Futurismic

We interrupt this blog for a weather bulletin–a space weather bulletin, that is:

INCOMING ASTEROID: A small, newly-discovered asteroid named 2008 TC3 is approaching Earth and chances are good that it will hit. Steve Chesley of JPL estimates that atmospheric entry will occur on Oct 7th at 0246 UTC over northern Sudan [ref]. Measuring only a few meters across, the space rock poses NO THREAT TO THE GROUND, but it should create a spectacular fireball, releasing about a kiloton of energy as it disintegrates and explodes in the atmosphere. Stay tuned for updates.

Keep watching the skies! (Via Space Weather).

We now return you to your regular posts.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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We may be in a bubble:

Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter.

Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.

…

“If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn’t be accelerating,” said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. “It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.”

One reason why this theory still isn’t widely accepted:

One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn’t special.

When Nicholas Copernicus argued that it made much more sense for the Earth to be revolving around the sun than vice versa, it revolutionized science.

Since then, most theories have to pass the Copernican test. If they require our planet to be unique, or our position to be exalted, the ideas often seem unlikely.

This is obliquely tied to the problem of the apparent un-arbitraryness of our universe: a key scientific and philosophical problem for the 21st Century - why is it that the universe seems to be conveniently set up for life.

[via Slashdot][image from Jeff Kubina on flickr]

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If this doesn’t boggle your mind, your mind is un-boggleable (Via Space.com):

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.” The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

***

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see. In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn’t contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

“The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe,” Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. “Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation.”

Even though I was a teenager in the 1970s, I don’t say this very often, but…far OUT!

And I mean that literally.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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Hubble-using astro-boffins have seen something they don’t recognise in the boundless worlds of space:

The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn’t there before. In fact, they don’t even know where it is exactly located because it didn’t behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can’t be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It’s not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It’s something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don’t have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

That’s a pretty big margin of error! Also check out the paper itself (via Sky and Telescope).

I was surprised to discover, whilst reading Bill Bryson’s brilliant A Short History of Nearly Everything how difficult it is to ascertain astronomical distances precisely, and how much brain work and observation goes into it.

Anyway I’d love to find out what this is (an OCP perhaps?). Such excitement!

[from Gizmodo][image is credited to Kayle Barbary and others]

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The novel I’m shopping around begins on the moon of a ringed gas giant.  You’d better believe that in the next draft, that moon is going to have gorgeous arcs like the ones the Cassini spacecraft imaging team recently found gracing Saturn’s moons Anthe and Methone.

[Image: CICLOPS; tip: io9]

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They’re scarce this year.

When the sun is more active, several sunspots can appear on a daily basis. However, very few have been spotted in 2008.  It wasn’t until August 21 and 22 that the Solar Influences Data Analysis reported the glimpse of one dark spot….Experts say the question is not when will the sunspots reappear, but rather how fast will their numbers increase once they start to appear.

[Image and story: RedOrbit News]

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It’s long been assumed that the complex and mysterious Antikythera mechanism was some sort of device for modelling astronomical movements. [image from Wikimedia Commons]

However, it was always thought to be a tool for the astronomers themselves. Now, new translations of the inscriptions on the device show localised names for months that may well locate the device’s origins in the Sicily region, suggesting that the Antikythera machine was used to demonstrate the ’science’ of astronomy to people unfamiliar with its language.

Given the prevalence of computers in the classrooms of our own time, it’s a piquant thought to imagine the earliest computer yet known being used for educational purposes as well.

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You might think that a dwarf planet is, oh, a planet, and that would settle it. But the International Astronomical Union just decided that the new classification for Pluto-like objects such as Eris, Ceres — and, presumably, Sedna, Orcus, Varuna, and Quaoar — is “plutoid.” Fearless prediction: Nobody is going to like this word. If you were the first to set foot on any of these objects, wouldn’t you want credit for being first on a planet? Bad enough that I have to tell my son that Xena was only the unofficial name for Eris, and that Buffy probably won’t stand as an astronomical name, either.
[Children protest Pluto's reclassification, c. 2006, Wikimedia Commons]

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Space scientists have come up with a novel way of studying the moon (and possibly later other satellites like Europa). Scientist Sir Martin Sweeting’s Moonlite experiment plans to launch a satellite to orbit the moon. Once in orbit, the satellite would fire four dart-like missiles at the moon’s surface, penetrating three or four metres to study the composition beneath the ground.

Planned for a launch in 2013, the project has had recent tests of the high powered darts in South Wales prove very successful. The subterranean probes are hoped to provide details on the heat flow, seismic activity and water components of our closest astronomical friend.

Meanwhile, the most recent astronomical mission is having problems with its own studies of extraterrestrial soil. The Phoenix lander is struggling to sift the clumpy Martian soil to small enough pieces to study in its compact detectors. The robotic lander is resorting to shaking and sprinkling soil samples with its robotic arm to get material small enough to study.

[picture by SSTL and story via BBC]

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Fans of Larry Niven’s superlative Integral Trees series will recognise the gas torus surrounding the red supergiant star WOH 64, located in everyone’s favourite neighbouring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. From The Scientific Frontline Observers Gallery:

Comparisons with models led them to conclude that the star is surrounded by a gigantic, thick torus, expanding from about 15 stellar radii (or 120 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun - 120 AU!) to more than 250 stellar radii (or 30 000 AU!).

Everything is huge about this system. The star itself is so big that it would fill almost all the space between the Sun and the orbit of Saturn,” says Ohnaka. “And the torus that surrounds it is perhaps a light-year across! Still, because it is so far away, only the power of interferometry with the VLT could give us a glimpse on this object.

In The Smoke Ring, as in much of Niven’s work - the environment is as big a part of the story as the characters. Niven describes a group of humans living within a vast “smoke ring” surrounding a neutron star.

A gas giant orbiting the star has had it’s atmosphere stripped off by the tidal forces of the neutron star, leaving a long, ring-shaped trail within which organisms have evolved to live in a weightless, three-dimensional world, where the only meaningful direction is “out”.

There are some beautiful artists impressions of WOH 64 - unfortunately there is no suggestion that the gas cloud would be anything less than monstrously uninhabitable, like almost everywhere else in the universe.

That said, it is splendid that the VLT Interferometer is working out so well. [via PhysOrg] [image by R'Yes']

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This blog is called Futurismic, but mostly we just talk about the near future. Let’s take a look at the far future…say, a few tens of millions of years down the road.

New studies suggest that after 40 million years or so, there’s a small but not insignificant chance–one or two percent–that the solar system will lose its stability, and, Velikovsky-like, start throwing whole planets off on wandering courses through the rest of the system, where they just might crash into ours. (Via NewScientistSpace.)

Although no one can say for sure what will happen beyond that, new calculations are now providing a rough guide to the more distant future. These suggest that there is a 1 to 2% chance that Mercury’s orbit will get seriously out of whack within the next 5 billion years.

This would tend to destabilise the whole inner solar system and could lead to a catastrophic collision between Earth and either Mercury or Mars, wiping out any life still present at that time.

In the case of a smash-up with Mars, for example, “all life gets extinguished immediately, and Earth glows at the temperature of a red giant star for about 1000 years”, says Gregory Laughlin, a co-author of one of the studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz, US.

Interestingly enough, it might not be the first time that has happened:

Many scientists think a Mars-sized object bashed into Earth in the early solar system, throwing out debris that eventually formed the Moon.

Earth was heated to thousands of degrees by the impact, with an ocean of lava covering its surface. A future replay of that event would be disastrous, Laughlin says.

That last quote qualifies, I think, for understatement of the year.

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech.)

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The Moon seems like a pretty static place. After all, there’s little atmosphere and apart from occasional meteorite impacts, nothing much happens. Or so we thought. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission found that every month when the moon is full, the moon crosses through the Earth’s magnetotail, bathing our satellite in high energy charged particles that may create dust storms and electrical static.

Astronauts have never been on the Moon during this period. Landings have never taken place when the moon is full. But as Roland Piquepaille on ZDNet’s Emerging Tech blog discusses, if astronauts return to the moon to establish a base, they will have to face the challenges of the magnetotail, which could clog up vents and even give astronauts electric shocks!

[via Science Daily, image by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab]

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A mix of two stories about completely different types of Black Holes today. First, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology found that interactions between three black holes should produce gravitational waves that detectors like LISA or LIGO could detect within the next ten years. Gravitational Waves are ‘ripples’ in Space-Time caused by massive objects and events and could tell us a great deal about the big bang.

Another kind of black hole in the news is the ‘internet black hole’. Researchers for the Hubble internet project found distinct pathways on the internet where data was lost for unexplainable reasons. The project, which you can see the results of at their website, was intentionally named after the famous astronomer and telescope. The researchers say they are performing ‘internet astronomy’, looking for events in the cosmos of data that is the internet.

[image by M Campanelli/L Carlos/Y Zlochower/H-P Bischof, that plus space story via New Scientist, internet story via TG Daily]

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Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our own but with a bonus: there are three stars rather than one. It’s also one of the best chances we know in the local area to have a planet similar to Earth capable of developing life like ours.

If any planet were to harbour earth-like life in the three-star system, it would likely be around Alpha Centauri A, which is most similar to the sun. However astronomer Javier Guedes and his coauthors believe that Alpha Centauri B is likely to have terrestrial planets in its habitable region. Based on computer simulations of planet formation, Guedes and his team found that no matter what starting conditions, a terrestrial planet always formed around the star. By studying the ‘wobbles’ the planet causes on its parent star, the team reckon they could find any potential planets within a few years.

[story via Daily Galaxy, image via Solstation]

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The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona has ‘opened its eyes’ for the first time, marking one of the first in a new wave of high-tech astronomical devices to come online. The LBT combines two 8m mirrors working in tandem to take pictures of the sky in a wide range of wavelengths at resolutions higher than that of Hubble.

Another couple of new telescopes, Herschel and Planck, will come online this year following their launch into space in April. Laser Interferometer LISA, which measures the bending of space time, has been given the go ahead but won’t be ready for a decade. A spate of advanced telescopes are in planning and construction, taking advantage of the computer advances of the last decade to give more accurate and detailed pictures of the sky than ever before.

[story and image via BBC]

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Gravitational lensing is all the rage in astronomy right now. A confirmation of one of Einstein’s theories, the phenomenon has seen recent use in mapping dark matter and detecting exoplanets.

To avoid making myself look like the bluffer and layman enthusiast that I am, I’ll defer to the experts and let Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait explain how gravitational lenses work, and point out that the Hubble telescope has just found a big new crop of them. [Image: NASA, ESA, C. Faure (Zentrum für Astronomie, University of Heidelberg) and J.P. Kneib (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille)]

“Big deal,” you might be thinking. In which case, I’ll direct you to Centauri Dreams, where you’ll find an explanation of how the phenomenon might be used for the rapid propulsion of interstellar probes or (in the comments) communication between star systems.

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Messenger, a NASA probe launched towards Mercury, has transmitted the first image of the unseen side of the first planet in our solar system, Mercury. Whilst Mariner 10 did pass Mercury 3 times in the seventies, it never saw this side due to the strange relationship between Mercury’s spin and orbit around the sun. The image is very good quality, with a lighter region in the top right corner believed to be the area of the planet that comes closest to the scorching heat of the sun.

[via Bad Astronomy Blog, picture by NASA]

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There’s a science fiction tale or two to be dug out of this little science item, I’m thinking:

If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.

The simulation in question is focused on “intermediate mass” black holes, and there isn’t really even any strong evidence that such things, weighing a few thousand solar masses, exist. (Via PhysOrg.)

Still, if they exist, and two of them of different sizes and rotating at different speeds combine, the simulation indicates resulting merged black hole gets a kick in the pants that can hurl it away in an arbitrary direction at a velocity that averages 200 kilometres per second but in some instances can be as high as 4,000 kilometres per second–enough in either case to allow the black hole to escape the globular cluster where these intermediate black holes (if they exist) are predicted to form.

The researchers are reassuring:

“These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe,” Holley-Bockelmann stresses. “Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighborhood!”

Of course, anything with a mass of a few thousands suns wandering close to the solar system is going to play havoc with planetary orbits…but fortunately, space is very, very big.

It’s probably nothing to worry about.

(Image: Ute Kraus, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Golm, and Theoretische Astrophysik, Universität Tübingen, www.spacetimetravel.org)

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It’s amazing the things you can find in the universe. Images of our neighbouring red planet by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter picked up this little space oddity: a teardrop shaped mountain with a rectangular dark patch that, to the human observer, looks like a door.

The oddly shaped mountain, in the frozen ocean region of the planet, was discovered by a Russian reader, rather than a member of the NASA project. The blog article also has some interesting quotes about Mars terraforming plans.

“They’ve done some experiments and have noticed that some types of plants can grow under the low pressure CO2 atmosphere on Mars,” Australian physicist Charles Lineweaver noted when asked about the prospect of altering the atmosphere of our red neighbour.

Of course, this doorway is probably not the path to some alien civilisation gifting us with its future tech but one can dream…

[via Daily Galaxy, image by NASA]

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