Nebula Ghost (Hanny’s Voorwerp)

SPACE WATCH
NASA – In this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, an unusual, ghostly green blob of gas appears to float near a neighboring spiral galaxy.

The bizarre object, dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (Hanny’s Object in Dutch), is the only visible part of a 300,000-light-year-long streamer of gas stretching around the galaxy, called IC 2947. The greenish Voorwerp is visible because a beam of light from the galaxy’s core illuminated it. This beam came from a quasar–a bright, energetic object powered by a black hole. The quasar may have turned off about 200,000 years ago.

This Hubble view uncovers a pocket of star clusters, the yellowish-orange area at the tip of Hanny’s Voorwerp. The star clusters are confined to an area that is a few thousand light- years wide. The youngest stars are a couple of million years old. The Voorwerp is the size of our Milky Way galaxy, and its bright green color is from glowing oxygen.

An interaction between IC 2947 and another galaxy about a billion years ago may have created Hanny’s Voorwerp and fueled the quasar. The Hubble image shows that IC 2947 has been disturbed, with complex dust patches, warped spiral arms, and regions of star formation around its core. These features suggest the aftermath of a galaxy merger. The bright spots in the central part of the galaxy are star-forming regions. The small, pinkish object to the lower right of IC 2397 is an edge-on spiral galaxy in the background.

The image was made by combining data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. The ACS exposures were taken April 12, 2010; the WFC3 data, April 4, 2010. more> http://tinyurl.com/4f3vzl4

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama) and the Galaxy Zoo Team

Urbee to Be First 3-D Printed Car

By Beth Stackpole – KOR EcoLogic’s hybrid vehicle stands out from the pack for reasons other than its futuristic tear-drop shape or promise to get up to 200 mpg on a hybrid electric/gasoline engine. The Urbee blazes new ground in that it’s the first automobile prototype with a body produced solely using a 3-D printer.

Autodesk’s Inventor CAD software and other digital prototyping tools are the starting point for the design process.  once the team was confident with the shape and aerodynamic drag, it was ready to build a physical prototype. It’s at this stage that technology really steals the show. Rather than using conventional forming technologies to create a prototype, KOR EcoLogic, in partnership with Stratasys, decided to produce the body panels for the prototype using Stratasys’ fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3-D printing process, which creates plastic parts by applying thermoplastics in layers from the bottom up. With this method, the Urbee team eliminates having to create any tooling or machining, and approach improves flexibility when a design change is required. more> http://tinyurl.com/4zjpojj

Rebuilding the world one pixel at a time

NSF – [VIDEO] Who says Rome wasn’t built in a day?

With the muscle of about 500 computers and 150,000 still images, Steve Seitz, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, and his colleagues have reconstructed many of Rome’s famous landmarks in just 21 hours.

“The idea behind “Rome in a Day”‘ is that we wanted to see how big of a city or model we could build from photos on the internet,” says Steve Seitz from the university’s graphics and imaging laboratory. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they’re rebuilding Rome pixel by pixel rather than brick by brick.

Calculations that once took months now take hours. “This is the largest 3-D reconstruction that anyone has ever tried,” explains Seitz. “It’s completely organic; it works just from any image set.” more> http://tinyurl.com/6b84eqr

Understanding the Credit Crisis

VIDEO 7:32/3:44

The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Part 1

Understanding the Credit Crisis – Part2

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The biggest threat to growth is public policy

By Jeremy Warner – One of the positives to emerge from the banking crisis was the way in which it galvanised countries across the globe into a common policy response. It seemed to work. A depression was averted.

Yet many of the lessons of the recession are already forgotten. There is a sense in which nothing has been resolved. A broad retreat into national solutions is everywhere to be seen.

On issues as diverse as what to do about resurgent inflation, bonuses, deficit reduction, destabilizing capital flows and trade imbalances, policy makers seem all at sea. Populism and delusion have come to dictate the debate in a manner which is almost bound to be destructive. more> http://tinyurl.com/4gomncr

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• Credit Crisis Leaves Economies Facing Risk of Default, WEF Says, Simon Kennedy, Bloomberg http://tinyurl.com/62jsan8