© Mike Herman via VK
© Mike Herrman via VK
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Strange SkiesS
'Fire rainbow' caught on camera
The video was filmed Jan. 9 over the city of Lecce.
The phenomenon is caused by light from the sun or moon refracting off plate-shaped ice crystals suspended among the clouds in the atmosphere.
It is nicknamed a "fire rainbow" despite being neither a rainbow nor fire-related because the halo sometimes manifests in a way that resembles flames.
This beautiful heart-shaped fallstreak hole appeared in the sky of Houston, Texas on January 17, 2016 and baffled many skywatchers.
One day after tubular clouds rolled across Texas, a heart-shaped hole punch cloud unexpectedly appeared in the sky of Houston.
© Gloria Youngblood via Travis Herzog
© Via twitter@CEO4SHO
© Brittney Garneau Roll cloud near Houston, Texas on January 16, 2016.
Look at these giant roll clouds tumbling across the sky from Texas to Oklahoma on January 16 and 17, 2016.
© Karen Cash Roll cloud in Cypress, Texas on January 16, 2016.
Roll clouds are just one of the weird weather phenomenon that can happen when winds go wild.
© Brad Hudson
This was the case of Brad Hudson, owner of The City Arborist in Greenville, SC.
When sunlight and raindrops combine to make a rainbow, they can make a whole circle of light in the sky. But it's a very rare sight. This rare sky phenomenon was captured on January 16, 2016.
Sky conditions have to be just right for this, and even if they are, the bottom part of a full-circle rainbow is usually blocked by the horizon. That's why we see rainbows not as circles, but as arcs across our sky. If you could get up high enough, you'd see that some rainbows continue below the horizon seen from closer to sea-level.
Brad Hudson with The City Arborist, LLC, a Greenville tree care company was at a 400-foot elevation when he snapped the full circle rainbow.
In 2014, a perfect rainbow circle was filmed from the Skylon Tower Revolving restaurant at Niagara Falls, Ontario:
Street lights are reflected in the sky in a vertically flipper mirror image, forming an accurate map of the town
The street lights are reflected in the sky in a vertically flipper mirror image, forming an accurate map of the town.
The jaw-dropping scene was captured by Mia Heikkilä, who later posted the picture on the Space Weather website.
'People gave hints to look if the pattern matches the local map. And there it was! Exact reversed light map of Kauttua, Eura, on the sky. Now I call it #LuxEura,' she wrote.
It may look like a scene from the X-Files but the explanation is more terrestrial.
The phenomenon, known as light pillar, appear when artificial light or natural light bounces off the facets of flat ice crystals in the air, producing luminous columns in the sky.
Light pillars are relatively common in cold, Arctic regions and most people see them from the side, where they look like towers that reach into the sky.
Image caught by Mia Heikkilä is an exact reversed light map of Kauttua, Eura on the sky
© JPL-Caltech/NASA
Known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby's star, it has been baffling astronomers for the past few months after a team of researchers noticed its light seemed to be dipping in brightness in bizarre ways. Proposed explanations ranged from a cloud of comets to orbiting "alien megastructures".
Now an analysis of historical observations reveals the star has been gradually dimming for over a century, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the cause.
The first signs of this space oddity came from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which continually watched the star's region of the sky between 2009 and 2013. Most planet-hosting stars show small, regular dips in light when their planets pass in front of them. But Tabby's star dipped erratically throughout the four years, sometimes losing as much as 20 per cent of its brightness.
© Victoria SvetlakovaSun dog
I mean look at the pictures and the video. They are overwhelming.
Sun dogs are either caused by the refraction of light on plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus or cirrostratus clouds or drifting in the air at low levels like in these pictures.
© Marseille Gizatullin
© CorbisThis artist's conception shows a powerful supernova ripping through a nebula.
The object, which takes its name, ASASSN-15lh from the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae, was first spotted on June 14, 2015. A week later, astronomer Subo Dong, with the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, was looking at the object's spectra, a chemical breakdown of its light, and realized something strange was going on.
The measurements were so different, the survey's automated software didn't even recognize it as a supernova, Dong wrote in an email to Discovery News.
"We thought about various non-supernova, exotic scenarios, but none seemed to work," Dong said.
Working with colleagues at observatories worldwide, Dong started thinking the object may belong to a rare class of so-called superluminous supernovae, a suspicion bolstered by follow-up measurements taken by the 10-meter South African Large Telescope .
"Seeing the SALT spectrum was the moment we knew for sure that we were on to something big," Dong said.
ASASSN-15lh is located about 3.8 billion light-years away, but is so bright that if were as close as Sirius, a bright star 8.6 light-years away from Earth, the supernova would appear to be almost as bright as the sun.
© Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital, Inc.This is an artist's conception of the "changing-look quasar" as is appeared in early 2015. The glowing blue region shows the last of the gas being swallowed by central black hole as it shuts off. The spectrum is the previous one obtained by the SDSS in 2003.
Their conclusions, reported Jan. 8 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Kissimmee, Florida, clarify why quasar SDSS J1011+5442 changed so dramatically in the handful of years between observations.
"We are used to thinking of the sky as unchanging," said University of Washington astronomy professor Scott Anderson, who is principal investigator of the SDSS's Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey. "The SDSS gives us a great opportunity to see that change as it happens."
Quasars are the compact area at the center of large galaxies, usually surrounding a massive black hole. The black hole at the center of J1011+5442, for example, is some 50 million times more massive than our sun. As the black hole gobbles up superheated gas, it emits vast amounts of light and radio waves. When SDSS astronomers made their first observations of J1011+5442 in 2003, they measured the spectrum of the quasar, which let them understand the properties of the gas being swallowed by the black hole. In particular, the prominent "hydrogen-alpha" line in the spectrum revealed how much gas was falling into the central black hole.
The SDSS measured another spectrum for this quasar in early 2015, and noticed a huge decrease between 2003 and 2015. The team made use of additional observations by other telescopes over those 12 years to narrow down the period of change.
Comment: Mysterious hole punch clouds appear over Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama