Space cadets, save the date! July 14 is when New Horizons FINALLY reaches Pluto. - http://clapway.com/2015/06/30/save-the-date-july-14-nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-to-fly-by-pluto-234/

On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft will fly by Pluto after nearly a decade of travel. The space mission is expected to bring new findings about the mysterious dwarf planet’s atmosphere and its five moons.

July 14 New Horizons Spacecraft will visit former planet Pluto

Save the date, space enthusiasts as NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft flies by Pluto on July 14, 2015. The spacecraft will be making history after journeying 3.6 billion miles over the past 9 years. In January 2006, the spacecraft became the first launched in hopes of reaching the former planet. In two weeks, the dwarf planet will finally have a visitor as New Horizons hovers over 7,800 miles above Pluto’s icy surface around 7:49 a.m.

Though New Horizons will arrive on July 14, we won’t be privy to the first pictures of Pluto for a few days and it may even take months for all the data gathered to be compiled. However, what’s a couple of extra days when we’ve been waiting for nearly a decade for this moment?

The space mission will also reveal the first glimpses of Charon, one of Pluto’s moons. After flying by Pluto, the spacecraft will travel along to explore the Kuiper belt, the solar system that Pluto and other dwarf planets call home.

Remember When Pluto Was a Planet? New Horizons Does!

When New Horizons blasted off on 19 January 2006, it became the fastest space mission ever launched. The main target was to reach our farthest planet Pluto, which Clyde Tombaugh discovered in February 1930. However, only seven months after the spacecraft launched, its mission would be changed as Pluto was officially demoted from planet to dwarf planet.

The demotion came after heated debate in the astronomical community drew proposals regarding Pluto’s inclusion or exclusion as a planet. The proposals used the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a planet to rule out our beloved Pluto.

Though Pluto meets the first and second criterion of being a planet–it is a celestial body orbiting the Sun with a sufficient enough mass to assume a round shape–because of the third criterion, which specifies that the planet must clear the area around its orbit.

Alan Stern, leader of the New Horizons mission, was quoted as saying he was embarrassed that less than five percent of astronomers cast a vote in the debate. Regardless of the vote, Stern could take comfort in the fact that New Horizons had already launched and would not be called back.

What will the New Horizons Spacecraft Reveal about Pluto?

Scientists and researchers involved in the New Horizons mission aren’t completely positive about what the space probe will find on Pluto. However, plenty of possibilities are in orbit in the astronomical community as to what that spacecraft will reveal besides the icy terrain. Some theories include lakes of liquid neon, an equatorial mountain range, and massive cryogeysers.

With all the speculation, everyone is eagerly awaiting July 14 for whatever images and secrets the New Horizons mission may divulge about Pluto, which is still our favorite (dwarf) planet.

For more information on this exciting event in space exploration history, check out this bit from Exceed Internet:

Via: http://www.exceedinternet.org/pluto-new-horizons-satellite

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Save the Date: July 14 NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft to Fly By Pluto

U.S.: The Hubble Captures a Collision within the Galaxy - http://clapway.com/2015/05/29/u-s-the-hubble-captures-a-collision-within-the-galaxy-123/

Hubble is once again proving its worth. A brand new video shows as Hubble captures a collision at high speeds in the center of a black hole. The collision was so fast that astronomers actually missed it. It wasn’t until they pieced together a time-lapse of several frames that the Hubble had captured.

Hubble Captures a Collision within Black Hole Stream

The galaxy is about 260-million light years away from Earth and it’s the one that this supermassive black hole resides in. Eileen Meyer, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland was one of the scientists who witnessed the explosion. This collision was the first to be caught on film in an extragalactic jet. Scientists now have the opportunity to see how energy was produced by the collision because Hubble captures a collision of these objects.

When objects fall into a black hole they travel very fast, heating up and they begin to eject a plasma stream or extragalactic jet. However, it is hypothesized that if the movement of the matter falling in is uneven, it creates knots of matter within the plasma stream. The matter moves at different speeds, but all at more than the speed of light. It is believed that a fast knot rear-ended a slower one. These knots are usually ejected from gravitationally compact objects. It is rare for scientists to be able to observe the motion with optical telescopes.

Hubble Captures Images in Ultraviolet

The ultraviolet images from the Hubble captures a collision shows the heart of the M87 galaxy. The jet was seen blasting out in a rather clumpy and sloppy way. One of the knots changed its brightness and increased so much it had blasted ninety times more energy than the black hole has inside it. Scientists believe that another explanation for the collision could be a wandering cloud of gas drifting into the jet and being slammed by particles, which started heating up and pouring out high energy light.

Magnetic Fields Keep Jet Narrow

The magnetic fields that focus the jet compress and squeeze material into the beam, causing it to glow and travel at more than seven times the speed of light. These are theories as to what happened and what caused the explosion of brightness, but no one knows for sure. All is known that the Hubble captures an explosion that would have otherwise been missed by the naked eye and given astronomers something very exciting to study.

U.S.: The Hubble Captures a Collision within the Galaxy