Tag: science

NASA funds a cubesat-sized ultra-violet telescope

2:50 pm

NASA has funded a cubesat-based ultra-violet telescope to launch in 2021.

SPARCS is a CubeSat built of six cubical units, each about four inches on a side. These are joined to make a spacecraft two units wide by three long in what is termed a 6U spacecraft. Solar power panels extend like wings from one end. “In size and shape, SPARCS most resembles a family-size box of Cheerios,” Shkolnik said.

The spacecraft will contain three major systems — the telescope, the camera, and the operational and science software. Along with Shkolnik, SESE astronomers Paul Scowen, Daniel Jacobs, and Judd Bowman will oversee the development of the telescope and camera, plus the software and the systems engineering to pull it all together. The telescope uses a mirror system with coatings optimized for ultraviolet light. Together with the camera, the system can measure very small changes in the brightness of M dwarf stars to carry out the primary science of the mission.

As I have noted numerous times recently, the space industry is splitting between large manned projects and tiny unmanned ones. While certain unmanned probes will always have to be larger, the ability to build and launch the same capabilities at a smaller size is lowering cost and allowing more probes to be launched.

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NASA renames Swift telescope to honor Neil Gehrels

10:48 am

NASA has renamed the Swift space telescope, designed to quickly detect and observe fast transient events in space like gamma ray bursts, to honor the late Neil Gehrels, the man who led the project from day one.

During a presentation at a NASA town hall meeting at the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society here, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said that Swift would now be known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Gehrels, who died in February 2017, had been principal investigator for Swift, a mission launched in 2004. The spacecraft was designed to be able to rapidly respond to transient events, such as gamma-ray bursts, observing them at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to visible light.

“Neil wore many hats in service to the astrophysics community,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, at a later press conference at the meeting. In addition to being the principal investigator for Swift, had served as project scientist on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory and Fermi missions. At the time of his death last year he was project scientist for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, NASA’s next flagship astronomy mission after the James Webb Space Telescope.

Knowing astronomers, they will now refer to this observatory as the NGSO. Not I. It will be “Gehrels Swift” to me, whenever I need to mention it. Gehrels was one of the most friendly, open, and easy-to-work-with astronomers I ever had to deal with. He is sorely missed.

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A spectacular collapse feature at Arsia Mons

3:55 pm

Collapse at Arsia Mons

Cool image time! This post could be called an update to my January 8th post, Exploring Arsia Mons. In that post I had compiled together the ten images of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano in the line of three giant volcanoes on Mars, that JPL had highlighted over several weeks in early January.

Today, I decided to do some of my own exploration of some of the many images taken of Arsia Mons by all of the Martian orbiters. My goal had been to explore the volcano’s western slopes (an area that had not been featured in the JPL releases) because that is the area where research has found evidence of past glacial activity as well as seasonal water clouds. I haven’t finished that survey, but in the process I came across a spectacular image of a collapse that had been visible in image nine of the January 8th post, but did not stand out there because of the lighting. The image on the right is that better image, cropped to focus in on the collapse itself.

The material at the base of the wall resembles piled up mud, which suggests this collapse is a Martian version of a mud slide. If so, it also suggests the presence of liquid. At the same time, the muddy look might not be from liquid but because of the lighter Martian gravity causing avalanches to be appear different there. The light gravity means material is not as dense, so when it collapses it might break apart more easily into a sandy type flow.

I am only an amateur geologist, so my theories here should not be taken very seriously. Nonetheless, I am sure there are planetary geologists who have looked at this closely because of the information about Martian geology that they can glean from it. I’d be curious to hear their thoughts.

Meanwhile, my exploration of the western slopes of Arsia Mons will continue. In Pioneer the science fiction book I wrote in the early 1980s (now available), I placed my Martian colony in Mangala Valles, a meandering canyon to the west of Olympus Mons that feeds out from the higher southern regions into the lower northern flat plains where even then some scientists thought an ocean might have once existed. My thinking then was that this might be a good location to find underground water. It now appears, with our greater knowledge, that the slopes of the volcanoes themselves might be more promising, and I am curious to find the most likely places in this region where a future colony might end up.

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Almost 500 science papers in 2017 challenge “global-warming consensus”

9:36 am

The uncertainty of science: A survey of climate papers published in 2017 shows that 485 directly challenged the so-called “consensus” that activists claim exists about global warming.

Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future.

According to Richard’s analysis, the 485 new papers underscore the “significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes,” which in turn suggests that climate science is not nearly as settled as media reports and some policymakers would have people believe.

This really is not a surprise for anyone who spends even a little time reading actual climate research. If you do, you immediately realize that the absurd claims of politicians (mostly Democrats) and activists about the certainty of human-caused global warming are based on their complete ignorance of the science. Some examples:

My point isn’t to say that human-caused global warming isn’t happening. We simply don’t know. The evidence so far is very inconclusive. And for those who advocate this theory, their own models have consistently failed to match the data. Skepticism is called for, which by the way is actually the hallmark of good science.

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A new prime number, 23 million digits long

8:38 am

An online pubic program designed to allow ordinary people to use their computers to identify previously unknown prime numbers has found the largest so far, 23 million digits long.

It was discovered on December 26, 2017 by electrical engineer Jonathan Pace, and it initially took six days of non-stop number crunching to show that it was indeed a prime number. Pace was using a consumer-level PC running an Intel i5-6600 processor, and after it was identified it was then independently verified by other users, with a range of other programs and hardware setups.

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First six segments of Extremely Large Telescope cast

8:23 am

The first six mirror segments of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope have been successfully cast.

These segments will form parts of the ELT’s 39-metre main mirror, which will have 798 segments in total when completed. The ELT will be the largest optical telescope in the world when it sees first light in 2024.

The 39-metre-diameter primary mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope will be by far the largest ever made for an optical-infrared telescope. Such a giant is much too large to be made from a single piece of glass, so it will consist of 798 individual hexagonal segments, each measuring 1.4 metres across and about 5 centimetres thick. The segments will work together as a single huge mirror to collect tens of millions of times as much light as the human eye.

The segments must now be cooled, then their surfaces ground and polished to the right shape. If all goes right, they will make more than 900 segments (with about a 130 as spares), manufactured to have the telescope operational by 2024.

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Sunspot update for December 2017

2:40 pm

The precipitous decline in sunspots continues. While November 2017 remains the most inactive month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, December was a very close second.

Below is my annotated version of NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for December, which they posted on Sunday.

December 2017 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

December 2017 sunspot record

The graph on the right, produced by SILSO (Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations) on December 31, shows only 14 days during the month when there were sunspots active on the Sun’s visible hemisphere. This is only four more days then seen in November. And like November, the few sunspots were weak, resulting in tiny sunspot numbers total.

The first graph above illustrates how weak this on-going sunspot cycle has been. While the curve most closely matches the 2007 weak prediction of half the solar science community, it has one very notable difference. The actual ramp up to solar maximum started two years later than predicted, even though it appears to be ending when that prediction expected. The result is a very very short solar cycle, something that has historically always been associated with very active and intense sunspot activity. Instead, this short cycle has only seen weak activity, generally below all the predictions.

All signs continue to point to an early arrival of solar minimum. They also suggest that the next maximum will also be weak, and might even not come at all, as some solar scientists have proposed. Instead, we might be heading toward another Grand Minimum, with no significant sunspots for decades.

So, is it cold outside right now? Well, that’s weather, not climate. Nonetheless, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that few sunspots correspond with a cooling climate on Earth. (The last grand minimum occurred in the 1600s, during what was called the Little Ice Age.) There is even some preliminary evidence to suggest that cosmic rays might be a cause. (Watch the video at the end of this link.).

Whether any of this will happen however remains unknown. We will need to wait to find out.

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Exploring Arsia Mons

2:01 pm

Master index

In November over a period of two weeks the Mars Odyssey team posted ten images of Pavonis Mons, the smallest of the aligned three giant volcanoes just to the east of Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. I then made all of those images available in a single link, with some analysis.

They have now done the same thing for the southernmost (and possibly the most interesting) of those three aligned volcanoes, Arsia Mons. From the first image below:

Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes. It is 270 miles (450km) in diameter, almost 12 miles (20km) high, and the summit caldera is 72 miles (120km) wide. For comparison, the largest volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa. From its base on the sea floor, Mauna Loa measures only 6.3 miles high and 75 miles in diameter. A large volcanic crater known as a caldera is located at the summit of all of the Tharsis volcanoes. These calderas are produced by massive volcanic explosions and collapse. The Arsia Mons summit caldera is larger than many volcanoes on Earth.

In other words, you could fit almost all of Mauna Loa entirely within the caldera of Arsia Mons.

The image on the right above is the master index, annotated by me to show the area covered by each image. The images can accessed individually below.
» Read more

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Curiosity images small tubelike rock features on Vera Rubin Ridge

12:24 pm

tubes on Mars

During Curiosity’s extended science observations in the past month on Vera Rubin Ridge the rover has found a number of rocks with strange tubelike features that remind some scientists of fossils. The image on the right, taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and cropped and reduced to post here, shows some of these weird tubes.

The origin of these odd features — geological or biological processes — is in TBD limbo at the moment. Regarding trace fossils on Mars, “we don’t rule it out,” Vasavada said, “but we certainly won’t jump to that as our first interpretation.”

Close-up looks at these features show them to be angular in multiple dimensions. That could mean that they are related to crystals in the rock, perhaps “crystal molds” that are also found here on Earth, Vasavada added. Crystals in rock that are dissolved away leave crystal molds, he said.

Still, that’s just one of a few possibilities, Vasavada explained. “If we see more of them … then we begin to say that this is an important process that’s going on at Vera Rubin Ridge,” he said.

The article outlines a number of other possible explanations, including fossil remains. None are convincing at this time, based on the limited data. Nor does Curiosity have the equipment to clarify things much.

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A faint seasonal fluctuation of methane on Mars?

8:23 pm

The uncertainty of science: Data from Curiosity during its two Martian years on Mars have revealed a faint but distinct seasonal fluctuation in the amount of methane in the local atmosphere, a fluctuation that scientists do not have a good explanation for.

Since landing in 2012, Curiosity has on 30 occasions opened a few valves to the martian night and taken a sniff of the thin, frigid air. In a small, mirrored chamber, it shines a laser through the air sample and measures the absorption at specific wavelengths that indicate methane. At the meeting, Webster reported vanishingly small background levels of the gas: 0.4 parts per billion (ppb), compared with Earth’s 1800 ppb.

Where that whiff comes from is the heart of the mystery. Microbes (including those that live in the guts of cows and sheep) are responsible for most of Earth’s methane, and Mars’s could conceivably come from microbes as well—either contemporary microbes or ancient ones, if the methane they produced was trapped underground. But methane can also be made in ways that have nothing to do with biology. Hydrothermal reactions with olivine-rich rocks underground can generate it, as can reactions driven by ultraviolet (UV) light striking the carbon-containing meteoroids and dust that constantly rain down on the planet from space.

Now, add to the methane puzzle the seasonal variation Curiosity has detected, with levels cycling between about 0.3 ppb and 0.7 ppb over more than two martian years. Some seasonality is expected in an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), says François Forget, who models the climate of Mars at the Laboratory of Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. In the southern winter, some of that CO2 freezes out onto the large southern polar cap, making the overall atmosphere thinner. That boosts the concentration of any residual methane, which doesn’t freeze, and by the end of northern summer this methane-enriched air makes its way north to Curiosity’s location, Forget says. Seasonal variations in dust storms and levels of UV light could also affect the abundance of methane, if interplanetary dust is its primary source.

But, Webster said at the meeting, the seasonal signal is some three times larger than those mechanisms could explain. Maybe the methane—whatever its source—is absorbed and released from pores in surface rocks at rates that depend on temperature, he said. Another explanation, “one that no one talks about but is in the back of everyone’s mind,” is biological activity, says Mike Mumma, a planetary scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You’d expect life to be seasonal.”

They have a lot of theories, from asteroids to alien life, but none really explains this adequately.

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Was the solar system formed inside a giant bubble?

10:28 am

Don’t bet the house on this! Astronomers have come up with a new theory for the formation of the solar system, that it was formed inside a giant bubble inside a Wolf-Rayet star, in order to explain the known ratios of certain isotopes here.

The new theory for how the solar system formed starts with an extremely massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star. Of all the stars in the universe, these stars burn the hottest. Because they are so hot, they also have exceptionally strong stellar winds.

As a Wolf-Rayet star sheds its outer layers – a normal end-of-life process for a giant star – its strong stellar winds plow through its loosely held cloak of material, forming densely shelled bubbles. According to the study, the solar system could have formed inside of one of these bubbles.

While this theory would explain a number of mysteries about the ratios of aluminum-26 and iron-60 in our solar system, which correspond closer to those in a Wolf-Rayet star than the galaxy itself, it is quite far-fetched. More hard data is necessary, including real evidence of such things actually happening in such stars, before it can be taken very seriously.

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New data from Tabby’s Star suggests that dust, not alien megastructures, is the cause of its dimming

8:39 am

New observations of Tabby’s Star now suggests that it is dust, not alien megastructures, that has caused the star’s erratic fluctuations in dimming over the past century.

“Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure,” said [LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Tabetha Boyajian].

Though the data appears strong, it still leaves astronomers a bit baffled about how dust could cause the particular dimming they have seen.

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A short dose of ultraviolet light might save North America’s bats

8:24 am

Researchers have found that the fungus that has been decimating bat populations in the eastern United States for the past decade is easily killed by a short dose of ultraviolet light.

Upon being compared to six non-pathogenic Pseudogymnoascus species, it was found that P. destructans lacks a key enzyme that allows it to repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light. When samples of the fungus were exposed to a low dose of UV-C light from a handheld source, the survival rate was only about 15 percent – this dropped to less than 1 percent when the dose was moderate. In both cases, the duration of exposure was a matter of no more than a few seconds.

Next comes a control group experiment. If this proves true, than it might be possible to safely sterilize both bat populations and caves of the fungus. To work, however, the task will likely require repeated yearly visits to bat hibernation sites to kill the fungus before it causes the bats to wake up in the winter. Such visits have their own problems, and would be difficult to pay for. However, I am sure the caving community across the U.S. would be glad to volunteer for this effort, and could handle it.

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Scientists catch a big volcano eruption on Io

9:12 am

Scientists reviewing twenty year old data from the Galileo orbiter that studied Jupiter and its moons in the 1990s have identified the most intense volcanic eruption yet found on Io.

While looking through the NIMS temperature data, Davies and his colleagues spotted a brief but intense moment of high temperatures that cooled oddly quickly. This signal showed up as a spike in heat from a region in the southern hemisphere called Marduk Fluctus. First, the researchers saw a heat signal jump to 4–10 times higher than background, or relatively normal, levels. Then just a minute later, the signal dropped about 20%. Another minute later, the signal dropped another 75%. Twenty-three minutes later, the signal had plummeted to the equivalent of the background levels.

This signature resembled nothing Davies had seen before from Io. The lava flows and lava lakes are familiar: Their heat signals peter out slowly because as the surface of a lava flow cools, it creates a protective barrier of solid rock over a mushy, molten inside. Heat from magma underneath conducts through this newly formed crust and radiates from Io’s surface as it cools, which can take quite a long time.

This new heat signature, on the other hand, represents a process never before seen on Io, Davies said: something intense, powerful, and—most important—fast.

There’s only one likely explanation for what the instruments saw, explained Davies, whose volcanic expertise starts here on Earth. Large, violent eruptions like those seen at Stromboli are capable of spewing huge masses of tiny particles into the air, which cool quickly.

The article makes it sound like we’ve never seen this kind of eruption on Io before, which isn’t really true. Such eruptions have been imaged, but this is the first time that infrared data of their temperature spike was captured, thus confirming its nature.

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Arecibo returns to operation with images of asteroid Phaethon

10:02 am

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has resumed science observations after recovering from Hurricane Maria with new radio images of the asteroid Phaethon.

After several months of downtime after Hurricane Maria blew through, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar has returned to normal operation, providing the highest-resolution images to date of near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its Dec. 16 flyby of Earth. The radar images, which are subtle at the available resolution, reveal the asteroid is spheroidal in shape and has a large concavity at least several hundred meters in extent near the leading edge, and a conspicuous dark, circular feature near one of the poles. Arecibo’s radar images of Phaethon have resolutions as fine as about 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel.

The images also revealed that Phaethon, which is considered a potentially hazardous near Earth asteroid, is about 3.6 miles across and is about a half mile larger than previously believed.

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A star that is devouring its planets?

12:55 pm

Astronomers now think that a nearby star that erratically dims inexplicably does so because of clouds of debris left by the destruction of one or more exoplanets.

A team of U.S. astronomers studying the star RZ Piscium has found evidence suggesting its strange, unpredictable dimming episodes may be caused by vast orbiting clouds of gas and dust, the remains of one or more destroyed planets. “Our observations show there are massive blobs of dust and gas that occasionally block the star’s light and are probably spiraling into it,” said Kristina Punzi, a doctoral student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York and lead author of a paper describing the findings. “Although there could be other explanations, we suggest this material may have been produced by the break-up of massive orbiting bodies near the star.”

Their data also suggest that the star is young.

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The best infrared image yet of a star’s surface

10:34 am

The surface of a star

Astronomers, using the Very Large Telescope in Chile have taken the best infrared image of the surface of a star, revealing gigantic granules or convection cells, across the star’s surface. These cells are somewhat similar to the bubbles you see when you simmer tomato sauce. Our own Sun usually has about two million such cells across its surface. For this aging red giant, which has the same mass as the Sun but has expanded to 350 times its diameter, things are different.

[The astronomers] found that the surface of this red giant has just a few convective cells, or granules, that are each about 120 million kilometres across — about a quarter of the star’s diameter [2]. Just one of these granules would extend from the Sun to beyond Venus.

I have posted the image on the right, reduced slightly in resolution to show here. The press release says that this is the first time that such granules have been imaged, but I think that is a bit of an overstatement. In fact, one of the very first articles I ever wrote, back in 1994, described an infrared image taken of Betelgeuse that showed similar giant bubbles or cells. What makes this image significant is its improved resolution. The ability to see smaller details on the faces of distant stars continues to improve.

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Two finalists for 2020 deep space planetary mission picked by NASA

1:16 pm

NASA has narrowed its choice for a 2020s deep space planetary mission to two finalists, either a sample return mission to Comet 67P/C-G or a drone that would fly through Titan’s atmosphere.

The sample return mission sounds very doable with today’s technology. The Titan drone mission however is far more intriguing.

Dragonfly is a dual-quadcopter lander that would take advantage of the environment on Titan to fly to multiple locations, some hundreds of miles apart, to sample materials and determine surface composition to investigate Titan’s organic chemistry and habitability, monitor atmospheric and surface conditions, image landforms to investigate geological processes, and perform seismic studies.

If it was up to me and I had unlimited funds, I’d go with Dragonfly. We know far less about the outer solar system, and this mission would be an ideal way to increase that knowledge. It is also far more daring, which carries the risk that the costs to build and launch will rise uncontrollably.

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Oumuamua has a thick carbon crust built up by its interstellar travel

8:59 am

New results of observations of the interstellar object Oumuamua suggest that it has a thick crust of organic carbon soot that was slowly built up during the millions of years it traveled between the stars.

New observations of the cigar-shaped body found evidence for a deep surface layer that formed when organic ices – such as frozen carbon dioxide, methane and methanol – that make up the object were battered by the intense radiation that exists between the stars.

…The deep outer crust may have formed on the body over millions or even billions of years and gives ‘Oumuamua a dark red colour, according to researchers who investigated the object with the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands and the European Southern observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert.

There have been a slew of news stories today about these results, all focusing not on the crust of the object, which tells us nothing really about its interior, but on one quote by one scientist from the press release, who theorized — based on zero data — that the interior of the object could be icy. From this quote I have seen at least a half dozen stories exclaiming that Oumuamua thus could be like a comet, based on no information at all.

All we have learned is that traveling for a long time in interstellar space causes a build up of carbon-rich materials on the surface of an object. What might be hidden under that crust remains entirely unknown. It could be icy, but we don’t know that.

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Mars rover update: December 18, 2017

11:44 am

Summary: The scientists and engineers of both Curiosity and Opportunity have route decisions to make.

Curiosity

null

For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.

Since my November 16 update, Curiosity’s travels crossing Vera Rubin Ridge, a geological bedding plain dubbed the Hematite Unit, has continued apace. They however have not been following the route that had been planned beforehand, as shown by the yellow dotted line on the right. Instead, they have headed south, along the red dotted line. For the past week or so they have been doing a variety of research tasks in the same area, analyzing samples taken months before, studying sand deposits, and taking many images of some interesting rock layers.

I also suspect that the lack of movement in the past week is partly because they need to make some route-finding decisions. The planned yellow route shown above appears to be somewhat rough in the full resolution orbital image. While I suspect they will still head in that direction, I also think they are doing some very careful analysis of this route and beyond, to make sure they will not end up in a cul de sac where the rover will not be able to continue its climb of Mount Sharp.

Opportunity

For the context of Opportunity’s recent travels along the rim of Endeavour Crater, see my May 15, 2017 rover update.
» Read more

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More films of early nuclear test released

10:52 am

The uncertainty of science: Researchers have released more films taken during numerous 1950s and 1960s atmospheric nuclear bomb tests to the public, while noting that modern computer simulations of nuclear explosions, based on the data taken from these early tests, could be as much as 30 percent in error.

Ten years ago, Spriggs was asked to write a computer code related to nuclear weapons effects, but his calculations didn’t agree with what was published in the 1950s and ’60s. When he dug in to find out why there was a discrepancy, he discovered that the manual measurements made in the ’50s and ’60s were off, in some cases by 20 percent to 30 percent. His new mission had become clear: reanalyze all the nuclear test films to ensure future computer simulations would be validated.

“It was driving me nuts,” Spriggs said. “No matter what I did, I couldn’t get my calculations to agree. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the data must be off. To prove our simulations are correct, we rely on quality benchmark data. That’s why this project is so important. It is providing the data our physicists need to ensure our deterrent remains viable into the future.”

They are scanning and reanalyzing all the footage so that they can refine their models. They also note that the analysis done in the 50s and 60s was actually quite good, but today’s computer technology allows for greater accuracy and objectivity.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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Initial analysis of radio observations of Oumuamua detect no artificial signals

1:34 pm

The initial analysis of the first set of radio observations of Oumuamua by Breakthrough Listen has so far not detected any artificial signals.

No such signals have been detected, although the analysis is not yet complete. So far, data from the S-band receiver (covering frequencies from 1.7 to 2.6 GHz) has been processed, and analysis of the remaining three bands is ongoing. A subset of the S-band data is now available for public inspection in the Breakthrough Listen archive3, and additional data will be added as it becomes available.

The data is stored in specialized formats, and analyzing it may be challenging for non-experts. We invite those who are interested to study the tutorial material provided by the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley, SETI Research Center and to assist with the analysis not only of this intriguing object, but of the entire Breakthrough Listen dataset.

They still plan three more observation sessions.

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New exoplanet makes eight in rival solar system

1:27 pm

comparing solar systems

Worlds without end: Astronomers using Kepler data mined by computers have discovered an eighth planet in another solar system, making that system somewhat comparable to our own.

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that “learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star.

Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin, and Shallue, a Google machine learning researcher, teamed up to train a computer to learn how to identify signs of an exoplanet in the light readings from distant stars recorded by Kepler. Similar to the way neurons connect in the human brain, this “neural network” sifted through the Kepler data to identify the weak transit signals from a previously missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, a sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. “For the first time since our solar system planets were discovered thousands of years ago, we know for sure that our solar system is not the sole record holder for the most planets,” Vanderburg said.

The image to the right compares the planet sizes between this solar system and ours. It does not show that, for this distant star, all eight planets have orbits closer to the star than the Earth, and would therefore be very unlikely to harbor life.

One more thing: This story is very cool, but it also is another one of those NASA press releases that the agency PR department overhyped beforehand, even allowing some reporters to think that it might involve the discovery of life beyond Earth. Not surprisingly, several news sources and radio shows asked me to talk about it. To their disappointment I said I’d rather wait, since NASA has overhyped more than a few stories like this in recent years. Once again, my instincts were right. This story has nothing to do with alien life, and though interesting, is actually not that big a deal.

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A variety of geological activity caused bright areas on Ceres

10:33 am

Occator Crater

Based on the data obtained of Ceres from Dawn scientists have concluded that a variety of geological activities caused the bright areas on the planet, and that some of those activities could still be happening today.

Since Dawn arrived in orbit at Ceres in March 2015, scientists have located more than 300 bright areas on Ceres. A new study in the journal Icarus, led by Nathan Stein, a doctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California, divides Ceres’ features into four categories.

The first group of bright spots contains the most reflective material on Ceres, which is found on crater floors. The most iconic examples are in Occator Crater [shown in the image above, reduced and cropped to post here], which hosts two prominent bright areas. Cerealia Facula, in the center of the crater, consists of bright material covering a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) pit, within which sits a small dome. East of the center is a collection of slightly less reflective and more diffuse features called Vinalia Faculae. All the bright material in Occator Crater is made of salt-rich material, which was likely once mixed in water. Although Cerealia Facula is the brightest area on all of Ceres, it would resemble dirty snow to the human eye.

More commonly, in the second category, bright material is found on the rims of craters, streaking down toward the floors. Impacting bodies likely exposed bright material that was already in the subsurface or had formed in a previous impact event.

Separately, in the third category, bright material can be found in the material ejected when craters were formed.

The mountain Ahuna Mons gets its own fourth category — the one instance on Ceres where bright material is unaffiliated with any impact crater. This likely cryovolcano, a volcano formed bythe gradual accumulation of thick, slowly flowing icy materials, has prominent bright streaks on its flanks.

The report is somewhat vague about why they think that there might be some geological activity even today.

The image above, released as part of this press release, gives us a simulated oblique look at Occator Crater and its bright areas. It is definitely worth it to look at the full resolution image.

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Saturn’s rings are very young

8:57 am

Data from Cassini’s last ring-diving orbits has now strengthened the hypothesis that Saturn’s rings formed very recently, just a few hundred million years ago.

Saturn acquired its jewels relatively late in life. If any astronomers had gazed at the sky in the time of the dinosaurs, they might have seen a bare and boring Saturn.

It was then that some sort of catastrophe struck the gas giant. Perhaps a stray comet or asteroid struck an icy moon, tossing its remnants into orbit. Or maybe the orbits of Saturn’s moons somehow shifted, and the resulting gravitational tug-of-war pulled a moon apart. However it happened, two new lines of evidence from Cassini make it clear that the rings were not around in the early days of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, as scientists had long believed, says Jeff Cuzzi, a ring specialist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “It rules out the primordial ring story,” Cuzzi says. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

At the moment there is no consensus on what might have caused the rings formation so recently.

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MU69 might have a moon

1:51 pm

Worlds without end: Observations of stellar occultations this past summer of 2014 MU69, New Horizons’ Kuiper belt target for a January 1, 2019 fly-by, suggest that the object is not only very elongated or two objects practically touching as they orbit around each other, but it might have a moon orbiting it.

The data that led to these hints at MU69’s nature were gathered over six weeks in June and July, when the team made three attempts to place telescopes in the narrow shadow of MU69 as it passed in front of a star. The most valuable recon came on July 17, when five telescopes deployed by the New Horizons team in Argentina were in the right place at the right time to catch this fleeting shadow — an event known as an occultation – and capture important data on MU69’s size, shape and orbit. That data raised the possibility that MU69 might be two like-sized objects, or what’s known as a binary.

The prospect that MU69 might have a moon arose from data collected during a different occultation on July 10, by NASA’s airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Focused on MU69’s expected location while flying over the Pacific Ocean, SOFIA detected what appeared to be a very short drop-out in the star’s light. Buie said further analysis of that data, including syncing it with MU69 orbit calculations provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, opens the possibility that the “blip” SOFIA detected could be another object around MU69. “A binary with a smaller moon might also help explain the shifts we see in the position of MU69 during these various occultations,” Buie added. “It’s all very suggestive, but another step in our work to get a clear picture of MU69 before New Horizons flies by, just over a year from now.”

All of this is somewhat speculative. We really won’t know until New Horizons arrives next year.

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Faults on Mars

9:20 am

Faults on Mars

Cool image time! The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, captures a distinctive fault line that cuts across some layered deposits. As noted by the MRO science team,

Some of the faults produced a clean break along the layers, displacing and offsetting individual beds (yellow arrow).

Interestingly, the layers continue across the fault and appear stretched out (green arrow). These observations suggest that some of the faulting occurred while the layered deposits were still soft and could undergo deformation, whereas other faults formed later when the layers must have been solidified and produced a clean break.

Meridiani Planum

These layers are located in Meridiani Planum, a relatively flat area on the Martian equator. Opportunity landed on this plain to the southwest of this region, as shown on the geology map to the left. The white cross in the southwest corner indicates Opportunity’s landing site, with Endeavour Crater just to the southeast. The white box in the northwest shows where the faulted layered deposits are located. Based on the scale of the map, this places Opportunity approximately 400 miles away.

What exactly caused these distinct faults remains unknown. The likely cause would be a earthquake, but since Mars does not have plate tectonics like the Earth, earthquakes would have to be caused by other geological processes not yet studied.

To my eye, they look like cracks in a mirror, though this provides no real explanation other than it illustrates how cool the image is.

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Flying through Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

8:40 am

Cool movie time! In conjunction with the release yesterday of data from Juno’s first close fly-over of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the science team also released an animation of what it would be like to fly down into the Spot.

You can also download the mp4 file here. It is definitely worth watching. It illustrates forcefully how daunting and challenging it will be for the human race to ever explore the vastness of Jupiter. This simulated plunge only goes into the Great Red Spot a few hundred miles, and barely touches its dynamics.

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Juno’s look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

3:10 pm

The Juno science team released its results from the spacecraft’s first close fly over of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in July 2017.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant oval of crimson-colored clouds in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere that race counterclockwise around the oval’s perimeter with wind speeds greater than any storm on Earth. Measuring 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) in width as of April 3, 2017, the Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth.

“Juno found that the Great Red Spot’s roots go 50 to 100 times deeper than Earth’s oceans and are warmer at the base than they are at the top,” said Andy Ingersoll, professor of planetary science at Caltech and a Juno co-investigator. “Winds are associated with differences in temperature, and the warmth of the spot’s base explains the ferocious winds we see at the top of the atmosphere.”

The future of the Great Red Spot is still very much up for debate. While the storm has been monitored since 1830, it has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In the 19th century, the Great Red Spot was well over two Earths wide. But in modern times, the Great Red Spot appears to be diminishing in size, as measured by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft. At the time NASA’s Voyagers 1 and 2 sped by Jupiter on their way to Saturn and beyond, in 1979, the Great Red Spot was twice Earth’s diameter. Today, measurements by Earth-based telescopes indicate the oval that Juno flew over has diminished in width by one-third and height by one-eighth since Voyager times.

The storm’s estimate depth, about 200 miles, seems gigantic, but then we must remember this storm is on a gas giant that is about 88k miles in diameter, about ten times larger than Earth. The relative size of this storm to the size of Jupiter therefore is really not that much different than the relative size of big hurricanes on Earth. At the same time, the realities here are daunting, filled with unknowns, chief of which is the fact that unlike Earth, the Great Red Spot is a storm that is floating high in the atmosphere with no solid surface below it.

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Breakthrough Listen to observe Ourmuamua

10:47 am

Breakthrough Listen, one of billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough initiatives, is going to do an observation campaign of the interstellar object Ourmuamua using the Green Bank Radio telescope.

It has a highly unusual structure for an asteroid – an elongated cigar shape, hundreds of meters in length but with width and height perhaps only one tenth as long.

Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimize friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust. While a natural origin is more likely, there is currently no consensus on what that origin might have been, and Breakthrough Listen is well positioned to explore the possibility that ‘Oumuamua could be an artifact.

Listen’s observation campaign will begin on Wednesday, December 13 at 3:00 pm ET. Using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, it will continue to observe ‘Oumuamua across four radio bands, from 1 to 12 GHz. Its first phase of observations will last a total of 10 hours, divided into four “epochs” based on the object’s period of rotation.

If anything, this observation will provide us more information about Ourmuamua itself, which unfortunately is very limited because the object was already on its way out when it was discovered.

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