astronomy

News from high in the Chilean Andes this morning: the ALMA observatory in Chile, the largest, most ambitious ground-based astronomy tool ever created, made its first measurements today from its overlook 17,400 above sea level. The interferometric measurements of radio signals, or "fringes," from a distant quasar at sub-millimeter wavelengths prove that ALMA isn't just hype, boasting unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

And that's using just two of the eventual 66 antennas making up the array.

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Celebrating the four centuries of astronomical advancement since Galileo took his first telescopic view of the heavens, NASA today unveiled this unique view of the heart of our galaxy as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The 6-foot-by-3-foot prints were unveiled at more than 150 planetariums, museums, libraries, and centers of learning across the land, and man, is it ever a view.

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While most of the world looked forward to the switch from analog to digital TV for the sharper picture and clearer sound, astronomers around the US anticipated the changeover period for a totally different reason: clarity. In the brief period between the removal of analog television signals and the assignment of those frequencies to other devices like cell phones, astronomers will get their first look at a time in the universe that has been obscured from telescopes since Wally and the Beav roamed the airwaves.

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Astrophotography is hard. Astronomically hard. Everything has to be perfect. Your telescope, with camera attached, must track your target in precise synchronization with the rotation of the Earth. It can't shake. It can't even vibrate. You have to nail your camera's exposure settings or you'll be rewarded with an incoherent mess. Your targets are often so dim you can't even see them until after the image has been made, so focusing is a nightmare.

So why try? Because it makes the entities floating in the vastness of the universe much more real than any Hubble wallpaper on your computer desktop can.

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Humans tend to imagine things we don't fully understand in our own image: for instance, we anthropomorphize God, most sci-fi movie aliens are some variation of a biped with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and every planet Captain Kirk visits has an atmosphere just ripe for human respiration. But science tells us things are rarely so neat and tidy out in the great unknown, and just to prove how weird things can be out there, scientists at Washington University St.

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A 100-ton antenna has arrived at a plateau in the Chilean Andes as the first piece of the world's largest astronomical observatory. The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is designed to observe light with millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths -- between infrared light and radio waves – and help astronomers see light from some of the coldest and most distant objects at the edge of the observable universe.

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Fancy yourself a sharpshooter at laser tag? The team at Goddard Space Flight Center might just have you beat. After all, since launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, they've been firing a laser across 250,000 miles of space, hitting the minivan-sized LRO as it orbits the moon at nearly 3,600 miles per hour. It's no lucky shot either; they do it 28 times per second.

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Good news for astrophysicists and fans of massive thermonuclear explosions alike: a team of mathematicians at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working alongside two astrophysicists from Stony Brook University and U.C. Santa Cruz, have modeled the hours leading up to a Type Ia supernova, capturing the gritty details of the cataclysmic death of a white dwarf star for the first time.

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Scientists recently spotted a swarm of baby comets flying away from a passing parent comet -- the largest comet birth ever witnessed. The discovery was assisted by a special digital filter that enhances faint features within the cloud of comet debris.

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The universe may be too big too big to wrap one’s mind around, but the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere has succeeded in distilling the entire Milky Way Galaxy into one breathtaking cosmic image. ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom project has released a stunning 360-degree panorama of the cosmos surrounding earth as seen with the unaided eye from one of the darkest places on earth.

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