Newfound Planet Orbits Backward

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.

A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.

The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.

"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery.

What's going on

A star forms when a cloud of gas and dust collapses. Whatever movement the cloud had becomes intensified as it condenses, determining the rotational direction of the star. How planets form is less certain. They are, however, known to develop out of the leftover, typically disk-shaped mass of gas and dust that swirls around a newborn star, so whatever direction that material is moving, which is the direction of the star's rotation, becomes the direction of the planet's orbit.

WASP-17 likely had a close encounter with a larger planet, and the gravitational interaction acted like a slingshot to put WASP-17 on its odd course, the astronomers figure.

"I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away," Seager told SPACE.com. "There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it."

Cosmic collisions are not uncommon. Earth's moon was made when our planet collided with a Mars-sized object, astronomers think. And earlier this week NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence of two planets colliding around a distant, young star. Some moons in our solar system are on retrograde orbits, perhaps at least in some cases because they were flying through space alone and then captured; that's thought to be the case with Neptune's large moon Triton.

The find was made by graduate students David Anderson at Keele University and Amaury Triaud of the Geneva Observatory.

Bloated world

WASP-17 is about half the mass of Jupiter but bloated to twice its size. "This planet is only as dense as expanded polystyrene, 70 times less dense than the planet we're standing on," said professor Coel Hellier of Keele University.

The bloated planet can be explained by a highly elliptical orbit, which brings it close to the star and then far away. Like exaggerated tides on Earth, the tidal effects on WASP-17 heat and stretch the planet, the researchers suggest.

The tides are not a daily affair, however. "Instead it's creating a huge amount of friction on the inside of the planet and generating a lot of energy, which might be making the planet big and puffy," Seager said.

WASP-17 is the 17th extrasolar planet found by the WASP project, which monitors hundreds of thousands of stars, watching for small dips in their light when a planet transits in front of them. NASA's Kepler space observatory is using the same technique to search for Earth-like worlds.

- SPACE.com

Malaysians can observe meteor shower tonight

Malaysians will be able to sight up to a total of 100 Perseid meteors per hour streaking across the northern sky in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Astronomy Atmospheric Science Unit lecturer Assoc Prof Dr Chong Hon Yew said that according to the International Meteor Organisation (IMO). the meteor shower is expected to be best viewed from 1.30am to 4am on Thursday.

“The shower could have started on July 24 and is expected to be observed until Aug 17.

“It is however predicted that during the peak viewing time (Thursday morning), the moon will be high in the sky, outshining the fainter meteors.

“There is a good chance for observers to spot the brighter meteors however,” he said on Wednesday.

Dr Chong also hoped the weather would be favourable for the Perseids to be seen.

Those who miss tomorrow’s meteor shower may still catch a “lesser version” after midnight Thursday, or early Friday morning.

Dr Chong said the Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle which are usually fast, bright and occasionally leave persistent trains.

“The point they come from lies in the constellation of Perseus,” he said.

The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2,000 years, with the first known sighting coming from the Far East.

Every year in August, the Earth passes through rock and dust fragments left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. As these small particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere, they burn up, often creating a startling streak of light across the sky.

The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the greatest activity between Aug 8 and Aug 14, peaking at about Aug 12.

Dr Chong said the meteor shower can be observed with the naked eye.

- THE STAR

Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It is the first time motions of individual stars have been measured in a galaxy so distant.

While the stars' swiftness is notable, stars in other galaxies have been observed to travel at similarly high speeds. In those situations, it was usually because they were interlopers from outside, or circling close to a black hole.

But in this case, the stars' high velocities help astronomers confirm that the galaxy they belong to really is as massive as earlier data suggested.

Bizarre, indeed

The compact nature of this and similar galaxies in the faraway early universe is puzzling to scientists, who don't yet understand why some young, massive galaxies are about five times smaller than their counterparts today.

"A lot of people were thinking we had overestimated these masses in the past," said Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, leader of the new study. "But this confirms they are extremely massive for their size. These galaxies are indeed as bizarre as we thought they were."

Scientists used the new velocity measurements, conducted with the Gemini South telescope in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope, to test the mass of a galaxy identified as 1255-0. The same way that the sun's gravity determines the orbiting speed of the Earth, the galaxy's gravity, and thus its mass, determines the velocities of the stars inside it.

The researchers found that indeed, the galaxy is exceptionally dense.

Given its distance of 11 billion light-years, galaxy 1255-0 is seen as it existed 11 billion years ago, less than 3 billion years after the theoretical Big Bang. Among other galaxies we can observe from this time period, about 30 to 40 percent are compact like this one. But in the modern, nearby universe, astronomers don't find anything similar.

Something wrong?

Somehow, high-mass galaxies from the young universe grow in size but not in mass – they spread out but maintain their overall heft – to become the high-mass galaxies we see today.

"It's a bit of a puzzle," van Dokkum told SPACE.com. "We think these galaxies must grow through collisions with other galaxies. The weird thing is that these mergers must lead to galaxies that are larger in size but not much more massive. We need a mechanism that grows them in size but not in mass."

So far, such a mechanism is elusive, but astronomers have some ideas. Perhaps these galaxies expand their girth by merging with many small, low-mass galaxies. Or maybe these galaxies eventually become the dense central regions of even larger galaxies.

"It could also still be that we are doing something wrong," van Dokkum said. "But I think at the moment you could say that the ball is somewhat in the court of the theorists. Hopefully they can come up with some kind of explanation that we can test further."

- SPACE.com

Another eclipse

We are currently in one of the most negative periods of the year.

The 21st century’s longest total solar eclipse will occur on July 22 and in Indian astrology, this is an inauspicious event. People have to be extra careful because it will have a negative impact on them.

The eclipse will be visible in India, Nepal, China, Hawaii and over the Pacific Ocean and will last for up to 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

The path of the Moon’s umbral shadow will begin in India and cross through into Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. After leaving mainland Asia, the eclipse will cross into Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and curve southeast through the Pacific Ocean.

A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the Moon’s penumbral shadow, which will include most of eastern Asia, and the Pacific Ocean.

A dark red shadow will creep across the sun and this can be observed in Malaysia from 9.07am to 9.48am on July 22.

Astrologically, this eerie dark light is viewed as inauspicious and it will cause some form of discomfort. Any eclipse signals a time to be wary and this is especially true if the sun is involved because all living beings are dependent on the sun for light.

As I have said in an article in January about a solar eclipse which occurred during the Chinese New Year, the power of negative energy is said to increase during such a time. When the environment becomes conducive for negative energy to amass, the chances of it affecting people increases.

The impact of the negative energies when the sun is obscured causes a lack of courage, fatigue and low self-esteem.

People are advised not to carry out activities as usual during the eclipse period as they may behave irrationally. Everyday activities that should be avoided during the time of the eclipse are sleeping, conjugal relations, swimming, holding meetings and weddings and all religious or special events.

- THE STAR

New type of black hole found

Astronomers on Wednesday said they had identified an intermediate class of black hole that could explain how supermassive, light-sucking monsters develop in the heart of galaxies.

Their find -- a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, on the fringe of galaxy ESO 243-249 -- is reported in the latest issue of Nature, the British-based science journal.

In terms of size, it lies between supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times the mass of the Sun, and relative tiddlers, which are between three and 20 solar masses.

Black holes are among the most powerful forces in the Universe. They are concentrated fields of gravity which are so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape them.

Stellar-mass black holes are believed to have been created from the death throes of massive stars.

But there is less consensus over how supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centre of galaxies, including the Milky Way, are formed.

"One theory is supermassive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate-mass black holes," said lead author Sean Farrell, an astrophysicist at Britain's University of Leicester.

"To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes."

As black holes do not emit light, the existence and size of the intermediate black hole was detected thanks to its "ultra-luminous" X-ray emissions, spotted by Europe's XMM-Newton orbital telescope.

- AFP

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."

Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said.

He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.

"It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said.

Mayor's main planet-hunting competitor, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, praised the find of Gliese 581 e as "the most exciting discovery" so far of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system.

"This discovery is absolutely extraordinary," Marcy told The Associated Press by e-mail, calling the discoveries a significant step in the search for Earth-like planets.

While Gliese 581 e is too hot for life "it shows that nature makes such small planets, probably in large numbers," Marcy commented. "Surely the galaxy contains tens of billions of planets like the small, Earth-mass one announced here."

Nearly 350 planets have been found outside our solar system, but so far nearly every one of them was found to be extremely unlikely to harbor life.

Most were too close or too far from their sun, making them too hot or too cold for life. Others were too big and likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Those that are too small are highly difficult to detect in the first place.

Both Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 e are located in constellation Libra and orbit around Gliese 581.

Like other planets circling that star — scientists have discovered four so far — Gliese 581 e was found using the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile.

The telescope has a special instrument which splits light to find wobbles in different wavelengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

"It is great work and shows the potential of this detection method," said Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

- AP

Shuttle Discovery blasts off for space station

The U.S. space shuttle Discovery blasted off its seaside launch pad on Sunday with a pair of solar wing panels and the first Japanese resident astronaut for the International Space Station.

NASA shook off a month of delays to launch its 125th shuttle mission at 7:43 p.m. EDT (2343 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"We had a little bit of a wait but that'll just make the payoff that much sweeter," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach radioed to the Discovery crew shortly before liftoff.

"Thanks for the work. We'll see you in a couple of weeks," shuttle commander Lee Archambault replied.

There was no sign of the hydrogen fuel leak that shut down Discovery's launch attempt last week and no issues with valves in the ship's engines that triggered four previous delays. In the final hour before launch, even Florida's notoriously fickle weather was perfect.

The shuttle rode into the clear sky trailing a column of pale smoke that turned into a knot of bright pink as it caught the light of the setting sun. Two and a half minutes into its climb to orbit the ship dropped its booster rockets, which could be seen drifting back to Earth as pinpoints of light against the darkening sky.

Discovery will spend the next 13 days in orbit, speeding around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,160 kph). For eight of those days it will be lodged at the space station, which is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction 225 miles (360 km) above Earth.

The space station is about 75 percent complete. When it's finished it will be larger than a full sized soccer field.

The primary goal of the mission is to deliver the last piece of the station's 11-part external backbone, the structural spine of the $100 billion outpost.

FULL POWER

The $300 million truss segment in Discovery's cargo hold contains the final set of solar wing panels to bring the station up to full power, with 120 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to power 42 homes of 2,800 square-feet.

"That's a pretty healthy neighborhood," said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.

The power boost will pave the way for NASA and its 15 partners to double the station's crew size from three to six members as early as May.

Japan's tenure as a prime station operator begins sooner. Discovery's seven-man crew includes Koichi Wakata, 45, who will be left behind on the space station as Japan's first resident crew member. NASA last year delivered and installed the main components of Japan's Kibo laboratory at the orbital complex.

"It is over 20 years since Japan started this endeavor, in participating in the International Space Station program," Wakata, a veteran of two previous shuttle missions, said in a preflight interview.

"To be able to conduct a variety of experiments, we need to be able to stay on board the space station on a long duration," he said. "I am very fortunate to be able to participate in a long-duration flight to fully utilize the Kibo module."

Joining Wakata are commander Lee Archambault, 48; pilot Dominic "Tony" Antonelli, 41; flight engineer and lead spacewalker Steven Swanson, 48; spacewalkers Joseph Acaba, 41, and Richard Arnold, 45; and John Phillips, 57, who already has served as a resident space station crewmember.

The crew plans to conduct three spacewalks to hook up the new solar wings and prepare the outpost for future additions.

Discovery also will be delivering parts to fix the station's water purification system, which recycles urine and condensate into clean water for drinking. The system was delivered during the shuttle's last mission in November, but stopped working shortly thereafter.

NASA has eight flights remaining to complete space station assembly before retiring the shuttle fleet next year. A proposal to fly a ninth mission to the station to deliver a dark matter experiment is pending before Congress.

The U.S. space agency also plans to fly a final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope in May.

- REUTERS
www.reuters.com

NASA rocket failure blow to Earth-watching network

A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch Tuesday, dealing a major setback to NASA's already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.

The $280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth to worsen global warming?

"It's definitely a setback. We were already well behind," said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton's administration. "The program was weak, and now it's really weak."

For about a decade, scientists have complained of a decline in the study of Earth from space. NASA spent more money looking at other planets than it did at Earth in 2007. That same year, the National Academy of Sciences warned that NASA's study of Earth "is at great risk" with fewer missions than before and aging satellites.

"We have a very weakened Earth-observing system just at a time where we need every bit of data that we could possibly get," said Elisabeth Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

She said NASA has fallen behind Europe in environmental satellites. Japan successfully launched a carbon dioxide tracking satellite just last month.

The NASA satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, was meant to explain Earth's capture of carbon dioxide, which now appears to be slowing and could accelerate global warming, said Holland, who helped write the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Minutes after launch Tuesday in California, the satellite fell back to Earth near Antarctica not far from where environment ministers and scientists met Monday to talk about climate change. NASA officials said a protective cover on the satellite did not release and fall away, and the extra weight meant the satellite could not reach orbit.

"This was going to be one of the few bright spots in the Earth-observing system for the last five years," Holland said.

The future was starting to look better for the scientists, who had felt ignored. Last year, NASA talked about being "greener" and gave initial approval to six new Earth-observing missions. This month, the Obama administration put $400 million in the stimulus program for NASA science, and NASA's science chief Ed Weiler said "it was all going to Earth sciences."

"It's very unfortunate that it happened just at this time when we trying to get Earth observations back on track," said Ruth DeFries, a Columbia University professor who was part of the National Academy study team.

Until Japan's launch, scientists have depended on land-based stations to monitor carbon dioxide at low altitudes. The Japanese probe uses a different technique to measure carbon dioxide and does so from a different orbit compared to NASA's satellite.

Tuesday's failure put on hold the launch of another NASA satellite, Glory, which will look at solar radiation and airborne particles that reflect and trap sunlight. That satellite will launch on the same kind of rocket, the Taurus XL.

NASA needs to figure out what went wrong before Glory is launched, Weiler said. It was the first major NASA mission launch failure since September 2001. An earlier version of the Taurus rocket, made by Orbital Sciences near Washington, failed, and an environmental satellite was lost.

But the Taurus rocket has a long history of success and has never had this type of cover problem before, said John Brunschwyler, project manager for Orbital Sciences.

But now NASA is facing a big question: Should it build a duplicate of the dead satellite?

Researchers on the satellite team are pushing NASA to do that, said Graeme Stephens, a Colorado State University professor who worked on the project. The project was nine years in the making, and the mission was supposed to last two years.

A duplicate would be significantly cheaper than $280 million to build and launch because much early work does not have to be repeated, Weiler said. It could be built relatively quickly.

But one of the missions that NASA was considering speeding up with the new stimulus money was a more sophisticated and costly follow-up to the failed satellite.

It makes more sense to go ahead with that project, said Berrien Moore III, who headed the National Academy study and is executive director of Climate Central, a Princeton, New Jersey, climate change think-tank. Weiler said a decision will be made during the next several weeks.

"Our commitment to Earth sciences is clearly unwavered by this," Weiler said.

- REUTERS

Album - Vega Solar System

In 1983 astronomers discovered that the star Vega is surrounded by a disk of small particles, probably dust, rock, and ice. Vega was the first star other than the Sun known to be orbited by such a disk.

SIARAN LANGSUNG (LIVE TELECAST) Gerhana Bulan (Lunar Eclipse) dari Planetarium Negara, Malaysia

Siaran Langsung (Live telecast) oleh Agensi Angkasa Negara, Malaysia (ANGKASA) dari Planetarium Negara, Kuala Lumpur.

Masa mula : 8.39 malam

Masa tamat : 11.38 malam

SILA KE LAMAN WEB ANGKASA:
http://www.angkasa.gov.my/live_webcasting

Eclipse of the moon this Monday, 9 Feb 2009

Malaysians will get the chance to observe a penumbral eclipse of the moon for four hours on Monday, 9 February 2009 starting from 8.39pm, said the National Space Agency (Angkasa).

In a statement, the agency said that the phenomenon would be easily visible as 89.9% of the moon’s disc would be in the shadow of the earth’s penumbra.

In general, lunar eclipse occurs when Moon passes Earth’s shadow during full Moon as shown in Diagram 1. On the 9 February, eclipse will be easily visible to the naked eye as 89.9% of the Moon’s disk is immersed in the penumbra.

The eclipse will begin at 8:39 p.m. when the Moon starts passing the penumbral shadow of the Earth (P1). The maximum phase occurs at 10:38 p.m. And the Moon will totally leave penumbral shadow (P4) at 00:38 a.m. in the following day.

However, most observers will not be able to visually detect the eclipse at the beginning and the ending of the eclipse until about 2/3 of the Moon’s disk is immersed in the penumbral shadow. This would put the period of eclipse visibility from approximately 10:00 p.m. to 11:20 p.m.

Residents in Alaska, Hawaii, Australia and East Asia will have the opportunity to observe Penumbral Lunar Eclipse. Residents in Western Canada and the Northern USA have the best views with moonset occurring sometime after maximum eclipse.

Phases of Penumbral Lunar Eclipse :
P1 - Moon start passing “Penumbra” - 08:39 pm
Maksimum - Moon partially blocked by “Penumbra" - 10:38 pm
P4 - Moon start leaving “Penumbra” - 12:38 am

In conjuction with Penumbral Lunar Eclipse, National Space Agency (ANGKASA) will organize a Penumbral Lunar Eclipse Observation Program at the National Planetarium Kuala Lumpur on 9 February 2009 from 8:30 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.

Meanwhile for those who are not be to attend the observation program, please watch the live web cast Penumbral Lunar Eclipse 8:30 p.m. to 12:00a.m. on 9 February 2009 at http://www.angkasa.gov.my

Milky Way — the galaxy — not snack-sized anymore

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.

The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif.

That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The slight 5-foot-5, 140-pound astrophysicist said it's the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a 6-foot-3, 210-pound NFL linebacker.

"Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant, and that we were the little sister of Andromeda," Reid said. "But now it's more like we're fraternal twins."

That's not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could be crashing violently into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted — though still billions of years from now.

Reid and his colleagues used a large system of 10 radio telescope antennas to measure the brightest newborn stars in the galaxy at different times in Earth's orbit around the sun. They made a map of those stars, not just in the locations where they were first seen, but an additional dimension of time — something Reid said hasn't been done before.

With that, Reid was able to determine the speed at which the spiral-shaped Milky Way is spinning around its center. That speed — about 568,000 miles per hour — is faster than the 492,000 mph that scientists had been using for decades. That's about a 15 percent jump in spiral speed. The old number was based on less accurate measurements and this is based on actual observations, Reid said.

Once the speed of the galaxy's spin was determined, complex formulas that end up cubing the speed determined the mass of all the dark matter in the Milky Way. And the dark matter — the stuff we can't see — is by far the heaviest stuff in the universe. So that means the Milky Way is about one-and-a-half times the mass had astronomers previously calculated.

The paper makes sense, but isn't the final word on the size of the Milky Way, said Mark Morris, an astrophysicist at the University of California Los Angeles, who wasn't part of the study.

Being bigger means the gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is stronger.

So the long-forecast collision between the neighboring galaxies is likely to happen sooner and less likely to be a glancing blow, Reid said.

But don't worry. That's at least 2 to 3 billion years away, he said.

- AP

First View of the Dark Side of the Sun

Soon we may get the first ever glimpse of the dark side of the sun.

Well, no, there's no actual dark side of a luminous ball of burning gas, but there is an effective dark side, as in, the side of the sun we can't see at any given time.

Scientists aren't content to get just half of the picture, so they've launched the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories) mission, a pair of NASA spacecraft that will orbit the sun simultaneously to provide a complete view of all sides of the star at once.

"Then there will be no place to hide and we can see the entire sun for the first time," STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told Wired.com.

The perfect spherical view will come on Feb. 6, 2011. Right now the satellites, which were launched in October 2006, are about 90 degrees apart, which allows a picture of about 270 degrees of the sun — the fullest view yet.

"The who goal of all of this is to try to get a better handle to try to predict solar storms, which cause cell phone disturbances, and disruptions to communications and power." Kaiser said. "We'd like to be able to predict these things as far in advance as possible to give us a longer warning time."

Solar storms are magnetic disruptions on the sun that release violent sprays of charged particles into space. These storms can produce magnificent displays of the Northern Lights. But some past storms have also cost airlines and satellite communications industries millions of dollars, and have led to large scale power blackouts (including one across the entire province of Quebec, Canada). Being able to reliably forecast these tempests in advance could make a huge difference in preventing disturbances on Earth.

Predicting solar weather is also important for the future of manned spaceflight. If astronauts are exposed to the intense radiation from solar storms while traveling beyond the protective magnetic field of the Earth, they could suffer serious harm. Even astronauts close to home who venture out for a spacewalk during a storm are put in danger.

"For future missions going to the moon and Mars, that's very important," Kaiser said. "Some of these solar storms can be very intense. If the astronauts were completely exposed to one of these storms the radiation could be high."

The STEREO mission also aims to improve our basic scientific understanding of the dynamics within the sun, which could shed light on the workings of stars in general.

- NASA

Video - Annular Solar Eclipse around Asia (26 Jan 2009)

Video - Annular Solar Eclipse in Jakarta, Indonesia (26 Jan 2009)

Black holes in every galaxy

A Hubble Space telescope census reveals that black holes are common in galaxies, according to a January 13 release on the Internet. Three black holes have been identified in three normal galaxies, and the team responsible suggests that nearly all galaxies may harbour supermassive black holes which once powered quasars which are now no longer active.

They took a census of 27 nearby galaxies with NASA's Hubble Space telescope and the ground-based Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which are being used to conduct a spectroscopic and photometric survey of galaxies to find black holes which have consumed the mass of millions of sun-like stars.

The key results are that:

Supermassive black holes are so common that nearly every large galaxy has one.

A black hole's mass is proportional to the mass of the host galaxy, so a galaxy twice as massive as another would have a black hole that is also twice as massive. This discovery suggests that the growth of the black hole is linked to the formation of the galaxy in which it is located.

The number and masses of the black holes found are consistent with what would have been required to power the quasars.

Two of the black holes weigh 50 million and 100 million solar masses, and they lie in the cores of galaxies NGC 3379 (also known as M105) and NGC 3377 respectively. These galaxies are both in the "Leo Spur," a nearby group of galaxies about 32 million light-years away and roughly in the direction of the Virgo cluster. Some 50 million light-years away, also in the Virgo cluster, NGC 4486B has a 500-million-solar-mass black hole. It is a small satellite of the very bright galaxy, M87 in the Virgo cluster. M87 has an active nucleus and is known to have a black hole of about two billion solar masses.

These new results suggest that smaller galaxies probably have lower-mass black holes, below Hubble's detection limit. The survey shows the black hole's mass is proportional to the host galaxy's mass. Now cosmologists will need to work on explaining why the black holes are so common, and why they seem to be proportional to the masses of the home galaxies.

The Hubble telescope's high resolution allowed the team to measure the velocities of stars orbiting the black hole. A sharp rise in velocity means that a great deal of matter is locked away in the galaxy's core, creating a powerful gravitational field that accelerates nearby stars.

The February 1997 servicing mission to the Hubble telescope will involve installing the Space telescope Imaging Spectrograph. This spectrograph will greatly increase the efficiency of projects, such as this black hole census, that require spectra of several nearby positions in a single object.

And in yet another galaxy . . .

The nucleus of the spiral galaxy NGC 1068 has always been obscured from direct observation by gas and dust. But radio images now suggest that it conceals a black hole of 10 to 20 million solar masses, and that the gas around it is swirling into the hole so rapidly that the nucleus is radiating at close to the theoretical limit, according to a report in Nature in early January, by Mitchell C. Begelman and Joss Bland-Hawthorn. Black holes, it seems, are all the go .