One shall never write articles about things one does not completely understand. But hey : isn’t this what 80% of bloggers do everyday ?

  I apologize for any misconception that may occur in this article. I am not even sure I would have understood everything would have the source been in French either…

  An international team of researchers including members from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and from Tokyo University published yesterday the discovery of a starbust galaxy (Monster Ginga in Japanese) that seems at least ten times bigger than usual starbust galaxies, earning the title of “Super Starbust Galaxy” (Cho Monster Ginga).The discovery has been published in the English magazine “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”, so why isn’t there any report of it on English language websites, pretty please ? (In fact, it seems the discovery has been announced since last July)

  The project, using the ASTE telescope to scan a deep-space area called Subaru/XMM Newton, already observed and registered about one thousand starbust galaxies. Starbust galaxies are really common at the begining of the Universe, between 9 and 12 billions years ago. They produced about 1000 stars a year (our Milky Way produces 2 or 3 stars a year). There is a possibility those starbust galaxies are the ancestors of more recents giant galaxies, the ones including a blackhole.

  They also discovered Orochi (named after Yamata no Orochi, the eight headed and eight tailed serpent of Japanese mythology) a galaxy located 11,8 billions light-years from Earth, and whose luminosity suggests it’s ten times more active than a classic starbust galaxy, with 10.000 stars (or more) produced each year.

  It seems that there is a giant galaxy between us and Orochi (9 billions light-years from us) and we can only see Orochi by gravitational lens effect. This effect could be the cause of the intensification of Orochi’s luminosity, and its real luminosity has stil to be calculated before we can be sure it really is a super-giant-monster-galaxy-of-doom.

  Source has detailed explanations about the researches led by each team in the research project + a bunch of illustrations.

Read More

  お久しぶりです。

  So what happened in Japan while I was job hunting ? Typhoon, earthquakes, baseball all-stars matchs… Nothing that really stands out from the ordinary.

  Furukawa Satoshi (Astro_Satoshi) is currently on the ISS, that’s no news either. But thanks to him, today the number of days spent by a Japanese in space has reached 494 : Japan became the third nation in the world in terms of “number of days spent in space” (the first and second ones being Russia and the USA, that are not fair-players with 20.760 days and 14.786 days respectively).

  Yay for Japan !

  The first Japanese in space was not a member of the army, nor a scientist, but a television reporter, Akiyama Toyohiro, who flied a Soyuz in 1990 to reach MIR. Astro_Satoshi is the 9th Japanese in space.

  OK, maybe not so deep…

  There is a Japanese astronaut in the ISS currently so the media are all “Hey look ! Space !”

  Furukawa Satoshi has got a twitter (and he’s called 「Astro_Satoshi」, isn’t that cool ?) and all the newspapers are reporting he tweeted (is this verb regular ? shall it go tweet, twot, twitten ?) he’s got space-drunk.

  He tweets everything in Japanese and in English, you can find him here.

  Thanks to his presence up there, we’re granted gorgeous pictures of the ISS transiting the Moon.

  Here from the Yomiuri :

  And here from the Mainichi :

  And the Yomiuri also have a film !