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"Last night's sunset was an amazing sight," reports Pete Lawrence from West Beach in Selsey, UK. "As the sun approached the horizon, the lower half of the solar disk extended downwards to touch an image of itself rising out of the waves." He took this picture of the phenomenon:
Jules Verne famously likened this kind of sunset to an Etruscan Vase. Others call it an "Omega sunset" because it resembles the Greek letter. Either way, it is caused by warm air overlying the sea surface, which refracts the rays of the setting sun to produce a mirage, as shown.
The biggest sunspots of the year are putting on a show for amateur astronomers. From his backyard observatory in Brazil, Rogerio Marcon photographed a maelstrom of hot gas swirling around the dark cores of AR1147-1149 on Jan. 22nd:
"I took the picture using a small refracting telescope and an H-alpha filter tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen," explains Marcon.
Sunspot 1149 (the southern half of the complex) has a tangled magnetic field that harbors energy for strong flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 10% chance of M-class eruptions during the next 24 hours. Readers with solar telescopes should continue to monitor the region for explosive developments.
© Rogerio Marcon
Sunspot 1149 (the southern half of the complex) has a tangled magnetic field that harbors energy for strong flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 10% chance of M-class eruptions during the next 24 hours. Readers with solar telescopes should continue to monitor the region for explosive developments.
© Courtesy of University of CalgaryDr. Stephen Grasby at Buchanan Lake, Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, where recent discovery of coal ash layers provide the first direct evidence of significant coal fires at the Latest Permian Extinction.
About 250 million years about 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land. Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact on global oceans.
"This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction," says Dr. Steve Grasby, adjunct professor in the University of Calgary's Department of Geoscience and research scientist at Natural Resources Canada.
Grasby and colleagues discovered layers of coal ash in rocks from the extinction boundary in Canada's High Arctic that give the first direct proof to support this and have published their findings in Nature Geoscience.
Unlike end of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, where there is widespread belief that the impact of a meteorite was at least the partial cause, it is unclear what caused the late Permian extinction. Previous researchers have suggested massive volcanic eruptions through coal beds in Siberia would generate significant greenhouse gases causing run away global warming.
The insect world apparently a better grasp of communal decision making than homo sapiens
© NewscomThis photomicrograph of a slime mold shows an immature sorocarp (fruiting body), magnified 30x.
When striking out for new territory, one species of single-celled amoeba runs through a checklist: Secrete a chemical signal to attract other amoebas, mass together into a multicellular "slug," and prepare to slither off to new pastures. Oh, and don't forget to pack a lunch.
A new study finds that some strains of this social amoeba, called Dictyostelium discoideum, pack bacteria snacks with them before they travel. Once the amoebae reach their destination, they seed the area with the bacteria, ensuring any amoeba offspring will have plenty to eat.
Though the amoebae don't plow, hoe, or otherwise tend their bacterial crop, the behavior is a form of primitive farming, Rice University researchers reported Jan. 20 in the journal Nature.
© Agence France-PresseA NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) image of the Sun. Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest
But according to scientists, it's all nonsense.
"Betelgeuse is losing mass, and it will turn into a supernova soon, but that 'soon' means on an astronomical time scale: It's as likely to happen a million years from now as it is tomorrow," University of Illinois astronomer Jim Kaler told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com.
No one knows quite when Betelgeuse, which is about 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun, will explode. But when it does detonate, the star, which forms the constellation Orion's right shoulder, won't look like a second sun in our sky, Kaler said.
"The supernova would hit somewhere around the brightness of a crescent moon," said Kaler, who has focused his research on dying stars since the 1950s. "It would definitely be visible in full daylight, and it would cast shadows. It might scare the crap out of people to be honest, but it would be nowhere near as bright as the sun."
© Unknown
Planetary magnetic fields are created by massive molten metal currents within the planet's core. A flowing current creates a magnetic field, even when the current is massive volumes of charged liquid metal moving under the influence of temperature gradients (convection) - in fact, especially then. But magnetic analysis of Martian sites by Berkeley researchers show that the red planet's protective field was switched off half a billion years ago, and now some scientists say they know why.
All was pure speculation until data came back from the Mars Global Surveyor and other recent spacecraft. In 2009, planetary scientists Robert Lillis and Michael Manga, both of the University of California, Berkeley, linked age estimates of impact basins with magnetic field strength to show that the previously established date of heavy bombardment, about 3.9 billion years ago, corresponds to the death of Mars's dynamo.
A rash of small spots is rapidly emerging near the main core of sunspot group 1147, and this could herald an increase in solar activity.
The reason this rash is interesting has to do with its magnetic characteristics. It is an evolving jumble of magnetic polarities, with positive (+) pressing against negative (-) in many places. These are favorable condition for magnetic reconnection and solar flares. researchers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor the region for further developments.
© SDO
The Cosmic Egg: diagram of the solar system
Physicist and the former ISRO chairman, U.R. Rao, has calculated that cosmic rays - which, unlike carbon emissions, cannot be controlled by human activity - have a much larger impact on climate change than The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims.
In fact, the contribution of decreasing cosmic ray activity to climate change is almost 40 per cent, argues Dr. Rao in a paper which has been accepted for publication in Current Science, the preeminent Indian science journal. The IPCC model, on the other hand, says that the contribution of carbon emissions is over 90 per cent.
© Anthony Galvan III
The largest rocket ever launched from the West Coast blasted off Thursday with a classified defense satellite on board.
The 235-foot-tall, 53-foot wide - about 1 and 1/2 times the size of the Statue of Liberty - Delta IV Heavy Launch Vehicle lifted off at 1:10 p.m. carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.
The booster rose into the sky over California's central coast and arced over the Pacific Ocean, a spectacle visible over a wide area.
Initial reports from launch control indicated the flight was going well.
"It's pretty amazing, you hear the ground move, it's pretty fun to see," said Steve Mercieca of Torrance. "And then to see the rockets go up, it's cool to see up close with your own eyes as opposed to on TV."
The launch was pushed back two minutes to avoid an object in space that could have been in the path of the rocket, said Michael J. Rein, spokesman for United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of rocket builders Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.
