Science & TechnologyS


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.

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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.
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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:

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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:

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Microscope 1

Chemist Marcos Eberlin advances case for intelligent design in new book endorsed by three Nobel laureates

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:55 UTC
eberlin foresight
The case for intelligent design begins with biology and paleontology, pushes onward to cosmology, physics - and now chemistry. Marcos Eberlin is the superstar Brazilian chemist and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences who founded and for a quarter century headed the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. His new book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, is out now from Discovery Institute Press.

Foresight carries endorsements not just from one Nobel Prize-winning scientist. No, not just two either. But three. They are Sir John B. Gurdon (Physiology or Medicine, 2012), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry, 2007), and Brian D. Josephson (Physics, 1973). Of course, accolades from famous people don't guarantee that the conclusion of the book is right. But at some point the critics need to admit that the accumulating strength of the argument demands, at last, an adequate response.

As Dr. Ertl writes, "Regardless of whether one shares Eberlin's approach, it is definitely becoming clear that nature is still full of secrets which are beyond our rational understanding and force us to humility." Yes, indeed.

Do you want to help celebrate the launch of this latest leading scientific voice in the discussion about design in nature? Join us in Seattle on Tuesday, May 7, at the Woodland Park Zoo, at 7:30 pm. More information is here. Meet and hear from Dr. Eberlin, a dynamic speaker will also be touring the United States in coming weeks with speaking events in Irvine, California (May 2), Dallas, Texas (May 5), and Littleton, Colorado (May 6).
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Info

India-Asia collision changed the world

Liz Fuller-Wright
Princeton University
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 17:53 UTC
When the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now a team of Princeton University scientists has identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world's oceans increased, altering the conditions for life.
Ancient World
© Images created by Emma Kast, Princeton University, using paleogeographic reconstructions from Deep Time Maps, with their permissionNeither the continents nor the oceans have always looked the way they do now. These “paleomaps” show how the continents and oceans appeared before (top) and during (bottom) “the collision that changed the world,” when the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent rammed northward into Asia, closing the Tethys Sea and building the Himalayas. Global ocean levels were higher then, creating salty shallow seas (pale blue) that covered much of North Africa and parts of each of the continents. A team of Princeton researchers, using samples gathered at the three starred locations, created an unprecedented record of ocean nitrogen and oxygen levels from 70 million years ago through 30 million years ago that shows a major shift in ocean chemistry after the India-Asia collision. Another shift came 35 million years ago, when Antarctica began accumulating ice and global sea levels fell.
"These results are different from anything people have previously seen," said Emma Kast, a graduate student in geosciences and the lead author on a paper coming out in Science on April 26. "The magnitude of the reconstructed change took us by surprise."

Kast used microscopic seashells to create a record of ocean nitrogen over a period from 70 million years ago - shortly before the extinction of the dinosaurs - until 30 million years ago. This record is an enormous contribution to the field of global climate studies, said John Higgins, an associate professor of geosciences at Princeton and a co-author on the paper.
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Cassiopaea

Is the upgraded LIGO finding a new black hole merger every week?

Matt Williams
Universe Today
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 10:25 UTC
black holes
In February of 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves (GWs). Since then, multiple events have been detected, providing insight into a cosmic phenomena that was predicted over a century ago by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

A little over a year ago, LIGO was taken offline so that upgrades could be made to its instruments, which would allow for detections to take place "weekly or even more often." After completing the upgrades on April 1st, the observatory went back online and performed as expected, detecting two probable gravitational wave events in the space of two weeks.

LIGO announced the first of the two new GW events on April 8th, which was followed by a second announcement on April 12th. The signals were detected thanks to the three-facility collaboration between LIGO and the Virgo Observatory in Italy, and both are believed to have been the result of a pair of black holes merging.

Comment: It's worth remembering that there has been signifcant controversy surrounding the LIGO project, and, as noted in the article, the scientists can't be certain about what they're seeing, just yet: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Galaxy

New study finds universe younger, expanding faster than previously thought

Sinéad Baker
Business Insider
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 22:53 UTC
expanding universe
© Business InsiderScientists are working to calculate how fast the universe is expanding.
We may need new physics as a result

The universe is younger and expanding faster than we thought, a new study found, scientists think we may have to work on new physics as a result.

A new study lead by Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Adam Riess, found that the universe is expanding 9% faster than previous calcultions that were based on studying the aftermath of the Big Bang.

The study by Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, was published in Astrophysical Journal this week, and used new measurements from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to calculate the new expansion rate, which scientist have theorized for years.

Comment:

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Cassiopaea

Life may have evolved before Earth finished forming

Mike Wall
Space.com
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 19:39 UTC
a young sun
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. PyleThe first organisms may have evolved before the rocky planets formed. Artist's concept showing a young sun-like star surrounded by a planet-forming disk of gas and dust.
Planetesimals, the rocky building blocks of planets, likely had all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it way back at the dawn of the solar system, said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University (ASU).

And clement conditions may have persisted inside some planetesimals for tens of millions of years - perhaps long enough for life to emerge, said Elkins-Tanton, the director of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of NASA's upcoming mission to the odd metallic asteroid Psyche.

Some planetesimals survived into and beyond the planet-forming period, raising the possibility that one of these primitive bodies may have seeded Earth with life, she added.

Comment: See also: And for more on the discussion of the origin of life, evolution, and much more, check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Dark-matter detector picks up radioactive decay of Xenon-124 atom

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 20:56 UTC
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
© Stefano Montesi - Corbis/Corbis via Getty ImagesDeep below a mountain in Italy, in a tank full of liquid xenon, things happen slowly. Very, very, very, very slowly.
A dark-matter detector buried under 1500 metres of Italian mountain has recorded what is arguably the most uncommon phenomenon in the universe - the decay of a Xenon-124 atom.

All radioactive matter is measured by what is commonly called a "half-life", which is defined as the time taken for half the radioactive atoms in any given sample to decay away.

Half-lives vary wildly, depending on the elements involved. Flerovium-289, for instance, has a half-life of just 2.6 seconds, while plutonium-239 takes 24,110 years to lose 50% of its load.

And although 24,000 years is a very long period of time - and one of the reasons the use of plutonium to generate electricity is viewed with caution - it is nothing, it turns out, compared to Xenon-124.

Italy's Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), deep beneath the Gran Sasso mountains, is a dark-matter detector that comprises a cylindrical tank filed with 3200 kilograms of liquid xenon at a temperature of minus-95 degrees Celsius.
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