New Horizons is a spacecraft designed for discovering the “ex-planet”, Pluto. It was launched at 19 January 2006. It’s going to flyby Jupiter on 28 February 2007 as it needs the strong gravity of Jupiter to accelerate to a higher speed to reach Pluto in 2015. I am quite sure that New Horizons will break Christopher Go’s Jupiter Imaging Job. 
The distance between New Horizons will be shrunk from 40 million to 2.24 million kilometres. Until then, New Horizons is able to use its high-resolution imager (LORRI) to image Jupiter. Its resolution is believed to exceed the highest resolution that HST can archieve. LORRI will take its best full-disk portrait of Jupiter, just before the giant planet fills the camera’s field of view. So, let’s wait for the mouthwatering photos! Time to know more about Jupiter.
SOHO No.1200 Discoverer, Bo Zhou. Image courtesy of Renjiang Xie
1200th comet discovery of SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft was found by a Chinese amateur astronomer, Bo Zhou. The SOHO No.1200 was a tiny, diffuse, and very faint object. It’s detected in images taken with the spacecraft’s LASCO C2 coronagraph which he downloaded.
From this, we know that we don’t have to own a telescope to do researches or findings. There are quite a number of “virtual telescope” among the internet. I will try to collect as much as possible to benefit those who can’t afford to buy a research grade telescope.
I will create a page of the collection and more virtual telescopes will be added.
SWEEPS (Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search) used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to monitor a portion of the galactic bulge in Sagittarius continuously for seven days, shooting one picture every six minutes.
There were 180 planet-transit candidates and only the best 16 was choosen. Two of them have been confirmed as outer planets. Each one of the candidates is a roughly Jupiter-size body that orbits its host star in just 4 days or less. Five of the candidates whip around their stars in less than an Earth day. They are grouped into a new category, ultra-short-period-planets.
The camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured its first light of Mars in the mapping orbit, thus the high resolution image is obtained.
The image is acquired by High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) acquired at 8:16 PM. The image scale is 29.7 centimeters per pixel. At this moment, the spacecraft was at the altitude of 280 kilometers. To be more accurate, at this resolution, a people is visible in the image.
Tomorrow, I am going to share some plugins to enchance your Adobe Photoshop CS2 in astromical usage.
Earthlike planets covered with deep oceans that could harbor life may be found in as many as a third of solar systems discovered outside of our own. These solar systems feature gas giants known as “Hot Jupiters,” which orbit extremely close to their parent stars which is even closer than Mercury to our sun.
The close-orbiting gassy planets may help encourage the formations of smaller, rocky Earthlike planets. They also help rocky planets form close to the suns and may help pull in icy bodies that deliver water to the young planets.
There may be a new class of ocean-covered, and possibly habitable, planets in solar systems unlike our own. However, lives on this planet are most likely different from ours.
Pluto is given an asteroid number by Minor Planet Center, the official organization responsible for collecting data about asteroids and comets in our solar system.. Its number is 134340. Furthermore, 2003 UB313, was formerly named Xena, is given the number 136199.
About the 2003 UB313, it’s most probably will be named by IAU as Eris. Eris was the goddess of strife and discord. The moon of Eris, was formerly known as Gabrielle, is now Dysnomia, the goddess of lawlessness.
You may check about the Greek Gods in this website, Theoi.
SMART-1 has crashed onto the lunar surface at around 13h 42m 21.759s GMT+8. The impact coordinates is 34.4S, 46.2W on the edge of Lacus Excellentiae.
Left: The bright point in the picture is the impact of SMART-1 on the Moon. Credit to CFHT as known as Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
What’s wrong with it and forced it to crash? It was running low on fuel. It ran on a low-thrust engine powered xenon ions. Its main job was to test an European made ions engine. It is so successful that it just used 60 liters xenon ions to travel over 100 Millions km from Earth to Moon in a spiral way. It’s then captured by the lunar gravity at a distance of 60 000km.
It took over thousands of high resolution pictures and made mineral maps of the lunar terrains. One of its most important discoveries was a “Peak of Eternal Light,” a mountaintop near the Moon’s north pole in constant, year-round sunlight. Peaks of Eternal Light are prime real estate for solar-powered Moon bases. Quoted from SpaceWeather.com
The impact site of SMART-1 is Lacus Excellentiae, the lake of Excellence, an ancient, 100-mile wide crater in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. Below is the coordinates of impact site.
The proverb “Man proposes, God disposes” is right. The sky is cloudy again.
NASA finds direct proof of dark matter by observing this cosmic collision.
The pink clumps (hot gas) are detected by Chandra X-rays and contains most of the normal and baryonic matter in the two clusters.The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. The galaxies are shown in orange and white in optical image. What are the blue clumps? What has caused this scene?
This animation helps you to understand more about the collision. Download it here. (2.92MB)
Explanation by Chandra X-ray Observatory:
The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separated from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.
The hot gas in each cluster was slowed by a drag force, similar to air resistance, during the collision. In contrast, the dark matter was not slowed by the impact because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. Therefore, during the collision the dark matter clumps from the two clusters moved ahead of the hot gas, producing the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the image. If hot gas was the most massive component in the clusters, as proposed by alternative theories of gravity, such an effect would not be seen. Instead, this result shows that dark matter is required.
Do you feel sad or happy about the decision? I don’t.
Both Pluto and Charon were supposed to be planets under the defination proposed on 16 August 2006. However, the IAU meeting on 24 August 2006 demoted Pluto as a dwarf planet. As the Pluto and Charon occupy the region with other objects, ie. Pluto doesn’t dominate the region like the 8 planets do.
The objects in the Solar System are categorized into 3 groups:
Planets: From Mercury to Neptune
Dwarf Planets: Pluto and any other round object that “has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite.”
Small Solar System Bodies: All other objects orbiting the Sun.
If you are not satisfied with this decision, you may go to “Live vote: Where do you stand on Pluto”. I am not sure whether it works.
One of the subgroups in International Astronomical Union (IAU) has now defined a new defination for Planet. If most of the positive votes go to this defination on 24 August in the meeting in Prague
(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet. Make it simple, it’s the object must be in orbit around a star, while not being itself a star and the object must be large enough (or more technically correct, massive enough) for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape.
(2) We distinguish between the eight classical planets discovered before 1900, which move in nearly circular orbits close to the ecliptic plane, and other planetary objects in orbit around the Sun. All of these other objects are smaller than Mercury. We recognize that Ceres is a planet by the above scientific definition. For historical reasons, one may choose to distinguish Ceres from the classical planets by referring to it as a “dwarf planet.â€
(3) We recognize Pluto to be a planet by the above scientific definition, as are one or more recently discovered large Trans-Neptunian Objects. In contrast to the classical planets, these objects typically have highly inclined orbits with large eccentricities and orbital periods in excess of 200 years. We designate this category of planetary objects, of which Pluto is the prototype, as a new class that we call “plutonsâ€.
(4) All non-planet objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodiesâ€.
However, many are not satisfied with this defination. There is rumour that Moon will most likely be another planet as Moon orbits the Sun in a wobbly way just like the Earth wobbles around the Sun due to the Moon’s proximity. Therefore, Earth and Moon maybe another double planets.
