Cosmos
gregladen | April 6, 2009An Astronaut is blogging from space:
I am going to try to paint a picture in words of what I saw. Close your eyes and imagine yourself here on ISS with me looking out of the docking compartment window. You are positioned so the Earth is passing by below and you can see the horizon as well with the night sky behind it. Here is what you see:
It is completely night. There are thunderstorms across Africa and lightening is everywhere; bright flashes are going cloud to cloud illuminating the clouds as it arcs from one to the other. It is a private fireworks show.
Here.
gregladen | April 1, 2009I won't even try to comment on this:
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gregladen | March 23, 2009We know where Dora's monkey is.... She's over at Fermi Lab throwing a wrench in Teh Physics:
... scientists have detected a new, completely untheorized particle that challenges what physicists thought they knew about how quarks combine to form matter. They're calling it Y(4140), reflecting its measured mass of 4140 Mega-electron volts.
"It must be trying to tell us something," said Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida, a spokesman for Fermilab's collider detector team. "So far, we're not sure what that is, but rest assured we'll keep on listening."
gregladen | March 22, 2009There has always been Oxygen on the earth, but it was not floating around free in the atmosphere as it is today (most of it still isn't). Indeed, it is kind of strange that the earth is blanketed in a mixture of toxic, corrosive liquid (water) and equally corrosive gas (the oxygen in the atmosphere). Imagine showing up at a planet without an atmosphere or liquid water, and splashing the water and spraying the air from he earth all over that planet. Depending on the planet, it could be like throwing vinegar into a bowl of baking soda. Third grade science fair time!
In fact, this could…
gregladen | March 21, 2009Assuming that the electrons are not, themselves, part of an elaborate computer simulation taking place somewhere, somewhen.
The Free Will Theorem can be read here.
gregladen | March 19, 2009Here is the imagery, and below is some info for you Saturn moon watchers.
On Feb. 24, 2009, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. The pictures were taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, developed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
In the new view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left, is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left…
gregladen | March 9, 2009Fermi lab has observed a single top quark. If you know anything about quarks, especially top quarks, you will know that this is extraordinary. Top quarks, generated using the Strong Nuclear Force have been observed in the past, but a single top quark is generated with the Weak Nuclear Force. This is apparently very hard to do, but Fermilab has done it.
The following is, apparently, what a top quark ... a single top quark ... looks like:
Its in there somewhere, trust me.
Details here: Take That LHC: Fermi Scores Again In Discovering Rare Single Top Quark
gregladen | March 3, 2009 ... hiding in a Ring of Saturn.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.
Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring.
The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular.
You…
gregladen | March 2, 2009Late word out of the IAU's Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth [on] ...March 2nd ... at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC's Timothy Spahr calculates that it'll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth's center. That's only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up -- well inside the Moon's orbit and roughly twice the altitude of most communications satellites!
This object is about 30 meters across. If it struck a dinosaur, it would probably kill it. But, unlike this object that struck the earth recently, this asteroid is going to fly by.
Apparently, people in…
gregladen | February 17, 2009Just who does this comet think it is? The comet Lulin, discovered last year by a Chinese teenage amateur astronomer, has never been here before. This is its first pass around the sun. It will, owing to a number of different poorly explained by science journalists effects, fly at the sun backwards, spewing green gasses. Only first time comets spew the green gas. Then it will fly around the sun and back out into the far reaches of the solar system. The comet will actually capture enough energy from this one single trip around the sun to escape the gravitational space time warp of our…
gregladen | February 16, 2009Slashdot is reporting that Satellite junk (from the recent collision) is falling on Texas, but he very latest (as of moments ago) from Bad Astronomy is that it is not.
UPDATE:
But then, there's this.
PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009
...POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND...OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE…
gregladen | February 15, 2009Apparently there is an argument among spaceologists as to how long satellite debris floating around the earth will stay "up there." The difference in opinion ranges from decades or a century or so on one hand to ten thousand years on the other hand . Details here.
gregladen | February 13, 2009Imagine if two people got in their cars and drove to work. They both live in different places and work in different places. They live miles from where they work. Their driving paths cross at one point.
There are no other cars in the universe, just these two (remember, I'm asking you to use your imagination). And from the first time they make the commute to work and back thereafter, the cars make the same trip every day on autopilot.
Eventually, this might happen:
According to Sorting Out Science (whence I totally stole this video) this is a reconstruction of a collision between two…
gregladen | February 1, 2009Meteors are falling on your head all the time, or so it is said. I've heard that you can collect meteorites by sifting through the stuff that accumulates in your gutters with a magnet. The magnet ignores the silica rock and tarry stuff that your roof is made of, but picks up the iron bits which tend to be meteoric dust. I'm not sure if I believe that, but this is what is said.
One of the best places to get meteorites is in Antarctica, because they land on ice instead of land, and are thus not mixed up with non meteoric rocky stuff, they stand out on the background, and there are certain…
gregladen | January 28, 2009Does Spirit have a Boyfriend? Or may be a little drug habit? NASA is perplexed:
PASADENA, Calif. - The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit plans diagnostic tests this week after Spirit did not report some of its weekend activities, including a request to determine its orientation after an incomplete drive.
Very suspicious. I'd start keeping track of the odometer if I was NASA.
On Sunday, during the 1,800th Martian day, or sol, of what was initially planned as a 90-sol mission on Mars, information radioed from Spirit indicated the rover had received its driving commands…
gregladen | January 25, 2009There are several things that can cause a magnetic signal to form in a rock (and this depends a lot on the rock). One is simply residing on a magnetic planet, like the earth. The other is being shocked by having, for instance, a meteor strike nearby. Another is heating from some other source. Many of the moon rocks collected by Apollo Astronauts show the second kind of magnetic signal (impact). This is not a surprise. But the presence of a signal caused by the first kind of magnetics would be especially interesting, because it would require that the moon have a self-generated magnetic…
gregladen | January 24, 2009Because the black holes that the big machine will probably create will decay too quickly to start an irreversible sucking-into-the-black-hole kind of effect.
But wait, there is a glitch in that theory. As being reported by the Physics arXiv blog, Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes.
In 2002, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few pals reassured the world that this was not possible because the black holes would decay before they got the chance to do any damage.
Now they're not so sure. The question is not simply how quickly a mini-black hole decays…
gregladen | January 11, 2009One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason why it is interesting. In addition, the Younger Dryas was a pretty big deal ... a climate change or something like a climate change that caused massive changes all around the earth, and fairly recently. But the cause of the Younger Dryas is at present unknown, although…
gregladen | January 6, 2009When Woody Allen was little, and his mother told him to clean his room, he countered that he had no room to put his stuff. So he was waiting for the universe to expand for a while, then it would be possible to clean his room.
Since then, cosmologists have admonished that expansion of the universe does not really work that way. Of course, it DOES work that way, and Woody Allen was partly correct. But other factors we need not discuss here would come into play and ruin his plans.
Anyway, I've been going to the gym a lot lately, and I noticed yesterday that my weight had gone UP instead of…
gregladen | December 5, 2008LHC to restart in 2009
Geneva, 5 December 2008. CERN today confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart in 2009. This news forms part of an updated report, published today, on the status of the LHC following a malfunction on 19 September.
"The top priority for CERN today is to provide collision data for the experiments as soon as reasonably possible," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "This will be in the summer of 2009."
The initial malfunction was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and…