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Could the Sun have a Core of Dark Matter?

Tom McFay — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Dark matter has become trapped at the center of the sun and is cooling down its core temperature according to a new study by Dr Stephen West from the Department of Physics at Royal , University of London. “Dark matter…

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Could the Sun have a Core of Dark Matter?

Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

Tom McFay — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:45:44 +0000

Scientists celebrated at the world’s biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era…

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Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

Tom McFay — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:45:44 +0000

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Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

New Tech: Where in the World Was this Photo Taken? Flickr Wizard Will Tell You

Tom McFay — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:10:00 +0000

Remember the last time you saw a photo of an exotic place or building and wondered where it was was taken? Well, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have devised the first computerized method to help answer your question -a feat made…

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New Tech: Where in the World Was this Photo Taken? Flickr Wizard Will Tell You

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (3/05)

Tom McFay — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:04:00 +0000

Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: Heaviest Known Antinucleus Heralds New Frontier in Physics Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: Heaviest Known Antinucleus Heralds New Frontier in Physics. An international team of scientists studying high-energy collisions…

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (3/05)

We Knew It Could Come to This…

Tom McFay — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:02:00 +0000

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We Knew It Could Come to This…

Rocky-Mountain-High Tower at Center of Mars Crater Reveals History of Violent Climate Change

Tom McFay — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:20:00 +0000

Near the center of the Martian Gale Crater (about the size of Connecticut), hundreds of exposed rock layers form a tower as tall as the Rockies and reveal a record of major environmental changes on Mars billions of years ago. Gale crater, like the Gusev crater, sits near the boundary between Mars’ southern highlands and northern lowlands. Its interior is filled with layer upon layer of rocks standing 5.5 kilometers (3.4 miles) higher than the northern crater floor, but it is unknown whether these are sediments came in with ancient floods, or lava flows, or windblown ash deposits. The geological history told by the rock layers matches what has been proposed in recent years as the dominant planet-wide pattern for early Mars, according to a new report by geologists using instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. “Looking at the layers from the bottom to the top, from the oldest to the youngest, you see a sequence of changing rocks that resulted from changes in environmental conditions through time,” said Ralph Milliken of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “This thick sequence of rocks appears to be showing different steps in the drying-out of Mars.” Using geological layers to understand stages in the evolution of a planet’s climate has a precedent on Earth. A change about 1.8 billion years ago in the types of rock layers formed on Earth became a key to understanding a dramatic change in Earth’s ancient atmosphere. Milliken and his colleagues found that clay minerals, which form under very wet conditions, are concentrated in layers near the bottom of the Gale stack. Above that, sulfate minerals are intermixed with the clays. Sulfates form in wet conditions and can be deposited when the water in which they are dissolved evaporates. Higher still are sulfate-containing layers without detectable clays. And at the top is a thick formation of regularly spaced layers bearing no detectable water-related minerals. Rock exposures with compositions like various layers of the Gale stack have been mapped elsewhere on Mars, and researchers, including Jean-Pierre Bibring of the University of Paris, have proposed a Martian planetary chronology of clay-producing conditions followed by sulfate-producing conditions followed by dry conditions. However, Gale is the first location where a single series of layers has been found to contain these clues in a clearly defined sequence from older rocks to younger rocks. “If you could stand there, you would see this beautiful formation of Martian sediments laid down in the past, a stratigraphic section that’s more than twice the height of the Grand Canyon, though not as steep,” said Bradley Thomson of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. NASA selected Gale Crater in 2008 as one of four finalist sites for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, which has a planned launch in 2011. The finalist sites all have exposures of water-related minerals, and each has attributes that distinguish it from the others. Casey Kazan via NASA

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Rocky-Mountain-High Tower at Center of Mars Crater Reveals History of Violent Climate Change

"Global Warming, Not Asteroids Caused Planet’s Mass Extinction Events" – Leading Climate-Change Experts

Tom McFay — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:20:00 +0000

“If you look at the fossil record, it is just littered with dead bodies from past catastrophes,” observes University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward says that only one extinction in Earth’s past was caused by an asteroid impact – the event 65 million years ago that ended the age of the dinosaurs. All the rest, he claims, were caused by global warming. Ward’s Under a Green Sky explores extinctions in Earth’s past and predicts extinctions to come in the future. Ward demonstrates that the ancient past is not just of academic concern. Everyone has heard about how an asteroid did in the dinosaurs, and NASA and other agencies now track Near Earth objects. Unfortunately, we may not be protecting ourselves against the likeliest cause of our species’ demise. Ward explains how those extinctions happened, and then applies those chilling lessons to the modern day: expect drought, superstorms, poison–belching oceans, mass extinction of much life, and sickly green skies. The significant points Ward stresses are geologically rapid climate change has been the underlying cause of most great “extinction” events. Those events have been, observed Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould, major drivers of evolution. Drastic climate change has not always been gradual; there is solid empirical evidence of catastrophic warming events taking place in centuries, perhaps even decades. The impact of atmospheric warming is most potent in its modification of ocean chemistry and of circulating currents; warming inevitably leads to non-mixing anoxic dead seas. We are already in the middle, not the beginning, of an anthropogenic global warming, caused by agriculture and deforestation, which began some 10,000 years ago but which is now accelerating exponentially; though the earliest wave of anthropogenic warming has been stabilizing and beneficial to human development, it appears to have the potential for catastrophic effects within a lifetime or two. Looking at the ancient evidence, Ward notes that ice caps began to shrink. “Melting all the ice caps causes a 75-meter increase in sea level will remove every coastal city on our planet.” It will also cover earth’s most productive farmland, the author warns, adding, “It will happen if we do not somehow control CO2 rise in the atmosphere.” A new analysis of the geological record of the Earth’s sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and Harvard universities supports Ward using a novel statistical approach that reveals the planet’s polar ice sheets are vulnerable to large-scale melting even under moderate global warming scenarios. Such melting would lead to a large and relatively rapid rise in global sea level. According to the analysis, an additional 2 degrees of global warming could commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise. This rise would inundate low-lying coastal areas where hundreds of millions of people now reside. It would permanently submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana, much of southern Florida and other parts of the U.S. East Coast, much of Bangladesh, and most of the Netherlands, unless unprecedented and expensive coastal protection were undertaken. And while the researchers’ findings indicate that such a rise would likely take centuries to complete, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not abated, the planet could be committed during this century to a level of warming sufficient to trigger this outcome. The last interglacial stage provides a historical analog for futures with a fairly moderate amount of warming; the high sea levels during the stage suggest that significant chunks of major ice sheets could disappear over a period of centuries in such futures. Previous geological studies of sea level benchmarks such as coral reefs and beaches had shown that, at many localities, local sea levels during the last interglacial stage were higher than today. But local sea levels differ from those in this earlier stage; one major contributing factor is that the changing masses of the ice sheets alter the planet’s gravitational field and deform the solid Earth. As a consequence, inferring global sea level from local geological sea level markers requires a geographically broad data set, a model of the physics of sea level, and a means to integrate the two. The study’s authors provide all three, integrating the data and the physics with a statistical approach that allows them to assess the probability distribution of past global sea level and its rate of change. The findings indicate that sea level during the last interglacial stage rose for centuries at least two to three times faster than the recent rate, and that both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheet likely shrank significantly and made important contributions to sea level rise. However, the relative timing of temperature change and sea level change during the last interglacial stage is fairly uncertain, so it is not possible to infer from the analysis how long an exposure to peak temperatures during this stage was needed to commit the planet to peak sea levels. A similar study by a team of scientists from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African village to extract microfossils from rocks which have revealed the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere at the time of the formation of the ice-cap. New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Professor Paul Pearson from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: “About 34 million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend. Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in many areas. “The period culminated in the rapid development of a continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever since. We therefore set out to establish whether there was a substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow.” Co-author Dr Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics added: “This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Our study is the first to provide a direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global climate.” Geologists have long speculated that the formation of the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural greenhouse effect. The study’s findings, published in Nature online, confirm that atmospheric CO2 started to decline about 34 million years ago, during the period known to geologists as the Eocene – Oligocene climate transition, and that the ice sheet began to form about 33.5 million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of around 760 parts per million. The team mapped large expanses of bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds. Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth’s history they had been searching for. Ward is encouraged that we are beginning to make changes in their daily lives and demanding action from their leaders -”that we are on a planet that has violent convulsions, and that we humans are playing with nature in such a way that we could recreate what were some really awful times in earth’s history, that we really tinker with the earth’s atmosphere at our peril.” Posted by Casey Kazan from material provided by Princeton University and Bristol University http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6546.html

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"Global Warming, Not Asteroids Caused Planet’s Mass Extinction Events" – Leading Climate-Change Experts

Is Saturn’s Titan A Mirror Image Of Earth Before Life Evolved?

Tom McFay — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:50:00 +0000

The Cassini spacecraft observations of Saturn’s largest moon, the orange-colored Titan, have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. They now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes. “Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” according to Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.” “When we designed the original tour for the Cassini spacecraft, we really did not know what we would find, especially at Enceladus and Titan,” said Dennis Matson, the JPL Cassini project scientist. “This extended tour is responding to these new discoveries and giving us a chance to look for more.” Unlike Earth, Titan’s lakes, rivers and rain are composed of methane and ethane, and temperatures reach a chilly minus 180 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Titan’s dense atmosphere limits viewing the surface, Cassini’s high-resolution radar coverage and imaging by the infrared spectrometer have given scientists a better look. Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. At an eye popping minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan has a surface of liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane with tholins believed to make up its dunes. The term “tholins,” coined by Carl Sagan in 1979, describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry. Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan’s surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves. Dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves. Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan’s lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane. “This global estimate is based mostly on views of the lakes in the northern polar regions. We have assumed the south might be similar, but we really don’t yet know how much liquid is there,” said Lorenz. Cassini’s radar has observed the south polar region only once, and only two small lakes were visible. Future observations of that area are planned during Cassini’s proposed extended mission. “We also know that some lakes are more than 10 meters or so deep because they appear literally pitch-black to the radar. If they were shallow we’d see the bottom, and we don’t,” said Lorenz. The question of how much liquid is on the surface is an important one because methane is a strong greenhouse gas on Titan as well as on Earth, but there is much more of it on Titan. If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan’s atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space. If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan’s past. Cassini’s mission originally had been scheduled to end in July 2008. A newly-announced two-year extension will include 60 additional orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its exotic moons. These will include 26 flybys of Titan, seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene. The extension also includes studies of Saturn’s rings, its complex magnetosphere, and the planet itself. “This extension is not only exciting for the science community, but for the world to continue to share in unlocking Saturn’s secrets,” said Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington. “New discoveries are the hallmarks of its success, along with the breathtaking images beamed back to Earth that are simply mesmerizing.” Based on findings from Cassini, scientists think liquid water may be just beneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The small moon, only one-tenth the size of Titan and one-seventh the size of Earth’s moon, is one of the highest-priority targets for the extended mission. Cassini discovered geysers of water-ice jetting from the Enceladus surface. The geysers, which shoot out at a distance three times the diameter of Enceladus, feed particles into Saturn’s most expansive ring. In the extended mission, the spacecraft may come as close as 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the moon’s surface. Other activities for Cassini scientists will include monitoring seasons on Titan and Saturn, observing unique ring events, such as the 2009 equinox when the sun will be in the plane of the rings, and exploring new places within Saturn’s magnetosphere. Cassini has returned a daily stream of data from Saturn’s system for almost four years. Its travel scrapbook includes nearly 140,000 images, and information gathered during 62 revolutions around Saturn, 43 flybys of Titan and 12 close flybys of the icy moons. More than 10 years after launch and almost four years after entering into orbit around Saturn, Cassini is a healthy and robust spacecraft. Three of its science instruments have minor ailments, but the impact on science-gathering is minimal. The spacecraft will have enough propellant left after the extended mission to potentially allow a third phase of operations. Data from the extended mission could lay the groundwork for possible new missions to Titan and Enceladus. Cassini launched Oct. 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a seven-year journey to Saturn, traversing 3.5 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles). Posted by Casey Kazan, adapted from materials provided by NASA. Related Galaxy posts: Saturn’s Rings as Ancient as Solar System

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Is Saturn’s Titan A Mirror Image Of Earth Before Life Evolved?

"The Universe Was Not Created By A Big Bang" -Say Several of the World’s Leading Cosmologists

Tom McFay — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

“What banged?” Sean Carroll, CalTech -Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology & Physics Several of the worlds leading astrophysicists believe there was no Big Bang that brought the universe and time into existence. Before the Big Bang, the standard theory assumes, there was no space, just nothing. Einstein merged the universe into a single entity: not space, not time, but space time. Proponents of branes propose that we are trapped in a thin membrane of space-time embedded in a much larger cosmos from which neither light nor energy (except gravity) can escape or enter and that that “dark matter” is just the rest of the universe that we can’t see because light can’t escape from or enter into our membrane from the great bulk of the universe. And our membrane may be only one of many, all of which may warp, connect, and collide with one another in as many as 10 dimensions -a new frontier physicists call the “brane world.” Stephen Hawking, among others, envisions brane worlds bubbling up out of the void, giving rise to whole new universes One of the most important space probes of the century is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) launched in 2001 to measure the temperature differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatiion -the 14-billion year old Big Bang’s remnant radiant heat . The anisotropies then in turn are used to measure the universe’s geometry, content, and evolution; and, perhaps most importantly, to test the Big Bang model, and the cosmic inflation theory. WMAP data seem to support a universe that is dominated by dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no supportative data to date for Big Bang theory, although the results aren’t sensitive enough to rule out the pervasive Big Bang/inflation model. The influence of gravitaional waves on polarization is different from that of overall energy distribution, so it should be possible to tell from polarization in the WMAP scans whether the variation is coming from contrasting energy density (heat) or gravitational waves that a Big Bang should have produced. The world’s leading astrophysicists are confidemt that with a sensitive enough probe such as that by the new Planck telescope with its more detailed CMB plots, that they can reduce the level of uncertainty low enough so that they can say definitively whether the gravitational waves that should have been created by the Big Bang as present. If this next generation Planck Telescope shows that there is no onvious distortions caused by gravity waves, it will rule out the Big Bang plus inflation theory -an add-on theory that explains the phenomenal sudden expansion of space from a tiny point. In it’s place will be new models that support what many leading cosmologists see as our universe to be proved to be one of just many in an eternal cycle of birth and rebirth. Models of the universe that involve a bouncing brane or a Big Crunch rather than a start from scratch Big Bang predict much smaller gravity waves being produced than would come from a Big Bang. If the universe actually went through cycles of expansion and contraction, it is possible that the uneven distributions in the early post-Big Bang universe that resulted in the formation of galaxies were leftovers from the universe before. Only gravity can’t exist soley in a specific brane, but wanders where it will, leaking off our brane into what physicists call “the bulk” — the rest of space-time. Brane theory offer an fascinating and plausable explanation for why gravity is such a weakling: Maybe it’s not any weaker than the other forces, nut just concentrated somewhere else in the bulk, or on another brane, providing the key to understanding the dark matter that makes up 90 % of our universe. If our brane is but a small slice of a much larger cosmos, however, the “dark matter” might be nothing but ordinary matter trapped on another brane. Such a shadow world, Hawking speculated, might contain “shadow human beings wondering about the mass that seems to be missing from their world.” Are branes the key to understanding the origin of our universe? “Who knows?” says Sean Carroll. “they will have taught us a useful lesson that we should have known all along, which is that we don’t have a clue to what’s going on.” Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, creator of the currently accepted model of the Big Bang, said recently “he felt a little like Rip Van Winkle — picking up his head from a long sleep only to notice that the landscape of physics he thought he knew had suddenly, drastically, changed.” Casey Kazan. Source Credits: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/17/science/sci-branes http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327226.000-review-before-the-big-bang-by-brian-clegg.html Image Credit: http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/stringtheory01.htm

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"The Universe Was Not Created By A Big Bang" -Say Several of the World’s Leading Cosmologists