On April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. Video footage has revealed breathtaking images of meteors ablating — or burning up — over Earth at night. This video is a composite of 310 still frames from that evening. (NASA/JSC/Don Pettit)
Author Archives: Jeroen
Venus transit coming
Here we have two sites celebrating the fact that Venus will pass in front of the Sun as seen from Earth on June 5/6. One will show you the happening in real time via webcam, courtesy Keck Observatory; the other will let you participate in recreating an 18th century experiment, courtesy the Bradford Robotic Telescope Project.
Here you can see a animated gif of 22 pictures I took on June 8, 2004, when the last Venus transit was visible on Earth. Taken with a simple webcam glued to my C8, through a Baader solar filter. Next time it won’t take 8 years almost to the day, but more like 105 years. So be prepared and tell the clouds to go hiking.
Turn up the overall heat
Black holes will be our demise. We should stop them. We’re not talking global warming but universal warming. We should form a committee.
So far, astrophysicists thought that super-massive black holes can only influence their immediate surroundings. A collaboration of scientists at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and in Canada and the US now discovered that diffuse gas in the universe can absorb luminous gamma-ray emission from black holes, heating it up strongly. This surprising result has important implications for the formation of structures in the universe. The results have just been published in “The Astrophysical Journal“ and „Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”. … (HIT)
Heavenly eating habits
It’s Ascension Day, so a post about this might be beneficial to know a bit more about eating habits above. Or drinking habits, for that matter.
Like wine in a glass, vast clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth in Abell 2052, a galaxy cluster located about 480 million light years from Earth. X-ray data (blue) from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the hot gas in this dynamic system, and optical data (gold) from the Very Large Telescope shows the galaxies. The hot, X-ray bright gas has an average temperature of about 30 million degrees.
A huge spiral structure in the hot gas – spanning almost a million light years – is seen around the outside of the image, surrounding a giant elliptical galaxy at the center. This spiral was created when a small cluster of galaxies smashed into a larger one that surrounds the central elliptical galaxy. … (Chandra)
Highspeed bypass
It might not look as spectacular as an F18/A Hornet on a 60 ft. Mach One highspeed bypass at the Mythbusters show, but it’s faster than you think, even in timelapse.
Rock(et) man
Hmmm, this guy is getting old.
Small might be beautiful if we can see it
Too bad I can’t attend, but it sure looks interesting.
with Dr. Martin Gorbahn (Excellence Cluster Universe)
While the Standard Model of particle physics explains many details of the building blocks of matter and their interactions, many questions still remain unanswered. Several on-going experiments, including CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, will help to clarify things. With these new tools, we can now study the forces of nature down to a scale of 10-19 metres, which is about one ten thousandth of the diameter of a proton!
During the next Café & Kosmos, Dr. Martin Gorbahn will discuss what physicists expect to see at that scale.
Please note that the Café & Kosmos events take place in German.
What: Digging down into the quantum world
When: Tuesday, 15 May 2012, 19:00 until approximately 20:30
Where: Vereinsheim, Occamstr. 8, 80802 München, near Münchener FreiheitAdmission is free. (ESO)
