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090120

January 20, 2009 on 2:50 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

http://astronomynow.com/090116_Massivestarssolved.html
Mark Krumholz: radiation pressure and gravitational attraction, instead of fighting one another, form ‘lanes’ like that for traffic going in different directions.

Black Holes Lead Galaxy Growth
http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2009/bhbulge/
“We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the early Universe. The black holes in these young galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the nearby Universe,” said Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Germany.

Blue Stragglers
http://www.scitech.ac.uk/PMC/PRel/STFC/stragglers.aspx
Two theories for Blue Stragglers were that blue stragglers were either created through collisions with other stars or that one star in a binary system was ‘reborn’ by pulling matter off its companion. Stellar cannibalism is key to formation of overweight stars.

http://www.ras.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1547&Itemid=2
Thomas Harriot was the first person to create drawings of the what the Moon looks like through a telescope, doing so months before Galileo.

090110

January 10, 2009 on 9:42 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/01/02/did-dark-matter-power-early-stars/
Katherine Freese from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: dark matter (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) heating provided the energy for “Dark Stars” instead of fusion.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2009/pr200901.html
using VLA, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have identified two protostars located only a few light-years from the galactic center. Elizabeth Humphreys found water masers.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2009/pr200902.html
Baby Jupiters Must Gain Weight Fast. Spitzer Thayne Currie. all stars in this cluster with the mass of the Sun or greater have lost their protoplanetary disks, and only a few stars less massive than the Sun retain their protoplanetary disks.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/02/image/a/
NICMOS+IRAC combined forces to create a HUGE panorama of the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2009/pr200903.html
Milky Way a Swifter Spinner, More Massive. Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) Mark Reid, Trigonometric parallax.

SCP 06F6
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/04/
appearance of a mysterious burst of light that was detected on February 21, 2006, brightened over 100 days, and then faded into oblivion. The source of the outburst remains unidentified.

for the first time, identified gas molecules in the host galaxy of a gamma-ray burst.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/molecules_host.html
GRB 080607

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 new gamma-ray-only pulsars
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/dozen_pulsars.html
the gamma rays must form in a broader region than the lighthouse-like radio beam. the pulsed gamma rays arise far above the neutron star

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/active_galaxies.html
Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) scans the sky. The survey is now the largest and most sensitive census of the high-energy X-ray sky. The BAT sees about half of the entire sky every day. “hard” X-rays — those with energies between 14,000 and 195,000 electron volts — can penetrate the galactic gunk and allow a clear view. Dental X-rays work in this energy range.