SONY ERICSSION MIX WALKMAN

Design

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is having an identity crisis. It's part MP3 player, part smartphone-wannabe and part budget feature phone, cutting out features to shed pounds. The result is an ill-conceived, often-overpriced and deceptively underequipped phone that would need to lower its price significantly to be in with a chance of winning a half-hearted recommendation.

Once upon a time, when the world was sepia-coloured and men walked around in bowler hats, doffing it at every passer-by, the term "Walkman" held significant power. Although used by many as a generic term for portable audio players, it was actually a Sony brand. Now, in the time of the iPod - when the ubiquity of Apple's iDevices all-but makes the iPod brand a generic term in itself, a Walkman seems like a quaint throwback to days of yore.

The brand is still used in Sony's rather great dedicated MP3 players like the NWZ-A845 and NWZ-A866, but it is rarely seen as prominently in phones as it is in the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman mobile. Could it be because this phone is grasping for a reason, an excuse, to exist?


From a casual glance, it looks a lot like a budget smartphone. It has a 3in touchscreen, a single Home button on the front, but it's chubbier and a bit gaudier than most budget Android or Symbian phones. Between the glossy black front and the matt soft-touch plastic battery cover is a band of bright rubbery plastic. Our review model had a lime green one attached and a silver one stashed in the box, but bright pink and more subdued bronze editions also exist.

You can pull this strip away from the body, altering the look just by quickly popping off the battery cover and switching these bands around. With the silver band on, it's a much classier-looking handset, but the Sony Ericsson Mix still looks and feels more like a £50 phone than one that sells for just under £100. The back is lumbered with too many cluttering bits including speaker ports and logos while the 14mm thickness is chunky and the style lacks coherence. The colourful strip may make the phone look a "bit different", but that doesn't equate to the phone looking good. It's uninspiring stuff at best.

We reckon the silver looks a lot nicer. What do you think?

The body does offer some unusual buttons, though. There's a shutter button on the right edge, pretty unusual at this budget level, and there are two Walkman buttons up top. They take you to the media player and the Zappin function, which we'll cover later. It's enough to just-about justify the phone's Walkman status, but note that there aren't actually any direct playback buttons - no play/pause, no fast forward and rewind.


The internal memory also limits the Mix Walkman's potential as a music player. Fresh out of the box there's just over 100MB of free internal memory, barely enough for an album encoded at a decent bit-rate. Yes, the memory is expandable and microSD cards are very cheap, but it's no way for a "music player" phone to make a good impression.    

Any phone function can be put into these four corner shortcut spots, and the shortcuts appear on both of the two home screens. Before you get excited at the mention of home screens, hold back. They don't do much. One houses a clock while the other displays the favourite contacts list. It looks like a cover flow system, but is static. Like so much of the Mix Walkman, early promise falls apart like a talcum power statue as soon as you look beyond the surface detail.

Delve into the favourite contacts "widget" and there's a bit more to it than just phone numbers, as it collates their Facebook and Twitter updates as well as text messages and call logs - but using it is hopelessly clumsy and, at times, broken. Contacts have to be manually linked to each of their social network accounts, and the Mix Walkman continually refused to link with Twitter, even while signed-into the built-in Twitter app.

The dedicated Twitter and Facebook apps are less problematic - at least they work - but are in reality little more than web links to the services' mobile sites. The giveaways are the browser navigation bar at the bottom and the URL bar at the top. This, along with limited connectivity features ensure this isn't a particularly good social networking phone. There's no 3G connectivity, so tweeting a picture taken with the phone's camera when when out of the house is a slow process. So is looking at other people's pics, although the built-in EDGE connectivity is just about quick enough to make downloading text tweets and updates bearable.


At home, this situation improves. The Sony Ericsson Walkman Mix has Wi-Fi, letting the phone suck data off your home broadband, or the Wi-Fi hotspots of cafes and restaurants. At the best of times, though, this phone is no match for a budget Android phone like the Huawei Blaze or Orange San Francisco. Every time you run one of the phone's connected apps, you're asked whether or not to allow mobile internet access - a question that seems rather redundant when you're accessing Facebook, and one that quickly becomes annoying.

All of the Mix's apps and games are java-based, making them largely incapable of the kind of behind-the-scenes activity that smartphone alternatives are all about. It's not a good way to keep up with emails, requiring manual updates and using a rather basic look. Games tend to look very basic and dated too.
Java gaming - fun, but all a bit 2004

Additional apps and games for the phone are sparse too. There's no proper app store here, just a link to Sony Ericsson's PlayNow WAP portal. This offers no real apps as such, but does have a bunch of additional games, plus wallpapers, music and ringtones. The price of each is much higher than the smartphone norm though, games usually costing £3 a pop.

The one positive thing to say about the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman's low-rent interface is that it's all operated using a fairly responsive capacitive touchscreen. This is the same kind of technology used in the iPhone 4, and means you don't have to press down on the screen to get it to respond - contact alone is enough. However, if it had used a resistive screen, at its price it would deserve to be paraded through the streets while being pelted with tomatoes.


With a 3in widescreen, Sony Ericsson has sensibly left you with T9 numerical keypad input rather than a full Qwerty. This keyboard is used when typing out text messages and in the default web browser. The predictive dictionary is pretty limited, though, and typing-out words manually to get them added to its library feels clumsy and slow. We also wished an option to use a full Qwerty in landscape mode had been included - as there's enough space when held like this. Instead, you're stuck with the T9 pad.    

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman - Music, Video and Browsing

A "dumb" phone selling for smartphone money, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman's one defence is that it's all about the music, not apps and Angry Birds. However, this line of argument doesn't get it very far.

There's no bundled microSD card and the internal memory only offers enough storage for one album. Memory is expandable - there's a microSD slot under the battery - but fresh out of its packaging, it's pretty much useless as a music player.

Undeterred, we loaded up a microSD card with tunes to see if its software is much cop. Press the Walkman button on the phone's top and you're taken directly to the media player. It uses the corner shortcut layout seen throughout the interface. These take you to your library, show the current playlist (or album), and give you access to the Zap and Karaoke functions.

Zappin is Sony's own take on a song preview mode. This plays you either a clip of each song lasting just a few seconds or around 15 seconds, skipping to the next afterwards unless you press the Zappin button up top. It's a neat enough idea, but the execution completely puts us off using it. "Zapping in", "Zapping out" and moving between tracks are all accompanied by whoosing or spoken sound effects. Maybe the kids will enjoy it, but we find it utterly tasteless and a bit embarrassing.

The Karaoke feature is sure to appeal to a similarly niche audience, but at least it doesn't limit its appeal through its technique. It effectively removes the central channel, where lead vocals tend to be mixed, in order to turn normal tracks into backing tracks. It'll also display lyrics if they've been added to your MP3s. Basic ID3 tagging won't do this. It works pretty well.

These secondary features are ones you'll find in Sony's dedicated MP3 players, but these are richer in those dedicated players. There's no pitch altering, no speed changing here - hardly essential but handy if you do want to get your Karaoke on. Our personal highlight of Sony Walkman's partly-superfluous features is SenseMe. This scans through your music and splits it into moods, effectively making playlists for you. There's an option for this within the Mix's music player, but it doesn't split up tracks for you like the NWZ-A866 will. Instead you have to get your computer to do that for you, before syncing the music to your phone. Who would have thought an MP3 player would have more power than a phone these days?

Once stocked with albums, the Mix offers a perfectly decent music experience. Navigation's fine, cover art displays and the audio output quality is solid if unremarkable. However, when its extra features aren't worth shouting about, and there's not a full complement of playback buttons, its musical ability won't trounce any other half-decent £80-100 phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack. The supplied MH140 earphones are well above average for a bundled pair, though, offering decent bass and clarity. But they leak sound, offer no isolation and aren't as comfortable as an IEM-style pair - in our opinion.

 
Whatever way you look at it - not a web browsing star

The browsing experience is more notable, but not for a good reason. There are two separate web browsers pre-installed - Sony Ericsson's own stab and Opera Mini, probably the most popular "third party" phone browser. The interface of each is good enough, but hampered by a number of technical limitations. The screen, at 240x400 pixels and 155dpi, is very low-res, there's no multi-touch support and without 3G connectivity, it's too slow to load full web pages unless you're on a Wi-Fi connection.

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman - Camera, Call Quality, Battery Life and Verdict

The Sony Ericsson Mix has a basic 3.2-megapixel camera. There's no flash and it's fixed focus, but there are a few features missing from most affordable alternatives, most notably the dedicated camera button.

This, in tandem with the fixed focus, makes taking pictures pretty quick. With an autofocus sensor, you'd have to wait for the camera to hone-in on its subject. It does limit the kind of photos you can take, though. Try and get a shot of something up close and it'll be blurry, but we've seen worse performance in phones of this spec. As you can see below, while the berry-like bits on the branches aren't entirely sharp, they're not a blurry mess either.

In perfect conditions, the relatively low resolution and budget sensor limit the amount of detail captured, and colours are fairly muted too. It'll do the job for the most basic of applications - for sending MMS messages or posting the odd shot to a social network. But you won't get shots worth printing out, even at standard 6x4in size. If you're desperate to save your shots for posterity, connecting the phone to a computer lets you access the file system directly, for drag 'n' drop transfer.



Unusual even in a budget phone, you're given no control over the camera's settings. The camera app uses the corner shortcut layout adopted throughout, but these only give you access to the gallery, the stills/video switch and a touchscreen shutter button. Manual settings are of limited use in such a low-powered camera anyway, but panorama and burst shot modes would have been appreciated - and the lack of some fun effects seem like an oversight in an arguably youth-oriented device.

Call quality is decent if unspectacular. The earpiece speaker is nice and loud, but there's no noise cancellation to combat noisy environments.


The Mix Walkman is powered by a 1000mAh battery. This is a bog-standard capacity for a small-screen phone like this, but the phone lasts longer than a proper smartphone because it doesn't have 3G and its apps don't secretly pay poker with each other while the phone's in your pocket. Under normal nonintensive use, it can last for a solid 2-3 days off a charge. Set it to more intensive tasks and the battery performance is thoroughly unremarkable.

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman would seem like an OK deal if its price were lowered, but, as is, it competes with fully-fledged smartphones. And it doesn't come off too well. There's no 3G, no GPS (ruling out using the phone to find out where you are) and there are no worthwhile apps here. Its Walkman cred can't make up for these gaps and its generally good-looking UI is all surface and no substance. It falls well short of earning a recommendation. Seek out the Samsung Galaxy Europa or Orange San Francisco for the real smartphone package, or look to spend less.


Verdict
 

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman wills buyers to believe it's a smartphone, with an interface that looks snazzy and seems to offer plenty of connected functionality at a quick glance. The problem is that it isn't, and doesn't. There's no 3G connectivity, and while Wi-Fi is on-board the clumsy implementation of built-in apps makes web browsing and social networking feel clunkier than it would with other phones.      

CHINA ANTRACTIC ASTRONOMY BASED IN ACTICE SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE

Chinese astronomers are actively searching for Earth-like planets using survey instruments in Antarctica, as they believe efforts to seek an extra-solar planet that harbors

life will soon be rewarded.Chinese astronomers installed the first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3-1) at Dome Argus, located at the highest elevation on the Antarctic continent, at the beginning of the year. One of its primary missions is to search for extra-solar planets suitable for life.

Antarctica has the best conditions on Earth for astronomical observation, as it has very flat ground, a transparent atmosphere and little turbulence. The ground-based telescopes here will bring us precious information from the universe.

Chinese astronomers now rely on an Iridium satellite phone to give orders to and receive data from their survey instruments in Antarctica, which only allows them to send and receive a small amount of data at a time.

They search through a wide range of main sequence stars, mainly sun-like stars, and then look for planets within a suitable distance around them. Stars that are smaller and darker than the sun, such as dwarfs, are also in their survey scope.

The second AST3 will be installed in Antarctica between late 2013 and early 2014, while the third one will be installed between late 2014 and early 2015. "These telescopes are expected to help us find at least 100 sun-like stars. We will work with Australian scientists to further study the movement of the stars to calculate their size," Wang said.

Chinese scientists are also planning to set up an Antarctic observatory to further boost their research and broaden the search for habitable planets. If approved and included in the 12th Five-Year Plan, the observatory should go into operation by 2020.

AURIGA WHEEL , A STRANGE GALAXY

The serendipitous discovery of a collision ring galaxy, identified as 2MASX J06470249+4554022, dubbed 'Auriga's Wheel', was found in a SUPRIME-CAM frame as part of a larger Milky Way surv

ey. The ring has a radius of about 10 kpc and a bridge of stars and gas connecting two galaxies.

The collision caused gas to collapse and resulted in a burst of star formation in the ring. In Auriga's Wheel, only 50 million years old, gas flows into the center, pouring fuel onto the central black holes and resulting in the active galaxy.

Institute for Astronomy in Germany noticed the rare galaxy in their image they tentatively dubbed it “Auriga’s Wheel." The redshift of these objects would allow astronomers to explore their distance and confirm that they were likely interacting and not simply a chance alignment. When the data was analyzed, the galaxies were found to lie together at a distance of nearly 1.5 billion lightyears making this a new record holder for furthest ring galaxy.

Auriga's Wheel as seen in the g (left) and r (right) filters from Subaru. But aside from the temporary place in the record books, the pair is interesting in other ways. Modeling of the interaction as well as the spectroscopic data allowed the team to estimate the propagation of the ring to be at ~200 km/sec which would make it 50 million years since the collision occurred.

The image also clearly shows the galaxy that plunged through the center of the more massive, disk galaxy and a distinct trail of gas and dust connects the two. Additionally, both galaxies appear to have Active Galactic Nuclei, which is rare for ring galaxies. However, it is not clear whether the activity was a result of the collision or a property of the individual galaxies prior to the interaction. 

RECORD IS BROKE

To get a grasp on what holds these visible forms of matter together—everything from stars to planets to people—you have to understand how quarks and

gluons interact. That's the essence of quark matter physics—and the Quark Matter 2012 international conference, taking place in Washington, D.C., August 12-18. "We're studying the 99 percent of the mass of the visible universe that isn't explained by the Higgs," says Peter Steinberg, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and a participant in the Quark Matter conference.

Visible matter, he explains, is everything made of atoms, which get their mass mainly from the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. The electrons orbiting around the nucleus contribute practically nothing. But the protons and neutrons, each made of three quarks, are much more massive than the sum of their constituent particles. Where does all the "extra" mass come from?

The answer, physicists believe, lies in how the quarks interact via the exchange of gluons, massless particles that hold the quarks together via nature's strongest force, and interactions among the gluons themselves. To tease apart the features of this force, which gets stronger and stronger if you try to pull the subatomic quarks apart, physicists accelerate atomic nuclei (a.k.a. heavy ions) to near light speed, where the gluons become dominant, and then steer them into head-on collisions at particle accelerators like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

FIRST RECORDED HUMAN VOICE FROM EARTH TO ANOTHER PLANET

In historic spoken words radioed to the rover on Mars and back to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) on Earth, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

noted the difficulty of landing a rover on Mars, congratulated NASA employees and the agency's commercial and government partners on the successful landing of Curiosity earlier this month, and said curiosity is what drives humans to explore.
"With this voice, another small step is taken in extending human presence beyond Earth, and the experience of exploring remote worlds is brought a little closer to us all," said Dave Lavery, NASA Curiosity program executive. "As Curiosity continues its mission, we hope these words will be an inspiration to someone alive today who will become the first to stand upon the surface of Mars. And like the great Neil Armstrong, they will speak aloud of that next giant leap in human exploration."

"The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future," Bolden said in the recorded message.

The telephoto images beamed back to Earth show a scene of eroded knobs and gulches on a mountainside, with geological layering clearly exposed. The new views were taken by the 100-millimeter telephoto lens and the 34-milllimeter wide angle lens of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. Mastcam has photographed the lower slope of the nearby mountain called Mount Sharp.

"This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go," said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity -- some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through."

A drive early Monday placed Curiosity directly over a patch where one of the spacecraft's landing engines scoured away a few inches of gravelly soil and exposed underlying rock. Researchers plan to use a neutron-shooting instrument on the rover to check for water molecules bound into minerals at this partially excavated target. * During the news conference, the rover team reported the results of a test on Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which can measure the composition of samples of atmosphere, powdered rock or soil. The amount of air from Earth's atmosphere remaining in the instrument after Curiosity's launch was more than expected, so a difference in pressure on either side of tiny pumps led SAM operators to stop pumping out the remaining Earth air as a precaution. The pumps subsequently worked, and a chemical analysis was completed on a sample of Earth air. 

"As a test of the instrument, the results are beautiful confirmation of the sensitivities for identifying the gases present," said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're happy with this test and we're looking forward to the next run in a few days when we can get Mars data."

Curiosity already is returning more data from the Martian surface than have all of NASA's earlier rovers combined.
"We have an international network of telecommunications relay orbiters bringing data back from Curiosity," said JPL's Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "Curiosity is boosting its data return by using a new capability for adjusting its transmission rate."
Curiosity is 3 weeks into a two-year prime mission on Mars. It will use 10 science instruments to assess whether the selected study area ever has offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

BLUE MOON ON AUGUST 31 , 2012

It’s not at all clear where the term ‘Blue Moon’ comes from. According to modern folklore it dates back at least 400 years. A Blue Moon is the second Full Moon in a calendar month. “Usually months

have only one Full Moon, but occasionally a second one sneaks in, David said. “Ancient cultures around the world considered the second Full Moon to be spiritually significant.”

Full Moons are separated by 29 days, while most months are 30 or 31 days long, so it is possible to fit two Full Moons in a single month. This happens every two and a half years, on average. By the way, February is the only month that can never have a Blue Moon by this definition. We had one Full Moon on August 2 this year and the second will be Friday night.

Does the Blue Moon actually turn blue? No. Physically colored Blue Moons are rare, and that’s where the phrase comes from, “Once in a Blue Moon”. There are occasions though when pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere can make the Moon appear to look blue in color. The extra dust scatters blue light. For example, the Moon appeared bluish green across the entire Earth for about 2 years after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.

There were also reports of a blue-green coloured Moon caused by Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. “So in a sneaky sort of way, it could be true,” Dave said with a grin. Look up at the night sky on August 31 and see for yourself. Everywhere in the world the full Moon rises in the east just as the Sun is setting in the west.

“Blue Moons don’t have any real significance scientifically but they’re fun to look at,” David said. “Anytime you can get people out to look at the real sky to me is a great plus, enjoy it while you can this Friday night and while you’re looking moonward, think of Neil Armstrong, OK?

EFFECT OF ELUSIVE GRAVITY WAVES DISCOVERED

Locked in a spiraling orbital embrace, the super-dense remains of two dead stars are giving astronomers the evidence needed to confirm one of Einstein’s predictions about the Universe.

A binary system located about 3,000 light-years away, SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short) contains two white dwarfs orbiting each other rapidly — once every 12.75 minutes. The system was discovered in April 2011, and since then astronomers have had their eyes — and four separate telescopes in locations around the world — on it to see if gravitational effects first predicted by Einstein could be seen.

According to Einstein, space-time is a structure in itself, in which all cosmic objects — planets, stars, galaxies — reside. Every object with mass puts a “dent” in this structure in all dimensions; the more massive an object, the “deeper” the dent. Light energy travels in a straight line, but when it encounters these dents it can dip in and veer off-course, an effect we see from Earth as gravitational lensing.

Einstein also predicted that exceptionally massive, rapidly rotating objects — such as a white dwarf binary pair — would create outwardly-expanding ripples in space-time that would ultimately “steal” kinetic energy from the objects themselves. These gravitational waves would be very subtle, yet in theory, observable.

FIRST EVER STAR DEATH DISCOVERED

The first evidence of a planet's destruction by its aging star has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. The evidence indicates that the missing planet was devoured as the star began expanding into a "red giant" -- the stellar equivalent of advanced age.

The astronomers also discovered a massive planet in a surprisingly elliptical orbit around the same red-giant star, named BD+48 740, which is older than the Sun with a radius about eleven times bigger. A Team detected evidence of the missing planet's destruction while they were using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope to study the aging star and to search for planets around it. The evidence includes the star's peculiar chemical composition, plus the highly unusual elliptical orbit of its surviving planet.

Lithium is easily destroyed in stars, which is why its abnormally high abundance in this older star is so 

unusual.

The second piece of evidence discovered by the astronomers is the highly elliptical orbit of the star's newly discovered massive planet, which is at least 1.6 times as massive as Jupiter."Such orbits are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars and, in fact, the BD+48 740 planet's orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far."

Because gravitational interactions between planets are responsible for such peculiar orbits, the astronomers suspect that the dive of the missing planet toward the star before it became a giant could have given the surviving massive planet a burst of energy, throwing it into an eccentric orbit like a boomerang.

THE OLDEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE

A primordial star at the outer edges of our Milky Way galaxy upsets current theories of star formation in the universe. The star simply shouldn't exist since it lacks the materials astronomers have long thought necessary for low-mass stars to form, scientists say. When Lorenzo Monaco of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and colleagues examined the elemental composition of the oddball star, prosaically named SDSS J102915+172927, they discovered that it has a mass smaller than that of the Sun, and is probably more than 13 billion years old.

"This star has the composition that is the nearest that has been found up to now to the big bang composition," says Piercarlo Bonifacio of the Paris Observatory, France.

"In some sense it is a perfectly normal star, but it is different because it's in a very low metal range," Monaco says. The relationship between a star's age and its elemental composition stems from the way the early universe evolved.

The first stars are thought to have condensed out of the hot soup left over from the big bang and contained only hydrogen, helium and a trace of lithium. Most were giants tens of times more massive than the sun, that quickly exploded as supernovas spewing elements from carbon to iron, which subsequent generations of stars incorporated. The process occurred again and again, with younger generations of smaller stars acquiring larger fractions of heavier elements. Which is how our Sun eventually formed.

Until now, the universe seemed to agree. Astronomers had found only three stars with very low amounts of heavier elements. They were low-mass, and oxygen and carbon dominated the traces of heavier elements, which meant they passed the carbon-oxygen threshold needed to form a low-mass star – despite having a very low concentration of heavier elements overall.

But SDSS J102915+172927 is different and a mystery: it's composed almost entirely hydrogen and helium, making it look like one of the very first in the universe. When Monaco and colleagues used two spectrographs at the Very Large Telescope in Chile to examined its elemental composition, they found it had the lowest content of heavier elements ever seen yet – 4.5 millionths that of the sun.

But similar to modern stars, its oxygen and carbon levels do not dominate over the other heavier elements. This means there is not enough carbon and oxygen overall to meet the critical threshold needed to form a low-mass star. According to the theory, this star should not have been able to form. One theory is that that the star is indeed near-primordial and that its nursery was cooled interstellar dust rather than carbon and oxygen.
It's also possible that low-mass, low-metal stars like this one could be detritus from giant stars' birth, suggests Abraham Loeb of Harvard University according to New Scientist.

THE MOST PROFITABLE ASTEROID

With the recent announcement of the asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources, some of the most-asked questions about this enticing but complex endeavor include, what asteroids do we mine? Which are the easiest asteroids to get to? Could it really be profitable?

While Planetary Resources officials said they hope to identify a few promising targets within a decade, the initial answers to those questions are available now on a new website that estimates the costs and rewards of mining rocks in space. Called Asterank, the website uses available data from multiple scientific sources on asteroid mass and composition to try and compute which asteroids would be the best targets for mining operations.
So, which asteroids are most profitable, valuable, easily accessible and cost effective?

The winners are, according to Asterank:

Most Profitable: 253 Mathilde, a 52.8 km-diameter C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid that has an estimated value of over $100 trillion and estimated profit of $9.53 trillion (USD)

Most Cost Effective: 2000 BM19, a very small O-type asteroid (less than 1 km wide) that makes several close approaches to Earth. Its estimated value is $18.50 trillion and an estimated profit of $3.55 trillion.

Most Valuable: 253 Mathilde

Most Accessible: 2009 WY7, another small asteroid with regular close approaches of less than 1 AU. This is an S-type asteroid, a silicaceous or “stony” object that has a high accessibility score on Asterank of 7.6577.

Asterank combines both the economic and scientific features of over 580,000 asteroids in our solar system, looking specifically for platinum-group metals and water. It was created by Ian Webster, a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

“I’ve always had a strong interest in astronomy and especially space exploration,” Webster said via an email to Universe Today. “The commercialization of space through ventures like asteroid mining really excites me because I believe it’ll open space to the rest of us and improve human quality of life. My day job is at a startup unrelated to space, but my hobbies include building rockets and many side projects like this one. I have a lot of fun applying computer science in different ways and I hope that Asterank will educate and inspire people.”

Webster provides a caveat, however, to the rankings of the top 100 asteroids in each category.

“Scientists know shockingly little about the composition of asteroids,” he writes on the website. “Visit JPL’s Small Body Database and you will notice how sparse information is.”
So, this mean that there aren’t really ‘experts’ in this field, and even those most knowledgeable about asteroids likely don’t have the numbers needed to completely and accurately estimate the true value of an asteroid or the cost of mining it — “which is why Planetary Resources is going to spend years or even decades investing in LEO-telescopes and data-gathering flybys before they ever touch an asteroid,” Webster said.

ASTEROID BELTS AND FIELDS

Asteroids have been fascinating scientists for hundreds of years. The first asteroid to be discovered was Ceres, in 1801. Since then literally tens of thousands of asteroids have been observed flying willy-nilly across our solar System.

In 2004 the near Earth asteroids really came into the public eye because the asteroid Apophis was thought to potentially impact the Earth. That is not really a news-worthy event in itself because several tiny asteroids impact the Earth’s atmosphere each year. What made Apophis stand out was its size. At 270 meters, scientists estimate that the asteroid could have destroyed up to 25% of the life on our planet.

In addition to scaring the average Joe, asteroids offer many scientific benefits. Much of what we know about space has been garnered from studying the metal and other content of asteroids that have impacted the Earth’s surface. Scientists have even managed to revive a bacteria form from a meteorite that is thought to have originated from Mars.

There are some scientists and industrialists that point a future where all of the metals and ores on this planet will be exhausted. They look towards the heavens and envision a time when there will be miners on the largest asteroids extracting the minerals, metals, and perhaps the water that the civilizations on Earth will desperately need to continue their existence.

Asteroid Belt :-The asteroid belt is a region of space between Mars and Jupiter. It is generally called the main belt to distinguish it from the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc. More than half the mass of the belt is is composed by Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. Ceres makes up nearly 25% of the asteroid belt’s mass by itself. The asteroids range from the size of Ceres down to many that are as small as a dust particle.

The asteroid belt is so thinly populated that several unmanned spacecraft have been able to move through it – this isn’t the dense field of asteroids you see in movies and television. The next mission to pass through the asteroid belt will be the Dawn space mission. Despite these space craft moving safely through the asteroid belt, several of the larger asteroids have collided and formed “families” with the same orbital characteristics and make up.


Asteroid Field :-The asteroid field is usually referred to as the main belt, but it is not the only asteroid field in the solar system. There are actually four sets of asteroids grouped into different fields: the main belt, Trojans, scattered disc, and the Kuiper belt.

The asteroid field known as the main belt is a large collection of objects that are in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. The largest known asteroid in the belt is Ceres which accounts for over 25% of the belts total mass. Ceres is also the only asteroid in the belt that is classified as a dwarf planet. Vesta, Hygeia, and Pallas are the other of the four largest bodies in the asteroid field. There have been several space missions that have crossed field. The asteroids are far enough apart that traversing it is easily done. The Dawn space mission to the next to visit the main belt and will visit two of the largest bodies.

ASTEROID MINING

Asteroid mining is purely conceptual at this time, but there are valuable minerals to be harvested out there. In addition to iron and nickel there is thought to be gold an platinum in some asteroids. Asteroids were formed in much the same way as the Earth, so it only makes sense that they contain many of the same minerals and raw ores as the Earth. In the future, miners will be asteroid mining.

Asteroids are classed in three types: More than 75% of them are C-type which are very much like the Sun, but less volatile. Then there are the S-type which contain iron, nickel, and magnesium for sure, but may also contain gold and platinum. Lastly, there are the M-type which contain iron and nickel. Astronomers know all of this by using telescopic spectroscopy, which analyzes light reflected from the asteroid’s surface, to find out what might be there. They also know that there is water and trapped oxygen on or in some of

these asteroids. Asteroid mining would only be possible if miners could take advantage of the oxygen and water there. There is no other way to make a profit or carry all of the supplies that you would need for a long term project.
John S. Lewis, author of an asteroid mining book has said “…an asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would have a mass of about two billion tons. One of these asteroids, according to Lewis, would contain 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of metal cobalt and 7,500 tons of platinum. The platinum alone would have a value of more than $150 billion!”. The huge sums of money involved could one day induce mining companies to look towards the heavens. It may not happen until we have exhausted most of the Earth’s natural resources, but it will happen. 

Asteroid mining may only be a concept for science fiction at this time, but it is a future probability. The problems lie in how to bootstrap along until the things needed for protection and daily living can be extracted from the asteroids themselves. Asteroid mining would not be a thing of glory. It would be a hard scrabble life that could end at any second.

WHAT COLOUR IS THE MILKY WAY

What color would the Milky Way appear to alien civilizations looking at our galaxy through their telescopes? It turns out the Milky Way has approximately the right name – but for all the wrong reasons. “The true color of the Milky Way is as white as fine-grained new spring snow seen in early morning light,” said Dr. Jeffrey Newman, from the University of Pittsburgh, speaking at a press conference from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting.

Our ancestors gave our galaxy the name “Milky Way” because when they looked up and saw the band of the stars that stretches from one horizon to the other, it appears white to our human eyes. “But that’s only because our low-light vision isn’t sensitive to color,” said Newman. “There are portions of the Milky Way that are more yellow or red versus more blue, but our eyes can’t pick that up. But a sensitive instrument or photograph can.”

When we look at other galaxies, we can see them in their entirety, and can examine them for color and luminosity. Color and luminosity have been great tool for astronomy, helping us to understand stars and galaxies.

Unfortunately we can’t get a complete picture of the Milky Way from outside, so we have had to resort to other methods,” said Newman. “Not only are we looking at Milky Way from the inside, but it’s even worse than that — our view is blocked by dust, both in clouds and diffuse dust. We can only see about 1,000 -2,000 light years in any direction, even though our galaxy is a 100,000 light years across.

RECREATING A SILENCE OF THE UNIVERSE

Cambridge, MA - Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years. For the first time it is now possible to build a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies like we observe around us.

"We've created the full variety of galaxies we see in the local universe," said Mark Vogelsberger (CfA).

Our cosmic neighborhood is littered with majestic spiral galaxies like Andromeda, the Pinwheel, and the Whirlpool. Spirals are common, but previous simulations had trouble creating them. Instead, they produced lots of blobby galaxies clumped into balls, without the broad disks and outstretched arms of a typical spiral.

The new software, called Arepo, solves this problem. Created by Volker Springel (HITS), Arepo generates a full-fledged simulation of the universe, taking as input only the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time for 14 billion years.

"We took all the advantages of previous codes and removed the disadvantages," explained Springel.

"Our simulations improve over previous ones as much as the Giant Magellan Telescope will improve upon any telescope that exists now," said Debora Sijacki (CfA).

(When completed later this decade, the Giant Magellan Telescope's 24.5-meter aperture will make it the largest telescope in the world.)

One of Arepo's key advantages is the geometry it uses. Previous simulations divided space into a bunch of cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo uses a grid that flexes and moves in space to match the motions of the underlying gas, stars, dark matter, and dark energy.

The simulations ran on Harvard's Odyssey high-performance supercomputer, using in total 1024 processor cores. This fast machine allowed the scientists to compress 14 billion years into only a few months - an endeavor that would have kept a desktop computer busy for hundreds of years!

BENEFITS OF MANGOES

Prevents Cancer and Heart diseases

High amount of antioxidants are present in mangoes. So mango when consumed regularly fights against cancer and other heart diseases. As mentioned earlier it also lowers cholesterol.


Improves Digestion

Mangoes are very much beneficial for people suffering from acidity and its enzymes helps to relieve indigestion problems. The Bio-active elements such as Esters, Terpenes and Aldehydes present in mango aids to easy digestion.

Lowers Cholesterol

High level of soluble dietary fiber, Pectin and Vitamin C present in mangoes helps to lower serum cholesterol levels specifically Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL) Cholesterol.

For Better Reproduction

The Vitamin E which is abundantly present in mangoes helps to regulate sex hormones and boosts sex drive. In many varieties of mango there is about 2.3 to 3 mg of Vitamin E per mango.

Improves Concentration and Memory Power

Mangoes are useful to children who lack concentration in studies as it contains Glutamine acid which is good to boost memory and keep cells active.

For Treating Acne

Mango helps in clearing clogged pores that causes acne. Just slice the mango into very thin pieces and keep it on your face for 10 to 15 min and then take bath or wash your face. Use warm water for washing your face.

High Iron for Women

It’s a known fact that Mango is rich in Iron. People who suffer from anemia can regularly take mango along with their dinner. Pregnant ladies can also take mangoes occasionally as their body needs iron and calcium during that time But Too much consumption of mangoes should be avoided during pregnancy. .

For Diabetes

Mango is slowly gaining new acclaim as diabetes fighter. Earlier there was a myth that people with diabetes should not eat mangoes but that’s not true.

BENEFITS OF CONSUMING DATES

1) Dates are free from cholesterol and contain very low fat. Dates are rich in vitamins and minerals.

2) They are rich source of protein, dietary fiber and rich in vitamin B1, B2, B3 and B5 along with vitamin A1 and C.

3)It helps improve the digestive system as it contains soluble and insoluble fibers and different kinds of amino acids.

4) Dates are great energy boosters as they contain natural sugars like glucose, sucrose and fructose. To get more advantage add dates to milk and make it a very nutritious snack.

5)Dates are very low in calories and are extremely suitable for health conscious people.

6) Dates are rich in potassium and reduced in sodium. This helps regulate a healthy nervous system. Researches have revealed the fact that potassium intake up to a certain extent can reduce risk of stroke.

7) Dates also help in lowering of the LDL cholesterol.

8) Dates have high iron content and are very useful in treating anemia. The patients can eat many dates for better advantages.

9) Dates also have fluorine that slows down the process of tooth decay.

10) It helps people suffering from constipation. Soak dates overnight and take it along with water to have added advantage.


11) Dates help in weight gain and are beneficial for those who suffer from over slimming problem.

12) Dates are excellent for alcoholic intoxication.Cures abdominal cancer.

13) It also helps in improving eye sight and helps in curing night blindness as well.

THE VIRUS PLANET

A Hidden Universe that Would Reach Out 100 Million Light Years.

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Planet Earth, which is more stars than are in the Universe -- stacked end to end, they would reach out 100 million light years.

Over tens, hundreds and millions years, our ancestors have been picking up retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) that reproduce by taking their genetic material and inserting it into our own chromosomes. There are probably about 100,000 elements in the human genome that you can trace to a virus ancestor. They make up about 8 percent of our genome, and genes that encode proteins only make up 1.2 percent of our genome making us more virus than human.



Occasionally, a retrovirus will end up in a sperm cell or an egg and insert its genes there, which then may give rise to a new organism, a new animal, a new person where every cell in that body has got that virus.
In 2009, MIT researchers have explained why two mutations in the H1N1 avian flu virus were critical for viral transmission in humans during the 1918 pandemic outbreak that killed at least 50 million people -- believed more than that taken by the Black Death, and higher than the number killed in World War I.

The 1918 flu pandemic -- commonly known as the Spanish flu -- was an influenza pandemic that started in the United States, appeared in West Africa and France and then spread to nearly every part of the globe in three waves lasting from March 1918 to June 1920, spreading to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. It was caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1.

In contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients, the Spanish Flu also claimed healthy young adults, resulting from infection rates of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms.

HIDDEN BLACK HOLE OF THE UNIVERSE

The galaxy NGC 1068 is shown above with an active supermassive black hole at its nucleus. Astronomers studying similar extreme galaxies in the infrared have found that in man
y cases

material obscuring the nucleus may be located over an extended region, and not confined in a small torus.

At the core of most galaxies including our own Milky Way is a massive black hole. Material falling into the environment of the black hole heats up, and can radiate dramatically, sometimes also powering the ejection of bipolar jets of rapidly moving charged particles. These so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN) are observed to have roughly two types of characteristics: bright, rapidly moving hot gas with dust emission features, or dust absorption with modest (or no) fast gas.


According to the "unified" model of AGN, these and most other variations in appearance are primarily due to the angle at which a galaxy and its central engine are seen. In the first case the galaxy is seen face-on, and fast-moving gas close to the black hole is clearly visible. In the latter, the whole galaxy as well as a torus of obscuring dust around the black hole are seen edge-on; the torus blocks our view of the fast-moving gas and absorbs infrared in characteristic dust features.

But is this simple model correct in all cases? CfA astronomers Andy Goulding, Bill Forman, Christine Jones, and Markos Trichas have undertaken a study of the origin of this infrared dust absorption feature. They specifically study the nature of the presumed torus: is it a small, uniform ring of dense material, a large extended structure of more diffuse material, or is it perhaps composed of many small dense clumps?

The observed strength the infrared dust absorption is key to sorting out these differences. The astronomers used the infrared spectrometer on the Spitzer Space Telescope to examine the dust feature in all twenty nearby AGN having extremely large columns of neutral gas .

MAN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

NICKNAMES
· If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.
· If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Dickhead and Shit for Brains.

EATING OUT
· When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in £20, even though it's only for £32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
· When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY
· A man will pay £2 for a £1 item he needs.
· A woman will pay £1 for a £2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS
· A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel.
· The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS
· A woman has the last word in any argument.
· Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

FUTURE
· A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
· A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS
· A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
· A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE
· A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
· A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP
· A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the rubbish, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
· A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL
· Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
· Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING
· Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favourite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.
· A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

SO, send this to the women who have a sense of humour and who can handle it .... And to the men who will enjoy reading it

EACH MAN GIVES A STORY

Three men were standing in line to get into heaven one day. Apparently it had been a pretty busy day, though, so Peter had to tell the first one, "Heaven's getting pretty close to full today, and I've been asked to admit only people who have had particularly horrible deaths. So what's your story?"

So the first man replies: "Well, for a while I've suspected my wife has been cheating on me, so today I came home early to try to catch her red-handed. As I came into my 25th floor apartment, I could tell something was wrong, but all my searching around didn't reveal where this other guy could have been hiding. Finally, I went out to the balcony, and sure enough, there was this man hanging off the railing, 25 floors above ground! By now I was really mad, so I started beating on him and kicking him, but wouldn't you know it, he wouldn't fall off. So finally I went back into my apartment and got a hammer and starting hammering on

his fingers. Of course, he couldn't stand that for long, so he let go and fell -- but even after 25 stories, he fell into the bushes, stunned but okay. I couldn't stand it anymore, so I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the fridge and threw it over the edge where it landed on him, killing him instantly. But all the stress and anger got to me, and I had a heart attack and died there on the balcony."

"That sounds like a pretty bad day to me," said Peter, and let the man in.

The second man comes up and Peter explains to him about heaven being full, and again asks for his story.

"It's been a very strange day. You see, I live on the 26th floor of my apartment building, and every morning I do my exercises out on my balcony. Well, this morning I must have slipped or something, because I fell over the edge. But I got lucky, and caught the railing of the balcony on the floor below me. I knew I couldn't hang on for very long, when suddenly this man burst out onto the balcony. I thought for sure I was saved, when he started beating on me and kicking me. I held on the best I could until he ran into the apartment and grabbed a hammer and started pounding on my hands. Finally I just let go, but again I got lucky and fell into the bushes below, stunned but all right. Just when I was thinking I was going to be okay, this refrigerator comes falling out of the sky and crushes me instantly, and now I'm here."

Once again, Peter had to concede that that sounded like a pretty horrible death.

The third man came to the front of the line, and again Peter explained that heaven was full and asked for his story.

"Picture this," says the third man, "I'm hiding inside a refrigerator..." ... :P

ADVANTAGE OF ALMOND MILK

Almond milk is a great alternative to dairy milk.

Weight Management, Plain almond milk without added sugars or flavoring contains 60 calories per each 8 oz serving size. This option works well for people looking to lose or maintain weight.

The low caloric content of almond milk causes less of an impact on our totally daily consumption of food calories. Some milk varieties contain more sugars than the cereal that they get combined with.

Heart Health,
Almond milk contains no cholesterol and only 5 mg of sodium per serving. Consuming foods low in sodium and cholesterol help us to maintain better heart health and normal blood pressure.
Without cholesterol, almond milk also decreases our chances of gaining bad cholesterol levels, all while increasing the good cholesterol levels. Almond milk also contains 150 mg of potassium in every serving. This mineral works to promote healthy blood pressure.

Blood Sugar Friendly,
Unlike other milk alternatives, the plain almond option contains only 8 grams of carbohydrates per serving. The 7 grams of sugars that make up the carbohydrate content have a limited affect on our blood sugar levels. When we consume simple sugars, our metabolic functions tend to miss the nutrients, storing much of the carbs as fat.
Instead, the low amount of sugars in almond milk have a low glycemic nature, meaning our bodies fully digest them and use them as energy. Diabetics benefit from this characteristic as well.

Bone Health
Almond milk contains 30% of our recommended daily value of calcium and 25% of Vitamin D. These nutrients work together to build strong bones in men, women, children and infants.
Vitamin D also helps improve immunity and cell function. Some studies have shown that Vitamin D helps decrease osteoporosis and even Alzheimer’s disease. The magnesium in found in almond milk helps absorb more of the calcium provided by the nutritious beverage.

Skin Care
Every serving of pure almond milk contains 50% of our recommended daily value of Vitamin E. This powerful nutrient has antioxidant abilities in that it helps regulate Vitamin A use and availability.
More importantly, Vitamin E acts the primary regulatory nutrient that improves skin health.

Eye Health
The moderate levels of Vitamin A found in almond milk helps keep our eyes functioning properly. Vitamin A directly influences the eye’s ability to adjust to differences in light.

More Muscle Power
Even though almond milk only contains 1 gram of protein per serving, it does contain B Vitamins in the form of riboflavin, plus other muscle regulating nutrients like iron. Each serving of almond milk contains about 4% of our recommended daily intake of iron, which helps muscles absorb and use protein for energy, growth and repair.

HOME REMEDIES FOR COLD AND COUGH

Common cold and cough home remedies that are very effective in relieving cold and cough are as follows

Take 5ml of fresh tulsi and mix it in 10ml of pure honey. Take this daily at least twice a day.

... Mix 5ml of onion juice with 10ml of pure honey. Consume this mixture at least twice a day.

Another effective natural cough remedy is to chew 4basil leaves and black pepper. This will relief your cough.

Take ½ teaspoon of ginger juice with ½ teaspoon of honey, three times a day Warm the mixture by mixing a teaspoon of warm water in it especially in winter.

Take garlic and boil them in water, then drink it. This is one of the useful home remedies for cough.

One of the most useful remedies for cough is to take 1-2gm powder of fried turmeric with honey, thrice a day.

Add 5-10 drops of eucalyptus, peppermint, pine, lavender, thyme, tea tree oil to a bowl of steaming water. Place your nose over the vapors and inhale, covering yourself with a towel and inhale deeply. This is one of the effective cure treatments.

Take some mint and eucalyptuses leaves and boil them together in water and then inhale its vapors when it gets cooled. It will also help in relieving cough and cold.

One of the natural ways to cure could and cough is to a take bath with a few drops of cinnamon in the bath water that can help in relieving congestion.

Take hot water in a tub or bucket add some Vicks vaporub in it. Cover your head with the towel and then started inhaling by placing your nose over vapors. This also has been found to be effective in the common cold treatment.

A cup of grape juice mixed with honey gives quick relief from cough

PEEPING MIMAS

Saturn's moon Mimas peeps out from behind the larger moon Dione in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is near the bottom center of the image. Saturn's rings are also visible in the top right.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across). North on Dione is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 12, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 377,000 miles (606,000 kilometers) from Mimas. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 56,000 miles (91,000 kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 42 degrees. Image scale is 1,773 feet (541 meters) per pixel on Dione.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

X RAYS FROM YOUNG SUPER NOVA

More than fifty years ago, a supernova was discovered in M83, a spiral galaxy about 15 million light years from Earth. Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to make the first detection of X-rays emitted by the debris from this explosion.

Named SN 1957D because it was the fourth supernova to be discovered in the year 1957, it is one of only a few located outside of the Milky Way galaxy that is detectable, in both radio and optical wavelengths, decades after its explosion was observed. In 1981, astronomers saw the remnant of the exploded star in radio waves, and then in 1987 they detected the remnant at optical wavelengths, years after the light from the explosion itself became undetectable.

A relatively short observation -- about 14 hours long -- from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2000 and 2001 did not detect any X-rays from the remnant of SN 1957D. However, a much longer observation obtained in 2010 and 2011, totaling nearly 8 and 1/2 days of Chandra time, did reveal the presence of X-ray emission. The X-ray brightness in 2000 and 2001 was about the same as or lower than in this deep image.

This new Chandra image of M83 is one of the deepest X-ray observations ever made of a spiral galaxy beyond our own. This full-field view of the spiral galaxy shows the low, medium, and high-energy X-rays observed by Chandra in red, green, and blue respectively.

The new X-ray data from the remnant of SN 1957D provide important information about the nature of this explosion that astronomers think happened when a massive star ran out of fuel and collapsed. The distribution of X-rays with energy suggests that SN 1957D contains a neutron star, a rapidly spinning, dense star formed when the core of pre-supernova star collapsed. This neutron star, or pulsar, may be producing a cocoon of charged particles moving at close to the speed of light known as a pulsar wind nebula.

If this interpretation is confirmed, the pulsar in SN 1957D is observed at an age of 55 years, one of the youngest pulsars ever seen. The remnant of SN 1979C in the galaxy M100 contains another candidate for the youngest pulsar, but astronomers are still unsure whether there is a black hole or a pulsar at the center of SN 1979C.

TWO SOLAR SYSTEM PUZZLE SOLVED

Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, and how did these refractory particles acquire rims with different compositions? Carnegie's theoretical astrophysicist Alan Boss and cosmochemist Conel Alexander* are the first to model the trajectories of such particles in the unstable disk of gas and dust that formed the Solar System.

They found that these refractory particles
could have been processed in the hot inner disk, and then traveled out to the frigid outer regions to end up in icy comets. Their meandering trips back and forth could help explain the different compositions of their rims. The research is published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The young Sun is thought to have
experienced a series of outbursts caused by the rapid infall of disk gas onto the Sun. The leading mechanism for explaining such outbursts is a phase of disk instability. The researchers modeled the trajectories of several hundred centimeter-sized melilite mineral particles during a phase of disk instability. These particles are similar to calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (or CAIs), the refractory particles often found in well- preserved meteorites, as well as the comet Wild 2.

Their disk model assumed a marginally
gravitationally unstable, fully three-
dimensional disk, with a mass of about 5 % of today's Sun and temperatures ranging from a frigid -350 °F (60K) in the outer regions, to a scorching 2240 °F (1500K) near the center. Their calculations allowed the CAIs to orbit in the disk while being subjected to gas drag and the gravity of both the disk and the Sun.

The particles started orbiting in unison, but after about 20 years their trajectories
started to diverge significantly. Most struck the inner boundary of the disk at 1 AU (the Earth/Sun distance), while others went to the outer boundary at 10 AU, where they could be swept up by a growing comet. About 10% migrated back and forth in the disk before hitting one or the other boundary.

The researchers then modeled the
evaporation and condensation processes that the particles would experience during their migrations and found that such particles were likely to acquire outer rims with varied isotopic compositions recently shown to characterize CAIs.

"CAIs are thought to have formed at the very beginning of the Solar System. Our results show that they must have experienced remarkably complex histories as they were transported chaotically all over the disk," remarked Alexander.

These migrations could explain the different oxygen isotopes that have been found in particles from meteorites. These are varieties of oxygen atoms with different numbers of neutrons, which point to different processing conditions for the particle rims.

Previous work by Boss had shown that
oxygen isotope abundances could vary in an unstable disk by the range found in meteorites. Coupled with the new results, these models show that several puzzles may have been solved -- an unstable disk can explain both large-scale outward transport of refractory particles, as well as the peculiar rim compositions acquired during their
journeys.

"It's nice to solve two problems at once,"
said Boss. "But there are still many more
puzzles about meteorites for us to work on." The research also included colleague Morris Podolak at Tel Aviv University and was funded in part by NASA Origins of Solar Systems Program. The calculations were performed on the Carnegie Alpha Cluster supported in part by the NSF.

TOP 5 MYSTERIOUS OF UNIVERSE

1. Dark Energy >> Dark energy is the greatest mystery in the universe today, because of the fact that it is believed to be all around us, and it explains why there seems to be anomalies within the law of gravity. By the law of gravity, large
objects, like galaxy clusters, should attract each other, and their gravitational pull should pull in other objects. This however, is not the case, and the fact is most galaxy clusters are moving farther apart. This is due to the fact that the universe is expanding at an incredible rate. To answer the question of why this is, scientists developed the theory of Dark Energy, which has the opposite effect as gravity, pushing things apart. Mathematical calculations have shown that if it exists, it makes up 74% of our universe, outweighing gravity, and this is why the universe is stretching out. However we still have no conclusive proof, so it remains a mystery to us.

2. “White” Holes >> One of Albert Einstein’s greatest accomplishments was the proving, though mathematics, the existence of black holes. From the advances in technology, we now have been able to find several black holes, and believe one to be at the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy. What is
astonishing, however, is what Einstein also proved through his equations; white holes also exist. The exact opposite of black holes, white holes are believed to “spit out” an incredible amount of matter from seemingly nothing. Such an object should be easy to find, yet none have been. If one was found, it may help us explain other unknown mysteries, such as where the material that made the galaxies came from.

3. Dark Matter >> Albert Einstein’s equation E = MC^2 is perhaps the best known equation of the century. However when applied to space, an anomaly occurs. When we use it to determine how much matter the universe should have, we realize that we have only found four percent of the matter in the universe! Where is the rest of it? Many believe it is in the form of dark matter.
Where is this dark matter? It’s everywhere, wherever there is no visible matter. Scientists have yet to show any conclusive proof that dark matter does in fact exist. The fact that you can’t see it, touch it, and light and radio waves pass right th undeterred makes it extremely hard to detect.

4. Are there Other Universes? >> This is one of the more controversial arguments out there. The theory is that there are an infinite number of universes, each which is governed by its own set of laws and physics. Many scientists dismiss this argument as nothing more than speculation, as there is no evidence or mathematical law that allows for the existence of oth universes. However, believers in this theory have argued that there are none that disprove it either. This is one mystery which can only be solved if we were able to travel there, however, with the expansion of the universe, it is unlikely humanity will ever find the answer.

5. Other Earths >> Our star, the sun, is just one of trillions in the universe. When you look at the fact that our star has eight planets, and do the math, it tells you that it is possible for there to be eight times as many planets in the universe than stars; an astounding figure. Is it not possible that just one of those planets might have life on it? It is a fact that, since the year 2000, hundreds of extra solar planets have been discovered orbiting distant stars. Some of these have found to be earth- like, such as the planet Gliese 581d, a planet believed to have liquid water on its surface. Could it possibly contain life? Hopefully with advances in technology in the next decade, we will soon know the answer. Till then, it remains one of space’s greatest mysteries.