I, for one, really hope we don't run into one. That would make Armageddon and Deep Impact look like a holiday.
Luckily for us, there's a lot of room out there. In the words of the great Douglas Adams:
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
__________________ @crazybaconlegs ***Mod edit: You are not now, nor have you ever been, a hamster. Please stop claiming this.***
A new survey is under way to search for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but this one has a twist: Instead of listening for alien signals from anywhere in the sky, scientists are aiming radio telescopes at the alien planets most likely to be like our own Earth.
The new search, which began last week, is scanning 86 alien worlds for radio signals that could suggest the presence of an advanced civilization. The extrasolar planets are thought to be the most Earth-like of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered so far by NASA's prolific Kepler space observatory.
Once they've scanned all 86 promising alien planets, the researchers will do a quick, coarse analysis of the data. Then, in about two months, they'll hand the observations off to an estimated 1 million amateurs working with the SETI@home project (SETI stands for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.")
In case any of you guys wanted to ask Ann Druyan any questions that you've been curious to ask, about her, cosmos series, and of course Carl Sagan; let me know and I'll do my best to bring it up.
I'll be lucky enough to spend the whole day sightseeing with her and the family along with a few other Icelandic humanist members next week before her talk the following day.
__________________ Allskonar fyrir Aumingja!!
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The Obama administration on Thursday offered Santa Monica solar startup SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee to build a 110-megawatt solar thermal power plant in Nevada that can generate electricity 24 hours a day.
Uses molten salt which is something that needs more working facilities to demonstrate how well it can work.
Doesn't help us much up here tho
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
Based on designs created for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the newly christened MPCV is a dramatically different approach to manned space flight than the shuttle oribters, focusing on safety and cost-savings over load and capability. It's almost as if NASA skipped the spaceplane phase altogether and continued with Apollo-style spacecraft.
The Lockheed Martin-designed Orion vehicle consists of a crew module sandwiched between a a launch abort system, a service module, and an adapter system. All of this will be placed on top of an Ares rocket and launched into space.
Not as flashy as the shuttle (if what amounts to a LEO truck can be called flashy), but better than nothing I guess.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
A Monash student has made a breakthrough in the field of astrophysics, discovering what has until now been described as the Universe’s ‘missing mass’. Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, working within a team at the Monash School of Physics, conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter and within just three months found it – or at least some of it.
What makes the discovery all the more noteworthy is the fact that Ms Fraser-McKelvie is not a career researcher, or even studying at a postgraduate level. She is a 22-year-old undergraduate Aerospace Engineering/Science student who pinpointed the missing mass during a summer scholarship, working with two astrophysicists at the School of Physics, Dr Kevin Pimbblet and Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway.
[...]
Still a year away from undertaking her Honours year (which she will complete under the supervision of Dr Pimbblet), Ms Fraser-McKelvie is being hailed as one of Australia’s most exciting young students. Her work has been published in one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific journals, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
[...]
“She has managed to get a refereed publication accepted by one of the highest ranking astronomy journals in the world as a result of her endeavours. I cannot underscore enough what a terrific achievement this is. We will use this research as a science driver for future telescopes that are being planned, such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, which is being built in outback Western Australian.”
An infra-red satellite image reveals the pattern of streets and houses in the buried ancient city of Tanis in Egypt. The new technique has also shown up the sites of 17 lost pyramids as well as thousands of tombs and settlements.
Dr Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama in Birmingham explains the findings at Tanis to Liz Bonnin and Dallas Campbell for the TV programme Egypt's Lost Cities which can be seen on BBC One on Monday 30 May at 2030 BST or afterwards at the above link (UK only).
Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.
More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.
Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.
The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.
...
"It just shows us how easy it is to underestimate both the size and scale of past human settlements," says Dr Parcak.
And she believes there are more antiquities to be discovered:
"These are just the sites [close to] the surface. There are many thousands of additional sites that the Nile has covered over with silt. This is just the beginning of this kind of work."
BBC cameras followed Dr Parcak on her "nervous" journey when she travelled to Egypt to see if excavations could back up what her technology could see under the surface.
In the BBC documentary Egypt's Lost Cities, they visit an area of Saqqara (Sakkara) where the authorities were not initially interested in her findings.
But after being told by Dr Parcak that she had seen two potential pyramids, they made test excavations, and they now believe it is one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt.
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Alicia Chang reported today that, according to project manager John Callas, the last attempt to uplink a command to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will be made tomorrow. NASA will cease listening for signals from Spirit on Tuesday. While it would totally be in Spirit's character for her to wait until the last possible moment to make contact with Earth, even diehard supporters like rover driver Scott Maxwell are now admitting that Spirit has probably met her end.
The last decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of the solar system with the discovery of the largest Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of comparable size to Pluto. Each one of these objects; including Makemake, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Sedna, Quaoar, and Orcus, has provided a wealth of information. Each of these large bodies tells a unique story, from Haumea's mantle-shattering collision to Sedna's lonely, strange orbit. These objects are the lighthouses of their population, bright enough for astronomers to discover them and study their physical properties and orbits using medium and large telescopes.
Alicia Chang reported today that, according to project manager John Callas, the last attempt to uplink a command to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will be made tomorrow. NASA will cease listening for signals from Spirit on Tuesday. While it would totally be in Spirit's character for her to wait until the last possible moment to make contact with Earth, even diehard supporters like rover driver Scott Maxwell are now admitting that Spirit has probably met her end.
Reposted by Phil Plait, but it's so good:
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The most distant observable object found, an supernova that occurred 520 million years after the big bang. It took the light to reach us 13.14 BILLION YEARS to reach our telescopes. How mind boggling is that!
Quote:
The event, which was picked up by Swift in April 2009, is referred to by astronomers using the designation GRB 090429B.
The "GRB" stands for "gamma-ray burst" - a sudden pulse of very high-energy light that the telescope is tuned to find on the sky.
These bursts are usually associated with extremely violent processes, such as the end-of-life collapse of giant stars.
"It would have been a huge star, perhaps 30 times the mass of our Sun," said lead researcher Dr Antonino Cucchiara from the University of California, Berkeley.
"We do not have enough information to claim this was one of the so-called 'Population III" stars, which are the very first generation of stars in the Universe. But certainly we are in the earliest phases of star formation," he told BBC News.
Swift, as its name implies, has to act quickly to catch gamma-ray flashes because they will register for only a few minutes.
I don't think this deserves it's own thread, and is science-related, so here it is.
This is an interesting talk about human nature, the pessimistic induction, how humans are very frequently wrong, why we're wrong and what it means for us, and how to take this realization to its optimistic, practical end.
__________________
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Not sure why people don’t make a bigger deal out of this fact. Physicists (and scientists more generally) are infamous for making grandiose claims about how close we are to Figuring It All Out, only to be shocked by some sort of revolutionary discoveries soon thereafter. Personally I have no idea how close we are to a comprehensive theory of absolutely everything. But I do know how close we are to having a comprehensive theory of the basic laws underlying the phenomena we encounter in our everyday lives — without benefit of fancy telescopes or particle accelerators or what have you. Namely, we already have it! That seems to be worth celebrating, or at least remarking upon, but you don’t hear it mentioned very much.
__________________ https://www.reddit.com/r/CalgaryFlames/
I’m always amazed these sportscasters and announcers can call the game with McDavid’s **** in their mouths all the time.
Look inside the clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch the next Mars rover being built. The camera is located in a viewing gallery above the clean room floor.
those who watched the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories. The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was delicious.
Make sure you check out the video on the link, so cool to see 30yrs later these old probes are still teaching us a lot about our own solar system and especially the heliosphere.
