Brighter Than 200 Million Suns

by | Sep 2, 2004 | | 0 Comments

It looks bright enough to be a foreground star, but this supernova, called SN 2004dj, is 11 million light years away in a galaxy known as NGC 2403. Not particularly germane to interstellar propulsion or finding candidates for robotic probes, but simply too remarkable a sight to ignore. You can read more about this Hubble photograph here. From the press release issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute: The heart of NGC 2403 is the glowing region at lower left. Sprinkled across the region are pink areas of star birth. The myriad of faint stars visible in the Hubble image belong to NGC 2403, but the handful of very bright stars in the image belong to our own Milky Way Galaxy and are only a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away. This image was taken on Aug. 17, two weeks after an amateur astronomer discovered the supernova. What we're seeing here is the creation of heavy chemical elements like calcium, iron and gold, all of which, on Earth and elsewhere, came from...

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European Space Agency to Create Catalog of Stars

by | Aug 19, 2004 | , | 3 Comments

Although ESA has cancelled its Eddington mission, which was to have used a precision photometer to record the transit of planets across the disks of distant stars, the agency is pressing ahead with a mission that will compile a catalog of up to a billion stars. As described in the ESA press release, the Gaia mission would be launched in 2010, and would spend almost a decade plotting these stars into a three-dimensional grid that would show not just their current position, but direction of motion, color and composition. It always startles me how little we know about even nearby stars. It was only last year that the red dwarf SO25300.5+165258 was discovered, but at 7.8 light years away, it is the third closest star to the Sun. Projects like Gaia will be invaluable at filling in our information about other close stars that have so far evaded detection, many of them simply because of their size and dimness -- some 70 percent of all stars in the galaxy are type M red dwarfs like Proxima...

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Hubble and the Solar Wind

by | Aug 13, 2004 | , | 0 Comments

The Hubble Space Telescope has given us no end of gorgeous astronomical photographs. This one is of an enormous cavity of gas carved out by the stellar wind from the nebula N44f; the image comes from the ESA/Hubble Information Centre. You're looking at what happens when a cloud of gas is inflated by fast-moving particles from a hot young star. This stellar wind is moving at about 7 million kilometers per hour, far faster than the Sun's (a sedate 1.5 million kilometers per hour). Keep this image in mind when thinking about new propulsion concepts like Robert Winglee's M2P2, which uses the solar wind to push a magnetic sail. You can read about Winglee's work at this Web site at the University of Washington. And note that when we talk about the solar wind pushing a magnetic sail, we are discussing something different than a solar sail, which gets its push solely from the momentum imparted by photons. They are two entirely different concepts.

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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