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You can subscribe to the Daily Minor Planet. It sends alerts as these critters do their flybys. The email alerts usually give a heads up a day or two in advance, at the time the asteroids are discovered.
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/daily-minor-planet
News just in of another one that will be about as close as the one Marley mentioned...
Asteroid 2017 BS32 was first observed by Pan-STARRS 1, Haleakala on 2017-01-30It will fly by Earth harmlessly on 2017-02-02 at 20:27 UTC at 0.4 times the distance to the Moon, at a speed (relative to the Earth) of 11.6 km/s. It is estimated to be 8 - 26 meters in size.
Newfound Asteroid to Buzz Earth Today: See It Live with Slooh
Samantha Mathewson, Space.com | 2 February 2017
http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article6206981.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/MAIN-Earth-and-Two-Moons.jpg
A small asteroid the size of a bus will pass harmlessly between Earth and the moon's orbit today (Feb. 2), only a couple days after astronomers first discovered the object. It's one of many small asteroids that have recently sped past the planet, and one of three flying by today, according to NASA (the other two will be much further from Earth).
The near-Earth asteroid, called 2017 BS32, was first spotted on Jan. 30, and it follows on the heels of three other notable small asteroid flybys, the first of which passed Earth on Jan. 9. Slooh will offer a live webcast of 2017 BS32 starting at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Feb. 2, and can be watched on the Slooh website.
Astronomers estimate that the asteroid will come within about 101,214 miles (162,888 kilometers) of Earth during its closest approach at 3:23 p.m. EDT (7:23 GMT) on Feb. 2, according to a statement from the Slooh observatory. The asteroid is about 39 feet (12 meters) in diameter, according to NASA's Asteroid Watch program
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- Ilan:
There is a conspiracy theory afoot suggesting that an asteroid is slated to collide with earth next week. The story can be viewed here:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/massive-asteroid-due-collide-earth-9702155
Study Finds Micrometeorites on Rooftops
David Dickinson, Sky & Telescope | January 31, 2017
A recent study collected micrometeorites from urban European rooftops.
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/wp-content/uploads/Stjernestov-teaser.jpg
A sampling of the tiny micrometeoroids collected by Project Stardust.
Jan Braly Kihle / Jon Larsen/Project Stardust
Do you dread having to clean out those rain gutters this spring? Try rethinking what it is you're cleaning. Mixed in with the muck and debris may just be a few tiny micrometeorites, debris literally from out of this world.
A recent study out of Imperial College London, the London Natural History Museum, the University of Brussels, and a group known as Project Stardust has shown a silent cosmic rain is falling just overhead.
The rain consists of micrometeoriods, small dust particles slamming into Earth's atmosphere as our planet plows around the Sun at 30 kilometers (18.3 miles) per second. Micrometeorites are notoriously difficult to study in their pristine state, but Project Stardust has been collecting the sediment from urban rooftop gutters for the past seven years in a bid to find them. And they succeeded: the recent study recovered a fascinating array of micrometeorites from the urban rooftops of Oslow, Norway and Paris, France.
Urban Space Rocks
Finding tiny bits of space debris isn't easy. Project Stardust collected and filtered through 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of material from a total collection area covering 30,000 square meters. Of these, about 500 rocks passed stringent scrutiny.
To pick out these tiny needles from the metaphorical haystack, scientists first sifted through the collected debris with magnets, since most ordinary chondrite-type meteorites have a high iron content. Next, the scientists washed the remainder and then painstakingly sorted the rocks by size and shape. Finally, the final suspects are examined under a binocular microscope, where researchers looked for the luster and spherical shape indicative of ablation during atmospheric entry. Of the 500 particles collected, 48 were then embedded in resin and polished for further characterization.
The micrometeorites collected are tiny, most just 300 to 400 micron in size. The largest of them are just under half a millimeter across, barely visible to the naked eye.
Rain Gutter Meteorites: Fact or Fantasy?
The idea of “rain gutter micrometeorites” is a matter of minor controversy in meteorite-collecting circles. The idea became vogue thanks to a 1940 micrometeorite study by American meteoriticist Harvey Nininger. Howeer, later studies found that the abundance of magnetic microspherules dropped sharply away from urban areas, and modern pollution is full of metallic particulates that add a steady stream of false-positive “micrometeor wrongs,” confounding searchefforts.
Still, it's a fun and easy project to fit a bucket's bottom with an NIB (neodymium-iron-beryllium) super-magnet, place the bucket under the end of a rain gutter, and see what turns up.
In this study, the team specifically looked for micrometeorites that matched the mineral compositions of known samples, including deep-sea samples, as well as those from the South Pole Water Well in Antarctica, which also contain similar tell-tale iron-nickel and sulfide beads indicative of micrometeorites.
In addition to being the largest study to date of rooftop material, this also marks the first longterm measurement of the flux of incoming micrometeoroid dust. The team estimates that 100 tons of micrometeorite dust falls over Earth every day, with about one micrometeroid “hit” per square meter per year. Samples taken from the South Pole Water Well, Larkman Nunatak moraine, and Cap Prud'homme in Antarctica also chronicle the steady flux of micrometeoroid bombardment over the past million years.
Astronomers find a new class of black holes
John Wenz, Astronomy Magazine | Wednesday, February 08, 2017
Welcome to the astronomical world, intermediate-mass black holes.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2017/02/The_Globular_Cluster_47_Tu.jpg?mw=1000&mh=800
Globular cluster 47 based on data from FORS1 ESO
Some black holes are small. Some black holes are giant. But oddly enough, in the cosmic fight between innocent passing stars and voracious black holes, scientists have never found a mid-sized black hole. Until now.
The star cluster 47 Tucanae, located about 13,000 to 16,000 light years from Earth, is a dense ball of stars. Hundreds of thousands of stars compacted into a 120 light-year span give off gamma rays and X-rays and more energetic events, but to date, no black holes had been found there. The center seemed ripe for opportunities to find one, but a lack of tidal disruption events and a jumble of stars hard to sift through obscured finding any lurking black holes there.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics turned to two tactics to find the black hole instead. First, they observed the motion of the stars in aggregate, and compared the rotation rate to what would happen if a black hole were present. Secondly, they observed the position of pulsars in the globular cluster.
Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. But neutron stars (which include pulsars) are a close second, as both can result from similar events in which a giant star goes supernova and its dense stellar core collapses (though a few other mechanisms can create black holes.)
If the pulsars were the biggest objects in the globular cluster, they’d be nearer to the core and act as a chief gravitational attractor. But instead, pulsars are scattered across the cluster rather than congregating in the center of the cluster.
This all suggests that a black hole of 2,200 solar masses is lying at the center of 47 Tucanae. Until now, though, astronomers have typically only found black holes of below 100 solar masses or above 10,000, the latter of which are the behemoths that power galaxies. These intermediate-mass black holes are believed to be seeds of supermassive black holes. As black holes feast, they gain mass.
The intermediate-mass black holes may form from several stars in a dense cluster collapsing, with the resulting black holes merging and creating a bigger black hole. They could also be black holes that have accumulated mass over time — and indeed, 47 Tucanae is 12 billion years old, giving plenty of time to slurp up matter. There is also a scenario under which, shortly after the Big Bang, certain areas of the expanding universe were so dense they formed black holes shortly after the event.
Finding more mid-range black holes can be hard. Black holes, especially larger ones, typically clean their general area of debris. But if an unfortunate star happens to cross paths with one, the resulting event could be detected by astronomers, allowing them to see an intermediate-mass black hole in action.
crazed 9.6
02-11-2017, 09:55 PM
was surfing some documentaries , as I always do.
I came across this video and the more I watched it, the better it got.
You guys may have seen this already, I think it is over a year old now.
Nuclear power in Space.... the 'n' word :eek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ
Atop Mt. Wilson, retired engineers keep alive astronomy's 'Sistine Chapel'
Louis Sahagun, LA Times | 12 February 2017
http://www.trbimg.com/img-58a0b2ed/turbine/telescope02/1000/1000x563
Dressed in parkas and knit caps, the three volunteers lug crates of power tools and spooled wire into the gleaming mountaintop edifice that some have called astronomy’s “Sistine Chapel” and immediately start tinkering.
In 1904, workers installed the first telescope at the still uncompleted Mt. Wilson Observatory. For much of the 20th century, astronomers with names like Hale and Hubble used it and the new telescopes it sprouted — the 100-inch reflector and three solar telescopes followed the initial 60-incher — as a figurative launch pad for exploration that changed our understanding of the cosmos.
Gradually, though, financial support waned along with the observatory’s cutting-edge status, and for the last 20 years its telescopes, still impressive by any standard, rely on the kind attention of a small volunteer team of retired space industry electrical engineers, most now in their 70s and 80s.
So it is that on a morning when parts of the San Gabriels are topped with snow, Kenneth Evans is on a ladder, his head lamp fixed on a new sensor switch for a 100-inch reflecting telescope that dominated the world of astronomy for more than three decades.
Nearby, William Leflang and Gale Gant test the wiring of a control console.
Dusting off his hands, Evans tells Leflang to “give it some power.”
He pivots to eyeball the sensor, which will improve the scope’s ability to track the movement of celestial objects, and with a grand wave of his grease-covered hands, says, “Works great.”
"Our volunteer engineers are heroes. They are keeping it alive." — Thomas Meneghini, Mt. Wilson Institute executive director
Satisfied smiles break out on the faces of men who seem confident that they were born to fix things.
The volunteers took up their cause in the late 1990s after the Carnegie Institution for Science, whose namesake had invested the initial funds for construction, transferred ownership of the Mt. Wilson Observatory to the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Institute.
Now, they shoulder much of the responsibility for keeping the observatory’s cluster of vintage telescopes from deteriorating into non-functioning museum pieces.
Other volunteers include John Harrigan, a former power distribution expert at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; Richard Johnston, an information technology consultant, and his son, Eric Johnston, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol’s Center for Quantum Photonics. Taking on problems one weekend work party at a time, the team has solved hundreds of pressing issues at the 40-acre observatory complex.
They have patched holes in walls, strengthened ceilings and walkways with wooden beams, fixed broken water mains and used steel wool and solvents to scour rust and old axle grease off flywheels and gears at the observatory, which looks much as it did when it was completed in 1917.
Mt. Wilson aficionados still talk about how Evans and his brother Larry refurbished a 1911 50-horsepower 2-cylinder vertical Fairbanks-Morse Type “RE” engine with brass plumbing and 22,000 pounds of machinery so that it could be used in demonstrations.
Now they’re laboring to improve the giant reflector’s potential as an educational tool and tourist draw.
But money for maintaining the observatory remains tight, the institute says, and the fate of the reflector, hailed as the mightiest instrument in astronomy when it was built, remains uncertain.
For Thomas Meneghini, the institute’s executive director, the facility’s dual nature conjures a peculiar charm: rooms where Albert Einstein once bunked bunched around picnic grounds, a museum, hiking trails and vista points that offer views from Pasadena, directly below, out across Southern California.
“But raising funds has been a challenge. That’s why our volunteer engineers are heroes. They are keeping it alive. Without them and other supporters, these magnificent instruments would just be cold hunks of steel and glass.”
A 150-foot-tall solar facility at Mt. Wilson has already deteriorated to the point that it can be used only for school programs and public demonstrations. That instrument’s 1970s-era computer system is a shambles. Its magnetograph — an instrument allowing detailed observations of the sun’s magnetic fields — was shut down in 2013, a year after its tower received a new coat of paint funded with a $1.5-million federal grant.
A separate solar telescope installed in 1904 to make photographic images of the wavelengths of the sun’s light has come to be known as “Leflang’s baby.” That’s because he maintains that instrument, which is used only two weeks a year for educational purposes.
Mt. Wilson’s biggest draw remains the 100-inch reflector, which reigned supreme until completion of Caltech’s 200-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar in San Diego County after World War II.
While Los Angeles slept, astronomer Edwin Hubble and others used the reflector to discover billions of galaxies where none were known before, most of them speeding away from each other in all directions. These observations led to the Big Bang theory, which suggests the universe began in a single explosive moment.
Keeping it in reliable shape, however, has been a work in progress since 1985, when the Carnegie Institution for Science put it in mothballs due to light pollution in the Los Angeles Basin and a commitment to expand its Las Camanas Observatory in Chile, which was more suitable for focusing on distant faint objects.
The telescope was reopened in 1994, nine years after Carnegie officials transferred ownership to the institute.
But it needs upgrades to continue operating.
And so the unusual fraternity gathers, trash-talking one another in terms that perhaps only those who recite antique gas engine minutiae like baseball stats can appreciate.
“There’s a lot of epic history in here,” Leflang says, proceeding gingerly past colossal marvels of World War I-era engineering and astrophysics.
The 87-ton scope has 2,000 moving parts including a cast-iron worm gear 18 feet in diameter. Steel cables as thick as mooring ropes attached to a crane used to service its 9,500-pound primary mirror. A 450-ton dome rotates overhead on trolley tracks.
Framed photographs of Hubble, George Ellery Hale and other pioneer astronomers are displayed on walls and scaffolding studded with rivets, and in the drawers of a wood filing cabinet are hundreds of original blueprints of the facility dated Jan. 17, 1917.
It takes the team about an hour to complete the modification, which they accomplished without altering the telescope’s basic design or optics.
“Some folks refer to this scope as the grand dame of astronomy,” Gant says with a boyish grin. “We call it a complex beast.”
After a 10-minute breather, the team members give one another approving nods, load their pickups, and head back down the mountain.
NASA is enlisting the public to find Planet Nine
John Wenz, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, February 16, 2017
Backyard World: Planet Nine can help you find a missing piece of our solar system from the comforts of your couch.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2017/02/PIA14720_hires.jpg?mw=1000&mh=800
NASA is funding a new program to bring together data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to create miniature movies. These loops look for objects that move across the sky compared to relatively stationary background stars.
NASA is turning to crowdsourcing rather than algorithms to find real objects that might have been missed the first time around because they were marked as instrument errors.
Although it’s proposed as a way to find Planet Nine, the Backyard Worlds program may also help find asteroids near Earth, faint dwarf planets in the outskirts of the solar system, and failed stars within a few dozen light years of us, all of which appear faint to the naked eye but will still give off heat in infrared.
Be warned, your field of view will look a little like this:
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2017/02/ScreenShot20170216at10.21.45AM.png?mw=1000&mh=800
To get started, visit the Backyard Worlds website. You may end up finding a planet … or at least a comet or two.
For a little primer on Planet Nine, here’s our editor-in-chief David J. Eicher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtSsS_aFI98
Scientists narrow down list of landing sites for Mars 2020
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy Magazine | Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Oh, the places the rover will go
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2017/02/Mars_2020_LandingSites_Final_8br.jpg?mw=1000&mh=800
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is the next major interplanetary mission that will be sent to the Red Planet to look for signs of past habitability, martian life, and will collect samples to return to Earth. The rover is set to land in February 2021, but where it will land no one yet knows.
Astronomers working on the mission have met a few times to narrow down the list of landing sites, and will meet a fourth time in mid-2018 to pick the final destination.
The final three candidates on that list, which was narrowed down from the previous list of eight sites, include Northeast Syrtis Major, Jezero Crater, and Columbia Hills/Gusev Crater.
Jezero Crater is of interest because of its dried-up lake that could potentially provide evidence of a previous microbial life form. Northeast Syrtis Major is in an area that astronomers thought was warm and wet at one point but now hosts a shield volcano near an impact crater. The area with the most mixed responses was Columbia Hills, where the Spirit rover had previously found volcanic ash, suggesting an old active hot spring and a chance to find past life on Mars.
“Mars 2020 is not a life-detection mission, but I think targeted to the right place we can make great strides toward finally answering the question about life on Mars,” John Grant, geologist at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and co-chair of the Mars 2020 Landing Site Steering Committee, told Scientific American. “It gets us down the road [to find out].”
Though this rover is very similar to the Curiosity, its software upgrades with make it operate quicker, more efficiently, and more independently.
Due to funding, Mars 2020 is currently NASA’s last confirmed mission heading to Mars. The lack of funding may have an impact on research on the Red Planet, but researchers are remaining optimistic.
Capt.Kangaroo
02-18-2017, 10:50 AM
Good video.
Not ice particles.
Not swamp gas....:rolleyes:
What ya think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMjuoc4yxBY&t=15s
Those are the guys who rewired Bannon's brain. They're stopping by to correct a few mistakes.
On the serious side, I don't know, but it is intriguing!
Capt.Kangaroo
02-18-2017, 09:33 PM
Those are the guys who rewired Bannon's brain. They're stopping by to correct a few mistakes.
On the serious side, I don't know, but it is intriguing!
Lol,you might be correct....;)
The Most Amazing Space Photos This Week!
SPACE.com Staff | February 18, 2017
http://www.space.com/images/i/000/062/666/original/comet-45p-honda-mrkos-pajdusakova.jpg?
This image captures Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková as it streaks across Earth's sky.
Credit: Gerald Rhemann
"Observing a comet multiple times over successive orbits is like taking snapshots at different stages of life," Joseph Nuth, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "And some comets have harder lives than others, depending on how close they get to the sun. We can learn about these effects by comparing different comets with varying perihelion distances over time." (Perihelion refers to the point in the comet's orbit when it's closest to the sun.)
In the nearer future, Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak will fly by Earth on April 1, 2017, followed by Comet 46P/Wirtanen on Dec. 16, 2018. Astronomers can learn more about Comets 45P, 41P and 46P by studying the differences between them, NASA officials said.
"Comet 46P, in particular, will remain within 10 million miles [16 million km] of Earth for several weeks, from December 4 through 28, 2018," Michael DiSanti, a researcher at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "This will permit detailed studies of its material, as successive regions of the comet's nucleus become exposed to sunlight."
Comet 45P will still be visible through telescopes or binoculars for a few more days as it travels away from Earth and farther out into space. You can see more photos of the beautiful comet flyby (and the penumbral eclipse) on Space . com.
Astronomers Use ALMA to Hunt for Universe’s Oldest Light
Sci News Staff | 20 February 2017
http://cdn.sci-news.com/images/enlarge3/image_4632e-ALMA-RX-J1347.5-1145.jpg
Astronomers combined data from ALMA’s 7- and 12-m antennas to produce the sharpest possible image of RX J1347.5–1145, the center of which shows up here in the dark ‘hole’ in the ALMA observations. The energy distribution of the CMB photons shifts and appears as a temperature decrease at the wavelength observed by ALMA, hence a dark patch is observed in this image at the location of the cluster. The optical image of RX J1347.5–1145 was taken with Hubble. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / T. Kitayama, Toho University / ALMA.
The events surrounding the Big Bang were so cataclysmic that they left an indelible imprint on the fabric of the cosmos.
Astronomers can detect these scars today by observing the oldest light in the Universe.
As it was created nearly 14 billion years ago, this light — which exists now as weak microwave radiation and is thus named the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — has now expanded to permeate the entire cosmos, filling it with detectable photons.
The CMB can be used to probe the cosmos via the SZE, which was first observed in 1983.
Scientists detect the CMB here on Earth when its constituent microwave photons travel to our planet through space.
On their journey to Earth, they can pass through galaxy clusters that contain high-energy electrons. These electrons give the photons a tiny boost of energy.
Detecting these boosted photons through our telescopes is challenging but important — they can help astronomers to understand some of the fundamental properties of the Universe, such as the location and distribution of dense galaxy clusters.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed RX J1347.5–1145, a giant cluster of galaxies approximately 5 billion light-years from Earth, as part of the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble.
This observation helped the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the CMB using the thermal SZE (blue-purple hues).
Marley
02-21-2017, 02:56 PM
great stuff guys always happy to click here
Brightest, farthest pulsar found!
Deborah Byrd in Space | February 21, 2017
In one second, this distant pulsar – the spinning remains of a once-massive star – emits the same amount of energy as that released by our sun in 3.5 years.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/02/NGC_5907_X-1_record-breaking_pulsar-e1487675966818.jpg
NGC 5907 X-1: record-breaking pulsar. Image via ESA.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said this morning (February 21, 2017) that an object identified by its XMM-Newton space observatory turns out to be a pulsar – a rapidly spinning, extremely dense star – pulsing about once a second. This pulsar -known as NGC 5907 X-1 – appears to be a thousand times brighter than previously thought possible. If so, the pulsar is not only the brightest pulsar; it’s also the most distant pulsar of its kind ever detected, with its light traveling 50 million light-years to Earth’s vicinity.
This very bright X-ray source appears to be 10 times brighter than the previous record holder. In one second, it appears to emit the same amount of energy as that released by our sun in 3.5 years. Gian Luca Israel of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomica di Roma, Italy is lead author of the paper describing the result published in the peer-reviewed journal Science this week. He said in a statement:
Before, it was believed that only black holes at least 10 times more massive than our sun feeding off their stellar companions could achieve such extraordinary luminosities, but the rapid and regular pulsations of this source are the fingerprints of neutron stars and clearly distinguish them from black holes.
Only a neutron star is compact enough to keep itself together while rotating so fast.
ESA explained the connection between pulsars and neutron stars this way:
Pulsars are spinning, magnetized neutron stars that sweep regular pulses of radiation in two symmetrical beams across the cosmos. If suitably aligned with Earth these beams are like a lighthouse beacon appearing to flash on and off as it rotates. They were once massive stars that exploded as a powerful supernova at the end of their natural life, before becoming small and extraordinarily dense stellar corpses.
ESA explained that its XMM-Newton has observed this object several times in the past 13 years, and that the discovery it is a pulsar was the result of a systematic search for pulsars in the data archive. The signal was also identified in NASA’s Nustar archive data, providing additional information. The archival data revealed that the pulsar’s spin rate has changed over time, from 1.43 seconds per rotation in 2003 to 1.13 seconds in 2014. The same relative acceleration in Earth’s rotation would shorten a day by five hours in the same time span. ESA said:
Although it is not unusual for the rotation rate of a neutron star to change, the high rate of change in this case is likely linked to the object rapidly consuming mass from a companion.
If that’s so, Luca said:
This object is really challenging our current understanding of the ‘accretion’ process for high-luminosity stars. It is 1,000 times more luminous than the maximum thought possible for an accreting neutron star, so something else is needed in our models in order to account for the enormous amount of energy released by the object.
The scientists think there must be a strong, complex magnetic field close to the star’s surface. In that scenario, accretion onto the neutron star surface would still be possible, while the pulsar continues to generate its high luminosity.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/02/vela-pulsar-jet-chandra.jpg
The jets that spring from pulsars and create their powerful pulses aren’t just theoretical; they’ve been observed. This deep image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the Vela pulsar, about 1,000 light years from Earth, with a fast-moving jet of particles produced by the pulsar visible on the right. This pulsar makes about 11 rotations every second. As the pulsar spins, it spews out a jet of charged particles that race out along the pulsar’s rotation axis at about 70% of the speed of light. It’s when pulsar jets are aligned toward Earth that we see the powerful pulses of a pulsar. Image via Chandra.
Bottom line: The pulsar known as NGC 5907 X-1 is not only the brightest pulsar; it is also the most distant pulsar of its kind ever detected, with its light traveling 50 million light-years to Earth’s vicinity.
Astronomers discover 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby star
Ashley Strickland, CNN | 22 February 2017
http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170221161852-trappist-1-planetary-system-exlarge-169.jpg
(CNN) Astronomers have found at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the same star 40 light-years away, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The findings were also announced at a news conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington. This discovery outside of our solar system is rare because the planets have the winning combination of being similar in size to Earth and being all temperate, meaning they could have water on their surfaces and potentially support life.
"This is the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around the same star," said Michaël Gillon, lead study author and astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium.
The seven exoplanets were all found in tight formation around an ultracool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Estimates of their mass also indicate that they are rocky planets, rather than being gaseous like Jupiter. Three planets are in the habitable zone of the star, known as TRAPPIST-1e, f and g, and may even have oceans on the surface.
Kimbo
02-24-2017, 09:20 PM
I have been reading about this and it is so fascinating, hopefully there will more news on these soon!! Thanks Ilan!!
Maybe someone there is posting about our solar system right now, wondering if there is any intelligent life. I guess we here wonder that too :)
crazed 9.6
02-24-2017, 09:56 PM
3 planets in the "Goldilocks zone" is pretty good odds .... wow !!
Capt.Kangaroo
02-25-2017, 12:42 AM
Awesome indeed. I hope we can make contact in my lifetime. (as long as they dont eat us) :eek:
Blackbear199
02-25-2017, 12:51 AM
does anyone realize that is still very far away..
40 light yrs = 234,788,544,000,000 Miles
the fastest spacecraft ever was the new horizion that went to pluto(36,000 mph)
so do the math....roughly 744509.5 years.
That's assuming first-hand, physical contact. A form of communication at the speed light would only take 80 years to get there and back, though. To that end, I'll be in the backyard waving my flashlight tonight.
Blackbear199
02-25-2017, 01:11 AM
That's assuming first-hand, physical contact. A form of communication at the speed light would only take 80 years to get there and back, though. To that end, I'll be in the backyard waving my flashlight tonight.
lol.i thnk NYC,Vegas or Tokyo will outshine that.
all this assuming ur msg doesnt go to the spam box.
By car, traveling at 60 mph, it would take 447 million years. Bet that would void a new car waranty.
Blackbear199
02-25-2017, 01:22 AM
just think abt whatt alien species would think of us..
the first broadcast(1936 olympics from munich) would be the first message they recieve(assuming they are checking that wave lenght).
roll ahead to today and after seeing the trump/hillary election fiasco would you want to make contact?
hell no...
I'm willing to let them have Bannon for experimental purposes.
Capt.Kangaroo
02-25-2017, 02:40 AM
I'm willing to let them have Bannon for experimental purposes.
He and Trump need a good probing...;)
Why Our First Alien Encounter Could Happen Soon
Simon Worral, National Geographic | 20 November 2016
We could discover life on the nearest Earth-like planets within the next ten years.
http://ll-media.tmz.com/2017/02/23/0223-new-planets-nasa-4.jpg
It’s one of the great questions of our age: Are we alone in the universe? A long line of films—from Contact to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the latest entry, Arrival—have explored whether intelligent life is somewhere out there in the cosmos and wondered what would happen if, or when, we finally come face-to-face with it.
Now, to get the scientific perspective on extraterrestrials, National Geographic has turned to a comedian, albeit one who pursued a Ph.D. in physics. The host of the British TV show It’s Not Rocket Science, Ben Miller has recently published a book called The Aliens Are Coming! The Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe.
Speaking from his home in Gloucestershire, England, Miller explains why the TESS project could finally tell us if there is life elsewhere in the universe, how comedy and science connect, and why we will need a new Rosetta Stone to interpret alien messages.
You write in your book that we are living through one of the most extraordinary revolutions in the history of science—the growing belief that we are not alone.
When I was studying at university, we weren’t even sure if there were planets around other stars or whether the solar system might be a one-off. But for the last few decades we have been on this extraordinary voyage where we’ve found thousands of planets around other stars. Strangely, we started looking for planets a long way out because of the technology we had at the time. Now we are starting to look at the stars closest to our own.
Recently, there was an exciting discovery that the very nearest star to us, a red dwarf, has got a planet called Proxima b. Not only that, but the planet is the right distance from that star to have liquid water on its surface. We think liquid water is very important for life. So, right on our doorstep, the conditions might be right for life.
A lot of the new thinking about the possibility of alien life-forms comes not from space but from deep in the ocean. Tell us about extremophiles.
This is an incredible story. Since the early 1960s we’ve been finding these living things, often single cells, in conditions we thought impossible for life to survive. One of the first places they were found was in Yellowstone Park, in hot springs of up to 90 degrees Celsius. That’s altered our thinking on alien life-forms. We have found bacterial life on the inside of nuclear power stations, in the upper atmosphere, and in rocks deep within the Earth. That means there’s more real estate for life out in the galaxy.
It also means we have to rethink where we fit in the spectrum of life. We now believe life on Earth started in hot, volcanic springs at the bottom of the ocean. What I love about that is that it makes you rethink the whole idea of what an extremophile is. When you think about it, we’re the extremophiles, sitting here having a conversation, breathing in oxygen, at absurdly low temperatures compared to how life first stared out. And we’re not even in water! We are an extraordinary, hyper-organized colony of bacteria that started its evolutionary journey in scalding hot, alkaline water in the bottom of some primordial ocean. In other words, one of your ancestors is a rock! [Laughs]
Comedy and space are not words that are usually linked. You have to tell us your favorite space joke.
How many ears has Capt. Kirk got? The answer is three: the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear. [Laughs] Actually, the link between comedy and space is pretty strong. Science is a skeptical pursuit, and so is comedy. There’s a fantastic tradition of combining science and comedy, from Douglas Adams to Monty Python. Think of Eric Idle’s songs about the universe and evolution. On my TV show, we have always done sketches on global warming. A man’s looking out the window, it’s raining, and he says to his wife, “Look at that! It’s dripping out there. So much for global warming, eh?” [Laughs]
Stephen Hawking believes we should not attempt to contact alien civilizations. What’s his thinking? And do you agree?
His position is a little harder to interpret than that. He’s a great supporter of the Breakthrough Listen project, this idea that we should put proper funding into searching the nearest million stars to see if there are signs of life. His point, generally speaking, is that when two civilizations come into contact, the civilization that’s not so technologically advanced doesn’t come off too well. His example is that it didn’t work out too well for North American Indians when they met Western settlers. I don’t agree [with his position on contacting alien civilizations]. I can’t say there’s not a risk. But what we stand to gain far outweighs the risk.
If we receive a message from outer space, we may not be able to understand it. How can Egyptian hieroglyphics help us with that conundrum?
We owe the deciphering of the hieroglyphs to Napoleon, who decided to annex Egypt and took with him some of the brightest philosophers and scientists of the age. But the hieroglyphs were an incredibly difficult thing to crack. What did a picture of a bee mean? Did that mean a bee, or the concept of being stung, or did it stand for a phonetic sound?
The breakthrough came when Napoleonic troops were dismantling an old fort at the port of Rosetta and found this stone with three different inscriptions. One was in hieroglyphs, another in ancient Greek, and the other in an intermediate form of Egyptian writing. It became known as the Rosetta Stone and was one of the ways we managed to crack Egyptian hieroglyphs.
We won’t have a Rosetta Stone when we receive our alien message, so it will be a very hard thing to translate. People have come up with clever ideas about how you might create a Rosetta Stone, how you might compose a message to send to an alien which contained something within it the aliens would also have within their culture, like mathematics or the ratio of the electron to the proton.
One thing we’ve learned is that the more information and language you have, the more chance you have of decoding it. The problem with sending just a short message, such as those attached to the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, is that there’s very little information in them. That’s why some experts, like Seth Shostak, the head of SETI, have come up with the idea of sending the Internet. The Internet is the most honest reflection of who we are as a species. Cats licking lollipops, a hundred recipes for American pancakes, the whole thing! [Laughs] We are not these superintelligent beings we’ve tried to present ourselves as in previous messages.
In 2017, NASA will launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). What is it—and what’s its mission?
We’re finally looking at the planets nearest to us. To begin with, we weren’t really sure any stars had planets. So we put up the Kepler space telescope and focused it on a very dense portion of the star field in a region of our own galaxy a long way away. The amazing thing about Kepler was that it found most of the stars have planets!
TESS, which will launch in 2017, will be looking at the very nearest stars. It may even be possible to look at the light coming from the atmosphere of those stars and tell what gases are in those atmospheres. When you look at Earth and see all this oxygen, you’d think there’s something strange going on. Oxygen is an incredibly reactive gas. What’s that doing in mass quantities in an atmosphere? It will be those kinds of signals that we’ll look for when we look at the atmospheres of other planets.
You know what the last question has to be: Are the aliens really coming?
Within the next ten years we’ll know whether the nearest Earth-like planets to us have got life on them. That has enormous implications for us as a species. Once we find life out there, you have to think that other intelligent life-forms and civilizations exist as well.
At the moment we are in this extraordinary position that our planet may be the only thing in the entire universe with life. So we would be taking a closer step to one of two extraordinary results: that we are the only life-form in the universe or that we are not alone. Either will be species defining. It will change the whole way we view ourselves: religion, politics, our individual psyches, everything.
One of these two possibilities has to be true. It’s just us—or we are not alone.
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Image added to liven the article. - Ilan
12 Of The Most Mind-Blowing Scientific Theories Ever Conceived
Wes Walcott, Goliath | April 5th, 2016
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As much as we might like to think that our collective knowledge has unlocked most of the mysteries of the universe, we’ve really only got a hold on a tiny fraction of the knowledge required to fully understand it all—and it’s a weak hold at best. But every once in a while a new theory comes along that completely upends everything we thought we knew and sends us down a new path that just might hold the key to all our unanswered questions. These theories often express ideas that are just too abstract or staggering to be accepted by the larger scientific community at the time, but, over the years, as more discoveries are made and certain pieces fall into place, sometimes even the wildest theories have been proven to be right all along.
While none of the hypothesis we present to you here have ever been conclusively verified, they haven’t been totally dismissed yet either. So why not decide for yourself which of these mind-blowing scientific theories you think has the most potential to pan out.
12. The Ekpyrotic Universe Theory
Providing an alternative to the widely accepted Big Bang theory, the ekpyrotic universe theory suggests that, unlike the Big Bang which supposedly began from a singularity, our universe is actually two universes that smashed into each other. It’s thought that this collision had the effect of “resetting” our universe and, after that point it started expanding just like in the Big Bang. However, instead of infinitely expanding forever, the theory asserts that one day the universe will begin to contract, inevitably leading to what some astrophysicists refer to as the Big Crunch. Then, all the speed and energy involved in the Big Crunch then creates another monumental collision, which results in the universe being reset again so the cycle can repeat itself for all eternity.
11. The Existence of White Holes
Everyone knows about black holes and how their immense gravity sucks in everything around them, including light. But what about white holes? Theoretically, they’re the exact opposite of a black hole and instead of sucking in matter they spit it out. But scientists have never observed one (likely because they would only exist in extremely hypothetical situations), so it’s unclear if a white hole would function like the tail end of a black hole, a wormhole, or something else entirely. If a white hole really were spewing out matter that was sucked into a black hole, that matter would have to avoid merging with the singularity and somehow be preserved. Currently, we don’t really know exactly what happens to matter that gets sucked into a black hole because all the black holes we’ve observed have an event horizon that prevents us from seeing them directly. The only reason why we can infer the locations of black holes in our universe is because we notice the gravitational effects they have on the objects around them. Which means that if we ever hope to prove the existence of white holes in the future we may need to reconfigure our understanding of the laws of physics—which would certainly be a tall order.
10. The Fermi Paradox
Originally put forth by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, the Fermi Paradox contests that if the Drake Equation is correct and there are actually millions of intelligent life to be found in our very own Milky Way galaxy, then it makes sense that we should have picked up some sort of signal from at least one of them by now. This argument has been referred to as the Great Silence.
A number of interesting theories have risen over the years that provide an explanation for this Great Silence, among them, perhaps the most interesting and imaginative one suggests that we’re all living out our lives in a Matrix-like computer simulation.
9. The Simulation Theory
This theory supposes that we all might be living in a computer simulation created by an alien race in some distant galaxy. While it may sound like an idea dreamed up by someone who has watched too many sci-fi movies, there are actually prominent scientists and physicists who not only think the Simulation Theory is possible, they’re working on experiments to prove it. In particular, a team of German physicists are trying to create their own programmed simulation of our universe.
Surprisingly, a recent string theory discovery made by theoretical physicist S. James Gate lends further credibility to this theory. Basically, Gate found what is essentially computer code buried deep within the equations we use to describe our universe. And it’s not just any code, it’s an extremely unusual self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code. So it would seem that error correcting 1s and 0s are embedded in the quantum core of our universe. “Wake up Neo. . . The Matrix has you.”
8. The Universe is a Hologram
Rather than an elaborate computer simulation, this theory suggests that the universe we see is nothing more than a hologram generated by the universe itself. The idea is that when we look up at the night sky, the distant stars and galaxies we see are really more like an image projected on a wall. This holographic principle could provide the explanation as to why the universe appears flimsy when broken down to the most basic of energy scales. Keep in mind that a holographic image is produced when you cover an object with the light from a laser and then a second laser jumps off the the reflective surface of the first later. Another light source then illuminates the image to produce the holograph. It’s thought that if variations in gravitational waves is caused by different patterns of light, then it would simulate this holographic image creation process. And if this theory is ever proven correct, it would mean we need to alter a lot of our perceptions of what we think we know about the universe.
7. Black Holes Can Give Birth to Entirely New Universes
With their mysterious nature and ominous light devouring capacity, it’s not surprising that black holes are often looked upon as the dark reapers of the universe. But this theory suggests that a black hole might actually be the mother of our universe. The idea is, when matter gets pulled into a black hole, the intense gravity compresses it to a single point so dense that it gets spit back out and forms an entirely new universe from that very same matter. So it would follow that a universe with a lot of black holes would essentially be a nursery for baby universes. Though it’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact locations of black holes in our universe, due to them being rendered invisible by their event horizon, some astronomers think the reason for this could be because we’re merely the product of another universe’s black hole—a concept that falls in line with theories that propose we are living in a multiverse.
6. The Many Worlds Theory
Speaking of the multiverse, the many worlds theory has a slightly different explanation for the existence of countless other universes. Using quantum mechanics, it affirms the objective reality of space but infers that matter cannot be condensed to the point of singularity. So rather than having new universes spontaneously popping out of black holes, the many worlds theory proposes that every time we make a decision, a new universe is born. So basically every time you have to make a choice, whether it’s paper or plastic, coffee or tea, debit or credit, you’re essentially creating a new universe where you made the opposite choice. Each decision you make is then played out in full until it comes time for you to make another decision, by which another universe would branch out from. If this does in fact occur, that would mean there are a seemingly infinite number of universes out there for every decision every person has ever made.
5. The Heat Death of the Universe
This theory follows from the second law of thermodynamics and proposes that if the universe was infinite, it should also be infinitely old. In other words, if a star is seen to be one million light years away, it could only be there if the universe was at least one million years old (assuming the speed of light is constant). Therefore, in an infinitely old universe, heat death would suggest that eventually the entire universe will have the same uniform temperature, at which point the universe will remain stagnant. However, this idea would only make sense if the speed at which the universe is expanding has always remained constant. An aspect that other ideas, like cosmic inflation, would be in direct conflict with.
4. Observing Dark Energy is an Act of Murder
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss once stated that every time we look at dark energy, we’re killing the universe. According to astrophysicists, dark energy makes up an estimated 70 percent of all the energy in the entire universe and holds the secrets to many of the unexplainable peculiarities we see in deep space.
Krauss suggests that the Big Bang was initiated when some unusual high energy with gravity repellent properties decayed into zero-energy; and it was the process of going from a false vacuum to an ordinary vacuum that resulted in the creation of our universe. In quantum mechanics there’s something called the quantum Zeno effect which states that if an unstable object is regularly observed, it will never decay. From this, Krauss’s argument follows that if dark energy is continuously observed, we are keeping it unstable and reducing the universe’s lifespan by forcing it back to that state when it was a false vacuum. But with so many of the mysteries of our universe pointing to dark energy as the key to understanding them, you can bet your bottom dollar that astronomers and physicists aren’t going to stop studying it anytime soon. Let’s just hope those effects are negligible.
3. The Panspermia Theory
Panspermia is a Greek word that translates literally as “seeds everywhere.” The panspermia theory states that the “seeds” of life are present throughout the universe and can be propagated through interstellar space or even intergalactic space through natural means. A growing number of people are even subscribing to the hypothesis that life on Earth may have begun from the “seeds” carried to our planet by meteorites and comets originating from the vast reaches of the cosmos.
The recent discovery of various extremophiles (organisms that can survive in extreme environments we previously thought were incapable of supporting life) here on Earth has contributed a great deal of credibility to this theory. It’s now known that life as we know it can survive in environments of extreme heat, extreme cold, intense radiation and lack of oxygen. All conditions an organism might experience while stowing away on an interstellar comet or meteor.
2. The Singularity
Ray Kurzweil is a prominent futurist who wholeheartedly believes that in the coming decades humanity will experience what he refers to as a technological singularity by which we will learn to transcend biology itself and all the limitations (including death) associated with it. Kurzweil reasons that truly intelligent civilizations (which he believes humanity to be) are destined to evolve into super-intelligent, possibly machine-based beings whose computational powers grow exponentially.
The idea is that once we hit this so-called “singularity” our technology will be so advanced that we’ll be making revolutionary new breakthroughs on practically a daily basis. We’ll be able to harness the power of our own sun in order to accomplish amazing interstellar feats once only dreamed of in science fiction. In this world, things like cyber brains, dyson spheres and teleportation devices aren’t just possible, they’re practically inevitable.
Of course, this theory has plenty of skeptics, including Noam Chomsky, who believes it to be nothing more than a science fiction enthusiast’s dream. While others simply believe we humans will carelessly destroy ourselves before ever reaching the singularity.
1. Retroactive Precognition
In 2011, Dr. Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University published a highly contentious paper titled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.” The paper describes a series of experiments conducted by Bem in an effort to discover precognition (knowledge of future events). Working on the assumption that there are, what he refers to as, “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms,” the evidence Bem gathered led him to conclude that future events could indeed affect a person’s cognition in the present.
In one study, Bem rounded up 1,000 college students and tested each of their ability to correctly intuit random information. Another study involved a reverse memory test in which participants were asked to categorize random words that they later had to commit to memory. Astonishingly, the results from this test showed that students were more likely to recall words in the present if they made a point of memorizing them in the future.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-01-2017, 06:55 AM
Some deep stuff for the brain.:eek:
Yes, but great food for thought! My gray matter needs all the feeding it can get :)
SpaceX to fly two space tourists around the moon in 2018
Matt McFarland, CNN Tech | 27 February 2017
Two thrill seekers are paying SpaceX to make a trip around the moon next year.
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(CNN Tech) SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Monday afternoon that the space tourists had already placed a significant deposit for the trip. The travelers will undergo fitness tests and begin training later this year.
"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration," SpaceX said in a blog post.
For takeoff, SpaceX will use the same launch pad near Cape Canaveral, Florida, that was used for the Apollo programs missions. No humans have traveled past low Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972. (Low-earth orbit is essentially the first rung on the ladder in being to space. It's also where some satellites that circle the Earth reside.)
The company doesn't expect this to be a one-time mission. SpaceX said that other people have expressed strong interest in making the trip. The names of the first two travelers have not been released. They are likely paying millions for the adventure.
For comparison, space tourists have previously paid the Russia government upwards of $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station. NASA has paid the Russians $80 million a seat to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX has not revealed the price of the roughly week-long trip.
SpaceX is putting forward an aggressive timeline for the mission, which will rely on a rocket and spacecraft that have not flown yet. The Falcon Heavy rocket is expected to make a test flight this summer. And the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will hold the two tourists, will complete a demo mission later this year.
"Next year is going to be a big year for carrying people to the space station and hopefully beyond," Musk said in a conference call with reporters.
Kimbo
03-01-2017, 06:21 PM
"The Matrix has us Ilan", I believe there is a little bit of truth on each theory, I do definitely believe singularity is most feasible reality for reasons too long to state in one post, but excellent article.
Yes, but great food for thought! My gray matter needs all the feeding it can get :)
I'd sure like to be around when one of these grand theories establishes itself as Truth, and Singularity would be one of the greatest leaps.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-01-2017, 09:15 PM
Im really excited about SpaceX.
A step in the right direction....:)
It would be one heck of a ride! Unfortunately, it is only within the reach of the very wealthy.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-01-2017, 11:40 PM
It would be one heck of a ride! Unfortunately, it is only within the reach of the very wealthy.
thats true,I heard around $10,000 eventually. for low earth orbit
If I was a single man with no kid, I would consider it.
I think it would be awesome...:eek:
Marley
03-02-2017, 03:18 AM
ill sell you one of my kids lol
crazed 9.6
03-02-2017, 04:45 AM
I am single man, kids growened up.
I gots not ties.
I could die in space (I had heard it was a very dangerous environment).
Wait a second... no way would I leave this planet.. I would be having anziaty attacks before the frigging rocket even blasted off and once in space, well I would be a mess.. I know this :)
This is when a straight jacket comes in handy :)
Groundbreaking UFO Video Just Released By Chilean Navy
Leslie Kean, Contributor, Huffington Post | Updated Jan 05, 2017
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The video depicts two connected white circular lights or hot spots, giving off much heat (left). This image was part of an analysis by astrophysicist Luis Barrera. “Envoltura” means “envelope.”
An exceptional nine-minute Navy video of a UFO displaying highly unusual behavior, studied by Chilean authorities for the last two years, is now being released to the public. The CEFAA - the Chilean government agency which investigates UFOs, or UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), has been in charge of the investigation. Located within the DGAC, the equivalent of our FAA but under the jurisdiction of the Chilean Air Force, CEFAA has committees of military experts, technicians and academics from many disciplines. None of them have been able to explain the strange flying object captured by two experienced Navy officers from a helicopter.
The Chilean government agency always makes its cases public when an investigation is complete, and acknowledges the existence of UAP when a case merits such a conclusion.
General Ricardo Bermúdez, Director of CEFAA during the investigation, told me that “We do not know what it was, but we do know what it was not.” And “what it is not” comprises a long list of conventional explanations. Here is what happened:
See the full story here along with multiple images and videos -- a bit too much for me to reproduce here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/groundbreaking-ufo-video-just-released-from-chilean_us_586d37bce4b014e7c72ee56b?utm_hp_ref=ufo s
A tiny little asteroid came incredibly close to Earth last week
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy Magazine | Monday, March 6, 2017
It won’t visit again for a very long time.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2017/03/2017ea.jpg?mw=600
D. Farnocchia/NASA/JPL
Researchers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a small asteroid as it came very close to Earth last Thursday.
Asteroid 2017 EA, which is smaller than 10 feet (3 meters) across passed within 9,000 miles (14,5000 kilometers) of Earth on the morning of March 2. That distance is closer than several communication and weather satellites and about one-twentieth the distance of Earth to our Moon.
Sadly, according to a statement from NASA’s Center of Near-Earth Object Studies (CNES), 2017 EA won’t be back for at least another 100 years.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-08-2017, 03:18 AM
Yikes, thats close....:eek:
Capt.Kangaroo
03-08-2017, 03:37 AM
Here's How Much a Ticket on a SpaceX Flight to the Moon Will Cost
Jack Crosbie
SpaceX
February 27, 2017
SpaceX is sending two private citizens to the Moon, and all things considered, it won’t cost all that much, if you happen to be a billionaire.
On Monday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that his company will fly two private individuals — not current astronauts, that is — on a trip around the moon and back on the Dragon 2 spacecraft.
The mission is tentatively scheduled for “late 2018,” but depends on a huge number of variables before it can go ahead. The SpaceX press release after the announcement notes that the private flight team has already paid a “significant deposit” to go to the moon and back, but Musk didn’t give an exact number as to what a ticket would cost. He did, however, drop a pretty big hint: during the press conference, Musk told reporters that a trip around the moon would cost about the same as a private trip to visit the International Space Station: about $35 million.
But that cost doesn’t quite line up with what’s on SpaceX’s website. The Dragon 2 spacecraft will go into space on top of a Falcon 9 Heavy rocket, which has a listed price of $90 million per launch on a late 2018 timeframe.
However, $35 million could be for a ticket, singular. The first private mission (and most Dragon 2 missions) will hold at least two astronauts, so it’s possible that Musk means the total cost will be more than $70 million, which would put it closer to a current estimate. NASA currently pays Roscosmos about $81.7 million per seat on the Soyuz capsule to get its astronauts to the ISS.
SpaceX will have no shortage of customers — if the cost to fly is around $35 million, there are thousands of individuals with a net worth high enough to justify that cost, assuming they’re willing to risk their life in the process. The company wants to conduct health and fitness tests and “begin initial training” for the private astronauts later this year, and said that “other flight teams have also expressed strong interest.” We’ll find out who the multi-millionaire guinea pigs are “contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results,” and eventually, they’ll probably say how much they paid for a round-trip ticket to the moon.
Photos via Getty Images / Roberto Gonzalez
I'll have to check my bank account again. I think I'm a few bucks shy. If I return some deposit bottles, it might put me over the top, though. It pays to save those for a rainy day.
Hubble solves the mystery bulge at the center of the Milky Way
Alison Klesman, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, March 9, 2017
Our supermassive black hole has been on a diet for millions of years… but when did it last splurge?
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The Fermi Bubbles are two huge structures “burped out” by the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and visible in X-ray and gamma-ray light.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The Milky Way appears as a relatively flat structure when viewed along its plane in visible light. Gamma-ray emission, however, paints a different picture: two huge structures billowing outward from the galaxy’s bulge like an enormous hourglass. Named the Fermi Bubbles, these structures are the result of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole gorging itself on interstellar gas in the past. Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have now determined just when these structured formed.
A team of astronomers led by Rongmon Bordoloi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used distant quasars to trace the structure and motion of the northern Fermi Bubble, which rises 23,000 light-years above the plane of the Milky Way and contains enough cool gas to create 2 million Sun-size stars. By observing the ultraviolet light from 46 quasars with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on HST (and adding one quasar observation with HST’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph), the team mapped out the motions of cool gas within the bubble to pin down its age: 6 to 9 million years.
Most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at the center, and our Milky Way is no exception. Sgr A* resides in the Milky Way’s bulge and has a mass equivalent to 4.5 million solar masses. Today, Sgr A* is relatively quiet, accreting slowly as the galaxy ages. By contrast, quasars are young, massive supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies in the early universe, sucking down huge amounts of gas and dust that shine brightly as the material is funneled into an accretion disk before finally passing into the black hole. Like these younger black holes, astronomers believe that our own supermassive black hole was once more active, at a time when the galaxy was still forming and material was more plentiful for accretion.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-12-2017, 08:41 AM
Thought this was funny...;)
https://scontent.fbna1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/17201042_1300428100007027_7456523095699121231_n.jp g?oh=15e5843ab0f8df4d440c4be9e6f024e9&oe=59613E29
crazed 9.6
03-12-2017, 08:44 AM
lmao ... damn !!
Kimbo
03-12-2017, 02:23 PM
interstellar sexting, or tinder for aliens. LOL
When galaxies collide, black holes eat
Deborah Byrd in Space | March 12, 2017
When our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring Andromeda galaxy collide, supermassive black holes will have a feast!
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/03/black-hole-tidal-disruption-event.jpgArtist’s concept of a Tidal Disruption Event, in which a black hole eats a star, in the distant galaxy F01004-2237. As the black hole swallows the star, there’s a release of gravitational energy from the star’s debris. The result is a visible flare. Image via Mark Garlick.
What’ll our sky look like 5 billion years from now, when our Milky Way galaxy merges with the nearby Andromeda galaxy? If there are any people left to look then, they’ll be able to see flares about every 10 to 100 years, each time our Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole swallows a star. The flares will be visible to the unaided eye. They’ll appear much brighter than any other star or planet in the night sky. That’s according to astronomers at the University of Sheffield in England, who say that central, supermassive black holes in colliding galaxies swallow stars some 100 times more often than previously thought.
Their study was published March 1, 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.
The study is based on a survey of just 15 galaxies, a very small sample size by astronomical standards. However, in that small sample, the astronomers were surprised to see a black hole swallow a star. Astronomers call this sort of event a tidal distruption event, or TDE. They’d been only been only seen before in surveys of many thousands of galaxies, leading astronomers to believe they were exceptionally rare: only one event every 10,000 to 100,000 years per galaxy.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2013/10/merger-milky-way-andromeda-e1395663064956.jpgArtist’s concept of Earth’s night sky in 3.75 billion years. The Andromeda galaxy (left) will fill our field of view then, astronomers say, as it heads toward a collision, or merger, with our Milky way galaxy. Image via NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger. Read more about the eventual merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.
The 15 galaxies of the University of Sheffield study are doing something those other thousands of galaxies weren’t doing. They’re undergoing collisions with neighboring galaxies. Study co-author James Mullaney said in a statement:
Our surprising findings show that the rate of TDEs dramatically increases when galaxies collide. This is likely due to the fact that the collisions lead to large numbers of stars being formed close to the central supermassive black holes in the two galaxies as they merge together.
Another study co-author, Rob Spence, said:
Our team first observed the 15 colliding galaxies in the sample in 2005, during a previous project.
However, when we observed the sample again in 2015, we noticed that one galaxy – F01004-2237 – appeared strikingly different. This led us to look at data from the Catalina Sky Survey, which monitors the brightness of objects in the sky over time. We found that in 2010, the brightness of F01004-2237 flared dramatically.
Galaxy F01004-2237 – which is 1.7 billion light years from Earth – had flared in a way characteristic of TDEs. These events are known to cause flaring due to energy release, as a star edges toward a galaxy’s central, supermassive black hole.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/03/colliding-galaxies-NGC2207-IC2163-e1489066016313.jpgNGC 2207 and IC 2163 are two spiral galaxies in the process of merging, or colliding. If the new study from University of Sheffield is correct, there is a much greater chance for stars to be eaten in these galaxies by their central, supermassive black holes. Read more about this colliding galaxy pair from Chandra.
Bottom line: A study from the University of Sheffield shows that collisions – like that predicted for our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring Andromeda galaxy – cause black holes to eat stars some 100 times faster than previously thought.
There’s a supernova occurring right now in NGC 5643
Alison Klesman, Astronomy.com | Published: Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Meet “Bob,” the second Type Ia supernova in the galaxy since 2013
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When most people hear the word supernova, they envision a massive star reaching the end of its life and exploding outwards to leave a ghostly remnant in its place. This is called a Type II supernova — the spectacular Supernova 1987A, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, was a Type II. Alternatively, a Type Ia supernova occurs when a white dwarf, the remnant of a Sun-like star, grows too massive after stripping a binary companion star of its outer layers. When the white dwarf reaches a critical mass, a runaway fusion reaction occurs in its core and the star explodes in a Type Ia supernova. Such a supernova has just been spotted occurring in a galaxy about 55 million light-years away.
The supernova which was officially announced via Astronomer's Telegram after an excited tweet by Rachael Beaton at the the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, CA, and known as 2017cbv (though Beaton has nicknamed it Bob), the explosion was spotted in NGC 5643, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Lupus. The area of the sky it inhabits is also part of the area covered by the Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey, a project aimed at gathering optical and near-infrared images of bright Southern Hemisphere galaxies. NGC 5643 was also the home galaxy of SN 2013aa, which occurred in early 2013.
Type Ia supernovae play an extremely important role as rungs on the astronomical distance ladder that allows astronomers to measure the distance to faraway galaxies. They’ve also played a critical role in measuring the accelerating expansion of the universe. Because they occur in white dwarfs of exactly the same mass every time (that critical mass mentioned earlier: about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun), Type Ia supernovae are always the same brightness, which means astronomers can use them as standard candles. Knowing how bright the explosion is in terms of absolute luminosity allows astronomers to then work backwards to calculate the distance to the object based on how bright it appears.
But the word “exactly” is perhaps a bit misleading. Not every star system in which a Type Ia supernova occurs can be exactly the same. Moreover, events in the real world do not always reflect the precise nature of theoretical calculations — as in, some white dwarfs might explode at a mass slightly under 1.4 solar masses, while others might grow a little heavier than this limit before exploding. The fact that 2017cbv is the second recorded Type Ia supernova to occur in NGC 5643 is thus extremely valuable. By comparing the distance to the galaxy as calculated from each supernova, astronomers can better characterize the real-world variance in supernova Type Ia magnitudes that occur, which in turn will improve the accuracy of using these events to measure distance.
Astronomers observe a dying red giant star's final act
From Phys.org | 17 March 2017
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Molecular gas forms a spiral pattern around the red giant star LL Pegasi. Credit: ALMA, Hyosun Kim
An international team of astronomers has observed a striking spiral pattern in the gas surrounding a red giant star named LL Pegasi and its companion star 3,400 light-years from Earth, using a powerful telescope in northern Chile called Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA.
"What we are seeing in splendid detail with these observations is the final act of a dying red giant star, as it sheds most of its gaseous bulk in a strong, outflowing wind," said study co-author Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy.
After comparing their telescopic observations with computer simulations, the astronomers concluded that a highly elliptical orbit is responsible for the shape of the gaseous emissions surrounding this system.
The research appears in the journal Nature Astronomy and is the cover story of the March issue.
"Because of the orbital motion of the mass-losing red giant, the cold molecular gas constituting the wind from that star is being spun out like the sprays of water from a rotating garden sprinkler, forming the outflowing pattern of spiral shells," Morris said.
ALMA, a powerful international facility operated cooperatively by many countries around the world including the United States, measures extremely short wavelength radio emission. Using this unique instrument, the scientists were able to create a three-dimensional image of the emission from molecules ejected from LL Pegasi and which then form a spiral pattern caused by the presence of the orbiting companion star.
See Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0Sr77kSI3nA
The images, which show many complete revolutions of the spiral pattern, offer clues about the dynamics of the binary system over a period of 5,000 years.
"This unusually ordered system opens the door to understanding how the orbits of such systems evolve with time as one of the stars loses most of its mass," Morris said.
Stephen Hawking: 'I may not be welcome' in Trump's America
By Judith Vonberg, CNN | March 20, 2017
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Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says he likes and admires the US but fears he may not be welcome there.
(CNN) British scientist Stephen Hawking fears he "may not be welcome" in the United States now that Donald Trump is President.
In an interview with ITV's Good Morning Britain on Monday, Hawking described President Trump's election as "a definite swing to a right-wing" and a "more authoritarian approach."
He was especially critical of the appointment of Scott Pruitt, "a man who does not believe that carbon dioxide causes climate change," as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
"He should replace Scott Pruitt at the Environment Protection Agency," Hawking told ITV.
"Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent," he said.
"It affects America badly, so tackling it should win votes for [Trump's] second term, God forbid."
He suggested that the appointment of Pruitt, as well as the promise of a border wall and the sanctioning of two oil pipelines, are designed to "satisfy [Trump's] electorate, who are neither liberal nor that well-informed."
"I have many friends and colleagues [in the US] and it is still a place I like and admire in many ways," he said, "but I fear that I may not be welcome."
His comments about the US President echo those he made in May last year, before Trump became the Republican nominee. At the time, Hawking described Trump as "a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator."
Brexit will leave UK 'isolated'
In Monday's wide ranging interview, Hawking also had harsh words for Britons who voted to leave the European Union in last year's Brexit referendum.
"A main worry for the British people was the feeling that Eastern Europe migration would take their jobs and undercut their wages," he said. "The majority voted accordingly and I see this as short-sighted."
A "hard Brexit" would "leave us isolated and inward looking," he said.
"A few people will get mega rich as is often the case but the majority will be poorer."
Trip to space on the horizon
Turning to lighter matters, Hawking also spoke about the prospect of going into space.
"I have already completed a zero gravity flight which allowed me to float weightless, but my ultimate ambition is to fly into space. I thought no one would take me but Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic and I said yes immediately."
Asked if he believed he was the most intelligent person in the world, he gave a sharp response: "I would never claim this. People who boast about their IQ are losers."
A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system — including Pluto
Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post | March 20 at 2:59 PM
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An image of Pluto captured by the New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA)
Is Pluto a planet?
It's not a question scientists ask in polite company.
“It's like religion and politics,” said Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “People get worked up over it. I've gotten worked up over it.”
For years, astronomers, planetary scientists and other space researchers have fought about what to call the small, icy world at the edge of our solar system. Is it a planet, as scientists believed for nearly seven decades? Or must a planet be something bigger, something more dominant, as was decided by vote at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006?
The issue can bring conversations to a screeching halt, or turn them into shouting matches. “Sometimes,” Runyon said, “it's just easier not to bring it up.”
But Runyon will ignore his own advice this week when he attends the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. In a giant exhibit hall crowded with his colleagues, he's attempting to reignite the debate about Pluto's status with an audacious new definition for planet — one that includes not just Pluto, but several of its neighbors, objects in the asteroid belt, and a number of moons. By his count, 102 new planets could be added to our solar system under the new criteria.
“It's a scientifically useful bit of nomenclature and, I think, given the psychological power behind the word planet, it’s also more consumable by the general public,” Runyon said.
“A classification has to be useful, or else it’s just lipstick on a pig,” countered planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. Runyon's definition “is not useful at all.”
The debate rages on.
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An artist's impression of the solar system. (NASA)
If aliens arrived at our solar system tomorrow, they would not see planets laid out in the orderly parade depicted in textbooks. Instead, they'd encounter hundreds of constantly moving bodies engaged in a complex dance around a brightly burning star.
It's hard to know what would immediately catch their attention. Probably Jupiter, the largest body in our solar system. Next they'd spot Saturn, Neptune and Uranus — other giant worlds — and the two belts of debris that orbit the sun inside Jupiter's orbit (the asteroid belt) and beyond Neptune (the Kuiper belt).
If they peered a bit closer, they'd spot the small, rocky spheres of the inner solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. They might see the dozens of worlds that circle the larger bodies or Ceres in the asteroid belt. And finally, if they searched near the Kuiper belt, they'd discern Pluto, tinier than Earth's moon but undeniably captivating, with water ice mountains and a heart-shaped plain.
Which of these would they consider a “planet” — or whatever the alien term for “planet” might be?
When the IAU voted in 2006, scientists came to the conclusion that gravitational dominance is what distinguishes the eight planets from the solar system’s other spheres. From giant Jupiter to tiny Mercury, each is massive enough to make them the bullies of their orbits, absorbing, ejecting or otherwise controlling the motion of every other object that gets too close. According to the definition, planets must also orbit the sun.
Pluto, which shares its zone of the solar system with a host of other objects, was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” — a body that resembles a planet but fails to “clear its neighborhood,” in the IAU's parlance.
“If you look at the solar system with fresh eyes, it is really hard to not realize that there are eight big things dominating the solar system and millions of tiny things flitting around,” said Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, whose discovery of the dwarf planet Eris, announced in 2005, precipitated the IAU vote a year later.
Brown was not at that vote, but he said that a definition based on orbital dynamics “is the most profound classification you can come up with.”
“That’s the one that asks the question we’re asking as planetary scientists,” he explained. “Why did the solar system form with these eight giant things and all these other things around them?”
But to Runyon, that distinction is less important than what dozens of solar system worlds have in common: geology.
“I’m interested in an object's intrinsic properties,” he said. “What it is on its surface and in its interior? Whether an object is in orbit around another planet or the sun doesn’t really matter for me.”
Runyon calls his a “geophysical” definition. A planet, he says, is anything massive enough that gravity pulls it into a sphere (a characteristic called “hydrostatic equilibrium"), but not so massive that it starts to undergo nuclear fusion and become a star.
“It’s only about one force and one property, the mass,” said Alan Stern, who led NASA's New Horizons mission to visit Pluto in 2015. Stern is a co-author on the paper outlining Runyon's new definition. “I think that's very elegant, as a physicist.”
Within that definition, Runyon and Stern say, scientists can divide planets into subcategories: moon planets like Europa and Titan; rocky planets like Earth and Mars; gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn; icy planets like Eris and Pluto.
But making “planet” more inclusive would formalize something many scientists already do: use the term when comparing geologic features. Runyon said he found dozens of examples in the scientific literature of researchers referring to “the planets Pluto, Earth and Mars” to talk about glacial processes on their surfaces, or “a planet-wide haze layer” when discussing the moon Titan's atmosphere.
“As planetary scientists we feel like the situation got really badly mangled back in 2006,” Stern said. “It was time somebody write this all down … and start a new conversation.”
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A 16th century illustration of the universe, which lists the moon as a planet. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris via NASA)
Questions about the definition of “planet” go back much further than the debate over Pluto. The moon was considered a planet until the 17th century, when Copernicus placed it in orbit around the Earth. Galileo initially referred to the four largest moons of Jupiter as planets, but astronomers eventually adopted the term “satellite” (“attendant”) instead.
Ceres was considered a planet for several years after it was discovered circling between Mars and Jupiter in 1801. But when astronomers realized it was just the largest of thousands of objects inhabiting that stretch of sky, they renamed Ceres an “asteroid” and called its crowded home orbit “the asteroid belt.”
When Pluto was named the ninth planet in 1930, astronomers vastly overestimated its size, suggesting it could be even larger than Jupiter. It would also take more than 50 years for them to realize that Pluto had plenty of company in its far-flung orbit.
Jean-Luc Margot, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who voted in favor of the IAU resolution in 2006, said Pluto might have gone the way of Ceres if scientists had found other Kuiper belt objects sooner.
“An aspect of science is that we revisit our ideas,” he said. “We have to be able to acknowledge when we make a mistake.”
That moment came in 2006. When astronomers arrived at IAU meeting in Prague that year, they were surprised to hear that a group had been working in secret to devise a formal definition for planet — something that had never been done before.
“Planet,” the group proposed, was any object made round by its gravity that's in orbit around a star. Though many bodies in the solar system met this requirement, only Ceres and Eris would be made new planets; Pluto and its moon Charon would be called a binary planet system. The group also suggested a new classification, “pluton,” for bodies like Pluto whose orbits around the sun took 200 years or more.
The draft definition made almost no one happy. It was criticized as awkward and arbitrary, and the secrecy in which it was developed meant that researchers who wanted to improve the definition had little time to do so. Scientists spent the next two weeks of the conference rushing to come up with terminology they liked better.
Sara Seager, an exoplanet researcher at MIT who did not attend that year's meeting, recalled watching the chaos from afar.
“It actually was very confusing,” she said. “Everyone was asking me what was going on. … I'd be in a taxi and the taxi driver would say, 'I really want Pluto to be a planet. Will it still be a planet?' And I couldn't say.”
The vote happened on the meeting's last day. Despite the rushed circumstances, the resolution passed with a large enough majority that no one counted the votes. Pluto had lost.
Stern, who missed the 2006 meeting to help his daughter move into her college dorm, said it felt like astronomers who study black holes and stars had hijacked the most important concept in his field. He hadn't even known that a definition was being formulated — otherwise, he might have tried to attend the meeting. Now, suddenly, he was a planetary scientist whose object of study was no longer a planet.
He scoffed at Pluto's new classification, “dwarf planet” — “How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun?” Stern asked. “There are dwarf stars but they're still considered stars.”
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Our evolving view of Pluto (NASA)
Runyon, who was a 21-year-old college student at the time of the IAU vote, said that the result never sat well with him. In 2015, he was on the data analysis team for the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto. That December, the stunning new images of that distant world fresh in his mind, he sat down and “in a fit of creative passion” drafted his definition.
The paper that Runyon will present this week isn't a formal proposal, like the one that was devised at the IAU. He's not putting his definition up to a vote, or even suggesting that it should replace the IAUs. If he did, it's unlikely that the IAU would adopt it.
But it's sure to spark debate. Porco, who is one of the lead scientists for NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, pointed out that she is a planetary scientist and has no problem with the IAU's orbital dynamics-based definition.
She also noted that astronomers already have a perfectly serviceable term for the kind of body Stern and Runyon are trying to describe: “world.” In her view, the only scientists who want to make those places planets are people who study Pluto.
Nearly everyone agrees that the IAU definition is imperfect. Margot, the UCLA planetary scientist who voted for the resolution, has tried to refine it. But the debate over Pluto was so “traumatic” for the community, he said, that he doubts that the IAU would be willing to revisit the issue anytime soon.
If you talk to enough scientists on either side of this debate, you'll notice that their arguments start to echo each other. They use the same terms to criticize the definitions they don't like: “not useful,” “too emotional,” “confusing.” Both groups want the same thing: for the public to understand and embrace the science of the solar system. But each is convinced that only their definition can achieve that goal. And each accuses the other of confusing people by prolonging the debate.
But Seager, the exoplanet researcher, said the opposite might be true. In her experience, the debate over Pluto's status has given her more opportunities to talk about the solar system than ever before.
“What I love about it is it’s a teaching moment,” she said. “If someone asks about Pluto … you use that as an opening to say, look whatever you want to call it, here’s what’s going on in our system today.”
Seager has no dog in this fight. Her gaze extends far beyond the Kuiper belt, to worlds that orbit stars light-years from our own. In the years since the IAU resolution, scientists have found thousands more planets outside our solar system. Many are like nothing astronomers have ever seen before — giant “hot Jupiters” that orbit tightly around their stars; “rogue planets” that rocket through the galaxy independent of any sun. For scientists like Seager, the age of planet discovery is just beginning.
“What else is out there? What’s beyond Pluto?” she asked. “There’s so much we still don’t know.
I'd like to see Pluto back on the team, although I wouldn't be excited to see the other 101 added to the roster.
Astronomers spot a runaway quasar
Alison Klesman, Astronomy Magazine | Friday, March 24, 2017
This rogue black hole may have been ousted from the center of its galaxy by gravitational waves.
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The quasar 3C 186 is clearly offset from the center of its host galaxy, encircled by the dashed line. 3C 186 is the bright star-like object to the lower right of the dimmer, blob-like galaxy.
NASA, ESA, and M. Chiaberge (STScI and JHU)
Supermassive black holes reside at the centers of most galaxies — or do they? A new detection by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) points to an active supermassive black hole in the process of fleeing its galaxy. The astronomers who spotted it say the data present a strong case for a gravitational wave event that knocked the black hole for a loop and sent it rocketing away in one direction.
While this isn’t the first such suspected “rogue black hole,” it’s currently the most compelling evidence for one. Astronomers have now assembled data from not only HST, but the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as well. “The amount of data we collected, from X-rays to ultraviolet to near-infrared light, is definitely larger than for any of the other candidate rogue black holes,” said Marco Chiaberge of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in a press release. Chiaberge is the lead author of a paper detailing the observations, which will be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on March 30.
A quasar is really the disk of dust, gas, and other matter that surrounds a supermassive black hole. As this material clumps and rubs together on its way into the black hole itself, it heats up and shines brightly, allowing astronomers to spot it. (This is because the material is located outside the black hole’s event horizon, inside of which even light cannot escape.) This quasar, named 3C 186, is associated with a distant galaxy that sits about 8 billion light-years away.
Kimbo
03-27-2017, 08:24 PM
Black holes are awesome!!!
Indeed!! Unfathomable power from these critters -- and we can't even see 'em. What a phenomenon!
Black Hole Facts
Space-facts . com
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Black holes are among the strangest things in the universe. They are massive objects – collections of mass – with gravity so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. The most common types of black holes are the stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes are created when massive stars explode, leaving behind a black hole with the mass of just a few suns. Supermassive black holes exist in the hearts of galaxies and usually contain the mass equivalent of millions of suns.
Famous Black Holes
Cygnus X-1: a stellar-mass black hole and x-ray source that lies some 6,500 light-years away. It is a binary system that contains a blue supergiant variable star and the x-ray source thought to be the black hole.
Sagittarius A*: the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. It lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. This black hole contains the mass of about 4 million suns.
M87: this elliptical galaxy has a 3.5 billion solar-mass black hole at its heart. The black hole is surrounded by a disk of superheated material and has a jet of superheated material streaming away from the black hole that extends across 5,000 light-years from the galaxy’s core.
Centaurus A: this galaxy, which lies in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, is a giant spiral galaxy with an incredibly active nucleus. It contains a 55 million solar-mass black hole at its heart, with two jets of material that stream away from the galaxy at about half the speed of light across a million light-years of space.
Facts About Black Holes
The massive gravitational influence of a black hole distorts space and time in the near neighbourhood. The closer you get to a black hole, the slower time runs. Material that gets too close to a black hole gets sucked in and can never escape.
Material spirals in to a black hole through an accretion disk — a disk of gas, dust, stars and planets that fall into orbit the black hole.
The “point of no return” around a black hole is called the “event horizon”. This is the region where the gravity of the black hole overcomes the momentum of material spinning around it in the accretion disk. Once something crosses the event horizon, it is lost to the pull of the black hole.
Black holes were first proposed to exist in the 18th century, but remained a mathematical curiosity until the first candidate black hole was found in 1964. It was called Cygnus X-1, an x-ray source in the constellation Cygnus.
Black holes do not emit radiation on their own. They are detected by the radiation given off as material is heated in the accretion disk, and also by the black hole’s gravitational effect on other nearby objects (or light passing by).
Astronomers hoping to directly capture image of a black hole
Phys.org | April 3, 2017
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Gravitational monster: This artistic impression shows the event horizon around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Credit: M. Moscibrodzka, T. Bronzwaar and H. Falcke, Radboud University
Astronomers want to record an image of the heart of our galaxy for the first time: a global collaboration of radio dishes is to take a detailed look at the black hole which is assumed to be located there. This Event Horizon Telescope links observatories all over the world to form a huge telescope, from Europe via Chile and Hawaii right down to the South Pole. IRAM's 30-metre telescope, an installation co-financed by the Max Planck Society, is the only station in Europe to be participating in the observation campaign. The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy is also involved with the measurements, which are to run from 4 to 14 April initially.
At the end of the 18th century, the naturalists John Mitchell and Pierre Simon de Laplace were already speculating about "dark stars" whose gravity is so strong that light cannot escape from them. The ideas of the two researchers still lay within the bounds of Newtonian gravitational theory and the corpuscular theory of light. At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravitation - and thus of matter, space and time - with his General Theory of Relativity. And Einstein also described the concept of black holes.
These objects have such a large, extremely compacted mass that even light cannot escape from them. They therefore remain black – and it is impossible to observe them directly. Researchers have nevertheless proven the existence of these gravitational traps indirectly: by measuring gravitational waves from colliding black holes or by detecting the strong gravitational force they exert on their cosmic neighbourhood, for example. This force is the reason why stars moving at great speed orbit an invisible gravitational centre, as happens at the heart of our galaxy, for example.
It is also possible to observe a black hole directly, however. Scientists call the boundary around this exotic object, beyond which light and matter are inescapably sucked in, the event horizon. At the very moment when the matter passes this boundary, the theory states it emits intense radiation, a kind of "death cry" and thus a last record of its existence. This radiation can be registered as radio waves in the millimetre range, among others. Consequently, it should be possible to image the event horizon of a black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is aiming to do precisely this. One main goal of the project is the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way, which is around 26,000 light years away from Earth and has a mass roughly equivalent to 4.5 million solar masses. Since it is so far away, the object appears at an extremely small angle.
One solution to this problem is offered by interferometry. The principle behind this technique is as follows: instead of using one huge telescope, several observatories are combined together as if they were small components of a single gigantic antenna. In this way scientists can simulate a telescope which corresponds to the circumference of our Earth. They want to do this because the larger the telescope, the finer the details which can be observed; the so-called angular resolution increases.
Merging galaxies behaving strangely
Deborah Byrd, Space | April 1, 2017
When large and small galaxies merge, the large galaxy’s central black hole typically gorges on gas and dust. But in a merging galaxy system called Was 49, the small galaxy has the feeding black hole.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/03/galaxy-merger-Was-49-e1490696032417.jpgThis optical image shows the Was 49 system, which consists of a large galaxy merging with a much smaller galaxy. The dwarf galaxy rotates within the larger galaxy’s disk, about 26,000 light-years from its center. The pink-colored region indicates a feeding supermassive black hole; the green color indicates normal starlight. Image via NASA/ DCT/ NRL.
One of the fascinating discoveries of modern astronomy has been that galaxies – entire islands of stars – sometimes merge with other galaxies. Another discovery has been that many galaxies like our Milky Way are known to contain supermassive black holes at their cores. Now a supermassive black hole inside one tiny galaxy is challenging what scientists have come to believe about galaxy mergers. The merging system is known as Was 49, and it consists of a large disk galaxy (Was 49a), merging with a much smaller dwarf galaxy (Was 49b).
Both of these galaxies have central supermassive black holes. Astronomers would have expected that, as the big and little galaxies merge, their gravitational interactions would create a twisting force – a torque – that would funnel gas into the larger galaxy’s black hole. As the black hole of the larger galaxy gobbled up gas and dust, they would have expected to see it spewing out high-energy X-rays (as matter is converted to energy).
But that’s not what they see in this system.
Instead, the smaller galaxy’s central black hole is the more active one, while the larger galaxy’s black hole is relatively quiet. Nathan Secrest, lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said in a statement:
This is a completely unique system and runs contrary to what we understand of galaxy mergers.
Also, the black hole of the smaller galaxy is mysterious in and of itself. Its mass – the amount of matter it contains in its hidden interior – is huge, compared to similarly sized galaxies. Data on the smaller galaxy’s x-ray emissions came from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission. Data from NuSTAR and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey suggest the black hole contains more than 2 percent of the galaxy’s own mass. Secrest said:
We didn’t think that dwarf galaxies hosted supermassive black holes this big. This black hole could be hundreds of times more massive than what we would expect for a galaxy of this size, depending on how the galaxy evolved in relation to other galaxies.
Scientists are trying to figure out why the supermassive black hole of dwarf galaxy Was 49b is so big. It may have already been large before the merger began, or it may have grown during the very early phase of the merger, they said. Secrest commented:
This study is important because it may give new insight into how supermassive black holes form and grow in such systems. By examining systems like this, we may find clues as to how our own galaxy’s supermassive black hole formed.
These astronomers also said that, in several hundred million years, the black holes of the large and small galaxies will merge into one.
Bottom line: When a large and small galaxy merge, astronomers expect the supermassive black hole at the center of the larger galaxy to be the one to feed on gas and dust and shine in high-energy x-rays. But in the merging galaxy system known as Was 49, the smaller galaxy – confoundingly – contains the feeding black hole.
New Hubble image of Jupiter
Deborah Byrd, Today's Image | April 7, 2017
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system – some 88,789 miles (142,984 km) at its equator. We pass between Jupiter and the sun this week, and Hubble Space Telescope looked its way.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/04/jupiter-4-302-17-Hubble-e1491559422930.pngWhen the Hubble Space Telescope aimed toward Jupiter on April 3, Jupiter was 4.45 Astronomical Units from Earth (415 million miles or 668 million km). Image via NASA/ ESA/ A. Simon (GSFC).
Earth goes between the sun and Jupiter this week, on April 7, 2017. And Jupiter is closer to Earth for this year on April 8. So it was an opportune time, a few days ago, for the Hubble Space Telescope to aim toward Jupiter and capture this beautiful new image. NASA said:
Hubble reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter’s clouds as arranged into bands of different latitudes, known as tropical regions. These bands are produced by air flowing in different directions at various latitudes. Lighter colored areas, called zones, are high-pressure where the atmosphere rises. Darker low-pressure regions where air falls are called belts. The planet’s trademark, the Great Red Spot, is a long-lived storm roughly the diameter of Earth. Much smaller storms appear as white or brown-colored ovals. Such storms can last as little as a few hours or stretch on for centuries.
It’s easy to see Jupiter now! The planet is the brightest “star” in the evening sky, brightest thing up all night (with the exception of the moon) until Venus rises shortly before dawn. You can’t miss Jupiter. But in case you feel uncertain, you can also follow the arc in the Big Dipper’s handle and speed on to Spica, the bright star near Jupiter now on the sky’s dome.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/03/2017-march-21-big-dipper-arcturus-spica-jupiter.jpg
In any year, you can extend the arc of the Big Dipper handle to bright stars Arcturus and Spica. But this year, 2017, is special because the dazzling planet Jupiter beams close to Spica all year long.
Big asteroid to whiz (safely) by Earth this month
Faith Karimi and Amanda Barnett, CNN | Updated 12:11 PM ET, Sat April 8, 2017
http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/140612140303-asteroid-0608-horizontal-large-gallery.jpg
NASA scientists used Earth-based radar to produce these sharp views of the asteroid designated "2014 HQ124" on June 8, 2014. NASA called the images "most detailed radar images of a near-Earth asteroid ever obtained."
(CNN) A large asteroid is hurtling toward Earth -- but there's no need to duck and cover.
The space rock, known by the very dull name of 2014 JO25 will safely fly by Earth on April 19, according to NASA. The chances of it pounding our planet and leaving us for the dead? Zero, experts say.
"Although there is no possibility for the asteroid to collide with our planet, this will be a very close approach for an asteroid of this size," NASA said in a statement.
What size are we talking about? Measurements taken by NASA's NEOWISE space probe indicate the asteroid is about 2,000 feet (650 meters) in size. That's about 670 yards (613 meters), or about the length of six NFL football fields.
And how close is "very close"? NASA says this rock will come about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Earth. That's about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The moon, by the way, is about 239,000 miles (384,400 kilometers) from Earth.
While several small asteroids pass within this distance of Earth a few times a week, this is the closest by any known asteroid of this size or bigger in 13 years -- since asteroid Toutatis in 2004, according to the space agency.
Can you see asteroid 2014 JO25? Well, maybe. This asteroid has a reflective surface and you might be able to see it with a telescope.
"The asteroid will approach Earth from the direction of the sun and will become visible in the night sky after April 19," NASA said.
If you don't have your own telescope, you can watch the asteroid online.
Astronomers discovered 2014 J025 three years ago (you guessed it in 2014). This will be its closest encounter with Earth for the last 400 years. NASA said telescopes around the world will be trained on it during the flyby to try to learn more about it.
"Radar observations are planned at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the resulting radar images could reveal surface details as small as a few meters," NASA said.
If you head out to try to spot the asteroid, you might also want to check out comet PanSTARRS (C/2015 ER61). It also is making its closest approach to Earth -- coming about 109 million miles (175 million kilometers) from the planet. NASA said it's visible in the dawn sky with binoculars or a small telescope.
First 'image' of a dark matter web that connects galaxies
Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) | April 12, 2017
Researchers have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together.
https://images.sciencedaily.com/2017/04/170412091230_1_900x600.jpg
Dark matter filaments bridge the space between galaxies in this false colour map. The locations of bright galaxies are shown by the white regions and the presence of a dark matter filament bridging the galaxies is shown in red.
Credit: S. Epps & M. Hudson / University of Waterloo
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The composite image, which combines a number of individual images, confirms predictions that galaxies across the universe are tied together through a cosmic web connected by dark matter that has until now remained unobservable.
Dark matter, a mysterious substance that comprises around 25 per cent of the universe, doesn't shine, absorb or reflect light, which has traditionally made it largely undetectable, except through gravity.
"For decades, researchers have been predicting the existence of dark-matter filaments between galaxies that act like a web-like superstructure connecting galaxies together," said Mike Hudson, a professor of astronomy at the University of Waterloo. "This image moves us beyond predictions to something we can see and measure."
As part of their research, Hudson and co-author Seth Epps, a master's student at the University of Waterloo at the time, used a technique called weak gravitational lensing, an effect that causes the images of distant galaxies to warp slightly under the influence of an unseen mass such as a planet, a black hole, or in this case, dark matter. The effect was measured in images from a multi-year sky survey at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
They combined lensing images from more than 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away to create a composite image or map that shows the presence of dark matter between the two galaxies. Results show the dark matter filament bridge is strongest between systems less than 40 million light years apart.
"By using this technique, we're not only able to see that these dark matter filaments in the universe exist, we're able to see the extent to which these filaments connect galaxies together," said Epps.
First 'image' of a dark matter web that connects galaxies
Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) | April 12, 2017
Researchers have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together.
https://images.sciencedaily.com/2017/04/170412091230_1_900x600.jpg
Dark matter filaments bridge the space between galaxies in this false colour map. The locations of bright galaxies are shown by the white regions and the presence of a dark matter filament bridging the galaxies is shown in red.
Credit: S. Epps & M. Hudson / University of Waterloo
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The composite image, which combines a number of individual images, confirms predictions that galaxies across the universe are tied together through a cosmic web connected by dark matter that has until now remained unobservable.
Dark matter, a mysterious substance that comprises around 25 per cent of the universe, doesn't shine, absorb or reflect light, which has traditionally made it largely undetectable, except through gravity.
"For decades, researchers have been predicting the existence of dark-matter filaments between galaxies that act like a web-like superstructure connecting galaxies together," said Mike Hudson, a professor of astronomy at the University of Waterloo. "This image moves us beyond predictions to something we can see and measure."
As part of their research, Hudson and co-author Seth Epps, a master's student at the University of Waterloo at the time, used a technique called weak gravitational lensing, an effect that causes the images of distant galaxies to warp slightly under the influence of an unseen mass such as a planet, a black hole, or in this case, dark matter. The effect was measured in images from a multi-year sky survey at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
They combined lensing images from more than 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away to create a composite image or map that shows the presence of dark matter between the two galaxies. Results show the dark matter filament bridge is strongest between systems less than 40 million light years apart.
"By using this technique, we're not only able to see that these dark matter filaments in the universe exist, we're able to see the extent to which these filaments connect galaxies together," said Epps.
Can you imagine the sky in five million years?
Alison Klesman, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, April 13, 2017
Now you don’t have to — Gaia has the answer.
http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2015/07/stellar_density_map/15503844-1-eng-GB/Stellar_density_map_node_full_image_2.png
In five million years, the sky will look a little different. The constellations will be unrecognizable,
and many of the stars we can see today will have moved significantly.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stare up at the sky millions of years from today? Would things look exactly the same, or would the sky be totally unrecognizable? Wonder no longer — the European Space Agency (ESA) has just released a video (see below) answering that exact question.
Since July 2014, ESA’s Gaia mission has been charting the positions of stars in the Milky Way with higher accuracy than ever before. Its goal is to create a three-dimensional map of our galaxy, which is uniquely challenging because we’re trying to make a map from inside the galaxy, rather than being able to take a step back and view it from outside.
With such precise stellar positions, however, comes something else: stellar motions. The stars seem perpetually fixed in the sky — sure, they rise and set, and change throughout the year as we go around the Sun, but they always form the same patterns. A significant percentage of the constellations most of us know are those derived, after all, by the Greeks just a little under 2,000 years ago. So, of course, it’s natural to assume that the stars just don’t move, because they’ve looked pretty much the same for thousands of years.
But thousands of years is but an eyeblink in the lifetime of a galaxy, and the notion that the stars don’t change positions is false. The stars do move, largely in bulk as they rotate around the center of the Milky Way, but sometimes they zip off in random directions dictated by the conditions of their formation or past interactions. This latter effect is exacerbated by perspective — the closer a star is to us, the more it will appear to move. This perspective effect is also essentially how Gaia measures stellar positions so accurately, using a technique called parallax that causes nearby stars to shift against the background as Earth orbits the Sun.
But largely, from our perspective, the stars are just so far away that even though they’re moving at hundreds of kilometers per second, they seem pretty fixed to the casual observer. Now, though, ESA has released a video containing 2,057,050 stars that have been measured well enough to predict where they are and where they’re going in the future. The overall motion of a star from our point of view against the background of extremely far away stars is called proper motion, and that’s the basis for the stellar motions in this video. Using the projected proper motions of the stars in the Gaia catalog, the result is a fast-forwarded trip through time that ends with the sky as it would appear from Earth in 5 million years. Each frame in the video represents the passage of 750 years.
Watch Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag0qsSFJBAk
To really see the changes, click early in the video (and pause) then click toward the end of the video (and pause). You will note a vast difference. - Ilan
Photos of close asteroid 2014 JO25
Deborah Byrd in Space | Today's Image | April 20, 2017
Large asteroid 2014 JO25 safely passed Earth on April 19, 2017 at some 1,098,733 miles (1,768,239 km) or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. Images from the EarthSky community here.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/04/2014JO25_19apr2017_pw17-e1492700517117.jpg
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUseAMZPsM4
In the video, the asteroid emerges at about :08 at the bottom center and makes it way toward the center right. - Ilan
Record-Breaking 'Gigapixel' View of a Tiny Galaxy Reveals Secret Lives of Stars
Ian O'Neill, Space.com Contributor | May 3, 2017 10:30am ET
https://img.purch.com/w/640/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA2NS 80OTQvaTAyL3NtYWxsLW1hZ2VsbGFuaWMtY2xvdWQuanBnPzE0 OTM3NzE1OTI=
A telescope in Chile captured this incredible view of a nearby dwarf galaxy, which reveals millions of previously hidden stars that you can explore without stepping away from your computer.
As a part of the VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC) project, an international team of astronomers, led by Stefano Rubele of the University of Padova in Italy, has released this jaw-dropping "gigapixel," zoomable image of the SMC here (Link Below).
"The result is this record-breaking image — the biggest infrared image ever taken of the Small Magellanic Cloud — with the whole frame filled with millions of stars," researchers explained in a statement.
See zoomable image here:
https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1714a/zoomable/
Proof of a Parallel Universe? Mysterious 'Cold Spot' Could Mean the Multiverse Actually Exists
Naia Carlos, Nature World News | 19 May 2017
http://images.natureworldnews.com/data/thumbs/full/39880/720/0/0/0/the-dipole-repellent-explained-the-void-that-is-pushing-the-milky-way-through-the-universe.jpg
A new study offers new evidence of the multiverse.
(Photo : NASA/Getty Images)
The multiverse is one of the most intriguing theories around, only it's one that has yet to be proven. The theory is that there are an infinite number of universes and ours is only a version of reality; the rest are in a dimension humans can't access (yet).
A new study has offered the best evidence so far of the existence of these parallel universes. According to a report from The Guardian, researchers recently analyzed what's called the "cold spot" that was spotted in the radiation from the formation of the universe over 13 billion years ago.
Blanketing the entire sky is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is a relic of the Big Bang that astronomers can observe for a peek at the early stages of the universe, a report from WIRED said. It has a temperature of 2.73 degrees above absolute zero, but there are certain anomalies like the cold spot that extends 1.8 billion light-years across and 0.00015 degrees colder than its surroundings.
The source of the cold spot, first detected in 2004 and again in 2013, is a mystery. Researchers say that it's not likely to have been produced during the birth of the universe, since the best current theory of its formation -- inflation -- would be mathematically challenging to explain otherwise. Meanwhile, the latest study disproves that the cold spot is just an optical illusion.
While it's still possible that it's merely a fluctuation caused by the standard theory of Big Bang, Durham University's Professor Tom Shanks said that there are more "exotic explanations" for the cold spot's existence.
"Perhaps the most exciting of these is that the Cold Spot was caused by a collision between our universe and another bubble universe," Shanks explained to the Royal Astronomical Society. "If further, more detailed, analysis ... proves this to be the case then the Cold Spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse."
Do we live in a multiverse? (Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=Rx7erWZ8TjA
A Whole New Jupiter: First Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission
NASA Release 17-051 \ May 25, 2017
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/17-051.jpg?itok=02Ec2e2p
This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles
Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.
“We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating,” said Diane Brown, Juno program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It was a long trip to get to Jupiter, but these first results already demonstrate it was well worth the journey.”
Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. The findings from the first data-collection pass, which flew within about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) of Jupiter's swirling cloud tops on Aug. 27, are being published this week in two papers in the journal Science, as well as 44 papers in Geophysical Research Letters.
“We knew, going in, that Jupiter would throw us some curves,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “But now that we are here we are finding that Jupiter can throw the heat, as well as knuckleballs and sliders. There is so much going on here that we didn’t expect that we have had to take a step back and begin to rethink of this as a whole new Jupiter.”
Among the findings that challenge assumptions are those provided by Juno’s imager, JunoCam. The images show both of Jupiter's poles are covered in Earth-sized swirling storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together.
“We're puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn't look like the south pole,” said Bolton. “We're questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we're going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”
Another surprise comes from Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), which samples the thermal microwave radiation from Jupiter’s atmosphere, from the top of the ammonia clouds to deep within its atmosphere. The MWR data indicates that Jupiter’s iconic belts and zones are mysterious, with the belt near the equator penetrating all the way down, while the belts and zones at other latitudes seem to evolve to other structures. The data suggest the ammonia is quite variable and continues to increase as far down as we can see with MWR, which is a few hundred miles or kilometers.
Prior to the Juno mission, it was known that Jupiter had the most intense magnetic field in the solar system. Measurements of the massive planet’s magnetosphere, from Juno’s magnetometer investigation (MAG), indicate that Jupiter’s magnetic field is even stronger than models expected, and more irregular in shape. MAG data indicates the magnetic field greatly exceeded expectations at 7.766 Gauss, about 10 times stronger than the strongest magnetic field found on Earth.
“Juno is giving us a view of the magnetic field close to Jupiter that we’ve never had before,” said Jack Connerney, Juno deputy principal investigator and the lead for the mission’s magnetic field investigation at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Already we see that the magnetic field looks lumpy: it is stronger in some places and weaker in others. This uneven distribution suggests that the field might be generated by dynamo action closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen. Every flyby we execute gets us closer to determining where and how Jupiter’s dynamo works.”
Juno also is designed to study the polar magnetosphere and the origin of Jupiter's powerful auroras—its northern and southern lights. These auroral emissions are caused by particles that pick up energy, slamming into atmospheric molecules. Juno’s initial observations indicate that the process seems to work differently at Jupiter than at Earth.
Juno is in a polar orbit around Jupiter, and the majority of each orbit is spent well away from the gas giant. But, once every 53 days, its trajectory approaches Jupiter from above its north pole, where it begins a two-hour transit (from pole to pole) flying north to south with its eight science instruments collecting data and its JunoCam public outreach camera snapping pictures. The download of six megabytes of data collected during the transit can take 1.5 days.
“Every 53 days, we go screaming by Jupiter, get doused by a fire hose of Jovian science, and there is always something new,” said Bolton. “On our next flyby on July 11, we will fly directly over one of the most iconic features in the entire solar system -- one that every school kid knows -- Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. If anybody is going to get to the bottom of what is going on below those mammoth swirling crimson cloud tops, it’s Juno and her cloud-piercing science instruments.”
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for NASA. The principal investigator is Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, in Denver, built the spacecraft.
A test of NASA’s asteroid defense system
By Eddie Irizarry and Deborah Byrd in Human World | Space | July 29, 2017
Asteroid 2012 TC4 might give Earth a close shave, or pass more distantly, in October, 2017. Scientists are trying to reacquire the asteroid this summer – find it again in space – to determine its precise orbit.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2017/07/asteroid-earth-animation.gif
The Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has had its eye on a small asteroid, designated 2012 TC4, that will pass close to Earth on October 12, 2017. These experts have said that, even though they can’t yet predict exactly how close it’ll come, they’re certain it’ll fly by at a safe distance. That safe distance could be a very close shave, with the space rock passing no closer than 4,200 miles (6,800 km) from our planet. Or it could be a more distant pass, some two-thirds the moon’s distance from Earth. Late in the day on Friday (July 28, 2017), scientists at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, Arizona announced an international collaboration that is utilizing asteroid 2012 TC4 in an exercise to test NASA’s network of observatories and scientists who work with planetary defense.
When we say CNEOS has had its eye on this asteroid, we mean that only figuratively. The calculations on its pass in October, 2017 are based on only seven days of tracking 2012 TC4, shortly after it was discovered in 2012. The Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii discovered it on October 5, 2012, and, one week later, the asteroid passed Earth at a distance of only 58,905 miles (94,800 km), or about a quarter of the distance between us and the moon.
Astronomers haven’t seen the asteroid since 2012, because it’s been so distant and so faint. The 2012 observations gave them enough information to put Earth in the clear for the 2017 pass.
However, the lack of further observations hasn’t let scientists precisely define the asteroid’s orbit (although they’re confident there’s no danger of a collision).
The international collaboration described by UA on Friday will help scientists to determine the asteroid’s orbit more precisely. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at UA is leading the campaign to reacquire 2012 TC4. In other words, even now, we are not tracking the asteroid; no one has seen it yet on this upcoming approach.
Thus as 2012 TC4 starts to approach Earth this summer, large telescopes will be searching for it, with the goal of re-establishing its precise trajectory. The asteroid should become visible again to large ground-based telescopes in early August, scientists say.
The new observations are expected to help refine knowledge about its orbit, narrowing the uncertainty about how far it will be from Earth at its closest approach in October.
Capt.Kangaroo
08-05-2017, 09:08 AM
Thanks ilan. Ill be watching out for it.:eek:
Let's hope it isn't too close a shave. This has all the trappings of a sci-fi movie.
crazed 9.6
08-05-2017, 05:59 PM
So does this mean that approx every 5 years this asteroid will pass Earth ?
Or until it collides with something and gets kicked off course (like the Earth) ?
Where did it come from in the first place ? Who let the dogs out !!
And where the heck was Jupiter in all this ? ... Lapsing on its job I see :eek:
Jupiter was busy posing for Juno. Shameless self-promotion!
Scientists detect 'fingerprint' of first light ever in the universe
By Ben Westcott, CNN Updated 4:48 AM ET, Thu March 1, 2018
(CNN) Scientists have detected traces of the earliest light in the universe thought to emanate from the first stars formed after the Big Bang, billions of years ago.
The new report, published in Nature on February 28, said researchers found the "fingerprint" of the universe's first light as background radiation left on hydrogen.
"This is the first time we've seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang," Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University who led the work, said in a statement. Following the Big Bang, physicists believe there was only darkness in the universe for about 180 million years, a period known by scientists as Cosmic "Dark Ages."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2018/02/180228131115_1_900x600.jpg
As the universe expanded, the soup of ionized plasma created by the Big Bang slowly began to cool and form neutral hydrogen atoms, say physicists. Eventually these were pulled together by gravity and ignited to form stars.
The new discovery is the closest scientists have ever come to observing that moment of "cosmic dawn."
"It's very exciting to see our baby stars being born," Keith Bannister, astronomer at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told CNN.
"(Although) we can't see the stars themselves, we're seeing the effect they have on the gas around them."
The discovery was made at a radio telescope in Western Australia, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, operated by the CSIRO.
Elon Musk: Mars rocket will fly 'short flights' next year
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/160927141657-spacex-mars-780x439.jpg
Elon Musk issued yet another incredibly ambitious timeline.
During a Q&A at the SXSW festival on Sunday, Musk said SpaceX will be ready to fly its Mars rocket in 2019.
"We are building the first ship, or interplanetary ship, right now," Musk said. "And we'll probably be able to do short flights, short up and down flights, during the first half of next year.
"Musk said last year that his Mas rocket, called BFR or Big Falcon Rocket, could one day fly people from city to city on Earth in incredibly short time spans, touting that it would take 30 minutes to hop from New York to Shanghai.
He said at the time that he hopes a BFR will land on Mars in 2022, and the first missions will send cargo. Eventually, the rocket will host convoys of people and their belongings. The ultimate goal is to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet.
Capt.Kangaroo
03-13-2018, 12:54 PM
Mr Musk is awesome. We're gonna make some big gains in space exploration thanks to him.:cool:
It is amazing. He has taken over the role that was once our country's, when we were a bit more intelligent and ambitious.
crazed 9.6
03-13-2018, 01:55 PM
awesome !!!
:)
Hubble finds relic galaxy close to home
By Eleanor Imster in SPACE | March 15, 2018
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/03/relic-galaxy-hubble-e1520963037127.png
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are investigating an ancient galaxy – called NGC 1277 – that’s in our cosmic backyard, 240 million light-years from Earth. What makes NGC 1277 unique is that the galaxy is composed exclusively of aging stars that were born 10 billion years ago. NGC 1277 started its life churning out stars 1,000 times faster than in our own Milky Way, but, unlike other galaxies in the local universe, NGC 1277 has not undergone any further star formation. The very rare and odd assemblage of stars has remained essentially unchanged for the past 10 billion years.
Astronomers nickname such galaxies as “red and dead,” because the stars are aging and there aren’t any successive generations of younger stars. Though Hubble has seen such “red and dead” galaxies in the early universe, one has never been conclusively found nearby. The findings were published in the March 12, 2018, issue of the peer-reviewed science journal Nature.
The researchers learned that although NGC 1277 has twice as many stars as our Milky Way, it’s one quarter of our galaxy in size. Essentially, the relic galaxy is in a state of “arrested development.” Perhaps, the researchers said, like all galaxies, it started out as a compact object but failed to accrete more material to grow in size to form a pinwheel-shaped galaxy.
Approximately one in 1,000 massive galaxies is expected to be a relic (or oddball) galaxy, like NGC 1277, researchers said. NGC 1277 offers a unique opportunity to see one up close and personal. Ignacio Trujillo, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias at the University of La Laguna, Spain, is an author of the study.
He said in statement: We can explore such original galaxies in full detail and probe the conditions of the early universe.
Stunning Mars images, from Curiosity
By Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | TODAY'S IMAGE | March 16, 2018
The Curiosity rover has sent back some beautiful new images of the foothills of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater on Mars. The first image is a panorama of the breathtaking view, thanks to processing by Thomas Appéré, who is an Associate Scientist at IPAG (l’Institut de Planétologie et d’ Astrophysique de Grenoble) in Grenoble, France. The rover is still making its way closer to these foothills at the base of the much taller mountain. The mesas and canyons are very reminiscent of the scenery in the American Southwest.
Curiosity has confirmed that Gale Crater used to contain a lake or series of lakes a few billion years ago, and fast-moving streams once emptied into the lake through the crater rim. Whether any life existed is still unknown, but this region was once a lot more habitable than it is today.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/03/mars-panorama-mar-2018-Curiosity-e1521192881952.jpg
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/03/mars-outcrop-thomas-appere-feb-2018-curiosity-e1521199796185.jpg
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/03/mars-outcrop-sand-ripples-thomas-appere-feb-2018-curiosity-e1521199750749.jpg
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In Memory of Dr. Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9tDO3HK20Q
Marley
03-17-2018, 06:57 PM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ufo-encounter-new-footage-shows-us-navy-pilots-apparent-sighting-of-alien-craft-near-east-coast/ar-BBK7XKY?li=BBnb7Kz
navy-pilots-apparent-sighting-of-alien-craft-near-east-coast
It freaked out those pilots!
Moon, Mercury, Venus March 18 to 20
By Bruce McClure in TONIGHT | March 18, 2018
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Watch for the returning young moon, and the planets Mercury and Venus, beginning on the evening of March 18, 2018. The planets will still be there – and the moon will become much easier to see – on the nights of March 19 and 20.
On March 18, if you’re far enough west with respect to the International Date Line, and especially if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ve got a good shot at seeing a whisker-thin very young moon. The moon will be only one day past new moon on March 18, and thus the moon will be a very fragile crescent indeed, very lovely, setting soon behind the sun.
Sometimes, you can’t catch a young moon for a couple evenings after new moon. And sometimes you can’t see planets so near the sunset. But – around the spring equinox – you can. That’s because the ecliptic (path of the sun, moon and planets) stands nearly straight up with respect to the western horizon after sunset in spring. The spring angle of the ecliptic places the moon and planets at their highest above your horizon, after sunset.
Mercury: The Swift Planet
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This colorful version of Mercury was assembled from spectral data taken with the MESSENGER spacecraft, highlighting various minerals on the planet's surface.
Mercury rotates on its axis with nearly no tilt whatsoever, meaning the planet experiences no seasons and there are places at the poles where sunlight never touches, blocked by steep crater walls. Solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts are two of the major forces that have shaped — and continue to influence — this world, and we are still digging for clues on its history and evolution. Only two spacecraft have ever visited, and the entire surface wasn't even imaged until earlier this century.
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Remember, Mercury is still visible tonight, next to Venus. See image a few posts above. Mercury was dubbed the Swift Planet by the Romans because it moves so quickly across the sky. It only takes 59 days for Mercury to revolve around the sun while it takes us 365 days, defining our year. - ilan
Mercury: The Swift Planet
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2018/03/spectra_mercury.jpg?mw=1000&mh=800
This colorful version of Mercury was assembled from spectral data taken with the MESSENGER spacecraft, highlighting various minerals on the planet's surface.
Mercury rotates on its axis with nearly no tilt whatsoever, meaning the planet experiences no seasons and there are places at the poles where sunlight never touches, blocked by steep crater walls. Solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts are two of the major forces that have shaped — and continue to influence — this world, and we are still digging for clues on its history and evolution. Only two spacecraft have ever visited, and the entire surface wasn't even imaged until earlier this century.
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Remember, Mercury is still visible tonight, next to Venus. See image a few posts above. Mercury was dubbed the Swift Planet by the Romans because it moves so quickly across the sky. It only takes 59 days for Mercury to revolve around the sun while it takes us 365 days, defining our year. - ilan
thats awesome:cool:
It is cool looking. Irrespective of the color, it looks an awful lot like our moon.
dishuser
03-21-2018, 12:52 AM
I Believe that We have been Visited for Many Many Years and Until One Sits down on the White House Lawn or some other Note Worthy Place and They Step Out, No One will will Admit They are Real...!
they're probably intelligent and will avoid the WH :p
It is cool looking. Irrespective of the color, it looks an awful lot like our moon.
indeed ilan:cool:
Velikovsky’s Venus
Kelly Beatty in Sky & Telescope | March 20, 2018
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Venus mimics all the phases of the Moon as it circles the Sun inside Earth’s orbit, as shown in this near-ultraviolet sequence recorded in 2007.Sean Walker
A controversial 1950 book declared that our neighbor world was spawned by Jupiter 3,500 years ago and nearly struck Earth — twice.
As northern winter gives way to the longer daylight hours of spring, Venus returns to the evening sky for a long engagement. As the chart below shows, the planet doesn’t get as dramatically high in the sky as it did back in 2015. But the Evening Star will remain in view through September.
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Telescopically, Venus never offers much to see aside from its gradual change in apparent size and an attractive progression of phases. Observers have strained for centuries to glimpse any detail on its cloud-cloaked disk. We sometimes forget that astronomers knew very little about this neighbor world — so like Earth in size and mass — until powerful radar probing and spacecraft visits started to peel back the layers of mystery in the 1960s.
The first artificial satellites were still a decade away when, in 1946, Immanuel Velikovsky finished the manuscript for Worlds in Collision, a book that capitalized on our relative ignorance and put forward a theory of solar-system formation that goes beyond bizarre. Born in 1895 and a student variously of history, law, biology, and psychoanalysis, Velikovsky maintained that the inner planets only recently assumed the serene, stable orbits they have today.
Rather, in his scheme Venus took the form of a huge, rogue comet after being ejected by Jupiter not long before 1500 BC. It then hurtled sunward, sideswiping Earth twice and colliding with Mars before settling into the almost perfectly circular orbit it now occupies.
The basis for all this astounding, historically recent chaos wasn’t a detailed computation of orbital motion but rather Velikovsky’s unwavering belief that Old Testament narratives and cosmological myths drawn from China, Central America, India, Assyria, and elsewhere were accounts of real events.
What got him started was the biblical story of Joshua commanding the Sun and Moon to stop moving for an entire day and invoking a devastating hail of stones from the sky during his battle with the Amorites. Velikovsky was also seeking a physical reason for the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians in Exodus.
Venus provided all the answers. That long tail it trailed after leaving Jupiter had also created all kinds of havoc for Pharaoh as Earth passed through it not once but twice. And although we escaped an outright collision, the proximity of Venus caused Earth’s orbit and axial tilt to change, a magnetic reversal, and worldwide floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions — all within recorded history. None of this catastrophism was chronicled by our ancestors, Velikovsky asserts, because they suffered from a “collective amnesia” that repressed all memory of these occurrences. As further proof, he details how Venus is conspicuously absent from various historical tabulations of planets prior to about 2000 BC.
Velikovsky acknowledged that his scenario was at odds with established physics. But any inconsistencies weren’t due to his myth-as-fact interpretations; instead, he pointed to the “need for a new approach to celestial mechanics” in which electrical forces and magnetism trumped the power of gravity.
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Understandably, astronomers of the day were outraged by all of this. It took Velikovsky four years to get Worlds in Collision published, finally getting a green light from Macmillan in part because a sympathetic Gordon Atwater, then head of astronomy at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, promised to create a show for Hayden Planetarium to depict the book’s planetary pinball. But Atwater was summarily fired before that could happen. Strenuous objections by Harvard’s Harlow Shapley, Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, and other academics — including a boycott of Macmillan’s astronomy textbooks — caused the publisher to jettison this literary hot potato to Doubleday. The book and its author merited a blistering editorial in Sky & Telescope.
A Curious, Believing Public
Remarkably, Worlds in Collision became phenomenally popular in the summer of 1950, especially among the New York literati. Advance articles about the forthcoming book in Harper’s, Collier’s, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere whetted the public’s appetite. Once in print, the book rocketed to the top of the New York Times’ best-seller list and remained a top-ten pick for five months.
Although pilloried almost universally by professional astronomers, Velikovsky remained a frequent acquaintance of Albert Einstein. More than a decade later he gained a modicum of support thanks to Princeton physicist Valentine Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz, whose letter in Science (December 21, 1962) pointed out Velikovsky’s successful predictions that Jupiter was a source of radio energy and that Venus must be very hot.
Still, one has to wonder why the outlandish premises of Worlds in Collision got so much traction in the first place. Science historian Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The Velikovsky affair raises what is perhaps the most disturbing question about the public impact of science. How is a layman to judge rival claims of supposed experts? Any person with a gift for words can spin a persuasive argument about any subject not in the domain of a reader’s personal expertise.” Advocate-turned-critic Leroy Ellenberger notes, more pointedly, “The less one knows about science, the more plausible Velikovsky’s scenario appears.”
Six decades later, Worlds in Collision is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror of history, yet our human penchant for intriguing but outlandish scientific claims remains.
Remember what our departed friend Stephen Hawking had to say about alien visitors. His admonition begins in the third paragraph. - ilan
STEPHEN HAWKING ON ALIEN LIFE, EXTRATERRESTRIALS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF UFOS VISITING EARTH
Andrew Whalen in Newsweek | 3/14/18 AT 12:31 PM
Physicist Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England, on Wednesday.
Hawking’s earliest astrophysics work posited the existence of singularities, mathematically conforming black holes with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Hawking established, along with Roger Penrose, the universe’s origin as a singularity, i.e., a point in spacetime where traditional physical laws break down and gravity becomes infinite. His later work in quantum mechanics, inspired by collaboration with Soviet scientists Yakov Zel’dovich and Alexei Starobinsky, would mathematically indicate the finite entropy and evaporation of black holes as they emitted particles that came to be known as Hawking radiation. Though widely accepted as a breakthrough in theoretical physics, Hawking radiation and its resulting micro black holes have yet to be observed in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
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His work in theoretical astrophysics (and the 1988 publication of his bestselling book A Brief History of Time) made Hawking a celebrity—including appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons and Futurama—which allowed Hawking a prominent public platform for his beliefs outside of physics. An atheist, anti-war activist, BDS supporter and anti-capitalist, the overlap between Hawking’s humanist politics and scientific interests found expression in his repeated public statements on the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial life.
Hawking took a conflicted position on alien life, at once promoting the search for extraterrestrial life and warning about the potential dangers of first contact with an alien species. His position on extraterrestrial life advocates two approaches: collecting intel and keeping as quiet as possible.
“There is no bigger question,” Hawking said, while announcing his support for Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million program to search for alien communications via radio wave and visible light observations of 1 million nearby stars and 100 galactic centers. “It is time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth.”
In 2010, Hawking worried what that answer would bring, describing the dangers of first contact with aliens in a Discovery Channel documentary. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” Hawking says. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
“Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach,” Hawking said in the documentary, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.
Absent knowledge about alien life, Hawking urged documentary viewers to analogize their likely behavior to ours. Hawking noted that first encounters throughout our own history rarely begin with: “I’ll pop the kettle on. Milk? Sugar?”
He would reiterate this theme in a later documentary. “One day, we might receive a signal from a planet like this," he says in Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places of the newly discovered world of Gliese 832c. “But we should be wary of answering back.”
During the announcement for Breakthrough Listen, Hawking said: “We don’t know much about aliens, but we know about humans. If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced. A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”
While Hawking expresses near certainty that alien life exists in the universe, he does not believe aliens have visited Earth in UFOs or at any point in history. “Why hasn’t the Earth been visited, and even colonised?” Hawking wrote on his official website. “I discount suggestions that UFOs contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant.”
In the essay Hawking describes some of the possibilities for the universe’s seeming silence, speculating that intelligence may be one of many possible evolutionary outcomes or, mostly darkly of all, the possibility that “intelligent life destroys itself.”
“I very much hope it isn’t true,” Hawking wrote.
Only 117 years 'til this asteroid (possibly) hits us
Don Lincoln, CNN | Updated 6:07 PM ET, Thu March 22, 2018
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(CNN) Chicken Little was right. In a very literal sense, the sky is falling. Not today and not tomorrow, but eventually. NASA has announced that on September 22, 2135 (which happens to be a Thursday, if you need to check your schedule), there is a small chance an asteroid a third of a mile across (named Bennu) will slam into the Earth with an impact energy equivalent to the currently deployed arsenal of US nuclear ballistic missiles.
Needless to say, if that happens, it will definitely be a bad day for everyone.
But, not to worry, NASA has a plan. In a theoretical exercise, a team of engineers devised a conceptual design of the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response vehicle, or HAMMER. It is a hypothetical spacecraft that could either ram into Bennu or target it with a nuclear device, either of which it is hoped would deflect the asteroid away from Earth.
HAMMER is not an actual NASA program, but rather an investigation into the technical challenges that would arise in building such a device. The 1998 movies "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" were dramatizations of broadly similar efforts.
While it is rather unlikely that Bennu will actually hit Earth, it is inevitable that eventually a similar one will. The probability of an impact is high for smaller rocks and decreases rapidly for larger asteroids.
In 2013, a meteor about 60 feet (20 meters) across hit the Earth near Chelyabinsk in Russia. This relatively small rock still did considerable damage. It released about 30 times as much energy as the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima, blowing out glass windows and causing 1,500 people to seek medical attention.
It was small enough that the energy was mostly dissipated in the atmosphere, although a few rocks hit Earth. At the other end of the spectrum was a meteor about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in diameter that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago with enough energy to wipe out the dinosaurs as a dominant form of life on Earth. This meteor left a crater about 100 miles (150 kilometers) across.
Meteors like the Chelyabinsk one are fairly common, hitting the Earth every few years, while those on the scale of the Yucatan one happen perhaps every 100 million years or so. In between are impacts comparable to the Bennu asteroid, which are also fairly rare, perhaps once every 100,000 years.
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But even smaller meteors can cause considerable damage. And they are surprisingly common, although luckily most impacts occur over the oceans or uninhabited regions around the globe. An impact of even a modest-sized meteor could have catastrophic consequences if it were to occur over a large city. Humanity would have to intervene to avoid massive loss of life. Ideally, that intervention would be a mission like HAMMER to avoid the collision entirely.
In the asteroid-deflection business, warning is everything. A small amount of force applied to an asteroid many years before a predicted impact can easily alter the asteroid's orbit, while a last minute intervention could require so much force that it might well be impossible to avoid the impact.
With that in mind, NASA set up a program whose chief executive has what could well be the coolest title of any position in any organization: Planetary Defense Officer. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office oversees studies of mitigation efforts (like HAMMER and others) but also the near Earth orbit, or NEO, observations program. The Center for NEO Studies is dedicated to watching the skies, looking for large space rocks in orbits that could intersect the Earth.
CNEOS has discovered approximately 18,000 near-Earth objects, with nearly 1,000 of them being over a kilometer in size. Those, of course, are the most dangerous ones. The NEO search program has existed in various forms since the 1970s.
In 1998, NASA was directed by the Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology to look for possible threats of asteroids larger than a kilometer. The program has become more sophisticated over the last two decades.
There are a bunch of NEOs out there and astronomers have found perhaps 90% of those larger than a kilometer and a lesser fraction of smaller ones. Of all NEOs found, NASA's programs were responsible for 98% of the discoveries, with other astronomers finding the others. At a very modest fraction of NASA's overall budget, this office is the sentinel, watching and waiting, warning us of potentially serious dangers. This is an important effort and one well worth our support.
Jupiter’s Red Spot gets taller as it shrinks
Eleanor Imster in SPACE | March 21, 2018
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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant oval of crimson-colored clouds in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. The clouds race counterclockwise around the oval’s perimeter with wind speeds greater than any storm on Earth. Measuring 10,000 miles (16,000 km) in width as of April 2017, the Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth. This looping animation simulates the motion of clouds in the Great Red Spot. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Justin Cowart.
Amy Simon is an expert in planetary atmospheres at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper. She said in a statement:
Storms are dynamic, and that’s what we see with the Great Red Spot. It’s constantly changing in size and shape, and its winds shift, as well.
The study confirms that the storm has been decreasing in length overall since 1878 and is big enough to accommodate just over one Earth at this point. But the historical record indicates the area of the spot grew temporarily in the 1920s. Reta Beebe, an emeritus professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, is a study co-author. Beebe said:
There is evidence in the archived observations that the Great Red Spot has grown and shrunk over time. However, the storm is quite small now, and it’s been a long time since it last grew.
Because the storm has been contracting, the researchers expected to find the already-powerful internal winds becoming even stronger, like an ice skater who spins faster as she pulls in her arms. But instead of spinning faster, the storm appears to be forced to stretch up, like clay being shaped on a potter’s wheel. As the wheel spins, an artist can transform a short, round lump into a tall, thin vase by pushing inward with his hands. The smaller he makes the base, the taller the vessel will grow. In the case of the Great Red Spot, the change in height is small relative to the area that the storm covers, but still noticeable, say the researchers.
The Great Red Spot’s color has been deepening, too, becoming intensely orange since 2014. Researchers aren’t sure why that’s happening, but say it’s possible that the chemicals which color the storm are being carried higher into the atmosphere as the spot stretches up. At higher altitudes, the chemicals would be subjected to more UV radiation and would take on a deeper color.
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Observations of Jupiter date back centuries, but the first confirmed sighting of the Great Red Spot was in 1831. Since then, observers have been able to measure the size and drift of the Great Red Spot by fitting their telescopes with an eyepiece scored with crosshairs. A continuous record of at least one observation of this kind per year dates back to 1878.
For the current study, the researchers drew on this archive of historical observations and combined them with data from NASA spacecraft, starting with the two Voyager missions in 1979. In particular, the group relied on a series of annual observations of Jupiter that team members have been conducting with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy, or OPAL, project.
The team traced the evolution of the Great Red Spot, analyzing its size, shape, color and drift rate. They also looked at the storm’s internal wind speeds, when that information was available from spacecraft.
Bottom line: A new study suggests Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is growing taller as it shrinks.
Tiangong-1: Chinese space station predicted to crash somewhere on Earth around Easter
Genelle Weule, ABC Science | Updated 25 March 2018
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Space experts predict the Tiangong-1 space station, or "Heavenly Palace", will turn into a spectacular fireball as it enters Earth's atmosphere sometime during the Easter long weekend.
According to the latest predictions, it will begin its fiery descent into Earth's atmosphere somewhere in a window between March 30 and April 3 — possibly around April 1.
But there are concerns the bus-sized spacecraft is out of control.
That means some debris from the fireball could hit the Earth anywhere in a band between 43 degrees north and south of the equator.
But you would have to be extremely unlucky to be taken out by a chunk of debris from Tiangong-1, according to space engineer Warwick Holmes, executive director of space engineering at the University of Sydney's School of Aerospace.
How do we know if it's out of control?
Not long after it was decommissioned, rumours began to circulate that the Chinese agency had lost control of the craft.
"It seems they lost communication link to the space station so there is no data link between Tiangong-1,"
Dr Wu said it had been planned to deorbit in September 2017, but this did not happen.
If there is no data link, ground engineers cannot fire up the engines to help control where the spacecraft lands.
"You can't activate or turn [the thruster engine] on so in this case you can't control the orbit," Dr Wu explained.
But, he added, the status of the craft was unknown.
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Are some places more likely to get hit than others?
Tiangong-1 orbits Earth once every one-and-a-half hours in a rollercoaster orbit pinging between the latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south.
That is as far north as Boston and as south as Hobart.
Hurtling at a speed of around seven kilometres a second (the equivalent of travelling between Sydney and Perth in about eight minutes), it is never anywhere long.
Originally it was intended the craft would burn into smithereens somewhere over a remote part of the south Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and South America at the bottom of this band.
This location, known as the "spacecraft cemetery", is the final resting place of space junk from a multitude of large spacecraft sent up into the sky by the US, Russia, Europe and Japan.
But, if communication has been lost with the craft, the re-entry point is much less certain.
According to Aerospace and the European Space Agency, the areas at the edges of this band had a slightly higher risk.
10 surprises about our solar system
Larry Sessions in SPACE | March 26, 2018
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Here are 10 unexpected and intriguing facts about our solar system – our sun and its family of planets – you probably did not know!
1. The hottest planet isn’t closest to the sun. Many people know that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, well less than half of the Earth’s distance. It’s no mystery, therefore, why people would assume that Mercury is the hottest planet. We know that Venus, the second planet away from the sun, is on the average 30 million miles (48 million km) farther from the sun than Mercury. The natural assumption is that, being farther away, Venus must be cooler. But assumptions can be dangerous. For practical consideration, Mercury has no atmosphere, no warming blanket to help it maintain the sun’s heat. Venus, on the other hand, is shrouded by an unexpectedly thick atmosphere, about 100 times thicker than Earth’s atmosphere. This in itself would normally serve to prevent some of the sun’s energy from escaping back into space and thus raise the overall temperature of the planet. But in addition to the atmosphere’s thickness, it is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas. The carbon dioxide freely lets solar energy in, but is much less transparent to the longer wavelength radiation emitted by the heated surface. Thus the temperature rises to a level far above what would be expected, making it the hottest planet. In fact the average temperature on Venus is about 875 degrees Fahrenheit (468 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt tin and lead. The maximum temperature on Mercury, the planet closer to the sun, is about 800 degrees F (427 degrees C). In addition, the lack of atmosphere causes Mercury’s surface temperature to vary by hundreds of degrees, whereas the thick mantle of carbon dioxide keeps the surface temperature of Venus steady, hardly varying at all, anywhere on the planet or any time of day or night!
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New Horizons captured this image of Pluto on July 25, 2015, when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 km) from the planet. Image via NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
2. Pluto is smaller than the U.S. The greatest distance across the contiguous United States – from Northern California to Maine – is nearly 2,900 miles (about 4,700 km). Thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015, we now know that Pluto is 1,473 miles (2,371 km) across, less than half the width of the U.S. Certainly in size it is much smaller than any major planet, perhaps making it a bit easier to understand why, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union changed Pluto’s status from major planet to dwarf planet.
3. George Lucas doesn’t know much about asteroid fields. In many science fiction movies, spacecraft are often endangered by pesky asteroid fields. In actuality, the only asteroid belt we are aware of exists between Mars and Jupiter, and although there are tens of thousands of asteroids in it (perhaps more), they are quite widely spaced and the likelihood of colliding with one is small. In fact, spacecraft must be deliberately and carefully guided to asteroids to have a chance of even photographing one. Given the presumed manner of asteroid creation, it is highly unlikely that spacefarers will ever encounter asteroid swarms or fields in deep space.
4. You can make volcanos using water as magma. Mention volcanoes and everyone immediately thinks of Mount St. Helens, Mount Vesuvius, or maybe the lava caldera of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Volcanos require molten rock called lava (or magma when still underground), right? Not really. A volcano forms when an underground reservoir of a hot, fluid mineral or gas erupts onto the surface of a planet or other non-stellar astronomical body. The exact composition of the mineral can vary greatly. On Earth, most volcanoes sport lava (or magma) that has silicon, iron, magnesium, sodium, and a host of complicated minerals. The volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon Io appear to be composed mostly of sulfur and sulfur dioxide. But it can be simpler than that. On Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, the driving force is ice, good old frozen H20! Water expands when it freezes and enormous pressures can build up, just as in a “normal” volcano on Earth. When the ice erupts, a cryovolcano is formed. So volcanoes can operate on water as well as molten rock. By the way, we have relatively small scale eruptions of water on Earth called geysers. They are associated with superheated water that has come into contact with a hot reservoir of magma.
5. The edge of the solar system is 1,000 times farther away than Pluto. You might still think of the solar system as extending out to the orbit of the much-loved dwarf planet Pluto. Today we don’t even consider Pluto a full-fledged planet, but the impression remains. Still, we have discovered numerous objects orbiting the sun that are considerably farther than Pluto. These are Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) or Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The Kuiper Belt, the first of the sun’s two reservoirs of cometary material, is thought to extend to 50 or 60 astronomical units (AU, or the average distance of the Earth from the sun). An even farther part of the solar system, the huge but tenuous Oort comet cloud, may extend to 50,000 AU from the sun, or about half a light-year – more than 1,000 times farther than Pluto.
6. Almost everything on Earth is a rare element. The elemental composition of planet Earth is mostly iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, sodium, and aluminum. While such elements have been detected in locations throughout the universe, they are merely trace elements, vastly overshadowed by the much greater abundances of hydrogen and helium. Thus Earth, for the most part, is composed of rare elements. This does not signify any special place for Earth, however. The cloud from which the Earth formed had a much higher abundance of hydrogen and helium, but being light gases, they were driven away into space by the sun’s heat as the Earth formed.
7. There are Mars rocks on Earth (and we didn’t bring them here). Chemical analysis of meteorites found in Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, and elsewhere have been shown by various means to have originated on Mars. For example, some contain pockets of gas that is chemically identical to the Martian atmosphere. These meteorites may have been blasted away from Mars due to a larger meteoroid or asteroid impact on Mars, or by a huge volcanic eruption, and later collided with Earth.
8. Jupiter has the biggest ocean of any planet, albeit made of metallic hydrogen. Orbiting in cold space five times farther from the sun than Earth, Jupiter retained much higher levels of hydrogen and helium when it formed than did our planet. In fact, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium. Given the planet’s mass and chemical composition, physics demands that way down under the cold cloud tops, pressures rise to the point that the hydrogen must turn to liquid. In fact there should be a deep planetary ocean of liquid hydrogen. Computer models show that not only is this the largest ocean known in the solar system, but that it is about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) deep – roughly as deep as the Earth is around!
9. Even really small bodies can have moons. It was once thought that only objects as large as planets could have natural satellites or moons. In fact the existence of moons, or the capability of a planet to gravitationally control a moon in orbit, was sometimes used as part of the definition of what a planet truly is. It just didn’t seem reasonable that smaller celestial bodies had enough gravity to hold a moon. After all, Mercury and Venus have none at all, and Mars has only tiny moons. But in 1993, the Galileo probe passed the 20-mile wide asteroid Ida and discovered its one-mile wide moon, Dactyl. Since then moons have been discovered orbiting many other minor planets in our solar system.
10. We live inside the sun. Normally we think of the sun as being that big, hot ball of light 93 million miles (150 million km) away. But actually, the sun’s outer atmosphere extends far beyond its visible surface. Our planet orbits within this tenuous atmosphere, and we see evidence of this when gusts of the solar wind generate the Northern and Southern Lights. In that sense, we definitely live inside the sun. But the solar atmosphere doesn’t end at Earth. Auroras have been observed on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and even distant Neptune. In fact, the outer solar atmosphere, called the heliosphere, is thought to extend at least 100 A.U. That’s nearly 10 billion miles (16 billion km). In fact the atmosphere is likely teardrop shaped due to the sun’s motion in space, with the “tail” extending tens to hundreds of billions of miles downwind.
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This artist’s concept puts solar system distances in perspective. The scale bar is in astronomical units, with each set distance beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance. One AU is the distance from the sun to the Earth, which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. NASA’s Voyager 1, humankind’s most distant spacecraft, is around 125 AU. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
What We've Learned From 60 Years of U.S.-Funded UFO Probes
Nadia Drake, National Geographic | December 19, 2017
http://storage.brantfordexpositor.ca/v1/dynamic_resize/sws_path/suns-prod-images/1297836085046_ORIGINAL.jpg?quality=80&size=650x&stmp=1463407196354
A recently revealed, formerly secret U.S. government program that studied unexplained aerial phenomena—more colloquially referred to as UFOs—came as a surprise to many when stories describing it appeared almost simultaneously in the New York Times and Politico.
The Pentagon’s project, called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was reportedly established in 2007 to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena that appeared to be using novel propulsive, hovering, or otherwise advanced technologies. A 490-page report detailing the program’s findings supposedly exists, though it has not yet been released.
https://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/33/photos/300000/620x/5a7c7de1a76fa_LuisElizondo668060.jpg
Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate UFOs until October, reportedly resigned in protest
of what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
Some may think that the very existence of this project supports the idea that aliens are visiting us, but that’s not a logical conclusion. The undeniable truth is that observations of a puzzling nature certainly merit investigation, as long as it’s done scientifically. And this project is not even close to the first U.S. government-funded search for evidence of advanced intelligence—so far, to little effect.
Projects that began more than five decades ago and still continue to this day include efforts to evaluate bizarre sightings and exotic objects, scan the skies for signs of intelligent transmissions, and develop instruments capable of sniffing out signs of life on faraway worlds.
The fact that the government chose to spend some cash on a supposedly scientific look at UFOs—particularly as they could be crucially related to national security threats—really should be no surprise, says Seth Shostak, one of the SETI Institute’s senior alien hunters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiFaTKg2v7U
Neil deGrasse Tyson and SETI astronomer Seth Shotsak talk about alien sightings
"The feds have long had an interest in UFOs, going back to the celebrity cases of the late 1940s—Roswell, anyone?” says Shostak. “Much of the motivation for this interest was the worry that the strange things being reported in the sky might be novel Soviet—or today, Russian or Chinese—aircraft.
“But even if you think that the interest had greater scope, that the government really wanted to know if our little planet was being visited by other beings, there’s little surprise in the fact that they’ve spent a modest amount of money investigating that possibility.” Indeed, roughly a third of the U.S. population believes that some of these bizarre phenomena are attributable to extraterrestrial visitors, he says.
The bigger problem, according to Shostak, is that the money shunted into the Pentagon program went primarily to a company founded by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire aerospace mogul whose company builds inflatable space modules and who has long believed in alien visitation. Initiated after conversations between Bigelow and then-Nevada senator Harry Reid, the program garnered at least $22 million in funding over five years (it’s not yet clear whether it survives under a different guise after its supposed termination in 2012).
Within the new stories are nuggets of curious information, including the supposed keeping of unearthly alloys at Bigelow’s facilities, and a video that reportedly shows an object spotted by two U.S. Navy pilots.
But the most that’s publicly known about the program’s findings is second-hand at best, coming from insiders relaying their impressions to reporters. Some, like Reid, claim there is compelling evidence that merits further investigation—but the details remain as elusive as the aliens.
“Objective description of any phenomena should be backed up by compelling evidence, and despite many decades of reports of various UFO and abduction phenomena, we don’t have such evidence,” says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI research center. “Moreover, astronomers spend their lives looking at the sky with a wide variety of telescopes and techniques, and we have never snapped a picture of [an unexplained] spaceship.”
Here are some of our previous and ongoing attempts to find out if, in fact, aliens are out there and whether we have been visited, starting with the heyday of such activities around the middle of the last century.
1947: Roswell (Project Mogul)
Easily the granddaddy of all UFO conspiracies, the Roswell incident is described by many as the catastrophic crash of an alien spaceship in the New Mexico desert, after which the U.S. government supposedly retrieved the spacecraft (and several aliens). In 1994, the Air Force released a report identifying the debris as belonging to “a once top-secret balloon operation, Project MOGUL, designed to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.”
1948-1952: Projects Sign and Grudge
First Sign and then Grudge, these Air Force-funded projects were examinations of flying saucers and other reported unexplained phenomena, inspired both by the Cold War and a 1947 observation of nine “disk-shaped objects” over Washington state. According to the CIA, “GRUDGE officials found no evidence in UFO sightings of advanced foreign weapons design or development, and they concluded that UFOs did not threaten U.S. security. They recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in UFOs and contributed to a ’war hysteria’ atmosphere.”
1952-1969: Project Blue Book
A continuation of the previous two projects, Blue Book was the longest and most extensive known investigation of unexplained aerial happenings. Of the 12,618 reported sightings it investigated, most were ruled to be misidentified natural phenomena or aircraft (including early U-2 spy planes on test flights); 701 and remained unidentified. The report concluded that “No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as ’unidentified’ represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; there has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as ’unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles.”
1960: Project Ozma
Funded by the National Science Foundation, a federal agency created in 1950, this $2,000 project was the first scientific search for signs of intelligent radio transmissions from other worlds. Using a telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, astronomer Frank Drake (yes, the reporter’s father) listened for radio transmissions coming from planets that could be orbiting the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, but the scans came up empty.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Pentagon-cropped.jpg
1966-1968: University of Colorado UFO Project/Condon Committee
Funded by the Air Force, this project produced 1968’s Condon Report, which concluded that there was no compelling evidence for extraterrestrial involvement in UFOs, and which recommended discontinuing Project Blue Book and any further investigations of UFOs. The report inspired the American Association of the Advancement for Science to convene a meeting on the topic, which Carl Sagan and Thornton Page then turned into a book called UFOs: A Scientific Debate.
1970s and ‘80s: CIA Investigations of Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena
The 1970s and 1980s saw the CIA investigating a bunch of phenomena associated with UFO sightings, such as parapsychology and psychic happenings. According to CIA report “Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (A Die-Hard Issue)”, “CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.”
1976-1993: SETI/HRMS
The only time the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has been written into a NASA budget line, this decade provided as much as $12 million a year for searches using the Arecibo and Goldstone antennas. Around 1990, the government’s SETI program—headquartered at NASA’s Ames Research Center—was renamed the High Resolution Microwave Survey in an attempt to avoid cancellation. Nevada senator Richard Bryan ended up cancelling the program anyway in 1993, right after actual observations had started.
1990s to now: NASA’s Astrobiology Institute
Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is one of many projects within the space agency aimed at investigating the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos. Scientists under its umbrella are currently thinking about whether life once existed on Mars, if there might be organisms tucked beneath the icy shells of the moons Europa and Enceladus, and how we would even recognize what life beyond Earth looks like if and when we see it.
Now, and beyond
Other ongoing work that continues to rely on federal funds includes developing instruments capable of detecting not only exoplanets but also alien biospheres, as well as work using organisms and environments on Earth as extraterrestrial analogs.
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You can find quite a bit of information online about/from Luis Elizondo, who is pictured above. - ilan
Wandering star shook up the prehistoric solar system
Jake Parks, Astronomy | Published: Tuesday, March 27, 2018
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2018/03/ancientstar.jpg?mw=600
70,000 years ago, a nomadic star came within a light-year of the Sun, likely sending dozens of comets and asteroids tumbling out of the solar system.
Around 70,000 years ago, a supervolcano named Toba erupted, blowing roughly 670 cubic miles (2,800 cubic kilometers) of vaporized rock and debris into the air. This is thought to have caused a massive struggle for humanity, ultimately leading to a population bottleneck that whittled down our numbers to as few as 1,000 reproductive adults. According to a 2015 study, during this pivotal point in human history, a small reddish star also was likely passing within a light-year of the Sun, just skimming the outer rim of the Oort cloud (the extended shell of over a trillion icy objects that is thought to cocoon the outer solar system).
Previously, astronomers believed that this wandering star — dubbed Scholz’s star — passed relatively peacefully by the Oort cloud, influencing very few (if any) outer solar system objects. But, according to a new study, researchers now think that Scholz’s star may have caused more of a ruckus than we initially gave it credit for.
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Although the star may not have triggered the volcanic activity, it is now thought to have disrupted comets and asteroids. Some activity might have been visible to our ancestors, who were struggling to understand why their world was changing so radically, killing many of their kindred. - ilan
"A UFO!’: FAA recording reveals moment two pilots report unknown object flying overhead
Lindsey Bever, Washington Post | March 28 at 4:45 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc2mAMjb7w4
An airline pilot was flying over the Arizona desert when he saw something strange.
The pilot, who was reportedly operating a Learjet late last month for Phoenix Air, had spotted an unfamiliar object pass overhead, so he radioed the regional air traffic control center in Albuquerque.
“Was anybody, uh, above us that passed us like 30 seconds ago?” the pilot said, according to a radio broadcast released this month by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Negative,” an air traffic controller said.
“Okay,” the pilot said.
“Something did.” “A UFO!” someone quickly responded.“Yeah,” the pilot replied with a chuckle.
It’s still not clear what the pilot saw, although another pilot would soon report the same thing.
Although there has been no confirmation — or even serious suggestions — that the recent incident was related to an unidentified flying object (at least, not the kind portrayed in Hollywood), the U.S. government has investigated sightings over the years.
For the first time last year, the Pentagon confirmed that it had run an operation, known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, to investigate reported UFO sightings.
In December, The Post’s Joby Warrick reported: Current and former Pentagon officials confirm that the Pentagon program has been in existence since 2007 and was formed for the purpose of collecting and analyzing a wide range of “anomalous aerospace threats” ranging from advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters. It is a rare instance of ongoing government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Funding for the program ended in 2012, according to Warrick.
Lynn Lunsford, a spokesman for the FAA, said in a statement Wednesday to The Washington Post that the air traffic controller was “unable to verify that any other aircraft was in the area. ”But he alluded to several possibilities.
“We have a close working relationship with a number of other agencies and safely handle military aircraft and civilian aircraft of all types in that area every day, including high-altitude weather balloons,” Lunsford said in the statement.
The midair mystery in southern Arizona occurred on the afternoon of Feb. 24 at about 40,000 feet above the Sonoran Desert, according to TheDrive.Com’s War Zone.
Not long after the pilot reported his observations, the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center alerted an American Airlines flight that was flying over the area en route to San Diego.
American 1095, uh, let me know if, uh, you see anything pass over you here in the next, uh, 15 miles,” an air traffic controller said, according to the audio recording, which was obtained by The Post.
“Let you know if anything passes over us?” the pilot responded.
“American 1095, affirmative,” the controller said. “We had an aircraft in front of you … that reported something pass over him and, uh, we didn’t have any targets. So just, uh, let me know if you see anything pass over you.”
“Alright,” the pilot agreed.
Then someone, who sounded like the first pilot, chimed in again.
“I don’t know what it was,” he said. “It wasn’t an airplane, but it passed us going the opposite direction.”
Moments later, the American Airlines pilot returned to the radio to report what the other had seen.
“It’s American 1095. Yeah, something just passed over us. Uh, I don’t know what it was, but at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over the top of us.”
“Okay, American 1095. Thank you,” the controller responded.
He later asked the American Airlines pilot: “Can you tell if it was, uh, in motion or just, uh, hovering?”
The pilot said he could not “make it out — whether it was a balloon or whatnot,” but he noted that the object appeared to have a “big reflection” as it passed them overhead. He said it was traveling “several thousand feet above us, going the opposite direction.”
“Was it a Google balloon?” someone asked.
“Doubtful,” the pilot replied.
Then, someone on the radio reiterated an earlier theory: “UFO.”
American Airlines referred questions to the FAA, and Phoenix Air did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This story has been updated.
Kimbo
03-29-2018, 02:51 PM
Saw that in the morning news, contact is expected by all account during this lifetime!!
But look at Hawking's thoughts about that (above). I'll keep wearing this tinfoil hat just in case.
beautiful stuff guys:cool:
Your words are appreciated!
very welcome Ilan but I do like this thread because its very informative and impressive stuff:cool:
I've liked astronomy since I was a little kid. Fascinating topic!
Astronomers spy runaway star in Small Magellanic Cloud
By Deborah Byrd in SPACE | March 28, 2018
The star is a rare yellow supergiant. It’s speeding across its little galaxy fast enough to travel from Los Angeles to New York in about half a minute.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2014/11/magellanic-clouds-Justin-Ng1.png
Astrophotographer Justin Ng caught the edgewise view into our Milky Way galaxy, the bright star Canopus and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds at sunrise, in September 2013, over East Java’s Mount Bromo. Canopus is a yellow supergiant, much like the recently discovered runaway star.
Astronomers at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said on March 27, 2018 that they’ve discovered a rare runaway star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The star is speeding across its little galaxy at 300,000 miles per hour (500,000 km/hour). At that speed, it would take about half a minute to travel from Los Angeles to New York. The runaway star is designated J01020100-7122208, and it’s believed to have once been one of two stars orbiting around each other. Astronomers think that, when the companion star exploded as a supernova, the tremendous release of energy flung J01020100-7122208 into space at its high speed.
The star is the first runaway yellow supergiant star ever discovered, and only the second evolved runaway star to be found in another galaxy. A paper about its discovery has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Astronomical Journal and is currently published online via Arxiv. A statement from Lowell Observatory said:
After ten million years of traveling through space, the star evolved into a yellow supergiant, the object that we see today. Its journey took it 1.6 degrees across the sky, about three times the diameter of the full moon. The star will continue speeding through space until it too blows up as a supernova, likely in another three million years or so. When that happens, heavier elements will be created, and the resulting supernova remnant may form new stars or even planets on the outer edge of the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Iridium Satellites into Orbit
Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor | March 30, 2018 11:15am ET
https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3NS 8zMTAvb3JpZ2luYWwvc3BhY2V4LWlyaWRpdW0tNS5qcGc/MTUyMjQxOTU3MQ==
A used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 10 new communications satellites into orbit from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base today (March 30) in a morning liftoff that also marked an anniversary for reusable rockets.
The Falcon 9 rocket, which first flew in October 2017, launched the fifth set of Iridium Next satellites for Iridium Communications at 10:13 a.m. EDT (1413 GMT) — exactly one year to the day after SpaceX's first used Falcon 9 rocket launch and landing. Since then, SpaceX has commonly landed the first stage of its two-stage Falcon 9 rockets and reused them on later flights.
In fact, the booster that launched today's Iridium-5 mission also launched 10 other Iridium Next satellites on Oct. 9 during SpaceX's Iridium-3 mission. And last December, Iridium became the first SpaceX customer to launch a mission on a rocket it used before when the Iridium-4 mission launched with the same booster SpaceX used to launch 10 other satellites on its Iridium-2 flight in June 2017.
"Today, this is our fifth launch for the Iridium constellation, using only three rockets," SpaceX materials engineer Michael Hammersley said during live commentary.
If that sounds like a lot of launches for Iridium to you, you're not wrong. Iridium has tapped SpaceX to launch 75 Iridium Next satellites to build up its communications constellation in orbit. To do that, Iridium has bought eight Falcon 9 launches for a total of $536 million.
In one departure from typical SpaceX launches, the company cut the live video feed from the Falcon 9 second stage about 9 minutes into the flight.
"Due to some restrictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric [Administration], NOAA for short, SpaceX will be intentionally ending live video coverage from the second stage just prior to engine shutdown," Hammersley said. "We're working with NOAA to address these restrictions in order to hopefully be able to bring you live views from orbit in the future."
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Update:
SpaceX tries to recover and reuse the nose cone (also known as the fairing) to reduce the price of missions. Apparently, the parafoils got tangled in the descent of the nose cone on this mission. The "fairing impacted water at high speed," according to Musk. ( I think he means it crashed.) I doubt there will be much reusable after this recovery. - ilan
I've liked astronomy since I was a little kid. Fascinating topic!
and I love new discoveries underwater or in orbit:cool:
Is ‘Oumuamua an Interstellar Pancake?
Kelly Beatty | March 27, 2018
A new analysis of more than 800 telescopic observations suggests that our first known interstellar visitor could have the shape of a flattened disk.
http://wwwcdn.skyandtelescope.com/wp-content/uploads/eso1737e.jpg
Artist's impression of ʻOumuamua
It's been about five months since Robert Weryk, observing with the PanSTARRS 1 telescope atop Haleakala on Maui, discovered the first object (other than dust particles) known to have entered our solar system from interstellar space. But 1I/‘Oumuamua, as it came to be named, zipped away from Earth too quickly to give astronomers more than a few weeks to observe it. (‘Oumuamua is a combination of two Hawai'ian words that roughly mean "the first scout," and 1I indicates the first cataloged interstellar object.)
When I reported the early findings about this surprising interloper back in December, astronomers were fixated on its slightly reddish color and its tenfold swings in brightness (up to 2½ magnitudes). Assuming that it's highly elongated, 5 to 10 times longer than its width, most researchers imagined this object pinwheeling end over end with a spin axis through its shortest dimension.
But Where Did ‘Oumuamua Come From?
Aside from puzzling out the object's shape and spin, many theorists are tackling the question of where ‘Oumuamua came from and how it got here. It came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, passing through at about 26 km (16 miles) per second. This incoming trajectory doesn't implicate any specific star as the source, but it's likely drifted through interstellar space for tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Early in our solar system's history, gravitational slingshots from the giant planets and the Sun cast countless objects (perhaps trillions of them) out into deep space, never to return. So ejection from another star system seems the most likely way that ‘Oumuamua escaped, but even then it's complicated.
We'll likely never know the real story, but astronomers have redoubled their efforts to spot other interstellar interlopers. Calculations by Aaron Do (University of Hawai'i) and two colleagues suggest interstellar escapees should average about one for every 5 cubic astronomical units of space. In other words, they conclude, "there are likely several of these objects in the inner solar system at any given time."
A sun is a star at the center of an interplanetary system. Most likely, a high percentage of stars have planets orbiting them, so they are suns, too. The star at the center of our solar system is named the Sun, with a capital S. All others are called suns, with a small s.
Dark matter and dark energy are associated with all kinds of astronomical phenomena. If they were eliminated as an explanation for the expanding universe, they would still play a big part in a host of other theoretical explanations and indirect observations. Plus, there ain't nothing cooler than the notion of a black hole being a gateway to an alternate universe! :)
4me2c
04-01-2018, 02:26 AM
Too Much to Re-post :
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0127/Stephen-Hawking-makes-shocking-revelation-on-black-holes
Stephen Hawking makes shocking revelation on black holes
Stephen Hawking, author of 'A Brief History of Time' makes a U-turn on black holes. What goes into black holes can now escape, although in a much mangled form, he suggests. ...
Stephen Hawking's latest paper on black holes is raising some eyebrows.
In a four-page article titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," published through arXiv, an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers, Dr. Hawking contradicts his earlier proposed theory over the existence of "event horizons," the proverbial point of no return surrounding a black hole.
The event horizon is a proposed boundary around a black hole. On the other side of it, the gravitational pull of the black hole is so strong that, in order to escape it, an object would have to be moving faster than the speed of light, a feat that almost all physicists agree is impossible. ...
But instead of there being event horizons, "there are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field," writes Hawking.
These "apparent horizons" for a certain time can retain "information" that could be in the form of matter, before eventually releasing them. In other words, if Hawking is correct, black holes might not be so black after all.
But what would happen if an astronaut fell into a black hole?
Astrophysicists often use the term "spaghettification" to describe our fictional astronaut's plight. The gravitational pull of the black hole increases so rapidly that the differences between the astronaut's head and toe are so great that he gets stretched into a noodle. ...! More with the Link...
What Is a Black Hole?
This is part of the NASA Knows series
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/blackhole_2.jpg
Artists view of our galaxy, the Milky Way. At its center is a supermassive black hole.
A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying.
Because no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help find black holes. The special tools can see how stars that are very close to black holes act differently than other stars.
How Big Are Black Holes?
Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom. These black holes are very tiny but have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the amount of matter, or "stuff," in an object.
Another kind of black hole is called "stellar." Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. There may be many, many stellar mass black holes in Earth's galaxy. Earth's galaxy is called the Milky Way.
The largest black holes are called "supermassive." These black holes have masses that are more than 1 million suns together. Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.
How Do Black Holes Form?
Scientists think the smallest black holes formed when the universe began.
Stellar black holes are made when the center of a very big star falls in upon itself, or collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space.
Scientists think supermassive black holes were made at the same time as the galaxy they are in.
If Black Holes Are "Black," How Do Scientists Know They Are There?
A black hole can not be seen because strong gravity pulls all of the light into the middle of the black hole. But scientists can see how the strong gravity affects the stars and gas around the black hole. Scientists can study stars to find out if they are flying around, or orbiting, a black hole.
When a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made. This kind of light can not be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and telescopes in space to see the high-energy light.
Could a Black Hole Destroy Earth?
Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that.
Even if a black hole the same mass as the sun were to take the place of the sun, Earth still would not fall in. The black hole would have the same gravity as the sun. Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now.
The sun will never turn into a black hole. The sun is not a big enough star to make a black hole.
How Is NASA Studying Black Holes?
NASA is using satellites and telescopes that are traveling in space to learn more about black holes. These spacecraft help scientists answer questions about the universe.
__________________________________________________ ____
Stephen Hawking explains Black Holes in 90 seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6yHXJuowU
Although Hawking mentions particles can escape a Black Hole, so they're not as black as we once thought, they are still very dense and very black, and they gobble up stars and other matter. - ilan
That is so science, though! Theories are works in progress. They aren't statements of fact. Theories are constantly being tweaked to better align with what is observed. Hawking has been trying to reconcile Einstein's Theory of General Relativity with the principles of modern day quantum mechanics. They often appear to be in conflict. Hawking was one of the few theoretical physicists with the intellectual horsepower to take on the challenge.
Don't forget to bring your umbrella so you won't get showered by Chinese Spacelab lol.
The weather calls for space vehicle showers tonight... :)
China's Tiangong-1 space lab will fall from the sky on Sunday evening, according to the latest estimates from the European Space Agency, or ESA.The derelict spacecraft has been slowly falling out of its original orbit for several years. It will largely, though not entirely, burn up on reentry. (If that sounds alarming, remember that space debris falls to Earth with some regularity, and has never injured a human being.)The "re-entry prediction window" from ESA has tightened significantly, to a four-hour window centered on 1 a.m. UTC on Monday. In the continental U.S., that's Sunday evening.
From NPR 1:52 ET
Tiangong-1 crash: China says space station came down in Pacific Ocean (The Guardian)
Officials say the space station, which had been out of control since 2016, mostly burnt up on re-entry.
The US military appeared to confirm the re-entry with a statement from its Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC).
Starmus Advisory Board remembers Stephen Hawking
Starmus Advisory Board
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=168&v=Yt--6HTDcqE
Stephen Hawking was a man of exceptional power of spirit and a model of civic stance. He changed the way we perceive our Universe, our time and ourselves, and did it with his unique talent of communication and gentle, Hawking-style sense of humour. Although he left a rich legacy of both academic and science popularisation texts, we will miss his hilarious personality and his outstanding ability to make this world a better place, whatever he did and wherever he happened to be.
Stephen Hawking was a point of reference for scientists and science lovers and members of Starmus Advisory Board. The Stephen Hawking Medal, awarded to the most successful science communicators, will keep his legacy and continue to inspire science lovers in the name of Stephen Hawking. To many of us, Stephen Hawking was a symbol — a symbol of the immense capabilities of the human being, a symbol of never surrendering mind, and of science itself.
It strikes us as quite symbolic that he was born on Kepler’s birthday, 300 years later, passed away on Einstein’s birthday, and, like Einstein, lived to the age of 76. We will keep this symbol in our hearts and follow the path he craved for us.
Rest in peace, Professor Hawking!
STARMUS Advisory Board
_______________________________
This is a short video, only 3 minutes. Essentially, it is an image collage. I wish it was a bit longer and meatier. - ilan
4me2c
04-02-2018, 02:39 PM
This one is Decent and the last 3 minutes, except for the very end, are a Nice Touch...!
https://youtu.be/Px5nokKPCVs
nice videos guys. thanks for sharing:cool:
Global Astronomy Month Celebrates the Moon
Mike Simmons | April 2, 2018
Astronomers Without Borders celebrates the night sky in its annual Global Astronomy Month — a month-long collection of online events and in-person gatherings. This year's theme: the Moon.
http://wwwcdn.skyandtelescope.com/wp-content/uploads/2018-02-23_5a902e1a9c746_moon_Small_01_003-768x499.jpg
From a bad omen to a sign of love, the Earth’s Moon has been important in cultures throughout the ages. For denizens of brightly-lit modern cities it’s practically the only nighttime object anyone ever notices.
The Moon can also play a role in connecting our planet’s inhabitants. A government minister in Kurdistan, Iraq, told me how, during a visit to California in the US, he was talking to someone in Iraq when they realized they could both see the Moon – rising in California, setting in Iraq. Both saw the same object but from different angles on Earth’s sphere. Always visible from half the Earth’s surface, how many amateur astronomers, poets, lovers, and others gaze at the Moon at the same time?
The Moon may even have played a critical role in the creation of life on Earth because of its large size relative to our planet. There are larger moons in our solar system but they orbit planets that dwarf ours. In Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image, Earth is just one bright pixel identified as our home planet. In Cassini’s image looking home from Saturn, Earth and the Moon seen together are unmistakable as a unique planet-moon system.
A live program with filmmakers Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet kicked off GAM, focusing on their inspiring new film, A New View of the Moon. The film follows Overstreet – who discovered the rewards of public outreach by accident – at various venues as he shares views of the Moon with passersby. The first-time viewers' “wow moments” include gasps and exclamations that will be familiar to any sidewalk astronomer. It’s the payoff for what we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrJ3NflOpE
The Moon has something for everyone – scientist, poet, geologist, artist, explorer. It was likely the midwife to Earth’s early life and has been humanity’s constant companion. The Moon was where we took our first tentative step into the Cosmos. We’ll reflect on all these roles with a variety of programs – to participate in and watch – during Global Astronomy Month 2018.
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Take a look at the Moon tonight. The Full Moon was on March 31, so the Moon is still close to full now. It looks awesome with or without a telescope. - ilan
beautiful view of Moon. Thanks Ilan
Astronomers zoom in on a supermassive black hole's jets
Alison Klesman | Published: Tuesday, April 03, 2018
A telescope bigger than our planet reveals minute details in a nearby galaxy's center.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2018/04/image.jpg
This image shows how radio telescopes on Earth and in space (left) combined to observe a very small region around another galaxy's supermassive black hole (right). In this radio image, the black hole is located in the bright yellow-green spot at the top; a young jet about 3 light-years long shoots away from the black hole.
Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun lurk in the centers of most galaxies. In addition to feeding on nearby gas and dust, some of these black holes launch massive jets of plasma that not only dwarf the black hole itself, but the entire galaxy in which they reside. The mechanics of these jets, including exactly where they are launched, are still poorly understood, but observations such as those recently achieved using a combination of Earth- and space-based radio telescopes will help unlock the mysteries surrounding these dramatic structures.
This is only the second observation of jets at such close proximity to the black hole; the only other system that has been observed with this level of detail is M87. But the jets in M87 are much older, which, researchers say, may be why they look different from those in NGC 1275. “The jet in NGC 1275 was re-started just over a decade ago and is currently still forming, which provides a unique opportunity to follow the very early growth of a black hole jet,” said Masanori Nakamura from Academia Sinica in Taiwan, a co-author on the paper. “Continuing these observations will be very important.”
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After gobbling matter around it (stars, gas, dust, etc.), a black hole periodically "burps" these plumes of electrically charged gas. - ilan
Milky Way Galaxy is Slowly Increasing in Size, Study Suggests
Sci News Staff | Apr 4, 2018
http://cdn.sci-news.com/images/enlarge4/image_5882e-Milky-Way.jpg
This artist’s impression shows how the Milky Way Galaxy would look seen from almost edge on and from a very different perspective than we get from the Earth. The central bulge shows up as a peanut-shaped glowing ball of stars and the spiral arms and their associated dust clouds form a narrow band. Image credit: ESO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / M. Kornmesser / R. Hurt.
The Solar System is located in one of the arms in the disk of a barred spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way.
The Galaxy consists of several hundred billion stars, with huge amounts of gas and dust, all intermingled and interacting through the force of gravity.
The nature of this interaction determines the shape of a galaxy, which may be spiral, elliptical or irregular.
As a barred spiral galaxy, the Milky Way consists of a disk in which stars, dust, and gas lie mostly in a flat plane, with arms stretching out from a central bar.
In the Milky Way’s disk there are stars of many different ages.
Massive, hot, blue stars are very luminous and have a relatively short lifespan of millions of years, whereas lower mass stars eventually end up redder and much fainter and may live for hundreds of billions of years.
The younger short-lived stars are found in the disk of the Galaxy, where new stars continue to form, whereas older stars dominate in the bulge around the Galactic center and in the halo that surrounds the disk.
Some star-forming regions are found at the outer edge of the disk, and models of galaxy formation predict that the new stars will slowly increase the size of the Galaxy they reside in.
One problem in establishing the shape of the Milky Way is that we live inside it, so astronomers look at similar galaxies elsewhere as analogues for our own.
Astronomer Cristina Mart*nez-Lombilla and co-authors set out to establish whether Milky Way-like galaxies are really getting bigger, and if so what this means for our own Galaxy.
They used the ground-based SDSS telescope for optical data, and the two space telescopes GALEX and Spitzer for near-UV and near-IR data respectively, to look in detail at the colors and the motions of the stars at the end of the disk found in the other galaxies.
They measured the light in these regions, predominantly originating from young blue stars, and measured their vertical movement (up and down from the disk) of the stars to work out how long it will take them to move away from their birthplaces, and how their host galaxies were growing in size.
Based on this, they calculate that galaxies like the Milky Way are growing at around 500 m/sec.
“The Milky Way is pretty big already. But our work shows that at least the visible part of it is slowly increasing in size, as stars form on the galactic outskirts,” Mart*nez-Lombilla said.
“It won’t be quick, but if you could travel forward in time and look at the Galaxy in 3 billion years’ time it would be about 5% bigger than today.”
“This slow growth may be moot in the distant future. The Milky Way is predicted to collide with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in about 4 billion years, and the shape of both will then change radically as they merge.”
Mart*nez-Lombilla and colleagues presented their results yesterday at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in Liverpool, UK.
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I'm adding a couple of images that show the approximate position of our Solar System (labeled Sun) and something about the Milky Way's anatomy. - ilan
http://www.danielsevo.com/astronomy/gfx/MilkyWay_relativepos1.jpg
http://www.danielsevo.com/astronomy/gfx/MilkyWay_relativepos2.jpg
4me2c
04-08-2018, 03:36 PM
This is a Good Article about Someone not so well known :
https://www.wired.com/story/the-woman-who-knows-everything-about-the-universe/ ...! Cool Video at the End...!
Dead Star Circled by Light
European Southern Observatory | Published: Friday, April 06, 2018
MUSE data points to isolated neutron star beyond our galaxy.
http://astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2018/04/circlestarhead.jpg
An isolated neutron star in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
ESO/NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/F. Vogt et al.
New images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other telescopes reveal a rich landscape of stars and glowing clouds of gas in one of our closest neighbouring galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud. The pictures have allowed astronomers to identify an elusive stellar corpse buried among filaments of gas left behind by a 2000-year-old supernova explosion. The MUSE instrument was used to establish where this elusive object is hiding, and existing Chandra X-ray Observatory data confirmed its identity as an isolated neutron star.
Spectacular new pictures, created from images from both ground- and space-based telescopes [1], tell the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200 000 light-years from Earth.
New data from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has revealed a remarkable ring of gas in a system called 1E 0102.2-7219, expanding slowly within the depths of numerous other fast-moving filaments of gas and dust left behind after a supernova explosion. This discovery allowed a team led by Frédéric Vogt, an ESO Fellow in Chile, to track down the first ever isolated neutron star with low magnetic field located beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=ikVDYGEa55w
This zoom sequence starts with a broad view of the southern skies and then dives towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way. Here we find a rich landscape of stars and glowing gas, including the filamentary remains of a supernova explosion seen about 2000 years ago. New observations from ESO's Very Large Telescopes, along with other telescopes in space, have revealed a stellar corpse, a neutron star, hidden in this region.
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A neutron star is the remnant of a supernova, a star explosion. After the explosion, the core of the star experiences a gravitational collapse, forming a densely packed mass, or neuton star. If the original star is large enough, a black hole may be formed by the core collapse instead of a neutron star. - ilan
Kimbo
04-09-2018, 09:17 PM
Those are some beautiful pictures,,,,thanks Ilan!!!
Thanks, Laser. These neutron stars are pretty and pretty amazing. Their density is astounding. A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about 10 million tons (20,000,000,000 pounds).
Giant sun tornadoes aren’t spinning
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | April 9, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=_U5wQFYDE9I
The movie above from the Helioviewer Project shows a tornado prominence on the sun – what you might hear called simply a solar prominence – observed by the NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in April, 2015. See the tiny image of the Earth, superimposed for scale? These things are big! Better data collected over the past several years by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SD0) has revealed that these giant structures on the sun do look much like earthly tornadoes. And the term tornado prominence has been around for decades, at least. But a team of European scientists said on April 6, 2018, that these structures – vastly bigger than Earth itself – don’t appear to spin as earthly tornadoes do.
Instead, these scientists said, sun tornadoes follow horizontal magnetic field lines extending out of the sun. They seem to be anchored on the sun’s surface.
Solar prominences are much bigger than Earth itself; they can extend hundreds of thousands of miles into space in contrast to Earth’s 8,000-mile (13,000-km) diameter. Prominences are made of plasma, not a solid, not a liquid, not a gas, but sometimes called a fourth state of matter in which the parts of atoms, the electrons and neutrons, are disassociated from each other, wandering freely.
A solar prominence forms quickly, shooting out of the sun in about an earthly day. Most are brief, but some persist for months.
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Solar flares are different from solar prominences. Solar flares are sudden, short-lived, more profound eruptions. They are the critters that can wreak havoc with electrical and communication equipment on earth. Solar prominences don't create issues on earth. - ilan
On This Day In Space! April 11, 1960: 'Project Ozma' Begins Search for Alien Life
Hanneke Weitering, Space.com Staff Writer | April 11, 2018 07:08am ET
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/z-misc/2012/20121003_ozma_telescope.jpg
THE PROJECT OZMA RADIO TELESCOPE
The 26-meter (85-foot) radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960 it was used in Project Ozma, the first SETI experiment.
On April 11, 1960, astronomers began the first scientific experiment that would search for extraterrestrial life. Known as Project Ozma, this experiment looked for interstellar radio transmissions coming from other star systems.
This was the first time that radio astronomy was used to look for aliens. The effort was led by an astronomer named Frank Drake at Cornell University. He used an 85-foot telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia to check out two nearby stars called Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.
Drake first pointed the telescope at Tau Ceti, but he didn't detect any signals. When he pointed the telescope at Epsilon Eridani, he did see a signal, but it turned out to be a false alarm. He later found out that the signal was created by military radar equipment and was definitely not aliens.
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The SETI project continues today. There is some talk about changing the name of SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Proponents of a name change suggest that the search is really for "technosignatures," evidence of technology that deliberately modified the environment and can be detected over interstellar space. - ilan
Cosmic gorilla effect could blind detection of aliens
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | April 11, 2018
WATCH THE VIDEO BEFORE YOU READ ANY OF THE MATERIAL BELOW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=67&v=vJG698U2Mvo
Have you seen the video above? Count how many times the players in white pass the basketball. Watch the video all the way through. What number did you get? And did you see the gorilla? When researchers in the 1990s first showed this video, as part of a test of human beings’ inattentional blindness, more than half the participants did not notice the gorilla. In a way that’s similar, a new study from neuropsychologists suggests that our human culture may not have detected extraterrestrial signals because, according to the study’s first author Gabriel de la Torre of the University of Cádiz, when we think of other intelligent beings, we tend to see them through our perceptions and consciousness:
… We are limited by our sui generis vision of the world, and it’s hard for us to admit it. What we are trying to do … is to contemplate other possibilities, for example, beings of dimensions that our mind cannot grasp; or intelligences based on dark matter or energy forms, which make up almost 95% of the universe and which we are only beginning to glimpse. There is even the possibility that other universes exist, as the texts of Stephen Hawking and other scientists indicate.
De la Torre and co-author Manuel Garc*a, also of the University of Cádiz, have an article related to this subject coming out in May 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica (view article online).
The authors – who say they prefer to avoid the terms extraterrestrial or alien and instead use the more generic term non-terrestrial – state that our own neurophysiology, psychology and consciousness can play an important role in the search for non-terrestrial civilizations. In relation to this, they conducted an experiment with 137 people, who had to distinguish aerial photographs with artificial structures (buildings, roads …) from others with natural elements (mountains, rivers …).
In one of the images, shown below, a tiny character disguised as a gorilla was inserted to see if the participants noticed.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/A-cosmic-gorilla-effect-could-blind-the-detection-of-aliens_image_380.jpg
The result was similar to those in the 1990s gorillia-video study, described at the top of this post. In other words, many did not notice the guy in the gorilla costume. But De La Torre’s study found a difference in perception of the gorilla between people with different cognitive styles. De La Torre said:
…we assessed the participants with a series of questions to determine their cognitive style (if they were more intuitive or rational), and it turned out that the intuitive individuals identified the gorilla of our photo more times than those more rational and methodical.
If we transfer this to the problem of searching for other non-terrestrial intelligences, the question arises about whether our current strategy may result in us not perceiving the gorilla. Our traditional conception of space is limited by our brain, and we may have the signs above and be unable to see them. Maybe we’re not looking in the right direction.
The authors’ paper also mentioned another example, drawn from Dawn spacecraft images of the dwarf planet Ceres, which is famous for its bright spots. Within the Ceres crater Occator, there appears an apparently geometric figure. De La Torre said:
Our structured mind tells us that this structure looks like a triangle with a square inside, something that theoretically is not possible in Ceres, but maybe we are seeing things where there are none, what in psychology is called pareidolia.
However, De La Torre said, there is another possibility:
The opposite could also be true. We can have the signal in front of us and not perceive it or be unable to identify it. If this happened, it would be an example of the cosmic gorilla effect. In fact, it could have happened in the past or it could be happening right now.
Bottom line: A new study from neuropsychologists suggests that our human culture may not have detected extraterrestrial signals because, when we think of other intelligent beings, we tend to see them through the filter of our own perceptions and consciousness. There could be a range of possibilities that we’re not considering.
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I saw a panda and a large spider. I wonder what that means. - ilan
Several Mind-Blowing Astronomy Facts
Mashable | Various Sources
https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/tADkbvB7afX_c25CJVPLlZ0pAQo=/fit-in/850x850/https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Fwp-content%2Fgallery%2Fmind-blowing-space-facts%2F10477549105_e55933fa79_b.jpg
1. Neutron stars can spin at a rate of 600 rotations per second. Neutron stars are one of the possible evolutionary end-points of high mass stars. They're born in a core-collapse supernova star explosion and subsequently rotate extremely rapidly as a consequence of their physics. Neutron stars can rotate up to 60 times per second after born. Under special circumstances, this rate can increase to more than 600 times per second.
Source: Swinburne University of Technology Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
2. All of space is completely silent. Sound waves need a medium to travel through. Since there is no atmosphere in space, space will always be eerily silent. You may be asking how astronauts can talk to each other in space. Lucky for them, radio waves can travel through space. No problem there, Houston.
Source: Cornell University Department of Astronomy
3. There is an uncountable number of stars in the known universe. We basically have no idea how many stars there are in the universe. Right now we use our estimate of how many stars there are in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We then multiply that number by the best guesstimate of the number of galaxies in the universe. After all that math, NASA can only confidently say that say there all zillions of uncountable stars. A zillion is any uncountable amount. An Australian National University study put their estimate at 70 sextillion. Put another way, that's 70,000 million million million. This figure is basically a guess, though.
Source: University of California at Santa Barbara Science Line
https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/GNFXGOfxoPt14hgIdL7PNWkmMwA=/fit-in/850x850/https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Fwp-content%2Fgallery%2Fmind-blowing-space-facts%2F4812251095_826d1caab5_b.jpg
4. The Apollo astronauts' footprints on the moon will probably stay there for at least 100 million years. Since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, there's no wind or water to erode or wash away the Apollo astronauts' mark on the moon. That means their footprints, roverprints, spaceship prints, and discarded materials will stay preserved on the moon for a very long time. They won't stay on there forever, though. The moon still a dynamic environment. It's actually being constantly bombarded with "micrometeorites," which means that erosion is still happening on the moon, just very slowly.
Source: Space.com
5. 99% of our solar system's mass is the sun. Our star, the Sun, is so dense that it accounts for a whopping 99% of our entire solar system. That's what it allows it to dominate it gravitationally. Technically, our Sun is a "G-type main-sequence star" which means that every second, it fuses approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen to helium. This means that it also converts about 4 million tons of matter to energy as a byproduct. Being the type of star that the Sun is, it also means that when it dies, it will become a red giant and envelop the earth and everything on it. But don't worry: That won't happen for another 5 billion years.
Source: The Ohio State University Department of Astronomy
https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/IrCsd0RqAPuLNMlXnbYtweg9N7E=/fit-in/850x850/https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Fwp-content%2Fgallery%2Fmind-blowing-space-facts%2F8705752000_7058dd9615_b.jpg
6. More energy from the sun hits Earth every hour than the planet uses in a year. You should be sad to know that solar technology produces less than one-tenth of 1% of global energy demand. This is due to several factors, including how much land is required for solar panels to capture enough energy for a population of people to use, how unreliable it is in bad weather and at night, and how expensive the technology is to install. Despite all these drawbacks, the use of solar energy has increased at a rate of 20% each year for the past 15 years.
Source: National Geographic
7. If two pieces of the same type of metal touch in space, they will bond and be permanently stuck together. This amazing effect is called cold welding. It happens because the atoms of the individual pieces of metal have no way of knowing that they are different pieces of metal, so the lumps join together. This wouldn't happen on earth because there is air and water separating the pieces. The effect has a lot of implication for spacecraft construction and the future of metal-based construction in vacuums.
Source: European Space Agency
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Ceres_-_RC3_-_Haulani_Crater_%2822381131691%29_%28cropped%29.jp g
8. The largest asteroid ever recorded is a mammoth piece of space rock named Ceres. The asteroid is almost 600 miles in diameter. It's by far the largest in the asteroid belt and accounts for a whole third of the belt's mass. The surface area is approximately equal to the land area of India or Argentina. It's so big, there's actually some debate over whether to refer to it as a dwarf planet instead of an asteroid, even if it has mostly asteroid-like qualities. Ceres piques our interest specifically, as water in the form of ice has been spotted on its surface. An unmanned spacecraft named Dawn has been orbiting the space rock since 2015.
Source: TheGuardian.com
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Ceres was disovered in 1801. It has enjoyed different classifications over the years: asteroid, comet, dwarf planet, planet. - ilan
Hubble finds an Einstein ring
SPACE | April 11, 2018
The arcs you see at the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image are created by the light of distant galaxies, distorted to form what’s called an “Einstein ring.”
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/einstein-ring-1-e1523365887754.jpg
Image via ESA/Hubble/NASA.
This image is packed full of galaxies! A keen eye can spot exquisite elliptical galaxies and spectacular spirals, seen at various orientations: edge-on with the plane of the galaxy visible, face-on to show off magnificent spiral arms, and everything in between.
With the charming name of SDSS J0146-0929, this is a galaxy cluster — a monstrous collection of hundreds of galaxies all shackled together in the unyielding grip of gravity. The mass of this galaxy cluster is large enough to severely distort the space-time around it, creating the odd, looping curves that almost encircle the center of the cluster.
These graceful arcs are examples of a cosmic phenomenon known as an Einstein ring. The ring is created as the light from distant objects, like galaxies, passes by an extremely large mass, like this galaxy cluster. In this image, the light from a background galaxy is diverted and distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light paths toward Earth, making it seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once.
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Very cool: The gravity of the galaxy in front is massive enough to deflect light that is coming from behind it, creating this glowing ring. - ilan
Meet M13, the Great Cluster in Hercules
Bruce McClure in CLUSTERS NEBULAE GALAXIES | April 11, 2018
Many stargazers call it the finest globular cluster in the northern half of the heavens. It’s M13, also known as the Great Cluster in Hercules.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/800px-Heart_of_M13_Hercules_Globular_Cluster-e1523446544340.jpg
The heart of M13, aka the Great Cluster in Hercules, a globular star cluster and one of our Milky Way galaxy’s oldest inhabitants. This image was acquired by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Great Cluster in the constellation Hercules – also known as Messier 13, or M13 – is considered to be the finest globular cluster in the northern half of the heavens. It’s found in a star pattern called the Keystone – a lopsided square within the constellation Hercules – between the two brightest stars of northern spring and summer, Vega and Arcturus.
At mid-northern latitudes, the M13 cluster can be found in the sky for at least part of the night all year round. It’s up part of the night in April, and all night long in May, June and July. In August and September the Hercules cluster is still very much a night owl, staying up till after midnight.
When you gaze at M13 or other globulars, you are looking at stars that are thought to be 12 to 13 billion years old. That’s almost as old as the universe.
M13 is not the easiest of sky objects to spot, but once you find it, you’ll be able to go back to it again and again. It’s located in the constellation Hercules, between summertime’s two brightest stars, Vega and Arcturus.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2014/04/hercules-arcturus-vega.jpg
The bright stars Vega in the constellation Lyra and the orange star Arcturus in the constellation Bootes are located on either side of the constellation Hercules. Notice the squarish pattern within Hercules. This pattern is called the Keystone. M13 is located along one of the borders of the Keystone.
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This beautiful globular cluster is designated M13. The M means it appears in a catalogue compiled by Charles Meisser (1730-1817), who was a pioneering observer of comets. There are estimated to be in the neighborhood of 300,000 stars in this cluster. - ilan
Asteroid buzzed Earth this weekend
Eddie Irizarry in SPACE | April 16, 20182018
GE3 swept by at half the moon’s distance Sunday, just hours after being detected. Its size is 3 to 6 times that of the space rock that penetrated the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/asteroid-2018-GE3-orbit-e1523872142356.png
Illustration of the orbit of asteroid 2018 GE3. The orbit appears to extend to the inner part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Image via Tomruen/Wikimedia Commons.
A medium-sized asteroid buzzed by Earth just hours after being detected this weekend. First observed at Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona on Saturday, April 14, 2018, the asteroid – which has been labeled 2018 GE3 – swept past us at about half the Earth-moon distance early Sunday morning according to clocks in North America. Closest approach to Earth occurred at around 2:41 a.m. EDT (6:41 UTC; translate UTC to your time) on April 15.
Its closest point to Earth was just 119,500 miles (192,317 km) away. That’s in contrast to the moon’s quarter-million-mile (400,000 km) distance. According to NASA, hours later, at about 5:59 a.m. EDT on April 15, the space rock passed even closer to the moon than it had to Earth.
With an estimated diameter of 157 to 361 feet (48 to 110 meters), asteroid 2018 GE3 has about three to six times the diameter of the space rock that penetrated the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February 2013, causing some 1,500 people to seek treatment for injuries, mostly from flying glass.
Asteroid 2018 GE3, an Apollo type earth-crossing asteroid, was flying through space at 66,174 miles per hour (106,497 km/h).
If the asteroid had entered our atmosphere, a great portion of the space rock would have disintegrated due to friction with the air. However, some of an asteroid this size might have gotten through to Earth’s surface, and an asteroid this big is capable of causing some regional damage, depending on various factors such as composition, speed, entry angle, and location of impact. It might make you feel better (or worse) to know that asteroids enter Earth’s atmosphere unnoticed on a fairly regular basis.
For example, in 2014, scientists announced 26 atom-bomb-scale asteroid impacts since 2000 that were discovered in data from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which operates a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations. Earth’s atmosphere does a good job of protecting us from incoming asteroids. Most explode high in the atmosphere, or over an ocean, and therefore do no harm.
Was Earth in danger from 2018 GE3? Not this time, but a Chelyabinsk-type event can clearly repeat. Astronomers have increased their programs to seek near-Earth asteroids like 2018 GE3, but sometimes – like this time and as in 2013 with the Chelyabinsk event – asteroids do still surprise us.
A preliminary analysis of the orbit of 2018 GE shows this is the closest this particular space rock has come to Earth at least since 1930.
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I thought I felt a breeze yesterday. - ilan
Will you see the young moon?
Bruce McClure in TONIGHT | April 16, 2018
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/20180416-moon-and-venus.jpg
Tonight – April 16, 2018 – it won’t be easy to catch the young moon after sunset, but, if you do catch it, you’ll be glad. The April 16 moon will be a frail and pale whisker-thin lunar crescent – less than 24 hours old from many parts of Earth. Sky watchers in North America and islands in the northern Pacific have the best chance of seeing this exceedingly young and beautiful young moon.
If you do see the moon on April 16, you’ll find it low in the western twilight, beneath the brilliant planet Venus.
If you catch it from North America or, say, Hawaii, you’ll see seeing the young moon on the official day of new moon. But, in reality, the moon will be more than a day old for us. New moon is April 16 at 1:57 UTC. At North American time zones, that means the new moon happened on April 15, at 10:57 p.m. ADT, 9:57 p.m. EDT, 8:57 p.m. CDT, 7:57 p.m. MDT, 6:57 p.m. PDT, 5:57 p.m. Alaskan Time and 3:57 p.m. Hawaiian Time.
An older moon is easier to see … farther from the sunset, with more of its illuminated side showing.From most of North America, the moon will plunge beneath the horizon less than one hour after sunset.
If you miss the young moon after sunset on April 16, look again on the evenings after that. A thin, but wider, waxing crescent will pair up more closely with Venus on April 17, as shown on the sky chart below.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/2018-moon-venus-aldebaran-april-17-18-19.jpg
The moon will be climbing upward and staying out later in the days ahead. See the Pleiades cluster on this chart? This lovely little dipper-shaped cluster is up there, too, after sunset. If you can’t see it, sweep with your binoculars. Have fun!
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The cool thing is you don't need any equipment to see the new moon and the other astronomical objects mentioned here. Take a gander! - ilan
The Lyrid meteor shower is starting
Bruce McClure in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | April 16, 2018
You might see some Lyrids this week. April 22 is the peak morning. Try April 21 and 23 as well. Good news … the moon is out of the way.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/04/lyrid_shower.jpg
Composite image of Lyrid and not-Lyrid meteors over New Mexico from April, 2012. Image via NASA/ MSFC/ Danielle Moser.
The annual Lyrid meteor shower is starting! It’s active each year from about April 16 to 25. In 2018, the peak of this shower – which tends to come in a burst and usually lasts for less than a day – is expected to fall on the morning of April 22, with little or no interference from the waxing moon.
No matter where you are on Earth, expect the greatest number of meteors to fall during the few hours before dawn.
All in all the Lyrid meteor shower prospects look pretty good for 2018, though meteor showers are notorious for being fickle and not totally predictable.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2013/04/Meteor_falling_courtesy_NASA.gif
Courtesy of NASA/George Varros.
In a moonless sky, you might see from about 10 to 20 Lyrid meteors an hour at the shower’s peak on the morning of April 22. In 2018, the waxing moon will set before the primetime morning hours. Those predicted maxima assume you are watching in a dark, country sky.
An outburst of Lyrid meteors is always a possibility, too, though no Lyrid outburst is predicted for 2018.
In 1982, American observers did see an outburst of nearly 100 Lyrid meteors per hour. Around 100 meteors per hour were seen in Greece in 1922 and from Japan in 1945.
Was another civilization on Earth before humans?
Deborah Byrd in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | April 18, 2018
How do we know earlier industrial civilizations on Earth didn’t rise and fall long before humans appeared? That’s the question posed in a new scientific thought experiment.
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Were others here before us? Photo by James Younger at Vancouver Island, B.C.
It’s a compelling thought experiment. What if there were an industrial civilization on Earth before us? What if, over the course of tens of millions of years, all of the direct evidence for it were ground to dust? Would it be possible to detect evidence of this civilization-infused dust in the geologic record? Astrophysicist Adam Frank of the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tackle this question in a paper published April 10, 2018, in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Astrobiology (view online here).
They call their study the Silurian Hypothesis after a race of intelligent, bipedal reptiles — known as the Silurians — introduced in a 1970 episode of the British science fiction series Doctor Who. Why? It’s because, as Frank explained in an April 2018 article in The Atlantic:
… if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago.
The idea for Frank and Schmidt’s new paper sprang in part from Frank’s studies of global warming from what he called an astrobiological perspective. In other words, he’d been asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through its own activity, trigger its own version of a climate shift. He explained:
We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated …
Could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years – which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.
As in the well-known Kardashev scale – often invoked in discussions of possible alien civilizations – Frank and Schmidt define a prior earthly civilization by its energy use. A statement from the University of Rochester said:
Human beings are just entering a new geological era that many researchers refer to as the Anthropocene, the period in which human activity strongly influences the climate and environment. In the Anthropocene, fossil fuels have become central to the geological footprint humans will leave behind on Earth. By looking at the Anthropocene’s imprint, Schmidt and Frank … lay out evidence of what might be left behind if industrial civilizations like ours existed millions of years in the past.
Human beings began burning fossil fuels more than 300 years ago, marking the beginnings of industrialization. The researchers note that the emission of fossil fuels into the atmosphere has already changed the carbon cycle in a way that is recorded in carbon isotope records. Other ways human beings might leave behind a geological footprint include:
- Agriculture, through greatly increased erosion and sedimentation rates.
- Plastics, synthetic pollutants, and even things such as steroids, which will be geochemically detectable for millions, and perhaps even billions, of years.
- Nuclear war, if it happened, which would leave behind unusual radioactive isotopes.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2016/08/nuclear-test-bikini-atoll-1946.jpg
In 2016, 28 of 35 members of an Anthropocene working group for the 35th International Geological Congress agreed that a golden spike in Earth’s sediment layers – an event or group of events laid down in the rocks clearly demarcating one geologic epoch from another – comes around the 1950s. That’s when what’s called the great acceleration began on Earth, when our human impacts intensified and began to happen globally, not just locally. Nuclear tests, like the 1946 test at Bikini Atoll, shown here, are examples of human-caused global events whose traces might be found in the rock record. Image via U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Frank wrote in The Atlantic:
Ironically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.
When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties, or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era.
Frank said that looking at the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of their planetary impacts might also affect how researchers approach future explorations of other planets:
We know early Mars and, perhaps, early Venus were more habitable than they are now, and conceivably we will one day drill through the geological sediments there, too. This helps us think about what we should be looking for.
And he said:
By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.
Bottom line: In a new paper published in April 2018 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Adam Frank at the University of Rochester and Gavin Schmidt at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies ask what signs an ancient pre-human industrial civilization would have left in the geologic record.
April 21 is International Astronomy Day
Guy Ottewell in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | HUMAN WORLD | April 20, 2018
A beautiful chart from astronomer Guy Ottewell, showing the evening sky on Astronomy Day 2018.
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View larger image (http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/04/evening-sky-astronomy-day-4-21-2018-lg.jpg)
April 21 will be 2018’s International Astronomy Day. The chart above shows the sky you will be able to see if you stay out after darkness falls, maybe with astronomical friends and their telescopes.
Or just go outside and look!
At the time and place of our chart – Astronomy Day evening, April 21, 2018 – Venus is just setting. Though, as always, brighter than any star or other planet, it has climbing and brightening to do before reaching its climax in the evening sky four months from now.
Over in the east, the second brightest planet has risen: Jupiter, which will be at opposition on May 8-9. The other planets will rise later through the night, being on the morning side of the sun.
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With the Moon as a reference point, tracking down the objects will be made easier. It would be a great night to "look to the skies!" - ilan
4me2c
04-21-2018, 12:31 AM
Right Now on Channel 120, History. Is a 4 Hour Special :
Ancient Aliens: Declassified
Otherworldly Destinations
(New, True, 4/20/2018, TV-PG)
Replay at Midnight EST...!
Sometimes these are pretty good. Sometimes they are slow and dry.
‘Spectacular’ Lagoon Nebula Featured for Hubble’s 28th Anniversary
On the 24th of April, Hubble will celebrate the 28th anniversary of its liftoff on the Space Shuttle. NASA released a Flythrough of the Lagoon Nebula on 19 April commemorating the event using images captured by Hubble. SPACE took that footage and wove it into a 4 minute tribute to Hubble. It is a cool offering and a must watch. - ilan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH9JVvKjG7s
4me2c
04-21-2018, 03:21 PM
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71lB-X8qC1L.jpg
How TESS will hunt for alien worlds
EarthSky Voices in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | April 22, 2018
Launched last week, TESS will scan 200,000 close and bright stars, seeking new planets and possibly livable worlds. Here’s a roundtable discussion with 2 scientists on the TESS mission.
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Via The Kavli Foundation
A new era in the search for exoplanets — and the alien life they might host—has begun. Aboard a SpaceX rocket, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched on April 18, 2018. Over the next two years, TESS will scan the 200,000 or so nearest and brightest stars to Earth for telltale dimming caused when exoplanets cross their stars’ faces.
The Kavli Foundation spoke with two scientists on the TESS mission, to get an inside look at its development and revolutionary science aim of finding the first “Earth twin” in the universe. The participants were Greg Berthiaume, Instrument Manager for the TESS mission and Diana Dragomir, Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
******
The Kavli Foundation: Starting with the big picture, why is TESS important?
Diana Dragomir: TESS is going to find thousands of exoplanets, which might not sound like a big deal, because we already know of nearly 4,000. But most of those discovered planets are too far away for us to do anything more than just know their size and that they are there. The difference is that TESS will be looking for planets around stars very close to us. When stars are closer to us, they’re also brighter from our point of view, and that helps us discover and study the planets around them much more easily.
Greg Berthiaume: One of the things TESS is doing is helping to answer the fundamental question, “Is there other life in the universe?” People have been wondering that for thousands of years. Now TESS won’t answer that question directly, but it’s a step, just like Diana mentioned, on the path to getting us the data to see where there might be other life out there. That’s something we’ve been struggling with and questioning since we were able to come up with questions.
TKF: What exactly do you expect TESS to find?
Dragomir: TESS will probably find 100 to 200 approximately Earth-size worlds, as well as thousands of more exoplanets all the way up to Jupiter in size.
Berthiaume: We’re trying to find planets that are Earth analogs, meaning they’ll be Earth-like in their characteristics, such as size, mass, and so on. That means we want to find planets with atmospheres, with gravity similar to Earth’s. We want to find planets that are cool enough so water can be liquid on their surfaces, and not so cold that the water is frozen all the time. We call these “Goldilocks” planets, located in a star’s “habitable zone.” That’s really our target.
Dragomir: Exactly right. We want to find the first “Earth twin.” TESS will mainly find planets in the habitable zone of red dwarfs. These are stars a bit smaller and cooler than the sun. A planet around a red dwarf can be located in an orbit closer to its star than it could be with a hotter star like our sun and still maintain that nice, Goldilocks temperature. Closer orbits translate to more transits, or star crossings, which makes these red dwarf planets easier to find and study than planets around sun-like stars.
Astronomers are working hard on ways that we might push the TESS data and find some planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, too. It’s challenging because those planets have longer orbital periods – years, that is – than close-in planets. That means we need a lot more observation time in order to detect enough transits of the planets across their stars to say we’ve definitely detected a planet. But we’re hopeful, so stay tuned!
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TESS will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky.
TKF: What do you need to see in order to deem any of the planets discovered by TESS as potentially habitable?
Dragomir: We want a planet to be close to Earth in size for all the reasons we just gave, but there’s a small problem with that. Those sorts of planets will probably have pretty small atmospheres, compared to how much rock makes up their bulk. And for most telescopes to be able to look at an atmosphere in detail, we actually need the planet to have a substantial atmosphere.
This is because of a technique we use called transmission spectroscopy. It gathers the light from the star that has gone through the atmosphere of the planet when the planet is crossing the star. That light comes to us with a spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere imprinted on it, which we can analyze to identify the composition of the atmosphere. The more atmosphere there is, the more material there is that can imprint on the spectrum, giving us a bigger signal.
If the light from the star is going through very little atmosphere, though, like we’d be looking at with an Earth twin, the signal would be very small. Based on what TESS finds, we’re therefore going to be starting with bigger planets that have a lot of atmosphere, and as we get better instruments, we’re going to move towards smaller and smaller planets with less atmosphere. It’s those latter planets which will more likely be habitable.
Berthiaume: What we’re going to look for in the atmosphere are things like water vapor, oxygen, carbon dioxide—the standard gases we see in our atmosphere that life needs and life produces. We’re also going to try and measure the nasty things that aren’t compatible with life as we know it on Earth. For instance, it would be a bad thing for biology if there were too much ammonia in a world’s atmosphere. Hydrocarbons, like methane, would also be problematic in too high an abundance.
TKF: Diana, your specialty is exoplanets smaller than Neptune – a planet four times bigger than Earth. What is our general knowledge about those kinds of worlds and how will TESS help with your research?
Dragomir: One thing we know about these planets is that they are extremely common compared to planets larger than Neptune. So that’s good. We therefore expect TESS to find lots and lots of planets smaller than Neptune for us to look at.
Although small is bad for getting those atmospheric imprints we just talked about, if the stars are nearby and bright, we might still be able to get enough light for doing good studies. I’m hoping that we’ll get enough below Neptune-size that we’ll start looking at the atmospheres of “super-Earths,” which are planets twice the size of Earth or so. We don’t have any super-Earths in our solar system, so we’d love to get a closer look at one of these kinds of worlds. And just maybe, if we find a really, really good planetary candidate, we may be able to start looking at the atmosphere of an Earth-sized planet.
With my research, one more thing TESS could really help with is figuring out the boundary between a very gassy planet like Neptune and a very rocky planet like Earth. We believe it’s mostly a matter of mass; have too much mass, and the planet starts to hold into a thick atmosphere. Right now, we’re not sure where that threshold is. And that matters so we know when a planet is rocky and potentially habitable, or gassy and not habitable.
TKF: Greg, as the TESS Instrument Manager, a lot rides on your shoulders for the mission’s success. Can you tell us a bit about your job?
Berthiaume: My job as instrument manager is different from a science job, for sure. My job was to make sure that all of the pieces, all the parts that go into the four flight cameras and the image processing hardware all play and work together and give us the great data that we need for Diana to go and continue to explore exoplanets. My personal role on the mission actually ends shortly after launch. Once we’ve demonstrated that the satellite provides the data that we expect, and we deal with any surprises that may come up, then I move on and data goes off to the science community.
I definitely feel responsible for getting the quality of the data as high as it possibly can be. A lot of people worked really hard for years to build the cameras that are flying on TESS and it’s been great to be part of that team.
TKF: New exoplanet missions like the European Space Agency’s Ariel and Plato satellites are slated to begin in the late 2020s. How might these future spacecraft complement and build on TESS’ body of work?
Dragomir: The great thing about TESS is that it’s going to give us a lot to choose from in terms of the best options for planets we’ll want to study. In that way, TESS will set the stage for Ariel’s mission, which is to deeply study the atmospheres of a select group of exoplanets.
The Plato mission will be looking for planets that are habitable, but around bigger stars like the sun, whereas TESS will focus on looking for habitable planets around smaller stars. I’m happy with that because I don’t want us to put all of our eggs in one basket by only looking at red dwarf stars with TESS. Planets around these red dwarfs are very exciting right now because they’re easier to study and they transit their stars more often, making them easier to find. But at the same time, red dwarfs tend to be much more active than the Sun. When a star is active, that means it often expels bursts of radiation called flares. These flares could be very damaging to a planet’s atmosphere and make the world uninhabitable.
In the end, we of course live around a sun-like star, and so far, we are the only “we” we know of in the universe. So for those reasons, it’s great to have Plato complementarily come along and find those planets around suns that TESS will probably not be able to find.
TKF: When do you expect TESS’ first discoveries of brand new worlds to be reported?
Berthiaume: First, it’s going to take a while to get TESS into its unique orbit. It’s the first time we’re putting a spacecraft in a new kind of far-ranging, highly elliptical orbit, where the gravity from the Earth and the Moon will keep TESS very stable, both from an orbit perspective and from a thermal perspective. So a big part of what’s going to happen over the first six weeks is just achieving that final orbit.
Then there’s a period of time where there’ll be data collected to make sure the instruments are working as expected, as well as getting our data processing pipeline tuned up. I think we’ll start to see interesting results come out sometime this summer.
TKF: Besides new worlds, what else might TESS reveal about the universe?
Dragomir: Because TESS is observing so much of the sky, it’s going to see lots of things that are happening in real-time, not just exoplanets crossing stars. As for those stars, we can learn a lot about their properties and even measure their masses quite precisely by doing asteroseismology with TESS. This technique involves tracking brightness changes as sound waves move through the interiors of stars – just like how seismic waves pass through the Earth’s rock and molten insides during earthquakes.
We’ll also be studying the flaring activity of the stars, which as we spoke about earlier might make close-in, temperate planets around red dwarf stars uninhabitable.
Moving up in size, scientists will want to search the TESS data for evidence of small black holes. These extreme objects, formed when colossal stars explode, can orbit normal stars that are still “alive,” so to speak. These systems will help us better understand how those black holes form and how they interact with companion stars.
And then finally, going even bigger, TESS will look at galaxies called quasars. These ultra-bright galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes in their cores. TESS will help us monitor how quasars’ brightness changes, which we can link back to the dynamics of their black holes.
TKF: The James Webb Space Telescope, hailed as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, has long been talked about as a primary instrument for doing the detailed follow-up observations on promising exoplanets found by TESS. However, James Webb’s launch, already delayed multiple times, just got pushed out yet another year, to 2020. How will the ongoing James Webb delays affect the TESS mission?
Dragomir: The James Webb delay is not so much of a problem because it actually gives us more time to collect great target planets with TESS. Before we can use James Webb to really observe candidate exoplanets and study their atmospheres, we first need to confirm the planets are real – that what we think are planets are not false positives caused, for instance, by stellar activity. That confirmation process takes weeks, using support observations from ground-based telescopes. It will then also take weeks to months to obtain the mass of the planets. We measure that by registering how much planets cause their host stars to experience slight “wobbles” in their motion over time, owing to the planets’ gravities, which are determined by their mass.
Once you have that mass, plus the size of an exoplanet based on how much starlight it blocks during a TESS detection, you can measure its density and determine if it’s rocky or gaseous. With this information, it is then easier to decide which planets we want to prioritize, and the more we can make sense out of what James Webb will tell us about their atmospheres.
TKF: Spacecraft sometimes have humorous or even profound extra elements built into them. One example: the “Golden Records” on the twin Voyager spacecraft, which contain images and sounds of life and civilization on Earth, including the Taj Mahal and birdsong. Are there any such items included on TESS? Any subtle maker’s marks or messages?
Berthiaume: One of the things that’s flying along with TESS is a metal plaque that has the signatures of many of the people who worked on developing and building the spacecraft. That was an exciting thing for us.
Dragomir: That’s cool. I didn’t know that!
Berthiaume: Also, NASA ran an international contest inviting people from around the world to submit drawings of what they thought exoplanets might look like. I know many children participated. All of those drawings were scanned onto a thumb drive and they’re flying along with TESS. The spacecraft’s orbit is stable for a century at least, so the plaque and the drawings will be in space for a long time!
– Adam Hadhazy, Spring 2018
Bottom line: Two scientists discuss the TESS mission.
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Yes, it's a fairly long article, but the search for alien life is such a "trip" that it's worth investing the time in a read. - ilan
New study suggests violent origin for Mars’ moons
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | April 19, 2018
It was thought Mars’ 2 small moons – Phobos and Deimos – might be captured asteroids. But new work suggests a violent birth for the moons during a colossal impact.
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Simulated view of a small body ramming into Mars, kicking up debris that formed its 2 small moons.
It’s long been suggested that Mars’ two moons – called Phobos and Deimos (Panic and Terror) for the two horses of the mythological war god Mars – are captured asteroids. After all, Mars orbits just one step inward from the asteroid belt. And the two moons resemble rocky C-type asteroids, the most common kind of asteroids, in terms of their estimated densities and reflected light.
A new study suggests otherwise...
The model predicts that the two moons are derived primarily from material originating in Mars, so their bulk compositions should be similar to that of Mars for most elements. However, heating of the ejecta and the low escape velocity from Mars suggests that water vapor would have been lost, implying that the moons will be dry if they formed by impact.
The new Mars model invokes a much smaller impactor than considered previously. Our moon may have formed when a Mars-sized object crashed into the nascent Earth 4.5 billion years ago, and the resulting debris coalesced into the Earth-moon system.
Bottom line: State-of-the-art computer modeling suggests Mars’ moons formed in a collision between primitive Mars and a dwarf-planet-sized body, early in the solar system’s history.
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The most popular model concerning our Moon's origination suggests it was formed when a celestial body named Theia collided with Earth. Earth's gravity bound the ejected pieces together, forming our Moon. - ilan
April 26 Moon near Spica and celestial equator
Bruce McClure in TONIGHT | April 26, 2018
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Tonight – April 26, 2018 – the waxing gibbous moon shines to the north of the celestial equator, whereas the the bright star Spica lies to the south of it. The celestial equator is Earth’s equator projected onto the imaginary sphere of stars encircling Earth. At present, the moon resides in the sky’s northern hemisphere. But – in a day or two – the moon will cross the celestial equator to enter the southern half of the starry sky.
The celestial equator isn’t a necessary concept to know for everyday stargazing. You can watch the stars for decades and never give it a thought. But the celestial equator is a useful tool for mapping the sky, in understanding how this imaginary great circle divides the celestial sphere into its northern and southern hemispheres.
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This is a perfect night to sample the night sky, checking out Spica and the waxing gibbous Moon. Once you start looking, you'll be hooked! - ilan
Phases of the Moon to accompany the prior post.
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Kimbo
04-26-2018, 02:33 PM
Very nice speach by the President of France, there is "currently" no Planet B!!!Hope TESS works produces results even then creating vessels to travel at the speeds needed are still in the science fiction stages!!
ET phone TESS!
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Uranus stinks. No, really, it does
Astronomy Now | 26 April 2018
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Uranus, as viewed by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft. Image: NASA
In case anyone is wondering, Uranus smells.
Astronomers using the 8-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii spectroscopically dissected infrared light reflected from the cloud tops of the seventh planet and detected noxious hydrogen sulphide, a gas familiar to anyone who’s ever encountered rotten eggs.
The composition of Uranus’ atmosphere has long been a bit of a mystery with astronomers debating whether ammonia or hydrogen sulphide dominates. But now, using the Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer with Gemini North, Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford and a team of collaborators have found definitive traces of the odiferous gas just above the visible cloud tops.
“Thanks to improved hydrogen sulphide absorption-line data and the wonderful Gemini spectra, we have the fingerprint which caught the culprit,” Irwin said in a statement.
The detection of hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere of Uranus – and, presumably, Neptune’s – stands in contrast to the atmospheres of the inner gas giants Jupiter and Saturn where ammonia dominates and hydrogen sulphide is absent.
Kimbo
04-28-2018, 01:50 PM
How can i not comment on Uranus...really :cool:
Yep, its name and malodor kind of go hand in hand.
Well that puts a dent on my plans to go there one day... Have to get my refund from Elon Musk
Without all kinds of support equipment, it looks like there ain't no place like home.
Stunning Virtual Tour of Exoplanets Takes Its One Millionth 'Passenger'
University Of Exeter, UK | Published: Thursday, April 26, 2018
One million budding astronomers and space enthusiasts have taken a magical tour to explore the exotic worlds orbiting distant stars, through a stunning virtual reality documentary.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2018/04/hotjupiter.jpg?mw=500&mh=400
Image of a hot Jupiter seen as part of the new VR documentary.
Engine House Vfx/University of Exeter/We The Curious
The spectacular and dramatic first-person journey across the landscape of six exoplanets was designed and created by astrophysicists from the University of Exeter, in conjunction with ‘We The Curious’ in Bristol and visual effects artists from Cornwall-based animation studio Engine House.
The team created a detailed 360° visual display to teleport viewers from Earth to these exotic worlds, to see how they differ from our own planet.
The researchers also provide a commentary to guide virtual space travellers through the experience.
Since launching late last year, the virtual planet tour has attracted one million views...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=55&v=qhLExhpXX0E
What would it be like to stand on the surface of another planet? We teamed up with a group of astrophysicists
to create a scientifically accurate, virtual reality tour of six planets discovered outside our solar system. So
strap on a VR headset, surf the giant waves of Kepler-62e, and gaze across the lava fields of 55 Cancri e.
Engine House Vfx / University of Exeter / We The Curious
Kimbo
04-29-2018, 03:00 PM
I was watching this before and it's so freaking cool...Thanks for the share!!
Thanks, Laser... The silicate (glass) rain would be a nasty experience.
Kimbo
04-29-2018, 06:20 PM
3D Glasses would be interesting!!!
Yeah, I wonder what it would look like. Probably cooler...
How Pluto got its name
EarthSky in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | May 1, 2018
Eleven-year-old Venetia Burney suggested Pluto, a classical mythological god of the underworld. The name also honored Percival Lowell, whose early efforts led to Pluto’s discovery.
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The New Horizons spacecraft captured this image of one of Pluto’s most dominant features – its “heart,” now called Tombaugh Regio – about 16 hours before its closest approach to the dwarf planet. The “heart” is estimated to be about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) across at its widest point, about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago, in America’s heartland. Image via NASA.
May 1, 1930. On this date, 11-year-old Venetia Burney in Oxford, England, received £5 (now $6.87 U.S.) for her clever suggestion of the name Pluto for what then was considered the solar system’s outermost and newest planet.
Clyde W. Tombaugh – an assistant at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona – had discovered Pluto earlier that year, on February 18, 1930.
But it was the American astronomer Percival Lowell who initiated the search for a planet beyond Neptune. Lowell had believed that something large was gravitationally pulling on Neptune and the next planet inward, Uranus, affecting the shape of their orbits. He had searched from 1905 until his death in 1916. But he never found his long-sought Planet X.
Thirteen years later, in 1929, Lowell’s observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, resumed the search for Planet X. The new administrators at Lowell built and dedicated a 13-inch telescope for this sole purpose, and hired 23-year-old Clyde W. Tombaugh to take systematic, painstaking photographs generally along the ecliptic, or pathway of planets in our solar system. After a year of nightly labor, Tombaugh found an object whose orbit showed it was more distant than Neptune, but vastly closer to us than the stars.
It was the object now known as Pluto.
In 1930, it wasn’t the IAU but the Lowell Observatory – where both Lowell and Tombaugh had conducted the search for an unseen, outermost planet – that had the right to name the new object.
The observatory received 1,000 suggestions worldwide, according to the Library of Congress. Venetia Burney suggested the name Pluto in part because it kept the nomenclature for planets in the realm of classical mythology, where Pluto was a god of the underworld.
Cleverly, the name also honors Percival Lowell, as the first two letters of the name Pluto are Percival Lowell’s initials.
From its discovery in 1930 until 2006 – for over seven decades – Pluto was considered the 9th planet of our solar system. It’s now considered a dwarf planet, one of five recognized so far by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became first-ever (and possibly only-ever, in some of our lifetimes) spacecraft to visit Pluto and its system of moons. NASA now says:
Pluto — which is smaller than Earth’s moon — has a heart-shaped glacier that’s the size of Texas and Oklahoma. This fascinating world has blue skies, spinning moons, mountains as high as the Rockies, and it snows — but the snow is red. These are details we didn’t know before NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past in July 2015.
Pluto is a complex and mysterious world of mountains, valleys, plains and craters …
crazed 9.6
05-01-2018, 12:59 PM
fantastic stuff
I do have a video/tune for this Pluto thing too.. yup I do :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtffv9bpB-U
But ever so slightly different than the story I remember as a kid :)
Kimbo
05-01-2018, 01:30 PM
Thats a classic, i still crack up every time i watch it!!!love it!!
crazed 9.6
05-01-2018, 02:07 PM
But ever so slightly different than the story I remember as a kid :)
did you catch the part when the wolf was all red color?
Like the Sun?
Pluto did not have a chance whence the big bad wolf had his say !!
Is a classic,yes sir Laser .. yes sir no matter which or way you take it :)
Puff puff blow your house in !
did you catch the part when the wolf was all red color?
Like the Sun?
Pluto did not have a chance whence the big bad wolf had his say !!!
Yes, I did!
The 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings
ROBERT SHAPIRO, History Channel | APRIL 25, 2018
https://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2018/04/GettyImages-583653332-E.jpeg
UFO spotters looking out over the Forth Valley in central Scotland where sightings are frequent.
(Credit: Colin McPherson/Sygma/Getty Images)
In 2017, several news organizations revealed the existence of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a U.S. government funded investigation into unidentified flying objects from 2007 to 2012. This secret $22 million program, however, was not the first of its kind. In fact official government UFO studies began in the 1940s with Project Sign providing some of the most credible videos of aerial phenomenon to date. The 2017 revelation that the U.S. government was actively researching UFOs reignited world interest in UFOs and aliens. Let’s revisit five of the most believable UFO sightings of the 21st century.
1
The Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike (2001)
It takes a lot for motorists to stop alongside a highway to look towards the sky, but on July 14, 2001, drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike did just that. For around 15 minutes just after midnight, they marveled at the sight of strange orange and yellow lights in a V formation over the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island, New York, and Carteret, New Jersey. Cataret Police Department’s Lt. Daniel Tarrant was one of the witnesses, as well as other metro area residents from the Throgs Neck Bridge on Long Island and Fort Lee, New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge. Air traffic controllers initially denied that any airplanes, military jets or space flights could have caused the mysterious lights, but a group known as the New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI) claimed to receive FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings of that night.
2
The USS Nimitz Encounter (2004)
On November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. For two weeks, the crew had been tracking objects which appeared at 80,000 feet and plummeted to hover right above the Pacific Ocean. When two FA-18F fighter jets from the USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they first saw what appeared to be churning boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface. Then, in a few moments, a white Tic Tac-like object appeared above the water. It had no visible markings to indicate an engine, wings, or windows, and infrared monitors did not reveal any exhaust. Commander David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 attempted to intercept the craft, but it accelerated away, reappearing on radar 60 miles away—it moved three times the speed of sound and twice the speed of the fighter jets. This encounter was one of the stories reported along with the news of AATIP.
3
O’Hare International Airport Saucer (2006)
Flight 446 was getting ready to fly to North Carolina from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac noticed a dark grey metallic craft hovering over gate C17. That day, November 7, 2006, a total of twelve United employees, and a few witnesses outside the airport, spotted the saucer-shaped craft around 4:15 p.m. The witnesses say it hovered for about 5 minutes before shooting upward where it broke a hole in the clouds, enough that the pilots and mechanics could see the blue sky. The news report became the most read story on Chicago Tribune’s website to that date and made international news. However, because the UFO was not seen on radar, the FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.
4
The Stephenville Sightings (2008)
The small town of Stephenville, Texas 100 miles southwest of Dallas, is mostly known for its dairy farms, but in the evening of January 8, 2008, dozens of its residents viewed something unique in the sky. Citizens reported seeing white lights above Highway 67, first in a single horizontal arc and then in vertical parallel lines. Local pilot Steve Allen estimated that the strobe lights “spanned about a mile long and a half mile wide” traveling about 3,000 miles per hour. No sound was reported. Witnesses believed the event was reminiscent of the Phoenix Lights sightings of 1997. While the U.S. Air Force revealed weeks later that F-16s were flying in the Brownwood Military Operating Areas (just southwest of Stephenville), many townspeople didn’t buy that explanation, believeing that what they saw was too technologically advanced for current human abilities.
5
East Coast GO FAST Video (2015)
Leaked in 2017 along with the news of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was a video that revealed an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unidentified flying vehicle. Seen along the East Coast on a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod, the craft was similar to that spotted off San Diego in 2004: It was a fast-moving white oval about 45-feet-long without wings or exhaust plume. The pilots tracked the object at 25,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away and simultaneously rotated on its axis. Whether the vehicle was a product of another country’s technology or alien airship remains a mystery.
______________________________________
"There are stranger things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies." - Shakespeare by way of ilan
Does Stephen Hawking’s final theory tame the multiverse?
Deborah Byrd in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | May 2, 2018
"I have never been a fan of the multiverse. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite the theory can’t be tested.”
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2018/05/stephen-hawking-e1525259066519.jpg
Stephen Hawking said of his study: “We are not down to a single, unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse, to a much smaller range of possible universes.” Image via Eleanor Bentall/ Telegraph.co.uk.
Does Stephen Hawking’s last study – published May 2, 2018, in the peer-reviewed Journal of High Energy Physics – prove or disprove the existence of parallel worlds? No. It’s a theory, one of many ideas in modern cosmology, many of which lead to the multiverse concept, the idea that our universe of stars and galaxies is just one of many possible separate universes. Some physicists told media sources that Hawking’s final paper did:
... set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple Big Bangs.
Other physicists disagreed, telling the media:
The paper makes no statements about observational tests. It’s … one of literally several thousand ideas for what might possibly have happened in the early universe.
In fact, the study has been commented on extensively, since it first appeared online in July 2017, in the preprint journal arXiv. Hawking and Thomas Hertog, a former student and frequent collaborator at Belgium’s Catholic University Leuven, posted an updated version of the study on arXiv on March 4, 2018, just 10 days before Hawking’s death on March 14 in Cambridge, England.
The study centers on the decades-long conflict between Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory (nature at very large scales, for example, how gravity works), and quantum mechanics (nature at very small scales; for example, the attempt to understand subatomic particles).
Hawking and Hertog’s latest study deals specifically with a subset of Big Bang theory, called eternal inflation. Most modern Big Bang theories incorporate the idea of an inflation, which calls for an exponential expansion of space in the universe’s first fraction of a second. Eternal inflation suggests that some pockets of space keep expanding exponentially forever, while some (like the one we inhabit) don’t.
If this theory is an accurate description of the cosmos, then we live in a multiverse consisting of many isolated bubble universes.
If it’s true, then our entire known cosmos of galaxies and stars exists inside a sort of bubble, but many other bubbles – forever unknowable – exist outside ours. Some might have laws of physics similar to (or even the same as) ours. Some would operate very differently. The University of Cambridge issued a statement about Hawking’s final study this week. It explained:
The observable part of our universe would then be just a hospitable pocket universe, a region in which inflation has ended and stars and galaxies formed.
Hawking said in one of his last interviews:
The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean. The local laws of physics and chemistry can differ from one pocket universe to another, which together would form a multiverse.
But I have never been a fan of the multiverse. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite the theory can’t be tested.
And indeed, in their new study, Hawking and Hertog say this account of eternal inflation as a theory of the Big Bang is wrong. Hertog said:
We predict that our universe, on the largest scales, is reasonably smooth and globally finite. So it is not a fractal structure.
Cambridge’s statement explained more and showed how Hawking and Hertog’s study incorporated some of the most far-out physics of our time:
The theory of eternal inflation that Hawking and Hertog put forward is based on string theory: a branch of theoretical physics that attempts to reconcile gravity and general relativity with quantum physics, in part by describing the fundamental constituents of the universe as tiny vibrating strings. Their approach uses the string theory concept of holography, which postulates that the universe is a large and complex hologram: physical reality in certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections on a surface.
Hawking and Hertog developed a variation of this concept of holography to project out the time dimension in eternal inflation. This enabled them to describe eternal inflation without having to rely on Einstein’s theory.
Hertog said:
When we trace the evolution of our universe backwards in time, at some point we arrive at the threshold of eternal inflation, where our familiar notion of time ceases to have any meaning.The new study harks back to Hawking’s earlier no boundary theory, which predicted that – if you go back in time to the beginning of the universe – the universe shrinks and closes off like a sphere.
The new study is a step away from the earlier work, Hertog explained, and he said:
Now we’re saying that there is a boundary in our past.
And so physics moves on …
In the film below, Stephen Hawking, James Hartle and Thomas Hertog explain their model of the early universe – The No Boundary Proposal – a model of the Big Bang that included quantum effects. These scientists say it explains some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos such as, is there a multiverse? How is there an arrow of time? What really happened during the Big Bang?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry_pILPr7B8
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This new theory suggests there may be other (multiple) universes, but probably not as many as once believed, and they are most likely not that different from our own in terms of the physical laws that operate within them. - ilan
Capt.Kangaroo
05-03-2018, 12:15 PM
Great read, still above my pay grade though....:eek:
Still working on the formatting...
I thought this one was pretty understandable. For sure, it is intriguing. And since it's his last piece of work, I gave it some due :)
Capt.Kangaroo
05-03-2018, 07:00 PM
Still working on the formatting...
I thought this one was pretty understandable. For sure, it is intriguing. And since it's his last piece of work, I gave it some due :)
You do a great job in this Section, its even better than I hoped for since I asked Tinie to start it up at the old Beta site.
Thanks for all the great info....:)
What if aliens can't reach Earth because gravity traps them on their worlds?
Phys.Org, Cordis | May 4, 2018
https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/800/2018/whatifaliens.jpg
Credit: Kateryna Kon, Shutterstock
The truth is out there. You want to believe. But you are becoming more and more frustrated because there's no conclusive evidence. All this time, the reason could be basic physics. A study submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology suggests that aliens living on distant planets can't cruise the cosmos because of gravity.
Man has found numerous exoplanets in the hunt for alien worlds. Most are large planets like Jupiter, while some are the size of Earth or slightly smaller. Others fall somewhere in between and are called super-Earths. They're about 10 times larger than Earth.
If aliens are out there, why are they grounded?
Astronomers and astrophysicists believe that super-Earths could shelter alien life. If earthlings can build rockets and explore the universe, why can't extraterrestrials do the same? According to the findings, super-Earths have massive gravitational pulls. These keep alien spacecraft from generating enough thrust to escape the gravitational forces of their home planets. To launch the equivalent of an Apollo moon mission, a rocket on a super-Earth would need to have a mass of about 440 000 tonnes because of fuel requirements.
"On more-massive planets, spaceflight would be exponentially more expensive," study author Michael Hippke, an independent researcher affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany, told Space.com. "Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission or a Hubble Space Telescope."
Hippke examined how difficult it would be to blast off from a hypothetical super-Earth. He calculated the rocket sizes needed to escape a super-Earth that is 70 % wider than our planet and 10 times more massive. These are about the dimensions of the planet Kepler-20b, which lies some 950 light years from Earth. On this super-Earth, the escape velocity needed would be roughly 2.4 times greater than on our planet.
Speaking to the UK's 'Daily Mail', Hippke said: "Civilisations from super-Earths are much less likely to explore the stars. Instead, they would be to some extent arrested on their home planet and, for example, make more use of lasers or radio telescopes for interstellar communication instead of sending probes or spaceships."
Fuel – the great barrier to alien travel
The weight of the fuel that conventional rockets carry is another major challenge for aliens on a planet like Kepler-20b. This means that they would need to use rockets that don't depend on chemical fuel to get into space. According to the research, a potential solution is a nuclear-powered spacecraft to leave a planet more than 10 times Earth's mass.
But they're extraterrestrials, after all! Shouldn't they have some kind of alien technology to help them get off their planets? Until then, some of us will have a good excuse as to why we haven't seen UFOs cruising overhead.
Insight Mars is on its way
Eddie Irizarry in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | May 5, 2018
The Insight Mars lander is due to set down on Mars’ surface in November, 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=LKLITDmm4NA
The Insight Mars mission is on its way to the red planet, following a successful May 5, 2018, predawn liftoff from Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
InSight‘s lander is due to set down on Mars’ surface in November 2018. InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) was the first planetary mission to launch from the U.S. West Coast.
The Atlas V rocket reached an initial parking orbit at an altitude of 115 miles (185 km) about 13 minutes after launch, when the rocket was about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) northwest of Isabella Island, Ecuador. It then passed over Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica. Then its trajectory continued to the north, passing close to India, and finally near Alaska, where the InSight spacecraft separated from the rocket to continue its journey to Mars.
New science from Jupiter
Eleanor Imster in SPACE | May 7, 2018
When the Juno spacecraft recently flew over the poles of Jupiter, researchers were astonished. This 5-minute video from NASA explores the latest discoveries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=261&v=txNjILemtsw
NASA’s Juno mission launched on August 5, 2011, traveled 1.74 billion miles (2.8 billion km) and entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016.
This new NASA ScienceCast video rounds up some of Juno’s coolest finds.
Juno’s mission is to measure Jupiter’s composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. It’s also searching for clues about how the planet formed, including whether it has a rocky core; how much water there is within the deep atmosphere; and Jupiter’s deep winds, which can reach speeds up to 384 miles per hour (618 km per hour).
Earth will pass between Jupiter and the sun this week! That means we’re now in the middle of the best time of year to see the planet. Learn more – including how to spot Jupiter – at EarthSky’s Tonight page.
Bottom line: NASA video describes the newest science from the Juno mission to Jupiter.
Bright star Vega on May evenings
Deborah Byrd in TONIGHT | May 10, 2018
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2010/02/10may28_430.jpg
Tonight, look for the star Vega, the fifth brightest star in the sky. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll find this beautiful bluish star easily, simply by looking northeastward at mid-evening in May.
Try it! Just look northeast in mid-evening in May. You’ll see this bright bluish star shining above that horizon. From far south in the Southern Hemisphere, you can’t see this star until late at night in May because Vega is located so far north on the sky’s dome. Vega will reach its high point for the night around 3 to 4 hours after midnight, at which time people in the Southern Hemisphere can see this star in the northern sky. As seen from mid-northern latitudes, the star shines high overhead at this early morning hour.
Because it’s the brightest star in the constellation Lyra the Harp, Vega is sometimes called the Harp Star.
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2013/05/lyra_vega.jpg
The constellation Lyra the Harp, with its brightest star Vega and other
interesting stars or objects within its boundaries.
Vega is a lovely star to come to know. When I was first learning the night sky, nearly 40 years ago, I spent hours, days, weeks, months poring over charts and books. So I sometimes came to know the names and whereabouts of certain stars before seeing them in the night sky. One soft May evening, I happened to glance toward the northeast. I was thrilled at the sight of Vega – gleaming, sapphire-blue – and surprisingly bright for being so low in the sky.
Like all stars, Vega rises some four minutes earlier each day as Earth moves around the sun. So Vega will ornament our evening sky throughout the summer and fall.
Although Vega is considered a late spring or summer star, it’s actually so far north on the sky’s dome that you can find it at some time during the night, nearly every night of the year at mid-northern latitudes.
Bottom line: It’s easy to identify the star Vega in the constellation Lyra at this time of year. Just look northeast in the evening for a bright, bluish star above the northeastern horizon.
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