Daily Archives: June 14, 2017

Galaxies can be used as tracers for numerous characteristics of the universe, including the cosmic web of hydrogen gas that connects galaxies and follows the distribution of dark matter filaments throughout the cosmos. Looking at where galaxies sit sheds light on these otherwise invisible structures, while also providing clues about the amount of mass in galaxies and how they influence their neighbors over time. Now, astronomers have traced the alignment of massive galaxies back 10 billion years, showing these objects have been in tune with their environment since the universe was just one-third its current age.

The work was led by Lowell Observatory astronomer Michael West, who together with his collaborators used Hubble Space Telescope images of 65 galaxy clusters located billions of light-years away to study the orientation of the massive elliptical galaxies in the centers of these clusters. What they found suggests that the biggest, brightest galaxies in galaxy clusters have been heavily influenced by their unique environment since very early times. The study appears in Nature Astronomy online today.

Galaxy clusters present a very different environment from the field, which is an astronomers term for the majority of the sky, which shows no preferential structure or clustering of galaxies. Inside galaxy clusters, individual galaxies are subjected to intense gravity, a hot intracluster medium of gas, and many more flybys between neighboring galaxies than could ever occur in the less dense field. And while galaxies in the field tend to be oriented any which way, galaxies in clusters are different. The massive galaxies at the centers of clusters show preferential alignment with their neighbors, and astronomers are still looking to find out why.

One reason for this alignment could be that over time, gravity simply tends to orient large galaxies in the same direction as their neighbors. Alternatively, because large galaxies grow by absorbing smaller galaxies, these smaller galaxies could impart orientation on the galaxies that eat them due to the progenitors preferred orientation along the cosmic web.

The results of Wests study dont rule out either scenario, but they do help constrain the alignment by showing that it occurs very early on in galaxy evolution. Its an important new piece of the puzzle, said West in a press release, because it says that whatever caused these alignments happened early.

Whats next? Wests group plans to push the envelope further by trying to observe even more distant galaxies. Despite the precision achievable with Hubble, however, this will be challenging, as even massive galaxies appear fainter and smaller as the distance between Earth and these clusters grows. But such observations at the earliest epochs may help astronomers finally determine the reason for this preferred orientation, helping to complete our picture of early galaxy evolution.

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Galaxies are locked in place by their surroundings - Astronomy Magazine

This helpful new tool may give you a better idea of where to go to watch the total solar eclipse.

The University of California, Berkeley teamed up with Google to create the Eclipse Megamovie Project, a new simulator that can show what the eclipse will look like from any location, including along the path of totality, which stretches across 11 states and goes up to 72 miles wide.

All you have to do is go to the website, enter the zip code or city you want to see, and youll receive an animation of the Sun in the sky over a three-hour time span. Youll see whether you will stand in the path of totality on eclipse day, or alternatively how much of the Sun will disappear during the partial eclipse visible from other locations.

Dan Zevin, who is on the team leading the project at UC Berkeleys Space Sciences Laboratory, said that while there are other eclipse simulators out there, this one is unique.

There are lots of online animations of the 2017 eclipse, but you cant use them like ours to get a sense of the full experience, including your surroundings, Zevin said in a press release. Our simulation is closer to what one might experience in a planetarium show.

Get a better idea of what the eclipse will look like in your hometown or along the path of totality on August 21, 2017, at this link.

Originally posted here:

Get a sneak peak of August's total solar eclipse - Astronomy Magazine

Artist's illustration of Deep Space Industries' Harvestor-class spacecraft for asteroid mining.

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficient asteroid mining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies like SpaceX have decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

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Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Comets also contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Mining the Heavens: Astronomers Could Spot Asteroid Prospects - Space.com

(Source: SKA Africa)

An ambitious astronomy effort designed to peer back to the origins of the universe and map the formation of galaxies is underpinned by an emerging memory technology that seeks to move computing resources closer to huge astronomy data sets.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is an international initiative to build the world's largest radio telescope. A "precursor project" in the South African desert called MeerKAT consists of 64 44-foot "receptor" satellite dishes. The array gathers and assembles faint radio signals used to create images of distant galaxies.

Once combined with other sites, SKA would be capable of peering back further in time than any other Earth-based observatory. As with most advanced science projects, SKA presents unprecedented data processing challenges. With daily data volumes reaching 1 exabyte, "The data volume is becoming overwhelming," astronomer Simon Ratcliffe noted during a webcast this week.

In response, Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) has come up with a processing platform for handling the growing data bottleneck called the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). The memory specialist combined its fast logic process technology with new DRAM designs to boost badly needed bandwidth in its high-density memory system.

Steve Pawlowski, Micron's vice president of advanced computing, claimed its memory platform delivers as much as a 15-fold increase in bandwidth, a capability that addresses next-generation networking and exascale computing requirements.

Applications such as SKA demonstrate "the ability to put [computing] at the edge" to access the most relevant data, Pawlowski added.

The radio telescope array uses a front-end processor to convert faint analog radio signals to digital. Those signals are then processed using FPGAs. Memory resources needed to make sense of all that data can be distributed using relatively simple algorithms, according to Francois Kapp, a systems engineer at SKA South Africa. The challenge, Kapp noted, is operating the array around the clock along with the "increasing depth and width of memory" requirements. "You can't just add more memory to increase the bandwidth, " he noted, especially as FPGAs move to faster interfaces.

Hence, the SKA project is wringing out Micron's HMC approach as it maps the universe and seeks to determine how galaxies were formed. The resulting daily haul of data underscores what Jim Adams, former NASA deputy chief scientist, called "Big Science."

The exascale computing requirements of projects such as SKA exceed those of previous planetary missions such as the 2015 New Horizon fly-by of Pluto. Adams said it took NASA investigators a year to download all the data collected by New Horizon.

The technical challenges are similar for earth-bound observatories. "Astronomy is becoming data science," Ratcliffe added.

Micron positions its memory platform as a "compute building block" designed to provide more bandwidth between memory and computing resources while placing processing horsepower as close as possible to data so researchers can access relevant information.

Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube moves processing power closer to astronomy data. (Source: Micron Technology)

Meanwhile, university researchers at the University of Heidelberg are attempting to accelerate adoption of new memory approaches like Micron's through open-source development of configurable HMC controller that would serve as a memory interface.

Research Juri Schmidt noted that the German university's network-attached memory scheme was another step toward pushing memory close to data by reducing the amount of data movement.

Micron's Pawlowski noted that the current version of the memory platform is being used to sort and organize SKA data as another way to reduce data movement. The chipmaker is also investigating how to incorporate more logic functionality, including the use of machine learning to train new analytics models.

Computing, memory and, eventually, cloud storage could be combined with Micron's low-power process technology for energy efficient high-performance computing. While the company for now doesn't view HMC as an all-purpose platform, it would be suited to specific applications such as SKA, Pawlowski noted.

The astronomy initiative will provide a major test for exascale computing since, according to Adams, SKA "is a time machine," able to look back just beyond the re-ionization period after the Big Bang when galaxies began to form.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 25 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as Executive Editor for Electronic Engineering Times.

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Data-Driven Astronomy Effort Gets Memory Boost - EnterpriseTech