The simplified layers of the Earth only have the inner and outer core, mantle and crust. However, today, there is a layer of molten or pliable rock that is found to be quite stiff in Earth's mantle. What's interesting is that they used diamond anvils to apply massive amounts of pressures to rocks to simulate conditions deep in the Earth to find this layer. Read more here @ popular science.
Raining Diamonds
Imagine a meteorite containing more diamonds than all of the deposits known on Earth just landing your country. Apparently, that's what happened. These diamonds are also claimed to be harder than Earth diamonds due to the immense amount of pressure and temperatures at the moment of impact which was a crater 100 km wide. Can you please picture that for a moment? Driving in a crater for an hour at 100km/hr. That's how big the explosion was...35 million years ago. Check out more from the Huffington post.
Checking out the Rings
Saturn's 6th largest moon, Enceladus, the source of Saturn's outermost ring now tops the list as most probable world to contain life. Sean Hsu, from Boulder University in Colorado lead a team to study the rings and discovered that the silica point to WARM waters. It's hard to imagine that something warm could exist so far out, but the small uniformity of the silicate materials serves as evidence. Their work has been published in Nature and can be further read about here on Popular Mechanics.
As Mars One whittles down to its finals to sending humans on a one way mission to Mars, NASA has already started advertising for other exoplanets outside of our solar system but seem to have habitable environments. Here is my favourite. Which one is yours?
Extent of Human Broadcasts
You know, sometimes I wonder if aliens will come and visit our Earth because of the recording on Voyager 1 that is "rolling out the red carpet" by giving the directions to our Earth blindly to any extra-terrestrial life out there. Then, I remember, even though our radio broadcasts are moving at the speed of light, our first radio broadcast in the early 1900s has only reached this far in our milky way galaxy:
There are 100 billion galaxies out there, and our radio broadcasts haven't even reached the edge of our one galaxy yet.
So, apparently, we're almost halfway to human destruction. The speed with which the diversity of living beings is decreasing (biodiversity loss) and the amount of nitrogen we are taking out of atmosphere have also been passed. It's like we're slowly checking off things to our own extinction...check...check...
Well - I'm doing my best to reduce my carbon footprint after my wife and I purchased a hybrid.
I like Earth. "If you like it, put a ring on it". The closest ring I can put on Earth is:
(from reddit...of course)
We are creating minerals and identifying minerals this week. I can't wait to see who wins the crystal growing competition!
Sunday, 8 March 2015
Ginormous Black Hole
A couple of weeks ago, the largest black hole with an ultraluminous quasar has been found. You can see how many times bigger it is than anything else that we've found by looking at the graph below. Props to the international team lead by Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University. Check out more here!
Creating a Different Kind of Life
A team of Cornell University researchers has successfully modeled a methane based, oxygen free life form that can metabolize and reproduce. This points to the possibility of life on other places that are really cold with methane, like Saturn's moon Titan.
Emotional about Space
I hope you guys get professors like this who absolutely love their job in the next few years. This professor Tom Burns really gets emotional talking about space. Couple that with an Inception soundtrack, and then maybe some goosebumps may rise.
Mars and Water
Using the riverbeds of Mars mapped out by the rovers, artists have created an image of Mars when it was covered in water.
Gravitational Lensing
Whoa, those presentations were quite impressive last week. We had tremendous discussions involving gravitational lensing; its effect has also given us a rerun of a supernova. Check it out!
Large holes of ground continue to disappear into the depths of Earth somewhere in Siberia. There were many hypothesis behind the sudden collapse of ground - ranging from nuclear testing to the end of the world. Check out more on iflscience!
The Mars' Rover, Curiosity, recorded a long burst of methane that lasted about 2 months. Methane is a molecule that points to either 1) the existence of hydrothermal systems or 2) some bacteria or alien cows farting. It's an exciting development that may point to life on Mars. Current life.
Curiosity, the rover, takes a selfie
Nacho Average Cheese. The oldest piece of cheese has been found. Using dating techniques that we will study in 2 months from now, the cheese, from 1615 BC, was discovered in clumps on mummies of Bronze Age people buried under wooden boats wrapped in cowhide. This burial ritual created a vacuum packing effect that's better than our ziplock bag in our kitchens! Read some more here on popscience.
I shall end off this post with a tremendous video from NASA. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory released time lapse videos of extreme violet, ultraviolet, and visible light. We get to see solar flares and prominences up close and personal:
Whoa, another Earth-like planet was discovered, and some NASA scientists say it has probable life! It is 'only' about 500 ly away from us, and its orbit is in the 'habitable' zone, a similar distance as we are away from the sun! Check out the video below for further details.
A question was asked to me the other day - how do super massive black holes come into existence? Well, one way for a black hole to be a billion times bigger than our sun, is to merge black holes, of course! Behold, a simulation of two merging black holes.
Oh my - some research into Einstein's equation has some scientists claiming that there was no big bang and that this universe has always existed. Their math has the universe at a finite size, and thus an infinite age. We will see how much traction this gets, if other scientists jump on board or find some error in their assumptions, or even their math! Read more here at phys.org.
The big four of Jupiter's moons were on display last month. Take a look at this spectacular footage. Make sure you don't mistake the shadows on Jupiter for moons! Read more at one of the more popular space blogs, Bad Astronomy.
With so many questions in class regarding dark matter, I just wanted to post this oldie from popular science that really showcases how hard our scientists are at work trying to find dark matter.
An amazing animated GIF showcasing the powers of our current telescopes shows the pillars in monkey head nebula. It starts with the constellations we see in the night sky, and demonstrates how far back in space/time we're able to see. It's beautiful and really a sight to take in.
Ok - now it's your turn to blog! Find ONE topic and start going in depth. Good luck!
Another year, another post. This year's a little different than most
with all of your applications to university due and you're wrapping up
your 7/8 of your high school career. Exams are coming up as well as a
multitude of final assignments and projects. You're probably experiencing stress as
you have never felt before. I respond to you with this:
Colleges in the US and universities in Canada are turning
to puppy therapy to help relax their students. Puppies can be found in
libraries and study halls throughout the university as a proven stress
reliever.
Now that you're a little more relaxed, you're ready to catch up with the latest in science news!
This professor can't get funding for his warp drive research because it's "too far out there". It doesn't stop David Pares though as he's willing to continue his research in his garage after a full day's work of teaching. He's convinced of all that anecdotal evidence of veteran pilots who have traveled through serious electrical storms around the world and in the Bermuda triangle and find themselves 100 miles away from where they should be. It's happened too often to far too many pilots in the past half decade that this man believes there's a correlation between high electrical activity and the ability to bend space. Some physicists actually believe he's on to something. Read more here.
Some person wondered what would each of the planets look like if they were as close as the Moon. Here's an animated GIF that I cannot corroborate on its authenticity but it's fun to look at nonetheless.
A 5,500 year old fossil of an aboriginal woman found in Canada has its DNA analyzed. It was found in BC's northern coast where many members of the indigenous First Nations currently live and apparently have lived for many years according to their history. Their claim of living there has been verified by matching the DNA of that fossil with a living person who is now scientifically the 200x great-grandaughter. That's a lot of generations. Take a look!
Remember those infographics and concept maps I assigned? They're an increasingly important method of visually communicating information and its shown in WIRED's top 2014 science visualizations of the year. Above what we see is a computer animation of a coronal mass ejection from the sun with the Earth in the background. Make sure to look at the rest and make sure to read the captions.
A mathematician has found a better way to get to Mars on less fuel. Instead of aiming at the intended target and using extreme brakes (fuel) to arrive safely, the mathematician has shown a method of slowing down earlier at a proper speed enough to be gently pulled into orbit by the gravitational pull of the target. It will be slower, but it's much cheaper.
Again, I've shown versions of this before, but here's a video version that came out xmas eve with extreme font to annoyingly hammer it home that we live in a very, very, small portion of the universe. Have fun in your last few days of holidays - I know I will, because I'm marking.
Curiosity, the Mars Probe, Confirms Organics on Mars
We briefly went over the biobits that were necessary for life to begin on Earth. Similar biobits, the building blocks of life, were found by the Mars rover Curiosity. Combine this fact with the finding that Martian soil is 2% water, methane gas has been found in the atmosphere, a huge ancient lake was found, and these organics did not come from Earth - we have more scientists scrambling to find out what is or was on Mars! Check it out!
A photo, courtesy of CBC, of Curiosity - the Rover ET is (probably) out there - Get Ready
If you're into videos - here's a TED talk from a SETI researcher who bets that we will find life out there in the next 24 years by discussing the new tech and laws of probability.
Don't Discount Planets with Horizontal Spinning Axis
In the search for extra terrestrial life, astronomers have always been looking at planets with similar characteristics as Earth. No tilt to small tilt was one aspect that seemed to always be a characteristic until scientists at MIT have explained that planets that is spinning on a horizontal axis similar to Uranus could support life as long as the planet was completely covered in deep ocean. Check it out here, at phys.org!
Since we Keep Talking about Life...
You guys enjoyed the last circular evolution animated GIF - look at how embroyos develop into babies. Feast your eyes on this one.
New Photos from Rosetta Comet Landing
At the American Geophysical Union they spent the time to discuss the newest pictures released from Philae, the probe that's currently sitting on the comet. They will wait until the comet approaches the sun at a different angle - sometime in March or April - Philae will then be able to use the sun's energy to power up and gather/send more data. See here for more photos.
NASA to be Overfunded in 2015
Looks like excitement is building up in the space field. So much so that NASA got MORE money than they asked for - $364 million more for a total of $18 billion.
Working for NASA would be pretty cool. Maybe Interstellar got me. Or maybe these NASA employees doing this lip dub got me excited...
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