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Saturn

Strange change in colors on Saturn's northern pole

Léa Surugue
International Business Times
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
A camera on Cassini spacecraft revealed a change in colour on the northern polar region of the planet which occurred in four years.
Saturn colors
© Reuters
Saturn's atmosphere and its rings in a false colour composite. The mosaic shows the tail of Saturn's huge northern storm. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light
Two pictures taken in the space of four years by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft have revealed that Saturn's north polar region has changed colour. In 2012, the area inside the north-polar hexagon on Saturn was a darker, blue-grey shade. It is now a brighter golden colour.

The Cassini mission is a joint project between Nasa, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. It is the first in-depth, up-close study of Saturn and its system of rings and moons, which started in 1997 when the orbiter and an ESA probe were launched into space. Seven years later, they reached Saturn, and the Cassini spacecraft became the first to orbit Saturn. For more than a decade now, scientists have uncovered a lot about the sixth planet from the Sun and the mission will come to an end next year.
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Satellite

Another one bites the dust: Third USAF weather satellite breaks up in orbit

Brian Berger
Space.com
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 15:45 UTC
satellite
© Lockheed
An artist’s illustration of a Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite in orbit.
A third U.S. Air Force weather satellite that launched more than 20 years ago has broken up in orbit, Air Force Space Command disclosed Monday evening.

Air Force officials confirmed the breakup of the long-retired Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 12 satellite (DMSP F-12) after the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, detected an additional object orbiting alongside the 22-year-old satellite.

DMSP F-12, which the Air Force retired from service in 2008, had the same battery assembly that was implicated in the February 2015 breakup of DMSP F-13.

While both satellites were built by Lockheed Martin and launched less than a year apart, DMSP F-13 was still in service when it suffered its breakup, producing nearly 150 pieces of debris.

Comment: Are these satellites just falling to pieces because of bad design? Is someone using them as target practice? Or are some of them falling victim to the increase in space rocks penetrating our skies? (For example: Space rock collision? USAF satellite explodes in Earth orbit) What exactly are these satellites used for? From Lockheed:
Today, DMSP is still providing strategic and tactical weather prediction to aid the U.S. military in planning operations at sea, on land and in the air. The satellites, equipped with a sophisticated sensor suite, can:
  • Image visible and infrared cloud cover
  • Measure precipitation, surface temperature, and soil moisture
  • Collect specialized global meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-geophysical information in all weather conditions


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Rocket

Russia reportedly successfully tests nuclear-capable hypersonic glider warhead


RT
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 14:54 UTC
Russia's RS-18 (SS-19 Stiletto) intercontinental ballistic missile
© Sergey Kazak / Sputnik
Russian strategic missile troops reportedly launched an RS-18 ballistic missile on Tuesday. The launch may have been a test of the advanced hypersonic glider warhead, which would be able to defeat US anti-missile systems.

The test was conducted at midday from a site near the town of Yasny, Orenburg region, in the southern Urals, and the warhead reached the Kura test range in Kamchatka in Russia's Far East.

"The test was a success. The warhead was delivered to Kura field," the Defense Ministry reported.

Popular defense blog MilitaryRussia.ru says the launch was meant to test Russia's hypersonic glider warhead, currently known by its developer designation, 'object 4202', or Aeroballistic Hypersonic Warhead.

Comment: More on the "Satan" missile: Russia unveils first image of prospective super-heavy ICBM set to replace 'Satan' missile

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Butterfly

Blue-leaf begonias use quantum mechanics to survive low light environments

William Herkewitz
Popular Mechanics
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:18 UTC
blue begonia leaves quantum mechanics
© Matthew Jacobs
Begonia species adapted to deep-shade conditions display blue leaf iridescence, a striking form of structural color originating from specialized chloroplasts in the epidermis.
There's a very good reason for this plant's iridescent color.

In the fading twilight on the rainforest floor, a plant's leaves glimmer iridescent blue. And now scientists know why. These exotic blue leaves pull more energy out of dim light than ordinary leaves because of an odd trick of quantum mechanics.

A team of plant scientists led by Heather Whitney of the University of Bristol in the U.K. has just discovered the remarkable origin and purpose of the shiny cobalt leaves on the Malaysian tropical plant Begonia pavonina. The plant owes its glimmer to its peculiar machinery for photosynthesis, the process plants use to turn light into chemical energy. Strangely enough, these blue leaves can squeeze more energy out of the red-green light that reaches the eternally dim rainforest floor. Whitney and her colleagues describe the blue leaves today in the journal Nature Plants.

"It's actually quite brilliant. Plants have to cope with every obstacle that's thrown at them without running away. Here we see evidence of a plant that's actually evolved to physically manipulate the little light it receives," says Whitney, "it's quite amazing, and was an absolutely surprising discovery."
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Igloo

Why ice ages occur every 100,000 years

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with That
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 03:20 UTC
From CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

Why does our planet experience an ice age every 100,000 years?

Deep storage of carbon dioxide in the oceans may have triggered this unexplained phenomena, new research shows.
Ice Ages
© Lisieki and Raymo
LR04 δ18O from Lisieki and Raymo (2005) correlated to the temperature anomaly inferred from the deuterium concentration in ice cores from EPICA Dome C, Antarctica (Jouzel et al., 2007). The main orbital (purple), tectonic (brown) and oceanic (blue) events are indicated (see the text for the references of each event). The orange box represents the start of the onset of the Northern Hemisphere glaciations. 100 kyrs and 40 kyrs correspond to the orbitally-driven glacial/interglacial cycles period. This period changed from 41 kyrs to 100 kyrs during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition toward 1 Ma (MPT). click to enlarge
Experts from Cardiff University have offered up an explanation as to why our planet began to move in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years.

This mysterious phenomena, dubbed the '100,000 year problem', has been occurring for the past million years or so and leads to vast ice sheets covering North America, Europe and Asia. Up until now, scientists have been unable to explain why this happens.

Our planet's ice ages used to occur at intervals of every 40,000 years, which made sense to scientists as the Earth's seasons vary in a predictable way, with colder summers occurring at these intervals.

However there was a point, about a million years ago, called the 'Mid-Pleistocene Transition', in which the ice age intervals changed from every 40,000 years to every 100,000 years.

New research published today in the journal Geology has suggested the oceans may be responsible for this change, specifically in the way that they suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere.
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Question

Strange signals coming from deep in space 'probably' aliens, scientists say

Andrew Griffin
The Independent
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:09 UTC
earth
© Terry W. Virts / NASA
Scientists have heard hugely unusual messages from deep in space that they think are coming from aliens.

A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence.

The new study reports the finding of specific modulations in just 234 out of the 2.5 million stars that have been observed during a survey of the sky. The work found that a tiny fraction of them seemed to be behaving strangely.

And there appears to be no obvious explanation for what is going on, leaving the scientists behind the paper to conclude that the messages are coming from aliens.

"We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis," write EF Borra and E Trottier in a new paper. "The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis," the two scientists from Laval University in Quebec write.

Comment: Related articles:

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Telescope

Jupiter's stripes go deep, and other surprises from NASA's Juno probe

Calla Cofield
Space.com
Thu, 20 Oct 2016 20:46 UTC
Jupiter
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/GSFC
This composite image depicts Jupiter's cloud formations as seen through the eyes of Juno's microwave radiometer (MWR) instrument as compared to the top layer, a Cassini imaging science subsystem image of the planet. The MWR can see a couple of hundred miles into Jupiter's atmosphere with the instrument's largest antenna. The belts and bands visible on the surface are also visible in modified form in each layer below.
Jupiter's stripes are more than skin deep, according to observations by NASA's Juno probe, which has revealed many new surprises about the Jovian giant.

Juno arrived at the Jupiter system in July. On Aug. 27, the probe made a close flyby of the planet, during which, the science team was supposed to calibrate Juno's instruments and get familiar with the intense environment around Jupiter, according to Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton. But the encounter proved more fruitful than expected.

Jupiter's bold, colorful stripes are clouds, and optical light can't penetrate them to see what's underneath. However, Juno is carrying microwave instruments that can each probe those clouds to different depths; together, these instruments can effectively peel back the clouds like layers of an onion. An artist's impression based on the microwave data reveals a striking feature: Some of the stripes are visible deep into the cloud layers.
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Telescope

Mysterious flaring X-ray objects in nearby galaxies may represent a new class of explosive cosmic event


Astronomy Now
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 20:25 UTC
Centaurus A
© NASA/CXC/UA/J.Irwin et al.
In this Chandra X-ray Observatory image of NGC 5128 (also known as Centaurus A), low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are coloured red, green, and blue. Five flares were detected from the source located near NGC 5128, which is at a distance of about 14 million light-years from Earth. A movie showing the average change in X-rays for the three flares with the most complete Chandra data, covering both the rise and fall, is shown in the inset.
Astronomers have found a pair of extraordinary cosmic objects that dramatically burst in X-rays. This discovery, obtained with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton observatory, may represent a new class of explosive events found in space.

The mysterious X-ray sources flare up and become about a hundred times brighter in less than a minute, before returning to original X-ray levels after about an hour. At their peak, these objects qualify as ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) that give off hundreds to thousands of times more X-rays than typical binary systems where a star is orbiting a black hole or neutron star.

"We've never seen anything like this," said Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama, who led the study that appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature. "Astronomers have seen many different objects that flare up, but these may be examples of an entirely new phenomenon."
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Galaxy

Milky Way galaxy mapped in incredible detail

Monica Young
Sky & Telescope
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 20:05 UTC
Astronomers have mapped atomic neutral hydrogen across the entire sky, creating an unprecedented portrait of our galaxy and some of its nearest neighbors.
Galaxy
© HI4PI Collaboration
This map depicts the radiation from neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) across the entire sky, as seen by the Parkes and Effelsberg radio telescopes. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, appears as a luminous band across the sky with the Galactic Center in the middle. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are prominently visible in orange below the Galactic plane. They are surrounded by huge clouds of gas, forcefully disrupted from their hosts by gravitational interaction with the Milky Way. The HI emissions of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and its neighbor, Triangulum (M33), are also easy to spot as bright purple ellipses in the lower left. The gas motion is color-coded to represent the gas's motion, and the visual brightness in the image relates to how much neutral hydrogen is present.
Hydrogen is the single most abundant element in the universe. The simple pairing of a proton and electron is so reactive that atomic hydrogen doesn't occur naturally on Earth — it reacts with itself or other elements to form molecules instead. But in the large, mostly empty space between stars floats a copious amount of neutral atomic hydrogen.

We only know it's there when the atom's lone electron very occasionally flips from an "up" state to a "down" state, releasing a single 21-centimeter radio wave. Modern radio telescopes can easily pick up the faint signal, which multiplies thanks to the wealth of hydrogen atoms. What's hard is to map that signal across the entire sky — and that's exactly what astronomers have done in unprecedented detail.

Using two of the world's largest fully steerable radio dishes, the 100-meter Effelsberg dish near Bonn, Germany, and the 64-meter Parkes dish west of Sydney, Australia, astronomers have generated a survey they've dubbed HI4PI. Pronounced "hi four pie," the survey refers to the abbreviation for neutral hydrogen (HI) and the geometrical reference to the whole sky (4PI, or 4π).
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Saturn

Saturn's polar hexagon has mysteriously changed colors

BEC Crew
Science Alert
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
Saturn hex changes color
© NASA
Saturn's polar hexagon changes color from 2012 to 2016.
It's like nothing we've seen on any other planet in the entire Universe, and now the mysterious structure on Saturn's north pole just got even weirder. In just four years, Saturn's hexagon has changed its colour from blue to gold. So far, our best guess as to why this change occurred is that this is what it looks like when Saturn's north pole gears up for next year's summer solstice.

Discovered almost 30 years ago, Saturn's hexagon is a six-sided structure that spans roughly 32,000 km (20,000 miles) in diameter, and extends about 100 km (60 miles) down into the planet's dense atmosphere. As observed by NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecraft, each point of the hexagon appears to rotate at its centre at nearly the same rate that Saturn rotates on its axis. Along the rim of the hexagon, a jet stream of air is blasting eastward at speeds of 321 km/h (200 mph).

Saturn hexagon
© NASA
Based on its size and movements, scientists have concluded that it's a vast cloud pattern generated by a gigantic, perpetual hurricane spinning at the centre of the planet's north pole. Scientists estimate that this storm has been raging for decades - maybe even centuries.

While we're pretty confident that we know what Saturn's hexagon is, the big mystery is how it got there in the first place. Once you have a giant whirlpool of air, it's relatively easy to keep it spinning - but the force you need to get it wound up in the first place is a whole lot more difficult to explain. "Scientists have bandied about a number of explanations for the hexagon's origin," says Charles Q. Choi from Space.com. "For instance, water swirling inside a bucket can generate whirlpools possessing holes with geometric shapes. However, there is of course no giant bucket on Saturn holding this gargantuan hexagon."

Now we've got something else to explain - how the Cassini spacecraft could have observed two completely different colours in the hexagon between November 2012 and September 2016. Here's more of the false colour hexagon:

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