The above image is an artist's representation of GX 339-4, a "low-mass X-ray binary located about 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara." The sun is no bigger than ours, but it orbits a black hole "estimated at 10 solar masses," every 1.7 days. And four times in the past seven years, the sun and its black hole partner have had an explosive meeting.

NASA explains:

Binary systems where a normal star is paired with a black hole often produce large swings in X-ray emission and blast jets of gas at speeds exceeding one-third that of light. What fuels this activity is gas pulled from the normal star, which spirals toward the black hole and piles up in a dense accretion disk.

"When a lot of gas is flowing, the dense disk reaches nearly to the black hole," said John Tomsick at the University of California, Berkeley. "But when the flow is reduced, theory predicts that gas close to the black hole heats up, resulting in evaporation of the innermost part of the disk." Never before have astronomers shown an unambiguous signature of this transformation.

It's a bumpy orbit, but the view is probably spectacular.

The ISS. The closest thing we currently have to a space colony is the International Space Station. While it can be considered a success in terms of international cooperation and scientific research, the ISS far from self-sufficient. Sweat and urine can be recycled into fresh water and filters and scrubbers keep the air breathable, but without regular resupply missions, the station's occupants wouldn't last long. Still, the future looks bright up there – NASA has several ISS missions scheduled for 2010, expanding the station and adding new components (as well as spare parts).

Lunar Colonization. The best prospect for a human colony on the moon seems to be NASA's Constellation project. The Altair Lunar lander will be able to carry a crew of four astronauts to the moon and support them there for a seven-day mission. Alternately, it can descend robotically to the moon carrying critical infrastructure for a longer-term lunar outpost. When completed, that outpost will support a crew of four for up to 180 days. NASA has a slick interactive website that explains Constellation.

A great deal of thought is being put into what astronauts will live in on the moon. The first moon base will likely be an inflatable dome. NASA has been testing such a design at McMurdo Station in Antarctica to see how it deals with extreme cold. Although there are no blizzards on the moon, the test will also prove whether or not the "lunar bounce house" is tough enough for a long-term mission. An inflatable habitat has the advantages of being light-weight and only requiring a few hours to set up.

Beyond that preliminary outpost, lunar settlers will require something a bit more sturdy and permanent. Rigid, durable building materials are too heavy to send from the Earth's surface to the moon – it would be impossibly expensive. The best option, then, is to create building supplies from the raw materials already present on the moon. The recent discovery of a large amount of water on the moon makes the production of concrete using lunar regolith much more feasible, but even without water, it's possible. In 2007, a paper published in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering explained how the regolith could be processed into sulfur, which could then be mixed with regolith to make waterless concrete. They even examined the physical properties of said concrete, and proposed a cylindrical habitat structure.

A more recent paper in the same journal studied potential lunar colonization in-depth, examining potential structural designs, insulation, power needs and other factors. If you're not willing to take the researchers' word for it, you could always study space architecture yourself. The University of Houston College of Architecture boats the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSAl). Students design and model space vehicles, orbital stations, and lunar and Martian habitats. Many of their designs come directly from NASA requests. While fun, it is a challenging curriculum, since designers must incorporate radiation shielding and variations in gravity, problems terrestrial architects rarely have to consider.

Martian Colony. We're a long way from colonizing Mars – decades, at least. However, NASA's Constellation program does have a Martian outpost as its ultimate goal. Creating a colony on the moon will generate an enormous amount of data that will directly aid the quest to put humans on Mars.

The European Space Agency isn't waiting around, though. They're currently screening volunteers to take part in a 520-day simulated mission to Mars. This year, they wrapped up a 105-day precursor simulation. The long-term test will examine the physical and psychological effects of such a mission.

Candidates should be aged 20-50, motivated, in good health and no taller than 185 cm. They should speak one of the working languages: English and Russian. Candidates must have a background and work experience in medicine, biology, life support systems engineering, computer engineering, electronic engineering or mechanical engineering.

Beyond. The "moon to Mars" path for human colonization of space isn't the only idea out there. In 2008, a group of researchers proposed a "company town" model for creating a space mining colony. What would they be mining? Water. Where would they be mining it? From the inside of comet 4015 Wilson-Harrington. Sometimes considered an asteroid, 4015 may in fact be a burned-out or intermittently active comet. The researchers believe that finding a large supply of water somewhere other than Earth is the key to post-Earth survival of the human race. Their company town model proposes an entire economic system that would support up to 10,000 colonists.

Image: NASA Ames Research Center

The US Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center revealed the first map of Mercury this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting. The map is a composite of 917 images taken from various Mercury flybys. Photos from Messenger's flybys in January 2008, October 2008, and September 2009 account for 90.90 percent of the mosaic, with the rest provided by the Mariner 10 photos from the 1970s. The map is just shy of complete, covering about 97.72 percent of Mercury, but it's the closest thing we have to a complete map of Mercury.

[USGS Astrogeology via Wired]

Known by the designation GJ1214b, this planet is, according to a paper published yesterday in Nature, one of just two super Earths found recently. It has "a composition of primarily water enshrouded by a hydrogen–helium envelope," and its atmosphere has evolved a great deal over time (much like Earth's). Unlike another super Earth discovered recently, CoRoT-7b, this new super Earth has an atmosphere that can be studied fairly easily due to the size of its star and close proximity.

What's most intriguing is that this super Earth appears to be made up of possibly 75 percent water. Unlike Earth, which has a molten rock and metal core, GJ1214b probably has a core made of water too. (Those of you who read Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist are probably grinning right now.) Astronomers aren't entirely certain that the planet is water - this is just an educated guess based the planet's density, which was calculated by observing how much the red dwarf dimmed when this planet passed in front of it.

Given its distance from the dwarf, GJ1214b's surface temperature could be as much as 530 degrees Fahrenheit. On Earth, water at that temperature would boil off into steam. So it's likely that something about GJ1214b's atmosphere is keeping its oceans in an ultrahot liquid state. Basically, we've got a giant boiling ball of water - the perfect place to breed weird new life.

via Nature

Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre, told news outlet DNA India that the Chandrayaan-1 probe detected chemical signals of what may be organic matter on the moon's surface. The information is currently being analyzed by ISRO researchers as well as peer reviewed. At a press conference yesterday, NASA's own chief lunar scientist Mike Wargo indicated that NASA is intrigued by the possibility and very interested in learning more about ISRO's results.

ISRO is also exploring how organic matter might have found its way to the lunar surface in the first place — whether it might have be the result of meteor or comet strikes, or even left behind by a human instrument.

If it turns out that the moon does hold organic matter that wasn't placed there by humans, it could help us better understand how organic matter travels through the universe and could provide yet another natural resource for an eventual lunar colony.

Indian scientists detect signs of life on Moon [DNA India via Universe Today — Thanks to Enon for the heads up]

Shoer writes:

With the advent of superluminal travel, each species soon discovered the network of Channels traversing the galaxy, allowing near-instantaeous travel from Channel Anchor to Channel Anchor. The giant artifacts spoke of a precursor civilization - but where are they now? Their ruins, gargantuan structures on planetary scales, float dead in the Burial Grounds or the Sea of Relics, but no explorers have ever located their ruins on a planet. The only unexplored portions of the galaxy seem uninhabitable: the vast Far Reaches, and the irradiated Cathedral at the galactic core...

Sounds like a smashing setup for a novel to me.

via Joseph Shoer

According to a news release from NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope:

Astronomers identify the object as 3C 454.3, an active galaxy located 7.2 billion light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. But even among active galaxies, it's exceptional.

"We're looking right down the barrel of a particle jet powered by the galaxy's supermassive black hole," said Gino Tosti at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Perugia, Italy. "Some change within that jet — we don't know what — is likely responsible for these flares."

Blazars, like many active galaxies, emit oppositely directed jets of particles traveling near the speed of light when matter falls toward their central supermassive black holes. What makes a blazar so bright in gamma rays is its orientation: One of the jets happens to be aimed straight at us.

Here's the above image, with 3C 454.3 circled:

This first image is the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), in the consellation of Orion — and that bright blue star towards the right is one of three stars making up Orion's Belt. Normally, you can't see the young stars at the nebula's core with visible light, but VISTA's infrared camera shows them perfectly. [ESO via Universe Today]

Here's the Fornax Cluster of galaxies, one of the closest galaxy clusters beyond our own grouping. "At the lower-right is the elegant barred-spiral galaxy NGC 1365 and to the left the big elliptical NGC 1399, surrounded by a swarm of faint globular clusters."

And here's a look deep into the dusty heart of the Milky Way galaxy, through the constellation of Saggitarius. A million stars are revealed in this image.

This just one of the many gorgeous creations of Jean-Pierre Normand, who has illustrated a ton of covers for science fiction magazine Analog, as well as countless book covers and more. He works with traditional media, paints and canvasses, and has been creating gorgeous images of space for over 20 years.

You can see more of Normand's work in his online gallery.

via Concept Ships

The Cassini spacecraft recently sent back images of Saturn's strange hexagon, which was last photographed 30 years ago by Voyager. So what is so unusual about it? In comparing the pictures now from the pictures 30 years ago, scientists have found that the shape of the hexagon has remained unchanged, making it an extremely long-lived weather pattern, perhaps akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

Researchers are trying to determine what causes the weather pattern — which has a diameter more than twice as long as Earth's — how it gets and expels its energy, and how it maintains such a rigid shape. Fortunately, the improved images from Cassini and the fact that Saturn probably has a relatively simple weather model should help the researchers get a better understanding of the hexagon and how weather works on other planets.

Saturn's Mysterious Hexagon Emerges from Winter Darkness [PhysOrg]

The magazine quotes Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who identifies it as the failure-prone Bulava ballistic missile, launched from a submarine. McDowell said the Russian Navy is in the right geographical position to launch it. He added that Russia has denied that it was their missile, but "this could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

As for why the perfect spiral shape was created:

McDowell says the shape suggests the failure occurred well above the atmosphere. If it had occurred at lower altitudes, atmospheric drag would have caused the missile to fall quickly to Earth, creating a downward-pointing corkscrew pattern whose contrails would have been blown "this way and that" by wind, he told New Scientist.

The Bulava missile has three stages that fire in succession as it climbs up in altitude. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong," McDowell says.

He says the third stage's nozzle, which directs the rocket's exhaust plume, may have fallen off or been punctured, causing the exhaust to come out sideways instead of out the back. "The sideways thrust sends the rocket into a spin, spewing flame as it goes," he says.

"If thrust was terminated right away, then you wouldn't see the spiral," he continues. "The unusual thing this time is that the missile was allowed to carry on firing for a bit after it went wrong."

UPDATE: Jonathan McDowell writes in to say:

The Russians did send out a 'notice to mariners' in advance warning of a rocket launch, and they have now (Dec 10) admitted that there was a launch of the Bulava and that the third stage failed. Hope that answers some of the comments on your page.

via New Scientist

Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog explains further:

They pointed Hubble at a fairly empty region of space, one where very few stars are seen. Then they unleashed the new Wide Field Camera 3 (called WFC3 for short) on it, taking images in infrared wavelengths just outside what the human eye can see… and they let it stare at that spot for a solid 48 hours.

The result? This picture, showing galaxies flippin' everywhere, some seen a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang itself. Because the Universe is expanding, distant galaxies appear to recede from us, and their light gets stretched out. This Doppler Effect - the same thing that makes the sound of a car engine drop in pitch when it passes you at high speed - changes the colors we see from these far-flung galaxies, so their ultraviolet light, for example, gets stretched into visible and even infrared wavelengths. What you are seeing here is actually more energetic light emitted by galaxies that's lost energy traveling across the expanding Universe, so by the time it gets here it's infrared.

So the colors are not "real" in this image; they've been translated into red, green, and blue so we can see them. The reddest objects in the image are most likely the farthest away, and may be as much as 13 billion light years away.

Thirteen billion. With a B.

Plait's deconstruction of this epic photo is worth reading in its entirety... once you're done staring and contemplating the vastness of a cosmos that barely notices the eyeblink of our existence. [Hubblesite via Bad Astronomy Blog]

Note: I'm not including the Star Wars prequels here, because the big letdown was The Phantom Menace in 1999. After that, the other two movies couldn't really be letdowns.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This was the moment we realized Frank Miller wasn't really Frank Miller any more. He agreed to do the long-awaited sequel to his most famous and groundbreaking graphic novels, the story that redefined Batman for a generation — and he turned in a bland caricature of his earlier brilliance. You can complain all you want about the assitude of All-Star Batman And Robin and The Spirit, but TDKSA was the start of the hackery. Worst moment: When the Joker turns out to be the much-abused Dick Grayson, and Bats kills him without a second thought.

Fox's Reign Of Terror. Firefly should have been one of the great success stories of the 2000s. It's hard to remember now how invincible Joss Whedon seemed going into Firefly — with two hit shows under his belt, he was the writer of several huge movies. And now he was bringing his patented mixture of rollicking adventure and twisted artiness to a space opera. Sure, Firefly's "Cowboys in Space" thing may have confused people at first, but the show really does sell itself, after just a few minutes' viewing, thanks to vivid characters. The failure of the TV show didn't just damage Joss Whedon's career — it damaged media SF as a whole, helping to push us towards canned remakes and reboots. And Firefly's demise was just the first of a trail of broken dreams and disappointments, culminating in the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the burial of the promising Virtuality.

NASA and the space program. The decade did hold some great achievements for NASA, including the Mars rovers and some probes traveling outwards into the solar system. But it's hard not to feel a bit crushed by the fact that NASA is retiring its fleet of space shuttles without having a replacement lined up. We're going to have to hitch a ride with the Russians from here on out, and it feels a bit, well, disappointing. Especially with science-fiction promising us that this is our time to explore the solar system and beyond it, the stars themselves.

Ang Lee's Hulk. Before this movie came out, I would have sworn that Ang Lee never made a bad film. His track record included arthouse sensations like The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm and Sense And Sensibility, but also the brilliant actioner Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He was also perhaps the most artsy director to take on a superhero icon to date (no offense, Tim Burton). There was every reason to believe Hulk would be both epic and heartfelt — but instead, we got gamma-irradiated poodles, daddy issues and a Hulk who sulked. We probably won't ever get a really great Hulk movie now, after two failures, which sucks. The Hulk deserves a proper outing, in which he fights monsters and marauders and crushes buildings. The Hulk needs to discover that he's not the worst monster in his world, and have larger-than-life adventures. Ang Lee just wasn't capable of giving that to us.

The Matrix sequels. This seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, but maybe you need cyber-Colonel Sanders to take you back and explain to you how much we were all looking forward to The Matrix 2 & 3. Ten years ago, The Matrix was the freshest thing to come out in ages, despite playing on ideas that books had explored for years. Its blend of fetish and noir and cyberpunk and Hong Kong action felt viciously original. And there were just so many ideas for the sequels to explore, so many mysteries about the machine world to uncover. And then... we just sort of descended into muddle. And long rave scenes. And blind Jesus. Walking out of The Matrix Reloaded, I remember someone turning to me and saying, "Well, that wasn't even the best powerpoint presentation I've sat through lately."

Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis. DC Comics' biggest "event" storylines of the mid-2000s seemed to be groping towards a more adult, more flawed view of their major superheroes, with some of comics' most talent writers on board. But they overshot, landing in angstville and bombarding us with retcons that rewrote the "Satellite era" of the Justice League. As if in an attempt to capture the cachet of Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke two decades earlier, these stories gave us female heroes being raped or abused, and turning into murderers. And Batman saying to Superman, "The last time you inspired anyone was when you died." The melodrama was thicker than the walls of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and yet when it was all over, it was hard to understand what any of it had been about. The superheroes were closer to a bickering family (calling each other by their first names all the time) and the threats they faced seemed more existential and less external.

Superman Returns. There were a slew of other disappointing superhero movies in the past decade — but mostly you knew going into them that they were going to be ass. Who really thought Brett Ratner would make a good X-Men movie? Even Spider-Man 3 showed every sign of being ass-flavored long before it came out, despite Sam Raimi's involvement. But this film was Bryan Singer coming off two great X-Men films and The Usual Suspects, and he was doing the gutsy move of making it a sequel to the two Donner movies instead of going for the standard-issue reboot. Singer doing Donner — how could it be bad? Uh. Well, there's the part where he changed Clark Kent into Stalkerman. And then there's the Son Of Superman thing. But also, maybe, there's just the fact that the Donner movies were of a different era, and you can't bring that back.

Heroes seasons 2-4. Just imagine, for a moment, if this show had lived up to the promise of its first season. I know it's almost impossible to picture it, but just try. This mutant soap opera thrived on showing us the complications and craziness that come from secret super powers, against the backdrop of a sinister mutant-hunting conspiracy and a super-powered serial killer. But the show wrote checks it couldn't cash, including showing us Claire growing into her heroic destiny and Hiro becoming a future shaved-headed badass. Most of all, the show ducked out on its very title, opting to show us histrionics and family squabbles in place of actual heroism.

Watchmen. It was perhaps the greatest graphic novel of all time — almost certainly the greatest superhero comic of all time — lovingly recreated on screen by the ultimate OCD nerd. Every panel of the comic, recreated as concept art, then as storyboards, then as living, breathing people in costumes, surrounded by CG. Finally, a movie made by us for us. Except. The result, though lovely as anything, looked sort of lifeless once you took it out of the Smashing Pumpkins music-video trailers. The characters didn't quite live and breathe — especially Silk Spectre II, who needed to be the heart of the story. And the ending wasn't just missing a giant squid, or some other huge monstrosity to replace it — it was also lacking a certain coherence and urgency. Once people start talking about power signatures, it suddenly turns into an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Maybe Watchmen could never have lived up to the book, but it could have been more thrilling than this, with a different Silk Spectre and a more thunderous ending.

Battlestar Galactica's big finale. I know that opinions will differ on this one — but just consider. BSG's finale was one of the most hyped things of recent years. We read endless interviews in which Edward James Olmos, Ron Moore and various others told us that the final episode would shake us to our very cores, and make us weep and smear paint and throw up on ourselves. Meanwhile, Syfy ran promos over and over again that said that "All Will Be Revealed," and I don't remember an asterisk leading to a disclaimer explaining that "All" in this context actually meant a limited number of things, not including how Starbuck came back from the dead or what the hell was up with the Opera House. Even if you think this was the most brilliant conclusion in history, you have to admit BSG promised too much.

Trotta's concern is mainly focused on information from the European Space Agency's Planck mission, due to be released in 2013. The amount of information - called "a feast" by New Scientist - may overwhelm cosmologists, according to Trotta, who feels that the release of the mission's findings should be rationed to be more easily understandable. Stuart Clark, writing for NS, agrees:

Instead of giving out all the data at once, the supply should be rationed. Drip-feeding will allow the development of new hypotheses which can be tested as more of the Planck information is released. If we don't adopt this approach, we risk wasting the finest cosmology data set we have ever had, and remaining forever in the dark.

We're unconvinced that this is the right approach: Surely dripfeeding information risks avoiding the creation of new hypotheses if the right combination of findings can't be made, because certain information is still classified? Doesn't releasing everything at once simply speed up progress?

Why we shouldn't release all we know about the cosmos [New Scientist]

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights from mike interbartolo on Vimeo.

[via Laughing Squid image via NASA]

In this awesome movie, where the butterfly flaps around in its cage with a floating chrysalis, you can see the future of elementary school experiments. This video is one in a series produced for elementary school classes whose students are growing their own butterflies - now, they get to compare their results with the insects' space-going counterparts.

Discovery News writes: BioServe Space Technologies and the University of Colorado [work with] students on the ground to follow the progress of the orbiting creatures. The school kids can then compare the development of butterflies in the classroom with their orbiting cousins.

Butterflies In Space experiment via Discovery News

Download ginormous versions of the image at the link. [Spacetelescope.org via Wired]

Scientists at Caltech think they may have uncovered the reasons for Titan's extremely odd lake arrangement. Data gathered by the Cassini orbiter showed 20 times more area in the Northern extremities were covered by liquid ethane and methane, when compared to the South. The researchers, headed by Oded Aharonson, think that the transport of methane northwards may be due to the elliptical orbit of Saturn, and hence Titan.

Over the course of one Titan year (29.5 Earth years), the Northern hemisphere summer is long and mild, but the Southern hemisphere version is short and intense. That's because in the Southern summer season Titan is around 12% closer to the sun. While this doesn't make a huge difference over the course of a year, it does over a longer time period: It's possible that these uneven seasons result in methane evaporating in the south, drifting northward in the clouds, and then raining prodigiously in the milder north.

Around 32,000 years ago, the situation would have been reversed, with the hydrocarbons traveling Southward instead of North.

This theory is being published in this month's Nature Geoscience. Other possible explanations for the lakes include the idea that there is some (as yet unknown) fundamental difference between the hemispheres. It's also possible the methane transfer happens every season, not gradually.

Check out more of these incredible space pictures over at the photographer's Flickr stream. [s58y on Flickr]

Heart nebula - RGB.

Rosette nebula

Rosette nebula

Barndoor nebula

Elephant trunk nebula

Elephant trunk nebula

About this particular advertisement for Los Alamos Labs (which worked on weapons systems), Prelinger writes:

The blue spot disrupts the conventionally romantic stylization of planetary or solar bodies by contracting the sphere to its minimal form. [Artist Oli] Sihvonen here seems to reference the early 20th century Russian constructivists, with the prolonged vertical angular shape aimed at the planetary circle. It brings to mind El Lissitzsky's constructivist graphic composition Beat Back the Whites with the Red Wedge which pioneered the use of juxtaposed triangle and circle as a graphic strategy to represent political conflict. I find it ironic that the graphic legacy of Communist action should be re-articulated and put into service - whether with or without the artists' sanction - in the service of American Cold War-era weapons and civil space technological programming.

You can see more of these advertisements, along with design-geek analysis, at Berg London. Or you can pre-order a copy of Prelinger's forthcoming (gorgeous) book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-62.