All Things Space / Science / Technology

So there was some concern because they were saying the harpoon designed to anchor the probe to the comet didn't fire on landing. I've been looking but no ones confirmed anything. Anybody else see anything about it?

Also those first pictures are eerily awesome.

Astronomers thrilled by extreme storms on Uranus



The normally bland face of Uranus has become increasingly stormy, with enormous cloud systems so bright that for the first time ever, amateur astronomers are able to see details in the planet's hazy blue-green atmosphere.

"The weather on Uranus is incredibly active," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that first noticed the activity when observing the planet with adaptive optics on the W. M. Keck II Telescope in Hawaii.
"This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus's once every 42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator," noted co-investigator Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. "But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody's guess."
In all, de Pater, Hammel and their team detected eight large storms on Uranus's northern hemisphere when observing the planet with the Keck Telescope on August 5 and 6. One was the brightest storm ever seen on Uranus at 2.2 microns, a wavelength that senses clouds just below the tropopause, where the pressure ranges from about 300 to 500 mbar, or half the pressure at Earth's surface. The storm accounted for 30 percent of all light reflected by the rest of the planet at this wavelength.
When amateur astronomers heard about the activity, they turned their telescopes on the planet and were amazed to see a bright blotch on the surface of a normally boring blue dot.
'I got it!'
French amateur astronomer Marc Delcroix processed the amateur images and confirmed the discovery of a bright spot on an image by French amateur Régis De-Bénedictis, then in others taken by fellow amateurs in September and October. He had his own chance on Oct. 3 and 4 to photograph it with the Pic du Midi one-meter telescope, where on the second night, "I caught the feature when it was transiting, and I thought, 'Yes, I got it!'" said Delcroix.
"I was thrilled to see such activity on Uranus. Getting details on Mars, Jupiter or Saturn is now routine, but seeing details on Uranus and Neptune are the new frontiers for us amateurs and I did not want to miss that," said Delcroix, who works for an auto parts supplier in Toulouse and has been observing the skies - Jupiter in particular - with his backyard telescope since 2006 and, since 2012, occasionally with the Pic du Midi telescope. "I was so happy to confirm myself these first amateur images on this bright storm on Uranus, feeling I was living a very special moment for planetary amateur astronomy."

Interestingly, the extremely bright storm seen by Keck in the near infrared is not the one seen by the amateurs, which is much deeper in the atmosphere than the one that initially caused all the excitement. De Pater's colleague Larry Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, identified the amateur spot as one of the few features on the Keck images from August 5 that was only seen at 1.6 microns, and not at 2.2 microns. The 1.6 micron light is emitted from deeper in the atmosphere, which means that this feature is below the uppermost cloud layer of methane-ice in Uranus's atmosphere.
"The colors and morphology of this cloud complex suggests that the storm may be tied to a vortex in the deeper atmosphere similar to two large cloud complexes seen during the equinox," Sromovsky said.
Such vortices could be anchored much deeper in the atmosphere and extend over large vertical distances, as inferred from similar vortices on Jupiter, including its Great Red Spot.
An expanded team of astronomers led by Kunio M. Sayanagi, an Assistant Professor at Hampton University in Virginia, leveraged the amateur observations to activate a "Target of Opportunity" proposal on the Hubble Space Telescope, which imaged the entire planet on Oct. 14. Observing at a variety of wavelengths, HST revealed multiple storm components extending over a distance of more than 9,000 kilometers (5,760 miles) and clouds at a variety of altitudes.
De Pater, Sromovsky, Hammel and Pat Fry of the University of Wisconsin will report the details of their observations on Nov. 12 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in Tucson, Ariz.

Uranus is an ice giant, about four times the diameter of Earth, with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, with just a bit of methane to give it a blue tint. Because it is so distant - 30 times farther from the sun than Earth - astronomers were able to see little detail on its surface until adaptive optics on the Keck telescopes revealed features much like those on Jupiter.
De Pater and her colleagues have been following Uranus for more than a decade, charting the weather on the planet, including bands of circulating clouds, massive swirling storms and convective features at its north pole. Bright clouds are probably caused by gases such as methane rising in the atmosphere and condensing into highly reflective clouds of methane ice.
Because Uranus has no internal source of heat, its atmospheric activity was thought to be driven solely by sunlight, which is now weak in the northern hemisphere. Hence astronomers were surprised when these observations showed such intense activity.
Observations taken with the Keck telescope by Christoph Baranec, an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii on Manoa, revealed that the storm was still active, but had a different morphology and possibly reduced intensity.
"If indeed these features are high-altitude clouds generated by flow perturbations associated with a deeper vortex system, such drastic fluctuations in intensity would indeed be possible," Sromovsky added.
"These unexpected observations remind us keenly of how little we understand about atmospheric dynamics in outer planet atmospheres," the authors wrote in their paper.

phys.org/news/2014-11-astronomers-thrilled-extreme-storms-uranus.html

Careful, conspiracies will start that the comet is a Borg Cube...

To be fair:

I'm reposting these here because they are interesting.

waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html


arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/

Heh I like that you can see the Sun's reflection on the water.

I want one of these:

It's a neat idea and cool concept video, but I'd be surprised if it actually gets funded. Or I guess I should say actually produced, regardless of funding. Obviously the video is just a concept as nothing like that has been made yet, but there's so many problems it would need to overcome (the size of that pico, far smaller than anything on the market, the power source it would require to be feasibly bright enough, different shades of skin, and of course the conflict of brightly lit areas versus a projected image - just to name a few).

The website seems fishy. You get nothing for donating, and unlike projects on kickstarter, you won't get any of it back if it doesn't end up going through.

Will the Universe end?

Although ancient cosmological models about an ever-existing universe have long been ruled out, an even bigger question is on the horizon. Discoveries we have made in recent decades allow us to change the direction we are heading in. We no longer use the auxiliary verb “Will”, but rather we ask questions like “When” and “How” is the universe going to come to an end. There are 3 leading scenarios that scientists are considering as a possible end of our universe, The Big Crunch, the Big Rip and the Big Chill.

The Big Crunch is a hypothesis in which the expansion of the universe continually slows down until it reaches a final point after which it starts to re-collapse on itself under the effect of its own gravity. We can imagine that by giving black holes as an example. Black hole’s gravitational pull could be looked as a scaled-down version of the Big Crunch. The main reason for that is that in both cases gravity takes over – in the case of the black holes, they collapse under the effect of their own gravity, due to their mass, and in the second case, the universe collapses due to the gravitational effect of the dominating substance, dark matter. This scenario is only valid if the average density of the universe divided by the critical density is bigger than 1 (Ω > 1). This space metric corresponds to a closed universe. This means that the size of the universe is finite, and if you go on a certain direction long enough, you will eventually come back to the point where you left. The Big Crunch could only be a possible end of the universe if it were matter dominated. To be such model valid, dark matter has to rule the universe, and from current observations we know with a high degree of certainty that this is actually not the case. Dark matter plays the role of “cosmic glue”, as it exerts positive attracting force and it is the main reason for the formation of large-scale structures in the universe. The present universe is dominated by the so-called dark energy, also known as vacuum energy, which is the energy of empty space. It makes up around 70% of the universe, and dark matter accounts for only around 25%. The other 5% is the visible universe. The Big Crunch suggests that the metric expansion of space will at some point in the future reverse, leading the universe to an end as a black hole singularity.



The Big Rip is probably the most dramatic and plausible way for the universe’s end. It involves a never-ending accelerated expansion. This model suggests the average density of the universe divided by the critical density should equal 1, or at least very close to 1 (Ω=1). This metric corresponds to almost perfectly flat universe, or at least on scales we have been able to measure. The assumption that the universe is not perfectly flat on very large scales still holds in some sense. To be able to precisely tell how the universe is going to end we should first look at how it all began and what exactly does a flat geometry means. According to the widely accepted Big Bang theory the universe began with a bang, a huge explosion which gave rise to both space and time. Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged and what the inevitable end of the universe is going to be. To answer all this questions we need turn to the theory of cosmic inflation which I’m going to mention very briefly here only for the sake of our current topic – the end of the universe. Our best explanation so far for the flatness of the universe comes from inflationary theory. It explains very gently and elegantly how our universe came to be as flat as it appears to us. According to the theory the universe underwent a dramatic and exponential expansion just a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. The exponential expansion “flattened” the universe just like an inflating balloon flattens itself as it grows. Unlike the closed universe, the flat universe is infinite in size and expands forever. As I mentioned earlier the present universe is dominated by dark energy, and it is believed to be what stands behind the major discovery about the expansion of the universe made by Edwin Hubble in 1929. It has been driving the expansion of the universe for the last 9 billion years; ever since the transition between matter-dominated and vacuum-dominated universe occurred. We still do not have a clue what this mysterious dark energy really is. The expansion of the universe is not slowing down but it is actually exponentially increasing. We know that by observing the redshift of light coming to us from Type IA supernovas, also called “Standard candles”. According to a recent paper published by a group of scientists from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in the UK when dark energy gets in contact with dark matter, it “swallows” it. As a result, the amount of dark energy increases while that of dark matter decreases. The results of the research are unambiguous – the universe is expanding with ever-increasing rate. An eventual confirmation of the discovery by other research groups will immediately rule out the other two possibilities about the end of our universe.

If the universe continues to expand with such an ever-increasing rate, then in approximately 40 billion years, depending on the rate of expansion, the universe will be so stretched that it will rip apart. First, the distances between galaxies will get so large that reaching them or maintaining any kind of communication will be impossible because the speed of recession will at some time exceed the speed of light. By then the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy to us, will have merged. In fact, we expect this to happen in approximately 4 billion years. It seems that the Andromeda galaxy is the only galaxy in the universe that is not lactose intolerant. Second, large scale structures will get “disintegrate” to their basic “building blocks” i.e stars and planets. The third major consequence, that will occur a little bit later, is the tarring apart of planets and other solid objects, inevitably leading in a little later time to tarring apart molecules into atoms and even atoms into protons, neutrons and electrons. A hypothetical observer will see the last phase as a “wall of darkness” reaching him from everywhere; it will no longer be able to sustain any kind of life forms. This will be the end of our universe.

The Big Chill as a third possible end of our universe is similar to the Big Rip hypothesis in some sense. For this theory to be correct, the expansion of the universe, which is driven by the dark energy, should remain a constant. To prove this theory right we first need to find solid proof that the amount of vacuum energy in the universe remains a constant. This scenario is similar to the Big Rip in that it involves continuous expansion, too. Note that the speed of expansion in this case stays exactly the same. This logically leads to a cold and dark universe. After a couple of billion years when an astronomer looks at the night sky all he will see is the darkness of space. There will be no signs of other planets, stars, galaxies or even clusters of galaxies. Future astronomers will not even be able to tell if the universe is expanding or static. As the universe continues to expand it becomes an even colder and lonelier place.

No matter which of these 3 scenarios about the inevitable end of the universe we tend to advocate to, we should all keep in mind the “intuitive and simple” advice that the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku gave us: “Go to hyperspace and “immigrate” to a parallel universe”.

planetary-science.org/will-the-universe-end/