Life On Venus, So Claims Russian Scientist
Maybe Jack Nicholson was right after all. Via Yahoo News:
Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during a 1982 during a mission to explore the heavily acid-clouded planet.
Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s, a waterless and volcano-riddled surface and a surface temperature of 894 degrees, the planet has never been considered a serious target of research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”
“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?” he wrote. “Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to…
Massive Solar Storm Hits Earth
Rerouting airplanes isn’t a big deal, but could there be dangers from the radiation? Doug Cameron reports for the Wall Street Journal:
Delta Air Lines Inc. said Tuesday that it was rerouting some transpolar flights between Asia and the U.S. to avoid the impact of the largest solar storm in almost a decade.
The Atlanta-based carrier said some flights to Detroit from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul took a more southerly routing on overnight flights, though a spokesman said planes flew faster to keep schedules intact. Tuesday departures from the U.S. were expected to follow similar routes.
A rare solar flare erupted late Sunday night resulting in a solar radiation storm today, according to NASA. It’s the strongest such storm since September 2005, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
Airlines occasionally reroute transpolar flights as a precautionary measure during big solar storms, with radiation levels heightened…
Sunsets On Alien Planets
A simulated sunset from a foreign solar system — what a dreamy dusk. PhysOrg writes:
Professor Frederic Pont, of the University of Exeter, imagined what it might really look like if a person were able to visit another planet and to then sit quietly watching as the sun set. He used data from a camera onboard Hubble, knowledge of how the color of light changes based on chemicals it encounters, and computer modeling, to create an actual image of what a sunset on an actual planet far out in space would look like. The planet in question, exoplanet HD209458b, nicknamed Osiris, just happens to be quite large and circles its star rather closely.
Though we couldn’t technically sit on the surface of Osiris, since it doesn’t have one, the picture that Pont produced approximates what it would look like, and the results are truly beautiful. The light from Osiris’s star is white, like…
Comet Dies As It Flies Too Close To Sun
Photo: Science/AAAS
Allison McCann reports for Popular Mechanics on the visual trail of a comet as it approached the sun, vaporized, and finally disintegrated:
Sun-grazing comets are frustratingly elusive. As they approach the intense heat of the sun, these dirty snowballs turn to gas in a hurry and put on an impressive show before they disappear. But the intense solar radiation also makes the comet’s death extremely difficult to detect.
On July 6, 2011, solar physicist C.J. Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center and colleagues became the first to directly witness a comet falling within the solar corona, a sort of blazing-hot atmosphere that surrounds the sun. Labeled C/2011 N3 (SOHO), the comet is from the Kreutz family, the source of about 80 percent of the comets that pass so close to our star. The comet, moving at roughly 1.3 million miles per hour, was only visible to scientists for 20 minutes…
Our Sun Is This Small (Animation)
For those of you who hated this proposed Earth-centric view of our Solar System, check out this video below. (VY Canis Majoris RULES for now; Giordano Bruno would be proud …):
VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant star located in the constellation Canis Major. At between 1800 and 2100 solar radii (8.4–9.8 astronomical units, 3.063 billion km or 1.7 billion miles in diameter), it is currently the largest known star and also one of the most luminous known …
NASA Shoots Down Triangular UFO Conspiracy Theory
The Week highlights NASA’s desire to squelch yet another bit of fun. First here’s the video footage that got certain people all excited:
The Dark Matter Map
So that’s what’s out there … Jason Palmer reports from the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin for BBC News:
Researchers have released the biggest images yet detailing dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up three-quarters of the Universe’s mass.
Each image, a billion light-years across, shows vast dark matter clumps and voids scattered through the cosmos.
The team from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope inferred the dark matter’s existence by the way it bends light.
The images were presented at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, US.
The four images were taken at four different seasons of the year, each capturing a swath of the sky about as large as a palm held at arm’s length.
They are a big step forward in understanding both dark matter itself, and the means by which dark matter influences the way normal matter clumps into the galaxies we see in the night skies.
Together,…
Earth (Usually) Has Two Moons
So reports MIT’s Technology Review:
Back in 2006, the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona noticed that a mysterious body had begun orbiting the Earth. This object had a spectrum that was remarkably similar to the titanium white paint used on Saturn V rocket stages and, indeed, a number of rocket stages are known to orbit the Sun close to Earth.
But this was not an object of ours. Instead, 2006 RH120, as it became known, turned out to be a tiny asteroid just a few metres across–a natural satellite like the Moon. It was captured by Earth’s gravity in September 2006 and orbited us until June 2007 when it wandered off into the Solar System in search of a more interesting neighbour.
2006 RH120 was the first reliably documented example of a temporary moon …
A Cloaked UFO Next To Mercury?
Many who want to believe are claiming that this footage taken by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft shows a “cloaked” UFO appearing, and then disappearing, near the planet Mercury. Extraterrestrials on vacation?
Our Milky Way Galaxy Devours Its Small Neighboring Galaxies
Via PhysOrg:
A team of astronomers led by Sergey Koposov and Vasily Belokurov of Cambridge University recently discovered two streams of stars in the Southern Galactic hemisphere [of the Milky Way] that were torn off the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. This discovery came from analysing data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and was announced in a paper released that connects these new streams with two previously known streams in the Northern Galactic hemisphere.
“We have long known that when small dwarf galaxies fall into bigger galaxies, elongated streams, or tails, of stars are pulled out of the dwarf by the enormous tidal field,” said Sergey Koposov.
The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy used to be one of the brightest of the Milky Way satellites. Its disrupted remnant now lies on the other side of the Galaxy, breaking up as it is crushed and stretched by huge tidal forces. It is so small that…
Large Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Pass Earth — Closer Than Moon
Edward Lovett and Ned Potter Report on ABC News:
We have a visitor — a large asteroid called 2005 YU55 that is expected to come within approximately 201,700 miles of Earth on Tuesday, according to NASA. That’s slightly less than the distance from Earth to the moon.
Asteroids often pass this close, but most are tiny. Countless thousands of pieces come plunging into the atmosphere, but they burn up without doing any harm. If they’re as large as grains of sand, we may, if we’re lucky, see them in the night sky as shooting stars.
But 2005 YU55 is at least 1,300 feet wide — larger than an aircraft carrier, according to radar measurements. The last time an asteroid this big passed by was in 1976, and the next one scientists know of won’t be until 2028, NASA says. (There have been some rude surprises in between, but not involving anything remotely as…
The Largest Galaxy Clusters in the Universe Hint That Something is Behaving Strangely
Via the Daily Galaxy:
The large-scale structure of the Universe appears to be dominated by vast “hyperclusters” of galaxies, according to the new the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, compiled with a telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. The survey plots the 2D positions of galaxies across a quarter of the sky. The science team has concluded that it could mean that gravity or dark energy — or something completely unknown — is behaving very strangely.
We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 light years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today’s galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between.
On even larger scales, though, cosmological…
In 1883, Did Earth Narrowly Miss Comet That Would Have Destroyed All Life?
“If they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”
The biggest event which never happened and no one knows about? Offering a novel reinterpretation of some forgotten historical data, several Mexican researchers say a billion-ton comet may have passed a few hundred miles from Earth in 1883. Via Technology Review:
On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.
Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the…
Microbes Found Preadapted for Life in Space
Via the Daily Galaxy (some have been unable to get this link, here is the cached version):
Microbes born on Earth are already pre-adapted for journeying through space, living in space, and not just surviving but flourishing in radioactive environments where they are continually exposed to radiation by ions similar to what might be encountered in a nebular cloud.
In 1958, physicists discovered clouds of bacteria, ranging from two million bacteria per cm3 and over 1 billion per quart, thriving in pools of radioactive waste directly exposed to ionizing radiation and radiation levels millions of times greater than could have ever before been experienced on this plane.
The world’s first artificial nuclear reactor was not even built until 1942. Prior to the 1945, poisonous pools of radioactive waste did not even exist on Earth. And yet, over a dozen different species of microbe have inherited the genes which enable them to survive conditions which…
Time Reversal: A Simple Particle Could Reveal New Physics
Shelley Littin writes in Space Daily:
A simple atomic nucleus could reveal properties associated with the mysterious phenomenon known as time reversal and lead to an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.
The physics world was rocked recently by the news that a class of subatomic particles known as neutrinos may have broken the speed of light.
Adding to the rash of new ideas, University of Arizona theoretical physicist Bira van Kolck recently proposed that experiments with another small particle called a deuteron could lead to an explanation for one of the most daunting puzzles physicists face: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. A deuteron is a simple atomic nucleus, or the core of an atom. Its simplicity makes it one of the best objects for experiments in nuclear physics …
2011 Nobel Prize to Dark Energy: Explained (Video)
Guest narrator Sean Carroll of Caltech describes dark energy and the acceleration of the universe, the discovery of which was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 4th, from Minute Physics’ YouTube:
Lunar Orbiter Find Footprints On The Moon
Some people were in awe as they watched to first men walk on the moon in 1969. Others still remain in skepticism of the lunar landing. Taken by NASA’s lunar orbiter, new photographs have been released of landing sites, including footprints left on the surface. Via Reuters:
Astronomers Find Planet Made Of Diamond
What celebrity couple will be first to take a honeymoon on the planet made of solid diamond crystal? Via Wired Science:
An international team of astronomers, led by Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.
Researchers from institutions in the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy and the USA used a variety of radio telescopes — including the Australian Parkes CSIRO, the Lovell in Cheshire and the Keck in Hawaii — and 200,000 Gigabytes of celestial data to find the nifty diamond-esque planet.
