Eye candy from space: The most beautiful panoramas and photos of the universe around us

Spacewalkin’ in a winter wonderland

Credit: NASA.

Located within the Milky Way, about 5,500 light years from Earth, frosty-looking NGC 6357 is actually a “cluster of clusters” containing at least three clusters of young stars as well as the rest of the older, dimmer population of local stars. X-ray exposures from Chandra and ROSAT reveal hundreds of point sources, which are the young stars in NGC 6357, as well as diffuse X-ray emission from hot gas, supernovae, and even cavities like bubbles that have been blown by the radiation and material blowing away from the surfaces of massive stars. This composite image contains X-ray data from Chandra and ROSAT in purple, infrared data from Spitzer in orange, and visible-spectrum data from the UKIT’s SuperCosmos Sky Survey in blue.

Pismis 24-1

Credit: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble).

This genuinely stunning and somehow very 80s tableau from the emission nebula NGC 6357, in Scorpius, depicts two different big names from the interstellar who’s who list. Pismis-1, the bright star in the cluster above, was once believed to be 200-300 solar masses, which would have been crazy huge. It’s been since revised down to “just” a hundred solar masses, which still means we can expect its life cycle to include a supernova — possibly a hypernova — and then a black hole. Below, there’s a bright young star blowing a stellar bubble inside the nebula. Its ultraviolet glow is part of what made it so hard for us to measure the mass of Pismis-1 and its fellows. Is it just me, or does it really look like this is painted on black velvet?


The spice must flow

Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA

It was not immediately clear to me that this was not from another planet. I thought it was from somewhere on the slopes of Mars, where the CO2 ice sublimates and makes water-like traces in the sand as it scoots down the dunes — but it is in fact from the Anti-Atlas mountain range bordering the Sahara in western Algeria. While it wasn’t an image of an exoplanet per se, we’re an exoplanet according to everywhere else in the Universe and this was taken from space by the Copernicus satellite, so here are some geological fractals for your viewing pleasure. The neat circular crater in the center is from an asteroid impact some 70 million years ago, which took place before the K-T boundary and while the dinosaurs were still quite alive

Mystic Mountain

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI).

Splashy and sexy, the Mystic Mountain is actually one region of intense turbulence and high-energy stellar activity within the larger Carina Nebula. Pairs of opposing jets at the ends of these collapsing columns of gas are flung from accretion jets: hallmarks of stars being born. All that activity is eating the columns away from within, while it’s being burned away by other stars in its neighborhood. The denser, more opaque regions here have been resistant to the erosion. In this composite image, different colors correspond to the glow of different elements: oxygen in blue, hydrogen and nitrogen in green, and sulfur in red.
The Pinwheel Galaxy

Credit: European Space Agency & NASA

Messier 101 is found within Ursa Major, and it’s riddled with fun stuff. Supergiant star-forming regions litter the arms of this face-on spiral galaxy, of roughly equivalent size to the Milky Way but 23 million light years away. This composite image integrates data from the visible and infrared, and also used photographs from the ground-based Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
Orion, the Hunter

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged in the visible spectrum, with an opaque cloud of dust silhouetted against a luminous cloud of gas. The bright but unrelated star in the lower left foreground is Zeta Orionis, the easternmost star in Orion's belt. Credit: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

Orion, the Hunter with his belt and sword, is a familiar presence in the night sky almost everywhere on the planet. It’s composed of very bright, faraway stars and nebulae, which means that long after apparent motion has distorted most of our other constellations beyond recognition, Orion will still shine as a beacon to people around the world. But not everywhere gets to see views like these. Observatories around the world worked together to make these composite images of the violently beautiful star nurseries in and near Orion, with data from many different parts of the EM spectrum. Looking at the sky in different spectra reveals very different portraits of the visible universe, including the deepest view of the Orion Nebula ever taken.

Hubble's sharpest-ever view of the Orion Nebula, composited from hundreds of images taken throughout the visible and infrared. This nebula covers the apparent angular size of the full moon. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

The reflection nebula Messier 78, in Orion. This nebula is illuminated by reflected light from two nearby stars, about 1400 light years from Earth.. Credit: ESO/Igor Chekalin

The Orion Nebula, imaged with multiple infrared exposures using the VLT in Chile. The full size image is >16000x12000px, more than 1GB, and tends to saturate your RAM, although it is glorious to behold (and pan and zoom through!). Credit: ESO/H. Drass et al.

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged in the visible spectrum, with an opaque cloud of dust silhouetted against a luminous cloud of gas. The bright but unrelated star in the lower left foreground is Zeta Orionis, the easternmost star in Orion's belt. Credit: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

The Orion Nebula (Messier 42), captured and composited in ten-minute near-infrared exposures.
 The image covers a region of sky about one degree by 1.5 degrees. Credit: ESO

Stellar nursery in Centaurus

Credit: ESO

“Nursery” might be in the name, but these places are anything but peaceful or serene. Nebulae shine so brightly because their component matter has been so thoroughly irradiated that it’s excited to a higher energy level and gives off photons as it calms back down. Bombarded by radiation in the UV, X-ray and gamma bands, star nurseries are even hostile to themselves. This star nursery lies at the center of a nebula in Centaurus that’s wracked with explosions and radiation so intense that they’re actually eroding away the dark, backlit clouds of dust you can see here silhouetted against the glow. In the ESO’s own words, the clouds — called Thackeray globules — are sizzling away in the onslaught like “lumps of butter dropped onto a hot frying pan.” They’ll probably be destroyed by their environment long before they can collapse to form new stars.


The Eagle Nebula

Credit: ESO

The Eagle Nebula spreads its wings here in the visible spectrum. Also visible near the heart of the nebula are the Pillars of Creation, themselves an iconic and much-photographed place in space.

The Medusa Nebula

Credit: ESO

The Medusa Cascade might be a figment of the Doctor Who universe, but we’ve a gorgeous Medusa of our own in the real world — the Medusa Nebula. As the Sun-like star at the core of this nebula died, it exploded and left behind these wisps and filaments of gas and dust. Stars like this one end their lives as white dwarf stars. At the end of its life span, our sun will become an object like this.

Bonus: Paranal is charging their laser

Credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky

Full disclosure: this one is more like eye candy of the tech that makes the other eye candy. This laser on the Very Large Telescope excites atmospheric sodium, thought to be left over from ancient meteorites. (You might recognize in the laser beam the flat yellow color of a sodium street light.) It’s creating an “artificial star” at an altitude of 90 km, whose interference characteristics help cancel out interference from water vapor and atmospheric detritus. The whole process actually reduces optical noise and gives the telescope a view almost as clear as if there were no atmosphere at all. 15,000 feet up in the Atacama Desert, where there’s barely a visible atmosphere to begin with, the ESO radio telescopes can take advantage of some of the clearest skies on Earth.

'Roundest known space object' identified

Astronomers claim to have discovered the roundest object ever measured in nature.

Artwork: Kepler 11145123 (L) compared to the Sun

Kepler 11145123 is a distant, slowly rotating star that's more than twice the size of the Sun.

Researchers were able to show that the difference between its radius as measured to the equator and the radius measured to the poles was just 3km.

"This makes Kepler 11145123 the roundest natural object ever measured," said lead author Prof Laurent Gizon.

He added that it was "even more round than the Sun".

Prof Gizon, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), and his colleagues used a technique called asteroseismology - the study of how stars pulsate, or oscillate.

Nasa's Kepler space telescope observed the star's oscillations continuously for more than four years.

The periodic expansions and contractions of Kepler 11145123 can be gleaned from fluctuations in its brightness. And from these data, astronomers were able to extract information about its shape.

Using the method, Prof Gizon and his colleagues discovered that the star rotated faster at the surface than in the core, contributing to an unexpected rounding of its form.

The difference of 3km, between the polar and equatorial radii, is tiny compared to the star's mean radius of 1.5 million km.

The authors say that this distortion is probably caused by factors other than rotation alone. They suggest that a weak magnetic field surrounds the star, making the star appear even more rounded.

The research is published in the journal Science Advances.

Space Scientists Launch Crowdfunding Campaign To Spot A 'Blue Dot' In Space

Space scientists and research organisations are on a mission to spot a blue dot in our nearest star system, which will indicate there might be life on other Earth-like planets.

Representational image/Reuters

Through “Project Blue: A Space Telescope to Photograph Another Earth” scientists and experts from University of Massachusetts Lowell and SETI Institute, among others, are appealing to the public to fund their search to find life in neighbouring star system Alpha Centauri A and B. With funds raised, they will build a telescope to observe planets.

Their goal is actually really simple (well in theory at least because a task like this can take years) to capture an image visible to the naked eye of orbiting planets. Spotting a “pale blue dot” could indicate the existence of oceans or even an atmosphere, which means the possibility of life.

The project plans to launch in 2020, only four years away so “we started this campaign,” they wrote on Kickstarter, “with the belief that together, people all over the world could push the boundaries of discovery in space, and possibly achieve one of the greatest milestones of human exploration”.

New Discovery Holds the Key to Possible Alien Life on Mars

Space News: New Discovery Holds the Key to Possible Alien Life on Mars

Alien life in Mars might have been possible in a recently discovered depression.
(Photo : NASA/Getty Images)

Scientists have recently discovered a strange depression on Mars that might finally answer the age-old question if there are extreterrestrial life or aliens on Mars.


Since ancient times, humanity has always been interested in what lies beyond the threshold of the planet's atmosphere. There have been troves of theories, scientific initiatives and researches dedicated to uncovering the truth surrounding the existence of alien life.

Mere days ago, RDMag published a report detailing the discovery of a peculiar depression on the surface of the red planet. The depression, which is located near the rim of the Hellas basin, seems to have all the requirements that could foster microbial life. According to Joseph Levy, research associate from the University of Texas and lead author of the study, the location is warm and chemical-rich enough to have been able to produce primitive forms of life.

"We were drawn to this site because it looked like it could host some of the key ingredients for habitability - water, heat and nutrients," explained Levy in a statement as reported by The Independent.



The team initially encountered the odd depression in 2009. However, it was not until earlier this year when scientists were able to analyze the location using stereoscopic images.

"These landforms caught our eye because they're weird looking. They're concentrically fractured so they look like a bulls-eye. That can be a very diagnostic pattern you see in Earth materials" explained Levy.

Nevertheless, Levy's research is not the only study that tackled the existence of alien life in Mars recently. According to Dr. Christian Schroder from Stirling University, life in Mars could only have been possible beneath the planet's dry surface.


"For life to exist in the areas we investigated, it would need to find pockets far beneath the surface, located away from the dryness and radiation present on the ground" explained Schroder as reported by The Independent.

Saturn's North Pole Has Changed Color, But Why?

The observed color change in Saturn's north polar region between 2012 and 2016.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Hampton University

Spectacular photos captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a curious color change over Saturn's north pole. The occurrence may be linked to seasonal changes and the planet's enormous hexagonal jet stream.

The images were captured by Cassini's wide-angle camera between 2012 and 2016. Photos from 2012 show a bluish halo over Saturn's north pole, while those taken in 2016 show the same area with a more golden hue.

Saturn's north pole has a unique, six-sided jet stream known as "the hexagon,"which is approximately 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide. Winds of this hexagonal vortex whip through the planet's atmosphere at approximately 200 mph (322 km/h). [Cassini Snaps New Views of Saturn's Hexagon (Video)]

Preliminary hypotheses suggest the color change observed in the atmosphere over Saturn's northern hemisphere could be associated with the jet stream. For instance, the hexagonal vortex may act as barrier and prevent surrounding particles from entering the area. In this case, the sky over Saturn's north pole would have been cleared of haze or aerosols during the seven-year-long Saturnian winter, according to a statement from NASA. Then, haze production would have ramped up again when the pole was exposed to sunlight.

"Scientists are investigating potential causes for the change in color of the region inside the north-polar hexagon on Saturn," NASA officials said in the statement. "The color change is thought to be an effect of Saturn's seasons. In particular, the change from a bluish color to a more golden hue may be due to the increased production of photochemical hazes in the atmosphere as the north pole approaches summer solstice in May 2017."

Photochemical hazes, or aerosols, are created from reactions between sunlight and the atmosphere. Saturn experienced equinox in August 2009, and since then has been subjected to continuous sunshine. During this time, photochemical aerosols have accumulated in the sky above Saturn's north pole, creating the golden haze observed today.

However, other factors, including changes in solar heating and wind patterns, could cause a shift in the planet's atmospheric circulation, officials said in the statement. These factors may also play a role in the observed color changes, the officials said.

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, and the mission is expected to come to a close in September 2017. Researchers will continue to study data collected from Cassini to get a better understanding of this curious color change.

What's Up with 'Niku'? Object's Weird Orbit Puzzles Scientists

An artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located about 4 billion miles from the Sun.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

A mysterious object in the outer reaches of the solar system is revolving around the sun in an abnormal way, and scientists currently cannot explain why.

The object has been nicknamed Niku, a Chinese adjective that means "rebellious," by the group of researchers who announced its discovery in August. This name was chosen because the object's orbit is retrograde, meaning it moves in the opposite direction of nearly everything else in the solar system.

Niku was discovered by researchers who used the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii, and it lies in the outer reaches of the solar system, about 35 times farther away from the sun than Earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune. [The Pan-STARRS Asteroid Hunting Telescope]


Niku's orbit is inclined at an extreme 110-degree tilt with respect to the relatively thin, flat zone in which the eight major planets of the solar system orbit. In contrast, most trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are in much less inclined orbits.

The retrograde and extremely tilted nature of the orbits of Niku and another TNO nicknamed "Drac" led the scientists to try to find out whether there were objects with similar orbital characteristics that were listed in the Minor Planet Center database (which contains information about more than 1,000 small bodies in the solar system). They discovered four other objects with orbits that were either retrograde or nearly retrograde (meaning is orbit is inclined by less than, but close to, 90 degrees) and were also highly tilted. Two of these objects are Centaurs — bodies that orbit between Jupiter and Neptune.

A gif showing Niku moving across the sky, taken with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii.

Credit: Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System/PS1

The scientists were surprised to find that all six of these objects appear to orbit within a common plane.

"They're not randomly distributed in the sky — they all seem to be aligned," study co-author Matthew Payne, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Space.com.

Computer simulations that the researchers carried out suggest that Niku and Drac may have been in their orbits for hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the scientists suggest that there may be more extremely inclined objects in this group.

It remains uncertain why these six objects apparently cluster together. Astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena recently found that they may have been scattered off-kilter from the rest of the solar system by the gravitational pull of "Planet Nine," a world about 10 times Earth's mass that may exist about 500 times farther away from the sun than Earth.

Another possible origin for this group is "galactic tides." As the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, it moves up and down within the disk of the galaxy, and "tidal forces are exerted on the solar system that are thought in general to have a variety of effects, such as disturbing the Oort Cloud and throwing comets into the solar system," Payne said.

The scientists detailed their findings Oct. 17 at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.

Massive cloud on collision course with the Milky Way

In 1963, an astronomy student named Gail Smith working at an observatory in the Netherlands discovered something odd – a massive cloud of gas orbiting the Milky Way galaxy.

Smith’s cloud contained enough gas to make two million stars the size of our sun, and it was moving through space at 700,000 miles per hour.

For the next 40-plus years the cloud remained a curiosity, one of a growing number of so-called high velocity clouds circling the Milky Way – interesting but not sensational.

Then something changed.

In the mid-2000s, radio astronomer Jay Lockman and colleagues took a closer look at Smith’s Cloud using the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, and they were able to calculate the cloud’s orbit.

Smith’s Cloud, it turns out, is on a collision course with the Milky Way.

Thirty million years from now, give or take a few million years, it will crash into the Perseus Arm of our galaxy. The impact will compress clouds of gas in that spiral arm, causing a brilliant burst of star formation.

There’s no real danger to the Milky Way. Smith’s Cloud is minuscule compared to the gigantic spiral of stars that makes up the backbone of our galaxy. But the coming collision has sharply increased interest in Smith’s Cloud.

“We don't fully understand the Smith Cloud's origin,” said Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “There are two leading theories. One is that it was blown out of the Milky Way, perhaps by a cluster of supernova explosions. The other is that the Smith Cloud is an extragalactic object that has been captured by the Milky Way.”

To investigate these theories, Fox and colleagues recently peered into the cloud using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

One of the elements they found was sulfur, absorbing ultraviolet light from the bright cores of three galaxies far beyond the cloud.

By analyzing the amount of light Smith’s Cloud absorbs, the astronomers were able to measure the abundance of sulfur in the cloud.

“The abundance of sulfur in Smith’s Cloud is similar to the abundance of sulfur in the outer disk of our own Milky Way,” Fox said.

This means we have a family relationship.

“The cloud appears to have been ejected from within the Milky Way and is now falling back,” Fox said. “The cloud is fragmenting and evaporating as it plows through a halo of diffuse gas surrounding our galaxy. It's basically falling apart. This means that not all of the material in Smith’s Cloud will survive to form new stars. But if it does survive, or some part of it does, it should produce an impressive burst of star formation.”

While Fox’s work has cleared up some of the mystery of the Smith Cloud, many questions remain: What calamitous event could have catapulted it from the Milky Way's disk, and how did it remain intact?

These are questions for future research. Thirty million years to impact: the clock is ticking!

Space FIREBALLS just found by NASA so fast they could get from moon to earth in 30 MINUTES

FIREBALLS are being blasted through space at such a speed they could travel from our Moon to earth in half an hour, it has emerged.

A NASA CGI of the solar blasts

The massive gas balls, which are twice as hot as the surface of our sun and twice the size of Mars, were detected by the Hubble telescope.

The mysterious plasma ejections were found being ejected near a dying star called V Hydrae.

A NASA spokesman said: "The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon.

"This stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years, astronomers estimate."

The fireballs have puzzled astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by host star V Hydrae, as this is a bloated dying red giant, 1,200 light-years away.

It has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes.

Red giants are dying stars in the late stages of life that are exhausting their nuclear fuel that makes them shine.

They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space.

The spokesman added: "The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star.

This four-panel graphic illustrates how the binary-star system V Hydrae is launching balls of plasma into space.

Panel 1 shows the two stars orbiting each other. One of the stars is nearing the end of its life and has swelled in size, becoming a red giant.

In panel 2, the smaller star's orbit carries the star into the red giant's expanded atmosphere.

As the star moves through the atmosphere, it gobbles up material from the red giant, which settles into a disk around the star.

The buildup of material reaches a tipping point and is eventually ejected as blobs of hot plasma along the star's spin axis, shown in panel 3.

This ejection process is repeated every eight years, the time it takes for the orbiting star to make another pass through the bloated red giant's envelope, shown in panel 4.

"According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years.

"As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material.

"This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour."

This star system could be the archetype to explain a dazzling variety of glowing shapes uncovered by Hubble that are seen around dying stars, called planetary nebulae, researchers say.

A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gas expelled by a star late in its life.

Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, lead author of the study, said: "We knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but this is the first time we are seeing this process in action.

"We suggest that these gaseous blobs produced during this late phase of a star's life help make the structures seen in planetary nebulae.

"We want to identify the process that causes these amazing transformations from a puffed-up red giant to a beautiful, glowing planetary nebula.

"These dramatic changes occur over roughly 200 to 1,000 years, which is the blink of an eye in cosmic time."

Mr Sahai's team used Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to conduct observations of V Hydrae and its surrounding region over an 11-year period, first from 2002 to 2004, and then from 2011 to 2013.

Spectroscopy decodes light from an object, revealing information on its velocity, temperature, location, and motion.

The data showed a string of monstrous, super-hot blobs, each with a temperature of more than 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit - almost twice as hot as the surface of the sun.

Based on the observations, Mr Sahai and his colleagues Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Samantha Scibelli of the State University of New York at Stony Brook developed a model of a companion star with an accretion disk to explain the ejection process.

Mr Sahai said: "This model provides the most plausible explanation because we know that the engines that produce jets are accretion disks.

"Red giants don't have accretion disks, but many most likely have companion stars, which presumably have lower masses because they are evolving more slowly.

"The model we propose can help explain the presence of bipolar planetary nebulae, the presence of knotty jet-like structures in many of these objects, and even multipolar planetary nebulae. We think this model has very wide applicability."

The team's results appeared in the August 20, 2016, issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

Where will the out-of-control Chinese space station land?
Scientists have admitted that they have no way of safely guiding Tiangong-1 back to Earth, and say it is moving too fast to accurately predict where debris from the 8.5-tonne module will crash

What is happening with the Chinese space station?

The nation’s first prototype space station, Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace”, launched into orbit in September 2011. The module reached the end of its service life earlier this year and was due to splashdown – eventually – in the Pacific Ocean. But at a recent press conference, the Chinese space agency admitted it had lost contact with the station. They did not explain what had gone wrong.

Does losing contact matter?

It depends what the Chinese planned to do next. If the agency was going to let the spacecraft simply fall to Earth in an uncontrolled way and burn up in the atmosphere, then the loss of contact means little. But if they had intended to perform a controlled de-orbit, that option is now gone. Controlled de-orbits tend to be reserved for spacecraft that pose a potential risk to people when they fall back to Earth. If the chances of someone being injured by components that survive the fireball of re-entry is greater than one in 10,000, then the spacecraft should be actively steered into a region of the South Pacific known in the business as the “spacecraft graveyard”. The module is already below the altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) and so there is no risk of a collision on its way down.

What was Tiangong-1 for?

Unlike the massive ISS, which is the size of a football field and has the living space of a five-bedroom house, Tiangong-1 is a mere 10 metres long and 3 metres wide. The Chinese used the module to practise rendezvous and docking procedures, and several taikonauts, including two women, spent time aboard after catching a ride on the Shenzhou spacecraft. Losing control of the module is more of an embarrassment to the Chinese space agency than a blow to their space programme. Two weeks ago, in a long-scheduled launch, the Chinese put another space station module, Tiangong-2, into orbit, and a crew of at least two taikonauts is expected to visit as early as next month. The agency still hopes to build a 55-tonne space station by 2020.

Will the stricken module survive re-entry?

Satellite tracking radar show the Chinese module at 380km high and travelling at 27,500km per hour. At that speed and altitude, it could lap the planet 5,000 more times before it starts to feel the drag of the upper atmosphere and begin its final descent. Most of the 8.5-tonne module will burn up from aerodynamic heating in the Earth’s atmosphere. But the Chinese space agency has conceded that some heat-resistant components may survive. “The module is predominantly a hollow shell, so there’s a good chance a significant portion will burn up in the atmosphere. But there’s also a chance some elements will survive down to surface,” said Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at University of Southampton.

Where will it come down?

No one knows. And the vagaries of re-entry mean it will be impossible to predict with accuracy, even in its final moments. Computer simulations cannot tell far in advance on which orbit a spacecraft will re-enter. The Tiangong-1 is moving fast, at a shallow angle relative to the atmosphere, and the height of the atmosphere at any point depends on the regional temperature. But even when an object has begun its descent through the atmosphere, the final resting place of debris is still hard to predict. How the spacecraft tumbles through the atmosphere has an influence on how it breaks up. The most space agencies can do is calculate a debris ellipse where fragments are expected to land.

Are we in danger?

Pieces of space debris fall to Earth every day, but most of these are small fragments. Now and again, whole satellites or rocket stages tumble out of orbit and break apart in the sky. The most dangerous uncontrolled re-entry happened in 1979 when Nasa’s 85-tonne Skylab space station came down over Australia. In 2001, when the Russian Mir space station had reached the end of its life, Roscosmos de-orbited the 135-tonne outpost into the Pacific. But even with so much hardware raining from the skies, no one is known to have been hurt by falling space junk. “It is luck, but it proves that luck is on our side,” said Lewis. The odds are wildly in favour of not being hit because most of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, and most of the world’s population is crammed into a small percentage of land. The chances of a specific individual being struck by falling debris is trillions to one, making death by lightning far more likely.

Alien Planet Has 2 Suns Instead of 1, Hubble Telescope Reveals

An artist's illustration shows an exoplanet named OGLE-2007-BLG-349. It orbits a binary pair of red dwarf stars

Imagine looking up and seeing more than one sun in the sky. Astronomers have done just that, announcing today (Sept. 22) that they have spotted a planet orbiting two stars instead of one, as previously thought, using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Several planets that revolve around two, three or more stars are known to exist. But this is the first time astronomers have confirmed such a discovery of a so-called "circumbinary planet" by observing a natural phenomenon called gravitational microlensing, or the bending of light caused by strong gravity around objects in space. You can see how researchers found the planet in this video.

In binary-star systems, the two stars orbit a common center of mass. When one star passes in front of the other from our perspective on Earth, gravity from the closer star bends and magnifies the light coming from the star in the background. Astronomers can study this distorted light to find clues about the star in the foreground and any potential planets orbiting the star system.

The exoplanet in this study, named OGLE-2007-BLG-349, is located 8,000 light-years from Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. It was first spotted in 2007 by ground-based observations from telescopes around the world. At first, astronomers identified the system as a planet orbiting one star. Their data suggested that there was a third object, too, but the researchers weren't able to identify it at the time.

"The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star," David Bennett of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the paper's first author, said in a statement.

To get a better view, the team decided to use the Hubble Space Telescope, because space telescopes take better photos of deep space than land-based telescopes. Hubble's high-resolution images revealed that the system has the brightness expected of two closely orbiting red dwarf stars.

A two-planet, single-star model is not possible in this scenario, "because a two-planet model with a main sequence host would appear to be too bright to match the [Hubble Space Telescope] data, while a two-planet system orbiting a white dwarf would be too faint," the study's authors wrote in The Astronomical Journal.

"So, the model with two stars and one planet is the only one consistent with the Hubble data," Bennett said in the same statement. With Hubble now shown to be useful for identifying circumbinary exoplanets, the space telescope could become an important resource in the search for exoplanets.

Alien Planet Has 2 Suns Instead of 1, Hubble Telescope Reveals

An artist's illustration shows an exoplanet named OGLE-2007-BLG-349. It orbits a binary pair of red dwarf stars

Imagine looking up and seeing more than one sun in the sky. Astronomers have done just that, announcing today (Sept. 22) that they have spotted a planet orbiting two stars instead of one, as previously thought, using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Several planets that revolve around two, three or more stars are known to exist. But this is the first time astronomers have confirmed such a discovery of a so-called "circumbinary planet" by observing a natural phenomenon called gravitational microlensing, or the bending of light caused by strong gravity around objects in space. You can see how researchers found the planet in this video.

In binary-star systems, the two stars orbit a common center of mass. When one star passes in front of the other from our perspective on Earth, gravity from the closer star bends and magnifies the light coming from the star in the background. Astronomers can study this distorted light to find clues about the star in the foreground and any potential planets orbiting the star system.

The exoplanet in this study, named OGLE-2007-BLG-349, is located 8,000 light-years from Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. It was first spotted in 2007 by ground-based observations from telescopes around the world. At first, astronomers identified the system as a planet orbiting one star. Their data suggested that there was a third object, too, but the researchers weren't able to identify it at the time.

"The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star," David Bennett of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the paper's first author, said in a statement.

To get a better view, the team decided to use the Hubble Space Telescope, because space telescopes take better photos of deep space than land-based telescopes. Hubble's high-resolution images revealed that the system has the brightness expected of two closely orbiting red dwarf stars.

A two-planet, single-star model is not possible in this scenario, "because a two-planet model with a main sequence host would appear to be too bright to match the [Hubble Space Telescope] data, while a two-planet system orbiting a white dwarf would be too faint," the study's authors wrote in The Astronomical Journal.

"So, the model with two stars and one planet is the only one consistent with the Hubble data," Bennett said in the same statement. With Hubble now shown to be useful for identifying circumbinary exoplanets, the space telescope could become an important resource in the search for exoplanets.

What happened after the lights came on in the universe?

An experiment to explore the aftermath of cosmic dawn, when stars and galaxies first lit up the universe, has received nearly $10 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to expand its detector array in South Africa.

The experiment, an international collaboration called the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA, currently has 19 14-meter (42-foot) radio dishes aimed at the southern sky near Carnarvon, South Africa, and will soon up that to 37. The $9.5 million in new funding will allow the array to expand to 240 radio dishes by 2018.

Led by the University of California, Berkeley, HERA will explore the billion-year period after hydrogen gas collapsed into the first stars, perhaps 100 million years after the Big Bang, through the ignition of stars and galaxies throughout the universe. These first brilliant objects flooded the universe with ultraviolet light that split or ionized all the hydrogen atoms between galaxies into protons and electrons to create the universe we see today.

"The first galaxies lit up and started ionizing bubbles of gas around them, and soon these bubbles started percolating and intersecting and making bigger and bigger bubbles," said Aaron Parsons, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy and principal investigator for HERA. "Eventually, they all intersected and you got this über bubble, leaving the universe as we observe it today: Between galaxies the gas is essentially all ionized."

That's the theory, anyway. HERA hopes for the first time to observe this key cosmic milestone and then map the evolution of reionization to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

"We have leaned a ton about the cosmology of our universe from studies of the cosmic microwave background, but those experiments are observing just the thin shell of light that was emitted from a bunch of protons and electrons that finally combined into neutral hydrogen 380,000 years after the Big Bang," he said. "We know from these experiments that the universe started out neutral, and we know that it ended ionized, and we are trying to map out how it transitioned between those two."

"Before the cosmic dawn, the universe glowed from the cosmic microwave background radiation, but there weren't stars lighting up the universe," said David DeBoer, a research astronomer in UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory. "At some point the neutral hydrogen seeded the stars and black holes and galaxies that relit the universe and led to the epoch of reionization."

The HERA array, which could eventually expand to 350 telescopes, consists of radio dishes staring fixedly upwards, measuring radiation originally emitted at a wavelength of 21 centimeters – the hyperfine transition in the hydrogen atom – that has been red-shifted by a factor of 10 or more since it was emitted some 13 billion years ago. The researchers hope to detect the boundaries between bubbles of ionized hydrogen – invisible to HERA – and the surrounding neutral or atomic hydrogen.

Chinese Space Station

Three Words: Chinese. Space. Station.

China just put another small space station into orbit—and by the 2020s they may replace the International Space Station. But private companies are the future of space exploration.

China has just launched its second small Tiangong space station into orbit, more or less catching up to what the United States’ and Russia’s own space programs achieved starting in the 1970s.
Riding atop a Long March rocket, the 34-foot-long, 10-ton Tiangong-2 blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Sept. 15, aiming for an orbit 240 miles over Earth’s surface.
While Beijing’s effort to establish a long-term human presence in orbit is impressive on a political level, on a technological level it’s decades behind the curve. In the United States and elsewhere, private companies are poised to establish a long-term presence in space that doesn’t depend on big, government-run orbital structures.
“China is currently doing nothing in space that the U.S. hasn’t done already, much sooner, and often with a much higher level of technological sophistication,” Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a space expert, told The Daily Beast.
In the race to build orbital habitations, Russia actually beat the United States by a few years when it launched the first of several Salyut stations beginning in 1971. America’s first space station was Skylab, which lasted six years starting in 1973. Today Russia and the United States work together on the International Space Station, which began operation in 1998 and has expanded to include dozens of modules capable of supporting six crew in total, year-round.
Compared to the International Space Station, the single-module Tiangong stations are tiny.
The plan is for a pair of Chinese astronauts to visit Tiangong-2 in October and stay for a month or so—an improvement over the Tiangong-1 station, which managed to support two crew for just eight days in 2012 and 12 days in 2013.
Tiangong-1, China’s first space station, launched in 2011 and decommissioned back in March amid rumors of a technical malfunction. Chances are the older station will plummet back to Earth sometime in 2017 as its orbit decays.
Like its predecessor, Tiangong-2 is supposed to last just a few years. Its replacement could be a third Tiangong station that, like Tiangong-1 and -2, will be temporary. The Chinese space agency is planning to loft a fourth and much larger station in 2020 or later. Assuming the project succeeds, the fourth craft could become the basis of a large, long-lasting space station similar in scale to the International Space Station.
But don’t hold your breath. “The Chinese have quite a bit more work to do before they are ready to start assembling their space station,” Gregory Kulacki, a space expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Daily Beast. “It is possible they could complete that work by 2020, but my guess is that they will need more time.”


In any event, it’s possible the Chinese could have a large, sustainable space station up and running by the time International Space Station finally reaches the end of the line in the mid- to late 2020s. At that point, prolonging the International Space Station’s useful life would take a sizable injection of expensive new technology requiring significant political will. With NASA’s budgets flattening and U.S.-Russian relations at a low point, the space station could begin to look like a pricey liability in Washington and Moscow.
And that’s where China holds an advantage. Sure, the Tiangong stations are small and somewhat archaic—and the larger station they’re meant to support will merely duplicate what the International Space Station achieved in 1998. What’s impressive is that Beijing has managed to plug away steadily at its space stations, year after year, calmly weathering economic crises and political turnover.
Such stability is vital for space programs costing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars and requiring years or even decades of research and development. And in space the Chinese Communist Party has proved remarkably stable. “As many members of the Chinese space community have told me, China is not in a hurry,” Kulacki explained. “They are not racing anyone, and safety is a higher priority than meeting an arbitrary deadline.”
Indeed, the enduring domestic political support for China’s space stations could prove more important than the stations themselves for China’s future as a space power. By contrast, the United States—and, to a lesser extent, other spacefaring countries—is virtually assuming that political will for its own space program will collapse, and private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic will fill the vacuum.
There’s even a company building space stations. In April, Las Vegas space startup Bigelow Aerospace announced an ambitious plan to build at least two inflatable space stations and lob them into orbit starting in 2020. The B330 stations—each featuring its own power, life-support systems, and maneuvering thrusters arranged around a central metal frame—could function as space hotels, orbital factories, and zero-gravity research labs.


CEO Robert Bigelow said he wants to attach the first B330 to the International Space Station in order to expand the station’s volume by as much as a third and, perhaps, help extend its usefulness beyond its planned mid-2020s decommissioning date. “We are hoping we can get the permissions necessary from NASA to say, ‘Yes, let’s attach it,’” Bigelow said.
But even if NASA says no, Bigelow said he will continue developing his inflatable stations. There’s plenty of incentive to do so. Asteroid- and moon-mining—and the associated orbital manufacturing—could mean hefty profits for any company willing to make a big investment in space technology andassume a significant financial risk.
“The new space players such as Bigelow, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic are the future,” Johnson-Freese told The Daily Beast. “The new space players aren’t reliant on political will. They operate on business plans, a much sounder practice and one that will eventually ‘normalize’ space as an area of industrial and geographic development.”
While China tinkers with old school, government-funded orbital stations, the United States—via private enterprise—is laying the foundation for a whole new approach to space exploration.

China’s atomic clock

China’s atomic clock in space will stay accurate for a billion years

China’s new space laboratory has an atomic clock which, Chinese engineers say, is more accurate than the best timepiece operated by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The device, called Cacs, or Cold Atomic Clock in Space, was launched this weak along with other instruments of the Tiangong-2, China’s second orbital lab. According to the South China Morning Post, it will slow down by only one second in a billion years. In comparison, the NIST-F2 atomic clock, which serves as the United States’ primary time and frequency standard, loses a second every 300 million years.
“It is the world’s first cold atomic clock to operate in space... it will have military and civilian applications,” said Professor Xu Zhen from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, who was involved in the Cacs project.
An atomic clock uses vibrations of atoms to measure time, which are very consistent as long as the atoms are held at constant temperature. In fact, since 1967 the definition of second has been “9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium-133 atom.”
In a cold atomic clock, the atoms are cooled down with a laser to decrease the effect of atom movement on the measurements. Cacs goes even further and eliminates the pull of Earth’s gravity by being based in orbit.
Chinese engineers had to miniaturize their device so that it could be sent into space. It can fit in a car trunk, while the NIST-F2, along with all its support equipment, is about the size of a room.
Cacs was launched before the European Space Agency could place their atomic clock, the Pharao, in orbit, which is scheduled to be launched next year. The US abandoned a similar project due to budgetary cuts.
Unlike Pharao, which uses the traditional design with cesium atoms, the Chinese clock uses rubidium atoms. Developers say the element offers better performance in terms of accuracy and reliability.
Cacs is not the most accurate timepiece in the world. German researchers at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt have built an experimental atomic clock, which uses ytterbium ions and is two orders of magnitude more accurate than regular cesium clocks. The device, however, is used only for demonstration purposes, while Cacs is meant for practical applications.
The Chinese plan to improve their BeiDou Navigation Satellite System with synchronization signals from the new orbital atomic clock.