Supiri.com » Space

Holiday in Space

Sky — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:23:22 +0000

Pack your holiday gear, your next holiday is in space? It’s not the case for now but in few years time that would be a reality. Good news is engineers at Virgin Galactic is carrying out their testing to get a licence from the Federal Aviation Authority to take off from its New Mexico launch site. Virgin Galactic have already raised $40m worth of deposits from people willing to part with $200,000 to be among the first people to travel to space.

The concept is simple (after all it is not rocket science for a certain level) the space craft which carrying passengers to space called SpaceShipTwo and it’s lifted to higher atmosphere of the earth by it’s mother ship called as VMS Eve. When it’s in correct altitude it’s released from the mother ship & SpaceShipTwo thrusters kick in and it’s launching to space. SpaceShipTwo can return to earth by on it’s own.

Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two | Amazing News www.supiri.com

SpaceShipTwo (SS2) is a suborbital spaceplane for carrying space tourists, under development by The Spaceship Company, a joint venture between Scaled Composites and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve in flight | Amazing News www.supiri.com

VMS Eve is a carrier mothership for Virgin Galactic and launch platform for SpaceShipTwo based Virgin SpaceShips (VMS). It also functions as a zero-g flight tourist plane.

Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two feathering | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve in flight | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve profile | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve Drop Shot | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Sir Richard Branson emperor of the Virgin empire and Burt Rutan is a pioneering American aerospace engineer have teamed up, to make this possible.

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve Air Banking | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve Takeoff | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Virgin Galactic VMS Eve | Amazing News www.supiri.com

Information Sources: VirginGalactic.com, Wikipedia.com, Guardian.co.uk

Top 10 Greatest Space Photographs using Hubble Telescope

shiny — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:13:50 +0000

Recently, astronauts voted on the top photographs taken by Hubble, in its 16-year journey so far.

The Sombrero Galaxy

28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

The Ant Nebula

A cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes. The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.

Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo

In third place is Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of comet shaped objects flying away from a dying star. Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.

At four is the Cat's Eye Nebula

The Hourglass Nebula

8,000 light years away, has a pinched-in-the-middle
look because the winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.

Cone Nebula

In sixth place is the Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon).

The Perfect Storm

a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away,
described as ‘a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulphur and other elements’.

Starry Night

so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting.
It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.

The glowering eyes

from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.

The Trifid Nebula

A ’stellar nursery’, 9,000 light years from here, it is
where new stars are being born.

About Black Holes

Sky — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:43:53 +0000

A black hole is a massive object whose gravitational field is so intense that it prevents any form of matter or radiation from escaping. The term derives from the fact that its absorption of visible light renders the hole invisible and indistinguishable from the black space around it.

In this artist’s rendition, the yellow region at the center represents a supermassive black hole. Around are dust grains mixed with heated, outflowing gas. But just how big is “supermassive?” Find out in the next photo!

This diagram shows different sizes of black holes as compared to our sun. As you can see, a black hole could swallow millions of stars. And in fact, they often do — see how black holes stifle stars next.

Supermassive black holes in some giant galaxies create such a hostile environment, they shut down the formation of new stars. Strangely, black holes lie at the center of most galaxies, as shown in the next image.

Like most galaxies, NGC 1097, a barred spiral galaxy, has a supermassive black hole at its center. The next image is a new Hubble photo showing another black hole at the center of a galaxy.

This is a new composite image of a galaxy cluster located about 2.6 billion light-years away. The three views of the region were taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2006. See a massive radio telescope in the next photo.

This is a depiction of a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen bridge, bursting open in the vacuum of space. Many believe these curves in spacetime could enable time travel. Find out about another mystery of space in the next photo: the elusive dark matter.

Dark matter composition is up for debate, with subatomic particles and black holes considered as candidates.

Black holes are predicted to exist through solutions of Einstein’s field equations of general relativity. They are not directly observable, but several indirect observation techniques in different wavelengths have been developed and used to study the phenomena they induce in their environment. In particular, gases caught by the gravitational field of a black hole are heated to considerably high temperatures before being swallowed, and thereby emit a significant amount of X-rays. Therefore, even if a black hole does not itself give off any radiation, it may nevertheless be detectable by its effect on its surrounding environment. Such observations have resulted in the general scientific consensus that, barring a breakdown in our understanding of nature, black holes do exist in our universe.