Tag: science

Astronomers discover complex molecules in protostar accretion disk

10:18 am

Astronomers have discovered several complex molecules in the accretion disk surrounding a very young baby star about 1300 light years away in the constellation Orion.

The research team’s ALMA observations have clearly detected an atmosphere of complex organic molecules above and below the disk. These include methanol (CH3OH), deuterated methanol (CH2DOH), methanethiol (CH3SH), and formamide (NH2CHO). These molecules have been proposed to be the precursors for producing biomolecules such as amino acids and sugars. “They are likely formed on icy grains in the disk and then released into the gas phase because of heating from stellar radiation or some other means, such as shocks,” says co-author Zhi-Yun Li of the University of Virginia.

What is even most interesting about this discovery is that these complex molecules are not scattered throughout the disk, but are concentrated in regions above and below its central plane, what the astronomers are labeling “an atmosphere.” This suggests that differentiation — the same process that separates the heavier molecules from lighter ones both in centrifuges and in the cores of planets — occurs quickly in accretion disks as well.

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A river canyon on Mars

11:02 am

A river on Mars

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced in resolution significantly to show here, was taken by the Themis camera on Mars Odyssey, and shows an unnamed canyon on Mars. Be sure to click on the image to see the full resolution version.

This canyon of course no longer has anything flowing in it. Moreover, it is not clear whether this was formed by water or lava. Unfortunately, the image is part of a series of “Art images” from Mars Odyssey, where they pick an image and suggest it looks like something else. In this case, they are claiming this looks like a “snake, slithering down the image.” Cute, but not very helpful. And unfortunately, they don’t add any further details at all about the image or its location. The context image suggests this canyon is next to a volcano.

After doing further research at the Themis image site, I was able to locate this image on Mars (using latitude 32.0515 and longitude 152.236 given at the link) and look at the images surrounding this one. Further research identified the volcano as Hecates Tholus in the Elyesium Plantia region to the west of Mars’s giant volcanoes.

Looking at all the nearby Mars Odyssey images, it appears that there are a lot of flows like this in this area, and all of them appear to be lava flows, with this one being the largest. A close look at the area just to the south of where the deep canyon opens out shows that the small surface flow draining into the canyon also appears to sit on much larger surface flows (at least two) that left the surface higher than the surrounding terrain.

Elyesium Plantia itself is a plateau, somewhat close to the border between Mars’s southern highlands and the northern plains where some scientists think an ocean might have once existed. Thus, it makes sense that the canyon drains north, as it is following the dip down to those northern low plains.

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Uranus’s magnetic field switches on and off daily

9:54 am

Using data from the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986, scientists now think that the gas giant’s magnetic field switches on and off each day as the planet rotates.

Uranus’s magnetosphere, in contrast [to Earth], exhibits precise regularity in its mode changes. This, say the researchers, is because it lies at an angle of roughly 60 degrees to the planet’s spin axis, causing its interaction with incoming solar winds to vary dramatically during the 17 hours it takes for a full rotation. “Uranus is a geometric nightmare,” says Paty.

“The magnetic field tumbles very fast, like a child cartwheeling down a hill head over heels. When the magnetised solar wind meets this tumbling field in the right way, it can reconnect and Uranus’s magnetosphere goes from open to closed to open on a daily basis.”

The researchers suggest the robust and regular changes to the magnetosphere may mean that the icy planet has spectacular auroras across its breadth every day.

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Orbital motion of a binary black hole detected for the first time

10:19 am

Astronomers have for the first time measured the orbital motion of two supermassive black holes that orbit each other.

Based on the initial data, the two black holes appear to orbit each other every 30,000 years. Eventually, they will spiral into each other, merge, and in the process produce ripples in the surrounding gravitational field that will be detectable by future gravitational wave detectors.

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Success of test mission paves way for orbiting gravitational wave detector

9:57 am

The success of LISA Pathfinder during the past year to test the technology for building an orbiting gravitational wave detector has now made it possible for Europe to approve construction of the full scale telescope, set to launch in the 2030s.

The LISA Pathfinder mission, launched in late 2015, beat its precision target by a factor of 1,000 and quieted critics who have doubted its potential, says project scientist Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at ESA in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. “This is not the impossible task that some people believed it was.”

Currently set to fly in 2034, the full-scale Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be the space analogue of the Laser Interfero-meter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), two machines in the United States — each with a pair of 4-kilometre-long arms — that first detected the ripples by ‘hearing’ the merger of two black holes. LISA’s three probes will fly in a triangle, millions of kilometres apart, making the mission sensitive to much longer gravitational waves, such as the ripples produced by the collisions of even larger black holes.

The article also notes that the European Space Agency also approved two other large missions, one to launch in 2022 and go the moons of Jupiter, another an X-ray observatory that will launch in 2028.

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Climate scientists once again claim ozone layer is threatened

9:40 am

Crying wolf! New research by climate scientists suggests that the Earth’s ozone layer is once again threatened by modern human technology.

Industrial emissions of a chemical commonly used in solvents, paint removers, and the production of pharmaceuticals have doubled in the past few years, researchers have found, which could slow the healing of the ozone layer over Antarctica anywhere between 5 and 30 years—or even longer if levels continue to rise.

The findings are “frightening” and “a big deal,” says Robyn Schofield, an environmental scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved with the work.

They might be right, but why should anyone believe them? The climate field has been spouting doomsday predictions about global warming and sea level rise now for more than 20 years, none of which have come true. As far as I can tell, this might be more of the same thing.

Worse, it might not, but by not being honest with so many other climate predictions the field has lost all political credibility, a great tragedy for them and for all of science. It will take decades, if ever, for them to recover that credibility.

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Mars rover update: June 23, 2017

11:11 am

Summary: Curiosity continues up hill. Opportunity has wheel problems.

Curiosity

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

The march up Mt Sharp continues. Since my last update on May 15, Curiosity has continued working its way up towards what the science team has named Vera Rubin Ridge, the beginning of a lighter, yellowish layer of rock, dubbed the Hematite Unit, that sits higher up the mountain’s slope. They have been traveling on the Murray Formation now for more than a year, since March, 2016, so entering this new layer of geology is eagerly anticipated by the science team. (This October 3, 2016 press release. gives an overall picture of the geology Curiosity is traversing.)

Reader Phil Veerkamp sent me a beautiful panorama he stitched together from recent Curiosity images of Vera Rubin Ridge, directly to the south of the rover and higher up hill. Below is a reduced resolution version. Be sure you click on it to explore the full resolution image. This is a new type of terrain, significantly different than anything Curiosity has seen up to now. It also appears that the rover will see far less dust, and might be traveling mostly over solid boulders. Below I have cropped out a very small section of the ridge line near the center of the full image, just to illustrate this.
» Read more

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Warp in Kuiper Belt suggests existence of Mars-sized object

8:40 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers think they have identified a warp in the Kuiper Belt that suggests a Mars-sized object exists there, affecting the orbits of surrounding objects.

According to the calculations, an object with the mass of Mars orbiting roughly 60 AU from the sun on an orbit tilted by about eight degrees (to the average plane of the known planets) has sufficient gravitational influence to warp the orbital plane of the distant KBOs [Kuiper Belt Objests] within about 10 AU to either side. “The observed distant KBOs are concentrated in a ring about 30 AU wide and would feel the gravity of such a planetary mass object over time,” Volk said, “so hypothesizing one planetary mass to cause the observed warp is not unreasonable across that distance.”

This proposed planet is not the theorized Planet Nine that other astronomers have proposed. That planet, which hasn’t been found and other data says doesn’t exist, would be much larger and much farther out.

I would add that neither of these proposed planets might exist. At this moment our data of the Kuiper Belt is very incomplete. I would not bet much on any theory that extrapolates planets from what we presently know.

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Trump administration continues to clean house at EPA

9:14 am

The Trump administration this week announced that it will not renew the appointment of 38 scientists to a key EPA science panel.

All board members whose three-year appointments expire in August will not get renewals, Robert Kavlock, acting head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said in the email, which was obtained by E&E News.

Because of the need to reconstitute the board, EPA is also canceling all subcommittee meetings planned for late summer and fall, Kavlock said. “We are hopeful that an updated BOSC Executive Committee and the five subcommittees can resume their work in 2018 and continue providing ORD with thoughtful recommendations and comments,” he wrote in urging departing members to reapply.

As the article notes, some Democratic pigs are squealing over this, but the Trump administration is only following the law. And considering how political and anti-business the EPA has become in recent years, a full review of all committee members seems entirely appropriate and reasonable.

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Recent Kuiper Belt discoveries cast doubt a big planet exists there

9:03 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite predictions by some scientists that a big planet exists in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, recent new discoveries of new objects there cast doubt on its existence.

If the additional big planet existed, the newly discovered objects would have shown some clustering, shepherded by its gravity.

“We find no evidence of the orbit clustering needed for the Planet Nine hypothesis in our fully independent survey,” says Cory Shankman, an astronomer at the University of Victoria in Canada and a member of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), which since 2013 has found more than 800 objects out near Neptune using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. In a paper posted to arXiv on 16 June and soon to be published in The Astronomical Journal, the OSSOS team describes eight of its most distant discoveries, including four of the type used to make the initial case for Planet Nine.

“I think it’s great work, and it’s exciting to keep finding these,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was among the first to suspect a large planet in the distant solar system. But he says three of the four new objects do have clustered orbits consistent with a Planet Nine. The fourth, an object called 2015 GT50, seems to skew the entire set of OSSOS worlds toward a random distribution. But that is not necessarily a knockout blow, he says. “We always expected that there would be some that don’t fit in.”

Note that I do not consider “Planet Nine” to be an accurate name for this theorized planet. Either it is #10, after Pluto, or one of a large number far more than nine, based on a new proposed and more logical planetary definition. The present definition however does not work.

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Largest quake in Yellowstone since 2014

10:03 am

The USGS today recorded a magnitude 4.5 earthquake at Yellowstone today, the largest since a magnitude 4.8 occurred in March 2014, and part of a continuing swarming of small quakes that began on June 12.

This sequence has included approximately thirty earthquakes of magnitude 2 and larger and four earthquakes of magnitude 3 and larger, including today’s magnitude 4.5 event.

It is hard to say whether this swarm of small quakes portend a really big volcanic event, or will simply die off in the coming days. Recent data at Yellowstone has suggested the former is possible, though not imminent.

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Update of Kepler exoplanet catalog

9:44 am

Worlds without end: The Kepler science team has released an update of the space telescope’s exoplanet candidate list, adding 219 new exoplanet candidates.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star’s habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet. This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.

With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.

Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life.

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How cats used humans to conquer the world

8:42 am

Link here. The bottom line is this:

Compared to many other animals, cats have also changed very little in the domestication process. Behaviorally, they’ve become more tolerant of humans. Physically, though, they’re still about the same size and shape. They still like to pounce on small prey. “Cats have done since before they were domesticated what we needed them to do,” says Leslie Lyons, a feline geneticist at the University of Missouri. In other words, unlike dogs that herd sheep or hunt badgers, cats didn’t need humans to breed them to become good mouse hunters.

In other words, cats did what they want (as they always do), and humans paid them with food and companionship, while providing them the transportation they needed to reach every continent.

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Titan’s clearing northern skies

11:10 am

Titan's clearing northern skies

The image of Titan on the right, reduced in resolution to show here, was taken by Cassini less than a week ago, on June 9, as it continues its last orbits of Saturn prior to crashing into the gas giant’s atmosphere in September.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn’s moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole. Compared to earlier in Cassini’s mission, most of the surface in the moon’s northern high latitudes is now illuminated by the sun. …Summer solstice in the Saturn system occurred on May 24, 2017.

When Cassini arrived more than a decade ago, it was winter on Titan’s northern hemisphere, and the atmosphere was thick with haze. Now the sky is clearing as the stormy weather shifts to the winter in the southern hemisphere.

As with yesterday’s global map of Mimas, this image is in many ways a farewell look at Titan. While Cassini will likely get a few more global images of the Saturn moon before the mission ends in September, this image essentially marks the end of our ability to observe this strange planet closely, for decades to come. When Cassini crashes into Saturn, our vision at Saturn will go blind. And no one knows when our sight there will return, as no mission is presently in the works, or is even being considered, to return to Saturn.

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Digitizing Venice’s 1,000-year-old archives

9:53 am

Link here. The article describes an ambitious effort to make this archive, much of which has never been read, easily accessible and searchable using modern digital technology.

As Venice’s empire grew, it developed administrative systems that recorded vast amounts of information: who lived where, the details of every boat that entered or left the harbour, every alteration made to buildings or canals. Modern banking was invented in the Rialto, one of Venice’s oldest quarters, and notaries there recorded all trading exchanges and financial transactions.

Crucially, those records survived through turbulent centuries. While the rest of Europe was roiled by its perpetually warring monarchs, from the eighth century onwards Venice began to develop into a stable republic that provided the peace and order required for trade to flourish. In many ways it was a model democracy. The people elected a leader — the doge — supported by various councils, whose members were also usually elected. Governance was secular, but for the most part co-existed tolerantly with religion.

French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte put an end to the Serene Republic in 1797. En route to Vienna during his attempt to conquer the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he declared Venice’s secular and democratic governance to be a form of autocracy, and the city to be an enemy of the revolution. He forced the republic to dissolve itself. In 1815, the old Frari was turned into the State Archives of Venice. Over the next decades, all state administrative documents, including death registers, were transferred there, along with medical records, notary records, maps and architectural plans, patent registers and a miscellany of other documentation, some from elsewhere in Italy. Particularly significant are ambassadors’ reports from wider Europe and the Ottoman Empire, providing a unique source of detailed information about daily life. “Venetian ambassadors were the most observant travellers, trained to find out things like what was being unloaded at the docks, or what a prince or other high-up was like as a person,” says Daston. “Their reports were full of gossip and intrigue.”

Most of the archive, predominantly written in Latin or the Venetian dialect, has never been read by modern historians. Now it will all be systematically fed into the Venice Time Machine, along with more unconventional sources of data, such as paintings and travellers’ logs.

Venice is a particularly important component of European history, as in many ways it was the last remnant of the Roman Empire, founded by Romans even as their empire was collapsing around them. It then lasted almost a thousand years, and became throughout the Middle Ages a powerful and important center of European trade. Moreover, the growth of this strange city in a bog is in many ways a mystery. This archive will actually allow researchers and historians to finally begin to understand how these events unfolded.

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China launches X-ray space telescope

9:35 am

China today launched the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), also dubbed Insight by Chinese news sources.

The HXMT carries three x-ray telescopes observing at energies ranging from 20 to 200 kilo-electron volts as well as an instrument to monitor the space environment, according to its designers. While orbiting 550 kilometers above the planet, the HXMT will perform an all-sky survey that is expected to discover a thousand new x-ray sources. Over an expected operating lifetime of 4 years, it will also conduct focused observations of black holes, neutron stars, and gamma ray bursts.

More here. This is China’s first home-grown X-ray space telescope, and its launch once again illustrates that, for at least the next few decades, China intends to be a major player in the exploration of the solar system.

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A new map of Mimas

9:36 am

Global map of Mimas

The Cassini science team has released what will be the best map of Saturn’s moon Mimas for many decades to come. A reduced resolution version is above, and was updated after the most recent fly-bys in November 2016 and February 2017.

The moon’s large, distinguishing crater, Herschel, is seen on the map at left. The map is an equidistant (simple cylindrical) projection and has a scale of 710 feet (216 meters) per pixel at the equator. The mean radius of Mimas used for projection of this map is 123.2 miles (198.2 kilometers). The resolution of the map is 16 pixels per degree.

Since Cassini is in its final orbits and will crash into Saturn in September, and no other Saturn mission is even being planned, do not expect a better map for a very long time.

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China to attempt to grow potatoes on Moon

9:22 am

China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover/lander, set to launch in 2018, will include a small experiment that will attempt to grow potatoes from seeds.

Note that I have just realized that I have been confusing Chang’e-5 with Chang’e-4. Chang’e-5 is a sample return mission that they hope to launch this year. It does not include a rover. Chang’e-4 is a lander/rover mission that is planned for 2018.

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Worm grows 2 heads on ISS

5:29 pm

The uncertainty of science: For reasons that are not yet understood, a flatworm fragment flown to ISS in a microgravity experiment regenerated with two heads.

But the most dramatic difference was a type of regeneration observed in one of the 15 worm fragments sent to the ISS. That worm returned to the scientists with two heads (one on each end of its body), a type of regeneration so rare as to be practically unheard of — “normal flatworms in water never do this,” Levin told Live Science. When the researchers snipped both heads off back on Earth, the middle portion regenerated into a two-headed worm again.

“And these differences persist well over a year after return to Earth!” Levin said. “Those could have been caused by loss of the geomagnetic field, loss of gravity, and the stress of takeoff and landing — all components of any space-travel experience for living systems going to space in the future,” he said.

The flatworms that flew in space showed other significant differences from the control group that stayed on Earth, further suggesting that for flatworms at least the environment of weightlessness causes more problems that were expected.

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Sunspot update for May 2017

10:32 am

Last week NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for May. Unfortunately, there appeared to be a problem with their posting software. Though the date of the image changed, the graph itself was not updated. I contacted NOAA, and Ann Newman, IT Specialist at NOAA’s
Space Weather Prediction Center, took a look and quickly fixed the problem.

The corrected graph is posted below, with annotations, as I have done now every month since 2010.

May 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.

The decline in sunspot activity resumed in May, putting the trend back below the 2007 low prediction. Overall, the trend continues to suggest that this very weak solar maximum will end much earlier than predicted, and will make it an unprecedented short but weak cycle. As the Sun is at this moment blank, and has been for several days, I expect that June will end up with low numbers as well, continuing this trend.

As I have repeatedly said now monthly for six years, if history is any guide, the Sun’s low activity should correspond with cooler temperatures here on Earth. Why this happens is not yet understood, though there are theories.

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Using math to protect the Washington power structure

8:58 pm

What could possible go wrong? A group of mathematicians have written software designed to prevent the gerrymandering of congressional districts, and are offering that software as a weapon for the courts to force states to revise the districts, even though those districts were created by fairly elected state legislatures.

Leaning back in his chair, Jonathan Mattingly swings his legs up onto his desk, presses a key on his laptop and changes the results of the 2012 elections in North Carolina. On the screen, flickering lines and dots outline a map of the state’s 13 congressional districts, each of which chooses one person to send to the US House of Representatives. By tweaking the borders of those election districts, but not changing a single vote, Mattingly’s maps show candidates from the Democratic Party winning six, seven or even eight seats in the race. In reality, they won only four — despite earning a majority of votes overall.

Mattingly’s election simulations can’t rewrite history, but he hopes they will help to support democracy in the future — in his state and the nation as a whole. The mathematician, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has designed an algorithm that pumps out random alternative versions of the state’s election maps — he’s created more than 24,000 so far — as part of an attempt to quantify the extent and impact of gerrymandering: when voting districts are drawn to favour or disfavour certain candidates or political parties.

There are numerous problems here, all of which center on my basic disbelief in the non-partisan objectivity of these scientists and their work.

First, note the first example used. Mattingly proudly shows how his software demonstrates that Democrats could have won more districts in North Carolina. In fact, if you read the article, he claims that the district revisions produced by his software (producing more victorious Democrats) creates fairer districts than the districts created by the state’s fairly elected Republican legislature. Moreover, it was the Republican redistricting that prompted this mathematician to write the software.

Funny how he never felt compelled to do this when it was Democrats controlling the legislatures and gerrymandering the congressional districts to their benefit.

Second, he has offered this software to the courts as evidence to overrule the redistricting done by fairly elected legislatures. In other words, this software will be used to justify letting unelected experts decide how congressional districts should be shaped, not elected officials picked by voters.

Third, note who has expressed interest in using this mathematician as a witness to win its lawsuits:
» Read more

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T Rex fossils suggest it was covered with scales, not feathers

9:04 am

The uncertainty of science: The only known fossils of a T Rex’s skin suggest that the dinosaur was covered with scales, not feathers as recent research has theorized.

[I]f these large tyrannosaurs had any feathers at all, says the team, their fluff would have been limited to their backs—the only body part for which they were lacking fossil impressions. Because their earlier cousins did have feathers, it’s likely that the large tyrannosaurs lost them somewhere along the way, the team suggests.

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Astronomers confirm that comet caused Wow! signal, not aliens

9:01 am

Astronomers have confirmed that the Wow! signal, thought to be the most promising detection by SETI of alien life, was actually caused by a comet.

Last year, a group of researchers from the Center of Planetary Science proposed a new hypothesis that argued a comet might be the culprit. The frequency could be caused by the hydrogen cloud they carry, and the fact that they move accounts for why it seemingly disappeared. Two comets, named 266/P Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs), happened to be transiting through that region of space when the Wow! signal was detected, but they weren’t discovered until after 2006.

To test the hypothesis, the team made 200 radio spectrum observations between November 2016 and February 2017. Sure enough, 266/P Christensen was found to emit radio waves at a frequency of 1,420 MHz, and to double check, the researchers moved their radio telescope by one degree. As expected, the signal vanished, and only returned when the telescope was trained back on the comet.

This story demonstrates once again why, in science, it is very dangerous to jump to any conclusions. The data we receive is a mystery. We must keep an open mind to solve that mystery.

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Climate scientists increasingly show no warming in peer review papers

10:19 pm

The uncertainty of science: Climate scientists are increasingly publishing papers that show no clear temperature global trend.

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

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Just within the last 5 months, 58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
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Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years. Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time. And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
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Succinctly, then, scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals have increasingly affirmed that there is nothing historically unprecedented or remarkable about today’s climate when viewed in the context of long-term natural variability. [emphasis in original]

At the link are 80 graphs from the most recent papers. Take a look. If you are convinced that the climate is warming than you must come up with an explanation for this data. Or you can put your fingers in your ears, cover your eyes, and chant “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” as loud as you can so that you don’t have to deal with it.

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Jupiter gets two more moons

4:51 pm

Astronomers using ground-based telescopes have identified two more moon circling Jupiter, bringing its total now to 69.

Both of these discoveries, as with the vast majority of Jupiter’s moons, occupy retrograde orbits, with inclinations greater than 90°, meaning that they move in directions opposite that of the planet’s spin. These distant, irregular orbits imply that these bodies formed elsewhere in the outer solar system and were captured while passing by early in the planet’s history.

A number of the moons recently discovered have since been lost because their orbits were too poorly constrained. However, some of these lost moons have also be recovered.

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Jupiter’s cloud-tops, up close

4:16 pm

Jupiter's cloud tops

Cool image time! On the right is a cropped and reduced resolution section from this image from Juno. It shows the top of some of Jupiter’s clouds, swirling about chaotically.

What I find most fascinating is how this image reveals the different elevations of some of these cloud belts. The swirling clouds on the left and bottom of the image are clearly higher than the dark areas to the top and right. They are in fact casting their shadows on those lower cloud-tops.

To really understand the interactions taking place here, however, will require satellites capable of continually tracking these clouds over time. Unfortunately, Juno cannot do this. Though it will provide us periodic snapshots of specific areas, its long 53-day orbit means that it will not return to view the same areas very frequently. Making movies of the evolution of these clouds will be difficult, if not impossible.

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More near Earth objects found by WISE

12:05 pm

NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) has released its third year of survey data, including the discovery of 97 previously unknown objects.

Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013.

For reasons that baffle me, NASA added “Near-Earth Object” to the telescope’s name when they restarted the mission, making its official name now NEOWISE.

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Cumulative data from Curiosity shows Gale Crater lake stratified

12:22 pm

The cumulative data from Curiosity since its arrival on Mars three and a half years ago shows that the lake that once filled Gale Crater lake had had a stratified chemical make-up.

Previous work had revealed the presence of a lake more than three billion years ago in Mars’ Gale Crater. This study defines the chemical conditions that existed in the lake and uses Curiosity’s powerful payload to determine that the lake was stratified. Stratified bodies of water exhibit sharp chemical or physical differences between deep water and shallow water. In Gale’s lake, the shallow water was richer in oxidants than deeper water was.

“These were very different, co-existing environments in the same lake,” said Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, lead author of a report of the findings in the June 2 edition of the journal Science. “This type of oxidant stratification is a common feature of lakes on Earth, and now we’ve found it on Mars. The diversity of environments in this Martian lake would have provided multiple opportunities for different types of microbes to survive, including those that thrive in oxidant-rich conditions, those that thrive in oxidant-poor conditions, and those that inhabit the interface between those settings.”

While what Hurowitz says above is true, remember that this discovery provides zero evidence of past life on Mars. All it has done is teach us something about the different conditions in the lake at different depths.

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LIGO detects its third gravitational wave

8:22 am

LIGO scientists today revealed that the detector had spotted its third gravitational wave in January.

Researchers estimate that the bodies in the latest collision were slightly lighter than those in the first event: one had the mass of 31 Suns and the other 19. (The black holes in the second discovery were even more lightweight, at 14 and 8 solar masses.) But the latest merger is the most distant detected so far. The gravitational waves it produced took somewhere between 1.6 billion and 4.3 billion years to reach Earth — most probably around 2.8 billion years.

This new field of astronomy should get even more interesting in the next year or two, as new detectors come on line in Italy and Japan.

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Frost on the Moon?

10:37 pm

A new analysis of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data suggests that the coldest spots at the Moon’s south pole are also its brightest, even though they are generally in shadow, suggesting that the surface there might have a thin layer of water frost.

These are also the areas where hydrogen has been detected, which strengthens the theory that this is water.

However, the result is not a positive one for future colonists as it suggests that the amount of water on the Moon is far less than hoped. First, there is this:

The icy deposits appear to be patchy and thin, and it’s possible that they are mixed in with the surface layer of soil, dust and small rocks called the regolith. The researchers say they are not seeing expanses of ice similar to a frozen pond or skating rink. Instead, they are seeing signs of surface frost.

Second, they have not detected this same pattern at the north pole, which strongly suggests that the permanently shadowed areas there do not even have frost.

Overall, this result suggests that the Moon might have water on its surface, but not in great quantities.

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