Miss Venus Transiting The Sun? Watch in UHD

Includes some stunning shots of the Sun.


H/T Best of Science

Sir Patrick Moore National Treasure 55 Years of The Sky at Night

 Update: Since the passing of Sir Patrick Moore, I can but make this post my eulogy to the man.

Those of you from foreign climes, may not have even heard of The Sky at Night, let alone know that it is the World's longest running television programme. But it is, celebrating next month in fact, fifty five years of continuous broadcasts, and all but one of those broadcasts, hosted by national treasure Sir Patrick Moore.

It was watching one such broadcast last night, that I was reminded of this Patrick Moore article that I had read in the Mail some short while ago. It is at this point, and not for the first time, every time in fact, every time I admit to having read something in the Mail I feel compelled to issue a disclaimer that I never have and never will, buy the Mail.

Which unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my younger sister, she being soo Daily Mail, that to have such a close family member catergorised as such, is not only excruciatingly embarrassing, it's also pretty damn sad. So on the rare occasion that I actually read an article in the Mail, it's only in passing and not by design.

Right so! having established my bona fides, let us move on.

Although Patrick shares his spot in the Mail's header, with young fellow me lad Brian Cox, OK he's forty four, but he doesn't bloody look it, and all things are relative you have to admit. And although the young Professor Cox is a national treasure in waiting, and I choose not to employ the word pretender as does the Mail, the man is anything but, the article in question is primarily about national treasure, Patrick Moore.

As we forgive other national treasures almost anything , the outrageous old queen Brian Sewell (watch) springing instantly to mind, so too must we forgive Sir Patrick, even if his peccadillos include the somewhat xenophobic philosophy of, the only good German is a dead German. Something I hope you too might forgive when you read the quite touching story behind Sir Patrick's reasoning.

I think what might be prudent before letting you loose on the article, is for me to now go and see if I can find a couple of short clips in order, that if you and Patrick are strangers, that you might get acquainted a tad beforehand.

Brian Cox? He's no astronomer! Patrick Moore turns his telescope on the young pretender - and concedes he's really rather good (for an ex-rock star)
By Jane Fryer
24 January 2012

Sir Patrick Moore is 88 years old and he looks it. His huge body is battered by age — lurid purple bruises decorate his enormous forearms, his baby-soft hands are clawed with arthritis, and an old wartime spinal injury has left him dependent on a rotating team of carers who share his fairytale 15th-century cottage in Selsey, West Sussex.

They help him from bed to chair and back again, glue his famous monocle (yes, really) to his eyelid to stop it tumbling out, launder his lurid Hawaiian shirts and fix him a daily G&T at 12.30pm, on the dot.

His enormous brain, however, is as sharp as ever and flits from his beloved cats Jeannie and Ptolemy ('they rule the house), to his loathing of all Germans ('if I saw the entire German nation sinking into the sea, I'd help push it down') and the national obsession with Professor Brian Cox — the pop star-turned-physicist who idolised Moore as a child, presented the 700th episode of Sky At Night with him last year, and is adored by the British public




Now, thanks to the BBC2 Stargazing Live show, Professor Cox has increased telescope sales by more than 500 per cent and is poised to take on Sir Patrick's mantle.

'These young ones come and they go, but he's a nice chap, you know,' barks Sir Patrick in his fabulously posh voice. 'Came on my show once. Can't say I've seen his, though. I've been so busy I keep forgetting. Sheer stupidity on my part. I think he and I could learn from each other.

'Though, of course, he's not an astronomer — he's a particle physicist!' he hurrumphs. 'And he was in a rock band! But I suppose the more people that come into astronomy the better. I'm all for it. And it's a good thing, because I'm ancient.'

So ancient, that he's planned his own death. In meticulous detail.

'I've got it all mapped out. I don't want a funeral. So they can take all my good bits and use them for medical science.'

What about the less 'good bits'?

'They can chuck it all away! I couldn't care less. But I've left some money in my will for a very good party. There will be a candle and a tape with a message from me, and they'll light the candle and play the tape, and at exactly the right moment I'll blow the candle out.'

And the message?

'I've already recorded it! I say: “I'll blow that candle out if it kills me”, ha ha ha!'

Goodness.

Sir Patrick may be cruelly incapacitated by a failing body, but it's hard to imagine his candle spluttering out any time soon. For one thing, he's too busy.




He's still filming The Sky At Night — the longest-running programme with the same presenter in the history of television ('I think we're on about instalment 760 . . . I can't see anyone beating it now, can you?') — recorded here in his cluttered study.

The first programme went out live on April 26, 1957, and he has missed just one since — in 2004, when he accidentally ate a rancid goose egg and nearly died of salmonella.

He has also just finished his Data Book of Astronomy — an enormous compendium of pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the cosmos, which took him ten years ('so much has happened — the probing of the planets, huge advances in astronomy') and is now sitting glossily on his desk, topped by Jeannie the cat.


But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past

'I went to sleep one night about ten years ago and woke up like this,' he says, looking down in disgust at his crippled body. 'Look at my hands. I can't play the piano or the xylophone any more. It killed everything.' Including regular games of tennis, cricket (his unorthodox bowling style involving lots of leaps, bounds and whirling of arms), travelling and even walking.

'My active life came to an abrupt full stop. It was a tremendous shock and it was permanent. Unlike all those new telescope users out there, I can't even operate my telescope any more — I can't handle the controls. I try to make the best of it, but I could have done without the last ten years.' So he'd rather not have woken up that morning?

'It might have been better, yes,' he says. 'I'm not scared of dying. I believe in some form of afterlife: I just hope my uncle George isn't there — silly, bald-headed old coot. But you've got to make the best of things and that's what I've always tried to do.'

Patrick Alfred Cauldwell-Moore was born in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1923, only child of Charles, a soldier ('who survived the Great War with a Military Cross and a lungful of gas') and Gertrude, a trained opera singer.

He had a weak heart and so was tutored at home. In his spare time, he would lie on the sofa reading about the moon and the stars, and saved his pocket money until, aged 11, he had enough (£7 10s) to buy his first telescope and became the youngest member of the British Astronomical Association. Fifty years later to the day he was elected its president.

On the outbreak of World War II, he lied about his age (he was 16) and his dodgy heart and joined the RAF ('I knew if I joined the Army or Navy I'd last ten minutes with my heart').

Today he's rather tight-lipped about his war years, admitting only to spending five years as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, losing all his teeth in an accident, sustaining the spinal injury that has finally caught up with him and, rather mysteriously, 'learning enough Norwegian to get by'.

With the war, though, came great personal tragedy.

'My girl, Lorna, was killed,' he says. 'We were both 20 and engaged. She was a nurse and she was in the wrong place when a German bomb fell. There was no question of anyone else — I still think about her all the time. Second best was no good for me. So I didn't marry and had no family.'

He lived with his beloved mother, Gertrude, until her death aged 94 in 1981 ('the worst day of my life after Lorna died'), became an amateur astronomer and travelled the world chasing eclipses, mapping the moon, reporting from meteorite craters for The Sky At Night and playing the xylophone on Morecambe And Wise.




'I never thought the programme would go on so long, but there are various reasons for it — it's cheap, it goes on late at night so it doesn't bother anybody, and it's not controversial. Though we had plenty of disasters.'

Like the time he swallowed a bluebottle live on air — 'it buzzed all the way down' — and his ten-minute interview in pidgin French with a Russian who spoke no English — 'we just about got away with it, ha ha!'

His high point was when he saw the dark side of the Moon for the first time after it was photographed from a space probe.

Nearly 760 Sky At Nights later, his letterbox is still overflowing with enthusiastic fan mail (they haven't all defected to Cox yet), which he answers in full — despite barely being able to type on his specially adapted computer keyboard — though he does now lean on a few stock replies for the bog-standard queries. 'You know . . . how do I take up astronomy? What's that bright thing in the sky? Is there life out there?'

And is there?

'I'm sure there is. I refuse to believe we're the only living things. But I can't prove it. The clue is maybe Mars — not little green men, or not any near here, anyway — but if we can find trace of any life on Mars, that will be our pointer.'

He is also a magnet for rather more eccentric correspondence — from the man convinced the Earth was shaped like a teacup, the women who wanted to send a carrier pigeon to the moon . . . He wrote back suggesting a parrot-pigeon hybrid, so it could say hello when it got there.




'There are plenty of nuts — the “flat-earthers” and “hollow-globers”,' he says. And he replies to every letter he receives, no matter how nutty.

Sir Patrick is surprisingly cheerful for a man whose physical life is restricted to his downstairs bedroom, wood-panelled study and a view through the mullioned windows at his cats playing on their very own scale model of Saturn in their luxury cat run. (He's paranoid about keeping them safe — there's a typewritten sign by the front door: 'Patrick's cats are fiendishly clever masters of escape. Please observe the airlock procedures'.)

'I used to wake up and think: “What have I got time for today?” Now, I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I'm not in them, I'll get on with the day's work.'

He is not a man afraid to speak his mind, whether it's regarding his own disabilities, or sharing some of his rather more, er, trenchant views.

There was an uproar two years ago when he said the BBC had been ruined by women executives drowning us in soap operas, cooking and quiz shows, and advocated two separate television stations — one for each gender. 'There should be a mix of men and women — that's what I actually said,' he insists (not very convincingly) today.

When I ask him about his comparing of EastEnders to diarrhoea, he smirks naughtily and says: 'I've never been a fan of soap operas.'

And don't, whatever you do, get him onto the Germans.

'Eughhh! A Kraut is a Kraut is a Kraut. And the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.'

'Of course I'm a lot older than (Brian Cox),' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

Like many men of his generation, he is fervently anti-European (though he loves the Norwegians and the Greeks — 'the only people who fought gallantly all through the war'), is a keen member of UKIP ('if I were 20 years younger I'd be fighting for a seat next time') and frets about immigration.

'They need to be controlled. I'm not sure how, but let in the people you want and not the riff-raff,' he says. Perhaps it's time to change the subject, and ask if he wishes he'd made it to the moon himself. 'I had no chance,' he says, 'wrong age, wrong nationality and wrong medical grade.'

Yet he must take comfort in how many budding astronomers he has inspired and how much he has crammed into his 88 years.

He has mapped the moon (when the Russians and Americans went to the moon, they used his guides), played duets with Einstein ('exactly what I expected — charming, old-worldly, courteous and never wore socks'), excelled as a musician and composer ('one thing that is no credit to me is perfect pitch and perfect timing') and written more than 70 books on astronomy.

And he is surely one of the very few people to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

He's done an extraordinary amount in his 88 years. So would he feel happy to be passing on the stargazing baton to Professor Cox? 'I'm not dead yet!' Oh dear. 'Of course I'm a lot older than him,' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

And, er, Professor Cox? 'Well, he's not the only one taking on the mantle. But he is very good . . .'

That's high praise indeed from the great man.

And with that I leave him planning his next project — 'I think it's high time I started concentrating on my composing' — fussing over his beloved cats and rubbing his vast hands at the thought of all those budding astronomers with their shiny new telescopes — ('a wonderful thing').

Sir Patrick is an exceptional man and one whom, for all his outrageously un-PC views, it's impossible not to like enormously.

After all, there aren't many octogenarians who can wear a glued-on monocle and a lurid green Hawaiian shirt and still exude gravitas. Professor Brian Cox has some very large shoes to fill. The Wail

Our Reliance on The Micro-Chip A Doomsday Scenario

As a blog writer, a fellow faces many decisions, none of them life threatening or earth shattering, some might say not even important, and they would probably be correct. Nevertheless, two decisions crop up almost daily, and those decisions often involve, how serious or how lighthearted be the content of what is offered up to you the reader.

Too frivolous the content; what would be the point in bothering at all? And on the other side of the coin, whereas nobody wants to read about a cat not stuck up a tree, I'm sure likewise, they don't want to visit a site where the blogger is only a merchant of doom, and constantly come away with an upside down smile.

Having said all that, what I'm going to offer you today is nothing more than a very glum post about a doomsday scenario. But it is an extremely interesting doomsday scenario nonetheless, nobody can argue with that evaluation, and all involving solar flares and our near total reliance on the micro chip.

Drive on!

More gifs @ Wikipedia Coronal Mass Ejection

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
by Michael Brooks
March 24 2009

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colorful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilizations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection. If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimizing power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

The second problem is the grid's interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. "It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.
72 hours of healthcare remaining

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

30 days of coal left

Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. "If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse," says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

4-10 years to recover

"I don't think the NAS report is scaremongering," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team. Green agrees. "Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful," he says. "This is a fair and balanced report."

Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America. High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid's efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. "China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem," Kappenman says.

Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.

Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."

The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don't cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.

By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). The probe, launched in 1997, has a solar orbit that keeps it directly between the sun and Earth. Its uninterrupted view of the sun means it gives us continuous reports on the direction and velocity of the solar wind and other streams of charged particles that flow past its sensors. ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes' warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable.
15 minutes' warning

However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. "It arrived faster than we can do anything," Hapgood says.

There is another problem. ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan. The onboard detectors are not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will finally give up the ghost. Furthermore, its sensors become saturated in the event of a really powerful solar flare. "It was built to look at average conditions rather than extremes," Baker says.

He was part of a space weather commission that three years ago warned about the problems of relying on ACE. "It's been on my mind for a long time," he says. "To not have a spare, or a strategy to replace it if and when it should fail, is rather foolish."

There is no replacement for ACE due any time soon. Other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can provide some warning, but with less detailed information and - crucially - much later. "It's quite hard to assess what the impact of losing ACE will be," Hapgood says. "We will largely lose the early warning capability."

The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a "deep indifference" when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. "It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible," he says.

The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The "perfect storm" is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity - something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth's field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.

What's more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid's power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.

If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. "A really large storm could be a planetary disaster," Kappenman says.

So what should be done? No one knows yet - the report is meant to spark that conversation. Baker is worried, though, that the odds are stacked against that conversation really getting started. As the NAS report notes, it is terribly difficult to inspire people to prepare for a potential crisis that has never happened before and may not happen for decades to come. "It takes a lot of effort to educate policy-makers, and that is especially true with these low-frequency events," he says.

We should learn the lessons of hurricane Katrina, though, and realise that "unlikely" doesn't mean "won't happen". Especially when the stakes are so high. The fact is, it could come in the next three or four years - and with devastating effects. "The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle," Kintner says. "It came out of nowhere, so we just don't know when something like that is going to happen again." Jim Pedan blog not been updated since 2009 hence full text coppied here.

H/T Michael Moore

More Evidence For Second Asteroid Induced Extinction

Dumb header.

Mammoths, sabre-tooths MURDERED by second giant space boulder

First the dinos, then the mastodons ... then ...
By Brid-Aine Parnell
7th March 2012

A 16-strong team of international boffins have added more evidence for the controversial theory that a gigantic asteroid smashed into the Earth 12,900 years ago and wiped out a range of furry mammals, including the mammoths.

The researchers found an ancient layer of thin, dark sediment buried at the bottom of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico that contains nano diamonds, impact spherules and other exotic materials that are only found after a cosmic impact. more

Previous: Did Air Burst Asteroid Do For North American Mammoths?

Hubble Snaps Exploding Star Eta Carinae

A stunning photograph, the likes of which, I hope we don't become blase.

Hubble snaps exploding star's near-fatal weight-loss bid

Eta Carinae on the fast track to supernova
By Brid-Aine Parnell
27th February 2012

Pic NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning shot of the Eta Carinae system's largest star suffering a near-death experience before it goes supernova in the near future.

Earlier this month boffins published a study into the Eta Carinae star's near-nova explosion during which it shed ten solar masses*. The violent detonation was seen in 1843 and, discounting our Sun, made the heavenly body the second brightest star in the sky. The only star brighter was Sirius, which is nearly a thousand times closer to Earth.

Now the star is once more visible to the naked eye at night, although it's nowhere near as bright as it was back in the 19th century.

This pic shows the cloud of material, now known as the Homunculus Nebula, thrown out during the star's brush with death - what space boffins call a "supernova impostor event".

The image, consisting of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows that the debris from the event wasn't thrown out uniformly, but in a dumbbell shape.

Boffins are fairly confident that the Eta Carinae star is on its way out and they expect its supernova in the near future. Of course, this being in astronomical timescales, "near future" could be as much as a million years from now.

Whenever it does eventually go off, the star will be one of the closest to Earth to explode when there was someone here to see it, giving an impressive view to folks on the surface. The brightest supernova ever observed from Earth was a star of the same type, but it was in a galaxy 200 million light years away. Eta Carinae is only 7,500 light years away. Register

* One solar mass is equivalent to 1.98892 x 1030 kilograms

I Say! That's a Bit Fresh 20-Million-MPH Wind

NASA sniffs little black hole's 20-Million-MPH wind
By Brid-Aine Parnell
22 Feb, 2012

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has caught a whiff of the fastest ever wind blowing from the gases around a stellar-mass black hole.

Illustration of high-speed winds from the stellar-mass black hole

The wind, which is moving at an awesome 20 million miles per hour, is nearly ten times faster than what's been previously detected from a hole of this size, and a space hurricane of this magnitude is more usually found blowing around a supermassive black hole.

Stellar-mass black holes are created by the collapse of pretty huge stars and typically weigh between five and ten times the mass of our sun. But supermassive holes are millions or billions of times bigger.

"This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category-five hurricane," said Ashley King of the University of Michigan, lead author of the study. "We weren't expecting to see such powerful winds from a black hole like this."

Black holes like this one, catchily called IGR J17091-3624, pull in material from a companion star to form a disk of hot gas around it, and the wind is driven off this disk in all directions.

The high-speed wind blowing around this black hole is also carrying away more debris than the hole is sucking in.

"Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091-3624 is expelled by the wind," King said.

IGR J17091-3624 is found in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy, about 28,000 light years away from Earth.

The research on the observations from Chandra and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Expanded Very Large Array was published in the 20 February issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters Register

Destination Titan: Video

This really is a remarkable program, documenting some remarkable people and their even more remarkable achievement. Tasked with building a probe that would be required to travel two billion miles over a period of seven years, descend through Titan's atmosphere, to land and then gather and transmit data while operating at a temperature of minus 200C, was no small order of the day. And made all the more remarkable that the team gathered to achieve this were, for want of a better description, a bunch of amateurs.

One of the defining moments for me was the launch aboard the Titan IV-B rocket, nothing but nothing brought home more, the pressure that the team must have been under and the expectation of a successful mission that hinged on this tiny module actually working when it arrived at Titan, than watching this truly enormous rocket, with all its associated costs and technical achievements, take off from the launch pad. The filming of that launch alone is quite remarkable, poetic even. Needless to say, highly recommended.

The Titan IV-B is the Nation's largest and most powerful expendable launch vehicle. It also is the Nation's newest model heavy-lift launch vehicle. This mammoth rocket is as tall as a 20-story building and weighs about 940,000 kg (2 million lbs.) with the solid rocket boosters and fuel. more NASA Glenn Research Center

I had intended just to give you the BBC's intro, but far better than that, this from the Open University, explains far better.

Destination Titan tells moving story of one man’s personal space odyssey

The landing of the Huygens probe on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, in January 2005 was one small step for The Open University’s Professor John Zarnecki and a giant leap for the history of space exploration. Not only was Huygens the most distant probe to land anywhere in our solar system, but the stunning images and data sent back by the probe have helped to paint a picture of an exotic new world. With its methane seas, volcanoes and cliffs of ice, Titan bears a striking resemblance to our own early Earth.

For Professor John Zarnecki, one of Huygen’s six principal scientists, the landing on Titan was a moment he had been building towards since his inspirational boyhood encounter with the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, 50 years ago.

Destination Titan, a BBC / Open University co-production, follows Zarnecki’s journey through the twists and turns of a distinguished career in space academia, to the surface of the world over a billion miles from Earth. First at the University of Kent and latterly at The Open University, Professor Zarnecki devoted years to the Titan project without any guarantee that would have a happy outcome – a terrific and inspiring combination of hard science and calculated risk taking.

In charge of the probe’s ‘Surface Science Package’, Professor Zarnecki’s team was faced with the task of designing the first contact with the surface of Saturn’s mysterious moon. The first-ever pictures from Titan adorned the front pages of newspapers around the world, but the inside story of this extraordinary mission remains largely untold.

John Zarnecki said: “The images from the surface of Titan, and the data from our own instrument, easily made the 15 years of hard work, occasional frustration and sometimes blind panic immediately worthwhile.

“That day, back in 1988, when we first toyed with the idea of putting in a bid to build an instrument to land on Titan, it was beyond my wildest dreams that the day would come to pass when it would all come true.”

Featuring previously unseen footage and exclusive interviews with those involved, Destination Titan tells the moving story of one man’s personal space odyssey, and of the small team of scientists who made this mission happen. Drawing on unprecedented access and detailed research, the programme will tell the warts and all inside story of this major planetary mission, and discover just what it takes to be a successful space scientist. Destination Titan offers a real insight into the team-work that goes into such a complex and ambitious scientific endeavour – not just the magical, revelatory moments but the daily slog, the frustrations and the need to make-do-and-mend with available resources. Open University

Video pulled due to copyright.

ScienceNews: "Mercury, here comes Messenger!"

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The first spacecraft to visit Mercury in more than 30 years passes the planet on Monday at a distance of just 200km.

The fly-by is the first of three the Messenger probe will make in the coming years as it slows itself to enter into orbit around the small world in 2011.

The US spacecraft will collect more than 1,300 images and make other observations during the encounter.

No probe has viewed Mercury up close since the Mariner 10 mission's third and final fly-by in March 1975.

"[Messenger] is lined up and ready to go; the team is ready and really pumped," said Marilyn Lindstrom, the US space agency (Nasa) mission's programme scientist.

"Mercury, here comes Messenger!"more

Russian GPS To Be Up And Runnig In 2009

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Russia successfully launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the last three satellites to complete a navigation system to rival America's GPS.

The military-run GLONASS mapping system works over most of Russia and is expected to cover the globe by the end of 2009, once all its 24 navigational satellites are operating.

A space rocket blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome on the steppes of neighbouring ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, from which Russia rents the facility.

"The launch was carried out smoothly at 10:32 p.m. (1932 GMT)," RIA news agency quoted a spokesman for the Russian space agency as saying. "We expect satellites to separate from the booster on the orbit at 2:24 a.m. (2324 GMT)".

Work on GLONASS -- or Global Navigation Satellite System -- began in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s to give its armed forces exact bearings around the world.

The collapse of the Russian economy in the late 1990s drained funds and the plans withered, but President Vladimir Putin has ensured the project is now being lavishly funded from a brimming government budget.

Officials said GLONASS would mainly be used alongside the U.S. global positioning system, which Washington can switch off for civilian subscribers, as it did during recent military operations in Iraq.source

Is NASA Pushing The Envelope On Shuttle Safety?

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Concerns over the safety of the shuttle Discovery before tomorrow's scheduled launch have overshadowed a historic milestone for Nasa - the first simultaneous command of two manned space missions by female astronauts. Retired US Air Force Colonel Pamela Melroy will lead six colleagues on a two-week flight to the orbiting international space station, currently controlled by veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson.

But cracks in Discovery's thermal protection shield and a decision by senior Nasa managers to press ahead with the 11.38am (4.38pm BST) lift-off regardless have alarmed some of the agency's leading safety officers, who wanted the mission delayed to carry out possible repairs. more

TOWING A YOKE

Light pollution, sure their wasn't a hint of it, somewhere near midway 'twixt France and Ireland.
There was just the one colour, black. A perfect black canvas that played its part in the creation of the few lines at the end this piece of prose; originally being writ as a stand alone few lines.

Some two or three years after the creation of those few lines, I joined for a brief spell, a little circle of writers who would meet every two weeks and read out whatever we had written on a subject chosen at the prior meeting, in this case "A starry night"
So then I composed the long intro of events leading up to the birth of those few lines. And here I cannot stress enough just how magnificent a sight it was.
I hope you can get a feel for the moment.
I employ a hybrid of Northern English vernacular with a biteen of Irish thrown in to add a little flavour, I hope you enjoy.



TOWING A YOKE

I got the job where most all jobs is got; in the pub.
Would I ship aboard a trawler going to France, and tow a boat back.
Giving it a bitteen of thought, and not wanting the sole company of two other men, I says “If Herself can come, you’re on”
“It’s a bit rough on board” says the skipper.
“Sure she’ll grand, not a problem”
So off we sets; it were fair lumpy day; thought to me self, I’m glad Herself’s with me, at least we can keep the bunk warm.
There’s nothing much to do on those kind of jobs, it’s all steaming.
Skipper weren’t up to much, he were a Kiwi, I think he’d been to one of them antipodean charm schools, but that’s another story.
Next day, it were glorious, so we thought we’d soak up some rays.
We dragged the mattresses up onto the foredeck, just in front of the wheelhouse, it were the only place you could sunbathe.
True to form, Herself, not bein’ one for false modesty or bikini tops, gets ragged off, and its tits out for the lads.
Now you can call me biased, but she’s a fair bonny lass, and I’m sure lads in wheelhouse agreed wi’ me.
It must have made watch keeping a bit more interesting.
In fact if it weren’t for autopilot, I don’t think boat would have ever got where it were s’posed to.
But got there we did, and made ready the tow for next day.
Well Herself had brought her glad rags, so we hit the town and got her lit.
Herself with her long tanned legs n all glittery, she looked a million dollars, and I felt like one.
What’s all this got to wi’ stars? Well as the Manx say, “Traa-dy-Liooar” it’s a bit like manyana, only nowhere near as urgent, “Time enough”
So off we sets back with this yoke in tow. Now for them of you that don’t know what a yoke is, well it’s a grand Irish word, and if you does a bit of writing , then it’s a right handy one to have.
A yoke is anything, a big yoke, a small yoke, a grand yoke altogether, you gets the idea.
One crystal clear night, there’s Herself and Himself, that’s me, sat on a couple of fish boxes on the blunt end off this old yoke we were sailing on.
And there it were, in all it’s glory, the Milky Way. It just blew us away, I just haven’t got the words in me to describe it.
It were like we were little atoms, no them little things inside ‘em, them neutrons or protons or whatever they're called.
We were speechless, it were a wonder we’ll never forget.
It were some time later, I couldn’t get this sight out of me head, and then didn’t a few little lines appear, just like magic, and them lines were these.


Delight the night
For hidden by day
Delight the night
We sailed the Milky Way
Our chariot of rust and rattles
Our space ship on the sea.
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