Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Outer-Space Mysteries

An "impossible" star is born. And a hole in space shows what happens once a star is formed. Plus, an out-of-this world zombie! It's your Buzz space roundup.

How did that get there?
That's not the only unexplained mystery in space. That same Herschel infrared telescope also picked up an enormous hole in space. A story from Space.com has a scientist noting, and we quote, "No one has ever seen a hole like this." The surprising find is confounding scientists because it is so unexpected. When a star forms, it's surrounded by gas and dust. (See above.) But how a newborn star shakes off the space debris to emerge from its brith cloud hadn't been fully understood. Until now: Black patches near the stars were always around a reflective gas, NGC 1999.
Everyone figured the black patches near the star were gas, but the telescope would have picked up on that. Finally, scientists realized they were looking at a big, empty hole where the space dust used to be — possibly caused by some of the young stars puncturing a hole with the jets of gas. For researchers, this amazing discovery is a helpful step into understanding how a star is formed.

It wants to eat your satellite's brain
Finally, scientists have no idea how to stop a fully powered satellite that has gone rogue and is no longer accepting orders from earth. This so-called "zombie" satellite, known as Galaxy 15 (which carried the SyFy channel), continues along in the Earth's orbit — on a course to interfere with the communications of a fully functioning SES satellite beaming down programming to its customers in Luxembourg. We know, we know: We're just happy it's not us.

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