Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Closest Encounter with Jupiter until 2022

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:13 UTC
Been outside at midnight lately? There's something you really need to see. Jupiter is approaching Earth for the closest encounter between the two planets in more than a decade--and it is dazzling.

The night of closest approach is Sept. 20-21st. This is also called "the night of opposition" because Jupiter will be opposite the sun, rising at sunset and soaring overhead at midnight. Among all denizens of the midnight sky, only the Moon itself will be brighter.

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© Tamas LadanyiScience@NASA reader Tamas Ladanyi took this picture of a friend photographing Jupiter over a lake in the Bakony mountains of Hungary on Sept. 5th. "The giant planet was remarkably bright," says Ladanyi.
Earth-Jupiter encounters happen every 13 months when the Earth laps Jupiter in their race around the sun. But because Earth and Jupiter do not orbit the sun in perfect circles, they are not always the same distance apart when Earth passes by. On Sept. 20th, Jupiter will be as much as 75 million km closer than previous encounters and will not be this close again until 2022.

The view through a telescope is excellent. Because Jupiter is so close, the planet's disk can be seen in rare detail--and there is a lot to see. For instance, the Great Red Spot, a cyclone twice as wide as Earth, is bumping up against another storm called "Red Spot Jr." The apparition of two planet-sized tempests grinding against one another must be seen to be believed.
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Blackbox

Crater map rekindles debate over moon impacts

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:02 UTC
A new map of lunar craters by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is stoking a long-smouldering debate about whether the moon was hit by a sudden barrage of impactors early in its life.

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Blackbox

Did Jupiter and Saturn play pinball with Uranus?


New Scientist
Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:59 UTC
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© Chuck Elliot/GettyA victim of planetary pinball
Uranus may have been batted back and forth between Jupiter and Saturn before being flung out to its present location, new simulations suggest.

Previous modelling has shown that Jupiter and Saturn moved out of their initial orbits in the early solar system, scattering nearby objects.

In some simulations, this led to Uranus crossing the path of Saturn, which could then have flung it towards Jupiter, which lobbed it back to Saturn. The process might have happened three times before Uranus was finally ejected beyond Saturn, to where it now resides. Hurling Uranus would have caused Jupiter and Saturn to recoil, further shifting their orbits.
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Blackbox

Light trapped on curved surfaces

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:54 UTC
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© Physical Review LettersGlow with the flow
Light, which in everyday experience travels in straight beams, has been trapped on complex curved surfaces. The feat is not just a parlour trick - it could help people visualise how light travels in the curved fabric of space.

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is the result of an object's mass deforming space itself, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. To model how light's path would change in space curved by gravity, Ulf Peschel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues constructed smooth 3D objects and sent laser beams shooting along their surfaces (Physical Review Letters, in press).

They took advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when it moves from one medium to another. In their simplest experiment, they shot laser light at the edge of a solid glass sphere. The angle of the beam was chosen so that the light - initially travelling in air - would be bent just enough when it entered the glass that it would keep reflecting off the inside surface of the sphere, and so travel along it. When the light inside the sphere reflected off its inner surface, some was also transmitted through the glass, creating a glowing ring on the outside surface (see image).
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Saturn

Jupiter and Uranus in Opposition To The Sun


Space Weather
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:49 UTC
Jupiter is at opposition on Sept. 21st, meaning the giant planet will be directly opposite the sun, soaring overhead at midnight with dazzling brilliance. In a coincidence of interplanetary proportions, Uranus is at opposition on the very same night! Fredrik Broms of Kvaløya, Norway caught the two converging during a geomagnetic storm on Sept. 15th:

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© Fredrik Broms
"It's amazing to be able to observe two giant planets next to each other--and never have I seen such a pair against a completely green background!" says Broms.

While Jupiter is outshining everything in the midnight sky (except the Moon), Uranus is barely visible to the naked eye. It's a difference of scale: Uranus is almost three times smaller than Jupiter and five times farther away. Nevertheless, Uranus is still a pretty sight. A telescope pointed at Jupiter on Sept. 21st will reveal the aqua-colored disk of Uranus less than a degree away. And if the sky turns green at the same time, well, that's just a bonus.
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Magnify

Hot Water in Cold Comets: Water Around Comets Produced With Unusual Properties


ScienceDaily
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Max-Planck-Institut für KernphysikBreakup on three pathways. A hydronium ion captures an electron and can then split into different combinations of fragments. The relative yields of the three pathways are shown as measured for the heavy hydronium ion D3O+. The capture produces the unstable radical D3O with the captured electron in a weakly bound (Rydberg) state.
Comets, sometimes called "dirty snowballs," are largely composed of water. An international research team led by Andreas Wolf of the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, recently succeeded in deciphering an important aspect of the way in which water molecules often form in space. As a surprise, the water molecules produced under cold, dilute conditions turned out to be produced as particles as hot as 60,000 Kelvin. In their research the physicists, though, did not use a telescope, but a particle accelerator.

The research appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In comets as well as in interstellar clouds, the precursor molecule of water is the positively charged hydronium ion H3O+. This molecular ion can be detected from earth by telescopes. In the cosmic clouds negatively charged electrons are also present, causing frequent collisions. In those the hydronium ion converts to the neutral instable radical H3O, which rapidly decays. "For this break-up reaction, nature offers three choices," describes Andreas Wolf, forming either H2O plus H, or OH plus H2, or OH plus two H atoms. Present research tries to determine the yields of these production channels, including that of water.
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Magnify

Best of the Web: Are Dreams an Extension of Physical Reality?

Robert Lanza
The Huffington Post
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 06:30 UTC
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© John Anster Fitzgerald
You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as "just dreams" is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality.
"I am real" said Alice (in Wonderland). "If I wasn't real, I shouldn't be able to cry."

"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
We take for granted how our mind puts everything together. Everything we experience is a whirl of information occurring in our heads. Biocentrism -- a new "theory of everything" -- tells us that space and time aren't the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. They're the key to consciousness, and why in experiments with particles, space and time -- and indeed the properties of matter itself -- are relative to the observer. During both dreams and waking hours, your mind collapses probability waves to generate a physical reality, replete with a functioning body. You're able to think and experience sensations in a 3D world.
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Info

Airbus Wants to Build Invisible Passenger Planes


MyFox Houston
Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:18 UTC
This is your captain speaking, your plane is about to become invisible!

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus has theorized a see-through passenger plane for the future, one with a completely transparent fuselage. In this concept craft, the push of a button by the captain would a send an electrical pulse through a high-tech ceramic skin -- making the main body of the plane see-through.

The extraordinary design would allow travelers to look down on cities and landscapes thousands of feet below or gaze up at the heavens, giving them the sensation of floating unassisted through the sky.

"Passengers in an airplane like this would experience flight in a completely new way," Airbus' head of research and technology, Axel Krein, the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Though the proposal might seem far-fetched, it is one of a number of plans being considered by engineers at the European aerospace giant.

Airbus unveiled the concept in "The Future, By Airbus," written by the giant manufacturer for July's Farnsborough Air Show. The report includes information on potential future sources of energy (watch for the "Cryoplane," fueled by hydrogen) and solutions for overcongestion in the air, such as pre-seating passengers in pods that are then loaded onto the plane when it is ready.

Other developments envisaged by Krein's team include an aircraft skin that can repair itself in the event of cracks or breaches and streamline engines that are embedded in the plane's fuselage rather than attached to its wings.
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Telescope

NASA's LRO reveals the Moon's asteroid bombarded youth

Anna Sanclement
Examiner.com
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:48 UTC
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© NASALRO's crater catalog
New results from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft show that the Moon was heavily bombarded by asteroids in its complex youth.

The early Moon was apparently hit by asteroids much more than previously thought, according to the LRO's new findings and its surface is much more intricate than what astronomers believed.

"Our new LRO LOLA dataset shows that the older highland impactor population can be clearly distinguished from the younger population in the lunar 'maria' -- giant impact basins filled with solidified lava flows." Said James Head of Brown University in RI, lead author of the study.

"The highlands have a greater density of large craters compared to smaller ones, implying that the earlier population of impactors had a proportionally greater number of large fragments than the population that characterized later lunar history." He continued.

NASA launched the LRO to study the Moon's surface and it is now returning its new results from its detailed global topographic map of the natural satellite's surface, which it acquired using its Lunar Laser Altimeter (LOLA).
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Sun

Solar flares could paralyse Britain's power and communications, Liam Fox says

James Kirkup and Andrew Hough
Telegraph UK
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:06 UTC
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© AlamyNatural events on the surface of the sun can cause electromagnetic disruption which can shut down electrical equipment and cripple orbiting satellites
Britain's electrical system, financial networks and transport infrastructure could all be paralysed by a solar flare or a nuclear attack, Liam Fox will warn next week.

The Defence Secretary will next week attend a summit of scientists and security advisers who believe the infrastructure that underpins modern life in Western economies is potentially vulnerable to electromagnetic disruption.

Such disruptions, which can shut down electrical equipment and cripple orbiting satellites, can be triggered by man-made nuclear blasts or natural events on the surface of the sun.
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