Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage, that mythical route through the northern islands of the American Northern Hemisphere. This was once a dream of many to travel this route, but due to the cold and ice it has been challenging. Now that the climate is changing, this route has recently been more free of ice and ships have transited the route. Sailing through this route is still a challenge, but it has been done. Of course the threat to animal life due to this rapid change makes this a bitter-sweet condition. I would rather see the ice and open water, better for the wildlife.

So true....

Sunrise sequence

 

Superbubble



A superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth can be seen in this image. Many new stars, some of them very massive, are forming in the star cluster NGC 1929, which is embedded in the nebula N44, so named because it is the 44th nebula in a catalog of such objects in the Magellanic Clouds. The massive stars produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and race through their evolution to explode as supernovas. The winds and supernova shock waves carve out huge cavities called superbubbles in the surrounding gas. X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) show hot regions created by these winds and shocks, while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) outline where the dust and cooler gas are found. The optical light from the 2.2-m Max-Planck-ESO telescope (yellow) in Chile shows where ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars is causing gas in the nebula to glow.

A long-running problem in high-energy astrophysics has been that some superbubbles in the LMC, including N44, give off a lot more X-rays than expected from models of their structure. These models assume that hot, X-ray emitting gas has been produced by winds from massive stars and the remains of several supernovas. A Chandra study published in 2011 showed that there are two extra sources of N44’s X-ray emission not included in these models: supernova shock waves striking the walls of the cavities, and hot material evaporating from the cavity walls. The Chandra observations also show no evidence for an enhancement of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the cavities, thus ruling out this possibility as a third explanation for the bright X-ray emission. Only with long observations making full use of the capabilities of Chandra has it now become possible to distinguish between different sources of the X-rays produced by superbubbles.


Oracle going into the water...

 The Oracle AC72 is being put together and getting ready for the water. It is already being called BatZilla, after the DOGZilla name given to the Tri from the past AC series. I would love to be there to see this monster, the wing is 135 feet (About 45 meters) and is quite something to see. The report is that the rudders have foils as do the main dagger-boards. So we will see if this animal will fly. In any case, this is an incredible engineering creation.

AC72

AC72

AC45 Foiling

As time ticks by, the America’s Cup next big boats are coming off the assembly line and hitting the water. The first to splash was Team New Zealand and now Oracle is getting ready to splash their AC72. The one question now is will these monsters be foiling cats? Oracle has played with a foil on the AC45, but will the 72’s be foiling as well? I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Mars Song

"For the first time in history, a recorded song has been beamed back to Earth from another planet. Students, special guests and news media gathered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., today to hear "Reach for the Stars" by musician will.i.am after it was transmitted from the surface of Mars by the Curiosity rover. "

You may have heard about this, it is really a silly thing... It serves no purpose other than to draw attention to Mars. I wonder if any student will sign up for advanced math or physics because they heard this song??? The people who study science would study it anyway, taking the time to send and receive a song from Mars does nothing to further science. What this shows is the absolute limit that Americans must take to try to get young school students to actually study. My opinion is that America is going down the stupidity hole and will never come out. It was a plan by the people in charge to make the 'average' American as stupid as possible so that they would not understand the crap that the power brokers do. I just think that maybe somewhere in this world I could go and feel that the people around me are not delusional, irrational people.

Kepler-47 B and C

Coming less than a year after the announcement of the first circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. This system, known as a circumbinary planetary system, is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

This discovery proves that more than one planet can form and persist in the stressful realm of a binary star and demonstrates the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy.

Astronomers detected two planets in the Kepler-47 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other every 7.5 days from our vantage point on Earth. One star is similar to the sun in size, but only 84 percent as bright. The second star is diminutive, measuring only one-third the size of the sun and less than 1 percent as bright.

"In contrast to a single planet orbiting a single star, the planet in a circumbinary system must transit a 'moving target.' As a consequence, time intervals between the transits and their durations can vary substantially, sometimes short, other times long," said Jerome Orosz, associate professor of astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the paper. "The intervals were the telltale sign these planets are in circumbinary orbits."

The inner planet, Kepler-47b, orbits the pair of stars in less than 50 days. While it cannot be directly viewed, it is thought to be a sweltering world, where the destruction of methane in its super-heated atmosphere might lead to a thick haze that could blanket the planet. At three times the radius of Earth, Kepler-47b is the smallest known transiting circumbinary planet.

The outer planet, Kepler-47c, orbits its host pair every 303 days, placing it in the so-called "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet. While not a world hospitable for life, Kepler-47c is thought to be a gaseous giant slightly larger than Neptune, where an atmosphere of thick bright water-vapor clouds might exist.

"Unlike our sun, many stars are part of multiple-star systems where two or more stars orbit one another. The question always has been -- do they have planets and planetary systems? This Kepler discovery proves that they do," said William Borucki, Kepler mission principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "In our search for habitable planets, we have found more opportunities for life to exist."

To search for transiting planets, the research team used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars. Additional ground-based spectroscopic observations using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin helped characterize the stellar properties. The findings are published in the journal Science.

"The presence of a full-fledged circumbinary planetary system orbiting Kepler-47 is an amazing discovery," said Greg Laughlin, professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the University of California in Santa Cruz. "These planets are very difficult to form using the currently accepted paradigm, and I believe that theorists, myself included, will be going back to the drawing board to try to improve our understanding of how planets are assembled in dusty circumbinary disks."

Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development.

AC Worlds

With the end of the August AC Worlds, we can look back on a fun and exciting series. The venue has lived up to the hype and from what I was told, the viewing was great. Either from shore or on a boat, the course allowed so many to see what the AC is meant to be. The Uggg moment must be the crash of the Oracle cat into the committee boat on the start of the first fleet race of the second to last day. That was a big mistake and though the damage wasn’t bad, it still was enough to send the boat to shore. Of course the wing sails had a hard time as well and the repair crews must spend a lot of time fixing those carbon wings.

Mars up close

With more images coming back from the Mars rover, we are starting to see high detail pictures of the landing site and the target of future exploration. Looking at these new images, it seems the geology of Mars shows the stratification of the rock, possibly caused by water sedimentation. Of course winds can also transport and deposit material to make layers in the geology. But this is the reason to study Mars, to answer these questions.