Two probes named after James Van Allen and designed to study the two Van Allen radiation belts have discovered there is a third intermittent belt.
The meteorite that landed in Russia on February 15 has now been traced to the Apollo family of near Earth asteroids.
An evening pause: “It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”
The uncertainty of science: Scientists are considering revising the guidelines for heart risk as determined by your cholesterol levels.
The ATP IV committee has pledged to hew strictly to the science and to focus on data from randomized clinical trials, says committee chairman Neil Stone, a cardiologist at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago. If so, Krumholz argues, LDL [cholesterol] targets will be cast aside because they have never been explicitly tested. Clinical trials have shown repeatedly that statins reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, but lowering LDL with other medications does not work as well. The benefits of statins may reflect their other effects on the body, including fighting inflammation, another risk factor for heart disease. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the assumption that’s been pushed for more than a decade that lowering your cholesterol will lower your risk of heart attack has never been tested or proven. If this isn’t science by myth I don’t know what is.
“Vulcan” and “Cerberus” win the poll to name Pluto’s two unnamed moons. Key quote:
Vulcan was a late addition to the Pluto moon name contenders, and pulled into the lead after Shatner, building on his Capt. James T. Kirk persona, plugged the name on Twitter. Vulcan, the home planet of Kirk’s alien-human hybrid first officer Spock, is not just a fictional world in the Star Trek universe. It is also the name of the god of fire in Roman mythology, and officials at SETI added the sci-fi favorite to the ballot for that reason.
The world’s smallest optical space telescopes to launch on Monday.
Mammoth Cave is now officially longer than 400 miles.
This official announcement is a bit old, as the survey work that brought Mammoth over 400 miles was probably done during the October or December 2012 expeditions.
Update: I contacted some of my caving friends who survey in Mammoth regularly, and they have confirmed that the survey reached 400 miles during the October 2012 expedition.
R.I.P. Dr. David S. McKay: 1936-2013. More here.
Though he was most famous for being the lead author of the 1996 paper suggesting that fossil life had found in a Martian meteorite, McKay was one of the giants of planetary science whose work was far more extensive and important. He will be missed.
New data has allowed scientists to lower the chance that the asteroid Apophis will hit the Earth in a future orbit.
Recent observations from Pan-STARRS PS1 telescope at Haleakala, Hawaii have reduced the current orbital uncertainty by a factor of 5, and radar observations in early 2013 from Goldstone and Arecibo will further improve the knowledge of Apophis’ current position. However, the current knowledge is now precise enough that the uncertainty in predicting the position in 2029 is completely dominated by the so-called Yarkovsky effect, a subtle nongravitational perturbation due to thermal re-radiation of solar energy absorbed by the asteroid. The Yarkovsky effect depends on the asteroid’s size, mass, thermal properties, and critically on the orientation of the asteroid’s spin axis, which is currently unknown. This means that predictions for the 2029 Earth encounter will not improve significantly until these physical and spin characteristics are better determined.
The new report, which does not make use of the 2013 radar measurements, identifies over a dozen keyholes that fall within the range of possible 2029 encounter distances. Notably, the potential impact in 2036 that had previously held the highest probability has been effectively ruled out since its probability has fallen to well below one chance in one million. Indeed only one of the potential impacts has a probability of impact greater than 1-in-a-million; there is a 2-meter wide keyhole that leads to an impact in 2068, with impact odds of about 2.3 in a million.
The second paragraph basically says that the keyholes that might bring Apophis back to Earth are very small, making it unlikely that the asteroid will fly through any one of them in 2029. The first paragraph however notes that it will be impossible to chart the asteroid’s course accurately enough to rule out this possibility until we have more data on the asteroid itself.
Consensus! In an interview in Australia, the head of the IPCC has admitted that the climate has stopped warming now for the past seventeen years.
No computer climate model offered in any IPCC report predicted this long pause in warming. They all instead insisted that because of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global temperature would have to rise, and do so quickly and with catastrophic results.
In other words, those models were wrong. The climate is very complicated, and we don’t yet understand very well how it functions.
Using Kepler astronomers have discovered a three planet solar system with one planet slightly larger than our Moon.
Kepler-37’s host star belongs to the same class as our sun, although it is slightly cooler and smaller. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. [The moon-sized] Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury’s distance from the sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin), would be hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny. Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit every 21 days and 40 days, respectively.
Scientists have released some results, including video, from their look at asteroid 2012 DA14 during its fly-by last week. Key quote:
The asteroid’s path was perturbed by Earth’s gravitational field in such a way that it won’t come as close in the foreseeable future.
The video, which I have embeded below the fold, was produced from radar data. It clearly shows the asteroid’s rotation.
» Read more
Consensus! A new poll of Earth scientists has found that a majority are skeptical of human-caused global warming.
Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.
This is fun to note, but this poll is as worthless in determining the climate of the Earth as every previous poll that said the opposite. What matters is the data. However, this quote about the poll is significant:
» Read more
Some thoughts by Alan Stern on a better way to name exoplanets.
Mercury, in full color.
Scientists working with NASA’s Messenger probe have produced a global color map of the surface of Mercury, closest planet to the Sun. Thousands of sets of images were enhanced then stitched together in a mosaic to create a detailed image covering the entire planet.
Russian scientists have identified the first fragments from Friday’s meteorite in Chelyabinsk.
The pieces, found on the ice of a lake, were stony chondrites.
More on today’s Russian meteorite: Largest in a century.
My earlier skepticism appears incorrect. This impact actually happened.
Note the article’s sense of outrage and panic that we aren’t looking for these types of rocks:
Although a network of telescopes watches for asteroids that might strike Earth, it is geared towards spotting larger objects — between 100 metres and a kilometre in size. “Objects like that are nearly impossible to see until a day or two before impact,” says Timothy Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which tracks asteroids and small bodies. So far as he knows, he says, his centre also failed to spot the approaching rock.
Yet, today’s impact actually illustrates the wisdom of excluding this kind of small asteroid from searches. They aren’t big enough to do serious harm, and trying to find them would hamper searches for larger asteroids that do pose a serious risk.
How to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 zip past the Earth today.
An unexpected meteorite shower yesterday across three regions of Russia has reportedly caused more than 400 people to seek medical help.
Hundreds suffered cuts from broken glass as the meteorites smashed windows in numerous buildings across the Chelyabinsk Region, officials said. “The condition of at least three [people] is considered grave,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said. At least six cities have been hit in three central regions of Russia. Some areas of neighboring Kazakhstan were also affected, Russian state officials confirmed on Friday.
There is something about this story, reported in many Russian news sources, that smells fishy to me. Something happened, and it likely is related to a shower of meteorites, but the images at the link above as well as here and here just don’t look right.
A group of California scientists have proposed a system to vaporize asteroids that threaten Earth.
In developing the proposal, Lubin and Hughes calculated the requirements and possibilities for DE-STAR systems of several sizes, ranging from a desktop device to one measuring 10 kilometers, or six miles, in diameter. Larger systems were also considered. The larger the system, the greater its capabilities.
For instance, DE-STAR 2 –– at 100 meters in diameter, about the size of the International Space Station –– “could start nudging comets or asteroids out of their orbits,” Hughes said. But DE-STAR 4 –– at 10 kilometers in diameter, about 100 times the size of the ISS –– could deliver 1.4 megatons of energy per day to its target, said Lubin, obliterating an asteroid 500 meters across in one year.
They also propose an even larger system which could “enable interstellar travel.”
Scientists now believe they have found evidence proving that the unknown origin of cosmic rays are supernova explosions.
This has been one of astronomy’s longest outstanding mysteries: What produces the interstellar cosmic rays that come from outside our solar system?
Asteroid 2012 DA14 might experience seismic activity, an asteroid quake, when it zips pass the Earth tomorrow.
[MIT scientist Richard] Binzel imagines what an astronaut floating alongside such an asteroid might see: “The surface could slowly sway or rock by a few centimeters. Other things to look for would be puffs of asteroid-dust rising from the surface and gentle avalanches on the steepest slopes of craters.” In rare cases, “rubble pile” asteroids might break apart during the encounter and then re-form as Earth recedes into the distance.
William Shatner proposes naming Pluto’s two unnamed moons Romulus and Vulcan.
Astronomers running the Pluto moon naming campaign accepted Vulcan, adding it to the list a day after Shatner suggested it, but Romulus didn’t make the cut. “Mr. Shatner’s second suggestion, Romulus, has a bit of a problem because it is already the name of a moon,” Mark Showalter, an astronomer involved with the competition, wrote in a blog on the Pluto Rocks website on Tuesday. “Romulus, along with his brother Remus, are the names of the moons of the asteroid 87 Silvia. They were discovered by a team led by my good colleague Franck Marchis, now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute.”
Chicken Little report: A 150 foot wide asteroid will buzz the Earth tomorrow at a distance of only 17,000 miles.
There have been numerous news articles about this fly-by for the last two weeks, all hyping the dangers of an impact that in this case simply won’t happen. A threat of an impact from an asteroid is real and should be dealt with, but the reporting here has at times been somewhat silly. Asteroid 2012 DA14 is not going to hit us as it goes by. All that will happen is that scientists will have take advantage of this opportunity to look at it.
Help name two of Pluto’s five moons!
A glimpse into the past: Kodak’s early test footage for full color Kodachrome film, shot in 1922.
Curiosity has obtained its first drill sample.
The founder of the green movement sees the light.
I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. … Although well-intentioned it is an erosion of our freedom and draws near to what I see as fascism.
On February 4, NOAA released its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, covering the period of January 2013. As I do every month, I have posted the latest graph, with annotation, below the fold.
Not surprisingly, the sunspot numbers in January showed a recovery and rise from the steep plunge in December. What is surprising, however, is that the rise is not very much, barely bringing the sunspot number for the month back to the weak numbers we’ve seen for most of 2012.
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