The GIANT MAGELLAN Telescope -- Resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope

            The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one member of the next class of super giant earth-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be constructed in the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Commissioning of the telescope is scheduled to begin in 2021.

           The GMT has a unique design that offers several advantages. It is a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today’s largest stiff monolith mirrors as segments. Six off-axis 8.4 meter or 27-foot segments surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters, or 80 feet, in diameter with a total collecting area of 368 square meters. The GMT will have a resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. The GMT project is the work of a distinguished international consortium of leading universities and science institutions.

Quick info:

• Completion target – 2021
• Location – Las Campanas Observatory, Chile
• Altitude of site – 8,254 feet (2,516 meters)
• Height of telescope housing – 200 feet (61 meters)
• Moving weight of telescope – 2,425,085 pounds (1,100 tons)
• Weight of each finished mirror segment – 25,000 pounds (12.5 tons)
• Diameter of each mirror – 28 feet (8.4 meters)
• Effective diameter of all mirrors – 83.5 feet (24.5 meters)
• Total collecting area of mirrors – 3,961 sq. feet (368 sq. meters)
• Mounting type – altitude/azimuth
• Wavelength sensitivity of telescope – Near infrared and visible (320–25000 nanometers)

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IMAGES OF JUPITER BY VOYAGER SPACECRAFT

       Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

Credits: Nasa, jpl, Esa

DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY

DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY 

 When scientists study our universe, they see that it’s expanding. But if the universe is only made of the galaxies, stars, planets, and other things that we know about, it shouldn’t be expanding. Something else is out there. There has to be energy that is making the universe expand. We just don’t know what this energy is. We also don’t know where it comes from. But we can tell that it’s there. Scientists named this energy dark energy

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

This might be a surprise, but we don’t know what most of the universe is made of. Seriously, we don’t. You might be thinking, “But of course we do! It’s made of galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, comets, asteroids, and all the other cool space stuff!”

    Yes, there is a lot of amazing space stuff, but if we add it all up, it’s just a very small part of the entire universe. There’s a lot more out there. And we don’t fully understand what it is.

    We don’t know much about dark energy, but we do know there is a lot of it. Dark energy makes up 68%, about two-thirds, of the universe.

     There is also stuff out there in space that has gravity. We can see its pull on matter like stars and galaxies. But it’s not regular matter. It’s not a black hole. It’s not anything that we have ever heard of. But it’s definitely there. Scientists named this stuff dark matter.

Just like dark energy, we don’t know a whole lot about dark matter. But it seems that 27% of the universe, or about one quarter, is made up of the strange stuff.

      Together, dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the universe. That’s almost all of it! That only leaves a small 5% for all the matter and energy we know and understand. Energy like light, heat, and X-rays, together with matter like people, elephants, planet Earth, the sun, and all the galaxies only makes up 5% of the universe! That’s not very much.

                   

Dark matter and dark energy raise some of the biggest questions in the study of space and physics. Lots of scientists are using observations and math to figure out what these are. This will help us understand more about our amazing universe, where there is always more to discover and more to learn.

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

                

Credits:nasa, esa 

What is Auroras?

What is Auroras?

If you’re ever near the North or South Pole, you may be in for a very special treat. Frequently there are beautiful light shows in the sky. These lights are called auroras. If you’re near the North Pole, it is called an aurora borealis or northern lights. If you’re near the South Pole, it is called an aurora australis or the southern lights. 

This beautiful view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011.

What makes this happen?

Even though auroras are best seen at night, they are actually caused by the sun.

                           

The sun sends us more than heat and light; it sends lots of otherenergy and small particles our way. The protective magnetic fieldaround Earth shields us from most of the energy and particles, and we don’t even notice them.

But the sun doesn’t send the same amount of energy all the time. There is a constant streaming solar wind and there are also solar storms. During one kind of solar storm called a coronal mass ejection, the sun burps out a huge bubble of electrified gas that can travel through space at high speeds.

When a solar storm comes toward us, some of the energy and small particles can travel down the magnetic field lines at the north and south poles into Earth’s atmosphere.

                           

There, the particles interact with gases in our atmosphere resulting in beautiful displays of light in the sky. Oxygen gives off green and red light. Nitrogen glows blue and purple

The green bands of light in the sky are an aurora australis, an aurora at the south pole. Credit: Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation

Do other planets get auroras?

These swirls of red light are an aurora on the south pole of Saturn. Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/STScI/A. Schaller.

They sure do! Auroras are not just something that happen on Earth. If a planet has an atmosphere and magnetic field, they probably have auroras. We’ve seen amazing auroras on Jupiter and Saturn.

                        

                     The NASA Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of a bright blue aurora on Jupiter.

credits: NASA

Why the Planets are Round?

Why the planets are round?

Scaled image of planets and sun relative to each other

Big, small, but all round

The eight planets in our solar system differ in lots of ways. They are different sizes. They are different distances from the sun. Some are small and rocky, and others are big and gassy. But they're all nice and round. Why is that? Why aren't they shaped like cubes, pyramids, or discs?

Planets form when material in space starts to bump and clump together. After a while it has enough stuff to have a good amount of gravity. That's the force that holds stuff together in space. When a forming planet is big enough, it starts to clear its path around the star it orbits. It uses its gravity to snag bits of space stuff.

A planet's gravity pulls equally from all sides. Gravity pulls from the center to the edges like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. This makes the overall shape of a planet a sphere, which is a three-dimensional circle.

Are they all perfect, though?

While all the planets in our solar system are nice and round, some are rounder than others. Mercury and Venus are the roundest of all. They are nearly perfect spheres, like marbles.

But some planets aren't quite so perfectly round.

Saturn and Jupiter are bit thicker in the middle. As they spin around, they bulge out along the equator. Why does that happen? When something spins, like a planet as it rotates, things on the outer edge have to move faster than things on the inside to keep up. This is true for anything that spins, like a wheel, a DVD, or a fan. Things along the edge have to travel the farthest and fastest.

Courtesy. NASA. 

What is Galaxy?

What is Galaxy?

We live on a planet called Earth that is part of our solar system. But where is our solar system? It’s a small part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held together by gravity. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, also has a supermassive black hole in the middle.

 

When you look up at stars in the night sky, you’re seeing other stars in the Milky Way. If it’s really dark, far away from lights from cities and houses, you can even see the dusty bands of the Milky Way stretch across the sky.

Courtesy. Nasa and 500px

About Space Science

Space science

Study of everything in outer space. This has sometimes been called Astronomy, but recently astronomy has come to be regarded as a division of broader space science,which has grown to include other related fields, such as studying issues related to space travel and space exploration (including space medicine), space archaeology and science performed in outer space

Milky way Galaxy