Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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23 posts tagged Hubble
Hubble to Use Moon as Mirror to See Venus Transit |
This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn’t aim NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun’s face on June 5-6.
Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at Earth’s moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus’s atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet’s atmospheric makeup.
These observations will mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars. In the case of the Venus transit observations, astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus’s atmosphere, and that it does not show signs of life on the planet. But the Venus transit will be used to test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earth-like planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star. Venus is an excellent proxy because it is similar in size and mass to our planet.
The astronomers will use an arsenal of Hubble instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, to view the transit in a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. During the transit, Hubble will snap images and perform spectroscopy, dividing the sunlight into its constituent colors, which could yield information about the makeup of Venus’s atmosphere. continue reading
Hubble Images Searchlight Beams from a Preplanetary Nebula |
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been at the cutting edge of research into what happens to stars like our sun at the ends of their lives. One stage that stars pass through as they run out of nuclear fuel is called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage. A new Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief but dramatic phase in a star’s life.
The preplanetary nebula phase is a short period in the cycle of stellar evolution, and has nothing to do with planets. Over a few thousand years, the hot remains of the aging star in the center of the nebula heat it up, excite the gas, and make it glow as a subsequent planetary nebula. The short lifespan of preplanetary nebulae means there are relatively few of them in existence at any one time. Moreover, they are very dim, requiring powerful telescopes to be seen. This combination of rarity and faintness means they were only discovered comparatively recently. The Egg Nebula, the first to be discovered, was first spotted less than 40 years ago, and many aspects of this class of object remain shrouded in mystery.
At the center of this image, and hidden in a thick cloud of dust, is the nebula’s central star. While we can’t see the star directly, four searchlight beams of light coming from it shine out through the nebula. It is thought that ring-shaped holes in the thick cocoon of dust, carved by jets coming from the star, let the beams of light emerge through the otherwise opaque cloud. The precise mechanism by which stellar jets produce these holes is not known for certain, but one possible explanation is that a binary star system, rather than a single star, exists at the center of the nebula. continue reading
Uranus Auroras Glimpsed from Earth |
For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots — a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth’s poles.
In the new observations, which are the first to glimpse the Uranian aurora with an Earth-based telescope, the researchers detected the luminous spots twice on the dayside of Uranus — the side that’s visible from Hubble. Previously, the distant aurora had only been measured using instruments on a passing spacecraft. Unlike auroras on Earth, which can turn the sky greens and purples for hours, the newly detected auroras on Uranus appeared to only last a couple minutes.
In general, auroras are a feature of the magnetosphere, the area surrounding a planet that is controlled by its magnetic field and shaped by the solar wind, a steady flow of charged particles emanating from the sun. Auroras are produced in the atmosphere as charged solar wind particles accelerate in the magnetosphere and are guided by the magnetic field close to the magnetic poles — that’s why the Earthly auroras are found around high latitudes. continue reading
Quasars Acting as Gravitational Lenses |
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found several examples of galaxies containing quasars, which act as gravitational lenses, amplifying and distorting images of galaxies aligned behind them.
Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, far outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes.
To find these rare cases of galaxy-quasar combinations acting as lenses, a team of astronomers led by Frederic Courbin at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) selected 23,000 quasar spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). They looked for the spectral imprint of galaxies at much greater distances that happened to align with foreground galaxies. Once candidates were identified, Hubble’s sharp view was used to look for gravitational arcs and rings (which are indicated by the arrows in these three Hubble photos) that would be produced by gravitational lensing. continue reading
Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet |
Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.
An international team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b.
“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” Berta said. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”
The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA’s David Charbonneau, discovered GJ 1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometres, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius. continue reading
Wreck Between Massive Clusters of Galaxies Leaves Dark Matter Core, Defies Explanation |
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Telescope have observed what appears to be a clump of dark matter left behind from a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies. The result could challenge current theories about dark matter that predict galaxies should be anchored to the invisible substance even during the shock of a collision.
Abell 520 is a gigantic merger of galaxy clusters located 2.4 billion light-years away. Dark matter is not visible, although its presence and distribution is found indirectly through its effects. Dark matter can act like a magnifying glass, bending and distorting light from galaxies and clusters behind it. Astronomers can use this effect, called gravitational lensing, to infer the presence of dark matter in massive galaxy clusters.
This technique revealed the dark matter in Abell 520 had collected into a “dark core,” containing far fewer galaxies than would be expected if the dark matter and galaxies were anchored together. Most of the galaxies apparently have sailed far away from the collision.
“This result is a puzzle,” said astronomer James Jee of the University of California in Davis, lead author of paper about the results available online in The Astrophysical Journal. “Dark matter is not behaving as predicted, and it’s not obviously clear what is going on. It is difficult to explain this Hubble observation with the current theories of galaxy formation and dark matter.” continue reading
Sheep in Wolf-Rayet’s Clothing: New Image of Planetary Nebula Hen 3-1333 |
It’s well known that the universe is changeable: even the stars that appear static and predictable every night are subject to change.
A new image from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows planetary nebula Hen 3-1333. Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets — they actually represent the death throes of mid-sized stars like the sun. As they puff out their outer layers, large, irregular globes of glowing gas expand around them, which appeared planet-like through the small telescopes that were used by their first discoverers.
The star at the heart of Hen 3-1333 is thought to have a mass of around 60% that of the sun, but unlike the sun, its apparent brightness varies substantially over time. Astronomers believe this variability is caused by a disc of dust which lies almost edge-on when viewed from Earth, which periodically obscures the star. continue reading
Rare Ultra-Blue Stars Found in Neighboring Galaxy’s Hub |
Peering deep inside the hub of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a large, rare population of hot, bright stars.
Blue is typically an indicator of hot, young stars. In this case, however, the stellar oddities are aging, Sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely blue-hot cores.
Astronomers were surprised when they spotted these stars because physical models show that only an unusual type of old star can be as hot and as bright in ultraviolet light.
While Hubble has spied these ultra-blue stars before in Andromeda, the new observation covers a much broader area, revealing that these stellar misfits are scattered throughout the galaxy’s bustling center. Astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to find roughly 8,000 of the ultra-blue stars in a stellar census made in ultraviolet light, which traces the glow of the hottest stars. The study is part of the multi-year Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey to map stellar populations across the Andromeda galaxy.
“We were not looking for these stars. They stood out because they were bright in ultraviolet light and very different from the stars we expected to see,” said Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, leader of the Hubble survey. continue reading
