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Pulsars: How The First ‘False Alien’ Signal Opened Up A New World In Astronomy

“In 1967, a radio source emitting regular, 0.04-second long pulses every 1.3373 seconds was found for the first time using a scintillation array. After the “noise” explanation was ruled out, the next thing people turned towards were intelligent extraterrestrials. There was no natural mechanism in existence that would have explained it at that time, so turning to aliens was logical, if ultimately incorrect.”

Observations that surprise us, of a phenomenon we weren’t expecting and don’t have an explanation for, are some of the most exciting things we can encounter in astronomy. In 1967, regularly pulsing radio sources, discovered without any expectation, provided exactly that. It wasn’t noise; it was definitely a robust, repeatable observation; so what was it? While our imaginations might have run to aliens initially, further developments quickly showed that this was a ball of rapidly rotating neutrons, more massive than even the Sun but only a few kilometers in diameter. These pulsars, as they’re now know, are ubiquitous and come about from the corpses of core-collapse supernova. Could this be a harbinger of what we can expect from the ‘alien megastructure’ controversy?

Come find out how the first ‘false alien’ signal from astronomy opened up a whole new field of science for us to investigate!

Ancient Buddha statue emerges in E. China reservoir

Archaeologists have started an underwater detection project after villagers in eastern China’s Jiangxi Province found the head of a Buddha statue emerging from the surface of a local reservoir.

The head was spotted at Hongmen Reservoir, Nancheng County in the city of Fuzhou, at the end of last year when a hydropower gate renovation project lowered water levels in the reservoir by more than 10 meters.

Judging from the head design, the statue was carved during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), said Xu Changqing, head of the provincial research institute of archaeology.

He said that the researchers had also found rectangular holes carved on the cliff, obvious marks of architecture, which meant that a temple could have existed there. Read more.

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CYGNSS rockets into orbit atop Pegasus

The first Cygnus launch from Cape Canaveral in nearly 10 years successfully placed NASA’s eight CYGNSS satellite into orbits Thursday, December 15. Pegasus, attached to the belly of Orbital ATK’s L-1011 Stargazer aircraft, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Skid Strip runway at 7:38am EDT.  After reaching an altitude of 39,000 feet and within the 10 by 40 mile launch box, Pegasus was commanded for release, falling away from the mothership at 8:37am. Less than five seconds later, the first stage ignited, beginning a 14-minute climb to orbit for Pegasus and the eight CYGNSS satellites. 

CYGNSS, short for Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, will use high-fidelity GPS signals to help forecasters better measure and predict hurricanes. In honor of the storm recently affecting the space coast, the Pegasus rocket launching CYGNSS was named Matthew. This was the 43rd launch of the Pegasus rocket, which made history in 1990 as the world’s first successfully-launched commercially-developed rocket vehicle. It remains the only air-launched rocket system in operation. CYGNSS was originally scheduled for launch Monday, but a faulty hydraulic pump in the rocket’s release mechanism promoted a delay into today. P/C: NASA.

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The eight planets of our solar system image credits: [x]

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The Only Library Ever Recovered from Antiquity: The 1800 Scrolls of Herculaneum

The Villa of the Papyri is the name given to a private house that was uncovered in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. This city, along with nearby Pompeii, is perhaps best remembered for its destruction during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. When the villa was rediscovered, archaeologists were lucky to discover a library of 1800 scrolls. This is the only known library to have survived from the Classical world.

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this atmospheric phenomenon is known as a circumhorizontal arc, which occurs when the sun is at least 58° above the horizon and the hexagonal ice crystals which form cirrus clouds become horizontally aligned.                     

(photos x, x, x, x, x, x, x. see also: more circumhorizontal arcs, asperatus clouds, mammatus clouds, polar stratospheric clouds and cloud iridescence)

My wife has never had a cat/kitten so I got her one. This is… - (Source: http://www.miniurls.co/lJTF)

NGC 7129

Dancer with a Fan by Edgar Degas

Medium: pastel

Celestial nomad takes centre stage

In this new ESO image, nightfall raises the curtain on a theatrical display taking place in the cloudless skies over La Silla.

In a scene humming with activity, the major players captured here are Comet Lovejoy, glowing green in the centre of the image; the Pleiades above and to the right; and the California Nebula, providing some contrast in the form of a red arc of gas directly to the right of Lovejoy.

A meteor adds its own streak of light to the scene, seeming to plunge into the hazy pool of green light collecting along the horizon.

The telescopes of La Silla provide an audience for this celestial performance, and a thin shroud of low altitude cloud clings to the plain below the observatory streaked by the Panamericana Highway.

Comet Lovejoy’s long tail is being pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. Carbon compounds that have been excited by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun give it its striking green hue.

This is the first time the comet has passed through the inner Solar System and ignited so spectacularly in over 11 000 years. Its highly elliptical orbit about the Sun — adjusted slightly due to meddling planets — means that it will not grace our skies for another 8000 years once it has rounded the Sun and begun its lonely voyage back into the cold outer regions of the Solar System.

Image credit: P. Horálek/ESO