The Enlightening Science Thread

Both nice scopes gents. Have either of you taken photos with them?

The Mars rock being a life form danced into my thoughts too. After all, we can't expect all life to be based on water and carbon.

Thank you for the compliment Gary. It was always in the back of my mind to mount one, but no, I never had a camera attached to mine. If I ever get around to it, I'd set mine up with video and pump it back to my computer inside where its nice and warm.

John's NexStar would be easier to run because its already computerized and he could send commands back to it from inside to change his view. With mine I'd have to go out and manually set it to another point in the sky, once set it would track by itself.

Once during the last Solar Max Cycle 23 in 2000 I did have mine set up to follow the Sun and project the image through the telescope onto posterboard I had mounted on our house, this will give an idea how to: Observing the Sun — Safely and I was taking pictures of those projected images, you could feel the heat if you put your hand in the projection. The neighbors and kids were fascinated.

It was easy to track with the motorized equatorial mount and I had a loads of fun trying to keep the moving image on the posterboard and take pictures. It was quite the show, I was like the proverbial one armed paper hanger.

Charlemagne's Bones Displayed at German Cathedral Are Likely Authentic

The relics of Charlemagne, long on display at a treasury in Germany, are likely the real bones of the Frankish king, scientists say.

Last Tuesday (Jan. 28) marked exactly 1,200 years since Charlemagne died in A.D. 814. To commemorate the occasion, a group of scientists at the Cathedral of Aachen gave a summary of the research that has been conducted on the king's bones, stretching back to 1988.

Like many saints whose body parts were scattered in various reliquaries, Charlemagne was not left to rest in one piece. (Charlemagne was actually canonized by the "antipope" Paschal III in the 12th century, though the Holy See rejected his sainthood.) Today, the vast majority of the king's bones belong to the treasury at the Cathedral of Aachen in western Germany, said Frank Rühli, who heads the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Source

A Guy

It’s Snack Time in the Cosmos

A gas cloud named G2 is about to collide with Sagittarius A*,
the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.




A simulation shows how the cloud might be stretched and torn apart (2011 - 2016)

Black holes, the ultradense collapsed objects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, are often depicted as voracious feeders whose extraordinary gravity acts like a one-way membrane: Everything is sucked in, even light, and virtually nothing leaks out.
Now, for the first time, astronomers may have a chance to watch as a giant black hole consumes a cosmic snack.

In March or April, a gas cloud that has been hurtling toward the center of the Milky Way is expected to collide with Sagittarius A*, a black hole that lies just 26,000 light-years from Earth. (The actual event, of course, took place 26,000 years ago.)

The cloud is as massive as three Earths — no match for the black hole, which has the mass of four million suns.
“This is a rare opportunity to witness spoon-feeding of a black hole,” said Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard. “Will the gas reach the black hole, and if so, how quickly? Will the black hole throw up or spit the gas out in the form of an outflow or a jet?

“The experience is as exciting for astronomers,” he went on, “as it is for parents taking the first photos of their infant eating.”

880-pound asteroid slams into moon, watch it go boom

The prevalence of loud action movies shows just how much humans enjoy a good explosion. You won't find many bigger than what happened on the moon in September last year. Footage of an 880-pound asteroid smashing onto the lunar surface was just released, showing a bright flash at the impact site.

The evidence was captured by telescopes as part of a moon-impact monitoring project run by astronomers at the University of Huelva in Spain. A paper about the event was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The impact makes NASA's video of a boulder-sized meteroid crashing into the moon early last year look like a hiccup in comparison. That impact rocked the lunar surface to the equivalent of about 5 tons of TNT. The more recent crash landing hit with the force of around 15 tons of TNT. Kaboom.

Source

A Guy

NASA's Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza, 715 New Worlds

NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.”

Source

A Guy

As happens about 20 times a year with current detection capabilities, a known asteroid will safely pass Earth Wednesday closer than the distance from Earth to the moon.

Source: Asteroid Will Safely Pass Closer Than Moon Wednesday - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Here's a video about the Kepler mission and how it works.
Kepler Multis Announcement, Recorded on 2/26/14 NASAtelevision on USTREAM. Science

BBC News - Ancient Earth hammered by double space impact

Trilobites......