Milky Way’s Bulge Holds Oldest Stars

Pointing the Australian National Univ.’s SkyMapper telescope towards the center of the galaxy, astronomers surveyed the dense bulge of the Milky Way. They were searching for celestial bodies that might hold clues to the galaxy’s start.

“We found what we think are the oldest stars in the galaxy and potentially the oldest objects ever discovered,” said Louise Howes, a PhD student at the university’s Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the lead author of a recent study published in Nature.

“Pretty much the galaxy formed around them,” she said of the nine stars discovered and analyzed for the study

According to Howes, the stars formed during a time astronomers call the Epoch of Reionization. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the epoch defines a period when the universe went from being a predominantly neutral intergalactic medium to an ionized one. Multiple luminous sources, which may have been stars, galaxies, quasars or a combination of the three, ignited, giving light to the universe.

Google Releases Newest Machine Learning System to Everyone

Google’s internal deep learning infrastructure DistBelief, developed in 2011, has helped the technology company advance its capabilities. It helped improve speech recognition in the Google app by 25%, assisted the image search option in Google Photos and helped in a myriad of the company’s experiments.

“Machine learning is the secret sauce for the products of tomorrow,” said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with Google. “It no longer makes sense to have separate tools for researchers of machine learning and people who are developing real products. There should really be one set of tools that researchers can use to try out their crazy ideas, and if those ideas work, they can move them directly into products without having to rewrite code.”

This week Google announced the open source release of its software TensorFlow, the technology company’s second-generation machine learning system. 

“Part of the point of TensorFlow is to allow collaboration and communication between researchers,” Corrado said.

Exoplanet Boasts Winds Traveling at 5,400 MPH

Barring winds associated with tornados, the strongest wind gust recorded occurred on April 10, 1996 at Barrow Island, Australia. According to the World Meteorological Association, the record shattering wind gust was a result of Cyclone Olivia. The speed was 408 km/h, or around 253 mph. 

But beyond Earth, beyond the reaches of the solar system, an exoplanet is ravaged by winds seven times the speed of sound.

“Whilst we have previously known of wind on exoplanets, we have never before been able to directly measure and map a weather system,” said Tom Louden, of the university’s astrophysics group.

Part of a group called “Hot Jupiters,” HD 189733b is 10% larger than Jupiter but 180 times closer to its host star. Its surface temperature is 1,200 C.