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Mind-Blowing NASA Video Shows Motion of Stars

Hubble Helps Fast-Forward the Motion of Stars

By Dave Mosher

To human eyes, stars seem like some of the most unmoving objects in the universe. From the perspective of thousands of years, however, they swarm like bees.

The Hubble Space Telescope has helped bring to life such motion in 100,000 stars drifting around within a distant celestial blob called Omega Centauri, a globular cluster orbiting the Milky Way galaxy about 16,000 light-years from Earth.

To create the video above, Hubble took photos of Omega Centauri from 2002 to 2006. But the video doesn’t show that period. Instead, it’s a computer-powered projection of the next 10,000 years deduced from the snapshots.

“All of the stars in the cluster are orbiting around the center of the cluster, kind of like bees buzzing around a beehive,” said Jay Anderson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who helped model the stars’ motions. “If they weren’t moving then they would all fall into the center.”

Previous studies of the globular cluster — the brightest in the night sky — hinted that a massive black hole may be lurking at the center. But Roeland van der Marel, also an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who worked on the research, said the motions he and his team helped tease out tell a different story.

“The case for such a black hole is weaker than it was before,” van der Marel said. “If there is a black hole in the center of the cluster, it cannot be as massive as had been previously suggested.”



Video: The projected motions of stars over the next 10,000 years at the heart of the Omega Centauri globular cluster.

NASA/ESA/Jay Anderson and Roeland van der Marel/STScI

Image: A sample of the projected motions of Omega Centauri stars at the globular cluster’s core. Each streak is about 600 years’ worth of motion. The space between plotted dots represents about a 30-year gap.

NASA/ESA/Jay Anderson and Roeland van der Marel/STScI

“Sperm Comet” Recent Discovery to Treat Sperm Infertility

by Dinesh Chandra Gaur

The UK fertility experts have claimed to develop a simple test that allows couples to be fast-tracked to the treatment which is most likely to succeed against the conventional IVF treatments and protect them from the tough financial stress of repeated unsuccessful struggles with AVF.



Panos Lioulias, of Queen’s University Belfast’s business arm claimed that the Sperm Comet is the only available test that can support clinics to customize treatments as per the patient need hence, enhances the chance of success.

Most of the clinics evaluate the quality of a man’s sperm through the observation of simple parameters including shape, speed and concentration under the microscope. Whereas the recent test, developed by highly proficient fertility doctor Professor Sheena Lewis, is directed to check the sperms at a higher level, that checks tiny tears and even breaks in sperm’s DNA, said Panos Lioulias.

During the development process, it was observed that sperms observed with some damages in their genetic material are less likely to cause a pregnancy and even if a women conceives, she is expected to encounter miscarry.

Meanwhile, the Managing Director of Care Fertility, Britain's biggest private provider of IVF to NHS patients said: "I can understand why the NHS is bringing in this policy, but what must be hard for couples is seeing the man in the street who smokes 50 fags a day, and has six kids”.

Introducing the SpermComet^™

The SpermComet^™ looks just like a ‘comet’ in the sky. Here the tail of the SpermComet™ is the damaged DNA.  We can look at your sperm individually and measure any damage. This gives you a much more detailed result than other tests.

What do the results mean?

Using the Sperm Comet^™ test to diagnose male infertility

Under 25%:

Men have no detectable sperm DNA problems

Over 25%:

Men with sperm DNA damage have a high risk of infertility and are less likely to get their partners pregnant naturally.  If you fall into this group, you should seek a referral to a fertility clinic from your family doctor

Using the SpermComet^™ test to predict your success with fertility treatment

You can also use this test to determine your chances of success with fertility treatment. Fertility clinics will offer you three types of treatment.

26-49%:

men with sperm DNA damage between 26-49% have a high chance of success with IVF

Over 50%:

men with sperm DNA damage over 50% have a high risk of failure with IVF treatment.   If treatment is planned, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is more likely to be successful than IVF if sperm DNA damage is above this value.

The SpermComet™ test also gives information about the sperm prepared in the lab for ART  treatment

Over 40%:

men with DNA damage over 40% in sperm prepared for ART  have a high risk of failure with IVF treatment.   If treatment is planned, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is more likely to be successful than IVF if sperm DNA damage is above this value.

Hubble data used to look 10,000 years into the future

Astronomers are used to looking millions of years into the past. Now scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look thousands of years into the future. Looking at the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in the Milky Way, they have calculated how the stars there will move over the next 10 000 years.

The globular star cluster Omega Centauri has caught the attention of sky watchers ever since the early astronomer Ptolemy first catalogued it 2000 years ago. Ptolemy thought Omega Centauri was a single star and probably wouldn't have imagined that his "star" was actually a beehive swarm of nearly 10 million stars, all orbiting a common centre of gravity.

The stars are so tightly crammed together in the cluster that astronomers had to wait for the Hubble Space Telescope before they could look deep into the core of the "beehive" and resolve the individual stars. Hubble's vision is so sharp that it can even measure the motion of many of these stars, and over a relatively short span of time.

A precise measurement of star motions in giant clusters can yield insights into how such stellar groupings formed in the early Universe, and whether an intermediate-mass black hole, one roughly 10 000 times as massive as our Sun, might be lurking among the stars.

Analysing archived images taken over a four-year period by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers have made the most accurate measurements yet of the motions of more than 100 000 cluster inhabitants, the largest survey to date to study the movement of stars in any cluster.

"It takes sophisticated computer programs to measure the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur over a period of just four years," says astronomer Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA, who conducted the study with fellow Institute astronomer Roeland van der Marel. "Ultimately, though, it is Hubble's razor-sharp vision that is the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this cluster."

Van der Marel adds: "With Hubble, you can wait three or four years and detect the motions of the stars more accurately than if you were using a ground-based telescope and were waiting 50 years."

The astronomers used the Hubble images, which were taken in 2002 and 2006, to make a movie simulation of the frenzied motion of the cluster's stars. The movie shows the stars' projected migration over the next 10,000 years.

Identified as a globular star cluster in 1867, Omega Centauri is one of roughly 150 such clusters in the Milky Way. The behemoth stellar grouping is the biggest and brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way, and one of the few that can be seen by the unaided eye. Located in the constellation of Centaurus, Omega Centauri can be seen in the southern skies.

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Anderson and R. van der Marel (STScI)

See Also:

• Hubble Captures Surprising Star Motions
• Simulate Star Clusters with Second Life Mod
• Rogue Black Holes Could Careen Across Milky Way
• Hubble Captures Image of Strange Giant Galaxy
• Black Hole Found in Unexpected Place
• Galactic Supervolcano Erupts From Black Hole
• Supermassive Black Holes Formed by Colliding Primordial Galaxies

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