Astronomy

Gamma-Ray Burst Blasted Earth in 8th Century
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-21/gamma-ray-burst-blasted-earth/4476806 Mon Jan 21, 2013 6:25pm AEDT

 A mystery wave of cosmic radiation that smashed into Earth in the eighth century may have come from two black holes that collided, a study says. Clues for the strange event were unearthed last year by Japanese astrophysicist Fusa Miyake, who discovered a surge in carbon-14 - an isotope that derives from high-energy radiation - in the rings of ancient cedar trees. Dating of the trees showed the burst struck the Earth in either 774 or 775 AD. Space scientists lined up the usual suspects as to what was the nature of the radiation. But there was no evidence that an exploding star, also called a supernova, occurred at that time, they found. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record in Old English, makes a dramatic reference to the appearance of a "red crucifix" seen in the skies after sunset. But that happened in 776 AD, which was too late to tally with the event marked by the tree rings. Also ruled out was a tantrum by the Sun, which can throw out sizzling cosmic rays or gouts of energy called solar flares. Writing in Monthly Notices, a journal of Britain's Royal Astronomical Society, German-based scientists Valeri Hambaryan and Ralph Neuhaeuser have come up with a new explanation. The pair suggest that two black holes collided and then merged, releasing an intense but extremely brief burst of gamma rays. A collision of neutron stars or white dwarf stars - tiny, compact stars near the end of their lives - may also have been the cause, say Hambaryan and Neuhaeuser of the University of Jena's Astrophysics Institute. Mergers of this kind are often spotted in galaxies other than our own Milky Way and do not generate visible light.

Pluto's 5th Moon Discovered
[]

Magnifying the Universe
[]

The Universe is BIG - How BIG. Take the link and see...

June 6th 2012 Venus Transit
On the morning of Wed June 6th 2012 Venus will transit the Sun. It should be viewable in the Eastern States of Australia, New Zealand and surround Pacific. The National Geographic has an article relating to this rare phenomenon. []

Image courtesy of NASA

New Earth Like planet discovered
[]

NASA discovers Earth-like planet Updated December 06, 2011 15:22:46 <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"> [|**PHOTO:** Earth-like: An artist's impression of Kepler-22b (]NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech ) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"> [|**RELATED STORY:** Astronomers discover biggest black holes ever][|**MAP:** United States] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Astronomers with NASA's Kepler mission have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in a "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light years away, about two-and-a-half times the size of Earth, with a temperature of about 22 degrees Celsius, allowing liquid water to exist on the surface. Its year is about 290 days long. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">This is the first time the Kepler mission has detected a potentially habitable world orbiting a Sun-like star, scientists reported in findings to be published in [|//The Astrophysical Journal//]. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">But scientists admit they do not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">"We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha said. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">The planet was spotted by NASA's [|Kepler Space Telescope, which was launched three years ago.] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">The telescope is staring at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for faint and periodic dimming as any circling planets pass by relative to Kepler's line of sight. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">

[|**AUDIO:** Newly discovered planet could support life(The World Today)] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Results will be extrapolated to determine the percentage of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that harbour potentially habitable, Earth-size planets. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Kepler-22b, which is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth, sits squarely in its star's so-called 'habitable zone', the region where liquid water could exist on the surface. Follow-up studies are under way to determine if the planet is solid, like Earth, or more gaseous like Neptune. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">"We don't know anything about the planets between Earth-size and Neptune-size because in our solar system we have no examples of such planets. We don't know what fraction are going to be rocky, what fraction are going to be water worlds, what fraction are ice worlds. We have no idea until we measure one and see," Dr Batalha said. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Among the 2326 candidate planets found by the Kepler team, 10 are roughly Earth-size and reside in their host stars' habitable zones. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Another team of privately funded astronomers is scanning the target stars for non-naturally occurring radio signals, part of a project known as SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">"As soon as we find a different, a separate, an independent example of life somewhere else, we're going to know that it's ubiquitous throughout the universe," astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the [|SETI Institute,] said. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">The Kepler team is meeting for its first science conference this week. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">**ABC/Reuters** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 0.8333em; text-align: left;">**Topics:** [|astronomy-space], [|united-states] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #666666; display: block; font-family: Verdana,'Lucida Grande','Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 0.9167em; text-align: left;">First posted December 06, 2011 08:01:50

Nobel Prize for Physics goes to Scientist looking at the expanding Universe
[] Australian National University astronomer Brian Schmidt has been named a joint winner of the 2011 Nobel physics prize for his research into supernovae. The prize was awarded "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae", the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Huge Telescope Begins Galaxy Probe
[]

A powerful telescope affording a view of the universe unmatched by most ground-based observatories gazed onto distant galaxies for the first time from deep in Chile's Atacama desert. The Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetere Array (ALMA), a joint project between Canada, Chile, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan and the United States, officially opened for astronomers after a decade of planning and construction.



New photos reveal evidence supporting the 1969 landing on the moon and against the conspiracy theory. [] =<span style="font-family: ProximaNovaBold,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 2.5em;">Photos show footprints still on the moon = Updated September 07, 2011 15:31:59 [|**PHOTO:** The NASA images show tracks left by astronauts walking on the moon in 1972] NASA [|**MAP** United States] Pictures taken by an orbiting NASA camera show the footprints of the last man to walk on the moon still visible in the lunar dust. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration released three pictures on Tuesday snapped over the past month by its two-year-old Lunar Reconnaissance Vehicle (LRO). The pictures provide the sharpest images yet of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites and include a photo of the boot tracks left behind in 1972 by the last US astronaut to walk on the moon. "These images remind us of our fantastic Apollo history and beckon us to continue to move forward in exploration of our solar system," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington. The LRO has been taking pictures of the moon's surface for more than two years. But scientists made an adjustment to its orbit in August that helped produce the higher resolution images. The manoeuvre temporarily lowered the LRO from its usual orbiting altitude of approximately 50 kilometres from the moon's surface to as low as 21 kilometres. The spacecraft remained in the lower orbit for four weeks, long enough for the moon to completely revolve and for the LRO wide angle camera to get the pictures of the three landing sites and the trails astronauts left in the moon's thin soil as they stepped out of the relative safety of their lunar modules and explored the moon on foot. As politicians in Washington move to cut federal spending and reduce the deficit, the US space agency is fighting to retain funding for human spaceflight. In July, NASA's 26-year-old space shuttle program completed its last flight. The agency had hoped to resume its moon program but that program was shelved last year because of budget cuts. [] Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

=<span style="font-family: ProximaNovaBold,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 2.5em;">Astronomers discover planet made of diamond = Updated August 26, 2011 12:34:45

[] The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon - ie a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way towards the centre of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometres in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare towards the carbon-rich centre.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."


 * Reuters**

**Topics:** [|astronomy-space], [|science-and-technology] , [|planets-and-asteroids] , [|melbourne-3000] , [|vic] , [|england] , [|united-kingdom] , [|hawaii] , [|united-states] , [|australia]

First posted August 26, 2011 06:24:40

===<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 2.5em; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 1; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Planets found free-floating around universe === <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 0.9167em; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.833em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">**Updated 1 hour 28 minutes ago ** <span style="background-position: -498px 0px; color: #0033cc; display: block; float: right; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; width: 340px; word-wrap: break-word;"> <span style="background-position: -498px 100%; color: #666666; display: block; float: right; font-size: 0.9167em; line-height: 1.363; margin: 0px 0px 0.833em; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding: 0.666em 10px; width: 340px; word-wrap: break-word;">Researchers analysed tens of millions of Milky Way stars over a two-year period. (NASA/JPL-Caltech )

**Astronomers say they have found evidence of a phenomenon previously thought impossible: planets that do not appear to be anchored to a host star but instead wander the heavens.** In a two-year scan of the cosmos, 10 planets with roughly the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet of our solar system, have been found at such enormous distances from the nearest star that some of them could be said to float freely through the Milky Way. The investigation, published in the British science journal Nature, breaks new ground in the science of exoplanets, or planets that exist beyond our solar system. More than 500 such planets have been identified since 1995. But these are the first of Jupiter size that have been found to be orbiting at such a huge range from their nearest stars or seem to be "unbound" from them. The new planets were found in a search that looked for objects ranging between 10 and 500 astronomical units (AU) from a star. The AU is a standard measurement comprising the span between Earth and the sun - nearly 150 million kilometres. By comparison, Jupiter is just over five AU from the sun, while Neptune, the outermost recognised planet, is 30. The theory of planetary foundation says that planets are agglomerations of dust and gas which are enslaved by their stars and doomed to orbit around it until the star runs out of fuel. The paper suggests these very distant planets unshackled from their gravitational moorings at an early phase. "They may have formed in proto-planetary discs, and subsequently scattered into unbound or very distant orbits," it said. The paper, published in the British science journal Nature, was written by two teams who used gravitational microlensing to analyse tens of millions of Milky Way stars over a two-year period. Under this technique, a foreground star passes in front of a distant, background star. Light from the background star is magnified, carrying a telltale 'light curve' that can be filtered from the foreground star. "The implications of this discovery are profound," said German astronomer Joachim Wambsganss in a commentary also published by Nature. "We have a first glimpse of a new population of planetary-mass objects in our galaxy. Now we need to explore their properties, distribution, dynamic states and history."
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid #e7e7e7; border-top: 1px solid #e7e7e7; color: #0033cc; line-height: 1.5; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; width: 340px; word-wrap: break-word;">[|****RELATED STORY:**** New planet found in Goldilocks zone]
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid #e7e7e7; border-top: 1px solid #e7e7e7; color: #0033cc; line-height: 1.5; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; width: 340px; word-wrap: break-word;">[|****RELATED STORY:**** NASA discovers rocky planet resembling Earth]
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid #e7e7e7; border-top: 1px solid #e7e7e7; color: #0033cc; line-height: 1.5; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; width: 340px; word-wrap: break-word;">[|****RELATED STORY:**** First pics of faraway planet confirmed]

- ** AFP **

NEW Telescope Construction in Australia???
[|Proposed Telescope] [] Extra-terrestrial life could be discovered first from Australia, if the country wins its bid to house the largest and most advanced radio telescope ever constructed. Australia and New Zealand together represent one of two candidates shortlisted to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a telescope so powerful it will enable scientists to look back in time, almost to the beginning of the universe. SKA director Brian Boyle, from CSIRO's Astronomy and Space Science division, said the telescope would "reveal knowledge about the universe that we've scarcely even begun to dream about". Scientists hope the SKA will help them unlock some of the universe's key mysteries. It will be used to search for intelligent life on other planets, explore the evolution of the galaxies, stars and black holes, and investigate the nature of the "dark energy" that fills much of the universe. "Perhaps the greatest scientific revolution might occur with this telescope, and that's the discovery of intelligence beyond our planet," Dr Boyle told ninemsn. "The SKA will increase the search volume by a factor of one million over what we've previously done, and it will encompass planets around stellar systems that could well be earth-like. It could even detect things like airport radars from those planets." As the telescope would be 50 times larger than its existing rival, and able to survey the sky 10,000 times faster, it will also enable astronomers to look much further back in time. "With this we can actually see right back to the first 300,000 years after the Big Bang," Dr Boyle said. If Australia is successful in its bid against rival candidate South Africa, the SKA's 3000 12m-wide dishes will stretch 5500km from a core site in Western Australia, in the remote Murchison region in the state's north-west, across the country and into New Zealand. Author and science commentator Karl Kruszelnicki told ninemsn the super-telescope could also improve the lives of those who may not be interested in science and space discovery. Astronomy research already has led to the discovery of useful everyday technologies, including wi-fi, cancer scanners and GPS devices, he said. Research conducted with SKA could have even greater potential to uncover new technologies. "Have you used wi-fi? Wi-fi technology was accidentally invented by people looking for black holes," Dr Kruszelnicki said. "Or have you known a friend who has had a body part scanned for … cancer? When (scientists) use the Hubble telescope to try to find a tiny grey dot on a grey background, it's hard, so [the same technology can work] when you're looking for little tiny lumps in the body. "The spin-offs from this will be amazing."  The 20 countries involved in the $2.5 billion SKA project will decide on its location in February 2012. Construction is expected to begin in 2015 and be completed by the mid-2020s.  Ninemsn's interview with Dr Boyle and Dr Kruszelnicki was filmed at Summit Restaurant & Bar, Level 47, Australia Square, Sydney.

Most Violent Storm inour Solar System
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/07/07/3263260.htm (7th July 2011) =Storm from hell seen on Saturn= Updated Thu Jul 7, 2011 1:38pm AEST Saturn's monster storms occur almost periodically (NASA/CICLOPS) Imagine being caught in a thunderstorm as wide as the Earth, with discharges of lightning 10,000 times more powerful than normal, flashing 10 times per second at its peak. Now imagine that this storm is still unfolding, eight months later. One of the most violent weather events in the Solar System began to erupt on Saturn last December and is still enthralling astronomers, the British journal Nature reports. Two studies draw on observations by professional and amateur astronomers using a broad range of equipment, from relatively small ground-based telescopes to NASA's scoutcraft Cassini. Saturn, like Jupiter, is no stranger to convective storms. It too is a 'gas giant', a planet comprising layers of thick, roiling gases, rather than a rock, like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The difference, though, is that Jupiter's mega-storms tend to erupt unexpectedly, but Saturn's monster storms occur almost periodically. The data used for the research included high resolution images provided by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who used a 0.4 metre telescope in the backyard of his home near Canberra. "The telescope acts as a giant lens for my home video camera, which is specially designed for low light use," he said. "I use some clever software to select images which are less blurred by the atmosphere." Mr Wesley is also credited with both the 2009 discovery of an asteroid slamming into Jupiter and last year's detection of a fireball crashing into the upper Jovian atmosphere. He says it is all great fun. "The contribution citizen scientists can make these days is amazing thanks to the technology now available to the amateur," he said. "The Solar System is a dynamic place, interesting things are happening all the time. It's possible we might see people travelling to these places, so we're taking photographs and trying to understand places that are not that far out of reach." Storms occur on average once every Saturnian year - nearly 29.5 Earth years - and appear to be linked to the summer solstice, when the planet's orbit brings it a bit closer to the Sun and its atmosphere warms a little. The event is known as the Great White Spot (a counterpart to the swirling Great Red Spot on Jupiter) because of the mass of brilliant white storm clouds that erupt in the upper atmosphere. The show is so big it can be visible by telescopes from distant Earth. Five have been observed in the past 130 years. The most recent occurred in 1990. But the current Great White Spot is proving to be a dazzling spectacle. Events began at 9:05pm GMT on December 5, when ground-based telescopes detected a "barely visible white point" on a normally unblemished and hazy part of Saturn's northern hemisphere, at around latitude 35 degrees north. Within a few weeks, the point had ballooned into a storm system that was 10,000 kilometres across, roughly comparable with the diameter of the Earth, and after two months the clouds had almost encircled the entire planet. Analysis of the data suggests the "spot" is in fact a cluster of super-storms, produced by upwelling of heat, moisture and ammonia from water clouds from lower down in the Saturnian atmosphere, where the pressure is high. As this mix rises into a cooler atmospheric layer, called the tropopause, bright, white clouds of ammonia start to spread horizontally into a tail, sculpted by eastward jets of wind. Astronomers are especially intrigued by the current Great White Spot. The observational history of this phenomenon is sketchy. But evidence suggests the present spot is exceptionally intense and rather premature, for it was still spring on Saturn when the storm brewed.
 * [| **Related Story:** Europe-sized cyclone batters Saturn for five years]
 * [| **Related Story:** Saturn's rings a chaotic clutter]
 * [| **Related Story:** New planet could be 'just right' for life]
 * [| **Related Story:** New planet found in Goldilocks zone]

='One' year on, Neptune still a mystery= http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-14/neptune-completes-one-year/2794778 Stuart Gary Updated July 14, 2011 15:47:47 [|**Photo:**][| Neptune has completed its first full orbit since its discovery in 1846.] [|(NASA)] [| **Map:** Australia] Neptune has just completed its first full orbit since its discovery 165 years ago. The eighth and most distant planet from the Sun was the first planet discovered after being predicted by scientists using mathematics. British astronomer Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline found Uranus in 1781. Shortly afterwards Herschel noticed the orbit of Uranus did not match the predictions based on Newton's theory of gravity. In 1821, French astronomer Alexis Bouvard speculated another planet was tugging on Uranus, altering its orbital motion. Astronomers Urbain Le Verrier of France and John Couch Adams of England independently predicted the mystery planet's location 20 years later by measuring how the gravity of a hypothetical object would affected Uranus's orbit. Le Verrier sent his predictions of the mystery planet's location to German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Galle found and identified Neptune as a planet on September 23, 1846. But he was not the first to see Neptune. In December 1612, Galileo recorded Neptune in his notebook, while observing Jupiter and its moons, but as a star. The next month he noted the 'star' appeared to have moved relative to other stars. But because Galileo failed to identify Neptune as a planet, he cannot be credited with its discovery.

Mystery remains
Macquarie University planetary scientist Dr Craig O'Neill says we really have not learnt all that much more about Neptune since then. "It's location at the edge of the solar system makes it a bit of a black hole from a knowledge point of view," says Dr O'Neill. "Neptune's so far away, it takes 165 Earth years to complete one orbit around the Sun. From Neptune, the Sun looks like a point of light no brighter than Venus does from Earth." Dr O'Neill says most of what we know about Neptune comes from Voyager 2's 1989 fly-by and the Hubble Space Telescope. "Neptune's atmosphere is hydrogen, helium and methane," he said. "We think its blue colour comes from methane absorbing red light. But Uranus has a similar atmosphere, yet it's cyan in colour." Scientists are also still speculating about Neptune's supersonic winds, which are the fastest in the Solar System. "They're pushing 2,000 kilometres per hour, yet Neptune's 30 times further away from the Sun than Earth," says Dr O'Neill. "The Sun can't be powering what's happening there. "Given Uranus has fairly mild winds, Neptune's dynamics are a mystery. "One idea is that if you put methane under enough pressure deep in Neptune's atmosphere, it could convert to diamond which would fall as rain. "This conversion process releases heat which could power the winds. "That's a little more speculative, but speculation is all we've got." First posted July 14, 2011 13:07:37
 * Topics:** [|planets-and-asteroids], [|astronomy-space], [|science-and-technology], [|australia]

Moon Legends:
P:\Science\Science resources\Astronomy Open Word File Moon Legends

Lesson ideas
[|View by learning area] | [|View by theme] | [|View by age]

[[image:http://www.racismnoway.com.au/teaching-resources/images/EarthMoon01.jpg width="530" height="398" caption="Earth and Moon"]]Good Heavens

 * Theme:** Cultural diversity and multiculturalism


 * Key Learning Area:** Science


 * Age Group:** Secondary Lower (13-14) **Resource Type:** Handouts


 * Stimulus Name:** Heavens

Outcomes
Students will look at the history of science to identify some of the scientific ideas that different cultures have contributed to science throughout history, to describe, using examples, ideas developed by different cultures to explain the world around them, to explore some models and theories that have been considered in science and then modified or rejected as a result of available evidence and discuss examples where societal, religious or ethical values have had an impact on scientific developments.

Introduction
Many cultures - past and present have ascribed religious and cultural significance to the moon and its behaviour. Almost every culture on earth has its own legends about the moon and its influence on their people and their behaviour. The science syllabus embraces not only the beginnings of scientific ideas through observation, but the contributions that have been made by the different cultures on earth, through their observations and folklore. In this series of activities, students will be introduced to the topic through the myths and legends of several different cultures. These activities are not a complete topic but are intended to show how a science unit can be rich in multicultural/ anti racism perspectives.
 * Worksheets to download**

[|Five moon legends] (rtf File)

[|Syllabus links for NSW schools] (rtf File)

Suggested Activities
> In groups of five: > Each group member receives a different legend to read and take notes. > After ten minutes, each student presents their legend or myth to the group and identifies the natural phenomena on which it is based. > With the whole class: > Each student selects their favourite myth, reads it, makes notes on it, and for homework, paraphrases it without the support of the original document. > In the next lesson, as an exercise in creative writing, students construct their own story of the moon the earth and the planets. > In addition, they are asked to write down their observations, i.e. the factual basis upon which their story is based. > Students observe a model of the sun, earth moon system (either in printed form, electronically, or a built model) and use this model to explain the occurrence of :- > night and day > length of a year > length of a month > the tides > Students plot a graph from a tide table, showing how tides vary with the time of the month.
 * 1) Download the //Five moon legends// worksheet or select other relevant myths from library collections.
 * 1) Students study either a globe, or a map of the earth and identify the north and south pole, the equator, the northern and southern hemisphere and list a number of countries from each of the two hemispheres.

Additional Strategies

 * 1) Students research and study some timekeeping methods as used by the ancient Greeks, Romans and Arabs
 * 2) Students select a country from the list and research the climate of that country. Students then associate the climate with its position on earth and account for it in scientific terms.
 * 3) Students make observations of the phases of the moon over a one month period and present their results in the form of a table, showing dates against diagrams of the moon's appearance.
 * Relevant websites to visit**

Education Encyclopedia

Interactive Atlas of World Astronomy

Geoscience Australia/ Astronomical Information

Windows to the Universe

Adapted from activities written by the Science Consultant K-12, Bondi District Office NSW Department of Education and Training
 * Copyright Acknowledgement**

=Trojan asteroid discovered in Earth orbit= http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-28/trojan-asteroid-dicovered-in-earth-orbit/2814204 Stuart Gary Updated July 28, 2011 18:41:16 [|**Photo:**][| An artist's impression of the Trojan asteroid that shares Earth's orbit around the Sun.] [|(NASA/JPL-Caltech)] [| **Map:** Canada] Astronomers have discovered the first Trojan asteroid sharing Earth's orbit around the Sun. Trojans are asteroids locked in stable orbits by a gravitational balancing act between a planet and the Sun. They have previously been discovered accompanying Neptune, Jupiter and Mars. Scientists, led by Dr Martin Connors from Athabasca University in Canada, suspected they may also be in stable positions orbiting with Earth. But Dr Connors says finding an Earth-bound Trojan is difficult because its location can only be seen from Earth in daylight. "When you look out towards Jupiter you've got no real problems picking up its Trojans because they're in the night sky for us most of the time," Dr Connors said. "But for our own Trojans, they're kind of near to the Sun, so they're the sort of thing you'll only see for an hour or so in the evening and in the morning - that's your only opportunity to look for them. "That's why none have been found before." Dr Connors says the launch of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft in 2009 changed all that. "WISE looked at the infrared light coming from all over the sky and was particularly good at detecting asteroids, finding about 150,000 of them, including 500 which come near the Earth." By examining the orbits of these objects in the WISE data, Dr Connors and colleagues identified a small asteroid called 2010 TK7 as a probable Earth Trojan. The researchers then used ground-based telescopes to confirm the sighting, calculating that it has been in a stable orbit with Earth for more than 10,000 years. Their finding appears in the journal Nature.

Asteroid mystery
Other than its orbit, scientists know very little about this asteroid. "Based on the amount of light it reflects, we estimate it to be about 300 metres wide, about the size of a small neighbourhood," Dr Connors said. "We know nothing (else) about it, a situation we hope will change in the future." Dr Connors says he has been looking for an Earth Trojan for a number of years based out of the belief that they must exist. "Well they do; we've got one," he said. "The question is, are there any more?" Scientists have suggested an Earth Trojan would be a good target for NASA's proposal to send astronauts to an asteroid. Dr Connors says 2010 TK7 is big enough for such a mission but its orbit is an issue. "The problem with this particular asteroid is that it's on quite a tilted orbit and it takes quite a bit of energy for a spacecraft to get into a tilted orbit, so this particular one wouldn't be very good," he said. "But the fact that this one exists means you could go looking for others which would be more suitable as targets for astronauts."

=<span style="font-family: ProximaNovaBold,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 2.5em;">NASA gets close look at asteroid Vesta = Posted August 02, 2011 12:15:44 []

[|**PHOTO:** Images of giant asteroid Vesta reveal a diverse terrain and several unexplained geologic features(NASA)] [|**RELATED STORY:** NASA probe enters orbit around asteroid]  [|**RELATED STORY:** Asteroid soars over Atlantic Ocean]   [|**RELATED STORY:** Trojan asteroid discovered in Earth orbit]   [|**RELATED STORY:** Shuttle program ends as Atlantis arrives home]   [|**MAP:** United States] The first close-up pictures of the asteroid Vesta, a protoplanet that dates back to the early days of the solar system, reveal a surprisingly diverse terrain and several unexplained geologic features, NASA scientists said. The images were taken by the US space agency's Dawn robotic probe, which is two weeks into a planned year-long survey of the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. "These photos already have been a great revelation to the team about what the surface [of Vesta] is like," Dawn lead scientist Chris Russell, with the University of California at Los Angeles, told reporters. "We did not imagine the detail that we're seeing." Scientists believe Vesta grew from a clump of gas and dust left over after the sun's formation about 4.65 billion years ago. About twice the size of California, Vesta is remarkably diverse, with grooves around its equatorial belt, bright spots, dark pits and craters filled with unexplained streaks of black and white debris. "I haven't seen anything like that before," Mr Russell said. "It's really a beautiful and exciting small world sitting there in the middle of the asteroid belt." Scientists believe that as Vesta was coming together about 5 million years after the sun's birth, a supernova exploded, which added radioactive materials to the growing body. The extra heat would have caused Vesta to melt and eventually form an inner core of iron and an outer lava crust. That may explain the myriad surface features seen in Dawn's first close-ups of Vesta. "This is not a uniform body. Different things were happening at different regions of the surface. That indicates to me that the interior was being very active," Mr Russell said. "We're going to learn a lot from this body."

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.333em;">Ion propulsion
Dawn will spend about a year circling Vesta, tweaking its orbit and altitude using an innovative ion-propulsion system, a technology that chief engineer Marc Rayman, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said he first heard about in an episode of the TV show Star Trek. Rather than chemical rocket thrusters, Dawn's engines work by pumping electrically charged ions of xenon gas through an electric field, which accelerates the particles and prepares them for an 142,400 kph escape into space. The force of the expelled gas causes the spacecraft to move in the opposite direction. The motion, about equal to the pressure of a sheet of paper on the palm of your hand, is so gentle it would be useless on Earth. But in space, where there is no counteracting gravitational force, momentum builds up over time. The ion propulsion system will enable Dawn to leave Vesta's orbit after a year of study and head off to a second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt.
 * Reuters**