Tag: science

The comet that the European probe Rosetta will visit in August has awakened.

11:37 am

The comet that the European probe Rosetta will visit in August has awakened.

Already 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is approximately 50 percent brighter than in the last images from October 2013. While the comet has moved another 50 million kilometers closer to Earth in this time (and 80 million kilometers closer to the Sun), the increase in brightness cannot be explained by the smaller distance alone. “The new image suggests that 67P is beginning to emit gas and dust at a relatively large distance from the Sun”, says Colin Snodgrass from the MPS. This confirms a study presented by Snodgrass and his colleagues last year in which they had compared the comet’s brightness as recorded during its previous orbits around the Sun. The calculations showed that already in March 2014 its activity would be measurable from Earth.

Update: A preprint paper published today on the astro-ph website predicts that Rosetta will see an unusual topographical feature on the comet’s surface when it arrives in August:

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Secular Light Curve (SLC) of this comet exhibits a photometric anomaly in magnitude that is present in 1982, 1996, 2002 and 2009. Thus it must be real. We interpret this anomaly as a topographic feature on the surface of the nucleus that may be a field of debris, a region made only of dust or an area of solid stones but in any case it is depleted in volatiles. We predict that images taken by spacecraft Rosseta will show a region morphologically different to the rest of the nucleus, at the pole pointing to the Sun near perihelion.

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The Sun goes boom again!

8:42 am

On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in January. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.

January was the most active month for sunspots this entire solar cycle, exceeding the predictions of the solar scientists, an event that has been quite rare during this generally weak solar maximum. In fact, the Sun was so active that for the first time, the second peak in a double-peaked solar maximum exceeded the first peak in sunspot activity.
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WISE’s survey of the sky in infrared has now shown that there is no large planet X orbiting beyond Pluto.

12:55 pm

WISE’s survey of the sky in infrared has now shown that there is no large planet X orbiting beyond Pluto.

This recent study, which involved an examination of WISE data covering the entire sky in infrared light, found no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (au), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 au. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 au, and Pluto about 40 au, from the sun. “The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star,” said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa., author of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing the results.

The theory, popular among planetary scientists and journalists, is that this theorized distant planet would periodically disturb the orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud, sending them raining down on Earth and thus cause the periodic extinction events found in the paleontological record. It was a cute theory, but based on little data. Now we have the data, and no such planet exists.

The data has found a lot of previously unknown nearby stars and brown dwarfs, which is significant in that they are close and can be studied more easily.

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“I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.”

8:22 am

From a Nobel Prize winner: “I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.”

Read the whole interview. The scientist outlines problems not only with peer review journals but with the whole structure of modern academic science, which to his mind would have prevented him from doing his Nobel Prize winning research had this system existed then.

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In reporting on climate change, ABC and CBS have excluded any commentary from any skeptical scientists for literally years.

4:52 pm

In reporting on climate change, ABC and CBS have excluded all commentary from any skeptical scientists for literally years.

Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out of the scientific mainstream” or backed by “oil and coal companies.”

It is almost like these news organizations are closing their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…” Not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a legitimate news organization.

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Another rock will fly past the Earth today, killing no one.

4:07 pm

Chicken Little report: Another rock will fly past the Earth today, killing no one.

The 33-foot-wide (10 meters) near-Earth asteroid 2014 EC will come within 34,550 miles (55,600 kilometers) of Earth’s surface this evening (March 6) — just 14 percent of the distance between our planet and the moon, which is about 239,000 miles (385,000 km) on average.

The key quote, however, is this:

Such back-to-back flybys are pretty special, though they can’t exactly be called rare events, [JPL scientist Don] Yeomans said. “For small asteroids, one would expect a flyby of the Earth, to within the moon’s distance, about every two weeks,” he said.

In other words, these flybys happen a lot, with no consequences.

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Hubble photographs the break-up of an asteroid.

8:36 am

Hubble photographs the break-up of an asteroid.

The ongoing discovery of more fragments makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating due to a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent in comparison to what has been observed. Some of the debris from such a high-velocity smash-up would also be expected to travel much faster than has been observed.

It is also unlikely that the asteroid is breaking apart due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporising. The object is too cold for ices to significantly sublimate, and it has presumably maintained its nearly 480-million-kilometre distance from the Sun for much of the age of the Solar System.

This leaves a scenario in which the asteroid is disintegrating due to a subtle effect of sunlight that causes the rotation rate to slowly increase over time. Eventually, its component pieces gently pull apart due to centrifugal force. The possibility of disruption by this phenomenon — known as the YORP effect — has been discussed by scientists for several years but, so far, never reliably observed.

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A look at the President’s overall budget for science, which finds spending levels remain flat.

9:54 am

A look at the President’s overall budget for science, which finds spending levels remain flat.

What makes this story significant is that the budget is really flat. Some agencies will get more money, others less, with the total spent about the same as the year before. They are not discussing, as had been typical in the past, the rate of increase in spending, where a reduction in that rate would be reported falsely as a “cut.”

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A 100-foot diameter newly discovered asteroid will zip past the Earth inside the Moon’s orbit today at 4:07 pm Eastern.

9:35 am

Chicken Little report: A 100-foot diameter newly discovered asteroid will zip past the Earth inside the Moon’s orbit today at 4:07 pm Eastern.

The asteroid, dubbed 2014 DX 110, is about 100 feet in diameter and is set to come within 216,000 miles of Earth — a close shave by astronomical standards, considering our Moon orbits the Earth at a distance of about 238,900 miles.

While an object that size may not seem imposing, if it were to strike the Earth, it would release a devastating amount of energy greater than a nuclear weapon. The infamous asteroid that exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30, 1908, has been estimated to be about 30 meters to 60 meters — 100 feet to 200 feet — in diameter.

While it is true that the impact would be significant, this news report does the typical fear-mongering to make the story seem interesting. The problem, however, is that the detection of these fly-bys is becoming more frequent. The number of asteroids isn’t changing, but our ability to spot them is, and with more frequent discoveries comes more frequent news stories like this. I fear that such stories — fueled by press releases from various astronomy organizations — are going to begin to sound like a kid “crying wolf” to the general public. The threat from an asteroid impact is real, even if most asteroids miss us. Desensitizing the public to the threat is not a good thing.

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One of the publishers who had published fake peer-reviewed papers generated by a computer program has responded aggressively to fix the problem.

12:15 am

One of the publishers who had published numerous fake peer-reviewed papers generated by a computer program has responded aggressively to fix the problem.

And by aggressive I mean positively. They have removed the fake papers and are reviewing everything they’ve published, with the help of the guy who exposed the fakes, to make sure there aren’t any other fakes not yet identified. They also say they are reviewing their procedures to figure out how this happened and to prevent it from happening again.

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An image of North Korea taken from ISS illustrates starkly the failure of a state-run top-down dictatorial society.

12:48 am

An image of North Korea taken from ISS illustrates starkly the failure of a state-run top-down dictatorial society.

As is typical for today’s leftwing political correct journalism, this reality is attributed not to communism but to vague generalities. North Korea is a “rogue state” or “North Korea stands alone as an unusually isolated nation, where residents live under a familial dictatorship,” statements that embarrassingly avoid the truth. The rulers of North Korea, like Cuba, refused to reject communist when the Soviet bloc fell in 1991 and have thus left their countries and the people trapped within them poor and bankrupt.

Aren’t you glad that today’s Democratic Party here in the United States considers leftwing dogma the height of progress and a goal worthy of emulation?

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Using archived Kepler data combined with statistical modeling, scientists have proposed the discovery of another 715 exoplanets.

12:26 am

Using archived Kepler data combined with statistical modeling, scientists have proposed the discovery of another 715 exoplanets.

This announcement is neat, but despite the many news stories about it today, it should be taken with a grain of salt. What the scientists have really done is pinpoint 715 stars where further research is likely to produce good exoplanet results. It is not guaranteed, however, that a scientist looking at these stars will actually see an exoplanet.

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Two publishers of scientific journals have withdrawn 120 papers which they have discovered were nothing more than computer-generated gibberish.

10:56 am

Layers and layers of peer-review: Two publishers of scientific journals have withdrawn 120 papers which they have discovered were nothing more than computer-generated gibberish.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers. …

Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

The real story here is that many of these gibberish papers were peer-reviewed by actual scientists who are supposedly experts in their fields and should have spotted the fakery immediately. That they didn’t suggests another level of corruption. Either they don’t really bother to peer review the papers they are asked to peer review, or they knew what was going on and were part of the game.

That this kind of stuff happens repeatedly in many fields of science should make us all very skeptical of any controversial scientific claim that carries with it any political component. This doesn’t mean that all published material is fake, only that we must not take anything on faith. Controversial results had better be bomb-proof before we accept them willingly.

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Harry Reid insists that “all” of the Obamacare horror stories “are untrue.”

10:00 am

Modern American intellectualism: Harry Reid insists in a speech on the Senate floor that the Obamacare horror stories being reported daily “are all untrue.”

He then attacks the sick patients themselves for telling these stories, calling them liars.

I call this modern American intellectualism because it jibs with the typical level of open-mindedness seen in modern intellectuals when it comes to climate science and any data that throws doubt on the theory of global warming.

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Global warming activists organize a petition to ban a column by Charles Krauthammer that criticized global warming activists of trying to silence opposing points of view.

10:33 am

You can’t make this stuff up: Global warming activists organize a petition to ban a column by Charles Krauthammer that criticized global warming science and the activists who try to stuff it down our throats.

These activists don’t seem capable of addressing any of the actual facts that Krauthammer mentions in his column, facts that readers of this webpage already know in great detail. No, the debate tactic of today’s global warming fascists is simply to tell their opponents to “Shut up!” Who needs facts when you can silence your opponents?

In related news, CNN and at least one of its anchors have declared that the debate over global warming is over and that they no longer consider the skeptical view worth covering.

Debate is such an inconvenient thing.

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A close look at the environmental assessment that Blue Origin submitted to the FAA to get approval for an expanded test operations reveals their intention to do numerous launch abort tests of an orbital crew capsule.

1:37 pm

The competition heats up: A close look at the environmental assessment that Blue Origin submitted to the FAA to get approval for an expanded test operations reveals their intention to do numerous launch abort tests of an orbital crew capsule.

At least, this is how I interpret the paperwork.

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Several massive countersuits have now been filed against global warming scientist Michael Mann after he failed to pursue his own lawsuit againsts Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball.

11:56 pm

Several massive countersuits have now been filed against global warming scientist Michael Mann after he failed to pursue his own lawsuit againsts Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball.

I am slightly unsure I trust this particular story, but decided to post it anyway as it is quite intriguing if true. If true, it suggests the tide has definitely turned in the battle over climate science — between honest scientists and the political activists who claim to be scientists (by which I am referring to Michael Mann).

Posted from Rome, Italy.

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A renowned astronomer reminds everyone — the public, the astronomy community, and most importantly the press — that the data collected on most exoplanets is far more uncertain than often claimed.

10:26 pm

The uncertainty of science: A renowned astronomer reminds everyone — the public, the astronomy community, and most importantly, the press — that the data collected on most exoplanets so far are far more uncertain than is often claimed.

A planet’s atmosphere is the gateway to its identity, including how it was formed, how it developed and whether it can sustain life, stated Adam Burrows, author of the review and a Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences. But the dominant methods for studying exoplanet atmospheres are not intended for objects as distant, dim and complex as planets trillions of miles from Earth, Burrows said. They were instead designed to study much closer or brighter objects, such as planets in Earth’s solar system and stars.

Nonetheless, scientific reports and the popular media brim with excited depictions of Earth-like planets ripe for hosting life and other conclusions that are based on vague and incomplete data, Burrows wrote in the first in a planned series of essays that examine the current and future study of exoplanets. Despite many trumpeted results, few “hard facts” about exoplanet atmospheres have been collected since the first planet was detected in 1992, and most of these data are of “marginal utility.”

The good news is that the past 20 years of study have brought a new generation of exoplanet researchers to the fore that is establishing new techniques, technologies and theories. As with any relatively new field of study, fully understanding exoplanets will require a lot of time, resources and patience, Burrows said. “Exoplanet research is in a period of productive fermentation that implies we’re doing something new that will indeed mature,” Burrows said. “Our observations just aren’t yet of a quality that is good enough to draw the conclusions we want to draw. “There’s a lot of hype in this subject, a lot of irrational exuberance. Popular media have characterized our understanding as better than it actually is,” he said. “They’ve been able to generate excitement that creates a positive connection between the astrophysics community and the public at large, but it’s important not to hype conclusions too much at this point.” [emphasis mine]

Burrows’ point is absolutely right. Every single story describing the atmosphere or make-up of any particular exoplanet at this point in time is essentially fantasy. The data are too weak or vague, and hardly robust enough to come to any solid conclusions. In fact, this research repeatedly reminds me of the conclusions many scientists drew from the flimsy spectrographic data that was gathered before the space age about the solar system’s planets. When we finally got spacecraft to those planets, we found those conclusions were routinely wrong.

This is not to say that our new knowledge of exoplanets is not exciting or significant. It is both. We just shouldn’t put too much faith in it at this time.

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Orbital images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed that the mysterious rock that appeared near Opportunity was not ejecta from a nearby meteorite impact.

2:29 pm

Orbital images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed that the mysterious rock that appeared near Opportunity was not ejecta from a nearby meteorite impact.

The scientists theorized that there was a very remote chance that a nearby impact has thrown the rock into place, but the images show nothing nearby. Moreover, if there had been an impact we probably would have seen more rocks raining down all around. The images are further confirmation that the rock was kicked up by the rover itself as it rolled along.

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Europe approves its own more advanced version of Kepler to launch in 2024 and hunt for exoplanets across half the sky.

11:27 am

Europe approves its own more advanced version of Kepler to launch in 2024 and hunt for exoplanets across half the sky.

During its six year long planned mission, PLATO will observe one million stars, leading to the likely discovery and characterisation of thousands of new planets circling other stars. PLATO will scan and observe about half the sky, including the brightest and nearest stars.

PLATO consists of an array of 34 individual telescopes mounted on an observing platform in the space probe. The satellite will be positioned at one of the so-called Lagrangian Points , where the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Earth cancel each other out so the satellite will stay at a fixed position in space. Each of the 34 telescopes has an aperture of 12 centimeters. The individual telescopes can be combined in many different modes and bundled together, leading to unprecedented capabilities to simultaneously observe both bright and dim objects. PLATO will be equipped with the largest camera-system sensor ever flown in space, comprising 136 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that have a combined area of 0.9 square metres.

More here and here.

What I like about this is that this project is essentially putting another optical telescope in space. The more of these we have the more discoveries we will make, as even a tiny optical telescope in the vacuum of space is more productive than a giant ground-based telescope looking through the foggy atmosphere of Earth.

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Three relatively large near Earth asteroids have just been discovered.

10:13 pm

Chicken Little report: In October of last year three relatively large near Earth asteroids were discovered unexpectedly.

Read the report, which is the second notice at the link. I missed it at the time. Each of these new discoveries was interesting and surprising. Key quote: “The delayed discovery of 2013 US10 is a bit harder to explain, since current population models suggest that almost all near-Earth asteroids of this size and orbit should have already been found.” Apparently not.

In related news, a several hundred foot wide asteroid zipped past the Earth this evening.

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Governments spent $359 billion in 2012, about the same as 2011, on their effort to stop global warming.

1:31 pm

Where the big money really is in climate science: Governments spent $359 billion in 2012, about the same as 2011, on their effort to stop global warming.

Global investment in climate change plateaued at USD $359 billion in 2012, roughly the same as the previous year, according to a new Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) study, “The Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2013.” Once again the figure falls far short of what’s needed. The International Energy Agency projects that an additional investment of USD 5 trillion is required by 2020 for clean energy alone, to limit warming to two degrees Celsius. However, the gap is likely wider: The World Bank projects we are on a path to four degree Celsius warming, suggesting that efforts to scale up finance are falling further and further behind.

I include the quote above to make it clear that the source is very much a supporter of the human-caused global warming scenario. And while the article also details the large amounts of money invested in fossil fuels, it is important to recognize the difference. The money for stopping global warming is almost entirely used for fake research or public relations propaganda efforts or to support government regulatory agencies. The money for fossil fuels is money used to invest in actual energy production.

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