Science & TechnologyS


Attention

Jupiter herding micrometeors towards Earth suggest new theory

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with That
Sat, 05 Dec 2020 16:16 UTC
New theory suggests Earth's 60‐Year climate cycle may be driven by planetary oscillations directing micrometeors toward Earth, creating more dust - which change cloud cover.
Jupiter
© WikipediaAn image of Jupiter taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters claims there is increasing evidence that Earth's 60-year climate cycle may be driven by planetary oscillations. They claim a 60-year climate cycle is found in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, aurora sightings, rainfall, and ocean climatic records.

The paper says:
"...the orbital eccentricity of Jupiter presents prominent oscillations with a period of quasi 60 years due to its gravitational coupling with Saturn." The authors propose that the planetary system modulates the interplanetary dust falling on Earth and modifying the cloud coverage.

The orbital eccentricity of Jupiter presents a strong 60‐year oscillation that is well correlated with several climatic records and with the 60‐year oscillation found in long meteorite fall records since the 7th century.

Since meteorite falls are the most macroscopic aspect of infalling space dust, we conclude that the interplanetary dust should modulate the formation of the clouds and, thus, drive climate changes."
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Info

Unusual planetary nebula fades mere decades after it arrived

James Urton
University of Washington
Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:16 UTC
Stingray Nebula,
© NASA/ESA/Bruce Balick/Martín Guerrero/Gerardo Ramos-LariosTwo images of the Stingray Nebula, located in the direction of the southern constellation Ara — or the Altar — captured 20 years apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The image on the left was taken in March 1996, while the image on the right was captured in January 2016.
Stars are rather patient. They can live for billions of years, and they typically make slow transitions — sometimes over many millions of years — between the different stages of their lives.

So when a previously typical star's behavior rapidly changes in a few decades, astronomers take note and get to work.

Such is the case with a star known as SAO 244567, which lies at the center of Hen 3-1357, commonly known as the Stingray Nebula. The Stingray Nebula is a planetary nebula — an expanse of material sloughed off from a star as it enters a new phase of old age and then heated by that same star into colorful displays that can last for up to a million years.

The tiny Stingray Nebula unexpectedly appeared in the 1980s and was first imaged by scientists in the 1990s using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It is by far the youngest planetary nebula in our sky. A team of astronomers recently analyzed a more recent image of the nebula, taken in 2016 by Hubble, and found something unexpected: As they report in a paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, the Stingray Nebula has faded significantly and changed shape over the course of just 20 years.

If dimming continues at current rates, in 20 or 30 years the Stingray Nebula will be barely perceptible, and was likely already fading when Hubble obtained the first clear images of it in 1996, according to lead author Bruce Balick, an emeritus professor of astronomy at UW.
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Cloud Lightning

Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Three cycles of time converge on Dec 21, 2020


Adapt 2030
Sat, 05 Dec 2020 06:14 UTC
Superbolts
© YouTube/Adapt 2030 (screen capture)
On December 21, 2020 these cycles will converge in time. The change of elements in astrology from Earth to Air in it's 700 year cycle, entering the first degree of the first minute of Aquarius in the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Grand Solar Minimum is intensifying all on the Winter Solstice.


Comment: 'Superbolts' detected above atmosphere are over 1,000 times brighter than normal lightning

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Alarm Clock

Cluster of Alaskan islands could be super volcano

American Geophysical Union
Heritage Daily
Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:49 UTC
Kagamil volcano
Kagamil volcano: Scientists suggest that a small group of volcanic islands in Alaska's Aleutian chain might be part of a single, undiscovered giant volcano.
If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.

The Islands of the Four Mountains in the central Aleutians is a tight group of six stratovolcanoes named Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana and Uliaga. Stratovolcanoes are what most people envision when they think of a volcano: a steep conical mountain with a banner of clouds and ash waving at the summit. They can have powerful eruptions, like that of Mount St. Helens in 1980, but these are dwarfed by far less frequent caldera-forming eruptions.

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland, the most active volcano of the group, trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains. They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Question

Newly discovered ghostly 'odd radio circles' can't be explained by current theories

Professor Ray Norris
The Conversation
Wed, 02 Dec 2020 17:37 UTC
In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she'd found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn't fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labelled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna's.

Ghostly ORC
© Image by Bärbel Koribalski, based on ASKAP data, with the optical image from the [Dark Energy Survey](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org), Author providedThe ghostly ORC1 (blue/green fuzz), on a backdrop of the galaxies at optical wavelengths. There’s an orange galaxy at the centre of the ORC, but we don’t know whether it’s part of the ORC, or just a chance coincidence.
Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO's revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.
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Galaxy

Black hole's structure possibly glimpsed, as dust ring casts shadows and rays far across space


RT
Sun, 22 Nov 2020 18:43 UTC
Hubble image core galaxy IC 5063
© NASA/ESA/STScI/W.P. Maksym (CfA)Hubble image showing bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core of the galaxy IC 5063.
Astronomers believe they are getting a glimpse of the structure of a black hole, after the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a collection of rays and shadows beaming out from the center of a galaxy millions of light-years away.

Black holes are the universe's greatest monsters, rapidly consuming everything in their vicinity. Their gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape them, an extraordinary fact which also makes them invisible to us and thus incredibly hard to study.

However, experts have noticed vast shadows and narrow, bright rays stretching out from the center of the galaxy IC 5063, as if something enormous is standing in the way of the intense light.

Galaxy IC 5063 - rays
© NASA, ESA, STScI/W.P. Maksym (CfA)Bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core of the galaxy IC 5063.
Experts believe this could be a black hole in the heart of the galaxy casting its shadow into space, and a quirk of alignment may be allowing them a glimpse of its structure.
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Rocket

Elon Musk says SpaceX will attempt uncrewed Mars flight in two years, human landing in four to six

Darrell Etherington
Tech Crunch
Tue, 01 Dec 2020 22:00 UTC
SpaceX mars landing unmanned
© SpaceX
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was given an award from media giant Axel Springer on Tuesday, and he sat down to provide a wide-ranging interview that covered topics including space, Tesla, AI and even underpopulation. Musk addressed SpaceX's Mars ambitions first, providing current timelines he's working toward for reaching the red planet with SpaceX's Starship, the next-generation spacecraft it hopes to fly in a new high-altitude test sometime later this week.

Musk said that he expects humans will land on Mars in around six years, and that he's "fairly confident" in that timeline. That's based on the fact that Earth and Mars are in sync in terms of their relative orbits around the sun approximately every 26 months. SpaceX plans to do an uncrewed launch and landing on Mars hopefully at the next opportunity in about two years from now. He added that with luck, a first human landing could happen during the next Mars-Earth synchronization after that, in four years instead of six.

Asked when Musk's own first trip to orbit would happen, he answered "possibly two or three years," though he qualified that his primary focus is to ensure the technology is in place to enable "a lot of people to go to Mars and make life interplanetary, and to have a base on the moon," downplaying his own personal spaceflight goals.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Scientists identify gene responsible for aging of human cells


Sci-News
Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:01 UTC
GATA6 gene pathway
A gene called GATA6 (GATA binding protein 6) regulates aging of human mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs), according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cellular reprogramming can reverse the aging that leads to a decline in the activities and functions of MSC cells. This is something that researchers have known for a while.

But what they had not figured out is which molecular mechanisms are responsible for this reversal.

Comment: See also:

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Comet 2

Unknown space object just skimmed past Earth and scientists still don't know what it is


RT
Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:44 UTC
Illustration earth
© marcelo celo from Pixabay
A slow-moving object of unknown origin just completed an extremely close flyby of our planet, before heading back out into the solar system. And the mysterious space material is expected to return in March.

The strange 'minimoon' - which is officially dubbed 2020 SO - has been the subject of speculation ever since it was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey on September 17. It has been classed as an asteroid but scientists still don't have a complete understanding of what the object is. Some have speculated that it is part of an old rocket.
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Map

Frozen bird found in Siberia is 46,000 years old


Geology In
Tue, 01 Dec 2020 21:43 UTC
frozen bird siberia prehistoric
© Valeri Plotnikov /Kennedy NewsThis 46,000-year-old 'ice bird' was so well preserved that fossil hunters mistook it for an unfortunate creature that 'died yesterday' - only to realise they had found the first ever Ice Age bird specimen
Fossil hunters find 'ice bird' from 46,000 years ago that looks like it died 'yesterday'

Scientists have recovered DNA from a well-preserved horned lark found in Siberian permafrost. The results can contribute to explaining the evolution of sub species, as well as how the mammoth steppe transformed into tundra, forest and steppe biomes at the end of the last Ice Age.

In 2018, a well-preserved frozen bird was found in the ground in the Belaya Gora area of north-eastern Siberia. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a new research center at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, haves studied the bird and the results are now published in the scientific journal Communications Biology. The analyses reveals that the bird is a 46,000-year-old female horned lark.

Comment: The change in climate may have come faster than researchers realize:

Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes

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