Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.
An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet's colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.
That's Jupiter doing its cosmic job, astronomers like to say. Better it than us. Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter's overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar system where it could do for us what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for similar configurations - a giant outer planet with room for smaller planets in closer to the home stars - in other planetary systems as an indication of their hospitableness to life.
Science & Technology
© Ted/J D Davidson
Professor Markram said he would send a hologram to talk at TED in 10 years
Professor Markram said he would send a hologram to talk at TED in 10 years
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.
He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.
Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
© Kazuhiko Sano
Neandertals, our closest relatives, ruled Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years. But sometime after 28,000 years ago, they vanished. Scientists have long debated what led to their disappearance. The latest extinction theories focus on climate change and subtle differences in behavior and biology that might have given modern humans an advantage over the Neandertals.
Schizophrenia is a severely debilitating psychiatric disease that is thought to have its roots in the development of the nervous system; however, major breakthroughs linking its genetics to diagnosis, prognosis and treatment are still unrealized. Jill Morris, PhD assistant professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and a researcher in the Human Molecular Genetics Program of Children's Memorial Research Center studies a gene that is involved in susceptibility to schizophrenia, Disc1 (Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1).
© Mansell / Time Life Pictures / Getty
A painting imagines the world of Neanderthal men
A painting imagines the world of Neanderthal men
© Julian Baum
Earth experienced an especially heavy bombardment of asteroids and comets early in the solar system's history.
Earth experienced an especially heavy bombardment of asteroids and comets early in the solar system's history.
A 1994 study showed that replacing Jupiter with a much smaller planet like Uranus or Neptune would lead to 1000 times as many long-period comets hitting Earth. This led to speculation that complex life would have a hard time developing in solar systems without a Jupiter-like planet because of more intense bombardment by comets.
But a new study by Jonathan Horner and Barrie Jones of Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, shows that if there were no planet at all in Jupiter's orbit, Earth would actually be safer from impacts.
The contradictory results arise because Jupiter affects comets in two different, competing ways. Its gravity helps pull comets into the inner solar system, where they have a chance of hitting Earth, but can also clear away Earth-threatening comets by ejecting them from the solar system altogether, via a gravitational slingshot effect.
© Pascal Petit
Bernard-Lyot Telescope, on top of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre (France).
Bernard-Lyot Telescope, on top of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre (France).
Vega is a famous star among amateur and professional astronomers. Located at only 25 light years from Earth in the Lyra constellation, it is the fifth brightest star in the sky. It has been used as a reference star for brightness comparisons. Vega is twice as massive as the Sun and has only one tenth its age. Because it is both bright and nearby, Vega has been often studied but it is still revealing new aspects when it is observed with more powerful instruments.
Vega rotates in less than a day, while the Sun's rotation period is 27 days. The intense centrifugal force induced by this rapid rotation flattens its poles and generates temperature variations of more than 1000 degrees Celsius between the polar (warmer) and the equatorial regions of its surface. Vega is also surrounded by a disk of dust, in which the inhomogeneities suggest the presence of planets.
© WP Images
This discovery took place during the research project conducted by INAH, which excavations are oriented to know architectonic features, archaeological contexts and information about terrain's unevenness.
© go2taiwan.net
After a year of investigation and research, the prehistoric archeology research team discovered the hearth at the Basiandong (Eight Deities) Historical Site (八仙洞遺址), which carbon-dating reveals to be 20,000 years old, an official with the county's Cultural and Tourism Bureau said.
"The sample proves that humans were living in Taiwan more than 20,000 years ago," the official quoted Tsang Chen-hua (臧振華), deputy director of Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology, who led the research team, as saying.
A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference. The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.
Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford. He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.
"There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power," he said.
Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford. He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.
"There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power," he said.
Comment: Regarding the claim that Jupiter "protects us from an even more dangerous band of comets coming from the so-called Oort Cloud", let's see what Clube and Napier, British astronomers and writers of The Cosmic Serpent, have to say: