Google+ photo app makes it easy to share and manage your photo collection from your Chromebook Pixel
Google has released a very nice little utility for the Chromebook Pixel today, aptly named Google+ Photos. The application, that we first saw glimpses of in February, allows photos to be uploaded to Google+ when the user inserts an SD card into the reader slot, and provides a nicely done front end to all pictures and albums in Google+ for viewing and sharing.
For now, the app is specific for the Chromebook Pixel, but Googler AJ Asver notes that they are working to bring the app to other Chromebooks as well. After installing the app, your photos are backed up to Google+ from any inserted SD card. Once there, you can browse them and easily share individual photos or entire albums directly from the app and clicking the share button. Your pictures are kept private (just like auto-upload for a phone or tablet) and your most recent shots are made available for offline viewing.
The application uses your Google account sign-in, and displays the images in the new webP format. To get the app, head to the Pixel Owners page while using your Pixel, and install it like any other app or extension. A couple of screenshots are after the break to give you a better idea of how it all looks.
We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, then here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget inquiry is from Richard-Keith, who leapt before he looked and now needs our help. If you're looking to ask one of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.
"Sheepishly, I have to admit that I didn't do my homework, but when the chance to get a Mac Pro came around, I didn't stop to think about the consequences. Now I've got a lovely new desktop, but now I'm lamenting the lack of an SD-card reader, built-in speaker and a webcam. I'm sure there are other displays that do the latter three jobs, including the Apple Cinema Display, but is there something a little cheaper than its rather staggering $999 price-tag? Thank you from the bottom my heart."
Let's be fair and help out our friend, after all, we've all made that odd impulse purchase without doing our homework. There aren't that many monitors that can do all of the jobs you need, but you can pick up a Cinemaview with extra USB ports, or perhaps ASUS' VK248H (and related), which even have Displayport outputs and a Webcam, although it may be a bit weak in the speaker department. Still, it's high time we passed this question over to the throng of Engadgeteers, to find out if they know of anything better.
Our own Tim Stevens (literally) rolled into Fort Mason this morning to kick off Expand and shortly after walked his way backstage to chat with Myriam Joire about -- you guessed it -- Expand. To find out more about where the event came from, where it is and where it's going, check out the full interview after the break.
Follow all of Engadget's Expand coverage live from San Francisco right here!
The discovery of a?colossal?gas giant some 130 light-years from Earth could help explain the origins of our own solar?system, say scientists.
By Charles Q. Choi,?SPACE.com / March 15, 2013
This artist's rendering of the planetary system of HR 8799 130 light-years from Earth as it may have appeared at an early stage in its evolution. The image shows the giant exoplanet HR 8799c, as well as a disk of gas and dust, and interior planets.
Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics; Mediafarm
Enlarge
The glowing atmosphere of a strangely giant alien world could help solve mysteries of not just how it formed, but how our own solar system arose, scientists say.
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The exoplanet discovery comes from the most detailed look yet at the?alien planets?around the distant star HR 8799, which lies about 130 light-years from Earth. The HR 8799 system is home to four giant planets orbiting a relatively young, 30-million-year-old star, with each planet far larger than any world found in Earth's solar system.
The planets orbiting HR 8799 weigh in at between five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter and are still glowing with the heat of their formation, allowing researchers to directly image them.
"It's the only system in which multiple planets can individually be seen," said study co-author Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The planetary system resembles a scaled-up version of our solar system, suggesting there may be smaller?Earth-size planets?closer in, although the researchers currently have not yet seen any.
It even "has something that kind of looks like maybe an asteroid belt interior to the closest giant planet like we have in our solar system, and something that maybe you can refer to as an Oort cloud analog out beyond the most distant gas giant" ? that is, a cloud of icy comets, said study lead author Quinn Konopacky, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. [Alien Planet Quiz: Are You an Exoplanet Expert?]
Exoplanet's atmosphere revealed
The astronomers concentrated on one of the star's visible planets, named HR 8799c, a colossal gas giant about seven times the mass of Jupiter. It circles the star HR 8799 at a range comparable to Pluto's distance from the sun.
The birth of such a massive planet at such a great distance from its parent star conflicts with the two popular?models of planetary formation. In the multistep process known as core accretion, gas slowly accumulates onto a planetary core, while the mechanism known as gravitational instability involves the simultaneous creation of a planet's interior and atmosphere.
"In the traditional core accretion model of planet formation, it is difficult to form planets as large as the HR 8799 planets at such large distances from their parent star," Konopacky told SPACE.com. "Typically, in this model, objects the size of Jupiter or larger must form much closer to their parent star. This is for several reasons, but has a lot to do with there being less material at large distances from the star that can form planets."
"In the gravitational instability method of formation, it is possible to form big planets at large distances, usually because they invoke a much more massive disc of material," Konopacky added. "But the model generally predicts that there should be many more massive objects orbiting lots of other stars at these distances, and these kinds of objects have not been discovered in surveys [of many stars for?exoplanets]."
To help solve this mystery, the scientists analyzed the glow from HR 8799c using a high-resolution imaging spectrograph called OSIRIS at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Molecules in atmospheres can absorb light, resulting in patterns known as spectra that allow scientists to identify what they are.
HR8799c is both fairly bright and located a fair distance from its star, helping the researchers acquire this spectral data for the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet beyond the solar system. [Birth of Giant Planet Seen? (Artist Animation)]
"The most exciting part of this result is that we were able to make these observations of an exoplanet atmosphere with this level of detail, much more than I even imagined was possible," Konopacky said. "We have broken the light from the planet down to such a fine level of detail that the chemical fingerprints of the molecules in the atmosphere are breathtakingly sharp and distinct. This is important because it requires data of this quality to truly probe the makeup of a planetary atmosphere, and in turn, say something about how the planet formed."
Missing methane: a clue
The scientists detected water and carbon monoxide in the exoplanet's atmosphere, but not methane.
The lack of methane "tells us that there must be mixing between the different layers of the atmosphere, much like a lava lamp swirls material up and down," Konopacky said. "Since methane is a sensitive molecule, it can be destroyed when it gets mixed into the deeper, hotter parts of the atmosphere. This mixing tells us about the atmospheric conditions in young Jupiter-like planets."
In addition, although the researchers see a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere of HR 8799c, "we actually detect slightly less than we would have expected if the planet had the same composition as its host star," Konopacky said. "This tells us that the planet has a slightly elevated amount of carbon compared to oxygen." [Types of Alien Planets Explained (Infographic)]
This high ratio of carbon to oxygen is a clue regarding the exoplanet's formation. The researchers suggest that grains of water ice condensed in the disc of matter surrounding HR 8799 that gave rise to the planets orbiting the star. Oxygen inside the ice depleted any other oxygen for the formation of HR 8799c.
"These ice grains stuck together to make bigger ice chunks, a few kilometers across, that kept colliding and building up the planet's solid core," Konopacky said. "The atmosphere came later ? from gas that the planet attracted after it got big enough. By the time that happened, some of the ice grains were gone and the gas didn't have as much water in it."
How planets are born
These findings imply that a planet-building mechanism known as core accretion led to the formation of HR 8799c, "much in the same way we think the planets in our own solar system formed," Konopacky said. The exoplanet's core arose first, and the atmosphere came afterward.
"These results represent a first step in finding direct evidence about how planets form, which in general, is a difficult thing to do observationally," Konopacky said. "It is really exciting that we have these tantalizing suggestions that this extrasolar system that looks like?our own solar system?in so many ways may have formed in the same way."
Researchers are now tinkering with existing models of core accretion to see how planets might form via the process at great distances from their stars. For instance, there may be more matter at the outer edges of the protoplanetary discs of matter around stars that give rise to planets than before thought, or perhaps solid matter could stick together and form planetary cores easier or faster than previously suspected.
"By further refining the core accretion model of formation to explain the HR 8799 planets, we may be able to learn more about the formation of planetary systems in general, including our own solar system," Konopacky said.
"We would also like to discover more planets through direct imaging that can be studied at this level of detail," Konopacky added. "We work on a new instrument called the Gemini Planet Imager that is designed to do just this. It will arrive at the Gemini South Telescope in Chile this year, and?discover new planets?that are both smaller than the HR 8799 planets and closer to their parent star."
Konopacky and her colleagues Travis Barman, Bruce Macintosh and Christian Marois detailed their findings online March 14 in the journal Science.
Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?and?Google+. Original article on?SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013?SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I went into Naruto: Powerful Shippuden expecting to dislike it. On the whole, licensed games that don?t have Batman in the title are known to largely be awful, and even though the various Naruto games have maintained a steady sense of consistency over the years, their quality relative to what the standards on the market demand from a new release has been steadily declining. On the whole, anime based games have suffered a steep decline in terms of perception and quality over the last few years, and I honestly did expect Powerful Shippuden to suffer from the same general trend.
It just goes to show you how pre conceived notions can be completely off. Naruto: Powerful Shippuden fully embraces the quirky side of its source material to deliver a charming, whimsical, and fun take on the universe it is portraying, that provides for a refreshing change from routine. By embracing the inherent silliness of the anime that it is based on, Powerful Shippuden manages to transcend its source and become a fun game in its own right.
But for starters, a clarification may be needed about said source material. Though the game is called Naruto: Powerful Shippuden (possibly in a bid to maximize sales), the actual game is based on the Naruto spin off series?Rock Lee & His Ninja Pals,?which is a more comic take on the Naruto universe, exaggerating and emphasizing its characters and their silly antics, something that is reflected in its visual style as well (retained in this game).?Rock Lee & His Ninja Pals?puts Rock Lee front and center, and sure enough, in Naruto: Powerful Shippuden, we find that Naruto has to share the spotlight with Rock Lee, with each character getting roughly half the campaign to their credit.
The campaign itself is split into two, depending on what character you choose to play as. Naruto?s storyline seems to at least try to be faithful to the anime, generally acting as good complementary material for fans, but taking what might be interpreted as a few liberties nonetheless. On the flipside, Rock Lee?s portions are batshit insane, confronting the players with some entirely contrived, nonsensical, and over the top scenarios and situations; in emphasizing the ridiculous nature of scenarios starring Rock Lee, these portions probably end up being more faithful to their source material than Naruto?s sections are to their. At least in spirit, anyway.
Rock Lee?s sections are a blast to play through: the game develops a sense of self awareness, and there is so much awkward humor and meta commentary that they are bound to elicit a laugh even from the most jaded gamer. In general, this is perhaps why Rock Lee?s sections are so much stronger and simply more fun than Naruto?s: freed from the shackles of trying to be faithful to the source material to appease legions of fans, they can go wild with their dialog and scenarios, and just aim to simply be fun.
I say that it?s the humor that makes Rock Lee?s sections better, because the actual gameplay seems to be of a consistent quality across both halves of the campaign. This is in spite of the fact that the two characters deliver entirely different styles of gameplay, with Naruto?s focus on ninja techniques delivering a complete contrast from Rock Lee?s preferred style of close quarters combat. Both characters end up feeling sufficiently distinct, and while you may prefer one over the other based on your own style of gameplay, both sections of the campaign are equal as far as objective quality is concerned.
Naruto: Powerful Shippuden is almost certainly targeted at younger audiences, and this shows in its gameplay and mechanics. Unlike recent console Naruto games, which are highly complex fighters with a dedicated community, Powerful Shippuden is a side scrolling brawler with minor platforming and RPG elements thrown in. In what is probably the most daring step this game makes from a gameplay perspective, Naruto embraces a variation of the difficulty system that Kid Icarus: Uprising so ingeniously implemented last year, by allowing you to set certain conditions and parameters for yourself before you begin a stage, and yielding higher experience for your character if you meet said parameters.
It?s this kind of effort that separates Powerful Shippuden from the flood of anime licensed titles on the market right now: it?s not a cheap cash in, this is a well developed and well thought out game that would have stood strong on its own. The core gameplay in the game is so sound and so much fun for a simple brawler, that you can?t help but like it. Add to that the oodles of charm that the game has, in everything that it does, from its exaggerated visual style to its over the top scenarios, from its dialog and humor to the music and sound effects, and you?re just left with a game that stands as a highly competent brawler on its own merits.
Indeed, that is perhaps the highest praise I can give Powerful Shippuden: even if you don?t like Naruto, or anime in general, you will probably find this game to be a fun outing. If you like Naruto, then your mileage with the game might actually vary based on what your opinion is on how it treats its source material.
But look past the anime trappings, and look at the license just as an excuse to justify the fun brawling that this game enables. In a year when the 3DS has had no dearth of great games, Powerful Shippuden unexpectedly adds another item to the growing list.
LONDON (AP) ? Workers digging a new railway line in London have uncovered what they believe is a burial ground containing victims of the Black Death ? a plague that wiped out as much as half of London's inhabitants when it swept the city in the mid-14th century.
Workers involved in the Crossrail project located 13 skeletons lying in two carefully laid out rows on the edge of historic Charterhouse Square, an area where historical records suggest a burial ground was located. Project archaeologist Jay Carver said scientists will study the bones to establish cause of death, and hope to map the DNA signature of the plague bacteria.
"This is a pretty rare find within London," Carver said Friday. It is the latest in a string of unusual discoveries that have been a byproduct of the Crossrail project, which has also uncovered amber that is 55 million years old, bison and mammoth bones 68,000 years old, the remains of a large manor house surrounded by a moat dating to the 1500s and remains from Roman times.
At a time long before people moved quickly, the plague traveled fast. The bacillus spread via fleas on rats, cutting a swathe through populations ignorant of its cause.
It began racing from Asia through Europe and North Africa in 1347, moving quickly among people who had no idea how to stop it. By 1348 it struck this island nation. While estimates vary, it is thought to have killed roughly 75 million people worldwide in a four-year pandemic.
Among the millions killed were thousands of Londoners, though the exact number is unclear because record-keeping was so poor, said Roy Stephenson, the head of the Museum of London's archaeological collections and archives.
Still there was order in the Charterhouse site, and the regular spacing between the bodies suggests some sort of municipal control, Stephenson said.
The way the bodies are laid out also corresponds to a similar Black Plague burial ground. The depth of the burials ? 2.5 meters below a road that surrounds the square ? together with artifacts dating from the area, also add to the case that it contained the pandemic's victims.
Historical records also suggest a burial ground had been located in the area of the dig. But the area ? considered somewhat of a "no-man's land" at the time of the plague ? sits at the edge of a historic square, and thus was never really pinpointed or excavated until the rail project.
Scientists have brought the remains to the Museum of London Archaeology for laboratory testing, hoping to map the DNA signature of the bacteria, which could be found in the teeth or bones. Radiocarbon dating could also be used to establish burial dates.
But there's no chance that a new outbreak of bubonic plague might be ignited from the find. Stephenson said the bacillus is quite fragile and dies without a host.
Researchers hope, simply, that the study of the bones might add to an understanding of the plague and the lives of the people who lived in the city at the time.
Crossrail, an ongoing 14.8 billion pound ($22.4 billion) project to put a new rail line from west to east London, has been digging big holes all over the city ? and adding to the understanding of London's past in the process.
The mammoth project has involved more than 100 archaeologists. They haven't had to dig down far to find layers of the past in a city that traces its history back millennia.
A vast array of treasures has been uncovered, including medieval ice skates, an underground vault filled with Victorian-era jars, three cannons, an 800-year old piece of ship and the foundations of an 18th century shipyard.
And it has also found other bodies. Archaeologists uncovered more than 300 skeletons at the New Cemetery near the site of the Bedlam Hospital at Liverpool Street.
Twitter is just a part of everyday life for a lot of us, but back in the days before, someone actually had to think it up. In an upcoming interview on this week's 60 Minutes, Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey sits down to explain exactly how the idea for Twitter came to be. More »
DEAR ABBY: I have been married 30 years and have raised four children to adulthood. I recently found out my husband has been having an affair with a prostitute from a strip club. He paid all her living expenses and promised to marry her. She was 26 when it started; he is 56. He told her his wife had run away with another man and that he was divorced. When I confronted him, he lied, lied, lied.He wants to continue living together and pretend nothing happened. He went to counseling and quit. Then he went to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with a "mixed personality disorder. ...
If you like the contrast of the sleek iPhone against rustic accessories, you’ll like the Driftwood iPhone Charging Dock from UncommonGoods. ?Each piece is made from actual driftwood collected in Maine, so no two docks will be the same. ?Woods used in these docks include pine, oak, ash, maple, or cedar. ?They are hand-crafted to [...]
ALMA exposes hidden star factories in the early universePublic release date: 13-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Daniel Stolte stolte@email.arizona.edu 520-626-4402 University of Arizona
Using entire galaxies as gigantic gravitational lenses, UA astronomers have obtained new measurements of some of the oldest galaxies in the universe
Some of the brightest galaxies in the universe infant galaxies that churned out tens of thousands of stars each year at the dawn of the universe evolved much sooner and in greater numbers than previously thought, according to new measurements obtained by University of Arizona astronomers.
The results are published in a set of papers to appear in the journal Nature on March 14 and in the Astrophysical Journal. The research is the most recent example of the discoveries coming from the new international ALMA observatory, which celebrates its inauguration today. ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is an array of 66 radio telescopes located in the dry and cloudless Atacama Desert in Chile.
The most intense bursts of star birth are thought to have occurred in the early universe, in massive, bright galaxies. These starburst galaxies used to convert vast reservoirs of cosmic gas and dust into new stars at a furious pace many hundreds of times faster than in stately spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. By looking far into space, at galaxies so distant that their light has taken many billions of years to reach us, astronomers can observe this busy period in the universe's youth.
"Even though these galaxies are among the brightest objects in the universe, they are very hard to see with telescopes that detect visible light, such as the Hubble Space Telescope," said Dan Marrone, an assistant professor at the UA's Steward Observatory and a leading author on the publications. The reason, Marrone explained, is that these young galaxies are enshrouded in thick clouds of dust. "Instead, we use ALMA to look for them in light coming from the dust itself. To ALMA, these are some of the brightest objects in the sky outside our own galaxy."
The international team of researchers first discovered these distant and enigmatic starburst galaxies with the National Science Foundation's 10-meter South Pole Telescope and then used ALMA to zoom in on them to explore the stellar baby boom in the young universe. They were surprised to find that many of these distant dusty star-forming galaxies are even farther away than expected. This means that, on average, their bursts of star birth took place 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just under 2 billion years old a full billion years earlier than previously thought.
Two of these galaxies are the most distant of their kind ever seen so distant that their light began its journey when the universe was only 1 billion years old. One of them appears to host the most intense burst of star formation that has ever been seen. Water molecules are also detected in that same galaxy, marking the most distant observations of water in the cosmos published to date.
The team used the unrivalled sensitivity of ALMA to capture light from 26 of these galaxies at wavelengths of around three millimeters. Molecules of carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas that is also the second most abundant molecule in the universe, are created in the star-forming gas in these galaxies and emit light at certain specific wavelengths. These wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of the universe over the billions of years that it takes the light to reach us. By measuring the stretched wavelengths, astronomers can calculate how long the light's journey has taken, and place each galaxy at the right point in cosmic history.
"The sensitivity of ALMA allowed us to do in a few minutes per galaxy what used to require hours or even multiple nights," said Joaquin Vieira, postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and lead author on the Nature paper.
The astronomers were using only a partial array of 16 of ALMA's 66 giant antennas, as the observatory was still under construction at an altitude of 5,000 meters on the remote Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. When complete, ALMA will be even more sensitive, and will be able to detect even fainter galaxies.
For now, the team targeted the brighter ones. It took advantage of a helping hand from nature, too: using gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, where light from a distant galaxy is distorted by the gravitational influence of a nearer foreground galaxy, which acts like a lens and makes the distant source appear brighter.
"Gravitational lensing causes the light from the distant galaxies to trace out a large, magnified circle around the lensing galaxy," explained UA astronomy graduate student and coauthor Justin Spilker, who has been analyzing the ALMA data and helped create the images revealing the galaxies' structure.
"This makes them much easier to see, and we use our understanding of gravity to take out the effect of the lensing and recreate the structure of the distant galaxy. The mass of these distant galaxies provides us with natural telescopes to view objects even further away."
Analysis of the distortion reveals that some of the distant star-forming galaxies are as bright as 40 trillion (40 million million) suns, and that gravitational lensing has magnified this by up to 22 times.
Marrone, who is the principal investigator of the gravitational lensing portion of the project, explained that because only those super-distant galaxies can be discovered that happen to lie in perfect alignment with another galaxy that can act as a lens and the Earth, it is likely that they are much more abundant than previously thought.
"It has been thrilling to be among the first to use ALMA to study the very early universe," added Spilker. "We are now trying to use the molecules we see to explain how and why these galaxies were so active, so soon after the Big Bang."
###
The research is described in the paper "Dusty starburst galaxies in the early Universe as revealed by gravitational lensing", by J. Vieira et al., in the journal Nature. The work to measure the distances to the galaxies is described in the paper "ALMA redshifts of millimeter-selected galaxies from the SPT survey: The redshift distribution of dusty starforming galaxies", by A. Weiss et al., in the Astrophysical Journal. The study of the gravitational lensing is described in the paper "ALMA observations of strongly lensed dusty starforming galaxies", by Y. Hezaveh et al., also in the Astrophysical Journal.
About ALMA:
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National
Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA
Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ALMA exposes hidden star factories in the early universePublic release date: 13-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Daniel Stolte stolte@email.arizona.edu 520-626-4402 University of Arizona
Using entire galaxies as gigantic gravitational lenses, UA astronomers have obtained new measurements of some of the oldest galaxies in the universe
Some of the brightest galaxies in the universe infant galaxies that churned out tens of thousands of stars each year at the dawn of the universe evolved much sooner and in greater numbers than previously thought, according to new measurements obtained by University of Arizona astronomers.
The results are published in a set of papers to appear in the journal Nature on March 14 and in the Astrophysical Journal. The research is the most recent example of the discoveries coming from the new international ALMA observatory, which celebrates its inauguration today. ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is an array of 66 radio telescopes located in the dry and cloudless Atacama Desert in Chile.
The most intense bursts of star birth are thought to have occurred in the early universe, in massive, bright galaxies. These starburst galaxies used to convert vast reservoirs of cosmic gas and dust into new stars at a furious pace many hundreds of times faster than in stately spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. By looking far into space, at galaxies so distant that their light has taken many billions of years to reach us, astronomers can observe this busy period in the universe's youth.
"Even though these galaxies are among the brightest objects in the universe, they are very hard to see with telescopes that detect visible light, such as the Hubble Space Telescope," said Dan Marrone, an assistant professor at the UA's Steward Observatory and a leading author on the publications. The reason, Marrone explained, is that these young galaxies are enshrouded in thick clouds of dust. "Instead, we use ALMA to look for them in light coming from the dust itself. To ALMA, these are some of the brightest objects in the sky outside our own galaxy."
The international team of researchers first discovered these distant and enigmatic starburst galaxies with the National Science Foundation's 10-meter South Pole Telescope and then used ALMA to zoom in on them to explore the stellar baby boom in the young universe. They were surprised to find that many of these distant dusty star-forming galaxies are even farther away than expected. This means that, on average, their bursts of star birth took place 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just under 2 billion years old a full billion years earlier than previously thought.
Two of these galaxies are the most distant of their kind ever seen so distant that their light began its journey when the universe was only 1 billion years old. One of them appears to host the most intense burst of star formation that has ever been seen. Water molecules are also detected in that same galaxy, marking the most distant observations of water in the cosmos published to date.
The team used the unrivalled sensitivity of ALMA to capture light from 26 of these galaxies at wavelengths of around three millimeters. Molecules of carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas that is also the second most abundant molecule in the universe, are created in the star-forming gas in these galaxies and emit light at certain specific wavelengths. These wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of the universe over the billions of years that it takes the light to reach us. By measuring the stretched wavelengths, astronomers can calculate how long the light's journey has taken, and place each galaxy at the right point in cosmic history.
"The sensitivity of ALMA allowed us to do in a few minutes per galaxy what used to require hours or even multiple nights," said Joaquin Vieira, postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and lead author on the Nature paper.
The astronomers were using only a partial array of 16 of ALMA's 66 giant antennas, as the observatory was still under construction at an altitude of 5,000 meters on the remote Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. When complete, ALMA will be even more sensitive, and will be able to detect even fainter galaxies.
For now, the team targeted the brighter ones. It took advantage of a helping hand from nature, too: using gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, where light from a distant galaxy is distorted by the gravitational influence of a nearer foreground galaxy, which acts like a lens and makes the distant source appear brighter.
"Gravitational lensing causes the light from the distant galaxies to trace out a large, magnified circle around the lensing galaxy," explained UA astronomy graduate student and coauthor Justin Spilker, who has been analyzing the ALMA data and helped create the images revealing the galaxies' structure.
"This makes them much easier to see, and we use our understanding of gravity to take out the effect of the lensing and recreate the structure of the distant galaxy. The mass of these distant galaxies provides us with natural telescopes to view objects even further away."
Analysis of the distortion reveals that some of the distant star-forming galaxies are as bright as 40 trillion (40 million million) suns, and that gravitational lensing has magnified this by up to 22 times.
Marrone, who is the principal investigator of the gravitational lensing portion of the project, explained that because only those super-distant galaxies can be discovered that happen to lie in perfect alignment with another galaxy that can act as a lens and the Earth, it is likely that they are much more abundant than previously thought.
"It has been thrilling to be among the first to use ALMA to study the very early universe," added Spilker. "We are now trying to use the molecules we see to explain how and why these galaxies were so active, so soon after the Big Bang."
###
The research is described in the paper "Dusty starburst galaxies in the early Universe as revealed by gravitational lensing", by J. Vieira et al., in the journal Nature. The work to measure the distances to the galaxies is described in the paper "ALMA redshifts of millimeter-selected galaxies from the SPT survey: The redshift distribution of dusty starforming galaxies", by A. Weiss et al., in the Astrophysical Journal. The study of the gravitational lensing is described in the paper "ALMA observations of strongly lensed dusty starforming galaxies", by Y. Hezaveh et al., also in the Astrophysical Journal.
About ALMA:
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National
Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA
Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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Netflix has a vested interest in fostering cloud computing -- after all, that's increasingly the company's core business. Accordingly, it's not going to just sit around and wait for a breakthrough. The subscription service is kicking off its Netflix Cloud Prize competition in the hopes that developers can move technology a little faster. Programmers who build upon Netflix's open-source code before September 15th can win from a pool of $100,000 spread equally among 10 categories, ranging from performance improvements to what has to be our automatic favorite: "best new monkey." Each winner also gets $5,000 in Amazon Web Services credit, flights to Las Vegas and a spot at Amazon's user conference this November. The challenge won't completely make up for the end to Netflix's public API, but it does show that at least some tinkerers are welcome in the streaming video giant's world.
Eater Atlanta is reporting that the Top Chef behind the Spence, Flip, and HD1, and the new cookbook, ?Try This At Home, has put a bid on a house in the East Bay area.
Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Powder drilled out of a rock on Mars contains the best evidence yet that the Red Planet could have supported living microbes billions of years ago, the team behind NASA's Curiosity rover said Tuesday.
"I think this is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we have described and recorded," said David Blake, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is the principal investigator for Curiosity's CheMin lab.
The findings are in line with what the scientists hoped to find when they sent the 1-ton, six-wheeled laboratory to Mars' Gale Crater. "It wasn't serendipity that got us here. It was the result of planning," Caltech's John Grotzinger, the $2.5 billion mission's project scientist, told reporters at NASA Headquarters in Washington on Tuesday.
Serendipity did, however, play a part in being able to find the evidence so soon, he said. Curiosity's handlers had planned to have the rover head for a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the middle of the crater. But when the rover landed, the science team decided to send Curiosity on a detour to a geologically interesting area in the opposite direction, nicknamed Yellowknife Bay. Preliminary readings showed that the area had been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times.
Last month, the rover finally got a chance to drill into a Martian rock that was named John Klein, after a member of the mission team who died in 2011. Curiosity fed tablespoons of the ground-up gray powder into its two onboard chemical labs: CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars). The results were announced at Tuesday's news briefing.
Scientists said the powder contained the elemental ingredients of life ? including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen,?oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. More significantly, they found that clay minerals made up at least 20 percent of the sample. On Earth, these clays are produced when relatively fresh water reacts with igneous minerals such as olivine. The scientists also found calcium sulfate, which suggested that the water had a neutral or mildly alkaline balance.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ames
A side-by-side comparison shows the X-ray diffraction patterns of two samples collected by Curiosity. The left side shows data from a sample collected from a drift of windblown dust, and the right side shows data from the powder drilled out of the John Klein rock. The John Klein readings show an abundance of phyllosilicate, a class of clay minerals called smectites that form by the action of relatively pure and neutral pH water on minerals.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / MSSS
The left image shows Wopmay rock in Endurance Crater, as studied by NASA's Opportunity rover. The right image shows Sheepbed in Yellowknife Bay, as studied by Curiosity. Scientists say both rocks were formed in the presence of water, but the water at Wopnay was highly acidic and salty, while the water at Sheepbed had a more neutral pH and lower salinity.
Earlier NASA missions had found evidence that?salty, acidic water was once present on Mars, but that extreme environment would have been challenging for today's Earth-type organisms. Curiosity's chemical analysis produced a different result: The water that was available during the formation of the rock at Yellowknife Bay, billions of years ago, could have supported the kind of life commonly found on Earth.
"We have found a habitable environment which is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around, and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," Grotzinger said.
The scientists said they were surprised to find a mixture of oxidized and non-oxidized chemicals, allowing for the type of chemistry that earthly microbes use to generate the energy they need for survival. This partial oxidation was first hinted at when the drill cuttings were revealed to be gray rather than red.
"The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for microorganisms," SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy said in a NASA news release.
NASA said another drilled sample would be used to help confirm the chemical findings for several of the trace gases that were analyzed by the SAM instrument.
The current plan calls for Curiosity to conduct experiments in the Yellowknife Bay for weeks or months longer, and then begin a roughly 6-mile (10-kilometer) drive to the big mountain, known as Mount Sharp or Aeolis Mons. Scientists will look for further evidence of ancient organic chemistry hidden in the mountain's many layers of rock.
The primary aim of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to find evidence of past habitability ? in particular,?organic carbon compounds that could have played a role in the chemistry of life billions of years ago. Grotzinger said Curiosity's scientists will focus on the systematic search for organic carbon now that they had "the issue of habitability in the bag."
NASA intends to follow up on Curiosity's findings with future Mars missions, including the $500 million MAVEN orbiter (due for launch this year), the $425 million InSight drill-equipped lander (set for 2016 launch) and another Curiosity-like rover that's scheduled to be sent out in 2020.?
More about Mars:
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
This story was originally published on Tue Mar 12, 2013 1:48 PM EDT
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Public release date: 13-Mar-2013
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