Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

Coolest thing I’ve seen all month.
–Ben

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

This gorgeous view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. The sped-up movie spans the time period from 12:22 to 12:45 PM ET.

While aurora are often seen near the poles, this aurora appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – the insertion of energy into Earth’s magnetic environment called the magnetosphere – caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun…

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=112616781

Is this one of the “First Stars”?

A Star That Should Not Exist

The above link is to astrobites. The article is about a star that is 13 billion years old and of very low metallicity (4.5×10^-5 that of the Sun). Could this be a Pop III star?

Doug?

New method detects emerging sunspots deep inside the sun

fyi:
–Ben

New method detects emerging sunspots deep inside the sun, provides warning of dangerous solar flares, say Stanford researchers

Sunspots spawn solar flares that can cause billions of dollars in damage to satellites, communications networks and power grids. But Stanford researchers have developed a way to detect incipient sunspots as deep as 65,000 kilometers inside the sun, providing up to two days’ advance warning of a damaging solar flare…

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-sunspot-prediction-081811.html

Photos and video at http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/">http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/

Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars

Fun bit of Astro 14 yr time lapse.

This is Not Computer fluid dynamics modeling but OBSERVED data.

So HST has done TWO movies??
This one and the Crab nebula, are there any others???

–Ben

Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars

Stars aren’t shy about sending out birth announcements. They fire off energetic jets of glowing gas traveling at supersonic speeds in opposite directions through space.

Although astronomers for decades have looked at still pictures of stellar jets, they now can watch movies of them, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

A diverse team of scientists led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University in Houston, Texas, has collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of young jets ejected from three stars…

…Hartigan and his colleagues used the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to study jets HH 1, HH 2, HH 34, HH 46, and HH 47. HH 1-HH 2 and HH 46-HH 47 are pairs of jets emanating in opposite directions from single stars. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 1 and HH 2 in 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 in 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 46 and HH 47 in 1994, 1999, and 2008. The jets are roughly 10 times the width of our solar system and zip along at more than 440,000 miles an hour (700,000 kilometers an hour).

All of the outflows are roughly 1,350 light-years from Earth. HH 34, HH 1, and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 46 and HH 47 are in the southern constellation Vela…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/20/full/