The Coldest Object in Space is Man-Made

-FUPPETS- is always amazed at the incredible ingenuity of humanity. The Planck Telescope is in space and contains several instruments. One of these, the Planck Telescope's High Frequency Instrument, reached it's coldest temperature on July 2nd.
The High Frequency Instrument needs to be at -273 Celsius in order to perform it's intended function, which is to capture radiation from the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, radiation which is maybe half a degree warmer than the -273 °C temperature that the Instrument has achieved. This was done with a passive cooling system which radiates heat out into space and got the temperature down to -230 °C, after which three active cooling units lowered the temperature of the instruments to 273.05°C, only 0.1°C above absolute zero! That is amazingly cold, and almost as cold as theoretically possible. Any colder and the atomic motion of the instrument itself would stop completely.
Here is an image of the Cosmic Background Radiation, in the best resolution we have. The Planck telescope will achieve a much higher resolution.

Another achievement of the Plank Telescope was reached on the same day. Just before noon that day, the telescope reached L2, The second Lagrangian point of the Sun/Earth system.
Lagrangian points are points in a two mass system where a third mass appears stationary in relation to the previous two masses, in this case the Earth and our sun, Sol.

For example, given two massive bodies in circular orbits around their common
center of mass, there are five positions in space where a third body, of comparatively negligible mass, could be placed which would then maintain its position relative to the two massive bodies. - ( Science Daily )

Here is a diagram of the 5 LaGrangian Points in relation to the Earth and Sol.

Herschel Infrared Space Telescope Opens It's Eyes!

The largest Infrared telescope ever flown into outer space opened it's "eyes" on June 14th. The first object to be imaged by the Herschel's cameras is M51, the first spiral galaxy seen by Charles Messier in 1773.

The image above is a very preliminary image, taken just to show the intense resolution capabilities of this telescope's infrared astronomy capabilities. Blue indicates regions of warm dust that is heated by young stars, while the colder dust shows up in red. The image above was taken at three different infrared exposure levels, 70, 100, and 160 microns. Once the Herschel Space Observatory is fully commissioned, the incredible images will just begin to pour forth.
-FUPPETS- will be ready.
Here is an image of the Herschel Space Observatory after completion.

Most Distant Known Object In The Universe

The Universe is a mighty huge place. It is so big as to seem infinite. With human ingenuity we have managed to create telescopes that peer ever farther into deep space. The energy gathered by our telescopes from these objects is as old as it is distant. If we see a galaxy that is 5 billion light years away we are actually seeing the photons that escaped that galaxy 5 billion years ago. It is time travel basically. The farther we look the further back in time we are looking. In deepest space, before the formation of galaxies as we now know them, the things we humans can see are quasars and gamma ray bursts. This is the story of one such gamma ray burst.

On April 23, NASA’s Swift satellite discovered the burst — a 10-second flash of highly energetic radiation believed to mark the explosive collapse of a massive star into a black hole. - ( Science News )

The image above shows the afterglow from the gamma ray burst seen on April 23rd.

Within three hours of Swift’s detection, astronomers recorded the burst’s infrared afterglow using the U.K. Infra-Red Telescope and the Gemini North Telescope, both on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Those observations, reported online (gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3_archive.html), suggested that the explosion ignited when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 630 million years old.

This is an amazing find, and much older than the previous record holder, a galaxy about 12.9 billion light years away. Scientists think that this burst was caused by a giant early star collapsing into a super-massive black hole.
It is truly bad-ass the amount of information that can be gathered about the Universe by sentient bags of meat and water residing in a tiny rocky world, on the edges of a nondescript galaxy, floating among the billions and billions of other galaxies in the Universe. -FUPPETS- loves the future.

Around The World In 80 Telescopes

Want to go on an extraordinary voyage? Today you can, by watching Around the World in 80 Telescopes. The 24-hour long webcast is organized by the European Southern Observatory for the International Year of Astronomy cornerstone project 100 Hours of Astronomy. The webcast event follows night and day around the globe to visit some of the most advanced observatories on Earth and in space, exploring the universe in visible light and beyond. The Gemini North Telescope (Hawaii, USA) and the large observatories at the summit of volcanic Mauna Kea are scheduled for the first stops in the program beginning April 3 at 09:00 UT. Others on the schedule include the Swift Satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (Hanle, India), and the 10-meter South Pole Telescope and IceCube Neutrino Telescope (South Pole, Antarctica). - ( Astronomy Picture Of The Day )

-FUPPETS- Loves Our Telescopes

Do you see the above image? It is a visible-light image of the star T Leporis. (click image to enlarge). It does not look like much you say? Well, you are an ignorant fool. Ha! Really though, this image may be the single sharpest resolution visible-light image color ever taken by humanity. Before describing what it is we are seeing, you must understand how this image was taken and how far away T Leporis is from our Earth.

The resolution of this image is about four milli-arc seconds. A minute of arc, or an arcminute, is a unit of angular measurement, equal to 1/60th of 1 degree. 1 degree is defined as 1/360th of a circle. 1 minute of arc is 1/21600th of a full circle, quite small. A second of arc, or an arcsecond, is 1/60th of an arcminute, and a milli-arc second is 1/1000th of an arcsecond. That is an incredibly tiny part of a degree, much less of the view of the night sky. That lets you see how ridiculously tiny the region of space pictured in the above image is. To use an analogy that fits our human scale,

. . .one should realize that the star appears, on the sky, as small as a two-story house on the Moon. ( ESO (European Organization for Astronomical Research In The Southern Hemisphere ) )

Picture trying to see a two-story house on the Moon from the surface of the Earth. It is nearly inconceivable, but in effect, this is what was accomplished by the scientists at ESO. Now, what you are seeing is a very old star. "The central disc is the surface of the star, which is surrounded by a spherical shell of molecular material expelled from the star."

The star T Leporis is HUGE. It is just enormous. Here is an image comparing the size of T Leporis and it's outer ring of molecular ejecta, to the size of the Earth's orbit around our Sol. (click image to enlarge)

-FUPPETS- cannot get enough of the incredible information gathering power of our modern day scientific equipment, and of the genius of the men and women that create, maintain, and use these incredibly precise and complex tools. This image was taken by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, located in a high mountain desert in northern Chile.

Old Telescope + New Technology = Asteroid Hunting Supreme!

In the near past, it was pure science fiction conjecture to claim that asteroids or other solar system debris would strike the Earth. It was even more ridiculous to suggest that this was an event that happened several times throughout our planet's history. Even plainly visible impact craters, such as the Barringer Crater (or "Meteor Crater" as it is commonly known), were thought to come from volcanic activity.
Here is a view of the Barringer Crater from space. The Crater was originally called Diablo Canyon Crater, then re-named the Barringer Crater after the man who first proposed that this was an impact crater, not a volcanic one.

It was not until Eugene Merle Shoemaker and his research came along in 1963 that it was conclusively shown to be an asteroid impact crater.
Scientists at the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project are using the telescope at Kitt Peak, outfitted with modern anti-blur video sensors, to scan the skies and track as many asteroids as possible. Here is a video describing their efforts, from Space.com . There are many other such impact craters on the Earth, and it is very likely that there are many asteroids out in our Solar System that could easily strike the Earth. After all, our planet is upwards of 5 Billion years old. Our Sun has at least 10 Billion more years of nuclear fuel left. We humans could be very lucky to have evolved into our modern civilization in the relatively short time span between asteroid impacts. There are many catastrophes that we can do nearly nothing about. Earthquakes are unpredictable and uncontrollable. The same goes for massive volcanic eruptions. Asteroid impact, no matter how far-fetched it may sound, is not just possible, it is probable, and it is the one thing that we can have advance warning of in time to actually do something about it. These things are HAULING MAJOR ASS through the Solar System, and an impact would wipe out almost all life as we know it.

Based on crater formation rates determined from the Earth's closest celestial partner, the Moon, astrogeologists have determined that during the last 600 million years, the Earth has been struck by 60 objects of a diameter of five kilometers or more. The smallest of these impactors would release the equivalent of ten million megatons of TNT and leave a crater 95 kilometers across. For comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons.