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Images from Planck space observatory reveal star formation processes

April 27, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, April 27 (ANI): Star formation takes place hidden behind veils of gas and dust, but ESA’s Planck space observatory – with its microwave eyes – can peer beneath that shroud to provide new insights into star-forming process.

The latest images released by the Planck team bring to light two different star forming regions in the Milky Way, and in stunning detail, reveal the different physical processes at work.

The Orion region is a cradle of star formation, some 1,500 light-years away. It is famous for the Orion Nebula, which can be seen by the naked eye as a faint smudge.

The first image covers much of the constellation of Orion. The nebula is the bright spot to the lower center. The bright spot to the right of center is around the Horsehead Nebula, so called because at high magnifications a pillar of dust resembles a horse’s head.

The giant red arc of Barnard’s Loop is thought to be the blast wave from a star that blew up inside the region about two million years ago. The bubble it created is now about 300 light-years across.

In contrast to Orion, the Perseus region is a less vigorous star-forming area but, as Planck shows in the other image, there is still plenty going on.

The images both show three physical processes taking place in the dust and gas of the interstellar medium. Planck can show us each process

separately.

At the lowest frequencies, Planck maps emission caused by high-speed electrons interacting with the Galaxy’s magnetic fields. An additional diffuse component comes from spinning dust particles emitting at these frequencies.

At intermediate wavelengths of a few millimeters, the emission is from

gas heated by newly formed hot stars.

At still higher frequencies, Planck maps the meager heat given out by extremely cold dust. This can reveal the coldest cores in the clouds, which are approaching the final stages of collapse, before they are reborn as fully-fledged stars. The stars then disperse the surrounding clouds.

The delicate balance between cloud collapse and dispersion regulates the number of stars that the Galaxy makes. (ANI)

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Planck spacecraft obtains first peek of big bang’s ‘afterglow’

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 18 (ANI): European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Planck spacecraft has obtained its first peek at the afterglow of the big bang, revealing it in unprecedented detail.

The ESA spacecraft was launched into space on May 14 this year. It is observing the glow of hot gas from just 380,000 years after the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

According to a report in New Scientist, the detailed properties of this background may contain hints of hidden extra dimensions or multiple universes, as well as providing clues to what caused a brief, early period of incredibly rapid cosmic expansion.

Planck began surveying the microwave background on August 13, a few weeks after reaching its planned perch 1.5 million kilometres from Earth at a point called L2 and cooling its detectors to within 0.1 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.

Now, the Planck team has released the probe’s first image, an observational strip covering about 5 per cent of the sky.

Slight variations in temperature from place to place in the early universe give the image its mottled appearance.

“With a few per cent of the data in, you can see it’s working well and delivering good stuff,” said team member George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge.

Planck is expected to provide the most detailed all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background yet, improving on the best current map, obtained by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which launched in 2001.

Planck’s detectors have more than 10 times the sensitivity of WMAP’s, and about 2.5 times the angular resolution.

“Every strip that Planck scans, we’re getting data that is many, many times more sensitive than WMAP,” Efstathiou told New Scientist.

Although Planck was only designed to observe the sky for 15 months, the team believes it could last for more than 30 months, based on new estimates of how long its coolant will last.

The extra time will allow Planck to measure the radiation with even greater precision, since it will scan the entire sky four times – two more than originally planned. (ANI)

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Cracks on Mars a result of evaporating lakes in ancient times

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 16 (ANI): Networks of giant polygonal troughs etched across crater basins on Mars have been identified as desiccation cracks caused by evaporating lakes, providing further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.

The findings were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress by PhD student M. Ramy El Maarry of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

The polygons are formed when long cracks in the surface of the Martian soil intersect.

El Maarry investigated networks of cracks inside 266 impact basins across the surface of Mars and observed polygons reaching up to 250 meters in diameter.

Polygonal troughs have been imaged by several recent missions but, until now, they have been attributed to thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost.

El Maarry created an analytical model to determine the depth and spacing of cracks caused by stresses building up through cooling in the Martian soil.

He found that polygons caused by thermal contraction could have a maximum diameter of only about 65 meters, much smaller than the troughs he was seeing in the craters.

“I got excited when I saw that the crater floor polygons seemed to be too large to be caused by thermal processes. I also saw that they resembled the desiccation cracks that we see on Earth in dried up lakes,” said El Maarry.

“The stresses that build up when liquids evaporate can cause deep cracks and polygons on the scale I was seeing in the craters,” he added.

El Maarry identified the crater floor polygons using images taken by the MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor and the HiRISE and Context cameras on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The polygons in El Maarry’s survey had an average diameter of between 70 and 140 kilometers, with the width of the actual cracks ranging between 1 and 10 meters.

Evidence suggests that between 4.6 and 3.8 billion years ago, Mars was covered in significant amounts of water.

Rain and river water would have collected inside impact crater basins, creating lakes that may have existed for several thousand years before drying out.

However, according to El Maarry, in the northern hemisphere, some of the crater floor polygons could have been formed much more recently.

“When a meteorite impacts with the Martian surface, the heat can melt ice trapped beneath the Martian crust and create what we call a hydrothermal system. Liquid water can fill the crater to form a lake, covered in a thick layer of ice. Even under current climatic conditions, this may take many thousands of years to disappear, finally resulting in the desiccation patterns,” said El Maarry. (ANI)

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Spare gene in fish provides raw materials for evolution of new Traits

September 4, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 4 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have discovered that a duplicate copy of a gene involved in embryonic development of fish has taken up a newer role in the evolution of fish scales.

Scientists have suspected that spare parts in the genome-extra copies of functional genes that arise when genes or whole genomes get duplicated-might sometimes provide the raw materials for the evolution of new traits.

Now, researchers say that they have discovered a prime example of this in fish.

The researchers show that a duplicate copy of a gene involved in embryonic development has taken up a newer and decidedly less essential role in the development of fish scales.

Zebrafish carrying a mutant version of that extra fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 (fgfr1) gene show decreases in their scale formation.

What’s more, the spare fgfr1 gene is at the root of similar scale loss seen in domesticated carp, which have been selectively bred by humans for the last 2,000 years.

“Our finding is an excellent case for (gene) duplication supporting diverse forms,” said Matthew Harris of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.

“By ‘tweaking’ the use of one of the two copies of the fish fgfr1, the teleost order that contains zebrafish and carp have a specialized ‘toolbox’ gene that now controls adult-specific variation in form,” added Nicolas Rohner, also of the Max Planck Institute.

Fish species outnumber all other vertebrates combined and include many with spectacular features to match the diverse environments in which they live, according to Harris and Rohner.

Teleost fish in particular represent the largest assemblage of vertebrates, comprising over 26,000 species with astonishing diversity in their form and physiology.

Although little is known about the genetic basis of that diversity, it is clear that gene duplication is commonplace within teleost groups, providing a source of genetic raw material for selection.

To further explore in the new study, the researchers first examined mutant strains of zebrafish in search of those with changes to their fins, skulls, or scales, all structures that tend to vary among species.

They focused their attention on one with fewer scales and in an unusual pattern-an abnormality they traced to fgfr1.

“We were surprised to find severe coding mutations in such an important developmental gene to cause an adult-specific and viable phenotype,” Harris said.

Further study showed the reason why: zebrafish maintain two copies of fgfr1 that function redundantly during embryonic development. One of those two genes is also required for the formation of the scales in juveniles. (ANI)

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Priming infants with cues to affiliation ups their tendency to be helpful

September 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 3 (ANI): Ever wondered why people often spend their valuable time and energy to help a neighbour, with no promise of payback?

Well, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter of Germany’s Max Planck Institute have now found that priming infants with subtle cues to affiliation increases their tendency to be helpful.

During a study, they showed a large group of 18-month-old infants photographs of household objects, such as a teapot or a shoe.

The researchers revealed that the household objects were always the central image and the only thing that they talked about with the infants.

They further said that placed in the background were much smaller secondary images that were intended to prime the infants’ subconscious thinking.

For these background images, some of the infants saw two small wooden dolls, facing and almost touching each other. Others saw the dolls facing away from one another, while others saw just one doll and still others saw some wooden blocks.

According to the researchers, the idea was that the two dolls who were obviously engaged with each other-and only those dolls-would spark thoughts of group identity and belonging-and that those unconscious feelings of affiliation would increase helpful behavior in the children.

To test that, after infants had seen the images, one of the researchers “accidentally” dropped a bundle of small sticks.

She then waited to see which of the infants would spontaneously reached out to help.

If the infants didn’t help immediately on their own, the researcher dropped some hints about the sticks and needing help.

She found that the children who had been primed for affiliation and group belonging were three times as likely as any of the other infants to spontaneously offer help.

She also observed that it was specifically the affiliative relationship of the dolls that caused the effect.

The researcher revealed that infants that saw two dolls who were standing close to each other, but who were disengaged, were about as helpful as those who saw just the lone doll-or the wooden blocks.

Having observed that mere social hints could boost children’s helpfulness in the lab, the researchers came to the conclusion that a few small changes in kids’ social environments might help promote selflessness in the real world.

A research article on their study has been published in the journal Psychological Science. (ANI)

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Novel method to make safer human stem cells uses just one gene

August 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug 29 (ANI): Inching closer to curing diseases like Parkinson’s using cells generated from a patient’s own body, researchers have successfully reprogrammed human nerve cells back to an embryo-like state by using just a single gene.

It is known that embryonic stem cells are pluripotent – they can develop into any of the body’s cell types.

But such cells are not available in large numbers, as they can only be harvested from a donated egg or embryo, and, for ethical reasons, most countries have laws restricting their use.

In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan successfully made mouse cells pluripotent by reprogramming skin cells into a state like embryo cells.

They did so by using retroviruses to insert four genes – known as “factors” – into the cells’ DNA.

They repeated the trick a year later with human cells.

However, using genes and retroviruses in this way increases the risk of the cell becoming cancerous, not just because tinkering with DNA has that effect, but also because two of the four factors are known to cause cancer.

In a bid to make these promising cells in a safe way, Hans Scholer’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany, has been working to achieve pluripotency using fewer factors.

Last year, they did this with the two factors that do not cause cancer, and now they have simplified the recipe further, doing it with just one.

“Remarkably, it turns out that three of these four essential factors are already expressed in human neural stem cells – although not in skin cells – so we only needed to add one factor, OCT4,” New Scientist quoted Boris Greber, a member of the team, as saying.

He said that the cells from neural tissue are much easier to reprogram than skin cells, and are less prone to mutations.

It is much harder to get a sample of neural stem cells than skin cells, as it can be done via extracting the cells from the dental pulp of teeth, said Greber.

Inserting even one gene into the chromosome of a cell still permanently modifies its DNA, which is why the new method will remain a lab tool instead of being allowed in the clinic.

However, the researchers are hoping that it will help them improve methods for producing embryonic stem cells.

“Ideally, we will be able to find a chemical that does the same job of expressing the factor without the need for a gene,” said Greber.

Earlier this year, researchers in California managed just that when they reprogrammed mouse fibroblasts using a cocktail of proteins.

That technique did not involve inserting genes, and, thus, shouldn’t raise the cancer risk. But that was far less efficient.

“Without stable intervention using viruses, the frequency of reprogramming goes down and you have to wait a long time. We don’t have the perfect method yet,” said Greber.

The study has been published in the journal Nature. (ANI)

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‘Mind is sharp as a steel trap’ even in old age: Study

August 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 22 (ANI): Many studies have suggested that cognitive function declines in old age, but a new study led by a Ryerson University researcher shows that this is not always the case.

In the study, Dr. Lixia Yang of Ryerson University and her co-author, Ralf Krampe of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, found that seniors were able to retain 50 per cent of concepts they learned almost a year ago.

“This finding was astonishing. We always assumed that seniors would have great difficulty in grasping new concepts and maintaining what they’ve learned. But our research demonstrates this is not always the case,” Yang said.

47 seniors in their 70s and 80s completed a series of tests that measured three areas that normally decline with age: reasoning, processing speed and visual attention.

They then repeated the same tests eight months later in a follow-up study. For example, to test the older adults’ visual attention, one test involved finding ‘target’ letters, like the letter ‘D’ with dots above and below, among other letters with similar patterns as fast as possible.

“This study suggests that seniors’ minds are still sharp, and they can be productive members of the workplace, as long as they receive appropriate training,” Yang said.

The study has been published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. (ANI)

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Scientists discover signaling pathway which ensures that plants remember to flower

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 21 (ANI): A team of scientists has discovered signaling pathway that ensures plants remember to flower, even without positive signals from the environment.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany found the solution to the mystery that why do some plants blossom even when days are short and gray.

According to the researchers, an endogenous mechanism allows them to flower in the absence of external influences such as long days.

A small piece of RNA, a so-called microRNA, has a central role in this process, as a decline of its concentration in the shoot apex triggers flowering.

MicroRNAs are very short RNA snippets that have emerged in recent years as essential regulators of gene function in both plants and animals.

By binding to complementary motifs in a messenger RNA, they inhibit its translation into protein. This process thus blunts the activity of the corresponding gene.

In Tubingen, developmental biologists have discovered that the common wallcress, Arabidopsis, uses this regulatory mechanism to switch from vegetative to reproductive development.

A group of related regulators, the SPL proteins, play an important role in promoting the onset of flowering.

In young plants, high levels of microRNA156 prevent production of SPL proteins.

Jia-Wei Wang and colleagues demonstrate that independent of external cues, the concentration of the microRNA declines over time, like sand running through an hourglass.

When the microRNA concentration falls below a certain level, enough SPL proteins are produced to activate the flowering process even in the absence of other regulators that measure day length or external temperature.

This in turns allows a sufficiently old plant to flower, even in an unfavorable environment.

Interestingly, the SPLs do double duty, since they have supporting roles when plants flower in response to long days.

Furthermore, both the SPLs and other regulators eventually converge on a similar set of targets crucial for flowering.

According to Detlef Weigel, director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, “Flowering is crucial for the long-term survival of plants. The redundancy of environment-dependent and independent mechanisms ensures that plants do not wait forever until flowering.” (ANI)

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Why people walk in circles when lost

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 21(ANI): It’s true: When people are lost, they walk in circles. That’s the conclusion of a new research which has also found the reason behind it.

Scientists in the Multisensory Perception and Action Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, led by Jan Souman and Marc Ernst, have presented the first empirical evidence that people really walk in circles when they do not have reliable cues to their walking direction.

The study has been published in the journal Current Biology.

The boffins examined the walking trajectories of people who walked for several hours in the Sahara desert (Tunisia) and in the Bienwald forest area (Germany). They used the global positioning system (GPS) to record these trajectories.

The results showed that participants were only able to keep a straight path when the sun or moon was visible. However, as soon as the sun disappeared behind some clouds, people started to walk in circles without even noticing it.

Speaking about the study, Jan Souman said: “One explanation offered in the past for walking in circles is that most people have one leg longer or stronger than the other, which would produce a systematic bias in one direction. To test this explanation, we instructed people to walk straight while blindfolded, thus removing the effects of vision. Most of the participants in the study walked in circles, sometimes in extremely small ones (diameter less than 20 metres).”

However, it turned out that these circles were rarely in a systematic direction. Instead, the same person sometimes veered to the left, sometimes to the right. Walking in circles is therefore not caused by differences in leg length or strength, but more likely the result of increasing uncertainty about where straight ahead is.

“Small random errors in the various sensory signals that provide information about walking direction add up over time, making what a person perceives to be straight ahead drift away from the true straight ahead direction,” according to Souman.

Marc Ernst, Group Leader at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics, added: “The results from these experiments show that even though people may be convinced that they are walking in a straight line, their perception is not always reliable. Additional, more cognitive, strategies are necessary to really walk in a straight line.

“People need to use reliable cues for walking direction in their environment, for example a tower or mountain in the distance, or the position of the sun.” (ANI)

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Astronomers unveil largest map of cold cosmic dust

July 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Berlin, July 2 (ANI): Astronomers have unveiled the largest map of cold cosmic dust, which are peppered in the inner regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and are the potential birthplaces of new stars.

Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space telescope.

This new guide for astronomers, known as the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) shows the Milky Way in submillimeter-wavelength light.

Images of the cosmos at these wavelengths are vital for studying the birthplaces of new stars and the structure of the crowded galactic core.

“ATLASGAL gives us a new look at the Milky Way. Not only will it help us investigate how massive stars form, but it will also give us an overview of the larger-scale structure of our galaxy,” said Frederic Schuller from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, leader of the ATLASGAL team.

The area of the new submillimeter map is approximately 95 square degrees, covering a very long and narrow strip along the galactic plane two degrees wide (four times the width of the full Moon) and over 40 degrees long.

The Universe is relatively unexplored at submillimeter wavelengths, as extremely dry atmospheric conditions and advanced detector technology are required for such observations.

The interstellar medium – the material between the stars – is composed of gas and grains of cosmic dust, rather like fine sand or soot.

However, the gas is mostly hydrogen and relatively difficult to detect, so astronomers often search for these dense regions by looking for the faint heat glow of the cosmic dust grains.

Submillimeter light allows astronomers to see these dust clouds shining, even though they obscure our view of the Universe at visible light wavelengths.

Accordingly, the ATLASGAL map includes the denser central regions of our galaxy, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius – home to a supermassive black hole that are otherwise hidden behind a dark shroud of dust clouds.

The newly released map reveals thousands of dense dust clumps, many never seen before, which mark the future birthplaces of massive stars.

The clumps are typically a couple of light-years in size, and have masses of between ten and a few thousand times the mass of our Sun. (ANI)

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Saturn’s moon Enceladus may host a salty ocean

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 25 (ANI): A new research by European scientists has provided evidence that an enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is fed by a salty ocean, a discovery that may have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

The Cassini spacecraft made a surprising discovery about Saturn’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus, on its exploration of the giant ringed planet in 2005.

Enceladus ejects water vapor, gas and tiny grains of ice into space hundreds of kilometers above the moon’s surface.

Enceladus orbits in Saturn’s outermost “E” ring. It is one of only three outer solar system bodies that produce active eruptions of dust and vapor.

Moreover, aside from the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Europa, it is one of the only places in the solar system for which astronomers have direct evidence of the presence of water.

New understanding of how this plume is produced was revealed in 2008 by Juergen Schmidt of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Nikolai Brilliantov of the University of Leicester, and colleagues.

They explained how the water vapor jets are blasted out much faster than the dust particles. To work their theory required that Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water below its surface.

The same team, working with Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, in Heidelberg, has now found the direct experimental evidence for the presence of this ocean, which was previously lacking.

Current theories of satellite formation suggest that should a moon have a deep liquid ocean in contact with the body’s rocky core, for many millions of years, then it should be a salty ocean.

The team now reports the detection of sodium salts among the dust ejected in the Enceladus plume.

Postberg and colleagues have studied data from the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) onboard the Cassini spacecraft and have combined this data with laboratory experiments.

They have shown that the icy grains in the Enceladus plume contain substantial quantities of sodium salts, hinting at the salty ocean deep below.

The theory, proposed by Brilliantov and Schmidt, has allowed the team to relate the detected salt in the CDA with the likely concentration in the water vapor above the ocean, which proves the consistency of the experimental data.

The results of the study imply that the concentration of sodium chloride in the ocean can be as high as that of Earth’s oceans and is about 0.1-0.3 moles of salt per kilogram of water. (ANI)

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Virtual model of sunspots may unlock Sun’s mysteries

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 19 (ANI): Scientists have created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots, a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the sun and its impacts on Earth.

Sunspots are associated with massive ejections of charged plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and disrupt communications and navigational systems.

They are also linked to variations in solar output that can affect weather on Earth and exert a subtle influence on climate patterns.

“Understanding complexities in the solar magnetic field is key to ‘space weather’ forecasting,” said Richard Behnke of NSF’s (National Science Foundation’s) Division of Atmospheric Sciences.

“If we can model sunspots, we may be able to predict them and be better prepared for the potential serious consequences here on Earth of these violent storms on the sun,” he added.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., collaborated with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, building on a computer code that had been created at the University of Chicago.

“If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth’s atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth’s atmosphere,” said lead paper author Matthias Rempel.

Sunspots accompany intense magnetic activity that is associated with solar flares and massive ejections of plasma that can buffet Earth’s atmosphere.

The resulting damage to power grids, satellites and other sensitive technological systems takes an economic toll on a rising number of industries.

The new computer models capture pairs of sunspots with opposite polarity.

In striking detail, they reveal the dark central region, or umbra, with brighter umbral dots, as well as webs of elongated narrow filaments with flows of mass streaming away from the spots in the outer penumbral regions.

They also capture the convective flow and movement of energy that underlie the sunspots, and which are not directly detectable by instruments.

The models suggest that the magnetic fields within sunspots need to be inclined in certain directions in order to create such complex structures.

The researchers conclude that there is a unified physical explanation for the structure of sunspots in umbra and penumbra that’s the consequence of convection in a magnetic field with varying properties.

The simulations can help scientists decipher the mysterious, subsurface forces in the sun that cause sunspots.

Such work may lead to an improved understanding of variations in solar output and their impacts on Earth. (ANI)

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Birds sing well even when exposed to bad tutors

May 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 28 (ANI): A new study by German researchers has revealed that male canaries sing well even when they are exposed to tutors lacking basic features of the song of their species.

The learning of birdsong is similar to speech learning in humans. Acoustic perception and the ability to produce sound are crucial for the process.

Social isolation leads to a disturbed vocal development both in humans and in birds. When kids grow up without contact with other humans, they either develop no or a rudimentary form of human language.

A similar scenario occurs in songbirds when juveniles are removed from their parents and are raised apart. Although these birds develop song, it usually contains abnormalities.

Whether the descendants of such birds accept these abnormal songs of their parents as a song model was investigated by researchers Sandra Belzner and Stefan Leitner from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, on domesticated canaries.

For the study, the researchers established a group of ‘poor’ singing tutors by raising young canaries in isolation from adult males but in contact with peers and females.

When these poor singers later on sired offspring, the adult males were removed only after juveniles had reached the age of 60-70 days and thus had started song development already.

Detailed song analysis showed that the juveniles did not simply copy the bad songs of their tutors, but rather developed a version that resembled more the song of normal canaries.

“Apparently these birds possess an innate template for species-specific song that needs to be activated by hearing song,” said Cornelia Voigt, study co-author.

When the researchers introduced the male offspring in their second year to normally singing canary males, they found that their songs did not contain any changes.

These findings were published in an online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. (ANI)

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Oil hunters started decimating whale populations as early as 1800

May 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 25 (ANI): One of several astonishing reconstructions of ocean life in olden days suggests that about the ocean around New Zealand teemed with about 27,000 southern right whales, about 30 times as many as today, before oil hunters started to whaling in the early 1800s.

The researchers set to make a presentation on the reconstruction at a Census of Marine Life conference, which runs from May 26 to 28, say that at about the same time, large pods of blue whales and orcas, blue sharks and thresher sharks darkened the waters off Cornwall, England, herds of harbour porpoise pursued fish upriver, and dolphins regularly played in waters inshore.

Census researchers are using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies to piece together images of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations.

They are also documenting the timelines over which those giant marine life populations declined.

Researchers James Barrett and Jen Harland of Cambridge University, Cluny Johnstone of York University, and Mike Richards of Germany-based Max Planck Institute reckon that a shift from eating locally-caught freshwater to marine fish species occurred around 1000 AD.

Their surmise is said to be consistent with analyses of scientifically-dated fish remains and historical data from England and northwestern Europe showing smaller freshwater fish and fewer species availability in early medieval times, likely caused by increased exploitation and pollution.

Meanwhile, Maria Lucia De Nicolo of the University of Bologna has established that new fishing boats and equipment invented in the 1500s made it possible to venture from coastal to deep sea fishing.

She says that the real revolution in marine fishing happened in the mid-1600s when pairs of boats began dragging a net.

Andy Rosenberg of the University of New Hampshire, a leader of the Census’ History of Marine Animal Population (HMAP) project and chair of the conference, says that new insights allowed by centuries of information are upending modern notions of “natural” marine life sizes, abundance, habitats and vulnerability, and causing authorities to revisit marine baselines.

The researchers believe that these insights may turn out to be useful for policy makers, who plan to use the results as a realistic baseline against which the current and future status of the marine ecosystem can be gauged.

Ian Poiner, Chair of the Census Scientific Steering Committee, says: “The insights emerging from this research of the past provide a new context for contemporary ocean management. nderstanding the magnitude and drivers of change long ago is essential to accurately interpret today’s trends and to make future projections.” (ANI)

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Tiny crystals in frozen comets created by outbursts from stars

May 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 14 (ANI): Astronomers have used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to determine that outbursts from stars create tiny silicate crystals in frozen comets.

Scientists have long wondered how tiny silicate crystals, which need sizzling high temperatures to form, have found their way into frozen comets, born in the deep freeze of the solar system’s outer edges.

The crystals would have begun as non-crystallized silicate particles, part of the mix of gas and dust from which the solar system developed.

Now, a team of astronomers believes they have found a new explanation for both where and how these crystals may have been created, by using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the growing pains of a young, Sun-like star.

The researchers from Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands found that silicate appears to have been transformed into crystalline form by an outburst from a star.

They detected the infrared signature of silicate crystals on the disk of dust and gas surrounding the star EX Lupi during one of its frequent flare-ups, or outbursts, seen by Spitzer in April 2008.

These crystals were not present in Spitzer’s previous observations of the star’s disk during one of its quiet periods.

“We believe that we have observed, for the first time, ongoing crystal formation,” said Attila Juhasz of the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, one of the research paper’s authors.

“We think that the crystals were formed by thermal annealing of small particles on the surface layer of the star’s inner disk by heat from the outburst. This is a completely new scenario about how this material could be created,” Juhasz added.

Annealing is a process in which a material is heated to a certain temperature at which some of its bonds break and then re-form, changing the material’s physical properties.

The crystals appear to be forsterite, a material often found in comets and in protoplanetary disks.

The crystals also appear hot, evidence that they were created in a high-temperature process, but not by shock heating.

“At outburst, EX Lupi became about 100 times more luminous,” said Juhasz.

“Crystals formed in the surface layer of the disk but just at the distance from the star where the temperature was high enough to anneal the silicate – about 1,000 Kelvin – but still lower than 1,500 Kelvin. Above that, the dust grains will evaporate,” Juhasz added.

The radius of this crystal formation zone, the researchers note, is comparable to that of the terrestrial-planet region in the solar system. (ANI)

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Planck satellite all set to measure the Big Bang

May 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Berlin, May 13 (ANI): Together with ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Space Telescope Herschel, Planck is all set to go into orbit on May 14, to begin its studies of the cosmic microwave radiation and of the clues it gives about the Big Bang, the earliest phases of the cosmic history, and the structure and composition of the Universe. ccording to the standard model of cosmology, our Universe began 13.7 billions years ago in a Big Bang, the origin of Space and Time.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the relic heat from this Big Bang, released 380,000 years after beginning and still traveling freely through space today.

At that early time, weak fluctuations of matter density were present, which are seen as variations of temperature in the CMB.

By observing these fluctuations, cosmologists can infer how the large-scale structure of today’s Universe – galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments – were formed.

The Planck satellite will be placed at the second Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth-Moon system (L2), located about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth – four times the distance to the Moon.

It will spin around its own axis, which will always point towards the Sun, with each rotation recording another strip of the sky and mapping its temperature to an accuracy of about one million of a degree.

The data are sent to Earth and turned into temperature maps of the sky in data processing centers in France and Italy.

What the maps look like depends on certain characteristics of the Universe, for example on the curvature of space.

For hypothetic Universes with specified properties, computer simulations using the MPA software generate virtual maps, which will be compared with maps of the real sky.

“From the comparison, we can draw conclusions about the structure of our own Universe, for example how much ordinary matter and dark energy exist in it,” explained Torsten Ensslin, head of the Planck group at MPA (The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics).

From their computer simulations, MPA cosmologists have shown how the CMB has influenced the gravitational field of dark matter.

The unseen structures of dark matter can therefore be deduced from temperature variations in the CMB.

The mission is expected to detect thousands of distant objects in a frequency range barely studied so far, and so to offer new insights into the physics of galaxies, Active Galactic Nuclei and quasars in the submillimeter domain.

These will show Planck scientists energetic processes in the immediate vicinity of massive black holes.

Planck may also help us to understand the birth of the first stars in the Universe and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. (ANI)

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World’s largest space telescope aims to explore depths of the Universe

May 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Berlin, May 12 (ANI): Herschel, the largest space telescope ever built, would explore the depths of the Universe, once it launches into orbit aboard the latest ESA (European Space Agency) mission on May 14th.

In 1.5 million kilometers distance from Earth, the space probe will orbit the Sun for 3 and a half years.

With its three instruments, it will especially detect and analyze infrared radiation, which contains information on a wide range of phenomena in the Universe, like the evolution of distant galaxies and the existence of water in our solar system.

The Universe reveals many of its secrets in the infrared.

Just like every object on Earth, the icy nebulae, galaxies and stars from the depths of the Universe emit infrared heat radiation.

The Earth’s atmosphere is impervious to these wavelengths.

The instruments aboard the Herschel space probe investigate space in the wavelength range between 55 and 672 micrometers.

No other infrared observatory so far has offered such a bandwidth in combination with the spatial resolution of a 3.5-meter telescope.

For the first time, the scientists are able to resolve the cosmic infrared background into its individual sources and thus to determine the development of the Universe.

The evolution of stars and galaxies, the formation of planetary systems, the history of our own solar system and the chemical composition of molecular clouds, stars and galaxies are the most important topics on which Herschel will provide information.

“With the start of this space telescope a dream comes true for which we have worked hard for more than ten years”, said Eckhard Sturm from Max Planck Institute (MPE).

“With Herschel, we will resolve the cosmic infrared background into individual galaxies and so be able to study the most active stage of star formation in the history of the Universe,” said Dieter Lutz, Sturm’s colleague.

Herschel also opens up new opportunities for our understanding of the trans-Neptunian region – remains of the disc from which our planets formed. (ANI)

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ESA to launch two large observatories to look deep into space and time

May 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Paris, May 8 (ANI): The European Space Agency (ESA) is going to launch two of the most sophisticated astronomical spacecraft ever built – Herschel and Planck – to look deep into space and time.

The two large observatories will be launched by ESA this month towards deep space orbits around a special observation point beyond the Moon’s orbit.

From there, both spacecraft will begin a revolutionary observation campaign that will further our understanding of the history of the Universe.

Herschel is a large far-infrared space telescope designed to study some of the coldest objects in space, in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum still mostly unexplored.

With its huge light-collection capability and set of sophisticated detectors cooled to the vicinity of absolute zero by over 2000 liters of superfluid helium, Herschel will look at the faintest and farthest infrared sources and peer into the as-yet uncharted far infrared and submillimetric parts of the spectrum.

Herschel will be able to see through the opacity of cosmic dust and gas and observe structures and events far away that date back to the early Universe – such as the birth and evolution of early stars and galaxies – ten thousand million years ago, in an effort to determine exactly how it all started.

Closer by, within our galaxy, Herschel will also observe extremely cold objects, such as the clouds of dust and interstellar gases from which stars and planets are formed, and even the atmosphere around comets, planets and their moons in our own solar system.

Planck is a telescope that will map the fossil light of the Universe – light from the Big Bang – with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy.

Featuring a 1.5 m telescope and instruments sensitive to microwave radiation, Planck will measure temperature variations in the very early Universe.

It will monitor the so- called Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic of the very first light ever emitted in space about 380 thousand years after the Big Bang, when the density and temperature of the young Universe had decreased enough to finally allow light to separate from matter and travel freely in space.

The two missions are among the most ambitious ever carried out by Europe and mark the crossing of new frontiers in the field of space-based astronomy.

The pair will be lofted in tandem by an Ariane 5 ECA launcher. Lift-off is now scheduled for May 14, from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. (ANI)

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How diamonds are created in space

April 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 24 (ANI): Astronomers have learned that creating diamonds in space requires very special conditions.

Loads of tiny diamonds, each measuring one micrometer are located in the material that surrounds some stars – their circumstellar disks.

Few stars have been identified which show clear evidence of diamonds in their disks.

Now, astronomers, using the Subaru Telescope, have learned that creating diamonds in space requires very special conditions.

When scientists look for diamonds in space, they are like detectives using fingerprints to trace a missing person.

The fingerprints of diamond crystals take the form of signature lines in the infrared wavelength, outside the range of visible light.

After more than fifteen years of puzzling over the reasons for these signature lines, astronomers have concluded that diamonds are the carriers of these emissions.

But, the question remains: Why are there so few diamond-studded stars?

An international team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany, Hokkaido University in Japan, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Hawaii, Jena University in Germany, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark used observations from the Subaru Telescope to provide data for their interpretation of why only particular stars have diamonds.

One of their major findings was that the emissions of diamond-disk stars are more centrally located and densely concentrated in the disk than other kinds of emissions.

The scientists then related this finding to another intriguing feature of two of the three stars with diamonds: Large X-ray flares are observed near them.

For stars of intermediate mass, like Elias 1, it is rather uncommon to have a strong X-ray emission, let alone an X-ray flare.

Were these rare occurrences – diamonds and X-ray flares – linked together in some way?

Findings from previous laboratory experiments provided the astronomers with a possible answer. In 1996, physicists in Germany found that tiny diamond particles formed at the core of “carbon onions” when they fired high-energy electron beams into a vacuum.

Led by the MPIA, the scientific team drew parallels between the laboratory findings and what happens in interstellar space.

The X-ray flares seem to come from the lighter companions to the primary stars of the binary systems, where two stars are consistently associated with each other.

Particle acceleration always accompanies the X-ray flare, as these two come from the same energetic phenomena related to stellar magnetic activity.

These conditions could result in a carbon onion in space, with the necessary high pressure to create diamonds. (ANI)

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World’s biggest radio telescope looks deep into NASA detected bright galaxies

April 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 23 (ANI): An international team of astronomers has used the world’s biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see.

The study solidifies the link between an active galaxy’s gamma-ray emissions and its powerful radio-emitting jets.

“Now we know for sure that the fastest, most compact, and brightest jets we see with radio telescopes are the ones that are able to kick light up to the highest energies,” said Yuri Kovalev, a team member at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

The brightest galaxies Fermi sees are active galaxies, which emit oppositely directed jets of particles traveling near the speed of light.

Some, called blazars, are especially bright because one of the jets happens to be directed toward us.

Astronomers believe that these jets somehow arise as a consequence of matter falling into a massive black hole at the galaxy’s center, but the process is not well understood.

To peer into the jets, Kovalev and his colleagues used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a set of ten radio telescopes located from Hawaii to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

When the signals from these telescopes are combined, the array acts like a single enormous radio dish more than 5,300 miles across.

The VLBA can resolve details about a million times smaller than Fermi can and 50 times smaller than any optical telescope.

The new findings are an outcome of the MOJAVE program, a long-term study of the jets from active galaxies using the VLBA.

“We see the innermost few hundred light-years of these jets for even the most distant active galaxies seen by Fermi,” Kovalev noted.

Kovalev and his colleagues see a correlation between active galaxies with the brightest gamma-ray emission and those with the fastest jets.

The VLBA can study a phenomenon called “Doppler boosting”, which makes radio-emitting blobs look brighter and appear to move much faster that the speed of light.

The VLBA data show that the bigger the Doppler boost seen in a radio jet, the more likely it is that Fermi recorded it as a variable gamma-ray source.

In addition, many objects found by Fermi to be extreme in gamma-rays are broadcasting strong bursts of radio emission at about the same time.

All this points to the team’s conclusion that the portion of an active galaxy’s radio jet closest to the galaxy’s core is also the source of the gamma-rays Fermi detects. (ANI)

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