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Bang for the Buck on Empire Avenue
I’ve been thinking more about Empire Avenue recently. There is one thing that I think could be the missing part of...
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Vela Supernova Remnant
Credit & Copyright: Marco Lorenzi (Star Echoes)Explanation: The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs through this...
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Opening tomorrow at Gallery 1988 in L.A.: The 3G Show, featuring artwork inspired by Ghosbusters, Gremlins and The Goonies. Sample exhibit...
Huge Rock Crashes Into Moon, Sparks Giant Explosion
If you were looking up at the Moon on March 17, 2013 at 03:50:55 UTC, you might have seen one of the brightest “lunar flashes” ever witnessed. And it would have been visible with just the naked eye.
“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
The scientists estimate that the flash came from a 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hitting the Moon, likely traveling about 90,000 km/hr (56,000 mph.) The resulting explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.
Lunar meteors hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that they don’t require an oxygen atmosphere to create a visible explosion. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.
When researchers looked back at their records from March, they found that the moon meteor might not have been an isolated event.
“On the night of March 17, NASA and University of Western Ontario all-sky cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors right here on Earth” said Cooke. “These fireballs were traveling along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt.”
Though Earth’s atmosphere protected our planet’s surface from being hit by these meteors, the moon has no such luck. Its lack of an atmosphere exposes it to all incoming space rocks, and the NASA monitoring program has spotted more than 300 meteor strikes that reached its surface since 2005.
Part of the motivation for the program is NASA’s eventual intent to send astronauts back to the moon. When they arrive, they’ll need to know how often meteors impact the surface, and whether certain parts of the year, coinciding with the moon’s passage through crowded bits of the solar system, pose special dangers.
“We’ll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-Moon system passes through the same region of space,” Cooke said. “Meanwhile, our analysis of the March 17th event continues.”
The scientists also hope to use NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph the impact site to learn more about how the crash occurred.
Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.
Butterflies have excellent vision. Similar to birds, butterflies are able to see in the ultraviolet spectrum; unlike birds, butterflies have the broadest spectrum of color vision known to exist in the animal kingdom. A compound eye is located on each side of the butterflies’ head and is made up of many little eyes pressed together into one. The tiny individual eyes are called facets, and are made up of six sides. Thousands of facets make up the two compound eyes. Unlike human vision, where we see one image, butterflies see thousands of small images at a time. Underneath the facets is a crystal cone that extends inwardly and forms a transparent rod. When light enters this rod, it has already been reversed twice, making its’ rays parallel so that light enters the rod in a straight line. Compound eyes aid in seeing into the UV, detecting movement, and seeing varied colors. The side location of their eyes enables them to see in different directions at one time, useful in detecting predators. However, butterflies cannot see detail from a distance and can only recognize the fine patterns of other butterflies from a few feet away. This would mean they are capable of seeing their own wings.
So basically this is one of those supposedly profound quotes that tries to make a point while being based on really shitty information and thus falls apart. Surely they could have found an analogy that doesn’t fly in the face of basic scientific observation if they wanted to send the “you’re more beautiful than you think” message..
Glass Frog
The glass frog is a fascinating little creature. While most of the frog’s body is lime green, the abdominal skin is translucent. Most of the internal organs, including the heart, liver, and gastrointestinal tract are visible through its translucent skin. The glass frog is also very small in size, ranging from 3 to 7 cm.
These 2 Maps About Student Loans Explode One of the Biggest Myths About Student Loans
The media fixates on the overall size of student debt. But where you go to school, whether you graduate, and what kind of job you get later may matter much more.
Read more. [Images: FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel]
The always-excellent Midnight Archive visits artist and Oddities host Ryan Matthew Cohn and his massive collection of skulls, shrunken heads, and other curiosities. Oddities’ Ryan Cohn’s apartment Mummies and Monkey Skulls
We never sit here under the weight of all this air, the 5 x 10^18 kg of atmosphere that sits above everyone on Earth, and say “Gosh, that sure is heavy!”
You don’t realize just how powerful that 1 bar (~100 kPa) of pressure is until a train car is filled with steam, allowed to cool, and then implodes ohmygod did that just happen?
For more implosion goodness, check out this awesome video from Veritasium.
(via we-are-star-stuff)
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” So proclaimed God in the Book of Genesis, but what does He know? He hasn’t got anything on Gaia.
Of course you can’t use biblical arguments when…
Stellar Archaeology Traces Milky Way’s History
Unfortunately, stars don’t have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star’s age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. But Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Md., has found the next best thing to a star’s birth certificate.
Using a new technique, Kalirai probed the burned-out relics of Sun-like stars, called white dwarfs, in the inner region of our Milky Way galaxy’s halo. The halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding our galaxy’s disk. Those stars, his study reveals, are 11.5 billion years old, younger than the first generation of Milky Way stars. They formed more than 2 billion years after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Previous age estimates, based on analyzing normal stars in the inner halo, ranged from 10 billion to 14 billion years. Kalirai’s study reinforces the emerging view that our galaxy’s halo is composed of a layer-cake structure that formed in stages over billions of years.
White dwarf stars have remarkable properties, yet they are very simple. These stripped cores of normal hydrogen-burning stars are about 1 million times denser than matter on Earth. This means that a tablespoon of material from a white dwarf’s surface would weigh as much as a school bus on Earth. White dwarfs also have no fuel to generate energy, and most of their atmospheres contain a single atom, hydrogen.
The second figure illustrates the spectral features of a white dwarf, in comparison to the Sun and a blue giant. The white dwarf spectrum is simple, containing only absorption lines from the hydrogen atom. But, unlike the same lines in the blue giant spectrum (a bloated star with a low density), the features in the white dwarf are broadened due to the intense pressure on the surface of the star (essentially, the energy levels of the atom are being perturbed). This broadening of the lines, as well as their depth, is directly related to the mass and temperature of the star. Unlike for most stars, astronomers can therefore reliably establish fundamental properties for white dwarfs from their spectra.
(via we-are-star-stuff)
There are now more Americans in jail than were in Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago
May 9, 2013There are now more Americans in jail — 6 million — than there were in Stalin’s Gulag, reports Fareed Zakaria, in a column called “Incarceration Nation.”
And it’s not just a relative population thing.
The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. How does that compare to other countries?
It’s 7-10X as high:
- Japan has 63 per 100,000,
- Germany has 90 per 100,000
- France has 96 per 100,000
- South Korea has 97 per 100,000
- Britain has 153 per 100,000
And it’s a rapidly exaggerating trend: In 1980, the U.S. only had 150 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. More than half of America’s 6 million prisoners are in jail for drug convictions, with 80% of those in jail for “possession.”
‘Ring of Fire’ eclipse wows Australia
AP: Skygazers across the Australian Outback were among the lucky few to witness a solar eclipse on Friday as the moon glided between Earth and the sun, blocking everything but a dazzling ring of light.
The celestial spectacle, known as a “ring of fire” eclipse, was the second solar eclipse visible from northern Australia in six months. In November, a total solar eclipse plunged the country’s northeast into darkness, delighting astronomers and tourists who flocked to the region from across the globe to witness it.
Photo: Friday’s annular solar eclipse blazes like a ring of fire after sunrise, 45 miles (70 kilometers) south of Newman, Australia. The “second sun” is a lens effect. (Nicole Hollenbeck via SpaceWeather.com)
This 1919 French laxative ad promises that it will set lose a cadre of tiny sewage workers who will personally scour your colon of impacted poop. Butt Pirates
