SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: "Zone of Avoidance" - Scientists Baffled By Mysterious Gravitational Acceleration On The Milky Way Galaxy Or Where It's Coming From, As Hundreds Of Other Galaxies Are Discovered Hidden Behind It?!

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February 10, 2016 - SPACE - Scientists have finally mapped the final frontier, and it turns out that one of the most secretive areas of space is just beyond our own backyard – the Milky Way was found to be hiding hundreds of galaxies from eager astronomers.

Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth – very close in astronomical terms – it took researchers decades to map the distribution of the galaxies behind our own, the Milky Way.

The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) mapped 883 galaxies, new and old, in research published in the Astronomical Journal.

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A team of international scientists have dubbed the area the “Zone of Avoidance.” Of the 883 galaxies mapped, over a third have never been seen before.

The astronomers used CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, which is famous for assisting with moon landings.


WATCH: Raw data visualisation of Hidden Galaxy positions.

The telescope is equipped with an innovative receiver that allowed scientists see past the stars and dust of the Milky Way into a previously unexplored region of space.

“The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it’s very interesting to study our own galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,” lead scientist Professor Lister Staveley-Smith from The University of Western Australia node of the ICRAR said.

The discovery may also help explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns.

Scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations in universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and ’80s, according to Professor Staveley-Smith.

“We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” he said.


WATCH: Animation showing hidden galaxies discovered in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’.

 

“We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometers per hour.”

This research identified several new structures that could help explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).


WATCH: Annotated animation showing hidden galaxies discovered in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’.

 

Observing radio waves is the only technique that allowed astronomers to view the hidden galaxies, and they were able to map the sky 13 times fast then previously by using the Parkes radio telescope.

“An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn’t know about until now,” University of Cape Town astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg said. - RT.

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: The Iconic Great Red Spot - Jupiter's Great Red Storm, The Size Of Three Earths Is SHRINKING Mysteriously?!

May 21, 2014 - PLANET JUPITER - Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot — a swirling storm larger than Earth — is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about since the 1930s, but now these striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture the spot at a smaller size than ever before.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a churning anticyclonic storm. It shows up in images of the giant planet as a conspicuous deep red eye embedded in swirling layers of pale yellow, orange and white. Winds inside this Jovian storm rage at immense speeds, reaching several hundreds of kilometres per hour.

Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged this turbulent spot to span about 41 000 kilometres at its widest point — wide enough to fit three Earths comfortably side by side. In 1979 and 1980 the NASA Voyager fly-bys measured the spot at a diminished 23,335 kilometres across. Now, Hubble has spied this feature to be smaller than ever before.

"Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the spot is now just under 16 500 kilometres across, the smallest diameter we've ever measured," said Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA.

This composite handout image provided by NASA, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the Great Red Spot
in 2014, left; in 1995, top right; 2009, center right; and 2014, bottom right.AP Photo/NASA

Amateur observations starting in 2012 revealed a noticeable increase in the spot's shrinkage rate. The spot's "waistline" is getting smaller by just under 1000 kilometres per year. The cause of this shrinkage is not yet known.

"In our new observations it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm," said Simon. "We hypothesised that these may be responsible for the accelerated change by altering the internal dynamics of the Great Red Spot."

Simon's team plan to study the motions of these eddies, and also the internal dynamics of the spot, to determine how the stormy vortex is fed with or sapped of momentum.

This full-disc image of Jupiter was taken on 21 April 2014 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). - Daily Galaxy

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: "We Have Not Seen Anything Like This Before" - NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Spots Possible New Moon Forming Around Planet Saturn!

April 15, 2014 - SATURN -  NASA's Cassini spacecraft has documented the formation of a small icy object within the rings of Saturn. Informally named "Peggy," the object may be a new moon. Details of the observations were published online today by the journal Icarus.

The disturbance visible at the outer edge of Saturn's A ring in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft could be
caused by an object replaying the birth process of icy moons. The image is adapted from one in a paper in the journal
Icarus, reporting the likely presence of an icy body causing gravitational effects on nearby ring particles, producing the
bright feature visible at the ring's edge. The object, informally called "Peggy," is estimated to be no more than about half
a mile, or one kilometer, in diameter. It may be in the process of migrating out of the ring, a process that one
recent theory proposes as a step in the births of Saturn's several icy moons.

"We have not seen anything like this before," said Carl Murray of Queen Mary University of London, and the report's lead author. "We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right."

Images taken with Cassini's narrow angle camera on April 15, 2013 show disturbances at the very edge of Saturn's A ring -- the outermost of the planet's large, bright rings. One of these disturbances is an arc about 20 percent brighter than its surroundings, 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) long and 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide. Scientists also found unusual protuberances in the usually smooth profile at the ring's edge. Scientists believe the arc and protuberances are caused by the gravitational effects of a nearby object.

The object is not expected to grow any larger, and may even be falling apart. But the process of its formation and outward movement aids in our understanding of how Saturn's icy moons, including the cloud-wrapped Titan and ocean-holding Enceladus, may have formed in more massive rings long ago. It also provides insight into how Earth and other planets in our solar system may have formed and migrated away from our star, the sun.

"Witnessing the possible birth of a tiny moon is an exciting, unexpected event," said Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. According to Spilker, Cassini's orbit will move closer to the outer edge of the A ring in late 2016 and provide an opportunity to study Peggy in more detail and perhaps even image it.

Peggy is too small to see in images so far. Scientists estimate it is probably no more than about a half mile in diameter. Saturn's icy moons range in size depending on their proximity to the planet -- the farther from the planet, the larger. And many of Saturn's moons are comprised primarily of ice, as are the particles that form Saturn's rings. Based on these facts, and other indicators, researchers recently proposed that the icy moons formed from ring particles and then moved outward, away from the planet, merging with other moons on the way.

"The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons," Murray said. "As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings."

It is possible the process of moon formation in Saturn's rings has ended with Peggy, as Saturn's rings now are, in all likelihood, too depleted to make more moons. Because they may not observe this process again, Murray and his colleagues are wringing from the observations all they can learn. - NASA.

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: The Unusual Magnetosphere of a "Strange Beast" - Rare Auroras Spotted on the Tilted Planet Uranus?!

Astronomers have caught the first views of auroras on the planet Uranus from a telescope near Earth, revealing tantalizing views of the tilted giant planet's hard-to-catch light shows.

These composite images show Uranus auroras, which scientists caught glimpses of through
the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011. The image was released on April 13, 2012.

The Uranus aurora photos were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, marking the first time the icy blue planet's light show has been seen by an observatory near Earth. Until now, the only views of auroras on Uranus were from the NASA Voyager probe that zipped by the planet in 1986. Snapping the new photos was no easy feat: Hubble recorded auroras on the day side of Uranus only twice, both times in 2011, while the planet was 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) from Earth. The observation time had to be carefully timed with a passing solar storm to maximize Hubble's chance of seeing auroras on the planet, researchers said. The two images were combined into a single photo for public release. Auroras are created by the interplay between the magnetic field of a planet and charged particles from the sun's solar wind. The magnetosphere funnels the particles down to the planet's upper atmosphere, where interactions between the atmosphere and solar particles cause a visible glow. On Earth, auroras occur at the north and south magnetic poles, so the light displays are known as the northern or southern lights.

The last glimpse of Uranus auroras came from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew by the planet more than 25 years ago. That Voyager 2 flyby showed that Uranus was a "strange beast," said planetary scientist Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo., in a statement. "We've been really keen to get a better view. This was a very clever way of looking at that."  To snap the views, astronomers tracked a series of major solar eruptions in mid-September 2011 and calculated the time it would take them to reach Uranus. The charged particles from the solar storm passed Jupiter in about two weeks, but it wasn't until mid-November that they arrived at Uranus, researchers said. By then, the scientists had reserved time on the Hubble Space Telescope to gaze at Uranus and hope for auroras. "This planet was only investigated in detail once, during the Voyager flyby, dating from 1986," said the study leader Laurent Lamy, with the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France, in a statement. "Since then, we've had no opportunities to get new observations of this very unusual magnetosphere."

While auroras have been seen on other planets in our solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus is unique because of its extreme tilt, which scientists think was created by a collision with another planet-size object.  Uranus rotates on an axis tilted so far over that the world is essentially spinning on its side. The magnetic field of Uranus is also tilted at a 60-degree angle from the rotational axis. For comparison, Earth's magnetic axis is only tilted about 11 degrees from its rotational axis.  Because of Uranus's odd tilt,, the auroras seen by Hubble in 2011 are different than those seen by Voyager 2 in 1986, researchers said.  In 1986, Uranus was at the solstice point in its orbit, with its axis pointed at the sun. The auroras seen on the planet by Voyager 2 at the time lasted longer and occurred primarily on the planet's night side — which the Hubble Space Telescope cannot see from its vantage point in Earth orbit.  Hubble's 2011 view of Uranus's auroras, meanwhile, occurred during the planet's equinox, when the planet's rotational axis is perpendicular to the sun; an orientation that allows each of the planet's magnetic poles to face the sun once each day.  "This configuration is unique in the solar system," Lamy said.  The research will be detailed in a study appearing in the April 14 edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.- SPACE.