Obama and House Republicans Destroying US Space Destiny

In 2009 the American Public spend $25.3 Billion on Video Games.

Astronomers reacted with immediate dismay, fearing that the death of the Webb telescope could have the same dire impact on American astronomy that killing the Superconducting Supercollider, a giant particle accelerator in Texas, did in 1993 for American physics, sending leadership abroad.

Canceling the Webb telescope would “have a profound impact on astrophysics far into the future, threatening U.S. leadership in space science,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which would run the new telescope. “This is particularly disappointing at a time when the nation is struggling to inspire students to take up science and engineering,” he added.

US lawmakers vote to kill Hubble successor
(AFP) – 2 days ago

WASHINGTON — In a fresh blow to NASA's post-shuttle aspirations, key US lawmakers voted Thursday to kill off funding for the successor to the vastly successful space-gazing Hubble telescope.
The US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science approved by voice vote a yearly spending bill that includes no money for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The move -- spurred on by belt-tightening in cash-strapped Washington -- still requires the full committee's approval, the full House's approval, the Senate's approval, and ultimately President Barack Obama's signature.
But the relatively mild dissents in the committee, which said in a terse statement this week that the project "is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management," suggests the JWST faces an uphill fight to survive.
The vote struck a blow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's goals with the space shuttle program about to end after 30 years, and Obama's decision to axe a new plan to return astronauts to the moon.
NASA plans to lay out a budget that "will allow us to launch the Webb telescope in this decade," deputy administrator Lori Garver told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"We will be working with Congress to assure them we can manage this program and develop the most amazing space telescope," she said, calling the JWST "a perfect example of reviewing the unknown and reaching for new heights."
In February, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told lawmakers the JWST had careened billions of dollars over budget.
Initial estimates put the cost of the telescope, designed to help the hunt for knowledge about early galaxies in the universe, at $1.6 billion, but now the total price tag has ballooned to $6.5 billion, he said.

AMAZING HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS

Forgot How a Star Is Formed?

Click Photo to Enlarge and View in Awe!

The new image, captured earlier this year by Hubble's brand-new Wide Field Camera 3, shows a cosmic pillar of gas and dust piled high in the Carina Nebula.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina, it shows a craggy mountaintop that is enshrouded by wispy clouds which would not look out of place in JRR Tolkien's epic fantasy or even a Dr Seuss book.

It captures in amazing detail the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

Nasa scientists say the scorching radiation and streams of charged particles from super-hot newborn stars shape and compress the pillar, which in turn causes more new stars to form within it.

They say the colours in the image reflect the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulphur (red).

The image was captured in February but released on Friday by the agency to mark the Hubble’s anniversary after it launched into space on April 24 1990 from the shuttle Discovery. -Telegraph
___________________________

How a Star Is Formed

A star is formed out of cloud of cool, dense molecular gas. In order for it to become a potential star, the cloud needs to collapse and increase in density.

There are two common ways this can happen: it can either collide with another dense molecular cloud or it can be near enough to encounter the pressure caused by a giant supernova. Several stars can be born at once with the collision of two galaxies. In both cases, heat is needed to fuel this reaction, which comes from the mutual gravity pulling all the material inward.

What happens next is dependent upon the size of the newborn star; called a protostar. Small protostars will never have enough energy to become anything but a brown dwarf (think of a really massive Jupiter). A brown dwarf is sub-stellar object that cannot maintain high enough temperatures to perpetuate hydrogen fusion to helium. Some brown dwarfs can technically be called stars depending upon their chemical composition, but the end result is the same; it will cool slowly over billions of years to become the background temperature of the universe.

Medium to large protostars can take one of two paths depending upon their size: if they are smaller than the sun, they undergo a proton-proton chain reaction to convert hydrogen to helium. If they are larger than the sun, they undergo a carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle to convert hydrogen to helium. The difference is the amount of heat involved. The CNO cycle happens at a much, much higher temperature than the p-p chain cycle.
Whatever the route – a new star has formed.

The life cycle of a star is dependent upon how quickly it consumes hydrogen. For example, small, red dwarf stars can last hundreds of billions of years, while large supergiants can consume most of their hydrogen with a comparably short few million years. Once the star has consumed most of its hydrogen, it has reached its mature state. This is how a star forms.

-Universe Today

Placing Things in Perspective