Gaze Into The Galactic Iris

On this day in 1968, Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, died never having gotten to see man touch the surface of another world.

In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first ambassador of our planet to enter the vastness of space. Vostok 1 was the first manned spaceflight of the early space race, and Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth before landing safely 108 minutes later.

While flying weightless above Earth’s surface, Yuri Gagarin witnessed a spectacular view of home — forests, deserts, and great plains were surrounded by expansive oceans. Upon viewing the thin blue line of the atmosphere, Gagarin became the first of our inquisitive species to see our planet as it truly is — a vibrant, geologically active world circling a star. Unfortunately, Yuri died seven years later during a jet crash in 1968, never having gotten to see man touch the surface of another world.

We at Penny4NASA urge you to honor the memory of this brave man, as his Vostok 1 mission was the catalyst for every manned spaceflight to date.

Klingon Bird Of Prey (Star Trek), Check Out more here

Seven Years of Tracking the Solar Cycle

Our sun is ever-changing, and a satellite called the Solar Dynamics Observatory has a front-row seat. 

On February 11, 2010, we launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, also known as SDO. SDO keeps a constant eye on the sun, helping us track everything from sunspots to solar flares to other types of space weather that can have an impact on Earth.

After seven years in space, SDO has had a chance to do what few other satellites have been able to do – watch the sun for the majority of a solar cycle in 11 types of light.

The sun’s activity rises and falls in a pattern that lasts about 11 years on average. This is called the solar cycle.

Solar activity can influence Earth. For instance, it’s behind one of Earth’s most dazzling natural events – the aurora.

One of the most common triggers of the aurora is a type of space weather called a coronal mass ejection, which is a billion-ton cloud of magnetic solar material expelled into space at around a million miles an hour. 

When these clouds collide with Earth’s magnetic field, they can rattle it, sending particles down into the atmosphere and triggering the auroras. These events can also cause satellite damage and power grid strain in extreme cases. 

The sun is in a declining activity phase, so coronal mass ejections will be less common over the next few years, as will another one of the main indicators of solar activity – sunspots.

Sunspots are created by twisted knots of magnetic field. Solar material in these tangled regions is slightly cooler than the surrounding areas, making them appear dark in visible light.

The tangled magnetic field that creates sunspots also causes most solar activity, so more sunspots means more solar activity, and vice versa. Humans have been able to track the solar cycle by counting sunspots since the 17th century.  

Image: Houghton Library, Harvard University, *IC6.G1333.613ia

The peak of the sun’s activity for this cycle, called solar maximum, was in 2014. 

Now, we’re heading towards the lowest solar activity for this solar cycle, also known as solar minimum. As solar activity declines, the number of sunspots decreases. We sometimes go several days without a single visible sunspot.

But there’s much more to the story than sunspots – SDO also watches the sun in a type of light called extreme ultraviolet. This type of light is invisible to human eyes and is blocked by our atmosphere, so we can only see the sun this way with satellites.

Extreme ultraviolet light reveals different layers of the sun’s atmosphere, helping scientists connect the dots between the sunspots that appear in visible light and the space weather that impacts us here on Earth.

SDO keeps an eye on the sun 24/7, and you can see near real-time images of the sun in 11 types of light at sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data.

Captain Phasma by expandedart

Comments of the Week #158: from event horizons to time travel

From Frank on proving Einstein wrong: “I had read somewhere that one time a reporter said to Einstein “There are hundred professors who say you are wrong.” Einstein answered “If I was really wrong just one professor would be enough.””

Is time travel real, or even better, inevitable? We’ve got a new podcast for you to check out! In addition, don’t miss out on all the bonus science available this week, on topics from scientific activism to relativity to black holes, planetary masses, and how philosophy can lead you away from scientific discovery if you adhere to your notions of “logic” too steadfastly.

Come take a journey into the greatest in-depth discussions available this week about the hottest science topics on this edition of our Comments of the Week!

Whale Flukeprint

Since you guys seemed to enjoy the post on vortices and birds. Here is a throwback for you :

This is a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) fluke-print and it is absolutely gorgeous. They are formed immediately after the whale dunks down into the sea. ( A reminiscent of the whales presence )

As you can observe, the inside surface is smoother compared to the outside waves. It appears that the waves inside have been dampened out somehow.

This paper ( A theory for the hydrodynamic origin of whale flukeprints )  suggests that there are vortices that are formed at the end of fluke print (Region III) which dampens them out. For more details on this phenomenon please read the paper by Levy.et al.

Its really fascinating ! Have a great day!

** video source ,  Image source

There’s No Science Behind Denying Climate Change

“Indeed, if there were a conspiracy, if climate science were a hoax, and if all this research were incorrect, all it would take was one scrupulous, competent scientist. But every scrupulous, competent scientist that investigates it has come to the same conclusion: it’s real, it’s warming, and it’s our CO2 that’s doing it. You are free to deny climate change if you want, but there’s no scientific leg to stand on if you do.”

It only makes sense that scientists should debate and argue over the findings in their field. Given all the suites of data available that are relevant to a particular physical phenomenon, how do we put it together in a way that is scientifically robust, allow us to understand and predict what’s happening, and justifiably attribute the causes of observed phenomena? It’s a daunting task, and one that you need science for. So when it comes to global warming, why aren’t the arguments about the temperature and atmospheric concentrations of gases over time? Why are they instead about scientific personalities, profitability, conspiracies and hacked emails? Why, instead, aren’t those opposing the science of human-caused climate change pointing to data and scientific arguments?

After all, the only thing it would take to overturn anthropogenic climate change was one compelling scientific argument. Learn why, if you value scientific thinking, it’s incompatible with climate change denial.

In this detailed view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the so-called Cat’s Eye Nebula looks like the penetrating eye of the disembodied sorcerer Sauron from the film adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings.”

The nebula, formally cataloged NGC 6543, is every bit as inscrutable as the J.R.R. Tolkien phantom character. Though the Cat’s Eye Nebula was one of the first planetary nebulae to be discovered, it is one of the most complex such nebulae seen in space. A planetary nebula forms when Sun-like stars gently eject their outer gaseous layers that form bright nebulae with amazing and confounding shapes.

In 1994, Hubble first revealed NGC 6543’s surprisingly intricate structures, including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas, and unusual shock-induced knots of gas.

As if the Cat’s Eye itself isn’t spectacular enough, this new image taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) reveals the full beauty of a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat’s Eye. Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky — that’s why it appears bright along its outer edge.

Observations suggest the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells, each of which contain as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined (still only one percent of the Sun’s mass). These concentric shells make a layered, onion-skin structure around the dying star. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible.

Until recently, it was thought that such shells around planetary nebulae were a rare phenomenon. However, Romano Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain) and collaborators, in a paper published in the European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics in April 2004, have instead shown that the formation of these rings is likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

The bull’s-eye patterns seen around planetary nebulae come as a surprise to astronomers because they had no expectation that episodes of mass loss at the end of stellar lives would repeat every 1,500 years. Several explanations have been proposed, including cycles of magnetic activity somewhat similar to our own Sun’s sunspot cycle, the action of companion stars orbiting around the dying star, and stellar pulsations. Another school of thought is that the material is ejected smoothly from the star, and the rings are created later on due to formation of waves in the outflowing material. It will take further observations and more theoretical studies to decide between these and other possible explanations.

Approximately 1,000 years ago the pattern of mass loss suddenly changed, and the Cat’s Eye Nebula started forming inside the dusty shells. It has been expanding ever since, as discernible in comparing Hubble images taken in 1994, 1997, 2000, and 2002. The puzzle is what caused this dramatic change? Many aspects of the process that leads a star to lose its gaseous envelope are still poorly known, and the study of planetary nebulae is one of the few ways to recover information about these last few thousand years in the life of a Sun-like star.

Object Names: Cat’s Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: R. Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain) and Z. Tsvetanov (NASA)

Time And Space

Berries - Vadim Sadovski