What do you see in this image?

“One is a Valentine’s Day heart, and the other is a surgical heart that you have in your body,” said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the image May 24 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. [Wired]

This infrared image is from WISE, more technically known as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a NASA space telescope launched on December 14, 2009. Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 326 miles, WISE snaps an infrared picture every eleven seconds. This one, of the so-called Heart and Soul nebulae, is made from 1,147 of these images stitched together.

The Heart and Soul nebulae are over 6,000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia. To capture beauties like these, WISE needs to stay cool enough that its own heat doesn’t distort the infrared images. For this reason, it carries a chunk of solid hydrogen, cryogen, that keeps the on-board telescope at about 17 degrees Kelvin (minus 429 degrees Fahrenheit). With its sensitive infrared vision, WISE can see the cool and dusty crevices of nebulae, where gas and dust are beginning to clump together to form new stars.

Having already taken about 960,000 images, the mission promises more pics like these for about four more months, until its cryogen supply runs out. Though this isn’t the first time we’ve seen these nebulae, WISE certainly has a unique perspective.

“WISE is the first survey capable of observing the two clouds in a uniform way, and this will provide valuable insight into the early solar system,” said astronomer Tommy Grav of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who presented the information at today’s meeting. [SPACE.com]

Related content:
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Bad Astronomy: A WISE flower blooms in space
Bad Astronomy: When a star struggles to be free of its chrysalis
Bad Astronomy: What does a nebula look like up close?

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

From the heroic Flipper to the charismatic Willy, dolphins and whales have made some splashy supporting actors. And since they often seem almost as smart and interesting as their human costars, perhaps it's not surprising that a new movement is afoot to grant these animals "human rights." Research on everything from whale communication to “trans-species psychology” hints that the glowing portrayals of these fictional animal friends have some basis in reality. If cetaceans—marine mammals including whales, dolphins, and porpoises—can act like humans, even using tools and recognizing themselves in a mirror, shouldn’t they have the same basic rights as people? That’s what attendees of a meeting organized by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) said yesterday, where a multidisciplinary panel agreed on a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.” “We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and well being,” says the Declaration, meant in part to stop current whaling practices. Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in California, told Reuters:
"Whaling is ethically unacceptable.... They have a sense of self that we used to think that only human beings have."
This declaration conflicts with ongoing negotiations within the International Whaling ...

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down near the Red Planet’s north pole in May of 2008. It was designed to investigate the history of water on Mars, digging into the surface soil and examining the chemistry there. It had a limited design lifetime of only a few months, since the onset of Martian winter in the north made weather conditions too severe to continue operations.

The hope was that NASA would be able to revive the lander once spring had sprung. Many such attempts have failed, and we may now know why: new images show the lander may be damaged.

The image on the left was taken in July 2008 with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows the lander in blue. The image on the right was taken just a few days ago, on May 7, 2010. The illumination is similar in the two shots — note the landscapes are very similar looking — but the shadow cast by the lander looks different now. My first thought was that dust built up on the lander, making it look different, but scientists have shown this not to be the case.

More likely, carbon dioxide buildup on the solar panels bent or even broke one of the panels. There were predictions that this might happen, so while this isn’t a total surprise, it’s disappointing. This means that Phoenix will not be able to soak up enough solar energy to restart its operations, which in turn, sadly, means it really is dead.

The good news is it did a tremendous job in its mission, returning important data about the properties of the Martian surface. Although it appears the mission is now over, it was a raging success and I’m happy for the team.

It’s funny: Mars missions tend to fail catastrophically before they even get there, or they get to Mars and seem to last forever. Spirit and Opportunity have long outlasted their warranties, and we have several orbiters still going strong. And even though Phoenix made it down to the surface and exceeded its planned lifetime, it’s still a little weird to find out it’s dead. It shows me that we get used to ESA, NASA, and JPL’s superhuman efforts when it comes to their missions.

Space exploration is hard, damn hard. But we continue to do it, and we continue to get better at it. So while this specific news is disappointing, it’s also a reminder that we can’t take anything for granted. My hat’s off to the scientists and engineers who made Phoenix work, and work beyond expectations.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

“There are lions and cheetahs and leopards out there, my dear. You’d be better off staying here with me.”

This is how male topi antelope lie for sex.

The area of Kenya where they live, Masai Mara National Reserve, is indeed filled with large predators that find antelopes to be just delicious, and so the topi have developed warning calls that they sound when it’s time to scurry away or else be eaten. But, according to an American Naturalist study, the devious topi males have figured out how to use their calls to fake the threat of immediate danger and keep females around, according to research leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen.

From February to March, male topi hold small territories through which receptive females pass to assess each male’s mating potential. The authors noticed that, while a female in estrus was on a male’s territory, the male would sometimes emit alarm calls, even in the complete absence of a predator. These false alarms are acoustically indistinguishable from true alarm snorts [Ars Technica].

The motivation is easy to see: Normally, during the one day a year that a female topi is sexually receptive, she’ll have sex 11 times with four separate males, on average. However, if a male cries “wolf”—or in this case, perhaps “hyena”—she might stick around his territory, which improves his reproductive odds. Indeed, the researchers found that the males almost never made false predator calls unless there was a lady around and he didn’t want her to wander.

“In fact, males quite frequently pull the trick on females in heat and one may ask why females keep responding to alarms at all,” Bro-Jørgensen said. “The answer seems to be that females are better off erring on the side of caution, because failing to react to a true alarm could easily mean death in a place like the Masai Mara, where it’s literally crawling with large predators” [MSNBC].

The mating game is full of liars and cheaters, or course—just check out DISCOVER’s gallery of the worst offenders. Because their prevarication employs the fear of death, topi are among the most successful, too. After a fake snort of alarm the males, on average, got to have sex nearly three more times. So expect the lying to continue.

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Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Eland Antelopes Click Their Heels To Prove Their Dominance
DISCOVER: The Best Ways To Sell Sex
DISCOVER: The Mating Game’s Biggest Cheaters (photo gallery)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The World Science Festival is running a blog in conjunction with this year’s festivities. Today I’ve written a post about one of the sessions, where scientists will talk about how we can understand our own minds by studying animal minds. Check it out here or here.

Appearing more like detached bits of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies thought to be orbiting the Milky Way.  Members of our Local Group, the Clouds are being pulled and distorted by the Milky Way.

The Atlas of the Universe - Richard Powell

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is about 1/10th as large as the Milky Way, and about 160,000 ly away.  It’s the fourth largest galaxy in the Local Group, and home to the Tarantula Nebula.  Visible to the unaided eye as a faint “cloud” in the southern hemisphere, it straddles the border between the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

Large Magellanic Cloud - NASA/JPL

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), at a distance of about 200,000 ly away, is one of the most distant objects visible with the unaided eye.  Seen only from the southern hemisphere and lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, it appears as a light “hazy” patch in the constellation Tucana.  The SMC is roughly one-half the size of the LMC.

Small Magellanic Cloud - NASA/ESA, Hubble ST

In comparison with the Milky Way, the Magellanic Cloud galaxies are gas-rich and metal-poor.  Noted for vigorous stellar growth and formation, the Clouds also host ancient objects.  The LMC was the host galaxy to SN1987a.  You remember that show-stopper:

SN1987a NASA/ESA/U. Colorado, CHANDRA/HUBBLE

The Clouds share a neutral hydrogen envelope, itself active in star formation, indicating they have been bound together by gravity for a long time.  Known as astronomical treasure-houses, the Clouds have something for everybody.

You can’t go without seeing our most famous satellite galaxies together in the night sky:

Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - ESO (great enlargement)