When you are young and everything is hunky dory around you, investments seems far-fetched. However, that’s when you should plan for the long-term investment. Usually, people are concerned about their retirement, a child’s education or a wedding in the future. It’s good to invest to meet some of the future needs; however one should invest generally as well. Stocks could be risky for some people if they are not hard-core investors. In that case, you can put your funds in safer investments. Safe investments can assure returns after a certain period of time.

Unit trusts are fairly safe as they are proficiently handled by fund managers who produce decent proceeds for you. Basically, unit trusts is a set of investors allocating their funds together to purchase bonds, stocks, or other investments in which the fund manager decides the way money is invested. An investor needs to find an esteemed company who manages this trust fund and it will invest his funds along with other customers. Unit trusts are a little riskier than bonds; however provide better profits than bonds over a long period of time.

You can also consider investing in the stocks and shares, however it’s essential that you choose a correct company whose shares can rise in the long term. A layman might miss out on such important issues. Shares of stocks are basically shares of ownership in the firm you are allocating funds for. When a firm performs well economically, the value of your stock also increases. Nevertheless, if a company performs badly, the value of your stocks also decreases. Obviously, stocks are far riskier than unit trust funds. However, you can still buy stock in reliable companies, and remain peaceful.

Bonds are also one of the strong investment options. They essentially lend you funds to a sovereign government or corporations, which consequently assure a yearly return as interest till maturity. There are several kinds of bonds that you can buy. Bonds are like Certificates of Deposit. They are not issued by banks but by the government or huge corporations. There are several types of bonds you need to know and also their risk level. Government issued bonds are normally considered safer than a corporation. Lower grade bonds could possibly be riskier but the proceeds are likely to be higher also.

It’s significant to do research before investing for a long term gain. When buying stocks you should pick stocks, which are well handled and established.

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For decades, astronomers have been blind to what our galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. After all, we sit in the midst of it and can’t step outside for a bird’s-eye view.

Now, new images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess.

“Spitzer has provided us with a starting point for rethinking the structure of the Milky Way,” said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, who presented the new results at a press conference today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Mo. “We will keep revising our picture in the same way that early explorers sailing around the globe had to keep revising their maps.”

Since the 1950s, astronomers have produced maps of the Milky Way. The early models were based on radio observations of gas in the galaxy, and suggested a spiral structure with four major star-forming arms, called Norma, Scutum-Centaurus, Sagittarius and Perseus. In addition to arms, there are bands of gas and dust in the central part of the galaxy. Our sun lies near a small, partial arm called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur, located between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

“For years, people created maps of the whole galaxy based on studying just one section of it, or using only one method,” said Benjamin. “Unfortunately, when the models from various groups were compared, they didn’t always agree. It’s a bit like studying an elephant blind-folded.”

Large infrared sky surveys in the 1990s led to some major revisions of these models, including the discovery of a large bar of stars in the middle of the Milky Way. Infrared light can penetrate through dust, so telescopes designed to pick up infrared light get better views of our dusty and crowded galactic center. In 2005, Benjamin and his colleagues used Spitzer’s infrared detectors to obtain detailed information about our galaxy’s bar, and found that it extends farther out from the center of the galaxy than previously thought.

The team of scientists now has new infrared imagery from Spitzer of an expansive swath of the Milky Way, stretching 130 degrees across the sky and one degree above and below the galaxy’s mid-plane. This extensive mosaic combines 800,000 snapshots and includes over 110 million stars.

Benjamin developed software that counts the stars, measuring stellar densities. When he and his teammates counted stars in the direction of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, they noticed an increase in their numbers, as would be expected for a spiral arm. But, when they looked in the direction where they expected to see the Sagittarius and Norma arms, there was no jump in the number of stars. The fourth arm, Perseus, wraps around the outer portion of our galaxy and cannot be seen in the new Spitzer images.

The findings make the case that the Milky Way has two major spiral arms, a common structure for galaxies with bars. These major arms, the Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus arms, have the greatest densities of both young, bright stars, and older, so-called red-giant stars. The two minor arms, Sagittarius and Norma, are filled with gas and pockets of young stars. Benjamin said the two major arms seem to connect up nicely with the near and far ends of the galaxy’s central bar.

“Now, we can fit the arms together with the bar, like pieces of a puzzle,” said Benjamin, “and, we can map the structure, position and width of these arms for the first time.” Previous infrared observations found hints of a two-armed Milky Way, but those results were unclear because the position and width of the arms were unknown.

Though galaxy arms appear to be intact features, stars are actually constantly moving in and out of them as they orbit the center of the Milky Way, like London commuters in a busy traffic circle. Our own sun might have once resided in a different arm. Since it was formed more than 4 billion years ago, it has traveled around the galaxy 16 times.

Co-investigators of this research include Ed Churchwell, Marilyn Meade and Brian Babler of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Barbara Whitney of the Space Science Institute, Madison, Wis.; Rémy Indebetouw of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and Christer Watson of Manchester College, Ind. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations occur at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena.

Scientists have long wondered how tiny silicate crystals, which need sizzling high temperatures to form, have found their way into frozen comets, born in the deep freeze of the solar system’s outer edges. The crystals would have begun as non-crystallized silicate particles, part of the mix of gas and dust from which the solar system developed.

A team of astronomers believes they have found a new explanation for both where and how these crystals may have been created, by using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the growing pains of a young, sun-like star. Their study results, which appear in the May 14 issue of Nature, provide new insight into the formation of planets and comets.

The researchers from Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands found that silicate appears to have been transformed into crystalline form by an outburst from a star. They detected the infrared signature of silicate crystals on the disk of dust and gas surrounding the star EX Lupi during one of its frequent flare-ups, or outbursts, seen by Spitzer in April 2008. These crystals were not present in Spitzer’s previous observations of the star’s disk during one of its quiet periods.

“We believe that we have observed, for the first time, ongoing crystal formation,” said one of the paper’s authors, Attila Juhasz of the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “We think that the crystals were formed by thermal annealing of small particles on the surface layer of the star’s inner disk by heat from the outburst. This is a completely new scenario about how this material could be created.”

Annealing is a process in which a material is heated to a certain temperature at which some of its bonds break and then re-form, changing the material’s physical properties. It is one way that silicate dust can be transformed into crystalline form.

Scientists previously had considered two different possible scenarios in which annealing could create the silicate crystals found in comets and young stars’ disks. In one scenario, long exposure to heat from an infant star might anneal some of the silicate dust inside the disk’s center. In the other, shock waves induced by a large body within the disk might heat dust grains suddenly to the right temperature to crystallize them, after which the crystals would cool nearly as quickly.

What Juhasz and his colleagues found at EX Lupi didn’t fit either of the earlier theories. “We concluded that this is a third way in which silicate crystals may be formed with annealing, one not considered before,” said the paper’s lead author, Peter Abraham of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Konkoly Observatory, Budapest, Hungary.

EX Lupi is a young star, possibly similar to our sun four or five billion years ago. Every few years, it experiences outbursts, or eruptions, that astronomers think are the result of the star gathering up mass that has accumulated in its surrounding disk. These flare-ups vary in intensity, with really big eruptions occurring every 50 years or so.

The researchers observed EX Lupi with Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph in April 2008. Although the star was beginning to fade from the peak of a major outburst detected in January, it was still 30 times brighter than when it was quiet. When they compared this new view of the erupting star with Spitzer measurements made in 2005 before the eruption began, they found significant changes.

In 2005, the silicate on the surface of the star’s disk appeared to be in the form of amorphous grains of dust. In 2008, the spectrum showed the presence of crystalline silicate on top of amorphous dust. The crystals appear to be forsterite, a material often found in comets and in protoplanetary disks. The crystals also appear hot, evidence that they were created in a high-temperature process, but not by shock heating. If that were the case, they would already be cool.

“At outburst, EX Lupi became about 100 times more luminous,” said Juhasz. “Crystals formed in the surface layer of the disk but just at the distance from the star where the temperature was high enough to anneal the silicate–about 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit)–but still lower than 1,500 Kelvin (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit). Above that, the dust grains will evaporate.” The radius of this crystal formation zone, the researchers note, is comparable to that of the terrestrial-planet region in the solar system.

“These observations show, for the first time, the actual production of crystalline silicates like those found in comets and meteorites in our own solar system,” said Spitzer Project Scientist Michael Werner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “So what we see in comets today may have been produced by repeated bursts of energy when the sun was young.”