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Below is a link to my Life Cycle of a Star story:



They are announcing the find in Nantes, France at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Conference and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science. The research will be published in a special Kepler issue of //The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series // in November. Cochran's team is announcing three planets orbiting Kepler-18, a star similar to the Sun. Kepler 18 is just 10 percent larger than the Sun and contains 97 percent of the Sun's mass. It may host more planets than the three just announced. The planets are designated b, c, and d. All three planets orbit much closer to Kepler-18 than Mercury does to the Sun. Orbiting closest to Kepler-18 with a 3.5-day period, planet b weighs in at about 6.9 times the mass of Earth, and twice Earth's size. Planet b is considered a "super-Earth." Planet c has a mass of about 17 Earths, is about 5.5 times Earth's size, and orbits Kepler-18 in 7.6 days. Planet d weighs in at 16 Earths, at 7 times Earth's size, and has a 14.9-day orbit. The masses and sizes of c and d qualify them as low-density 2Neptune-class" planets. Planet c orbits the star twice for every one orbit d makes. But the times that each of these planets transits the face of Kepler-18 "are not staying exactly on that orbital period," Cochran says. "One is slightly early when the other one is slightly late, [then] both are on time at the same time, and then vice-versa." Scientifically speaking, c and d are orbiting in a 2:1 resonance. "It means they're interacting with each other," Cochran explains. "When they are close to each other ... they exchange energy, pull and tug on each other." Kepler uses the "transit method" to look for planets. It monitors a star's brightness over time, looking for periodic dips that could indicate a planet passing in front of the star. A large part of the Kepler science team's work is proving that potential planets they find aren't something else that mimics the transit signature (such as a perfectly aligned background star, specifically either an eclipsing binary star or a single star orbited by a giant planet). That follow-up work to Kepler is done by scores of scientists using ground-based telescopes the world over (including several at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory) as well as Spitzer Space Telescope. Kepler-18's planets c and d did astronomers a favor by proving their planet credentials up front via their orbital resonance; they had to be in the same planetary system as each other for the resonance to occur. Confirming the planetary bona fides of planet b, the super-Earth, was much more complicated, Cochran says. His team used a technique called "validation," instead of verification. They set out to figure out the probability that it could be something other than a planet. First, they used the Palomar 5-meter (200-inch) Hale Telescope with adaptive optics to take an extremely high-resolution look at the space around Kepler-18. They wanted to see if anything close to the star could be positively identified as a background object that would cause the transit signal they had attributed to a super-Earth. "We successively went through every possible type of object that could be there," Cochran says. "There are limits on the sort of objects that can be there at different distances from the star." Astronomers know how many of different types of objects (various kinds of stars, background galaxies, and more) are seen on average in the sky. They didn't find anything in the Palomar image. "There's a small possibility that [planet b] is due to a background object, but we're very confident that it's probably a planet," Cochran says. His team calculated that the likelihood the object is a planet is 700 times more likely than the likelihood that it's a background object. The process is called "planet validation," rather than the usual "planet verification." Cochran says it's important to understand the difference -- not just for this system, but for future discoveries from Kepler and other missions. "We're trying to prepare the astronomical community and the public for the concept of validation," he says. "The goal of Kepler is to find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone [where life could arise], with a one-year orbit. Proving that such an object really is a planet is very difficult [with current technology]. When we find what looks to be a habitable Earth, we'll have to use a validation process, rather than a confirmation process. We're going to have to make statistical arguments." //Kepler //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> was selected as the tenth NASA Discovery mission. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., developed the //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Kepler // flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Space Telescope This article is about Astronauts going to the moon and observer it everybody knows we can live on moon

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Three astronomers won the <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Nobel Prize] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;"> in Physics on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|dark energy] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">, a finding that has thrown the fate of the universe and indeed the nature of physics into doubt.

<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">TimesCast | Nobel Nod to Dark Energy

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">The astronomers are Saul Perl mutter, 52, of the <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;"> and the University of California, Berkeley; <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Brian P. Schmidt] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">, 44, of the Australian National University in Canberra; and <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Adam G. Rises] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">, 41, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">“I’m stunned,” Dr. Riess said by e-mail, after learning of his prize by reading about it on The New York Times’s Web site. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">The three men led two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to limn the expansion of the universe. The goal of both groups was to measure how fast the cosmos, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, was slowing down, and thus to find out if its ultimate fate was to fall back together in what is called a Big Crunch or to drift apart into the darkness. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Instead, the two groups found in 1998 that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have believed if not for the fact that both sets of scientists wound up with the same answer. It was as if, when you tossed your car keys in the air, instead of coming down, they flew faster and faster to the ceiling. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Subsequent cosmological measurements have confirmed that roughly 70 percent of the universe by mass or energy consists of this antigravitational dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart, though astronomers and physicists have no conclusive evidence of what it is. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">The most likely explanation for this bizarre behavior is a fudge factor that Albert Einstein introduced into his equations in 1917 to stabilize the universe against collapse and then abandoned as his greatest blunder. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Quantum theory predicts that empty space should exert a repulsive force, like dark energy, but one that is 10 to the 120th power times stronger than what the astronomers have measured, leaving some physicists mumbling about multiple universes. Abandoning the Einsteinian dream of a single final theory of nature, they speculate that there are a multitude of universes with different properties. We live in one, the argument goes, that is suitable for life. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">“Every test we have made has come out perfectly in line with Einstein’s original cosmological constant in 1917,” Dr. Schmidt said. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">If the universe continues accelerating, astronomers say, rather than coasting gently into the night, distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another and all the energy will be sucked out of the universe. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Edward Witten, a theorist at the <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Institute for Advanced Study] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">, Einstein’s old stomping grounds, called dark energy “the most startling discovery in physics since I have been in the field.” Dr. Witten continued, “It was so startling, in fact, that I personally took quite a while to become convinced that it was right.” <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">He went on, “This discovery definitely changed the way physicists look at the universe, and we probably still haven’t fully come to grips with the implications.” <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Dr. Perlmutter, who led the <span style="color: #004276; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">[|Supernova Cosmology Project] <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;"> out of Berkeley, will get half of the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). The other half will go to Dr. Schmidt, leader of the rival High-Z Supernova Search Team, and Dr. Riess, who was the lead author of the 1998 paper in The Astronomical Journal, in which the dark energy result was first published. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">All three astronomers were born and raised in the United States; Dr. Schmidt is also a citizen of Australia. They will get their prizes in Stockholm on Dec. 10. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 15px;">Since the fate of the universe is in question, astronomers would love to do more detailed tests using supernovas and other observations. So they were dispirited last year when NASA announced that cost overruns and delays on the James Webb Space Telescope had left no room in the budget until the next decade for an American satellite mission to investigate dark energy that Dr. Perl mutter and others had been promoting for almost a decade. Indeed on Tuesday the European Space Agency announced that it would launch a mission called Euclid to study dark energy in 2019.

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 18px;">Astronomers have tracked down the first gamma-ray pulsar in a globular Cluster of stars. It is around 27,000 light years away and thus also holds the distance record in this class of objects. Moreover, its high luminosity indicates that J1823-3021A is the youngest millisecond pulsar found to date, and that its magnetic field is much stronger than theoretically predicted. This therefore suggests the existence of a new population of such extreme objects. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> The discovery, reported online in the journal //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Science //, was made by Paulo Freire and an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. The researchers evaluated data from the //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fermi // space telescope. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">When the nuclear fuel in the core of a massive star is spent, the star collapses and releases so much energy in the process that it briefly radiates a billion times brighter than before. Such a supernova also marks the birth of a neutronstar, an extremely compact atomic nucleus with a diameter of around 20 kilometres but several million times the mass of Earth. The neutron star spins very rapidly about its axis and accelerated; charged particles emit electromagnetic radiation along the magnetic field lines in different wavelength bands. This radiation is bundled along the magnetic field's axis -- like the light beam from a beacon. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Such a pulsar has rotational periods of between 16 milliseconds and eight seconds. The so-called millisecond pulsars, which have rotational periods down to 1.4 milliseconds, rotate even faster -- this corresponds to 43,000 rotations per minute! It would seem that the initially lower rotational speed was subsequently increased as matter was accreted from a companion star. It is indeed the case that most of these millisecond pulsars can be found in binary star systems. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Millisecond pulsars have an extremely high rotational stability -- even on long time scales; their cycle accuracy is comparable with that of the best atomic clocks on Earth. They are like huge flywheels in space, and hardly anything can affect their rotation. These objects can assist scientists to test the General Theory of Relativity; they can also be used in the search for gravitational waves and to analyse the properties of the superdense matter in the pulsar. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">"We have now discovered more than 100 of these objects with radio telescopes," says Paulo Freire from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. "The high sensitivity of the Fermi telescope has now enabled us to track down a millisecond pulsar by its gamma radiation as well for the first time." The researchers found the pulsar with the designation J1823−3021A in the centre of a globular cluster. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Globular clusters are very old swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars whose gravitational forces bind them to each other. They are home to a large number of binary star systems that can lead to the formation of millisecond pulsars. One of these star clusters is NGC 6624 out towards the Sagittarius constellation. It is in the central region of our Milky Way, around 27,000 light years away. The researchers have been able to find a total of six pulsars in this globular cluster; J1823-3021A was the first. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">With a rotational period of only 5.44 milliseconds (11,000 rotations per minute) it is also the most luminous pulsar detected to date in a globular cluster. J1823-3021A had already been discovered in the radio band back in 1994. Since then, regular time sequence measurements have been carried out with large radio telescopes, in particular with the Lovell telescope of the University of Manchester (Great Britain) and the Nançay telescope in France. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">"We were very surprised to discover that the pulsar radiates very brightly in the gamma radiation band as well," says Damien Parent from the US Center for Earth Observing and Space Research. "We did not expect these millisecond pulsars to be so bright. This implies an unexpectedly strong magnetic field for such a rapidly rotating pulsar." <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">"This is a challenge for our current theories regarding the formation of such pulsars," explains Michael Kramer, Director at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn and head of the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy research group there. "We are currently investigating a whole series of possible explanations. Nature might even be forming millisecond pulsars in a way that we do not even have on the radar as yet." <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">"No matter how these anomalous pulsars might form, one thing seems to be certain," says Paulo Freire: "In globular clusters, at least, these are objects so young that they are probably forming as often as the large number of normal millisecond pulsars which we already know about."

T-9 : 45 minute hold. Everything is “Go For Launch” pending weather and the “Close Out Crew” have been cleared from the launch area. There are close to 750 thousand Earthlings present at KSC viewing areas to observe this historical launch. (Usually the area is invaded by a mere 150-250 thousand tourists.)

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Launch Day!

As NASA’s Mission Control comments: “Launch chances are always 50/50 due to weather and other potential issues which may occur during countdown. The crew is seated and ready to contribute their part to the Shuttle’s final mission taking Atlantis passed it’s already accrued 115 million miles, on its 33rd flight to the ISS. The next possible launch date, should Atlantis not launch this weekend, is July 16, 2011.”

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Atlantis- STS 135 scheduled for Friday, 8 July, 2011 11:26 a.m. EDT is the final Shuttle mission to the International Space Station transporting the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module in addition to necessary supplies and logistics. Atlantis will return carrying a failed ammonia pump module on its twelve day excursion. Atlantis also will transport “a system to investigate the potential for robotically refuelling existing spacecraft”. Mission Control is monitoring a potential weather threat located in the Caribbean, expected to bring high winds and rain to the launch area. In preparation for the launch Commander Chris Ferguson and Pilot Doug Hurley continue to perform touch and go landings at Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility. Atlantis’s crew of four also include Mission Specialists Rex Walheim, and Sandy Magnus.