Science discovers the obvious! The US Geological Survey has learned that if water looks and smells bad, you probably shouldn’t drink it.
Good news for science: UCLA has backed off from its plan to fire a politically incorrect professor, giving Dr. James Enstrom an eight month reprieve as it reviews his case.
Don’t bet the bank on this: In a preprint paper posted tonight on the astro-ph website, scientists predict the discovery of the first Earthlike extrasolar planet — using statistical analysis alone! Fun quote:
Using a bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date being early May 2011.
Back to the climate-theory drawing board: A paper published today in Nature Geoscience suggests that the ocean conveyor belt that brings warm water to the northern Atlantic is far more complex than the original theories proposed. These results strengthen earlier reports that also questioned the conveyor belt theory.
Using archival Hubble Space Telescope images astronomers have discovered 14 objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. Key quote:
The newfound objects range from 25 to 60 miles across (40 to 100 kilometers), said the researchers.
This breath-taking image of Saturn and its rings was taken by Cassini on July 19, 2009 and posted on the Cassini image gallery on August 27, 2010.
All systems go! The project engineer of the Dawn mission has posted a very detailed update (as of August 30), describing the spacecraft’s status in its journey to the asteroid Vesta.
Paul Spudis at Air and Space magazine has some more thoughts about the origins of that natural bridge on the Moon that Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed recently.
The Sun is spotless again. By this stage in the ramp up to solar maximum, such things should no longer be happening.
More data from Kepler! In a paper [pdf] published today on the astro-ph website, scientists outline Kepler’s census of the variability of stars. Key quote from the abstract:
We have separated the sample in 129,000 dwarfs and 17,000 giants, and further sub-divided, the luminosity classes into temperature bins corresponding approximately to the spectral classes A, F, G, K, and M. G-dwarfs are found to be the most stable with < 20% being variable. The variability fraction increases to 30% for the K dwarfs, 40% for the M and F dwarfs, and 70% for the A-dwarfs. At the precision of Kepler, > 95% of K and G giants are variable.
The detection in June by two different amateur astronomers of an impact on Jupiter bodes well for asteroid/comet research. You can read the actual paper here. [pdf] Key quote from the abstract:
A systematic study of the impact rate and size of these bolides can enable an empirical determination of the flux of meteoroids in Jupiter with implications for the populations of small bodies in the outer Solar System and may allow a better quantification of the threat of impacting bodies to Earth. The serendipitous recording of this optical flash opens a new window in the observation of Jupiter with small telescopes.
The mapping of the atmospheres and surfaces of some extrasolar planets, even at distances of many light years, is now possible.
Set to launch before year’s end, construction of China’s next lunar probe, Chang’e 2, appears to be on schedule, at least according to Chinese news sources.
This amazing Hubble image, showing a strange spiral to the left of the bright star, is not of a galaxy. Instead, it is a binary star system where the material from one star is being sucked away from it by the other, thus producing the spiral pattern.
What is most fascinating about this discovery is that this kind of phenomenon has been predicted for decades, by both astronomers and science fiction writers. Consider for example this quote from Larry Niven from his short story, The Soft Weapon, where he describes what he thinks the binary star Beta Lyrae might look like:
There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil. At the center of the coil was the source of the fire: a double star. One member was violet-white, a flame to brand holes in a human retina, its force held in check by the polarized window. The companion was small and yellow. They seemed to burn inches apart, so close that their masses had pulled them both into flattened eggs, so close that a red belt of lesser flame looped around them to link their bulging equators togehter. The belt was hydrogen, still mating in fusion fire, pulled loose from the stellar surfaces by two gravitional wells in conflict.
The gravity did more than that. It sent a loose end of the red belt flailing away, away and out in a burning Maypole spiral that expanded and dimmed as it rose toward interstellar space, until it turned from flame-red to smoke-red, bracketing the sky and painting a spiral path of stars deep red across half the universe.
A new climate theory: The Pakistani floods and Russian heatwave this summer might explain why the hurricane season going on right now in the North Atlantic started off so slow.
Back to the drawing board! Though the theories say it can’t happen that fast, scientists have found evidence that 16 million years ago the Earth’s magnetic field flipped polarity in less than five years. Even more depressing for the theorists is that this is the second such fast flip researchers have discovered.
Deep Impact gets its first look at its next target, Comet Hartley 2. The closest approach is set for November 4.
On August 18, 2010, the Mars rover Opportunity took this panorama image of the Martian terrain. Up close, patches of bedrock can be seen where the sand had blown clear. In the far distance the rim of Endeavour Crater, the rover’s long term destination, pokes up over the horizon.
Update: A press notice from JPL today notes that Opportunity has now traveled about half of the 11.8 mile distance to Endeavour Crater. As it took two years to go this far, the journey still has two years to go, assuming the rover survives that long.
Scientists develop first tractor beam, although it can only move tiny objects less than two yards. Worse, “because this technique needs heated gas to push the particles around, it can’t work in the vacuum of outer space like the tractor beams in Star Trek.”
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has released another lunar cave image, this time showing a double pit entrance with a natural bridge between them. [Thanks to reader James Fincannon for the tip.]
From the caption: “The bridge is approximately 7 meters wide on top and perhaps 9 meters on the bottom side, and is a 20 meter walk for an astronaut to cross from one side to the other.”
The uncertainty of science: The melt rate of the icecaps is half what was previously calculated.
Collision alert! Two small asteroids are going to zip past the Earth this week, both passing closer than the Moon.
A preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website shows further evidence of the decline in the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field over the past ten years. Extrapolated into the future, this data also suggests that the next solar maximum will be the weakest in 200 years, and that the solar maximum after that will have no sunspots at all. You can download the paper here [pdf].
New research now suggests that it was premature to conclude that Mars has no life, based on the data from the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. This is vindication for Gilbert Levin, one of the chief scientists for those missions, who had said so then and was subsequently pilloried for it.
UCLA has fired a scientist after 36 years because according to them, his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department. In other words, his research uncovering flaws in the such politically correct subjects as secondhand smoke and diesel emissions is something the academic community at his campus cannot stomach. Key quote:
[The fired scientist] questions the science behind the new [California diesel] emissions standards, and he has raised concerns about the two key reports on which they were based – exposing the author of one study as having faked his credentials and the panel that issued the other study as having violated its term limits.
Meltdown of the climate ‘consensus’. Key quote:
What does the best evidence now tell us? That man-made global warming is a mere hypothesis that has been inflated by both exaggeration and downright malfeasance, fueled by the awarding of fat grants and salaries to any scientist who’ll produce the “right” results. The warming “scientific” community, the Climategate emails reveal, is a tight clique of like-minded scientists and bureaucrats who give each other jobs, publish each other’s papers — and conspire to shut out any point of view that threatens to derail their gravy train.
Better late than never. An independent academic panel has concluded that the IPCC needs reform.
This guy is thinking ahead: a paper extolling the scientific benefits of interstellar space travel (published in a 2009 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society) was made available today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website. Fun quote from the abstract:
Significant benefits are identified in the fields of interstellar medium studies, stellar astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In the latter three areas the benefits would be considerably enhanced if the interstellar vehicle is able to decelerate from its interstellar cruise velocity to rest relative to the target system. Although this will greatly complicate the mission architecture, and extend the overall travel time, the scientific benefits are such that this option should be considered seriously in future studies.
Evidence continues to build that volcanic activity on Venus has occurred in the very recent past, and might even be going on today.
India announced today the scientific instruments it plans for its second lunar probe, scheduled for launch in 2013. India is building the orbiter and Russia is building the lander/rover.
