JamesSavik

I predict a winner in a landslide. Head is wildly popular.

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A Kilonova Detected --"A Cosmic Phenomenon Long Theorized But Never Conclusively Observed — Until Now" Daily Galaxy October 16, 2017 In the world of astrophysics, Aug. 17, 2017, was a red-letter day. “This is a game-changer for astrophysics,” said UC Santa Barbara faculty member Andy Howell, who leads the supernova group at the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). “A hundred years after Einstein theorized gravitational waves, we’ve seen them and traced them back to their source to find an explosion with new physics of the kind we’ve only dreamed about.” First, NASA’s orbiting Fermi satellite identified a burst of high-energy gamma rays. Then, in the minute leading up to the Fermi burst, scientists noticed microscopic distortions in space caused by gravitational waves passing through the Earth. When they combined the data from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, with the data from the Virgo detector in Italy, they realized they could localize the disturbance to a relatively small region of the sky — only about 150 times the size of the full moon — near the constellation Hydra. Astronomers at Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) in Santa Barbara activated their robotic network of 20 telescopes around the world and were one of six teams to co-discover a new source of light in that region and localize it to the galaxy NGC 4993, only about 130 million light years away. “Such a gravitational wave signal had never been seen before but was unmistakably generated by two neutron stars spiraling together,” explained Iair Arcavi, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Physics and leader of the LCO follow-up effort. The resultant study appears in the journal Nature. The outburst that occurs right after two neutron stars merge is called a kilonova, a phenomenon that had long been theorized though never conclusively observed — until now. Unlike traditional ground-based facilities with single telescopes, the LCO network could observe the phenomenon every few hours for five consecutive days. During that time, the light from the explosion dimmed by a factor of 20, fading at an unprecedented rate for something so luminous. “This marks the first time in history that an astronomical phenomenon has been first sensed through gravitational waves and then seen with telescopes,” Arcavi said. “For years, we’ve heard theorists predict how a kilonova should look. I couldn’t believe we were finally seeing one for the first time.” Kilonovae are thought to be the primary source of all the elements heavier than iron in the universe. For example, most of the gold on Earth may have been created in a kilonova. The name originates from the prediction that a kilonova would be a thousand times brighter than a nova, though dimmer than a supernova. “We know now that one reason they had been so elusive is that they fade too quickly for conventional astronomical facilities to detect,” Arcavi said. “Thanks to knowing where to look and then having telescopes networked together all around the world, we were able to watch this new type of cosmic explosion rise and fade in real time,” said co-author Curtis McCully, a postdoctoral researcher at LCO and in the UCSB Department of Physics. “This is a remarkable story of the advent of gravitational wave astronomy combined with robotic internet-based optical astronomy.” LCO astronomers also used their and other facilities around the world, including the 8-meter Gemini telescope in Chile, to split the light of the kilonova into its chromatic components: a rainbow. McCully led this study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We found that only a tiny amount of material was ejected in the explosion —only about 1 percent of the total matter in the system,” he noted. “The material was also flung out at an extraordinary speed, as much as 30 percent of the speed of light.” The LCO group also contributed to a third study measuring the Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate of the universe. That research used the inspiraling neutron stars as “standard sirens” to determine their distance from Earth and compared that distance to the redshift, or how much light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. That study appears in the journal Nature. The Daily Galaxy via UC Santa Barbara

"Everybody Knew It Had To Be There" --Missing Half of Normal Matter in the Universe Has Been Detected October 09, 2017 Daily Galaxy “Everybody sort of knows that it has to be there, but this is the first time that somebody – two different groups, no less – has come up with a definitive detection,” says Ralph Kraft at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. Observations of galaxies and galaxy clusters in the local universe can account for only 10% of the baryon content -made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter- inferred from measurements of the cosmic microwave background and from nuclear reactions in the early Universe. Locating the remaining 90% of baryons has been one of the major challenges in modern cosmology. The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. Models of the universe say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far. Now, two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. “The missing baryon problem is solved,” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “There’s no sweet spot – no sweet instrument that we’ve invented yet that can directly observe this gas,” says Richard Ellis at University College London. “It’s been purely speculation until now.” Because it's not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to observe. Both teams took advantage of a phenomenon called the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect that occurs when light left over from the big bang passes through hot gas to find another way to definitively show that these threads of gas are really there. As photons of light travel, some of them scatters off the electrons in the gas, leaving a dim patch in the cosmic microwave background from the birth of the cosmos that were to faint to be mapped by the Planck satellite in 2015. Both teams selected pairs of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that were expected to be connected by a strand of baryons. They stacked the Planck signals for the areas between the galaxies, making the individually faint strands detectable en masse. Tanimura’s team stacked data on 260,000 pairs of galaxies, and de Graaff’s group used over a million pairs revealing firm evidence of gas filaments between the galaxies. Tanimura’s group found they were almost three times denser than the mean for normal matter in the universe, and de Graaf’s group found they were six times denser confirming that the gas in these areas is dense enough to form filaments. “We expect some differences because we are looking at filaments at different distances,” says Tanimura. “If this factor is included, our findings are very consistent with the other group.” “This goes a long way toward showing that many of our ideas of how galaxies form and how structures form over the history of the universe are pretty much correct,” says Ralph Kraft. Journal references: arXiv, 1709.05024 and 1709.10378v1 The Daily Galaxy via New Scientist and NextBig Future and ARXIV.org

Thank you for setting this up! History Channel: did marie antoinette really say let them eat cake

Some people might think that the 1st memes invented were Keyboard cat, Philosoraptor and the numa-numa guy. That would be very, very wrong. Imagine you lived in a Kingdom that was one of the most powerful and influential in the world but, it had fallen on hard times. The king was, by all accounts, a corrupt incompetent dolt. The people were hungry and the spoiled, foolish Queen, when told there was no bread for the peasants said let them eat cake. While this might sound uncomfortably familiar to modern Americans, this was the climate that gave rise to the French Revolution. It was also the fertile ground for the French satirists who I submit were early generation memers. What people fail to understand about memes is they are much more about ideas than humor but the combination of the two makes them that much more powerful. What we call memes is an evolution of a very old idea called satire more succinctly defined as the illustration of the absurd with absurdity. Every middle schooler naturally knows about satire because that is when they inevitable meet an incompetent and bungling bureaucracy. One must take care with satire as to be a proper smart ass, you must first be smart. Otherwise you are just an ass. There were many French satirists. I would like to focus on a gentleman named Voltaire. Voltaire and the French satirists used their wit to point out the myriad hypocrisies and inequities of their political and social situations. Like Charlie Hebdo, many of the French Revolutionary era satirists faced rather deadly blow-back from those that failed to see the humor in their work. This was an amazing era and one that the modern democracies owe much to because many of the things we see as foundations of democracy were first discussed by the thinkers during this era. They were seeing the end of the monarchy as a practical form of government and looked forward to imagine what the next step would look like. See if you recognize any of Voltaire's ideas: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Common sense is not so common. It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere. Prejudices are what fools use for reason. As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. Superstition sets the whole world in flames; reason quenches them. Voltaire would have been hell on wheels if he had internet access. Be suspicious when you hear people in power discount the ideas of others. Those silly memers that poke them right in the hypocrisies have quite the history. So when you see memers banned from facebook or twitter, what you are really seeing is da man swatting the Socratic gad-fly that stung him in a sore spot. Only a fearful tyrant censors speech. He is afraid that you will tell the people just what a putz he really is.

Friday night I picked up my 14 year clean & sober medallion. The official date is Oct. 1 but that was the first Friday after. Shit happens. I feel like disappearing with a bottle sometimes but once you get in the habit of choosing something different, it gets a little easier with time. That doesn't make it easy. Just easier. Like that shit in Las Vegas this week. That seriously pissed me off. OK- I'm angry but, fuck it. Getting hammered won't help. So I focus my white hot anger elsewhere. What I would do to anyone I caught shooting at kids (at my age that's anybody under 30) doesn't bear close consideration but it would hurt real bad, last a long time and a chainsaw would figure prominently in it. In other matters there is something I've been asked- why didn't you join the new Pit club? No mas. Talking politics is just too toxic.

Proclamation of Extreme Wretchedness When in the course of human events, you come across a day like Monday Oct. 2nd, 2017, drinking heavily is authorized and encouraged by this office. Las Vegas Violence Death of Tom Petty Plumbing problems The only thing that could make it better would be a root canal. All that adds up to holy shit, nuke me now! Shutup Little Kim. Quit playing with your tiny missile or you'll go blind.

Is that a ferret in your pants or are you just happy to see me? *rim shot*

Cute young couple having sax!

The Alien Observatory --“Extinction is the Cosmic Default for Most Life That Has Emerged in the Universe" (WATCH Video) September 26, 2017 Daily Galaxy Something Enrico Fermi overlooked: scientists from the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences think the reason we haven’t found signs of advanced technological life might be because all the aliens went extinct. “Extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged,” the authors of the study write. In a 2016 study published in the journal Astrobiology, Aditya Chopra and his colleagues do a good job detailing something already well established but not necessarily articulated enough among the scientific community at large: the window is too short to allow that life to evolve fast enough where they can survive in the long run. "The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology. "Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive. Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable." About four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox. Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said co-author Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute. "Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet's climate," he said. The ESO image above is an artist's impression of Mars some 4 billion years ago with it's northern ocean. "The mystery of why we haven't yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces," Chopra said. Wet, rocky planets, with the ingredients and energy sources required for life seem to be ubiquitous, however, as physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out in 1950, no signs of surviving extra-terrestrial life have been found. A plausible solution to Fermi's paradox, say the researchers, is near universal early extinction, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck. "One intriguing prediction of the Gaian Bottleneck model is that the vast majority of fossils in the universe will be from extinct microbial life, not from multicellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids that take billions of years to evolve," said Associate Professor Lineweaver. A copy of the paper can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/gaianbottleneck. The Daily Galaxy via Australian National University

Scientists Closing in on the Dawn of Plate Tectonics The massive slabs of Earth’s crust might have started their journey more than 3.5 billion years ago Shannon Hall on September 22, 2017 Scientific American Scientists now think early Earth contained light-colored rocks, like the granite within Yosemite’s Half Dome. Such rocks likely formed via plate tectonics. Credit: David Iliff Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0) Geologists think early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where jet-black lava fields extend as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides rise steeply above the clouds and stark black-sand beaches outline the land. But over time the world gradually became less bleak. Today Earth also harbors light-colored rocks, like the granite that composes Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. But scientists remain uncertain as to when the world started to transition from the one that looked like Iceland to that which we know today. A new study published Thursday in Science suggests the shift transpired more than 3.5 billion years ago. Not only does the finding tell scientists the color of the world’s early beaches, it might help them understand when tectonic plates—the interlocking slabs of crust that fit together like puzzle pieces far beneath our feet—started to wake up and shuffle around. That is because the lighter-colored rocks, known as felsic rocks, are actually dark, or mafic, rocks “reincarnated.” In short, felsic rocks form when mafic ones are pushed deep inside Earth—possibly when one tectonic plate slips under another in a process called subduction. Given that light-colored felsic rocks were abundant billions of years ago, plate tectonics had likely already kicked into action. In order to reach that conclusion, Nicolas Greber, a geologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues analyzed 78 different layers of sediment to pin down the ratio of felsic to mafic rocks. This was not as simple as counting light versus dark stones (both had long ago eroded into tiny particles). Instead, Greber’s team looked at titanium. Although the metallic element is present in both types of rock, the proportion of its isotopes (chemically identical atoms with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons) shifts as the rock changes from mafic to felsic. Suppose you mix something that turns out both salty and sweet, Greber says. An analysis like this gives you “an idea of how much salt you added and how much sugar you added.” He had expected the earliest sediments in his sample, which date back 3.5 billion years, would be composed mostly of mafic particles. But to his surprise, roughly half of the particles locked within were felsic. Assuming those rocks formed within subduction zones, that means tectonic plates were already on the go by that time—a conclusion that just might help solve an age-old mystery: the birth date of plate tectonics. Scientists have long argued over the precise date these crustal plates started to rouse from their slumber, with estimates ranging from one billion to 4.2 billion years ago. That range is far too large if scientists want to understand the evolution of early Earth. Shifting plates have the ability to dramatically reshape the planet by sculpting ocean basins and thrusting up mountain ranges. They also alter the composition of the atmosphere and oceans. This would have affected the supply of nutrients available to the fledgling life on our young planet. With such a vast time range involved, it is easy to see why scientists cannot agree on a firm date. Paul Tackley, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, disagrees with the latest interpretation. He contends felsic rocks can form anytime mafic rocks sink deep within Earth—and not only along subduction zones. In fact, he argues this process can occur on a motionless plate. Should a volcano erupt, for example, the newly released lava will push down on mafic rocks until they become so deeply buried that they melt under the high subterranean pressures and temperatures, transforming into felsic rocks. Although Greber agrees felsic rocks can certainly form like this, he argues such a high felsic ratio cannot be explained by Tackley’s rock-sinking explanation alone. Take Iceland, for example—because the island is far from any subduction zones high numbers of light-colored rocks simply do not form—hence the island’s endless black lava fields and black-sand beaches. So Greber argues the high ratios of light-colored rocks discovered in his old sediments can only mean plate tectonics began early in our planet’s history. But 3.5 billion years is just a lower limit. In the future he hopes to find even older rocks, allowing him to pinpoint an exact birth date.

Perspective Cat Romance <3

No I won't do my stripper routine for the anniversary! I'm retired. I'll probably break a hip or something. Oh, all right but I get to keep all the tips...

Why the Giant Mexican Earthquake Happened Thursday night's quake, near an undersea crust collision zone, was the strongest to hit Mexico in a century By Josh Fischman 2017 Sep 08 Scientific American The 8.1 magnitude quake happened between the line of the Middle America Trench and Mexico's southern coast. Credit: Image from U.S.G.S. Late Thursday night the biggest earthquake to hit Mexico in 100 years shook the country—and a large part of the globe. The magnitude 8.1 temblor was centered just off the southern end of Mexico’s Pacific coast. It was stronger than the 1985 quake that killed thousands of people in Mexico City. Last night’s quake took 32 lives, according to news reports, and the toll may rise. The quake happened about 54 miles offshore of the southern state of Chiapas, just to the east of an undersea geological feature called the Middle America Trench. Here, several parts of the planet’s crust are colliding. This quake, however, probably occurred within one of those crust slabs, not at the junction, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program. The slab fractured about 43 miles below the surface, which is deeper than the trench zone. The shaking could be detected by seismic instruments across North America and in Asia. It was profound in Mexico City, more than 450 miles away, where warning sirens split the night, buildings shivered, and streetlights and stone monuments swayed back and forth. The noticeable motion in the city is because the earthquake waves were amplified by the loose ground beneath the metropolis, noted Jascha Polet, a seismologist at California Polytechnic State University in Pomona. The city is built on sediments from an ancient lake bed.

New type variable star: Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsator BLAP- wikipedia Arxiv pre-published paper (pdf) appears in Nature June 26, 2017 doi:10.1038/s41550-017-0166 Variable stars are very interesting because they give us some clues how stars tick in general and, what happens when one factor or another is a tad out of balance. The ways stars operate is a complex of six inter-related differential equations that define their, energy states, hydrostatic stability, energy diffusion and a number of other factors. When some stars go a bit wonky, we can infer some of these factors are a bit off. Variable stars of different types provide us with laboratory examples for long term study.