The Mystery Hexagon on SATURN
Saturn holds a secret, a mysterious HEXAGON over the north pole. Yet unexplainable.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Saturn and Jupiter Systems Stunning Close-Ups Compiled in New Video
This up close and personal look at the gas giants and their moons was stitched together by Sander van den Berg using imagery captured by NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecrafts. Van den Berg named the black and white piece 'Outer Space'.
Alien Planet "Full Documentary
The CGI or computer animated drama/documentary takes place on Darwin IV, a planet 6.5 light years from earth, with 2 suns and 60% of Earth's gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the Mothership Von Braun and three probes: Balboa, Da Vinci, and Newton. This robotic fleet is responsible for finding and assessing any life forms on Darwin IV. Initially, the expectation is to find microscopic life, but the probes soon find themselves in the middle of a developed ecosystem teeming with diversity of life of all sizes. The drama on Darwin IV is motivated by real science missions, such as the NASA Origins Program and the NASA / JPL Planet-Finder Mission, as well as the European Space Agency's Darwin Project. "Alien Planet " is a cosmic expedition along side Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Jack Horner, Craig Venter, and George Lucas...
NASA | X-ray 'Echoes' Probe Habitat of Monster Black HoleAstronomers using data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite have found a long-sought X-ray signal from NGC 4151, a galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole. The discovery promises a new way to unravel what's happening in the neighborhood of these powerful objects. Most big galaxies host a big central black hole containing millions of times the sun's mass. When matter streams toward one of these supermassive black holes, the galaxy's center lights up, emitting billions of times more energy than the sun. For years, astronomers have been monitoring such "active galactic nuclei" (AGN) to better understand what happens on the brink of a monster black hole.
Matter falling toward a black hole collects into a rotating disk, where it becomes compressed and heated before eventually spilling over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. A mysterious and intense X-ray source near the black hole shines onto the surface layers of the accretion disk, causing iron atoms to radiate characteristic emission -- what astronomers call the iron K line -- at about 6,000 to 7,000 electron volts. The inner part of the disk is orbiting the black hole so fast that the effects of Einstein's relativity come into play -- most notably, how time slows down close to the black hole. These relativistic effects broaden and distort the X-ray signal in a unique way. When the X-ray source near NGC 4151's black hole flares up, the accretion disk reflects the emission about half an hour later. Moving at the speed of light, the X-rays associated with the echo must have traveled an additional 400 million miles -- equivalent to about four times Earth's average distance from the sun -- than those that came to us directly from the flare.
Since 2000, XMM-Newton has observed NGC 4151 -- among the brightest AGN in X-rays -- with an accumulated exposure of about four days. By analyzing all of this data, a team led by Abderahmen Zoghbi at the University of Maryland at College Park uncovered numerous X-ray echoes, demonstrating for the first time that what was expected from theory really occurred in nature. Amazingly, the extreme environment at the heart of NGC 4151 is built on a scale comparable to our own solar system. If we replaced the sun with the black hole, the event horizon would extend less than halfway to Earth if the black hole spins rapidly; slower spin would result in a larger horizon. The X-ray source would hover above the black hole and its accretion disk at a distance similar to that between the sun and the middle of the asteroid belt.
Matter falling toward a black hole collects into a rotating disk, where it becomes compressed and heated before eventually spilling over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. A mysterious and intense X-ray source near the black hole shines onto the surface layers of the accretion disk, causing iron atoms to radiate characteristic emission -- what astronomers call the iron K line -- at about 6,000 to 7,000 electron volts. The inner part of the disk is orbiting the black hole so fast that the effects of Einstein's relativity come into play -- most notably, how time slows down close to the black hole. These relativistic effects broaden and distort the X-ray signal in a unique way. When the X-ray source near NGC 4151's black hole flares up, the accretion disk reflects the emission about half an hour later. Moving at the speed of light, the X-rays associated with the echo must have traveled an additional 400 million miles -- equivalent to about four times Earth's average distance from the sun -- than those that came to us directly from the flare.
Since 2000, XMM-Newton has observed NGC 4151 -- among the brightest AGN in X-rays -- with an accumulated exposure of about four days. By analyzing all of this data, a team led by Abderahmen Zoghbi at the University of Maryland at College Park uncovered numerous X-ray echoes, demonstrating for the first time that what was expected from theory really occurred in nature. Amazingly, the extreme environment at the heart of NGC 4151 is built on a scale comparable to our own solar system. If we replaced the sun with the black hole, the event horizon would extend less than halfway to Earth if the black hole spins rapidly; slower spin would result in a larger horizon. The X-ray source would hover above the black hole and its accretion disk at a distance similar to that between the sun and the middle of the asteroid belt.
Systems Engineer Carlos Gomez-Rosa discusses his work on the ground communication system for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission, and his experience at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This video is the second of a two-part Spanish-language series.
English captions available by clicking closed caption button on player.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Universe A journey to the Edge of the Cosmos
Beginning on Earth. Travel at the speed of light and explore remarkable planets,stars,nebulae white dwafs, supernova, black holes and galaxies, before reaching the very edge of the universe
The Largest Black Holes in the Universe
Watch commercial free on the SpaceRip App, available on the Apple and Google Play stores.
How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide?
We've never seen them directly...
yet we know they are there...
Lurking within dense star clusters...
Or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy....
Where they prey on stars...
Or swallow planets whole.
Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes...
the ultra dense remnants of dead stars.
But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there's evidence of something even more ominous...
A breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power.
It has taken a new era in astronomy to find them...
High-tech instruments in space tuned to sense high-energy forms of light -- x-rays and gamma rays -- that are invisible to our eyes.
New precision telescopes equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere...
and see to the far reaches of the universe.
Peering into distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time can be shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind.
We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe around us.
That understanding recently took a leap forward.
A team operating at the Subaru Observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano looked out to one of the deepest reaches of the universe...
And captured a beam of light that had taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us.
It was a messenger from a time not long after the universe was born.
They focused on an object known as a quasar... short for "quasi-stellar radio source."
It offered a stunning surprise...
A tiny region in its center is so bright that astronomers believe it's light is coming from a single object at least a billion times the mass of our sun...
Inside this brilliant beacon, space suddenly turns dark...
as it's literally swallowed by a giant black hole.
As strange as they may seem, even huge black holes like these are thought to be products of the familiar universe of stars and gravity.
They get their start in rare types of large stars... at least ten times the mass of our sun.
These giants burn hot and fast... and die young.
The star is a cosmic pressure-cooker. In its core, the crush of gravity produces such intense heat that atoms are stripped and rearranged.
Lighter elements like hydrogen and helium fuse together to form heavier ones like calcium, oxygen, silicon, and finally iron.
When enough iron accumulates in the core of the star, it begins to collapse under its own weight.
That can send a shock wave racing outward...
Literally blowing the star apart:...
a supernova.
At the moment the star dies, if enough matter falls into its core, it collapses to a point, forming a black hole.
Intense gravitational forces surround that point with a dark sphere... the event horizon... beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
That's how an average-size black hole forms.
What about a monster the size of the Subaru quasar?
Recent discoveries about the rapid rise of these giant black holes have led theorists to rethink their view of cosmic history.
Tribute to Earth Evolution
A tribute to Earth evolution, inspired by National Geographic's "The Story of Earth", mixed with Eric Amarillo's beautiful soundtrack "Air".
Enjoy ;)
If nature has taught us one thing, it is that the only constant is the change.
Monday, May 21, 2012
The Elegant Universe
Eleven dimensions, parallel universes, and a world made out of strings? It's not science fiction, it's string theory. Bestselling author and physicist Brian Greene offers a tour of this seemingly strange world in "The Elegant Universe," a three-hour Peabody Award-winning miniseries.
Part 1, "Einstein's Dream," introduces string theory and shows how modern physics—composed of two theories that are ferociously incompatible—reached its schizophrenic impasse: One theory, general relativity, successfully describes big things like stars and galaxies, while another, quantum mechanics, is equally successful at explaining small things like atoms and subatomic particles. Albert Einstein, the inventor of general relativity, dreamed of finding a single theory that would embrace all of nature's laws. But in this quest for the so-called unified theory, Einstein came up empty-handed, and the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics has stymied all who've followed. That is, until the discovery of string theory
Life Beyond Earth
Some 900 million miles from the Sun,orbiting the planet Saturn, lies a mysterious world. Enceladus is enveloped in ice. Because nearly all of the sunlight that manages to hit its surface is reflected back into space, it's one of the brightest objects in the solar system.
At its equator, the temperature is --315 degrees Fahrenheit. But, at the poles, the temperature is at least 15 degrees warmer... and as much as 65 degrees warmer in grooves that stretch across the south like tiger stripes.
In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft spotted a complex plume of water vapor shooting out into space from several locations near the south pole. That may mean that Enceladus harbors a remarkable secret below its frigid surface:
A liquid ocean... and maybe... some forms of life. This discovery was the culmination of a search that began over three decades ago. Back in 1979, the outer planets of the solar system lined up in such a way that mission planners were able to dispatch the Voyager spacecraft to fly past each of them.
The two Voyagers sent back tens of thousands of images... of planetary realms more diverse than anyone had imagined. These long-distance marathon flyers - both now headed out towards interstellar space - made discoveries about the planetary chemistry that make these gas giants appear to us as gigantic works of abstract art.
The Voyagers disclosed new details about their magnetic fields, atmospheres, ring systems, and even the nature of their inner cores. Voyager turned up some surprising new mysteries too: a huge dark spot -- a storm in fact - on Neptune. They found that Uranus is tipped 90 degrees to one side. That Saturn is less dense than water; if you had a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float!
And that you'd need the mass of three Saturns to make just one Jupiter! But what really knocked the scientists' socks off were the moons that orbit these gas giants. All of them have been pummeled over the millennia by wayward asteroids and comets.
But a few appear to also be sculpted by forces below their icy surfaces. Neptune's largest moon Triton has few craters. It's marked with circular depressions bounded by rugged ridges that may mean the icy surface is collapsing. There are also grooves and folds in the land that stretch for dozens of miles, a sign of fracturing and deforming.
Triton has geysers too. But these are not spurts of water. On frigid Triton -- so far from the Sun -- the liquid that spouts some five miles above the planet is nitrogen. No one yet knows exactly what drives them. Tiny Miranda... one of 27 known moons that orbit Uranus... wears a jumbled skin that's been shaped and reshaped. Most likely, its outer crust is slipping and sliding on a molten core.
The moon called Io -- orbiting perilously close to giant Jupiter is literally turning itself inside out! Rivers of sulfurous lava roll down from open craters that are constantly erupting. What was causing these tiny moons to generate so much energy from within? The answer may well be here... on Jupiter's Europa -- just slightly smaller than Earth's Moon.
Voyager saw no signs of volcanic activity, but --but instead documented a complex network of criss-crossing grooves and ridges. In the 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft was sent back to get a closer look at Europa and its sister moons. .
It found that Europa's surface is a crazy quilt of fractured plates, cliff faces and gullies... amid long grooves like a network of superhighways. How did it get like this?
Well, as it orbits around Jupiter in a nearly circular ellipse, the massive planet's gravity constantly tugs at Europa's rocky core. The friction of rock rubbing on rock causes that core to heat up. That heat rises up through an ocean of liquid water... then cracks and spreads the icy surface in a thousand different ways.
Callisto and Ganymede also show such features... suggesting they have -- or perhaps once had --liquid oceans below their surfaces too! Crossing outward to the Saturn system, Voyager's images from the late 1970's showed that the moon Enceladus had a similar surface...
The same was presumed of Saturn's by far largest moon, Titan... enshrouded in heavy clouds. So when the Cassini spacecraft arrived in 2004 to scrutinize the kingdom of Saturn, it came ready to answer a range of burning questions.
Can such moons really have liquid oceans beneath their surfaces... and do those oceans have the ability to cook up and then support life?
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