Friday, December 28, 2012
Hubble Goes Extremely Deep
Hubble Goes Extremely Deep
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of their best shots,
astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of
the Universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by
combining ten years of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations taken of a
patch of sky within the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small
fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of
space in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), created using Hubble Space
Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over one million
seconds of observation, the resulting image revealed thousands of galaxies, both
nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the Universe ever taken
at that time.
The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive than the
original Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, thanks to the additional observations,
and contains about 5,500 galaxies, even within its smaller field of view. The
faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness that the unaided human
eye can see.
Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to the Milky Way
and its neighbor the Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do large, fuzzy
red galaxies in which the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies
are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their
declining years as the stars within them age.
Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, and yet more distant
galaxies that are like the seedlings from which today’s magnificent galaxies
grew. The history of galaxies — from soon after the first galaxies were born to
the great galaxies of today, like the Milky Way — is laid out in this one
remarkable image.
Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits
made over the past decade with a total exposure time of two million seconds.More
than 2000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble’s two primary cameras:
the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends
Hubble’s vision into near-infrared light. These were then combined to form the
XDF.
“The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and
reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to
explore further back in time than ever before,” said Garth Illingworth of the
University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble
Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.
The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals
galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the
XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they
collided and merged together. The early Universe was a time of dramatic birth
for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars far brighter than our Sun. The
light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a
time tunnel into the distant past when the Universe was just a fraction of its
current age. The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years
after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang.
Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers were able to
see galaxies up to about seven billion light-years away, half way back to the
Big Bang. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish
how galaxies formed and evolved in the early Universe. Hubble gave astronomers
their first view of the actual forms of galaxies when they were young. This
provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the Universe is truly changing
as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep
surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant Universe and the
subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.
The planned NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (Webb
telescope) will be aimed at the XDF, and will study it with its infrared vision.
The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the
Universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of
the Universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared
wavelengths. The Webb telescope’s infrared vision is ideally suited to push the
XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled
the early “dark ages” of the Universe with light.
Image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth,
D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens
(Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team [high-resolution]
Caption: Hubble
Heritage Team
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Congress tweaks US video-privacy law so Netflix can get on Facebook
It looks like Netflix will finally manage to get the small change to US privacy law that it's been seeking for nearly two years now. Last night, the Senate passed a reform to the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, that Netflix says it needs in order to integrate its services with Facebook.Right now, the VPPA stops anyone's movie-rental history from being disclosed without specific written consent. Netflix expressed to its shareholders back in July 2011 [PDF] that the VPPA made it "ambiguous" how it could get consent from US users to allow a sharing function on Facebook. Given that online privacy has been a growing area of litigation in the past few years, the concern was warranted.
The reform bill that just passed, H.R. 6671, should clear up Netflix's concerns as well as those of other streaming-video providers that want to reach out to your inner over-sharer. It also shows the contours of what a Netflix sharing function, on Facebook or otherwise, might look like. The bill makes clear that: 1) consent for sharing video-watching history can be granted over the Internet; and 2) consent can be given for a whole period of time, up to two years, and doesn't need to be given every time sharing happens. It also specifies that the disclosure has to be in a "distinct" form. In other words, don't put it in the fine print. Consumers will be allowed to withdraw consent for sharing when they want to, on a case-by-case basis, or altogether.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) originally attached VPPA reform to a much larger bill that would force law enforcement to get warrants before snooping on e-mail, a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act long sought by privacy advocates. However, the video-rental-privacy part, which is relatively non-controversial, was stripped out of the ECPA bill so that it could be passed quickly according to Politico's Morning Tech (no link available).
The VPPA is something of an oddity in US law. It was passed after the 1988 US Senate debate over the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork, who failed to get Senate approval to join the high court, passed away earlier this week.
During the hearings, a reporter from Washington DC's alt-weekly City Paper acquired the nominee's video-rental history from Bork's local video store, and published a story based on his selections.
Bork's movie-watching predilections were completely unremarkable. They included 12 Alfred Hitchcock flicks; solid Americana like On the Town, The Wild Bunch, and The Right Stuff; and British costume dramas such as The Private Life of Henry the Eighth.
The story got Congress' attention, though. It resulted in the passage of the VPPA, one of the most thorough privacy laws passed by the federal government. Violating the VPPA entails penalties of up to $2,500 per offense.
Now that Netflix can be sure it won't run afoul of such penalties, we can all look forward to a Facebook newsfeed full of friends who broadcast every episode of television they watch.
The Barefoot Peckerwood: Zuckerburg: A Modern Day Joseph Goebbels
The Barefoot Peckerwood: Zuckerburg: A Modern Day Joseph Goebbels: via Infowars Facebook is purging accounts that carry pro-second amendment and pro-liberty information in a censorship purge that has ...
The Evolution Of The Batman Logo
Some are simplified illustrations of Batman himself--a few even including his masked mug--while others are stylized versions of the real thing. Some over the years have done double duty as the hero’s nonlethal weapon of choice, the Batarang. Others are decidedly less aerodynamic.
Laver says she drew inspiration from a similar, though less comprehensive image she saw on the web a few years back, as well as a YouTube video showing the icon’s transformation over the years. Her research into the comics and graphic novels turned up a surprising trove of designs, though as she moved into the movie-era and saw Batman becoming an increasingly multifaceted (and consequently diffuse) marketing and merchandise juggernaut, things became thornier. "It was tricky [deciding] which logos to feature as some were on the bat suit and others were the comic and promotional logos," Laver notes. "Quite interesting to see which was used where."
China wants Obama to ban all firearms.
The Communist Party of China demands the U.S. should disarm. According to Chinese officials, the recent school massacre gave all to understand that one should not wait any longer. The country's leaders believe that the brutality of the Connecticut shooter will ensure the widest public support for arms reduction, Infowars.com reports with reference to China's news agency Xinhua.
Xinhua is, in fact, the press service of the current government of China. This organization is responsible for "the work of the State Council and for the reports of the Party on Chinese propaganda and public information services." In other words, Xinhua is a mouthpiece of Chinese leaders.
Thus, the Chinese government calls Obama "to use the tragedy as a reason to promote the law on the control of weapons." According to Chinese officials, now is the best time to act so, since the president has just been elected for a second term.
They also note that although previous similar shootings did not to any serious actions, the most recent tragedy may serve an important impetus to revise the system of arms control."
According to US-based activist and FBI informant Brandon Darby, "the current Chinese government killed from 40 to 70 million people during Mao Zedong's Revolution. Mao himself said that "political power starts in the barrel of a gun."
China and Obama want to remove political power from the American people and subjugate them to the will of Socialists, Communists and Marxists.
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