Blogs / Bad Astronomy

BABloggee Mauro Mello Jr. from Sydney, Australia sent me this wonderful picture.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

A cluster of galaxies recently observed by three different telescopes now holds the record for the most distant ever seen: 10.2 billion light years, a solid billion light years farther away than the previous record holder!

[Click to embiggen.]

The cluster, called JKCS041 — evidently all the cool names have already been taken — was discovered in 2006 and subsequently observed by Chandra. The image above also includes observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the Digitized Sky Survey. In this image, the blue glow is from X-ray-emitting hot gas between galaxies, and the white galaxies are from the optical and infrared observations.

The image doesn’t look like much, but it’s scientifically amazing. When light left those galaxies, the Universe was only about 3.5 billion years old! Remember, for a long time the whole cosmos was just gas, and that took a long time to collect, clump up, and form stars and galaxies. It’s currently thought that it took a few billion years for clusters of galaxies to form after the Big Bang, so JKCS041 looks like it was an early bloomer. We may find even more distant clusters, but there probably aren’t too many more out there, and they almost certainly won’t be much farther away than this one.

Clusters are among the largest structures in the Universe (the only things bigger are superclusters; clusters of clusters if you like), so studying them tells us a lot about conditions in the early Universe. And, of course, the farther back we find them the more interesting things get! I suspect that the newly-refurbished Hubble may be pointed this way sometime soon, too, and I also imagine JKCS041 will be a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest space telescope ever launched. When it’s observed by these observatories, what secrets about dark matter, dark energy, and the early Universe will the cluster reveal?

And since I hate ending posts with rhetorical flourishes, I’ll take a stab at a generic answer: surprises. Whenever we probe deeper, look farther, the one thing we discover is that the Universe will always have something unexpected up its sleeve. That’s one reason science is so much fun!

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/S.Andreon et al Optical: DSS; ESO/VLT.

One thing I love about Colorado is that things I used to think were rare are actually rather common here. For example, lenticular clouds are lens-shaped (hence the name) clouds that sometimes form when air flows over the mountains in a certain way. Where I grew up on the east coast they were non-existent, but here, a few miles downwind of the Rocky Mountains, I see them pretty often.

While I was at the gym the other day I saw a nice one, and posted a pic using my phone, but the cloud is a bit small and hard to see. After my workout, I got home, climbed onto my roof and, using a better camera, got this shot:

Sadly, by the time I got home the formation started to falter, but you can still see the elongated, oddly-sculpted shape. The knobby formation on the ridge line is called The Devil’s Thumb, and is located south of Boulder on the foothills.

I took a second picture at a faster exposure time so that details weren’t washed out, and that one is on the right (you can click both to embiggen).

I remember seeing lenticular clouds practically every day last fall, so I’m looking forward to seeing better ones here soon. They’re very cool, and another in a long list of things you might miss if you don’t simply look up every once in a while.

Just a quick note: The Big Picture did Saturn today, and it’s gorgeous. You need to a) get over there and check it out, and 2) bookmark it or put it in your RSS feed or whatever. It always delivers, and never disappoints.

When NASA slammed the 700 kg (1500 pound) 2400 kg (5200 pound) Centaur rocket booster into the Moon on October 9, the hope was that it would make a plume visible from Earth. Terrestrials were disappointed, however, when none was seen.

However, a better view was to be had by LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Sensing and Observation spacecraft, which shepherded and closely followed the rocket booster, impacting itself just minutes later. From its much closer (and doomed) location it spotted both the plume and the flash of impact! Here’s the plume:

I’ll be honest with you, it’s not much to see. For some reason, the plume was not several kilometers high as hoped, but instead more like only one or maybe two (and, it seems, blocked from our Earthly view by the rim of a crater). In the above image, taken 15 seconds after the booster impact, the plume was 6-8 kilometers wide. The fact that it was not as bright as hoped is itself interesting, however! The actual plume brightness was at the low end of what was expected, which may be due to the nature of the material it slammed into.

There was never really a chance to see the flash from Earth, since it was at the bottom of a crater blocked from our view. But LCROSS was directly above the crater when the Centaur hit, and took several images, including the one shown here right at the moment of impact. This image shows the flash in the mid-infrared, beyond what our eyes can see but where a lot of the energy of the impact went. Other images can be found on the NASA site.

The crater carved out by the Centaur was less than 30 meters across. That’s far too small to be seen from Earth (our limit, even with Hubble, is more than 100 meters in size), but the orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should be able to see it easily, and in fact did take observations of the impact just a minute or so after it happened.

All of these data are being analyzed right now. Did any of those instruments see the signature of water in the plume? Did the much larger LCROSS impact (it had a mass of 2000 kg) dig up any water? No one’s telling right now, but I suspect we’ll know soon enough. You can read more about this at Universe Today.

Update: Somehow, in my head, I got the masses of LCROSS and the Centaur reversed. Apologies, and thanks to IVAN3MAN for correcting me!

The Mars Global Surveyor was in operation around the Red Planet for over nine years. From 1997 to 2006 it snapped away with its Mars Orbiter Camera, taking more than 240,000 images. One of these pictures from the MOC is circulating the web right now; but no one is giving the supplemental info on what it is or linked to where it’s from! So I’m chiming in.

The picture was taken in May 2003, but its impact has not lessened with time. It shows Earth and Jupiter in one shot as seen from Mars! The whole image can be found here, but it’s huge (basically a long strip) so I’ve extracted the two planets here:

Whoa. You can clearly see the Earth and Moon, and even the continent of South America! On Jupiter, the banding of the clouds of obvious, as are three of the Galilean moons.

But I think you really need to click through and see the whole image (as well as the accompanying explanation on the MOC site). In this case, context is important. It’s critical! It’s images like this that remind us that we live on a planet, a world like any other and yet unique in that it’s our home. I get people asking me if space exploration is worth it, and then I see images like this, and I know the answer is yes. We need this perspective. It’s said that the Apollo 8 shot of the Earth rising over the Moon launched the modern environmental movement, because it showed all of us eggs sitting in our one, lone basket. We should be reminded of this idea as often as possible, and images like this one from the MOC need to be spread far and wide.

A couple of days ago, the Netherlands and Germany were treated to a spectacular fireball, a very bright meteor burning up over their skies. Photographer Robert Mikaelyan was at the right place at the right time and got tremendous photos of the bolide:

Wow! Click through to see the series; you can see the meteoroid breaking up as it slams through our air. Robert took beautiful shots, especially given that he couldn’t have had more than a few seconds to get them; things like this appear very suddenly and are gone in less than a minute at best. The event took place around 19:00 local time and was probably witnessed by thousands of people. I’m totally jealous.

Also in the meteor news category, apparently scientists have verified that a piece of metal that fell through a UK man’s roof in July is in fact space debris of some kind — meaning from a man-made object, not a natural meteorite. The Daily Mail (I know, barf) has the story and a picture of the object. Interestingly, the man claims the object was too hot to touch when it hit his house. In general, meteorites from deep space are not hot, but this is a bit different; it would have fallen from a decaying orbit, meaning a slower speed and a shallower angle as it came in at the top of the atmosphere. I’m not exactly sure why that would mean it would stay hot, but I’ll note it wasn’t hot enough to start a fire. I’ll have to look into this further.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to IVAN3MAN. Image from Robert Mikaelyan used with permission.