Cassini Revisits Enceladus
Aug 14 at 7:07pm by Aileen
Returns Very Cool Pix
Fractures, or “tiger stripes,” where icy jets erupt on Saturn’s moon Enceladus will be the target of a close flyby by the Cassini spacecraft on Monday, Aug. 11. - JPL/NASA
Calling all space geeks! Check out the photos returned from Monday’s 50-km fly-over of Enceladus’ ridged south pole “geyser region” at JPL’s Cassini-Huygens Images page. Well done indeed!
And to get the low-down on what they’re looking at and why, Discover magazine collects the data in readily accessible links here.
Saturn and its 52 moons are a fascinating system, and Cassini keeps returning spectacular images and data that will have scientists scratching their heads for years. I personally am following the Titan and Iapetus fly-bys due to long time fascination with these particular moons, but Enceladus is one of the solar system’s most likely places to find life that’s not right here on planet earth. Here’s some useful links…
Cassini-Huygens Images
Discover: Cassini Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon
Moons: Titan
Moons: Iapetus
I Was Bigfoot’s Love Slave!
Jul 30 at 10:10pm by Aileen
Or, how about “Angelina’s Alien Clone Babies!” (subtitle, “Brad stands by his woman even after UFO abduction…”. Or some such rot. We’ve all seen ‘em at the grocery store checkout line, and we’ve all been terribly tempted to read the funnies even if we absolutely don’t want to be seen buying one. I once saw a stand-up comedy act in which the comedian did nothing more than hold up a copy of the National Enquirer and read off the headlines and sidebar - with feeling. Then he’d say…
“But that’s NOT the real story! The REAL story is on page [whatever]…” whereupon he’d flip to some inside page with an even more bizarre headline and story. All with a perfectly deadpan face, fully animated only while reading the lurid details with Shakespearian delivery. He was so funny I saw the show three times.
Now, most of us actually do know better than to believe the sensationalized storytelling and photoshop creativity in tabloid rags like that. That’s what makes them such good comedy fodder. Nor do most of us purchase the magical anti-hex pendants or crystal healing rings or genuine eye of newt sure-love powder advertised in the pages of such rags. But somebody must be buying all that junk - as well as the tabloids they finance - and even if we do occasionally get a guilty pleasure out of light reading in the checkout line, most regular people would claim they don’t know anybody who’s really that dumb. Save perhaps an odd relative or friend of a friend.
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.
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.”
Origin of Life: Outer Space?
Aug 17 at 9:09am by Aileen
The debates have been raging for years. Scientists square off and argue with each other about what is most likely to be true, and those of us on the sidelines have picked favorites and made our bets.
How - and where - did life originate? Are we alone in the universe? And if not, where are our brothers and sisters? Two recent reports have added some new evidence and analysis to the debates.
In the article, Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities, researchers report that particles of inorganic dust in plasmas can self-organize into helical structures in the electronically charged environment, resulting in microscopic strings of particles that assume the characteristic corkscrew shape of organic molecules like DNA and even “reproduce” - bifurcate to produce two copies of the original structure. According to computer models, these structures also evolve into more complex structures, and experience a form of natural selection so that only the ‘fittest’ structures survive.
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