Pluto and the now FOUR moons. Click for larger. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)

Cool, Pluto might be “just” a dwarf planet but it sports four moons and thanks to Hubble we know it. I am amazed even Hubble could spot the tiny moon P4.

The short version from Hubblesite (click for the Full Story and more images):

These two images, taken about a week apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show four moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle in both snapshots marks the newly discovered moon, temporarily dubbed P4, found by Hubble in June. P4 is the smallest moon yet found around Pluto, with an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Pluto’s largest moon Charon is 746 miles (1,200 km) across. Nix and Hydra are 20 to 70 miles (32 to 113 km) wide. The new moon lies between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, two satellites discovered by Hubble in 2005. P4 completes an orbit around Pluto roughly every 31 days.

The new moon was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28, 2011. The sighting was confirmed in follow-up Hubble observations taken July 3 and July 18. P4, Nix, and Hydra are so small and so faint that scientists combined short and long exposures to create this image of Pluto and its entire moon system. The speckled background is camera “noise” produced during the long exposures. The linear features are imaging artifacts. The Hubble observations will help NASA’s New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. Space Telescope Science Institute director’s discretionary time was allocated to make the Hubble observations.

Well this is it, NASA’s human spaceflight becomes a memory after the landing of Atlantis this morning. Thousands of people gave all they had to the various programs over the years and now their efforts are essentially being tossed away but those efforts were not for naught and they will be remembered by some of us. some would say well there are the other missions in the works, the sad truth is the human program was probably the toughest nut to crack and the rest could be cancelled quite easily. Fortunately there are other countries out there with the foresight to continue to build their programs.

We are hanging our hats on private industry and they will not disappoint I am sure as long as the economy doesn’t preclude it.

So hopefully this UStream video link works and we can watch live, I will admit I will be watching on NASA TV as well.

Live streaming by Ustream

The twisted ring around the galactic center. Larger versions linked below. Images: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

If you are having trouble visualizing the ring click the image.  You can get larger versions of the images at the link below and I recommend you do so, they are really good.

From the ESA Herschel Space Observatory site (via Caltech).

New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel’s view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads.
“We have looked at this region at the center of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared,” said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But when we looked at the high-resolution images using Herschel’s sub-millimeter wavelengths, the presence of a ring is quite clear.” Noriega-Crespo is co-author of a new paper on the ring published in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions. It sees infrared and sub-millimeter light, which can readily penetrate through the dust hovering between the bustling center of our galaxy and us. Herschel’s detectors are also suited to see the coldest stuff in our galaxy.
When astronomers turned the giant telescope to look at the center of our galaxy, it captured unprecedented views of its inner ring — a dense tube of cold gas mixed with dust, where new stars are forming.
Astronomers were shocked by what they saw — the ring, which is in the plane of our galaxy, looked more like an infinity symbol with two lobes pointing to the side. In fact, they later determined the ring was torqued in the middle, so it only appears to have two lobes. To picture the structure, imagine holding a stiff, elliptical band and twisting the ends in opposite directions, so that one side comes up a bit.
“This is what is so exciting about launching a new space telescope like Herschel,” said Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in Rome, Italy, lead author of the new paper. “We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy.”
Observations with the ground-based Nobeyama Radio Observatory in Japan complemented the Herschel results by determining the velocity of the denser gas in the ring. The radio results demonstrate that the ring is moving together as a unit, at the same speed relative to the rest of the galaxy.
The ring lies at the center of our Milky Way’s bar — a bar-shaped region of stars at the center of its spidery spiral arms. This bar is actually inside an even larger ring. Other galaxies have similar bars and rings. A classic example of a ring inside a bar is in the galaxy NGC 1097, imaged here by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/images/2687-ssc2009-14a-Coiled-Creature-of-the-Night The ring glows brightly in the center of the galaxy’s large bar structure. It is not known if that ring has a kink or not.
The details of how bars and rings form in spiral galaxies are not well understood, but computer simulations demonstrate how gravitational interactions can produce the structures. Some theories hold that bars arise out of gravitational interactions between galaxies. For example, the bar at the center of our Milky Way might have been influenced by our largest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda.
The twist in the ring is not the only mystery to come out of the new Herschel observations. Astronomers say that the center of the torqued portion of the ring is not where the center of the galaxy is thought to be, but slightly offset. The center of our galaxy is considered to be around “Sagittarius A*,” where a massive black hole lies. According to Noriega-Crespo, it’s not clear why the center of the ring doesn’t match up with the assumed center of our galaxy. “There’s still so much about our galaxy to discover,” he said.
An abstract and full PDF of the Astrophysical Journal Letters study is online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5486.
Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA’s Herschel Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel’s three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Atlantis has undocked from the ISS marking a milestone in extinguishing the US human space program.  It’d  kind of ironic really, considering tomorrow (July 20) is the anniversary of the first manned moon landing.  Don’t forget to watch for the pair in the skies over head, you will never get another look at them together.  You can find when to look by checking Heavens Above or Spaceweather.com

Oh by the way, the place I posted about last week (and they donated the riddle prize), Headlineshirts is running a sale on a moon themed tee shirt called the Moon Flamingo , it’s only $ 2.00 with the code SPACEBOOTS.

Dawn captured this image of Vesta yesterday, July 17:

NASA/Dawn at about 9,500 miles

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned the first close-up image after beginning its orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta. On Friday, July 15, Dawn became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The image taken for navigation purposes shows Vesta in greater detail than ever before. When Vesta captured Dawn into its orbit, there were approximately 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) between the spacecraft and asteroid. Engineers estimate the orbit capture took place at 10 p.m. PDT Friday, July 15 (1 a.m. EDT Saturday, July 16).

Vesta is 330 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes have obtained images of Vesta for about two centuries, but they have not been able to see much detail on its surface. “We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system,” said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles. “This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta’s history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons.”

Vesta is thought to be the source of a large number of meteorites that fall to Earth. Vesta and its new NASA neighbor, Dawn, are currently approximately 117 million miles (188 million kilometers) away from Earth. The Dawn team will begin gathering science data in August. Observations will provide unprecedented data to help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar system. The data also will help pave the way for future human space missions.

NASA - Check out the enlargement

I have posted on the existence of blonde hair amongst some Melanesians before. There are natural chemical treatments as well as extreme malnutrition which can result in blonde hair in dark skinned people. The latter seems unlikely from the photos I’ve seen (the lightening of hair due to lack of food has been reported in African refugee camps). In regards to the former I’m confused as to why chemical treatments would be common among Oceanian people as disparate as Solomon Islanders and central desert Australian Aborigines, and yet not among many other east Eurasian populations.

In any case, in response to this comment below on Negrito appearance, I started using google images, and I stumbled upon something strange. In my Malaysian Negrito sample there’s a division between two ethnic groups, Kensiu and Jehai. The Kensiu have hardly any Austro-Asiatic or Austronesian admixture compared to the Jehai. When I looked for images of the Kensiu I came upon on this page, which seems to relate an experience of an aid worker in an isolated Malaysian village. The inhabitants were ethnically diverse, some Malays, but indigenous Negritos a well. Well, it turns out that some of ...