NASA Links
Black hole games and
information:
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/blackhole/
News from NASA
We have a great new game on the Space Place web
site -- I know that you will enjoy it! Please try it out -- see URL below --
and consider helping us get out the word via your organization's newsletter
and/or web site.
I have attached a blurb on the game. Feel free to use it.
Black Hole Rescue!
Nearby matter is not the only thing attracted by a black hole. These mysterious
objects also attract a great deal of curiosity from kids here on Earth. Taking
advantage of this interest, NASA’s Web site for kids, The Space Place, has just
added a new game called “Black Hole Rescue!” After (or before) reading a short,
illustrated article introducing black hole concepts, game players “rescue” the
vocabulary words, one letter at a time, before they get sucked into the black
hole. After playing this mesmerizing game for a while, kids of all ages will
not soon forget what black holes are all about. http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/blackhole/
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Thank you all, for everything you do!
Trent Wells
APT, Space Place
Phone: 818-393-5936
Fax: 818-354-9068
___________________________
Voices from the Cacophony
By Trudy E. Bell and Dr. Tony Phillips
The
article’s accompanying image can be found at:
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/astro_clubs/bigbang.jpg
Around 2015, NASA and the European Space Agency plan to launch one of the
biggest and most exacting space experiments ever flown: LISA, the Laser
Interferometer Space Antenna.
LISA will consist of three spacecraft flying in a triangular formation behind
Earth. Each spacecraft will beam a laser at the other two, continuously
measuring their mutual separation. The spacecraft will be a mind-boggling 5
million kilometers apart (12 times the Earth-Moon distance) yet they will
monitor their mutual separation to one billionth of a centimeter, smaller than
an atom’s diameter.
LISA’s mission is to detect gravitational waves—ripples in space-time caused by
the Universe’s most violent events: galaxies colliding with other galaxies,
supermassive black holes gobbling each other, and even echoes still ricocheting
from the Big Bang that created the Universe. By studying the shape, frequency,
and timing of gravitational waves, astronomers believe they can learn what’s
happening deep inside these acts of celestial violence.
The problem is, no one has ever directly detected gravitational waves: they’re
still a theoretical prediction. So no one truly knows what they “sound” like.
Furthermore, theorists expect the Universe to be booming with thousands of
sources of gravitational waves. Unlike a regular telescope that can point to one
part of the sky at a time, LISA receives gravitational waves from many
directions at once. It’s a cacophony. Astronomers must figure how to
distinguish one signal from another. An outburst is detected! Was it caused by
two neutron stars colliding over here or a pair of supermassive black holes
tearing each other apart in colliding galaxies over there?
“It’s a profound data-analysis problem that ground-based astronomers don’t
encounter,” says E. Sterl Phinney, professor of theoretical physics at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Profound, but not hopeless: “We have lots of good ideas and plans that work—in
theory,” he says. “The goal now is to prove that they actually work under real
conditions, and to make sure we haven't forgotten something.”
To that end, theorists and instrument-designers have been spending time together
brainstorming, testing ideas, scrutinizing plans, figuring out how they’ll pluck
individual voices from the cacophony. And they’re making progress on computer
codes to do the job.
Says Bonny Schumaker, a member of the LISA team at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory: “It's a challenge more than a problem, and in fact, when overcome,
a gift of information from the universe.”
For more info about LISA, see lisa.nasa.gov . Kids can learn about black holes
and play the new “Black Hole Rescue!” game on The Space Place Web site at
spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/blackhole .
This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute
of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration.
Caption:
LISA will be able to detect gravitational waves from as far back as 10-36 second
after the Big Bang, far earlier than any telescope can detect.
