Every now and then, someone takes Carl Sagan’s wonderful reading of his iconic “Pale Blue Dot” narrative and turns it into an animated presentation, usually combining images and video footage of space exploration and Earthly vistas to create something undeniably spellbinding (Sagan’s narratives do have a tendency to have that effect!) Artist Adam Winnik went a slightly different route, however, creating an illustrated animation to go along with Sagan’s reading for his thesis project in 2011. The result is no less poignant… check it out above.
The folks over at PHD Comics have put together a new video in their Two-Minute Thesis series, this one featuring Ph.D candidate Or Graur of the University of Tel Aviv and the American Museum of Natural History discussing the secret lives — and deaths — of astronomers’ “standard candles” of universal distance, Type Ia supernovae.
Judging distances across intergalactic space isn’t easy, so in order to figure out how far away galaxies are astronomers have learned to use the light from Type Ia supernovae, which flare up with the brilliance of 5 billion Suns… and rather precisely so.
Type Ia supernovae are thought to be created from a pairing of two stars: one super-dense white dwarf which draws in material from a binary companion until a critical mass — about 40% more mass than the Sun – is reached. The overpacked white dwarf suddenly undergoes a rapid series of thermonuclear reactions and explodes in an incredibly bright outburst of material and energy.
But exactly what sorts of stellar pairs lead to Type Ia supernovae and how frequently they occur aren’t known, and that’s what Ph.D candidate Or Graur is aiming to learn more about.
“We don’t really know what kind of star it is that leads to these explosions, which is kind of embarrassing,” says Graur. “The companion star could be a regular star like our Sun, a red giant or supergiant, or another white dwarf.”
Because stars age at certain rates, by looking deeper into space with the Hubble and Subaru telescopes Graur hopes to determine how often and when in the Universe’s history Type Ia supernovae occur, and thus figure out what types of stars are most likely responsible.
“My rate measurements favor a second white dwarf as the binary companion,” Graur says, “but the issue is far from settled.”
Watch the video for the full story, and visit PHD TV and PHD Comics for more great science illustrations.
Video: PHDComics. Animation: Jorge Cham. Series Producer: Meg Rosenburg. Inset image: merging white dwarfs causing a Type Ia supernova. (NASA/CXC/M Weiss)
Just released, this mesmerizing animation was created by Kevin Ward from images acquired by NOAA’s GOES-O/14 satellite. It shows the progression of Hurricane Sandy, currently a Category 1 hurricane off the coast of the eastern U.S. that’s poised to make a devastating impact when its heavy rains, winds and storm surges strike the shores of many major metropolitan coastal areas — including New York City and Washington, D.C.
Nearly 12 hours of time are compressed into 30 seconds, revealing the evolution of Sandy as it churned over the Atlantic on Sunday, October 28.
From NASA’s Earth Observatory’s YouTube page: This time-lapse animation shows Hurricane Sandy from the vantage point of geostationary orbit—35,800 km (22,300 miles) above the Earth. The animation shows Sandy on October 28, 2012, from 7:15 to 6:26 EDT. Light from the changing angles of the sun highlight the structure of the clouds. The images were collected by NOAA’s GOES-14 satellite. The “super rapid scan” images — one every minute from 7:15 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. EDT — reveal details of the storm’s motion.
Launched by NASA as GOES-O on June 27, 2009, GOES-14 is now under control by the NOAA, keeping an eye on the mid-Atlantic region from a geostationary position approximately 22,300 miles (35,800 km) above the Earth.
Sandy is expected to bring up to 10 inches of rain into New York, with a surge possible over 6 feet above high tide and wind gusts in excess of 75 mph. Once the hurricane moves inland there could be millions left without electricity. States of emergency have already been declared in many areas within Sandy’s projected path.
Currently Sandy is off the coast of North Carolina (at the time of this writing, 34.5 N / 70.5 W) moving northeast at 14 mph (22 km/h) with a low pressure of 950 mb… that’s as low or lower than some of the most powerful storms to hit the eastern U.S. over the past century, including the “perfect storm” of 1991 (a low system which also struck at Halloween) and the deadly 1938 “Great Hurricane”, which devastated coastal regions all across southern New England.
Stay up to date on Hurricane Sandy’s progress on the NOAA page here, with the latest public advisories being posted here.
NASA animation by Kevin Ward, using images from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.
Answer: a LOT. And there’s new ones being discovered all the time, as this fascinating animation by Scott Manley shows.
Created using data from the IAU’s Minor Planet Center and Lowell Observatory, Scott’s animation shows the progression of new asteroid discoveries since 1980. The years are noted in the lower left corner.
As the inner planets circle the Sun, asteroids light up as they’re identified like clusters of fireflies on a late summer evening. The clusters are mainly positioned along the outer edge of Earth’s orbit, as this is the field of view of most of our telescopes.
Once NASA’s WISE spacecraft begins its search around 2010 the field of view expands dramatically, as well as does the rate of new discoveries. This is because WISE’s infrared capabilities allowed it to spot asteroids that are composed of very dark material and thus reflect little sunlight, yet still emit a telltale heat signature.
While Scott’s animation gives an impressive — and somewhat disquieting — illustration of how many asteroids there are knocking about the inner Solar System, he does remind us that the scale here has been very much compacted; a single pixel at the highest resolution corresponds to over 500,000 square kilometers! So yes, over half a million asteroids is a lot, but there’s also a lot of space out there (and this is just a 2D top-down view too… it doesn’t portray any vertical depth.)
While most asteroids are aligned with the horizontal plane of the Solar System, there are a good amount whose orbits take them at higher inclinations. And on a few occasions they even cross Earth’s orbit.
An edge-on view of the Solar System shows the positions of asteroids identified by the NEOWISE survey. About 4700 potentially-hazardous asteroids (PHAs) have been estimated larger than 100 meters in size. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
As far as how many asteroids there are… well, if you only consider those larger than 100 meters orbiting within the inner Solar System, there’s over 150 million. Count smaller ones and you get even more.
I don’t know about you but even with the distances involved it’s starting to feel a little… crowded.
You can see more of Scott Manley’s videos on YouTube here (including some interesting concepts on FTL travel) and learn more about asteroids and various missions to study them here.
Inset image: the 56-km (35-mile) wide asteroid Ida and its satellite, seen by the Galileo spacecraft in 1993. (NASA)
Yes, Mars gets eclipses too! This brief animation, made from ten raw subframe images acquired with Curiosity’s Mastcam on September 13 — the 37th Sol of the mission — show the silhouette of Mars’ moon Phobos as it slipped in front of the Sun’s limb.
The entire animation spans a real time of about 2 minutes.
As a moon Phobos really is an oddity. In addition to its small size – only 8 miles (13 km) across at its widest – and irregular shape, it also orbits its parent planet at a very low altitude, only 5,840 miles (9,400 km) and thus needs to travel at a relatively high velocity in order to even stay in orbit. Phobos actually orbits Mars over three times faster than Mars rotates, appearing to rise in Mars’ western sky. And its orbit is so low that it can’t even be seen from the polar regions!
Since Phobos, and its even more petite sibling Deimos, are so small, the Mars rovers won’t ever see a total solar eclipse. In fact these events are often referred to as transits rather than actual eclipses.
This isn’t the first time an eclipse was captured by a Mars Exploration Rover; Opportunity witnessed a similar partial eclipse of the Sun by Phobos in December 2010, and Spirit caught a lunar (or “Phobal?”) eclipse on camera back in 2005, when the moon passed into the shadow of Mars.
Curiosity’s find was no accident, either, as mission engineers had the Mastcam already positioned to capture the event. Preparation really pays off!
See the latest images and news from the MSL mission here.
Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems. Animation by Jason Major. Inset image: Phobos as seen by Mars Express ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
UPDATE 9/19/12: See a close-up animation of the eclipse event here.
That’s exactly the scenario shown by a mesmerizing animation called “Worlds” by Alex Parker — a single system containing 2299 multiple-transit planetary candidates identified to date by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is currently scrutinizing a field of view within the constellation Cygnus to detect the oh-so-faint reductions in brightness caused by planets passing in front of their stars.
The search requires patience and precision; it’s not really this crowded out there.
Alex’s animation takes 2299 candidates that have been observed multiple times, each shown to scale in relation to their home star, and puts them in orbit around one star, at their relative distances.
The result, although extravagantly impossible, is no less fascinating to watch. (I suggest going full screen.)
“The Kepler observatory has detected a multitude of planet candidates orbiting distant stars,” Alex writes on his Vimeo page. “The current list contains 2321 planet candidates, though some of these have already been flagged as likely false-positives or contamination from binary stars. This animation does not contain circumbinary planets or planet candidates where only a single transit has been observed, which is why ‘only’ 2299 are shown.
“A fraction of these candidates will likely be ruled out as false positives as time goes on, while the remainder stand to be confirmed as real planets by follow-up analysis,” Alex adds.
The white ellipses seen when the animation pulls back are the relative sizes of the orbits of Mercury, Venus and Earth.
At this time the Kepler mission has identified 2321 planetary candidates, with 74 exoplanets confirmed. See more on the Kepler mission here.
Animation: Alex Parker. Image: Kepler mission planet candidates family portrait (NASA Ames/Jason Rowe/Wendy Stenzel)
In what may very well be the world’s first computer-generated animation, this video shows the motion of a box-like “satellite” orbiting a rotating sphere… Pixar, eat your heart out.
Created in 1963 by Edward E. Zajac, a programmer at Bell Labs from 1954 to 1983, the animation was made to demonstrate a theoretical satellite that used gyroscopes to maintain an Earth-facing orientation. Only a year after the launch of Telstar 1, the world’s first communications satellite (which just had its 50th anniversary) Bell Labs was very much invested in the development of satellite technology.
According to the description on the ATT Tech YouTube channel:
Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, called ORBIT. The original computations were fed into the computer via punch cards, then the output was printed onto microfilm using the General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. All computer processing was done on an IBM 7090 or 7094 series computer.
I’d like to say that many Bothans died to bring us this information but… well, I guess I just did.
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center in Warren, NJ. H/T to Paul Caridad at VisualNews.com.
This quick animation made by astrophotographer Alan Friedman shows a 30-minute view of sunspot 1520, a large region of magnetic activity on the Sun that’s currently aimed directly at Earth. Although 1520 has been quiet for the past couple of days, it’s loaded with a delta-class magnetic field — just right for launching powerful X-class flares our way. There’s no guarantee that it will, but then there’s no guarantee that it won’t either.
(Click the image to play the animation.)
Alan captured the images from his location in upstate New York using a 10″ Astro-Physics scope and PGR Grasshopper CCD. A master at solar photography — several of his hydrogen alpha images have been featured here on Universe Today as well as other popular astronomy news sites — Alan’s work never fails to impress.
A static, color version of sunspot 1520 can be seen here… what Alan calls “a magnetic beauty.”
Although the sunspots don’t change much over the course of the animation, the surrounding texture on the Sun’s photosphere can be seen to shift and move rapidly. These bright kernels are called granules, and are created by convective currents on the Sun. An individual granule typically lasts anywhere from 8 to 20 minutes and can be over 600 miles (1000 km) across.
The overall wavering effect is caused by distortion from Earth’s atmosphere.
While 1520 is facing Earth we’re subject to any flares or CMEs that may erupt from it, potentially sending a solar storm our way. In another week or so it will have rotated safely around the Sun’s limb and eventually dissipate altogether… but then, it is solar maximum and so there’s likely to be more active regions just like it (or even larger!) coming around the bend.
When they do come, there’s a good chance that Alan will grab some pics of those too.
With the science world all abuzz in anticipation of tomorrow’s official announcement from CERN in regards to its hunt for the Higgs, some of you may be wondering, “what’s a Higgs?” And for that matter, what’s a boson?
The video above, released a couple of months ago by the talented Jorge Cham at PHDcomics, gives a entertaining run-down of subatomic particles, how they interact and how, if it exists — which, by now, many are sure it does — the Higgs relates to them.
It’s the 7-minutes course in particle physics you’ll wish you had taken in college (unless you’re a particle physicist in which case… well, you’d still probably have enjoyed it.)
SpaceX's Falcon on the pad on May 18 (via Spaceflight Now)
With less than a day left before SpaceX’s historic launch of the first commercial vehicle to the ISS, slated for 4:55 am EDT on Saturday, May 19, here’s a video of what will happen once the Falcon lifts off.
(Part of me really wishes that they’ll be pumping out some dramatic music when it launches!)
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The video, created by NASA in 2011, shows the events that will take place from the initial launch at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral facility to the release of the Dragon capsule and its eventual docking with the ISS on Tuesday, as well as its return to Earth (yes, it’s reusable!)
The Dragon capsule contains 674 lbs (305 kg) of food and supplies for the Expedition 31 crew.
In addition to what’s aboard Dragon, the Falcon rocket will also be taking the cremated remains of 308 people — including Star Trek actor James Doohan and NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper — into space, via a private company called Celestis.
