Robonaut R2 tweets from outer space

The first human-like astronaut robot - Robonaut 2 or R2 - has awakened at the International Space Station - and already started tweeting.

"Those electrons feel GOOD! One small step for man, one giant leap for tinman kind," said the robot's first tweet.

R2 was brought to the ISS in February 2011 on board of space shuttle Discovery.

It has been designed to work alongside humans, helping them both inside and outside the station.

Although there were tweets sent from R2′s account (@astrorobonaut) before it "woke up", now its nearly 40,000 followers can rest assured the robot is indeed actively "tweeting" as its circuits are operational.

It is even responding to questions and sending birthday greetings.

R2 weighs 136kg (300 pounds), has a torso, two human-like arms and hands, and wears a golden helmet with a visor on its head.

The "tinman" has yet to get its legs, but for now it will stay attached to a fixed base.

At some point though NASA will supply it with one leg - for climbing through the station's corridors.

Eventually, the torso may be mounted on a four-wheeled rover called Centaur 2 for possible explorations of Lunar and Martian surfaces.

Truly humanoid
There are currently four Robonauts on Earth - but R2 is much more advanced.

According to NASA, the robot is "capable of reaching speeds more than four times faster than R1, is more compact, is more dexterous, and includes a deeper and wider range of sensing."

R2 has been primarily designed to show how dexterous robots cope in a weightless environment - but NASA hopes that eventually it will get out of the station to assist its human colleagues on spacewalks.

"R2 is the first humanoid robot in space," said NASA in a statement on its website.

"R2, now unpacked, will be initially operated inside the Destiny laboratory for operational testing, but over time, both its territory and its applications could expand."

However there was bad news for robot fans hoping to see the new superstar on its return. "There are no plans to return R2 to Earth," said Nasa.

Moon and Mars
The US space agency said that the R2 project pointed to the future of space exploration, not as a replacement for humans, but as a companion, capable of carrying out supporting roles.

"The combined potential of humans and robots is a perfect example of the sum equalling more than the parts," said John Olson, director of NASA's Exploration Systems Integration Office, quoted on the agency's website.

"It will allow us to go farther and achieve more than we can probably even imagine today."

It took NASA and General Motors 15 years to build the human-like robot.

If the mission is a success, future R2-like "droids" could be sent into space to carry out works on satellites.

They could even venture all the way to Mars - to prepare for the arrival of their human masters on the red planet.


source: bbc news

Super-massive black hole caught shredding a star to pieces for the first time

A stunning cosmic jet from a super-massive black hole which shredded then swallowed a star has been observed by astronomers for the first time.

The extremely rare phenomenon caused by stellar debris being consumed by the hole has never been observed before.

Known as 'relativistic jets', they can reach hundreds of thousands of light years in length.

This illustration shows plasma shooting out of the
black hole after it devours a star. Such an event took
place four billion light years from Earth

Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-ray
telescopes (yellow and red) showing the bursts

Most galaxies have super-massive black holes - regions of space that suck in everything nearby with their strong gravitation pull - at their core, with masses of millions or even billions of suns.

Scientists were first alerted to the phenomenon in March after Nasa's Swift telescope detected several bursts of X-rays from a quiet patch of sky.

Teams from both Pennsylvania State University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the bursts could be the remnants of a star pulled apart when it came too close to a black hole located 3.9billion light years away.

Dr David Burrows, from Pennsylvania State University which controls Swift, said chemical analysis of the bright flash's ultraviolet light show it comes from material being sucked into a black hole the size of a million suns.

Writing in Nature, they concluded that the Swift satellite just happened to be in the path of the jet of star remains that were shot out at 99.5 per cent the speed of light.

Dr Burrows said: 'Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for the Swift satellite to observe into next year. It behaves unlike anything we've seen before.'

The swallowing of a star by a black hole only happens once every one hundred million years in a galaxy. The black hole is now believed to be even more powerful because of the additional mass from the swallowed star.

The absorption of large mass such as stars or even other black holes is what gives black holes growth and spawn the existence of super-massive black holes.Super-massive black holes could contain up to billions of solar masses. By comparison, the sun is just one solar mass and the Earth is 1/332,950th of a solar mass.


source: dailymail

Discovered: Stars as Cool as the Human Body

Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered six "Y dwarfs"-- star-like bodies with temperatures as cool as the human body.

This artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf"
 might look like.

Astronomers hunted these dark orbs for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of a half dozen Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," says Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Y's are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family. Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "failed" stars. They are too low in mass to fuse atoms at their cores and thus don't burn with the fires that keep stars like our sun shining steadily for billions of years. Instead, these objects cool and fade with time, until what little light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths. The atmospheres of brown dwarfs are similar to those of gas giant planets like Jupiter, but they are easier to observe because they are alone in space, away from the blinding light of a parent star.

So far, WISE data have revealed 100 new brown dwarfs. Of these, six are classified as cool Y's. One of the Y dwarfs, called WISE 1828+2650, is the record holder for the coldest brown dwarf with an estimated atmospheric temperature cooler than room temperature, or less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).

The coldest brown dwarf known so far, is denoted by a
green dot in very center  of this infrared image.
The chilly star-like body isn't even as warm as a human
  body, at less than about 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The brown dwarfs we were turning up before this discovery were more like the temperature of your oven," says Davy Kirkpatrick, a WISE science team member at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. "With the discovery of Y dwarfs, we've moved out of the kitchen and into the cooler parts of the house."

The Y dwarfs are in our sun's neighborhood, from approximately nine to 40 light-years away. The Y dwarf approximately nine light-years away, WISE 1541-2250, may become the seventh closest star system, bumping Ross 154 back to eighth. By comparison, the star closest to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is about four light-years away.

"Finding brown dwarfs near our sun is like discovering there's a hidden house on your block that you didn't know about," says Michael Cushing, a WISE team member at JPL. "It's thrilling to me to know we've got neighbors out there yet to be discovered. With WISE, we may even find a brown dwarf closer to us than our closest known star."

Once the WISE team identified brown dwarf candidates, they turned to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to narrow their list. To definitively confirm them, the WISE team used some of the most powerful telescopes and spectrometers on Earth to split apart the objects' light and look for telltale molecular signatures of water, methane and possibly ammonia. For the very coldest of the new Y dwarfs, the team used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Y dwarfs were identified based on a change in these spectral features compared to other brown dwarfs, indicating they have a lower atmospheric temperature.


source: NASA

The world that's darker than black

An artist's conception of how TrES-2b, the darkest planet
ever found, might look up close.

Astronomers say they've uncovered the darkest world ever, a planet blacker than coal that absorbs 99% of the light its star sends its way.

TrES-2b is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star 750 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Draco. Astronomers found out the dark truth about TrES-2b using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, a satellite telescope to survey our Milky Way galaxy in search of Earth-like planets. TrES-2b won't fall into that category, however.

"TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world," astronomer David kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a press release. He is the lead author of a research paper n the dark planet submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Kipping and co-author David Spiegel of Princetion University say TrES-2b is a scalding world, with a temperature of about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Its atmosphere probably contains vaporized sodium and potassium, or gaseous titanium oxide, all substances that absorb light but wouldn't alone account for the planet's darkness.

"It's not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark," Spiegel said in a press release. "However, it's not completely pitch black. it's so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove."

TrES-2b revealed itself when as its orbit took it between Kepler and its star, changing the amount of light coming from the star ever so slightly.

"By combining the impressive precision from Kepler with observation of over 50 orbits, we detected the smallest-ever change in brightness from an exoplanet: just 6 parts per million," Kipping said in the press release. "In other words, Kepler was able to directly detect visible light coming from the planet itself."

source: CNN