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POPSCosmic crash unmasks dark matter It looks as if it is being seen through lots of little lenses. And each of these lenses represents a piece of dark matter. Astronomers used the Chandra X-ray telescope to map ordinary matter in the merging clusters, mostly in the form of hot gas, which glows brightly in X-rays. As the two clusters that formed MACSJ0025 merged at speeds of millions of kilometres per hour, hot gas in the two clusters collided and slowed down. However, the dark matter kept on going, passing right through the smash-up. The latest astronomical observations suggest that dark matter makes up some 23% of the Universe. Ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4%. The remaining 73% is made up of another mysterious quantity; dark energy, which is responsible for speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
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POPSAmateur spies gassy 'cosmic ghost' Some people get to name an object. Even fewer get to name a new class of object. Now we'll have people scanning the skies for Voorwerps. One day we might even discover what they are. I wonder if they come in different colours?
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POPSAstronomy Picture Of The Day Strong gravitational lenses like SDSSJ1440 are more than oddities -- their multiple properties allow astronomers to determine the mass and dark matter content of the foreground galaxy lenses
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POPSFinding the weight of black holes This is a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in purple) and Hubble Space Telescope (blue) of the giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 4649, located about 51 million light-years from Earth.
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POPSLast shuttle flight set for May 2010 Weather permitting.Then there will be a transition to the new launch vehicles Here is a link to the NASA Constellation program page that includes details of the new launch vehicles Orion, and Ares. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html
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POPSPlan to build telescopes from Moon dust I can't imagine them doing it any other way. After what we've seen with Hubble, The view from the dark side during a full moon, the improvement is likely to be the same magnitude. seems like the deeper we look into the stars, the bigger the Universe seems to get. Maybe we could get clearer readings that would show us where a few more 'earth-like' planets are.
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POPSHungry, hungry black holes The conclusion comes from a large observing campaign of the spiral galaxy M81, which is about 12 million light-years from Earth. In the center of M81 is a black hole that is about 70 million times more massive than the Sun, and generates energy and radiation as it pulls gas in the central region of the galaxy inwards at high speed.
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POPSExperimenting in a galaxy far far away While the readings confirm the laws of physics apply across the known universe, if it had been any other way, it would not only have been a surprise, but physics textbooks would have to be rewritten. Of course, the search has only just begun. The Radio Telescope is only a recent development, and much of what we know about the Universe, has been learned since the Hubble telescope became operational.
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POPSBricks Litter Space Shuttle Launch Pad Grounds Bloody reporters. "Most of the bricks were still scattered over the ground Monday, many of them in fragments, resembling the aftermath of a volcanic eruption." So this one thinks a few thousand bricks looks like the earth has moved. Must have pretty one sided relationships.
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POPSMysterious Outburst from the Edge of the Milky Way The outburst may represent a transitory stage in a star's evolution that is rarely seen. The star has some similarities to highly unstable aging stars called eruptive variables, which suddenly and unpredictably increase in brightness.
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