IT IS Big, EXTREMELY Big

ESO announce on the 26th of April the site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The chosen site will be Cerro Armazones is a mountain at an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,060 meters) in the central part of Chile’s Atacama Desert, and about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

The E-ELT will be 42 meters (138 feet) in diameter, which make it the biggest telescope on earth. Final approval is expected by the end of 2010 and first-light 2018. If you have seen the any of the specials on telescopes Like the one on the 200 Palomar telescope a few months back or the 2 Nova specials celebrating 400 years of the telescope. You will realize the achievement that the sucessful complete of this telescope and mirror will be. The mirror will be made up of 984 smaller segments.

Artist Concept of the Exterior

Artist Concept Telescope

Cerro Armazones, altitude of 10,000 feet

Spotted this on Astronomy.com

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How Small Is Too Small To Be A Star

Science Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Todorov and K. Luhman (Penn State University) Artwork Credit: Gemini Observatory, courtesy of L. Cook

Astronomy.com is running a story from scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory, they discovered a super small Brown dwarf and a companion planet 5 to 8 times the size of Jupiter at about the Saturn Uranus distance.

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Carl Sagan sings

Nice little piece I found on the Bad Astronomy Blog. This is a clever piece using Autotune.

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Site Down

When I rebooted the faintfuzzies server 10 days ago most everything was broken. It required a complete rebuild of the software and in Gentoo Linux parlance that means “emerge -eD world”. Or for you binary guys and dolls that is compiling every single package from scratch. That is the only way to know that here are not foul badies still in the system. When I took a look at my system for the first time with a rescues disk I discovered that every file/config in all directories with the exception of Var and Home had been deleted.

The weird thing was that all the directories trees were in place just the files were missing!! Go figure. This server has been working fine for a while, but I guess someone took offence to the changes I was making. Having completed the servers’ first security audit, I found number issues that needed to be address. So for a week prior to the failure, I’d been diligently attempting to plug all the holes.

Someone out there didn’t like me. I’ve been throughly going through my logs and there is some suspicious activity, however nothing yet that I can nail it down. But trust me if the server was hacked and the person was sloppy I’ll figure it out. Of course if they where very good there is a possibility I’ll never figure it out.

There is one possibility I’m intentionally ignoring… the culprit is me. ;-) As computer techs like to say, 99.99% of the time the problem lays between the seat and the keyboard. But in my defence I don’t even know a command in Linux that can delete files while leaving the directory tree in place.

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Could We Be Seeing The Birth Of a Star?

J Swift/NASA/JPL–Caltech/E Churchwell (University of Wisconsin) and James Clerk Maxwell Telescope/Joint Astronomy Centre.

J Swift/NASA/JPL–Caltech/E Churchwell (University of Wisconsin) and James Clerk Maxwell Telescope/Joint Astronomy Centre.

Astronomy Now, the UK astronomy magazine has an article on there website regarding the potential for a dark molecular cloud in a region of the Milkway called the Aquila Rift, giving birth to a large star as large as 8 times the mass of the sun.

“The mass and density of this object along with the lack of evidence for star formation is unique, and this fits very well with our expectations for massive pre-stellar cores,” says Swift. That said, theoretical models predict that star-formation could be kick-started and form massive stars in as little as 50,000 years. The radiation from massive stars can quickly destroy the environments in which they grow up, and this incredibly fast process (on galactic timescale anyway) means that finding dark cores is a rare occurrence. This just highlights how important this discovery in the Aquila Rift is to our understanding of the birth and evolution of the most enormous stars in the Universe.

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