Nova, Blue Rings Surround Uranus, Breathing Fire
We're coming up on Passover. Wednesday April 12th, 14th Nissan, is First Seder.
Interesting data coming out of space.
'Dead star' erupts for big show
By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, in Leicester
The data will be used to improve the current model of nova events
Scientists are studying the violent outburst of a dead star as it tries to fire back into life.
The white dwarf star in the Ophiuchus constellation has exhausted its own nuclear fuel but is now stealing it from a neighbouring giant.
Every 20 years or so, it gathers sufficient material to explode with enough intensity to be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
The so-called recurrent nova event has now flared up six times in 108 years.
"It's a runaway nuclear bomb, basically, that has gone off on the surface of the white dwarf star," said Mike Bode.
The Liverpool John Moores University professor has been detailing the ongoing incident, along with Dr Tim O'Brien of Jodrell Bank Observatory, to the 2006 UK National Astronomy Meeting.
Amateur stargazers in Japan were the first to report the nova on 12 February, and the professional scientific community has responded by calling up some of the world's leading facilities to take a look.
These telescopes include the US space agency's flagship Swift and Spitzer missions; as well as ground-based observatories such as the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Merlin radio astronomy network in England.
"The level of co-operation and the range of telescopes involved has been extraordinary," said Professor Bode, the leader of the Swift's nova campaign.
Slow fade
The white dwarf star is about 5,000 light-years from Earth and is probably little bigger than our own planet, having burnt all its hydrogen and shed its outer layers.
It is now extremely dense and its strong gravity can pull gas off a companion, red giant star. The two objects orbit each other every 455 days.
What is very unusual in this arrangement is that the red giant is losing enormous amounts of gas in a wind that envelops the whole system (referred to as RS Ophiuchi, or RS Oph).
As a result, when the episodic thermonuclear explosions let go, they do so "inside" the companion's extended atmosphere.
"When this thing goes bang, it blows material out into the wind and sets off shocks that are at more than 100 million degrees, nearly 10 times the core temperature of our Sun," Professor Bode told the BBC News website.
The event remained visible in the sky to the unaided eye for about a week or so. Skywatchers would now need binoculars or a small telescope to see it.
However, the nova remains bright at wavelengths outside the visible spectrum - especially to the world's biggest telescopes.
Great opportunity
The space-borne Swift observatory was called in just three days after the outburst began. The Nasa-managed spacecraft carries UK-built components that detect X-rays.
Swift recorded how this high-energy light brightened, faded and then lit up again.
"About a month after the outburst, the X-ray brightness of RS Oph increased very dramatically," explained Dr Julian Osborne, a Swift scientist at the University of Leicester.
"This was presumably because the hot white dwarf, which is still burning nuclear fuel, then became visible through the red giant's wind.
"This new X-ray flux was extremely variable, and we were able to see pulsations which repeat every 35 seconds or so. Although it is very early days, and data are still being taken, one possibility for the variability is that this is due to instability in the nuclear burning rate on the white dwarf."
From high energies to lower-energy radio wavelengths, the astronomical community expects the observations to be a boon to its understanding of nova behaviour. All the data will be used to improve the current model for this type of event.
"This is our best chance yet of understanding what is truly going on," said radio astronomer Dr Stewart Eyres, of the University of Central Lancashire.
RS Oph's activity is expected to die down over the next few weeks and months - before it pulls enough gas off the red giant to explode again in 10-30 years' time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4885700.stm
.....
The sun gives us life by nuclear reaction.
hmmm
.....
Seventh planet has a blue ring
By Helen Briggs BBC News science reporter
Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System.
Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon.
Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon.
Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science.
All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the rings reddish in appearance.
Bright blue
Astronomers have long known that the gas giant Uranus is surrounded by rings of dark particulate matter up to ten metres in diameter.
But last December, two new rings - the planet's twelfth and thirteenth - were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers observed the ring system at infrared wavelengths with the Keck telescope, in Hawaii.
The outermost ring, and its ice-bound moon Mab, could not be observed in infrared light unlike the red inner ring.
A team led by Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the ring was bright blue, something of an oddity in planetary terms.
"The blue colour says that this ring is predominantly submicron-sized material, much smaller than the material in most other rings, which appear red," Professor de Pater said.
The tiny particles - less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair - scatter and reflect predominantly blue light, much like the very small molecules in the air that make the Earth's sky blue.
The more common rings are reddish because they also contain many larger particles, which gives the reflected light its colour, and may be made up of reddish material, perhaps from iron.
It appears that the outer blue rings of Saturn and Uranus are strikingly similar, not least because they are both associated with small moons.
Moon dance
"The moon orbits the planet in the ring," Professor de Pater told the BBC News website.
"It is continuously impacted by very tiny particles [micrometeorites]. On a moon that doesn't have any atmosphere these tiny particles impact the moon at high velocity, and throw stuff up into space.
"Because the moon is so small, it escapes the moon and goes into orbit around the planet.
"The smaller particles stay in orbit around the planet but the larger particles smash back into the moon."
The work was carried out in collaboration with Mark Showalter, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute in California; Heidi Hammel, of the Space Science Institute, Colorado; and Seran Gibbard, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The scientists plan to carry out further observations next year, when the faint rings of Uranus will be more visible.
.....
Blueness is being revealed. Enceladusians are blue too.
.....
Last quote from Chernobyl, by Frederick Pohl. I finished the book. Lots of data in there I didn't remember, especially the political stuff.
The next novel I pick up to read won't be so so so i guess depressing is a good work to use here.
In the meantime, I have Barry Manilow's new CD Greatest Songs of the 50's, which is better than Paxil.
"Meterologists who wish to explain the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere sometimes employ an illustration called 'Caesar's Last Breath.' By an arithmetical coincidence, the average number of molecules of air in a human lung is quite close to the total number of 'lungful-equivalents' in the Earth's atmosphere. In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar died of his stab wounds in the Toman Forum, there has been plenty of time for mixing, so the molecules of air he exhaled as he perished are now everywhere. Even in your lungs. On average, each time you take a breath, you take in one molecule that Caesar gasped out. This does you no harm. Caesar's last breath contained nothing that can hurt you' but the last huge breath from the dying Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 is another matter. It is not aw well distributed as Caesar's eshalation. There has not been as much time. Expecially in the southern hemisphere, which exchanges air with the north only, weakly, through what are called 'Hadley cells', and only tiny fractions of the Chernobyl gases have yet been circulated. But there was so vastly much more of the gases from Chernobyl that every one of us now has in our lungs a certain number of Chernobyl molecules, and this is not only true for all Americans and Russiand and Chinese and French and Italians, but for every African, Australian, and Cambodian, and even for all the elephants in Kenya and the Antartic penguins. We breathe in some of Chernobyl's last breath every day, and will go on doing so all our lives."
There is a lot more that has happened since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Once example is 9.11. After 9.11, breathing in NYC was like breathing in cracked glass.
.....
We're being sustained by a constant thermonuclear reaction in our sun.
Somehow I'm find the quantum synchronicity of it quite fascinating.
.....
This week's Torah Portion Parashat Tzav. The main metaphor is fire, the fire that must never be extinguished. hmmmm.
It is Shabbat Hagadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. This means a lot of energy is flowing down , directly as it were, to us, the vessels for the light.
Candelighting 7:28, forward one hour (that's daylight saving time) + 3 minutes.
Ileya has her own blog now.
http://ileyasblogspace.blogspot.com/
.....
Think Blue
Think Peace
Breathe Peace
and
Thanks for the Dance this week. Thanks for the Dance. I love you.
Shabbat Shalom
Interesting data coming out of space.
'Dead star' erupts for big show
By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, in Leicester
The data will be used to improve the current model of nova events
Scientists are studying the violent outburst of a dead star as it tries to fire back into life.
The white dwarf star in the Ophiuchus constellation has exhausted its own nuclear fuel but is now stealing it from a neighbouring giant.
Every 20 years or so, it gathers sufficient material to explode with enough intensity to be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
The so-called recurrent nova event has now flared up six times in 108 years.
"It's a runaway nuclear bomb, basically, that has gone off on the surface of the white dwarf star," said Mike Bode.
The Liverpool John Moores University professor has been detailing the ongoing incident, along with Dr Tim O'Brien of Jodrell Bank Observatory, to the 2006 UK National Astronomy Meeting.
Amateur stargazers in Japan were the first to report the nova on 12 February, and the professional scientific community has responded by calling up some of the world's leading facilities to take a look.
These telescopes include the US space agency's flagship Swift and Spitzer missions; as well as ground-based observatories such as the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Merlin radio astronomy network in England.
"The level of co-operation and the range of telescopes involved has been extraordinary," said Professor Bode, the leader of the Swift's nova campaign.
Slow fade
The white dwarf star is about 5,000 light-years from Earth and is probably little bigger than our own planet, having burnt all its hydrogen and shed its outer layers.
It is now extremely dense and its strong gravity can pull gas off a companion, red giant star. The two objects orbit each other every 455 days.
What is very unusual in this arrangement is that the red giant is losing enormous amounts of gas in a wind that envelops the whole system (referred to as RS Ophiuchi, or RS Oph).
As a result, when the episodic thermonuclear explosions let go, they do so "inside" the companion's extended atmosphere.
"When this thing goes bang, it blows material out into the wind and sets off shocks that are at more than 100 million degrees, nearly 10 times the core temperature of our Sun," Professor Bode told the BBC News website.
The event remained visible in the sky to the unaided eye for about a week or so. Skywatchers would now need binoculars or a small telescope to see it.
However, the nova remains bright at wavelengths outside the visible spectrum - especially to the world's biggest telescopes.
Great opportunity
The space-borne Swift observatory was called in just three days after the outburst began. The Nasa-managed spacecraft carries UK-built components that detect X-rays.
Swift recorded how this high-energy light brightened, faded and then lit up again.
"About a month after the outburst, the X-ray brightness of RS Oph increased very dramatically," explained Dr Julian Osborne, a Swift scientist at the University of Leicester.
"This was presumably because the hot white dwarf, which is still burning nuclear fuel, then became visible through the red giant's wind.
"This new X-ray flux was extremely variable, and we were able to see pulsations which repeat every 35 seconds or so. Although it is very early days, and data are still being taken, one possibility for the variability is that this is due to instability in the nuclear burning rate on the white dwarf."
From high energies to lower-energy radio wavelengths, the astronomical community expects the observations to be a boon to its understanding of nova behaviour. All the data will be used to improve the current model for this type of event.
"This is our best chance yet of understanding what is truly going on," said radio astronomer Dr Stewart Eyres, of the University of Central Lancashire.
RS Oph's activity is expected to die down over the next few weeks and months - before it pulls enough gas off the red giant to explode again in 10-30 years' time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4885700.stm
.....
The sun gives us life by nuclear reaction.
hmmm
.....
Seventh planet has a blue ring
By Helen Briggs BBC News science reporter
Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System.
Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon.
Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon.
Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science.
All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the rings reddish in appearance.
Bright blue
Astronomers have long known that the gas giant Uranus is surrounded by rings of dark particulate matter up to ten metres in diameter.
But last December, two new rings - the planet's twelfth and thirteenth - were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers observed the ring system at infrared wavelengths with the Keck telescope, in Hawaii.
The outermost ring, and its ice-bound moon Mab, could not be observed in infrared light unlike the red inner ring.
A team led by Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the ring was bright blue, something of an oddity in planetary terms.
"The blue colour says that this ring is predominantly submicron-sized material, much smaller than the material in most other rings, which appear red," Professor de Pater said.
The tiny particles - less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair - scatter and reflect predominantly blue light, much like the very small molecules in the air that make the Earth's sky blue.
The more common rings are reddish because they also contain many larger particles, which gives the reflected light its colour, and may be made up of reddish material, perhaps from iron.
It appears that the outer blue rings of Saturn and Uranus are strikingly similar, not least because they are both associated with small moons.
Moon dance
"The moon orbits the planet in the ring," Professor de Pater told the BBC News website.
"It is continuously impacted by very tiny particles [micrometeorites]. On a moon that doesn't have any atmosphere these tiny particles impact the moon at high velocity, and throw stuff up into space.
"Because the moon is so small, it escapes the moon and goes into orbit around the planet.
"The smaller particles stay in orbit around the planet but the larger particles smash back into the moon."
The work was carried out in collaboration with Mark Showalter, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute in California; Heidi Hammel, of the Space Science Institute, Colorado; and Seran Gibbard, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The scientists plan to carry out further observations next year, when the faint rings of Uranus will be more visible.
.....
Blueness is being revealed. Enceladusians are blue too.
.....
Last quote from Chernobyl, by Frederick Pohl. I finished the book. Lots of data in there I didn't remember, especially the political stuff.
The next novel I pick up to read won't be so so so i guess depressing is a good work to use here.
In the meantime, I have Barry Manilow's new CD Greatest Songs of the 50's, which is better than Paxil.
"Meterologists who wish to explain the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere sometimes employ an illustration called 'Caesar's Last Breath.' By an arithmetical coincidence, the average number of molecules of air in a human lung is quite close to the total number of 'lungful-equivalents' in the Earth's atmosphere. In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar died of his stab wounds in the Toman Forum, there has been plenty of time for mixing, so the molecules of air he exhaled as he perished are now everywhere. Even in your lungs. On average, each time you take a breath, you take in one molecule that Caesar gasped out. This does you no harm. Caesar's last breath contained nothing that can hurt you' but the last huge breath from the dying Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 is another matter. It is not aw well distributed as Caesar's eshalation. There has not been as much time. Expecially in the southern hemisphere, which exchanges air with the north only, weakly, through what are called 'Hadley cells', and only tiny fractions of the Chernobyl gases have yet been circulated. But there was so vastly much more of the gases from Chernobyl that every one of us now has in our lungs a certain number of Chernobyl molecules, and this is not only true for all Americans and Russiand and Chinese and French and Italians, but for every African, Australian, and Cambodian, and even for all the elephants in Kenya and the Antartic penguins. We breathe in some of Chernobyl's last breath every day, and will go on doing so all our lives."
There is a lot more that has happened since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Once example is 9.11. After 9.11, breathing in NYC was like breathing in cracked glass.
.....
We're being sustained by a constant thermonuclear reaction in our sun.
Somehow I'm find the quantum synchronicity of it quite fascinating.
.....
This week's Torah Portion Parashat Tzav. The main metaphor is fire, the fire that must never be extinguished. hmmmm.
It is Shabbat Hagadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. This means a lot of energy is flowing down , directly as it were, to us, the vessels for the light.
Candelighting 7:28, forward one hour (that's daylight saving time) + 3 minutes.
Ileya has her own blog now.
http://ileyasblogspace.blogspot.com/
.....
Think Blue
Think Peace
Breathe Peace
and
Thanks for the Dance this week. Thanks for the Dance. I love you.
Shabbat Shalom
posted by VickeB | 10:22 AM
2 Comments:
Isn't it interesting that we are being shined down on with fire, as we breath in chernoble and all and everything that has come before us.. The thermonuclear stuff coming from the sun, ahhh, are we all connected..
I breath you into me, I breath it all into me, and I am whole... Maybe within this realm of death and destuctrution we are not truely whole until we embrace the all of it, life and death, that which bring s life and that which brings death. I need to ponder this.. The all of all of it here. The none of any of it there.. Oh boy, my fav, THE DICHOTOMY !! Off I go to ponder and see what I might know..
BLue, Blue, Blue, always makes me think of you..
I was pondering
how we swim in the sea
and walk in the woods
.....
you don't walk in the sea
or
swim in the woods.
I blue my own mind :P with the circular synchronicity of nuclear reaction.
the sea makes me think of thee
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