Science & Technology

New potentially hazardous asteroid 2014 KP4

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes & Martino Nicolini
Remanzacco Observatory
Sat, 24 May 2014 13:21 UTC

The MPEC 2014-K35 issued on May 23, 2014 announced the discovery of a new PHA asteroid officially designated 2014 KP4. This asteroid (~ magnitude 16) was discovered by C. Jacques, E. Pimentel & J. Barros through a 0.20-m f/2.2 Schmidt-Cassegrain + CCD telescope of SONEAR Observatory (MPC code Y00), on images obtained on May 20.2, 2014.

According to the preliminay orbit, 2014 KP4 is an Apollo type asteroid. This class of asteroids are defined by having semi-major axes greater than that of the Earth (> 1 AU) but perihelion distances less than the Earth's aphelion distance (q < 1.017 AU). It is also flagged as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid". PHA are asteroids larger than approximately 100m that might have threatening close approaches to the Earth (they can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU).

2014 KP4 had a close approach with Earth on May 11, 2014 at rougly 26.2 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.0673 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers).

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object on 2014, May 20.6, remotely from the Q62 iTelescope network (Siding Spring) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer. Below you can see an animation showing the fast movement (the object was moving at 6.5 "/min) of 2014 KP4 on the the sky on May 20, 2014. Each frame is a single 15-second exposure. Click on the thumbnail here to see the animation (East is up, North is to the right):

Below you can see the discovery images of 2014 KP4 by SONEAR survey.

Russia launches 'safe search' Sputnik to rival Yandex, Google

RT
Thu, 22 May 2014 15:04 UTC

Russian state-owned telecoms company Rostelecom has launched a trial version of its Sputnik search engine offering approved links and information helpful to everyday life, such as buying the cheapest medicine or applying for a passport.

The debut of the new search engine was announced Thursday at the 18th International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg dubbed the "Russian Davos".

The engine is referred to as "safe search", because no unchecked links should appear in its results.

"We've indexed over 10 billion documents on the Russian internet, picking the most reliable, and full and official sources of information," the company said in a statement.

"We consider the absence of unreliable information crucial for users rather than the recall ratio. Such an approach is at the core of the Sputnik concept", said Aleksey Basov, Vice President of Rostelecom and Chairman of Sputnik.

The new web-search engine aims to develop and incorporate services that might be helpful to people in their everyday life and social activities. It will be handy in daily local tasks, saving time and money, finding a petrol station with the cheapest gasoline, a nearest vet clinic, the fastest services to renovate an apartment, or links to process an official document. Sputnik will also broadcast news from several TV stations on its page.

Comment: With filters in place for extremism, child pornography and other unsavory topics, does what a company chooses not to index, or deem "unreliable," amount to protection or censorship?

Pigs can choose sex of their offspring before fertilisation, amazing new study reveals

Helen Barratt
The Express, UK
Wed, 21 May 2014 15:26 UTC

Scientists have been left baffled after discovering female pigs may be able to tell whether a sperm will produce a boy or girl before it reaches the egg.

The study, published in the journal BMC Genomics, shows different genes are active in female pigs' reproductive system cells depending on whether female (X) or male (Y) sperm are present.

It is thought the sow's fallopian tubes, known as the oviduct, change in response, allowing her to influence the sex of her offspring.

The research suggests the sow may favour one sex over the other and give it a better chance of reaching the egg first.

Researchers are still not sure why this ability has evolved but believe if females can recognise the sex of sperm and change in response, they might be able to create an environment that favours boys or girls.

Lead author Prof Alireza Fazeli, from the department of human metabolism at the University of Sheffield said: "What this shows is that mothers are able to differentiate between the sperm that makes boys and girls.

"That on its own is amazing. It's also of great scientific and evolutionary importance.

"If we understand how they can do that, this can revolutionise the field.

"We don't know what the human application could be or how it works but we believe female pigs can choose one gender over another.

Universe is not expanding after all, scientists say

Sci-News.com
Fri, 23 May 2014 14:58 UTC

New evidence, based on detailed measurements of the size and brightness of hundreds of galaxies, indicates that the Universe is not expanding after all, says a team of astrophysicists led by Eric Lerner from Lawrenceville Plasma Physics.

In their study, the scientists tested one of the striking predictions of the Big Bang theory - that ordinary geometry does not work at great distances.

In the space around us, on Earth, in the Solar System and our Milky Way Galaxy, as similar objects get farther away, they look fainter and smaller. Their surface brightness, that is the brightness per unit area, remains constant.

In contrast, the Big Bang theory tells us that in an expanding Universe objects actually should appear fainter but bigger. Thus in this theory, the surface brightness decreases with the distance. In addition, the light is stretched as the Universe expanded, further dimming the light.

So in an expanding Universe the most distant galaxies should have hundreds of times dimmer surface brightness than similar nearby galaxies, making them actually undetectable with present-day telescopes.

But that is not what observations show, as demonstrated by this new study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D.

Chelyabinsk meteor believed to be created in outer space collision

RT
Fri, 23 May 2014 12:58 UTC

Russian scientists and their Japanese colleagues have determined that the Chelyabinsk meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere almost 60 times the speed of sound and exploded above the Russian city back in February 2013 was formed by a space collision.

A joint study of Russian researchers from the Novosibirsk University and members of Japanese academia, in their newly published study in the Scientific Reports periodical, conclude that Chelyabinsk meteor constitutes "the second largest asteroid airburst in our recorded history."

Their study is based on the analysis of the composition of fragments of the celestial body, raised last summer from the bottom of lake Chebarkul, where parts of the meteorite fell.

"Chelyabinsk meteorite is a unique sample: it is fragments of a Near-Earth Object that actually hit the Earth and its trajectory was well-recorded," the study says.

In particular, the researchers found that the meteorite contained a jade - green mineral that is rarely found in such samples.

"We found a clear evidence for an intense impact event: the existence of a high-pressure mineral jadeite in Chelyabinsk meteorite."

Comment: Those in the know understand that the Chelyabinsk meteorite is only the opening show:

Astronauts reveal sobering data on asteroid impacts: Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world

'Every' meteorite fall on earth mapped

We live in a cosmic shooting gallery

Crowded Skies

Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

LA Times backpedals on crazy talk about Antarctica, glacier melt, sea level rise, and the Los Angeles Airport

Anthony Watts
Wattsupwiththat.com
Wed, 14 May 2014 05:58 UTC

Below is a screencap of the "walkback" story headline in the LA Times posted late today.

This morning, about 5:30AM, I sent a short but succinct letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times (reproduced below) regarding the statements made yesterday by California Governor Jerry Brown saying that the LAX and SFO airports would "have to be moved" due to effects from posited sea level rise caused by melting of portions of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, some 200-800 years in the future. The claim by Governor Brown, was patently ridiculous and I wrote about it here: Governor 'Moonbeam' beclowns himself over sea level rise at LAX airport.

Pentagon plans project to combat 'space junk chain reaction,' but is it really incoming space rocks they're worried about?

RT
Sat, 17 May 2014 03:55 UTC

Later this month the US Pentagon plans to award a massive contract to one of the two most influential American contractors for a project that, if all goes according to plan, will be able to identify space debris before it becomes a threat to the Earth.

Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. are competing for the $6 billion contract to design and construct Space Fence, a radar system that will eventually be able to track large bodies of space matter. The plan is being put into place so that the government can not only better predict the bodies that may come into contact with Earth (such as the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, for instance) but also to better protect satellites that could be destroyed while in orbit.

"There's a lot of stuff up there, and the impact of the new space fence will be able to track more objects and smaller objects," Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval College, told the Sydney Morning Herald, adding that the technology "is a necessity, but not sufficient...We need to move on to an active plan for removal."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has estimated that 500,000 chunks of man-made material floats around the Earth. Any one of those could damage or completely knock out the 1,200 operational satellites owned by various nations that are responsible for providing Internet access, banking functions, cell phone connections, Global Position System mapping, and other necessities.

Comment: Space Fence is a successor project to design and deliver globally positioned S-band radars capable of interoperation with the Space Surveillance Network. Not conveyed is what can possibly be done, once alerted, to stop a 22,000 mile-per-hour space junk collision. Since debris begets debris, the field is predicted to reach critical density beginning 2015 and initiate a chain reaction (Kessler Syndrome), enough to render low earth orbits unusable and too hostile for future space use. Is the Pentagon justified to spend multi-billions on a space junk tracker? Or, could it be the uptick of incoming comets and asteroids is the real tracking priority lurking in the background not being talked about?

Violent stellar explosion: Stellar behemoth self-destructs

ScienceDaily
Thu, 22 May 2014 14:38 UTC

© Avishay Gal-Yam, Weizmann Institute of Science
For the first time, astronomers have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star -- sitting 360 million light years away -- died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova.

Our sun may seem pretty impressive: 330,000 times as massive as Earth, it accounts for 99.86 percent of the Solar System's total mass; it generates about 400 trillion trillion watts of power per second; and it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Yet for a star, it's a lightweight.

The real cosmic behemoths are Wolf-Rayet stars, which are more than 20 times as massive as the Sun and at least five times as hot. Because these stars are relatively rare and often obscured, scientists don't know much about how they form, live and die. But this is changing, thanks to an innovative sky survey called the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which uses resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), both located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to expose fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae.

For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star -- sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation -- died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science led by Avishay Gal-Yam caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. They then triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event approximately 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed. These observations are providing valuable insights into the life and death of the progenitor Wolf-Rayet.

New supernova pops in bright Galaxy M106 in the 'Hunting Dogs'

Bob King
Universe Today
Thu, 22 May 2014 14:13 UTC

© Gianluca Masi, Francesca Nocentini and Patrick Schmeer
The new supernova with the temporary name of PSNJ12185771+4718113 nestles right up to the nucleus of the galaxy in this photo taken May 21 with a 17-inch telescope. It’s just 1″ east and 3″ south of galactic center.

A supergiant star exploded 23.5 million years ago in one of the largest and brightest nearby galaxies. This spring we finally got the news. In April, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) as part of the Lick Observatory Supernova Search, photographed a faint "new star" very close to the bright core of M106, a 9th magnitude galaxy in Canes Venatici the Hunting Dogs.

Strange rocks found in Earth's crustal graveyard

Becky Oskin
Live Science
Thu, 22 May 2014 13:00 UTC

Models of how the Earth's mantle works may need to change, thanks to two new studies that recreate the extreme conditions just above the planet's core.

The deep mantle, a region that lies 416 to 1,800 miles (670 to 2,900 kilometers) below the Earth's surface, is impossible to reach and hard to "see" clearly with seismic signals. The little scientists do know about the mantle comes from earthquake waves, which speed up and slow down as they travel through different rock layers inside the Earth. The deepest part of the mantle has weird blobs and seismic slow zones that have long puzzled scientists. Both new studies offer possible explanations for the strange seismic behavior.

In the studies, researchers mimicked conditions inside the deep mantle with experiments in the laboratory. Teams working independently on different continents shot lasers at tiny specks of rock squeezed between diamond anvils.

One team concluded that scientists had been wrong about the form that a certain rock takes in the deep mantle, which accounts for about half of Earth's volume. The other team found evidence for small amounts of Earth's most common surface rock, basalt, pooling in liquid form at the core-mantle boundary. The findings are published today (May 22) in the journal Science.

"These results are a new step forward in reproducing in the laboratory what is occurring in the very deep mantle," said Denis Andrault, lead author of one of the studies and a scientist at Blaise Pascal University in France.

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Science & Technology

New potentially hazardous asteroid 2014 KP4

Russia launches 'safe search' Sputnik to rival Yandex, Google

Pigs can choose sex of their offspring before fertilisation, amazing new study reveals

Universe is not expanding after all, scientists say

Chelyabinsk meteor believed to be created in outer space collision

LA Times backpedals on crazy talk about Antarctica, glacier melt, sea level rise, and the Los Angeles Airport

Pentagon plans project to combat 'space junk chain reaction,' but is it really incoming space rocks they're worried about?

Violent stellar explosion: Stellar behemoth self-destructs

New supernova pops in bright Galaxy M106 in the 'Hunting Dogs'

Strange rocks found in Earth's crustal graveyard

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