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Illustrations of British Fungi (Hymenomycetes), to serve as an atlas to the “Handbook of British Fungi”.

By Cooke, Mordecai Cubitt, Publication info LondonWilliams and Norgate1881-91 BHL Collections: New York Botanical Garden

the-wolf-and-moon

Milky Way Over Bolivian Salt Flats

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What in the Universe is an Exoplanet?

Simply put, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star.

All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars outside our solar system are called exoplanets.

Just because a planet orbits a star (like Earth) does not mean that it is automatically stable for life. The planet must be within the habitable zone, which is the area around a star in which water has the potential to be liquid…aka not so close that all the water would evaporate, and not too far away where all the water would freeze.

Exoplanets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit. So, astronomers use other ways to detect and study these distant planets by looking at the effects these planets have on the stars they orbit.

One way to search for exoplanets is to look for “wobbly” stars. A star that has planets doesn’t orbit perfectly around its center. From far away, this off-center orbit makes the star look like it’s wobbling. Hundreds of planets have been discovered using this method. However, only big planets—like Jupiter, or even larger—can be seen this way. Smaller Earth-like planets are much harder to find because they create only small wobbles that are hard to detect.

How can we find Earth-like planets in other solar systems?

In 2009, we launched a spacecraft called Kepler to look for exoplanets. Kepler looked for planets in a wide range of sizes and orbits. And these planets orbited around stars that varied in size and temperature.

Kepler detected exoplanets using something called the transit method. When a planet passes in front of its star, it’s called a transit. As the planet transits in front of the star, it blocks out a little bit of the star’s light. That means a star will look a little less bright when the planet passes in front of it. Astronomers can observe how the brightness of the star changes during a transit. This can help them figure out the size of the planet.

By studying the time between transits, astronomers can also find out how far away the planet is from its star. This tells us something about the planet’s temperature. If a planet is just the right temperature, it could contain liquid water—an important ingredient for life.

So far, thousands of planets have been discovered by the Kepler mission.

We now know that exoplanets are very common in the universe. And future missions have been planned to discover many more!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

primatologistinthemaking-deacti

An entomologist from the University of Gdansk in Poland has rediscovered a striking blue-and-white species of clearwing moth known only from a single faded and damaged museum specimen collected in 1887. The Oriental blue clearwing (Heterosphecia tawonoides) looks more like a bee, behaves more like a bee, and may even buzz like a bee, according to a paper published recently about the species in the journal Tropical Conservation Science.

hematitehearts

Sphalerite

Locality: Las Mánforas Mine, Aliva, Cantabria, Spain

currentsinbiology

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Dr. Seuss (via currentsinbiology)

the-wolf-and-moon

NGC 6357, Star Cathedral

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nature

currentsinbiology

The world’s first trees grew by splitting their guts

Scientists have discovered some of the best preserved specimens of the world’s first trees in a remote region of China. At up to 12 meters tall, these spindly species were topped by a clump of erect branches vaguely resembling modern palm trees and lived a whopping 393 million to 372 million years ago. But the biggest surprise is how they got so big in the first place.

Today’s trees grow through a relatively simple mechanism. The trunk is a single cylindrical shaft made up of hundreds of woody strands called xylem, which conduct water from the roots to the branches and leaves. New xylem grow in rings at the periphery of the trunk just behind the bark, adding girth so the tree can get taller.

This is not how ancient trees known as cladoxylopsids grew, however. Two specimens discovered in a desert in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province in 2012 were remarkably well preserved. That’s because they underwent a process in which silica—likely emitted by a nearby volcano—saturated the tree and took on the shape of the wood’s internal structure as it decayed, preserving its 3D cellular structure.

The fossils reveal that, unlike modern trees with a single shaft, cladoxylopsids had multiple xylem columns spaced around the perimeter of a hollow trunk. A network of crisscrossing strands connected the vertical xylem—much like a chain-link fence spreads from pole to pole—and soft tissue filled the spaces between all these strands. New growth formed in rings around each of the xylem columns while an increasing volume of soft tissue forced the strands to spread out.

All of this expanded the girth of the trunk, allowing for a taller tree. But it also split apart the tree’s xylem skeleton, which required the tree to continually repair itself, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The weight of the tree squeezed tissue at the base of the trunk outward.

vaporcape

currentsinbiology

If you care about the the oceans and all the life therein or if you are more self-centered, maybe just like seafood, pay attention!

How did that get there? Plastic chunks on Arctic ice show how far pollution has spread

A British-led expedition has discovered sizeable chunks of polystyrene lying on remote frozen ice floes in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

The depressing find, only 1,000 miles from the north pole, is the first made in an area that was previously inaccessible to scientists because of sea ice. It is one of the most northerly sightings of such detritus in the world’s oceans, which are increasingly polluted by plastics.

Estimates suggest that there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating on the surface of the world’s oceans. It has been claimed that there is now enough plastic to form a permanent layer in the fossil record. Dr Ceri Lewis, scientific adviser to the expedition based at the University of Exeter, has previously warned that people produce around 300 million tons of plastic a year, roughly the same weight as all the humans on the planet. Around half of all plastic produced is used once and then thrown away.

A significant concern is that large plastic pieces can break down into “microplastics” – tiny particles that are accidentally consumed by filter-feeding animals. The particles remain in animals’ bodies and are passed up the food chain, threatening wildlife at all levels from zooplankton to apex predators such as polar bears. In an attempt to gauge the presence of microplastics in Arctic waters, the scientists intend to test samples of seawater they collected in nets with holes smaller than a millimetre across.

Plastic pollution on an ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Photograph: Conor McDonnell

viewsfromspaceandbeyond

A wide view(200mm) of the Perseus Double Cluster Visit http://spaceviewsandbeyond.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-wide-view200mm-of-perseus-double.html for more space pics