Science & TechnologyS


Sun

The Sun is stranger than astrophysicists imagined

Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Wed, 01 May 2019 12:00 UTC
sun gamma ray
© 5W Infographics for Quanta MagazineGamma radiation from the sun was thought to come from cosmic rays interacting with the sun’s magnetic field and then colliding with gas molecules near its surface. But this long-standing theory doesn’t account for the observed strength and other features of the solar gamma-ray signal.
Gamma radiation from the sun was thought to come from cosmic rays interacting with the sun's magnetic field and then colliding with gas molecules near its surface. But this long-standing theory doesn't account for the observed strength and other features of the solar gamma-ray signal.

A decade's worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.

The surplus light, the gap in the spectrum, and other surprises about the solar gamma-ray signal potentially point to unknown features of the sun's magnetic field, or more exotic physics.

Comment: There are some fascinating and fruitful discoveries here, although they also show how science can be so easily blinded by its own suppositions these days.

See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

Read More...
Fireball 2

Water found in samples from asteroid Itokawa


Arizona State University
Thu, 02 May 2019 18:28 UTC
Itokawa
© Image by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)Asteroid Itokawa is the much-battered remnant of a larger parent body. Working with samples provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, ASU scientists have discovered that despite Itokawa's tumultuous history, this rubble-pile asteroid still contains significant amounts of water in its minerals. .
Two cosmochemists at Arizona State University have made the first-ever measurements of water contained in samples from the surface of an asteroid. The samples came from asteroid Itokawa and were collected by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa.

The team's findings suggest that impacts early in Earth's history by similar asteroids could have delivered as much as half of our planet's ocean water.


Comment: Study: Earth's water may have originally been formed deep within its mantle


"We found the samples we examined were enriched in water compared to the average for inner solar system objects," Ziliang Jin said. A postdoctoral scholar in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, Jin is the lead author on the paper published May 1 in Science Advances reporting the results. His co-author is Maitrayee Bose, assistant professor in the school.

Comment: As far as science can reach the presence of water is never far away:

Read More...
Attention

Humans will eat maggot sausages as meat substitute - scientists

Hannah Sparks
New York Post
Wed, 01 May 2019 18:03 UTC
maggot sausages
"One hot dog, please - heavy on the maggots."

Food scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia are incorporating insects such as maggots and locusts into a range of specialty foods, including sausage, as well as formulating sustainable insect-based feeds for the livestock themselves.

Hoffman says conventional livestock production will soon be unable to meet global demand for meat, so other fillers and alternatives will be needed to supplement the food supply with sufficient protein sources.

"An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food," says meat science professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman. "Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts? The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources."
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Meteorologists warn 5G frequencies could interfere with water vapor signals, disrupting forecasting


Strange Sounds
Wed, 01 May 2019 12:00 UTC
NOAA sateillite image
© Satellite image from NOAAGlobal 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts: Next-generation mobile technology could interfere with crucial satellite-based Earth observations.
Wireless radio frequencies being auctioned by the U.S. government for mobile 5G networks could interfere with weather forecasts and make them much less accurate, as the mobile network could cause interference that prevents satellites from detecting concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere accurately, warn meteorologists. A new global problem.

For months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and two committees in the U.S. House, asked the Federal Communications Commission to delay 5G spectrum auctions.

But the FCC has gone ahead with the sales. An auction on April 17 involved two groups of frequencies: one between 24.25 and 24.45 gigahertz and the other between 24.75 and 25.25 gigahertz.

Water vapor problem

Comment: This is just one of many grave concerns over 5G - but with the rise in extreme weather and the increasingly erratic seasons accurate forecasting has never been more critical:

Read More...
Info

The phenomenon STEVE is not an Aurora after all

Monica Young
Sky&Telescope
Wed, 01 May 2019 02:51 UTC
STEVE
© Rocky RaybellSTEVE's mauve ribbon and green "picket fence."
A few years ago aurora chasers kept finding a mauve arc crossing the sky, sometimes accompanied by green stripes. The phenomenon lacked both an explanation and a name, so they dubbed it Steve. But even as their discovery went viral, its origin continued to stump amateurs and professionals alike.

As scientists began to investigate the pinkish celestial ribbon from within, using satellite data, they managed to turn the name into a scientific description: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE). They soon found that the ribbon itself isn't an aurora after all but rather the warm glow from fast-flowing plasma above Earth's atmosphere. These regions appear following frequent space weather squalls called substorms, but still STEVE's origin remained unclear.

Now, Toshi Nishimura (Boston University) and colleagues report on the energy source that fuels STEVE in the Geophysical Research Letters, following an in-depth probe of the regions just outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Read More...
Better Earth

First hominins on the Tibetan Plateau were Denisovans - 160,000 years ago

Max Planck Society
Phys.org
Wed, 01 May 2019 20:05 UTC
Tibetan plateau
Tibetan Plateau
So far, Denisovans were only known from a small collection of fossil fragments from Denisova Cave in Siberia. A research team now describes a 160,000-year-old hominin mandible from Xiahe in China. Using ancient protein analysis, the researchers found that the mandible's owner belonged to a population that was closely related to the Denisovans from Siberia. This population occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene and was adapted to this low-oxygen environment long before Homo sapiens arrived in the region.

Denisovans-an extinct sister group of Neandertals-were discovered in 2010, when a research team led by Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) sequenced the genome of a fossil finger bone found at Denisova Cave in Russia and showed that it belonged to a hominin group that was genetically distinct from Neandertals. "Traces of Denisovan DNA are found in present-day Asian, Australian and Melanesian populations, suggesting that these ancient hominins may have once been widespread," says Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the MPI-EVA. "Yet so far the only fossils representing this ancient hominin group were identified at Denisova Cave."

Comment: It was only 6 months ago that scientists were claiming Denisovans had arrived at the Tibetan plateau a mere 30,000 years ago - stuff just keeps getting older and humanity's story is proving to be so much more complex:


Read More...
Galaxy

'Gobsmacked' astronomers spot black hole so powerful it's warping nearby space

Hanneke Weitering
Space.com
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
black hole V404 Cygni
© ICRARAn artist's impression of the inner parts of the accretion disk around the black hole V404 Cygni.
Astronomers have spotted wildly wobbling jets of particles spewing out of a black hole, and they think this unusually rapid motion could be happening because the black hole's strong gravity is warping space around it.

The black hole, named V404 Cygni, is located about 8,000 light-years from Earth and is relatively small as far as black holes go - only nine times the mass of Earth's sun. It is part of a binary system in which it and a sun-like star orbit one another. The black hole is constantly siphoning material from its stellar companion, and as that material gets sucked in, it forms an accretion disk around the black hole.

Some of the particles falling into the black hole escape through relativistic jets, long beams of energetic plasma that flow from the black hole's axis of rotation at more than half the speed of light. Astronomers have seen black hole jets before but have never seen jets that wobble as rapidly as those from V404 Cygni, which were observed oscillating over time periods of only a few minutes.

Read More...
Jupiter

Scientists discover a large ice corridor on Saturn's largest moon

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 14:51 UTC
Titan ice corridor
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteThe ice corridor, mapped in blue.
Titan is a mystery as mighty as its namesake. A thick haze of atmospheric nitrogen conceals the moon's surface from view, hiding a giant and ancient geological oddity that scientists have only just unmasked.

In new research, scientists report the discovery of a massive 'corridor' of ice-rich bedrock that spans almost halfway around Saturn's largest satellite, stretching for an epic 6,300 kilometres (3,900 miles) in total - a length equivalent to 40 percent of Titan's overall circumference.

"This icy corridor is puzzling, because it doesn't correlate with any surface features nor measurements of the subsurface," says planetary scientist Caitlin Griffith from the University of Arizona.

Griffith and her team pored through thousands of spectral images taken by the Cassini space probe, using an infrared spectrometer instrument to peer as far as possible through Titan's opaque haze.
Read More...
Telescope

Stunning image of LMC galaxy taken by team of amateur astrophotographers in 204-megapixels over 1,060 hours


Peta Pixel
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 12:00 UTC
204-megapixel, 1,060-hour photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
204-megapixel, 1,060-hour photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud
A team of five French amateur astrophotographers has captured a gorgeous 204-megapixel, 1,060-hour photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Lowell Observatory reports that the team, which goes by the name "Ciel Austral" (which translates to "Southern Sky"), captured thousands of photos between July 2017 and February 2019 and stitched them together to create this eye-popping ultra-high-resolution photo. You can download the 14400×14200-pixel, 80.8-megabyte JPEG here.

The astrophotographers own and operate a remotely-controlled observatory in Chile, and a 160mm refracting telescope was used to capture the roughly 4,000 photos over 1,060 hours of cumulative exposure. A total of 620 gigabytes of data was captured for creating the resulting photo.

Comment: For more awesome visuals, see:

Read More...
Blue Planet

300,000 year old skull reveals variation and continuity of early humans in Asia

LI Yuan
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 12:00 UTC
Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull
© WU Xiujie and Erik TrinkausThe Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull and the collapsed cave site, with the fossil-bearing breccia in beige aournd the limestone blocks.
A team of scientists led by LIU Wu and WU Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a new Middle Pleistocene human skull ever found in southeastern China, revealing the variation and continuity in early Asian humans. Their findings were published on April 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Excavations in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits in southeastern China yielded a largely complete skull that exhibits morphological similarities to other East Asian Middle and Late Pleistocene archaic human remains, but also foreshadows later modern human forms.

Fossil evidence for human evolution in East Asia during the Pleistocene is often fragmentary and scattered, which makes evaluating the pattern of archaic human evolution and modern human emergence in the region complicated.

Comment: See also:

Read More...