4 Multiverses You Might Be Living In

Could parallel universes exist? If so, what would they look like and how would they form? 

Many physicists believe there is a strong connection between the inflationary multiverse and an important feature of string theory; for more see: WGBH

Although there is not yet evidence favoring the quantum multiverse over several other interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is still consistent with the results of every quantum experiment ever conducted.

CREDITS

Produced, animated, and edited by Greg Kestin

Editorial help from Kate Becker, Anna Rothschild, and Lauren Aguirre

A special thanks to Andrew Friedman

Original Footage
© WGBH Educational Foundation 2014

MEDIA RIGHTS

Music:
Night Music, Air Prelude, Not as it Seems, and Comfortable Mystery 3 by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) CC By 3.0

Images:
Bicep2: Courtesy of National Science Foundation
Big Bang, Galaxies, and Cosmic Web: Courtesy of NASA

The Godzilla Of Earths

The "Godzilla of Earths!" is in the foreground. Behind it is the smaller 'lava world'. Their sun, in the back, appears to have been created only 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Based on what we know about how solar systems form, researchers thought that a giant rocky planet could not exist. But they just found one that's 17 times Earth's mass. They're calling it the Mega-Earth.

Scientists say the new planet may have "profound implications for the possibility of life" on extra-solar planets, according to a press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They announced the finding in a talk at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston.

Researchers have always thought Mega-Earths were impossible since any planets that big would attract hydrogen gas, forming a gas planet like Jupiter.

Meet The Mega-Earth

Mega-Earth, also known as Kepler-10c, is 18,000 miles in diameter and 2.3 times as large as Earth. It appears to be as solid as the planet beneath our feet.

Kepler-10c was previously known to astronomers, but they had not yet measured its mass. Due to its size — 2.3 times that of Earth — it was assumed to be a "mini-Neptune," a planet encased in thick gas. But the new observations have confirmed that it is rocky, not gassy.

It orbits an 11 billion-year-old star named Kepler-10 located 560 light years away from Earth. Its year lasts only 45 days.

Interestingly, this solar system is more than twice as old as our own — it was born less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

A Mysterious System

Researchers had previously thought that this kind of planet impossible.

Not only did they think something that big would be a gas giant, but they didn't even think the elements that make up a rocky planet existed in our universe when this solar system was born: The early universe had only the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements were forged from these lighter ones in stars over billions of years.

Because of this, many scientists hadn't been looking for rocky planets in these very old solar systems.

The mega-Earth isn't the only weird planet in its solar system. There's also a 'lava-world' 1.5 times Earth's size whose year lasts only 20 hours.

By David A. Aguilar

B612 Asteroid Impact Video

By Spine Films

Between 2000 and 2013, a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations detected 26 explosions on Earth ranging in energy from 1 to 600 kilotons – all caused not by nuclear explosions, but rather by asteroid impacts. These findings were recently released from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which operates the network.

To put this data in perspective, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 exploded with an energy impact of 15 kilotons. While most of these asteroids exploded too high in the atmosphere to do serious damage on the ground, the evidence is important in estimating the frequency of a potential “city-killer-size” asteroid.

A list of the impacts shown in the video can be found here.
b612foundation.org/list-of-impacts-from-impact-video/

For more information on this data, please check out our Impact Video FAQ.
b612foundation.org/impact-video-faq/

You can read or download the press release about today’s event here.
b612foundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/B612_PR_042214.pdf

Waterton Lake Eclipse

Explanation: Recorded on April 15th, this total lunar eclipse sequence looks south down icy Waterton Lake from the Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, planet Earth. The most distant horizon includes peaks in Glacier National Park, USA. An exposure every 10 minutes captured the Moon’s position and eclipse phase, as it arced, left to right, above the rugged skyline and Waterton town lights. In fact, the sequence effectively measures the roughly 80 minute duration of the total phase of the eclipse. Around 270 BC, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus also measured the duration of lunar eclipses – though probably without the benefit of digital clocks and cameras. Still, using geometry, he devised a simple and impressively accurate way to calculate the Moon’s distance, in terms of the radius of planet Earth, from the eclipse duration. This modern eclipse sequence also tracks the successive positions of Mars, above and right of the Moon, bright star Spica next to the reddened lunar disk, and Saturn to the left and below.

Image Credit & Copyright: Yuichi Takasaka

Mars Flyover

From the highest volcano to the deepest canyon, from impact craters to ancient river beds and lava flows, this showcase of images from ESA’s Mars Express takes you on an unforgettable journey across the Red Planet.

Mars Express was launched on 2 June 2003 and arrived at Mars six-and-a-half months later. It has since orbited the planet nearly 12 500 times, providing scientists with unprecedented images and data collected by its suite of scientific instruments.

The data have been used to create an almost global digital topographic model of the surface, providing a unique visualisation and enabling researchers to acquire new and surprising information about the evolution of the Red Planet.

The images in this movie were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the video was released by the DLR German Aerospace Center as part of the ten years of Mars Express celebrations in June 2013. The music has been created by Stephan Elgner of DLR’s Mars Express planetary cartography team. DLR developed and is operating the stereo camera.

Biggest Void In Space Is 1 Billion Light Years Across

The biggest known hole in the universe has left a cold-spot in the cosmic microwave radiation (Illustration: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA)

By Anil Ananthaswamy

Radio astronomers have found the biggest hole ever seen in the universe. The void, which is nearly a billion light years across, is empty of both normal matter and dark matter. The finding challenges theories of large-scale structure formation in the universe.

Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US, stumbled upon the void by accident. Rudnick's team had been studying data from a survey carried out by the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, also in the US. "One morning I was a little bored, and said, 'why don't I look in the direction of the WMAP cold spot'," says Rudnick.

The cold spot in question is an unexplained anomaly in the map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) created by NASA's WMAP satellite. The photons of the CMB coming from a region of the sky in the direction of the constellation Eridanus are colder than expected.

Rudnick's team started looking for radio sources such as radio galaxies and quasars in the direction of the cold spot. "Radio sources track the distribution of mass in the universe," says Rudnick. "They are the signposts for galaxies, clusters of galaxies and dark matter."

Unexpected Size

The team was in for a surprise. They saw little or no radio sources in a volume that is about 280 megaparsecs or nearly a billion light years in diameter. The lack of radio sources means that there are no galaxies or clusters in that volume, and the fact that the CMB is cold there suggests the region lacks dark matter, too.

The void, which is about 6 billion to 10 billion light years away, is considerably larger than any found before. Until now, optical surveys have found no voids larger than 80 megaparsecs wide - making the new hole 40 times larger in volume than the previous record holder.

Rudnick says that these optical surveys could easily miss the void his team found simply because they don't study large enough volumes.

He thinks that the void is a confirmation that dark energy is at work in the universe. Normally, when the CMB photons pass through a gravitational well, created say, by a supercluster of galaxies, they first gain energy as they fall into the well, then lose energy as they climb out.

Problem Poser

If the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to dark energy, then by the time the photons climb out, the supercluster has expanded, and its gravity is a little less strong. So the photons exit relatively easily and with more energy than they had when they entered the gravitational well.

But photons going through a void actually lose energy, ending up colder than if they had been flying through a series of superclusters. Rudnick thinks that the discovery of the void ties in neatly with the WMAP cold spot and the existence of dark energy. "What the community says remains to be seen," he told New Scientist. "People will take shots at it now."

Because the CMB is leftover radiation from the big bang, some cosmologists have said that the cold spot is a problem for the theories of the early universe. But Rudnick says that the void could have been created billions of years after the big bang. "We have taken the problem away from the very early universe and put the problem in the time of structure formation," he says.

Computer simulations that recreate the formation of clusters and super-clusters have never seen voids of this size. That could be because modellers have not simulated large enough volumes to see such a void, says Rudnick. If they did, maybe a void would emerge. "It is an open question whether this will create problems for structure formation," he says.

Star Trek - The Real Story

Courtesy Of The Smithsonian Channel

Evidence Of The Existence Of 'Multiverse'

Revealed For The First Time By Cosmic Map

Scientists studied radiation data gathered by Planck telescope
Claim anomalies show gravitational pull from other universes
Could be the first real evidence to support controversial theory

The first 'hard evidence' that other universes exist has been found by scientists.

Cosmologists studying a map of the universe from data gathered by the Planck spacecraft have concluded that it shows anomalies that can only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes.

The map shows radiation from the Big Bang 13.8billion years ago that is still detectable in the universe - known as cosmic microwave radiation.

Scientists had predicted that it should be evenly distributed, but the map shows a stronger concentration in the south half of the sky and a 'cold spot' that cannot be explained by current understanding of physics.

Laura Mersini-Houghton, theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Richard Holman, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, predicted that anomalies in radiation existed and were caused by the pull from other universes in 2005.

Now that she has studied the Planck data, Dr Mersini-Houghton believes her hypothesis has been proven.

Her findings imply there could be an infinite number of universes outside of our own.

She said: 'These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang.

'They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen.'

Detailed: Planck data has been used to create a map of light from when the universe was just 380,000 years old

Better quality: Previous maps of radiation (left) were not as detailed as the recent Planck map (right)

Although some scientists remain sceptical about the theory of other universes, these findings may be a step towards changing views on physics.

The European Space Agency, which runs the £515million Planck telescope, said: 'Because precision of Planck’s map is so high, it made it possible to reveal some peculiar unexplained features that may well require new physics to be understood.'

Cambridge professor of theoretical physics Malcolm Perry told the Sunday Times that the findings could be real evidence of the existence of other universes.

While George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at the university, told the newspaper: 'Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago. But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe.'

The Sun's Eruption

Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona. 

On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun's lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays -- a phenomenon known as coronal rain. 

Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface. 

The footage in this video was collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory's AIA instrument. SDO collected one frame every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at 30 frames per second, so each second in this video corresponds to 6 minutes of real time. The video covers 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2012.
Music: "Thunderbolt" by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of artist.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at:http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11168

The Search For Earth-Like Planets

The search for Earth-like planets is reaching a fever-pitch. Does the evidence so far help shed light on the ancient question: Is the galaxy filled with life, or is Earth just a beautiful, lonely aberration? If things dont work out on this planet Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us. Well have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away. The question right now: is it worth the trip?

If things don't work out on this planet...

Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future... 

Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us.

We'll have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away.... But that's for later.

The question right now: is it worth the trip? The destination is a star that you can't see with your naked eye, in the southern constellation Libra, called Gliese 581. 

Identified over 40 years ago by the German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese, it's a red dwarf with 31% of the Sun's mass... and only 1.3% of its luminosity. 

Until recently, the so-called M Stars like Gliese 581 flew below the radar of planet hunters. 

They give off so little energy that a planet would have to orbit dangerously close just to get enough heat. 

Now, these unlikely realms are beginning to show some promise... as their dim light yields to precision technologies... 

...as well as supercomputers... honed in the battle to understand global changes on this planet... Earth. 

Will we now begin to detect signs of alien life? 

Or will these worlds, and the galaxy itself, turn out to be lifeless... and Earth, just a beautiful, lonely aberration?

To some, like astronomer and author Carl Sagan, the sheer number and diversity of stars makes it, as he said, "far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life."

This so-called "many worlds" view can be traced back to ancient observers... in China, India, Greece and Egypt. The Qur'an, the Talmud, and many Hindu texts all imagined a universe full of living beings. 

In the 16th Century, this view got a boost from astronomer and mathematician Nikolas Copernicus... who came to believe that Earth is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the Sun.

Seven decades after Copernicus, Galileo Galilei used his newly developed telescope to show that our Sun was just one among countless other stars in the universe. 

By the modern era, the "many worlds" view held sway in scientific circles. A variety of thinkers considered what and who inhabited worlds beyond our own. 

From Martians desperate to get off their planet... to alien invaders intent on launching pre-emptive strikes against ours... or simple life forms on an evolutionary track to complexity.

But other thinkers have been struck by a different view.

The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy believed that humans and Earth are unique. 

With the spread of Christianity, this Ptolemaic system became widely accepted. 

The latest variation on this theme is what's called the "Rare Earth" hypothesis. It holds that Earth and sophisticated life were the result of fortuitous circumstances that may not be easy to find again in our galaxy. 

Does the current search for planets shed light on this debate... sending it in one direction or the other?

So far, our only good reference for recognizing an Earth-like planet is... Earth. 

It does have some fortuitous characteristics... it's dense, it's rocky -- with a complex make-up of minerals and organic compounds -- and it has lots and lots of water. 

It's also got a nearly circular orbit around the Sun, at a distance that allows liquid water to flow... not too close and not too far away, in the so-called "Habitable Zone." 

That's defined as the range of distance from a parent star that a planet would need to maintain surface temperatures between the freezing and boiling points of water. 

Of course, that depends on the size of the planet, the make-up of its atmosphere, and a host of other factors. 

And whether the parent star is large; medium like the Sun; or small. 

Some scientists also believe we live in a "Galactic Habitable Zone." We're close enough to the galactic center to be infused with heavy elements generated by countless stellar explosions over the eons...

But far enough away from deadly gamma radiation that roars out of the center. 

If there is a galactic habitable zone... it's thought to lie 26,000 light years from the center... about where we are... give or take about 6,000 light years.

Arepo Simulation Of Galaxy Formation

This computer animation, created using new software called Arepo, simulates 9 billion years of cosmic history. 

Arepo can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years. 

Arepo generates the full variety of galaxies seen locally, including majestic spirals like the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Credit: CfA/UCSD/HITS/M. Vogelsberger (CfA) & V. Springel (HITS)

Silicon Brains To Oversee Satellites

A beautiful and expensive sight: upwards of €6 million-worth of silicon wafers, crammed with the complex integrated circuits that sit at the heart of each and every ESA mission. Years of meticulous design work went into these tiny brains, empowering satellites with intelligence. 

The image shows a collection of six silicon wafers that contain some 14 different chip designs developed by several European companies during the last eight years with ESA’s financial and technical support. 

Each of these 20 cm-diameter wafers contains between 30 and 80 replicas of each chip, each one carrying up to about 10 million transistors or basic circuit switches.

To save money on the high cost of fabrication, various chips designed by different companies and destined for multiple ESA projects are crammed onto the same silicon wafers, etched into place at specialised semiconductor manufacturing  plants or ‘fabs’, in this case LFoundry (formerly Atmel) in France.

Once manufactured, the chips, still on the wafer, are tested. The wafers are then chopped up. They become ready for use when placed inside protective packages – just like standard terrestrial microprocessors – and undergo final quality tests.

Through little metal pins or balls sticking out of their packages these miniature brains are then connected to other circuit elements – such as sensors, actuators, memory or power systems – used across the satellite.

To save the time and money needed to develop complex chips like these, ESA’s Microelectronics section maintains a catalogue of chip designs, known as Intellectual Property (IP) cores, available to European industry through ESA licence. 

Think of these IP cores as the tiniest mission ‘building blocks’: specialised designs to perform particular tasks in space, laid down within a microchip.

These IP cores range from single ‘simpler’ functions such as decoding signals from Earth to control the satellite to highly complex computer tasks such as operating a complete spacecraft.

The latter is achieved for example by the SCOC-3 ‘spacecraft controller on a chip’ developed by ESA and Astrium, which itself combines more than 20 different IP cores from other sources, seen at the bottom of the image.

SCOC3 on silicon wafer

Once manufactured, the chips, still on the wafer, are tested. The wafers are then chopped up. They become ready for use when placed inside protective packages – just like standard terrestrial microprocessors – to undergo final quality tests.

Through little metal pins or balls sticking out of their packages these miniature brains are then connected to other circuit elements – such as sensors, actuators, memory or power systems – used across the satellite.

To save the time and money needed to develop complex chips like these, ESA’s Microelectronics section maintains a catalogue of chip designs, known as Intellectual Property (IP) cores, freely available to European industry.

Think of these IP cores as the tiniest mission ‘building blocks’: specialised designs to perform particular tasks in space, laid down within a microchip.

These IP cores range from single ‘simpler’ functions such as decoding signals from Earth to control the satellite to highly complex computer tasks such as operating a complete spacecraft.

The latter is achieved for example by the SCOC3 ‘spacecraft controller on a chip’ developed by ESA and Astrium, which itself combines more than 20 different IP cores from other sources, seen at the bottom of the image.

Each IP core is coded in a ‘hardware description language’ that can then guide the manufacturing process. Today’s state-of-the-art minimum sizes of integrated circuit tracks are measured in tens of nanometres.

Via: "ESA"

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field In 3D

I've recently discovered an animation that was rendered using the measured redshift of all 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.

I've written a short script that leads you through a quick history of both deep field images and this video ends with a fly-through of the Ultra Deep Field.

Every galaxy in the image is in its proper distance as viewed from the telescope line of sight.

As if this image wasn't amazing enough.

Animation Credit:

Hubble Cosmological Redshift Animation Courtesy:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/28/video/b/

Mike Gallis

http://phys23p.sl.psu.edu/phys_anim/Phys_anim.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6G2Z6iD-9M

Music Used in this video was purchased from stockmusic.net and belongs to the Spirit Legends Collection.

The tunes I used were:

Voice Redo B
Voice in the Dark

Link to demos:

http://www.stockmusic.net/index.cfm/page/main.collectionDetails/collectionId/67

Jupiter's Gravity

Image via: MySpace.com

Jupiter is the most massive planet in our Solar System and; therefore, the gravity of Jupiter is the most intense in the Solar System. The gravity of Jupiter is 2.5 times what it is here on Earth.

In the 1990s Jupiter’s gravity tore apart Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 and pulled the broken pieces into the to planet. This marked the first time that humans had direct observation of two extraterrestrial Solar System bodies colliding. Jupiter had actually captured the asteroid between 20 and 30 years prior to impact and it had been orbiting the planet since. In 1992, the asteroid entered Jupiter’s Roche limit and was broken apart by the planet’s tidal forces. The asteroid resembled a string of pearls until its fragments impacted the surface July 16-22 of 1994. The fragments were as large as 2 km each and hit the surface at 60 km/s. The impacts allowed astronomers to make several new discoveries about Jupiter.

Some scientists, including Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory, as well as Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz believe that Jupiter’s gravity may lead to the destruction of Mercury. 

After running some simulations the group found that Jupiter is perturbing Mercury’s already eccentric orbit. They arrived at four possible end results: 

Mercury will crash into the Sun, Mercury will be ejected from the solar system altogether, Mercury will crash into Venus, or Mercury will crash into Earth. None is pleasant for Mercury and the last would be even less pleasant for humans. Not to fear though, none of these possible outcomes will happen in the next 5-7 billion years anyway.

The gravity of Jupiter affects every planet to one degree or another. It is strong enough to tear asteroids apart and capture 64 moons at least. Some scientist think that Jupiter destroyed many celestial objects in the ancient past as well as prevented other planets from forming. How’s that for a powerful neighbor?

Here’s an article from Universe Today about how Jupiter’s gravity might actually wreck the Solar System, and here’s an article about how big planets like Jupiter could get.

Use this site to calculate your weight on other worlds, and here’s more information about Comet P/Shoemaker Levy 9.

We’ve also recorded an entire show just on Jupiter for Astronomy Cast. Listen to it here, Episode 56: Jupiter, and Episode 57: Jupiter’s Moons.

Via: "Universe Today"

NASA's Next Flagship Space Telescope

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope — the notoriously over-budget new space observatory slated to launch in 2018 — is on time and still within its new budget, the project's chief said Wednesday (Jan. 9).

“Our budget still stands and the schedule remains the same,” Eric Smith, the space telescope's program director, told astronomers here at a town hall meeting during the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Smith also outlined the future of the James Webb Space Telescope program in 2013 and With an $8.8 billion dollar price tag, JWST is destined to be one of the largest and most expensive projects in NASA history. Set to replace the venerable Hubble Space Telescope once it is launched, JWST will take infrared images of distant galaxies, probing the cosmos for hints and signals left behind from the Big Bang.

Of the four science instruments responsible for investigating those mysteries aboard the spacecraft, two were delivered to NASA in 2012. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) — the instrument responsible for taking “Hubble-like” images of distant galaxies, comets and other heavenly bodies — was sent last year by the European consortium that built it. [Photos: The James Webb Space Telescope]

The Canadian Space Agency has also delivered its instrument: the Fine Guidance Sensor/Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS/NIRISS) that will also take high-quality images of other bodies in space.

NASA is still awaiting two more contributions: the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) from Lockheed Martin and the University of Arizona, and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) from the European Space Agency, which is still in its early testing phases. Both instruments measure light on the infrared spectrum. All of the science instruments are set to be integrated by the end of 2013, officials say.

The telescope's tennis court-size sunshield is in the early stages of testing as well. The sunshield itself is too large to launch in an unfurled state, creating a unique problem for JWST scientists to solve. Instead of launching the telescope with the sunshield in place, NASA is planning to unroll the shield once the craft is in orbit. At one-third of the way complete, NASA scientists are now starting to practice rolling and unrolling the shield to see how it might unfurl in space after launch.

Once all four instruments are finished, researchers will combine them to test JWST as one cohesive unit. While final testing on the ground should begin in 2015, simulation testing using Optimal Trajectories by Implicit Simulation — a space telescope tester that mimics the temperature and environment of a space telescope in Earth’s orbit — won’t start until 2017, a year before launch.

JWST is also going to investigate a few objects a little closer to home.

Mike Brown, an astronomer from Caltech, detailed a few of the more promising applications for JWST within the solar system. Planetary scientists have been interested in understanding what composes comets, protoplanets and other mysterious space objects. 

JWST’s sensitive instruments should be able to deliver some information as to what elements created rocky and icy objects in the outer solar system, Brown said at the town hall meeting.

NASA officials, meanwhile, are hopeful that the JWST's predecessor — the iconic Hubble Space Telescope — will still be functioning by the time the new observatory launches. This week, agency officials said the 23-year-old Hubble telescope could potentially last through 2018, allowing for some overlap with the JWST mission that would be a boon for astronomers.

Via: "Live Science"

Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010

Video Created by Scott Manley, this is a view of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. 

The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system. 

Earth Crossers are Red

Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow

All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths. 

The scale of the video at 1080P resolution is roughly 1million kilometers per pixel, and each second of video corresponds to 60 days.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates show no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects, scientific estimates suggest that there are about a billion asteroids larger than 100metres (about the size of a football field) .

Orbital elements were taken from the 'astorb.dat' data created by Ted Bowell and associates at ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/elgb/astorb.htm­l

Music is 'Transgenic' by Trifonic:http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Trifo... - they're awesome guys, give them some love.

Check out todays asteroid map athttp://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map....
Quite a few journalists, bloggers and tweeters are attributing this to NASA or Arecibo Observatory - while they do fine work they had nothing to do with this. If you write a story you can credit it to Scott Manley. 

If you are needing a higher quality video or images for a specific purposes - education, news or just eye candy I can supply them on a case by case basis.

ChillOut In Space

I recommend that you watch this video in full screen, the images will blow you away!

01. Aquascape - Sunrise
02. Cafe Del Mar (Lounge Remake) - Calar Del Sole
03. Sunless - Summer Dreams
04. Super 8 & Tab Ft. Alyna
05. Solaris Navis - Blissful Memories - Cafe Del Mar
06. Solaris Navis - When the Sun Goes Down
07. Apple & Stone - Graceful Spring
08. Y Mor (Glide & Swerve)
09. Jane Maximova - Rain In My Heart (Pianochocolate remix)
10. Pianochocolate - Lost Zone