Astronomy

NASA has high hopes that they will be able to send people to the moon a year earlier then they planned. They had scheduled to send people in 2015.

At this time Congress is worried by the fact that we have to rely on Russia in order to make any trips to the International Space Station during that time. NASA is preparing for any demands that the new President might have and is working on a new study that pushes up the test launch of the brand new Ares rocketship.

The Large Hadron Collider (also knows as the LHC) is the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Despite many attempts at trying to delay the activation of the machine it looks like it will be turned on for the very first time September 10th.

The machine was built on the borders of France and Switzerland and has been worked on since the early 1980’s. More then 8,000 physicists from 85 different countries have worked long and hard on this machine and are excited to finally see it in action.

The NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope have collected much more clues on certain dark matter and the properties that they hold. They recently captured what is believed to be a powerful collision of galaxy clusters a good two years after the Bullet Cluster was first discovered. This new collision (which has been labeled the MACS J0025.4-1222) offer evidence on the inner workings behind the dark matter of the universe. This evidence will in turn help scientists to discover the separation between ordinary and dark matter.

NASA set the final space shuttle mission for May 31st, 2010. This is exactly four months before the shuttle’s fleet is set to retire. According to NASA the fleet has exactly 10 more missions left.

President Bush ordered that this missions be retired by September 30th, 2010. Five more flights this year have been scheduled, five more in 2009, and three in 2010. At this time the space agency is working on creating a new spacecraft that will be able to take astronauts back to the moon.

European researchers discovered what looked to be three ‘super-Earths’ orbiting around a star and two other solar systems that contained small planets. They believe that these large Earth-like planets are more common then we think.

“Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?” asked Michel Mayor of Switzerland’s Geneva Observatory. “We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it,” Mayor said in a statement.

It hasn’t even been a week and already NASA’s Phoenix lander has taken some interesting pictures of Mar’s surface and discovered a lump of ice or a Martian rock on the surface. Now NASA has ordered the Phoenix to dig up the dirt around it and analyze the material.

Scientists have been worried for years over the increase in global warming and the effects that it is having on the Earth. They have come up with ideas on how to fix the problem by cooling off the Earth. They believe that if they were to inject the Earth’s atmosphere with sulfate particles it would cool the Earth – but they discovered that it would also deplete the ozone layer and in the end would have dramatic and dangerous effects.

NASA has performed many research projects, has landed on the moon, and has sent a robot to capture live images of Mars. Who’s to say they can’t be wrong every now and then? Apparently a 13 year old German school boy has corrected some of the estimates that NASA released concerning the chances on an asteroid hitting Earth.

All particles, such as protons and electrons, have antimatter counterparts with the same mass but the opposite charge. When protons and electrons meet they destroy each other. For decades the source of antimatter has been elusive.

The source of this antimatter has now been found. Stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes. When matter comes in contact with antimatter, they destroy each other, releasing energy called gamma rays. In 1978, gamma ray detectors were placed on balloons detected a type of gamma ray coming from space meaning there was antimatter in space.

There are many mysterious things in space that researchers have not discovered and many that they don’t understand. One of the most confusing to them is the ultra high-energy cosmic rays. At this time 370 scientists and engineers from 17 different countries have gathered together in a group known as the Pierre Auger Collaboration. They have stated that they finally have evidence explaining what these phenomenons are. They are super-massive black holes that rumble at the hearts of many galaxies, crushing stars and gas out of existence and spewing jets of radiation and subatomic particles into intergalactic space.