How meteorites struck Moon

Image credit: universetoday.com

A wealth of evidence, provided by lunar rock samples, shows how meteorites struck the moon.

The study, headed by microstructural geology experts Nick Timms and Steven Reddy, professor, Western Australian School of Mines (WASM), documents the discovery of impact-related shock features in lunar zircon.

Timms said they stumbled upon the discovery while looking more closely at lunar zircon mineral grains, with the use of microscopy facilities at Curtin University, the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science reports.

They found the presence of preserved microscopic details, known as planar deformation features (PDFs), as well as micro-twins (impact indicators), which are only ever produced by large-scale meteorite impacts, according to a WASM statement.

"This research is the first to report the presence of PDFs and micro-twins in lunar zircon, which provide unequivocal evidence of the immense pressures that occur during an impact event," Timms said.

"This research also provides a new explanation of how these features form. As shock waves pass through a rock, fractions of a second after a meteorite impact, these features form like microscopic crumple zones which are caused by directional differences in zircon's elasticity."

Timms said the research was a step closer to the major scientific goal of establishing the absolute timing of meteorite impact events on the moon, and consequently, the inner solar system.

"The current paradigm for the early impact history of our solar system stems from studies of lunar rocks and involves a period of intense impact events around 3.9 billion years ago, known as the 'Late Heavy Bombardment'," he said.

IANS

Solar storm sparks dazzling northern lights

The aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, are seen near
the city of Tromsoe, northern Norway, on Jan. 24.
Image credit: Rune Stoltz Bertinussen/Scanpix Norway/AP

A storm from the broiling sun turned the chilly northernmost skies of Earth into an ever-changing and awe-provoking art show of northern lights on Tuesday.

Even experienced stargazers were stunned by the intensity of the aurora borealis that swept across the night sky in northern Scandinavia after the biggest solar flare in six years.

"It has been absolutely incredible," British astronomer John Mason cried from the deck of the MS Midnatsol, a cruise ship plying the fjord-fringed coast of northern Norway.

"I saw my first aurora 40 years ago, and this is one of the best," Mason told The Associated Press, his voice nearly drowning in the cheers of awe-struck fellow passengers.

US space weather experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday evening that so far they had heard of no problems from the storm that triggered the auroras, which made it as far south as Wales, where the weather often doesn't cooperate with good viewing.

It was part of the strongest solar storm in years, but the sun is likely to get even more active in the next few months and years, said physicist Doug Biesecker at the US Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

"To me this was a wake up call. The sun is reminding us that solar max is approaching," Biesecker said. "A lot worse is in store for us. We hope that you guys are paying attention. I would say we passed with flying colors."

Even before particles from the solar storm reached the Earth on Tuesday, a different aurora Monday night was dancing across the sky as far south as Ireland and England, where people rarely get a chance to catch the stunning light show.

Those northern lights were likely just variations in normal background solar wind, not the solar storm that erupted Sunday, Biesecker said.

Tuesday's colorful display may not have moved that far south, limiting its audience, but those who got to see it got brilliance in the sky that had not been around for years.

"It was the biggest northern lights I've seen in the five-six years that I've worked here," said Andreas Hermansson, a tour guide at the Ice Hotel in the Swedish town of Jukkasjarvi, above the Arctic Circle.

He was leading a group of tourists on a bus tour in the area when a green glow that had lingered in the sky for much of the evening virtually exploded into a spectacle of colors around 10:15 p.m.

"We stopped the bus. And suddenly it was just this gigantic display of dancing lights and Technicolor," said Michele Cahill, an Irish psychologist, who was on the tour. "It was an absolutely awesome display. It went on for over an hour. Literally one would have to lie on the ground to capture it all."

But in -30 degrees F (-35 C), that didn't seem like a good idea.

An aurora appears when a magnetic solar wind slams into the Earth's magnetic field, exciting electrons of oxygen and nitrogen.

The northern lights are sometimes seen from northern Scotland, but they were also visible Monday night from northeast England and Ireland, where such sightings are a rarity.

"The lights appear as green and red mist. It's been mostly green the past few nights. I don't know if that's just special for Ireland," said Gerard O'Kane, a 41-year-old taxi driver and vice chairman of the Buncrana Camera Club in County Donegal in Ireland's northwest corner.

He and at least two dozen amateur photographers were meeting after dark at a local beach for an all-night stakeout. They've been shooting the horizon from dozens of locations since Friday night.

Scientists have been expecting solar eruptions to become more intense as the sun enters a more active phase of its 11-year cycle, with an expected peak in 2013.

But in recent years the sun appeared quieter than normal, leading scientists to speculate that it was going into an unusually quiet cycle that seems to happen once a century or so.

While the geomagnetic part of the solar eruption — which happened around 11 p.m. EST Sunday — was more of a fizzle, another earlier part of the sun's outburst was more powerful.

On Monday and Tuesday, the proton radiation from the eruption reached strong levels, the most powerful since October 2003. That mostly affects astronauts and satellites, but NASA said the crew on the International Space Station was not harmed and only a few minor problems with satellites were reported, Biesecker said.

However, some airplane flights over the North Pole have been rerouted because of expected communication problems from the radiation.

Geomagnetic storms cause awesome sights, but they can also bring trouble. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, problems can include current surges in power lines, and interference in the broadcast of radio, TV and telephone signals. No such problems were reported Tuesday.

Peter Richardson, a 49-year-old bar manager and part-time poet at the 17th-century Tan Hill Inn in northern England, said the pub — normally dead on a Monday night in January — was thronged until the wee hours of the morning with people who came to look at the lights.

"I just thought: 'Oh my God, this is just absolutely amazing,'" he said. "You do get a lot of spectacular skylines out here, but that was just something out of the ordinary. Very different."

Ken Kennedy, director of the Aurora section of the British Astronomical Association, said the northern lights may be visible for a few more days.

The Canadian Space Agency posted a geomagnetic storm warning Tuesday after residents were also treated to a spectacular show in the night sky.

John Manuel, a scientist with the Canadian Space Agency, said there's an increased chance of seeing northern lights over northern Canada on Tuesday night.

"It's not likely people in the major Canadian cities further south will see a significant aurora tonight," he said. "There's always a possibility but the current forecast is for a good show for people who live further north. It should be a particularly good night tonight."

Bureau Report

How birds avoid hitting trees

Image credit: leeds.ac.uk

Birds don't have to bother about overcrowded roads, but they do stick to a speed limit to avoid hitting trees or other objects.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe their findings could help the military fly unmanned drones as fast as possible without crashing.

They looked at birds such as the daredevil northern goshawk and developed mathematical models based on the way the animals travel through the air.

MIT professor and study author Emilio Frazzoli said: "If birds flew at speeds purely based on what they can immediately see, they wouldn't go very fast."

Instead, he explained, they roughly calculate the density of the environment they are flying through and set themselves a top speed based on the likelihood of finding a gap between the trees or buildings, the Daily Mail reports.

Above that top speed, he went on, they are "sure to crash". But if they stay below it, they could theoretically remain in flight forever.

Frazzoli, who is currently testing his theory on pigeons, added: "There is no magic number for the critical speed. In fact, the critical speed depends on some parameters describing tree density and size, and the bird's manoeuvrability and size.

"In other words, if the forest is too dense, the trees are too thick, the bird is too large or flying too fast, it will eventually collide with a tree," he added.

He said that mathematical calculations drawn from the way birds fly could eventually be used by scientists to increase the speed unmanned drones can safely fly at.

IANS

Tiny alcohol amounts double worm's life

C elegans. Image credit: neuinfo.org

Tiny portions of ethanol, the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, can more than double the lifespan of a tiny worm known as C elegans.

The worm, found in soils, where they eat bacteria, is used frequently as a model in aging studies, according to University of California Los Angeles biochemists.

"This finding floored us - it's shocking," said Steven Clarke, a California professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

In humans, alcohol consumption is generally harmful, Clarke said, and if the worms are given much higher concentrations of ethanol, they experience harmful neurological effects and die, other research has shown.

Clarke's research team - Paola Castro, Shilpi Khare and Brian Young - studied thousands of these worms in the first hours of their lives, while they were still in a larval stage.

The worms normally live for about 15 days and can survive with nothing to eat for roughly 10-12 days. "Our finding is that tiny amounts of ethanol can make them survive 20 to 40 days," Clarke said.

The scientists fed the worms cholesterol, and the worms lived longer, apparently due to the cholesterol. They had dissolved the cholesterol in ethanol, often used as a solvent, which they diluted 1,000-fold.

"It's just a solvent, but it turns out the solvent was having the longevity effect," Clarke said.

"The cholesterol did nothing. We found that not only does ethanol work at a 1-to-1,000 dilution, it works at a 1-to-20,000 dilution.

"That tiny bit shouldn't have made any difference, but it turns out it can be so beneficial.

"The concentrations correspond to a tablespoon of ethanol in a bathtub full of water or the alcohol in one beer diluted into a hundred gallons of water," Clarke said.

IANS

UFOs seen over Britain?

These two bright discs were seen over Chatham in Kent on January 6
Image credit: Barcroft Media

 

 

Six suspected unidentified flying objects (UFOs) were reportedly captured on camera in two counties of Britain.

The sightings were reported from Chatham in Kent and Loughton in Essex, around 50 km apart, The Sun reported.

Ernestas Griksas, 21, was clicking a cherry-picker outside his window at his home in Kent. When he looked at the photo, he spotted strange objects in the sky.

"There are two white discs I can't explain. I'm nowhere near a flightpath. One is slightly fainter as if it is further away or going at a different speed," he said.

In the second incident, car salesman Josh Cummins spotted four bright objects hovering in pairs as he drove to work in Essex.

"I nearly crashed. I stopped to take this picture with my mobile. It was like the UFOs were surfing the clouds. They were there for 15 seconds then vanished," Cummins said.

IANS

Mars rocks fell in Africa last July

Image credit: AP

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July.

This is only the fifth time scientists have confirmed chemically Martian meteorites that people witnessed as they fell. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks were not discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.

This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars' potential for life. So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only Martian samples scientists can examine are those that come here in meteorite showers.

Scientists and collectors of meteorites are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big money because they are among the rarest things on Earth, rarer even than gold.

PTI

Insects watch skies to navigate

Image credit: globalanimal.org

How do insects such as butterflies, locusts and fruit flies navigate thousands of miles so precisely with only the unchanging sky in the foreground? Researchers now have an answer.

"If you go out in a field, lie on your back and look up at the sky, that's pretty much what an insect sees," said study co-author Michael Dickinson, a University of Washington biology professor.

Peter Weir, doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Dickinson examined the behaviour of the fruit fly, in outdoor lighting conditions, to find answers, the journal Current Biology reports.

They demonstrated that fruit flies, equipped with complex compound eyes, keep their bearings by using the polarisation pattern of natural skylight, some of them for thousands of miles, according to Caltech-Washington statement.

Demonstrating that fruit flies can navigate using cues from natural skylight makes it easier to use genetics to better understand the complex capability and exactly how it is implemented in the brain.

For millennia, seafarers have depended on the sun to know their position in the world, but often the sun is not visible.

Polarisation vision solves that problem, Dickinson said, because if there's even a small patch of clear sky in a fruit fly's very broad range of view, then the natural light patterns can provide location information.

IANS

Science’s “most beautiful theories”

From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself.

Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question.

In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?"

This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?"

The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Several of the nearly 200 scholars nominated what are arguably the two most powerful scientific theories ever developed. "Darwin's natural selection wins hands down," argues Dawkins, emeritus professor at Oxford University.

"Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few," he says of the theory that encompasses everything about life, based on the idea of natural selection operating on random genetic mutations.

Einstein's theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the curvature of space, also gets a few nods.

As theoretical physicist Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes, "This central idea has shaped our ideas of modern cosmology (and) given us the image of the expanding universe."

General relativity explains black holes, the bending of light and "even offers a possible explanation of the origin of our Universe - as quantum tunneling from 'nothing,'" he writes.

Many of the nominated ideas, however, won't be found in science courses taught in high school or even college.

Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, extols the discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions such as what work people do and who they marry. Instead, he writes, "an ancient brain system called the basal ganglia, brain circuits that consciousness cannot access," pull the strings.

Running on the neurochemical dopamine, they predict how rewarding a choice will be - if I pick this apartment, how happy will I be? - "evaluate the current state of the entire cortex and inform the brain about the best course of action," explains Sejnowski. Only later do people construct an explanation of their choices, he said in an interview, convincing themselves incorrectly that volition and logic were responsible.

To neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, the most beautiful idea is emergence, in which complex phenomena almost magically come into being from extremely simple components.

For instance, a human being arises from a few thousand genes. The intelligence of an ant colony - labor specialization, intricate underground nests - emerges from the seemingly senseless behavior of thousands of individual ants.

"Critically, there's no blueprint or central source of command," says Sapolsky. Each individual ant has a simple algorithm for interacting with the environment, "and out of this emerges a highly efficient colony."

Among other tricks, the colony has solved the notorious Traveling Salesman problem, or the challenge of stopping at a long list of destinations by the shortest route possible.

THE OTHER PAVLOVIAN EFFECT
Stephen Kosslyn, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, is most impressed by Pavlovian conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus such as a sound comes to be associated with a reward, such as food, producing a response, such as salivation.

That much is familiar. Less well known is that Pavlovian conditioning might account for placebo effects. After people have used analgesics such as ibuprofen or aspirin many times, the drugs begin to have effects before their active ingredients kick in.

From previous experience, the mere act of taking the pill has become like Pavlov's bell was for his dogs, causing them to salivate: the "conditioned stimulus" of merely seeing the pill "triggers the pain-relieving processes invoked by the medicine itself," explains Kosslyn.

Science theories that explain puzzling human behavior or the inner workings of the universe were also particular favorites of the Edge contributors:

* Psychologist Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley, is partial to one that accounts for why teenagers are so restless, reckless and emotional. Two brain systems, an emotional motivational system and a cognitive control system, have fallen out of sync, she explains.

The control system that inhibits impulses and allows you to delay gratification kicks in later than it did in past generations, but the motivational system is kicking in earlier and earlier.

The result: "A striking number of young adults who are enormously smart and knowledgeable but directionless, who are enthusiastic and exuberant but unable to commit to a particular work or a particular love until well into their twenties or thirties."

BEAUTIFUL IDEAS

* Neurobiologist Sam Barondes of the University of California, San Francisco, nominates the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance. One serendipitous force is which parental genes happen to be in the egg and sperm that produced the child.

"But there is also chance in how neurodevelopmental processes unfold - a little virus here, an intrauterine event there, and you have chance all over the place," he said in an interview. Another toss of the dice: how a parent will respond to a child's genetic disposition to be outgoing, neurotic, open to new experience and the like, either reinforcing the innate tendencies or countering them.

The role of chance in creating differences between people has moral consequences, says Barondes, "promoting understanding and compassion for the wide range of people with whom we share our lives."

* Timothy Wilson nominates the idea that "people become what they do." While people's behavior arises from their character - someone returns a lost wallet because she is honest - "the reverse also holds," says the University of Virginia psychologist. If we return a lost wallet, our assessment of how honest we are rises through what he calls "self-inference." One implication of this phenomenon: "We should all heed Kurt Vonnegut's advice," Wilson says: "'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.'"

* Psychologist David Myers of Hope College finds "group polarization" a beautiful idea, since it explains how interacting with others tends to amplify people's initial views. In particular, discussing issues with like-minded peers -increasingly the norm in the United States, where red states attract conservatives and blue states attract liberals - push people toward extremes. "The surprising thing is that the group as a whole becomes more extreme than its pre-discussion average," he said in an interview.

* Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, nominates the "astonishing concept" that what we consider the universe "could be hugely more extensive" than what astronomers observe.

If true, the known cosmos may instead "be a tiny part of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which is itself just one bang among a perhaps-infinite ensemble," Rees writes. Even more intriguing is that different physics might prevail in these different universes, so that "some of what we call 'laws of nature' may ... be local bylaws."

Bureau Report

Milky Way ‘seems as white as spring snow’

Image credit: Space.com

Our galaxy would appear like the shade of fine-grained spring snow in early morning light when seen from another galaxy, according to scientists.

The Milky Way is redder than most spiral galaxies, but when combined with its blue arms, its overall colour is white.

The Milky Way’s overall colour is about the shade of white halfway between an incandescent light bulb and the standard spectrum white on a TV.

“Understanding the colour of the Milky Way allows us to compare other galaxies to it because for most galaxies all we can measure is how bright they are and what colour they are. It’s really frustrating that that’s exactly what we can’t measure about the Milky Way from our position inside it,” astronomer Jeffrey Newman, with the University of Pittsburgh, told Discovery News.

The research found that the Milky Way is among the reddest of spiral galaxies, meaning that its star-forming days are coming to an end.

“It’s entering its retirement when it won’t make anything new,” Newman said.

Based on the type and number of its stars, the Milky Way turns out to be a very typical galaxy, the analysis shows.

“We find that the color, the spectrum of the Milky Way is very close to the average of all the galaxies we see,” Newman stated.

For the analysis, scientists combined data from about 1,000 galaxies that have a similar number of stars and similar star birthrates as the Milky Way out of nearly 1 million galaxies in the Sloan survey.

Overall, the light from the Milky Way closely matches the colour of a standard incandescent light bulb, well within the range of what the human eye perceives as white.

The research was unveiled Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin.

ANI

Astronomers see more planets than stars in galaxy

Exoplanets. Image credit: theperfectsilence.com

The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

"We're awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren't even sure there were planets" outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn't involved in the new research.

Astronomers are finding other worlds using three different techniques and peering through telescopes in space and on the ground.

Confirmed planets outside our solar system — called exoplanets — now number well over 700, still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands.

NASA's new Kepler planet-hunting telescope in space is discovering exoplanets that are in a zone friendly to life and detecting planets as small as Earth or even tinier. That is moving the field of looking for some kind of life outside Earth from science fiction toward plain science.

One study in Nature this week figures that the Milky Way averages at least 1.6 large planets per star. And that is likely a dramatic underestimate.

That study is based on only one intricate and time-consuming method of planet hunting that uses several South American, African and Australian telescopes. Astronomers look for increases in brightness of distant stars that indicate planets between Earth and that pulsating star. That technique usually finds only bigger planets and is good at finding those further away from their stars, sort of like our Saturn or Uranus.

Kepler and a different ground-based telescope technique are finding planets closer to their stars. Putting those methods together, the number of worlds in our galaxy is probably much closer to two or more planets per star, said the Nature study author Arnaud Cassan of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris.

Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at the University of California Berkeley's search for extraterrestrial intelligence program and who wasn't part of the studies, was thrilled: "It's great to know that there are planets out there that we can point our telescopes at."

Kepler also found three rocky planets — tinier than Earth — that are circling a dwarf star that itself is only a bit bigger than Jupiter. They are so close to their small star that they are too hot for life.

"It's like you took your shrink ray gun and you set it to seven times smaller and zap the planetary system," said California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson, co-author of the study presented Wednesday at the astronomy conference.

Because it is so hard to see these size planets, they must be pretty plentiful, Johnson said. "It's kind of like cockroaches. If you see one, then there are dozens hiding."

It's not just the number or size of planets, but where they are found. Scientists once thought systems with two stars were just too chaotic to have planets nearby. But so far, astronomers have found three different systems where planets have two suns, something that a few years ago seemed like purely "Star Wars" movie magic.

"Nature must like to form planets because it's forming them in places that are kind of difficult to do," said San Diego State University astronomy professor William Welsh, who wrote a study about planets with two stars that's also published in the journal Nature.

The gravity of two stars makes the area near them unstable, Welsh said. So astronomers thought that if a planet formed in that area, it would be torn apart.

Late last year, Kepler telescope found one system with two stars. It was considered a freak. Then Welsh used Kepler to find two more. Now Welsh figures such planetary systems, while not common, are not rare either.

"It just feels like it's inevitable that Kepler is going to come up with a habitable Earth-sized planet in the next couple of years," Caltech's Johnson said.

Bureau Report

Alien Earths may have two Suns

Tatooine like planet. Image credit: Wikia

Astronomers should start hunting for planets like the Tatooine in the science fiction series "Star Wars", as Earth-like worlds could exist in the habitable zones around binary systems, scientists say.

In the "Star Wars" universe, Tatooine was a circumbinary planet that had two Suns. In September last year, NASA's Kepler space telescope had discovered the first real-life circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, a gas giant like Jupiter.

Now, astrophysicists from the University of Texas in the US suggested that Earth-like worlds could exist in the habitable zones around binary systems that are neither too hot nor too cold to support liquid water on its surface, and thus life as we know it.

"This is an assessment of the possibilities," said study co-author Zdzislaw Musielak. "We're telling them where a planet has to be in the system to be habitable. We're hoping they will look there," he was quoted as saying by SPACE.com

The researchers used the Kepler-16 twin Sun system as a starting point. The habitable zone of this system is centered mostly on the system's primary star and extends in a region around it equal to 0.36 to 0.71 the distance of the Earth to the sun. This corresponds in our system to a distance from between Earth and Venus to about Mars, the researchers said.

"This work is informed by observations and it has the potential to trigger more observations," said study co-author Manfred Cuntz.

One possibility the researchers explored involved an Earth-sized planet that directly orbits the binary system at distances outside its conventional habitable zone. This corresponds to a distance from the system's primary star equal to twice the distance from Earth to the sun.

To host life in this extended region, such a planet would need high levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon monoxide or methane in its atmosphere to trap warmth.

"We determined that a habitable Earth-like exoplanet is possible in the extended habitable zone," said lead author Billy Quarles. "There is less light from the star, so the planet itself has to maintain more heat."

Another possibility involved an Earth-sized moon of a gas giant in the habitable zones of Kepler-16, the team told the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

"We determined that a habitable exomoon is possible in orbit around Kepler-16b," Quarles said.

Other more exotic possibilities the researchers are considering include an Earth-sized planet around the twin stars that gets captured by a gas giant in the system to become a moon, as well as an Earth-sized world in a so-called Trojan orbit equidistant from the gas giant Kepler-16b and the binary system's primary star.

Calculations regarding these possibilities are ongoing, Quarles added.

PTI

How sun sets in an alien world

'Amazingly, we know what sunset on HD 209458 looks like quite accurately,' says Professor Pont. 'The colour of the sunset is exactly what is measured when we collect the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere of a planet as it passes its star.'

Scientists have thrown light on how sunsets on exoplanets would look like.

According to University of Exeter exoplanetary scientist Frederic Pont, as exoplanet planet HD 209458 b - unofficially known as “Osiris”, a world 150 light-years from Earth, orbits extremely close to its star, atmospheric temperatures are high (around 1,000 degrees Celsius or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).

This implies that its outer atmospheric layers become “puffed up.”

The exoplanet’s atmospheric “puffiness” makes it easier to analyze, and using data from the STIS spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope, Pont was able to calculate how the star would look as seen at the exoplanet’s horizon, Discovery News reported.

In the case of Osiris, as its star drops through the atmosphere from an observer’s perspective, it will transform from predominantly white to blue.

The blueness is due to atmospheric sodium absorbing the orange/red light being emitted by the star, causing its light to shift towards the blue part of the spectrum.

As the star drops further, Rayleigh scattering by atmospheric molecules will disperse even the blue light from the star. (Rayleigh scattering is the same mechanism that gives Earth's sky a blue hue.)

The only light able to make it through the atmosphere will be green and ultimately murky brown. The atmosphere will then glow because of emission from atmospheric molecules and the Rayleigh scattering will cause a blue hue to stay on.

ANI

Why dew drops sit on leaf tip

Image credit: widescreenwallpapers.org

Nobel laureate and poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote: "Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf." A new study is finally offering an explanation for why small dew drops, as Tagore said, form on the tips, rather than on the flat surfaces of leaves.

In the study, researcher Martin E.R. Shanahan from the Institute for Materials and Processes, University of Edinburgh, observes that drops of water have a preference for exactly where they collect on leaves as their surfaces cool in the morning and afternoon, reported the journal Langmuir.

Those droplets, which condense from water vapour - moisture - in the air, collect randomly across the surfaces of flat leaves. However, dew drops tend to accumulate at the tips of spindly leaves, even if that means defying gravity by moving upwards, according to a university statement.

He explained that an inherent unwillingness or lack of necessity of water drops to move on a dry surface governs their positioning on flat leaves, causing them to stay where they form.

Dew's tendency to head to the end of finely pointed leaves, however, sent Shanahan looking for a different explanation. The answer is based on the fundamental principle of free energy, that everything in nature seeks the lowest possible energy state.

Shanahan modelled two types of dew drops on a theoretical (simplified) cone-shaped leaf: a thin, cylindrical sheath of water and a spherical drop centred on the cone's axis. In both cases, he found that the drop lowered its energy by moving toward the point of the leaf.

IANS

CO2 turns clownfish into drunken daredevils

Clownfish. Image credit: glassbox-design.com

Carbon dioxide in the ocean acts like alcohol on fish and leaves them less able to judge risks, making them prone to losing their senses, a new study has claimed.

The intoxication caused by carbon dioxide adds to the threats posed by global warming and ocean acidification to marine ecosystems.

Almost 2.3 billion tonnes of CO2 caused by human emissions dissolves into the world’s oceans every year, turning it all the more acidic.

Philip Munday and his colleagues from James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, had previously found that if a reef fish is put in water with more CO2 levels in it than what is normal, they become bolder and more attracted to odours they would normally avoid, including those of predators and unfavourable habitats.

Munday and his colleague Goran Nilsson at the University of Oslo, Norway, have now discovered that carbon dioxide leads to riskier behaviour by interfering with a neurotransmitter receptor called GABA-A.

They nurtured clownfish larvae in seawater with normal and elevated CO2 levels. When the Amphiprion percula reached adulthood, they were given a choice between a water stream containing the odour of common predators like the rock cod or a stream lacking predatory odours.

Those reared in high levels of CO2 swam towards rock cod’s scent almost 90 percent of the time, whereas those that had enjoyed normal levels of CO2 avoided the predator’s scent most of the time.

On treating the clownfish bred under CO2-rich conditions with gabazine, a chemical that blocks the GABA-A receptor helped them regain their senses.

Fish treated this way swam towards the predatory smell only 12 percent of the time.

“The fact that we could use a specific blocker for the GABA-A receptors to reverse the behavioural alterations proves that this receptor is involved in the CO2 effects,” New Scientist quoted Nilsson as saying.

ANI

Even birds can’t resist a good yawn

Image credit: animalwise

Not just humans but birds also find yawns irresistible, say a researcher.

Andrew Gallup at Binghamton University in New York found that budgies, the highly social birds, also make contagious yawn, New Scientist reported.

Many animals yawn, but only humans and a few other primates are known to trigger cascades of yawns around a group.

For his finding Gallup watched 21 budgies over 15 days and counted their yawns - a wide-open beak and slightly closed eyes, followed by a brief stretch of the neck.

He found each bird yawned one to three times an hour, but was more likely to do so if their neighbour had just yawned.

Gallup says it’s the first good evidence for contagious yawning in a non-primate.

His unpublished work also revealed that their yawns are more contagious after a sudden loud noise, suggesting yawning might help coordinate group alertness in the face of a threat.

ANI

Earth has always had two moons

Image credit: niharsworld.com

The Earth has always had a temporary second moon, new study has claimed.

When astronomers caught sight of a mysterious titanium white object circling around the Earth in 2006, they assumed it was a spent rocket.

But it was actually a small asteroid captured by the Earth’s gravitational field that rotated around the Earth until June 2007.

In the new study, astrophysicists at Cornell claim that this little moon was not an anomaly as these asteroids come and go so often it means our planet always has a temporary second moon.

According to Cornell University’s Mikael Granvik, Jeremie Vaubaillon and Robert Jedicke, they have calculated the population of “irregular natural satellites that are temporarily captured” by Earth.

In their study, researchers say that while these moons are small, the scientific implications of this discovery are phenomenal.

“At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth,” the Daily Mail quoted the team as saying.

Instead of having to send crews to asteroids astronomers can wait until they come closer to Earth to intercept and learn more about the origins of our solar system.

Although the small asteroids, which measure just a few metres across they qualified as a natural satellite just like our Moon, are difficult to track, astronomers believe they could potentially save millions if NASA waited for it to orbit the earth, instead of launching missions into the solar system.

Even though NASA couldn't land on an asteroid, which was just a few metres, it could get close to collect information on fact finding missions.

“At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth,” the team added.

The study has been published on the Cornell University website.

ANI

British scientists unravel Stonehenge riddle

Scientists in Britain have at long last unravelled the riddle about the origin of the Stonehenge rocks, pinpointing their source to north Pembrokeshire.

Geologists Robert Ixer from the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales suggest the stones came from Craig Rhos-y-Felin, in north Pembrokeshire.

The discovery paves the way for better understanding of how and why the stones were transported to the Wiltshire monument.

Controversy has raged over the origin of the Bluestones or 'spotted dolerites'-- that form the inner circle and inner horseshoe of the 5,000-year-old site.

There is a consensus that the large stones, the sarsens, were added hundreds of years later.

Bevins said: "It has been argued that humans transported the spotted dolerites from the high ground of Mynydd Preseli down to the coast at Milford Haven and then rafted them up the Bristol Channel and up the River Avon to the Stonehenge area."

"However, the outcome of our research questions that route, as it is unlikely that they would have transported the Pont Season stones up slope and over Mynydd Preseli to Milford Haven. If humans were responsible, then an alternative route might need to be considered."

"However, some believe that the stones were transported by the actions of glacier sheets during the last glaciation and so the Pont Season discovery will need appraising in the context of this hypothesis," Bevins said.

Bevins describes his discovery as like 'looking for a needle in a haystack', but is convinced it's correct. "We've been able to make the match on a range of features, not just a single characteristic."

Rob Ixer added: "Being able to provenance any archaeologically significant rock so precisely is remarkable, to do it for Stonehenge was quite unexpected and exciting.

Stonehenge expert Vince Gaffney, from the IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre at the University of Birmingham, underlined the importance of the discovery.

"Dr Ixer's research is a significant contribution to our understanding of Stonehenge and the intricate social networks that lay behind the construction of this unique monument."

IANS

NASA discovers black hole with 'heartbeat'

Soon after finding the largest black hole last week, NASA has now found another black hole, but it is the tiniest one and with a heart beat.

A NASA satellite has detected what astronomers said was a "heartbeat" of what could be the smallest known black hole.

The star-sucker could weigh less than three times the mass of the sun, placing it near the minimum mass required for a black hole to be stable.

Using the NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), which detects X-rays coming from cosmic sources, a team of astronomers identified a specific X-ray pattern, nicknamed a "heartbeat", that indicates that a black hole is present in a binary system with the ordinary star.

The "heartbeat" pattern is caused by the regular cycles of matter accumulated into the black hole from its neighbouring star.

"Just as the heart rate of a mouse is faster than an elephant's, the heartbeat signals from these black holes scales according to their masses," said Diego Altamirano, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, who worked on the NASA project.

The heartbeat was referring to the intermittent X-ray bursts as gas is sucked from stars, forming a disc around the black hole, where it's heated by friction to millions of degrees, hot enough to emit X-rays. Astronomers have named the new discovery - IGR J1091-3624.

Astronomers first became aware of the binary system during an outburst in 2003. Archival data from various space missions show it becomes active every few years.

Its most recent outburst started in February and is ongoing. The system is located in the direction of the constellation Scorpius, but its distance is not well established. It could be as close as 16,000 light-years or more than 65,000 light-years away.

The potential discovery comes as NASA announced earlier this month the discovery of one of the largest black holes on record.

Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe.

This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

NASA officials say the pair of projects represent the first step and is just the start of a larger program to compare both of these black holes in detail using data from RXTE, NASA's Swift satellite and the European XMM-Newton observatory.

PTI

Supernova explosion unlikely to harm life on Earth

An erroneous doomsday theory predicts that year 2012 may experience a supernova explosion and the incredible amounts of energy resulting from it – as much as the sun creates during its entire lifetime– may harm life on Earth.

However, astronomers are confident that it will not prove detrimental for life on earth, given the vastness of space and the long times between supernovae.

They can say with certainty that there is no threatening star close enough to hurt Earth.

Astronomers estimate that, on average, about one or two supernovae explode each century in our galaxy. But for Earth’s ozone layer to experience damage from a supernova, the blast must occur less than 50 light-years away. All of the nearby stars capable of going supernova are much farther than this.

Any planet with life on it near a star that goes supernova would indeed experience problems. X- and gamma-ray radiation from the supernova could damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet light in the sun’s rays. The less ozone there is, the more UV light reaches the surface.

At some wavelengths, just a 10 percent increase in ground-level UV can be lethal to some organisms, including phytoplankton near the ocean surface. Because these organisms form the basis of oxygen production on Earth and the marine food chain, any significant disruption to them could cascade into a planet-wide problem.

Another explosive event, called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), is often associated with supernovae. When a massive star collapses on itself or less frequently, when two compact neutron stars collide -- the result is the birth of a black hole.

Astronomers estimate that a gamma-ray burst could affect Earth from up to 10,000 light-years away with each separated by about 15 million years, on average. So far, the closest burst on record, known as GRB 031203, was 1.3 billion light-years away.

As with impacts, our planet likely has already experienced such events over its long history, but there’s no reason to expect a gamma-ray burst in our galaxy to occur in the near future, much less in December 2012.

ANI

Phobos-Grunt Mars probe to hit Earth in January

Russia’s space agency has said that its unsuccessful Mars probe will be falling back on Earth next month.

Roscosmos’ unmanned Phobos-Grunt spacecraft became stranded in orbit in November, the BBC reported.

According to the agency, the toxic fuel on board is expected to burn up on re-entry, but 20-30 fragments of the spacecraft will survive to the surface.

Current Roscosmos estimates for the timing of the fall are between 6 and 19 January, but this window will be narrowed as the event comes nearer.

Professional and amateur groups around the world will also be modelling the decay in the orbit in an attempt to determine precisely where and when Phobos-Grunt might come down.

Phobos-Grunt is currently moving around the Earth at an altitude that varies between 201km and 275km.

The maximum latitudes are 51 degrees North and South, encompassing London in the Northern Hemisphere and Punta Arenas, Chile, in the Southern Hemisphere.

The spacecraft’s mass at launch was some 13 tonnes, most of which was the propellants unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (DTO).

These are extremely unpleasant substances and the Russian authorities are hoping that they are destroyed during the descent.

With more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface covered by water, the chances are that any fragments that do survive the fiery re-entry will end up in the ocean.

Roscosmos expects only about 200 kilograms to make it all the way through.

Phobos-Grunt was built to land on the larger of Mars’ two moons, Phobos, to scoop up rock and bring it back to the Earth.

ANI

Sun's future 'revealed'

Old stars, called red giants, have offered insight into what our sun will look like after five billion years -- its outer layer will expand and cool down, so it'll look red, and the core will contract and become extremely hot and dense.

Tim Bedding and Dennis Stello, professors of astronomers at the University of Sydney, and colleagues discovered that red giants have slowed down on the outside while their cores spin at least 10 times faster than their outer layers.

The finding tells what the sun will look like in five billion years when it develops into a red giant, the journal Nature reports.

"The heart of a star determines how it evolves, and understanding how a star rotates deep inside helps us to understand how stars like our sun will grow old," said Bedding, according to a university statement.

Using NASA's Kepler space telescope, the team observed deep inside ageing red giants to make their discovery of the difference in rotation rate between the core and outer layers of the stars.

The team, led by Paul Beck from Leuven University in Belgium, analysed waves inside the stars, which appear as rhythmic variations in the surface brightness of the stars.

The effect of rotation on the frequencies of the waves is so small, it took the scientists nearly two years of almost continuous data gathering from the Kepler satellite to make their discovery.

"Red giants were once stars like our sun, but as they age their outer layers expand to more than five times their original size and cool down significantly, so they look red," explained Stello.

"The opposite actually happens to the cores of red giants, as the core contracts and becomes extremely hot and dense," said Stello.

IANS

NASA’s Voyager 1 nearing solar system edge

Image credit: scientificamerican.com

The NASA has announced that Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, has now sailed to the edge of the solar system and is expected to punch its way into interstellar space in the coming months or years.

The identical spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched by NASA in the summer of 1977 and programmed to pass by Jupiter and Saturn on different paths. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune, completing the “Grand Tour of the Solar System”.

University of Colorado Boulder scientists, who designed and built identical instruments for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were also stunned when the spacecraft began sending back data to Earth.

The discoveries by Voyager started piling up, Twenty-three new planetary moons at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, Io – Jupiter’s ring system, organic smog shrouding Saturn’s moon, Titan – the braided, intertwined structure of Saturn’s rings, the solar system’s fastest winds and nitrogen geysers spewing from Neptune’s moon, Triton.

Charlie Hord, a former planetary scientist at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and principal investigator for a time on the LASP instrument known as a photopolarimeter built for Voyager, still shakes his head in wonder as he recalls some of the discoveries.

The LASP photopolarimeter, a small telescope that measured the intensity and polarization of light at different wavelengths, was used for a variety of observations during the mission.

A guitar player himself who performs jazz and Big Band music with a trio that visits Boulder retirement homes, Hord recalls that JPL threw the Voyager team a party to celebrate the end of Voyager 2's Grand Tour as it passed by Neptune in 1989.

In 1990, Voyager 1 turned around one last time and took a portrait of the solar system, a sequence of photos that revealed six of the nine planets in an orbital dance. From nearly 4 billion miles away, Earth took up only a single pixel.

“To me, Voyager was the most fun and interesting planetary mission ever,” Hord said.

According to Larry Esposito, Senior Research Associate Ian Stewart, the biggest discovery by CU-Boulder''s Voyager photopolarimeter team was the intricate structure of Saturn’s F ring, a ring he discovered in 1979 using data from NASA Pioneer 11 mission.

The CU-Boulder team determined the faint F ring was made up of three separate ringlets that appeared to be braided together, and that the inner and outer limits of the ring were controlled by two small “shepherd satellites”.

In addition, Esposito also said that density waves, ripple-like features in the rings caused by the influence of Saturn’s moons, allowed the team to estimate the weight and age of Saturn’s rings.

Rocketing at roughly 35,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1 will float within 9.3 trillion miles of the star AC+793888 in the constellation Camelopardalis in about 40,000 years.

In 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass within 25 trillion miles of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Perhaps on the way, the spacecraft will encounter some musically inclined aliens up for a little Bach, Beethoven or Berry.

ANI

Water in Mars regions may have rudimentary life

Patches of Mars sub-surface could contain water and sustain a rudimentary form of life, such as martian microbes, reveals a study.

"Our models tell us that if there is water present in the Martian sub-surface, then it could be habitable," said doctoral student Eriita Jones from the Planetary Science Institute of the Australian National University.

"We know that there is a hot, deep biosphere on Earth that extends to around five kilometres. If there is a hot deep biosphere on Mars, our modelling shows that it could extend to around 30 kilometres," study co-author Charley Lineweaver added.

The same scientists had modelled the earth earlier and identified water that was inhabited and water that was not, the Astrobiology Journal reported.

In this research, they applied the same technique to Mars and found that a large fraction of the Martian sub-surface could be harbouring habitable water, according to a university statement.

"We found that about three percent of the volume of present-day Mars has the potential to be habitable to terrestrial-like life. This is compared to only about one percent of the volume of the Earth being inhabited," said Lineweaver.

"Our conclusion is that the best way to find water - or potentially microbes - on Mars is to dig. Sadly, NASA's Curiosity Rover, which is scheduled to land on Mars in August, has a limited capacity to scratch the surface to 10 or 20 centimetres," he added.

IANS

Scientists unravel mystery of missing mineral

Dolomite has been found inside 'reef building' algae.

Scientists have stumbled upon a cache of dolomite in coral reefs, ending a 100-year quest for the missing mineral.

"For over a century, scientists have puzzled over the 'dolomite problem' - the mystery surrounding the abundance of dolomite in fossil reefs and its apparent absence from modern reefs," said Bradley Opdyke, who led the discovery.

"We have discovered that dolomite is in fact present in large quantities in modern coral reefs, but from an unexpected source," said Opdyke of the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University.

"The discovery was completely serendipitous - we were working on an unrelated question at the time," said Opdyke, the journal Biogeosciences reports.

"When we confirmed the finding, I said to Marinda (Nash) [member of the research team], 'This is going to be huge. It opens up a kaleidoscope of future research topics'," said Opdyke.

The team's eureka moment came when they found large quantities of dolomite packed inside a 'reef builder' species of red algae, Hydrolithon onkodes, according to Earth Sciences statement.

"There was dolomite on the reefs all along, but it was hidden within these algae. This species... is found in abundance on reefs around the world," said Opdyke.

"The algae work with coral to 'cement' the reef structure to withstand the tremendous hydraulic pressure of waves. This is the first discovery of dolomite associated with a living organism," he added.

IANS

Mayans never predicted world to end in 2012

Image credit: grind365.com

If you are worried the world will end next year based on the Mayan calendar, relax: the end of time is still far off.

So say Mayan experts who want to dispel any belief that the ancient Mayans predicted a world apocalypse next year.

The Mayan calendar marks the end of a 5,126 year old cycle around December 21, 2012, which should bring the return of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with war and creation.

Author Jose Arguelles called the date "the ending of time as we know it" in a 1987 book that spawned an army of Mayan theorists, whose speculations on a cataclysmic end abound online. But specialists meeting at this ancient Mayan city in southern Mexico say it merely marks the termination of one period of creation and the beginning of another.

"We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012," said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). "It's a marketing fallacy."

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been trying to quell the barrage of forecasters predicting the apocalypse. "The West's messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans," the institute said in a statement.

In the Mayan calendar, the long calendar count begins in 3,114 BC and is divided into roughly 394-year periods called Baktuns. Mayans held the number 13 sacred and the 13th Baktun ends next year.

Sven Gronemeyer, a researcher of Mayan codes from La Trobe University in Australia, who has been trying to decode the calendar, said the so-called end day reflects a transition from one era to the next in which Bolon Yokte returns.

"Because Bolon Yokte was already present at the day of creation ... it just seemed natural for the Mayan that Bolon Yokte will again be present," he said.

Of the the approximately 15,000 registered glyphic texts found in different parts of what was then the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012, the Institute said.

"The Maya did not think about humanity, global warming or predict the poles would fuse together," said Alfonso Ladena, a professor from the Complutense University of Madrid. "We project our worries on them."

Bureau Report

An alien spacecraft parked next to Mercury?

Is this proof we're not alone? A bright object suddenly appears to the right of Mercury.

A giant object the size of a planet that appeared lurking near Mercury in a NASA footage has caught the attention of alien-hunters who say it could be a "cloaked" spaceship parked near the planet.

The object appears from nowhere in a sequence of images of a coronal ejection from the Sun taken by NASA's STEREO spacecraft.

In the footage, one sees a huge spurt of plasma and other solar ejecta washing over Mercury; peculiarly, the material seems to flare up as it hits another nearby object, too.

"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his commentary on the footage which has gone viral and been viewed by more than 100,000 users on the video-sharing site.

There's "absolutely no explanation" for the mystery object other than that it's a spaceship. "What object in space cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?" the user asked.

However, experts said that there is no alien race hiding away in our solar system, a website reported.

The image from the telescope was analysed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, with engineer Nathan Rich explaining that the "mysterious object" is actually the image of Mercury from the previous day.

To make sure that the solar flare stood out, researchers compared the image with one taken a day before and subtracted anything that appeared twice. In this process stars are easily eliminated, but moving objects, such as planets, are more difficult to remove, Rich explained.

"When (this averaging process) is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich told a website.

PTI

Solar storms 'could sandblast the moon'

Lunar surface. Image credit: universetoday.com

Solar storms and associated (CMEs) could significantly erode the lunar surface, according to a new set of computer simulations by NASA scientists.

In addition to removing a surprisingly large amount of material from the lunar surface, this could be a major method of atmospheric loss for planets like Mars that are unprotected by a global magnetic field, say the planetary scientists led by Rosemary Killen at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

CMEs are basically an intense gust of the normal solar wind, a diffuse stream of electrically conductive gas called plasma that's blown outward from the surface of the Sun into space.

The moon has just the barest wisp of an atmosphere, technically called an exosphere because it is so tenuous, which leaves it vulnerable to CME effects. The plasma from CMEs impacts the lunar surface, and atoms from the surface are ejected in a process called "sputtering."

"We found that when this massive cloud of plasma strikes the moon, it acts like a sandblaster and easily removes volatile material from the surface.

"The model predicts 100 to 200 tons of lunar material -- the equivalent of 10 dump truck loads -- could be stripped off the lunar surface during the typical 2-day passage of a CME," said William Farrell, a team member.

This is the first time researchers have attempted to predict the effects of a CME on the moon. "Connecting various models together to mimic conditions during solar storms is a major goal of the DREAM project," said Farrell.

Plasma is created when energetic events, like intense heat or radiation, remove electrons from the atoms in a gas, turning the atoms into electrically charged particles -- ions.

The Sun is so hot that the gas is emitted in the form of free ions and electrons called the solar wind plasma. Ejection of atoms from a surface or an atmosphere by plasma ions is called sputtering.

"Sputtering is among the top five processes that create the moon's exosphere under normal solar conditions, but our model predicts that during a CME, it becomes the dominant method by far, with up to 50 times the yield of the other methods," said Killen.

The findings have been published in the 'Journal of Geophysical Research Planets'.

PTI

Watch total lunar eclipse tomorrow night

Image credit: leeloveshottrends.com

The last eclipse of the year, a total lunar eclipse, will occur tomorrow, giving sky lovers all over the country an opportunity to witness the celestial event.

The total lunar eclipse with the Moon immersed deeply inside the umbral (darker) shadow of the Earth will occur tomorrow, Nehru Planetarium Director N Rathnasree said.

The crisp winter night will offer a very good chance for an excellent view of the event, Arvind Paranjpye of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) said.

The entire event will last for nearly five hours, he said.

The maximum eclipse will be at 20:01:50 IST.

The eclipse begins at 5.02 PM and ends at 11.02 PM. The noticeable Umbra phase begins at 6.15 PM and ends at 9.48 PM.

The total phase begins at 7.36 PM and ends at 8.28 PM.

The entire event is visible from Asia and Australia.

Observers throughout Europe and Africa will miss the early eclipse phases because they occur before moon rise. It will also not be visible from South America or Antarctica, C B Devgun from Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) said.

This eclipse will be longest (at 52 mins) till the year 2018, N Raghunandan Kumar of Planetary Society of India said.

India is one of the best places to see this celestial event because the eclipse will be visible in its various phases (start to end), he said.

People would be able to witness moon entering shadow of earth and leaving as the moon's disk gradually darkens and returns slowly to its full brightness.

A similar opportunity to witness a total lunar eclipse from start to end (in various phases) will only come on 27/28th July, 2018 for people in and around India, he added.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth in course of its orbit around the Sun, comes between the Moon and Sun in such a way that Moon is hidden in the shadow cast by Earth.

This can occur only when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are aligned in a straight line.

PTI

Dead Sea may vanish completely soon

Dead Sea. Image credit: deadseabody.com

The Dead Sea had almost disappeared once some 120,000 years ago and the way it's water levels are declining, the giant lake may not survive another significant period of drought in the Middle East, scientists have warned.

A team of environmental scientists, who examined the sediments drilled from the Dead Sea, said their discovery proves the precarious existence of the remarkable body of water, which is currently diminishing at an alarming pace.

The Dead Sea, which marks the borders between Israel and Jordan, would have little chance of surviving another period of extreme drought as its fresh water tributaries have been all but drained the populations surrounding it, mostly for the irrigation of crops, they warned.

The water body is the lowest point on the planet, sitting 425 meters below sea level. Its highly salted water covers layer upon layer of sediment that captures with unique clarity the climatic history of the region reaching back thousands of years.

Holes drilled into the deepest point of the lake in late 2010 produced evidence that it very nearly evaporated about 120,000 years ago, when there were very few humans living by its shores, a newspaper reported.

Professor Moti Stein, of the Jerusalem University who led the international research, said: "I am a geologist not a prophet but I can say that a combination of natural climate change and the man-made changes we have seen to the environment around the Dead Sea could lead to a catastrophe."

"When the lake drained hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was renewed because the fresh water came back. Now we have blocked the fresh water supply, there would be no reason for the sea to come back. It is out of balance with its surroundings," he said.

The only way to protect the Dead Sea would be to unblock its fresh water sources, Professor Stein claimed, but warned that this would have a significant impact on the water supplies of several countries.

Commercial industries using minerals from the Dead Sea, which are of significant economic importance to both Israel and Jordan, have also had a significant impact on the lake's water levels.

The surface of the Dead Sea has dropped by more than 10 metres since 1997.

The researchers presented the results of their research at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

PTI

First amateur image of another solar system captured

An astronomer has captured the first amateur pictures of
another solar system from a tiny telescope in his back yard.

An astronomer in New Zealand claims to have captured the first amateur pictures of another solar system from a tiny telescope in his back yard.

Rolf Olsen, a New Zealand-based astrophotographer, has published the first non-professional pictures of the disk of debris and dust swirling around Beta Pictoris, a very young solar system.

Incredibly, the 12 million-year-old system, some 60 million light years away from our own, was captured with only a 25cm telescope, a newspaper reported.

The material that forms the proto-planetary disc around Beta Pictoris has been photographed by large observatories before, but it was not thought possible for amateurs to take a picture of the system, due to the glare from the star itself.

But by capturing an image of a similar star and subtracting it from the picture of Beta Pictoris, Olsen was able to eliminate the stellar glare, revealing the dust disk.

Olsen says he first gathered fifty images of Beta Pictoris. Then he collected similar pictures of another star that is similar in colour and brightness Alpha Pictoris. He subtracted the image of the second star, removing the glare.

The raw image of the material disc looked scrappy, so he blended it with the original image of Beta Pictoris using photo editing software.

Olsen wrote on his website: "The result is, I believe, the first amateur image of another solar system: The proto-planetary disc around Beta Pictoris. I must say it feels really special to have actually captured this."

Olsen's observatory is located in Titirangi in the foothills of Waitakere Ranges west of Auckland.

PTI