Science & TechnologyS


Mars

Scientists map Mars' global wind patterns for the first time

University of Maryland Baltimore County
Phys.org
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
MAVEN
© NASA Goddard/MAVEN/SVS/Greg ShirahComputer-generated visualization of the orbital paths (white dots) taken by the MAVEN spacecraft as it mapped winds (blue lines) in the Martian upper atmosphere. Red lines coming from the white dots represent local wind speed and direction, measured by MAVEN's Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer instrument.
Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth's upper atmosphere. But it didn't happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren't originally designed to collect wind measurements.

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could "swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough," to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.

Comment: See also:

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Cloud Lightning

Hotspots of mysterious "superbolt" lightning shown in new map

Stephen Ornes
Science for students
Mon, 09 Dec 2019 06:45 UTC
lightning
© Jurkos/iStock /Getty Images PlusThis striking array of lightning is zapping the open Mediterranean, a superbolt hotspot.
Not every lightning strike is the same. Some skip from cloud to cloud. Others strike the ground, delivering a shocking wallop to anything that gets in the way. Lightning differs by how strong it is, too. Scientists have observed mega-strikes of lightning that carry 1,000 times more energy than ordinary bolts. They're so intense that, about four decades ago, a scientist had to coin a new word to describe them: Superbolts!

Scientists don't yet know how these mega-bolts amass so much energy. But they don't strike equally everywhere, a new study finds.

Superbolts seem to strike mostly at sea, it finds. And they don't occur at the same rate throughout the year. Few, for instance, develop from April to October.

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Fish

Ocean acidification occurred during last great marine mass extinction

Leoma Williams
Discover Wildlife
Wed, 23 Oct 2019 15:37 UTC
meteor
A long-held theory about the marine mass-extinction during the dinosaur die-off has been confirmed.

A new study has revealed the first direct evidence that the marine mass-extinction known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event coincided with a rise in ocean acidity.

This change in the pH of the oceans is thought to have affected the development of animals with shells and skeletons, which had devastating effects for predators up the food chain, leading to mass die-offs.

The team of researchers from Yale University and the Universities of St Andrews and Bristol used boron isotope analysis and modelling techniques to confirm the long-suspected theory.

Comment: It was not 'behind' the last mass extinction - it coincided with it. Ergo, today's ocean acidification is not man-made either.

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Nebula

NASA's NICER delivers precise pulsar measurements and first surface map


NASA
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
NICER
© NASANASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer is an X-ray payload aboard the International Space Station.
Astrophysicists are redrawing the textbook image of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Using NICER data, scientists have obtained the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar's size and its mass, as well as the first-ever map of hot spots on its surface.

The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), lies in an isolated region of space 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree "hot spots" on the pulsar's surface are much stranger than generally thought.

"From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars," said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now."


Watch how NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) has expanded our understanding of pulsars, the dense, spinning corpses of exploded stars. Pulsar J0030+0451, located 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces, now has the most precise and reliable size measurements of any pulsar to date. The shapes and locations of its hot spots challenge textbook depictions of these incredible objects. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Corey Schink, Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
antifragile
Fragile things hate chaos, volatility and randomness. The slightest jolt can break them. But what is the opposite of fragility? Not resilience or robustness. Resilient things are neutral to stressors. They take a beating, but remain unchanged. So what likes from disorder? Our languages don't have a word for such a property, or at least they didn't, until Nassim Taleb came around.

Antifragile is the property of things that gain from disorder: like muscle, economies, creativity, and character. And today on MindMatters we delve into Taleb's book on the subject. Insightful, down to earth, witty and practical, Taleb's writing is one of a kind. Just like the man himself.


Running Time: 01:17:14

Download: MP3 — 70.7 MB

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Sun

Revealing the physics of the Sun with NASA's Parker Solar Probe

Sarah Frazier, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Phys.org
Wed, 11 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
sun parker probe
© NASA/STEREO/Angelos Vourlidas
Nearly a year and a half into its mission, Parker Solar Probe has returned gigabytes of data on the Sun and its atmosphere. Following the release of the very first science from the mission, five researchers presented additional new findings from Parker Solar Probe at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Dec. 11, 2019. Research from these teams hints at the processes behind both the Sun's continual outflow of material — the solar wind — and more infrequent solar storms that can disrupt technology and endanger astronauts, along with new insight into space dust that creates the Geminids meteor shower.

The young solar wind

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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Jupiter

NASA spacecraft spies huge new storm on Jupiter

Mike Wall
Space.com
Fri, 13 Dec 2019 12:43 UTC
A new, smaller cyclone can be seen at the lower right of this infrared image of Jupiter's south pole
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAMA new, smaller cyclone can be seen at the lower right of this infrared image of Jupiter's south pole taken on Nov. 4, 2019, during the 23rd science pass of the planet by NASA's Juno spacecraft.
NASA's Juno probe discovered a giant new storm swirling near Jupiter's south pole last month, a few weeks after pulling off a dramatic death-dodging maneuver.

Juno spied the newfound maelstrom, which is about as wide as Texas, on Nov. 3, during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. The storm joins a family of six other cyclones in Jupiter's south polar region, which Juno had spotted on previous passes by the gas giant. (Those encounters also revealed nine cyclones near Jupiter's north pole, by the way.)

The southern tempests are arrayed in a strikingly regular fashion. Previously, five of them had formed a pentagon around a central storm, which is as wide as the continental United States. With the new addition, that girdling structure is now a hexagon.

"These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement yesterday (Dec. 12).

"Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work," he added. "We are beginning to grasp it through observations and computer simulations. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."

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Comet 2

Hubble Space Telescope records the best view of the first observed interstellar comet, Borisov

Gege Li
New Scientist
Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
Borisov
© NASA, ESA/D. Jewitt (UCLA)Best view yet of interstellar comet Borisov
This image, captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the first observed interstellar comet to enter the solar system as it speeds past the sun at 160,000 kilometres per hour. It is the closest comet 2I/Borisov has come to the sun since Hubble started tracking it in October.

The latest image from the telescope shows that Borisov is currently about 300 million kilometres away from Earth. It will approach slightly closer to our planet in late December, getting within about 290 million kilometres.
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Microscope 1

A 'beautiful' dinosaur tail found preserved in amber

Paul Rincon
BBC News
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00 UTC
Tail amber
© Current BiologyFeathered tail preserved in amber from North-Eastern Myanmar
The tail of a feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. The one-of-a-kind discovery helps put flesh on the bones of these extinct creatures, opening a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years.

Examination of the specimen suggests the tail was chestnut brown on top and white on its underside. The tail is described in the journal Current Biology.

"This is the first time we've found dinosaur material preserved in amber," co-author Ryan McKellar, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told the BBC News website.

The study's first author, Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, discovered the remarkable fossil at an amber market in Myitkina, Myanmar.

The 99-million-year-old amber had already been polished for jewelry and the seller had thought it was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow.
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Better Earth

High-precision map reveals Antarctica's ice sheet bed topography

University of California, Irvine
Phys.org
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
Antarctic
© Mathieu Morlighem / UCI"Ultimately, BedMachine Antarctica presents a mixed picture: Ice streams in some areas are relatively well-protected by their underlying ground features, while others on retrograde beds are shown to be more at risk from potential marine ice sheet instability," says Mathieu Morlighem, UCI associate professor of Earth system science and lead author of the paper describing the newly released Antarctica bed topography map.
A University of California, Irvine-led team of glaciologists has unveiled the most accurate portrait yet of the contours of the land beneath Antarctica's ice sheet — and, by doing so, has helped identify which regions of the continent are going to be more, or less, vulnerable to future climate warming.

Highly anticipated by the global cryosphere and environmental science communities, the newly released Antarctica topography map, BedMachine, and related findings were published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Among the most striking results of the BedMachine project are the discovery of stabilizing ridges that protect the ice flowing across the Transantarctic Mountains; a bed geometry that increases the risk of rapid ice melting in the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers sector of West Antarctica; a bed under the Recovery and Support Force glaciers that is hundreds of meters deeper than previously thought, making those ice sheets more susceptible to retreat; and the world's deepest land canyon below Denman Glacier in East Antarctica.

Comment: In Did Earth 'Steal' Martian Water?, Pierre Lescaudron's provides fascinating insight into Antarctica's unusual topography and ice cover:
Does the bedrock of Antarctica show any sign of positive electric scarring, i.e. a massive canyon-like geological feature? Indeed it does. As shown in the satellite picture above, Antarctica is considered to host the largest canyon on Earth, according to a 2016 geological survey:
[...] the largest unsurveyed region on the icy continent is a region called Princess Elizabeth Land. Now a team of geologists has scoured that area to reveal a massive subglacial lake and a series of canyons, one of which — more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon — could rank as Earth's largest.
[...]

The question then arises: why is there so much more ice in Antarctica compared to the Arctic? Why does Antarctica ice extend 2,500 meters below sea level and reach the bedrock, while Arctic ice is a mere 4 meter thick layer floating on the ocean?

[...]

In any case, no endogenous cause (snowfall difference, temperature difference) can explain the marked difference in depth and volume between the Antarctic ice sheet and the Arctic one. A massive and sudden inflow of exogenous water (in ice form) in Antarctica would, however, explain these discrepancies.
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