Stories tagged The Universe
Sunspot activity reaches record low
in Earth and Space Science, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and The Universe
Where, oh where, have my sunspots gone?: Sunspot activity tied a record low of zero in August, 2008.
Courtesy NASA
For the first time in almost a century, the Sun has a spotless record. There were no observed sunspots in August. None. Zero. Zip. Can't get a record any lower than that. That's the first time this has happened since 1913.
That's before commercial radio. Before talking movies. Before World War I. Why, it's almost as long as since the last time the Cubs won the World Series.
Now, that's a long time!
Plus, as we've discussed before, the Sun has been unusually quiet of late. Sunspots generally go through an 11-year cycle, and we're a couple years late for the next rise in activity.
But, you are no doubt wondering, what does this mean to me, the Average Joe? (Assuming your name is indeed "Average Joe," which would be pretty remarkable and, ironically, not average.) Well, sunspots seem to be tied to weather. Three times, since astronomers began observing suspots, has the Sun fallen silent, and each time coincides with significant drops in global temperatures. One such dip, from roughly 1600 to 1750, was so severe it is known as "The Little Ice Age."
Are we heading into another glacial period? Much too soon to tell. But if you start feeling chilly, keep your eye on the Sun. Astronomers will be doing the same.
(NOTE FOR THE METAPHORCALLY-IMPAIRED: That was meant figuratively. Do not look directly at the Sun with your naked eye. You'll burn out your retina.)
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Black hole in action: Artist's rendition of a distant super-massive black hole warping space while busy eating up stellar material.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-CaltechScientists now have a better idea why stars can still form out of giant molecular clouds being ripped apart by the gravitational pull of a nearby massive black hole.
The observed existence of huge stars in eccentric orbits around the super-massive black hole believed to be located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy has puzzled scientists. How can stars form in such extreme environments? Gravitational forces would be tremendous near the black hole, tearing apart everything in the immediate region.
The computer simulations, done by researchers from St Andrews University in the UK, show how a molecular cloud – a normal stellar nursery – is torn apart by the black hole’s immense gravitation pull. Although the powerful gravity-well eats a huge portion of the gas cloud, the remaining gases are still able to accrete more material and coalesce into stars.
This is possible because as a molecular cloud enters the black hole’s gravitational field it begins to form into a spiraling elliptical disk. The disk’s matter nearest the black hole is sucked into the gravitational vortex, while energy is transferred to the remaining outer material. This transferred energy allows the remnants to retain the eccentric orbital path as they form into huge stars many times the mass of the Sun.
"These simulations show that young stars can form in the neighborhood of super-massive black holes as long as there is a reasonable supply of massive clouds of gas from further out in the galaxy," said co-author Ian Bonnell. The study’s results appear in the current issue of Science.
The stars live fairly short lives - perhaps only about 10 million years. But their existence could help explain some of the mysteries surrounding black holes in galaxies.
LINKS
Story on BBC website
Science magazine abstract
More on super-massive black holes
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo 14 astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the Moon has come out publicly to say extraterrestrial beings exist and have visited the Earth. During an interview on a British radio program last week Mitchell confirmed knowledge of NASA and government cover-ups of alien visitations to our planet including the famous incident near Roswell, New Mexico where it has long been rumored (but never confirmed) that a spaceship with alien occupants had crashed in 1947.
At the moment it’s all hearsay, and skeptics want to see some real evidence, but you have to admit Mitchell adds some credibility to the subject. The fact that all this has come out at the same time the new X-Files movie is opening could just be a coincidence or just another piece of the conspiracy. You can decide for yourself.
LINKS
CNN report
New Zealand television report
Letterman's Top Ten Reasons for NASA cover-up
KARE-TV report
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
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
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