Cosmos
gregladen | February 1, 2008
You can fly, without leaving the comfort of your own computer, to Saturn and its moon Titan. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and CIT have a bit of software and data that lets you climb on board the Cassini Huygens mission.
The first time you click on the button below it will automatically download and install the needed software (a free plug-in to your web-browser) and the real Cassini mission data. The download is about 15 megabytes so it should only take a minute or two. (If you use a Mac you may need to install the software after it downloads and then restart your web-browser.) Once…
gregladen | January 29, 2008You've probably already heard that a US spy satellite known as USA-193 is no longer able to keep itself up because the software on board has failed. This is a secret spy satellite so we don't at present know what the software was (any guesses?). It is big enough to not totally burn up in the atmosphere, and there are concerns that the satellite has nasty toxins on board. But again, since it is a secret spy satellite we can't know this either.
The expected date of entry is late February or early March.
Here is a source of info and a picture of the satellite.
gregladen | January 23, 2008Careful scanning of recent Mars rover imagery shows a sentient being. The best explanation for this is that the sentient being or beings have been following around the Spirit Rover for some time, always ducking behind a rock when the cameras swung their way. But this photograph shows a sentient being caught in the act:
[source]
What is especially interesting about this case is that we can clearly identify this being as Bigfoot. Compare with this photograph of Bigfoot:
Coincidence? I think not.
(Thanks to Virgil Samms for this tip)
gregladen | January 16, 2008Black holes have a maximum speed? Not really, just the usual Cosmic Speed Limit of the speed of light. From a Penn State Press Release....
A new study using results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provides one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly, according to a research team led by a Penn State astronomer. The whirling of these giant black holes drives powerful jets that pump huge amounts of energy into their environment and affects the growth of galaxies.
"We think these monster black holes are spinning close to the…
gregladen | January 12, 2008There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Imagine taking twenty percent of those stars and stuffing them into one, single black hole. That would be one hell of a black hole.
Well, there is such a black hole, called OJ287 (no relation to the ex foot ball star/murderer). It is about 3.5 billion light years away.
What is interesting about OJ287 is that there is so much gravity going on here .... between this massive black hole and a smaller black hole that orbits it ... that you have to measure the orbital dynamics using Einsteinian calculations, which makes it a test of one of…
gregladen | January 11, 2008An Einstein Ring is one of those freaky relativistic predictions that can't possibly be true unless Einstein was right. Well, Einstein Rings have been observed in the past, and now, we have a double Einstein Ring. Doubly proving that Einstein was right!
Click here for a bigger picture of the amazing double Einstein ring.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung…
gregladen | January 11, 2008This just in from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected plump black holes where least expected -- skinny galaxies.
...
Scientists have long held that all galaxies except the slender, bulgeless spirals harbor supermassive black holes at their cores. Furthermore, bulges were thought to be required for black holes to grow.
The new Spitzer observations throw this theory into question. The infrared telescope surveyed 32 flat and bulgeless galaxies and detected monstrous black holes lurking in the bellies of seven of them. The results imply that galaxy bulges…
gregladen | January 11, 2008An asteroid heading for Mars is going to miss the angry red planet. Too bad, that would have been cool.
But there is a very cool graphic that results from the science surrounding this non event.
This is a moving GIF showing the evolution over time of the uncertainty region for the collision. You can see where mars was initially in the uncertainty region, and over time, as the uncertainty region became smaller and smaller, the planet moved first to the edge then entirely out of the region.
Much like Barack Obama and the New Hampshire Primary.
Oh well, maybe next time. Mars and Barack.…
gregladen | January 6, 2008Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco says, "I'm going to take you on a journey." And does she ever. Showing breathtaking images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, she focuses on Saturn's intriguing largest moon, Titan,with deserts, mudflats and puzzling lakes, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to shoot jets of ice.
gregladen | January 5, 2008Wielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.
gregladen | January 4, 2008Pope Evicts Astronomers Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope's summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.
The eviction of the astronomers and their instruments, reported by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, and their removal to a disused convent a mile away, marks the end of a period of intimacy between popes and priest-astronomers that has lasted well over a century.
[source]
gregladen | December 30, 2007I like the way this address spacetime instead of merely space. Or time .
Do you recognize the languages i the background?
gregladen | December 23, 2007Jennifer Gooch's mission was to create a simple Web site where people could go to find their lost gloves. Even if no happy reunions ever took place, she was just content to spread a little goodwill.
But just a month since http://www.onecoldhand.com went live, the Carnegie Mellon University art student is busier than ever. She's reunited four gloves with their owners, is working on similar sites for cities around the globe, and is planning a book to showcase her found gloves.
Four. Wow, that is impressive, I would have thought zero.
Why do I think that? No, not because I think the dog…
gregladen | December 15, 2007I hope these stories are not related to each other
Great beasts peppered from space
There is fairly convincing evidence that the explosion of an object not of this earth hit mammoths and other Pleistocene Mega Beasts with shrapnel up in Siberia and Alaska.
Boeing's 12,000lb chemical laser set to fry targets from aircraft
Earthlings have finally developed an effective, large scale, and portable Ray Gun.
Global group aims to return Martian soil to Earth
There is a plan to go to Mars and bring back some dirt. Who knows what is going to be in that dirt?
Who Speaks for Earth? ... From Seed…
gregladen | December 14, 2007Saturn's rings probably date back billions of years and could likely be around forever although they are continually changing, according to a new study published this week.
Data collected by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s and later the Hubble telescope originally led scientists to think the planet's famous rings were relatively young in cosmic terms and possibly created by a comet that smashed into a large moon.
But new data collected by the Cassini probe suggests that rather than being formed some 100 million years ago, the rings were probably formed as the solar system was being built…
gregladen | December 13, 2007Using digital techniques and INT Photometric H-alpha dohinkies, astronomers have generated a new picture of our galaxy. One picture is here (click below enlarge) and below the fold is the abstract from the paper in Astrophysics.
View full, very large version of this image
The INT/WFC Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS) is an imaging survey being carried out in H-alpha, r' and i' filters, with the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the 2.5-metre Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) to a depth of r'=20 (10 sigma). The survey is aimed at revealing large scale structure in our…
gregladen | December 12, 2007This time, it comes from the side effect of the Mars Rover getting the Martian equivalent of a flat tire...
NASA's Spirit Mars rover has been dealing with [a] right front tire [that] went bad nearly two years ago. It didn't go flat, but it's quit turning forcing NASA to move the rover around in reverse ever since, trailing the stuck wheel behind.
But nearly a year later, [it was noticed that [r]uts carved by the bad wheel last May churned up a bright spot in the rover's wake.
Rover guiders turned the craft back to the colorful streak for a closer look and discovered that the rock contains…
gregladen | December 12, 2007This time, it comes from the side effect of the Mars Rover getting the Martian equivalent of a flat tire...
NASA's Spirit Mars rover has been dealing with [a] right front tire [that] went bad nearly two years ago. It didn't go flat, but it's quit turning forcing NASA to move the rover around in reverse ever since, trailing the stuck wheel behind.
But nearly a year later, [it was noticed that [r]uts carved by the bad wheel last May churned up a bright spot in the rover's wake.
Rover guiders turned the craft back to the colorful streak for a closer look and discovered that the rock contains…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Try this: Starting at home, drive, run, ski, or walk about fifty thousand feet. That would be about ten miles, or 15 kilometers. It won't take you long (especially if you drive) and chances are, when you get there, it will be a place at least vaguely familiar to you. At the very least, it will be a place that is qualitatively familiar to you. Even if you end up in a strip mall, or a government office building, or a recreational park, that you've never been to before, you'll be able to find your way around.
Now do the same thing, but instead of going across the landscape, go straight up…