Recap: 21 July 2010

This weeks news stories came from Jesse Rogerson.

NASA's WISE spacecraft has released its first all-sky image in the mid-infrared. Data to be crunched in the coming months. Also took a great shot of the Pleiades.

The next mars rover, Curiosity, will provide us with a 2 min long high-definition video of its decent through the martian atmosphere. It will also use a 'Sky-Crane' to get to the surface. Read up on the details here.

Like Space Elevators? well, one from Earth might be far fetched at the moment, but it MAY be possible to build one from the surface of the Moon with current technology.

The brightest Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) ever has been observed by the SWIFT satellite. It beats the last record holder by a factor of 5, and is located 5 BILLION light years away. This was a monster.

Speaking of records, a star in 30 Doradus (Tarantula Nebula in LMC) has been measured to have a mass of 265 solar masses. If it's correct, that's one heck of a mass.

Finally, the battle for NASA's future plans continues. The Senate has made some tweaks to Obama's plan, focusing more on a new heavy-lift rocket, and less on private industry initiatives. Check out the major changes here.

That ends another week. Next week will be the last meeting of the summer. We'll pick back up again in September.

Recap: 14 July 2010

Rob Berthiaum was kind enough to bring is this weeks astronomy related news.

On its way out to randevous with a comet, ESA's Rosetta spacecraft flew by a rather large asteroid dubbed 'Lutetia.' Check out the images!

Radio astronomers will have more competition in their bandwidth due to increase usage by cell phones.

The National Research Council says NASA is spending too much money. Read up here.

Middle school students across America have the chance to get their own experiment aboard the ISS, as part of a NASA outreach and education program.

NASA and Microsoft team up to create a high resolution 3D map of the martian surface. A really fun tool to play with. Sort of like Google Mars.

Curiosity, the next martian rover, is moving along in its testing. Recently it began moving its wheels! Scheduled touch down sometime in 2012. Check out three generations of mars rovers.

Another case of science fiction becomes science fact: JAXA's solar sail has been deployed and has officially caught wind of the Sun, accelerating itself very slowly. I suppose tacking on this thing might be somewhat more difficult.

From Rob: 'Supernovae may not make the heaviest atoms. But they probably do.'

The Transit Timing Variation (an indirect, indirect way of detecting exo-planets) method has found its first exoplanet!

Last but not least, the solar eclipse of July 11, 2010 was perhaps one of the least viewed ever, due to its horrible path on Earth, but many good images were taken. here's a taste.

thanks rob!

see ya all next week!

Recap: 7 July 2010

This weeks news stories came to you from Jesse Rogerson, here is a list:

the 'Where in the universe' contest hosted by universetoday had a image of Pingualuit Crater.

The Gemini observatory seems to have observed a white dwarf shortly after swallowing a Ceres sized object, check out the press release here.

A mysterious ring of gas in the Leo group has been explained thanks to CFHT.

The CMB observing plank telescope has released an AMAZING all sky image.

SDSS helps cosmologists constrain the mass of the neutrino.

Hayabusa has 12 grains of dust 0.01 mm is size. Something is better than nothing people.

June Round Up

The month of June has been a little slow getting to the blog, so I've condensed it into one post for your reading pleasure.

On June 16th 2010, Prof. Michael DeRobertis lead us through the workshop he went to in Ottawa titled "A Workshop on the Governance of National Astronomical Facilities." The workshop was Canada-centric, discussing what the future looks like for Canadian astronomy. The report PDF will be sent around to everyone, if you're interested in looking at it.

On June 30th, Stu Dack brought us some of the past week's astronomy news stories.

Climate change may be increasing the amount of space junk we have hanging around our planet. Go to the story here to find out how!

NASA has listed the top ten cool things that LRO did in its first year.

Was venus a habitable planet at some point. Check out this article from ESA.

Brown University adds to the ever increasing evidence of liquid water on mars in the past.

The GoogleX prize is still up for grabs, but who's in contention?

Check out this wicked cool Earth gravity map.

Hayabusa has much to tell us, hopefully we'll talk to it soon!

Recap: Jun 9th

Another week of interesting discussion, here is a list of the talking points:

A study on retrograde blackholes show that these backwards spinning blackholes seem to have much more energetic jets.

Another Jupiter impact! Comes almost exactly one year since the last impact of Jupiter, both observed by the same amateur astronomer.

The NASA rover Spirit has found very high concentrations of carbonates in its area, indicating a very wet and relatively neutral environment.

A recent story about life on Titan has been more thoroughly explained, read it all here. But let's be clear, there is NO life on Titan.

More on titan, the largest methan/ethane lake is roughly 4 times the size of lake superior.

An old russian lunar rover has been found again, will spark new laser/orbit research.

SpaceX had a successful launch of its Falcon9 into orbit of approx the height of the ISS! good news for private space industry.

A mars crew is embarking on a grounded 520-day mock-mission to mars. Check it out

see you all next week!

June 2 Recap

Another succesful summer addition of the astronomy journal club. Jesse Rogerson hosted, here are a list of the various talking points.

First off, if you've ever been interested in seeing a full video of the inside of the ISS, check out this youtube video.

Marshall also provided video of one entire night time-lapse video of the sky above the volcano Cotopaxi, it's quite impressive.

During the years of the moon landings, President Nixon provided each of the 50 states with a commerative chunk of moon rock (approx the size of a golf ball) attached to a plaque. Unfortunately the governors of the states at the time seem to have found these trinkets unimportant as many of them have been lost. Just recently, Colorado both lost and found there little piece of moon history. Check out the story here.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has seen first light! Jupiter never looked so good in IR.

With NASA seemingly out of the race, other countries seem to be stepping up to aim for the moon. JAXA has a plan to have a moon base operational 2020...for robots.

A small chunk of space something went whizzing by Earth recently, although it seems to be manmade.

Herchel has released an image probing to z~5. This galaxy-studded image is impressive to say the least.

The blackhole at the centre of M87 seems to be slightly off-centre (to the tune of 0.1"). A number of reasons have been hypothesized for this difference, though we're not sure why.

Andromeda's black hole seems to be accreting as we speak, over the past 10 years adromeda has brightened over 100 times.

Gemini has observed one of the most massive galaxies in the local universe!

Ever wondered why the martian polar ice caps look the way they do? have no fear, katabatic winds are the reason!

Thanks for coming everyone, see you next week!

May 26 Recap

Laura Chajet was kind enough to take us through the latest astronomy news. Here are a list of some of the articles we talked about.

CITA celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, a number of talks were recounted. Check out the latest Millenium II simulation here and the Aquarius Project here. Also, check out the Canadian Cluster Comparison Project here.

An overluminous supernovae that possibly tips the scales of the Chandrasekhar limit was observed, see the Physics Today article here.

Could galaxy mergers be the reason for type 1 and type 2 quasars? Obscuration is studied in mergers in this article in science.

Unique supernovae require careful consideration as described in this nature article.