Sidewalk Astronomy at UNH

UPDATE, Nov. 3:

Unfortunately, Sidewalk Astronomy has been canceled for November 3 due to clouds.

UPDATE, Oct. 25:

Join the UNH Observatory for the final Sidewalk Astronomy session of the semester on November 3.

UPDATE, Oct. 7:

It was a beautiful night for Sidewalk Astronomy on October 6.

UPDATE, Sept. 8:

Sidewalk Astronomy is canceled for September 8 due to weather.

ORIGINAL STORY, Aug. 20:

During the fall semester, the University of New Hampshire Observatory is offering three Sidewalk Astronomy events on the streets of Durham.

From 8 to 10 p.m. on Thursday, September 8; Thursday, October 6; and Thursday, November 3, join observatory staff as they bring the skies to you at two different locations across town.

Eight-inch Meade telescopes will be stationed next to the Wildcat statue in front of the Whittemore Center and near the intersection of Main Street and Mill Road.

These events free and open to anyone interested in looking at the night sky. However, Sidewalk Astronomy is dependent on weather conditions and will not be held in the event of cloudy skies, rain, or snow.

Public sessions at the UNH Observatory are held every first and third Saturday of the month. Find out more at www.physics.unh.edu/observatory/ or follow the observatory on Facebook and Twitter.

Found: Distant Reservoir of Water

In a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth, astronomers have found the largest—not to mention the most distant—reservoir of water yet discovered in the universe. It is thought to contain 140 trillion times the amount of water in all our oceans.

Quasars, powered by black holes, are objects which emit massive amounts of energy. As the black hole feasts on a disk of gas and dust that surrounds it, called an accretion disk, the quasar spews out energy.

Also, quasars tend to dwell in the most distant edges of the universe. They have large red shifts, meaning that they are moving away from us due to the expansion of the universe. Therefore, they were created early on in the history of the universe. Astronomers are excited about this latest discovery which can indicate what conditions were like at the beginning of the universe.

The quasar, named APM 08279+5255, was found with the 33-foot Z-Spec telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, located near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Observations were initially made in 2008, and measurements showed a large amount of water vapor surrounding the quasar. According to a NASA news release, astronomers had expected to find water vapor in the distant reaches of the universe, but they simply had not detected it before.

An artist's concept of a quasar similar to APM 08279+5255 (Image: NASA)