As I head off to Nashville and Huntsville for NASA (NIAC) symposia, let's all remember how cool it is that our species and civilization is exploring, even as we thrash out other matters of deep concern. And so...
Here's a nice video on the bio experiments being carried by Dragon to the ISS. I am involved (at a minor but honorable level) in the last one, having contributed a concept or two.
Saddened by the loss of communication with India's Vikram moon lander - but their lunar orbiter has spotted the lander on the lunar surface. It may be in one piece after a 'hard landing.'
NASA is inviting students to help name the next rover to Mars: Mars 2020.
Here's a nice video on the bio experiments being carried by Dragon to the ISS. I am involved (at a minor but honorable level) in the last one, having contributed a concept or two.
Saddened by the loss of communication with India's Vikram moon lander - but their lunar orbiter has spotted the lander on the lunar surface. It may be in one piece after a 'hard landing.'
NASA is inviting students to help name the next rover to Mars: Mars 2020.
== and beyond ==
Teegarden’s star is a relatively quiet, ultra-cool star, only 12 light-years away and 10% the mass of the sun; it’s the 24th closest star to the Sun. Scientists have discovered a pair of temperate, Earth-sized exoplanet candidates in orbit and one of its planets may be similar to Earth. Discovered via the Doppler method which lets us find planets that aren’t fortuitously in ecliptic planes perfectly aligned toward us. Remember that these red dwarf stars have problems of their own.
Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often remnants of a "globular cluster" that plunged into the Milky Way - stretched out in a long line across our sky. One of them appears to show a gap where something immense may have passed through the stream disrupting it. Failing to find any candidate, an astronomer suggests maybe it was a dense clump of dark matter.
TMO interviews my associate Andrew Friedman about how science fiction inspired him as a youth to become a cosmologist. They then get into some cool topics of cosmology: using Type Ia supernovae to measure the rate of expansion of the universe, why infrared observations of those stars are helpful, whether quantum entanglement suggests a substrate on which spacetime resides, the multiverse, and the implications of the Planck length and Higgs field for our very existence.
Visit the ESA Hubble site to access high resolution versions of the image and get lost in the sheer number of galaxies on display in the Hubble Legacy Field, a swathe of sky as bit as the moon that has been probed at depth with 7500 exposures, letting you see 265,000 galaxies reaching back across 13.3 billion years. Speaking of Hubble images… NGC2903 is a very photogenic spiral galaxy.
A supernova about 123 light-years away from Earth about 2.6 million years ago, about the dawn of the Pleistocene epoch, may have so ionized our atmosphere that lightning burned forests in eastern Africa into grasslands, spurring human ancestors to rise onto two legs. Well. An idea. Though in fact the first evidence for bipedalism in ancient humans dates to approximately 7 million years ago, and the transition to full bipedalism was well underway by around 4.4 million years ago. Still, mapping our past supernova encounters is a valuable quest.
A new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content.”…. “Scientists have found that many of the 4000 confirmed or candidate exoplanets discovered so far fall into two size categories: those with the planetary radius averaging around 1.5 that of the Earth, and those averaging around 2.5 times the radius of the Earth.”
Now a new model indicates that those exoplanets which have a radius of around x1.5 Earth radius tend to be rocky planets (of typically x5 the mass of the Earth), “while those with a radius of x2.5 Earth radius (with a mass around x10 that of the Earth) are probably water worlds…” …but with very hot, steamy atmospheres. It’s unclear whether organic chemistry would work well in such steamy hothouses. (Oh, without continents, it might be hard to strike a Gaia-style temperature balance. And with only small continents you'll not get fire-using sapients. My water-world hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox.)
== Weirdness abounds ==
We’re beginning to get used to bizarre notions from quantum mechanics, even if we don’t understand them. So, how do entangled particles transcend the space-time gulf separating them? Perhaps the answer is they don’t have to — because entanglement doesn’t happen in space-time. Entanglement creates space-time.
For the latest updates on the supreme oddities of space-time entanglement, see Sean Carroll's new book: Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has spotted an unusual symbol on the surface of Mars — the iconic "Star Trek" Starfleet logo.
MRO also spotted a recent/fresh impact crater that exposed a bluish – possibly icy – surface under all the red dust
The latest data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests that methane lakes on Titan may result from explosions of warming nitrogen on the moon's crust.
The latest data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests that methane lakes on Titan may result from explosions of warming nitrogen on the moon's crust.
== But I can get weirder ==
I’ve touted the visionary speculative-science videos of Isaac Arthur several times. He’ll take you on tours of super-tech concepts from beanstalk elevators and orbital rings to living at the edges of a black hole… or (here’s a link) using black holes as weapons. Mind-blowing sci fi stuff. And in the most recent posting, he gets around – at the end – to citing my novel EARTH, as both his recommended reading of the month and for – well – doing a lot of SFnal speculating about various kinds of Weaponized black holes.
Alas, while folks have often commented on the way I initially use black holes as metaphors for an Earth in peril, I’ve seen hardly anyone remark on what I deem one of the most creative elements in the book (setting aside showing web pages before the web and proliferation of cheap digicams and privacy issues and global warming and all those other things).
That’s the concept of the gravity laser or gazer. It’s based on the simple fact that if you have two mirrors on both sides of an energized medium that can radiate, well, the particular ray traced exactly between the mirrors can self-reinforce and become an amplified beam; the essence of a laser.
I extrapolated that a micro black hole might resonantly act as a kind of mirror for gravity radiation. And hence two of them, arrayed on either side of the Earth’s hot and vibrating core…
...well, I’d say ‘you get the picture,’ and you will, when you read the novel. Alas, except for rubbing their chins and saying “interesting,” I’ve seen no commitment from the best physicists, yea or nay! Even though it is at least conceivably a gravity amplification/manipulation method within reach of a mere Kardashev Type I civilization.
That’s the concept of the gravity laser or gazer. It’s based on the simple fact that if you have two mirrors on both sides of an energized medium that can radiate, well, the particular ray traced exactly between the mirrors can self-reinforce and become an amplified beam; the essence of a laser.
I extrapolated that a micro black hole might resonantly act as a kind of mirror for gravity radiation. And hence two of them, arrayed on either side of the Earth’s hot and vibrating core…
...well, I’d say ‘you get the picture,’ and you will, when you read the novel. Alas, except for rubbing their chins and saying “interesting,” I’ve seen no commitment from the best physicists, yea or nay! Even though it is at least conceivably a gravity amplification/manipulation method within reach of a mere Kardashev Type I civilization.
And weirdly beautiful… Hubble’s latest ultraviolet images of the exploded binary star Eta Carinae is stunning, amazing and enlightening.
