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The cosmic ray signature of dark matter?

November 24, 2008 By
Detecting supersymmtric dark matter

Detecting supersymmtric dark matter

A very interesting paper was published in last week’s issue of Nature – I blogged about it before after reading the NASA press release. It’s wasn’t all that helpful without reading the actual paper but the cosmic ray – dark matetr link caught my attention.

Just today a conference paper (i.e. not peer-reviewed) appeared on astro-ph about some preliminary results from PAMELA – another cosmic ray detector that focuses on antiparticles (positrons and antiprotons). Recall that PAMELA was the source of some controversy earlier this year. Another paper on PAMELA data was posted on astro-ph back in October, it’s listed as being submitted to Nature so again, not reviewed yet. But perhaps another cosmic rays Nature paper soon, and there’s certainly a lot of buzz!

I had a read through these papers and some background stuff – it’s something I didn’t know much about and it’s very cool. Cosmic rays: inneresting akshually!

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More Exoplanet Image Coolness

November 21, 2008 By
A possible planet orbiting Beta Pic?

A possible planet orbiting Beta Pic?

Hot on the tail of the exciting exoplanet images produced with the Gemini, Keck and Hubble telescopes, a team of French scientists have spotted a possible planetary companion to Beta Pictoris. This star bears a remarkable resemblance to the parent stars of last week’s exoplanet hosts, HR8799 and Fomalhaut – it is a very young A-type star surrounded by a marked dusty debris disk. In fact, in 1984 Beta Pic was the first star to have its debris disk imaged optically, using the 2.5 m du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

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Cosmic Rays Reveal A Mysterious Galactic Neighbour?

November 19, 2008 By

The Earth’s atmosphere is continuously pelted by highly energetic cosmic rays from an unknown source local to the Solar system, scientists from Louisiana Stat University announced yesterday. Using a NASA-funded balloon-borne insrument called the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, or ATIC, the team found an excess of cosmic radiation at very high energies that can only have originated within the Galaxy, in the relative vicinity of our Sun.

I’m a bit confused, cosmic rays aren’t my thing, but I’ll try to make sense of it anyway as it sounds pretty exciting….

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India lands on the Moon

November 14, 2008 By

After a successful launch and lunar orbit insertion, Indian space mission Chandrayaan-1 has successfully landed its Moon Impact Probe on the surface of the Moon. The lander will now take measurements to help determine the composition of the Moon’s thin atmosphere.

CORRECTION: The Moon Impact Probe took all its measurements and images during its descent to the Moon’s surface. The probe then had a “hard landing” on the lunar surface that “terminated its functioning”. Thanks for Emily at the Planetary Society Weblog for clearing up this confusion! I think the BBC have also amended their story, as I’m sure the one I read before said nothing about a “crash landing”.

The Chairman of the Indian Space Programme, Madhavan Nair, has indicated that India will also consider sending a mission to Mars.

Click here for a nice image gallery of the Chandrayaan mission over at the BBC.

And congratulations to India for a successful mission!

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A Double Astrono-Whammy of Exoplanet Finds

November 13, 2008 By
P. Kalas, UC Berkeley.

Image of the Fomalhaut debris disk with the image of Fomalhaut b inset. Image credit: P. Kalas, UC Berkeley.

National Research Council of Canada.

The HR8799 planetary system imaged with the Keck telescope. Image credit: National Research Council of Canada.

Since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1995, exoplanet astronomy has advanced in leaps and bounds. With well over 300 planets known to orbit stars other than the Sun, something special is needed for a discovery to hit the headlines. Today, two separate teams of astronomers are publishing results with a great big X-factor in the journal Science.

For the first time, astronomers have managed to produce images of planetary systems around other stars.

What about this, you ask? This image of the 2M1207 system, hailed as the first even exoplanet image on its release in 2005, is indeed an exoplanet image. But its host is a brown dwarf; a sub-stellar sized object that isn’t massive enough to burn fuel its core.

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