Scientists/Astronomers Discover Hottest Planet Ever Found

Nasa Image, Click To enlarge

LONDON: An exoplanet has been found to be the hottest planet discovered so far with a record-breaking temperature of 3,200 degrees Celsius. The planet WASP-33b, is also known as HD15082. Its scorching temperature is explained by its close orbit around its star, itself one of the hottest planet-hosting stars at 7,160 degrees Celsius, the New Scientist reports.

Scientists were first alerted to WASP-33b’s existence in 2006, after observing regularly timed dimmings of its parent star. This was caused by the planet, four-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter, orbiting its star at less than seven percent the distance of Mercury from the Sun, according to the Daily Mail.

This is not to be scoffed at considering the star’s temperature of 7,160 degrees Celsius dwarfs the sun’s 5,600 degrees Celsius. A study led by Alexis Smith of Keele University in Staffordshire, Britain, discovered WASP-33b’s thermal emission using an infrared camera on the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. Its temperature is 900 degrees Celsius hotter than what was formerly the hottest known planet in the Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists believe that the planet, called WASP-12b and which lies 600 light-years away from Earth, may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured. (IANS)

Hubble Telescope Spot "Most Distant and Ancient Galaxy Ever Seen"

US and European researchers trying to peer back to the beginnings of the universe said on Wednesday they have spotted what they think is the most ancient galaxy ever seen – 13.2 billion years old, Reach Hubble [2], which corresponds to a redshift around 10.

Called UDFj-39546284, this galaxy most likely contains blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang. “We’re seeing huge changes in the rate of star birth that tell us that if we go a little further back in time we’re going to see even more dramatic changes,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The new find indicates that the rate at which galaxies were forming stars was increasing by a factor of ten over the 170 million years that elapsed between the era of this newly discovered candidate galaxy and that of the population of previously identified galaxies at a redshift around 8 (650 million years after the Big Bang). “These observations provide us with our best insights yet into the likely nature of the earlier generation of primeval objects that we are yet to find,” added Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The object appears as a faint dot of starlight in the Hubble exposures, and although its individual stars can’t be resolved by Hubble, the evidence suggests that this is a compact galaxy of hot stars that first started to form over 100-200 million years earlier, from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter. The team has reported the find in the 27 January issue of Nature. (ANI)

2010-NASA Space Photos' Absolutely You Don’t Want to Miss - 26 Pics

Beautiful And Scary Nasa Space Photos :

1. The International Space Station against the moon

2.  Space Shuttle Atlantis docked at Space Station

3. Space Shuttle Discovery with Earth in the background

4. The Manam Volcano Islands

5. Even space debris looks cool

6. The McNaught Comet racing through space

7. Far away Spiral Galaxies claimed to have earth-type planets with human life

8. Satellite orbiting like a boss

9. Shadows fom Saturn's rings

10. The Star of Bethlehem

11. Space Shuttle Endeavor at sunset

12. The Sun is alive

13. This is not from space, I found this rock in my yard. Ok, it Asteroid Letutia.

14. Martian forest on Mars

15. One of Saturn's moons

16. Spiral Galaxy of constellation Ursa Major

17. Gas bubbles in the deep space

18. Total solar eclipse

19. Astronaut Nicholas Patrick swimming in space

20. Gulf oil disaster looks like you could wipe it up with a rag from here

21. Sun Spot up close.

22. Space Nebula

23. Looking down on Auroras from space

24. Dual-core comet Hartley

25. City lights of Italy and Greece

26. Space Medusa

Supermassive Black Hole Discovered in "Dwarf Galaxy"

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in a small nearby galaxy that may shed light on how black holes and galaxies may have grown in the early history of the Universe. They said that finding a black hole a million times more massive than the Sun in a star-forming dwarf galaxy is a strong indication that supermassive black holes formed before the buildup of galaxies.

The galaxy, called Henize 2-10, 30 million light-years from Earth, has been studied for years, and is forming stars very rapidly. “This galaxy gives us important clues about a very early phase of galaxy evolution that has not been observed before,” said Amy Reines, of the University of Virginia.

“Now, we have found a dwarf galaxy with no bulge at all, yet it has a supermassive black hole. This greatly strengthens the case for the black holes developing first, before the galaxy’s bulge is formed,” said Reines. The researchers found a region near the center of the galaxy that strongly emits radio waves with characteristics of those emitted by super-fast “jets” of material spewed outward from areas close to a black hole.

They then searched images from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory that showed this same, radio-bright region to be strongly emitting energetic X-rays. This combination indicates an active, black-hole-powered, galactic nucleus, they said. While central black holes of roughly the same mass as the one in Henize 2-10 have been found in other galaxies, those galaxies all have much more regular shapes.

Henize 2-10 differs not only in its irregular shape and small size but also in its furious star formation, concentrated in numerous, very dense “super star clusters.” “This galaxy probably resembles those in the very young Universe, when galaxies were just starting to form and were colliding frequently. All its properties, including the supermassive black hole, are giving us important new clues about how these black holes and galaxies formed at that time,” said Johnson. (ANI)