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aamukherjee Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Hymn To The Sea -
epistemophobiarunsdeep Falling Over Myself. -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot cwl -
pieceinthepuzzlehumanity This Is The Right One -
project-argus Hello, Universe. -
torgothegreat God Delusion
NASA to Reveal Hubble Discovery of Milky Way’s Violent Fate
Figure: Galactic Cannibalism of two galaxies that wandered too close to each other’s orbit.
NASA will reveal new discoveries about the violent fate of our Milky Way galaxy on Thursday (May 31), the space agency has announced.
NASA will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Scientists will discuss new Hubble Space Telescope findings about the inevitable crash of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, which will occur billions of years from now.
“Because of uncertainties in Andromeda’s motion, it has not been possible to determine whether the Milky Way will have a head-on collision or glancing blow with the neighboring galaxy billions of years in the future,” NASA officials said in a media alert Friday (May 25). “Hubble’s precise observations will settle this question.”
ikenbot
‘Laser Comb’ May Aid Search for Earth-Like Alien Planets
Image: This picture illustrates part of a spectrum of a star obtained using the HARPS instrument on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO
Astronomers searching for alien planets may be a step closer to finding true Earth-like worlds around sun-like stars, by using a new tool that promises to increase the accuracy of planet-hunting instruments tenfold, scientists say.
The laser frequency comb is a calibration tool specifically designed for large ground-based telescopes that search for alien planets through the “wobble method,” which identifies extrasolar planets by the gravitational effect (the wobble) they have on their parent stars.
Today instruments such as the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph on a telescope in Chile observe planets via the wobble method. But precision is key, and the hollow cathode lamps used to calibrate those spectrometers have their limitations, researchers said — they are not adjustable, can be difficult to gauge, and allow the spectrometers to track the wobble of a star only down to about 30 centimeters per second.
“To detect low-mass planets — down to the Earth mass — in Earth-like orbits requires a precision 10 times better,” study co-author Gaspare Lo Curto of the European Southern Observatory said.
Uniting the Planet for a Journey to Another Star
Former astronaut Mae Jemison (and living legend) will spearhead the audacious 100 Year Starship plan to send mankind on an interstellar adventure.
(via discoverynews)
On June 5, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.
Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a hundred years. This June’s transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair, won’t be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sliver of Antarctica, will be in position to see it.
Earth Experiences Back-to-Back Asteroid Close Encounters
Two small asteroids buzzed by Earth, zooming well within the moon’s orbit, over the last 48 hours. Neither posed any danger, but the events were eagerly captured by amateur astronomers, and the second encounter was a record-setter.
The first asteroid, designated 2012 KP24, was first detected last week and passed within 32,000 miles of Earth on May 28. It is less than 70 feet across, approximately the size of a blue whale.
The second asteroid, named 2012 KT42, zipped by at midnight PDT on May 29, coming within 8,950 miles of Earth. That’s closer than the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, making the KT42 encounter one of the top 20 closest approaches ever recorded. The asteroid was discovered only a day before its flyby, but is a puny 15 feet across, not much bigger than a minivan.
Continue Reading “Earth Experiences Back-to-Back Asteroid Close Encounters” »
Occupy the Neolithic: Social Immobility in the Stone Age
Even the most democratic societies are rife with social and economic inequalities, as the current tension between the poorer “99 percent” and the richest “1 percent” vividly illustrates. But just how early in human events such social hierarchies became entrenched has been a matter of debate. A new study of skeletons from prehistoric farming communities across Europe suggests that hereditary inequality was an early feature, going back more than 7,000 years ago.
Most researchers agree that social hierarchies began with the advent of farming. The earliest known farming communities are found in the Near East, dating back almost 11,000 years. Archaeologists have looked for evidence of social stratification in these societies with mixed results. Some early farming societies show signs that people played different roles and that some were buried with greater ritual — shuffling off this mortal coil with a number of elaborate “grave goods,” including pottery and stone tools. However, there is little evidence that social inequality was hereditary or rigidly defined.
Continue Reading “Occupy the Neolithic: Social Immobility in the Stone Age” »
Antibiotic Overuse May Increase Superbug Evolution Rate
By flooding our environment with antibiotics, people may alter a little-appreciated but profound aspect of bacterial evolution: the very pace at which it occurs. Bacteria may evolve more rapidly and more radically than just a few decades ago.
This proposition is still a hypothesis, but it’s an intriguing one. While drug resistance is a well-known consequence of antibiotic use, a global acceleration of bacterial mutability could make drug resistance more common and shape pathogens in unpredictable ways.
“Human activities might be altering the fundamental tempo of bacterial evolution,” write geneticists Michael Gillings of Australia’s Macquarie University and Hatch Stokes of the University of Technology in a June Trends in Ecology and Evolution paper.
Triton: The Outer Most Ocean in The Solar System
A new day dawns on Triton. It’s going to be a cold one, much like the last. And the one before that… and every day since the moon settled into its present orbit around Neptune. Even the volcanoes here spew out cold gases and liquid water rather than hot magma. But below the frigid surface, which registers a temperature of -235 °C, there’s something more clement: a liquid ocean.
At first glance, Triton seems to be just another icy moon – a featureless, barren world spinning around Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system. But Triton is different.
For one thing, it orbits Neptune backwards, moving in the opposite direction to Neptune’s rotation. It’s the only large moon in the solar system to do so. Satellites can’t form in these “retrograde” orbits, so Triton must have begun life elsewhere before being captured by the gas giant. It looks a lot like Pluto, and probably came from the same place – the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, close to Neptune.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Triton in 1989, sending back images of the moon’s frozen surface. They revealed signs of cryovolcanism – the eruption of subsurface liquids which quickly freeze when exposed to the cold of the outer solar system. As such, Triton joins a short list of worlds in the solar system known to be geologically active.
Its surface ice is unique, too: largely composed of nitrogen, with some cantaloupe-textured terrain, and a polar cap of frozen methane.
New Research Confirms The Existence of Dark Matter
Image: Don Dixon
Fans of dark matter can rest easy. A study published last month raised eyebrows by suggesting that our cosmic neighbourhood is empty of the extra mass needed to hold the galaxy together. But a re-analysis shows that the dark matter was there all along.
Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 83 per cent of the matter in the universe. It is responsible for keeping galaxies from flying apart despite their high spinning speeds, and has aided our understanding of how structures in the universe formed.
The most popular theories say that dark matter is a hitherto undetected particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) that is shy of interacting with ordinary matter through any force except gravity.
But several underground detectors waiting for WIMPs have come up empty, or with conflicting results. If the galaxy is so full of dark matter, why hasn’t it shown up yet?
In April, a team led by Christian Moni-Bidin of the University of Concepcion in Chile thought they had a solution: the WIMPs aren’t actually there.
The team tracked the motions of more than 400 stars within 13,000 light years of Earth to estimate the mass of matter – visible and dark – in the sun’s local neighbourhood. They concluded that the mass they found could be explained by the visible matter alone, with no need for dark matter.
But the team made a subtle error, say Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Moni-Bidin and colleagues considered stars whose orbits take them far above or below the Milky Way’s main bright disc, and used the speed at which they orbit the centre of the galaxy to figure out how much of a pull they feel from the nearby mass of stars and dark matter. They assumed that the stars’ speeds would be the same no matter how far they were from the galactic centre. Observations of dust clumps have shown that this assumption is true for young stars orbiting in the galactic disc, which mostly move in a near-perfect circle.
But the stars that orbit high above or far below the disc can’t have circular orbits, Bovy says. The only stars that reach such great heights have been kicked away from the disc by matter in the galaxy’s spiral arms, which sent them on highly elliptical orbits.
Full Article: Crisis averted: Dark matter was there all along
Bigfoot: Beyond Footprints and DNA
Last week researchers from Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology announced that they are seeking genetic materials (such as hair, skin, and blood samples) claimed to be of unknown animals such as Bigfoot. The goal of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project is to catalogue and identify new species, including those long believed to be mythical.
Scientists Flood NASA With 400 Ideas to Explore Red Planet
Scientists have responded in a big way to NASA’s call to help reformulate its Mars robotic exploration strategy, submitting about 400 ideas and Red Planet mission concepts to the space agency.
NASA’s Mars program suffered deep cuts in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, which was released in February. In response, NASA pulled out of the European-led ExoMars mission, which aims to launch an orbiter and a rover to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
The agency also undertook a broad rethink of its Mars strategy, to figure out how best to explore the Red Planet with reduced funding. NASA asked the scientific community for ideas and was expecting to get about 200 proposals at its recent Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration Workshop in Houston, officials said.
Instead, twice that many submissions poured in from individuals and teams that included professional researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, NASA centers, federal laboratories, industry and international partner organizations.
New Image of the Pinwheel galaxy in Many Colors Shows Off 21 Million Year Old Light
This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or also known as M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA’s space-based telescopes. This multi-spectral view shows that both young and old stars are evenly distributed along M101’s tightly-wound spiral arms.
Such composite images allow astronomers to see how features in one part of the spectrum match up with those seen in other parts. It is like seeing with a regular camera, an ultraviolet camera, night-vision goggles and X-ray vision, all at the same time.
The Pinwheel Galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major (also known as the Big Dipper). It is about 70% larger than our own Milky Way Galaxy, with a diameter of about 170,000 light years, and sits at a distance of 21 million light years from Earth.
This means that the light we’re seeing in this image left the Pinwheel Galaxy about 21 million years ago - many millions of years before humans ever walked the Earth.
Brilliant Color Flows From Glacier
Credit: NASA
The Columbia Glacier descends from an ice field 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) above sea level, down the flanks of the Chugach Mountains, and into a narrow inlet that leads into Prince William Sound in southeastern Alaska. It is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers in the world.
This false-color image, captured by the Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument on Landsat 5, shows the glacier and the surrounding landscape on May 30, 2011. Snow and ice appears bright cyan, vegetation is green, clouds are white or light orange, and the open ocean is dark blue. Exposed bedrock is brown, while rocky debris on the glacier’s surface is gray.
Science Query for the Presidential Candidates
I wonder when will the public start demanding scientific literacy among their governing officials, including presidential candidates. We were not a country founded on religious beliefs yet it floods our country’s interest for some odd reason. Would it be too much to ask these people have at least a basic, well-rounded sense of the scientific method, much like we require the same level of expertise from our doctors, scientists, teachers, etc.?.
Here’s a nice article via SciAm that reiterates a similar concern:
3 Science Questions to Ask U.S. Presidential Candidates
“As you may already be aware from my previous posts, The Guardian U.S. and NYU’s Studio 20 journalism lab have teamed up to push a project called The Citizens’ Agenda into the media discourse surrounding the U.S. presidential 2012 election. The idea: find out what you–the citizens–want the candidates to be discussing over the next four months – usually meaning questions of substance about policy rather than horserace and gotcha questions so pervasive in mainstream media.”
