So first post in a month or so from me due to traveling, but luckily Kári has done a nice job in the meantime. This will also be the reason why I am writing about some pretty old news once i a while, but hey, nobody said this is a news site, right?

Well enough with the excuses. One thing that caught my eye from the last month of scientific news is this press release about how the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been indirectly caused by the our movement in the Galaxy. You see we are actually not just making our way around the Galaxy every 220 million years in the normal circular way, but we are also bouncing up and down through the galactic plane every 36 million years. With the increased density in the galactic plane, the Solar System is subject to more gravitational disturbances when passing through it, and comets and asteroids from the outer parts of the Solar System might be thrown towards new orbits passing through the inner part where Earth goes about it’s day. Of course, Earth is then more likely to be hit, and it just so happens that we were probably passing right through the galactic plane about 65 million years ago when a large comet hit Earth, causing what is called the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event that killed off large parts of life on Earth.

So no, passing through the galactic plane didn’t finish off the dinosaurs, but it might have increased the probability of the asteroid collision that did.

On a quick but interesting note in the last part of the piece, the scientists behind the theory also mentions that large collisions like this one might be able to send micro-organisms hurling into space, seeding the Universe with life from Earth… or maybe that is how life on Earth first started? In that case the green aliens might not be so green and alien after all!

Not a whole lot to say about this video, it’s just incredibly cool. It shows in an animated/CGI way how magnetic field lines act (for example on the sun). It’s not your normal boring/dry NASA material, it’s incredibly cool and mesmerizing.

This youtube video is a quick 1.5 minute clip from the movie, check out the full movie (~5min) here. The movie was made by NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, and they provide the commentary as well.

Thanks to Zac for tipping me and letting me know about this! Originally saw this at Gizmodo.

I know this is kind of last minute, but i wanted to let everyone know that if you want to (and i hope you do), you can watch the phoenix spacecraft land on Mars LIVE over at NASA TV.

Touchdown of the phoenix mars lander is expected to happen just before 8:00PM Eastern time (little more then two hours from writing this), but the live broadcast will actually start at 6:30PM (see the full schedule here). You will be getting all the images at the exact same time as everyone over at NASA, so you can follow it live as it goes through what they are calling 7 minutes of hell in it’s entry into the Marsian atmosphere.

Due to time difference and school early tomorrow i’m afraid i won’t be able to stay up and follow the events, but i can highly recommend heading over to Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy Blog, i’m sure he’ll be covering the entire event with style.

Well it turns out that big announcement that NASA had today (if you haven’t been following it, there’s been a lot of speculation about it), was not aliens or admittance of fake moon landings, but the youngest supernova ever found in the milky way.

This may seem kind of dull, as there are plenty of supernovas out there to look at, but what makes this interesting is the fact that judging by the rate we see supernovas (outside our galaxy), we should be seeing more young supernovas around us. Based on calculations made, there should be around 10 supernovas in the milky way, that are younger then the (now previously) youngest supernova, Cassiopeia-A, which occured in 1680. This is exactly what they have now observed, a 140 year old supernova called G1.9+0.3 (catchy isn’t it?), observed with the cleverly named “Very Large Array” and the in-orbit x-ray telescope Chandra.

They actually observed the supernova originally over 20 years ago, and it was assumed to be 400-1000 years old. Recently though, they took a second look at it, and saw that it had expanded much more rapidly then they had expected. This lead to them to have a closer look and conclude that it was a lot younger. Check out the picture (courtesy of NASA) for a look at the actual supernova where you can see the remains of the sun expanding. The inner white ring that is superimposed on it, is to show how big it was when it was first observed.

Official NASA press release.

Scientists from the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards (NIST) have succeeded in producing a very powerful laser that also produces short pulses at very high speeds (press release here). While this may sound like something that doesn’t really concern us a whole lot (aren’t lasers for DVD players?) it turns out that this could actually have a big impact on finding earth-like planets in orbit of other stars.

To start with let me wow you with some numbers, the laser can produce 40 billion pulses per second and each one of those lasts only 40 femtoseconds, with the average power being 650milliWatts. Those may all be very impressive numbers (and trust me, they are), but let me tell you why this is something to be excited about aside from being the equivalent of porn for engineers. Well it turns out that lasers with these properties, can be used as so-called frequency comb’s, which is more or-less a measuring stick of sorts for light. You can think of this one as having a lot more notches on it and can therefore differentiate between much finer frequencies than it’s predecessors. For a great article on frequency combs, check out an article on NIST’s website, although long, it is not riddled with math and tries to explain it in a way so everyone can follow.

Now i said before that this could help with finding planets, and if you are a regular reader of ReducedMass.com, this may not surprise you. One of the most successful methods of finding exo-planets (planets orbiting other suns) is to detect a slight wobble in the light of a sun that is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (Henrik wrote a great article about it a few weeks ago). Obviously, a bigger planet has a stronger pull, causing more severe wobbles that are easier to detect, but small planets, like ours, would make very small pulls on the sun, and therefore require a very precise measurement of light in order to detect it. Current technology does not allow for this, but they claim that this laser just might do the trick.

One thing that made me pause a bit though is the claim that it will improve the accuracy of detection 100-fold, which certainly seems like a tall order. I’m not really basing that on anything scientific (and the fact that the press-release comes from NIST probably means that my concerns are unfounded), but an improvement by two orders of magnitude is not something seen every-day.

Well this has been pretty much all over the Internet for the last week, but I wanted to wait and see how it was received before writing about it. A team of Italian scientists have recently released a paper on their experiment to detect dark matter directly, and I must say they present some very promising results. Before presenting the results, let me just explain the idea behind the experiment…

One (and the most widely accepted) theory of what dark matter may be, is the WIMP theory. That is, dark matter consisting of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles and we “just” have to figure out which particle that might be. Another quite certain thing we know about dark matter is that it encloses the Galaxy in a halo that extends far longer than the galaxy itself. The galaxy is like the meat ball in the bowl of dark matter soup. The important part of the WIMP acronym is the weakly interacting part. Even though it is extremely rare that a dark matter particle interacts with another (bright? Ok, you can hit me) matter particle, releasing detectable light, it CAN happen. The problem is that it would be almost impossible to detect these events because they would easily drown in the sea of other unrelated interaction events, so we need a clever, and as it turns out, quite simple idea to overcome it.

As the Sun and the rest of the Solar System moves around the center of the Galaxy, we are dragged through the soup of dark matter particles. So when the Earth revolves around the Sun, we will in half the time be traveling in the direction of the galactic rotation, and in the other half in the opposite direction, which essentially just means that we move just a little faster and slower around the Galaxy every 6 months. If we then assume that the dark matter particles are not moving with the galaxy (which there would be no reason to think they are), we should be hitting more dark matter particles in some 6 months than in the other. Just like you feel less wind when you’re riding your bike slowly. Now if we are able to detect events that vary with this annual cycle, dark matter WIMPs would be very likely to be the reason for it. We simply know of nothing else that would cause this effect.

As you’ve of course guessed by now, this is exactly what the Italian scientists have measured, and to a very high precision as well. There simply is no doubt that there is something changing with our velocity around the Galaxy, and thus the seasons of the year, but it’s very important to note that it is by no means certain that it is actually dark matter. But lets just say the results are interesting in all cases. If it’s not dark matter, it must be something else we don’t know about, which is interesting by definition. If it turns out to be dark matter particles though, we’ve just come one step closer at solving one of the greatest mysteries of modern science.

In his 50-years NASA anniversary lecture, Stephen Hawking called for the World to spend a lot more money on manned missions to the Moon, Mars and eventually to other stars. In a move to conserve humanity from catastrophes on Earth he would like to see an increase in the money spent for space exploration to about 0.25% of the world GDP, and a manned base on the Moon to pave the way for more adventurous missions to Mars.

While I guess it would be nice to save humanity, we should also think about the technological progress that would have to be made before pulling something like this off. A lot of the technology and research coming from this would eventually trickle down to us plebes, hopefully raising our standard of living, increasing the size of our TV’s and perhaps even help save us from one of the dooms-days people seem to be predicting. All in all, it is just a lot easier for the public to relate to space exploration when there are actually humans on board, and my guess is we’d see a boost of students in natural science studies as well as in the general interest in science/astronomy.

Hawking also mentions that, in the long run, we should aim outside our own solar system, and towards interstellar colonization. That is, colonization of habitable planets around other stars, and he suggests this should happen within the next 200 to 500 years. While it’s impossible to say how technology will evolve in this timespan, it seems reasonable to estimate that in that time period our technology could be good enough to start discussing that. As you may remember, we here at Reducedmass have already lined up some possible methods for reaching the stars.

Other than that, you should go read the Wikipedia article on space colonization if your more interested in this stuff. They cover both solar system as well as interstellar colonization.

Well it’s not exactly new, but an image from the Hubble Space Telescope of V838 Monocerotis looks remarkably similar to the logo of a popular open source project. Just take a look:

Aside from this rather cool coincidence, the image is a good example on how beautiful the Universe can be. Also, we actually have a hard time explaining what is going on, making it even more interesting. First everybody thought that this outburst of gas was a typical nova, an explosion due to the exchange of matter between a white dwarf and a nearby star, but on closer inspection, the system should not include a white dwarf, let alone have had the time to accrete enough material onto the surface of it. This eventually makes it explode as there’s a limit to how much mass the physics of a white dwarf can bare (around 1.4 solar masses if I remember correctly).

So what is it then? Well there are some theories, but as far as I can see, nothing has been concluded yet. It could be an outburst from the supergiant star in it’s deathbed, or the swallowing of a large planet (go read more on the Wikipedia page), but whatever it is, it’s quite spectacular and we should continue to investigate the system further. Who knows, maybe we’ll discover a completely new type of explosion leading to spectacular gas eruptions like this.

Until then, let’s just thank the Universe for kicking in on the good course for unbreaking the internet.

The LIGO detector, a US gravitational waves detector, will see a $205 million upgrade in the next seven years, making the Advanced LIGO 10 times more sensitive and boosting the number of observable galaxies from hundreds to tens of thousands.

While it might seem like a lot of money, the research on gravitational waves are very important for understanding one of the most fundamental parts (it’s one of the only four known forces) of our Universe: Gravity. Although gravity is probably the most intuitively well known force (just try to jump out of the window), we really don’t know much about it on a fundamental level, and it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the fundamental physics in the Standard Model. Einstein released his theory of General Relativity in 1916, and since then we have only verified the predictions of it, never disproven it. One of the predictions of General Relativity is the existence of gravitational waves, and we’ve been trying to detect them directly for a long time*. With the upgrade of the LIGO experiment, the probability of detecting gravitational waves will increase significantly. As the LIGO scientists says in the LiveScience article:

“With Advanced LIGO, it’d be very surprising from a relativity perspective if we didn’t observe anything.”

Not only can the gravitational waves help us investigate the gravitational force and why it doesn’t fit with the other forces further, it could also be a great tool for future astronomers and astrophysicists. The gravitational wave is shaped uniquely by its source and by traveling unhindered through space and time, they would enable us to investigate things like black holes, neutron stars and grand cosmic collisions in a way that is currently not possible by looking at the light (if any) from these objects.

* Gravitational waves have never been detected directly, but their existence has been proven indirectly by the observation of an exotic pulsar system. This system consists of a pulsar and a close companion and seems to be losing orbital energy that goes to making the gravitational waves, exactly as Einstein predicted that such a system would. This discovery was the basis of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, and you should go read that press release if you’re more interested.

As a follow-up on our exoplanet hunting article a few days back, I just wanted to make a quick note on a new low mass exoplanet discovery that has just been made. This one is around 5 times the mass of Earth, making it the lightest known exoplanet to date. As i also mentioned in the article, we expect to find Earth-sized planets in the near future, but at least the scientists at Spanish Research Council and the University College London get to keep the trophy for a little while.

What is interesting about this discovery is that the presence of the planet was inferred from its perturbation of the orbit of another already known transiting planet in the same system. This means that the transits of the other Neptune-sized planet was perturbed slightly in a way that was modeled and fitted to match the presence of another smaller planet close to the bigger one. Observations of the radial velocity confirmed these predictions perfectly, and another rocky exoplanet (we now know 4) can be added to the list. With the very close orbit it doesn’t look like this planet can harbor any life, however.

Link to the press release.