New images of Comet ISON suggest it might have begun breaking up.
NASA’s next Mars orbiter, MAVEN, is go for launch today at 1:28 pm.
Moreover, another launch on Tuesday night from Wallops Island will be visible along the entire east coast, and will put a record 29 satellites into orbit.
Comet ISON brightens to just within naked eye visibility.
“[T]he little but intensely condensed, globular cluster-looking comet was a whopping magnitude 5.4 — two full magnitudes brighter than just 24 hours ago! This makes for a three magnitude total rise since my observation on Monday.” In just 72 hours, Comet ISON increased nearly 16 times in brightness.
Don’t get too excited. Magnitude 5.4 would make it comparable to one of the dimmer stars in the night sky, while the description above indicates it looks less like a comet and more like a blob.
Scientists have discovered a Kuiper Belt asteroid lighter than water.
Nor is the asteroid small, having a 400 mile diameter. It is thought is is made up mostly of ice, is not very densely packed, and is probably quite porous as well.
Comet ISON is now visible in binoculars, and has a double tail.
The double tail is not that unusual. Many comets sport two tails.
Only a few weeks till the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun, it is appears that ISON is not going to give us much of a show, though the knowledge that will be gained from it will still be substantial.
Engineers successfully completed Mangalyaan’s second engine burn yesterday, raising its orbit to just under 25,000 miles.
Each one of these burns demonstrates the reliability of the spacecraft.
India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe has successfully completed its first orbital engine burn.
Not only was the burn successful, it demonstrated that the probe’s thrusters work as planned, which means it is almost certainly not going to be stranded in Earth orbit and will at least get to Mars.
Worlds without end: The number of candidate exoplanets found by Kepler has now risen to 3,500.
According to this new analysis, researchers estimate about 70% of stars are host to at least one planet, making planets a common cosmic occurrence. There are now 1,750 candidates that are super-Earth-size or smaller, and 1,788 are Neptune-size or larger. Only 167 of the 3,538 candidates are confirmed to be planets, but Kepler has a good track record: the vast majority of these are probably real.
Two dozen of these candidates are in the habitable zone, ten of which are thought to be close to Earth-sized.
Hubble spots an asteroid spout six comet-like tails.
Astronomers viewing our solar system’s asteroid belt with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel. Unlike all other known asteroids, which appear simply as tiny points of light, this asteroid, designated P/2013 P5, resembles a rotating lawn sprinkler. Astronomers are puzzled over the asteroid’s unusual appearance.
The uncertainty of science: The geology of Vesta as seen by Dawn appears to contradict the present models for that asteroid’s origin.
A rare new microbe has been found in two different clean rooms, one in Florida and the other in South America.
This population of berry-shaped bacteria is so different from any other known bacteria, it has been classified as not only a new species, but also a new genus, the next level of classifying the diversity of life. Its discoverers named it Tersicoccus phoenicis. Tersi is from Latin for clean, like the room. Coccus, from Greek for berry, describes the bacterium’s shape. The phoenicis part is for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, the spacecraft being prepared for launch in 2007 when the bacterium was first collected by test-swabbing the floor in the Florida clean room.
Some other microbes have been discovered in a spacecraft clean room and found nowhere else, but none previously had been found in two different clean rooms and nowhere else. Home grounds of the new one are about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) apart, in a NASA facility at Kennedy Space Center and a European Space Agency facility in Kourou, French Guiana.
Unlike the bacteria found on ISS, this microbe does not appear to pose any specific health problem. It does provide biologists with a good example of the kind of life that might survive in hostile environments like Mars.
The accumulated evidence from the Chelyabinsk meteorite now suggests the risk of large asteroid impacts might be ten times greater than previously estimated.
The Chelyabinsk asteroid had approached Earth from a region of the sky that is inaccessible to ground-based telescopes. In the 6 weeks before the impact, it would have been visible above the horizon only during the daytime, when the sky is too bright to see objects of its size, says Borovička.
“The residual impact risk — from asteroids with yet-unknown orbits — is shifting to small-sized objects,” says Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and an author on the Nature papers.
Of the millions of estimated near-Earth asteroids 10–20 metres in diameter, only about 500 have been catalogued. Models suggest that an object the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid hits Earth once every 150 years on average, Brown says. But the number of observed impacts exceeding 1 kiloton of TNT over the past 20 years alone hints at an actual impact risk that may be an order of magnitude larger than previously assumed,
The data also now suggests that the Chelyabinsk asteroid was twice as big as previously thought, and that it had an almost identical orbit to a much larger already known asteroid.
A new ligament has just been discovered in the human knee.
[T]he Belgian doctors are the first to identify the previously unknown ligament after a broad cadaver study using macroscopic dissection techniques. Their research shows that the ligament, which was given the name anterolateral ligament (ALL), is present in 97 per cent of all human knees.
This only illustrates once again that as much as we think we know, there is always something new to discover.
Shades of science fiction: A bacteria that causes urinary tract infections has been found to grow better in zero gravity than it does on Earth.
It was inevitable that such a bug would be found. The key here is to figure out how to keep it from getting up into space.
The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the variation of the cosmic ray flux during the solar cycle has little influence on the climate.
The study seems statistical in nature, which leaves me skeptical. Nonetheless, the link between cosmic rays and climate change remains tenuous, with only one study at CERN providing any evidence that cosmic rays might have an influence.
It is always best to admit when you are wrong as soon as you find out. Last month, in reporting NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, I unequivocally stated that
My interpretation of this data tells me that almost certainly the solar maximum has ended. We might see some later fluctuations whereby the sunspot number jumps, but the Sun is clearly beginning its ramp down to solar minimum.
Well, I spoke too soon. Last night NOAA posted the newest update of the solar cycle, and it shows that in October the Sun was more active then it has been in two years. In fact, for only the second time this entire solar cycle the Sun’s sunspot activity actually came close to matching the predictions of scientists. This month’s graph is posted below the fold, with annotations.
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Students crash rockets into the ground on purpose! With video.
In what at first glance seems like a terrible sense of direction, in March students from the University of Washington fired rockets from kites and balloons at an altitude of 3,000 ft (914 m) straight into the ground at Black Rock, Nevada: a dry lake bed in the desert 100 mi (160 km) north of Reno. This may seem like the ultimate in larking about, but it’s actually a serious effort to develop new ways of collecting samples from asteroids.
For its next science mission the European Space Agency (ESA) has now decided to give first priority to an X-ray space telescope.
They have demoted a space-based gravity wave detector to second place. As is typical for ESA, the pace here is quite slow, as both missions are now scheduled for launch in 2028 and 2034, decades away.
The competition heats up: India successfully launched its first probe to Mars today.
The mission, also known in India as Mangalyaan (which means “Mars-craft”), has at the moment only reached Earth orbit. To get to Mars, it must still complete an additional engine firing on November 30.
Scientists now estimate that one in five sunlike stars have Earthlike planets in the habitable zone.
This conclusion is entirely statistically based, and should be treated with some skepticism. Still, it seems reasonable, and I think it is likely to be a close approximation of the truth, when we finally begin to gather some real data.
28 solar flares in the past week.
The sun has erupted more than two dozen times over the last week, sending radiation and solar material hurtling through space – and scientists say more eruptions may be coming.
This shouldn’t be unusual. After all, we are technically at solar maximum, the peak of the 11-year cycle of the sun’s activity. But this has been a noticeably mellow solar maximum, with the sun staying fairly quiet throughout the summer. So when our life-giving star suddenly let loose with 24 medium strength M-class solar flares and four significantly stronger X-class flares between Oct. 23 and Oct. 30, it felt like a surprise.
October was one of the most active months for the sun this solar maximum, and I expect the sunspot count for the month to be quite high as well, more than we’ve seen in two years. I shall have that update in just a few days.
All of these active sunspots have been in the sun’s southern hemisphere, which indicates that hemisphere is finally gearing up to flip its magnetic field, something the sun’s northern hemisphere did last year. Once that happens the solar maximum will be officially over and we will head for the next solar minimum.
Sunrise tomorrow on the East Coast will be interesting, as the sun will rise in the middle of a partial solar eclipse.
Technically speaking, the partial eclipse could be visible as far inland as, say, Tennessee. Sky & Telescope projects that 57 percent of the sun’s diameter could be covered over at sunrise in Boston, 48 percent in New York, 44 percent in Philadelphia, 35 percent in Washington, and 36 percent in Miami. But you’d have to have a clear view of a flat horizon — and no matter where you are on the East Coast, the partial eclipse will be over within an hour after sunrise.
The first Earth-sized exoplanet, just discovered, makes no sense to scientists.
Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn’t exist. This scorching lava world circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one million miles – one of the tightest known orbits. According to current theories of planet formation, it couldn’t have formed so close to its star, nor could it have moved there. “This planet is a complete mystery,” says astronomer David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “We don’t know how it formed or how it got to where it is today. What we do know is that it’s not going to last forever.”
The planet itself is only 20 percent larger than the Earth, with a comparable density that suggests its composition is similar as well.
The uncertainty of science: A new dark matter detector has failed to detect any dark matter after its first three months of operation.
Buried about a mile underground in a repurposed South Dakota gold mine, the LUX experiment searches for signs of dark matter particles colliding with the atoms in a vat of liquid xenon. During its first three months of operation, the detector found no such signals whatsoever. “We looked hard for these dark matter particles and we didn’t see anything,” says physicist Rick Gaitskell of Brown University, co-spokesperson for the LUX experiment. The results, presented at a seminar today and submitted to Physical Review Letters for publication, rule out a number of possible masses and characteristics for the particles that make up dark matter. The null result also conflicts with earlier experiments that had reported possible signals of dark matter.
This experiment has not proven that dark matter does not exist. It merely has narrowed significantly the kinds of particles that dark matter could be made of. That the results also contradict evidence from other detectors, however, leaves this specific area of science particularly uncertain.
The uncertainty of science: Geologists have determined that the magma reservoir under Yellowstone is much bigger than previously thought.
Jamie Farrell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, mapped the underlying magma reservoir by analysing data from more than 4,500 earthquakes. Seismic waves travel more slowly through molten rock than through solid rock, and seismometers can detect those changes.
The images show that the reservoir resembles a 4,000-cubic-kilometre underground sponge, with 6–8% of it filled with molten rock. It underlies most of the Yellowstone caldera and extends a little beyond it to the northeast.
The geologists also noted that the threat from a huge volcanic eruption is less of a concern than that of earthquakes.
Want to fly over the surface of Mars? ESA scientists have produced a movie using the data produced by their Mars Express orbiter in the past decade.
Video below the fold. More details here.
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A look at what scientists think Comet ISON is and is not.
It appears it will not be as bright as first hoped, but will certainly provide scientists with a treasure trove of new data about comets.
Europe turns off Planck.
Planck operated four-and-a-half years, three times longer than originally planned. Launched in May 2009 on an Ariane 5 rocket shared with ESA’s Herschel telescope, Planck measured the cosmic fingerprint of the Big Bang, detecting subtle variations in background light originating 380,000 years after the genesis of the universe.
The Mars rover Opportunity is heading up hill.
Even after a decades, this rover is still functioning and doing real exploration. It is an incredible engineering achievement.
