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Archive for February 22nd, 2012

European students are among the regional winners in the YouTube Space Lab student science competition, co-sponsored by ESA. The ultimate winners will have their experiment performed on the International Space Station, live-streamed to a global audience.

Policy, solutions and funding for new initiatives: ESA is joining forces at two events with decision-makers, universities, industry and users to map how space services can contribute to emerging challenges in the Arctic. At the forefront are climate change, transport safety and security, and sustainable exploitation.

This artist’s impression shows a binary system containing a stellar-mass black hole called IGR J17091-3624, or IGR J17091 for short. The strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, is pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk. New observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory clocked the fastest wind ever seen blowing off a disk around this stellar-mass black hole. Stellar-mass black holes are born when extremely massive stars collapse and typically weigh between five and 10 times the mass of the Sun. The record-breaking wind is moving about twenty million miles per hour, or about three percent the speed of light. This is nearly ten times faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole, and matches some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes, objects millions or billions of times more massive. Another unanticipated finding is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be carrying away much more material than the black hole is capturing. The high speed for the wind was estimated from a spectrum made by Chandra in 2011. A spectrum shows how intense the X-rays are at different energies. Ions emit and absorb distinct features in spectra, which allow scientists to monitor them and their behavior. A Chandra spectrum of iron ions made two months earlier showed no evidence of the high-speed wind, meaning the wind likely turns on and off over time. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

NASA has signed its final contract option with InfoPro Corp. in Huntsville to continue engineering technicians and trades support services for the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center.