Satellite Rocket EXPLODES!

It is a disaster when a space shuttle/rocket crashes or dose not even make it into space. Millions of pounds are wasted. And many people have died in such crashes. The most recent was on Saturday, it was a Indian space rocket, the Geostationary Satellite launch vehicle(GSLV), carrying the GSAT-5P communications satellite. It exploded in the first stages of its flight. Luckily nobody was inside the rocket at the time. It is unknown what caused the explosion but investigations are underway.

A video of the rocket exploding

For the past few months a small team of astronomers from uplands community college have been on a mission to locate a new ellusive asteroid using are schools classes to the Faulks telescope project located in Hawaii and Australia. The study was tedious and extremely hard, we were hoping to get a deep space picture of it but after a lack of information about where in the image to find the asteroid, and bad weather anomalies over Hawaii and Australia we finally conceded defeat and a four and a half month project came to an end. We used a blinking method which means that we take several pictures of an area of space and we flash the pictures and see of we can see a correlation between the pictures but any disturbances like planes and asteroids which ruin the pictures.

Although this mission was a failure we hope to start a new one were we hope to discover something new in our galaxy or the next.
The next three are todays solar filter images of the same asteroid imaged yesterday:

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:07:00 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:12:05 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03



by Jordan Harris (Yr10) Badge Winner
(Editor)

[*Ed. Jordan also had the idea to take different colour pictures of the same area of sky, and see if the asteroid movement could be seen by layering the images, but, unfortunately, this did not reveal any more than the above pictures]

Dwarf galaxy eaten by neighbour!

Astronomers have noticed stellar streams around the galaxy M 63. They say this is a clear sign that the galaxy has digest a dwarf neighbour at some stage. Although this observation has also been made for distant galaxies. The findings are being written up in a astronomical journal.
They claim that it could shed light on the evolution of galaxies.As dwarf galaxies are digested by spiral galaxies, they form structures called stellar streams which are long strips of stars produced by the stretching action of tidal forces. Events like these have been observed in our immediate neighbors (the "local group" of galaxies) for over a decade.David Martínez-Delgado from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany carried out a survey of spiral galaxies at distances of up to 50 million light-years from Earth.He discovered the signs of spiral galaxies eating dwarfs (claiming that this was the first time this has been observed in galaxies beyond the "Local Group")Surprisingly, the research was done with the telescopes of amateur astronomers.For his observations, he used telescopes with apertures between 10cm and 50cm, equipped with CCD cameras. He now plan to use the data to test computer predictions of the frequency of features such as stellar streams.

Black hole blows big gas bubble

This is, hopefully, one of many astronomy articles. Each one will cover a recent event and ask a question (answer the question correctly and get a prize). Please enjoy…

A big gas bubble was produced by a small black hole. The fiery gas bubble was 1,000 light years across. The gas expanded due to powerful particle ‘jets’ released by the black hole. The observation was made in Chile by a very big telescope and by NASA’s Chandra space observatory. When a black hole swallows matter they are known to let of high amounts of energy, thus heating the gas ball.

Astronomers say that these particle jets where the biggest they had ever seen. Roberto Soria from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London said that “If the black hole were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball, each jet would extend from the Earth to beyond the orbit of Pluto”. They are surprised because the size of the black hole was small compared to others yet it produced these huge jets and a hot gas ball.

If any readers want to locate it, it is in the spiral galaxy NGC 7793. And finally, for the question. Are there any pictures of black holes? Thanks for reading. Check again for more articles and news!

What am I?

I am a lone wolf, or should you say traveller
Drifting from place to place
Every now and then I get a kick and a prod
Some call me a waste of space

I have many brothers and sisters
A key to a forgotten land
But just to let you know
I am bigger than a grain of sand

And as time goes by
I wonder, what am I?

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by Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner
(Editor)

Riddle by Jack Morgan, Yr9

What am I???

You can see my smiling face
But never see my dark side
I’m like a nocturnal animal
And at day I do hide
I can only be with you for 28 days
And then get replaced by something new
Scars on my face, big things have hit me
Now this is the question I ask to you…

What am I???

by Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner

Poem by James Roye, yr 9

Twas early in the solar system
And all through space
Nothing was living
There was no human race

When suddenly the sun exploded

Hydrogen and helium became their own odours
They formed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune too
The rocks stayed close to the sun and they grew

Earth, Mars, Mercury and even Venus
All the denser stuff settled down beneath us

The solar winds shoot out from the sun
And Earth’s magnetism protects us from the burn
Magnetic poles make an atmospheric force field
Pushing away the flares and giving us a shield

James Roye (Yr9)Badge Winner

Poem by Jack Morgan, Yr9

Big, old, big, old asteroid belt
How I wonder how it felt
Round and round our fiery sun
Wouldn't that be a lot of fun

Magnetic field, it's a powerful force
It made solar wind go off course
That's how Mars got fried
If we were there, we'd have died

When the Earth got hit it went-a-flying
But not the substence called iron
That is how the moon was made
Ever since then, it has stayed

That's the day the Earth was born!

Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner

Faulkes Telescope Tue 14 July, 2009 14:30 UTC

Around a few months ago, we (the astronomy group) got to use the Faulkes Telescope to get our own pictures of the universe. In the end…we were left with 3 pictures.

lc 5146: RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters

mgc 7686: H-alpha (hydrogen) filter

M15: RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters

To get these pictures, we did this:

First we chose which stars/galaxies/clusters we wanted to look at. This was done simply with Stellarium, which gave us the coordinates of what we wanted to look at. It also proved useful as we could also see what would and wouldn’t be visible on the day we used the telescope.
For the next part, we chose which out of the stars we wanted were best and then planned which order to photograph them. This was to save time when the telescope had to shift position between images. With Mr. Pert helping us, this was quickly done.
Finally we could use the telescope. For this, all we needed to do was input the coordinates of the star we wanted and wait for it to be photographed. When Mr.Pert had put in the coordinates, we got a live feed of the telescope moving. In the 30 min time frame, we got the 3 images you see above.
Overall, it was a fun experience that I learned a lot from. If I got the chance to do it again, I would.

by Connor Lynch (Yr10)
Badge Winner