Disinformation » Astronomy

The Known Universe Incepted (Video)

bluemana — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:12:32 +0000

Life On Venus, So Claims Russian Scientist

ralph — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:22:28 +0000

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 say that they are living.”

Massive Solar Storm Hits Earth

majestic — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:45:01 +0000

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 near the poles because of the relatively thin ozone layer. The region is also more prone to the disturbance of navigation and communication systems because of the convergence of magnetic field lines at the poles.

A huge solar storm on the sun Monday spewed out a stream of charged particles that hit the Earth earlier Tuesday. The Space Weather Prediction Center of the U.S. National Weather Service said it was the largest solar storm since October 2003.

The biggest issue is radiation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

Sunsets On Alien Planets

JacobSloan — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:30:50 +0000

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 our own sun, but when it passes through the sodium in Osirisi’s atmosphere, red light in it is absorbed, leaving the starlight to appear blue. But then, as the sun sets, the blue light is scattered in the same way as it is here on Earth (Rayleigh scattering) causing a gradual change to green, and then to mushy dark green. And finally, due to diffraction, the bottom of the image becomes slightly flattened.

Comet Dies As It Flies Too Close To Sun

majestic — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:31:20 +0000

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 before vaporizing.

Schrijver and his colleagues describe their observations of the destructing comet in a study released in Science this week. A series of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images captured by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite enabled researchers to document the comet’s death plunge into the sun…

[continues at Popular Mechanics]

Our Sun Is This Small (Animation)

ralph — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:01:52 +0000

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

majestic — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:30:13 +0000

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:

Following its public debunking of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse myth in 2009, Nasa has once again dignified a conspiracy theory with a response, claiming that a planet-sized triangular UFO is actually an optical illusion.

True believers had seized on video footage from Stereo-B, one of two Nasa probes studying the sun, which appeared to show a colossal triangular-shaped object. The video [above], which was recorded in December 2011, shows the triangle entering the frame from top right, while earth, Venus and the sun are all on the left of the frame.

Nasa has offered its own explanation for what it terms an “image artifact”. On the Stereo website they write: “The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image. At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-B field-of-view from the lower left.

“Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector. This is not a coincidence. The strange looking geometrical ‘object’ is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics.” Cuttingly, the Nasa writer adds: “This effect has been seen many times before.”…

[continues at The Week]

The Dark Matter Map

majestic — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:54:22 +0000

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, they represent the images of more than 10 million galaxies, whose light gives the only hints of the large-scale structure of dark matter…

[continues at BBC News]

Earth (Usually) Has Two Moons

HAL9000 — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:18:50 +0000

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?

JacobSloan — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:52:16 +0000

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

HAL9000 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:24:29 +0000

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 it has lost half of its stars and all its gas over the last billion years.

Before SDSS-III, Sagittarius was known to have two tails, one in front of and one behind the remnant. Previous SDSS imaging had already found the Sagittarius tidal tail in the Northern Galactic sky in 2006 and revealed that one of the tails was forked into two.

Large Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Pass Earth — Closer Than Moon

HAL9000 — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:07:33 +0000

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 large.)
Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., said this fly-by is an opportunity to learn more about c-type — that is, carbon-based — asteroids, to find “clues as to what it was like when our solar system was forming.”

More: ABC News

The Largest Galaxy Clusters in the Universe Hint That Something is Behaving Strangely

HAL9000 — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:42:39 +0000

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 models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales larger than a few hundred million light years across.

In 1883, Did Earth Narrowly Miss Comet That Would Have Destroyed All Life?

JacobSloan — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:52:33 +0000

" />“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 ‘misty’ appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

But there’s much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it’s not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That’s just a hair’s breadth.

What’s more, Manterola and co estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tons or more, that’s huge, approaching the size of Halley’s comet.

One puzzle is why nobody else saw this comet. It must have been particularly dull to have escaped observation before and after its close approach. However, Manterola and co suggest that it may have been a comet called Pons-Brooks seen that same year by American astronomers.

Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.

Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: “So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”

Microbes Found Preadapted for Life in Space

phunkychic666 — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:55:24 +0000

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 for the previous 4.5 billion years could have only been experienced in space. (These radiation-loving microbes include Deinococcus radiodurans, D. proteolyticus, D. radiopugnans, D. radiophilus, D. grandis, D. indicus, D. frigens, D. saxicola, D. marmola, D. geothermalis, D. murrayi).

Microbes from Earth are preadapted to surviving conditions which they have not encountered on this planet. Therefore, they must have inherited the genes which made survival in space possible; and this means these genes were acquired from microbes which had lived in space. It is this adaptation which made them the perfect vehicle for spreading the genetic seeds of life throughout the cosmos.

Time Reversal: A Simple Particle Could Reveal New Physics

phunkychic666 — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 05:52:37 +0000

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)

phunkychic666 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:47:29 +0000

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

Pelliciari — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:41:58 +0000

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

JacobSloan — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:35:09 +0000

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.

DARPA Wants To Send Humans To The Stars

majestic — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:34:37 +0000

Is this a good way to spend the money we’re borrowing from Chinese investors in U.S. Government debt? The New York Times‘ Dennis Overbye reports on DARPA’s bold step:

Alpha Centauri or bust.

The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.

In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

The Darpa plan has generated buzz as well as befuddlement in the labs, pubs, diners and Web sites that ring NASA centers both physically and virtually, where the dream of space travel has never died and where a few stubborn bands of scientists and engineers, fueled by science fiction dreams and prophecies, are designing spacecraft that could cross interstellar space, incubating a technology and preserving it for the day when it will be used.

“If you want to have a hobby, why can’t it be designing an interstellar spacecraft?” said Andreas Tziolas, who teaches at the University of Alaska and directs Project Icarus, a worldwide volunteer effort to design a spacecraft that could carry a scientific probe to a nearby star — perhaps Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light-years from here — in a trip that would take less than 100 years…

[continues in the New York Times]

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Did We Stop Dreaming About Outer Space? (Video)

ralph — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:50:34 +0000

Astrophysicist and NOVA host Neil deGrasse Tyson laments the United States’ failure of imagination with its space program, from a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher:

How The Universe (Something) Appeared From Nothing (Video)

ralph — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:51:34 +0000

Granted this video is a promo for the New Scientist’s recent issue on “existence”, it’s pretty interesting, if you are OK with incomplete answers. (Figuring out how the universe got so large is still a serious head-scratcher.) My takeaway after watching this, is if “something” is not really that different from “nothing” (according to our human perception) then, well, there is still much to ponder …

‘Multiverse’ Theory Suggested By Microwave Background

Pelliciari — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:04:35 +0000

“It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe. It’s a long shot, but it would by very profound for physics” (Prof. Efstathiou). Via BBC:

The idea that other universes – as well as our own – lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.

This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.

The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

For now, the team has worked with seven years’ worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the faint glow left from our Universe’s formation.

[Continues at BBC News]

Black Hole Hosts Universe’s Most Massive Water Cloud

Pelliciari — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:57:40 +0000

Photo: NASA

A giant quasar billions of light-years away is surrounded by water vapor that could fill Earth’s oceans over 140 trillion times. Via National Geographic:

In a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say.

Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar.

Among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets.

“As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor,” said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California.

[Continues at National Geographic]

Planet Earth Has A Stalker

HAL9000 — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:41:02 +0000

Michael Reilly reports in the New Scientist:

An asteroid 300 metres in diameter is stalking the Earth. Hiding in the pre-dawn twilight, it has marched in lockstep with our planet for years, all but invisible to our telescopes.

The rock is Earth’s first confirmed Trojan, which can orbit the sun in either of two gravitational wells along the same orbital path as our planet. From the sun’s point of view, these wells lie 60 degrees ahead of and behind the Earth, at Lagrange points where gravitational forces between the sun and the Earth balance out.

Trojans are common — Jupiter alone boasts about 5000, and Neptune and Mars each have their own smaller collections. But finding Earth’s has proven difficult, because the Lagrange points lie towards the sun in the sky. Astronomers must look for the objects just before the sun rises or after it sets, and until now the glare of this sunlight has obscured the feeble light reflected from any rocks that might be hiding there.

Now Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, and colleagues have used a heat sensor to see past the gloaming. Using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, they identified a 300-metre-wide Trojan now dubbed 2010 TK7.

This is Planet Earth’s Impact So Far in the Universe

HAL9000 — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 04:34:25 +0000

Look for the tiny blue dot for our impact. Adam Grossman writes about “The Tiny Humanity Bubble” on jackadamblog:

Mankind has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now — since the days of Marconi.

That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years across.

But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)?

How Buzz Aldrin Answers Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorists (Video)

vulcan — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:18:14 +0000

42 years ago today Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, and Buzz doesn’t enjoy anyone saying otherwise:

Here’s more on what got Buzz so worked up.

This Is How Small We Earthlings Really Are (Video)

HAL9000 — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 16:23:11 +0000

Summer Solstice Celebrations Turn Violent At Stonehenge

majestic — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:47:43 +0000

Summer Solstice Sunrise over Stonehenge. Photo: Andrew Dunn (CC)

Today marks the summer solstice – the day of the year when the Earth’s and the moon’s axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun. It’s a day of celebration around the world, as exemplified by the English at Stonehenge, where Steven Morris reports for the Guardian that the usual mix of pagans and partiers are in attendance:

The summer solstice is meant to be a night and dawn of peace, love and amazement. But not all of those attending the celebrations at Stonehenge entered into the spirit of the event.

Druids, pagans and revellers watched as two men, one shirtless, staged a fist fight at the ancient monument in Wiltshire.

While the majority of the 18,000 people who attended the solstice celebrations were well-behaved, 20 arrests and almost 50 drug seizures were made.

Photographer David Hedges, who witnessed the fight, said: “They were sparring for a few minutes before they really started throwing punches.”

Spectators surrounded the pair and a couple tried to break it up before the police arrived.

The 20 arrests included 11 for drugs offences and five for public order offences. Superintendent Gavin Williams of Wiltshire police said most of the attendees “came to see the sunrise in the spirit of the event. Although it was disappointing that some individuals chose to bring drugs with them, they were dealt with robustly.”

Fewer people attended than in recent years, partly due to the damp weather, perhaps, but also because the event fell at the start of the week.

But Arthur Pendragon, a well-known druid who purports to be a modern incarnation of the legendary king, said both those who were there for faith reasons and the many others who attend just for a good time – including plenty who stopped off on the way to Glastonbury – seemed to have enjoyed the night and dawn…

[continues at the Guardian]

Super-Long Lunar Eclipse Today!

majestic — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:33:49 +0000

Schematic diagram of the shadow cast by the Earth. Within the central umbra shadow, the Moon is totally shielded from direct illumination by the Sun. In contrast, within the penumbra shadow, only a portion of sunlight is blocked.

The longest lunar eclipse in a decade is going to happen later today, but unfortunately it won’t be visible in North America. If you’re in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, though, you can spend nearly two hours viewing it. National Geographic has the details:

Wednesday night the full moon will plunge into the longest and deepest total lunar eclipse in more than a decade.

Sky-watchers across most of the Eastern Hemisphere will be able to watch the lunar disc turn stunning shades of orange and red as the moon becomes engulfed within the darkest part of Earth’s shadow for almost two hours.

“The path that the moon is taking through Earth’s shadow is almost directly through [the shadow's] center, making for the longest possible path and so the longest duration,” said Ben Burress, staff astronomer at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, California.

“The last eclipse that was as long as this one was in 2000, while the next won’t be until 2018, so this makes it a somewhat rare event.”

Lunar Eclipse to Last a Hundred-Plus Minutes

Because of the tilt of the moon’s orbit around Earth, the moon usually passes slightly above or below Earth’s cone-shaped shadow, so no lunar eclipse occurs.

Sometimes, however, the geometry is just right for the moon to cross Earth’s orbital plane—always during a full moon. As all three bodies line up, the moon passes through Earth’s shadow and we see a lunar eclipse.

Partial eclipses happen when the moon grazes Earth’s shadow, while total eclipses occur when the whole moon passes through the shadow.

On June 15 Earth’s shadow will start to darken the moon around 18:22 universal time, or UT (2:22 p.m. eastern time).

The total lunar eclipse will begin at 19:22 UT and will last for more than a hundred minutes. The deepest part of the eclipse will occur at 20:12 UT, as the moon plunges into the umbra, the dark center of our planet’s shadow.

The last hint of Earth’s shadow will slip off the moon around 22:02 UT…

[continues at National Geographic]