Looking to the Stars: NASA Touts ‘Beautiful’ Meteor Shower Wednesday

By JOE JACKSON

NASA / MEO / B. COOKE False-color image of a rare early Quadrantid, captured by a NASA meteor camera in 2010.

Heads up for stargazers: an annual meteor shower early Wednesday morning promises a “brief, beautiful show” worth waking – or staying – up for this year.

The Quadrantids, a little-known meteor shower named after an extinct constellation, should peak for a few hours after 3 a.m. on Jan. 4. The agency has billed it as “an excellent chance for hardy souls to start the year off with some late-night meteor watching.” (Alas, it will only be visible from the northern hemisphere.)

Black Hole Drinks 140 Trillion Earths’ Worth of Water

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

We don’t think of the universe as a terribly wet place, but in fact, there’s water out in space pretty much everywhere you

This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. NASA / ESA

look. A few billion years ago, Mars was awash in the stuff, with rivers scouring twisted channels en route to ancient seas. The Solar System from Jupiter outward would be an interplanetary water park if most of the H2O out there weren’t frozen. Saturn’s rings are made mostly of trillions of chunks of ice. The comets are mostly ice. So is Pluto. Jupiter’s moon Europa has a thick shell of ice surrounding a salty ocean, kept warm by the little world’s internal heat. Saturn’s moon Eceladus spews its own subsurface water into space in titanic geysers that form a ring of vapor that surrounds Saturn itself. Uranus and Neptune are known to planetary scientists simply as “ice giants.”

And it doesn’t stop in our own solar system. Water — solid, liquid or vaporous — has been turning up for years, all over the cosmos. So it takes a pretty impressive discovery to put space water in the headlines. But “impressive” may be an understatement for what two international teams of astronomers have turned up. Peering out to the very edges of the visible universe, both groups have detected a cloud of water vapor weighing in at a mind-bending 140 trillion times the mass of the world’s oceans, swirling around a giant black hole 20 billion times the mass of the Sun.

To be precise, the water vapor is mixed with dust and other gases, including carbon monoxide, forming a cloud hundreds of light-years across. (The star closest to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is less than four light-years away.) The cloud is so enormous that while it’s incredibly massive, it’s also vanishingly sparse: the thinnest morning fog is hundreds of trillions of times denser.

Most surprising of all perhaps, is the fact that finding such an immense reservoir of water, lurking in the cosmos just 1.6 billion years or so after the Big Bang, makes perfect sense. Hydrogen has always been the most common element in the universe. Oxygen is less common, but there’s still plenty of it, and the two love to combine whenever they get the chance. And in fact, previous observations had turned up water from only about a billion years later in the life of the cosmos. Earthly astronomers have previously used water vapor swirling around a black hole to try and understand the mysterious dark energy that pervades the cosmos.

GOOD THINGS TO KNOW

[1] If you are right handed, you will tend to chew your food on the right side of your mouth. If you are left handed, you will tend to chew your food on the left side of your mouth.

[2] To make half a kilo of honey, bees must collect nectar from over 2 million individual flowers

[3] Heroin is the brand name of morphine once marketed by ‘Bayer’.

[4] Communications giant Nokia was founded in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill by Fredrik Idestam.

[5] Tourists visiting Iceland should know that tipping at a restaurant is considered an insult! In America tipping is forced upon customer at 15 to 18%.

[6] People in nudist colonies play volleyball more than any other sport.

[7] Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.

[8] Astronauts can’t belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs. 

[9] Ancient Roman, Chinese and German societies often used urine as mouthwash. 

[10] The average person who stops smoking requires one hour less sleep a night. 

[11] The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. In the Renaissance era, it was fashion to shave them off! 

[12] Because of the speed at which Earth moves around the Sun, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds. 

NASA STEREO Images Entire Sun For First Time Ever (VIDEO)

Amazing!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NASA spies storm stretching across the Sun

New findings from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) reveal that the Sun’s surface is an even more complicated

A global event on 1 August 2010

web of physical and magnetic processes than previously thought. The finding was unveiled this week in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting and could lead to better forecasts of radiation levels experienced by satellites.

The surface of the Sun is an incredibly volatile environment, which frequently ejects intense radiation and clouds of energetic radiation into space. These emissions pose a serious threat to astronauts and if they reach Earth they can wreak havoc with telecommunications satellites.

The research focuses on the analysis of an event that occurred on 1 August 2010 when almost the entire Earth-facing side of the Sun erupted in a tumult of activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The event was captured by equipment on board the SDO, launched in February to investigate the causes of solar variability and how this creates a weather system in space.

Connected phenomena

While earlier missions have returned data from isolated active regions of the Sun, the SDO and its twin STEREO spacecraft were specifically designed to study magnetic activity over almost the whole star. This enabled Karel Schrijver and Alan Title of Lockhead Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory to deconstruct the activities of 1 August to look for connections between the different phenomena.

Living with a star

Physics world

Launched in February, data from the sensitive suite of instruments aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are already reshaping what we know about solar processes and the causes of space weather, says Alan Title

The Sun is at its most beautiful when it is at its most dangerous. That beauty is visible down here on Earth in the form of the northern and southern lights, which appear when charged particles from the Sun strike the Earth’s upper atmosphere. But out in space, the consequences of Sun-caused “space weather” are not so benign: the high-energy particles, X-rays and gamma rays that the Sun emits can damage sensitive electronics, crash computers and have dangerous (possibly even fatal) effects on astronauts.

Most of the time, the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the more violent events that occur in the solar atmosphere, such as explosions near the Sun’s surface (known as solar flares) or eruptions of huge bubbles of gas from inside the Sun (called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs). Even so, when charged particles from the Sun hit the Earth’s magnetic field, the field gets distorted and compressed. The resulting changes in the densities of charged particles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere can produce significant effects. Radio communications can be disrupted and, sometimes, such changes can induce damaging currents in long power lines, buried cables and oil pipelines. Giant flares have even destroyed power transformers and brought down electrical grids.

Yet like the auroral displays, the solar processes that cause space weather are also stunningly beautiful. The image on the left shows a ring-shaped prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun, sending a pulse of plasma rushing outwards at a speed of about 300 km s^–1. Before the eruption, this prominence existed as a long tube of relatively cool, magnetically contained material just above the visible surface. It was then destabilized by mechanisms that are not completely understood. Such mechanisms are important because they can produce CMEs, which can launch up to 10 billion tonnes of hot plasma into the heliosphere – with serious consequences for any object, human or otherwise, that happens to be in the way.

Detailed Pictures Of The Sun Let You Get Up Close And Personal With The Star (PHOTOS)

Amazing!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost