Thanks to the presence of a natural “zoom lens” in space, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope got a uniquely close-up look at the brightest “magnified” galaxy yet discovered.

This observation provides a unique opportunity to study the physical properties of a galaxy vigorously forming stars when the universe was only one-third its present age.

A so-called gravitational lens is produced when space is warped by a massive foreground object, whether it is the Sun, a black hole, or an entire cluster of galaxies. The light from more-distant background objects is distorted, brightened, and magnified as it passes through this gravitationally disturbed region.

A team of astronomers led by Jane Rigby of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., aimed Hubble at one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. Hubble’s view of the distant background galaxy is significantly more detailed than could ever be achieved without the help of the gravitational lens.

The results are published today in The Astrophysical Journal, in a paper led by Keren Sharon of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Professor Michael Gladders and graduate student Eva Wuyts of the University of Chicago were also key team members.

The presence of the lens helps show how galaxies evolved from 10 billion years ago to today. While nearby galaxies are fully mature and are at the tail end of their star-formation histories, distant galaxies tell us about the universe’s formative years. The light from those early events is just now arriving at Earth. Very distant galaxies are not only faint but also appear small on the sky. Astronomers would like to see how star formation progressed deep within these galaxies. Such details would be beyond the reach of Hubble’s vision were it not for the magnification made possible by gravity in the intervening lens region.

In 2006 a team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile measured the arc’s distance and calculated that the galaxy appears over three times brighter than previously discovered lensed galaxies. In 2011 astronomers used Hubble to image and analyze the lensed galaxy with the observatory’s Wide Field Camera 3.

The distorted image of the galaxy is repeated several times in the foreground lensing cluster, as is typical of gravitational lenses. The challenge for astronomers was to reconstruct what the galaxy really looked like, were it not distorted by the cluster’s funhouse-mirror effect.

Hubble’s sharp vision allowed astronomers to remove the distortions and reconstruct the galaxy image as it would normally look. The reconstruction revealed regions of star formation glowing like bright Christmas tree bulbs. These are much brighter than any star-formation region in our Milky Way galaxy.

Through spectroscopy, the spreading out of light into its constituent colors, the team plans to analyze these star-forming regions from the inside out to better understand why they are forming so many stars.

For images and more information about galaxy RCS2 032727-132623 and gravitational lensing, visit:

http://hubblesite.org/news/2012/08

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

Source: Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Photo: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Inst. for Cosmological Physics, Univ. of Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (Univ. of Chicago)

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Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have, for the first time, measured the alignment of magnetic fields in gigantic clouds of gas and dust in a distant galaxy. Their results suggest that such magnetic fields play a key role in channeling matter to form denser clouds, and thus in setting the stage for the birth of new stars.

The work is being published in the journal Nature.

Stars and their planets are born when giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust collapse. You’ve probably seen the resulting stellar nurseries in beautiful astronomical images: Colorful nebulae, lit by the bright young stars they have brought forth.

Astronomers know quite a bit about these so-called molecular clouds: They consist mainly of hydrogen molecules — unusual in a cosmos where conditions are rarely right for hydrogen atoms to bond together into molecules. And if one traces the distribution of clouds in a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way galaxy, one finds that they are lined up along the spiral arms.

But how do those clouds come into being? What makes matter congregate in regions a hundred or even a thousand times more dense than the surrounding interstellar gas?

One candidate mechanism involves the galaxy’s magnetic fields. Everyone who has seen a magnet act on iron filings in the classic classroom experiment knows that magnetic fields can be used to impose order. Some researchers have argued that something similar goes on in the case of molecular clouds: that galaxies’ magnetic fields guide and direct the condensation of interstellar matter to form denser clouds and facilitate their further collapse.

Some astronomer see this as the key mechanism enabling star formation. Others contend that the cloud matter’s gravitational attraction and turbulent motion of gas within the cloud are so strong as to cancel any influence of an outside magnetic field.

If we were to restrict attention to our own galaxy, it would be difficult to find out who is right. We would need to see our galaxy’s disk from above to make the appropriate measurements; in reality, our Solar System sits within the galactic disk. That is why Hua-bai Li and Thomas Henning from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy chose a different target: the Triangulum galaxy, 3 million light-years from Earth and also known as M 33, which is oriented in just the right way (cf. image).

Using a telescope known as the Submillimeter Array (SMA), which is located at Mauna Kea Observatory on Mauna Kea Island, Hawai’i, Li and Henning measured specific properties of radiation received from different regions of the galaxy which are correlated with the orientation of these region’s magnetic fields. They found that the magnetic fields associated with the galaxy’s six most massive giant molecular clouds were orderly, and well aligned with the galaxy’s spiral arms.

If turbulence played a more important role in these clouds than the ordering influence of the galaxy’s magnetic field, the magnetic field associated with the cloud would be random and disordered.

Thus, Li and Henning’s observations are a strong indication that magnetic fields indeed play an important role when it comes to the formation of dense molecular clouds — and to setting the stage for the birth of stars and planetary systems like our own.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie
Photo: Image of the Triangulum Galaxy M33, which presents astronomers with a bird’s eye view of its disk. The pink blobs are regions containing newly formed stars. Credit: Thomas V. Davis (http://tvdavisastropics.com)

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Using several telescopes, both ground-based and in orbit, the scientists unravelled longstanding mysteries about the object called Cygnus X-1, a famous binary-star system discovered to be strongly emitting X-rays nearly a half-century ago. The system consists of a black hole and a companion star from which the black hole is drawing material. The scientists’ efforts yielded the most accurate measurements ever of the black hole’s mass and spin rate.

“Because no other information can escape from a black hole, knowing its mass, spin, and electrical charge gives a complete description of it,” said Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “The charge of this black hole is nearly zero, so measuring its mass and spin make our description complete,” he added.

Though Cygnus X-1 has been studied intensely since its discovery, previous attempts to measure its mass and spin suffered from lack of a precise measurement of its distance from Earth. Reid led a team that used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a continent-wide radio-telescope system, to make a direct trigonometric measurement of the distance. Their VLBA observations provided a distance of 6070 light-years, while previous estimates had ranged from 5800-7800 light-years.

Armed with the new, precise distance measurement, scientists using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, and visible-light observations made over more than two decades, calculated that the black hole in Cygnus X-1 is nearly 15 times more massive than our Sun and is spinning more than 800 times per second.

“This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed and how fast it was spinning,” Reid said. “Getting a good measurement of the distance was crucial,” Reid added.

“We now know that Cygnus X-1 is one of the most massive stellar black holes in the Milky Way,” said Jerry Orosz, of San Diego State University. “It’s spinning as fast as any black hole we’ve ever seen,” he added.

In addition to measuring the distance, the VLBA observations, made during 2009 and 2010, also measured Cygnus X-1′s movement through our Galaxy. That movement, the scientists, said, is too slow for the black hole to have been produced by a supernova explosion. Such an explosion would have given the object a “kick” to a much higher speed.

“There are suggestions that this black hole could have been formed without a supernova explosion, and our results support those suggestions,” Reid said.

Reid, Orosz, and Lijun Gou, also of CfA, were the lead authors of three papers on Cygnus X-1 published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Photo: Artist’s conception of Cygnus X-1: Black hole draws material from companion star (right) into hot, swirling disk. CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

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There’s been just one problem: the theory suggested most galaxies should have far more stars and dark matter at their cores than they actually do. The problem is most pronounced for dwarf galaxies, the most common galaxies in our own celestial neighborhood. Each contains less than 1 percent of the stars found in large galaxies such as the Milky Way.

Now an international research team, led by a University of Washington astronomer, reports Jan. 14 in Nature that it resolved the problem using millions of hours on supercomputers to run simulations of galaxy formation (1 million hours is more than 100 years). The simulations produced dwarf galaxies very much like those observed today by satellites and large telescopes around the world.

“Most previous work included only a simple description of how and where stars formed within galaxies, or neglected star formation altogether,” said Fabio Governato, a UW research associate professor of astronomy and lead author of the Nature paper.

“Instead we performed new computer simulations, run over several national supercomputing facilities, and included a better description of where and how star formation happens in galaxies.”

The simulations showed that as the most massive new stars exploded as supernovas, the blasts generated enormous winds that swept huge amounts of gas away from the center of what would become dwarf galaxies, preventing millions of new stars from forming.

With so much mass suddenly removed from the center of the galaxy, the pull of gravity on the dark matter there is diminished and the dark matter drifts away, Governato said. It is similar to what would happen if our sun suddenly disappeared and the loss of its gravitational pull allowed the Earth to drift off into space.

The cosmic explosions proved to be the missing piece of the puzzle, and adding them to the simulations generated formation of galaxies with substantially lower densities at their cores, closely matching the observed properties of dwarf galaxies.

“The cold dark matter theory works amazingly well at telling where, when and how many galaxies should form,” Governato said. “What we did was find a better description of processes that we know happen in the real universe, resulting in more accurate simulations.”

The theory of cold dark matter, first advanced in the mid 1980s, holds that the vast majority of the matter in the universe — as much as 75 percent — is made up of “dark” material that does not interact with electrons and protons and so cannot be observed from electromagnetic radiation. The term “cold” means that immediately following the big bang these dark matter particles have speeds far lower than the speed of light.

In the cold dark matter theory, smaller structures form first, then they merge with each other to form more massive halos, and finally galaxies form within the halos.

Coauthors of the Nature paper are Chris Brook of the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute in the United Kingdom; Lucio Mayer of the Institut für Astronomie and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Switzerland; Alyson Brooks of the California Institute of Technology; George Rhee of the University of Nevada; James Wadsley and Gregory Stinson of McMaster University in Canada; Patrik Jonsson and Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Beth Willman of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Thomas R. Quinn of the UW.

The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, and was conducted using facilities of NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, the University of Washington Computing Center, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Alaska and the TeraGrid supercomputer coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group at the University of Chicago.

Source: University of Washington
Photo: These images depict various stages of galaxy formation under the cold dark matter theory using new computer simulations that account for the effects of supernova explosions. (Credit: Katy Brooks)

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“We have taken the first step in identifying and preserving our collections and historic buildings,” said Antoinette Beiser, manager of Lowell Observatory’s library and archives.

Through this program, CAP will provide a general conservation assessment of the Observatory’s collections and historic buildings. A professional conservator will spend two days surveying Lowell’s Mars Hill campus and three days writing a comprehensive report to identify conservation priorities. The on-site consultation will enable Lowell Observatory to evaluate its current collections care policies, procedures and environmental conditions. The assessment report will allow the Observatory to seek funding to make appropriate improvements for the immediate, mid-range, and long-term care of important historic structures and collections.

About Historic Preservation

Historic Preservation is a national non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the United States. By identifying risks, developing innovative programs, and providing broad public access to expert advice, Heritage Preservation assists museums libraries, archives, historic preservation and other organizations, as well as individuals, in caring for our endangered heritage. To learn more, visit www.heritagepreservation.org.

About the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more, visit www.imls.org.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Please Contact:
Steele Wotkyns, Public Relations Manager, Lowell Observatory, (928) 233-3232, steele[at]lowell[dot]edu

or:

Antoinette Beiser, Manager, Library and Archives, Lowell Observatory, (928) 233-3216, asb[at]lowell[dot]edu

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The newest and most advanced tool for this work is called NIHTS (pronounced “nights”), the Near-Infrared High-Throughput Spectrograph. NIHTS will be used to carry out a new research program, the Kuiper Spectral Survey (KSS).

“NIHTS is designed to be a highly efficient instrument to allow us to take spectra of very faint objects,” said Henry Roe, Lowell Observatory astronomer. “NIHTS should be a fabulous tool, not only for exploring the Kuiper Belt, but also for many other projects, including identifying the coolest brown dwarfs, studying clouds on young stars, and understanding the composition of near-Earth asteroids.”

Roe plans to use NIHTS to make spectroscopic observations of hundreds of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). While well over a thousand KBOs are now known, only a few dozen of the brightest ones have been studied in any significant detail. The goal with NIHTS is to observe several hundred fainter KBOs that are more representative of this icy region in the outer solar system.

Such precise study of such faint objects is possible because NIHTS collects light at near-infrared wavelengths.

When light from the sun lands on Kuiper Belt objects, much of it is reflected back. Some, however, is absorbed by molecules on the surface, leaving a distinctive pattern in the color of the reflected light – a kind of shadowy fingerprint. Each type of material that might be on the surface of a KBO leaves a distinctly different spectral pattern in the reflected light. The most interesting parts of these patterns lie in the infrared, which is why NIHTS is designed to observe at those wavelengths. However, room temperature objects emit light in the infrared. Therefore the NIHTS detector and insides of the instrument have to be kept extremely cold.

NIHTS will be one of five instruments mounted on what is called the “instrument cube” at the base of the Discovery Channel Telescope. The arrangement has been designed so that it is possible to switch from one instrument to the next in less than a minute. In other words, astronomers will not only have some of the finest instruments in the world to use in their work, but they will be able to switch between them in not much more time than it takes a carpenter to put down a hammer and pick up a screwdriver.

NIHTS was recently funded for development under a grant from NASA’s Planetary Astronomy and Planetary Major Equipment Programs to Lowell Observatory astronomer Henry Roe.

Visit DCT Science for more information.

_____
Source: Written and provided by Lowell Observatory Staff.
Photo: An illustration depicting the Near-Infrared High-Throughput Spectrograph (NIHTS) that will be used to carry out the Kuiper Spectral Survey (KSS).

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Binary systems where a normal star is paired with a black hole often produce large swings in X-ray emission and blast jets of gas at speeds exceeding one-third that of light. What fuels this activity is gas pulled from the normal star, which spirals toward the black hole and piles up in a dense accretion disk.

“When a lot of gas is flowing, the dense disk reaches nearly to the black hole,” said John Tomsick at the University of California, Berkeley. “But when the flow is reduced, theory predicts that gas close to the black hole heats up, resulting in evaporation of the innermost part of the disk.” Never before have astronomers shown an unambiguous signature of this transformation.

To look for this effect, Tomsick and an international group of astronomers targeted GX 339-4, a low-mass X-ray binary located about 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara. There, every 1.7 days, an evolved star no more massive than the sun orbits a black hole estimated at 10 solar masses. With four major outbursts in the past seven years, GX 339-4 is among the most dynamic binaries in the sky.

In September 2008, nineteen months after the system’s most recent outburst, the team observed GX 339-4 using the orbiting Suzaku X-ray observatory, which is operated jointly by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA. At the same time, the team also observed the system with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite.

Instruments on both satellites indicated that the system was faint but in an active state, when black holes are known to produce steady jets. Radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array confirmed that GX 339-4′s jets were indeed powered up when the satellites observed.

Despite the system’s faintness, Suzaku was able to measure a critical X-ray spectral line produced by the fluorescence of iron atoms. “Suzaku’s sensitivity to iron emission lines and its ability to measure the shapes of those lines let us see a change in the accretion disk that only happens at low luminosities,” said team member Kazutaka Yamaoka at Japan’s Aoyama Gakuin University.

X-ray photons emitted from disk regions closest to the black hole naturally experience stronger gravitational effects. The X-rays lose energy and produce a characteristic signal. At its brightest, GX 339-4′s X-rays can be traced to within about 20 miles of the black hole. But the Suzaku observations indicate that, at low brightness, the inner edge of the accretion disk retreats as much as 600 miles.

“We see emission only from the densest gas, where lots of iron atoms are producing X-rays, but that emission stops close to the black hole — the dense disk is gone,” explained Philip Kaaret at the University of Iowa. “What’s really happening is that, at low accretion rates, the dense inner disk thins into a tenuous but even hotter gas, rather like water turning to steam.”

The dense inner disk has a temperature of about 20 million degrees Fahrenheit, but the thin evaporated disk may be more than a thousand times hotter.

The study, which appears in the Dec. 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms the presence of low-density accretion flow in these systems. It also shows that GX 339-4 can produce jets even when the densest part of the disk is far from the black hole.

“This doesn’t tell us how jets form, but it does tell us that jets can be launched even when the high-density accretion flow is far from the black hole,” Tomsick said. “This means that the low-density accretion flow is the most essential ingredient for the formation of a steady jet in a black hole system.”

_____
Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Photo: GX 339-4, illustrated here, is among the most dynamic binaries in the sky, with four major outbursts in the past seven years. In the system, an evolved star no more massive than the sun orbits a black hole estimated at 10 solar masses. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

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Planet X, also known as Nibiru, supposedly passes through our solar system every 3,600 years leaving death and destruction in its wake. The planet was first spotted by astronomers in the early 1980s and has been tracked by infrared observatories ever since.

If Nibiru enters our solar system, there could be a catastrophic effect on Earth. The poles could shift, extreme natural disasters could increase and the sun might be blotted out by the dust left by Planet X for some 40 years, killing most life forms on Earth.

Assuming that Planet X is actually due to enter our solar system in 2012, the last time it passed through our solar system would have been somewhere around 1588 BC. So, if we look back to that time, there are a number of events which could be linked to the passing of Nibiru. According to the World Book Encyclopaedia, an unknown civilization living in the Indus Valley (West Pakistan) mysteriously vanished at around 1500 BC. A quick look at Encarta tells us that the first dynasty of Babylon ended in 1595 and that the Cycladic settlement on the island of Thera was destroyed by a massive volcanic eruption around 100 years earlier. M.I. Farley, author of Early Greece also noticed a total catastrophe all over Crete in 1400.

The list goes on depending where you look on the internet. But how much of it is actually true, and just how worried should we be? Is it about time we spent all our savings and partied like it’s 1999 or should we continue as normal?

Let’s face it, Planet X isn’t the first time we have be warned of an oncoming apocalypse. December 31, 1999 was the last time we were expecting the world to end with the arrival of the Millennium Bug. I’m not exactly sure how a computer malfunction in dates would end the world but somehow we survived it and lived to fight another day.

French apothecary and reputed seer, Nostradamus published a series of prophecies which have also become world famous. Predictions of Napoleon, Hitler and the 9/11 attacks have all been credited to the seer. While he doesn’t actually tell us the world will end in 2012, some say Nostradamus saw some cataclysmic event in December 2012… whatever that means.

Fact is, there have always been predictions of doomsday – it’s merely human nature. Even the Bible, one of the oldest and best selling books of all time predicts the end of days:

“From a far away land they came, from the end point of Heaven do the Lord and his weapons of wrath come to destroy the whole Earth.” Isaiah 13:1.

But what of this latest threat? As already stated, the planet was first discovered in the early 1980s. 1983 to be precise, by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Shortly afterwards, The Washington Post ran a front page article entitled Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered.

Inevitably, this started a huge furor in the media. NASA scientists couldn’t determine what this body was. Was it was a planet, a comet or a distant galaxy? And this was where the 2012 end of days theories began. With a lack of categorical evidence telling us what this so-called heavenly body actually was, conspiracy theorists jumped on the chance to scare us all to our wit’s end.

Some people have taken this news to the extreme. Patrick Geryl, a 53-year-old American has been gathering supplies for some time now, in preparation for the catastrophe.

“You have to understand,” says Geryl, “there will be nothing. Nothing left. We will have to start an entire civilization from scratch.”

His fears of doomsday have only been strengthened by the fact that the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends on 21 December of the same year. Apparently, at the end of every cycle in this calendar, catastrophe strikes, and 2012 sees the end of the fifth and final cycle.

There is a lot of uncertainty in this 2012 myth, but one thing is painfully clear. Do a Google search for the words planet x and 2012 and be prepared for a number of sites warning us that the end is nigh. The trouble is, large percentage of these sites are made by religious sect trying to convert you to whichever God they champion this week.

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What Drake wanted to do was to try and work out how likely it was that we’d ever make contact with another civilization, or if the probability of intelligence arising was so remote that we’d spend our time very much alone. The result of his attempts is the now famous Drake Equation, the formula that essentially powers SETI and helps astronomers to focus their searches for artificial signals in the universe.

The Drake equation works backwards, looking at each factor that has lead to intelligent life evolving on Earth and then trying to predict how likely each event is to occur again elsewhere.. By breaking down the factors leading to the evolution of intelligent life it is believed that we’ll be able to narrow down the search, hopefully with greater chances of success.

The Drake Equation is composed of seven parts, each thought to be a contributing factor as to how easy it is for an intelligent species to arise. A crucial factor to remember is SETI’s definition of intelligent life. The search is focusing on finding another species in the galaxy that is capable and willing to communicate through radio transmission or some other form of electromagnetic radiation. Using Earth as an analogy for life elsewhere it is assumed that as we leak radio transmission into the galaxy, then so would another species.

The problem with looking for radio transmissions is that it assumes two things. One is that an intelligent race will use radio for communication and be leaking it into the galaxy. The other is that they will continue to use it. It is actually very cost-ineffective to broadcast in all directions, and we can see this on Earth where broadband and fiber optic cables are now the new standard.

Soon we will leak very little information into space as we focus all communication in its intended directions. If we again use Earth as an example it could be said that any species just a few decades ahead of us in technological development would no longer leak radio into the cosmos, and a species a hundred years younger would not have developed radio yet. By looking for radio transmissions we’re looking for a narrow space in a species’ development, however it is assumed for the purpose of the equation that the alien life we’re looking for are willing communicators and would let themselves be known, much like us.

The Drake equation is written as N = R*xF_pxN_exF_lxF_ixF_xxL.

N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way with which communication may be possible. The other figures are the factors that are considered vital for the appearance of intelligent life, based on observations in our own Solar System and what we know of life on Earth.

R* is the rate of star formation in the galaxy. Currently the figure for this is put at seven per year. Life cannot exist without a star, and so this is seen as the first step.

F_p is the fraction of stars that form that support planets. As we discover more exoplanets by the week this number is creeping up and up, current estimates put the figure at around 0.5, but the figure is certain to rise. Our current technology is only reliable at detecting Jupiter size planets, but once we start finding Earth analogs in other solar systems we’ll have a much better grasp of how many planets there are for potential aliens to evolve on.

N_e is the number of those planets where life can be supported. Life as we know it requires liquid water, which requires a certain temperature band known as the habitable zone. Life also requires an atmosphere, which only a planet meeting certain criteria will be able to hold. Based on observations of the Solar System we see only one planet orbiting that is capable of supporting liquid water on its surface and therefore, life. It is thought that Mars may once have had water on the surface, but due to its low mass it has lost must of its atmosphere and so water cannot stay as a liquid on the surface.

The next figure, F_l, is for how many of those planets that are capable of supporting life will develop life. On Earth we find life everywhere there’s water. Even without light at the bottom of the sea, or buried deep in layers of arctic ice, if we find water there’s at the very least bacteria. This suggests that if conditions are right then life is certain to arise, putting F_l at a value of 1.

F_i and F_c look at the chance of intelligent life evolving and then being willing to communicate with other planets. On Earth only one species in the four and a half billion year history of the planet has evolved intelligence and radio technology, which puts these figures quite low. Again, these guesses have a certain degree of bias as we only have one example to look at. It may prove that if life starts on a planet that the path to sentience is inevitable. It may also prove an extremely rare event, we won’t know for sure and so these figures are largely guesswork.

L is the number of years that the civilization will last. Currently this figure is set at 10,000 years. Given that mankind has already developed the capability to destroy ourselves through nuclear weapons (developed just seven years after radio astronomy) it might be guessed that the self destructive ability goes hand in hand with interstellar communication. Our civilization teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cold War, and the threat, while greatly reduced, has not entirely evaporated.

Given that some civilizations that develop the capability to destroy themselves will destroy themselves then it cannot be assumed that once intelligent life has evolved that it will last indefinitely. L is a guess, but is used to guess the window in which we have to communicate with a species from their development of communication to their eventual downfall.

Using Drake’s estimations the figure for the number of species able to communicate with us in the Milky Way is 10. The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 billion stars, so the chances of finding an alien species are around one in thirty billion. Different estimates of parts of the equation will give higher values. For example if L is set to 50,000 years then there are 50 civilizations in the Milky Way. More optimistic outlooks can set the number of communicating aliens at 5,000 per galaxy.

The figure can change wildly depending on the number plugged into the equation, and at SETI they’re working on minimizing the guesswork for each of the factors to help them narrow their search. With any luck we’ll find our first alien broadcast within the next few decades, and if we do, a lot of the success will be attributed to the Drake equation.

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The American space program, from its earliest days through the present, has lead to thousands of technological advancements that are used everyday by our citizens. These new technologies have increased our national security, safety, lead to medical advancements, increased energy efficiency (which makes for a cleaner environment), saves lives, and increases our overall quality of life. Some of the technological benefits we have seen from the space program are:

Items used around the average American household

• Better Insulation. Aluminum heat shields from the Apollo program are used in homes to drastically reduce home heating and cooling costs, making homes more energy efficient which leads to lower power consumption.
• Smoke Detectors. These devices are standard in every home now, and were created for the Skylab space station in the early 1970′s.
• Better satellite technology for worldwide communication and television broadcasts.
• Small in home water purification systems were originally invented to purify water on early space missions.
• Cordless power Tools. NASA asked Black and Decker to develop a cordless power tool for use by the Apollo astronauts to collect deeper core samples on the moon. This invention lead to the wide range of cordless power tools in use today, including the first dust busters.

Items leading to a cleaner environment

• Satellite mapping used for forest management and weather.
• Hydroponic systems for the growing of food sources.
• Pollution measuring/smokestack monitor devices used in factories.
• Advances in solar energy technology.

Items used by the medical field

• Advancements in laser technology, now adapted to conduct laser heart and eye surgeries.
• Better technologies used for conducting mammograms.
• A spin-off from the Hubble Space Telescope has lead to a less intrusive and more method for conducting breast biopsies through digital imaging.
• NASA developed technologies were adapted for use in CAT scan and MRI machines.
• Infrared Thermometers. NASA technology used for measuring the heat of stars and distant planets was adapted for use in infrared thermometers common in every home and hospital today.

Advancements to aid in Firefighting and public safety

• Lighter weight Respiration systems developed for Apollo astronauts were adapted for use in fire fighting.
• Rescue jaws used by firefighters to quickly cut through doors and roofs in order to get to trapped accident victims inside.
• Newer light weight and portable radiation detectors.
• Personal alarm systems used by firemen, prison guards, the elderly, etc.
• Self righting life rafts.
• Doppler radar used for storm warning and tracking, to include wind shear detection used at major airports in the U.S.

The above list in not all inclusive; it is only a fraction of the items which were developed as a result of the U.S. space program. The total number of technological achievements gleaned from NASA space programs numbers in the thousands. Future missions planned for the moon and Mars will only aid in pushing technology further and serve as a catalyst for the next generation of technological advances that future generations will undoubtedly take for granted.

Check out the following sources for more information on this topic:

1. http://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/f_apollo_11_spinoff.html
2. http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
3. http://www.lunarproperties.com/page/28
4. http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html
5. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-10-04-questions-answers-griffin_x.htm

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About the Author:
Sally Reynolds is a Liberal Arts student from Palm Beach, Florida, who loves shopping, space and writing.

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