Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Astronomer finds new moon orbiting Neptune

An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said on Monday.

Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune.
Image
© Reuters/NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI Institute/Handout via Reuters

The location of a newly discovered moon, designated S/2004 N 1, orbiting Neptune, is seen in this composite Hubble Space Telescope handout image taken in August 2009.
Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky.

"We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further," Showalter told Reuters.

"I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said.

Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon.

Telescope

Amateur astronomer discovers comet C/2013 N4 (Borisov) during a star party

Ukrainian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered a brand new comet on July 8 near the bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga. The comet was confirmed and officially christened C/2013 N4 (Borisov) on July 13. At the time of discovery, Borisov was attending the Russian-Ukrainian "Southern Night" star party in Crimea, Ukraine. He nabbed the comet - his first - using an 8-inch (20-cm) f/1.5 wide field telescope of his own design equipped with a CCD camera.
Image
© Oleg BruzgalovGennady Borisov, who lives in Naunchniy in Crimea, Ukraine, discovered the comet C/2013 N4 on July 8 during a star party. Borisov, 51, is a professional optician. He’s shown here with his two telescopes.
The new comet is on the faint side, appearing as a small, fuzzy patch of 13th magnitude with a brighter center. To see it you'll need at least a 10-inch (25-cm) telescope and the fortitude to rise in the wee hours before dawn. The reason for the early hour is Borisov's location in Auriga, a constellation that doesn't clear the horizon until shortly before the start of morning twilight. Faintness and low altitude will combine to make Comet Borisov an enticing if challenging object for amateur astronomers.

Animation of Comet Borisov compiled from multiple images

C/2013 N4 is currently traveling through Auriga not far from the easy-to-spot naked eye star Beta and will slowly brighten as it approaches perihelion - closest point to the sun - on August 20 at a distance of 113.5 million miles (182.7 million km). Unfortunately its elongation or separation from the sun will be slowly shrinking in the coming weeks, causing the comet to drop lower in the sky as it approaches perihelion. Our fuzzy visitor misses Earth by a comfortable 192.5 million miles (310 million km) on August 11. It's likely Comet Borisov won't get much brighter than 12th magnitude. Astronomers are still working out the details of its orbit, so it's possible brightness predictions could change in the near future.

Telescope

Electric Universe: Plasma storms

Jupiter
© NASA/Cassini Mission600 kilometer per hour winds on Jupiter.
Why do planets farthest from the Sun have the fastest winds?

Earth's average wind speed is approximately 56 kilometers per hour, with a maximum of 372 kilometer per hour gust recorded on Mount Washington, New Hampshire in 1934. Some isolated wind phenomena, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, can sustain average velocities of 480 and 320 kilometers per hour for short periods. The maximum 24 hour speed record of 205 kilometers per hour from 1934 still remains, however.

Tornadoes continue to be a mystery to consensus science, as well as Electric Universe advocates, although it seems that they are more like rotating electric discharges than anything else. The electric charges in a tornado are whirling at many meters per second, so they probably form an electromagnetic field called a "charge sheath vortex."

It is commonly believed that weather is driven on Earth primarily by the Sun's thermal influence on the atmosphere. As we rotate beneath our primary, gases and dust absorb solar radiation at varying rates and in varying degrees. When any particular region heats up, the air expands and loses density, creating a relative low pressure area. Cooler air, being denser, will naturally flow into the bottom of the warm, low pressure region, causing an upwardly rotating convection cell to form.

Most weather systems on Earth are thought to be based on that simple kinetic explanation: winds blow when the cooler, denser air flows into the warmer, buoyant air.

The kinetic model of weather does not take into account the fact that planets much farther out in the Solar System have sustained winds that make those on our planet seem like gentle breezes. The average wind speeds on the gas giant planets are fantastic.

Jupiter's winds clock at 635 kilometers per hour around the Great Red Spot; Saturn's average wind speed is up to 1800 kilometers per hour; Uranus 900 kilometers per hour; and Neptune comes in at 1138 kilometers per hour. On Neptune the winds are blowing through an atmosphere that measures minus 220 degrees Celsius. Why is it that the most remote planets, receiving small fractions of the solar energy bathing Earth, are able to convert that small fraction into much larger effects?

Pi

Imaging electron pairing in a simple magnetic superconductor

heavy fermion superconductor
© Nature Physics jAnticipated electronic structure of a heavy fermion superconductor. a, Schematic representation of the crystal unit cell of CeCoIn5. b, Schematic of the typical evolution of the k-space electronic structure observed as hybridization splits the light band into two heavy bands, and the consequential effects on the density of statesN(E).
In the search for understanding how some magnetic materials can be transformed to carry electric current with no energy loss, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have made an important advance: Using an experimental technique they developed to measure the energy required for electrons to pair up and how that energy varies with direction, they've identified the factors needed for magnetically mediated superconductivity-as well as those that aren't.

"Our measurements distinguish energy levels as small as one ten-thousandth the energy of a single photon of light-an unprecedented level of precision for electronic matter visualization," said Séamus Davis, Senior Physicist at Brookhaven the J.G. White Distinguished Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell, who led the research described in Nature Physics. "This precision was essential to writing down the mathematical equations of a theory that should help us discover the mechanism of magnetic superconductivity, and make it possible to search for or design materials for zero-loss energy applications."

The material Davis and his collaborators studied was discovered in part by Brookhaven physicist Cedomir Petrovic ten years ago, when he was a graduate student working at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It's a compound of cerium, cobalt, and indium that many believe may be the simplest form of an unconventional superconductor-one that doesn't rely on vibrations of its crystal lattice to pair up current-carrying electrons. Unlike conventional superconductors employing that mechanism, which must be chilled to near absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) to operate, many unconventional superconductors operate at higher temperatures-as high as -130°C. Figuring out what makes electrons pair in these so-called high-temperature superconductors could one day lead to room-temperature varieties that would transform our energy landscape.

The main benefit of CeCoIn5, which has a chilly operating temperature (-271°C), is that it can act as the "hydrogen atom" of magnetically mediated superconductors, Davis said-a test bed for developing theoretical descriptions of magnetic superconductivity the way hydrogen, the simplest atom, helped scientists derive mathematical equations for the quantum mechanical rules by which all atoms operate.

Comet 2

Canada's Arctic islands yield new clues in ancient mass extinction

Mass Extinction
© Stephen Grasby , Postmedia NewsResearchers walk through sediments deposited shortly after the worst extinction event in Earth history, on the shores of Buchanan Lake, Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut.
Canadian scientists probing two sites in the High Arctic have found fresh evidence pointing to a fiery Siberian suspect in the greatest mass extinction of all time - a planet-wide cataclysm that wiped out more than 90 per cent of the Earth's species about 250 million years ago.

The so-called "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian geological era killed off a larger proportion of species than any of the 25 other mass extinctions scientists have identified from sudden and widespread gaps in the fossil record at certain layers of rock corresponding to specific periods of time.

The precise cause of the biological catastrophe 252 million years ago has been debated by scientists for decades. But nothing else in Earth history compares to the Late Permian disaster, which eclipsed 95 per cent of all marine life and about 70 per cent of species on land.

Some have argued that a massive meteorite strike - like the one widely presumed to have triggered the end of the dinosaur age 65 million years ago - must have been to blame. Others point to extreme climate change linked to ocean acidification, oxygen depletion, mercury poisoning or other species-snuffing effects as the main driver of the extinctions.

And without discounting the other forces as potential contributors to the Great Dying, a growing number of scientists - including several groups of Canadian researchers who are among the world's leading investigators of the die-off - have fingered a prolonged series of enormous volcanic eruptions in northern Asia known as the "Siberian Traps" as the main culprit in the Permian extinction.

Health

Team of scientists develops artificial cells to study molecular crowding and gene expression

The interior of a living cell is a crowded place, with proteins and other macromolecules packed tightly together. A team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University has approximated this molecular crowding in an artificial cellular system and found that tight quarters help the process of gene expression, especially when other conditions are less than ideal.

As the researchers report in an advance online publication by the journal Nature Nanotechnology, these findings may help explain how cells have adapted to the phenomenon of molecular crowding, which has been preserved through evolution. And this understanding may guide synthetic biologists as they develop artificial cells that might someday be used for drug delivery, biofuel production and biosensors.

"These are baby steps we're taking in learning how to make artificial cells," said Cheemeng Tan, a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow and a Branco-Weiss Fellow in the Lane Center for Computational Biology, who led the study. Most studies of synthetic biological systems today employ solution-based chemistry, which does not involve molecular crowding. The findings of the CMU study and the lessons of evolution suggest that bioengineers will need to build crowding into artificial cells if synthetic genetic circuits are to function as they would in real cells.

The research team, which included Russell Schwartz, professor of biological sciences; Philip LeDuc, professor of mechanical engineering and biological sciences; Marcel Bruchez, professor of chemistry; and Saumya Saurabh, a Ph.D. student in chemistry, developed their artificial cellular system using molecular components from bacteriophage T7, a virus that infects bacteria that is often used as a model in synthetic biology.

Comet 2

New Comet: C/2013 N4 (Borisov)

Discovery Date: July 8, 2013

Magnitude: 16.8 mag

Discoverer: Gennady Borisov (Crimean Laboratory of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute)
C/2013 N4
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-N51.

Comet

New Comet: 2013 NS11

Discovery Date: July 5, 2013

Magnitude: 21.4 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)
2013 NS11
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published at the MPC Ephemerides and Orbital Elements.

Comet 2

New comet discovered: P/2013 N3 (PanSTARRS)

Discovery Date: July 4, 2013

Magnitude: 20.7 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)
P/2013 N3
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-N50.

Telescope

Astronomers baffled by mysterious "flash" in the sky

Image
© Wikimedia, CSIROThe Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
A series of "fast radio bursts" detected by an Australian lab has scientists puzzling over its origin.

Every now and then things go "bump!" in the cosmic night, releasing torrents of energy that astronomers can't easily explain. Not that they mind: most times an energetic riddle flares up in their view of the sky, major epoch-setting discoveries are sure to follow. This was the pattern for pulsars - rapidly spinning city-size stellar remnants that steadily chirp in radio. It was also the pattern for gamma-ray bursts - extreme explosions at the outskirts of the observable universe thought to be caused by stellar mergers and collapsing massive stars. Now the pattern is playing out again, with last week's announcement that an international team of researchers has detected brief, bright bursts of radio waves washing over Earth from mysterious sources that may be billions of light-years away. The findings, reported in the July 5 Science, could open an entirely new window on the universe by allowing scientists to measure the composition and dynamics of the intergalactic medium - the cold, diffuse plasma that lies between galaxies.

Using a year's worth of data gathered from some 10 percent of the sky by the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the team detected four bursts from far outside the galactic plane, each occurring only once and lasting a few thousandths of a second. According to Dan Thornton, a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester in England who led the study, the results suggest that these "fast radio bursts," or FRBs, probably occur as often as every 10 seconds or so, nearly 10,000 times a day. "If we had radio telescopes watching the entire sky, that's how many we think we'd see each day," Thornton says. "We haven't seen more of these until now only because we've been looking at small regions of the sky for small amounts of time."