Wednesday 24 June 2015

Observations of one billion years after Big Bang: New stage in galactic lifecycle discovered

more »
Astronomers have analyzed the clouds of gas and dust from some of the earliest galaxies ever observed -- one billion years after the Big Bang.
via Science Daily
Zazzle Space Exploration market place

'Behemoth' bleeding atmosphere around a warm Neptune-sized exoplanet

more »
Astronomers have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dispersing from a warm, Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous comet-like tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star.
via Science Daily
Zazzle Space Exploration market place

Hubble Sees a 'Behemoth' Bleeding Atmosphere Around a Warm Neptune-Sized Exoplanet


Get larger image formats

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dubbed "The Behemoth" bleeding off a planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous, comet-like feature is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The hydrogen is evaporating from a warm, Neptune-sized planet, due to extreme radiation from the star. A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around any exoplanet. It may offer clues to how Super-Earths massive, rocky, versions of Earth are born around other stars through the evaporation of their outer layers of hydrogen. Finding "The Behemoth" could be a game-changer for characterizing atmospheres of the whole population of Neptune-sized planets and Super-Earths in ultraviolet observations.


via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/17/

Vintage Astronomy, Phases of the Moon with Sun Print

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: vintage, moon, sun, celestial, sky, nostalgic, retro, earth, nostalgia, americana, antique celestial

Vintage illustration astronomy and celestial design featuring the different phases of the moon around the earth and the sun in a dark night sky.

»visit the YesterdayCafe store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize with size, paper type etc.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Silicon Valley could save the world from climate change. But we don't want them to.

Science Focus

original post »

Silicon Valley could save the planet. All they need to do is combine their entrepreneurial brilliance with an enormous infusion of cash, and, more importantly, have our society grant them the cultural permission to lead us to a green future.

But we don't want that. And, frankly, that's why we peons annoy the titans of tech so much.

Why won't we hand our environmental challenges to our top technologists to solve? After all, these are among the world's most successful people at identifying unsolved problems and tackling them. And they're loaded with enough money, resources, and cache to get things done.

The reason is simple: We're afraid.

Instead we demand solutions from policymakers — not because we think they're the biggest geniuses, but because we think only the government has the legitimate authority to do big binding things that affect us all, which is what stopping climate change requires.

What's more, many of us think that only government can do the right thing in a divided world. Regardless of our partisanship or our policy preferences, we're increasingly doubtful that big goals can be met except by coercive force. In fact, we suspect that, at bottom, everything is a matter of coercive force.

Consider, for a moment, Jeb Bush. After teasing environmentalists with dreams of a "moderate" Republican — as opposed to yet another "denier" — Bush recently laughed off restrictive policymaking as a solution to our climate challenges, enthusing instead over, well, Silicon Valley.

Innovation and technology, said Bush, are "the source of a lot more solutions than any government-imposed idea and sometimes I sense that we pull back from the embrace of these things." Instead, Americans should "tear down the barriers," allowing new inventions to "accelerate in our lives to find solutions" to our humanity-wide problems.

Speaking for a host of green activists at their wits' end, Salon political writer Simon Maloy called Bush's vision "an impossibly vague nothingburger […] that gives the impression that Jeb cares about climate change as he advocates for the status quo." And indeed, that's one way the story Bush tells could wind up.

Here's another real possibility: Bush's vision could actually make enormous progress toward soliving our environmental struggles.

Why not trust our technologists to actually tackle the difficulties our scientists warn us about? Why do we put our faith in government not even to compel us to do great things, but to stop us from doing little things that add up, such as emit carbon?

We are setting our sights too low, envisioning a government that just skims some value off the top of our emissions in the form of taxes and fees. This is not nearly enough. And our government is incapable of doing the big things that actually need to be done.

At Vox, David Roberts warns that reversing the trend line of net emissions requires us "to imagine all of human society turning on a dime, beginning in 2030, deploying massive amounts of nuclear, bioenergy, wind, and solar, and doing so every year for decades." That public effort "may not violate the laws of physics," says Roberts, "but it is unlikely, given what we know about human beings, path dependence, and political dysfunction."

It's almost as if the best approach is to set aside our lawmakers' climate policy agendas and focus on rendering our old energy technologies ridiculously obsolete. That would take a ton of work, yes. It would probably take government subsides on a massive scale. But if we really wanted to, we could create an energy-industrial complex every bit as powerful, wealthy, and supreme as the military-industrial complex that grew out of World War II. Just look at what one person, Elon Musk, has been able to achieve with even modest government subsidies.

Humanity has a simple problem: We are not good enough at making and using energy. We're slow, inefficient, fearful, and unserious about how plentiful energy can be.

Why don't we turn Washington into the biggest venture capitalist in the world, and hand Silicon Valley a blank check marked "climate"? Because it makes them masters of the universe. Yes, it's all about our fear again. Even worse than lining their pockets with "public money" we envision going to poor people instead, letting our tech titans lead would make them a civilization apart: plainly higher and better than us, in a way that cuts to the heart of our egalitarian envy and pride.

Unless we get over that resentful queasiness about the new ruling techno-class we're winding up with anyway, we'll just keep choking on climate.

 
#science 
 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/556627/silicon-valley-could-save-world-from-climate-change-but-dont-want
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Possible identity for mysteriously bright x-ray-emitting objects

Science Focus

original post »

A new study may have discovered the nature of a class of objects that have been mysterious for decades. The objects in question are Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs), which are named for their incredible brightness at those wavelengths.

ULXs are understood to be black holes (though some are known to be pulsars, we're not sure what percentage), but their properties challenge our understandings of these objects. Many of the black holes seem to be taking in matter (accreting) faster than their Eddington limits, which describes how much matter can be ingested in a given time. At that accretion rate, the light produced by the friction of the infalling material should push new material away, slowing the process down.

Since it’s not known how much mass the ULX black holes have, models have proposed a variety of scenarios. It could be that the ULXs are mostly intermediate-mass black holes (black holes with masses between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the Sun), which have higher Eddington limits. Or maybe they’re stellar-mass black holes (black holes that formed out of a collapsed star) that are accreting faster than their Eddington limit by some unknown mechanism.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

 
#science 
 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/u8bikk3iHhU/
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Hypervelocity impact test damage

Science Focus

original post »

An aluminium plate, ripped inwards by a single sand grain-sized fleck of aluminium oxide shot at it during

The post Hypervelocity impact test damage has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/5cn_14zEDH8/
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Cats Eye Nebula Square Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: nebulae, amazing astronomy images, tcenebnch, hubble chandra images, cats eye nebula, stellar evolution, dying star, red giant evolution, galaxies, outer space pictures, stars, nasa

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous design featuring a composite image of the Cat's Eye nebula from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
This famous nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution after a star like our Sun runs out of fuel. In this phase, a star becomes an expanding red giant and sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures.
more items with this image
more items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

image code: tcenebnch

Image credit: NASA/Chandra www.nasa.gov

»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Triple Conjunction Over Galician National Park

more »



Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Exposed water ice detected on comet’s surface

more »

Using the high-resolution science camera on board ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, scientists have identified more than a hundred patches of water ice a few metres in size on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Exposed_water_ice_detected_on_comet_s_surface

Nanostructure design enables pixels to produce two different colors

more »
Through precise structural control, A*STAR researchers have encoded a single pixel with two distinct colors and have used this capability to generate a three-dimensional stereoscopic image.

Zazzle Space market place

Orion Nebula Case For iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: orion, nebula, rust, aqua, green, space, cosmic, astronomy, images, nasa, hubble

A lovely image of the Orion Nebula thanks to NASA/Hubble Space Telescope.

»visit the annaleeblysse store for more designs and products like this
The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

Shark deterrent research reveals interesting results

original post »

Shark researchers from the Neuroecology Group at The University of Western Australia have released the results of their

The post Shark deterrent research reveals interesting results has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Vintage Astronomy, Constellations of Southern Sky Poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: sky, constellations, nostalgic, stars, nostalgia, retro, antique, americana, vintage, celestial map, antique celestial

Vintage illustration Renaissance era astronomy and celestial image featuring an antique star chart of the southern sky, created in 1660 by Andreas Cellarius. Map of the constellations of the southern hemisphere including some signs of the Zodiac, from The Celestial Atlas, or the Harmony of the Universe. Andreas Cellarius (c.1596-1665) was a Dutch-German cartographer, best known for his Harmonia Macrocosmica from 1660, a major star atlas, published by Johannes Janssonius in Amsterdam.

»visit the YesterdayCafe store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize with size, paper type etc.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Stellar Nurseries RCW120 Square Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, star clusters, nebulae, gstlnrsr, breathtaking astronomy images, star nurseries, inspirational stars, ionised gas clouds, star forming regions, hrbstslr rcw120, galaxies, starfields, heavens, eso, european southern observatory, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

A fantastic set of stickers, with a monogram for you to change, featuring a colour composite image of RCW120.

It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed.

The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red).

All items with this image
All items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

Image code: gstlnrsr

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

The Orion Nebula iPad Folio Cases

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: pink, red, orion, nebula, nasa, hubble, space, images, pretty, beautiful, artistic, amazing, awe-inspiring, astronomy

A lovely detailed image of the Orion Nebula in infrared thanks to NASA/Hubble.

»visit the annaleeblysse store for more designs and products like this
The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

Physicists fine-tune control of agile exotic materials

more »
Physicists have found a way to control the length and strength of waves of atomic motion called polaritons that have promising potential uses such as fine-scale imaging and the transmission of information within tight spaces. Heterostructures made from graphene and hexagonal boron nitride support hybrid plasmon-phonon polaritons that can be tuned electronically.
via Science Daily