GP-B — Einstein's Spacetime. Special Relativity Physics at the end of the nineteenth century found itself in crisis: there were perfectly good theories of mechanics (Newton) and electromagnetism (Maxwell), but they did not seem to agree. Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter.
Experiments by Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) and others in the 1880s showed that it always traveled with the same velocity, regardless of the speed of its source. Older physicists struggled with this contradiction in various ways. In 1892 George F. Einstein in 1905 None of these eminent physicists, however, put the whole story together. The Fourth Dimension Minkowski Lightcone diagram showing the worldline of a moving observer Einstein did not quite finish the job, however. Four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime is often pictured in the form of a two-dimensional lightcone diagram, with the horizontal axes representing "space" (x) and the vertical axis "time" (ct). NASA: DNA Found on Meteorites Indicates Life May Have Originated in Space.
Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greebelt, Md., report evidence that ready-made DNA parts could have crashed to the surface on objects like meteorites, and then assembled under Earth's early conditions to create the first DNA. The discovery was made using samples from 12 carbon-rich meteorites, nine of them from Antarctica. The team extracted small fragments of the meteorite and ran them through a process to determine their structure. What they found was adenine and guanine. These are two of the nucleobases needed to make the rungs of DNA's spiral ladder (in addition to thymine and cytosine, which were not present in the sample).
The team also found hypoxathine and xanthine, which are not part of DNA but are used in various biological processes. "People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life," said Dr. The fastest way to send humans to Mars is to not worry about bringing them back. Moon's interior water casts doubt on formation theory.
26 May 2011Last updated at 19:01 By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News The study looked at pockets of volcanic material locked in glass An analysis of sediments brought back by the Apollo 17 mission has shown that the Moon's interior holds far more water than previously thought. The analysis, reported in Science, has looked at pockets of volcanic material locked within tiny glass beads. It found 100 times more water in the beads than has been measured before, and suggests that the Moon once held a Caribbean Sea-sized volume of water.
The find also casts doubt on aspects of theories of how the Moon first formed. A series of studies in recent years has only served to increase the amount of water thought to be on the Moon. The predominant theory holds that much of the water seen on the lunar surface arrived via impacts by icy comets or watery meteorites. They wrote in a Nature paper that the samples contained about 10 times more water than they expected. 'Not consistent' EXOSOLAR. 7 Horrible Ways The Universe Can Destroy Us Without Warning. The universe hates you. Let's get that out of the way right now. The universe loathes your guts and is infuriated by the way you dress, and the stupid way you talk sends it into a murderous rage. It's just one bad morning and an empty coffee canister away from driving to your house and shanking you in the neck. With a supernova. It may happen tomorrow, or it may take billions of years. The universe is patient. What we tend to call shooting stars are really just meteoroids burning in the Earth's atmosphere.
GettyThe stars want you dead. How They Will Get Us: But it's probably OK: We've only found like 16 of these things zipping about. GettyIf you ever meet a woman who's impressed with your bat'leth skills, it's probably time to start worrying. But the thing with the universe is that it's kind of a largish place. Getty"How about Earth? And we're not exaggerating that "hypervelocity" part, either -- an average HV star moves at a staggering 1.6 million kilometers an hour. Wait, what? Anatomy of a short gamma ray burst. Seil Collins, reporter (Image: ASA/AEI/ZIB/M.Koppitz and L.Rezzolla) A supercomputer has revealed the process behind the formation of short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in gory detail.
GRBs are some of the brightest events in the universe. The most common type lasts over 2 seconds and the process behind their formation is generally well understood: the collapse of a massive star into a black hole triggers the formation of jets, which bore through the collapsing star, producing gamma rays as they emerge. Short GRBs last less than 2 seconds, and the exact nature of the forces behind their formation has proven difficult to understand.
The new simulation ran for nearly seven weeks on the Damiana computer cluster at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany and follows the events as they unfold over 35 milliseconds. The first 15 milliseconds show two neutron stars crashing and transforming into a rapidly spinning black hole. 'Tendex' lines help visualise black holes - space - 13 April 2011. Physicists have a new tool to picture how black holes warp the fabric of space-time around them. Just as magnetic field lines show how magnetic forces vary in space, a new study suggests that "tendex" and "vortex" lines show how gravity warps space. The technique offers new insight into why some black holes get a kick after undergoing a merger, and could help in the search for gravitational waves.
Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that space-time deforms around massive objects, such as black holes. But this warping is notoriously difficult to visualise, since the theory states that each point in space-time is associated with 10 different numbers. Now a team of physicists led by Robert Owen of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says relatively simple patterns of lines can capture its essence, providing a new perspective on phenomena such as merging black holes and gravitational waves. 'Tendex' lines Black hole kicks Such kicks Cancelled out More From New Scientist. Could we (temporarily) get a second sun. Starless planets may be habitable after all - space - 20 February 2011. LIQUID water may survive on free-floating planets that have no star to warm them. If they also support life, they could act as stepping stones to spread life around the galaxy.
Gravitational tussles with other planets or passing stars can eject planets from their solar systems. But even in the cold of space, these wayward worlds could stay warm, thanks to the decay of radioactive elements in their rocky cores. Dorian Abbot and Eric Switzer of the University of Chicago calculate that rocky planets with a similar mass to Earth could remain warm enough to keep water liquid under thick, insulating ice sheets for over a billion years. A planet with the same fraction of water as Earth could keep a subsurface ocean liquid if it was 3.5 times Earth's mass. But a planet with 10 times Earth's water concentration could do this if it weighed just one-third as much as Earth, they say (arxiv.org/abs/1102.1108). New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Promoted Stories Recommended by. What's an alien solar system like? - space - 23 February 2011.
What's wrong with the sun? - space - 14 June 2010. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3 Video: Sun spots SUNSPOTS come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only for them to fade away again after a few days, weeks or months. But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The stakes have never been higher. . , and disputes over the sun's role in climate change, are adding urgency to these studies. Sun behaving badly Sunspots are windows into the sun's magnetic soul. When sunspot numbers drop at the end of each 11-year cycle, solar storms die down and all becomes much calmer. What's special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The first sign that the prediction was wrong came when 2008 turned out to be even calmer than expected.
More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. The sun sends a charged cloud hurtling our way - space - 02 August 2010. Video: Magnetic eruption An unusually complex magnetic eruption on the sun has flung a large cloud of electrically charged particles towards Earth. When the cloud hits, which could be anytime now, it could spark aurorae in the skies around the poles and pose a threat to satellites – though probably not a particularly severe one. On 1 August, a small solar flare erupted above sunspot 1092.
It would not have raised many eyebrows, except that a large filament of cool gas stretching across the sun's northern hemisphere also chose that moment to explode into space. Despite being separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometres, the two events may be linked. Satellite threat Filaments are gigantic tubes of magnetism that fill up with solar gas and hang in the atmosphere of the sun. When the cloud hits our planet, as will happen any day now, satellites could be affected. In the grand scheme of solar things, this is not a big eruption. . Share on emailShare on gmailShare on stumbleupon (YouTube) Two planets found sharing one orbit - space - 24 February 2011. Update on 5 March: Lead researcher Jack Lissauer says: "Further study of the light curve of this target produced an alternative interpretation wherein one of the co-orbital candidates (KOI 730.03) has a period that is twice what we originally estimated.
We think that this new interpretation, without co-orbital candidates, is more likely to be correct. We will continue to acquire Kepler data and ground-based observations ... so we can reach a better understanding of this interesting, multi-resonant, system. " Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star.
If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon's formation. The two planets are part of a four-planet system dubbed KOI-730. Gravitational "sweet spots" make this possible. More From New Scientist. We needn’t be afraid of the dark. Astronomers discover a planet made of diamond. An international team of scientists has discovered a planet made of diamond after first detecting a pulsar using the Parkes and Lovell radio telescopes. Pulsars are essentially small spinning stars approximately 20 km in diameter that emit a beam of radio waves.
As the star spins its radio beam sweeps repeatedly over Earth, allowing radio telescopes to pick up a regular pattern of pulses. However, the arrival times of the pulses emanating from the pulsar - known as PSR J1719-1438 - were markedly and systematically modulated. Researchers subsequently concluded the deviation was due to the gravitational pull of a small companion planet orbiting the pulsar in a binary system. According to Professor Bailes of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, the pulsar and its planet are part of the Milky Way's plane of stars and lie 4,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens (the Snake).
The result? Univ. Another dose of Martian awesome. If someone woke me out of a sound sleep and forced me at gunpoint to say which is my favorite camera in the solar system, they’d probably have to shoot me. But I think that HiRISE onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be in the top three.
And it’s pictures like this one that put it there: [Click to get to greatly embiggened pictures.] That is not a closeup of my chin before I shave. It’s Mars, a dune field in the far north; at latitude 83.5° to be precise, less than 400 km (240 miles) from the north pole. The eternal Martian wind blows the heavy sand into dunes, and you can see the hummocks and ripples from this across the image. But what are those weird tendril thingies? In the Martian winter, carbon dioxide freezes out of the air (and you thought it was cold where you are). Now, you might think I’m making this all up. Oh, baby. I love stuff like this. Awe. We’ve seen this before on Mars, but it’s still shocking and amazing.
SDO_Earth_scale-EDIT2.jpg (JPEG Image, 975x1000 pixels) - Scaled (50%) Full Impulse on my mark… engage! | A User's Guide to the Universe. There has been a ton of chatter on the interwebs about yet another potentially habitable planet in the Gliese 581 system, approximately 20.5 light years from earth. This one, Gliese 581g, was discovered by the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey using Keck. Based on its size, is approximately 3 earth masses, with roughly earth-like gravity. More important still, is the fact that it’s roughly in the middle of the “Goldilocks zone“ Most everyone is focusing on the unfortunate fact that 581g seems to be tidally locked with its sun, which means that one side is blazing hot, and the other is freezing cold (and, of course, that there’d be only either day or night on each side).
But who cares? I’ll take it as read that we could live there — all of the newspapers have. Let’s go now. The Trip to Gliese 581g I’ve explored this sort of topic a number of times before. But if you don’t want to do all of that reading, let me just sketch it out for you. But if you convert to light-years and such, you find: Impact: Earth! Science and Engineering Festival Player > Bill Nye discusses space with ENGINEERING.com. Gravity. The Oh-My-God Particle. By John Walker January 4, 1994 Fly's Eye The University of Utah operates a cosmic ray detector called the Fly's Eye II, situated at the Dugway Proving Ground about an hour's drive from Salt Lake City.
The Fly's Eye consists of an array of telescopes which stare into the night sky and record the blue flashes which result when very high energy cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. From the height and intensity of the flash, one can calculate the nature of the particle and its energy. On the night of October 15, 1991, the Fly's Eye detected a proton with an energy of 3.2±0.9×1020 electron volts.[1,2] By comparison, the recently-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have accelerated protons to an energy of 20 TeV, or 2×1013 electron volts—ten million times less.
All evidence points to these extremely high energy particles being protons—the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Microbial Mass How Fast? How fast was it going? And thus, approximately: v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c Quicktime. A Black Hole Engine That Could Power Spaceships. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo makes first solo flight. The Space Elevator Reference. TEDx Talk: An Elevator to Space © Alan Chan Space Elevator and Earth.
Is a Space Elevator pure fantasy or just a technological leap from reality? Markus Landgraf, a mission analyst at the European Space Agency (ESA), explains how to get to space via elevator. 2012 Space Elevator Conference Proceedings Available The proceedings for last year's Space Elevator Conference are available at the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) Store. If you attended the Conference, this CD will be mailed to you. Concept: Dirigible Space Elevator A Dirigible Space Elevator, a unique combination of aerospace design and geodesic geometry, has many monetary, efficiency and energy saving uses. ISEC Releases Space Elevator Concept of Operations Report The International Space Elevator Consortium has a released a 46 page report titled Space Elevator Concept of Operations. 2013 Space Elevator Conference Set for August in Seattle Annual Space Elevator Conference Set for August 25-27 Conference events to include: