The Invisible Beauty of Wireless Networks

Humans can only see a small patch of the electromagnetic spectrum – a mere 310nm range. Other animals can see into the ultraviolet and infrared, but none can see the wavelengths used for wireless networks. Imagine if we could. Luis Hernan has given us a vision of what that might be like.
Hernan, a PhD student at the Newcastle University, UK, maps wireless signals in a room using what he calls the Kirlian Device. Then he translates the signals into color. In a reversal of the actual energy of colors, the strongest signals are converted to red, the weakest to blue.
“I call the images ‘spectres’ because wireless networks remind me of ghosts,”  Hernan said. “They are there but you can’t see them with the human eye.”

“The fact we are becoming increasingly reliant on something that we can’t see intrigues me,” Hernan added. “I wanted to find a way to show the wireless which is around us and also to show how it changes. It is an impossibly fragile and volatile infrastructure that holds our digital technologies together, and shapes the way in which we interact with the digital world. Something as seemingly inconsequential as walking around the house will interfere with and reshape their propagation and strength field. Close the wrong door, and the bedroom becomes a dead spot for wireless.”
Hernan was inspired by Seymon Davidovich Kirlian, who discovered a way to photograph electrical discharges. Kirlian, and many followers, became convinced that they had found evidence of paranormal phenomenon, equating the images produced with aura and seeing evidence of an energy field unique to living things.
A Kirlian Device App is available for Android phones (sorry iPhone users). “I would love other people to get involved and to create their own images using the app,” Hernan said. “I used it as part of an exhibition of my work, where we hung mobile phones from the ceiling and it showed how signal strength was varying as people moved around the room.”

What Would Happen If The Planet Stopped Spinning?

A team of researchers based at Yanshan University has produced a new synthetic diamond that’s remarkably robust, outperforming natural diamonds and other synthetic diamonds in both thermal stability and pressure tests. The results have been published in Nature.
Diamond is the hardest natural material known to man and consequently it is used in a wide variety of industrial settings such as aerospace engineering, mining and car manufacture. Its hardness and wear resistance makes it a particularly useful material for cutting tools but unfortunately poor stability at very high temperatures has restricted its applications in industry. Researchers are therefore turning to synthetic diamonds in order to overcome the limits of natural diamonds.
In nature, diamond occurs only as single crystals and while these materials are pretty hardy, they’re expensive and tend to wear unevenly. Synthetic diamonds, however, can either be prepared as single crystals or as a polycrystalline or nanocrystalline material. Polycrystalline diamond (PCD) is formed from tiny grains of diamond, as small as tens of nanometers in diameter, which have been fused together under high-pressure, high-temperature conditions. The smaller the grain, the harder the diamond.
These diamonds offer numerous benefits over natural diamonds given reduced costs, improved hardness and high wear resistance. However, industry is pushing these diamonds to the limits and there has been a need to develop even better diamonds.
In order to produce their super-hard diamond, the researchers subjected carbon nanoparticles that were layered like onions to high pressures and temperatures. The grains were arranged in pairs that were a mere 5 nanometers in size. The resulting “nanotwinned” diamond demonstrated remarkable thermal stability and hardness.
The team applied large pressures to the diamond and found that it was able to endure pressures of up to 200 gigapascals, which is around 1.9 million atmospheres. It would take only around half that pressure to shatter a natural diamond.
Next, they tested temperature resistance by investigating the highest temperature that could be tolerated before the diamond started to oxidize. They found the synthetic started to oxidize at temperatures between 980-1,056^oC (1,796-1,932^oF), which is around 200^oC higher than that of natural diamond.
The researchers hope that this method could be adopted in industry as a way to produce novel carbon-based materials that are super-hard and exceptionally heat stable.

Pesticides Are Killing Far More Than Bees, Study Claims

Neonicotinoid pesticides have been proposed as the most likely cause of collapsing bee populations, although the claim remains very much disputed. Now the Worldwide Integrated Assessment report has concluded the damage extends to worms and butterflies, and even fish and birds. Unsurprisingly, the authors have called for tighter regulation of the their use.
Although none of the other species thought to be affected by the use of the neurotoxins have anything like the commercial importance of bees, the alleged impact on vertebrates raises questions about whether humans might also be vulnerable. The report expresses similar concerns about fipronil, a different soft of neurotoxin insecticide.
Neonicotinoids are used to treat seeds prior to planting. Advocates say the targeted methodology means application doses are low and protection long-lasting. The main manufacturers, Bayer and Snygenta, predict losses in the billions of dollars from bans on the products.
However, if the decline in bee populations globally is not reversed the losses will be far larger. Insect pollinators, predominantly bees, were estimated to be worth €153 billion in 2005, and mass starvation is very likely if their decline cannot be halted.
The question of whether neonicotenoids are responsible is thus a matter of enormous significance. Most scientists agree that there must be multiple factors causing bees to suddenly desert their hives, but whether neonicotenoids are one of the major ones remains hugely controversial. Several studies claim to demonstrate a link, but their relevance or sample size has been questioned.
The European Union has implemented a two year trial ban on the basis that, while the evidence was not conclusive it was strong enough to justify action.
The Assessment, conducted on behalf of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and to be published in Environment Science and Pollution Research has widened the focus. Reviewing 800 studies it found that leaching into the soil is affecting earthworms, upon which the long term health of the soil depends, even more severely than bees. However, some studies report the damage goes further, reaching into waterways and affecting birds that eat fruits grown from treated seeds or insects that have fed on the plants.
“The evidence is very clear. We are witnessing a threat to the productivity of our natural and farmed environment equivalent to that posed by organophosphates or DDT. Far from protecting food production the use of neonics is threatening the very infrastructure which enables it, imperiling the pollinators, habitat engineers and natural pest controllers at the heart of a functioning ecosystem,”said Dr Jean-Marc Bonmartin, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, one of the reports lead authors.
Crop Protection Association chief executive Nick von Westenholz hit back, calling the report, "A selective review of existing studies which highlighted worst-case scenarios, largely produced under laboratory conditions".

Brain Waves Synchronize for Faster Learning

As our thoughts dart from this to that, our brains absorb and analyze new information at a rapid pace. According to a new study, these quickly changing brain states may be encoded by the synchronization of brain waves across different brain regions. Waves originating from two areas involved in learning couple to form new communication circuits when monkeys learn to categorize different patterns of dots.
Brain synapses, or the connections between neurons, are believed to underlie learning and long-term memory formation (with the help of sleep, as we just learned). But that process is too time-consuming to account for the human mind’s flexibility. “If you can change your thoughts from moment to moment, you can’t be doing it by constantly making new connections and breaking them apart in your brain. [Synaptic] plasticity doesn’t happen on that kind of time scale,” MIT’s Earl Miller​ explains in a news release.
He adds: “There’s got to be some way of dynamically establishing circuits to correspond to the thoughts we’re having in this moment, and then if we change our minds a moment later, those circuits break apart somehow.” Miller and Evan Antzoulatos from the University of California, Davis, believe the brain does it through a synchrony of brain waves: Neurons that hum together encode new information.
Millions of neurons in the brain produce its own electrical signals; these generate brain waves, and these oscillations are measured by EEGs. The duo focused on EEG patterns from the striatum (red, above), which controls habit formation, and the prefrontal cortex, (blue, above) the seat of the brain’s executive control system. “The striatum learns very simple things really quickly, and then its output trains the prefrontal cortex to gradually pick up on the bigger picture,” Miller explains. “The striatum learns the pieces of the puzzle, and then the prefrontal cortex puts the pieces of the puzzle together.”
They measured EEG signals as monkeys learned to assign patterns of dots into one of two categories. In the beginning, the monkeys were shown two different examples from each category. After each round, the researchers doubled the number of exemplars. At first, the monkeys memorized which exemplars belonged to which category, but as those numbers doubled, the monkeys couldn’t memorize them all. That’s when they began to learn the general traits characterizing each of the two categories. By the last stages of the experiment, the monkeys were able to categorize all 256 exemplars correctly.
As the monkeys shifted from rote memorization to category-learning, there was a corresponding shift in their EEG patterns. Brain waves independently produced by the prefrontal cortex and the striatum began to synchronize with each other -- suggesting that a communication circuit is forming between the two regions.
“There is some unknown mechanism that allows these resonance patterns to form, and these circuits start humming together,” Miller says. “That humming may then foster subsequent long-term plasticity changes in the brain, so real anatomical circuits can form. But the first thing that happens is they start humming together.”
When the monkeys nailed down the two categories, two separate circuits formed between the striatum and prefrontal cortex, each corresponding to one of the categories. Once the prefrontal cortex learns the categories and sends them to the striatum, they undergo further modification as new information comes in -- this occurs over and over.

Study Provides Insight Into The Recovery Of Consciousness After Anesthesia

Despite their extremely widespread use, anesthetics are actually poorly understood. How the brain recovers consciousness after general anesthesia has mystified scientists and medics for years; after such a significant perturbation, how does the patient wake up with memories and skills unharmed? A new study, published in PNAS, may finally provide us with some answers.
A simplistic theory of how the brain recovers consciousness after anesthesia is that as the anesthetic washes out of the patient, the brain simply follows a steady path toward consciousness. UCLA researchers conducting this study, however, found that this is not the case.
The team administered the anesthetic isoflurane to mice in order to induce unconsciousness and then used electrodes to record brain activity in several regions that are known to be associated with arousal and consciousness. They then gradually reduced the amount of anesthetic and monitored patterns of electrical activity as the rodents slowly returned to consciousness.
While previous research had demonstrated that the brain does exhibit certain patterns of electrical activity under anesthesia, the team discovered that this neuronal activity occurred in discrete clusters. Furthermore, they found that certain patterns of activity were consistently detected in the rodents which were dependent on the amount of anesthetic administered.
En route to recovery of consciousness, the brain was found to transit through several activity states. The brain spontaneously jumped between these patterns of activity, some of which served as “hubs” that connected patterns of activity associated with deeper anesthesia with those associated with lighter anesthesia.
The team note that while many paths through this neuronal network are possible, the brain must pass through these hubs in an orderly fashion to reach consciousness.
“Recovery from anesthesia is not simply the result of the anesthetic ‘wearing off’ but also of the brain finding its way through a maze of possible activity states to those that allow conscious experience,” lead researcher Dr. Andrew Hudson said in a news-release. “Put simply, the brain reboots itself.”
Alongside shedding light on this poorly understood area, this information could have applications in the medical field. For example, if the information can be applied to individuals in a coma then doctors may be able to predict recovery with greater accuracy by examining brain activity in the regions investigated in this study.
The researchers hope to continue this work using other anesthetics to see if the same patterns of brain activity are observed.

Bigger Is Better After All

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Bath has found that enlargement of the visual cortex of the brain in primates is associated with increased visual acuity, suggesting that increases in the size of brain regions are associated with enhanced function.  The study has been published in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
While an overall relationship between brain size and cognitive ability is apparent in primates, little is known about the relevance of the size of specific cortical regions in regard to function. In order to shed some light on this poorly understood area, researchers compared the visual cortex of numerous primate species, including humans, and used assessments of visual acuity and the perception of visual illusions provided by other studies as measures of cortical function.
The researchers found that as the size of the visual cortex increased, the number of neurons in this region also increased. However, with this increase in size actually came a decrease in overall neuron density. This is likely because the cell bodies (neuronal soma) are more sparsely distributed, resulting in more space being occupied by interneuronal connections. They suggest that this increase in cell number and neuronal connections may allow greater brain plasticity.
“Primates with a bigger visual cortex have better visual resolution, the precision of vision, and reduced visual illusion strength,” said lead author Alexandra de Sousa in a news-release. “In essence, the bigger the brain area, the better the visual processing ability.” She explains that the increase in neuronal connections that likely occur in larger brains allow for increasingly complex interneuronal communications to be made that allow for more accurate visual perception.
According to co-author Michael Proulx, this study provides a framework that ties brain structure and function together. “The theory of brain size that we discuss can be tested in the future with more behavioral tests of other species, gathering more comparative neuroanatomical data, and by testing other senses and multi-sensory perception, too,” he added.

First Vine From Space Uploaded By NASA Astronaut

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman has managed to post the first-ever Vine (a Twitter app used to share up-to 6 second looping videos) from space, recorded on the International Space Station. And it’s pretty incredible.

You’ll have probably noticed by now that the Sun doesn’t set in the video, but instead goes round and round. This is because when the video was shot, the ISS was orbiting parallel with the Earth’s terminator line. The terminator (not Schwarzenegger, this time), or twilight zone, is the moving line that separates day from night on an object illuminated by a star. The location of the terminator changes depending on the season. When the ISS lines up with the terminator it dodges the shadow from the Earth and consequently the crew onboard the satellite get an unfathomable view of the Sun.
The ISS orbit only aligns with the terminator a couple of times per year, around one of the solstices, so this footage is pretty unique.

55 Year Old Mystery About The Dark Side Of The Moon Solved

A team of astrophysicists claim to have solved one of the great mysteries of the moon, in the process providing insight into our companion's creation and a new take on our frame of reference.
When the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 transmitted the first images from the other side of the moon it was expected it would look pretty much like the side we are familiar with. Instead they saw none of the “seas” visible to Earthly astronomers with small telescopes, and only a couple of smaller dark areas covering 2% of the surface.
For 55 years the question of why the two sides are so different has remained a puzzle, now known as the Lunar Farside Highlands Problem. "I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks," says Jason Wright "It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it's been a mystery since the fifties."
Now Wright, and colleagues at Penn State University have come up with an explanation, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It has long been known that the absence of the basaltic plains we call maria or seas is a result of the crust being thicker on the far side, but it has been unclear whether this greater thickness on the side away from the Earth was a coincidence.
The Moon's size, relative to Earth, has also been a puzzle with the theory that it was formed from debris thrown up when an object the size of Mars collided with the Earth gaining steadily more favor.
"Shortly after the giant impact, Earth and the moon were very hot," says Professor Steinn Sigurdsson, another of the paper's authors. Sigurdsson notes that the moon initially lay much closer to the Earth, ensuring it was more affected by our gravity.
At such a close distance, the Penn state team propose, synchronous rotation where one side always faces the object it is orbiting, would have occurred very rapidly. The same phenomenon is seen with planets orbiting close to their stars.
While the Earth-Moon interaction has slowly pushed the Moon to 10 or 20 times its original distance, with a correspondingly much longer orbit, its rotation has kept pace so that the same side has always face the Earth.
The smaller moon would have cooled while the Earth remained hot from the collision, 2500°C according to the paper's authors. For the side of the Moon facing the Earth it would be like having two suns – the second one cooler and smaller but also much closer. As a result the side facing the Earth would have cooled more slowly than that facing towards outer space.
"When rock vapor starts to cool, the very first elements that snow out are aluminum and calcium," says Sigurdsson. These would have snowed out first on the cooler far side, creating a thicker crust of plagioclase feldspars. The highlands have much more alumina (24% to 15%), and much less iron oxide (14% to 6%) and titanium dioxide (4% to 1%) concentrations.
When asteroids struck the moon's near side lava flowed to fill the spaces, but on the far side the thicker crust almost always prevented lava flowing.
There is a certain irony to the new theory. Some astronomers are annoyed at references to the “Dark Side of the Moon”. Sunlight reflected off the Earth aside, the far side of the moon gets just as much light as the side we can see.  Once however, it seems that if the far side was not actually dark, then it was certainly much less light than the side lit up by close association to the molten Earth.

Scientists May Have Detected Echoes From A Pre-Collision Earth

Two independent studies presented within just a week of each other have added to the growing body of evidence that the Moon formed from a dramatic collision between primordial Earth and another Mars-sized astronomical body around 4.5 billion years ago.
Last week, a study was published in the journal Science which compared oxygen isotopes between lunar samples collected from Apollo missions and samples collected from Earth. If this dramatic event took place we would expect to see differences in the chemical compositions. Indeed, scientists found subtle differences between the isotope ratios which supported the collision theory. Furthermore, the data gathered also offered some insight into the geochemistry of the colliding object, which has been named Theia.
Now, a team of scientists from Harvard University believe that they have obtained further information from isotopic ratios which may represent signals, or echoes, from a pre-collision Earth. More specifically, they believe that their data suggests that the violent collision caused some, but not all, of the Earth to melt, and that an ancient remnant still exists deep within the Earth’s mantle. The results are being presented at the Goldschmidt conference in California.
According to popular theories about the collision between Theia and Earth, the event would have generated so much heat that Earth would have completely melted. Shortly afterward, some of the debris would have been flung out into space, destined to become the Moon. However, Harvard scientists believe their evidence contradicts this theory and suggest that only a portion of Earth melted.
“The energy released by the impact between Earth and Theia would have been huge, certainly enough to melt the whole planet,” said lead researcher Sujoy Mukhopadhyay in a news-release. “But we believe that the impact energy was not evenly distributed throughout the ancient Earth. This means that a major part of the impacted hemisphere would probably have been completely vaporized, but the opposite hemisphere would have been partly shielded, and would not have undergone complete melting.”
The team obtained their evidence by comparing the ratios of noble gas isotopes (variants of a particular element that differ in the number of neutrons) from deep within the Earth’s mantle with those nearer the surface of the mantle. They found that the ratios of Helium-3 and Neon-22 were significantly higher in samples obtained from the shallow mantle. According to Professor Mukhopadhyay, this suggests that the collision did not completely mix the mantle.
Furthermore, the scientists found evidence for the persistence of early-formed chemical signatures in the deep mantle by analyzing Xenon isotope ratios (129Xe/130Xe). 129Xe is produced by the slow decay of Iodine-129, and by probing 129Xe/130Xe ratios the team was able to date the creation of the ancient part of the mantle to within the first 100 million years of Earth’s timeline.
“The idea that a very disruptive collision of Earth with another planet-sized body, the biggest event in Earth’s geological history, did not completely melt and homogenize Earth challenges some of our notions on planet formation and the energetics of giant impacts,” said Mukhopadhyay. “If the theory is proven correct, then we may be seeing echoes of the ancient Earth, from a time before the collision.”

Earth and Moon Are 60 Million Years Older Than Previously Believed

The oldest rocks ever discovered in our solar system have been dated back about 4.57 billion years, meaning Earth obviously finished forming later than that. However, determining exactly when that happened can be difficult. New research presented by French geochemists from the University of Lorraine at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California has revealed xenon isotopes. These isotopes indicate that the Earth and Moon are 60 million years older than was previously believed.
There aren’t many geological clues from the time our planet originated, just because so much of it has been destroyed over time. Layers of rock which provide a considerable amount of reliable information from other points in the planet’s history just don’t exist that far back. Instead, researchers need to use other techniques, such as analyzing the isotopes of different gasses in rock samples.
A quartz sample from Australia dated back to 2.7 billion years, while quartz from South Africa was found to be 3.4 billion years old. The xenon gas that was trapped inside is reflective of the conditions at the time, which researchers Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty compared to xenon today. This allowed the researchers to tweak the technique used for dating rock samples, making it more accurate. In doing so, it pushes back the estimated date of the hypothesized impact that formed the moon by about 60 million years (+/- 20 million years).
"It is not possible to give an exact date for the formation of the Earth. What this work does is to show that the Earth is older than we thought, by around 60 million years,” Avice explained. “The composition of the gases we are looking at changes according the conditions they are found in, which of course depend on the major events in Earth's history. The gas sealed in these quartz samples has been handed down to us in a sort of "time capsule". We are using standard methods to compute the age of the Earth, but having access to these ancient samples gives us new data, and allows us to refine the measurement.”
It is believed that when the solar system was coming together, a planet about the size of Mars slammed into the proto-Earth, and the debris that was expelled eventually coalesced into the moon. This had to have happened before the atmosphere formed, otherwise it would have been obliterated in the collision. While many have traditionally believed that the atmosphere formed about 100 million years after the solar system formed, these results suggest that it could have appeared only 40 million years after the fact.
“The xenon gas signals allow us to calculate when the atmosphere was being formed, which was probably at the time the Earth collided with a planet-sized body, leading to the formation of the Moon,” Avice continued. “Our results mean that both the Earth and the Moon are older than we had thought.”
"This might seem a small difference, but it is important. These differences set time boundaries on how the planets evolved, especially through the major collisions in deep time which shaped the solar system,” Marty concluded.

The Sun Emitted Two X-Class Solar Flares Back-to-Back

The sun emitted a spectacular solar flare off its left side on Tuesday morning, peaking at 7:42 a.m. EDT. And then about an hour later, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory was treated to a second burst, peaking at 8:52 a.m. EDT.
The first (pictured above) was classified as an X2.2 flare, while the second (pictured below) was an X1.5 flare. The X-class designation is reserved for the most intense flares, with an X2 being twice as intense as an X1.
Video and images of the two flares were captured by the observatory, which watches the entire sun, 24 hours a day. According to SDO, this morning, a new active region (dubbed AR2087) rotated into view on the solar disk before promptly emitting the two X-class flares.

If intense enough, these powerful bursts of radiation can disturb our atmosphere in the layer were GPS and communications signals travel. According to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, there were some strong radio blackouts on Tuesday.
Here’s a picture of the second X-class flare of June 10, appearing as a bright flash on the left side. This image shows light in the 193-angstrom wavelength, which is typically colorized in yellow. It was captured at 8:55 a.m. EDT, just after the flare peaked.

NASA Reveals Latest Warp-Drive Ship Designs

Look at the picture above. Nope, it’s not a snapshot of a Star Wars scene, or any other sci-fi movie. It’s what you get if you combine a NASA physicist working on achieving faster-than-light travel with a 3D artist, and the result is freaking AWESOME. And yes, you heard correctly, there are scientists working on faster-than-light travel, and this is what the ship could look like in the future.
You might be thinking to yourself right now “Faster-than-light travel? But Einstein!” Yes, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But scientists are looking for ways to get around this, and a team based at NASA Eagleworks, led by Dr Harold “Sonny” White, have been working on just that. They discovered a loophole that could theoretically allow faster-than-light travel without breaking the laws of physics. How? Warp drive, of course!
If a spaceship could be designed in such a way that it created a warp bubble, then the space in front of the ship would be compressed and the space behind would expand. This would result in space-time moving around the object, repositioning the ship without it actually moving.
“Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed,” White told io9.
So of course, White’s new design incorporates these ideas and involves “a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble,” 3D artist Mark Rademaker explained to io9. You can check out some more of Rademaker and White's ship design here.
Think this sounds a little too futuristic? According to a report by Gizmodo, White’s team has been using a test instrument called a White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer in order to try and generate and detect microscopic instances of warp bubbles. If they can achieve this, then who knows how quickly the technology could advance. “Perhaps a ‘Star Trek’ experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility” says White.

Outstanding Time-Lapse of a Stellar Explosion From Hubble

In January 2002, astronomers discovered a massive explosion coming from V838 Monocerotis. They initially thought they were witnessing a supernova, but after the initial flash of light began to dim (as expected), it began to brighten again in infrared wavelengths at the beginning of March. After that brightening faded, another one happened in April. While astronomers were certain they weren’t witnessing a supernova, they weren’t quite sure what it actually was.
Now the Hubble team have released an absolutely extraordinary time-lapse video of the event. Check it out here, and make sure you go full screen.

Nothing like this has ever been observed before, making it hard to rule out many of the possible explanations. There are five hypotheses put forward in the literature about what is causing the event, and they really don’t have much in common.
Some scientists believe V838 Monocerotis was a supernova, just a fairly unique one. This idea doesn’t have much support, since the stars in that area are too young and too massive to have caused this type of event. Another unlikely explanation is that a dying star’s core exploded into a helium flash, like what happened in Sakurai’s Object. Again, this star is too young for a thermal pulse to be the most likely scenario.
Another model proposes the helium flash, but as a thermonuclear event in which a massive star would have been able to survive. While this does fit within the necessary age of the star, the star’s mass might not support this idea.
In planetary capture events, stars begin to consume planets in their system. For a very large planet, getting pulled apart would increase friction between the solar atmosphere and the planet. There could be enough energy generated to spark deuterium fusion, which releases large amounts of energy, such as was seen in the explosion. These types of events are predicted to be about five times more common for stars like V838 Monocerotis than for stars like our Sun.
Another possible explanation is an event known as a mergeburst, in which two main sequence stars collide. This hypothesis is supported by computer modeling, and the youth of the star systems in that region could provide the unstable orbits required for stars to merge in that fashion.

Dark Gamma Ray Bursts Obscured By Dust

The galaxies in which two Gamma Ray Bursts have been observed have been found to be much dustier than expected, a discovery likely to force a rethink about the most powerful explosions since the Big Bang and the formation of very large stars.
Gamma Ray Bursts are followed by an afterglow, in which the area at which the explosion occurred is lit up. Often this occurs in all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, not just the very short lengths that give the events their name. However, in roughly half of all cases we observe so called “dark” gamma ray bursts in which gamma and X-rays are detected, but little or no visible light. These events have represented a puzzle since gamma ray bursts were first observed.
The most likely explanation has been thought to be that the dark bursts occur in galaxies thick with interstellar dust. Dust absorbs wavelengths close to visible light, but lets X-Rays and gamma rays through.
However, the theory has troubled astronomers, because it conflicts with the idea that the enormous stars thought to produce gamma ray bursts at the end of their lives are formed in regions thick with molecular gas rather than dust.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) a team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have become the first to map the gas and dust in galaxies in which two bursts occurred.
"We have been searching for molecular gas in GRB host galaxies for over ten years using various telescopes around the world. As a result of our hard work, we finally achieved a remarkable breakthrough using the power of ALMA. We are very excited with what we have achieved,” said Professor Kotaro Kohno one of the authors of a paper in Nature outlining their findings.
Molecular gas itself is very hard to track at the distances involved here, 4.3 billion light years for GRB 020819B and 6.9 billion light years for GRB 051022. However, observations in closer galaxies show that the easier to observe carbon monoxide is a good proxy for molecular gas, so this was used instead.
“The bursts happened in regions rich in dust, but not particularly rich in molecular gas,” the paper reads. “The ratio of molecular gas to dust (<9–14) is significantly lower than in star-forming regions of the Milky Way and nearby star-forming galaxies, suggesting that much of the dense gas where stars form has been dissipated by other massive stars.” The difference is not subtle, in the Milky Way dust makes up about 1% of the mass of the interstellar medium, a tenth of what was found for these galaxies.
GRB 020819B proved particularly intriguing, with very dusty outskirts to the galaxy in which it occurred but molecular gas towards the center.
 "We didn't expect that GRBs would occur in such a dusty environment with a low ratio of molecular gas to dust. This indicates that the GRB occurred in an environment quite different from a typical star-forming region," said team leader Bunyo Hatsukade.
While the observations certainly explain why these, and presumably many other bursts, are dark it opens up the question of how the regions came to be so dusty. The researchers propose that the sort of huge stars capable of producing gamma ray bursts change the environment around them. The intense ultraviolet light emitted by very large stars seems the most likely explanation, since this light can break the bonds within molecular gas, reducing its frequency relative to that of dust.
While such widespread changes might be too much for a single star, large stars tend to form together, so a star capable of producing a gamma ray burst is likely to have many neighbors of almost equal size.

Dwarf Galaxies Fail To Match Expectations

The debate about the nature of dwarf galaxies has been renewed with claims that the characteristics of our smaller neighbors do not fit the dominant model of galactic formation. While the argument sounds esoteric there could be profound consequences for cosmology more generally if the latest paper proves correct.
The lambda cold dark matter model predicts that galaxies should form in halos of dark matter, with a wide distribution and effectively random motion.
"But what astronomers see is different," says Dr Marcel Pawlowski of Case Western Reserve University. "We see the satellite galaxies are in a huge disk and moving in the same direction within this disk, like the planets in our solar system moving in a thin plane in one direction around the sun. That's unexpected and could be a real problem."
The Milk Way has what is called the Magellanic Plane, which takes in almost all the known dwarf galaxies and star clusters. Satellite galaxies can be hard to find when they are hidden by the galactic center or other dense gas clouds so our knowledge may be incomplete, but a similar pattern has been observed around Andromeda, where half the satellite galaxies form the “Great Plane”.
Whether this is a problem or not for theories of galactic formation has been a subject for debate for several years.
Pawlowski is one of those who has previously suggested there distribution is not in keeping with theoretical models, having previously claimed, “The probability to find the observed clustering of streams is only 0.3%”
Publishing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Pawlowski and 13 co-authors have rejected three recent papers that concluded observations and theory align. "When we compared simulations using their data to what is observed by astronomers, we found a very substantial mismatch," Pawlowski says. Out of thousands of simulations of galaxies like the Milky Way, only one trial produced something that matched what is observed.
"But we also have Andromeda," Pawlowski said. "The chance to have two galaxies with such huge disks of satellite galaxies is less than one in 100,000."
If the standard formation model is wrong, some very important ideas could come into question. "The standard model contains various putative ingredients— such as dark matter and dark energy —which were introduced because the model wasn't consistent with observations," said Dr Benoit Famaey, of the University of Strasbourg,
Famaey and Pawlowski advocate an older, but now largely discarded, theory of the origins of satellite dwarf galaxies. They proposed that arrays of satellites occur when two large galaxies collided, ripping material from each and throwing it to substantial distances where it formed “tidal dwarf galaxies”. "Standard galaxies must contain dark matter, but tidal galaxies cannot contain dark matter,” says Bonn University's Professor Pavel Kroupa, another of the paper's authors. "There's a very serious conflict, and the repercussion is we do not seem to have the correct theory of gravity."
If the paper's authors are correct a major revision of dark energy and matter – thought to dominate the mass of the universe compared to the 5% we can see – will be required. Such a major challenge will require plenty more evidence behind it to gain widespread acceptance. However, co-author Professor  David Merritt of Rochester Institute of Technology says, "When you have a clear contradiction like this, you ought to focus on it. This is how progress in science is made."

Scientists Discover Smallest Known Star

Astronomers recently stumbled upon a teeny star called 2MASS J0523-1403 located just 40 light years away. It's not only the smallest star discovered so far - it may also represent the smallest possible star. By studying stars such as this, scientists are starting to be able to answer the question: where do stars end and brown dwarfs begin?
Stars are burning balls of gas held together by gravity that are fuelled by the fusion of hydrogen atoms to helium in their cores. Stars come in a variety of sizes; the smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, can possess as little as 10% of the mass of our Sun, whereas the biggest stars (hypergiants) can be over 100 times as massive as the Sun. But just how small can an object be and still be defined as a star? This has mystified astronomers for years. All that was previously known is that objects below this limit don’t have enough mass to ignite the fusion of hydrogen in their cores. These objects are known as brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are elusive objects that are thought to be the missing link between gas giants and low-mass stars such as red dwarfs. They’re generally around the size of Jupiter, but they don’t have enough mass to become a star. Unlike stars, brown dwarfs have no internal energy source.
There exists another strange difference between brown dwarfs and stars; they have opposite relationships between mass and size. The more material you add to a star, in the form of hydrogen, the bigger the radius of the star. I.e. stars increase in size as mass increases. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, actually shrink in size with increasing mass because of something called electron degeneracy pressure.
So how do we find the limit that dictates whether an object is a star or a brown dwarf? Astronomers scanned the skies and located objects that were thought to lie around the stellar/brown dwarf border. They then calculated the luminosity, temperatures and radii of all of these objects and plotted them. Temperature is dependent on mass but it’s easier to measure. They found that as temperature decreased, so did radius; this is the expected trend for stellar objects. However, they found that after temperatures of around 2100K (1826^oC [3320 ^oF]) there was a break until radius starts to increase with decreasing temperature; this is the trend that would be expected for brown dwarfs.
Thanks to this data, scientists can now pinpoint the specific temperature, luminosity and radius at which the main sequence ends. The main sequence is a relationship between luminosity and temperature (and luminosity and radius) that is obeyed by stars throughout the majority of their lives. 2MASS J0523-1403 is located around this boundary, but toward the stellar side. This star actually has a temperature of 2074K, which is the lowest described temperature so far for a main sequence star. It’s also the smallest and the least massive; if it had less mass then it would be a brown dwarf. This star has therefore been identified as a representative of the smallest possible star. However, it is theoretically possible that a star with a slightly smaller mass than 2MASS J0523-1403 could exist, but we haven’t found it yet.
Scientists believe that information such as this could help us in our search for life on other planets. Brown dwarfs cool much quicker than stars, so their surrounding planets are likely not very habitable. Therefore knowing the temperatures of objects around the star/brown dwarf boundary will assist astronomers in their search for candidates that could support habitable planets.

Solar Storms Could Hit Earth This Friday 13th

The Sun has been unusually active this week and the product of all this excitement is anticipated to hit today/tomorrow, depending on where you are in the world.
However, even if you are the sort of person to be worried by dates like Friday the 13^th, it seems the small amount of damage from this set of events has already been done. While geomagnetic storms from solar events can do plenty of harm, this one will only strike us a glancing blow, minimizing the consequences.
Solar storms come in two forms: flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Both involve the ejection of particles into space, but flares are much more local. By virtue of their large scale CMEs can do much more damage. To add to the confusion, CMEs usually, but not always, occur in conjunction with large flares.
This week has seen three X-class flares, the most intense category, although the largest, at X2.2 was still only a tenth the size of the flare that occurred on April 2 2001, let alone events that predated our ability to measure them precisely. Whether such events do us any harm depend not only ont their size, but also on whether the Earth is in the path of the ejected particles.
One of this week's flares was associated with a CME. Spaceweather.com reports “At first it appeared that Earth was outside the line of fire, but a closer look at the CME reveals an Earth-directed component.” A small component of a not particularly large CME is not expected to do much damage, but should make a great display for those in a position to see aurora.
The flares, on the other hand did cause three radio blackouts according to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
Solar activity, which appeared to have peaked in 2012 now seems to be having a second, slightly larger, peak as part of its regular cycle. Even adding the two together, however, this has been the smallest peak in the eleven year sunspot cycle for a century.
However, if you're just itching for storms large enough to do some damage you may yet be in luck. The NOAA notes there are currently 10 numbered sunspots, and that Active Region 2081, responsible for this week's events, remains active and reports, indicates a “moderate chance of X-class flares” over the next three days.

Scientists Create A Supernova Explosion In The Lab

For those who really like blowing things up, an alternative career path to Mythbusters host or a minerals geologist has opened up. Astrophysicists have replicated the supernova explosion that caused Cassiopeia A, a project so challenging it required contributions from 12 institutions to make it happen.
“The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and physical processes can be scaled from one to the other in the same way that waves in a bucket are comparable to waves in the ocean,” says Oxford University's Professor Gianluca Gregori, one of the authors of the report published in Nature Physics. “So our experiments can complement observations of events such as the Cassiopeia A supernova explosion.”
While having “replicated a supernova” on your CV has its attractions, the motivation for the study was the anomaly of the magnetic fields around Cassiopeia A, and the behavior of the material ejected in the explosion. As the paper notes, “Observations of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A reveal the presence of magnetic fields about 100 times stronger than those in the surrounding interstellar medium.”
Light from the supernova that caused Cassiopeia A should have reached Earth 300 years ago, which would have made it the only supernova to be seen in the Milky Way since the invention of the telescope. However, there are no records of observations at the time. Astronomers have been making up for lost time, with the expanding nebula having attracted much attention since. TAs the brightest radio object outside the solar system, the supernova remnant attracts plenty of attention.
The explosion threw off a shell of gasses expanding at a speed of 4000-6000km/s with a temperature of 30 million °C but these are not spreading out evenly. Instead twisting shapes are produced. It is thought that the progenitor star for the explosion was so large that it threw off clouds of materials prior to the main explosion, just as giant star Eta Carinae has done more recently. The faster moving material from the explosion itself is running into the uneven circumstellar cloud, creating turbulence as it encounters denser clumps. Some other supernova remnants look similar, while others are much more even, presumably because they did not throw off the pre-explosion clouds.
Keen to test the theory Gregori and his co-authors fired three laser beams 60 trillion times the power of a laser pointer at a thin carbon rod in a chamber of gas replicating the possible surroundings into which the supernova exploded. They heated the rod to millions of degrees, causing it to explode.
“The experiment demonstrated that as the blast of the explosion passes through the grid it becomes irregular and turbulent just like the images from Cassiopeia,” said Gregori. “We found that the magnetic field is higher with the grid than without it.”
“The experiment also provides a laboratory example of magnetic field amplification by turbulence in plasmas, a physical process thought to occur in many astrophysical phenomena,” the authors note. This could have wider significance. The magnetic field in interstellar space is much stronger than theoretical models suggest it should be. The amplification of the field in this case may provide insight into how this could be occurring throughout the galaxy.

Vacation To The Moon For $150 Million

If you’re tired of traditional vacations like a cruise to the Bahamas or hitting up Cozumel, Mexico, there may soon be an option that is out of this world. The company Space Adventures hopes to bring tourists to a trip around the moon, starting as early as 2017.
The seats are expected to go for $150 million each, and they’ve already sold tickets to their first two customers. However, it has not been decided if the two customers will go together or if they will decide for one to go first. Maybe an epic rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock showdown is in order?
Though there are relatively few who would ever be able to afford such a journey, the trip could be worth every penny. After all, only 18 people have ever seen the moon in such an up close and personal way, and nobody has done it since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
After launching on a modified Soyuz rocket from Russia, the tourist and the cosmonaut pilot will make a pit stop at the International Space Station before taking a trip around the moon. It is planned that the modified rockets will be altered to make the trip more comfortable. Since the trip will be a commercial vacation and not a scientific mission, it makes sense to make the quarters as comfortable as possible.
The trips themselves will last about 17 days, with half of that being used to go to the moon. How close are travelers expected to get? Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson claims they hope to bring the spacecraft within 100 kilometers of the lunar surface.
Before any manned trips to the moon take place, unmanned tests will be done in order to ensure that the equipment is suited for the trip. If successful, we can only hope that others will get into the commercial space travel market to help drive down the cost. At least then people would be filling our Facebook feeds with vacation pictures we actually want to see.

The Center Of Our Galaxy Smells Like Raspberries And Tastes Like Rum

Ever wondered what the center of the galaxy smells like? Depending on your preference, the answer could be raspberries or rum.
As improbable as this sounds, the discovery was made when astronomers from the Max Plank Institute used the IRAM radio telescope in Spain to study Sagittarius B2, a dust cloud near the center of the galaxy. The announcement was made at the time in Astrophysics and has since been confirmed with studies of similar dust clouds.
Among the chemicals for which signals were found was ethyl formate (C3H6O2), the dominant flavor in raspberries, as well as an important one in rum.
Now before enthusiasts start getting too carried away with plans for giant drunken berry picking space voyages there are a few things that need to be pointed out. Ethyl formate “does happen to give raspberries their flavor, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," the Institute's Arnaud Belloche told The Guardian. The density is also far to thin to be useful, and there is that annoying lack of enough oxygen to breathe.
Moreover, the smell is hardly pure. Belloche found nearly 4000 distinct signals in Sagittarius B. "So far we have identified around 50 molecules in our survey, and two of those had not been seen before," Belloche said at the time, but since then progress has been made on establishing the source of some of these.
The finding serves as a reminder that a lot of the chemicals we know as a product of living things can be produced in other ways, including through the impact of ultraviolet light on other molecules, as in this case. Alcohols, including ethanol, turn up quite frequently in space.
On Earth, ethyl formate is usually produced when ethanol reacts with formic acid (the primary constituent of ant venom)
The ambition for astronomers like Belloche is to find amino acids, the building blocks of life. Since glycine, the simplest amino acid, is no larger than ethyl formate, the find boosted their confidence. Claims for the discovery of glycine have been made before, but have attracted little support.
"The difficulty in searching for complex molecules is that the best astronomical sources contain so many different molecules that their 'fingerprints' overlap and are difficult to disentangle," says Belloche.

"The Beast" Asteroid Tracked As It Passed Earth By

On June 8th the asteroid 2014 HQ124 whizzed past the Earth at a distance of 1.25 million km. NASA has provided remarkably detailed images of the 370m long object, revealing features as small as 4m wide.
The first five images are taken by using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to collect radar signals bounced off the asteroid from the 70m dish at Goldstone, California. The rest were taken with a smaller dish near the Goldstone collecting the reflected signals, which is why they are much darker.

It is thought the two lobes may once have been separate asteroids that fused to produce the bowling pin shape we see. "This may be a double object, or 'contact binary,' consisting of two objects that form a single asteroid with a lobed shape," said Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

By coincidence, The Beast, as the asteroid has been named, rotates once every 24 hours.
Asteroids passing at three times the distance of the moon usually don't attract much attention, but the Beast, while no “dinosaur killer” is large enough to do serious damage. “This would definitely be catastrophic if it hit Earth. You'd end up with a crater about 3 miles across," said Dr Mark Boslough of the Sandia National Laboratories . "An event like that would break windows over 100 kilometers away."  Appropriately, Boslough, an asteroid expert as well as defender of science has had a space rock, 73520 Boslough named after him, although its orbit puts it safely out of reach of Earth.
Moreover, having only been discovered on April 23, the Beast serves as a reminder of the value of programs to identify threats from space. We are thought to have discovered almost all of the inner solar system objects large enough to endanger civilization, but plenty that we'd much prefer to have plenty of warning about are still out there undetected.

Titan Smells Like Gasoline And Farts

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is of particular interest to scientists because of its unusually Earth-like qualities. Prior to the arrival of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, Titan was difficult to study because it is shrouded in a thick golden haze of photochemical smog that obscured its surface. Observations gathered by this instrument have transformed investigations of this curious moon, and now a novel set of laboratory experiments has teased out even more information.
Using Cassini data, a team of NASA scientists has got tantalizingly close to recreating an unknown material discovered in Titan’s hazy atmosphere, furthering our knowledge of its composition.
This unidentified material was detected using Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer which collects spectral data in far-infrared regions. The signature of this material suggested that it was composed of several different ingredients, but what precisely these were remained a mystery.
In order to figure out the possible constituents, scientists used a trial and error method of combining different mixtures of gases in a chamber and seeing what came out. The team knew that if they could get the concoction right, then under the correct conditions it should be possible to recreate the unknown material. Although this may sound relatively simple, given the number of possible combinations this was no mean feat.
The team started off their experiments by combining the two most abundant gases in Titan’s atmosphere, nitrogen and methane, but the resulting mixtures never matched up with the signature picked up by Cassini. So the team experimented by throwing something else into the mix; aromatic hydrocarbons. These are hydrocarbons that contain one or more benzene ring. Since these are partly responsible for Titan’s burnt orange color this seemed logical.
The researchers began with the simplest aromatic hydrocarbon, benzene, which has been previously detected in Titan’s atmosphere and then worked their way through a list of closely related aromatic compounds.
They discovered the best spectral match to the Cassini data when they added aromatic hydrocarbons containing nitrogen, which are part of a subgroup known as polycyclic aromatic nitrogen heterocycles. These are polycyclic aromatic (contain more than 1 aromatic ring) hydrocarbons where carbon atoms have been replaced by nitrogen.
“Now we can say that this material has a strong aromatic character, which helps us understand more about the complex mixture of molecules that makes up Titan’s haze,” said planetary scientist Melissa Trainer in a news-release.
Although the spectral signatures were not identical when the team aligned them, they were strikingly similar which suggested that the scientists were very close to the right combination.
“This is the closest anyone has come, to our knowledge, to recreating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data,” said co-lead author of the study Joshua Sebree.
The team will now continue to play with the experimental conditions in order to hopefully yield a better fit to the Cassini signature.
“With the combination of laboratory experiments and Cassini data, we gain an understanding of just how complex and wondrous this Earth-like moon really is,” said Cassini Deputy Project Scientist Scott Edgington.

Cracks in Pluto's Moon Reveal Underground Ocean

Underneath the icy exterior of Pluto’s giant moon, there may have been a warm, life-hosting interior that’s now long gone. According to a new NASA study, analyzing the cracks on the surface could reveal if Charon’s interior was warm enough to have maintained an underground ocean of liquid water.
Orbiting the sun more than 29 times farther than Earth, Pluto and its moons have an estimated surface temperature of minus 229 degrees Celsius. In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will visit Pluto and Charon -- the first ever to do so.
"Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon's interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved," Alyssa Rhoden of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center explains in a news release. "By comparing the actual New Horizons observations of Charon to the various predictions, we can see what fits best and discover if Charon could have had a subsurface ocean in its past, driven by high eccentricity."
Eccentricity refers to how much an orbit deviates from a perfect circle. Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, for example, have cracked surfaces with evidence for ocean interiors. A gravitational tug-of-war between their parent planets and neighboring moons keep the orbits of Europa and Enceladus oval shaped. These eccentric orbits raise daily tides that flex the interior and stress the surface, and scientists believe that tidal heating extended the lifetimes of subsurface oceans by keeping the interior of those moons warm.
Right now, Charon’s orbit is stable and circular. But according to the new study, past high eccentricity could have generated large tides that caused friction and surface fractures. Charon is unusually massive compared to its planet -- about one-eighth of Pluto’s mass, a solar system record -- and it’s thought to have formed close to Pluto after a giant impact ejected material off the planet’s surface, which went into orbit and coalesced to form several moons.
Gravity between Pluto and Charon would have caused their surfaces to bulge toward each other, generating friction in their interiors and creating strong tides immediately. But that friction would have caused the tides to lag behind their orbital positions, slowing Pluto’s rotation, while transferring that rotational energy to Charon. That would have made Charon speed up and move away from Pluto.
"Depending on exactly how Charon's orbit evolved, particularly if it went through a high-eccentricity phase, there may have been enough heat from tidal deformation to maintain liquid water beneath the surface of Charon for some time," Rhoden explains. According to models of the interior structure, it wouldn't have taken much eccentricity (less than 0.01) to generate surface fractures like those seen on Europa.
She adds: "Since it's so easy to get fractures, if we get to Charon and there are none, it puts a very strong constraint on how high the eccentricity could have been and how warm the interior ever could have been.” At the moment, its circular orbit means that if there was an ancient underground ocean, it would be frozen by now.

Space Telescope Reveals Predecessors of Giant Stars and Mysterious Ring

The Herschel Space Telescope has photographed the star formation region NGC 7538. As anticipated, it revealed images of clumps that are expected to become some of the largest stars known - but it also turned up another, so far unexplained feature.
NGC 7538 is a cloud of gas and dust from which stars are forming, located 8,800 light years away in Cepheus. While the nearby Bubble Nebula is more attractive to amateur astronomers, star formation regions are of great interest to researchers, as there is so much we don't know about the process of making stars.
With an estimated mass 400,000 times that of the sun, NGC 7538 attracts plenty of study, even more so since it has yielded such gems as the youngest high-mass star observed, NGC 7538 S with a mass at least 40 times that of the sun, and a surrounding disk at least twice the size. The same nebular also contains MM1, a slightly smaller, but also more advanced massive star.
"We have looked at NGC 7538 with Herschel and identified 13 massive, dense clumps where colossal stars could form in the future," said Professor Cassandra Fallscheer, of Whitman College in Walla Walla, and lead author of a paper reporting the findings in The Astrophysical Journal. The paper notes, “These 13 clumps have masses in excess of 40 solar masses and temperatures below 15K. They range in size from 0.4 pc to 2.5 pc (1.3-9 light years) and have densities between 3×10³cm^–3 and 4×10⁴cm^–3.” As such they represent prime targets for future study. Star formation is far too slow for us to see it happening, but by identifying enough similar regions at different stages of the process we can test our ideas of how it occurs.
Cold gas clouds contract under the influence of gravity until the pressure is large enough to force nuclei together to initiate fusion, causing stars to shine. Unsurprisingly, it takes a dense cloud to produce the large stars capable of ending their lives as supernovae. Until fusion begins the clouds are too cold to be seen in visible light unless lit up by nearby stars. Instead they need to be studied in the infrared and submillimeter wavelengths in which the European Space Agency's Herschel Observatory operates.
However, what was not expected was the oval shaped ring, 35 light years on the long axis and 25 on the short. It is made up of cool dusty material that Fallscheer estimates weighs 500 times the mass of the sun.
Apparently similar rings have been seen before, but these are associated with massive O-type stars, and are thought to be caused by the exceptional solar winds these giants produce, or by the forces unleashed by a supernova. However, in this case there is evidence of neither an O-type star, nor a supernova remnant that could be creating this shape.
"Further research to determine the mechanism responsible for creating the ring structure is necessary," said Fallscheer. One tentative theory is that an O-type star shaped the ring, before moving on, perhaps leaving a supernovae remnant somewhere else. Although follow-up observations were taken with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, deeper research is impeded since the Herschel ran out of liquid coolant last year. Analysis of the images taken while it operated continue however.
The paper notes that NGC's filamentary structure had not been seen before in submillimeter surveys.

Methane Hunting Tool Could Boost The Search For Extraterrestrials

A hole in one of the methods proposed to seek extraterrestrial life has been patched, providing astronomers with better tools for studying cool stars and “hot Jupiters”, with benefits that may extend to the search for candidates to host life.
The detection of methane (CH₄) is one of the major quests of modern astronomers, but they've been using incomplete tests. Methane is produced in volcanoes on Earth (and probably on Titan), but it has a limited life in most environments, so its presence suggests constant refreshment - quite possibly from living things, which produce 90% of the methane in our own atmosphere.
Moreover, methane produced by microbes has a higher ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 than that from non-living sources, so in those cases where the isotopes can be measured it could provide an even more powerful indication of the presence of life.
Atoms in hot gasses release distinctive spectral lines that allow us to look at the light emitted and determine the presence of specific elements, while light passing through gasses is absorbed at the same wavelengths. However, hydrogen and carbon are so common through the universe that finding them is no surprise. Detecting molecules is harder. The combination of a carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms gives a unique spectrum of electron transitions, allowing methane to be distinguished from those atoms combined with other elements.
However, the wavelengths of these transitions vary depending on the temperature at which they occur. A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observes, “Previous methane data are incomplete, leading to underestimated opacities at short wavelengths and elevated temperatures.” Astronomers operating with an incomplete list of possible transitions will miss the presence of methane, or underestimate its frequency, when studying a light source.
The authors have responded by providing a calculating 9.8 billion transitions covering temperatures up to 1500K across infrared, visible and ultraviolet light. By comparison, experimental studies captured a third of a million. "Current models of methane are incomplete, leading to a severe underestimation of methane levels on planets. We anticipate our new model will have a big impact on the future study of planets and 'cool' stars external to our solar system,” says University College London (UCL)'s Professor Jonathan Tennyson, one of the authors.
"The comprehensive spectrum we have created has only been possible with the astonishing power of modern supercomputers which are needed for the billions of lines required for the modeling,” said lead author, UCL's Dr Sergei Yurchenko. “We limited the temperature threshold to 1,500K to fit the capacity available, so more research could be done to expand the model to higher temperatures still. Our calculations required about 3 million CPU (central processing unit) hours alone.”
Experimental studies had found all the most common transitions, and therefore the ones that show up most strongly when analyzing light from sources containing methane. However, the authors note, “Even though the lines below the cutoff are very weak, the very large number of them means they contribute significant total absorption.”
Most of the missing transitions occur at temperatures far too high for life – no one is expecting to find methane producing microbes the atmosphere of planets hotter than Venus. However, even at room temperature Yurchenko and his colleagues detected previously unknown weak transitions, and including these in future studies could improve the chances of detecting methane on planets at temperatures similar to Earth, albeit only slightly.
The paper will have applications closer to home. The authors note, “Studies of many topics [including] halon flame inhibitors, combustion, gas turbine energies and exhausts all rely on an understanding of the spectroscopy of hot methane."

Spectacular Solar Eruption Caught On Camera

NASA has released an incredible video of the Sun spewing out a jet of plasma hundreds of thousands of miles from its surface. The event, which was driven by powerful magnetic forces, was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on May 27 and NASA has condensed the 2 hour event into 12 magnificent seconds of footage.
Although it may look dramatic, this particular eruption was minor and events such as these occur frequently - but that doesn’t stop it from being pretty spectacular to watch!
The plasma that was ejected from the surface lacked sufficient force to escape, meaning that the majority of the material collapsed back into the Sun.

Herschel Discovers Water Building Molecules Around Dying Stars

Using the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory, two independent teams of researchers have detected a molecule critical for the formation of water in the cloudy remnants of dying stars known as planetary nebulas.
When a star comes to the end of its life, a series of events ensue that are dependent on the star’s mass. Stars that are at least several times more massive than the Sun explode dramatically as supernovas which will then go on to form either a neutron star or a black hole. Stars that have masses similar to our Sun go through a slightly different sequence when they die, first swelling dramatically into a red giant. The star then starts to shed its outer layers of gas and dust into space in clumps, leaving a striking remnant known as a planetary nebula.
Both supernovas and planetary nebulas enrich their surroundings with various elements which will eventually be used to forge new stars. Supernovas are able to produce heavy elements, whereas planetary nebulas contain lighter elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
When a planetary nebula enters the next phase of stellar evolution, forming a white dwarf, a large amount of UV radiation is released into the environment. It was believed that this harsh radiation would likely obliterate the vast majority of molecules expelled previously by the star and also hinder the creation of new molecules.
Intriguingly, however, two independent studies using Herschel data have found evidence for a water-building molecule in this harsh environment. The molecule, OH⁺, is a positively charged combination of one oxygen and one hydrogen atom.
In one of the studies, a team of researchers analyzed 11 planetary nebulas and found evidence for this molecule in three of them. Interestingly, it transpires that these three were also the hottest nebulas. According to lead author of the study, Dr Isabel Aleman, the high energy UV and X-ray radiation emitted by the central star interacts with the encircling clumps of gas and dust, triggering chemical reactions that lead to OH⁺ formation.
The second study honed in on a nearby planetary nebula known as the Helix Nebula, located a mere 700 light years away. While the central star is half as massive as the Sun, it is far hotter with temperatures of around 120,000^oC. The researchers discovered that OH⁺ was predominantly located in regions where previously released carbon monoxide molecules were likely being destroyed by the radiation. The radiation would split apart the CO molecules, freeing the oxygen so that it can combine with hydrogen and thus form OH⁺.
Although OH⁺ could go on to form water molecules in principle, it remains unknown whether the conditions around these stars would actually permit water formation.
“Herschel has traced water across the Universe, from star-forming clouds to the asteroid belt in our own solar system,” said Herschel project scientist Gӧran Pilbratt in a news-release. “Now we have even found that stars like our Sun could contribute to the formation of water in the Universe, even as they are in their death throes.”

SpaceX Want To Put Humans on Mars Within 12 Years

Technological guru and all-around badass Elon Musk revealed in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that SpaceX is planning to put humans on the surface of Mars by 2026; nearly a decade before NASA.
"I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said on the show Closing Bell. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary.”
SpaceX is currently vying for government contracts, in hopes that NASA will select the Dragon V2 spacecraft to bring up to seven astronauts at a time to the ISS. Though the Dragon V2 vessel is highly innovative and will be much more cost-effective than spacecraft currently in use, the fact that SpaceX is a relative newcomer is a disadvantage. SpaceX is competing against companies like Boeing, who have established reputations and much more experience.
Though gaining the NASA contract would be great for the company’s financial security, getting passed up would slow SpaceX’s developments, not stop them. "It's possible that we may not win the commercial crew contract,” Musk acknowledges. “We'll do our best to continue on our own, with our own money.” He also adds that there are no hard feelings toward NASA if SpaceX doesn’t get the contract. "We would not be where we are today without the help of NASA,” he said.
Back in 2012, Musk began talking about the possibility of commercial round-trip tickets to Mars for $500,000 each. Quite a bargain, compared to the $150 million Space Adventures will charge to go circle the moon. Before price per ticket to the red planet is worked out, SpaceX will first need to finish the equipment that is capable of making the trip.
Currently, SpaceX is developing the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which is similar to their Falcon 9, with the addition of twin booster rockets which make it capable of bringing an incredible payload to space, making a Mars mission more feasible. The Falcon Heavy will begin test launches in 2015. While getting there and back seems doable enough, SpaceX doesn’t currently have a craft that is able to land and relaunch from the Martian surface, as NASA did on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. It may very well turn out that the earliest SpaceX missions to Mars will orbit the red planet and not land on the surface.
In the interview, Musk also teased the idea of SpaceX becoming a publicly traded company, though not in the immediate future. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable,” he said. "Maybe [when] we’re close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally [after] we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense.” Let us know when you have those ducks in a row, Mr. Musk. We’ll be eagerly waiting