ISS Sharack NX-15

Astroid named after Takei

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http://www.space.com/news/071003-ap-asteroid-takei.html

Cosmic Factories Produce Rubies and Sapphires

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http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... ewels.html

NASA: Shuttle Launch Paves Way to Larger Space Station

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http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/07 ... aunch.html

NASA Satellite images show California Wildfires

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http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookin ... oct07.html

NASA Examines Arctic Sea Ice Changes Leading to Record Low in 2007

10.01.07


PASADENA, Calif. - A new NASA-led study found a 23-percent loss in the extent of the Arctic's thick, year-round sea ice cover during the past two winters. This drastic reduction of perennial winter sea ice is the primary cause of this summer's fastest-ever sea ice retreat on record and subsequent smallest-ever extent of total Arctic coverage.

A team led by Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., studied trends in Arctic perennial ice cover by combining data from NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) satellite with a computing model based on observations of sea ice drift from the International Arctic Buoy Programme. QuikScat can identify and map different classes of sea ice, including older, thicker perennial ice and younger, thinner seasonal ice

Between winter 2005 and winter 2007, the perennial ice shrunk by an area the size of Texas and California combined. This severe loss continues a trend of rapid decreases in perennial ice extent in this decade. Study results will be published Oct. 4 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The scientists observed less perennial ice cover in March 2007 than ever before, with the thick ice confined to the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean was dominated by thinner seasonal ice that melts faster. This ice is more easily compressed and responds more quickly to being pushed out of the Arctic by winds. Those thinner seasonal ice conditions facilitated the ice loss, leading to this year's record low amount of total Arctic sea ice.

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Dead Stars Collide, Explode

A massive explosion in the deep reaches of space stemmed not from one dying star, as is typical, but from two dead ones that collided as the climax of a long orbital dance, new research shows.

Two white dwarf stars slowly spiraled into each other to touch off a supernova explosion called SN 2006gz and discovered last year in a spiral galaxy some 300 million light-years from Earth, said the study's lead author Malcolm Hicken.

"This finding shows that nature maybe richer than we suspected, with more than one way to make a white dwarf explode," said Hicken, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The research is detailed in the Nov. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A white dwarf is the remains of a star with too little mass on its own to end its stellar life as a supernova, the cataclysmic explosions that redistribute material back into space. The Sun, as well as stars with up to eight times its mass, will ultimately end up as white dwarfs.

Astronomers split supernovas into two categories: the explosion of a young, massive star whose core collapses, or the cataclysmic result of a white dwarf star siphoning gas from a stellar companion until it, too, blows itself apart.

Originally, astronomers thought that supernova SN 2006gz was just another example of a white dwarf stealing material from a partner star. But a closer look revealed signs of extra carbon and silicon, hallmarks of a smash-up between two white dwarf stars.

SN 2006gz was also brighter than researchers expected, suggesting that its origins included more material than the 1.4 solar mass upper limit of a single white dwarf star.

The observations offer new evidence for what until now has been only a theoretical way for supernovas to form. Since single white dwarf-spawned supernovas, also known as Type 1a explosions, are used as a standard for judging cosmic distances, separating them from those caused by two-white dwarf collisions will be critical for future research, Hicken said.

"[W]e have to be careful not to mistake a double white-dwarf explosion for a single white-dwarf blast," he added. "SN 2006gz was easy to recognize, but there may be less clear-cut cases."

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HODave Mosher
Staff Writer
SPACE.com


HUSTON - With NASA's go-ahead, astronauts are gearing up for a tricky solar wing repair at a far end of the International Space Station (ISS) tomorrow.


Crewmembers scrounged around the orbital laboratory yesterday for supplies, crafting "cuff links" with them that will button up two rips in the solar array wing. Today, mission controllers here at Johnson Space Center (JSC) sent astronauts on another scavenger hunt to find tools for repairing the power-generating blanket.


The space station now confronts two major threats to its power supply, both of which arose during the STS-120 mission. In addition to the maimed solar wing, which generates electricity but is structurally unstable, spacewalker Dan Tani discovered unusual metallic grit in solar-array-orienting gears on Oct. 28.


Since the solar array tore during its deployment on Oct. 30, however, mission managers abandoned inspecting the gears and scrambled to make the solar wing fix a top priority.


"We've had at least three or four extra teams running throughout the shifts," said Heather Rarick, ISS flight director, of the efforts to finish detailed plans for tomorrow's spacewalk. "It's just been a fantastic effort."


Astronauts took the changes in stride as well, offering up their sparse free time to outfit the space station's newest room as well as create the solar wing-saving cuff links. Today, crewmembers prepared Parazynski's ride--a 90-foot (27.4-meter), extended robotic arm--to the damaged solar wing.


"We know and understand how hard you guys are working down there," spacewalker Doug Wheelock told mission controllers last night. "We're ready to execute."


Wheelock will accompany Parazynski during the fourth and now final spacewalk of the mission. A fifth spacewalk was planned for Sunday, but mission managers cancelled the operation to focus on hashing out plans to repair the 4B solar wing, which is attached to the Port 6 truss section of the space station.


Risky repair


Mission managers said yesterday that Parazynski faces multiple risks while tacked onto the extended robotic arm.


Beyond electrocution from the solar array wing, which can generate 110 volts of electricity at 90 amperes in full sunlight, Parazynski will be an hour away from the safety of the airlock--significantly farther than astronauts are during most spacewalks.


David Wolf said the spacewalk is necessary to ensure the future completion of the space station.


"There comes a time when the station needs repaired, one-time events where we--with good mitigation and knowledge--accept high risk," Wolf said. "And that's one of them." Wolf added that addressing the risks outright helps prepare astronauts like Parazynski to avoid the dangers.


"Our job is to think of all those possible ways where a bad outcome could occur," Wolf said, "and be sure that every hazard is mitigated and handled."


NASA awoke the 10 free-floating astronauts this morning to the song "World" by Five for Fighting. "We're looking forward to another great day working with you and building the space station," Wheelock said as he awoke, dedicating the tune to hard-working crews on the ground.


Discovery and its seven-astronaut crew are slated to leave the orbital laboratory on Nov. 5 and land at Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 7, weather permitting. NASA officials said that the crew has enough supplies to stay docked for the ISS for two more days beyond Monday, should the need arise.


And it might. Mission managers said that if Saturday's spacewalk effort fails to repair the solar wing, mission managers said they will resurrect the fifth spacewalk for a second try on Sunday or Monday.

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From http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/st ... 451&page=1

Far away, around a star in the constellation Cancer the crab, scientists say they have discovered new evidence that we may not be alone.

A group of scientists working in Hawaii and California reported today that the star 55 Cancri has a complete solar system -- five planets, in almost circular orbits, at least one of which seems to be in the star's "habitable zone," where temperatures are likely to be right for liquid water to exist.

It has been more than a decade since astronomers found the first so-called "exoplanets" -- planets orbiting other stars -- and the total count is now more than 250.

But most of them were vastly larger than the Earth and followed lopsided, elliptical orbits. If they orbited close enough to their host stars to be warm, they would alternately fry and freeze -- not the best conditions for life to take root.

"This discovery of the first-ever quintuple planetary system has me jumping out of my socks," said Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the world's leading discoverers of far-away planets. "We now know that our sun and its family of planets is not unusual."

Marcy and other scientists have been scanning the heavens, openly hoping to find planets like Earth.

"This discovery shows that our Milky Way contains billions of planetary systems," said Marcy.

Slight Wobble Proves Noteworthy The scientists who reported the find today said they have been watching 55 Cancri for 18 years, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Lick Observatory in California as part of a project funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The star is 41 light years away, more than 240 trillion miles. Because of the great distances, they could not directly see the planets, but they could watch the star wobbling, ever so slightly, because of the gravity exerted on it by the planets as they orbited.

Then they did the math. They concluded that one of the planets is in an orbit about 72.5 million miles from the star, taking 260 Earth days to circle it once. It's therefore closer to its host star than the Earth is to the sun (93 million miles) -- but they said that is a promising sign because 55 Cancri is slightly fainter than the sun is.

"This object," said Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona at Tucson, "would have a very temperate climate. It would be a little bit warmer than the Earth, but not very much."

Is there a prospect for life on that distant world? Any answer to that question, said the scientists, would be pure conjecture. But Debra Fisher, an astronomer from San Francisco State University, pointed out that our Earth would be too small to be seen from other stars if there were anyone out there using technology like ours.

It's quite possible, she said, that 55 Cancri has more planets in its temperate zone -- and even moons around those planets -- that we cannot see.

"There could be Earths, there could be 10 Earth-mass planets, and we would just not have detected them," she said.

This discovery, said the researchers, raises the odds other worlds are capable of supporting life. Space telescopes of the future, flying above the Earth's atmosphere, may be able to spot them.

"There may be terrestrial planets around most stars," said Lunine. We just haven't found them yet."

Dinosaur From Sahara Ate Like A 'Mesozoic Cow'

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2007) — A 110-million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull bones has been discovered.

Found in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago, the dinosaur is a plant eater known as Nigersaurus taqueti. Originally named by Sereno and his team in 1999 with only a few of its distinctive bones in hand, Nigersaurus has emerged as an anatomically bizarre dinosaur.

Nigersaurus, a younger cousin of the more familiar North American dinosaur Diplodocus, is small for a sauropod, measuring only 30 feet in length. It managed to sustain its elephant-sized body with a featherweight skull armed with hundreds of needle-shaped teeth, said Sereno. Barely able to lift its head above its back, Nigersaurus operated more like a Mesozoic cow than a reptilian giraffe, mowing down mouthfuls of greenery that consisted largely of ferns and horsetails.

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What Space Telescopes of Tomorrow Will See

Giant-sized telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra offer unprecedented views of the cosmos, but astronomers are eager to put more powerful tools into orbit around the Earth.

Without the extra help, said Rachel Somerville, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, it may be impossible to resolve some of the universe's greatest mysteries.

"We need better observations to make our models better," Somerville said, noting her search to understand galaxy formation and mysterious quasars. "... If you just put theorists in a room for the next 15 years with the biggest supercomputer you can find, it will never happen."

NASA expects the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to launch in 2013, and many scientists are already pondering their future observations of tiny extrasolar planets, elusive black holes and distant galactic arms.

Somerville and other astronomers laid bare their sky-watching hopes—including telescopes beyond JWST—at the recent Astrophysics 2020 conference, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and held at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Galactic details

JWST will boast a segmented mirror nearly 21 feet (6.4 meters) in diameter, which has seven times the light-collecting area of Hubble. Somerville thinks the sensitive infrared observatory will be crucial for understanding galaxy formation.

"If you don't have a high enough resolution, galaxies you're trying to observe are going look like fuzzy blobs," Somerville said. "Seeing the star-filled arms of galaxies in detail, for example, can tell us how some galaxies evolved."

And the higher the resolution, the further a telescope can see back in time, as light can take millions or billions of years to reach Earth.

While Somerville said NASA's next "great observatory" will deliver unprecedented views of galactic arms, she thinks the telescope could use some help to speed along other cosmic discoveries.

Helper telescopes

"JWST has a big mirror and is very sensitive, but it has a postage-stamp sized camera sensor. You can see very, very deep into the universe, but you can only see this much at a time," she told SPACE.com, drawing the sensor size in the air with her hands.

"That takes a long time. If you have a smaller-diameter telescope with a lot of sensors, you can see much more of the sky at one time."

She explained that while such "wide-field" telescopes would not be as sensitive as JWST, such high-sensitivity telescopes could step in to observe interesting areas in greater detail. "It narrows your playing field and, ultimately, saves you a lot of time," Somerville said.

Saving that time should help astronomers find objects of interest faster and rapidly expand scientific knowledge.

Beyond JWST

Somerville, however, isn't the only one with big ideas. Wes Traub, an astronomer and project scientist for several proposed planet-finding NASA missions, would like to see extrasolar planets in greater detail than ever before.

Traub and his colleagues envision blocking out the blinding light of distant stars with giant occulters, or "solar shades," to observe planets around stars with future space telescopes.

"There are many, many planets to be found," Traub said. If the solar shade idea takes off, he explained, astronomers could block the intense glare of a planet's star and precisely measure light reflecting off the planet. In effect, astronomers could look for life-nurturing compounds such as water, methane and oxygen on the planet.

"If we can image a planet with just one pixel on a detector ... we could characterize its surface and search for life," he said. If NASA approves such a mission in the next decade, JWST may be the first telescope to take such measurements.

But Traub said he would like to see bigger space telescopes to peer at distant planets.

"When you go to a larger telescope, you gain proportionately that much detection ability and sensitivity," he said, which allows for speedier extrasolar planet searches and observations. "It would be lovely to have a 16-meter [53-foot] diameter telescope to do this."

Black Hole Record Shattered

In athletic events such as swimming or running, a world record will often stand for several years before it’s broken. The same thing usually holds true for astronomical records as well.

But in the case of black holes that form when their parent stars explode as a supernova, a record established less than two weeks ago has just been shattered. Black holes are objects with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp.

On October 17, astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that a black hole in the galaxy M33 contains 16 times the mass of the Sun. For two weeks it was the heaviest known black hole of its type. Such black holes are known as "stellar-mass" black holes, because they have masses typical of stars.

But in a paper to be published on November 1, another team is announcing a stellar-mass black hole with at least 24 times the mass of the Sun, and perhaps as many as 33 solar masses.

The team, led by Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., used both Chandra and NASA’s Swift satellite to make its discovery.

Prestwich is quick to point out that breaking a record is not nearly as important to scientists as learning something new about how black holes form. "We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized," she says. The black hole resides in a small, irregular-shaped galaxy known as IC 10, which is a relatively nearby galaxy 1.8 million light-years from Earth. The black hole is accompanied by a companion star in its journey through space. The two stars orbit around each other. The companion star is blowing off large amounts of gas in a gusty wind, and some of this gas is trapped by the black hole’s powerful gravity. This material is destined to fall into the black hole and disappear from the universe, but as it spirals into the black hole, it heats up and radiates X-rays.

Using Chanda, Prestwich and her colleagues noticed that the system normally emits a lot of X-rays, but every so often, the X-rays disappear. To find out what was happening, she targeted this system with Swift and looked at it over the course of about 10 days in late November 2006. The team found that the X-rays periodically cut off. As the two objects orbit each other, the companion star periodically passes in front of the black hole as seen from Earth, and blocks the X-rays. This is just like the Moon passing in front of the Sun and blocking its light, an event known as an eclipse.

The Swift observations, as well as observations from the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, told Prestwich and her group how fast the two stars go around each other, This information allowed the team to measure the mass of the black hole. When taking into account the various uncertainties, they determined the black hole has at least 24 times the Sun’s mass, and perhaps as many as 33. Even at the lower end of 24 solar masses, the IC 10 black hole is considerably heavier than the 16-solar-mass black hole in M33.

The discovery raises the obvious question of how this black hole got to be so big. Calculations performed on computers suggest that even the most massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy leave behind black holes with no more than 15 or 20 solar masses. Even if these stars begin their lives with 100 solar masses, they blow off almost all of their mass in winds and in the supernova explosions that end their lives.

But the black hole in IC 10 probably formed from a star with a different chemical composition than the stars that currently reside in our Milky Way. Specifically, the parent star probably had a very low fraction of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements on the Periodic Table. Computer calculations show that such stars will blow off less gas in winds before they explode, so they can leave behind heavier black holes.

Prestwich’s colleague Roy Kilgard of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., points out that massive stars in our galaxy today are probably not producing very heavy stellar-mass black holes. But, he adds, "There could be millions of heavy stellar-mass black holes lurking out there that were produced early in the Milky Way’s history, before it had a chance to build up heavy elements."

Even though the IC 10 black hole breaks the record for largest stellar-mass black hole, it’s puny compared to black holes in the centers of large galaxies. These monsters formed early in the universe’s history by a mechanism that remains unknown. They contain millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun, and are thus known as "supermassive" black holes.

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NASA to Launch NASCAR Daytona 500 Flags
By Robert Z. Pearlman

When the green flag drops at the 50th running of the Daytona 500 on February 17, 2008, it will travel just a few inches. But for the first car crossing the finish line 500 miles later, a different green flag awaits the winner with a few million miles to its history.

In fact, to even come close to matching the distance traveled by that green flag, the driver would need to climb back in his car and repeat the race another 9,000 times.

That's because NASA plans to fly three of the green flags on its next space shuttle mission, scheduled to launch in December, in celebration of its own 50th anniversary and the 50th year of NASCAR's Daytona 500, as first reported by the Orlando Sentinel.

The flags will be stowed aboard space shuttle Atlantis as it embarks on the STS-122 mission to the International Space Station where it will deliver the European science laboratory, Columbus. When the planned 11-day mission lands back on Earth, two of the flags will be returned to NASCAR, which in turn will present one to the winner of the Daytona 500 while placing the other on public display at the Florida racetrack.

The third flag will be kept by the space agency. "It will be used as a 50th anniversary commemorative piece," said NASA spokesperson John Yembrick in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "It may be given to the Smithsonian, we do not know yet."

NASA has listed the Daytona 500, which NASCAR bills as "The Great American Race," on its website's calendar of officially-recognized events that will mark the agency's founding 50 years ago on October 1, 1958. The inaugural Daytona 500 was run on February 22, 1959.

David Talley, spokesperson for the Daytona International Speedway, told collectSPACE.com that in addition to the flags, NASA is working with NASCAR on other crossover events, the logistics of which are still being finalized, but may include astronaut-driver promotions and, according to the Orlando Sentinel, an in-flight press event involving the shuttle crew and Daytona drivers.

"All of that is being discussed. We're in the early stages of planning," said Yembrick.

The three green flags will be flown as part of the STS-122 Official Flight Kit (OFK), a small package of mementos carried on each flight to award organizations that support the crew's success. During the previous shuttle mission in October, NASA flew a prop lightsaber in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Lucasfilm's "Star Wars" franchise.

According to Talley, this may be the first time NASA has collaborated with the Speedway and NASCAR to promote the Daytona 500, outside of ticket packages combining access to the racetrack and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. NASA has however, highlighted the use of its technology in the design of NASCAR race cars and the material used to protect their drivers.

"We have had a connection to NASCAR for some time," said NASA's News Chief at the Kennedy Space Center, Allard Beutel. "Flags are small, easy to fly. It's something easy we can do, and adds extra sentimental value for some people."

"It's another way to reach an audience we don't normally reach," Beutel told collectSPACE.com.

David E. Steitz
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1730
david.steitz@nasa.gov

Dec. 21, 2007 RELEASE : 07-285 NASA Spinoff 2007 Highlights Space Innovation in Everyday Life WASHINGTON - NASA's Spinoff 2007, an annual online and print publication featuring NASA space technologies that provide practical, tangible benefits to society, is now available.

Spinoff 2007 highlights 39 new examples of how NASA innovation can be transferred to the commercial market place and applied to areas such as health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, homes and recreation, environmental and agricultural resources, computer technology and industrial productivity.

"NASA's science, aeronautics and space exploration drives inspiration, innovation and discovery which in turn keep this nation at the forefront of technology advancements at a global level," NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said.

An example of NASA innovation helping to better lives today is a method for non-invasive, painless, ultrasound examination of the carotid artery, which carries blood from the heart to the brain. The test helps to identify risk for atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart attacks and strokes. The test uses software based on a program NASA uses to interpret spacecraft imagery from Mars.

Spinoff 2007 also profiles NASA's education efforts and other partnership successes, and provides reference and resource information available through the agency's programs.

NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program produces the NASA Spinoff series. The program fosters technology partnerships, commercialization and innovation in support of NASA's overall mission and national priorities. For more information about the program, visit:


http://ipp.nasa.gov


To request a free printed copy of Spinoff 2007, call 301- 286-5979. To access Spinoff 2007 and a searchable database of previous Spinoff editions on the Web, visit:


http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto


For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:


http://www.nasa.gov

2-D Invisibility Cloak For Visible Light Created


False color representation of the measured plasmon field scattering around the central area of the cloak. The flow of energy around the cloaked region is visualized. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Maryland)ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2007) — Harry Potter may not have talked much about plasmonics in J. K. Rowling's fantasy series, but University of Maryland researchers are using this emerging technology to develop an invisibility cloak that exists beyond the world of bespectacled teenage wizards.

A research team at Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering comprised of Professor Christopher Davis, Research Scientist Igor Smolyaninov, and graduate student Yu-Ju Hung, has used plasmon technology to create the world's first invisibility cloak for visible light. The engineers have applied the same technology to build a revolutionary superlens microscope that allows scientists to see details of previously undetectable nanoscale objects.

Generally speaking, when we see an object, we see the visible light that strikes the object and is reflected. The Clark School team's invisibility cloak refracts (or bends) the light that strikes it, so that the light moves around and past the cloak, reflecting nothing, leaving the cloak and its contents "invisible."

The invisibility cloak device is a two-dimensional pattern of concentric rings created in a thin, transparent acrylic plastic layer on a gold film. The plastic and gold each have different refractive properties. The structured plastic on gold in different areas of the cloak creates "negative refraction" effects, which bend plasmons—electron waves generated when light strikes a metallic surface under precise circumstances—around the cloaked region.

This manipulation causes the plasmon waves to appear to have moved in a straight line. In reality they have been guided around the cloak much as water in a stream flows around a rock, and released on the other side, concealing the cloak and the object inside from visible light. The invisibility that this phenomenon creates is not absolutely perfect because of energy loss in the gold film.

The team achieved this invisibility under very specialized conditions. The researchers' cloak is just 10 micrometers in diameter; by comparison, a human hair is between 50 to 100 micrometers wide. Also, the cloak uses a limited range of the visible spectrum, in two dimensions. It would be a significant challenge to extend the cloak to three dimensions because researchers would need to control light waves both magnetically and electronically to steer them around the hidden object. The technology initially may work only for small objects of specific controlled shape.

The team also has used plasmonics to develop superlens microscopy technology, which can be integrated into a conventional optical microscope to view nanoscale details of objects that were previously undetectable.

The superlens microscope could one day image living cells, viruses, proteins, DNA molecules, and other samples, operating much like a point-and-shoot camera. This new technology could revolutionize the capability to view nanoscale objects at a crucial stage of their development. The team believes they can improve the resolution of their microscope images down to about 10 nanometers—one ten thousandth of the width of a human hair.

A large reason for the success of the group's innovations in both invisibility and microscopy is that surface plasmons have very short wave lengths, and can therefore move data around using much smaller-scale guiding structures than in existing devices. These small, rapid waves are generated at optical frequencies, and can transport large amounts of data. The group also has made use of the unique properties of metamaterials, artificially structured composites that help control electromagnetic waves in unusual ways using plasmonic phenomena.

The diverse applications the group has derived from their plasmonics research is an example of the ingenuity of researchers approaching new and dynamic technologies that offer broad and unprecedented capabilities. The research has attracted a great deal of attention within the scientific community, industry and government agencies. Related plasmonics research offers applications for military and computer chip technologies, which could benefit from the higher frequencies and rapid data transfer rates that plasmons offer.

The team's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Clark School Corporate Partner BAE Systems.

Smolyaninov and Davis have published an article in the journal Science about their superlens microscope technology, titled "Magnifying Superlens in the Visible Frequency Range." The group and their colleagues from Purdue University will also soon publish a paper about their invisibility cloak research.

New X-ray Source In Nearby Galaxy Spawns Mystery

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Astronomers studying a nearby galaxy have spied a rare type of star system -- one that contains a black hole that suddenly began glowing brightly with X-rays.

Though this type of star system is supposed to be rare, it's the second such system discovered in that galaxy, called Centaurus A.

The discovery suggests that astronomers have more to learn about the lives and deaths of massive stars in galaxies such as our own.

Normally when astronomers study Centaurus A, it's the giant X-ray jets emanating from the heart of the galaxy that steal the show, explained Gregory Sivakoff, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Ohio State University. The jets extend from the galaxy for 13,000 light years in different directions.

But when his team studied Centaurus A with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory starting in March 2007, they saw a new X-ray source -- much smaller than the X-ray jets, but still glowing brightly. The source wasn't there during the last survey of the galaxy in 2003, but it shined throughout the time of the new observations, from March to May of 2007.

Because it hadn't been seen before, the astronomers classified the object as a “transient” X-ray source, meaning that the object had been there before 2007, but had only recently brightened enough to stand out.

Sivakoff discussed the results in a press briefing Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

The newly bright object, dubbed CXOU J132518.2-430304, is most likely a binary star system, the researchers concluded. The two stars likely formed at the same time, with one much more massive than the other. The more massive star evolved more quickly, and collapsed to form a black hole. It is now slowly devouring its companion. Such binary systems are thought to be extremely rare.

But this is the second bright, transient X-ray binary system discovered in Centaurus A -- and that's the problem, Sivakoff said.

“When we look at other galaxies like Centaurus A, we don't see these bright, transient X-ray binaries,” he said. “But now we've found two such objects in Centaurus A, and the implication is that we may not understand these objects as well as we thought we did.”

“So right now, our discovery is actually pointing to a puzzle rather than a solution.”

Because Centaurus A is near to our galaxy, astronomers have long hoped to use it as a Rosetta stone for studying other galaxies with black holes.

As astronomers piece together an explanation for the existence of the newly-discovered binary system, they may gain a better understanding of how black holes form from massive stars and how binary systems evolve.

“These binary systems are signposts of the massive stars that once existed in galaxies like Centaurus A. To understand the massive stars, we must first know how to read the signs,” he said.

Sivakoff and Ralph Kraft of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the study; their collaborators were from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, University of Hertfordshire, University of Virginia, University of Bristol, McMaster University, and the University of Birmingham.

This research was sponsored by NASA.