I’m shamelessly going to attribute at least some of the quietness of this blog to the Olympics going on in China right now, so if you were also with us around the Euro2008 you won’t be surprised to know that we’re quite into sports in general. So what could be better than a look at what science related stuff is going on at the olympics? Not much if you ask me…

First off, if you were watching the opening ceremony or any of the athletic games, you have probably been amazed how cool the stadium, the Bird’s Nest, looks. That’s because it is cool! Just take a look at this show from the Man Made Marvels series on Discovery Channel. It’s in the usual sensational Discovery style with detours around other non-scientific stuff about the Olympics in Beijing, but they certainly do their job telling you exactly how cool it is, and what incredible engineering had to be done for everything to fall into place.

But what good is such a nice stadium and an amazing opening ceremony if the weather is bad? China is also prepared in this area, as several measures have been taken to forecast and actually control the weather above certain areas when desired. High sensitive weather satellites have been launched and supercomputers have been prepared to give detailed forecasts on an hourly basis, and when rain seems inevitable, there’s nothing like shooting silver iodide into the sky and doing some old fashioned cloud seeding.

And show me someone who isn’t amazed by the 8-gold-medals-and-7-world-records-at-the-same-olympics sensation of a swimmer in Michael Phelps? I sure am! But behind every true sensation stands sensational science…. or did I just make that up? Well anyway, there’s a lot of debate going on about how some new high tech swimsuits from Speedo (yes, the company that gave name to the original Speedo swim briefs, and made the name impossible to take seriously) makes the competition uneven. In fact the Speedo LZR swimsuit was developed with help from NASA, giving evidence for the relatively deep level of science that has gone into the sport.

And to finish it, so we can all go back to watching some random sport that we hardly knew existed, I’d like to direct you towards another brilliant post on the Cosmic Variance blog about some oddities in the point system of decathlon, and some ideas to make your favorite nerdy mathematician actually win the race. You don’t want to miss out on this one!

Ever since we realized that an object from the sky could actually cause a mass extinction event like the one that killed off the dinosaurs, science fiction authors and doomsday conspiracists alike have frequently reminded us of the danger. But the reminders are not totally uncalled for, as there is a very real probability that such an object, commonly called a NEO (for Near-Earth Object), could at some point collide with the Earth, wreaking havoc as no man has ever seen. So what do we do? A lot of methods have been discussed for somehow avoiding the disaster if a comet or an asteroid were discovered on collision course with Earth, but any one of them requires us to know about it in advance. If you don’t know the punch is coming, it’s hard to block it right? Now imagine it’s dark, the big guy doesn’t glow very much (despite all the steroids) and there’s an unknown amount of big guys running around punching randomly in all directions…

Well the Pan-STARRS telescopes on Hawaii will enable us to spot very dim, moving objects, kinda like the NEOs we just described above. It will do this by surveying the night sky around 4 times a month with unprecedented sensitivity and the highest resolution digital camera ever built. Like the Wikipedia article explains, it will consist of four 1.8 meter (in diameter) telescopes and it will perform astrometry and photometry, largely meaning that it will measure the position and movement of the objects as well as their brightness. Enough to determine if the big guys are coming for us and how big they might be.

So far I’ve spared you of a lot of the details about the telescope as it quickly gets a bit tangled up in astronomy lingua, but I’m going to leak this one to you, explaining it afterwards: The telescope will be able to image objects down to an apparent magnitude of 24. Now the magnitude scale is one of those things that only astronomers use, and while it can be a bit hard to grasp at first, it’s an important thing to know if you’re ever going to read about a telescope or anything astronomy related in general. First of all, apparent magnitude is really nothing but a measure of how bright an object looks in the night sky, but with a few twists. For example it’s logarithmic and its backwards.

In astronomy you tend to get REALLY big numbers, or at least really big leaps in numbers, and brightness is no exception (eg. its around 4*10^26 Watts for the Sun), but if you take the logarithm of the number, you get a much nicer, more understandable number (like -27 for the Sun). The scale is reverse for historical reasons, meaning that the brighter an object is, the lower the magnitude is. For example the apparent magnitude of the full moon, which is 450.000 times less bright than the Sun, is -13 and the apparent magnitude for the dimmest objects visible by the naked human eye is around 6.

So let’s get the apparent magnitude of 27 for the Pan-STARRS into perspective. It must be able to observe really faint objects, as 27 is a lot larger than that of the faintest objects visible to unaided humans. Faintest objects visible with binoculars are around apparent magnitude 10, and Pluto, the former planet, has a maximum (that is, maximum brightness and minimum apparent magnitude) of 14. It’s when talking about Plutos smallest moons, Nix and Hydra, that we’ll encounter an apparent magnitude of 23. Notice that the Hubble telescope is able to see down to an apparent magnitude of 30 in visible light, but there’s a subtle difference, namely that Pan-STARRS will survey almost the entire sky, and really fast. With Hubble you’d have to know where to look to see Plutos moons. With Pan-STARRS you’d actually be able to discover them without knowing they were there.

It can’t be a surprise to anyone that surveying the night sky with an 1.4 GP (GigaPixel) camera 4 times a month will create an abnormally large amount of data to analyse for NEOs and other faint celestial objects. In fact, it’s expected that the system will produce around 10 TB (TeraBytes, 1.024 GB) of data each night! This will of course require an unseen data processing mechanism and an 1 PetaByte database. A nice article has been written about that in Computerworld, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

Just in case anyone should actually still be reading this, I wanted to mention that this telescope is not only useful for looking at and finding things in our own solar system. The project has a number of use cases far beyond the Solar System neighborhood. In addition to the expected findings of a lot of variable stars and eclipsing binary star systems that will help determine the distances to nearby galaxies better, it is actually expected that Pan-STARRS could find a lot of new exoplanets by measuring small changes in the brightness as the planet moves in front of the star or due to microlensing of the planetary system. In other words, this will not only be an important tool for protecting Earth against the great dangers from the sky, but also a great scientific tool for learning a lot more about the Universe that we live in!

HAHAHA…

You wouln’t think it was even possible to come up with this stuff, but a group of apparently dozens of people showed up at the LHC protesting against the cruelties that the accelerator will expose the colliding hadrons for. Yes hadrons, the subatomic particles composed of quarks.

This marks another collision of the worlds stupidest and some of the worlds smartest people. I wonder what kind of people choses to give their time to a cause that they have absolutely no clue about. Do they think hadrons are some kind of living beings? If they really don’t want hadrons to be hurt, I’d say they are going to have a pretty hard time living their lives.

Weather Whether this is a joke or for real, PLEASE keep it up. You guys really make my day.

To the usual reader of this blog, it can’t be any surprise that we are pretty excited about the Large Hadron Collider and the insight it might bring into the nature of our universe. In fact, you could be a bit afraid that it’s the only thing we’re capable of writing about these days, but what the heck…

We previously slated the startup of the proton-proton accelerator to sometime this fall, but now CERN has made an official statement including the planned date for the first test-runs. In short, it’s September 10th. A lot of pieces has to fall into place for this to happen, but at least they must be nearing a state where the first TeV proton beams can be smashed together an analyzed. It is not until around 2010 that the accelerator will reach maximum energy of around 7 TeV, but a lot of interesting physics could be revealed on the way there. By the way, 7 TeV is comparable to the energy it takes for you to pronounce one syllable of a word. It’s when applied to particles the size of an atom that it really kicks ass, accelerating it to velocities very close to that of the speed of light.

On another note, if you like me have been a bit confused as to what scientists are actually expecting and hoping to find, and what they are looking for when TeV energies are reached, you should go read this comprehensive list at the (very cool) science blog, Cosmic Variance. It’s a nice collection of possible outcome with estimates of the probability for finding each of them, although it is of course the authors personal estimates and views.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is not long from an operational state (should be sometime this fall), and while we wait for the insane amount of data, approximately 27 TB (TeraByte that is) of raw data a day, that has to be analyzed for answers to some of the biggest questions in modern science, why not use the time for looking at some pictures of the thing? Well ok, you say?

HERE is what might be the coolest set of pictures I have seen in a while, even including all the cool galleries from our previous posts on scientific pictures. This site shows the unbelievable planning, engineering and construction work going on at CERN, as well as the datacenters and general atmosphere of the place. They even have small explanatory captions so you know what you’re looking at.

So if you like beatiful pictures and you like science, believe me you want to go check this out.

The last week has brought some seriously cool astronomical news that has already been covered on every big science news site on the web, so if you haven’t already heard this, you must’ve been living under a rock.

I’m of course talking about the news about the definite proof of liquid lakes of hydrocarbons (like methane and ethane) on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and the discovery of water ice on Mars. Now neither of these are big surprises, as they have been suspected for some time, but finally having definite proof is a big step in the right direction.

Regarding the lakes on Titan, scientists have for years theorized that Titan could contain global oceans of ethane. The very successful Cassini mission has therefore flown by the big moon a bunch of times, trying to take pictures that could indicate weather this was true or not. It was quickly accepted that there were no global oceans, but a lot of smooth, dark features that looked a lot like lakes. Taking pictures in the infrared and using a method for filtering out the disturbing hydrocarbons in the moon’s thick atmosphere, it has now been possible to confirm that these are in fact liquid lakes as opposed to some other smooth material that would look the same on the pictures. In fact there is good evidence that these lakes are evaporating to the atmosphere, forming clouds of hydrocarbons and raining back down on the surface. A complete cycle like the one on Earth, only that the primary molecules are ethane and methane in stead of water. The press release from NASA also speaks of what can best be described as beaches at the brink of these lakes. Let’s hope possible vacating titans are enjoying these as much as we are enjoying ours. Or, this lake could be the footprint of a giant Titan walking hiding somewhere on the moon… I’m sure some conspiracy theorists would claim something like that when seeing this image.

As if this great news was not enough for astronomy interested earthlings to digest, it was later announced that the Phoenix mission has found proof of frozen water on the surface of Mars. Recent missions to Mars have suggested that water could exist in the soil of the Martian surface, but it is not until now that a probe has been able to pick it up and “taste” it. If you are anything like the authors of this blog, you’ll probably find this news awesome. The soil that has been proven to contain water ice is actually pretty common on Mars, making it possible for water to be widespread. This would make possible future maned missions and bases on the planet a lot easier, as carrying along water for several years of consumption is a logistical problem in such missions.

Furthermore on the possibility of life on the planet, be it present or past, has been increased significantly, and will without doubt become a big question to investigate in future missions. If ice is present now, it might have existed as liquid form earlier in the history of the planet, if the atmosphere was thicker and the temperature higher. The end of the article also mentions that European orbiters are finding geological features that suggests the presence of standing water in the earlier Martian history. In either way this is very interesting and it’s gonna be a cool next few years when we become even more certain of what has once been and what has happened to the planet.

If you’ve been following recent reminders on the total solar eclipse this friday, you might’ve been a bit reluctant to spend all your savings on a trip to the northern Canada, Greenland, Mongolia or China just to run into some bad weather and go home empty-handed. But dispare not, NASA is here to help you as usual.

On their website you can this friday follow the solar eclipse live as it happens, which means you probably won’t have to move an inch from your current position, making it bareable even for the lazy part of us. I would have told you some stuff about eclipses, but in line with the aforementioned lazyness I’m just going to recommend you the Wikipedia article on solar eclipses, which does a very good job explaining these spectacular events.

So no excuses! This is too easy and too cool to let pass.

As a small follow-up to the previous post on scientific image galleries, one of which showed a bunch of pictures of colorful deep sea animals, I couldn’t let this new list of 25 Amazing and Bizarre Deep Sea Creatures pass by without a mention.

As opposed to the previous one, this list even has some nice descriptions of the animals in addition to the pictures, so go check it out. My personal favorite is the fishing monster-fish (it is of course the Deep-sea Anglerfish), shown in the image to the left.

You’ve heard it before, that a picture can be worth a thousand words, and in some cases, it really is true. We’ve all seen pictures from various fields of science that just makes you stop for a second and wonder how nature has been able to create these scenes and objects, and how incredibly talented photographers (or whoever made it look so good) have been able to capture them. This post is just a short list of galleries and image sites I’ve recently come across, that made me go WOW!

Well pictures are basically just snapshots of light in a scene at a given moment, so why not start the list with a collection of the 20 Most Incredible Light Phenomena? This list really is incredible, and it’ll show you some of the most daunting visual experiences that you can have from the surface of Earth, most of them actually visible to the naked eye under the right circumstances. I’ll save you the whole 1000 words and let you see for yourself.

The next gallery is going above the surface of the Earth, looking down at it. While not as visually pleasing, the pictures in this collection of the 10 Greatest Major-Impact Craters on Earth (actually from the same cool picture site, www.environmentalgraffiti.com) really tell their story, and with the accompanying text, you can actually learn some things. As an added bonus, you get to see the traces from some of the most important events in the history of the Planet.

Moving on to the field of biology, National Geographic presents a small sample of Colorful Sea Creatures that makes you and me look quite boring if you ask me. I’ve always been fascinated by the diversity of sea animals, and the more we investigate of the deep oceans, the more strange species we’ll definitely come across.

Last, but definitely not least, I want to mention a special site that has been made available. If you’ve been looking at astronomical pictures, you’ve most certainly come about pictures from the NASA archive, who have been producing an amazing amount of pictures from ground and space-based telescopes as well as satellites, probes and rovers all around the Solar System. So whats new? Well NASA has in collaboration with Internet Archive created a new dedicated media site, that holds the largest amount of NASA images to date, and promises to add a lot more so we can all be amazed by space, and the incredible amount of work behind the pictures. Believe me, I’ve tried reducing the data from telescopes in order to get just a vaguely decent picture, and it’s everything but easy.
The new site is located at www.nasaimages.org, and will also include sound and video footage. If you’re more interested, go read the press release.

This marks the end of my short list, but there are an uncountable number of amazing galleries out there, so if you have some favorites that are not on the list, please share them with us in the comments below.

I’ll try not to be prematurely excited here, but there are rumors running around that a team of astronomers have found 2 more planets around Gliese 581 (we already know of one planet there), which might be located in the habitable zone, meaning that the distance to the star is just right so that the temperature is in the range where liquid water can exist. And liquid water is the one thing that makes a planet habitable by human standards.

The team hasn’t yet released any data, so we have to wait for that before drawing any conclusions, but if this is true, it is exciting news. Also, the method used to discover the planets make it hard to tell exactly what size and composition they have. If you’ve followed Reduced Mass for a while, and remember our articles on exoplanets, you’ll remember how most planets have been found using the method of radial velocity. This method measures a characteristic wobble of the star caused by orbiting planets. Until now this method has been cursed by not being able to find small (rocky) planets in large enough distances from the planets for them to be habitable. But now the technology has improved to the point where this is actually possible.

Thats all good, but there are still some problems with this method. For one it can only give a lower limit on the mass, meaning that it could be more massive than the proposed 5 Earth masses, depending on the how the solar system is tilted compared to our line of sight. Secondly it can only deduce the (err, lower limit of the) mass of the planet, and not the size, which is very important to know weather it is made of rock or gas. Rock is good, gas is bad, from a habitable point of view of course. So even if the data holds, and this is a 5 Earth mass planet in the habitable zone, we won’t know if it’s actually habitable before we are able to either analyze the light from the planet itself and determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere (if any), or somehow measure the size of it (meaning its radius).