Category: Astro-NEWS

As the many impact craters on Earth and especially the Moon attest, over time these bodies have been subject to numerous collisions with asteroids and comets that have encountered our planet. There are obviously less on the Earth because a) our atmosphere protects us and burns most of them up and b) weathering and erosion eventually “hide” the craters that do reach the Earth’s surface. Over the millennia, the Moon and Earth have interacted with many of these Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), but as recent intensive observing campaigns by space agencies and observatories to discover and catalogue these NEOs and extensive theoretical calculations reveal, many more still orbit the sun and may at some time in the future impact Earth, potentially causing indescribable damage to populated areas.
So what can we do? Well, to deal with potentially hazardous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could strike the Earth, there is a need to establish an effective international communications strategy. This is easier said than done.
To figure out what to do, there was a meeting held last November between Secure World Foundation (SWF) and the Association of Space Explorers (ASE). Nearly 40 scientists, reporters, risk communication specialists and SWF staff participated in the meeting, held at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
What did they figure out? There needs to be a way to warn the appropriate people and groups. Also, and probably more importantly, there needs to be a better way to keep track of and judge how dangerous these NEOs are.
Hopefully we will soon hear about the progress they are making.

From Mark Paquette

There is enough debate on whether or not global warming is occurring here on Earth, nevermind Mars, but I saw this and thought this was interesting. See this article here from AccuWeather.com about the odds of each of the last 12 months being in the warmest third of each month since records have been kept.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express has provided images of a remarkable crater on Mars that may show evidence that the planet underwent significant periodic fluctuations in its climate due to changes in its rotation axis.
On June 19, 2011, Mars Express pointed its high-resolution stereo camera at the Arabia Terra region of Mars, imaging the Danielson and Kalocsa craters.
Danielson crater is named after the late George E. Danielson, who was instrumental in the development of many spacecraft cameras flown to Mars. Kalocsa crater is named after a town in Hungary known for its astronomical observatory.
Danielson crater, like many in the Arabia Terra region, is filled with layered sediments, which in this instance have been heavily eroded over time. Within the crater are peculiarly layered buttes, known as yardangs.
Yardangs are streamlined hills carved from bedrock or any consolidated or semi-consolidated material by abrasive dust and sand particles carried in the wind.
They are seen on Earth in desert regions, with notable examples in North Africa, Central Asia and Arizona in the United States.
In the case of Danielson crater, it is believed that sediments were cemented by water, possibly from an ancient deep groundwater reservoir, before being eroded by the wind.
The orientation of the yardangs leads scientists to theorize that strong north-northeasterly winds both deposited the original sediments and then caused their subsequent erosion in a later drier period of Martian history.
The crater floor of Danielson shows evidence for a series of alternating sedimentary layers with roughly uniform thickness and separation.
Some scientists believe that this indicates periodic fluctuations in the climate of Mars, triggered by regular changes in the planet’s axis of rotation. The different layers would have been laid down during different epochs.
By marked contrast, Kalocsa crater shows a completely different topography.
Here, no layered sediments are seen. This is thought to be due to the higher altitude of its floor, with the crater not tapping in to the suspected underlying ancient water reservoir.
Another hypothesis is that this crater is younger than its neighbor, created when water was not present anymore.

AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

May 2, 2012; 9:47 AM ET
Images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star giving out a fiery outburst and spraying the cosmos with dust. This shows a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets and even life.
Results indicate the star recently exploded with copious amounts of fresh dust, equivalent in mass to our planet Earth. The star is heating the dust and causing it to glow with infrared light (heat energy).
The aging star is in the “red giant” phase of its life. Our own sun will expand into a red giant in about 5 billion years. When a star begins to run out of fuel, it cools and expands. As the star puffs up, it sheds layers of gas that cool and congeal into tiny dust particles. This is one of the main ways dust is recycled in our universe, making its way from older stars to newborn solar systems. The other way, in which the heaviest of elements are made, is through the deathly explosions, or supernovae, of the most massive stars.
Astronomers used images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, to locate an aging star shedding loads of dust (orange dot at upper left).

I awoke this morning with messages to share wih all of you about the shifting times we’re in and what’s happening now and what is changing.

First, there was a wave of illness this past week with flu-like symptoms, fever, nausea, down for the count loss of energy. This, I’m told is the letting go process releasing the fear of change. The storms and earthquakes happening now are just recalibrating the planet.

Those of you who have found a way to feather their nests in this stormy energy have fears that these changes will destroy your comfort levels, but this is not the case. And that fear will slow you down. Changes will occur anyway because the cosmic energy supports something different now, but how you experience the change is up to you. Fear it or embrace it and love it.

All the things you love and cherish and have been able to maintain through the last couple of years of sloughing off your snakeskin or breaking out of your cocoon have resulted in a refinement of what you want in your life. You need not fear further loss as the intention now is to build the new and good for everyone.

The energy of the old age, the Piscean Age, was of power and control, the few in charge of the many, and personal control issues and addictions as well. So, all the corporation building, the wars and dictators are products of the old age, and the energy no longer supports these structures. That is why you see them falling away one by one and en masse.

The Aquarian Age supports a new way of being: community, creativity, collaboration, cooperation and compassion. Because the cosmic energy now supports new structures, we are able to release the karmic patterns created during the old age, and claim the lessons and rewards of our service to humanity.

In the Piscean Age, if you stood up for your truth, you were most likely killed for it, i.e., Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy and so many others. In a past life, I was bound to a water wheel and stoned to death by the very people I was trying to help. This was an old pattern, and it created a long-term fear that if we speak out we will be killed. It shut our voices down and our throat chakras closed up.

But, now is the time to claim the rewards for the times we spoke out for others and stood up for what is right. Now is the time when we are being asked to truly center ourselves in our heart and ask what truth do we want to express in our lives? What life do we want to live? What environment do we want to live in? All these things are possible to manifest now.

Ever since I had that fifth dimensional training dream, I have become acutely aware of my thoughts and feelings and what, through lifetimes, has reinforced limiting beliefs in me. The truth is that those limitations may have resulted from standing in your truth in energy that did not support that truth – a true act of bravery. We deserve the rewards of our bravery, our selfless acts and our concern for the wholeness when all was being divided into little pieces. We deserve to be rewarded for being who we are, for coming to this planet, for sharing in the common good.

What would a world look like that gave you all the things you want in life? What is truly important to you? You don’t have to have the whole picture, just your beautiful heart-felt picture. We, as a whole will put that puzzle together into an amazing collage that offers us a reality that is greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s time now. Make the leap. Believe and let go. Claim your piece of the new age, the new energy and your new life.

Last week, I moved back to NM to the beautiful Oso Vista Ranch where I’m helping create retreats and trainings for the new age, helping people claim their health, their wealth, their creative passions. Helping people move into their new lives easily, joyfully and willingly. http://osovistaranch.com

My shift has occurred, and I’m living the life that all my lives have prepared me for. Nothing is wasted. All my skills, hopes, dreams, passions and joys are embodied in this new expression. But I spent nine months stewing in the old energy before I made the internal shift that allowed the outer expression to occur. I’m living the dream and loving it. I feel like the genie blinked, but I’m the one who blinked.

I look out my windows at the spectacular view and look around the beautiful, comfortable home I’m in, and my heart swells with gratitude. You’ve done the work, now claim the rewards.

Look where I live, photos are posted on my Facebook page: My Zuni Mountain neighborhood: https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.10150707679779144.416047.783179143&type=1&notif_t=photo_album_comment

(You’ll have to sign into your FB account to see this, I beleive.)

Thanks for sharing this phase of the journey. The best is yet to come.

Love … Sandy Penny, http://sandypenny.com

Posted by Sandy Penny – WritingMuse – Love and Happiness Coach, Build Your Own Website Instructor at 9:40 AM

By Ray Sanders, Universe Today / March 2, 2012
Galactic collision creates mysterious ‘dark core’
Images captured by the Hubble telescope reveal a mysterious clump of dark matter thought to be left behind after a massive galactic collision. But this dark matter isn’t behaving in the way scientists expect dark matter to behave.
This composite image, captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, formed from a violent collision of massive galaxy clusters.

NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Jee (University of California, Davis), and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University)

Astronomers are left scratching their heads over a new observation of a “clump” of dark matter apparently left behind after a massive merger between galaxy clusters. What is so puzzling about the discovery is that the dark matter collected into a “dark core” which held far fewer galaxies than expected. The implications of this discovery present challenges to current understandings of how dark matter influences galaxies and galaxy clusters.

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Topics
Astrophysics Physics Astronomy Sciences Dark Matter Cosmology
Initially, the observations made in 2007 were dismissed as bad data. New data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 confirmed the previous observations of dark matter and galaxies parting ways. The new evidence is based on observations of a distant merging galaxy cluster named Abell 520. At this point, astronomers have a challenge ahead of them in order to explain why dark matter isn’t behaving as expected.

“This result is a puzzle,” said astronomer James Jee (University of California, Davis). “Dark matter is not behaving as predicted, and it’s not obviously clear what is going on. Theories of galaxy formation and dark matter must explain what we are seeing.”

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Current theories on dark matter state that it may be a kind of gravitational “glue” that holds galaxies together. One of the other interesting properties of dark matter is that by all accounts, it’s not made of same stuff as people and planets, yet interacts “gravitationally” with normal matter. Current methods to study dark matter are to analyze galactic mergers, since galaxies will interact differently than their dark matter halos. The current theories are supported by visual observations of galaxy mergers in the Bullet Cluster, and have become a classic example of our current understanding of dark matter.

Studies of Abell 520 are causing astronomers to think twice about our current understanding of dark matter. Initial observations found dark matter and hot gas, but lacked luminous galaxies – which are normally detected in the same regions as dark matter concentrations. Attempting to make sense of the observations, the astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to map dark matter in the cluster using a gravitational lensing technique.

“Observations like those of Abell 520 are humbling in the sense that in spite of all the leaps and bounds in our understanding, every now and then, we are stopped cold,” said Arif Babul (University of Victoria, British Columbia).

Jee added, “We know of maybe six examples of high-speed galaxy cluster collisions where the dark matter has been mapped, but the Bullet Cluster and Abell 520 are the two that show the clearest evidence of recent mergers, and they are inconsistent with each other. No single theory explains the different behavior of dark matter in those two collisions. We need more examples.”

The team has worked on numerous possibilities for their findings, each with their own set of unanswered questions. One such possibility is that Abell 520 was a more complicated merger than the Bullet Cluster encounter. There may have been several galaxies merging in Abell 520 instead of the two responsible for the Bullet Cluster. Another possibility is that like well-cooked rice, dark matter may be sticky. When particles of ordinary matter collide, they lose energy and, as a result, slow down. It may be possible for some dark matter to interact with itself and remain behind after a collision between two galaxies.

Another possibility may be that there were more galaxies in the core, but were too dim for Hubble to detect. Being dimmer, the galaxies would have formed far fewer stars than other types of galaxies. The team plans to use their Hubble data to create computer simulations of the collision, in the hopes of obtaining vital clues in the efforts to better understand the unusual behavior of dark matter.

If you’d like to learn more about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Ray Sanders is a Sci-Fi geek, astronomer and space/science blogger. Currently researching variable stars at Arizona State University, he writes for Universe Today, The Planetary Society blog, and his own blog, Dear Astronomer. Be sure to follow via the links below for more of Ray’s posts!