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 zodiac signs

Aries
March 21 -
April 19

Taurus
April 20 -
May 20

Gemini
May 21 -
June 20

Cancer
June 21 -
July 22

Leo
July 23 -
August 22

Virgo
August 23 -
September 22

Libra
September 23 -
October 22

Scorpio
October 23 -
November 21

Sagittarius
November 22 -
December 21

Capricorn
December 22 -
January 19

Aquarius
January 20 -
February 18

Pisces
February 19 -
March 20

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Space Porch Open for Business

August 7, 2009: The International Space Station has a new "engawa"—and it's open for business.

Engawa is Japanese for "porch," and while that might seem like a strange thing for a space station to have, researchers have been looking forward to the addition for a long time. Space shuttle Endeavour delivered the Japanese-built platform to the ISS on July 22nd and astronauts attached it to Japan's Kibo^1 science lab a day later. Now, when a science experiment requires a dose of hard vacuum or radiation, it can be set "out on the porch" for exposure.

And that's just for starters.

On the new 'Japanese Exposed Facility' [JEF for short], researchers can stage experiments to look up at the cosmos, down at Earth, or around at the environment the ISS voyages through," says Julie Robinson, ISS Program Scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "Besides resembling a porch, this structure has unique features that differentiate it from the experiment exposure points^2 located elsewhere on the station."

For instance, the JEF offers temperature control. Like the space station's other external experiment locations, it has a warming plate for thermal control, but unlike the others the JEF includes a cooling feature.^3 Another advantage is that JEF experiments can be serviced by Kibo’s robotic arm^4.

"The beauty of this is that payloads can be designed to be 'plug and play,'" says Robinson, "so the robotic arm can install them -- no space walk required."

On July 24th, Kibo's arm deftly delivered the first two JEF experiments from the Shuttle payload bay to the porch and positioned them^5. These Japanese experiments are the SEDA-AP^6, short for Space Environment Data Acquisition equipment-Attached Payload, and MAXI^7, or the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image.

"SEDA-AP's sensors will measure the space environment of low Earth orbit -- neutrons, plasma, heavy ions, high-energy light particles, atomic oxygen, and cosmic dust," explains Robinson.

With this experiment, researchers can test the mettle of materials and equipment exposed to the UV light, deep space radiation, and extreme temperatures of space. SEDA-AP will monitor material degradation to help researchers choose the hardiest materials for building future space instruments, equipment, and vehicles.

MAXI is an all-sky X-ray scanner with super-sensitive X-ray slit cameras to search continuously for exploding stars, black holes, and other hot cosmic X-ray sources. Earth's atmosphere absorbs X-rays (lucky for us), so astronomers have to send their sensors to orbit.

"MAXI will look at more than 1000 different X-ray sources and cover the entire sky," says Tai Nakamura^8 of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). Data from MAXI will be broadcast on the Internet. Upon detecting an X-ray source, MAXI's ground communication system will speed alerts to observers across the globe within 30 seconds.

The U.S. has two experiments destined for the JEF this fall: HREP-RAIDS, or the Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System, and HREP-HICO, or the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean.^9

"RAIDS will tell us about upper layers of Earth's atmosphere called the thermosphere and ionosphere," says Robinson. "These layers are tremendously imortant because that is where many spacecraft and satellites orbit. According to the Naval Research Laboratory, RAIDS is the most comprehensive survey of the thermosphere and ionosphere in 20 years."

HICO, also built by Naval Research Laboratory, is a hyperspectral imager for mapping coastal areas.^10 That simply means it collects detailed information on the light reflected from these locations. Traditional multispectral sensors, like Landsat, lump the light measured into only a few bands; hyperspectral sensors have hundreds of bands.

"Hyperspectral sensors are like Landsat on steroids," says Robinson. "But HICO is a test unit that lacks Landsat's spatial resolution. Similar imagers have flown on aircraft, and another hyperspectral imager is on NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite as a technology demonstration."

"The JEF will help us figure out whether HICO would be feasible for a satellite platform. The 'porch' is perfect for proving imaging technologies in space before investing in sophisticated optics for instruments and putting them on satellites. If HICO passes with flying colors and an operational imager is developed, that new imager could provide unprecedented maps of coastal features."

The JEF can host nine different experiments at once and has places for communications equipment, storage, and for berthing Japan's HTV-exposed pallet.

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Star clusters point to black holes ejected from host galaxies

Hypercompact stellar systems result when a supermassive black hole is violently ejected from a galaxy, following a merger with another supermassive black hole.

Provided by Rochester Institute of Technology, NY

July 10, 2009
The tight cluster of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole after it has been violently kicked out of a galaxy represents a new kind of astronomical object and a fossil record of the kick.

A paper in The Astrophysical Journal discusses the theoretical properties of "hypercompact stellar systems" and suggests that hundreds of these faint star clusters might be detected at optical wavelengths in our immediate cosmic environment. Some of these objects may already have been picked up in astronomical surveys, reports David Merritt, from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Jeremy Schnittman, from Johns Hopkins University, and Stefanie Komossa, from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Hypercompact stellar systems result when a supermassive black hole is violently ejected from a galaxy, following a merger with another supermassive black hole. The evicted black hole rips stars from the galaxy as it is thrown out. The stars closest to the black hole move in tandem with the massive object and become a permanent record of the velocity at which the kick occurred.

"You can measure how big the kick was by measuring how fast the stars are moving around the black hole," said Merritt, professor of physics at RIT. "Only stars orbiting faster than the kick velocity remain attached to the black hole after the kick."

These stars carry with them a kind of fossil record of the kick, even after the black hole has slowed down. In principle, you can reconstruct the properties of the kick, which is nice because there would be no other way to do it."

"Finding these objects would be like discovering DNA from a long-extinct species," said Komossa.

The best place to find hypercompact stellar systems, the authors said, is in cluster of galaxies like the nearby Coma and Virgo clusters. These dense regions of space contain thousands of galaxies that have been merging for a long time. Merging galaxies result in merging black holes, which is a prerequisite for the kicks.

"Even if the black hole gets kicked out of one galaxy, it's still going to be gravitationally bound to the whole cluster of galaxies," Merritt said. "The total gravity of all the galaxies is acting on that black hole. If it was ever produced, it's still going to be there somewhere in that cluster."

Merritt and his co-authors think that scientists may have already seen hypercompact stellar systems and not realized it. These objects would be easy to mistake for common star systems like globular clusters. The key signature making hypercompact stellar systems unique is a high internal velocity. This is detectable only by measuring the velocities of stars moving around the black hole, a difficult measurement that would require a long time exposure on a large telescope.

From time to time, a hypercompact stellar system will make its presence known in a much more dramatic way, when one of the stars is tidally disrupted by the supermassive black hole. In this case, gravity stretches the star and sucks it into the black hole. The star is torn apart, causing a beacon-like flare that signals a black hole.

"The only contact of these floating black holes with the rest of the universe is through their armada of stars with an occasional display of stellar fireworks to signal 'here we are,'" Merritt said.

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Baby Stars Finally Found in Jumbled Galactic Center

06.10.09

 

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows three baby stars in the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Full image and caption

These data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal a newborn star at the center of our Milky Way. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Full image and caption PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic place, but they're baffled as to how this occurs. Confounding the problem is all the dust standing between us and the center of our galaxy. Until now, nobody had been able to definitively locate any baby stars.

"These stars are like needles in a haystack," said Solange Ramirez, the principal investigator of the research program at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "There's no way to find them using optical light, because dust gets in the way. We needed Spitzer's infrared instruments to cut through the dust and narrow in on the objects."

The team plans to look for additional baby stars in the future, and ultimately to piece together what types of conditions allow stars to form in such an inhospitable environment as our galaxy's core.

"By studying individual stars in the galactic center, we can better understand how stars are formed in different interstellar environments," said Deokkeun An of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, lead author of a paper submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "The Milky Way galaxy is just one of more than hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe. However, our galaxy is so special because we can take a closer look at its individual stellar components." An started working on this program while a graduate student at Ohio State University, Columbus, under the leadership of Ohio State astronomer Kris Sellgren, the co-investigator on the project.

The core of the Milky Way is a mysterious place about 600 light-years across (light would take 600 years to travel from one end to the other). While this is just a fraction of the size of the entire Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years across, the core is stuffed with 10 percent of all the gas in the galaxy -- and loads and loads of stars.

Before now, there were only a few clues that stars can form in the galaxy's core. Astronomers had found clusters of massive adolescent stars, in addition to clouds of charged gas -- a sign that new stars are beginning to ignite and ionize surrounding gas. Past attempts had been unsuccessful in finding newborn stars, or as astronomers call them, young stellar objects.

Ramirez and colleagues began their search by scanning large Spitzer mosaics of our galactic center. They narrowed in on more than 100 candidates, but needed more detailed data to confirm the stars' identities. Young stellar objects, when viewed from far away, can look a lot like much older stars. Both types of stars are very dusty, and the dust lying between us and them obscures the view even further.

To sort through the confusion, the astronomers looked at their candidate stars with Spitzer's spectrograph – an instrument that breaks light apart to reveal its rainbow-like array of infrared colors. Molecules around stars leave imprints in their light, which the spectrograph can detect.

The results revealed three stars with clear signs of youth, for example, certain warm, dense gases. These youthful features are found in other places in the galaxy where stars are being formed.

"It is amazing to me that we have found these stars," said Ramirez. "The galactic center is a very interesting place. It has young stars, old stars, black holes, everything. We started mining a catalog of about 1 million sources and managed to find three young stars -- stars that will help reveal the secrets at the core of the Milky Way."

The young stellar objects are all less than about 1 million years old. They are embedded in cocoons of gas and dust, which will eventually flatten to disks that, according to theory, later lump together to form planets.

Other collaborators include Richard Arendt of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; A. C. Adwin Boogert of NASA's Herschel Science Center, Caltech in Pasadena; Mathias Schultheis of the Besancon Observatory in France; Susan Stolovy of NASA's Spitzer Science Center, Caltech in Pasadena; Angela Cotera of SETI Institute, Mountain View, Calif.; and Thomas Robitaille and Howard Smith of Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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Physicist Stephen Hawking rushed to hospital  

LONDON (Reuters) - Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time" who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.

Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he is a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

"Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's Hospital," the university said.

A university spokesman said his condition was described as comfortable and that he would be kept in hospital overnight.

Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, had been ill for a couple of weeks, with his condition deteriorating since he returned from a trip to the United States at the weekend, a source said.

He canceled an appearance at Arizona State University on April 6 due to a chest infection. A pre-recorded lecture was played to a science conference instead.

He has previously been treated for pneumonia and the source said it appeared his latest illness was related to the chest infection, although he stressed there was no diagnosis yet.

The head of Cambridge's applied mathematics department expressed hope that Hawking would recover.

"Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague," said Peter Haynes. "We all hope he will be amongst us again soon."

GLOBAL RENOWN

Hawking is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. He achieved global recognition with the publication in 1988 of "A Brief History of Time," an account of the origins of the universe.

Hawking began suffering from motor neurone disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world's leading scientific authorities, and is constantly called upon to comment on new discoveries in astronomy and physics.

He raised his profile in popular culture with guest appearances in "Star Trek" and the cartoons "Futurama" and "The Simpsons." In 2007, he took a zero-gravity flight over the Atlantic Ocean in an adapted Boeing 727 jet.

Since 1974, the Oxford-educated scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics -- Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.

As a result of his research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: "real time," or time as human beings experience it, and "imaginary time," the time on which the world may really run.

"The universe is self-contained, and without boundary, in imaginary time. However, in real time, the universe will appear to begin at the Big Bang (the explosion thought to be at the origin of the universe)," Hawking has said.

"The laws of physics will hold everywhere, so it is not necessary to believe that God intervened to set it going."

Motor neurone disease is a catch-all name for a family of muscle wasting diseases that includes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease in the United States.

Although Hawking is virtually paralyzed, he has a slow-progressive form of the disease.

Hawking, who is due to step down as Cambridge's Lucasian professor of Mathematics when he turns 70, has been married twice. He has three children by his first wife.

(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Charles Dick)

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The Principle of Emptiness
 

Emptiness is a spiritual concept that is best defined by the Tao Te Ching. The true nature of the cosmos is emptiness, the universe is almost 100% empty space. The reason we sense the material world as solid is that the solid particles are moving so fast we sense them in millions of places as if at once.

An empty mind is in a state of meditation, an empty mind can receive insight which is always fresh and present oriented. Communicated insight becomes old and stale and contributes to the accumulation of knowledge rather than the depth of understanding.

The principle of emptiness basically refers to the meaninglessness of phenomenon. Whatever meaning is interpreted from any action or circumstance is wholly illusory and subjective.

The Tao Te Ching reads:

Become totally empty
Quiet the restlessness of the mind
Only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness
See all things flourish and dance in endless variation
And once again merge back into perfect emptiness
Their true repose
Their true nature
Emerging, flourishing, dissolving back again
This is the eternal process of return
To know this process brings enlightenment
To miss this process brings disaster

Again the Tao Te Ching:

Know That which is beyond all beginnings
And you will know everything here and now
Know everything in this moment
And you will know the Eternal Tao

The fullness of the present moment is framed by the emptiness of the past and the emptiness of the future. Misunderstanding this emptiness is the basis of all illusion.

We are empty vessels. As long as the ego seeks fulfillment from the outer world enlightenment and contentment are not possible. We cannot seek for the truth and acquire it as if it were a rare object, Rather truth flows from the plenum of the void and fills the emptiness and expresses itself through us in appearance, language, and behavior. It flows like a river, it cannot be stored as knowledge and experience, nor even as wisdom.

Bruce is a Reiki Master/Teacher and has a masters of divinity with a focus on the major world religions including both Western and Eastern faiths. He is a Tantra Master and has a self-realized style of teaching and practicing this ancient mystic art. Bruce is ordained in the Universal Life Church and is a member of the prestigious Monastery. He has been ordained through the Church of Spiritual Humanism as well. He has a unique approach to conflict resolution, intimacy and relationship issues, and practices what he calls reality guidance.

The combination of reality guidance and the practice of Reiki enables the client to resolve stress, anger, and anxiety issues without years of psychotherapy.

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Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth

                                   

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.

The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

"Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.

"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said.

A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.

The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.

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 کمتر از ۳ روز به سال جهانی نجوم و تولد من !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                          سال نجومی خوبی داشته باشین.       

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Fingers, Loops and Bays in the Crab Nebula

 

 

This image gives the first clear view of the faint boundary of the Crab Nebula's X-ray-emitting pulsar wind nebula. The nebula is powered by a rapidly-rotating, highly-magnetized neutron star, or "pulsar" (white dot near the center). The combination of rapid rotating and strong magnetic field generates an intense electromagnetic field that creates jets of matter and anti-matter moving away from the north and south poles of the pulsar, and an intense wind flowing out in the equatorial direction.

The inner X-ray ring is thought to be a shock wave that marks the boundary between the surrounding nebula and the flow of matter and antimatter particles from the pulsar. Energetic electrons and positrons (antielectrons) move outward from this ring to brighten the outer ring and produce an extended X-ray glow.

The fingers, loops, and bays in the image all indicate that the magnetic field of the nebula and filaments of cooler matter are controlling the motion of the electrons and positrons. The particles can move rapidly along the magnetic field and travel several light years before radiating away their energy. In contrast, they move much more slowly perpendicular to the magnetic field, and travel only a short distance before losing their energy.

This effect can explain the long, thin, fingers and loops, as well as the sharp boundaries of the bays. The conspicuous dark bays on the lower right and left are likely due to the effects of a toroidal magnetic field that is a relic of the progenitor star.

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Seward

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سلام .

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