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Five MORE asteroids to fly past Earth in coming week, as NASA identifies space rock with highest odds of hitting us


RT
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 16:55 UTC
asteroid flyby earth illustration
© Pixabay / urikyo33
NASA's asteroid watchers have given a heads-up about five asteroids headed toward Earth in the coming days, while the agency's automated Sentry system has identified the space rock which has the highest chance of impact.

Over this weekend, two asteroids - 2020 MU1 (120ft diameter or half the wingspan of a 747 jet) and 2020 ML (73ft diameter, roughly half the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris) - are expected to shoot past us at a distance of 4.4 million and 2.7 million miles respectively.

Lest anyone get too comfortable and breathe a sigh of relief, however, NASA warns that a further three space rocks are expected in these parts next week.
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Moon

Chinese scientists reveal analysis of weird substance found on the moon's far side by Yutu 2 rover

Hanneke Weitering
space.com
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 04:14 UTC
lunar lander
© AP Photo / China National Space Administration/Xinhua News Agency
Chinese scientists have published an analysis of a curious substance on the moon which generated widespread interest following its discovery by the Yutu 2 rover last year.

The discovery was made by a Yutu 2 drive team member in July 2019, during lunar day 8 of the rover's mission, which is part of China's Chang'e 4 mission to explore the far side of the moon. A report by Our Space, a Chinese-language science-outreach publication, revealed the discovery on Aug. 17 and described the substance using the term "胶状物" ("jiao zhuang wu"), which can be translated as "gel-like."

This description, along with the initial absence of images, sparked wide interest as well as speculation among lunar scientists.

However the substance is, as expected by scientists, made up of rock. In their article in "Earth and Planetary Science Letters", Gou Sheng and colleagues analyzed data from Yutu 2's panoramic and hazard avoidance cameras, and the rover's Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer (VNIS) instrument.
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Butterfly

Temperate zones not tropics may host more modern evolutionary innovation according to plant study

Natalie van Hoose
Florida Museum
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
hibiscus

The tropics are the birthplace of most rosids, a massive group of flowering plants that includes this hibiscus, a member of the mallow family. But researchers found new rosid species are evolving in temperate zones twice as quickly as the tropics, a finding that challenges a longstanding hypothesis.
In a surprise twist, a major group of flowering plants is evolving twice as quickly in temperate zones as the tropics. The finding runs counter to a long-held hypothesis that tropical regions, home to the planet's richest biological diversity, outpace their temperate counterparts in producing new species.

The tropics are the birthplace of most species of rosids, a group that makes up more than a quarter of flowering plants, ranging from mangroves to roses to oaks. But in an analysis of about 20,000 rosid species, researchers found the speed of tropical rosid evolution lags far behind that of younger communities in temperate habitats.

Although rosids originated 93-115 million years ago, the rate at which the group diversified, or formed new species, dramatically increased over the last 15 million years, a period of global cooling and expanding temperate habitats. Today, rosids are diversifying far faster in places such as the southeastern U.S. than in equatorial rainforests, said study co-lead author Ryan Folk, assistant professor of biological sciences and herbarium curator at Mississippi State University.

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

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Moon

Unexpected metal on moon could signal close connection with early earth

Elizabeth Howell
Space.com
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 20:38 UTC
moon
© NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
An image of the near side of the moon based on data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Earth's moon is more metal than scientists imagined.

NASA's prolific Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) found rich evidence of iron and titanium oxides under the surface of the moon, which may show a close connection with Earth's early history.

Scientists have been debating how the moon formed for decades. The leading theory suggests that a Mars-size world collided with Earth billions of years ago. The colliding world shattered upon impact and blasted part of the proto-Earth's surface into space. The debris surrounded Earth with a ring; the moon we see today is the result of that ring slowly collapsing under its own gravity.


Comment: Why is Earth missing a huge part of its crust?


The moon's chemical composition, however, doesn't show clear evidence of that theory. The lunar highlands on the moon, visible from the Earth as bright regions, have rocks with smaller amounts of metal-bearing minerals relative to our planet.
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Cassiopaea

Two bright new supernovae light up nearby galaxies

Bob King
Sky & Telescope
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 19:20 UTC
Two bright new supernovae are now within the range of amateur telescopes in the western sky at nightfall.

Supernova 2020nlb
© Gianluca Masi
Supernova 2020nlb in the galaxy M85 in Virgo was a 17th-magnitude blip at discovery but has grown brighter each night. Now at magnitude 12.2 (July 7th), it's bright enough to see in a 6-inch telescope. M85's supernova is currently almost a full magnitude brighter than the 13.1-magnitude field star immediately to its northeast. The supernova sits 1.0″ east and 43.2″ north of the core. North is up.
If you want to see a supernova in your lifetime, why wait around for Betelgeuse to blow up? If you have a 6-inch telescope and access to a dark sky, you can see one right now. Two actually. Both are visible in the western sky at nightfall in the neighboring constellations Virgo and Coma Berenices.

The first of the pair, dubbed 2020nlb, was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on June 25th in the 10th-magnitude galaxy M85. Located in Coma Berenices 60 million light-years from Earth, M85 is an elliptical galaxy a quarter again as large our Milky Way. The "M" stands for Charles Messier, an 18th century French astronomer who compiled a list of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae he stumbled on during searches for his favorite prey, comets.
Supernova 2020nvb
© Gianluca Masi
Located just 3.3″ west and 8″ north of the core, the bright supernova 2020nvb appears "stuck" to NGC 4457's bright nucleus. North is up.
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Telescope

Dying stars breathe life into Earth: study

Johns Hopkins University
Phys Org
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 00:00 UTC
NGC 7789, also known as Caroline's Rose
© Guillaume Seigneuret and NASA
NGC 7789, also known as Caroline's Rose, is an old open star cluster of the Milky Way, which lies about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It hosts a few White Dwarfs of unusually high mass, analyzed in this study.
As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos through the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many different chemical elements, including carbon.

Findings from a study published today in Nature Astronomy show that the final breaths of these dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbon's origin in the Milky Way.

"The findings pose new, stringent constraints on how and when carbon was produced by stars of our galaxy, ending up within the raw material from which the Sun and its planetary system were formed 4.6 billion years ago," says Jeffrey Cummings, an Associate Research Scientist in the Johns Hopkins University's Department of Physics & Astronomy and an author on the paper.
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Info

White dwarfs reveal new insights into the origin of life in the universe

Tim Stephens
UC Santa Cruz
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 21:37 UTC
Caroline's Rose
© Guillaume Seigneuret and NASA
NGC 7789, also known as Caroline's Rose, is an old open star cluster of the Milky Way, which lies about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It hosts a few white dwarfs of unusually high mass that were analyzed in this study.
A new analysis of white dwarf stars supports their role as a key source of carbon, an element crucial to all life, in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Approximately 90 percent of all stars end their lives as white dwarfs, very dense stellar remnants that gradually cool and dim over billions of years. With their final few breaths before they collapse, however, these stars leave an important legacy, spreading their ashes into the surrounding space through stellar winds enriched with chemical elements, including carbon, newly synthesized in the star's deep interior during the last stages before its death.

Every carbon atom in the universe was created by stars, through the fusion of three helium nuclei. But astrophysicists still debate which types of stars are the primary source of the carbon in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Some studies favor low-mass stars that blew off their envelopes in stellar winds and became white dwarfs, while others favor massive stars that eventually exploded as supernovae.

In the new study, published July 6 in Nature Astronomy, an international team of astronomers discovered and analyzed white dwarfs in open star clusters in the Milky Way, and their findings help shed light on the origin of the carbon in our galaxy. Open star clusters are groups of up to a few thousand stars, formed from the same giant molecular cloud and roughly the same age, and held together by mutual gravitational attraction. The study was based on astronomical observations conducted in 2018 at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and led by coauthor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
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Magnet

Simulations show Earth's magnetic field can change 10 times faster than previously thought


PhysOrg
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 16:39 UTC
Earth’s magnetic field
© Aubert et al./IPGP/CNRS Photo library
A simulation of the Earth’s magnetic field.
A new study by the University of Leeds and University of California at San Diego reveals that changes in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field may take place 10 times faster than previously thought.

Their study gives new insight into the swirling flow of iron 2800 kilometers below the planet's surface and how it has influenced the movement of the magnetic field during the past hundred thousand years.

Our magnetic field is generated and maintained by a convective flow of molten metal that forms the Earth's outer core. Motion of the liquid iron creates the electric currents that power the field, which not only helps guide navigational systems but also helps shield us from harmful extra terrestrial radiation and hold our atmosphere in place.
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Blue Planet

Flying snakes exist and now scientists finally understand how they do it


Strange Sounds
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 21:10 UTC
paradise flying snake (Chrysopelea paradisi)

Paradise flying snake (Chrysopelea paradisi)
Flying snakes exist. And now, scientists finally understand how they can fly... There are snakes that can fly and scientists now know how

Anyone scared of snakes on the ground may not want to read this story — because the reptiles are also in the sky.

The paradise snake, which is native to south and southeast Asia, has been known to scientists for some time. But they never really understood how the species — and others like it — are able to glide through the air.

Researchers at Virginia Tech conducted controlled tests with the snakes in an indoor environment.

Comment: Another fascinating take on the paradise snake



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Chalkboard

Mistakes ID critics make: Information theory

Brian Miller
Evolution News
Sun, 05 Jul 2020 20:11 UTC
scrabble letters
© Surendran MP on Unsplash.
In previous articles, I demonstrated how substantial quantities of biological information cannot emerge through any natural process (see here and here), and I described how such information unambiguously points to intelligent design. Now, in posts today through Friday, I will address the mistakes typically made by critics who challenge these claims (see here, here, here, and here). Nearly always, the errors fall into three categories:
  1. Misapplying information theory.
  2. Misinterpreting research related to protein rarity.
  3. Misunderstanding the creative potential of evolutionary processes.
The Nature of Biological Information

Skeptics of information-based design arguments typically misunderstand the nature of biological information (see here and here). For instance, one physicist, Randy Isaac, stated the following:
We first note that, from a thermodynamics perspective, living cells are dynamic, open systems that continually exchange energy, entropy, and information with their surrounding environment...Thus there is plenty of opportunity for information to be transformed from one variable to another, from various physical states to useful information-bearing variables. Information in a cell is not conserved, just as entropy is not conserved in an open system.
His analysis reveals a common confusion between what is termed the Shannon measure of information and semantic information (more generally, specified complexity).
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