masses. There may also be invisible satellites made of dark matter. (There is six times as much dark matter in the universe as ordinary, visible matter.) Astronomers' computer simulations have found that this invisible matter formed hundreds of massive structures that move around our Milky Way.
Because of their abundance, these dark matter satellites are more likely than the visible satellite galaxies to cut through the Milky Way’s midplane and cause vertical waves."
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-scientists-milky-struck-million-years.html
[video] Ever seen inside an observatory? I've been catching up on Thunderf00t's travels, as shown on his other channel (which i only recently found out about!), and here he showed us around a rather small one.
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