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Distant Sedna Raises Possibility of Another Earth-Sized Planet in Our Solar System
(Robert Roy Britt, Space.com, 16 March 2004)
Our corner of the galaxy got a little stranger this week with the discovery of Sedna, the most distant object ever spotted in the solar system. Now astronomers are puzzling over how it got there. . . . The most intriguing idea is that there might be another world as big as Earth, a gravitational bully lurking in some unexplored corner of the solar system. . . . Here's the problem: Scientists can't figure out how Sedna, which is about three-fourths as big as Pluto, came to have such a strange orbit around the Sun. Sedna's path is highly elliptic. It ranges from 76 astronomical units (AU) when it is closest to the Sun to 1,000 AU when it is farthest. One AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun. . . . "How on Earth could anything get into an orbit like that," wonders astronomer Brian Marsden. He suggests another sort of Earth might have had something to do with putting Sedna on its current, odd course. . . . "Perhaps there's more than one planet out there," Marsden said. "Who knows? But let's suppose it is something of an Earth mass, maybe even a few Earth masses. A close approach could throw this object [Sedna] from something more circular into something more eccentric." . . . Marsden says such a scenario leaves open the question of how an Earth-sized planet could have formed so far from the Sun, where raw material should have been sparse, according to current theory. . . . Brown said there is one unexplored region of space left, amounting to about 20 percent of the sky, that hasn't been searched for an Earth-sized object that would be orbiting at 70 AU and presumably in the main plane of the solar system. It is the region toward the bright galactic center, which is harder to search. . . . Brown said his team is considering making that search now. . . . Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute adds another twist to the whole puzzle. Stern thinks there could be Earth-sized planets in the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of the solar system. . . . Brown's team said they thought Sedna should be counted as the first known object of the otherwise theoretical Oort Cloud. The distant reservoir of small icy objects is thought to exist based on the orbits of some comets that zoom through the inner solar system now and then, and then disappear into deep space. . . . Nobody knows what's actually in the Oort Cloud, however. . . . Ferreting out worlds that far away would be a monumental challenge. The Oort Cloud is said to stretch nearly halfway to the next known star.

posted by Lorenzo 4:20 PM

 

Hubble delivers best-ever view of early Universe


(New Scientist, 04 March 2004)
Astronomers have begun poring over the deepest visible-light image yet of the early Universe, which shows galaxies dating back to a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang. Near-infrared images of the same region push back to within 300 million years of the birth of the Universe, which occurred about 13.5 billion years ago. . . . However, the images were obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and the cancellation of its shuttle means the new Ultra Deep Field visible-light image is likely to be astronomers' best view for many years to come. . . . Hubble stared at a small patch of sky in the constellation Fornax for a combined total of nearly 12 days to record the image. Only four people had seen the image before its public release on Tuesday at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, US.

[COMMENT: The above link will take you to a page with the full image of the photo. The image shown here only shows a few of the 10,000 galaxies in the full photo.]

posted by Lorenzo 12:06 PM

 

Bush Condemned by World's Leading Scientists
(Mark Morford, SF Gate, February 27, 2004)
What do you get when more than 60 of the world's top scientists, 20 Nobel Laureates among them, get together and write one of the most scathing, damning reports in the history of modern science, aimed squarely at BushCo's thoroughly atrocious record of cover-ups and obfuscations and outright lies regarding the health of the planet? . . . What do you get when those very scientists, a highly respected, nonpartisan group called the Union of Concerned Scientists, go on to claim that no other president in modern history has so openly misled the public or been so flagrantly disrespectful of scientific fact and mountains of irrefutable research, deliberately and systematically mutilating scientific data in the service of its rather brutal, pro-corporate, antienvironment agenda? . . . If you answered, "Why, you get even more painful polyps of sadness and disgust on your soul due to the BushCo onslaught," consider yourself among the millions who are right now rather horrified and appalled and who are wondering just what sort of human -- not what sort of politician, mind you, not what sort of power broker, not what sort of failed Texas oilman corporate lackey -- but what sort of human being you have to be to enact such insidious ongoing planet-gouging legislation, smirking and shrugging all the way. . . . you can only wonder what has gone so horribly wrong, what sort of line has been crossed so that not even the basic dignity of the planet, not even a modicum of respect for it, is the slightest factor anymore in modern American right-wing politics. . . . no one wants to hear how badly we've been duped by this administration, again. Given the nonexistent WMDs and the complete lack of Iraqi nukes and the bogus wars and manufactured fear and a galling budget deficit and nearly 3 million lost jobs and a raft of BushCo lies so thick you need a jackhammer to see some light, no one wants to know that even the world's top scientists are disgusted with our nation's leadership. . . . This is a president, after all, who truly believes he is doing God's will by turning this country into the most lawless, internationally loathed aggressor on the planet, something I'm sure is very reassuring to those countless thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. . . . as the Union of Concerned Scientists point out, never has the oppression of fact been so systematic, so widespread, so repulsive as that which Bush has wrought. Never has the abuse been so flagrant, the border marking what's morally acceptable so shamelessly crossed. . . . This is like the saturation level of BushCo. Something's gotta give, you say. Surely some sort of ugly orgiastic critical mass has been reached wherein Bush and his planet-reaming policies simply cannot go any further without some sort of meltdown, some sort of massive international cosmic recoil whereby we finally see the Bush admin for what it is, quite possibly the most self-serving, egomaniacal cluster of enviro thugs in modern history. . . . BushCo's ugly rejection of not merely the "liberal" environmental politicking but also of the factual science of the natural world is, ultimately, a form of self-loathing. . . . It is a snide and self-destructive rejection of the human-nature connection, of the very real and very direct correlation between how we treat our world and how we view ourselves, between what we choose to celebrate/annihilate in nature and what we venerate/devastate in own spirits. After all, the less regard you have for one, the less you care about the other. Simple, really. . . . Look. We reflect the planet. The planet reflects us. And 60 out of 60 scientists agree: BushCo's time of reflecting nothing but cruel blackness and abuse needs to come to an end, right now.

posted by Lorenzo 3:54 PM

 

WATER ON MARS!
(Jet Propulsion Laboratory, March 2, 2004)
Opportunity Rover Finds Strong Evidence Meridiani Planum Was Wet . . . Scientists have concluded the part of Mars that NASA's Opportunity rover is exploring was soaking wet in the past. . . . Evidence the rover found in a rock outcrop led scientists to the conclusion. Clues from the rocks' composition, such as the presence of sulfates, and the rocks' physical appearance, such as niches where crystals grew, helped make the case for a watery history. . . . "Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. "We've been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion." . . . Opportunity has more work ahead. It will try to determine whether, besides being exposed to water after they formed, the rocks may have originally been laid down by minerals precipitating out of solution at the bottom of a salty lake or sea. . . . The first views Opportunity sent of its landing site in Mars' Meridiani Planum region five weeks ago delighted researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., because of the good fortune to have the spacecraft arrive next to an exposed slice of bedrock on the inner slope of a small crater. . . . The robotic field geologist has spent most of the past three weeks surveying the whole outcrop, and then turning back for close-up inspection of selected portions. The rover found a very high concentration of sulfur in the outcrop with its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, which identifies chemical elements in a sample. "The chemical form of this sulfur appears to be in magnesium, iron or other sulfate salts," said Dr. Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. "Elements that can form chloride or even bromide salts have also been detected." . . . The water evidence from the rocks' physical appearance comes in at least three categories, said Dr. John Grotzinger, sedimentary geologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge: indentations called "vugs," spherules and crossbedding. . . . Pictures from the rover's panoramic camera and microscopic imager reveal the target rock, dubbed "El Capitan," is thoroughly pocked with indentations about a centimeter (0.4 inch) long and one-fourth or less that wide, with apparently random orientations. This distinctive texture is familiar to geologists as the sites where crystals of salt minerals form within rocks that sit in briny water. . . . JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington.

[COMMENT: Take a Drive on Mars and look around for yourself. DriveOnMars.com is a project of the Digital Space Commons in conjunction with NASA. There is no software to install as such, since this is a 3D cyberspace outerspace exploration on the Web in Adobe Atmosphere, which self-installs in your browser. Give it a try and Drive on Mars in real-time 3D.]

posted by Lorenzo 11:16 AM