This Atmospheric Phenomenon Is Known As A Circumhorizontal Arc, Which Occurs When The Sun Is At Least

Hubble Chases a Small Stellar Galaxy in the Hunting Dog

by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center   On a clear evening in April of 1789, the renowned astronomer William Herschel continued his unrelenting survey of the night sky, hunting for new cosmic objects — and found cause to celebrate! He spotted this bright spiral galaxy, named NGC 4707, lurking in the constellation of Canes Venatici or The Hunting Dog. NGC 4707 lies roughly 22 million light-years from Earth. NGC stands for “New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars.” Over two centuries later, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is able to “chase down” and view the same galaxy in far greater detail than Herschel could, allowing us to appreciate the intricacies and characteristics of NGC 4707 as never before. This striking image comprises observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), one of a handful of high-resolution instruments currently aboard the space telescope. Herschel himself reportedly described NGC 4707 as a “small, stellar” galaxy; while it is classified as a spiral (type Sm), its overall shape, center, and spiral arms are very loose and undefined, and its central bulge is either very small or non-existent. It instead appears as a rough sprinkling of stars and bright flashes of blue on a dark canvas. The blue smudges seen across the frame highlight regions of recent or ongoing star formation, with newborn stars glowing in bright, intense shades of cyan and turquoise. 

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800-Year-Old Skeleton Yields Genome of Deadly Infection

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GODS AND GODDESSES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD: Enki (Sumerian god of wisdom, water, magic, creation and chaos) 

ENKI (also known as Ea, Enkig, Nudimmud, Ninsiku) was the Sumerian god of wisdom, fresh water, intelligence, trickery and mischief, crafts, magic, exorcism, healing, creation, virility, fertility, and art. 

Iconography depicts him as a bearded man wearing a horned cap and long robes as he ascends the Mountain of the Sunrise; flowing streams of water run from his shoulders, emphasizing his association with life-giving water, while trees representing the male and female principle stand in the background. The streams are interpreted as the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which, according to one myth, were formed from Enki’s semen. His name means “Lord of the Earth” and his symbols are the fish and the goat, both representations of fertility.

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Article by Joshua J. Mark on AHE

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New Impact Hypothesis Might Explain Our Moon’s Uniqueness

“This also helps explain some nice oddities all in one go. “What’s beautiful about this work is that we can end up with the current state of the moon — its orbit, its chemistry — with just one step, without invoking any other event,” says Sarah Stewart, a coauthor on the study. If the Earth rotated on its axis before the impact, and if the protoplanet that collided with Earth were in the Earth-Sun plane, none of this would be possible. But with this, we not only get a rapidly spinning young Earth and a 24-hour, 23.5º tilted Earth today, but a Moon that orbits out of the plane, nearly locked to the Sun rotationally, and locked to the Earth revolution-wise. The pieces all fall together beautifully.”

Why is our Moon so unlike every other moon in the Solar System? No other moon is such a large percent of its parent planet’s mass or size; no other moon rotates so far afield of its planet’s rotational axis; no other moon orbits so far out of the planet-Sun plane. Yet our Moon does it all. The giant impact hypothesis might explain why the Moon is made of the same material as Earth, but wouldn’t explain these features. Unless, that is, the giant impact occurred with a very large velocity out of the plane of proto-Earth’s orbit. Unless, again, the Earth weren’t rotating at 23.5º prior to the impact. This new tweak on the impact hypothesis, put forth by a team of authors earlier this week in the journal Nature, might explain the unique history of the Earth-Moon system, including some features we don’t normally think about as being puzzling.

It isn’t just Earth that’s unique in our Solar System, but the Moon as well. Combined, the great cosmic detective story might have a new lead suspect!

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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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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!

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Patagonian fossil leaves reveal rapid recovery from dinosaur extinction event http://www.geologypage.com/2016/11/patagonian-fossil-leaves-reveal-rapid-recovery-dinosaur-extinction-event.html