mars blueberries

the informative space.com put together a list of the top 10 most amazing things discovered by the mars rovers, spirit and opportunity. everyone likes their lists and i think it's great that there's finally one about my favorite robots!

items included on the list are the first meteorite ever found on another planet and the possibility that mars smells like rotten eggs from all the sulfur on its surface!! my personal favorite discovery by the rovers was definitely the blueberries!


Scientists aren't completely sure what causes these little rocks to have such spherical shapes and pure contents, but they have a good theory. the BB-sized spheres are mostly made of hematite, an oxide of iron. if the martian spheres are formed similarly to blueberry stones found on earth in utah, then over time, water seeps through cracks, spaces and pores in the martian dirt.... eventually, the hematite dissolves out of the water and the weathering of the area causes the shape (or something like that... geologists, help me out?). so this would mean.... that there was once flowing water on mars!



cool stuff. i havent read much more about these blueberries recently. anyone else seen articles about them? anyway, neat top 10 list and finally some good press for NASA!

Geocentricism? Is that all?

Astropixie, I noticed on a recent entry you were lamenting the continued existence of Geocentricism. Fear not, I have something to help you get over it:

The Flat Earth Society

From the FAQ:

Q: "Is this site for real?"

A: This site is real. There are people who seriously believe the Earth is flat. However, there are also people on this site who do not.

Q: "Why do you guys believe the Earth is flat?"

A: Well, it looks that way up close. Also, Samuel Rowbotham et al. performed a variety of experiments over a period of several years that show it must be flat. They are all explained in his book, which is linked at the top of this article.

Don't worry it gets better:

Q: "How did NASA create these images with the computer technology available at the time?"

A: Since NASA did not send rockets into space, they instead spent the money on developing advanced computers and imaging software instead

PLEASE NOTE This means that pictures confirming the roundness or flatness of the Earth DO NOT IN THEMSELVES CONSTITUTE VALID PROOF.

If 2000 year old dead bodies could spin in their graves, Eratosthenes's would be doing it about now.

flatulence?

theres a website updated daily, http://arxiv.org/ called "archive", where researchers in every branch of physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology can post their newly published papers for all to see. i've been a bit back-logged so today i decided to sit down and catch up on the last two weeks of posts. the title of this one cracked me up because as i glanced over it, my mind substituted the word "flatulences" for "fluctuations." this in itself made me laugh, but it actually became more funny when i read the whole title again! hahaha!

Title: Air-shower simulations with and without thinning: artificial fluctuations and their suppression

Authors: D.S. Gorbunov, G.I. Rubtsov and S.V. Troitsky
Categories: astro-ph
Comments: 8 pages, revtex. The shower library is available at
http://livni.inr.ac.ru

The most common way to simplify extensive Monte-Carlo simulations of air showers is the use of the thinning approximation. We study its effect on the physical parameters reconstructed from simulated showers. To this end, we created a library of showers simulated without thinning with energies from 10^17 eV to 10^18 eV, different zenith angles and primaries. This library is publicly available. Various physically interesting applications of the showers simulated without thinning are discussed. Observables reconstructed from these showers are compared to those obtained with the thinning approximation. The amount of artificial fluctuations introduced by thinning is estimated. A simple method, multisampling, is suggested which results in a controllable suppression of artificial fluctuations and at the same time requires less demanding computational resources as compared to the usual thinning.
( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703546 , 472kb)
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An Astronomer is I!

Classic Sagan Quotation

Not really dirty (maybe dusty) or news, but a great thought from a great thinker.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Reflections on a Mote of Dust

Dark Side

An article by Phil Plait for Seed Magazine tells the story of how scientists have learned how to "see" dark matter.

After decades of attempts, astronomers have unveiled the dark side of the Universe.

I have to wonder if they finally resorted to alcohol in their "unveiling" attempts.

Dark matter was first thought of in the 1930's.

As time went on, more and more data suggested that the bulk of the Universe is invisible. Astronomers weren't thrilled with this (who wants to be told you can't see the majority of what you're trying to study?), but the evidence kept mounting. Galaxies rotated too quickly, implying that they had extra matter surrounding them in halos that were totally invisible. X-ray images revealed galaxies that were submerged in vast pools of million-degree gas, which should quickly dissipate unless the gravity from some unseen matter held it in place.

To simulate, get on a crowded bus of people who are leaving a bean and chili festival.

To see the dark matter, scientists decided to measure its only known effect: gravity. By measuring the distortion due to gravity of objects in space and comparing them with the expected distortion, astronomers were able to map out a 3-D view of dark matter. Since the far away dark matter is also being seen as it used to be, the map gives a view into the universe's past.

In the past, dark matter formed huge structures spanning hundreds of millions of light years across. But in more recent history, these enormous blobs have broken into smaller, scattered clumps.

Which indicates that the universe needs to eat more fiber.

For more details about this story, click on the link above.

Atmosphere

That space voyeur we call Hubble was, in 2003, peeking at an extrasolar "Hot Jupiter". Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very closely to their stars. Because they are so close, they revolve around the stars fairly quickly. The larger size and frequency of revolutions makes these planets easier to detect from Earth. Most of the extrasolar planets we know about are Hot Jupiters.

The analysis of the 2003 observations indicates that the atmosphere of one Hot Jupiter is in fact being "melted off" by it's proximity to the star. The atmosphere trails behind the orbiting planet like a comet giving it... a bit of tail.