Your Weigh More in Algeria than Any other country

Explanation: Is gravity the same over the surface of the Earth? No – it turns out that in some places you will feel slightly heavier than others. The above relief map shows in exaggerated highs and lows where the gravitational field of Earth is relatively strong and weak. A low spot can be seen just off the coast of India, while a relative high occurs in the South Pacific Ocean. The cause of these irregularities is unknown since present surface features do not appear dominant. Scientists hypothesize that factors that are more important lay in deep underground structures and may be related to the Earth’s appearance in the distant past. To better map Earth’s gravity and hence better understand its interior and past, NASA plans to launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate (GRACE) satellite in February.

Source: JPL, NASA

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Biggest Telescope Documentary

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Largest Binocular Telescope

So, It's been a week or more since i wrote a article. I wasn't interested in writing the article that already exists.And one day i was watching a space specials documentary and i decided to write article about this amazing thing, The Large Binocular Telescope. Although everything on that documentary seemed good, i thought of getting more relevant info from different sources including wikipedia. And now, it took this far to write down everything i've researched about.

Overview

Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is an optical telescope for astronomy located on Mount Graham (10,700-foot (3,300 m)) in the Pinaleno Mountains of southeastern Arizona, and is a part of the Mount Graham International Observatory. The LBT is currently one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes; using two 8.4 m (27 ft) wide mirrors can give the same light gathering ability as a 11.8 m (39 ft) wide single circular telescope and detail of 22.8 m (75 ft) wide one. Either of its mirrors would be the largest optical telescope in continental North America. Strehl ratios of 60-90% at H band and 95% at M band have been achieved by the LBT.

The telescope was dedicated in October 2004 and saw first light with a single primary mirror on October 12, 2005 which viewed NGC 891. The second primary mirror was installed in January 2006 and became fully operational in January 2008.

The first binocular light images show three false-color renditions of the spiral galaxy NGC 2770. The galaxy is 88 million light years from our Milky Way, a relatively close neighbor. The galaxy has a flat disk of stars and glowing gas tipped slightly toward our line of sight.

The first image taken combined ultraviolet and green light, and emphasizes the clumpy regions of newly formed hot stars in the spiral arms. The second image combined two deep red colors to highlight the smoother distribution of older, cooler stars. The third image was a composite of ultraviolet, green and deep red light and shows the detailed structure of hot, moderate and cool stars in the galaxy. The cameras and images were produced by the Large Binocular Camera team, led by Emanuele Giallongo at the Rome Astrophysical Observatory.

In binocular aperture synthesis mode LBT will have a light-collecting area of 111 m ², equivalent to a single 11.8-meter (39 ft) surface and will combine light to produce the image sharpness equivalent to a single 22.8-meter (75 ft) telescope. However, this requires a beam combiner that was tested in 2008, but has not been a part of regular operations. It can take images with one side at 8.4 m aperture, or take two images of the same object using different instruments on each side of the telescope.

The technology relies on adaptive optics ? a mechanism that allows a telescope's mirror to bend in order to compensate for the blurring of light as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere.

The new system, installed on the $120 million Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has delivered images three times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope, LBT scientists said. And that's with only one of its twin 27.6-foot (8.4-meter) mirrors working.

Discoveries With LBT

LBT, with the XMM-Newton was used to discover a galaxy cluster 2XMM J083026+524133 in 2008, over 7 billion light years away from Earth. In 2007 the LBT detected a 26th magnitude afterglow from the gamma ray burst GRB 070125.

Stats

Organization	LBT Consortium
Location	Mount Graham International Observatory, Arizona, USA
Coordinates	32°42′05.4″N 109°53′22.6″WCoordinates: 32°42′05.4″N 109°53′22.6″W
Altitude	3221 m (10,567 ft)
Wavelength	visible to near infrared
Built	1996-2004
First light	October 12, 2005 (1st primary mirror). September 18, 2006 (2nd primary mirror). January 11 – January 12, 2008 (1st & 2nd together)
Telescope style	Gregorian binocular
Diameter	8.4 m per mirror
Collecting area	111 m²
Focal length	9.6m (f/1.142)
Mounting	elevation/azimuth
Dome	co-rotating building, dual parting slits
Website	http://www.lbto.org/

Note: LBT is world's largest binocular but not largest telescope. It is 5th largest telescope. Ultimately it was named Largest Binocular  Telescope.
For More Images Visit this university site!
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/LBT/

I will be posting a video(documentary) about this shortly. Sorry if there are any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors Please notify us!

Sources: Wikipedia, Myself And the Documentary i watched.

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The "Wow!" Signal | Communication with the outer world

It’s no rare occurrence in science fiction: The introverted researcher working the graveyard shift at a SETI radio observatory jumps out of his seat in surprise when the red light blinks on the control panel. “We’re getting a signal!” he shouts into a phone as needles dance across paper chart recorders, and scientists rapidly converge on the scene. At some point someone yells, “Get me the President!” at the person whose job it is to get presidents.

On August 15th, 1977, such a signal was received at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio, though the ensuing drama was considerably more subdued. The volunteer who spotted the pattern on the paper logs circled the data and wrote “Wow!” in the margin.That person was none other than Dr. Jerry Ehman . The radio telescope was observing space as part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, and it was the most compelling signal the receiver had recorded in its fourteen years of operation. It was powerful enough to push the Big Ear’s monitoring device off the charts.

The signal came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and lasted seventy-two seconds at about 1420.456 MHz before it faded away. The volunteer who found and circled the data in the paper printout was Jerry Ehman, who was amazed at the signal’s intensity and what a narrow range of frequencies it appeared in. Seventy-two seconds also happened to be the exact length of time it would take for the Earth to rotate the Big Ear through a signal from space. He did some analysis of the data, and by all indications this powerful, narrowband radio signal was from outside of our solar system. But was it sent by an advanced civilization?

Curiously, the signal was picked up by only one of the scope’s two detectors. When the second detector covered the same patch of sky three minutes later, it heard nothing. This indicated either the unlikely possibility that the first beam had detected something that wasn’t there, or that the source of the signal had been shut off or redirected in the intervening time. The observatory researchers trained their massive scope on that part of the sky for a full month, watching closely for a repeat of the mysterious signal. Nothing interesting was observed during those thirty days, yet scientists were at a loss for an explanation of the original event. Planning to return to that patch of sky periodically, the Big Ear continued its broader purpose.

Several times over the next twenty years, longtime SETI researcher Robert Gray and his colleague Kevin B. Marvel arranged for further scans of that region of space. They managed to obtain some time on the META array at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, and the extremely sensitive Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which is made up of twenty-seven 25-meter radio dishes. They detected some extremely faint sources of radio emissions in the infamous patch of sky, but nothing like that of the “Wow!” signal. However their findings did essentially disprove the only working theory as to the cause of the original event: “interstellar scintillation.” It was thought that perhaps some weaker radio signal from space had been temporarily focused on the Big Ear in a way similar to stars twinkling… but the VLA is sensitive enough that it would have detected such a source, and it did not.

The Big Ear maintained its periodic scan of that part of space for almost forty years, and never again came across such a compelling signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make way for a golf course.

“Wow” remains the strongest and clearest signal ever received from an unknown source in space, as well as the most fascinating and unexplainable. The signal’s original discoverer Jerry Ehman doesn’t care to speculate on its source, and he remains scientifically skeptical. “Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal,” he said in an interview, “they’d do it far more than once. We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times.”

Perhaps. But consider that when humankind used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message out into space in 1974, it was only sent once.

Thanx to Kwl3rin for article.

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NASA’s Messages to the Great Unknown

In the thirty-three years since it was launched, NASA’s Pioneer 10 space probe has traveled over thirteen billion miles, and is now hurtling through a region of asteroids and comets known as the Kuiper Belt. Its last radio contact, barely detectable given the probe’s diminishing power levels, was received on January 23, 2003, about thirty-one years after it left the Earth.

During it’s long journey through the universe, should any intelligent beings come across Pioneer 10 (or Pioneer 11, which carries a copy of the same plaque), they’ll be greeted with a pictorial engraving from humanity in the form of a 6 by 9-inch gold anodized plaque bolted to the spacecraft’s frame. The plaque design attempts to convey as much data about humans and the Earth as possible using simple line diagrams, in the hope that whatever beings may find it can learn whence and from where the probe originated.

Among other things, it depicts a naked man and woman, with the right hand of the man raised as a sign of good will. It also indicates the layout of our solar system, as well as our sun’s position relative to a number of pulsars, so that our location can be triangulated from fixed points in space.
When the plaque’s design was revealed to the general public, a number of people were upset about it for various reasons. Because it depicts nudity, there was a huge uproar about NASA “wasting” taxpayer money to send “obscenities” into space. Clearly, the people voicing such pseudo-moral objections were “morons.” Or rather, they had the unfortunate character flaw of being unable to separate an obscene image from a benign, scientifically useful drawing.
There were also many who criticized the complexity of the message, indicating that it would not be immediately understandable to a completely alien civilization. This is certainly true, but the plaque’s designers did not intend for the message to be instantly detectable, only for it to be precise and informative. If found, its discoverers can spend as much time as necessary to decode its message, even if it takes generations.
Still other critics warned that showing a map to the probe’s planet of origin may invite a hostile race to find and attack the Earth. This risk does exist, but even in the extremely unlikely event that the first star a Pioneer probe encounters (two million years from now) is home to a hostile race bent on our destruction, they must first A) detect the fast-moving piece of space debris, B) capture it, C) decode the plaque’s message, D) locate our planet, and E) traverse the distance. This means that at the soonest, such aggressors would be arriving in about three million years.
In point of fact, the chances of the probe ever being discovered by any civilization– hostile or otherwise– are virtually non-existent, even if the universe is teeming with life. Something so tiny is just lost against the enormity of space. So why even bother including message? It seems that it was motivated by pure, unadulterated optimism. On the off chance that the someone, somewhere ever stumbles across our humble probe, it can’t hurt to tell them a little about ourselves.
NASA’s next attempt at making contact with aliens arrived in 1974, when the Aricebo radio telescope was remodeled. To mark the occasion, a high-powered message was beamed towards globular star cluster M13, some 21,000 light years away. This target was selected because it contains such a large number of stars, increasing the message’s likelihood of being detected by intelligent races.
The graphic representation of the message is pictured to the right, with color added to indicate the different sections. It was originally transmitted in binary, using prime digits to give clues on how to arrange the pixels.
Among other things, it attempts to depict a human, the structure of DNA, and our solar system, but clearly it can’t represent any of those things very clearly in the given space. However, if the message is ever received and decoded, it will certainly be clear to the recipients that it originated from an intelligent source. If nothing else, aliens should be able to deduce the existence of the Atari 2600 game console. If they have a reply, we can expect to receive it in about 42,000 years, assuming we’re still able to listen for it.
But the most ambitious information payloads that we’ve blasted into the cosmos are those attached to the sides of the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched in 1977. Each probe has a copy of the same gold gramophone record, which is encoded with sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The probes also provide a cartridge and a needle for use in reading the records’ contents.
Each record’s data includes images, sounds from nature, recorded greetings in 55 languages, and a selection of music from around the world. Among the encoded photographs, it was originally planned to include a picture of a nude man and a nude pregnant woman, but after the uproar over the nude engravings on the Pioneer plaques, NASA decided against it.
Pictured is the gold-plated protective cover, which is engraved with diagrams describing how to extract the data from the disk, and the same pulsar diagram from the Pioneer probes indicating the record’s place of origin. NASA also had the cover electroplated with Uranium 238, so an advanced race might determine the record’s age by measuring the amount of radioactive decay.
President Carter included a spoken greeting on the record, which included the following:

“We cast this message into the cosmos . . . Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – - perhaps many – - may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Of course it is unlikely that any intelligent race will ever stumble across one of our derelict spacecraft, and even if they do, the time scales and distances involved are staggering. Moreover, it’s doubtful that a completely alien intelligence can discern the whole meaning of the diagrams for lack of a common frame of reference. But there would be little doubt that the object is the product of an intelligent race of people, which is perhaps the most important message to convey.
So it seems that the act of including these messages from humanity is really a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with other civilizations. But long after humanity has died off, and the Earth is burned to a crisp by her dying sun, these tiny messengers will continue to tote little pieces of our history throughout the universe. And maybe after drifting for millions of years, one of our messages-in-a-bottle will be discovered, and possibly mark the most exciting event in another civilization’s history.

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Twin black holes found doing a cosmic tango

HEAVENLY BODIES: An artist’s rendition of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other about five billion light years from Earth

Washington: Two colossal black holes appear to be orbiting one another in sort of a cosmic minuet at the center of a faraway galaxy formed when two separate galaxies collided, US astronomers said on Wednesday.
These two so-called supermassive black holes, which are celestial objects with enormous gravitational pull, are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, or the distance light travels in a year. Data from Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico provided the best evidence to date of two black holes orbiting each other, according to astronomer Todd Boroson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. This is known as a binary system.
Scientists believe all or most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center. For example, our Milky Way galaxy has a black hole at its center that is about 3 million times the mass of the sun.
When galaxies collide and merge, as they do relatively often, the black holes at their center may gravitate toward one another because of their great mass, entering into orbit as these two appear to be doing.
Boroson said orbiting black holes eventually may merge into an even larger single black hole. While scientists think binary black holes may be relatively common, they have been elusive. Boroson and fellow National Optical Astronomy Observatory astronomer Tod Lauer detected these two by spotting the radiation emitted by objects apparently being sucked into the black holes by their gravitational pull. AGENCIES

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How the Sun Will Die and What Will Happen to Our Earth?

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Amazing earth spining video

This is one film that€™s sure to leave you in a spin.
The crew of the International Space Station pointed a camera at North America and the resulting still pictures were spliced together into a mesmerising speeded-up sequence.
It shows a rotation of the Earth in just a matter of seconds from a vantage point 225 miles up.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

The northern lights shimmer over the horizon as the International Space Station passes over the brightly lit cities of America beneath

Nasa explains that the camera was north-facing, so the amazing Aurora Borealis can be seen shimmering at the top of the screen throughout the video.

The sequence begins with lights from southern Canada sweeping into view before the station passes over central North America. Through the clouds, the peninsula of Michigan can be seen, with Chicago’s millions of lights glowing at the south end of Lake Michigan. A few dramatic lightning storms can be seen flashing in the clouds over central United States before the East Coast of the United States, including Atlanta and Georgia, comes into view.

Whole cloud formations can be seen clearly moving across the earth’s surface as the ISS passes over
Heavens above: The International Space Station orbits at over 200 miles above Earth

Near the end of the video, the eastern half of the Florida peninsula is visible, as well as the shallow waters of the Bahamas.
The station, a $100billion project of 16 nations, was finished this year after more than a decade of construction.
The outpost, which is about the size of a five-bedroom house, supports a variety of scientific research and technology demonstrations.
It has travelled more than 1.5 billion miles – the same as eight trips to the sun and back.

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New Planets Found

3 Planets Orbit Same Star, 4th A Different One. OUT-OF-THE-WORLD IMAGES: The first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star taken by Nasa’s Hubble space telescope. ® An artist’s rendition of the star called Fomalhaut and the Jupiter-like planet that was photographed by Hubble

Washington: Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away — three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.
None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable.
It’s only a matter of time before “we get a dot that’s blue and earthlike”, said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He led one of the two teams of photographers. “It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like earth and potentially life out there,” he said.
Macintosh’s team used two ground-based telescopes, while the second team relied on photos from the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope to gather images of the exoplanets — planets that don’t circle our sun. The research from both teams was published in online edition of the journal Science.
In the past 13 years, scientists have discovered more than 300 planets outside our solar system, but they have done so indirectly, by measuring changes in gravity, speed or light around stars.
Nasa’s space sciences chief Ed Weiler said the actual photos are important. He compared it to a hunt for elusive elephants: “For years we’ve been hearing the elephants, finding the tracks, seeing the trees knocked down by them, but we’ve never been able to snap a picture. Now we have a picture.”
In a news conference Thursday, Weiler said this fulfills the last of the major goals that Nasa had for the Hubble telescope before it launched in 1990: “This is an 18 1/2-year dream come true.”
There are disputes about whether these are the first exoplanet photos. Others have made earlier claims, but those pictures haven’t been confirmed as planets or universally accepted yet. Alan Boss, an exoplanet expert at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Harvard exoplanet hunter Lisa Kaltenegger both said more study is needed to confirm these photos are proven planets and not just brown dwarf stars. AP

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Satellite Images Show Air Trafiic, Data links, Transportation lines

Air traffic routes are shown between North America and Europe. Felix Pharand-Deschenes has created global snapshots depicting how power lines, roads and even air traffic corridors have come to dominate the surface of Earth. His visualisations based on real data show air traffic routes, the underwater cables that carry the internet, road and rail networks and electricity transmission lines all superimposed over cities at night.

Felix's visualisations showing how human technology has taken over our crowded planet come just one week before the global population is set to top seven billion. The United Nations Populations Fund has revealed that by October 31st, there will be an extra billion people on the Earth compared to 1999.
Major road and rail networks in Europe, along with transmission line and underwater cable data, superimposed over satellite images of cities illuminated at night

Felix used US government sources like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Oceanic for railways, pipelines and roads as well as the Atmospheric Administration for the air traffic to piece together the visualisations.
Human technology presence over North America superimposed over satellite images of cities illuminated at night

"These pictures show several sides of global human activities," said 34-year-old Felix, from Montreal, Canada. "We see everything from paved and unpaved roads, light pollution, railways, electricity transmission lines. All the way to submarine cables, pipelines, shipping lanes and air traffic. The show the extent of our civilisation, the patterns of our global sprawl, how human-influenced our planet now is."
Human technology presence over Asia at night

Felix is the founder and director of Globaia, an organisation that seeks to enhance awareness of the impact and role of the human race on our world. He has spent 13 years researching and presenting his theories to students, fellow academics and the general public. "During this time I have been designing and presenting conferences on the global issues of our time," said Felix. "I believe a picture is worth a thousand words, so I slowly started to improve my design skills to be able to show what I was explaining."
Human technology presence over Africa at night

"There is a growing number of global datasets showing the extent of our ecological footprint," he said. "These are numbers and tables but I decided to use these datasets and to present them in a more realistic way. I started to gather data from numerous sources and to explore ways of assembling them."
Road and rail networks in South America superimposed over satellite images of cities illuminated at night

During his research Felix found that over three per cent of the world's land surface has now been covered in tarmac. This amounts to 1.7 million square miles and is a greater land area than the whole of India.
Human technology presence over Australasia at night

Despite the threat to nature that this rise of humanity represents, Felix is positive about the legacy of our species. "Today's global civilisation is the work of billions of people throughout history," he said. "It has been established through much effort, successes and sufferings - as well as wars, inventions, exchanges, crisis and socio-technological changes. The world at the start of the 21st Century is also the result of what we call the Great Acceleration - the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in history. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the mid-20th Century and sharply accelerated towards the end of the century."
Air traffic routes over sea around North and South America

Road and rail networks and cities illuminated at night in Europe, along with transmission lines and underwater cables

Human technology presence over North America

Major road and rail networks in Africa, along with transmission line and underwater cable data

Major road and rail networks in Australasia, along with transmission line and underwater cable data

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