Stars and Spice

The Moving Universe

[starsandspice]

Pulses of accretion onto a pair of newborn stars set off a "strobe light" effect. The pulse of radiation races through the nebula of dust and gas surrounding the stars every 25 days, according to the NASA press release. The video loops through a sequence of near-infrared images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Changing times...

I've been doing a lot of reading about Apollo missions lately for work (I love my job), and I came across a few pictures of mission control. From left to right: Gemini mission control, Apollo 13 mission control (before things started going wrong), and modern mission control.

Things I've learned: Apparently black is the new white. And check out the ginormous computers (if that's what they are) from the Gemini days. 

I'm only a little sad that the glory days of mission control are essentially over, at least when it comes to manned spaceflight. Only a little, though...there's promise for the future: private space exploration. Not to mention space tourism.

[starsandspice]

Blow your mind a little...

Incredible footage of the gas giants in all their glory. Saturn's rings are thin - 30 feet, sometimes as much as 300 feet - compared to Saturn's diameter, 400 million feet (75,000 miles).

How Saturn's rings formed is still a matter of debate, but Cassini helped us see why they stick around: they're fed by Saturn's moons. Cassini watched Enceledus, one of Saturn's moons, shoot salty water-ice into space, likely from a reservoir locked beneath Enceladus's surface. The salt and ice make their way to the E ring, Saturn's outermost ring.

[starsandspice]

Jupiter and Venus, Sitting in a Tree

For folks who want to know (you know who you are :)),

If you're curious about those planets in the sky this past week or so, check out this week's Sky and Telescope's Sky at a Glance. They just passed each other by, but at 5 degrees apart, Venus and Jupiter still make a beautiful pair at sunset.

By the way, even though Jupiter is 11 times bigger (in diameter) than Venus, Venus shines brighter. Why? Mainly because Venus is so much closer to Earth - 160 million miles is the furthest it ever gets, while the closest Jupiter can approach Earth is 390 million miles. When Jupiter and Venus are close together in the sky, that means Jupiter is even further away, at 580 million miles. It helps that Venus is closer to the sun, reflecting more light per unit area.

[starsandspice]

These Changing Times

My blog has been a little slow lately, and here's why: I've just started an editorial internship at Sky & Telescope!  Now I finally get to do for a living what I've been doing for fun for the past few years, which is pretty darn awesome.  But combine a new job with a four-month old adorable baby boy, and there won't be much blogging going on here for a little while.

What I will do, though, is post my newest S&T stories.  My first news story covered the idea that free-floating, Pluto-sized planets might outnumber stars in the Milky Way. That idea inspired some lively comments, so feel free to join in on the fun :).

[starsandspice]

A New Hope (for plasma caught in a black hole's gravity well)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away*....

It is a period of civil war. Plasma, through a trick of magnetic fields, has won its first victory against the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of galaxy M87.

During the battle, plasma managed to pull away from the black hole, a singularity with enough gravitational power to destroy an entire planet (and its host star). 

Pursued by the black hole's gravity, the plasma races outward aboard magnetic field lines, custodian of the mysterious physics that can explain how jets form and restore freedom to gravitationally bound plasma....

* 52 million light years, to be exact

[itsokaytobesmart]

Apollo 17 astronauts singing on the moon.

This is real.

This is why we beat zee Soviets.

(via Boing Boing)

[starsandspice]

Oooo...

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I Think, Therefore I Am?

Researchers didn't peek into anyone's brain to capture these fiery flashes between neurons. What they actually did is even weirder.  

To make the video, neuroscientists like Ph.D. students Michelle Kuykendal and Gareth Guvanasen grew neuron cultures in petri dishes lined with electrodes. In the flat dishes, the neurons' activity can more easily be captured by a microscope and camera. The electrodes allow the scientists to interact with the neuron cultures, giving the neurons information, even teaching them to perform complicated tasks.

Kuykendal and Guvanasen are students in Georgia Tech's Neurolab, a crew of biomedical, electrical, and computer engineers, and their research is the stuff of science fiction. Steve Potter, Neurolab's director, envisions a future world where humans regularly interface with machines. To accomplish this, Potter has spent his career growing cultures of neurons in multi-electrode arrays. One of Potter's projects, MEART, is a "semi-living artist": a collection of rat neurons grown in Potter's Neurolab (the "brain") that controls a robotic arm in Australia (the "body"). Inspired by images of a person's face, if neurons in a dish can said to be inspired, the brain directs the body to draw complex drawings with felt markers. 

[starsandspice]

Climbing Beans

In the quiet white of winter, the sight of green leaves unfurling soothes the soul. In the video, climbing beans sprout under the watchful eye of a camera that snaps a picture every 9-12 minutes. We watch the bean sprout into a plant, shrinking as it provides nourishment to the growing root. Until the root is ready to take up water, baby leaves, called cotyledons, absorbs moisture from the ground. Meanwhile, the bean continues to feed a burgeoning shoot that struggles its way upwards through the soil and into the light.  (Notice how the shoot bends, forming a hook, so that the tip is not damaged as it pushes through the soil.)

Climbing beans start their growth with "epigeal germination", meaning that the baby leaves grow with the shoot, emerging into the sunlight and nourishing the plant until the true leaves emerge.  Once they're no longer needed, the baby leaves shrivel and fall off.

On a side note of personal interest, or for anyone planning on starting a vegetable garden from seed this spring, epigeal germinating plants (like beans or tomatoes) signal when they're ready to transplant: while the baby leaves will emerge first, showing you which plants have germinated successfully, the plants will not be ready for transplant until the true leaves emerge.

[itsokaytobesmart]

Mind-Melter of the Day

It turns out that if you divide 1 by 998,001 you get all three-digit numbers from 000 to 999 in order.

Except for 998.

(via Futility Closet)

[starsandspice]

Huh.

[starsandspice]

Lightning Strikes

Nothing is more inspiring than the view of a lightning storm from space...except possibly the view from the ground - 30 minutes of an off-shore thunderstorm compressed into 7 gorgeous seconds. 

So what's really happening in the video?  As clouds gather, the potential for lightning grows. Electrical potential, that is (ba dum ching). The turbulent air and moisture in a raincloud collide with each other again and again, separating electrons from their host molecules.  The electrons cluster at the bottom of the cloud, forcing positive charge to float to the top.  Soon, the electric field is strong enough to rip apart air molecules into a plasma that, at 20,000 degrees Celsius, is three times the surface temperature of the Sun.  The free electrons in the plasma race toward the positively charged ground in a white-hot bolt.

The average bolt in the video lights up the sky with a terawatt (10^12 W) of power, but only for 30 millionths of a second - that's enough energy to power a 100-watt bulb for roughly 5.5 hours.  That may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that there are more than 1.4 billion flashes a year, it adds up.  

“A typical little thunderstorm is like an atomic bomb’s worth of energy," says Dr. Martin A. Uman, co-director of the Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. Unfortunately, he cautions, any effort to try to harvest that energy would be more trouble than it's worth.  "Trying to get the energy from the bottom of the lightning is hopeless.”

[starsandspice]

Murmuration

To watch a murmuration - a flock of starlings - return to their roost is to watch poetry in motion. These birds are guided by the simple principle of survival: every bird wants to land to roost, but no bird wants to be the first, lest they become an easy target for predators. So hundreds, even thousands of birds turn and turn again in a beautiful dance, only landing when the dark of night falls. The dance can be described by the physics of critical systems - systems that are "poised on the brink of near-instantaneous transformation."

Starlings fly close together, only a wingspan apart at the borders, where there is safety in numbers. Every bird copies the actions of its neighbors, so that if one starling turns a tiny bit, its neighbors magnify that change until the whole flock shifts in direction. This is a classic example of chaos theory, which describes how tiny deviations can lead to global changes, just as a flap of a butterfly's wings in Tokyo could cause a tornado in California. 

[starsandspice]

Clouds Wave Over Birmingham, Alabama

Every winter, I relearn how to ice skate, and at least once every winter, my feet slip out from underneath me, leaving the rest of me to come crashing down.  Something similar happened in the skies above Birmingham, Alabama a few weeks ago.  As one layer of air currents moved faster than the one beneath, the clouds carried by the currents "crashed" like ocean waves breaking against the shore.

This formation has a name: the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.  Watch a simulation of this wave-like instability here.

[starsandspice]

A Map in the Making

In one of the more amazing feats on the internets, Project Open Street Map is mapping out the globe, one open-sourced street at a time.  Though some of their maps come from commercial or government sources, individual users (lots of them) built the initial maps as they traversed streets, rivers, or trails with a handheld GPS and some kind of note-taking device - a digitial camera, notebook, or voice recorder.  When they uploade their routes, they (or any registered user) can then edit, noting hospitals, restaurants, schools, bus stops, even fire hydrants.  Watch the map created from edits in the year 2008 alone!

Although the OpenStreetMap site itself doesn't let you ask for directions, other route-planning sites using OSM data are popping up all over (such as yournavigation.org, openrouteservice.org, and many others). GoogleMaps, beware!

[starsandspice]

I wrote a little guest post over the holidays on the excellent blog, Science in my Fiction, which is an excellent resource if you like to write science fiction, or if you just like to read about weird and fun science.  Check it out!

[starsandspice]

Comet Lovejoy Pays A Holiday Visit

Comet Lovejoy, the same comet that survived a close pass around the sun just a week ago, swings by the earth just in time for the holidays.  On Dec. 21 (the winter solstice), astronaut Dan Burbank captured this view from aboard the International Space Station. Lightning storms dot the Earth's surface before the comet appears, a streak of light passing above the Earth's blue-white horizon.  Then the sunrise takes over, and the screen goes white.

Happy Winter Solstice, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!