Antimatter Supernova Discovered

Here's another extremely explosive supernova that can be chalked up to the production of antimatter in the core of the star: Y-155. These types of supernova explosions – which can be ten times brighter than the already spectacular explosion of a Type Ia supernova – have been theorized to exist for over forty years. About a month ago, we reported on the first observations of one of these types of supernovae, and at the American Astronomical Society super-meeting yesterday, Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame presented on the observation of a second.
The star Y-155 was a whopping large star, with a mass of over 200 times that of our Sun. In these types of stars, energetic gamma rays can be created by the intense heat in the core of the star. These gamma rays in turn make pairs of electrons and positrons, or antimatter pairs. Since so much energy goes to the creation of these pairs, the pressure pushing outwards on the star weakens, and gravity swoops in to collapse the star, generating a supernova of enormous proportions.
These types of supernovae have been dubbed "pair-instability" supernovae, and once they explode, there is nothing left: in other types of supernovae, a neutron star or black hole can form out of the remnants of the star, but pair-instability supernovae explode with such force that there is nothing left where the core of the star once existed. In addition to supernova 2007bi, which we reported on in December of 2009, the supernova 2006gy is another candidate for this type of supernova.
Y-155, which lies in the constellation Cetus, was discovered as part of the Equation of State: SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion,"ESSENCE", search for stellar explosions. During the 6-year search, a team of international astronomers led Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University collaborated to find Type Ia supernovae as a means to measure the expansion of the Universe. These types of supernovae explode with a characteristic luminosity, making them excellent candidates to measure distances in theUniverse. The team utilized the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's (NOAO) 4-m Blanco telescope in Chile.
Y-155 was discovered in November of 2007, during the last weeks of the project, using the Blanco telescope. Once the initial discovery was made, followup observations using the Keck 10-m telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan telescope in Chile, and the MMT telescope in Arizona revealed the redshifting of the light due to the expansion of the Universe to be about 80%, meaning that the star is very far away, and thus very old. Y-155 is estimated to have undergone a supernova approximately 7 billion years ago.
According to Garnavich, the team calculated the star to be generating 100 billion times the energy of the Sun at its peak. To accomplish this, it must have synthesized between 6 and 8 solar masses of nickel 56, which is what gives Type Ia supernovae their brightness. For comparison, the typical Type Ia supernova burns 0.4-0.9 solar masses of nickel 56.
Y-155 has been shown by deep imaging with the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to reside in a galaxy that is rather small. Smaller galaxyies are usually low in heavier atoms. The gas out of which this and other types of ultra-massive stars form is relatively pristine, composed largely of hydrogen and helium. Supernova 2007bi, the first-observed pair-instability supernova, grew up in a galaxy remarkably like that of Y155.
This means that when astronomers look for other types of pair-instability supernovae, they should find more of them in smaller galaxies that existed near the beginning of the Universe, before other supernovae synthesized heavier elements and spread them around.

Moon’s deep hole will be used for Human settlement ?

A deep, giant hole on the moon could be suitable enough for setting up human colonies, say scientists who have recently discovered the protected “lava tube” on the lunar surface.
In a major discovery, geophysicists identified a vertical hole in the volcanic Marius Hills region on the moon’s near side.
The dark pit is 213-feet wide and is estimated to be more than 260-feet deep, the CNN quoted from the findings published in Geophysical Research Letters. A thin sheet of lava protects the hole from the moon’s harsh temperatures and meteorite strikes and makes the tube suitable for further exploration or possible inhabitation.Lava tubes have previously been discovered on the moon but scientists say the new hole is notable because of its lava shield and because it does not appear to be prone to collapse.
“Lunar lava tubes are a potentially important location for a future lunar base, whether for local exploration and development or as an outpost to serve exploration beyond the Moon,” writes the team, led by Junichi Haruyama, a senior researcher with the Japanese space agency JAXA.
“Any intact lava tube could serve as a shelter from the severe environment of the lunar surface, with its meteorite impacts, high-energy UV radiation and energetic particles, and extreme diurnal temperature variations.”The research was carried out using high-resolution images from a Japanese moon orbiter called SELENE.

Iron line in the sun’s corona

Another piece of puzzle of solar corona has been found by observing the sun’s outer atmosphere during eclipses. Ground-based observations reveal the first images of the solar corona in the near-infrared emission line of highly ionized iron, or Fe XI 789.2 nm. The observations were taken during total solar eclipses in 2006, 2008, and 2009 by astrophysicist Adrian Daw of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with an international team of scientists. “The first image of the corona in Fe XI 789.2 nm was taken during the total solar eclipse of March 29, 2006,” said Daw.
The images revealed some surprises, according to a NASA release. Most notably, that the emission extends out at least three solar radii—that’s one-and-a-half times the sun’s width at its equator, or middle—above the surface of the sun, and that there are localized regions of enhanced density for these iron ions.
Combined with observations of other iron charge states, the observations yield the two-dimensional distribution of electron temperature and charge-state measurements for the first time, and establish the first direct link between the distribution of charge states in the corona and in interplanetary space.
“These are the first such maps of the 2-D distribution of coronal electron temperature and ion charge state,” said Daw. Mapping the distribution of electron temperature and iron charge states in the corona with total solar eclipse observations represents an important step in understanding the solar corona and how space weather impacts Earth.

Sciece 2010

Stopping species loss
The United Nations has proclaimed 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, to culminate in an October summit in Nagoya, Japan, that hopes to establish strategies to prevent biodiversity loss — probably by setting out ways to try to halt the current decline by 2050. New ideas are sorely needed: this year, 120 countries will miss a goal set by a 2002 accord to achieve a 'significant reduction' in biodiversity loss.
Planck peeks at the Universe's origin
The first detailed images of the cosmic microwave background sent back by the European Space Agency's Planck mission could alter theories about the origins and structure of the early Universe. Full results won't be officially released until 2012.
Life, but not as we know it
Surely this will be the year when genome pioneer Craig Venter and his team reveal they have booted up a laboratory-made genome inside a living bacterial cell, to create what will be billed as synthetic life.
An Antarctic time machine
An ice core from Antarctica could provide the sort of year-by-year climate records already gathered in the Northern Hemisphere from Greenland. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core project is in the final stages of pulling up a 3.4-kilometre-long climate record that covers the past 40,000 years in enough detail to compare how the north and south polar regions warm up, or chill, in relation to one another.
A flood of genomes
The completed Neanderthal genome and the genomes of remaining primates will count among the highlights of another year of ever-cheaper DNA-crunching. Following last year's comprehensive portraits of cancer genomes, medically minded sequencing will continue to focus on the causes of specific diseases, and on spotting more human genetic variants.
Mexico City: the new Copenhagen
Starting in late November, Mexico will be the venue for the next major round of United Nations climate-policy wrangling, where an overdue formal agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change may finally be hammered out. Before then, attention will focus on the action that individual countries need to take on their commitments, on climate legislation in the United States and on international standards to monitor emissions and verify promised reductions.
Earth-like worlds elsewhere
As planet-hunters eagerly await the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star, they may have to make do this year with an easier target: a potentially hospitable planet around a red dwarf star. NASA's Kepler telescope has already discovered previously unknown planets .
Hope for HIV prevention
Early this year, the first clinical trial to use a gel incorporating an antiretroviral drug is expected to release its initial results; several large trials of other microbicides have failed to show benefit in blocking HIV. Early results are also due from long-anticipated trials that look at 'pre-exposure prophylaxis', or administering anti-HIV drugs before risky sex.
A perfect symmetry
Evidence for supersymmetry — the theory that every known fundamental particle has an undiscovered, superheavy partner — may be the most intriguing discovery to come from Europe's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The find would be even more bizarre than the anticipated Higgs boson, the particle thought to imbue matter with mass.
Quantum effects go large
Solid objects in physics laboratories could be seen to enter a superposition of states — the real-world version of Schrödinger's mythical cat that is dead and alive at the same time. The effect, predicted by quantum mechanics, has previously been seen in objects no bigger than ions, but could push into the macroscopic realm this year.
Cell reprogramming gets safer
Induced pluripotent stem cells will probably be created from adult cells using small molecules — lessening the risk of tumours, which comes with adding genetic material to a cell. Safer, more efficient reprogramming routes could lead to the field's first therapeutic applications.
Embryonic stem cells go clinical
The first clinical trials of therapies involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) could finally come this year. Biotech company Geron, of Menlo Park, California, plans to restart regulator-halted trials of an hESC-derived therapy for patients with spinal-cord injuries.
Space travel crosses frontiers
Among the year's planned space launches are Japan's Akatsuki, to orbit Venus, and China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2. And as NASA looks set to choose a new direction for its human space-flight programme, a decision that could come early in 2010, the US space-shuttle fleet will make its final outings. These include the July launch of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an instrument to study cosmic rays for evidence of antimatter and dark matter.
X-rays with laser-sharp focus
X-ray free-electron lasers, which produce short pulses of coherent X-ray light, may start to assert their superiority over synchrotrons for imaging। They should enable researchers to make images of single biomolecules without having to crystallize them, and to create detailed movies of molecular events such as protein folding. Data will flow from the first of these facilities, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.

Climate computing heats up
Expect increasingly realistic climate models from several recently launched supercomputers, including the Earth Simulator II in Yokohama, Japan, and Blizzard in Hamburg, Germany. As some of the world's 40 most powerful computers, they will improve on two of the largest uncertainties of current simulations: resolving local eddies in ocean circulation, and providing long-term forecasts of cloud behaviour. Blizzard will also incorporate Earth's carbon cycle into its climate models.

The Satellite distroyer

Indian defence scientists are readying a weapons system to neutralise enemy satellites operating in low-earth orbit, a top defence scientist said here on Sunday."India is putting together building blocks of technology that could be used to neutralise enemy satellites," Defence Research and Development Organisation Director General V K Saraswat told reporters on the sidelines of the 97th Indian Science Congress.
However, he added that the defence scientists have not planned any tests but have started planning such technology which could be used to leapfrog to build a weapon in case the country needed it .Saraswat, who is also the Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister, said the scientists were planning to build the weapon which would have the capacity to hit and destroy satellites in low-earth orbit and polar orbit.

Usually, satellites in such orbits are used for network centric warfare and neutralising such spacecraft would deny enemy access to its space assets."We are working to ensure space security and protect our satellites .At the same time we are also working on how to deny the enemy access to its space assets," he said. To achieve such capabilities, a kill vehicle needs to be developed and that process is being carried out under the Ballistic Missile Defence programme.
"Basically, these are deterrence technologies and quite certainly many of these technologies will not be used. I hope they are not used," Saraswat said. In January 2007, China had demonstrated its capability to destroy satellites by conducting an anti-satellite test. It had launched a missile that blew to smithereens an ageing weather satellite Fengyun 1C orbiting at a distance of 500 miles away from the earth. Saraswat said the DRDO is building an advanced version of its interceptor missile with a range of 120-140 km. The missile interceptor is expected to be test fired in September.Space security is going to be a major issue in the future and India should not be left behind in this area, the defence scientist said.

India's first commercial solar power plant

India inaugurated Azure Power's 2-megawatt photovoltaic plant in the state of Punjab, the first privately owned, utility-scale power plant on the Asian subcontinent.
Built under a 30-year power purchase agreement with the Punjab State Electricity Board, the plant will help power 4,000 rural homes for 20,000 people.
Farooq Abdullah, minister of new and renewable energy, said the plant showcases India's pledge to generate 20,000 megawatts from solar power by 2022 under the country's national solar mission.
Azure Power is India's first independent power producer in solar energy. It built the plant, situated on 13 acres of farmland in the village of Awan, in a record six months,
Inderpreet Wadhwa founded Azure Power two years ago after a 15-year career in the United States that most recently included software giant Oracle Corp. The 37-year-old native of Amritsar city in Punjab said he wanted to return home and do something for rural areas in India, where millions of people don't have reliable electricity.
Azure Power received initial venture-capital funding from Helion Ventures and Foundation Capital.
Wadhwa encountered a number of bureaucratic hurdles in the project, including obtaining signatures from 152 local officials in Punjab, The Wall Street Journal reports. And he ended up paying more than double the market rate for the land, about $420 per acre a year.
Yet Wadhwa is pressing on. His company has also inked agreements with local Indian governments of Gujarat and Harayana to build facilities that can produce a total of 22 megawatts. It is also coordinating with the state governments of Karnataka, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Rajasthan for another 30 megawatts.
"My aim is to be a leading solar power generator in India by offering viable and socially responsible alternatives to conventional sources of energy," he told the India Business Standard.
About 8 percent of India's energy comes from renewable sources such as wind and hydropower. Solar power, experts say, has great potential because it can work almost anywhere in India.
But growth in the sector has been hampered somewhat by the high costs of the technology and inability of power companies to obtain sizeable tracts of land for the solar panels.
To encourage more investment in the solar sector, the Indian government is increasing subsidies for solar projects and mandating that state utilities purchase solar power. But some experts say government support won't help as long as solar technology remains expensive.
"To achieve scale, you'll need private participation, and that will only happen if the projects are viable without significant state support," Jai Mavani, head of infrastructure and government consulting at KPMG India, told The Wall Street Journal.

Born in Beauty

A collection of 30 never-before-released images of embryonic planetary systems in the Orion Nebula are the highlight of the longest single Hubble Space Telescope project ever dedicated to the topic of star and planet formation। Also known as proplyds, or protoplanetary discs, these modest blobs surrounding baby stars are shedding light on the mechanism behind planet formation.

Looking like a graceful watercolour painting, the Orion Nebula is one of the most photogenic objects in space and one of the Hubble Space Telescope's favourite targets. As newborn stars emerge from the nebula's mixture of gas and dust, protoplanetary discs, also known as proplyds, form around them: the centre of the spinning disc heats up and becomes a new star, but remnants around the outskirts of the disc attract other bits of dust and clump together. Proplyds are thought to be young planetary systems in the making. In an ambitious survey of the familiar nebula using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), researchers have discovered 42 protoplanetary discs.
Visible to the naked eye, the Orion Nebula has been known since ancient times, but was first described in the early 17th century by the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc -- who is given credit for discovering it. At 1500 light-years away, the nebula, also known as Messier 42, is the closest star-forming region to Earth with stars massive enough to heat up the surrounding gas, setting it ablaze with colour, and making the region stand out to stargazers.
Within the awe-inspiring, gaseous folds of Orion, researchers have identified two different types of discs around young and forming stars: those that lie close to the brightest star in the cluster (Theta 1 Orionis C) and those farther away from it. This bright star heats up the gas in nearby discs, causing them to shine brightly. Discs that are farther away do not receive enough energetic radiation from the star to heat up the gas and so they can only be detected as dark silhouettes against the background of the bright nebula, as the dust that surrounds these discs absorbs background visible light. By studying these silhouetted discs, astronomers are better able to characterize the properties of the dust grains that are thought to bind together and possibly form planets like our own.
The brighter discs are indicated by a glowing cusp in the excited material and facing the bright star, but which we see at a random orientation within the nebula, so some appear edge on, and others face on, for instance. Other interesting features enhance the look of these captivating objects, such as emerging jets of matter and shock waves. The dramatic shock waves are formed when the stellar wind from the nearby massive star collides with the gas in the nebula, sculpting boomerang shapes or arrows or even, in the case of 181-825, a space jellyfish!
It is relatively rare to see visible images of proplyds, but the high resolution and sensitivity of Hubble and the Orion Nebula's proximity to Earth allow for precise views of these potential planetary systems.
This proplyd atlas is the first scientific outcome from the HST Treasury Program on the Orion Nebula. Treasury Programs are carried out to allow scientists to conduct comprehensive studies over longer periods since time on the in-demand Hubble Space Telescope is strictly allocated. High resolution imaging of protoplanetary discs is an example of a science discovery that has led to better technology and is one of the main science cases for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the largest ground-based astronomy projects of the next decade. ALMA will observe the dust at longer wavelengths, in emission (instead of in absorption as we see it at optical wavelengths) with an angular resolution up to 10 times better than that of Hubble.

Spirit Has Uncertain Future

NASA's Mars rover Spirit will mark six years of unprecedented science exploration and inspiration for the American public on Sunday। However, the upcoming Martian winter could end the roving career of the beloved, scrappy robot.

Spirit successfully landed on the Red Planet at 8:35 p.m. PST on Jan. 3, 2004, and its twin Opportunity arrived at 9:05 p.m. Jan. 24, 2004. The rovers began missions intended to last for three months but which have lasted six Earth years, or 3.2 Mars years. During this time, Spirit has found evidence of a steamy and violent environment on ancient Mars that was quite different from the wet and acidic past documented by Opportunity, which has been operating successfully as it explores halfway around the planet.
A sand trap and balky wheels are challenges to Spirit's mobility that could prevent NASA's rover team from using a key survival strategy for the rover. The team may not be able to position the robot's solar panels to tilt toward the sun to collect power for heat to survive the severe Martian winter.
Nine months ago, Spirit's wheels broke through a crusty surface layer into loose sand hidden underneath. Efforts to escape this sand trap barely have budged the rover. The rover's inability to use all six wheels for driving has worsened the predicament. Spirit's right-front wheel quit working in 2006, and its right-rear wheel stalled a month ago. Surprisingly, the right-front wheel resumed working, though intermittently. Drives with four or five operating wheels have produced little progress toward escaping the sand trap. The latest attempts resulted in the rover sinking deeper in the soil.
"The highest priority for this mission right now is to stay mobile, if that's possible," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He is principal investigator for the rovers.
If mobility is not possible, the next priority is to improve the rover's tilt, while Spirit is able to generate enough electricity to turn its wheels. Spirit is in the southern hemisphere of Mars, where it is autumn, and the amount of daily sunshine available for the solar-powered rover is declining. This could result in ceasing extraction activities as early as January, depending on the amount of remaining power. Spirit's tilt, nearly five degrees toward the south, is unfavorable because the winter sun crosses low in the northern sky.
Unless the tilt can be improved or luck with winds affects the gradual buildup of dust on the solar panels, the amount of sunshine available will continue to decline until May 2010. During May, or perhaps earlier, Spirit may not have enough power to remain in operation.
"At the current rate of dust accumulation, solar arrays at zero tilt would provide barely enough energy to run the survival heaters through the Mars winter solstice," said Jennifer Herman, a rover power engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The team is evaluating strategies for improving the tilt even if Spirit cannot escape the sand trap, such as trying to dig in deeper with the wheels on the north side. In February, NASA will assess Mars missions, including Spirit, for their potential science versus costs to determine how to distribute limited resources. Meanwhile, the team is planning additional research about what a stationary Spirit could accomplish as power wanes.
"Spirit could continue significant research right where it is," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the rovers. "We can study the interior of Mars, monitor the weather and continue examining the interesting deposits uncovered by Spirit's wheels."
A study of the planet's interior would use radio transmissions to measure wobble of the planet's axis of rotation, which is not feasible with a mobile rover. That experiment and others might provide more and different findings from a mission that has already far exceeded expectations.
"Long-term change in the spin direction could tell us about the diameter and density of the planet's core," said William Folkner of JPL. He has been developing plans for conducting this experiment with a future, stationary Mars lander. "Short-period changes could tell us whether the core is liquid or solid," he said.
In 2004, Opportunity discovered the first mineralogical evidence that Mars had liquid water। The rover recently finished a two-year investigation of a half-mile wide crater called Victoria and now is headed toward Endeavor crater, which is approximately seven miles from Victoria and nearly 14 miles across. Since landing, Opportunity has driven more than 11 miles and returned more than 132,000 images.

Looking Back in Time

An instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory launched in May by the European Space Agency has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.

The December images have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, or SPIRE instrument, riding aboard Herschel। The new images are being analyzed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, or HerMES, which involves more than 100 astronomers from six countries।

Equipped with three cameras including SPIRE, the Herschel Space Observatory was launched in May 2009 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana। The spacecraft -- about one and one-half times the diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope -- is orbiting nearly 1 million miles from Earth. Herschel is the first space observatory to make high-resolution images at submillimeter wavelengths, which are longer than visible and infrared light waves and shorter than radio waves. SPIRE was designed to look for emissions from clouds and dust linked to star-forming regions in the Milky Way and beyond, said Glenn. The most recent observations were made in the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the Big Dipper.
CU-Boulder is receiving roughly $2 million from NASA for the combined support of SPIRE instrument development and science data analysis during the lifetime of the orbiting telescope, said Glenn, an associate professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and CU-Boulder built essential instrumentation for the telescope used to make the most recent observations, said Glenn, also a member of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.