Date: January 30, 2010

Title: The Universe in 10 Minutes

Podcaster: Juan Guevara Torres – Host of TecnoCasters

Organization: TecnoCasters – http://www.tecnocasters.com/

Additional Links: Astronomy Picture of the Day app for the iPhone

Description: The TecnoCasters discuss several recent news items about astronomy and technology.

Bio: TecnoCasters is the best technology podcast in Spanish. Hosted by Juan D. Guevara, Pedro Riveroll, Lorena Galan and Raul Mitre, TecnoCasters offers a funny and friendly point of view about the gadgets and technology you’ll come across in your ordinary day.

Produced simultaneously in the US and Mexico, TecnoCasters is an international podcast, specially created for the Spanish speaking audience in the world and or for all of those who want to improve their Spanish speaking skills and love technology at the same time.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Physics Department at Eastern Illinois University: “Caring faculty guiding students through teaching and research” at www.eiu.edu/~physics/.

Transcript:

Hello everyone and welcome to this Episode of 365 days of Astronomy. My name is Juan Guevara Torres , Host of TecnoCasters – the best technology podcast En espanol and with me my co-hosts:

– Lorena Galan- You can Follow Lorena on Twitter at twitter.com/logalan
– Pedro Riveroll – / riverolla
– Raul Mitre /jrmitre
– JDGT / guevarajd

Hello Guys!

You can be in touch with us our website www.tecnocasters.com, via twitter twitter.com/tecnocasters

We are very happy and thrilled to be here with you guys. We want to thank Nancy Atkinson, Senior Editor of Universe Today and Producer of Astronomy Cast for letting TecnoCasters be a part of such a cool project like the 365 Days of Astronomy.
Astro-News – Raul Mitre:

– NASA’s finds: too hot for planets, too small for stars

According to the Associated Press, NASA found this month 2 mysterious objects “that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars”. These objects- discovered by the Kepler Telescope launched in March of 2009 – are circling its own star. However these two objects are literally thousands degrees hotter than the stars they circle. This may suggest that these objects are not planets.

“The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

The discovery does not fit into any definition of known astronomical objects. In fact, scientists might need to create a new definition for these kind of objects. NASA researcher Jason Rowe, who found the objects, called them “hot companions”

How hot are these two ‘companions’? 14,426 Celsius or 26,000 Fahrenheit, enough to melt lead or iron.

But then, what could they be?

a) New Born Planets: Usually new planets are extremely hot in temperature. Rowe, suggests these objects might be only 200 million years old.
b) Another theory proposed by Ronald Gilliland of the Space Telescope Science Institute suggests these objects might be dying dwarf stars.

Astro-Gadgets – Pedro Riveroll

Free Applications to bring Astronomy pretty much home:

a) Astronomy Picture of the Day: By Concentric Sky.

Developed in partnership with NASA, Astronomy Picture of the Day for the iPhone brings the vastness of space right to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Browse through decades of high resolution NASA space photos, jump to photos by date and save them to your photo roll. Want the latest Hubble photo as a background? Then APOD is for you.
New pictures every day! Shake the phone for a random image and browse through descriptions in English, French, German, Italian, japanese and Spanish.
You can get this application in the Apple Store.

b) Stellarium

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
Works with Windows, Linux, and Mac.

You can Get this application in http://www.stellarium.org/

c) MicroSky

What is MicroSky MicroSky is a planetarium for mobile/cell devices with Java-support and a connection to the Internet (preferably GPRS or UMTS). It is a very small J2ME-Midlet client/server application which retrieves its starcharts from the skyserver. It can display 2.500.000 stars, 8.000 deep sky objects, the constellations, the planets, local horizon, 1000 current comets, and minor planets. MicroSky provides lots of functions and settings for customizing the MicroSky-Charts to your individual needs.
You can find the models this free application will work with as well as downloading the free application in :

http://www.upto.org/microsky/index.html

Astro-Frame Lorena Galan

Would the Transporter from Star Trek would ever be a reality? Do you believe that such a device is possible to some advanced technology?

In theory, a matter transporter would require scanning and recording, the details of the object to be transported. Now, in a gram of matter there are aprox. 1E24 ( That is 1 followed by 24 zeros ) atoms. That is a LOT OF ATOMS. So, imagine how many atoms we would have in 70,000 grams or 70 Kgs? So, to create such a device we need:

a) Computing processing power, to record the exact position, composition and characteristics of each atom of each gram of matter.

c) We would need to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision.

d) We would need to find a way, to store that huge amount of information, digitally send it – somehow quickly-, making sure there not any information lost. But… What compression protocol would we need to ensure the integrity of the data?

e) We would also need to find a way to stream the information encoded…. we wouldn’t want to have our systems hacked and get your ‘atom’ map stolen. This would mean somebody else could literally reconstruct another you.

f) And finally rebuild matter – somehow based on your atom map…

The fastest computers in the world… assuming they work in some sort of a parallel configuration would take years and years just to compute a single gram of matter….. unless we find a weird way to get around all this.. the star trek transporter, although would be a very cool gadget to have, sounds incredibly impossible to build.

Maybe this is one of the questions we could send Dr. Michio Kaku author of the book Physics of the Impossible, to see if he can crack it up….

Well, that’s all for us, thank you for listening 365 of Astronomy. Tomorrow Bill Hudson here and on Feb 1. Wild Ideas and migration by Celestial Navigation. Thank you very much, my name is Juan Guevara Torres – host of TecnoCasters, have a great day!!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.