UK bid to prevent asteroid impact

UK space experts will tomorrow unveil a mission to save the world from a devastating asteroid impact. Leading rocket builders Astrium have drawn up plans to send a space probe to a 250-yard wide space rock called Apophis in 2013. The asteroid, weighing 25 million tons, will have Earth in its sights twice in the next 30 years. During the first close encounter, in 2029, Apophis will pass closer than geostationary satellites such as those used for TV broadcasts. Experts fear that the near miss in 2029 could put the asteroid on a collision course with our planet seven years later in 2036. It would strike with the force of many thousands of atom bombs - enough to wipe out a small country and causing havoc around the world. Astrium engineers at Stevenage are submitting plans for their unmanned mission, called Apex. Their spaceprobe is designed to rendezvous with Apophis to map its surface in details and analyse its physical properties, such as the way it spins. From the data, they will work out whether the asteroid will fly through a vital "keyhole" in space in 2029 that would lead to a real life Deep Impact in 2036. Astrium's proposal, which is being submitted to the US-based Planetary Society, also contains an analysis on how to avert disaster if a collision looks inevitable. This would involve finding ways to nudge it onto a different course, away from Earth. Simply blowing it apart with nuclear missiles is not an option as it could leave us at the mercy of several slightly smaller rocks. Astrium's Space Science Director Dr Mike Healy said today: "It is imperative to collect data on Apophis as soon as we can because once we know it's on a collision course the safest way to avoid disaster is to nudge the asteroid to change its orbit. "If we leave it too long, it will be impossible to build a spacecraft powerful enough to move its orbit. Ideally we would need to nudge it before 2025 to be sure it misses." The Planetary Society is offering a $50,000 prize for the winning proposal on how to tackle Apophis in a contest that has attracted around 100 entries from international teams and individuals. Astrium, who are also designing a robot rover to work on Mars, say they will fund a scholarship at the International Space University if their mission is accepted. Picture: An Astrium artist's impression of Apophis heading for the "cosmic keyhole" in 2029. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Steamy action on alien worlds

Enough water to fill the Earth's seas five time over has been spotted raining down onto a new-born solar system. The vital ingredient for life is falling as steam and hitting a disk of dust where planets are probably forming. The remarkable discovery, by Nasa's heat-seeking Spitzer space telescope, is giving astronomers a first direct look at how water makes its way into planets, possibly including rocky worlds like our own. Dan Watson, of Rochester University, New York, said: "For the first time, we are seeing water being delivered to the region where planets will most likely form." Scientists turned their space telescope on a stellar nursery called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B in the constellation of Perseus to make their discovery. The fledgling alien solar system, 1,000 light-years away, is still growing inside a cool cocoon of gas and dust. Within this cocoon, circling around an embryonic star, is a warm disk of planet-forming materials. The new Spitzer data indicates that ice from the outer cocoon is falling towards the forming star and vaporising as it hits the disk. Watson said: "On Earth, water arrived in the form of icy asteroids and comets. Water also exists mostly as ice in the dense clouds that form stars. Now we've seen that water, falling as ice from a young star system's envelope to its disk, actually vaporises on arrival. This water vapour will later freeze again into asteroids and comets." ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

US airman found first pulsars

Astronomers were beaten to the discovery of pulsars by an American airman scanning the skies for Russian missiles, a fascinating new report reveals. UK scientists Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish were credited with finding the first of these rapidly rotating neutron stars in 1967. They are the most accurate clocks in the universe. The objects emited radio signals so precisely, like a souped-up lighthouse, that astronomers first wondered if they were messages from aliens. Now a retired US Air Force staff sergeant who was on the front line in the Cold War has come forward to reveal that he detected signals from a number of pulsars several months earlier. Nature reports online this week that Charles Schisler was based at a remote outpost in Alaska where he operated military radar and identified around a dozen radio sources. Schisler, now 81, kept a meticulous record of his observations but was unable to speak to anyone about them before because the information was classified. Astronomers have now checked them and believe that he recorded a pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula months before Nature reported the discovery of this new class of object in 1968. Schisler says he first noticed a faint blip on his radar as he used the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System to watch the skies over Siberia for any signs of an attack. He noted the signals repeatedly after that and soon realised that they were happening four minutes earlier every day. This told him they must be extra-terrestrial because the star rose four minutes earlier every day due to the Earth's motion around the Sun. Schisler drove to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to meet an astronomy professor who identified the source of his blips as the Crab, the tattered remains of a supernova blast, 6,300 light-years away. Over the following months, Schisler recorded more celestial radio signals and believes most were pulsars. However, he did not appreciate how special his observations were until he heard of the UK astronomers' discovery on his short-wave radio. Hewish later won the Nobel Prize for the find while his research student Bell Burnell, controversially, did not. Nature reports that Schisler regrets being unable to share his own findings more widely. He told them: "I wish we had had a way to communicate with the scientific community." Picture: The Crab Nebula, photographed by the Hubble space telescope. (Nasa/ESA). ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Eclipse watch for lunar fireworks

Space scientists will watch for explosions on the Moon during tomorrow's total eclipse. Nasa experts believe meteors flying in from the direction of the sun could smash into the lunar surface with the force of hundreds of pounds of TNT. Fist-sized rocks will produce bursts of light bright enough to be seen through amateur telescopes back on Earth and blast out craters several yards wide. The Full Moon will turn a deep coppery red during the lunar eclipse as it completely enters the Earth's shadow. Nasa astronomer Bill Cooke says the eclipse offers the chance to watch for so-called Helion meteors flying in from the sun. They are believed to have been left by ancient comets called sungrazers that left trails of debris as they flew close to our home star. In December, Cooke, of Marshall Space Flight Center's Meteoroid Environment Office, recorded a string of explosions on the dark side of the Moon as it was bombarded by a meteor shower called the Geminids. He said: "The eclipse is a great time to look. Meteoroids that hit Earth disintegrate in the atmosphere, producing a harmless streak of light. But the Moon has no atmosphere, so lunar meteors plunge into the ground." So far, Cooke's team has recorded 62 meteor impacts on the Moon since becoming aware that the phenomenon was actually visible in late 2005. They are not looking for fun. Nasa says it needs to estimate the hazard that meteors pose to future astronauts living in lunar colonies. This week's eclipse is visible from the USA, Australia and the Pacific but not from Europe as the Moon will be below the horizon. Picture: A Nasa artist's impression of a meteoroid striking the Moon. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Find your birth star with Google Sky

The launch of Google Sky has already prompted much discussion. Wiser heads have correctly understood that this is much more than a planetarium-style program. Instead, it offers tremendous possibilities for the presentation of astronomical data at all levels. It may soon, for example, become a standard for professional scientists to present celestial locations related to their research. Meanwhile, humble amateur groups could develop layers to display their observing targets with links to their own photos or sketches. It will take bigger brains than my own to develop such applications, and the discussions have already begun. A couple of possibilities did come to mind today however as I was soaping myself down in the shower (too much information). One rather trivial notion was to wonder whether some of the outfits operating "name a star" scams might find a way to show their unfortunate and gullible customers where their celestial unreal estate can be found. (As has been noted elsewhere, it is surprising to find even scientific institutions falling for the patter of the snake-oil salesmen). The second idea that occurred to me as a fun way to promote interest in the stars was to encourage people to find their "birth stars" in the heavens. Don't worry, I haven't gone astrological. I'm referring to a rather fun project that the Joint Astronomy Centre on Hawaii set up to help you find the star whose light that we see today left it when you were born. I checked mine today and found that the best-fit star is currently 39 Tau, a star that is theoretically just visible to the unaided eye in clear, dark skies, and which lies not far from the open cluster that dare not speak its name. (You can work out my age for yourself). I manaaged to view it on Google Sky quite easily by doing a manual search for 39 Tau, then zooming in (see picture), but perhaps the JAC people might think of developing a clickable link from their site to do the same thing. I have to confess that I don't know offhand how accurate these distance determinations are - perhaps the e-Astronomer will be along soon to tell us (when Andy has finished trying to upset the French and playing the Phantom of the Opera, that is). ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

There's a hole in my universe . . .

A vast hole in the universe has only just been spotted by astronomers - despite the fact that it is nearly a billion light years wide. The cosmic chasm is completely empty of stars, galaxies, dust and even that mysterious, invisible stuff called dark matter. Like an air bubble in a cake mix - except without the air, of course - it dwarfs any other void known. The hole is so vast that a ray of light, travelling at 186,300 miles per second, would take nearly a billion years to cross it. American astronomers found the empty patch by studying images produced by radio telescopes in a survey of the entire sky. The pictures indicated a remarkable drop in the number of galaxies within the constellation of Eridanus, the River. Co-discoverer Lawrence Rudnick, of the University of Minnesota, said: "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size." Colleague Liliya Williams said: "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe." The astronomers' attention was first drawn to the region because it was dubbed a "cold spot" in a previous mapping of radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the universe. This map of the Cosmic Wave Background was produced by Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe satellite, launched in 2001. The cold spot, with temperature differences of only millionths of a degree, was noticed in 2004. Now observations have shown that the coldness is due to it being completely empty of stars and galaxies. Rudnick said: "The slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly six to ten billion light-years from Earth." The survey used by the team was made by the Very Large Array of radio telescopes which mapped 82 per cent of the sky from New Mexico. The discovery will be reported in the Astrophysical Journal. The rather inventive illustration shows the hole left as the cosmic radiation expends, plus the satellite and radio telescopes used to make the discovery. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF, Nasa. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Has life on Mars already been found?

Traces of life may already have been found on Mars, a space scientist will claim today. Tests on Martian soil carried out by two Nasa landers suggest some have a biological origin, Dr Joop Houtkooper will tell an international conference in Germany. Dr Houtkooper has analysed results obtained by Nasa's two Viking probes which touched down on Mars in 1976. He says they show that the dry, frozen soil may contain organisms made up of hydrogen peroxide - better known as hair bleach - and water. The levels of life - the soil's so-called biomass - is one part in a thousand, similar to that found in the Antarctic, the scientist's evidence suggests. Dr Houtkooper, of the University of Giessen, Germany, will reveal his evidence at the European Planetary Science Congress at Potsdam. He will describe how he has used data from the Gas Exchange experiment, carried by NASA's Viking landers, to estimate the biomass in the Martian soil. Dr Houtkooper and colleague Dr Schulze-Makuc, from Washington State University, say that an organism based on hydrogen peroxide and water would be able to survive in the harsh Martian climate where temperatures rarely rise above freezing and can reach -150 degrees Celsius at the poles. They would also be able to scavenge water molecules from the Martian atmosphere. It is not the first time that the two men have claimed that the Viking probes found life and that no one noticed. Dr Houtkooper said in a press release: "The GEx experiment measured unexplained rises in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels when incubating samples. If we assume these gases were produced during the breakdown of organic material together with hydrogen peroxide solution, we can calculate the masses needed to produce the volume of gas measured. "From that, we can estimate the total biomass in the sample of Martian soil. It comes out at little more than one part per thousand by weight, comparable to what is found in some permafrost in Antarctica." Dr Houtkooper's findings boost hopes that Nasa's new Phoenix probe, currently, on its way to Mars, will find life when it digs into the soil next year. Later, a European robot rover is set to speed up the search. Just don't expect to find any bleached blond, little green men. The Viking 1 view, above, of the Chryse Planitia region of Mars shows parts of the lander, including the sampling arm at centre, plus trenches in the soil dug by the probe. Photo: Nasa. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

The Sky's the limit for Google

Readers with long memories might recall that this blog called on Google to turn their powerful mapping technology on the sky. Comments here and in another place showed that we were not alone in wanting to see a Google Universe. I am happy to say that our prayers have been answered with the launch today of Google Sky. You will need the very latest version of Google Earth to access it with your PC or Mac. Once installed, switch from the terrestrial to the celestial with a new option under the View menu. From an intial screen showing the constellations as seen with the naked-eye, users can apparently zoom right in to view more than a million faint stars and 200 million galaxies (I've not counted them yet. :-) ). Google Sky uses images and surveys of the sky from the Hubble space telescope and other major observatories plus institutions including the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre. Just as with Google Earth, zooming in produces ever increasing levels of detail and objects carry helpful labels. Positions of the Moon and planets are included plus "user's guides" and advice as to the best targets for stargazers. At first glance, I felt that the opening screen looked a little crude with its constellation outlines. There were also a few odd artefacts, including a "dandelion clock" at the North Celestial Pole. Rather bizarrely, placemarkers from Google Earth remained in view when I switched to sky mode. So the Eiffel Tower and Berlin Reichstag were indicated alongside the Whirlpool Galaxy and Messier 94. But the power of the program becomes clear when you begin to explore it. Close in and be amazed as fainter and fainter stars and galaxies come into view. From a wide-angle view of Ursa Major, I zoomed right in on a star-rich arm of M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, thanks to clever blending of a Hubble photo, just as one might zoom into one's street from a starting view of the whole of the UK. One quirk was that the built-in search failed to show me that well-known star cluser the Seven Sisters, whether I entered its proper name of the Pleiades, Messier 45 or M45. It offered me the "Southern Pleiades", way down in the southern sky, as an alternative. Never mind. I found the northern original simply enough by scrolling the sky myself. I am sure that astronomers everywhere will welcome this powerful tool to help anyone who is interested to explore the night sky for themselves. And, of course, they will never need to worry about clouds! Robin Scagell, vice president of the UK's Society for Popular Astronomy, told me today: "This sounds very exciting and if it helps people to view the wonders of the heavens, then that is great. "Hopefully it will also encourage some to take a look at the real sky. After all, as with the Earth, there is a big difference between looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon and actually going there!" ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Death star may be the closest to Earth

Scientists have discovered a real-life "death star" close to the Earth. The mysterious object is the remains of another sun that has collapsed into a ball just 10 kilometers or so wide. A thimbleful of its material would weigh around one hundred million tons. The strange body, which is estimated to lie between 250 and 1,000 light-years away, is called a neutron star. Unusually for such an object, it has no companion star and shows no tattered remains of a supernova explosion. Neither does it emit any radio pulses. It is only the eighth such known "isolated neutron star" and was observed using Nasa's Swift X-ray satellite in the constellation of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. Its discoverers, from universities at Pennsylvania and Montreal, have named it Calvera after the villain in The Magnificent Seven. That is because they dubbed the previous seven with the title of the hit movie. Despite its isolation, astronomers believe Calvera is the remains of a star that existed within our galaxy before exploding as a supernova. They say that to reach its current position, it must have wandered out of the Milky Ways disk of stars. Now they want to find out why. Robert Rutledge of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, first called attention to the object. He compared a catalogue of 18,000 X-ray sources from the German-American ROSAT satellite, which operated from 1990 to 1999, with catalogues of objects that appear in visible light, infrared light, and radio waves. Rutledge realized that the ROSAT source - known as 1RXS J141256.0+792204 - did not appear to have a counterpart at any other wavelength. His team aimed the Swift satellite, plus other telescopes, at the mysterious source and confirmed that it was not associated with any other object. The team believe that, although the star appears to have travelled across a large part of the sky, it is still close to its original birthplace. This means that it must be relatively close to Earth - indeed it could be the closest neutron star known. Rutledge adds: "Either Calvera is an unusual example of a known type of neutron star, or it is some new type of neutron star, the first of its kind." Last year, astronomers announced the discovery of a neutron star ringing like a bell. The closest known supernova of recent times blew itself to bits in a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. Picture: Casey Reed/Penn State University. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Voyager probes' 30 years in space

A space probe beyond the edge of the solar system celebrated 30 years since its launch yesterday. Voyager 2 is still sending data back to Earth from a distance of 7.8 billion miles - more than three times further than distant Pluto - powered by as little energy as a light bulb. Its sister craft, Voyager 1, was launched a couple of weeks later, on September 5, 1977, but is even further away at a distance of 9.7 billion miles, making it the most distant man-made object in space. The two unmanned spacecraft sent back close-up views of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons, plus the first detailed images of Uranus and Neptune in their first 12 years of flight. They laid the groundwork for later missions to the planets, and were first to spot mysteries such as the hexagon on Saturn. For the past 19 years, they have been probing conditions at the "final frontier" where the sun's influence dies and interstellar space begins. In December 2004, Voyager 1 began crossing this region, called the heliosheath, approximately 8.7 billion miles from the sun, is where the solar wind slows as it crashes into the thin gas that fills the space between stars. Voyager 2 is expected to reach this boundary later this year. Each spacecraft carries five fully functioning science instruments that study the solar wind, energetic particles, magnetic fields and radio waves as they cruise through this unexplored region of deep space. The spacecraft are too far from the sun to use solar power. Instead, they run on less than 300 watts, enough to light up a bright light bulb, and provided by radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, said: "It's a testament to Voyager's designers, builders and operators that both spacecraft continue to deliver important findings more than 25 years after their primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn concluded." Stern's own mission, New Horizons, zipped past Jupiter earlier this year on its way to study the former planet Pluto. Picture: A Nasa artist's impression of a Voyager passing Saturn. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

High-speed hunt for life on Mars

A UK-built robot is set dramatically to speed up the search for life on Mars, European space scientists were being told today. The roving explorer, nicknamed Bridget, will be intelligent enough to decide for itself which martian rocks are best to investigate. It will work three times faster than previous robots such as Nasa's rovers Spirit and Opportunity which are currently weathering the tail end of a huge dust storm on Mars. A six-wheeled prototype of the rover, named after Brigitte Bardot, has been undergoing tests at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Scientists there have developed an automatic system to allow Bridget to see its surroundings in 3D and look for evidence of alien life. The robot, which is designed to fly to the Red Planet as part of the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission in 2013, is being built by EADS Astrium at Stevenage, Herts. Dr Dave Barnes was in Potsdam, Germany, today to present results from the University of Wales's tests to the European Planetary Science Congress. Preparing for the presentation, he said: "This system allows the rover to do more than find nice flat areas to drill. The versatility of our system and its ability to pinpoint the best site to take samples, even from complex micro-features on rocks, could be vital when looking for evidence of exobiology." The Welsh scientists have turned a 250 square metre part of Abersytwyth into a replica of the martian landscape for their tests. They call it the Mars Yard. Nasa, meanwhile, have their latest Mars mission, Phoenix, currently en route for the Red Planet. You may be wondering why the space wags have dubbed their rover Bridget. Engineering jargon calls prototypes like Bridget a "Breadboard". That get shortened to "BB" - just like Brigitte Bardot. Picture: An ESA artist's impression of the ExoMars rover. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Shuttle in race to beat hurricane

The shuttle Endeavour broke free from the International Space Station a day early yesterday in a bid to dodge Hurricane Dean. Nasa chiefs were worried that the massive storm, pictured here by the shuttle astronauts, might veer off course and disrupt mission control at Houston, Texas, as it headed into the Gulf of Mexico. They ordered the shuttle's seven astronauts to prepare for a landing tomorrow at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, despite lingering fears over damage to the shuttle's vital heat shield which protects the ship during re-entry. A piece of insulating foam fell from a fuel tank and broke two tiles on the shield as the shuttle lifted off two weeks ago. Engineers took the decision not to get astronauts to repair the damage in orbit believing it will not endanger the craft. It was damage to the edge of a wing from falling debris that doomed Endeavour's sister ship Columbia in 2003, killing all seven crew on re-entry. After the shuttle undocked from the space station, 214 miles above the South Pacific, Endeavour's crew extended a robotic arm, equipped with a camera, from the cargo bay to double-check the craft's exterior. They paid particular attention to the shuttle's nose and wings to make sure they had not been hit by any space debris during the mission. The mission STS-118 crew, led by Commander Scott Kelly, spent nine days working jointly with three astronauts aboard the space station. They continued building the orbiting outpost which is now one of the most brilliant objects in the night sky. Photo: Nasa. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Prof's 'proof' that life came from comets

A controversial scientist says he has overwhelming evidence that life was brought to Earth from space. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe claims life was delivered by comets. That presumably means we are all aliens. The professor is an astrobiologist at Cardiff University and has spent years investigating a cosmic origin for life. He used data from Nasa missions to comets including Deep Impact for his research. Professor Wickramasinghe says his calculations show that it is one trillion trillion times more likely that life began inside a comet than on Earth. He has created computer models suggesting that comets are full of porous clay particles that can hold water liquid in which organic material are nurtured for millions of years. Comets are balls of ice and dust that travel round the Sun from the edge of the solar system. Collisions with our planet were frequent in the early days of the solar system and we still pass through dust scattered by comets as meteor streams throughout the year. Professor Wickramasinghe said: "Comets and the warm, watery clay pools in comets are settings in which the organic molecules are transformed into living structures. “The odds of life starting on Earth rather than on a comet are now calculated as around one trillion trillion to one against. The conditions inside the comet can act as perfect incubators for early life." The professor has sparked controversy before by claiming that flu epidemics begin on Earth following brushes with passing comets. He drew up his theories about life's origins in space - called panspermia - when he worked with the late, famous British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Professor Wickramasinghe added: “Life is like an infection that spread out across the galaxy. People are essentially aliens and life on Earth is a cosmic phenomenon." A report by the professor and his team or researchers is to appear in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Last year, scientists in India sparked controversy by claiming they had found particles of alien life in a shower of red rain. The photo of Comet Hale-Bopp was taken by Paul Sutherland. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Supersonic star has tail like a comet

A favourite star for amateur astronomers is Mira, in the constellation of Cetus the Whale. Its name literally means "the wonderful" because it varies hugely in brightness in a little under a year. Now astronomers have just discovered that this red giant, star is even more wonderful than they realised. Observations from an observatory in space reveal that Mira is trailing an incredibly long tail, rather like the con-trail from a jet, as it travels faster than a bullet through space. The discovery was made using Nasa's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which scans the universe in ultraviolet light. When it viewed Mira - also known as Omicron Ceti - it recorded what looked more like a comet to astronomers. They measured a tail 13 light-years long, or around 20,000 the distance of distant dwarf planet Pluto from the Sun. It is the first time any such tail has been observed flowing from a star. Mark Seibert, of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena and co-author of a paper in the journal Nature, said: "This is an utterly new phenomenon to us, and we are still in the process of understanding the physics involved. We hope to be able to read Mira's tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star's life." Mira is travelling unusually fast for a red giant star, at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. Astronomers believe it may have been given a gravitational boost by other passing stars. They believe its amazing tail - formed of carbon, oxygen and other important elements - will also offer a unique opportunity to study how stars like our sun die and ultimately seed new solar systems. As well as a tail, Galaxy Evolution Explorer also discovered a bow shock - a build-up of hot gas - in front of the star, plus two thin streams of material coming out of the star's front and rear. Mira, which lies 350 light-years from Earth and has a white dwarf star companion, undergoes vast changes in brightness. At some times it can be seen easily with the unaided eye while at others you will need binoculars or a telescope to spot it. Earlier this year, as Skymania recorded, it was particularly bright. One day, far in the future, our own Sun is expected to swell up into a red giant like Mira. It could then become big enough even to swallow up the orbit of the Earth. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Bright galaxies seen in distant space

Space scientists have discovered some of the brightest distant galaxies ever found, playing hide and seek in clouds of cosmic dust. The brilliant cities of stars lie close to the edge of the known universe and are so far away that their light has taken 12 billion years to reach us across space. They were virtually invisible to the powerful Hubble space telescope because of the blocking dust and gas. But astronomers combined optical and radio telescopes to force the galaxies to break cover. Their powerful tools included the heat-seeking Spitzer space telescope which views objects in the infrared part of the spectrum. Last month, astronomers from California reported that they had spotted the most distant galaxies ever observed from Earth. And Spitzer has already recorded objects forming in the earliest days of the universe. The latest team of astronomers, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, say they are seeing the galaxies as they existed when the universe was less than two billion years old, compared to its current age of around 14 billion years. They are surprised by their brightness because smaller, dimmer galaxies were more common in the early universe because it took time for them to grow. Astronomer Giovanni Fazio said: "It's a real surprise to find galaxies that massive and luminous existing so early in the universe. We are witnessing the moment when the most massive galaxies in the universe were forming most of their stars in their early youth." Colleague Josh Younger said: "It's tough to explain how such bright, massive, dusty galaxies formed so early in the lifetime of the universe." The discovery team first spotted the distant galaxies with the AzTEC imaging camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaiii. The camera discovered several hundred previously unseen, luminous galaxies. The astronomers made follow-up observations of the seven brightest galaxies, confirming that they were single objects and not several fainter ones seen together. Once their precise positions were measured, additional observations were made with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array of radio telescopes. Hubble found almost no sign of them, because of the veils of dust and gas, and the Very Large Array detected only the two closest galaxies. View the original press release here. Remember, too, that you can study distant galaxies for yourselves and help astronomers at the amazing Galaxy Zoo. The image shows one of the galaxies as revealed, from left, by the AzTEC submillimeter camera, by the high resolution of the Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array, and in visible light by Hubble. Credit: Left – UMass Amherst / Middle – Harvard-Smithsonian CfA / Right – COSMOS/ACS Team. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Endeavour blasts off for space station

Space shuttle Endeavour made a perfect lift-off, right on schedule tonight, to continue building the International Space Station. It blasted off at 6.36pm local time from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, to begin a 14-day mission. Among the seven crew was former elementary schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, 55, on her first spaceflight. The mum-of-two had been waiting 21 years to fly, having trained as backup for another teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who died with her six crewmates in the Challenger disaster in 1986. Last night's launch was the first flight of the shuttle Endeavour since the fleet was grounded by Nasa's second shuttle disaster, Columbia, in 2003. The craft has been virtually rebuilt with state-of-the-art satellite navigation gear and other controls for its trip to the orbiting outpost. The shuttle mission, numbered STS-118, will install part of a 5,000 lb solar array, replace a vital gyroscope that keeps the space station steady, and deliver fresh water and 5,000 lb of supplies. Astronauts will also install a 7,000 lb external equipment storage platform. Mission commander is Scott Kelly. The rest of the crew are pilot Charlie Hobaugh, spacewalkers Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams, and rookie astronauts Tracy Caldwell and Al Drew. Photo: Nasa. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Phoenix set to fly on hunt for Martians

A space probe is due to blast off tomorrow to begin the biggest ever search for life on Mars. Nasa's Phoenix Mars Lander will dig into the Red Planet's icy soil to look for evidence of past or present microbe-sized aliens. It will be the first ever bid to touch and analyse frozen water that orbiting probes have discovered lying just beneath the martian surface. Scientists want to see if it has provided a habitat for simple life. Today, the craft is sitting on top of a 13-storey high Delta II rocket stack in Florida waiting for launch into Earth orbit. From there it will be pushed onto a nine-month, 422 million mile journey to Mars, arriving on May 25 next year. The probe is due to land in the northern plains, in an area known as Vastitas Borealis - Mars's equivalent of Alaska. Once there, it will have three months to claw into the martian dirt before winter sets in and its solar panels lose power. An international team has contributed the most sophisticated set of laboratory tools ever sent to Mars. They include a robotic arm, camera, stereo imager, microscope and weather station plus instruments to discover the chemical make-up of ice and soil. British scientists from Imperial College London and Bristol University will be directly involved in the mission. Principal Investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, said: "Our instruments are specially designed to find evidence for periodic melting of the ice and to assess whether this large region represents a habitable environment for Martian microbes." Phoenix is named after the mythical bird that rose from the ashes because it uses parts intended for an abandoned mission to Mars from 2001. It is set to lift off as a dust storm rages on Mars, threatening the two robot rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The storm is expected to have blown itself out before Phoenix arrives. You can find the official Phoenix mission website here. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA and in the UK. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.