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Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web o
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| Title |
Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web of "Clumpy" Dark Matter in 3-D |
| General Information |
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created a three-dimensional map that provides the first direct look at the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Read more: * NASA Press Release [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/01/text/ ] * The Full Story [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/01/full/ ] |
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Process Astronomical Images
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| Title |
Process Astronomical Images on Your Home Computer Just Like the Experts |
| General Information |
What is a News Nugget? News Nuggets are bulletins from the world of astronomy. Anyone with a desktop computer running Adobe® Photoshop® or Adobe Photoshop Elements software can try their hand at crafting astronomical images as beautiful as Hubble Space Telescope's. A free software plug-in being released today for Photoshop makes the treasure of archival astronomical images and spectra from Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory and many other famous telescopes accessible to home astronomy enthusiasts. Read more: * Release Text [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/53/text/ ] |
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FITS for Fun -- Create Spect
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FITS for Fun -- Create Spectacular Pictures in Minutes |
| General Information |
What is a News Nugget? News Nuggets are bulletins from the world of astronomy. With the release of version 2 of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator image processing software, it's now even easier and faster to create stunning color pictures from the raw data taken by observatories such as NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and ESA's XMM-Newton. |
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Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow: S
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Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow: Supernova Connection |
| Explanation |
What causes the mysterious gamma-ray bursts [ http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/ 0398fishman.html ]? Indicated in this [ http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~derekfox/ grb011211/ ] Hubble Space Telescope exposure of an otherwise unremarkable field in the constellation Crater [ http://www.astronomical.org/constellations/ crt.html ], is the dwindling optical afterglow of a gamma-ray burst first detected [ http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/other/011211.gcn3 ] by the Beppo-SAX satellite on 2001 December 11. The burst's host galaxy [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020228.html ], billions of light-years distant, is the faint smudge extending above and to the left of the afterglow position. After rapidly catching the fading [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980528.html ] x-ray light [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010413.html ] from the burst with the orbiting XMM-Newton observatory [ http://sci.esa.int/xmm/ ], astronomers are now reporting [ http://www.star.le.ac.uk/news/0302.html ] the telltale signatures [ http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/ snr_group/spectroscopy.html ] of elements [ http://www.uky.edu/Projects/Chemcomics/ ] magnesium, silicon, sulphur, argon, and calcium - material most likely found in an expanding debris [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011026.html ] cloud produced by the explosion of a massive star. The exciting result [ http://www.pparc.ac.uk/nw/press/gamma.asp ] is evidence that the gamma-ray burst itself is linked to a very energetic supernova explosion [ http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9712123 ] which may have preceded the powerful [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gamma/ milkyway.html ] flash of gamma-rays by up to a few days. |
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Galaxy Cluster in the Early
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| Title |
Galaxy Cluster in the Early Universe |
| Explanation |
Long before medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting base metals to gold [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010405.html ], stellar furnaces in this massive cluster of galaxies - cataloged as RDCS 1252.9-2927 - had transformed light elements into heavy ones [ http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/nucleo.html ]. In the false-color composite image [ http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/rdcs1252/ ] individual cluster galaxies can be seen at optical and near-infrared wavelengths, shown in red, yellow, and green colors. X-ray [ http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/xrays.html ] data (in purple) reveal the hot intracluster gas [ http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_sources/ galaxy_clusters.html ], enriched in heavy elements. Attracting the attention of astronomers using the orbiting Chandra [ http://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/ ] and XMM-Newton [ http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/ index.cfm?fareaid=23 ] x-ray telescopes, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/01/ ] and ground based VLT [ http://www.eso.org/paranal/ ], the galaxy cluster lies nearly 9 billion light-years away [ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/ part8/section-14.html ] ... and so existed at a time when the Universe was less than 5 billion years old. A measured mass of more than 200 trillion [ http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/ large.html ] Suns makes this galaxy cluster the most massive object ever found when the Universe was so young. The cluster elemental abundances [ http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309546 ] are consistent with the idea that most heavy elements were synthesized early on by massive stars, but current theories suggest that such a massive cluster should be rare in the early Universe [ http://www.us-gemini.noao.edu/project/ announcements/press/2004-1.html ]. |
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