The New Enlightenment Age

Three Centaurs Follow Uranus Through the Solar...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:00:45 -0400

Three Centaurs Follow Uranus Through the Solar System

Astrophysicists from the Complutense University of Madrid have confirmed that Crantor, a large asteroid with a diameter of 70 km has an orbit similar to that of Uranus and takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun. Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that this and a further two objects of the group of the Centaurs are co-orbital with Uranus.

Uruguayan astronomer Tabaré Gallardo suggested in 2006 that the asteroids Crantor and 2000 SN331 complete their orbits of the Sun in the same time period as Uranus - an orbit of approximately 84 Earth years. Now two researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain) have confirmed that in the case of Crantor this is true.

astronemma: The fast winds of Venus are getting faster The...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:30:32 -0400

astronemma:

The fast winds of Venus are getting faster

The most detailed record of cloud motion in the atmosphere of Venus chronicled by ESA’s Venus Express has revealed that the planet’s winds have steadily been getting faster over the last six years.

Venus is well known for its curious super-rotating atmosphere, which whips around the planet once every four Earth days. This is in stark contrast to the rotation of the planet itself – the length of the day – which takes a comparatively laborious 243 Earth days.

By tracking the movements of distinct cloud features in the cloud tops some 70 km above the planet’s surface over a period of 10 venusian years (6 Earth years), scientists have been able to monitor patterns in the long-term global wind speeds.

When Venus Express arrived at the planet in 2006, average cloud-top wind speeds between latitudes 50º on either side of the equator were clocked at roughly 300 km/h. The results of two separate studies have revealed that these already remarkably rapid winds are becoming even faster, increasing to 400 km/h over the course of the mission.

“This is an enormous increase in the already high wind speeds known in the atmosphere. Such a large variation has never before been observed on Venus, and we do not yet understand why this occurred,” says Igor Khatuntsev from the Space Research Institute in Moscow and lead author of the Russian-led paper to be published in the journal Icarus.

Read more: [x]

Credit: Khatuntsev et al; ESA

Milky Way & Airglow over Crater Lake

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:01:18 -0400

Milky Way & Airglow over Crater Lake

Loch Ness Monster Spied… in Space! Ol’ Nessie isn’t known...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:00:45 -0400

Loch Ness Monster Spied… in Space!

Ol’ Nessie isn’t known for making herself easy to find, but it looks like she recently popped up in an image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — and my, how she’s grown!

First catching the eye of summer student Roberto Rodriguez, undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico, working with Arecibo astrophysicist Rhys Taylor, this monstrosity is actually a distant galaxy 700 million light-years away, and is about 200,000 light-years across — nearly twice the width of the Milky Way. Rodriguez is participating in Arecibo’s 10-week “Research Experience for Undergraduate” program.

Time to Plan for a Mission to Alpha Centauri Late last year a...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:01:31 -0400

Time to Plan for a Mission to Alpha Centauri

Late last year a team of European astronomers announced that they had found a planet located in the nearest star system to our sun, Alpha Centauri.

At 4.6 light-years away, it’s just a stone’s throw on the cosmic yardstick. The system is reachable within a human lifetime at velocities of one-tenth the speed of light. We don’t need warp drive to magically travel there at superluminal speed.

How Darwin Helped Invent the Idea of Aliens The 19th century was...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:31:04 -0400

How Darwin Helped Invent the Idea of Aliens

The 19th century was still trying to wrap its head around the theory of evolution when a group of scientists decided to up the ante and declare that the universe was teeming with “ultra-terrestrial” life.

Evolution was occurring on myriad planets, they said, and the Earth was just one tiny outpost of creation. “Is it not evident that this world has been thrown without any distinction into the planetary cluster, and that it is not better adapted than the others to be the exclusive seat of life and intelligence?” asked the famed French astronomer Camille Flammarion.

Sally Ride: First American Woman in Space On June 18, 1983, NASA...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:45:29 -0400

Sally Ride: First American Woman in Space

On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride broke through the ultimate glass ceiling, blasting into orbit on the shuttle Challenger as part of the crew of mission STS-7. Since her history-making flight, 39 female NASA astronauts have followed her into space, including shuttle commanders and an International Space Station commander.

After a second shuttle flight in 1984 and other roles at NASA, Ride returned to her passion for inspiring young people. She’s written several books and founded Sally Ride Science, a company dedicated to supporting students and their interest in math and science.

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Final Construction Starts for Europe’s 2016 Methane Sniffing...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:01:28 -0400

Final Construction Starts for Europe’s 2016 Methane Sniffing Mars Mission

Has life ever existed on Mars? Or anywhere beyond Earth?

Answering that question is one of the most profound scientific inquiries of our time.

Europe and Russia have teamed up for a bold venture named ExoMars that’s set to blast off in search of Martian life in about two and a half years.

kenobi-wan-obi: Center of The Milky Way in Wide-Field View by...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:00:45 -0400

kenobi-wan-obi:

Center of The Milky Way in Wide-Field View by Luis Argerich

we-are-star-stuff: What are neutrinos? In the most basic sense,...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:00:56 -0400

we-are-star-stuff:

What are neutrinos?

In the most basic sense, neutrinos are elementary subatomic particles that have almost no mass and can travel vast distances without interacting with normal matter. “They can go through light-years of lead without stopping,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an IceCube physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In fact, trillions of neutrinos are passing right through you each second.

Neutrinos owe their ghost-like powers to the fact that they have no electric charge (are unperturbed by electromagnetic forces) and are only affected by the weak nuclear force, which works at very short ranges, and gravity, which is quite weak at subatomic scales.

Famed physicist Wolfgang Pauli initially proposed the concept of the neutrino back in 1930 to explain what happens when tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) undergoes beta decay. You see, when tritium decays into helium-3, an electron is also released, carrying away some of the energy. But scientists noticed that the equation was unbalanced - tritium had more energy than its resulting decay product, suggesting that an invisible particle must be carrying away additional energy.

Scientists didn’t detect neutrinos until over thirty years later. A team led by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines detected neutrinos coming from a nuclear reactor and published their results in the journal Science.

There are three known types (flavors) of neutrinos: electron neutrino νe, muon neutrino νμ and tau neutrino ντ, named after their partner leptons in the Standard Model. The current best measurement of the number of neutrino types comes from observing the decay of the Z boson. This particle can decay into any light neutrino and its antineutrino, and the more types of light neutrinos available, the shorter the lifetime of the Z boson. Measurements of the Z lifetime have shown that the number of light neutrino types is 3. The correspondence between the six quarks in the Standard Model and the six leptons, among them the three neutrinos, suggests to physicists’ intuition that there should be exactly three types of neutrino. However, actual proof that there are only three kinds of neutrinos remains an elusive goal of particle physics.

Where do neutrinos come from?

There are numerous sources of neutrinos in the universe, both in space and here on Earth. Wherever there is nuclear physics, there are neutrinos; they are the liaisons that make nuclear physics possible.

Neutrinos are produced in the sun and other stars. They are the byproduct of nuclear fusion, which involves the merging of two protons (hydrogen atoms) to form a deuteron, releasing a positron (antielectron) and an electron neutrino at the same time.

High-mass stars end their lives in supernova explosions, which also produce neutrinos. Before the explosion, the star collapses in on itself, forcing protons to combine with electrons, forming neutrons and electron neutrinos. Eventually a neutron core will form in the center of the dying star - as it cools, it releases neutrino-antineutrino pairs of all flavors.

Scientists also believe that tons of neutrinos were created during the Big Bang, so there should currently be a “cosmic neutrino background” similar to the cosmic microwave background radiation. These particles, however, are thought to have energies too low to detect with current neutrino detectors.

Ultimately, the scientists hope the neutrinos will help them better understand the origins of high-energy cosmic rays, which are a mystery to scientists. Essentially, anything that could produce cosmic rays would also produce these high-energy neutrinos. So they are now trying to trace the neutrinos back to their source(s) - a task that should be easier than tracing back cosmic rays because neutrinos travel in a straight line, unperturbed by strong magnetic fields.

“These neutrinos could be clues to the origins of cosmic rays,” Whitehorn says. “We could be opening a new window into the universe.”

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kenobi-wan-obi: Lagoon Nebula in Deep Field by Kfir Simon The...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:01:02 -0400

kenobi-wan-obi:

Lagoon Nebula in Deep Field by Kfir Simon

The Lagoon nebula in a closer and deeper look.

The central structure of the nebula , normally overexposed ( Upper Left) is revealed in this image.

Seen in silhouette just lower from the center of the view are small, dark clouds of obscuring cosmic dust.

These globules Called Thackeray’s Globules for their discoverer, are potential sites for the formation of new stars, but are likely being eroded by the intense radiation from the nearby young stars. — NASA

The Turbulent, High-Energy Sky Is Keeping NuSTAR Busy NuSTAR...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:01:05 -0400

The Turbulent, High-Energy Sky Is Keeping NuSTAR Busy

NuSTAR Status Update

NuSTAR has been busy studying the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Recently, a few high-energy events have sprung up, akin to “things that go bump in the night.” When one telescope catches a sudden outpouring of high-energy light in the sky, NuSTAR and a host of other telescopes stop what they were doing and take a better look.

For example, in early April, the blazar Markarian 421 had an episode of extreme activity, brightening by more than 50 times its typical level. Blazars are a special class of galaxies with accreting, or “feeding,” supermassive black holes at their centers. As the black holes feed, they light up, often ejecting jets of material. When the jets are pointing toward Earth, they are called blazars. By using telescopes sensitive to a range of energies to study how blazars vary, astrophysicists gain insight into black hole feeding processes and the physical conditions near the black hole.

neuromorphogenesis: Mindfulness: Potent Medicine for Easing...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:30:18 -0400

neuromorphogenesis:

Mindfulness: Potent Medicine for Easing Physical Suffering

We’d like to be forever free from physical discomfort, but we’re in bodies and they get injured, sick, and old. The good news is that the Buddha prescribed some medicine—mindfulness—to help ease that physical discomfort. Mindfulness is not a miracle pill, but it is a miracle practice, meaning that, over time, we can learn to respond skillfully to the inevitable physical suffering that comes with being in bodies.
Bodily discomfort has three components:

The unpleasant physical sensation itself (pain, aching muscles, fatigue).

Our emotional reaction to that discomfort (anger, frustration, fear).

The thoughts that are triggered by the discomfort (the stress-filled stories we spin that have little basis in reality, such as, “This pain will never go away,” “I’ll never be happy again,” “I’ve ruined my partner’s life”).

Note that two of the three components that make up our experience of bodily discomfort are mental in origin! These two mental components are often referred to as “mental suffering.” They can make our physical suffering worse because mental reactions are felt in the body.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of paying careful attention to what is happening in the present moment, whether it be a sight, a sound, a taste, a smell, a sensation in the body, or mental cognition (this latter includes emotions and thoughts). Mindfulness is called a practice because it takes practice: our minds tend to dwell in the past and the future.

You don’t need to be meditating to practice mindfulness. Right now, stop and take three or four conscious breaths, feeling the physical sensation of the breath as it comes in and goes out of your body. There. You’ve just practiced mindfulness!

Notice that while you were engaging in this conscious breathing, your mind wasn’t dwelling in the past or the future. You may have been aware of a sound, a smell, a bodily sensation other than the breath, an emotion, a thought. Meticulous attention to whatever is happening in the present moment is the essence of mindfulness. The sensation of the breath is often used as an anchor because breathing is always present in the moment.

How can mindfulness help ease physical suffering?

With practice, mindfulness calms and steadies the mind. This is beneficial because when we’re experiencing physical discomfort, our minds often churn with stressful emotions and thoughts, but they’re a muddy blur—we can’t sort them out. With mindfulness, the “mud” settles so we can see more clearly which allows us to identify what emotions and thoughts are present in our minds at the moment. “Ah, this is anger.” “This is fear.” “This is a worry-filled thought about the future.” With this clearer view, we can make skillful choices about how to respond to these emotions and thoughts—choices that will lessen our overall suffering.

Stressful emotions. Our habitual reaction to physical discomfort is some form of resistance and aversion, such as frustration or anger. By practicing mindfulness, we can counter that habitual response with one that’s more skillful.

Once we begin to treat ourselves with kindness, we can calmly and gently examine the actual physical sensation. It’s not a solid block of discomfort. We may feel waves of sensations, some of which may even be pleasant. We may notice some heat, some pulsating, some tingling. Using mindfulness to examine physical sensations reveals their ever-changing nature. This helps break up the sense that our whole being is only the discomfort.

Having noticed that the physical sensation keeps changing, we can reflect that our frustration is impermanent too. It arose but it will pass. This recognition alone weakens its grip on us.

Stressful thought patterns. At a meditation retreat in the 1990s, the Buddhist nun, Ayya Khema, told us, “Most thoughts are just rubbish, but we believe them anyway.” Becoming mindfully aware of the stories we spin about our physical discomfort quiets and steadies the mind so that the “mud” settles and we can see the thoughts more clearly. Then we have a choice. We can continue to blindly believe them or we can calmly assess their validity. Are you absolutely sure you’ll never be happy again or that you’ve ruined your partner’s life?

Letting go of stress-filled stories that have little or no basis in fact is a tremendous relief. A smile might even appear on your face as you acknowledge the convoluted stories the mind can spin. As Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, likes to say, “The mind has no shame.”

Mindfulness calms and steadies the mind so we can respond more skillfully to stressful emotions and thoughts. This, in turn, eases our physical suffering because we’re not adding mental suffering to it. As the wonderfully blunt Zen teacher, Joko Beck, said: “What makes life so frightening is that we let ourselves be carried away in the garbage of our whirling minds. We don’t have to do that.”

Mindfulness is the best medicine for not doing that.

For example, if we’re in pain, aversion in the form of frustration may arise. We have two choices. We can let that habitual response brew and get stronger; this not only increases our mental suffering, but it often increases our physical pain because the muscles surrounding the pain tighten in response to our frustration. Or, we can respond to our frustration by mindfully acknowledging it and beginning to incline our minds toward kindness and compassion for ourselves. (After all, who doesn’t get frustrated at times?)

kenobi-wan-obi: Exploding Aurora by Dennis Mammana

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:01:02 -0400

kenobi-wan-obi:

Exploding Aurora by Dennis Mammana

Gaze Upon All of Mercury For the First Time Ever The existence...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:00:43 -0400

Gaze Upon All of Mercury For the First Time Ever

The existence of our solar system’s innermost planet has been common knowledge since ancient times, but that doesn’t actually mean we’ve always know much about it. Mercury’s proximity to the Sun has allowed it to jealously guard its secrets, and so this NASA video offers an unprecedentedly detailed view of the planet’s surface.

This video is based on images taken by the MESSENGER probe, the first spacecraft to actually orbit Mercury. It has allowed astronomers to get the first up-close view at the planet’s geology; until now, the sum total of our knowledge was limited to a single Mariner flyby in 1975. Over the past year, MESSENGER has taken over 80,000 images with plans to take 80,000 more. That’s allowed us to assemble this complete visual representation of Mercury’s surface, with each pixel representing about a square kilometer; the video expands on this previously published image.

It’s perhaps not quite enough detail to plan out a day hike, but it’s a gigantic leap in our understanding. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that it was mistakenly thought that the planet was tidally locked around the Sun, meaning one half of the planet would be bathed in searing, eternal sunlight, while the other half would be a forever frozen ice cube. Since then, astronomers have learned that Mercury actually rotates three times for every two revolutions about the Sun.

Courtesy of the MESSENGER website, here’s a breakdown of what the various colors represent in the video:

This view captures both compositional differences and differences in how long materials have been exposed at Mercury’s surface. Young crater rays, arrayed radially around fresh impact craters, appear light blue or white. Medium- and dark-blue areas are a geologic unit of Mercury’s crust known as the “low-reflectance material,” thought to be rich in a dark, opaque mineral. Tan areas are plains formed by eruption of highly fluid lavas. The large circular area near the top center is the Caloris impact basin, whose interior is filled with smooth, somewhat younger volcanic plains. Small orangish spots are materials deposited by explosive volcanic eruptions.

MESSENGER via NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day.

“Dark Galaxies” —Were They the Building Blocks...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:50 -0400

“Dark Galaxies” —Were They the Building Blocks of the Galaxies We See Today?

Dark galaxies are essentially devoid of stars, therefore they don’t emit any light that telescopes can catch. This makes them virtually impossible to observe unless they are illuminated by an external light source like a background quasar. The image above combines observations from the Very Large Telescope, tuned to detect the fluorescent emissions produced by the quasar illuminating the dark galaxies, with colour data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. Dark galaxies are small, gas-rich galaxies in the early Universe predicted by theories of galaxy formation, and are thought to be the building blocks of today’s bright, star-filled galaxies. Astronomers think that they may have fed large galaxies with much of the gas that later formed into the stars that exist today.

"I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:00:46 -0400

“

I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson (via senoranelson)

Photo

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:30:14 -0400

How do rockets move in space? If space is basically a vacuum...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:00:58 -0400

How do rockets move in space?

If space is basically a vacuum and void of atmosphere, how do rockets alter the direction and speed of space craft? In other words, how do they “push off” against nothing?

This is a very good question. Isaac Newton worked out the solution and published it in 1687 in his Principia Mathematica. It is phrased as Newton’s 3rd law. I’ll include all 3 below just in case!

1st: A body will remain at rest or at motion with a uniform speed unless it is acted on my an external force. 2nd: The acceleration of a body with a force acting on it is that force divided by the mass of the body (F=ma) 3rd: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

So the third law basically says that if you shoot out stuff in one direction you will move in the other direction. This is how rockets work in a vacuum. They have a source of fuel which is heated up so that it expands and is pushed out of the rocket. In order to change direction in space rockets have to have little ‘thrusters’ on all sides (you need 6 in total to maneuver completely in 3 dimensions).

Newton’s 3rd law seems contrary to our intuition because on Earth there are lots of sources of friction - providing much easier methods of propulsion, however you might have seen it in action if you have ever blown up a balloon and then let go of it before tying it up. What pushes the balloon all around the room is the air you blew into in escaping.

distant-traveller: First X-ray view of Martian soil This...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:13:24 -0400

distant-traveller:

First X-ray view of Martian soil

This graphic shows results of the first analysis of Martian soil by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) experiment on NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image reveals the presence of crystalline feldspar, pyroxenes and olivine mixed with some amorphous (non-crystalline) material. The soil sample, taken from a wind-blown deposit within Gale Crater, where the rover landed, is similar to volcanic soils in Hawaii.

Curiosity scooped the soil on Oct. 15, 2012, the 69th sol, or Martian day, of operations. It was delivered to CheMin for X-ray diffraction analysis on October 17, 2012, the 71st sol. By directing an X-ray beam at a sample and recording how X-rays are scattered by the sample at an atomic level, the instrument can definitively identify and quantify minerals on Mars for the first time. Each mineral has a unique pattern of rings, or “fingerprint,” revealing its presence. The colors in the graphic represent the intensity of the X-rays, with red being the most intense.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames