Tag Archives: space news

Using Einstein’s Theory, Brightest Galaxy 10000 Million Light Years Away Discovered

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Using Albert Einstein’s gravitational lensing theory, scientists have discovered a galaxy at about 10,000 million light years away but thousand times brighter than the nearest Milky Way.

Anastasio Diaz-Sanches from Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain used gravitational lensing phenomenon found by Einstein to magnify the apparent image of the original object.

“Thanks to the gravitational lens” explained Sánchez, “produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is.” It appears as several images on an arc centred on the densest part of the cluster, known as ‘Einstein Ring’.

To measure it they used the Gran Telescopio Canarias at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in Garafía, La Palma. The advantage of this type of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, enabling the study of very distant objects as if they were much nearer.

The galaxy is forming stars at a rate of 1,000 solar masses per year, compared to the Milky Way which is forming stars at a rate of some twice a solar mass per year. Susana Iglesias-Groth, co-author of the research said, “This type of objects harbour the most powerful star forming regions known in the universe. The next step will be to study their molecular content”.

The research findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The fact that the galaxy is so bright, its light is gravitationally amplifed, and has multiple images allows us to look into its internal properties, which would otherwise not be possible with such distant galaxies.

“In the future we will be able to make more detailed studies of its star formation using interferometers such ast the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA/IRAM),in France, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), in Chile,” said IAC researcher Helmut Dannerbauer, who is another contributor to the paper.

‘Star Trek’ Fiction Comes True, China Succeeds in Quantum Teleportation

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Chinese scientists have achieved a breakthrough in much-awaited quantum teleportation when they successfully teleported photons to an orbiting satellite 300 miles above, paving the way for a future unhackable quantum Internet.

In Star trek, Scotty beams up crew to distant locations anytime and in the latest experiment, Chinese researchers were able to beam photons from a ground station in Ngari, Tibet to their Micius satellite, which is orbiting 300 miles above in the sky.

“Space-scale teleportation can be realised and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum internet,” said the team of authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Explaining the process, their research paper said, “An arbitrary unknown quantum state cannot be precisely measured or perfectly replicated. However, quantum teleportation allows faithful transfer of unknown quantum states from one object to another over long distance, without physical travelling of the object itself.”

Teleportation also enhances capabilities of unhackable large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation. In previous experiments, photons were lost in optical fibres or space channels after about 100-km distance.

Chinese experiment was based on satellite platform and space-based link, which can conveniently connect two remote points on the Earth with greatly reduced channel loss because most of the photons’ propagation path is in empty space, they said.

The team was able to teleport independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite – through an up-link channel – with a distance of up to 1,400 km. To optimize the link efficiency and overcome the atmospheric turbulence in the up-link, a series of techniques are developed, including a compact ultra-bright source of multi-photon entanglement, narrow beam divergence, high-bandwidth and high-accuracy acquiring, pointing, and tracking (APT).

“We demonstrate successful quantum teleportation for six input states in mutually unbiased bases with an average fidelity of 0.80+/-0.01, well above the classical limit. This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet,” they said.

NASA’s Juno to Fly Directly Over Jupiter’s Mysterious Red Spot Now

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft is all set for another manoeuvre on July 10, flying directly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the gas giant’s iconic, 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm.

This meanoeuvre will be humanity’s first close-up view of the gigantic storm being monitored since 1830 and possibly existing for more than 350 years on Jupiter, making it mysterious and puzzling.

“Jupiter’s mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This monumental storm has raged on the solar system’s biggest planet for centuries. Now, Juno and her cloud-penetrating science instruments will dive in to see how deep the roots of this storm go, and help us understand how this giant storm works and what makes it so special,” said a NASA report.

The July 10 flyby will Juno’s sixth on to the gas giant’s mysterious cloud tops. Since Juno’s perijove is on Monday, July 10, at 6:55 pm PDT (9:55 pm EDT), Juno will be about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops.

In its closest reach lasting for 11 minutes and 33 seconds, Juno will cover another 24,713 miles (39,771 kilometers) and will be directly above the coiling crimson cloud tops of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, said NASA. The spacecraft will bee about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the Giant Red Spot clouds and all its 8 instruments and its camera JunoCam, will be directly on the storm during the flyby.

“The success of science collection at Jupiter is a testament to the dedication, creativity and technical abilities of the NASA-Juno team,” said Rick Nybakken, project manager for Juno from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Each new orbit brings us closer to the heart of Jupiter’s radiation belt, but so far the spacecraft has weathered the storm of electrons surrounding Jupiter better than we could have ever imagined.”

As US is celebrating its Independence Day on July 4, Juno will have logged exactly one year in Jupiter orbit.

 

Cassini Takes Plunge Into Saturn, Scientists Cross-Fingered

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In its line up for final plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, Cassini has once again taken a proximal plunge into the surface of Saturn on June 29, 2017. The final plunge is scheduled for mid-September.

The Cosmic Dust Analyzer’s (CDA) science team, in Germany adjusted the instrument’s settings this week based on experience in recent “proximal” passages between Saturn’s rings and atmosphere. They have created a string of 39 commands that would set the instrument to make the best possible observations during the next proximal plunge. Now the instrument’s data-collection rate has been adjusted to 4 kilobits per second, thus making sure all ring-particle impacts would be sensed.

Here is a week-long update previous to the plunge:

Wednesday, June 21 (DOY 172)

Writers, bloggers, photographers, educators, students, artists and others who use social media to engage specific audiences are encouraged to apply for special access to Cassini’s Grand Finale event in mid-September.

Thursday, June 22 (DOY 173)

The Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) turned and looked at Saturn’s large icy moon Dione for 3.5 hours today. The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS), the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) – all the other Optical Remote-Sensing (ORS) instruments – rode along to make observations as well. CIRS’s goal was to measure Dione’s surface emissivity at thermal-infrared wavelengths, which hold clues to the composition and structure of that moon’s regolith.

Friday, June 23 (DOY 174)

Beginning late today, the spacecraft trained its High-Gain Antenna dish on the distant Earth. It then accurately tracked our planet for a total of 28 hours. Accordingly, the Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) team had Cassini power on its S-band (2 GHz) and Ka-band (32 GHz) radio transmitters, which directed their beams of energy out the HGA along with the main communications beam at X-band (8 GHz).

The result was a high-precision measurement of Saturn’s gravitation, which will be analyzed to reveal deviations from spherical symmetry.

Saturday, June 24 (DOY 175)

CIRS observed the dark side of Saturn’s A ring at far-infrared wavelengths for five hours today, with the other ORS instruments riding along. In addition to studying ring-particle compositions, the observation was part of a campaign to compare the spectral properties of ices among different regions of Saturn’s rings and icy moons.

Cassini and Titan happened to come close to one another today, to a distance about the same as that from Earth to our own Moon.

Sunday, June 25 (DOY 176)

This week’s Titan observing wrapped up with its final 4.3 hours devoted to observing clouds on the planet-like moon; VIMS rode along.

Monday, June 26 (DOY 177)

ISS turned and spent 7.7 hours observing Saturn’s irregular moon Bebhionn, an object of about six kilometers diameter, which orbits Saturn in an inclined ellipse that reaches as far as 25.1 million km from the planet. It might have a binary or contact-binary nature. Bebhionn was named after the goddess of birth in early Irish mythology.

The flight team held a Command Approval Meeting fine-tuning commands with consent from representatives from each of the affected spacecraft subsystems and instruments.

Tuesday, June 27 (DOY 178)

UVIS observed. Ten minutes after the Deep Space Network (DSN) station in Australia acquired Cassini’s downlink, its 18-kilowatt transmitter was turned on, and comands were sent. After a round-trip of 2 hours 31 minutes, telemetry confirmed that the commands had been received and were ready to take effect right before Cassini’s eleventh proximal plunge on June 29.

A total of 58 individual commands were uplinked, and about 1,625 megabytes of science and engineering telemetry data were downlinked and captured at rates as high as 142,201 bits per second.

Wrap up:

Cassini is executing its set of 22 Grand Finale Proximal orbits, which have a period of 6.5 days, in a plane inclined 61.9 degrees from the planet’s equatorial plane. Each orbit stretches out to an apoapsis altitude of about 1,272,000 km from Saturn, where the spacecraft’s planet-relative speed is around 6,000 km/hr. At periapsis, the distance shrinks to about 2,500 km above Saturn’s visible atmosphere on the planet’s total 120,660 km in diameter with a speed of 123,000 km/hr.

ISRO Launches PSLV-C36 Remote Sensing Satellite

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In its 38th flight (PSLV-C36), ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully launched the 1,235 kg RESOURCESAT-2A Satellite on Wednesday morning (December 07, 2016) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota.

After PSLV-C36 lift-off at 10:25 am IST from the First Launch Pad with the ignition of the first stage, the subsequent important flight events, namely, strap-on ignitions and separations, first stage separation, second stage ignition, payload fairing separation, second stage separation, third stage ignition and separation, fourth stage ignition and cut-off, took place as planned.

After a flight of 17 minutes 05 seconds, the vehicle achieved a polar Sun Synchronous Orbit of 824 km height inclined at an angle of 98.725 degree to the equator (very close to the intended orbit) and 47 seconds later, RESOURCESAT-2A was separated from the PSLV fourth stage.

After separation, the two solar arrays of RESOURCESAT-2A deployed automatically and ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) at Bangalore took over the control of the satellite. In the coming days, the satellite will be brought to its final operational configuration following which it will begin to provide imagery from its three cameras. The data sent by RESOURCESAT-2A will be useful for agricultural applications like crop area and crop production estimation, drought monitoring, soil mapping, cropping system analysis and farm advisories generation.

Like its predecessors RESOURCESAT-1 and 2, RESOURCESAT-2A has a unique 3-Tier imaging system with Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS), Linear Imaging Self Scanner-3 (LISS-3) and Linear Imaging Self Scanner-4 (LISS-4) cameras. The AWiFS provides images with a sampling of 56 metres, a swath of 740 km and a revisit of 5 days whereas the LISS-3 provides 23.5 metre sampled images with 141 km swath and a repitivity of 24 days. LISS-4 provides 5.8 metre sampled images with 70 km swath and a revisit of 5 days.

"With today’s launch, the PSLV has yet again demonstrated its reliability," said ISRO in a statement. The total number of satellites launched by India’s workhorse launch vehicle PSLV including today’s RESOURCESAT-2A has now reached 122, of which 43 are Indian and the remaining 79 are from abroad.

Indian Origin Scientist Makes it to 36 NASA Fellows of 2016 Final List

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NASA has selected 36 fellows for its prestigious Einstein, Hubble and Sagan fellowships, including one Indian called Dheeraj Pasham from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, who will conduct research on “Quest for the Elusive Intermediate-mass Black Holes”.

 

Dheeraj Pasham

Dheeraj Pasham (“DJ”) received his Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2004. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in College Park (2014) where he focused on X-ray timing studies to understand the nature of ultraluminous X-ray sources in order to answer the question of whether they host stellar-mass or intermediate-mass black holes.

As an Einstein fellow at MIT, he plans to apply and extend his expertise in time series analysis to (1) identify and weigh intermediate-mass black holes, and (2) address the many open questions concerning the tidal disruption of stars by supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes.

See full bio of other selected scientists here.

Each post-doctoral fellowship provides three years of support to awardees to pursue independent research in astronomy and astrophysics. The new fellows will begin their programs in the fall of 2016 at a host university or research center of their choosing in the United States.

“The selected fellows are some of the brightest, rising stars in the field of astronomy and astrophysics,” said Paul Hertz, director of Astrophysics at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “We look forward to the exciting discoveries they make that further our understanding of the universe.”