Stories tagged The Universe
The distant, lonely Earth seen from the MoonCourtesy NASA (via Zonu.com)Back in 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were making their historic moonwalk, I remember thinking to myself, what would happen if some kind of malfunction on the Lunar Module prevented them from blasting off the Moon's surface back to the Command and Service Module? They would most certainly die, there's no doubt about that, because NASA had no rescue plan in place. But what about Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot who was orbiting the Moon in the mother ship? He was waiting to take his fellow crew members home to Earth. If they didn't show up, he'd be in for a pretty lonely and agonizing three-day trip across the quarter-million miles of empty space back to Earth. I wondered what that would have been like.
Fortunately, Apollo 11 was a tremendous success and all three astronauts made it back safely, as did the 18 Apollo astronauts who followed in their footsteps (including the ill-fated Apollo 13 astronauts), so the tragic scenario never played out.
Lonely Al Worden: Even the loneliest of Maytag repairmen would have nothing on this astronaut.Courtesy NASABut what would that have been like? Astronaut Al Worden probably came closest to experiencing the profound loneliness of isolation in ourter space, when he was piloting the Command Module for the Apollo 15 mission. While his crew mates were busy walking (and driving!) on the Moon's surface, Worden was circling overhead - all by himself - for 3 days. At times, when his craft disappeared behind the far side of the Moon, he had no communications with anyone - not even Mission Control - and was thousands of miles away from his colleagues, and hundreds of thousands of miles away from any other human beings. He holds the record for being the "most isolated human being" ever.
You might think it must have been an anxious time for the solo astronaut, but his story, which can be found here, might just surprise you.
SOURCE and LINKS
The Loneliest Human Being
Apollo 15 Mission
Al Worden's webpage
Tags : This amazing video from NASA (via EarthSky) shows an incredibly gigantic eruption on the Sun's surface that produced three different types of events: a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME), and a really interesting and rare phenomenon known as coronal rain.
Coronal rain occurs when hot plasma in the eruption cools and condenses then follows the outline of the normally invisible magnetic fields as it rains back to the Sun's chromosphere. I found that particularly amazing to see.
The images were gathered on July 19, 2012 by the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA instrument. One frame was shot every 12 seconds over a span of 21.5 hours from 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT. The video plays at a rate of 30 frames per second, so each second equals 6 minutes of real time.
What's extra cool is when the scale of this thing is compared to the size of Earth. If you were feeling small earlier today, you should be feeling microscopic after watching this.
SOURCE
EarthSky website
Flying saucer cutaway from Project 1794: Recent declassified documents show the US Air Force worked on developing a flying saucer in the 1950s.Courtesy National ArchivesSomeone contact Mulder and Scully. Recently declassified documents show that the US Air Force was actually working on building flying saucers in the 1950s. Known as Project 1794, the four digitized documents available on the National Archives website, indicate the program involved development of a disk-shaped aircraft capable of achieving air speeds between Mach 3 and Mach 4 (2,300-3,000 mph) and a height of 100,000 feet! Propulsion was based on the Coandă effect, created by high-speed rotation of the saucer's outer rim. Jet turbines supplied the power. Avro Canada, a Canadian aircraft manufacturer, was also in on this very secret project. The truth might out there, but we might have to wait until the remainder of the two full boxes of documents is digitized and posted online.
This is a protest paper for the right for Pluto to be a planet. Pluto may be a small planet, but it orbits the sun just like the other planets do. People think Pluto may be a satellite to another bigger formation of rock, but maybe Pluto may have a stronger gravitational pull than the rest of the planets for some strange reason. Pluto has been a planet for so long, science teachers will have to make sure they do not include Pluto in the list of planets or when they are teaching. If anyone has heard of Mr. Parr the science teacher who does science songs, in planets around the star, he explains the planets and says for Pluto at the end, "if you want it back, scream until they hear you out". Thank you for reading my short blog, it should really have been a burst, but oh well. Please leave comments below on if you think that pluto should be a planet.
☺ over and out,
teamdaley
Evolution timeline from 1882: This caricature of Darwin's theory appeared in the 1882 Punch Almanac. The recent evolution timeline created by Kyrk and Sezen is a bit of an improvement.Courtesy Public domain via Wikipedia This cool evolution timeline is really fascinating and fun to mess around with. I'm guessing Charles Darwin would agree it's a vast improvement over the one that appeared in Punch Almanac in1882 when he was still alive (see image at right). This new one was created by John Kyrk, a biology-trained artist in San Francisco in collaboration with Dr. Uzay Sezen, a plant biologist from the University of Georgia. The timeline is available in several languages and would be very useful in a classroom setting when studying evolution and paleontology.
The site is interactive and follows the evolution of our universe from the Big Bang to the present. You start it by clicking and sliding the red pyramid on the right. As you scroll across the timeline, various events in the history of the Universe, Solar System and ultimately, the Earth show up on the screen. All along, links also appear that either explain concepts or show examples of them. In the upper left hand corner is a menu linking you to several corollary Flash animations by Kyrk explaining cell biology and how RNA, DNA, cells, water, and other basic elements of life (including viruses) operate. Kyrk thinks animated illustrations are very useful in teaching and remembering ideas and concepts.
All the phases of Earth’s formation and development are covered in the evolution timeline, including the Late Heavy Bombardment, Snowball Earth, Cambrian Explosion, stromatolites, photosynthesis and iron formation. Once life begins to rise up, your computer screen will run amok with Earth’s diverse species populations from the one-celled animals, trilobites and fish to amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals – the whole shooting match. All the major extinction events are shown, too.
The site also contains a link to this YouTube video version of someone else working the timeline so you can just sit back and watch how it happens, But I recommend working the interactive page yourself. A lot more happens and is available than the video allows you to see. Note that you’ll need Flash for it to run on your computer.
I wonder how Darwin would have reacted if he were able to see his theory illustrated in this way?
SOURCES
Evolution Timeline
The transit of Venus across the face of the Sun yesterday was a big attraction around Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, MN late yesterday afternoon. My brother and I set up on the east shore of the lake to watch the rare astronomical event, which started at 5:04pm and continued even after the Sun sank below the horizon. Swarms of people were at the lake enjoying the beautiful weather, and surprisingly many of them had a high level of interest in viewing the event. Luckily there were several telescopes, including my brother's Celestron, set up along the lake paths available to see it.
View through the Celestron: Venus (upper right) and several sunspots were visible on the Sun's surface.Courtesy Mark Ryan
Everyone wants a look: Crowds gathered to get a view of the last transit of Venus until 2117.Courtesy Mark Ryan
Another way to look at it: The Solarscope, which the owner said he had purchased in the early 1980s, is a cool viewing device that projected an image on the Sun and Venus.Courtesy Mark Ryan
One final look: Venus was still in transit as the sun disappeared below the horizon.Courtesy Mark Ryan
Annular solar eclipse sequence: Spain, 2005Courtesy CestomanoA rare opportunity for many of us astrogeeks takes place this Sunday (May 20, 2012) when a good portion of North America will experience an annular solar eclipse. The celestial mechanics start around 7pm CDT when the Moon begins to cross in front of the face of the Sun. Because the Moon's orbit is near its apogee with the Earth (that is at its farthest distance) it will appear smaller and won’t cover the entire solar disk (as it does in a total eclipse), but instead, a ring of sunlight will remain exposed at maximum eclipse. Here in Minnesota we won’t get that effect as only 80-90 of the sun will be covered from our vantage point, but since it starts so late in the day we should be able to watch the sun set in partial eclipse, which should look kind of cool. Let’s hope the weather cooperates. The East Coast of the US won’t see the eclipse because it will start there after sunset.
It’s best not to look directly at the Sun with the naked eye during this type of eclipse as even a sliver of sunlight can cause damage, but there are ways of viewing a solar eclipse safely.
My favorite phenomena during the partial phases of a solar eclipse are the odd shadows created by the leaves of trees and bushes. Each dappled shadow is an image of the crescent sun.
Kepler's Earth-like planets: Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f line up against Earth and Venus.Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. PyleNASA announced this week the discovery of two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star 1000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The star system, called Kepler 20, is orbited by five planets. The two planets of interest, named Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are the first exoplanets their size to be discovered around another star resembling our own.
Francois Fressin, the lead author of the study which appears in the journal Nature, said the Kepler mission's main goal is to discover Earth-sized planets located in the habitable zone of other star systems. "This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars, and that we are able to detect them,” Fressin said.
Kepler 20e is slightly smaller than Venus, while Kepler-20f is slightly larger than Earth. The exoplanets' host star is smaller than the Sun and a bit cooler in temperature, however, the orbits of Kepler-20e and 20f are closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun, which makes them far too hot to support liquid water and too inhospitable to support life.
But the discovery is a big step in the three-and-a-half year Kepler mission, which uses ground-based telescopes and space telescopes to search out possible planet candidates.
SOURCES and LINKS
NASA Kepler story
Kepler video
Kepler spacecraft info
Phil Plait, astronomer, lecturer, and blogger at Bad Astonomy gives a humorous and informative talk about asteroid impacts both in the past and in the future. He touches on the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and the 50 meter-wide asteroid that created Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert 50,000 years ago, and the rocky bolide that exploded with the force of 1000 atomic bombs above the Tunguska river region in Siberia in 1908. Each impacted with Earth, and lucky for us, they all took place safely in the past. But you know it’s bound to happen again. It’s not a question of if, but one of when. And when could be sooner than you think. Plait ratchets up his talk’s anxiety level with the information that an asteroid discovered in 2004 and known as Apophis is headed toward Earth. This thing isn’t anywhere as huge as the 6-mile wide space rock that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, but at over 250 meters across it could still do some serious damage.
In 2029, Apophis will pass so close to Earth it will come inside the orbit of some of our weather satellites. It won’t strike our planet at that time but if it manages to pass through a small kidney-shaped region in known as a gravitational keyhole, Earth’s pull would redirect Apophis orbit into one that would set it on a path of collision with us the next time it comes around on April 13, 2036. Sure the odds are slim everything will actually line up right for this to happen, but Plait sees it as an opportunity for us to learn how to deal with such events. We know impacts happened in the past, and we can assume they'll continue to happen in the future. Apophis is a good example of that. So it makes sense to start planning on how we can defend against such an event. Scientists from organization such as the B612 Foundation and NASA are already trying to raise public awareness of the dangers asteroids and other near Earth objects may pose to the future of our planet. And Plait explains some interesting counter offensives already being considered. It won't be an easy task but it's probably one that needs planning just in case. Besides, look at what could happen if we don't. It's a no-brainer.
MORE INFO
More about Apophis
Asteroid Watch website
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Jose A. y Bonilla's 1883 photgraphCourtesy Wikimedia
In August, 1883, Mexican astronomer Jose A. y Bonilla observed several objects passing in front of the solar disc. These objects were reported as being surrounded by a mist, looked dark against the solar disc, but bright outside of the disc. He took a photograph and published his findings in the magazine L'Astronomie in 1886. This photograph has had many interpretations, ranging from a flock of birds passing between the observer and the sun to the first photographic documentation of a UFO.
Recently, researchers from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico have come up with an alternate explanation. Hector Javier Durand Manterola, Maria de la Paz Ramos Lara, and Guadalupe Cordero hypothesize that what Bonilla observed in 1883 was a highly fragmented comet, in an approach almost flush to the surface of the Earth. According to their calculations, the distance from the Earth's surface to the objects was between 538 km (334.3 miles) and 8,062 km (5009.5 miles), and the mass of the object before fragmentation was between 0.002 and 8.19 times the mass of Halley's Comet. Fragmentation of comets has been observed recently, as in the case of the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which fragmented in 1995/1996, 2001, and 2006, as shown here.
Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (2006)Courtesy NASA,
However, the report's claims have been questioned. A comet breaking up so close to earth should have resulted in a meteor shower, and no astronomers detected one.
