Busy Week in Astro-News
Apr 4 at 6:06pm by Aileen
The annual meeting of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast this week has produced some cool news items on the astronomical discoveries of the past year. First up, we have some interesting findings in our own neighborhood with research focusing on our sun. An international team announced that they’d discovered the source of the solar wind.
The solar wind consists of electrically charged particles that flow away from the sun in all directions. The scientists working with the Hinode mission and the UK’s Extreme Ultraviolet imaging Spectrometer to determine that the sun’s magnetic fields create bright regions of activity on the solar surface. The edges of these bright regions emit hot gas at high speeds. The magnetic fields connect even in separated regions, and this connection (or collision) allows hot gas to escape from the sun’s gravitational field as solar wind.
The Great Meteor-Hunt is On!
Mar 10 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Astronomers Capture Rare Meteor On Video
Astronomers at the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Western Ontario captured video of a meteor falling toward the Parry Sound area on the night of March 5. The video can be seen at UWO’s website using this link.
Because the meteor was tracked to an altitude of 24 kilometers - much closer than the 60-70 km altitude at which most incoming meteoroids burn up - the astronomers have enlisted the help of local residents in the area to search for meteorites they suspect can be found on the ground.
50 Weird Science Tidbits - 5
Feb 15 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Part 5: Items 41-50
This is the final installment of our 50 Weird Science tidbits, odd factoids and strange-but-true trivia. There are of course more weird things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But these 50 should get you through at least one championship round down at the pub. By the way, the word “dreamt” is the only word in the English language that ends in “mt.” That’s a freebie!
41. Plants Have Family Values Too
Researchers from Canada found that plants can have complex social interactions despite being… um, vegetative. Plants will grow more aggressively near unrelated plants than when they grow near relatives from the same maternal family.
42. The World’s Most Dangerous Animal
The not-so humble mosquito wins this award hands down. Mosquitoes transmitting countless diseases kill more animals - including humans - than any other animal (or plant) on Earth.
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50 Weird Science Tidbits - 4
Feb 14 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Part 4: Items 31-40
More obscure facts and scientific oddities that most people haven’t filed in their brains…
31. How Crowded Are We, Really?
10% of all the humans who have ever lived are alive in the world right now.
32. And You Thought Stillness Was a Meditative Virtue…
The planet Earth travels through space in its journey around the sun at a stunning 67,000 miles per hour, and we’re all moving that fast along with it!
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50 Weird Science Tidbits - 2
Feb 12 at 7:07pm by Aileen
Part 2: Items 11 - 20
In this second installment of weird science facts, I’ll repeat that none of the items in this series are in a particular order of weirdness. Readers are encouraged to offer their favorites in the comments, so that in the end some sort of weird-o-meter ranking applies!
Now let’s get on with the show…
11. If Only We Could Plug Into It!
A cloud to ground bolt of lightning carries between 100 million and 1 billion volts. It can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit - 3-4 times hotter than the surface of the sun!
12. Patching That Ever-Growing Hole
There are lightning strikes somewhere on earth 100 times a second. And every time lightning strikes, it generates Ozone gas. This strengthens the Ozone Layer in the upper atmosphere - you know, the one with the big hole that heightens our need for sunscreen.
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50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities
Feb 11 at 10:10pm by Aileen
Part 1: Items 1 - 10
In my surfing journeys through the internet’s reefs and shoals, I’ve encountered some really strange stuff. Factoids hardly anybody knows, about pretty much anything that might turn up as subject matter in a rousing championship match of Trivial Pursuit down at the pub on Thursday night. Some of these are real crowd-pleasers sure to draw spontaneous applause, stunned gasps, and plenty of free beers from admirers.
While there will be ten fun, honest-to-scientific facts or odd theories in each of the five posts on this subject this week, they’re not listed in any particular order on my weird-o-meter. If you have favorites among them, please log your votes in the comments. Eventually we should have a Top Ten!
1. Octopus Beats Grinch, Heart for Heart
The Grinch (that green fuzzy guy who stole Christmas) became an official good-guy when his heart grew three sizes one day. The octopus does even better - he has three hearts!
[Further facts: The blue-ringed octopus pictured here is the most poisonous octopus, with venom that can kill an adult human in minutes. There is no known antidote.].
Human ETs, Tropical Polar Regions, and Self-Eating Cells as a Treatment for Cancer
Dec 31 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Earth scientists have managed to discover a lot of not-earth planets in the last couple of decades, though none of them look to be very much like Earth. Now Eric Ford, a University of Florida astronomer, has published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal that suggests To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet…
If they could measure our planet’s rotation, its atmospheric gases, the presence of abundant water, and calculate what our temperature range must be, our planet would definitely stand out as life-friendly. To intelligent life forms a lot like us, anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of neat to consider myself as ET. Even though I doubt we’d qualify as cute enough or friendly enough to other ETs for them to want to actually meet us.
New Theories and X-Rated Space Follies
Dec 13 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Quantum Iron in the Core, Killer ETs and Indecent Singularities
Researchers have recently discovered some new things about both our own planet’s core and our close encounters of the closest kind with extraterrestrial billard balls. Beginning here at home, geophysics researchers published a paper in Science reporting that Deep Earth Model Challenged by New Experiment.
Apparently the iron concentrated in the lower Earth mantle behaves quite differently than previous models predicted. Instead of finding a particular, thin “transition zone” at a certain depth where the temperature and pressure ‘flips’ the spin of electrons in Iron atoms to a paired state (a quantum effect that affects the density of the iron compounds), the experiments found a whole new region in the lower mantle where both high and low spin states coexist in the same crystal structure.
This continuous transition zone grew to a thickness of nearly 750 miles, comprising the entire region between the depths of 620 and 1,365 miles beneath the surface of the Earth.
Venus and Earth: Twins Separated at Birth?
Nov 29 at 5:05pm by Aileen
On November 29 the New York Times published an article about the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission, highlighting findings from that mission that suggest Earth and Venus are “really twins which are just separated at birth.” Hmmm…
In New Findings Underscore an Earth-Venus Kinship, author Kenneth Chang cites scientists’ surprising findings that Venus experiences lightning, wide swings in temperature, and evidence that Venus once hosted oceans covering as much of the planet as Earth’s oceans do.
Eight different articles about findings from the mission were published in the 11-29 issue of the journal Nature. The scientists speculate that Venus’ oceans evaporated to form the water vapor canopy that shrouds the planet, trapping heat in the good old ‘greenhouse effect’ to cause surface temperatures approaching 900º F, yet the mission also found that the temperature varies as much as 70º F between day and night. Which must be quite a relief in a climate hot enough during the day to melt metals!
Our Universe: Missing, Found, Then Missing Again
Nov 8 at 10:10pm by Aileen
Keeping Up With Astronomy’s Game of Hide-and-Seek
Big astrophysics science news this week that a Big Chunk of the Universe Is Missing - Again. This requires a little background for understanding how it is our universe can be so adept at playing hide-and-seek.
As much as 96% of the mass necessary to account for how our universe is observed to be has been missing for a long time. The mass is necessary to explain the gravity that holds galaxies together, but all the atomic matter we can see in planets, comets, asteroids, assorted space junk, stars and galaxies accounts for just 4% of it. In 1974 astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that instead of following a Newtonian scheme where Mercury travels faster around the sun than Neptune does, almost all stars rotating around a galaxy’s center - at any distance - all travel at the same speed.
There had to be some ‘extra’ source of gravity working in galaxies, but there wasn’t nearly enough mass to account for this anomaly. The choice was between gravity being variable (unthinkable!) or the existence of a great deal of extra mass that we couldn’t see. Scientists jumped on that answer in defense of Newtonian/Einsteinian gravity and gifted us with “Dark Matter.”
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