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Ahh, the wonders of science! But some science is just a little more wonderful than others. For the really great and wonderful science there are the Nobel Prizes. For the off-the-beaten-path and unusual science, Harvard University’s Annals of Improbable Research magazine awards the “Ig Nobel” Prizes, touted as “research that makes people laugh and then think.” Prizes were doled out Oct. 1, but if you are in the Massachusetts area, you might want to attend a free lecture given by the winners on Oct. 3 at 1:00 pm EDT. Here are the 2009 winners:
Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson for showing that cows with names give more milk than unnamed cows.
Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl for investigating whether it is better to be struck over the head with a full beer bottle or with an empty beer bottle.
Economics: Executives of four Icelandic banks for showing how tiny banks can become huge banks, and then become tiny banks again.
Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor Castaño for creating diamonds out of tequila.
Medicine: Donald Unger for cracking just the knuckles on his left hand for 60 years to see whether knuckle-cracking contributes to arthritis.
Physics: Katherine Whitcome, Liza Shapiro and Daniel Lieberman for figuring out why pregnant women don’t tip over.
Literature: The Irish national police for issuing 50 tickets to one Prawo Jazdy, which in Polish means “driver’s license.”
Public health: Elena Bodnar, Raphael Lee and Sandra Marijan for inventing a brassiere than can be converted into a pair of gas masks.
Mathematics: Gideon Gono and the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank for printing bank notes in denominations from 1 cent to $100 trillion.
Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei for demonstrating that bacteria in panda poop can help reduce kitchen waste by 90%.
Bright spot on Mercury. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
[/caption]More new images were released today from the MESSENGER spacecraft’s third flyby of Mercury. I asked astrophysicist Dr. Jeff Goldstein (doctorjeff on Twitter), (who was on hand at the mission operations center to blog and Tweet about the flyby) which image the science team found most intriguing, and he replied that it was really hard to tell, as they were oohing and aahing at every image! But one of the most interesting was this shot of a bright spot on the planet closest to the sun. MESSENGER’s Narrow Angle Camera also saw this spot during the spacecraft’s second Mercury flyby on October 6, 2008, but the bright feature was just on the planet’s limb (edge) from the spacecraft’s vantage point. This time, however, the geometry of MESSENGER’s flyby provided a better look at this feature. Surprisingly, at the center of the bright halo is an irregular depression, which may have formed through volcanic processes. Color images from MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera reveal that the irregular depression and bright halo have distinctive color. This area will be of particular interest for further observation during MESSENGER’s orbital operations starting in 2011.
Craters form a paw print on Mercury. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
If you like seeing a little pareidolia, here’s a fun one: a paw print! Mercury’s surface is covered with craters in many sizes and arrangements, the result of impacts that have occurred over billions of years. In the top center of the image, outlined in a white box and shown in the enlargement at upper right, is a cluster of impact craters on Mercury that appears coincidentally to resemble a giant paw print. In the “heel” are overlapping craters, made by a series of impacts occurring on top of each other over time. The four “toes” are single craters arranged in an arc northward of the “heel.” The “toes” don’t overlap so it isn’t possible to tell their ages relative to each other. The newly identified pit-floor crater can be seen in the center of the main image as the crater containing a depression shaped like a backward and upside-down comma.
The exoplanet Corot-7b is so close to its Sun-like host star that it must experience extreme conditions. Sister planet, CoRot-7c is seen in the distance. Credit: ESO
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If any creature lives on COROT-7b, the recently confirmed rocky exoplanet, they might think the sky is falling. This planet is close enough to its star that its “day-face” is hot enough to melt rock, and according to models by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, COROT-7b’s atmosphere is made up of the ingredients of rocks and when “a front moves in,” pebbles condense out of the air and rain into lakes of molten lava below. Yikes!
This unusual rocky world was the first planet found orbiting the star COROT-7, an orange dwarf in the constellation Monoceros, or the Unicorn. COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and only five times its mass. But this place is nothing like Earth.
“The only atmosphere this object has is produced from vapor arising from hot molten silicates in a lava lake or lava ocean,” said Bruce Fegley Jr., Ph.D., professor at Wash U, who created models of COROT-7b along with research assistant Laura Schaefer. Their paper appears in the Oct. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
This star-facing side has a temperature of about 2600 degrees Kelvin (4220 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s infernally hot—hot enough to vaporize rocks. The global average temperature of Earth’s surface, in contrast, is only about 288 degrees Kelvin (59 degrees Fahrenheit).
The side in perpetual shadow, on the other hand, is positively chilly at 50 degrees Kelvin (-369 degrees Fahrenheit). COROT detects small, transiting exoplanet. Credits: CNES
So, what might the planet’s atmosphere be like? To find out Schaefer and Fegley used thermochemical equilibrium calculations with a special computer program called MAGMA that was used to study high-temperature volcanism on Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean satellite.
Because the scientists didn’t know the exact composition of the planet, they ran the program with four different starting compositions. “We got essentially the same result in all four cases,” says Fegley.
Perhaps because they were cooked off, COROT-7b’s atmosphere has none of the volatile elements or compounds that make up Earth’s atmosphere, such as water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
“Sodium, potassium, silicon monoxide and then oxygen — either atomic or molecular oxygen — make up most of the atmosphere.” But there are also smaller amounts of the other elements found in silicate rock, such as magnesium, aluminum, calcium and iron.
Why is there oxygen on a dead planet, when it didn’t show up in Earth’s atmosphere until 2.4 billion years ago, when plants started to produce it?
“Oxygen is the most abundant element in rock,” says Fegley, “so when you vaporize rock what you end up doing is producing a lot of oxygen.”
The peculiar atmosphere has its own singular weather. “As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of ‘rock’ the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth,” explains Fegley. “But instead of a water cloud forming and then raining water droplets, you get a ‘rock cloud’ forming and it starts raining out little pebbles of different types of rock.”
Even more strangely, the kind of rock condensing out of the cloud depends on the altitude. The atmosphere works the same way as fractionating columns, the tall knobby columns that make petrochemical plants recognizable from afar. In a fractionating column, crude oil is boiled and its components condense out on a series of trays, with the heaviest one (with the highest boiling point) sulking at the bottom, and the lightest (and most volatile) rising to the top.
Instead of condensing out hydrocarbons such as asphalt, petroleum jelly, kerosene and gasoline, the exoplanet’s atmosphere condenses out minerals such as enstatite, corundum, spinel, and wollastonite. In both cases the fractions fall out in order of boiling point.
The atmosphere of COROT-7b may not be breathable, but it is certainly amusing.
Cumulonimbus clouds are a type of cumulus cloud associated with thunder storms and heavy precipitation. They are also a variation of nimbus or precipitation bearing clouds. They are formed beneath 20,000 ft. and are relatively close to the ground. This is why they have so much moisture. Cumulonimbus clouds are also known as thunderheads due to their unique mushroom shape.
These clouds often produce lightning in their heart. This is caused by ionized droplets in the clouds rubbing against each other. The static charge built up create lightning. Cumulonimbus clouds need warm and humid conditions to form. This gives them the moist warm updrafts needed to produce them. In some instances a Thunderhead with enough energy can develop into a supercell which can produce strong winds, flash floods, and a lot of lightning. Some can even become tornadoes given the right conditions.
Despite the heavy rainfall these clouds produce, the precipitation normally just lasts for around 20 minutes. This is because the clouds require not only a lot of energy to form but also expend a lot energy. However, there are exceptions to the rule. There are also dry thunderstorms which are cumulonimbus clouds whose precipitation does not touch the ground. This type is common in the Western United States where the land is more arid. It is often cited as a cause of wild fires.
An overlooked result of Cumulonimbus clouds are flash floods. This was proven recently in Atlanta, Georgia area of the United States. The state had gone through a two year drought and water supplies such as creeks and rivers were low. However the fall season brought with it the end of the drought and a lot of Thunderstorms. Even though Atlanta is not near any major waterways, the resulting flash floods were on a scale seen only with areas near major rivers with wide flood plains. This demonstrates how much precipitation that Cumulonimbus clouds can produce even in a short amount of time.
Cumulonimbus clouds are a perfect example of how difference in altitude can affect the formation of clouds. Cumulonimbus clouds form in the lower part of the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere closest to the surface of the Earth. This region due to evaporation and the greenhouse effect produces alot of the warm updrafts that make creation of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds possible. The turbulence created by the friction between air and the surface of the Earth combined with stored heat from the sun helps to drive the majority of weather.
If you enjoyed this article there are others on Universe Today that you will be sure to enjoy. There is a great article on cloud types and another on the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Data from NASA's TRMM satellite was used to create an enhanced 3-D topographic rainfall map of Ketsana's flooding rains received in the Philippines. The dark yellow and orange areas indicate 375 mm (~15 inches) to over 475 mm (~19 inches), respectively. The red area over Manila indicates almost 2 feet of rain fell. Credit: SSAI/NASA, Hal Pierce
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Data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite has been used to create a 3-D map of rainfall over the Phillipines from September 21-28, 2008. Armed with both a passive microwave sensor and a space-borne precipitation radar, TRMM has been measuring the amount of rainfall created by the tropical cyclone, Typhoon Ketsana (known in the Phillippines as “Ondoy”). A record 13.43 inches of rain fell in Manila in six hours between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. local time, which is equivalent to about a month’s worth of rain for the area. In just 24 hours, Ketsana dropped 17.9 inches (455 mm) of rain in Manila in just 24 hours on Saturday, September 26.
The TRMM-based, near-real time Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. is used to monitor rainfall over the global Tropics. TMPA rainfall totals for the 7-day period 21 to 28 September 2009 for the northern Philippines and the surrounding region showed that the highest rainfall totals occurred south of the storm’s track in an east-west band over central Luzon that includes Manila. Amounts in this region are on the order of 375 mm (~15 inches) to over 475 mm (~19 inches). The highest recorded amount from the TMPA near Manila was 585.5 mm (almost 24 inches).
Ketsana maintained minimal tropical storm intensity as it crossed central Luzon on the afternoon of September 26 (local time). The main deluge in the Manila area, located on the western side of Luzon, began around 8:00 a.m. local time even though the center of Ketsana had yet to make landfall on the eastern side of the island.
Click here to watch an animation of the TRMM satellite data.
The enhanced rainfall over on the Manila-side of the island as the storm approached was because of an interaction between Ketsana’s circulation and the seasonal southwest monsoon.
Galileo Galilei's telescope with his handwritten note specifying the magnifying power of the lens, at an exhibition at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
The history of the telescope dates back to the early 1600s. Galileo Galilei is commonly credited for inventing the telescope, but this is not accurate. Galileo was the first to use a telescope for the purpose of astronomy in 1609 (400 years ago in 2009, which is currently being celebrated as the International Year of Astronomy). Hans Lipperhey, a German spectacle maker, is generally credited as the inventor of the telescope, as his patent application is dated the earliest, on the 25th of September 1608.
Lipperhey combined curved lenses to magnify objects by up to 3 times, and eventually crafted sets of binocular telescopes for the Government of the Netherlands.
There exists some confusion as to who actually came up with the idea first. Lipperhey’s patent application is the earliest on record, so this is usually used to settle the debate, although another spectacle-maker, Jacob Metius of Alkmaar, a city in the northern part of the Netherlands, filed for a patent for the same device a few weeks after Lipperhey. Another spectacle-maker, Sacharias Janssen, also claimed to have invented the telescope decades after the initial claims by Lipperhey and Metius.
Regardless of the inventor, most of the earliest versions of the telescope used a curved lens made of polished glass at the end of a tube to magnify objects to a factor of 3x. To learn more about how a telescope lens works, read our article on the telescope lens in the Guide to Space.
Galileo heard news of the telescope, and constructed his own version of it without ever seeing one. Instead of the initial 3 power magnification, he crafted a series of lenses that in combination allowed him to magnify things by 8, 20 and eventually 30 times. You can obtain a version of Galileo’s original telescope today, at the Galileoscope web site.
The lens telescope is still in use today in smaller telescopes, but many larger and more powerful telescopes use a reflective mirror and eyepiece combination that was initially invented by Isaac Newton. Called a “Newtonian” telescope after its inventor, these types of telescopes have a polished mirror at the end of a tube, which reflects the image into an eyepiece at the top of the tube. More information about Newtonian telescopes can be found in our Guide to Space article here.
Here’s a few more links on the history of the telescope:
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is testing a new robotic lunar lander test bed that will aid in the development of a new generation of multi-use landers for future robotic space exploration. Image Credit: NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham
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The best way to study the new-found water on the Moon would be with in-situ instruments. Since humans won’t be making any lunar landings for at least a decade, the next best option is robotic spacecraft. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is developing and testing a new robotic lander to explore not only the Moon, but also asteroids and Mars. This design is definitely next generation: it’s bigger than any lander yet and MSFC is currently testing the all-important final of reaching the destination: landing.
“Specifically, what we are doing at Marshall is identifying the terminal – or the final – phase of landing, and designing a robotic lander to meet those needs,” said Brian Mulac, a test engineer at Marshall, quoted in an article in the Huntsville Times. “That last part is the highest risk of setting down on the moon.”
Of course, parachutes can’t be used for landing on the Moon or asteroids, since neither destination has an atmosphere, so thrusters are key for landing.
Large, oval-shaped tanks on the craft are used to store fuel for thrusters. Thrusters guide the lander, controlling the vehicle’s altitude and speed for landing. An additional thruster on this test vehicle, above, offsets the effect of Earth’s gravity so that the other thrusters can operate as they would in a lunar environment.
Just in case the tests don’t go as planned, a huge net is place under the lander to catch the vehicle and avoid damaging it.
As the saying goes, it’s not the fall that’s dangerous, but the sudden stop.
The Crab Nebula; at its core is a long dead star. Did early massive stars die in supernova explosions like this? Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
The Crab Nebula, or M1 (the first object in Messier’s famous catalog), is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula. The name – Crab Nebula – is due to the Earl of Rosse, who thought it looked like a crab; it’s not in the constellation Cancer (the Crab), rather Taurus (the Bull).
The supernova which gave rise to the Crab Nebula was seen widely here on Earth in 1054 (and so it’s called SN 1054 by astronomers); it is perhaps the most famous of the historical supernovae. It is certainly one of the brightest (estimated to be –7 at peak), partly because it is so close (only 6,300 light-years away), and partly because it’s not hidden by dust clouds. The expansion of the nebula – as in seen-to-be-getting-bigger, rather than the-gas-is-moving-very-fast – was first confirmed in 1930.
As it was a core collapse supernova (a massive star which ran out of fuel), it left behind a neutron star; by chance, we are in line with its ‘lighthouse beam’, so we see it as a pulsar (all young neutron stars are pulsars, but not all of them have beams which point to us in one part of the cycle). It’s a pretty fast pulsar; the neutron star rotates once every 33 milliseconds. Because it’s so young and so close, the Crab Nebula pulsar was the first to be detected in the visual waveband, and also in x-rays and gamma rays. Being the source of the tremendous output of energy, from both the pulsar wind nebula and the pulsar itself, and as energy is conserved, the pulsar is slowing down, at a rate of 15 microseconds per year.
The inner part of the Crab Nebula, the pulsar wind nebula, contains lots of really hot (‘relativistic’) electrons spiraling around magnetic fields; this creates the eerie blue glow … synchrotron radiation. This makes the Crab Nebula one of the brightest objects in the x-ray and gamma ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and as it is a relatively steady source (unlike most high energy objects) it has given its name to a new astronomical unit, the Crab. For example, a new x-ray source may be 2 mCrab (milli-Crab), meaning 0.002 times as strong an x-ray source as the Crab Nebula.
This SEDS page has a lot more information on the Crab Nebula, both historical and contemporary.
The Hubble Space Telescope distribution of dark matter - indirect observations (HST)
WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, hypothetical particles which may be the main (or only) component of Dark Matter, a form of matter which emits and absorbs no light and which comprises approx 75% of all mass in the observable universe.
The ‘weakly’ is a bit of a pun; WIMPs would interact with themselves and with other forms of mass only through the weak force (and gravity); get it? More plays on words: WIMP, the word, was created after the term MACHO (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Object) entered the scientific literature.
WIMPs are massive particles because they are not light; they would have masses considerably greater than the mass of the proton (for example). Being massive, WIMPs would likely be cold; in astrophysics ‘cold’ doesn’t mean ‘below zero’, it means the average speed of the particles is well below c. Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles, but they are not massive, so they cannot be WIMPs (besides, neutrinos aren’t hypothetical, and they’re hot, very hot … they travel at speeds just a teensy bit below c).
Or maybe they are … if there is a kind of neutrino which is really, really massive (a TeV say) then it would certainly be a WIMP! However, the latest results from WMAP seem to rule out this kind of WIMP-as-neutrino.
This is a previous optical image of one of the approximately 200 quasars captured in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) "first light" exposure is shown at top, with the BOSS spectrum of the object at bottom. The spectrum allows astronomers to determine the object's redshift. With millions of such spectra, BOSS will measure the geometry of the Universe. Credit: David Hogg, Vaishali Bhardwaj, and Nic Ross of SDSS-III
[/caption] Baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) sounds like it could be technobabble from a Star Trek episode. BAO is real, but astronomers are searching for these particle fluctuations to do what seems like science fiction: look back in time to find clues about dark energy. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey(BOSS), a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), took its “first light” of astronomical data last month, and will map the expansion history of the Universe.
“Baryon oscillation is a fast-maturing method for measuring dark energy in a way that’s complementary to the proven techniques of supernova cosmology,” said David Schlegel from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the Principal Investigator of BOSS. “The data from BOSS will be some of the best ever obtained on the large-scale structure of the Universe.”
BOSS uses the same telescope as the original Sloan Digital Sky Survey — 2.5-meter telescope
at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico — but equipped with new, specially-built spectrographs to measure the spectra. Senior Operations Engineer Dan Long loads the first cartridge of the night into the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope. The cartridge holds a “plug-plate” at the top which then holds a thousand optical fibers shown in red and blue. These cartridges are locked into the base of the telescope and are changed many times during a night. Photo credit: D. Long
Baryon oscillations began when pressure waves traveled through the early universe. The same density variations left their mark as the Universe evolved, in the periodic clustering of visible matter in galaxies, quasars, and intergalactic gas, as well as in the clumping of invisible dark matter.
Comparing these scales at different eras makes it possible to trace the details of how the Universe has expanded throughout its history – information that can be used to distinguish among competing theories of dark energy.
“Like sound waves passing through air, the waves push some of the matter closer together as they travel” said Nikhil Padmanabhan, a BOSS researcher who recently moved from Berkeley Lab to Yale University. “In the early universe, these waves were moving at half the speed of light, but when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, the universe cooled enough to halt the waves, leaving a signature 500 million light-years in length.”
“We can see these frozen waves in the distribution of galaxies today,” said Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona, the Director of the SDSS-III. “By measuring the length of the baryon oscillations, we can determine how dark energy has affected the expansion history of the universe. That in turn helps us figure out what dark energy could be.”
“Studying baryon oscillations is an exciting method for measuring dark energy in a way that’s complementary to techniques in supernova cosmology,” said Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who is leading the commissioning of BOSS. “BOSS’s galaxy measurements will be a revolutionary dataset that will provide rich insights into the universe,” added Martin White of Berkeley Lab, BOSS’s survey
scientist.
On Sept. 14-15, 2009, astronomers used BOSS to measure the spectra of a thousand galaxies and quasars. The goal of BOSS is to measure 1.4 million luminous red galaxies at redshifts up to 0.7 (when the Universe was roughly seven billion years old) and 160,000 quasars at redshifts between 2.0 and 3.0 (when the Universe was only about three billion years old). BOSS will also measure variations in the density of hydrogen gas between the galaxies. The observation program will take five years.
