Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon align beautifully for evening sky watchers

A sunset skyshow again? A month ago, Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon aligned beautifully for evening sky watchers around the world. Tonight it's happening again. On March 25th and 26th, the three will form a bright triangle in the western sky at sunset. Marek Nikodem photographed the early stages of the convergence over Szubin, Poland, on March 24th:
Image
© Marek Nikodem
Observing tip: Try catching them before the sky fades completely black. Bright planets are extra-beautiful when they are framed by twilight blue. Sky maps: March 25, March 26.

Question

Possible Nova in Centaurus

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Cen (TOCP Designation: PNV J13410800-5815470) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of "Faulkes Telescope South" (MPC Code - E10).

On our images taken on March 24.5, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with filtered R-Bessel CCD magnitude 9.3 (USNO-B1.0 Catalogue reference stars) at coordinates:

R.A. = 13 41 09.36, Decl.= -58 15 16.9

(equinox 2000.0; USNO-B1.0 catalogue reference stars).

Our confirmation image:

New Nova?
© Remanzacco Observatory
You can see an animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1994).

Saturn

NASA's Cassini Space Probe Finds New Saturnian Ocean

enceladus
© NASA
It's hard enough for kids to remember all the known oceans and seas -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Norwegian, Barents -- and now they can add one more to the list: the Enceladan Ocean. The name is lovely, and the place is nifty, but there's not much chance of visiting it soon. It's located on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 66 known moons. While Enceladus has been familiar to us since it was first spotted in 1789, the discovery of its ocean, courtesy of the venerable Cassini spacecraft, is a whole new and possibly game-changing thing.

Enceladus has always been thought of as one of the more remarkable members of Saturn's marble bag of satellites. For one thing, it's dazzlingly bright. The percentage of sunlight that a body in the solar system reflects back is known as its albedo, and it's determined mostly by the color of the body's ground cover. For all the silvery brilliance of a full moon on a cloudless night, the albedo of our own drab satellite is a muddy 12%, owing mostly to the gray dust that covers it. The albedo of Enceladus, on the other hand, approaches a mirror-like 100%.

Such a high percentage likely means the surface is covered with ice crystals -- and, what's more, that those crystals get regularly replenished. Consider how grubby and gray a fresh snowfall becomes after just a couple of days of splashing road slush and tromping people. Now imagine how a moon would look after a few billion years of cosmic bombardment by incoming meteors.

Einstein

'Birdman' confesses Dutch human flight film was a hoax

The flying Dutchman has turned out to be a lying Dutchman after human birdman Jarno Smeets confessed that his film showing him using a pair of wings to fly like a bird was in fact a hoax.


Comment: These viral propaganda experiments apparently work very well. Choosing the right music seems to be key to sending waves of emotions through viewers. Even though the emotions were induced from believing in a lie, people naturally want to share 'the good vibes' with others.


Info

Ocean expedition gets rare glimpse of earth's innards

Map of the Atlantis Massif
© NOAAA topographical map of the Atlantis Massif, which also shows the location of its Lost City hydrothermal vents.
Scientists recently returned from an expedition to an unusual seafloor mountain, where they conducted what may be the first-ever on-site study of a type of rock that makes up a huge amount of our planet, but is largely out of reach.

Researchers aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution sent instruments to the Atlantis Massif, a seamount that lies near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a long volcanic rift bisecting the Atlantic Ocean, where two tectonic plates are being slowly shoved apart and fresh oceanic crust is created. (Seamounts are essentially a mountain that doesn't rise above the ocean's surface.)

Unlike most seamounts, which are typically made of volcanic rock, geological forces essentially yanked the Atlantis Massif from the Earth's gabbroic layer - the deepest layer of the Earth's crust, which rests directly on the planet's ever-shifting mantle.

Even though the dense, greenish rock constitutes the greatest volume of the ocean's crust, it has rarely been studied because it's so difficult to reach.

Info

Trees May Play Role in Electrifying the Atmosphere, Study Suggests

Trees
© Michele HoganPlants have long been known as the lungs of the earth, but a new finding has found they may also play a role in electrifying the atmosphere.

Plants have long been known as the lungs of the Earth, but a new finding has found they may also play a role in electrifying the atmosphere.

Scientists have long-suspected an association between trees and electricity but researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) think they may have finally discovered the link.

Dr Rohan Jayaratne and Dr Xuan Ling from QUT's International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH), led by Professor Lidia Morawska, ran experiments in six locations around Brisbane, including the Brisbane Forest Park, Daisy Hill and Mt Coot-tha.

They found the positive and negative ion concentrations in the air were twice as high in heavily wooded areas than in open grassy areas, such as parks.

Dr Jayaratne, who is also a member of QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI), said that natural ions in the air were mainly created by ionisation due to two processes -- radiation from the trace gas radon in air and cosmic radiation from space.

Info

Why Seeing Around Corners May Become Next 'Superpower'

Seeing Around Corners_1
© Christopher Barsi and Andreas Velten, MIT Media LabThe mannequin, shown here, is not in the camera's line of sight.

Superman had X-ray vision, but a pair of scientists has gone one better: seeing around corners.

Ordinarily, the only way to see something outside your line of sight is to stand in front of a mirror or similarly highly reflective surface. Anything behind you or to the side of you reflects light that then bounces off the mirror to your eyes.

But if a person is standing in front of a colored wall, for example, she can't see anything around a corner, because the wall not only absorbs a lot of the light reflected from the objects around it, but scatters it in many directions as well. (This is especially true of anything with a matte finish.)

MIT researchers Ramesh Raskar and Andreas Velten got around this issue using a laser, a beam-splitter and a sophisticated algorithm. They fired a laser through the beam-splitter and at a wall, with pulses occurring every 50 femtoseconds. (A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, or the time it takes light to travel about 300 nanometers).

Seeing Around Corners_2
© Christopher Barsi and Andreas Velten, MIT Media LabThe experimental set-up used by MIT researchers to "see around corners.
When the laser light hits the splitter, half of it travels to the wall, and then bounces to the object around the corner. The light reflects off the object, hitting the wall again, and then returns to a camera. The other half of the beam just goes directly to the camera. This half-beam serves as a reference, to help measure the time it takes for the other photons (particles of light) to return to the camera.

Robot

Robots Could Be Future Playmates for Kids

Robovie
© American Psychological AssociationA child interacting with Robovie, a remotely controlled humanoid robot. In the near future, children may view such robots as friends.

As technology continues to improve, humanlike robots will likely play an ever-increasing role in our lives: They may become tutors for children, caretakers for the elderly, office receptionists or even housemaids. Children will come of age with these androids, which naturally raises the question: What kind of relationships will kids build with personified robots?

Children will view humanoid robots as intelligent social and moral beings, allowing them to develop substantial and meaningful relationships with the machines, new research suggests.

Researchers analyzed the interactions between nearly 100 children and Robovie, a 3-foot-tall (0.9 meters) robot developed by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan. In the study, two technicians controlled Robovie remotely from another room, leading the children to believe that the robot was autonomous. The researchers imparted humanlike behavior to the robot, such as having Robovie claim unfair treatment when he was told to go into the closet at the end of the interaction sessions.

Follow-up interviews with the children showed that the kids believed Robovie had mental states, such as being intelligent and having feelings, and was a social entity capable of being a friend and confidante. Many of the children also believed that Robovie deserved fair treatment and should not be psychologically harmed.

"We typically think [of] robots as rational calculators rather than humanlike and emotional," said Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, who was not involved in the study. "But this research provides a nice example of how endowing a robot with emotions can lead children to treat the robot as a companion and to consider its moral standing."

Sun

Can building be the future of world cities?

Image
© Miller Hull Partnership illustrationEarth Day co-found Denis Hayes and architect Jason McLellan are behind a project that aims to build the greenest office building ever.
An office building that lasts 250 years with no monthly electricity or water bills? It may sound like an environmentalist's pipe dream, but it will soon be a reality, say the builders of what they hope will be the biggest office tower in the nation that produces as much water and electricity as it consumes.

Currently rising from a pit in downtown Seattle, the $30 million, six-story "living building" is being spearheaded by Denis Hayes and Jason McLennan, who believe they can save the world one building at a time by reducing the massive energy appetites of modern cities.

"Eighty-two percent of Americans, and more than half of humanity, now live in cities -- none of which have been designed for sustainability," said Hayes, who in 1970 helped create Earth Day, which has developed into the planet's unofficial holiday.

Hayes, 67, now heads the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental nonprofit that intends to practice what it preaches by moving into the building when it's completed, currently planned for November.

Info

Rare Rectangle Galaxy Discovered

Rectangular Galaxy_1
© Swinburne University of TechnologyLEDA 074886: a dwarf galaxy with a curious rectangular shape.

It's being called the "emerald-cut galaxy" - recently discovered by an international team of astronomers with the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, LEDA 074886 is a dwarf galaxy located 70 million light-years (21 Mpc) away, within a group of about 250 other galaxies.

"It's an exciting find," Dr. Alister Graham, lead author and associate professor at Swinburne University Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing told Universe Today in an email. "I've seen thousands of galaxies, and they don't look like this one."

The gem-cut galaxy was detected in a wide-field image taken with the Japanese Subaru Telescope by astrophysicist Dr. Lee Spitler.

It's thought that the unusual shape is the result of a collision between two galaxies, possibly two former satellite galaxies of the larger NGC 1407, the brightest of all the approximately 250 galaxies within its local group.

"At first we thought that there was probably some gravitational-tidal interaction which has caused LEDA 074886 to have its unusual shape, but now we're not so sure, as its features better match that of two colliding disk galaxies," Dr. Graham said.