Japan (日本) - Astronomy - Books - Music
The Chronicle of Narnia - Star Wars - Ghibli - Disney
Harmony - Atsumina (あつみな) - Clois
Shania Twain - Lara Croft - Fukuda Mayuko (福田麻由子)
(*￣◇￣*) (*￣・￣*) (*￣〓￣*) ( ￣ω￣) (〃´▽｀〃) (*￣◎￣*) （●＾д＾●) (≧ｖ≦） (。・ω・。) (｡♥‿♥｡)
The Chronicle of Narnia - Star Wars - Ghibli - Disney
Harmony - Atsumina (あつみな) - Clois
Shania Twain - Lara Croft - Fukuda Mayuko (福田麻由子)
(*￣◇￣*) (*￣・￣*) (*￣〓￣*) ( ￣ω￣) (〃´▽｀〃) (*￣◎￣*) （●＾д＾●) (≧ｖ≦） (。・ω・。) (｡♥‿♥｡)
Matsui Jurina vs 10 members of AKB : Round 4 - Hura Hoop
- Matsui Jurina vs Takahashi Minami (Jurina win)
“You’ll protect me, right?”
Day 6 - Favorite Detective Boys Member?
Miyano Shiho. Codename: Sherry.
Ai Haibara.
Mysterious hot spots observed in a cool red supergiant
Astronomers have released a new image of the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse – one of the nearest red supergiants to Earth – revealing the detailed structure of the matter being thrown off the star.
The new image, taken by the e-MERLIN radio telescope array operated from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, also shows regions of surprisingly hot gas in the star’s outer atmosphere and a cooler arc of gas weighing almost as much as the Earth.
Betelgeuse is easily visible to the unaided eye as the bright, red star on the shoulder of Orion the Hunter. The star itself is huge – 1,000 times larger than our Sun – but at a distance of about 650 light years it still appears as a tiny dot in the sky, so special techniques combining telescopes in arrays are required to see details of the star and the region around it.
The new e-MERLIN image of Betelgeuse – published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows its atmosphere extends out to five times the size of the visual surface of the star. It reveals two hot spots within the outer atmosphere and a faint arc of cool gas even farther out beyond the radio surface of the star.
The hot spots are separated by roughly half the visual diameter of the star and have a temperature of about 4,000-5,000 Kelvin, much higher than the average temperature of the radio surface of the star (about 1,200 Kelvin) and even higher than the visual surface (3,600 Kelvin). The arc of cool gas lies almost 7.4 billion kilometres away from the star – about the same distance as the farthest Pluto gets from the Sun. It is estimated to have a mass almost two thirds that of the Earth and a temperature of about 150 Kelvin.
Lead author Dr Anita Richards, from The University of Manchester, said that it was not yet clear why the hot spots are so hot. She said: “One possibility is that shock waves, caused either by the star pulsating or by convection in its outer layers, are compressing and heating the gas. Another is that the outer atmosphere is patchy and we are seeing through to hotter regions within. The arc of cool gas is thought to be the result of a period of increased mass loss from the star at some point in the last century but its relationship to structures like the hot spots, which lie much closer in, within the star’s outer atmosphere, is unknown.”
The mechanism by which supergiant stars like Betelgeuse lose matter into space is not well understood despite its key role in the lifecycle of matter, enriching the interstellar material from which future stars and planets will form. Detailed high-resolution studies of the regions around massive stars like the ones presented here are essential to improving our understanding.
Dr Richards, who is based in Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy, added: “Betelgeuse produces a wind equivalent to losing the mass of the Earth every three years, enriched with the chemicals that will go into the next generation of star and planet formation. The full detail of how these cool, evolved stars launch their winds is one of the remaining big questions in stellar astronomy.
“This is the first direct image showing hot spots so far from the centre of the star. We are continuing radio and microwave observations to help decide which mechanisms are most important in driving the stellar wind and producing these hot spots. This won’t just tell us how the elements that form the building blocks of life are being returned to space, it will also help determine how long it is before Betelgeuse explodes as a supernova.”
Future observations planned with e-MERLIN and other arrays, including ALMA and VLA, will test whether the hotspots vary in concert due to pulsation, or show more complex variability due to convection. If it is possible to measure a rotation speed this will identify in which layer of the star they originate.
The new Betelgeuse image and a copy of the paper that accompanies it, entitled ‘e-MERLIN resolves Betelgeuse at wavelength 5 cm: hotspots at 5R*,’ are available on request.e-MERLIN, the UK’s national radio astronomy facility, is operated from the Jodrell Bank Observatory by The University of Manchester on behalf of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. Its power lies in its combination of the sharpness of view afforded by telescope separations of up to 217km, and its ability to detect very faint signals resulting from the array’s high bandwidth optical fibre connections. By connecting seven large radio telescopes, stretching from Cambridge to Cheshire (including the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank), e-MERLIN is able to produce images with the same detail as the Hubble Space Telescope but at radio rather than visible wavelengths. The signals from the telescopes are brought to Jodrell Bank on a dedicated optical fibre network whose high bandwidth allows the detection of very faint sources of radio emission. At Jodrell Bank 210 Gb of data arrive from the seven telescopes each second. These signals are combined in the correlator, a specialised supercomputer which carries out one thousand million million operations per second. For the signals from each telescope to be accurately combined, they must be synchronised at the level of a few million millionths of a second. The application of these fibre technologies and signal synchronisation techniques have led to e-MERLIN being designated as a pathfinder for what is planned to be the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array.
Time to Meet the Neighbors!
Spiral Galaxy NGC 0895 was discovered by William Herschel in 1875. Herschel created the first maps of the Milky Way galaxy by observing and drawing the stars. Herschel also saw galaxies outside the Milky Way, but he didn’t know what they were, so he only referred to them generically as nebulae. That was the common term at the time for diffuse, extended objects – including actual nebulae, which are the gaseous remains of exploded stars.
Galaxy NGC 0895 is located in the constellation Cetus, about 110 million light years away – still a fraction (about 0.2 percent) of the observable universe. The star nearest to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, and the nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away.
We can tell how many stars are forming by how blue the galaxy appears through the camera lens. Blue galaxies contain many young, newly formed stars. The golden object in the upper right is a redder galaxy, which has many more older red stars, and fewer still forming.
If you want to find NGC 0895 yourself, it is located at coordinates (RA 02 21 36.5, Dec -05 31 16).
This image was taken with the Dark Energy Camera, and shows us this galaxy in sharper detail than we have ever seen it. Check back here every Monday for another image and another story from the Dark Detectives at DES.
A guide to: Japan
→Tokyo City
●About Tokyo:
Tokyo is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan, is the capital of the country, the center of Greater Tokyo Area and the largest metropolian area in the world. The city is also described as one of the three “command centers” for the world economy, along with New York City and London.
Tokyo is often thought of as a city but is commonly referred to as a “metropolitan prefecture”. The Tokyo metropolitan government administers the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo (each governed as an individual city), which cover the area that was formerly the City of Tokyo before it merged and became the subsequent metropolitan prefecture.
(read more about tokyo: wikipedia, japan-guide)
you can read about universities in tokyo here, here, here and here.
●Culture:
Many different festivals occur throughout Tokyo. Major events include the Sannō at Hie Shrine, the Sanja at Asakusa Shrine, and the biennial Kanda Festivals. The last features a parade with elaborately decorated floats and thousands of people. Annually on the last Saturday of July, an enormous fireworks display over the Sumida River attracts over a million viewers. Once cherry blossoms bloom in spring, many residents gather in Ueno Park, Inokashira Park, and the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden for picnics under the blossoms.
(read more about their culture: wikipedia, go japan go, facts about japan, japan-guide)
●Popular Culture:
As the largest population center in Japan and the location of the country’s largest broadcasters and studios, Tokyo is frequently the setting for many Japanese movies, television shows, animated series (anime), web comics, and comic books (manga). In the kaiju (monster movie) genre, landmarks of Tokyo are routinely destroyed by giant monsters such as Godzilla and Gamera. Some Hollywood directors have turned to Tokyo as a filming location for movies set in Tokyo. Well-known examples from the postwar era include Tokyo Joe, My Geisha, Tokyo Story and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice; well-known contemporary examples include Kill Bill, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Lost in Translation, Babel, and Inception.
(read more about their popular culture: wikipedia, virtual japan →you can read about j-pop, manga, shibuya, visual kei, harajuku etc. Very interesting.)
You can also read about sports in Japan: here, here and here.
●Architecture:
Architecture in Tokyo has largely been shaped by Tokyo’s history. Twice in recent history has the metropolis been left in ruins: first in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and later after extensive firebombing in World War II. Because of this, Tokyo’s urban landscape consists mainly of modern and contemporary architecture, and older buildings are scarce. Tokyo features many internationally famous forms of modern architecture including Tokyo International Forum, Asahi Beer Hall, Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building and Rainbow Bridge. Tokyo also features two distinctive towers: Tokyo Tower and the new Tokyo Skytree which is the tallest tower in Japan and the second tallest structure in the world.
(read more about their architecture: wikipedia, tofugu)
