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JamesSavik

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  1. JamesSavik
    This Type II (core collapse) supernova was captured by cameras of ROTSE-III and followed up with the Keck. Pictured is a before and after image of the general area from file images.
     
    Lately there have been several very bright supernova, in contrast with what we usually see out of objects with similar spectral characteristics. Clearly it is a type II event- confirmed by spectra.
     
    Why have the type II SN we've been seeing lately been so bright? Could it be because they occure in a low extinction wavepath proximate to our position? Galaxies in particular and the universe in general are rather dusty places. As a wave packet of happy little photons at specific wavelengths zips along at relativietic speeds, its very easy for some of those photons to be lost in galactic or intergalactic gas and dust- the higher the frequence, the greater the loss. This loss is called extinction which works by a process called absorption which can be observed spectroscopically. As light passes through gas and dust clouds, it leave absortpion lines on the spectra. The more material that the light passes through, the more absortion occures until the signal is gone.
     
    Absorption isn't such a bad thing. Our oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere absorbs everything on the high side of UV, x-rays and gamma rays and protects us all from ionizing radiation. Yeah atmosphere!
     
    Absorption is as much a tool as it is a nuisance. It allows us to see if gas or dust clouds lie between us and a star and the absortption line spectra gives us clues as to the composition, temperature and even chemistry of those clouds.
     
    This SN occured at what's called a "HIGH-Z" or high redshift, specifically z = 0.2832 putting it in the neighborhood of 5 billion light years away.
     
    Quimby, et al: SN 2005AP: A MOST BRILLIANT EXPLOSION
  2. JamesSavik

    Gays In the Military

    By JamesSavik,

    Obviously there were no gays in the military in this WWII era recruitment poster- despite the coy looking blond twink servicing all those pipes and valves.
     

     
    Nothing homo-erotic at all about this big, burly sweaty man slamming that big shell home...
     

     
    This WWI era recruiting poster is looking for young men and seamen...
     

     
    Oh well, leave it too the marines to know where the action is.
     
    Semper fi, do or die, Marine Corp, Marine Corp, Marine Corp!
     
    _______________________________________________________________
     
    I mean absolutely no disrespect to any of the services... even the Air Farce. I just wish that I had the oppertunity.
     
    You can save any of these images by backclick, save image.
  3. JamesSavik

    Libris Magnus- I

    By JamesSavik,

    I have been working on a project for a long time that I'm going to describe in the next few blog entries.
     
    I began collecting e-books some time ago. At first it was just a few but as I began finding more and more sources for them, my ebooks collection became like a snowball rolling downhill getting bigger and bigger gathering momentum.
     
    It wasn't too long before the management of this collection became a real chore. This library is now several hundred gigs in size and contains over 100,000 distinct volumes.
     
    There are a great many headaches involved. First: formats- there is pdf, djv, txt, html, compiled html and more. Second: some volumes are teasers and are incomplete and ineligible for inclusion. Third: some books don't neatly fit into one subject area- e.g. Does An Atlas of Gravity belong in the Reference section, physics section or astrophysics section? Fourth: duplicates are a big problem and are not easily detected.
     
    As a person who has worked in "Information Systems" for 20+ years, the management of unstructured data is a challenge that I have been working on for a very long time. While many applications are neatly and cleanly death with in the tabular format of spreadsheets and relational databases, knowledge is not so neat or clean. It comes in blobs and often overlaps on to completely different genres. The breakthrough that I have accomplished is not making knowledge fit into a nice neat package or application. It is building the application to accommodate the knowledge.
     
    Various schemes have been devised to accomplish this. The oldest and best known is the Dewey Decimal System which is a reasonable and efficient way to organize paper libraries. When IT is applied to the problem however, Dewey's decimals don't add up. The DDS depends on numbers like 431.11c, 536.32 and 702.122. The problem is that computers see those numbers as REAL numbers with a decimal part and an exponent. In some cases a Dewey Decimal Number doesn't equal a number that the computer can use. Because of rounding, 702.122 might actually equal 702.123. This Dawg just won't hunt.
     
    In the eighties, another scheme developed for organizing library data with info technology in mind is called MARC MAchine Readable Cataloging. MARC kicks butt for cataloging libraries. The problem is that it was expanded to encompass ALL of the different things that modern libraries are keeping: records, CDs, software, etc. MARC has become so complex that it has become unwieldy and difficult to work with.
     
    The use of other methods is underway like XML and XML enabled databases but the central problem remains: how best to organize and structure an electronic library?
  4. JamesSavik
    Once upon a time there was a thing called science. Science was a beautiful thing because it offered answers to those with the wits to comprehend without the need for witch-doctors or crystal balls. In fact science offered humanity something very special: an ordered universe without the need for the super-natural.
     
    Science had a pristine logic and reasoning process because even when science reached the wrong conclusion, each step in the scientific method depends on empirical evidence and peer review. Even when science made a mistake, it was an honest mistake shared by thousands of researchers slapping themselves in the forehead and saying DOH! The mistake would not stand because in contrast to the unchanging dogma of religion or the mysterious will of an unseen God, SCIENCE NEVER CLAIMED PERFECTION.
     
    Science dismisses outmoded or incorrect theories all the time. In fact one of the most important scientific theories of our time is called the Uncertainly Principal.
     
    Belief systems that claim perfection hold on to their laws long after they have been shown to be inaccurate or seriously flawed. Theirs is the burden of perfection: static, unchanging and never being able to admit that they are WRONG.
     
    Without the burden of perfection, science is free to explore the universe and make mistakes improving itself in a stepwise refinement process. Belief systems that claim perfection (inerrant) must suppress or subvert knowledge of the universe because it exposes the imperfections in their dogma.
     
    It is inevitable that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. It is the subversion of knowledge that most concerns me.
     
    Some years ago, religions saw that they were falling outside the mainstream of modern thought. Catholics had long associations with universities but other denominations saw that their theories were being brushed aside. A number of Universities were established by and for the purpose of keeping these religions relevant. BYU, Liberty University and literally hundreds of colleges run by Baptist, Methodist and other religions exist simply to give theories like "Creation Science" or "Intelligent Design" a platform and the quacks that spread this stuff a place to work where they don't have to compete with real scientists.
     
    Beware of those who are selling perfection. It simply does not exist. It is one of a bunch of illusions which opportunists use to exert control.
     
    I'll stick with science because it gives us room explore since we don't claim to know everything and the very human capability to occasionally be wrong.
  5. JamesSavik
    Canada's space telescope cracks open a massive star
    UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL NEWS RELEASE
    Source Link
    Posted: May 18, 2005
     
    The MOST space telescope has given astronomers new clues about an exotic star, at least ten times more massive than our Sun, spewing gas into space at a rate of more than 100 trillion tonnes per second.
     
    And according to results presented at the Canadian Astronomical Society meeting in Montreal, Canada, the star - with the misleadingly bland name of WR123(*) - is even weirder than astronomers ever suspected.
     
    The new findings, by Laure Lefevre and Anthony Moffat (Universite de Montreal), Sergey Marchenko (Western Kentucky University) and the international MOST science team, are based on over five weeks of non-stop monitoring of the light variations of WR123. WR123 is a member of the relatively rare class of Wolf-Rayet stars (named after two French astronomers who discovered their telltale strong plasma winds using a simple spectroscope in the Paris suburbs in 1867, ironically the same year Canada became a nation).
     
    Wolf-Rayet stars like WR 123 have long been known to exhibit complex - seemingly chaotic - brightness variations associated with the turbulent high-speed winds they eject into space. But the nearly continuous coverage possible with the MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) satellite has revealed a clock in the chaos - a stable variation repeating every 10 hours (see figure illustrating WR123 variations).
     
    "Finding a clock in a star like WR123 is like finding the Rosetta stone for astronomers studying massive stars," explained Ms. Lefevre, a PhD student at the Universite de Montreal. "However, although WR123 may vary like clockwork, it must be a very strange mechanism indeed."
     
    The only theories to explain the 10-hour clock in WR123 would be: (1) the rotation of the star itself, (2) the orbit of another small star around WR123, or (3) vibrations in the structure of WR123 that are transmitted to its dense enveloping wind. All of these ideas are equally strange. If WR123 is spinning at that rate, the surface would be moving so fast (about 2000 kilometres per *second*, or over 7 million kph) that the star should throw itself apart, unless that is the actual source of the wind! If the star is in a tight binary system, it's so tight that its companion would be orbiting *inside* the star itself. If pulsations are the right answer, theoreticians will have to completely revise their current understanding of this class of massive stars.
     
    The same period was hinted at in spectroscopic data obtained from an Earthbound observatory a year earlier, but the MOST results leave little doubt as to the bizarre timing of this stellar clock.
     
    One hundred times fainter than what the unaided eye can see, WR123 is located about 19,000 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Aquila ("the Eagle"). WR123 and other similar Wolf-Rayets (see the Hubble image of WR124) are believed to have had very violent births, ejected by a supernova explosion in a binary system, or by a gravitational slingshot from a dense star cluster. "Either way, WR123 was probably kicked out from the nest rather abruptly," jokes Dr. Moffat, who helped develop these formation theories in the late 1970's.
     
    Stars that start off their lives with ten or more times the Sun's mass are capable of "burning" hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, and so on up to the final nuclear ash, iron, before the iron-rich core collapses on itself in less than a second and produces the greatest of all stellar explosions, a supernova. Since H-burning lasts by far the longest, some 90% of stars that shine are actually consuming hydrogen in their cores at a prodigious rate. Then, somewhat under 10% of stars are in the next stage, that of He-burning, while only a miniscule fraction occurs in the subsequent, ever-faster evolving stages. WR123 represents the fleeting final stages of helium-burning, before the rapid death-spiral to supernova.
     
    The gases ejected from stars like WR123 will enrich the interstellar medium, and contribute to future generations of stars. Understanding such stars is vital if we are to properly understand the evolution of the Milky Way and other galaxies. "We may be seeing an example of one of the key stages in the stellar lifecycle that led to the Sun, Earth, and us, being here," noted Ms. Lefevre.
     
    The MOST mission was financed by the Canadian Space Agency and supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
     
    __________________________________
     
    *- WR stars are so rare that less than 200 of them have been cataloged.
     
    The current theory is that WR stars are not a specific class of star as much as they are a later stage in the evolution of the hot, massive O and B class stars. In fact, WR stars are only found in clusters called OB associations.
     
    WR stars are so powerful (luminious) that a mere sprinkling of them can influence the spectra of an entire galaxy. In fact the phenemenon that astronomers called Wolf-Rayet galaxies are spiral galaxies which show emission spectra. This is interperted as active star formation since O and B class stars from which WR stars evolve have relatively short lifespans- between 10-60 million years.
     
    WR123 indicates that this star is listed in van der Hutch's 7th General Catalog of Wolf Rayet Stars.
  6. JamesSavik

    Nova Scorpii 2007!

    By JamesSavik,

    V1280 Scorpii = Nova Scorpii 2007
    (February 7, 2007)
    Source: American Association of Variable Star Observers
     
    IAUC 8803 announces a new nova in Scorpius, independently
    discovered by Y. Nakamura and Y. Sakurai. The position is
     
    16:57:40.91 -32:20:36.4 J2000
     
    and the unfiltered magnitude is about 8.3
    (T. Krajci, 2007-02-06).
     
    Spectra indicate blue color, no emission blueward of 540nm,
    but Halpha emission with P-Cyg profile.
     
    Report observations to the AAVSO as: 9999+99 V1280 Sco. Please be sure to
    indicate what you used for comparison stars.
     
    Thank you for your astronomical efforts and contributions!
     
    This special notice was compiled by: Arne A. Henden
    _________________________________________________________________
     
    No- this isn't a super-nova. They are bigger and more dramatic. This is an outburst of a recurrent nova- a white dwarf that has an extremely unstable outer layer.
     
    Here is a good explanation of how they tick: Nova at Wiki
     
    This Nova is special because it is the brightest one in several years and is fairly easy to see. If you go outside to look for it, it is the "new" star inside the curl in Scorpio's tail.
  7. JamesSavik
    Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock and roll band in the world, I give you the Rolling Stones!
     

    Sucking in the Seventies

    Some Girls
     
    It's May 1980. Me and all of my friends and a bunch of friendly strangers without many clothes have been partying since March. It is the graduation season: sangria in garbage drums, feasts of friend, alive we cried, stoned, immaculate, laid and luded, wasted and poluted...
     
    I'm sitting on a bean-bag chair in my friend Scotty's houseboat hitting the bong and drinking wine at 10:00 in the morning. The party never really ended; you just passed out for a while and woke up to start all over again.
     
    Yesterday's hangover was dancing in my head so I turned on the radio to confuse its rythym. Scotty groaned from his place beneath the table. He hated the Knack and who the f**K was "My Sharona" anyway? His groan became even more plaintiff when the next song rolled out: Toni Basil's Hey Mickey. I started to feel a little queezy myself.
     
    David sat up from his spot on the sofa and whined, "Oh for God's sake gimme me a bong hit and change the station."
     
    I loaded a hit for David and handed him the bong and changed the station to find the Rolling Stones Missing You which quickly tamed the unrest caused by Toni Basil's bubble-gum abomination that so grated on hung-over ears.
     
    Joey sat up and grabbed the phone and started dialing furiously.
     
    He sat patiently and then asked, "Am I caller number seven?", "No shit? I'm Joey White of 230 Dogwood. I'll be right down."
     
    Joey hung up the phone and started bouncing around the room, and muttering something about the Stones.
     
    Bouncing and muttering was very unpopular given the circumstances so Scotty grabbed him and said, "Dude, settle! What about the Stones?"
     
    Joey caught his breath and gathered his composure enough to form a complete sentence. "Dudes- Miss You was K-rock's secret song! I just won six tickets to see the Stones in New Orleans. We're going to see the Stones!"
     
    Suddenly six people were bouncing off the walls. The Stones. New Orleans. The Superdome... Holy shit! We're going to see the Stones!
     
    ...to be continued
     
     
    Miss You
     
    I've been holding out so long
    I've been sleeping all alone
    Lord I miss you
    I've been hanging on the phone
    I've been sleeping all alone
    I want to kiss you
     
    Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
     
    Well, I've been haunted in my sleep
    You've been starring in my dreams
    Lord I miss you
    I've been waiting in the hall
    Been waiting on your call
    When the phone rings
    It's just some friends of mine that say,
    "Hey, what's the matter man?
    We're gonna come around at twelve
    With some Puerto Rican girls that are just dyin' to meet you.
    We're gonna bring a case of wine
    Hey, let's go mess and fool around
    You know, like we used to"
     
    Aaah aaah aaah aaah aaah aaah aaah
     
    Oh everybody waits so long
    Oh baby why you wait so long
    Won't you come on! Come on!
     
    I've been walking Central Park
    Singing after dark
    People think I'm crazy
    I've been stumbling on my feet
    Shuffling through the street
    Asking people, "What's the matter with you boy?"
     
    Sometimes I want to say to myself
    Sometimes I say
     
    Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
    Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
    Oooh oooh oooh
     
    I guess I'm lying to myself
    It's just you and no one else
    Lord I won't miss you child
    You've been blotting out my mind
    Fooling on my time
    No, I won't miss you, baby, yeah
     
    Lord, I miss you child
  8. JamesSavik
    Hubble mission will be devilishly complex
    Kelly Young for NewScientist.com news service
    01 November 2006
    Source Link
     
     
    The space shuttle's final flight to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope will be one of its most complex yet, featuring five spacewalks and some quick bolt changes usually reserved for the pit stops of car races.
     
    On Tuesday, NASA announced to great fanfare that it would send a shuttle to service Hubble as early as May 2008. If the mission were successful, Hubble would have six working instruments for the first time since 1993 and would be able to do science until at least 2013, adding about five years to its professional lifetime.
     
    "Looking back on the last four years, without reservation, today is my happiest day to be at the office," said Preston Burch, Hubble's mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.
     
    The mission had been cancelled in 2004 because of safety risks to the shuttle crew
  9. JamesSavik
    Discovery of Gamma Rays from the Edge of a Black Hole
     
    Press Release of the Max Planck Society
    Oct 26, 2006
    Source Link
     
    H.E.S.S. discovers drastic variations of very-high-energy gamma rays from the central engine of the giant elliptical galaxy M 87
     
    The astrophysicists of the international H.E.S.S. collaboration report the discovery of fast variability in very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays from the giant elliptical galaxy M 87. The detection of these gamma-ray photons - with energies more than a million million times the energy of visible light - from one of the most famous extragalactic objects on the sky is remarkable, though long-expected given the many potential sites of particle acceleration (and thus gamma-ray production) within M 87. Much more surprising was the discovery of drastic gamma-ray flux variations on time-scales of days. These results, for the first time, exclude all possible options for sites of gamma-ray production, except for the most exciting and extraordinary one: the immediate vicinity of the super-massive black hole which is located in the centre of M 87 (Science Express, October 26, 2006).
     

    Fig. 1: Image of radio galaxy M 87 seen in visible light. The central region, from which the VHE gamma rays are seen, is located in the upper left part of the image and the relativistic plasma jet extends to the bottom right.(HST)
     
    An international team of astrophysicists from the H.E.S.S. collaboration has announced the discovery of short-term variability in the flux of very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays from the radio galaxy M 87. In Namibia, the collaboration has built and operates a detection system, known as Cherenkov telescopes, which permits these gamma rays to be detected from ground level (see notes). Pointing this system at a nearby galaxy, M 87, the team has detected VHE gamma rays over the past four years. The real surprise is, however, that the intensity of the emission can be seen to change drastically within a few days on occasion.
     
    The giant radio galaxy M 87

    [editor's note: this is a reference image of M87 from my own files.]
    This galaxy, located 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, harbours a super-massive black hole of 3 thousand million solar masses from which a jet of particles and magnetic fields emanates. However, unlike for previously-observed extragalactic sources of VHE gamma rays - known as Blazars - the jet in M 87 is not pointing towards the Earth but is seen at an angle of about 30
  10. JamesSavik

    Projects/Progress

    By JamesSavik,

    I owe it to my fan to let him know what is up. The check is in the mail.
     
    ________________________________________________________
    Broken- on hiatus. Six to nine more chapters, 2 written, all outlined. This is a pretty emotional story to write and the climax of the story is coming. When it is released, it will be ready. I thought about finishing this story this fall but wasn't satisfied with it.
     
    Operation Hammerhead- working There will be much more of this story.
     
     
    Coming Soon
     
    the Legacy- in development A World War II veteran leaves his son a dangerous legacy.
     
    the Alternative- in development. What happens to a troubled kid that gets in trouble?
     
    Blind Spot- in development. When loyalty is a liability.
  11. JamesSavik
    Jupiter's Little Red Spot Growing Stronger
    Press Release: 10.10.06
    Nasa- Goddard Space Flight Center
    Source Link
     

    These are two views of Jupiter's Little Red Spot taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in April 2006. The left image is a close-up view. In the right image, a box has been added to show the Little Red Spot's location on Jupiter. The larger Great Red Spot, which has been observed for the past 400 years, can be seen to the right. Image Credit: NASA / ESA / Amy Simon-Miller
    ______________________________________________________
     
    The highest wind speeds in Jupiter's Little Red Spot have increased and are now equal to those in its older and larger sibling, the Great Red Spot, according to observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
     
    The Little Red Spot's winds, now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour, signal that the storm is growing stronger, according to the NASA-led team that made the Hubble observations. The increased intensity of the storm probably caused it to change color from its original white in late 2005, according to the team.
     
    "No one has ever seen a storm on Jupiter grow stronger and turn red before," said Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a paper describing the new observations appearing in the journal Icarus. "We hope continued observations of the Little Red Spot will shed light on the many mysteries of the Great Red Spot, including the composition of its clouds and the chemistry that gives it its red color."
     
    Although it seems small when viewed against Jupiter's vast scale, the Little Red Spot is actually about the size of Earth, and the Great Red Spot is around three Earth diameters across. Both are giant storms in Jupiter's southern hemisphere powered by warm air rising in their centers.
     
    The Little Red Spot is the only survivor among three white-colored storms that merged together. In the 1940s, the three storms were seen forming in a band slightly below the Great Red Spot. In 1998, two of the storms merged into one, which then merged with the third storm in 2000. In 2005, amateur astronomers noticed that this remaining, larger storm was changing color, and it became known as the Little Red Spot after becoming noticeably red in early 2006.
     
    The new Hubble observations by the team reveal that winds in the Little Red Spot have grown stronger compared to previous observations. In 1979, Voyager 1 and 2 flew by Jupiter and recorded that top winds were only about 268 miles per hour in one of the "parent" storms that merged to become the Little Red Spot. Nearly 20 years later, the Galileo orbiter revealed that top wind speeds were still the same in the parent storm, but winds in the Great Red Spot blew at up to 400 miles per hour. The team used Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument to discover that top wind speeds in both storms are now the same, because this instrument has enough resolution to track small features in these storms, revealing their wind speeds.
     
    Scientists are not sure why the Little Red Spot is growing stronger. One possibility is a change in size. These storms naturally fluctuate in size, and their winds spin around their central core of rising air. If the storm were to become smaller, its spiraling winds would increase the same way spinning ice skaters turn faster by pulling their arms closer to their bodies. Another possibility is that it's the only survivor. "The lack of other large storms in the same latitude on Jupiter leaves more energy to feed the Little Red Spot," said Simon-Miller.
     
    According to the team, the increased intensity of the Little Red Spot probably explains why it changed color. It is likely to be behaving like the Great Red Spot for two reasons: it has the same wind speed and the team's color analysis showed that it really is the same color as the Great Red Spot. It's probably pulling up gaseous material from far below that changes color when exposed to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. The question remains whether the storm is pulling up something that it wasn't before, because its increased intensity allows it to reach deeper, or whether it is pulling up the same material but the higher winds allow the storm to hold it aloft longer, increasing the time it is exposed to solar ultraviolet light and turning it red.
     
    The team could confirm exactly what the red material is if they are able to use a technique called spectroscopy in future observations of the Little Red Spot. Spectroscopy is an analysis of the light given off by an object. Each element and chemical gives a unique signal - brightness at specific colors or wavelengths. Identifying these signals reveals an object's composition.
     
    However, spectroscopy of Jupiter's atmosphere is complicated because it has many chemicals that could turn red if exposed to ultraviolet light. "We need to simulate different possible Jupiter atmospheres in a lab so we can discover what spectrometric signals they give. We will then have something to compare with the actual spectrometric signal," said Simon-Miller.
     
    The team includes Simon-Miller, Dr. Nancy J. Chanover and Michael Sussman of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, N.M.; Dr. Glenn S. Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Irene G. Tsavaris of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Dr. Erich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona, Tucson
     
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The red spots of Jupiter have been described as a shere between fronts with differential temperatures, a hurricane and a magnetic storm. Truthfully, it has never really been adaquately explained or modeled. The great red spot has been around for at least 400 years. "Red jr" as it is nicknamed has formed in recent years.
     
    One of the biggest mysteries of star formation is how and when do proto-stars pass through the barrier and become stars. For large stars, the ignition of the Hydrogen burning fusion process is easily explained by pressure and heat created by gravity. However in very small stars, this trigger-point and how it is reached is not at all obvious.
     
    Jupiter is often called a "failed star" because it is mostly hydrogen and helium gas. It is the prototypical "brown dwarf". In fact extra-solar planets are described in terms of Jupiters mass.
     
    Since the Pioneer, Voyager and Gallieo probes have visited Jupiter, we've been very surprised by how energetic and active a cold gas giant can be. With the exception of the Sun, it has the most powerful magnetic and gravitational fields in the solar system.
     

     
    In this photo of Jupiters northern polar region taken by the Galieo probe, we see massive aurora activity in which charged solar plasmas interact with Jupiters magnetic field. Any manned mission to Jupiters moons would have to contend with intense radiation.
     
    Jupiter shows us tantalizing clues of processes and forces that we are only beginning to understand. What role does magnetism play? How do magnetic and gravitational fields interact and how much of that energy is bound into the system?
     
    So how do dwarf main sequence stars fire up? Perhaps Jupiter will show us one day.
  12. JamesSavik
    Japan launches Sun 'microscope'
     
    By Jonathan Amos
    Science reporter, BBC News
    Source Link
     

     
    Scientists have high hopes for Japan's Solar-B mission which has been launched from the Uchinoura spaceport.
     
    The spacecraft will investigate the colossal explosions in the Sun's atmosphere known as solar flares.
     
    These dramatic events release energy equivalent to tens of millions of hydrogen bombs in just a few minutes.
     
    The probe will attempt to find out more about the magnetic fields thought to power solar flares, and try to identify the trigger that sets them off.
     
    The ultimate goal for scientists is to use the new insights to make better forecasts of the Sun's behaviour.
     
    Flares can hurl radiation and super-fast particles in the direction of the Earth, disrupting radio signals, frying satellite electronics, and damaging the health of astronauts.
     
    Solar-B lifted off from Uchinoura, at the southern tip of Japan, at 0636 local time on Saturday (2136 GMT Friday).
     
    "It will take two to three weeks to transfer the spacecraft into its so-called Sun-synchronous polar orbit. From this position, Solar-B will be able to observe the Sun without having any nights for eight months of the year," said Professor Tetsuya Watanabe, of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).
     
    As is customary on Japanese missions, the satellite will get a new name once it is ready to begin its work.
     
    The spacecraft, developed by the Japanese space agency (Jaxa) and the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, has scientific and engineering contributions from, principally, the US and the UK.
     
    'Fine detail'
     
    The Sun behaves like a giant twisting magnet; and when contorted field lines that have lifted up off the surface of the star clash, they release a colossal maelstrom of energy.
     
    A blast of intense radiation is emitted, and charged particles are accelerated out into the Solar System. Some of these particles are moving so fast they can cover the 149 million km to Earth in just tens of minutes.
     
    Whilst scientists understand the flaring process reasonably well, they cannot predict when one of these enormous explosions will occur.
     
    Solar-B is expected to transform our understanding.
     
    It carries three instruments: a Solar Optical Telescope (SOT), an X-ray Telescope and an Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer.
     
    They will make continuous, simultaneous observations of specific solar features, to observe how changes in the magnetic field at the Sun's surface can spread through the layers of the solar atmosphere to produce, ultimately, a flare.
     
    "Solar-B acts essentially like a microscope, probing the fine details of what the magnetic field is doing as it builds up to a flare," said mission scientist Professor Louise Harra, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL, UK.
     
    "What we don't know is what triggers a flare; we don't understand the physics of that phase at all. Solar-B will show us how tangled the field is, and how the field lines collide to produce all that energy."
     
    Space dependence
     
    Solar-B is but one of a fleet of spacecraft now dedicated to understanding the relationship between the Sun and the Earth; and more are set to follow.
     
    Next month, the US space agency (Nasa) plans to launch its Stereo mission - twin spacecraft that will make 3D observations of our star.
     
    As we become more reliant on space-based systems - to provide us with everything from timing and positioning services to the relay of telecoms data - the need to understand the tempestuous Sun-Earth interaction just gets more urgent.
     
    Losing a satellite because of solar flare effects could prove costly, not just in economic terms but in human lives.
     
    Spacecraft like Solar-B should give scientists the data they need to make better "space weather" forecasts.
     
    "The information that Solar-B will provide is significant for understanding and forecasting of solar disturbances, which can interfere with satellite communications, electric power transmission grids, and threaten the safety of astronauts travelling beyond the safety of the Earth's magnetic field," said John Davis, Solar-B project scientist at Nasa's Marshall centre.
     

    Scientists would like to predict the onset of solar flares which can have a tremendous impact on both earth and space based systems. [image credit: NASA/SOHO]
  13. JamesSavik
    NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds of Young Galaxies in Early Universe
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NASA Press Release:
    September 21, 2006
    PRESS RELEASE NO.: STScI-PR06-12
    Source Link
     

     
    NASA'S HUBBLE FINDS HUNDREDS OF YOUNG GALAXIES IN EARLY UNIVERSE
     
    Astronomers analyzing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500 that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies thrived when the cosmos was less than 7 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe, researchers said.
     
    The discovery is scientifically invaluable for understanding the origin of galaxies, considering that just a decade ago early galaxy formation was largely uncharted territory. Astronomers had not seen even one galaxy that existed when the universe was a billion years old, so finding 500 in a Hubble survey is a significant leap forward for cosmologists.
     
    The galaxies unveiled by Hubble are smaller than today's giant galaxies and very bluish in color, indicating they are ablaze with star birth. The images appear red because of the galaxies' tremendous distance from Earth. The blue light from their young stars took nearly 13 billion years to arrive at Earth. During the journey, the blue light was shifted to red light due to the expansion of space.
     
    "Finding so many of these dwarf galaxies, but so few bright ones, is evidence for galaxies building up from small pieces
  14. JamesSavik

    Borland is Back!

    By JamesSavik,

    Back in the eighties if you had anything to do with computer programming, Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were all the rage. Borland created Intergrated Development Environments (IDEs) that allowed programmers to write, edit, compile and debug code all in one program. Since then, IDEs have become something of an industry standard like JavaBeans and Eclipse.
     
    Well, Borland is back!
     
    You can download for free Turbo Explorer compilers for C++, C# and Delphi. Free is always the right price. C stuff is all over the web so I won't belabor that point.
     
    Delphi is an object-oriented version of Pascal with extensions for the windows environment. You can find these compilers at the Turbo Explorer Homepage.
     
    If you are intrested in Delphi, check out Marco Cantu's homepage. He has free code and ebooks available for download.
     
    Two of these are of special interest are: Essential Pascal and Essential Delphi. These can be found at Cantu's free Pascal and Delphi ebooks.
  16. JamesSavik
    Is America Punch-Drunk?
     
    American history is lousy with them. The twentieth century started with one. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 50 year Cold War, the Gulf War, Somalia, a hundred other conflicts that only historians remember and finally rounding out the nineties, we just couldn
  17. JamesSavik
    Where are the supermassive black holes hiding?
     
    26 July 2006
    ESA Press Release
    Source Link
     
     

    This artist's impression shows the thick dust torus that astronomers believe surrounds many supermassive black holes and their accretion discs. When the torus is seen edge-on as in this case, much of the light emitted by the accretion disc is blocked, creating a "hidden" black hole.
     
    However, the sharp gamma-ray and X-ray eyes of Integral can peer through the thick dust and identify the black hole within. An Integral survey of the local universe found few hidden black holes, implying that they must have existed earlier (deeper) in the universe.
     
    Credits: ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)
     
    ____________________________________________________________________
     
    European and American scientists, on a quest to find super-massive black holes hiding in nearby galaxies, have found surprisingly few. Either the black holes are better hidden than scientists realised or they are lurking only in the more distant universe.
     
    Scientists are convinced that some super-massive black holes must be hiding behind thick clouds of dust. These dusty shrouds allow only the highest energy X-rays to shine through. Once in space, the X-rays combine into a cosmic background of X-rays that permeates the whole of space.
     
    The search for hidden black holes is part of the first census of the highest-energy part of the X-ray sky. Led by Loredana Bassani, IASF, Italy, a team of astronomers published results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in January this year. They show the fraction of hidden black holes in the nearby Universe to be around 15 percent, using data from ESA
  18. JamesSavik
    New Life in Dead Star: Supernova 'Changing Right Before Our Eyes'
     
    Ker Than for Space.com
    July 24, 2006
    Source Link
     

    This image of SN 1987A combines data from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 8-meter Gemini South infrared telescope in Chile. The X-ray light detected by Chandra is colored blue. The infrared light detected by Gemini South is shown as green and red. The ring is produced by hot gas (largely the X-ray light) and cold dust (largely the infrared light) from the exploded star interacting with the interstellar region. Credit: Gemini/NASA
    _________________________________________________________________
     
    Newly detected dust found around the burst remains of a dead star could help reveal how planets and stars formed and how life began.
     
    About 160,000 years ago, a star 20 times more massive than our sun erupted in a fiery explosion called a supernova. The star was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. In 1987, the first light from that catastrophic event reached Earth and for several months, the supernova, dubbed SN 1987A, blazed as brightly as 100 million suns before fading again.
     
    Now, nearly two decades later, astronomers have detected dust particles around the supernova that they think formed before the star exploded. The new finding is the first evidence that star dust can survive a supernova explosion. It is also providing a rare glimpse into a process called "sputtering," in which dust is eroded by interactions with superheated gas.
     
    "Supernova 1987A is changing right before our eyes," said Eli Dwek, a cosmic dust expert at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who was involved in the finding. "What we are seeing is a milestone in the evolution of a supernova."
     
    Cosmic building blocks
     
    Finer than grains of beach sand, stellar dust is a constant source of frustration for astronomers because it can obscure observations from distant stars. Yet the troublesome dust is also a prime ingredient in the construction of planets and of all living things. The dust is made in the fiery furnaces of stars as they burn and is scattered across space either by stellar winds or by supernova explosions.
     
    Despite its importance, scientists still know very little about star dust. How much dust does a star produce throughout its lifetime? How much survives a star's death? And how do rings of dust coalesce to form stars and planets?
     
    1987A's newly detected stardust, found using an infrared telescope at the Gemini South Observatory in Chile, could help astronomers answer these questions. The dust particles are intermixed with superheated, X-ray emitting gas and found within an equatorial ring around SN 1987A. About a light-year across, the ring of gas and dust is expanding very slowly.
     
    This suggests that the ring was created about 600,000 years before the star exploded, the researchers say. It is therefore unlikely that the ring was created by a supernova blast during the star's death, but rather by stellar winds when the star was still alive.
     
    Made visible
     
    The ring of dust and gas remained invisible for nearly twenty years until shockwaves from the supernova blast caught up with it. As the shockwaves expanded, they passed through the ring, heating up its gas and normally cool dust until they glowed in the infrared.
     
    "This much was expected," said study team member Patrice Bouchet of the Observatoire de Paris. "The collision between the ejecta of supernova 1987A and the equatorial ring was predicted to occur sometime in the interval of 1995 to 2007, and it is now underway."
     
    What was surprising, however, was the composition of the dust, which followup observations with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed to be almost pure silicate. Also, far less dust than expected was detected. A star as massive as the one that created SN 1987A was thought to produce much more dust.
     
    The dearth of dust could mean that shockwaves from the supernova blast destroyed more dust than originally thought. This could have broad implications for determining dust origins throughout the universe if confirmed, the researchers say.
     
    A spate of new infrared, optical and X-ray observations of SN 1987A are now planned to follow up on the new findings.
     
    ___________________________________________________________________
     
     
    Core of Supernova Goes Missing
     
    Michael Schirber for Space.com
    June 6, 2005
    Source Link
     

    The remnant of supernova 1987A shows no sign of the neutron star scientists believe is lurking at its heart. The Hubble Space Telescope took this image in December 2004. Credit: P. Challis & R. Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
    ____________________________________________________________________
     
    A search for the remains of a nearby stellar explosion has come up empty. Astronomers observed the blast site of the supernova, SN 1987A, with the Hubble Space Telescope, but could not find any sign of the dense stellar core.
     
    "We think a neutron star was formed. The question is: Why don't we see it?" astronomer Genevieve Graves of UC Santa Cruz said today.
     
    A neutron star is an extremely dense ball of subatomic particles, which theory says can form as the core of a massive star collapses after exploding. This is what is believed to have happened in 1987, when a star with 20 times the mass of our Sun blew up, 165,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
     
    "Therein lies the mystery -- where is that missing neutron star?" said Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
     
    Neutron stars are often detected as pulsars when they emit intense beams of radio waves, like a lighthouse. It may be too soon to see radio flashes from the remnant of SN 1987A, since theory predicts that pulsars take between 100 to 100,000 years to develop after a supernova.
     
    A young neutron star could, however, be seen if it is swallowing up nearby gas and debris from the explosion. This accreted material would heat up and emit light. But when the team of astronomers scoured the area of SN 1987A, they found no signature of this accretion.
     
    "A neutron star could just be sitting there inside SN 1987A, not accreting matter and not emitting enough light for us to see," said Peter Challis from the CfA.
     
    Future observations may uncover this quiet remnant by studying the infrared emission from dust clouds in the vicinity, which may be reprocessing the weak ultraviolet and visible light coming from the neutron star.
     
    A supernova from a more massive star can form a black hole, instead of a neutron star. The progenitor of SN 1987A is right near the dividing line, so it may have created a black hole. Still, a black hole would be indirectly detectable by the same accretion mechanism that was not seen in these latest results.
     
    _______________________________________________________________
     
     
    Hubble Reveals Dramatic New Phase of a Supernova Explosion
     
    Robert Roy Britt for Space.com
    19 February 2004
    Source Link
     
     

    A sequence of Hubble images of supernova 1987A taken from 1994 through late 2003 shows the central star has faded while bright spots in the outer ring are enhanced.
    ________________________________________________________________
     
     
    The most dramatic stellar explosion witnessed in centuries just got more interesting. New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show a dying star's "ring of fire" entering a new phase of brightness.
     
    The remarkable event is the only one of its kind ever recorded by telescopes.
     
    Astronomers first saw the star explode -- an event called a supernova -- in 1987. It shone as bright as 100 million suns for several months.
     
    Robert Kirshner of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the latest observations. He explained what's going on around the star named 1987A. When the star first exploded, ultraviolet light raced outward and lit up a previously unknown ring of gaseous debris that the star had presumably spat out about 20,000 years prior.
     
    "Then there's a blast wave going out from the supernova to the ring," Kirshner said in a telephone interview. "We all knew it was going to hit in a decade or so."
     
    Shock wave hits
     
    In 1996, that shock wave began to plow into the debris ring, which is about a light-year in diameter. It heated the ring material -- gas and dust -- in spots, created an increasing number of bright areas that Hubble has been documenting over the years.
     
    In the latest image, the spots nearly cover the ring like pearls on a necklace. The star, meanwhile, is a million times dimmer than when it first exploded.
     
    The fact that the ring did not light up all at once suggests it is not perfectly round but instead is unstable, with parts of the inner ring closer to the central star than other parts, Kirshner said. He described it as a corrugated structure, or a wall with stalactites sticking inward.
     
    Inside the ring, an amorphous purplish blob surrounds the central, dying star. That blob glows because it's made of radioactive elements forged in the supernova explosion. It is probably radioactive titanium, Kirshner explained, "shredded bits of the star going out at about 3,000 kilometers per second," or 6.7 million mph.
     
    "Looking at the expansion of that [blob] we get a clue to what was happening in first couple of minutes of the explosion of the star," he said.
     
    Scientists have seen no other supernova evolve over time with anything approaching this sort of detail.
     
    Show continues
     
    The ring around 1987A should continue to brighten for a couple of decades, Kirshner said. The bright spots will merge as the debris is engulfed by the shock wave until it creates a "ring of fire," he said. Watching the evolution should help theorists understand how and why stars explode.
     
    "There's going to be plenty to see," Kirshner said.
     
    But its uncertain whether 1987A will be monitored continuously.
     
    Like many astronomers, Kirshner said he's disappointed that under NASA's current plans, Hubble won't be around to record 1987A's progress in the latter years of this decade. The activity can be studied by X-ray and radio observatories, but valuable visible-light data would go uncollected.
     
    "The value of the data keeps getting bigger as we get a longer series," Kirshner said. He added that it could be a long time before a similar event is available to astronomers and Hubble "is one of our chief instruments for doing this."
     
    The last supernova to shine so brightly in Earth's skies was spotted by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.
     
    1987A was generated by a star 20 times more massive than the Sun. It resides in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of the time it takes light from the event to reach Hubble, the explosion actually occurred 160,000 years ago, in the time frame of its origin.
     
    _______________________________________________________________
     
     

     
    This is a wide field image from the Hubble taken of the remnant of SN 1987A. The background is the Large Magellanic Cloud-- a nearby galaxy observable from the southern hemisphere.
     

     
    This image of SN 1987A was voted #6 of the Hubble's top 10 most valuable science images.
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