Milky Way Found to Exist on Outskirts of a Vast Supercluster of 100,000 Galaxies

Astronomers have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed "Laniakea," which means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian. This discovery clarifies the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local Universe.The Milky Way resides in the outskirts of the supercluster, whose extent has for the first time been carefully mapped using these new techniques. This so-called Laniakea Supercluster is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies.

This new study also clarifies the role of the Great Attractor, a gravitational focal point in intergalactic space that influences the motion of our Local Group of galaxies and other galaxy clusters.

Within the boundaries of the Laniakea Supercluster, galaxy motions are directed inward, in the same way that water streams follow descending paths toward a valley. The Great Attractor region is a large flat bottom gravitational valley with a sphere of attraction that extends across the Laniakea Supercluster.

"We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home," said lead researcher R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations."

Superclusters are among the largest structures in the known Universe. They are made up of groups, like our own Local Group, that contain dozens of galaxies, and massive clusters that contain hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments. Though these structures are interconnected, they have poorly defined boundaries.

To better refine cosmic mapmaking, the researchers are proposing a new way to evaluate these large-scale galaxy structures by examining their impact on the motions of galaxies. A galaxy between structures will be caught in a gravitational tug-of-war in which the balance of the gravitational forces from the surrounding large-scale structures determines the galaxy's motion.

By using the GBT and other radio telescopes to map the velocities of galaxies throughout our local Universe, the team was able to define the region of space where each supercluster dominates. "Green Bank Telescope observations have played a significant role in the research leading to this new understanding of the limits and relationships among a number of superclusters," said Tully.

The name Laniakea was suggested by Nawa'a Napoleon, an associate professor of Hawaiian Language and chair of the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Kapiolani Community College, a part of the University of Hawaii system. The name honors Polynesian navigators who used knowledge of the heavens to voyage across the immensity of the Pacific Ocean.

The GBT is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. Its location in the National Radio Quiet Zone and the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone protects the incredibly sensitive telescope from unwanted radio interference.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

A short video about Laniakea that gives the viewer a general sense of the structure of our home supercluster and of galaxy motions in the nearby universe is available at http://vimeo.com/104704518

Farthest Developing Galaxy Cluster Ever Found

In a random sky survey made in near-infrared light, Hubble found five tiny galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. They are among the brightest galaxies at that epoch and very young -- existing just 600 million years after the big bang.

"These galaxies formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly, when galaxies had just started to cluster together," said Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "The result confirms our theoretical understanding of the buildup of galaxy clusters. And, Hubble is just powerful enough to find the first examples of them at this distance."Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe, comprising hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. The developing cluster, or protocluster, is seen as it looked 13 billion years ago. Presumably, it has grown into one of today's massive galactic cities, comparable to the nearby Virgo cluster of more than 2,000 galaxies.

Trenti presented the results January 10 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Most galaxies in the universe reside in groups and clusters, and astronomers have probed many mature galactic cities in detail as far as 11 billion light-years away. Finding clusters in the early phases of construction has been challenging because they are rare, dim and widely scattered across the sky.

"We need to look in many different areas because the odds of finding something this rare are very small," said Trenti, who used Hubble's sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to pinpoint the cluster galaxies. "The search is hit and miss. Typically, a region has nothing, but if we hit the right spot, we can find multiple galaxies."

Hubble's observations demonstrate the progressive buildup of galaxies. They also provide further support for the hierarchical model of galaxy assembly, in which small objects accrete mass, or merge, to form bigger objects over a smooth and steady but dramatic process of collision and collection.

Because the distant, fledgling clusters are so dim, the team hunted for the systems' brightest galaxies. These galaxies act as billboards, advertising cluster construction zones. From computer simulations, the astronomers expect galaxies at early epochs to be clustered together. Because brightness correlates with mass, the most luminous galaxies pinpoint the location of developing clusters. These powerful light beacons live in deep wells of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up the underlying gravitational scaffolding for construction. The team expects many fainter galaxies that were not seen in these observations to inhabit the same neighborhood.

The five bright galaxies spotted by Hubble are about one-half to one-tenth the size of our Milky Way, yet are comparable in brightness. The galaxies are bright and massive because they are being fed large amounts of gas through mergers with other galaxies. The team's simulations show that the galaxies eventually will merge and form the brightest central galaxy in the cluster, a giant elliptical similar to the Virgo Cluster's M87.

The observations are part of the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies survey, which uses Hubble's WFC3 to search for the brightest galaxies around 13 billion years ago, when light from the first stars burned off a fog of cold hydrogen in a process called reionization.

The team estimated the distance to the newly found galaxies based on their colors, but the astronomers plan to follow up with spectroscopic observations, which measure the expansion of space. Those observations will help astronomers precisely calculate the cluster's distance and yield the velocities of the galaxies, which will show whether they are gravitationally bound to each other.

Kepler-22b: NASA confirms 'super-Earth' that could hold life

WASHINGTON: In another step toward finding Earth-like planets that may hold life, NASA said on Monday the Kepler space telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system.

French astronomers earlier this year confirmed the first rocky exoplanet to meet key requirements for sustaining life. But Kepler-22b, initially glimpsed in 2009, is the first the US space agency has been able to confirm.

Confirmation means that astronomers have seen it crossing in front of its star three times. But it doesn't mean that astronomers know whether life actually exists there, simply that the conditions are right.

Such planets have the right distance from their star to support water, plus a suitable temperature and atmosphere to support life.

"We have now got good planet confirmation with Kepler-22b," said Bill Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center.

"We are certain that it is in the habitable zone and if it has a surface, it ought to have a nice temperature," he told reporters.

Spinning around its star some 600 light years away, Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in class known as "super-Earths," and orbits its Sun-like star every 290 days.

Its near-surface temperature is presumed to be about 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). Scientists do not know, however, whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid.

The planet's first "transit," or star crossover, was captured shortly after NASA launched its Kepler spacecraft in March 2009.

NASA also announced that Kepler has uncovered 1,094 more potential planets, twice the number it previously had been tracking, according to research being presented at a conference in California this week.

Kepler is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, and cost the US space agency about $600 million.

It is equipped with the largest camera ever sent into space -- a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices -- and is expected to continue sending information back to Earth until at least November 2012.

Kepler is searching for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.

The latest confirmed exoplanet that could support life brings to three the total number confirmed by global astronomers.

In addition to French astronomers' confirmed finding of Gliese 581d in May, Swiss astronomers reported in August that another planet, HD 85512 b, about 36 light years away seemed to be in the habitable zone of its star.

However, those two planets are "orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our Sun," NASA said in a statement, noting that Kepler-22b "is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun."

"The Europeans have also been very active, actively working on confirming our candidates," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University.

"They have already confirmed two that are published and they have got another batch that are on the preprint servers so those will be, I'm sure, in the published literature soon," she added.

"So we are just thrilled about this. We need all telescopes observing these candidates so we can confirm as many as possible."

A total of 48 exoplanets and exomoons are potential habitable candidates, among a total of 2,326 possibilities that Kepler has identified so far.

New planet discovered in Trinary star system

New planet discovered in Trinary star system

Enlarge

A planet 6 times the mass of Earth orbits around the star Gliese 667 C, another member of a triple star system. Credit: ESO

Until recently, astronomers were highly skeptical of whether or not planets should be possible in multiple star systems. It was expected that the constantly varying gravitational force would eventually tug the planet out of orbit. But despite doubts, astronomers have found several planets in just such star systems. Recently, astronomers announced another, this time in the trinary star HD 132563.

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The detection of the new planet came as part of a larger study on the trinary star system spanning 10 years. The two main stars that comprise the system are both similar to the Sun in mass, although somewhat less prevalent in metals, and orbit each other at a distance of around 400 AU. The main star, HD 132563A is also itself, a binary. This fact was not previously recognized and also reported by the team, led by Silvano Desidera from the Astronomical Observatory in Padova, Italy.

The newly discovered planet orbits the secondary star in the system, HD 132563B. As with the binary component of the main star, the new planet was discovered spectroscopically. The planet is at least 1.3 times the mass of Jupiter, with an average distance from its parent star of 2.6 AU, and an moderately high eccentricity of 0.22.

The team also attempted to image the planet directly using adaptive optics from the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. While there was a hint in the glare of the star that may have been the planet in question, the team could not rule out that the detection was not an instrumental effect.

With the discovery of this new planet, the total number of discovered planets in multiple star systems lies at eight. while this is rather small numbers from which to draw firm conclusions, it appears that planets can be commonly found orbiting the more remote members of trinary star systems for good periods of time. On the shorter end, the stellar system is anticipated to be 1-3 billion years in aged, based on the amount of stellar activity and amount of lithium present in the star’s atmosphere (which decreases with time). However, fitting of the mass and luminosity onto isochrones suggest the stars may be as much as 5 billion years in age. In either situation, the planetary system is dynamically stable.

Also based on these eight systems, the team also suggests that planets existing around such far removed members of a multiple star system may be as common as planets around wide binaries, or even single stars.

Source: Universe Today

Does ET live on Goldilocks planet? How scientists spotted 'mysterious pulse of light' from direction of newly-discovered '2nd Earth' two years ago

An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged.

Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it.

A member of the Australian chapter of SETI, the organisation that looks for communication from distant planets, Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g.

The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered another planet in the system: Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.

Dr Bhathal's discovery had come just months before astronomers announced that they had found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star 20 light years away. This planet was called Gliese 581e.

When asked about his discovery at the time Dr Bhathal admitted he had been really excited about what he had possibly stumbled across.

He said: 'Whenever there’s a clear night, I go up to the observatory and do a run on some of the celestial objects. Looking at one of these objects, we found this signal.

'And you know, I got really excited with it. So next I had to analyse it. We have special software to analyse these signals, because when you look at celestial objects through the equipment we have, you also pick up a lot of noise.'

He went on: 'We found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing we’re looking for - a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing.'

For months after his discovery Dr Bhathal scanned the skies for a second signal to see whether it was just a glitch in his instrumentation but his search came to nothing.

But the discovery of Earth-like planets around Gliese 581 - both 581e and 581d, which was in the habitable zone - has also caught the public imagination.

Documentary-maker RDF and social-networking site Bebo used a radio telescope in Ukraine to send a powerful focused beam of information - 500 messages from the public in the form of radiowaves - to Gliese 581.

And the Australian science minister at the time organised 20,000 users of Twitter to send messages towards the distant solar system in the wake of the discoveries.
This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth

This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth. The four tiny planets in the background are the planets that have already been discovered. The closer, blue and green planet is 581G, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered

And Dr Steven Vogt who led the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz, today said that he was '100 per cent sure ' that there was life on the planet.

The planet lies in the star's 'Goldilocks zone' - the region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers.

The planet also appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could well be capable of life. Researchers say the findings suggest the universe is teeming with world like our own.

'If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby,'

'The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 per cent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.'
GLIESE 581g FACT FILE

* Diameter - 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth
* Mass - 3.1 and 4.3 times that of the Earth
* Average surface temperature - between -24F and 10F (-31C and -12C)
* Distance from the Earth - 20 light years or 118,000,000,000,000 miles
* Time needed to travel to Gliese 581g in a rocket travelling one tenth the speed of light, or 19,000 miles per second - 200 years
* One of six planets to orbit the star Gliese 581
* Length of year - 37 Earth days
* Gravity - similar or slightly higher than Earth
* Distance from its sun - around six million miles
* The planet orbits a red dwarf which is 50 times cooler and a third the size of our Sun
* Composition - rocky with liquid water and atmosphere.

He told Discovery News: 'Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it'.

The planet is so far away, spaceships travelling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make the journey. If a rocket was one day able to travel at a tenth of the speed of light, it would take 200 years to make the journey.

Planets orbiting distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. Instead, astronomers look for tell-tale gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit.

The findings come from 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The planet orbits a small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra. The planet, named Glieseg, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away - so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.

It takes just 37 days to orbit its sun which means its seasons last for just a few days. One side of the planet always faces its star and basks in perpetual daylight, while the other is in perpetual darkness.

The most suitable place for life or future human colonists would be in the 'grey' zone - the band between darkness and light that circles the planet.

'Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,' said Dr Vogt who reports the find in the Astrophysical Journal.

If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. It's gravity is likely to be similar - allowing a human astronaut to walk on the surface upright without difficulty.

More...

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'This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever,' Vogt said.
Gliese 581, the brightest object in this Nasa image from 2007, is only 20 light years from Earth and is one of our nearest neighbours

Gliese 581, the brightest object in this Nasa image from 2007, is only 20 light years from Earth and is one of our nearest neighbours

'If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface. Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life,' Vogt added.

Astronomers have now found six planets in orbit around Gliese 581 - the most discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system.

Like the solar system, the planets orbiting Gliese 581 have mostly circular orbits.

Two of its detected planets have previously been proposed as habitable planets. However they lie at the extremes of the Goldilocks Zone - one on the hot side, the other on the cold side.

Gliese 581g, in contrast, lies right in the middle.

The star has not been given a proper name. It appears in a catalogue of stars compiled by the German astronomer William Gliese where it has been given the reference number 581.

Astronomers name planets found orbiting stars with a letter.

The previous five planets found around Gliese 581 were named b to f, making the latest discovery Gliese 581g.

Its star is a red giant - a massive star near the end of its life. It is too dim to see in the night sky from Earth without a telescope.

Astronomers have found nearly 500 exoplanets - or planets outside our own solar system.

However, almost all are too big, made of gas instead of rock, too hot or too cold for life as we know it.
The orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system are compared to those of our own solar system

The orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system are compared to those of our own solar system. The Gliese 581 star has about 30% the mass of our sun, and the outermost planet is closer to its star than we are to the sun. The 4th planet, G, is a planet that could sustain life.

story from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316538/Gliese-581g-mystery-Scientist-spotted-mysterious-pulse-light-direction-newEarth-planet-year.html

Earth-sized UFOs Using our Sun as Star Gate

These huge spherical UFO's started appearing around January 18, 2010. They are on both the forward and rear images taken by NASA's Stereo Spacecraft in space. They appear to be moving as they are in different positions on many photos. Remember these are huge possibly at least the size of Earth. Further, if they were planets or some type of huge asteroid comets, they would already have been pulled into the sun by the strong gravity the sun produces as in the case of the recent comet.

Notice also that they are reflecting the suns light just like a metal constructed ship would do.

Our best guess is that these are huge planet sized spacecrafts either observing the sun, or could it be that official UFO disclosure is now happening through these NASA released videos and images. Either way, We await NASA's official explanation. Please help to share this with the world. This could finally be the evidence that NASA can't cover-up or ignore.

Could the recent comets heading into the Sun and now these huge UFO's be the signs spoken of in the bible? Luke Chapter 21 vs 5 - And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring.

Dr. Joseph B. Gurman, STEREO Project Scientist's Statement ... : What you're seeing is the difference between "beacon mode" (near realtime, heavily compressed, binned [I believe 512 x 512 or smaller]) images and normal playback telemetry images (2048 x 2048 native mode, less heavily but still lossily compressed).

Normally, we get most of each day covered by the near realtime, beacon mode data through the help of a variety of ground stations around the world (including some operated by radio amateurs).

So we have prompt information when space weather events have originated at the Sun. The full-resolution playback telemetry comes from dedicated periods of downlink ("station contacts") through NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). A single playback can last hours, and covers data from a day or more stored on one of the two spacecrafts' solid state recorders. Those data are then played back over the Internet to the mission operations center and the STEREO science center, and thence to the instrument teams' home institutions, where they are processed over the course of a day or so. Thus, in normal operations, the full-resolution images will be ~ three days behind real time. Newer images will be the lower-res, more highly compressed beacon mode images, and older images will have been replaced by the full-res, playback data.

On January 18, at ~ 21:47 UT, the "central data recorder" at DSN, that stores all the playback data from all the missions DSN supports, failed. A backup CDR took over, but apparently started working on data from January 10, instead of just the four previous hours, as designed. (The last I heard, the DSN engineers don't understand why, but it certainly sounds like a software issue.) For some reason, DSN is unable to reset a pointer and say, please start processing from this time instead of that time. So we, and all the other missions supported by DSN, are waiting for our playback data from January 18 and all following days. As soon as we get it, and the instrument teams have reformatted the telemetry into scientifically useful formats (that allow, for instance, making SECCHI EUVI data into images), we will post the images and other STEREO browse data in the normal places.

And no, I don't know why DSN designed such an inflexible CDR system. I suspect they may modify it after this experience.

Best,

Joe Gurman

(Dr.) Joseph B. Gurman
STEREO Project Scientist

References :

• Critiquekat - YouTube
• http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/

" This is quite simply brilliant evidence for all those who are still looking for some kind of evidential reassurance that we are not the only intelligent ones here on this Planet leave alone the possibilities of life on other planets in other worlds ... :)

We can now expect to see more of UFO Disclosure files and public media information being released on the subject of UFOs and Extraterrestrials shedding new light and understanding of the roots of creation itself, knowing our true spiritual unity with the divine !

Namaste Dear Ones ! "

Latest Update ... the spheres are still there ... Thank You Dave ... :)

Source :
http://psychedelicadventure.blogspot.com/2010/02/huge-ufos-spheres-orbiting-sun-nasa.html
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/

Space Junk Mess Getting Messier in Orbit

By Leonard David
SPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnist
posted: 23 February 2010
09:20 am ET

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month.

A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft.

Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).

ESA's Envisat tips the scales at 8 tons, with China's discarded rocket body weighing some 3.8 tons. A couple of tweaks of maneuvering propellant were used to nudge the large ESA spacecraft to a more comfortable miss distance.

But what if the two objects had tangled?

Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany.

It turns out, Klinkrad told SPACE.com, that 50 percent of all the close conjunctions that Envisat faces are due to the lethal leftovers from China's January 2007 anti-satellite test, as well as chunks of junk resulting from last year's smashup between an active U.S. Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos spacecraft.

Klinkrad joined several orbital debris experts that took part in the 33rd Annual Guidance and Control Conference organized by the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Astronautical Society. The five-day meeting began Feb. 5.

Avoidance maneuvers

Significant progress has been made by the U.S. and the international aerospace communities in recognizing the hazards of orbital debris, reported Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Johnson added that steps are being taken to reduce or eliminate the potential for the creation of new debris. However, "the future environment is expected to worsen without additional corrective measures," he noted.

During 2009, Johnson reported, five different NASA robotic spacecraft carried out collision avoidance maneuvers: a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-3), Cloudsat, Earth Observing Mission 1, Aqua, and Landsat 7. Also, the space shuttle and the International Space Station took collision avoidance actions, he said.

The worst thing that could happen, according to ESA's Klinkrad, is the International Space Station (ISS) receiving a fatal hit. The space station is currently home to five astronauts representing the U.S., Russia and Japan.

"A penetrating object hitting the ISS, and possibly causing a casualty onboard . . . I think that would be the most dramatic case we could have," Klinkrad suggested. Such an incident might turn public opinion against human spaceflight, he said.

Collaboration on the increase

One bit of good news in all this orbital riff-raff.

Due to last year's satellite crash between the Iridium and Cosmos spacecraft, Johnson explained that the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) of the U.S. Strategic Command now conducts conjunction assessments for all operational spacecraft in Earth orbit, regardless of ownership nationality.

"To be honest, a year ago, we couldn't even have hoped to have done this," Johnson told SPACE.com.

"It's really a consequence of the collision last year. People have been talking about this for years. But now we've made the commitment . . . that this is something that needs to be done and can be done relatively easily," Johnson said.

Klinkrad concurred. "The collaboration is getting even closer now," he said.

Duck or pluck?

Playing dodge ball with high-speed space debris is one tactic. But there is also a growing interest in removing the most troublesome objects — perhaps an annual quota of some sort.

Targeted would be specific inclination bands and altitude regimes, Klinkrad said. But prior to implementing debris remediation measures on a global scale, technical, operational, legal and economic problems must be overcome.

Klinkrad and NASA's Johnson provided a wearisome appraisal of the future.

Even with an immediate halt of launch activities, spacefaring nations will be dealing with an unstable low-Earth orbit environment in some altitude and inclination bands. This would be a consequence of about 20 catastrophic collisions within the next 200 years, the two orbital debris experts explained.

Some orbit altitudes already have critical mass concentrations that will trigger "collisional cascading" within a few decades, unless debris environment remediation measures are introduced.

The Kessler Syndrome

The idea of debris creating debris was put in motion by Donald Kessler, along with fellow NASA researcher, Burton Cour-Palais, back in 1978.

Their research suggested that, as the number of artificial satellites in Earth orbit increases, the probability of collisions between satellites also increases. Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth.

Now, decades later, that prophecy has been dubbed the Kessler Syndrome.

Kessler told SPACE.com that the disorder fits into much more complex natural laws that include the evolution of the solar system, as well as meteoroids, meteorites, and climate-changing asteroids.

Kessler is now an orbital debris and meteoroid consultant in Asheville, North Carolina.

"There is nothing complex about what is called the 'Kessler Syndrome' . . . it is just the way nature may have converted a disorderly group of orbiting rocks into an orderly solar system . . . although nature reminds us with a large asteroid or comet collision every few million years that it isn't quite finished yet.

"In the case of orbital debris, this collision process is just starting," Kessler explained.

Consequently, nobody should be surprised that as orbital debris models became more complex — and as more data is obtained — the same conclusion holds, Kessler said.

"The future debris environment will be dominated by fragments resulting from random collisions between objects in orbit, and that environment will continue to increase, even if we do not launch any new objects into orbit," Kessler concluded.

• Some of the Worst Space Debris Moments in History
• India Developing Anti-Satellite Spacecraft
• Video — The Expanding Danger of Space Junk

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999

Original Story: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/space-debris-getting-messier-100223.html