Ongoing important Science news thread

[keratosis]

Umm...
Says sorry cannot play video.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by keratosis

Umm...
Says sorry cannot play video.

Try this link than. You'll find the video at the bottom of the page.

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/f...31502-69199437

Here's the youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjr0...ature=youtu.be

[keratosis]

Thank you

[pylon]

Just a heads up... literally.

Right now star gazing is absolutely top notch. Around 10pm directly west, the first star you see come out is Venus, and through binoculars or a telescope, it looks like a mini half eclipsed moon. It looks best before the sun fully sets. About 10 pm, positioned just left and up from Venus (about the 10:00 position) Jupiter will come out too. If you catch it with a powerful enough scope before it is visible with the naked eye, it looks incredibly cool against a sun setting sky. It is hard to do, without a computerized GPS enabled scope, but I pulled it off with mine last night and it was amazing.

The absolute star of the show right now though is Saturn. The brightest star you see tonight, to the left of the moon at around 11pm is Saturn. If you have really powerful Binocs it is possible to see it and make out tiny rings, but you will need a tripod.

So in essence right now you have Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter, all visible to the naked eye at the same time of night, at a reasonable hour.

I had my 8" Celestron SC8 set up last night which is 2000 mm equivalent, with a 9.7mm eyepiece I had a mag factor I believe of around 350X and you could make out the main separation in the rings, Titan was plainly visible, and I could see two other moons, don't know which they were though. A couple that were passing by behind my folks house (they live on a ridge in Cranston) thought I was pulling their leg when I showed them.

Anyway, I am heading out the re again tonight with my CCD gear to try and snap some pics. I have chased good images of Saturn for a couple years, and right now, it's the best I've ever seen, and the easiest it has ever been to align to the tracking computer on my scope (that and I absolutely fluked out and calibrated with frikkin surgical precision last night somehow.) If anyone lives in the deep south and is interested in taking a peek, shoot me a PM, I'll let you know where to go.

[dammage79]

Damn, I need a telescope.

[pylon]

It's not an expensive hobby to get into any more. For less than the price of a mediocre DLSR lens, you can get a pretty wicked set-up for an amateur. This is pretty much the exact setup I have:



http://www.amazon.com/Celestron-NexS.../dp/B000GUFOC8


Albeit I added on GPS capability , and a bunch of eyepieces, and software for controlling the scope from my laptop, and adapters to hook up my DSLR. But for around $2-2500 all-in, unless you want to publish photos to National Geographic, or OMNI, you'll have everything you need for a long long time.

[Dan02]

Awesome setup dude

[photon]

Getting closer to Pluto!

[troutman]

Closest approach to Pluto in 11 days:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/n...ain/index.html



New Horizons is now less than 9.5 million miles (15 million kilometers) from the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

Pluto closest approach is scheduled for July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/spac...-new-horizons/

The spacecraft will go silent during the flyby

All told, New Horizons will spend about 12 hours in the Pluto system. As such, the NASA and Johns Hopkins University researchers behind the mission want to use all available resources to monitor the target. New Horizons will ping Earth as it begins the flyby, then focus solely on imaging the Pluto system and concentrating on its other scientific payload, such as a dust collector that will show how much debris is still in the system—a leftover from the collision that formed the five known moons.

We may discover even more moons

You get to see the images almost as fast as NASA does

We're eagerly the best new images of Pluto, and the NASA / JHU team is releasing them to this website almost as soon as they come in, creating a fast turnaround time for some astonishing views. It currently takes about 9 hours round-trip for NASA to send a message to New Horizons and for the craft to send information back.

[Yasa]

Wow pylon, I didn't know you were such a nerd.

...Can I come over?

[Vulcan]

From HHMI another short film on the Biology of Skin Colour

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/b...86e54-69199437

http://media.hhmi.org/biointeractive...SkinColor.html

[DownInFlames]

Originally Posted by troutman

Closest approach to Pluto in 11 days:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/n...ain/index.html



New Horizons is now less than 9.5 million miles (15 million kilometers) from the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

Pluto closest approach is scheduled for July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/spac...-new-horizons/

The spacecraft will go silent during the flyby

All told, New Horizons will spend about 12 hours in the Pluto system. As such, the NASA and Johns Hopkins University researchers behind the mission want to use all available resources to monitor the target. New Horizons will ping Earth as it begins the flyby, then focus solely on imaging the Pluto system and concentrating on its other scientific payload, such as a dust collector that will show how much debris is still in the system—a leftover from the collision that formed the five known moons.

We may discover even more moons

You get to see the images almost as fast as NASA does

We're eagerly the best new images of Pluto, and the NASA / JHU team is releasing them to this website almost as soon as they come in, creating a fast turnaround time for some astonishing views. It currently takes about 9 hours round-trip for NASA to send a message to New Horizons and for the craft to send information back.

Wanna get an idea just how far away Pluto is? Load this page and start scrolling right.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/...larsystem.html

[polak]

NASA has been posting more and more pictures of Pluto on Instagram.

Thick Atmosphere is pretty interesting.

[Muta]

NASA has a great Instagram account, have been following it for a while. Such a nice break from all the Stampede photos too.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by DownInFlames

Wanna get an idea just how far away Pluto is? Load this page and start scrolling right.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/...larsystem.html

NPR illustrated it this way:

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/201...-would-it-take

It would take 6,293 years to drive there at 65 mph.

Or 680 years in a Boeing 777.

[EldrickOnIce]

This might slow down global warming a bit
Winter is coming?
Mini ice age by 2030?
http://www.iflscience.com/environmen...i-ice-age-2030

We predict that this will lead to the properties of a 'Maunder minimum'," said Zharkova.

The Maunder minimum was a 70-year period between 1645 and 1715. The Sun produced barely any sunspots and the Earth experienced a mini ice age. Parts of northern Europe and the United States experienced uncharacteristically cold winters. The river Thames, flowing through London, even froze over for seven weeks and was passable by foot.

[Thor]

Covered it in another thread, but I forgot to link to Phil Plaits response to the mini Ice age nonsense, this is in 2011, to give you an idea of how this story keeps popping up

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...a-new-ice-age/

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Thor

Covered it in another thread, but I forgot to link to Phil Plaits response to the mini Ice age nonsense, this is in 2011, to give you an idea of how this story keeps popping up

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...a-new-ice-age/

I found this part interesting:

The jet stream is a river of air that flows roughly west to east across the Earth. It varies a lot season to season and year to year, and it can affect regional weather quite strongly. A dip south can bring very cold arctic air to one place while a northward kink keeps another region temperate. When the jet stream is strong it flows well and that doesn’t happen, but when it’s weak it can meander, flopping north and south in various locations. The jet stream strength and direction depends on many factors, including, of all things, ozone.
The dependence is complicated, but the bottom line is the jet stream is weaker when there’s less ozone (it has to do with latitude-dependent temperature gradients across the upper atmosphere; those gradients are strong in winter and weak in summer). Ozone creation depends on UV from the Sun, which is weaker during a solar minimum. See where this is going? Weaker magnetic activity on the Sun means less ozone which means a weaker jet stream which means it meanders more, bringing cold air south in some places.

We know the sun is weaker currently, wonder if that has played some role in the wacky jet stream we have had lately.

[troutman]

Say Hello To Earth 2.0! Historic Kepler Discovery Suggests We Are Not Alone


http://www.iflscience.com/say-hello-...-are-not-alone

For the first time, scientists have found what appears to be a rocky world orbiting a Sun-like star at almost exactly the same distance that Earth orbits our own Sun. While other potential habitable planets have been found before, this is the first that could plausibly be another Earth. This might be the real deal, people.

Kepler 452b, found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, is located 1,400 light-years from us. It orbits a star that is 4% more massive and 10% brighter than our Sun. The planet itself is 1.6 times the size of Earth – making it a super-Earth – but the scientists are fairly sure that it is a rocky world, owing to its size and the type of star it orbits.

Its orbit, 384.84 Earth days and 5% more distant than our planet is from the Sun, places it right in its star’s habitable zone, where it is not too hot or cold for liquid water to form: the same region Earth is in around the Sun. This is not the first Earth-sized planet found in a habitable zone; last year, the world was abuzz with the discovery of Kepler 186f, more similar in size to Earth. But that planet orbited a red dwarf star, smaller and cooler than the Sun. Kepler 452b, excitingly, orbits almost an exact clone of the Sun.

While Kepler 452b ticks almost all of the boxes for being an Earth twin, there is one that it doesn’t – its size, which is 60% greater than Earth. Thus, while we can herald this as the best candidate for Earth 2.0 so far, the hunt will go on for even more Earth-like planets.

[Fuzz]

To bad it's 1400 light years away. Sounds like a nice place for a vacation, devoid of people to bug me.