Thursday, May 27, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
NASA - Let There Be Light
Endeavour pilot Terry Virts opened the windows of the newly installed cupola one at a time early Wednesday, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick an early look into the International Space Station's room with a view that they had helped install.
The cupola's fully opened windows look down on the Sahara Desert in this image that was 'tweeted' from space by JAXA astronaut and Expedition 22 flight engineer Soichi Noguchi.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Physicists Re-Create Conditions of the Big Bang - Sharon Begley
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Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.
Feb 16, 2010
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While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup%u2014quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.
The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot%u20144 trillion degrees Celsius%u2014that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.
The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers%u2014or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.
The behavior that has most intrigued the scientists so far is something called broken symmetry (of which there is a nice video here. Within the quark soup appear "bubbles" that violate a principle of physics called mirror symmetry, or parity. This form of symmetry means that events%u2014in this case, the collisions of particles and the spray of subatomic debris that results%u2014look the same if viewed in a mirror as they do when viewed directly. But one of the detectors monitoring the collisions inside RHIC observed an asymmetry in the electric charges of particles emerging from most of the collisions. Specifically, positively charged quarks seem to prefer to fly out of the collision parallel to the magnetic field, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. This behavior would appear reversed if reflected in a mirror, with negative quarks traveling parallel to the magnetic field and positive quarks traveling in the opposite direction. Hence the violation of mirror symmetry.
The quark soup also seems to contain bubbles that violate another form of symmetry, called charge-parity invariance. According to this bedrock principle of physics, when energy is converted to mass or vice versa as per Einstein's E=mc2, equal numbers of particles and antiparticles%u2014matter and antimatter%u2014are created or annihilated, respectively. That may seem like an abstruse point, but it may hold the key to how structure and form emerged from the otherwise homogeneous quark soup. Such symmetry-violating bubbles in the nascent universe, cosmologists suspect, tipped balance in the sea of otherwise equal amounts of matter and antimatter toward a preference for matter over antimatter. If the amounts of matter and antimatter had remained identical, no one would be here to notice: when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, they go poof in an annihilating burst of energy. By now, almost 14 billion years after creation, every particle of matter would have been destroyed through this process, leaving a universe awash in radiation and nothing else, an ethereally glowing world of light without substance. By re-creating conditions that last existed at the birth of the universe, says Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, who oversees research at RHIC, "RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe."
Previous experiments have found violations of charge-parity symmetry (a 1964 experiment discovering such violations brought the scientists who conducted it a Nobel Prize), but in each case the effect was too small to account for the amount of matter in the universe today. What RHIC found is "consistent with predictions of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of the universe." For a field that has been in the doldrums (especially in the United States) since the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, and that seems plagued by gremlins (as when the Large Hadron Collider sprang a helium leak, particle physics really needed this one.
Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves andTrain Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.
� 2010
While I barely understand this particle physics stuff, the stories around it are fascinating!
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo | Wired Science
One late night in 2007, Rogelio Bernal Andreo and his wife were driving down Highway 1 along California’s Lost Coast, when his wife opened the moon roof. What spread out above them looked nothing like the mauve sky near their Sunnyvale home.
“It was like the Milky Way was in front of us,” said Andreo, a former early eBay employee, who runs a Spanish-language internet company. “It looked like it was gonna fall on us.”
He pulled out his digital SLR camera and spent two hours trying to capture the vast galaxy. When he got home, he downloaded the photos, and caught the astrophotography bug.
“I started to look on the internet and see all these pictures, really gorgeous pictures,” Andreo said. “I said, ‘How do people do this?’”
Two years of intensive study, rigorous practice, and perhaps $10,000 of equipment later, he knows. And he let Wired.com in on his process. Step-by-step, we’ll break down how he went from the black-and-white star scene below to the mind-blowing space photo above.
Thanks to cheaper high-quality digital cameras and editing equipment, creating beautiful images of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters is now within the reach of anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend.
So, we live in a golden age for space photos, but looking at the technicolor images of what appears to the naked eye to be a fairly bland sky, we find ourselves asking: Does it really look like that?
As we find in this behind-the-scenes look at the making of a mind-blowing space photo, the answer is yes — but just not to your eyes, which are pretty poor sensors, compared with purpose-built astrophotographic equipment.
But that doesn’t mean the photos aren’t “real.” Most astrophotographers have an ethic: They won’t add color or lasso just a part of an image for editing. They can only bring things out of the data, not add them. The photos are often processed in Photoshop, but what they do is the opposite of falsifying the visual record. Astrophotographers are using digital-editing tools to find the truth in the noisy data that are the heavens.
“The stuff up there is really dim,” Andreo said. “The good thing is that the camera records all that and the trick is to bring it out.”
The first step in getting a good space photo is picking a spot without light pollution from cities. In northern California, Andreo prefers Lake San Antonio, Henry Coe State Park and Fremont Peak, depending on how far he wants to drive.
His equipment list is long. He packs a Takahashi telescope, Takahashi mount, tripod, SBIG STL11000M camera, adapters, cables, deep-cycle marine batteries, an Asus eee laptop, food and coffee of course.
This photo is how the process begins. It’s the first of 11 black-and-white exposures that he’ll make. The field of view is just the left third — the area around the bright blue stars of Orion’s belt — of the completed panorama at the top of the page.
“This is just one shot, a 15-minute exposure,” Andreo said. “That’s how it comes out of the camera. The original size of the picture is like 20 megabytes.”
Of course, he shoots in RAW format with no compression to maximize the amount of data the images retain.
Now, the processing begins. Andreo takes his 11 exposures and “stacks” them in
PhotoshopDeep Sky Stacker, one on top of the other. Then, he averages their data to screen out the noise. Each exposure has a set of random noise in some subset of pixels. By combining them, the good pixels outweigh the bad pixels and you end up with a less noisy image.“The stuff that’s really up there is going to stay, but the noise — because it was random — is going to disappear,” he said.
At this stage, he also does background calibration, which tends to brighten the image and make it a little “creamier.”
Here, Andreo has started to “push the histogram,” as astrophotographers say.
“You push up or down the low levels of the image and the high levels of the image and more data starts to show up,” he said. “It’s the first thing that most people are going to do. Once you stack your images, then adjust your histogram a little to see how much stuff is really there.”
Here, more stars are obviously apparent and the creaminess has gone away with the processing for greater contrast. Next comes the color.
After he shoots an area of the sky with the monochrome, high-resolution filter, he switches to separate red, green and blue filters. He goes through the same process for each color component as he did for the black-and-white image. He takes multiple exposures, combines them, and does background calibration.
“It’s just red, green and blue combined and slightly stretched to bring out all the detail,” Andreo said. “You start to see more of pretty picture, basically.”
Here, Andreo has draped the color data onto the more detailed luminance image.
“I take the RGB that you saw from the previous image, and I put it on top of the luminance,” Andreo said, “but I don’t want the details, I just want the color information.”
Once that’s complete, he pushes the histograms some more or perhaps adjusts the levels in the image to bring out the details. Some of the artistry comes out in this stage.
“Because there is a lot of creativity, with the same set of raw data, two different people are going to come up with different things,” he said.
The last step was simply to rotate it vertically because he just “liked it more this way.” After all, the number of targets for amateur astrophotographers is fairly limited. Framing is a key component of standing out.
“I’m hoping that my final picture will escape mediocrity,” he said. “It may not be the best you’ve ever seen, but at least it’s not just one more.”
Later, that rotation turned out fortuitously when a friend saw the image and suggested he combine it with photos he’d taken of an adjacent region of the sky.
Working with a program called Registar that helps photographers join their photos by identifying the common stars in different images, he stitched the images together. It required rotating and cropping his original Orion belt, but when the mosaic was finished, it was absolutely breathtaking. Last month, it was selected by NASA as the agency’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 18th.
The image certainly traveled a long way from its initial incarnation to the finished product, but is the first image any more real than the last? Does adding dozens of exposures together and “pushing the histogram” add or subtract from the reality of the image?
After stepping through the transformation, we’re not convinced either way, but we’re sure glad that someone takes pictures of space that look like pieces of the heavens.
Images: Rogelio Bernal Andreo.
See Also:
- More on Mindblowingspacephotos
- Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun
- Photo: Space Shuttle Crosses the Sun
- Spectacular Space Photo of the Christmas Tree Cluster
- Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama of the Milky Way
- The Pinwheel Galaxy Captured in Dazzling Color
- Zoom In on Lagoon Nebula with Super-High-Res Image
- Details of Galactic Core Revealed in X-Rays
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
The making of heavenly beauty...
New Telescope Captures Dazzling Image of Orion Nebula | Wired Science
You’ve undoubtedly seen the smudge of the Orion Nebula hanging just below his belt thousands of times, but the most beautiful image yet of the celestial body was just released Wednesday.
The European Southern Observatory’s new VISTA telescope’s enormous field of view allows it to image the entire nebula at once. It’s been designed to capture near-infrared light. The longer wavelengths of light in that part of the spectrum allow rays to pass through dusty space without being scattering.
The Orion Nebula is located about 1,350 light-years from Earth. The cloud of gas and dust is a nursery for young stars. The red blobs in the features near the center of the image are young, growing stars that are hidden by dust in visible light.
VISTA was just placed into service late last year, so we can expect many more beautiful near-infrared images as it conducts its survey of the sky.
There are detailed close-up shots below, too.
Image: ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. The 341 MB XXXL version.
See Also:
- The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo
- Slick NASA iPhone App Puts Space in Your Pocket
- Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
The new VISTA infrared telescope is coming online... more images to follow!