night-shining clouds
Night-shining clouds have been discovered high above the earth’s atmosphere.
The noctilucent or “night-shining” clouds are at an altitude of 47 to 53 miles (76 to 85 km), where meteors and bright aurora lights are not uncommon and the atmosphere gives way to the blackness of space. The clouds remain a scientifically baffling phenomenon more than 120 years after their discovery.
“It’s lovely,” said Gary Thomas, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado after looking at a photo taken from the space station. “And it shows just how high these clouds really are at the very edge of space.”
a couple more headlines
Martian soil might be toxic and endangered gorillas have been found in large numbers in the Congo.
lakes of liquid ethane
Astronomers have found evidence of lakes of liquid ethane on the Saturn moon Titan. No word on lakes of liquid gas on Uranus.
Solstice and After
summer solstice | Alek Lindus | enigma janitor
And my response.
Plutoids
Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a plutoid not long ago and now the third such object has been named Makemake (pronounced MAH-keh MAH-keh).
Pluto, Makemake and a third object — dubbed Eris — are all classified as plutoids, as well as dwarf planets. The solar system’s largest asteroid Ceres is also a dwarf planet, but not in the plutoid class because its orbit, which falls in the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, is smaller than that of the more distant Neptune.
Originally designated 2005 FY9, the object was nicknamed “Easterbunny” by its discoverers before officially being named Makemake after the Polynesian creator of humanity and the god of fertility, the IAU said.
“We consider the naming of objects in the solar system very carefully,” said Brown.
Discovering Life on Mars: Bad News?
Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University thinks so:
Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: the first sign of extraterrestrial life ever detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we’re not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
They shouldn’t. To the contrary, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form – a bacterium, some algae – it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something even more advanced, like the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be horrible news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing. Scientifically interesting, yes, but dire news for the future of the human race.
Here’s the basic argument: There is a conspicuous silence “out there,” and this suggests that there is a “Great Filter” (Robin Hanson’s term and idea). This means that the filter may lie in our past (as a highly improbable step in the early development of life) or in our future (as a highly improbable leap needed for a civilization to populate the galaxy and survive extinction. Bostrom’s argument holds that finding evidence of even simple life on Mars would tend to place the GF in out future. And, as he also points out, there may be filters in our past and future.
I have to say that I would still be excited and pleased to hear that life–simple or complex–is or was present on Mars. If we decide to see everything in terms of our potential survival as a species, who needs the threat of a Filter to see our prospects as slim? In many ways I think we have the most to fear from our own egos–our sense of dominion over a galaxy we can’t even reach. News of other life elsewhere may itself be a step that leads to just the sort of curiosity we need to get through the next Great Filter.
Moon Illusion
A full moon can loom large when viewed near the horizon. See, for instance, this solstice moonrise over the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. (A NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day via Coudal.)
communication by neutrino
The SETI project scans the skies for radio signals from intelligent life elsewhere. Perhaps we are looking for the wrong technology. The United States is building a neutrino detector in Antarctica called IceCube to detect naturally occurring neutrinos. Neutrinos pass easily through most matter and are relatively noise free, allowing for the ability to send a very clean signal.
The beauty of directed beams of neutrinos at the energy levels considered here is that their signal would clearly signal the presence of an extraterrestrial civilization, there being no known natural mechanism for making neutrinos in only this energy range. The authors estimate that properly encoded data could accumulate at a rate of roughly 1000 pages per year. If any civilizations have taken this course and are actively transmitting to us, we can sit back and wait for the result, for the neutrino detectors coming online should soon discover their signatures.
See also Wired, Physics World.
know it all!
A thirteen year old German kid corrected NASA’s estimates on the likelihood of the Apophis asteroid hitting Earth. “NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000″ but Nico Marquardt put the odds at 1 in 450. Sometimes kids should learn to shut the fuck up.
Update: This is funny. The link no longer works because, apparently, the story isn’t true.
transcripts from the national press club presentation
For those who would rather read the transcripts from the video I posted this weekend, I found the page. You can read each report in pdf format at your leisure. Here’s a brief excerpt from James Penniston, TSgt. USAF Ret., who was stationed at RAF Bentwaters.
Read more
Lunar Eclipse
I did not photograph the moon last night as she made her way to and from her terrestrial tryst with Endymion. But Alek Lindus captured a fleeting afterimage of her and her lover (and the shoes she left behind).
i believe this coincides with sheila’s birthday
“Ether” is back again!
Once dismissed as an anachronism and of little value, the whole notion of an etherlike substance is back, but now is called “dark-liquid.” An interesting new theory unites the “dark forces” and suggests that the two biggest mysteries in cosmology may be one. Dark matter and dark energy could arise from a single dark fluid-like substace that permeates the whole universe. And this could mean Earth-based dark matter searches will come up empty handed.
Northern Lights
A time lapsed film of an Aurora Borealis on Sep/24/2006 in British Columbia, Canada.
A Hole in the Universe
Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.
Is the search for aliens such a good idea?
Many scientists, frightened by the danger that might lurk out there, have argued against our actively seeking contact with extraterrestrials. Jared Diamond, professor of evolutionary biology and Pulitzer Prize winner, says: “Those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are naive, even dangerous.”
I want to laugh at this. I really do.
But when I see things like this, I can’t help but feel a bewildered despair, at least for a little while.
Potentially Habitable Planet
For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for “life in the universe.”
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a “red dwarf,” is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
Wikisky
Virtual star-gazing . . . with a twist.
luna rosa
Ditto
I have been pondering this situation for as long as I can remember (maybe age 7-8) and it drives me nuts. It makes me feel like my head will implode if I think any harder. Is the universe infinite? It must end somewhere. But when it ends … there must be something on the other side … right?
A Claude-y Day in Londontown . . .
In their study, Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes of the University of Birmingham analyzed the position of the sun in 9 of the 19 paintings in Monet’s “Houses of Parliament” series. There was “a perfect correlation,” Thornes says, between the solar positions in the images, the actual solar positions derived from astronomical records and the dates on which Monet said, in letters to Alice, that he began the works. “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images,” Thornes says. Having found some quantitative information in the paintings, Baker and Thornes say they hope to find more. “We believe,” Thornes says, “that we can basically deconstruct the images to work out how much smoke would have to be in the air to create that visibility and those colors in, say, February 1900.”
Some art historians doubt the London paintings hold this much documentary evidence, pointing out, among other things, that Monet continued to work on many of the images after he returned to his studio in Giverny, France. “There’s no question that Monet was astonishingly allegiant to what lay in front of him,” the Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker says. “But at the same time, for example, he had a penchant for pinks. He always was trying to sneak pinks into pictures throughout his career.”
link (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Ancient Astronomical Calculator
“What is extraordinary about the thing is that they were able to make such a sophisticated technological device and to be able to put that into metal,” he added.
Carbon-13
“The odds are 10,000-to-1 against this unexpected link between cosmic rays and the variable state of the biosphere being just a coincidence, and it offers a new perspective on the connection between the evolution of the Milky Way and the entire history of life over the last 4 billion years,” said study author Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center.
Not impossible, just highly improbable
What he’s saying is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for a predisposition to favor intelligence in biology. Features like multicellularity, photoreception, long sharp fangs, flight, etc., pop up in life’s history over and over again, independently; but intelligence? Feh. The universe doesn’t seem to like smart guys. We happened once, and what’s more, we seem to be teetering at the end of one long chain of improbable events in the history of one marginal set of lineages, of which most of its members are in decline.
Link (via Blowing and Drifting)