Science & TechnologyS


Fireball 5

Astronomers discover a new meteor shower - The Source is Comet 46P/Wirtanen

Mark Thompson
Universe Today
Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:21 UTC
Comet Wirtanen
© Stub MandrelComet Wirtanen imaged using a 130P-DS Newtonian telescope on a guided HEQ5 mount and an astro modified and cooled Canon 450D. 45 two-minute images stacked using deep sky stacked to stack comet and stars separately before recombination topo remove blurring.
Like many of you, I love a good meteor shower. I have fond memories of the Leonid meteor storm back in 1999 when several hundred per hour were seen at peak. Sadly meteor storms are not that common unlike meteor showers of which, there are about 20 major showers per year. Wait, there's another one and this time it comes from the debris left behind from Comet 46P/Wirtanen with an expected peak on December 12. Last year, 23 meteors were seen on that night that matched the location of the comets trail.

Comets (and some asteroids) leave a trail of debris behind them like a trail of celestial breadcrumbs. If the orbit of a comet crosses the orbit of the Earth then the particles from the debris (that are often no larger than grains of sand) collide with our atmosphere. At the immense speeds (of the order of 60 km per second, the particles falling through the atmosphere cause the gas to glow giving rise to the classic shooting star we see in the sky. Because the orbits of Earth and comets are relatively fixed, this process repeats itself every time we go through the same part of the orbit giving us the familiar annual meteor showers.

One such comet that it seems may become host to a new annual shower is Comet 46P/Wirtanen (46P). It nearly hit the headlines previously when it had been initially selected as the target for the Rosetta mission which, as you may recall, visited 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko instead. 46P is known as a short period comet taking 5.4 years to complete one orbit of the Sun. It is among the family of comets known as a Jupiter comet which has a most distant point from the Sun of between 5 and 6 astronomical units (1 AU is the average distance between the Sun and Earth). Observations have suggested it has a diameter of about 1.4km.
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People 2

Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began developing their own accent

Richard Gray
BBC
Mon, 26 Feb 2024 16:24 UTC
Rothera Research Station antarctica
© British Antarctic SurveyAlthough the snow and sea can disappear during the summer months at Rothera Research Station, in winter it becomes effectively cut off
Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak.

It was a suitably icy farewell salute: a handful of snowballs arcing through the sky towards RSS Ernest Shackleton as the ship slipped away from the wharf. The vessel was setting out across the stormy Southern Ocean, leaving 26 hardy souls behind on a snowbound island at the frozen tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Those waving goodbye from the shore were watching their last tangible link to the rest of the world glide off through the bitterly cold water. Ahead of them lay six months of winter, effectively marooned, in the coldest continent on the planet.

"They say it is quicker to get to someone on the International Space Station than it is to medically evacuate someone from Antarctica in the winter," says Marlon Clark, one of those 26 international researchers and support staff left behind at the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, just to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula in March 2018. Antarctica is the least-inhabited continent on the planet - it has no permanent human population - with just a handful of research stations and bases scattered across the 5.4 million sq mile (14 million sq km) frozen landscape. "So, you're isolated," says Clark. "There's a lot of mystery and lore about 'a winter in Antarctica'. Anticipation was the strongest feeling as well as realising, 'OK, this is real, I'm going to be here for a long, long time'."
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Nebula

Webb finds evidence for neutron star at heart of young supernova remnant


Webb Space Telescope
Thu, 22 Feb 2024 21:34 UTC
SN 1987A.
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Claes Fransson (Stockholm University), Mikako Matsuura (Cardiff University), M. Barlow (UCL), Patrick Kavanagh (Maynooth University), Josefin Larsson (KTH)The James Webb Space Telescope has observed the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of a well-known and recently-observed supernova known as SN 1987A. At left is a NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) image released in 2023. The image at top right shows light from singly ionized argon (Argon II) captured by the Medium Resolution Spectrograph (MRS) mode of MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). The image at bottom right shows light from multiply ionized argon captured by the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). Both instruments show a strong signal from the center of the supernova remnant. This indicated to the science team that there is a source of high-energy radiation there, most likely a neutron star.
Astronomers detect long-sought compact object within the remnant of Supernova 1987A.

In February 1987, the closest supernova to earth in almost 400 years exploded onto the scene. Designated Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), it resulted from the death of a massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy 160,000 light-years away. In the decades since, its remnant has been studied by telescopes at all wavelengths of light from X-rays to radio. Yet despite all the scrutiny, one mystery has remained.

Theory predicted that the stellar explosion should have produced either a neutron star or a black hole. Evidence for such a compact object has long been sought, without success. Now, new observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have provided the first direct evidence of what is likely a neutron star, revealed by the effects of its high-energy emission.
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Camera

Magnificent yellow-crested bird photographed for the first time

Chen Ly
New Scientist
Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:05 UTC
The first-ever photograph of the yellow-crested helmetshrike
© Matt Brady/The University of Texas at El PasoThe first-ever photograph of the yellow-crested helmetshrike
The yellow-crested helmetshrike was considered lost after going unseen for nearly 20 years - now an expedition has rediscovered what appears to be a healthy population in central Africa

A rare bird with a stunning yellow crest has been photographed for the first time in the tropical mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - almost two decades after its last confirmed sighting.

The yellow-crested helmetshrike (Prionops alberti), also known as King Albert's helmetshrike, is a small bird that lives in the humid forests of the Albertine Rift mountains in central Africa. Adults are covered in glossy black plumage with a splendid crown of bright, golden feathers on their heads. Their eyes are surrounded by distinctive orange tissue called a wattle.
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Propaganda

"Diversity Madness": Google (Kinda) apologizes after Woke AI Gemini exposed as Anti-White Racist

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00 UTC
Update (1645ET): Having been busted on some very clear race bias in the image generation segment of their new AI, Gemini Experiences Senior Director of Product Management Jack Krawczyk addressed the responses from the AI that had led social media users to voice concern.

Jack Krawczyk

Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Mysterious wave-like structure in our galaxy found to be slowly rippling

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Wed, 21 Feb 2024 12:00 UTC
wave structure galaxy
© Ralf Konietzka, Alyssa Goodman, and WorldWide TelescopeA diagram illustrating the Radcliffe Wave. The white line represents its current position, with blue blobs representing star clusters. The green and purple lines indicate future positions. The yellow dot is the Sun. 
Gazing out upon the apparently unchanging sea of stars around us, it's tempting to think of the Milky Way galaxy as static and everything within it as fixed and immutable.

While the timescales on which our galaxy moves often defies human experience, move it does indeed.

Not all of these dynamic processes are easy to see. Just a few years ago, scientists discovered a huge, wave-shaped structure extending some 9,000 light-years in length snaking along a spiral arm of the Milky Way, just 500 light-years from the Solar System at its closest point.

Comment: One wonders whether there's an energy coursing through the region causing the wave to move like that:

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Microchip

Elon Musk says first Neuralink patient can control a computer mouse through thinking

Arjun Kharpal
CNBC
Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00 UTC
neuralink elon
© Jonathan Raa/ Nurphoto/ Getty Images
A patient implanted with Neuralink's brain technology can now control a computer mouse just by thinking, the company's founder Elon Musk said.

″[The] patient seems to have made a full recovery with no ill effects that we are aware of and is able to control the mouse, move the mouse around the screen just by thinking," Musk said in a Spaces session on social media platform X.

Neuralink is the billionaire's startup, which says it has developed a brain implant designed to help humans use their neural signals to control external technologies. The company aims to restore lost capabilities such as vision, motor function and speech.
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Cassiopaea

Best of the Web: Earth's glaciation periods may be triggered by large asteroid impacts - Yale

Keith Cowing
Astrobiology
Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:39 UTC
ice age earth glaciation
© NASA
A Yale-led research team has picked a side in the "Snowball Earth" debate over the possible cause of planet-wide deep freeze events that occurred in the distant past.

According to a new study, these so-called "Snowball" Earth periods, in which the planet's surface was covered in ice for thousands or even millions of years, could have been triggered abruptly by large asteroids that slammed into the Earth.

The findings, detailed in the journal Science Advances, may answer a question that has stumped scientists for decades about some of the most dramatic known climate shifts in Earth's history. In addition to Yale, the study included researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Vienna.

Comment: As is increasingly the case, mainstream science is finally coming to conclusions that have long been put forth by authors and articles here on SOTT, but their finding has much more profound implications than they have yet to acknowledge: Also check out SOTT radio's:


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Magnify

For Darwin Day, Robert Shedinger calls Darwin's bluff

Jonathan Witt
Evolution News
Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:04 UTC
bird finch missing link chain graphic weak
© Evolution News
It's Darwin Day 2024, the birthday of Charles Darwin, and Discovery Institute Press has a new truth bomb for the occasion — Darwin's Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished. The book, by Robert Shedinger, Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, drags from Charles Darwin's closet a long overlooked skeleton devastating to the Darwinian mythology.

Tucked away in Darwin's surviving papers is a lengthy manuscript he never finished, The Origin of Species' oft-promised sequel on speciation he said would finally supply solid empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection. He admitted such evidence was largely absent from the Origin, a work he repeatedly described as a "mere abstract." And yet Darwin soon abandoned his sequel, and without ever revealing this decision to his reading public.
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Galaxy

The brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole that eats a 'sun a day'

Robert Lea
Space.com
Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:50 UTC
quasar
© ESO/M. KornmesserAn illustration of the recording-breaker quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a greedy supermassive black hole.
The quasar, as bright as 500 trillion suns, has evaded astronomers for over 40 years because of its incredible luminosity.

A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it's also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It's also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen — one that consumes the equivalent of over one sun's mass a day.

The quasar, J0529-4351, is located so far from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it is seen as it was when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just under 2 billion years old.

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar is estimated to be between 17 billion and 19 billion times the mass of the sun; each year, it eats, or "accretes" the gas and dust equivalent to 370 solar masses. This makes J0529-4351 so luminous that if it were placed next to the sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brilliant star.
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