What moon am I?: Ancient cultures had special names for each full month's full moon. Tonight's full moon is a "Buck Moon." Can you figure out what moon this one is?
Courtesy Luc ViatourTonight there will be a full moon. It happens every 29.5 days, no big deal right?
But did you know each full moon through the cycle of a calendar year has a special name? Tonight’s full moon, the one for July, is called a “Buck Moon,” named after a male deer.
The special monthly names for the full moons go back to ancient cultures, who tied the full moons to hunting, weather, planting and harvesting cycles of the year. Full details can be found here.
FYI: Here is a rundown of the various names for each month’s full moon:
January – Wolf Moon
February – Snow Moon
March – Worm Moon
April – Pink Moon
May – Flower Moon
June – Strawberry Moon
July – Buck Moon
August – Sturgeon Moon
September – Harvest Moon
October – Hunter's Moon
November – Beaver Moon
December – Cold Moon
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Spiral galaxy M81: The black hole in the center of this galaxy is 70 million times as massive as the Sun, but it behaves exactly the same as much, much smaller black holes.
Courtesy X-ray: NASA/CXC/Wisconsin/D.Pooley & CfA/A.Zezas; Optical: NASA/ESA/CfA/A.Zezas; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J.Huchra et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA
This may fall under the heading of small comfort, but a new study has shown that all black holes, big or small, suck in matter in the same way. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, astronomers studied the different types of light (X-ray, radio and visible) emanating from the region around a massive black hole in the center of galaxy M81. They found that this light was the same as light coming from smaller black holes, even though this one is some 10 million times bigger, and is sucking in matter from a different source. This confirms a part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which predicted that black holes would be fairly simple objects, not subject to a lot of variation. Which doesn’t really help much if you find yourself getting sucked in, but at least you know it’s nothing personal.
You can learn more about Chandra and X-ray astronomy in our Be an Astronomer! web exhibit. And you can ask questions of Megan Donahue, a scientist who work with the Chandra observatory.
Good lookin', bad soundin': Radiowaves that get caught up in the Northern Lights are creating some annoying noises that zap out into space.
Courtesy NASANo wonder aliens want to attack the Earth with such regularity in the movies. From out in space, we sound pretty annoying, like that renter in the apartment above you who insists on playing Yoko Ono records at 2:30 in the morning.
You laugh, but new recordings from space show that Earth, our home, makes an array of nasty sounds that ring out across the universe.
Scientists have actually known about this phenomenon since the 1970s. But today we have some audio evidence of this annoying noise. So what’s happening?
There’s a bunch of radiation created high above our planet. Solar winds blow it into Earth’s magnetic field and then things start to get loud. Basically, this radiation gets sucked into the same conditions that cause the Northern Lights. While they look great, they sound horrible – sorta like Brittney Spears.
Earth’s ionosphere keeps the radio waves created in this action from coming down toward us, which is a good thing. That’s because they’re about 10,000 times stronger than any radio signals we have on our planet.
Satellites from the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, however, have now detected strong beams of these annoying radio waves out in space.
Click here to hear a sample of what this space noise sounds like. Personally, I think I’ve experienced this sound, much quieter, after eating a bad burrito.
The Sun in more active times: Sunspot activity, which is linked to weather and other phenomena on Earth, peaked in 2001. But for the last two years there’s been almost nothing.
Courtesy NASA
Occasionally, intense magnetic activity in the Sun creates sunspots, dark regions on the surface of the Sun. Sunspot activity rises and falls roughly every 11 years – the last maximum was in 2001, and activity slowly fell off to zero by 2006.
And since then…almost nothing. Scientists had expected sunspot activity to start increasing by now, but it hasn’t. No one knows why, or when the cycle will pick up again.
Why is this important?
Sunspots, created by intense magnetic activity, are associated with solar flares, enormous streams of high-energy particles sent shooting out into the Solar System. These play havoc with satellites and other electronic communication. So, no sunspots in this case would be a good thing.
Solar flares also create the beautiful northern and southern lights. In this case, no sunspots is a bad thing.
Perhaps most important, sunspots seem to be an indicator of solar activity. And low activity can mean lower temperatures here on Earth. The Sun once went 50 years without producing any spots – from 1650 to 1700 – and these years were some of the coldest in recorded history. Today they are known as the little Ice Age.
Are we on the brink of a new Ice Age? It’s wayyyy to early to tell. But scientists are keeping an eye on the Sun, to see if it reveals any clues.
Not only is today the birthday of the UFO, but apparently June 24th is infamous for all sorts of crazy carp, from (one of) the discovery of North America, to Angelic visions and rains of blood and goo, to a handful of Bigfoot sightings. And a bunch of other stuff.
It looks like ice on Mars: NASA scientists think the bright chunks must be ice.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M UniversityA few days ago on Mars, the robotic scoop on NASA’s Phoenix Lander uncovered some white, dice-sized chunks of material in a trench it was digging. Today, some of those same bright chunks are nowhere to be seen leading NASA scientists to think they were ice that has since evaporated.
"These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice,” said Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."
Check out the official ASU Phoenix site for some cool (pun intended) photos and more information about the mission.
LINKS
More info on NASA site
A different crop circle: This one was created by confused cattle. Amazing.
Courtesy Alan L. BaughmanWant to blow some minds, Buzzketeers? You’ve got a couple of options.
The first and most obvious route to some serious brain-blasting is to become a motorcycle stunt jumper. I don’t care if you aren’t into engines and broken bones; if you see a man in a cape riding a dirtbike fly over 30 flaming school buses, your brain will ooze out your ear holes (in the most awesome way).
The other option is to learn some math. It doesn’t have to be too much math—a lot of people couldn’t tell trig if it bit them in the calc, and so a little math can go a long way. And if you can combine that math with another skill…minds will be blown.
Take, for example, the latest, greatest crop circle. Now, we all know that crop circles are made by aliens, right? Duh. It’s a case of Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the best. So we have unusual patterns battered into fields of crops. What’s the explanation with the fewest assumptions? That beings we have never encountered traveled from a place we know nothing about, and use their very likely highly advanced minds and inter-stellar travel technology to draw circles and things in our food for reasons we can’t fathom.
For the sake of argument and education, however, let’s pretend that crop circles have a much more complex origin—that they come from dudes (and dudettes, undoubtedly) with an artistic bent, and too much time on their hands.
So, back to this particularly mind blowing circle. It appeared on a field near Barbury Castle (which, I’m afraid, isn’t much of a castle), and consists of a ten layered, jagged-looking spiral, with a few circles and dots and things. It looks pretty cool—check out the photograph—but it means nothing to me. Then again, I majored in the liberal arts. When the circle was examined by an astrophysicist (or a “professional cleverboots,” as they are sometimes known), however, something remarkable jumped out of the shape: it’s a mathematical code.
And what secret equation or figure is hidden in this alien thought bubble?
Pi.
“The code is based on 10 angular segments with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment,” says the astrophysicist on-call. “Starting at the centre and counting the number of one-tenth segments in each section contained by the change in radius clearly shows the values of the first 10 digits in the value of pi (3.141592654). The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point.”
How about that? I wouldn’t have noticed, but now that I’ve been told, my mind is hissing and steaming out of my tear ducts. Or are those just tears of happiness?
Very clever, crop circle-person, very clever. Consider all minds blown. And you couldn’t have done it without your old pals math and geometry.
Check out this page for ten of the most impressive crop circles to be seen on Google Earth (the new one isn’t on there yet
Where are you going?: I'm going home.
Courtesy MilaNew tests performed on a meteorite found in Australia suggest that life on earth could have had its start in space; it’s possible that the first components of self-replicating genetic material came from outer space.
This particular meteorite only struck Earth about 40 years ago, but new studies confirm that the molecules uracil and xanthine (which are found in our RNA) were present in the meteoritic fragments before human contamination.
Uracil and xanthine are “nucleobases,” and play an important role in the replication of DNA. Some have argued that these molecules could have originally formed on Earth, but these researchers claim that the atmospheric conditions on the planet at the time the first organic molecules are thought to have appeared would have prohibited a terrestrial origin. Going even further, they state that it’s possible—assuming that there are all these vital molecules floating out there on meteors—that life, or at least the key components for life (a big difference I suppose), could be widespread in the universe.
I prefer extraterrestrial life delivery by spaceship, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. Wild.
Junk food or junk science?: Six hours worth of advertising for Doritos chips have been beamed out in to space as a signal to other life forms that there's crispy, tasty, good times available on Earth.
Courtesy ீ ๑ AdamWe can’t escape advertising, can we? It’s there along the roadside, imbedded on the results of our web search and even on the bathroom stall wall. And now it’s off into space.
Six-straight hours of Doritos advertising have been beamed out into space from a European space station located on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle. The message is directed at the Ursa Major constellation, which is just 42 light years from Earth. That location was targeted as astronomers figure it has the best chances of hosting a planet that can support life forms, and potential Doritos eaters.
And while the effects of advertising are always hard to measure, these space scientists aren’t expecting the message to have a huge impact on Doritos sales. The actual advertisement has been broken down into a MPEG file that is just a series of “0s” and “1s”. The hope is that any one receiving the message will understand it as a message coming across with some intelligence and to perk the receiver’s curiosity in wanting to see where it came from.
But I ask you, is it really intelligent to try to entice an alien to come 42 light years to Earth in the hope of getting some Doritos? After all, the package expiration date doesn’t come close to lasting that long.
Actually, Doritos made a donation to the space station in exchange for having its advertisement sent into space. But I ask you, what kind of message would you send out into space to encourage intelligent life to come investigate Earth?
This is how trees grow on our planet: Also, on our planet, we hold cameras upside-down.
Courtesy JaboneyThe natural order of things has been a little bonkers this last week. Things all over the world are ending up where they don’t belong.
Snake on baby. Snakes don’t belong on babies. If anything, babies belong inside snakes.
Bomb in chicken. What on earth is a bomb doing in a chicken? I doubt that the chicken put it there.
Nail in head. The doctor removed it with a claw hammer. Seriously.
What good is science in a world like this? Educated guesses cannot be made, nothing is repeatable.
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