Excerpt from educatinghumanity.com "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."Niels Bohr10 Ways Quantum Physics Will Change the WorldEver want to have a "life do over", teleport, time travel, have your computer wor...
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Excerpt from mashable.com Thanks to a rare, severe geomagnetic storm, the Northern Lights may be visible on Tuesday night in areas far to the south of its typical home in the Arctic. The northern tier of the U.S., from Washington State to Michiga...
| This artist's impression of the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus shows that interactions between hot water and rock occur at the floor of the subsurface ocean -- the type of environment that might be friendly to life, scientists say. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) |
Excerpt from latimes.com
Scientists say they’ve discovered evidence of a watery ocean with warm spots hiding beneath the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The findings, described in the journal Nature, are the first signs of hydrothermal activity on another world outside of Earth – and raise the chances that Enceladus has the potential to host microbial life.
Scientists have wondered about what lies within Enceladus at least since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft caught the moon spewing salty water vapor out from cracks in its frozen surface. Last year, a study of its gravitational field hinted at a 10-kilometer-thick regional ocean around the south pole lying under an ice crust some 30 to 40 kilometers deep.
Another hint also emerged about a decade ago, when Cassini discovered tiny dust particles escaping Saturn’s system that were nanometer-sized and rich in silicon.
“It’s a peculiar thing to find particles enriched with silicon,” said lead author Hsiang-Wen Hsu, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In Saturn’s moons and among its rings, water ice dominates, so these odd particles clearly stood out.
The scientists traced these particles’ origin to Saturn’s E-ring, which lies between the orbits of the moons Mimas and Titan and whose icy particles are known to come from Enceladus. So Hsu and colleagues studied the grains to understand what was going on inside the gas giant’s frigid satellite.
Rather than coming in a range of sizes, these particles were all uniformly tiny – just a few nanometers across. Studying the spectra of these grains, the scientists found that they were made of silicon dioxide, or silica. That’s not common in space, but it’s easily found on Earth because it’s a product of water interacting with rock.
Knowing how silica interacts in given conditions such as temperature, salinity and alkalinity, the scientists could work backward to determine what kind of environment creates these unusual particles.
A scientist could do the same thing with a cup of warm coffee, Hsu said.
“You put in the sugar and as the coffee gets cold, if you know the relation of the solubility of sugar as a function of temperature, you will know how hot your coffee was,” Hsu said. “And applying this to Enceladus’s ocean, we can derive a minimum [temperature] required to form these particles.”
The scientists then ran experiments in the lab to determine how such silica particles came to be. With the particles’ particular makeup and size distribution, they could only have formed under very specific circumstances, the study authors found, determining that the silica particles must have formed in water that had less than 4% salinity and that was slightly alkaline (with a pH of about 8.5 to 10.5) and at temperatures of at least 90 degrees Celsius (roughly 190 degrees Fahrenheit).
The heat was likely being generated in part by tidal forces as Saturn’s gravity kneads its icy moon. (The tidal forces are also probably what open the cracks in its surface that vent the water vapor into space.)
Somewhere inside the icy body, there was hydrothermal activity – salty warm water interacting with rocks. It’s the kind of environment that, on Earth, is very friendly to life.
“It’s kind of obvious, the connection between hydrothermal interactions and finding life,” Hsu said. “These hydrothermal activities will provide the basic activities to sustain life: the water, the energy source and of course the nutrients that water can leach from the rocks.”
Enceladus, Hsu said, is now likely the “second-top object for astrobiology interest” – the first being Jupiter’s icy moon and fellow water-world, Europa.
This activity is in all likelihood going on right now, Hsu said – over time, these tiny grains should glom together into larger and larger particles, and because they haven’t yet, they must have been recently expelled from Enceladus, within the last few months or few years at most.
Gabriel Tobie of the University of Nantes in France, who was not involved in the research, compared the conditions that created these silica particles to a hydrothermal field in the Atlantic Ocean known as Lost City.
“Because it is relatively cold, Lost City has been posited as a potential analogue of hydrothermal systems in active icy moons. The current findings confirm this,” Tobie wrote in a commentary on the paper. “What is more, alkaline hydrothermal vents might have been the birthplace of the first living organisms on the early Earth, and so the discovery of similar environments on Enceladus opens fresh perspectives on the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System.”
However, Hsu pointed out, it’s not enough to have the right conditions for life – they have to have been around for long enough that life would have a fighting chance to emerge.
“The other factor that is also very important is the time.… For Enceladus, we don’t know how long this activity has been or how stable it is,” Hsu said. “And so that’s a big uncertainty here.”
One way to get at this question? Send another mission to Enceladus, Tobie said.
“Cassini will fly through the moon’s plume again later this year,” he wrote, “but only future missions that can undertake improved in situ investigations, and possibly even return samples to Earth, will be able to confirm Enceladus’ astrobiological potential and fully reveal the secrets of its hot springs. ”
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| Totality! The 2012 total solar eclipse as seen from Australia. Credit and copyright: www.hughca.com. |
Excerpt from universetoday.com
The first of two eclipse seasons for the year is upon us this month, and kicks off with the only total solar eclipse for 2015 on Friday, March 20th.
And what a bizarre eclipse it is. Not only does this eclipse begin just 15 hours prior to the March equinox marking the beginning of astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere, but the shadow of totality also beats path through the high Arctic and ends over the North Pole.
An animation of the March 20th eclipse. Credit: NASA/GSFC/AT Sinclair.
Already, umbraphiles — those who chase eclipses — are converging on the two small tracts of terra firma where the umbra of the Moon makes landfall: the Faroe and Svalbard islands. All of Europe, the northern swath of the African continent, north-central Asia and the Middle East will see a partial solar eclipse, and the eclipse will be deeper percentage-wise the farther north you are .
2015 features four eclipses in all: two total lunars and two solars, with one total solar and one partial solar eclipse. Four is the minimum number of eclipses that can occur in a calendar year, and although North America misses out on the solar eclipse action this time ’round, most of the continent gets a front row seat to the two final total lunar eclipses of the ongoing tetrad on April 4th and September 28th.
How rare is a total solar eclipse on the vernal equinox? Well, the last total solar eclipse on the March equinox occurred back in 1662 on March 20th. There was also a hybrid eclipse — an eclipse which was annular along a portion of the track, and total along another — on March 20th, 1681. But you won’t have to wait that long for the next, as another eclipse falls on the northward equinox on March 20th, 2034.
The path of the March 20th eclipse across Europe, including start times for the partial phases, and the path of totality, click to enlarge. For more maps showing the percentage of occlusion, elevation, and more, click here. Credit: Michael Zeiler/GreatAmercianEclipse.com.
The March 20th eclipse also occurs only a day after lunar perigee, which falls on March 19th at 19:39 UT. This is also one of the closer lunar perigees for 2015 at 357,583 kilometres distant, though the maximum duration of totality for this eclipse is only 2 minutes and 47 seconds just northeast of the Faroe Islands.
Views from selected locales in Europe and Africa. Credit: Stellarium.
This eclipse is number 61 of 71 in solar saros series 120, which runs from 933 to 2754 AD. It’s also the second to last total in the series, with the final total solar eclipse for the saros cycle occurring one saros later on March 30th, 2033.
What would it look like to sit at the North Pole and watch a total solar eclipse on the first day of Spring? It would be a remarkable sight, as the disk of the Sun skims just above the horizon for the first time since the September 2014 equinox. Does this eclipse occur at sunrise or sunset as seen from the pole? It would be a rare spectacle indeed!
An equinoctal eclipse as simulated from the North Pole. Credit: Stellarium.
Practicing eclipse safety in Africa. Credit: Michael Zeiler/GreatAmericanEclipse.com
A solar filtered scope ready to go in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: photo by author.
The view of totality and the planets as seen from the Faroe Islands. Credit: Starry Night.
Solar activity is also another big variable. Witnesses to the October 23rd, 2014 partial solar eclipse over the U.S. southwest will recall that we had a massive and very photogenic sunspot turned Earthward at the time. The Sun has been remarkably calm as of late, though active sunspot region 2297 is developing nicely. It will have rotated to the solar limb come eclipse day, and we should have a good grasp on what solar activity during the eclipse will look like come early next week.
And speaking of which: could an auroral display be in the cards for those brief few minutes of totality? It’s not out of the question, assuming the Sun cooperates. Of course, the pearly white corona of the Sun still gives off a considerable amount of light during totality, equal to about half the brightness of a Full Moon. Still, witnessing two of nature’s grandest spectacles — a total solar eclipse and the aurora borealis — simultaneously would be an unforgettable sight, and to our knowledge, has never been documented!
We also put together some simulations of the eclipse as seen from Earth and space:
Note that an area of southern Spain may witness a transit of the International Space Station during the partial phase of the eclipse. This projection is tentative, as the orbit of the ISS evolves over time. Be sure to check CALSky for accurate predictions in the days leading up to the eclipse.
The ISS transits the Sun during the eclipse around 9:05 UT as seen from southern Spain. Credit: Starry Night.
GanymedeExcerpt from latimes.comAstronomers have found the most conclusive evidence yet that a large watery ocean lies beneath the surface of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.Scientists have suspected for decades that a subterranean ocean ...
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| Hubble optical image (left) and VLT infrared image (right) of the circumstellar disk surrounding HD 100546. (ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.) |
Excerpt from news.discovery.com
Mommy, where do baby planets come from? There’s no storks, birds, bees, or romantic dinners for two involved in the answer to that question — regardless of size, planets are all formed in pretty much the same way: through the aggregation of material within the disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star. While how long it actually takes and just what sort of planets are most likely to form where are still topics of discussion among astronomers, the birth process of a planet is fairly well understood.
And this may be the very first image of it actually happening.
Acquired by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the infrared image above (right) shows a portion of the disk of gas and dust around the star HD100546, located 335 light-years away in the constellation Musca. By physically blocking out the light from the star itself by means of an opaque screen — seen along the left side of the image — the light from the protoplanetary disk around HD 100546 can be seen, revealing a large bright clump that’s thought to be a planet in the process of formation.
If it is indeed a baby planet, it’s a big one — as large as, or perhaps even larger than, Jupiter.
A candidate protoplanet found in a disc of gas and dust around young star HD100546 (ESO)
This does raise an interesting question for astronomers because if it is a Jupiter-sized planet, it’s awfully far from its star… at least according to many current models of planetary formation. About 68 times as far from HD100546 as we are from the sun, if this planet were in our solar system it’d be located deep in the Kuiper Belt, twice as far as Pluto. That’s not where one would typically expect to find gas giants, so it’s been hypothesized that this protoplanet might have migrated outwards after initially forming closer to the star… perhaps “kicked out” by gravitational interaction with an even more massive planet.
Alternatively, it may not be a planet at all — the bright blob in the VLT image might be coming from a much more distant source. While extremely unlikely, further research will be needed to rule that possibility out.
If it’s found to be a planet, HD100546 “b” would offer scientists an unprecedented opportunity to observe a planetary formation process in action — and from a relatively close proximity as well.
According to the team’s paper, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, ”What makes HD100546 particularly interesting is that 1. it would be the first imaged protoplanet that is still embedded in the gas and dust disk of its host star; and 2. it would show that planet formation does occur at large orbital separations.”
(Now all we have to do is wait a couple billion years and then show these pictures to HD100546b’s girlfriend. How embarrassing!)
(Reuters) - Astronomers have found a star hurtling through the galaxy faster than any other, the result of being blasted away by the explosion of a massive partner star, researchers said on Thursday.
The star, known as US 708, is traveling at about 746 miles (1,200 km) per second, fast enough to actually leave the Milky Way galaxy in about 25 million years, said astronomer Stephan Geier with Germany-based European Southern Observatory, which operates three telescopes in Chile.
"At that speed you could travel from Earth to the moon in five minutes," noted University of Hawaii astronomer Eugene Magnier.
US 708 is not the first star astronomers have found that is moving fast enough to escape the galaxy, but it is the only one so far that appears to have been slingshot in a supernova explosion.
The 20 other stars discovered so far that are heading out of the galaxy likely got their impetus from coming too close to the supermassive black hole that lives at the center of the Milky Way, scientists report in an article in this week’s edition of the journal Science.
Before it was sent streaming across the galaxy, US 708 was once a cool giant star, but it was stripped of nearly all of its hydrogen by a closely orbiting partner. Scientists suspect it was this feeding that triggered the partner’s detonation.
If confirmed, these types of ejected stars may provide more insight into how supernova explosions occur. Since the explosions give off a fairly standard amount of radiation, scientists can calculate their distances by measuring how bright or dim they appear and determine how fast the universe is expanding.
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Astronomers have discovered a dust-filled ancient galaxy from the very early universe, which debunks earlier theories that earliest galaxies had no dust but gas. Astronomers from the University of Copenhagen used the Very Large Telescope’s X-shooter instrument along with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and discovered a galaxy, named Galaxy A1689-zD1, which is an ancient galaxy and far from Earth.
The astronomers stated that the galaxy which
they were surprised to discover is far more evolved system than expected. It had a fraction of dust similar to a very mature galaxy, such as the Milky Way. Such dust is vital to life, because it helps form planets, complex molecules and normal stars.
According to the astronomers A1689-zD1 is only observable by virtue of its brightness being amplified more than nine times by a gravitational lens in the form of the spectacular galaxy cluster. Without the gravitational boost, the glow from this very faint galaxy would have been too weak to detect.
The astronomers stated that they are viewing A1689-zD1 when the Universe was only about 700 million years old, which is 5% of its present age. According to them, it is a relatively modest system — much less massive and luminous than many other objects that have been studied before at this stage in the early universe and hence a more typical example of a galaxy at that time.
A1689-zD1 is being observed as it was during the period of reionization, when the earliest stars brought with them a cosmic dawn, illuminating for the first time an immense and transparent universe and ending the extended stagnation of the Dark Ages. Expected to look like a newly formed system, the galaxy surprised the observers with its rich chemical complexity and abundance of interstellar dust.
Dust plays an extremely important role in the universe – both in the formation of planets and new stars.
Darach Watson, Associate Professor at Dark Cosmology Centre, University of Copenhagen, and the lead author of the study, said, “After confirming the galaxy’s distance using the VLT we realized it had previously been observed with ALMA. We didn’t expect to find much, but I can tell you we were all quite excited when we realized that not only had ALMA observed it, but that there was a clear detection. One of the main goals of the ALMA Observatory was to find galaxies in the early Universe from their cold gas and dust emissions — and here we had it!”
The researchers hope that future observations of a large number of distant galaxies could help unravel how frequently such evolved galaxies occur in this very early epoch of the history of the universe.
Excerpt from csmonitor.com
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found the first evidence of false memories in non-human animals.
It has long been known that humans – even those of us who aren't famous news anchors – tend to recall events that did not actually occur. The same is likely true for mice: In 2013, scientists at MIT induced false memories of trauma in mice, and the following year, they used light to manipulate mice brains to turn painful memories into pleasant ones.
Now, researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that insects, too, can create false memories. Using a classic Pavlovian experiment, co-authors Kathryn Hunt and Lars Chittka determined that bumblebees sometimes combine the details of past memories to form new ones. Their findings were published today in Current Biology.
“I suspect the phenomenon may be widespread in the animal kingdom," Dr. Chittka said in a written statement to the Monitor.
First, Chittka and Dr. Hunt trained their buzzing subjects to expect a reward if they visited two artificial flowers – one solid yellow, the other with black-and-white rings. The order didn’t matter, so long as the bee visited both flowers. In later tests, they would present a choice of the original two flower types, plus one new one. The third type was a combination of the first two, featuring yellow-and-white rings. At first, the bees consistently selected the original two flowers, the ones that offered a reward.
But a good night’s sleep seemed to change all that. One to three days after training, the bees became confused and started incorrectly choosing the yellow-and-white flower (up to fifty percent of the time). They seemed to associate that pattern with a reward, despite having never actually seen it before. In other words, the bumblebees combined the memories of two previous stimuli to generate a new, false memory.
“Bees might, on occasion, form merged memories of flower patterns visited in the past,” Chittka said. “Should a bee unexpectedly encounter real flowers that match these false memories, they might experience a kind of deja-vu and visit these flowers expecting a rich reward.”
Bees have a rather limited brain capacity, Chittka says, so it’s probably useful for them to “economize” by storing generalized memories instead of minute details.
“In bees, for example, the ability to learn more than one flower type is certainly useful,” Chittka said, “as is the ability to extract commonalities of multiple flower patterns. But this very ability might come at the cost of bees merging memories from multiple sequential experiences.”
Chittka has studied memory in bumblebees for two decades. Bees can be raised and kept in a lab setting, so they make excellent long-term test subjects.
“They are [also] exceptionally clever animals that can memorize the colors, patterns, and scents of multiple flower species – as well as navigate efficiently over long distances,” Chittka said.
In past studies, it was assumed that animals that failed to perform learned tasks had either forgotten them or hadn’t really learned them in the first place. Chittka’s research seems to show that animal memory mechanisms are much more elaborate – at least when it comes to bumblebees.
“I think we need to move beyond understanding animal memory as either storing or not storing stimuli or episodes,” Chittka said. “The contents of memory are dynamic. It is clear from studies on human memory that they do not just fade over time, but can also change and integrate with other memories to form new information. The same is likely to be the case in many animals.”
Chittka hopes this study will lead to a greater biological understanding of false memories – in animals and humans alike. He says that false memories aren’t really a “bug in the system,” but a side effect of complex brains that strive to learn the big picture and to prepare for new experiences.
“Errors in human memory range from misremembering minor details of events to generating illusory memories of entire episodes,” Chittka said. “These inaccuracies have wide-ranging implications in crime witness accounts and in the courtroom, but I believe that – like the quirks of information processing that occur in well known optical illusions – they really are the byproduct of otherwise adaptive processes.”
“The ability to memorize the overarching principles of a number of different events might help us respond in previously un-encountered situations,” Chittka added. “But these abilities might come at the expense of remembering every detail correctly.”
So, if generating false memories goes hand in hand with having a nervous system, does all this leave Brian Williams off the hook?
“It is possible that he conflated the memories,” Chittka said, “depending on his individual vulnerability to witnessing a traumatic event, plus a possible susceptibility to false memories – there is substantial inter-person variation with respect to this. It is equally possible that he was just ‘showing off’ when reporting the incident, and is now resorting to a simple lie to try to escape embarrassment. That is impossible for me to diagnose.”
But if Mr. Williams genuinely did misremember his would-be brush with death, Chittka says he shouldn’t be vilified.
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| The God Particle, which is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe, was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider. In this image two high-energy photons collide. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision, which helped lead to the discovery of the God particle. |
Excerpt from dailymail.co.uk
- God Particle is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe
- Particle was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider in Geneva
- uperconductor experiment suggests the particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider
- LHC is due to come back online next month after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy
Scientists have discovered a simulated version of the elusive 'God particle' using superconductors.
The God Particle, which is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe, was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider.
The superconductor experiment suggests that the Higgs particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider.
The results could help scientists better understand how this mysterious particle – also known as the Higgs boson – behaves in different conditions.
'Just as the Cern experiments revealed the existence of the Higgs boson in a high-energy accelerator environment, we have now revealed a Higgs boson analogue in superconductors,' said researcher Aviad Frydman from Bar-Ilan University.
Superconductors are a type of metal that, when cooled to low temperatures, allow electrons to pass through freely.
'The Higgs mode was never actually observed in superconductors because of technical difficulties - difficulties that we've managed to overcome,' Professor Frydman said.
The superconductor experiment suggests that the Higgs particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider (pictured)
WHAT IS THE GOD PARTICLE?
The 'God Particle', also known as the Higgs boson, was a missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works.
Scientists believe that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field, called the Higgs field, formed.
This has been described as a kind of 'cosmic treacle' across the universe.
As particles passed through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape and allowing them to form the atoms that make up you, everything around you and everything in the universe.
This was the theory proposed in 1964 by former grammar school boy Professor Higgs that has now been confirmed.
Without the Higgs field particles would simply whizz around space in the same way as light does.
A boson is a type of sub-atomic particle. Every energy field has a specific particle that governs its interaction with what's around it.
To try to pin it down, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva smashed together beams of protons – the 'hearts of atoms' – at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
Although they would rapidly decay, they should have left a recognisable footprint. This footprint was found in 2012.
The main difficulty was that the superconducting material would decay into something known as particle-hole pairs.
Large amounts of energy – which are usually needed to excite the Higgs mode - tend to break apart the electron pairs that act as the material's charge.
Professor Frydman and his colleagues solved this problem by using ultra-thin superconducting films of Niobium Nitrite (NbN) and Indium Oxide (InO) as something known as the 'superconductor-insulator critical point.'
This is a state in which recent theory predicted the decay of the Higgs would no longer occur.
In this way, they could still excite a Higgs mode even at relatively low energies.
'The parallel phenomenon in superconductors occurs on a different energy scale entirely - just one-thousandth of a single electronvolt,' Professor Frydman added.
'What's exciting is to see how, even in these highly disparate systems, the same fundamental physics is at work.'
The different approach help solve one of the longstanding mysteries of fundamental physics.
The discovery of the Higgs boson verified the Standard Model, which predicted that particles gain mass by passing through a field that slows down their movement through the vacuum of space.
To try to pin it down, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva smashed together beams of protons – the 'hearts of atoms' – at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
Although they would rapidly decay, the also left a recognisable footprint.
Professor Higgs, 83, has been waiting since 1964 for science to catch up with his ideas about the Higgs boson
According to Professor Frydman, observation of the Higgs mechanism in superconductors is significant because it reveals how a single type of physical process behaves under different energy conditions.
'Exciting the Higgs mode in a particle accelerator requires enormous energy levels - measured in giga-electronvolts, or 109 eV,' Professor Frydman says.
'The parallel phenomenon in superconductors occurs on a different energy scale entirely - just one-thousandth of a single electronvolt.
'What's exciting is to see how, even in these highly disparate systems, the same fundamental physics is at work.'
The LHC is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy.
'With this new energy level, the (collider) will open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries,' CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in a statement.
'I'm looking forward to seeing what nature has in store for us.'
Cern's collider is buried in a 27-km (17-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains.
The LHC in Geneva will come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy
Excerpt from sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER (CBS SF) — Earth and the Sun may be 93 million miles apart, but cosmic explosions between the two celestial spheres occur often and with devastating effects–unleashing waves of X-ray radiation and disrupting GPS communications, and it is with this danger in mind that next month, NASA will launch four “Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission” satellites, studying these “magnetic reconnections” and better predicting the consequences of these cosmic phenomena.
NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View uses supercomputers to create theoretical models of the magnetic fields on the sun, but the new mission will be able to actually observe what is happening, from a lofty vantage point `far above the Earth’s pole.
The mysterious magnetic reconnections actually transfer energy and physical particles from the Sun to Earth. The forces at work can accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, with devastating consequences.
In October 2003, a massive release of X-ray radiation hit Earth in what became known as the Halloween Storms. The energy triggered the first ever radiation warning to aircraft, alerting pilots that high altitude flights could expose passengers and crew to unhealthy levels of radiation.
Simultaneously, the GPS location system was impacted. Back then, this wasn’t as great a concern for the general public. It mainly affected the military, pilots, and sea captains, but were the same event to occur today, it may be much more noticeable with today’s smartphone world where everything we do is geo-tagged and coordinated using the GPS signals. In the future, it could evven impact autonomous self-driving vehicles and airborne drones that rely on GPS.
Karen C. Fox from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland writes, “Understanding vast systems in space requires understanding what’s happening on widely different scales. Giant events can turn out to have tiny drivers — take, for example, what rocked near-Earth space in October 2003.”
The Halloween geomagnetic storms had a beautiful side too. The Northern Lights were visible clear down to Southern California, and even Texas.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission will be the first ever mission dedicated to studying this universal process by orbiting Earth, and passing directly through nearby magnetic reconnection regions.
“Armed with this data, scientists will have their first chance to watch magnetic reconnection from the inside, right as it’s occurring. By focusing on the small-scale process, scientists open the door to understanding what happens on larger scales throughout the universe,” wrote Fox.
The Icarus Interstellar 'Firefly' starship concept could use novel nuclear fusion techniques to power its way to Alpha Centauri within 100 years.Adrian MannExcerpt from news.discovery.com As part of Icarus Interstellar's continuing series ...
Excerpt from thespacereporter.com
Astronomers are baffled by images of plumes rising from Mars’ atmosphere in images taken by amateur astronomers in March and April 2012.
The plumes were present for about 10 days though their shapes and sizes changed rapidly during that time, from finger-like tendrils to spherical blobs.
Researchers have proposed several possible explanations for the plumes, which are discussed in an article just published in the journal Nature.
Each of the theories being considered poses problems. One theory, for instaqnce, proposes the plumes are caused by the same magnetic influence that causes the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, on Earth. The movement of electrically charged particles from the Sun, driven by the solar wind towards Earth’s poles, results in these particles colliding with molecules of gas. These collisions produce the strange lights known as aurorae.
In the study, the researchers admit, “Mars aurorae have been observed near where the plume occurs, a region with a large anomaly in the crustal magnetic field that can drive the precipitation of solar wind particles into the atmosphere.”
They move on to consider another option, namely that the plumes might be clouds high in the Martian atmosphere.
A highly reflective cloud of either water ice, carbon dioxide ice, or dust particles could explain the plumes. But according to computer models, the presence of these clouds “would require exceptional deviations from standard atmospheric circulation models to explain cloud formations at such high altitudes,” explained the paper’s lead author, Agustin Sanchez-Lavega of the Universidad del Pais Vasco in Spain.
The plumes were seen approximately 120 miles (200 km) from Mars’ surface, which is problematic because the highest Martian clouds are seen is 60 miles (100 km) above the planet’s surface. The only way water can condense so far up is if the temperature in that part of Mars’ atmosphere drops 370 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 degrees Kelvin, below its norm.
Condensation of carbon dioxide would require twice this temperature drop.
A third theory posits the flumes are caused by atmospheric dust. A wind powerful enough to transport dust 111 miles (180 km) above Mars’ surface could occur only around noon, when the Sun’s heat would be strong enough to create such wind currents.
However, the plumes were seen not at noon but in the mornings along the terminator that separates the planet’s day and night sides.
Recently, data from the Hubble Space Telescope was found showing the plumes back in 1997.
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