M57

Gods Creations

Hubble give's us image's more beautiful then any artist could imagine.

Titan's River's

« 'Seeds' of Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole Discovered | Main July 21, 2012 The Rivers of Saturn's Titan --"A Weirdly Earth-like Place" In 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft — a probe that flies by Titan as it orbits Saturn — penetrated Titan’s orange haze, providing scientists with their first detailed images of the surface. Radar images revealed an icy terrain carved out over millions of years by rivers of liquid methane, similar to how rivers of water have etched into Earth’s rocky continents. The image above from the Cassini mission show river networks draining into lakes in Titan's north polar region. While images of Titan have revealed its present landscape, very little is known about its geologic past. Now researchers at MIT and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have analyzed images of Titan’s river networks and determined that in some regions, rivers have created surprisingly little erosion. The researchers say there are two possible explanations: either erosion on Titan is extremely slow, or some other recent phenomena may have wiped out older riverbeds and landforms. “It’s a surface that should have eroded much more than what we’re seeing, if the river networks have been active for a long time,” says Taylor Perron, the Cecil and Ida Green Assistant Professor of Geology at MIT. “It raises some very interesting questions about what has been happening on Titan in the last billion years.” “It’s a weirdly Earth-like place, even with this exotic combination of materials and temperatures,” Perron says. “And so you can still say something definitive about the erosion. It’s the same physics.” Compared to most moons in our solar system, Titan is relatively smooth, with few craters pockmarking its facade. Titan is around four billion years old, about the same age as the rest of the solar system. But judging by the number of craters, one might estimate that its surface is much younger, between 100 million and one billion years old. What might explain this moon’s low crater count? Perron says the answer may be similar to what happens on Earth. * “We don’t have many impact craters on Earth,” Perron says. “People flock to them because they’re so few, and one explanation is that Earth’s continents are always eroding or being covered with sediment. That may be the case on Titan, too.” For example, plate tectonics, erupting volcanoes, advancing glaciers and river networks have all reshaped Earth’s surface over billions of years. On Titan, similar processes — tectonic upheaval, icy lava eruptions, erosion and sedimentation by rivers — may be at work. But identifying which of these geological phenomena may have modified Titan’s surface is a significant challenge. Images generated by the Cassini spacecraft, similar to aerial photos but with much coarser resolution, are flat, depicting terrain from a bird’s-eye perspective, with no information about a landform’s elevation or depth. “It’s an interesting challenge,” Perron says. “It’s almost like we were thrown back a few centuries, before there were many topographic maps, and we only had maps showing where the rivers are.” Perron and MIT graduate student Benjamin Black set out to determine the extent to which river networks may have renewed Titan’s surface. The team analyzed images taken from Cassini-Huygens, and mapped 52 prominent river networks from four regions on Titan. The researchers compared the images with a model of river network evolution developed by Perron. This model depicts the evolution of a river over time, given variables such as the strength of the underlying material and the rate of flow through the river channels. As a river erodes slowly through the ice, it transforms from a long, spindly thread into a dense, treelike network of tributaries. Black compared his measurements of Titan’s river networks with the model, and found the moon’s rivers most resembled the early stages of a typical terrestrial river’s evolution. The observations indicate that rivers in some regions have caused very little erosion, and hence very little modification of Titan’s surface. “They’re more on the long and spindly side,” Black says. “You do see some full and branching networks, and that’s tantalizing, because if we get more data, it will be interesting to know whether there really are regional differences.”* Going a step further, Black compared Titan’s images with recently renewed landscapes on Earth, including volcanic terrain on the island of Kauai and recently glaciated landscapes in North America. The river networks in those locations are similar in form to those on Titan, suggesting that geologic processes may have reshaped the moon’s icy surface in the recent past. TheDaily Galaxy via http://web.mit.eduImage credit: NASA/JPL/USGS Our Partners Archives July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 About Us/Privacy Policy For more information on The Daily Galaxy and to contact us please visit this page.

EXOPLANET FOUND

Nearby Mars-Sized Exo-Planet Discovered Orbiting a Red Dwar The University of Central Florida has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33 light- years away. The exoplanet candidate called UCF 1.01, is close to its star, orbiting the star in 1.4 days. The planet's surface likely reaches temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The discoverers believe that it has no atmosphere, is only two-thirds the gravity of Earth and that its surface may be volcanic or molten. "We have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very close-by planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope," said Kevin Stevenson, a recent Ph.D graduate from the UCF and lead author of the paper, which appears online tomorrow in The Astrophysical Journal. "This discovery is a significant accomplishment for UCF." Stevenson and his colleagues were studying a hot-Neptune exoplanet, designated GJ 436b, already known to exist around the red-dwarf star GJ 436, when data revealed clues that led them to suspect there could be at least one new planet in that system, perhaps two. The team noticed slight dips in the amount of infrared light streaming from the star. A review of Spitzer archival data showed that the dips were periodic, suggesting that a planet might be blocking out a small fraction of light as it passed in front of GJ 436, as seen from Earth. * "I could see these faint dips in the starlight and I wanted to determine their source. I knew that if these signals were periodic, they could be from an unknown planet," said Stevenson, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. So he, UCF planetary sciences professor Joseph Harrington and UCF graduate student Nate Lust began looking at the data. They sifted through hundreds of hours of observations collected from Spitzer, the Deep Impact spacecraft, the ground-based Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This transit technique, used by a number of telescopes, including NASA's Kepler space telescope, relies on these tiny, partial eclipses to find exoplanet candidates. Spitzer has performed science work on known exoplanets before, but UCF-1.01 represents the first time Spitzer has made a transit discovery. With the finding of UCF-1.01, GJ 436 is likely now home to the first multi-transiting-planet system described by a mission other than Kepler. Of the 1,800 stars identified by Kepler as candidates for having planetary systems, only three are verified to contain sub-Earth size exoplanets. The depth and duration of a transit reveals basic properties of an exoplanet, such as its size and distance from a host star. In UCF-1.01's case, its diameter is estimated at 5,200 miles, or two-thirds that of Earth, placing the world among the smallest on record. The team also noticed hints of yet another potential planet dubbed UCF-1.02, but its period was impossible to estimate. So why aren't scientists calling UCF-1.01 a planet? A measured mass is needed to verify that these objects are planets, but even the most sensitive instruments currently available are unable to measure exoplanet masses this small. "Despite the lack of a confirmed mass, the team is confident future observations will verify our findings," Harrington said. "I hope future observations will confirm these exciting results, which show Spitzer may be able to discover exoplanets as small as Mars," said Michael Werner, Spitzer Project Scientist at JPL. "Even after almost nine years in space, Spitzer's observations continue to take us in new and important scientific directions." Journal reference: Astrophysical Journal

Supernovae Alert

Each century, about two massive stars in our own galaxy explode, producing magnificent supernovae. In the Universe at large, a supernova event occurs every second. Astrophysicists at the level of Stephen Hawking believe that these massive explosions may be resonsible for killing off advanced civilization --a major factor perhaps in the "Great Silence" of the Fermi Paradox. These stellar explosions send fundamental, uncharged particles called neutrinos streaming our way and generate ripples called gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time. Scientists are waiting for the neutrinos and gravitational waves from about 1000 supernovae that have already exploded at distant locations in the Milky Way to reach us. On Earth, large, sensitive neutrino and gravitational-wave detectors have the ability to detect these respective signals, which will provide information about what happens in the core of collapsing massive stars just before they explode. If we are to understand that data, however, scientists will need to know in advance how to interpret the information the detectors collect. To that end, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found via computer simulation what they believe will be an unmistakable signature of a feature of such an event: if the interior of the dying star is spinning rapidly just before it explodes, the emitted neutrino and gravitational-wave signals will oscillate together at the same frequency. "We saw this correlation in the results from our simulations and were completely surprised," says Christian Ott, an assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics at Caltech and the lead author on a paper describing the correlation, which appears in the current issue of the journal Physical Review D. "In the gravitational-wave signal alone, you get this oscillation even at slow rotation. But if the star is very rapidly spinning, you see the oscillation in the neutrinos and in the gravitational waves, which very clearly proves that the star was spinning quickly—that's your smoking-gun evidence." Scientists do not yet know all the details that lead a massive star—one that is at least 10 times as massive as the Sun—to become a supernova. What they do know (which was first hypothesized by Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky and his colleague Walter Baade in 1934) is that when such a star runs out of fuel, it can no longer support itself against gravity's pull, and the star begins to collapse in upon itself, forming what is called a proto-neutron star. They also now know that another force, called the strong nuclear force, takes over and leads to the formation of a shock wave that begins to tear the stellar core apart. But this shock wave is not energetic enough to completely explode the star; it stalls part way through its destructive work. There needs to be some mechanism—what scientists refer to as the "supernova mechanism"—that completes the explosion. But what could revive the shock? Current theory suggests several possibilities. Neutrinos could do the trick if they were absorbed just below the shock, re-energizing it. The proto-neutron star could also rotate rapidly enough, like a dynamo, to produce a magnetic field that could force the star's material into an energetic outflow, called a jet, through its poles, thereby reviving the shock and leading to explosion. It could also be a combination of these or other effects. The new correlation Ott's team has identified provides a way of determining whether the core's spin rate played a role in creating any detected supernova. It would be difficult to glean such information from observations using a telescope, for example, because those provide only information from the surface of the star, not its interior. Neutrinos and gravitational waves, on the other hand, are emitted from inside the stellar core and barely interact with other particles as they zip through space at the speed of light. That means they carry unaltered information about the core with them. The ability neutrinos have to pass through matter, interacting only ever so weakly, also makes them notoriously difficult to detect. Nonetheless, neutrinos have been detected: twenty neutrinos from Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud were detected in February 1987. If a supernova went off in the Milky Way, it is estimated that current neutrino detectors would be able to pick up about 10,000 neutrinos. In addition, scientists and engineers now have detectors—such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, a collaborative project supported by the National Science Foundation and managed by Caltech and MIT—in place to detect and measure gravitational waves for the first time. Ott's team happened across the correlation between the neutrino signal and the gravitational-wave signal when looking at data from a recent simulation. Previous simulations focusing on the gravitational-wave signal had not included the effect of neutrinos after the formation of a proto-neutron star. This time around, they wanted to look into that effect. "To our big surprise, it wasn't that the gravitational-wave signal changed significantly," Ott says. "The big new discovery was that the neutrino signal has these oscillations that are correlated with the gravitational-wave signal." The correlation was seen when the proto-neutron star reached high rotational velocities—spinning about 400 times per second. Future simulation studies will look in a more fine-grained way at the range of rotation rates over which the correlated oscillations between the neutrino signal and the gravitational-wave signal occur. Hannah Klion, a Caltech undergraduate student who recently completed her freshman year, will conduct that research this summer as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) student in Ott's group. When the next nearby supernova occurs, the results could help scientists elucidate what happens in the moments right before a collapsed stellar core explodes. Most of the computations were completed on the Zwicky Cluster in the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research. Ott built the cluster with a grant from the National Science Foundation. It is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. The image below shows the inner regions of a collapsing, rapidly spinning massive star. The colors indicate entropy, which roughly corresponds to heat: Red regions are very hot, while blue regions are cold. The black arrows indicate the direction of the flow of stellar material. The two white curves with black outlines indicate the neutrino (top) and gravitational-wave (bottom) signals. This frame shows a simulation about 10.5 milliseconds after the stellar core has become a dense proto-neutron star. Journal reference: Physical Review D The Daily Galaxy via California Institute of Technology Image Credit top of page: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Illinois/R.Williams & Y.-H.Chu; Optical: NOAO/CTIO/U.Illinois/R.Williams & MCELS coll.; Radio: ATCA/U.Illinois/R.Williams et al.) This composite image of DEM L316 combines data from Chandra (X-ray, blue), the Curtis-Schmidt telescope at CTIO (optical, red) & ATCA, the Australia Telescope Compact Array (radio, green).

ALIENS,GHOSTS,END DAYS PROPHECY,DO YOU BELIEVE?POST YOUR OPINIONS HERE

ALIENS,GHOSTS,END DAYS PROPHECY,DO YOU BELIEVE?POST YOUR OPINIONS HERE

Half Way There (Dec 21, 2012)

Hello, i know its been a long time since my last post as I've been dealing with some personal issues, now here we are over halfway to the supposed end date of our civilization, i'm no prophet by a long shot but i can say without a doubt we as a people have changed, we live in a world where people will walk around a dying person in the street and i think that is very sad, there is nothing humane about humanity anymore!! So should this be the year the world comes to a end i will surely welcome it with open arms, look around people, we have become selfish uncaring animals, we only care about our selves, now you may disagree but your only in denial because when push comes to shove we will save ourselves without regret for the person who is dying next to us, i am ashamed and you should be too, so with this i say let god wipe this planet clean of all humanity, we no longer deserve this once beautiful world that we were created on, stop and think long and hard because the truth hurts and i am ready for the pain to go away, God Bless All of you.

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