If you go outside at night in Fall or Winter and look at the sky, the most impressive constellation is undoubtedly Orion, the mighty hunter of the stars. His right shoulder is marked by a bright star, visibly red even with the naked eye. That's Betelgeuse. Enjoy it now, before it goes away.
According to NOAA, the next solar cycle should peak in about 2013, but with a record low number of sunspots.
The Sun follows a cycle of sunspot activity, with a roughly 11-year period between times of low activity. But the length can vary. Fewer sunspots mean fewer solar flares, less heating of the Earth's upper atmosphere, and fewer auroral displays. (The actual scale of the flares, etc., don't seem to be correlated -- as the linked article points out, one of the worst episodes of solar activity on record came during a similar low cycle.)
There's also a connection between solar activity and climate -- which is why NOAA, rather than, say, NASA, is the agency which keeps tabs on sunspots. Low sunspot activity seems to have a connection with cooler weather. The "Maunder Minimum" of the 17th Century, a period when there may have been no sunspots at all for several decades, correlates pretty neatly with the "little Ice Age" of notably cold weather in Europe.
If all this is true -- and we're talking about estimates and correlations only -- then the next few years should see warmer weather. Let's check back in, oh, 2015 or so and see how it turned out.
This is about astronomy, etymology, history, Passover, Easter, and a bunch of other stuff.
A couple of days ago, on Passover, I got to wondering if there was a connection between the Hebrew word "Pesach," meaning Passover, and the word "Paschal" referring to Easter in Church Latin and various Romance languages. Thanks to the mighty OED, I was able to determine that, yes, there is. Paschal is derived from Pesach. In the Romance languages, Easter is Passover. Indeed, in nearly every language spoken by Christians, the name for Easter is derived from Pesach. Only in our mongrel hybrid English did the feast somehow pick up the name of a minor Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess with a thing for rabbits.
Has anybody found the remote for the Sun yet? Its output is now lower than it has been at any point since 1913.
The idea of the Solar cycle dates back less than 200 years, though it stems from discoveries made in the 17th century. Bear with me: Galileo started observing the Sun around 1610 and discovered sunspots. He also went blind -- don't stare at the Sun, okay?
Anyway, in the 19th century some stereotypically methodical German astronomers, Samuel Schwabe and Rudolf Wolf, began counting sunspots and analyzing their frequency. They discovered something kind of neat: sunspots go in an 11-year cycle. Every 11 years the number of sunspots drops off to nearly zero, then starts building up again.
Right now we're in the middle of an unusually long sunspot minimum. What does this mean? Well, in good news it means less heating of the upper atmosphere, less radio interference, less solar flare risk to astronauts, and in general a quieter environment in space. On the other hand, it might plunge the Earth into an ice age. Plus no auroras.
What exactly causes this cycle is not well understood. Obviously it has something to do with how the Sun's core produced energy, or how the Sun's outer layers release that energy, but as one might imagine it's hard to study the interior of a star.
In the meantime, if you do run across the remote, turn the power back on.
I may need to use all the subject tags on this one. It's got Giant Rocks From Space, DARPA mad scientists, killer robots, parasites, pirates -- oh, and it just may answer some of the Big Questions about life, the universe, and everything.
Weirdness fans may recall that last autumn a group of Somali pirates hijacked an Iranian vessel on the high seas, but then started becoming mysteriously sick. At the time, radiation sickness was suspected, but that was later ruled out.
Now a team of DARPA researchers have identified the culprit in the mystery illness: a parasite infection. Apparently the pirates (and some of the Iranian crew) show signs of a "systemic parasite infestation" similar to our old friend the Sacculina barnacle. Similar, but not identical: the pirates' infestation is an unknown type.
But that's not the weird part. The weird part is what was discovered when investigators used robots (see, I told you there'd be robots) to examine the possibly-radioactive cargo hold of the captured ship. The good news: it wasn't radioactive. The WEIRD news: the hold contained "4.1 tons of stone and iron, identified as meteoritic material from the Nubian desert."
So, to sum up: the pirates have an unknown brain-controlling parasite and a ship full of meteor fragments. It doesn't take H.G. frickin' Wells to see what this means.
They're here.
A while back I discussed the interesting new findings about methane in the Martian atmosphere. (For those joining us already in progress, the short version is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere of Mars periodically jumps, and nobody's sure why.)
Well, a couple of researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston were going over images of the Martian surface and noticed some odd-looking mounds on the northern lowlands of Mars. They look like "mud volcanoes" on Earth. Moreover, when viewed in infrared light, the mounds cool off at night as if they're sediment, not rock.
Terrestrial mud volcanoes emit large amounts of methane gas. Are the Martian mounds the source of the mysterious methane spikes? And if they are mud volcanoes, that means liquid water, the Holy Grail of astrobiology research. Are there microorganisms deep under the Martian surface? Maybe someone should go check.
Today marks the 154th anniversary of the birth of Percival Lowell, a man who made his mark on the entire Solar System. Lowell was one of those Lowells from Boston -- the ones who "only spoke to Cabots" while the Cabots spoke only to God. He was rich, well-educated, and spent many years in Japan as a diplomat before retiring to study astronomy.
Lowell had read Schiaparelli's account of discovering "canali" on Mars and immediately decided to have a look for himself. Not the sort of person to piddle around with a little Astroscan on the patio, he built himself an observatory near Flagstaff and commissioned a 24-inch refracting telescope. For the next several years he spent his nights looking through it at Mars, mapping and naming the network of canals he saw covering its surface. He wrote books about Mars, speculating that it was home to advanced intelligent beings, fighting the drying and cooling of their world with huge engineering projects. His vision of Mars inspired Wells, Burroughs, and countless others.
But of course the canals turned out to be an optical illusion. Mars does have vast waterways, but they were carved by liquid water a billion years ago and today carry nothing but windblown dust. There are no Martians.
Lowell's real mark on the Solar System was the ex-planet Pluto. After satisfying his curiosity about Mars, he turned his attention to looking for a trans-Neptunian planet, whose existence was suggested by certain irregularities in Neptune's orbit. He himself didn't live to see it, but fourteen years after his death Clyde Tombaugh, working at Lowell's observatory, found a tiny moving speck on the photo plates. On what would have been Lowell's seventy-fifth birthday, Tombaugh announced his discovery. The new planet was named Pluto, in honor of the Roman god of the underworld -- but also in honor of Percival Lowell. PLuto, geddit?
So, have a glass of sake in honor of the man who discovered canals that weren't there and sponsored the discovery of a planet which isn't.
Turns out the gas giant planets in the outer Solar System aren't just big -- they're cannibals. At least, that's what a model of moon formation seems to indicate. As the planets formed, each was surrounded by a "debris disc" of rocks, ice, and dust. The disc coalesced into moons. But the mass of each giant's current moons is much smaller than the size of the primordial debris disc. So where did the extra moons go?
According to scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, the gas giants ate them. Interactions with the debris disk sent the early moons plummeting into the parent planet. Gulp.
Interestingly, these findings were anticipated thousands of years ago in Greek myth. The ancients gods Jupiter and Saturn were notorious for swallowing their children. Saturn gobbled down all the Olympians (but had to spit them out again), while Jupiter consumed his pregnant paramour Metis -- only to have their child Athena erupt fully-armed from his forehead. (I offer these mythic parallels free of charge to any crackpots who wish to claim the ancient Greeks knew about the moon-swallowing issue.)
Fortunately for the outer planets, the only evidence of their ancient crimes is the computer model. Any fallen moons would have long since been absorbed into their planetary cores. No witnesses, no corpses -- and the statute of limitations surely ran out a couple of billion years ago.
Still, it's worth keeping an eye on those planets in case they get hungry again . . .
You may recall back in November I 'blogged about the Kepler orbiting telescope and its mission to seek out new Earthlike worlds orbiting distant stars. Well, it's on the pad in Florida right now, waiting for launch tonight. You can see the countdown clock here. NewScientist has a story with some quotes from project team members, but remember, you heard it here first. Good luck, Kepler!
UPDATE (11:45 p.m. EST): It's up! Launched at 10:49, in orbit and everything seems to be fine. Congratulations to the hundreds of people who brought this about.
Or perhaps even YIKES!
(Spotted by Transterrestrial Musings.)
Recent Comments