Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn’s largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan’s surface features from prying eyes. But Titan’s surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric absorption is reduced.
Arrayed around this visible light image (center) of Titan are some of the clearest global infrared views of the tantalizing moon so far. In false color, the six panels present a consistent processing of 13 years of infrared image data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board the Cassini spacecraft. They offer a stunning comparison with Cassini’s visible light view.
Image Credit: VIMS Team, U. Arizona, U. Nantes, ESA, NASA
THE SOLAR WIND HAS ARRIVED:Earth is entering a stream of high-speed solar wind flowing from a wide gash in the sun’s atmosphere. NOAA forecasters say there is a 55% chance of G1-class geomagnetic storms on March 15th as the gaseous material envelops our planet. (From SpaceWeather.com online .)
There is a funny story posted on The Watchers website today about this particular event that is interesting – funny, but still interesting:
Solar storm mania makes headlines
According to many media sources, a massive solar storm is supposed to be ravaging Earth today. Some MSM channels, and several well-known alternative, went as far as posting fake news about a ‘massive X-class solar flare hitting Earth’ today… they claim that Russian Academy of Sciences is the source of this dire warning. But it’s not…
“The stories are overblown,” Dr. Tamitha Skov said, referring to fake news stories about a massive solar storm that is supposed to be ravaging Earth today.
A Minnesota Planetarium Video- Natural Radio: When solar flares hit the Earth’s magnetic field, the skies at both poles can light up with auroras. The particles also create very low frequency electromagnetic waves, a type of natural radio that can be picked up around the globe.
Every year sound recordist Steve McGreevy heads north where the reception is best and points his receiver at the sky. (Made for use in the Planetarium dome, thus the circular frame of the images.)
Image of Sirius A and Sirius B taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Sirius B, which is a white dwarf, can be seen as a faint pinprick of light to the lower left of the much brighter Sirius A. Image: NASA, ESA
Astronomers spot a never-before-seen type of white dwarf star; its discovery could change our understanding of star death
By Loren Grush / The Verge online / March 31, 2016
For the first time ever, researchers have spotted a white dwarf surrounded by an atmosphere of mostly oxygen. A star of this kind, a super-dense dead star with an oxygen atmosphere, had never been seen before, though astronomers had speculated that one might exist. Such a unique finding could change how we think about the evolution of stars and what happens when these stellar objects die.
“It was completely not expected.”
To find this unique zombie star, an international team of researchers looked through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — a project that measures the colored lines of light coming off of objects throughout the universe. These lines, called spectral lines, can tell astronomers what types of elements make up a star’s atmosphere. Using this data, the researchers found that one particular white dwarf, with the eloquent name SDSS J124043.01+671034.68, didn’t have any hydrogen or helium in its atmosphere; its surrounding air was instead almost pure oxygen.
“It was completely not expected for a star with a low mass like our star,” said study author Kepler Oliveira, an astronomer at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
An image of SDSS J124043.01+671034.68. (Kepler Oliveira)
The finding is so surprising because it doesn’t quite fit with our current understanding of what stars look like when they die. Typically, when a star like our Sun runs out of fuel, it starts collapsing. As the star becomes more compact, it heats up, causing its outer layers to expand more than 100 times the star’s original size. Eventually those outer layers are lost and only the core of the star remains — the faint white dwarf.
Most of the star’s hydrogen and helium get lost with those outer layers, but a little bit of them are left over in the white dwarf’s atmosphere. The hydrogen and helium float to the top of the star’s surface, because they’re relatively light; the heavier elements, like oxygen and carbon, remain below.
“It’s the same reason that panning for gold works,” said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomy graduate student at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study. “If you have gold and sediments in water, the gold is heavier so it’ll sink to the bottom, but the sediments are lighter, so they’ll stay at the top.”
Some kind of event caused the hydrogen and helium to disappear
The fact that no hydrogen and helium are seen in the atmosphere of the white dwarf in question is puzzling. It means some kind of event has caused the two elements to disappear, making oxygen the lightest element in the star’s atmosphere. But the researchers aren’t sure what kind of event that was, as they’ve never considered it before. “We don’t make models of things we don’t know exist,” Oliveira said. “But now that we know this star exists, we have to calculate the model for it.”
One possible explanation for the lack of helium and hydrogen is that the star experienced a giant thermal pulse when the object was a red giant, and that intense explosion stripped away all the lighter elements. Another possible scenario is that the star was actually part of a binary system. The stars may have merged together, causing an explosion that ejected the hydrogen and helium. These ideas are only loose theories, though. “We don’t have a calculation that shows [a binary merger] happened, but that’s the only explanation that I can think of,” Oliveira said. “It must have come from a binary system.”
The researchers will work to figure out what happened to this star, but in the meantime, the white dwarf’s discovery is a significant find for the astronomy community. “It’s a new class of star,” said Vanderburg. “We don’t understand how it formed, but this is the kind of thing that pushes our field forward, and who knows where it will take us.”
APOD is one of the sites I subscribe to and one of my favorites. God’s marvelous creations – and the technology to view it – never fail to amaze me, awe me, and cause me to love Him more, the one who created it all with such loving detail. Click on the photo to enlarge.
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2016 March 24
Hickson 91 in Piscis Austrinus Image Credit & Copyright: CHART32 Team, Processing – Johannes Schedler Explanation: Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). This sharp telescopic image captures one such galaxy group, HCG 91, in beautiful detail. The group’s three colorful spiral galaxies at the center of the field of view are locked in a gravitational tug of war, their interactions producing faint but visible tidal tails over 100,000 light-years long. Their close encounters trigger furious star formation. On a cosmic timescale the result will be a merger into a large single galaxy, a process now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. HCG 91 lies about 320 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. But the impressively deep image also catches evidence of fainter tidal tails and galaxy interactions close to 2 billion light-years distant.
Explanation: Auroras usually occur high above the clouds. The auroral glow is created when fast-moving particles ejected from the Sun impact the Earth’s magnetosphere, from which charged particles spiral along the Earth’s magnetic field to strike atoms and molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere. An oxygen atom, for example, will glow in the green light commonly emitted by an aurora after being energized by such a collision. The lowest part of an aurora will typically occur at 100 kilometers up, while most clouds usually exist only below about 10 kilometers.
One year since Philae made its historic landing on a comet, mission teams remain hopeful for renewed contact with the lander, while also looking ahead to next year’s grand finale: making a controlled impact of the Rosetta orbiter on the comet.
Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014, and after an initial survey and selection of a landing site, Philae was delivered to the surface on 12 November.
After touching down in the Agilkia region as planned, Philae did not secure itself to the comet, and it bounced to a new location in Abydos. Its flight across the surface is depicted in a new animation, using data collected by Rosetta and Philae to reconstruct the lander’s rotation and attitude.
In the year since landing, a thorough analysis has also now been performed on why Philae bounced.
There were three methods to secure it after landing: ice screws, harpoons and a small thruster. The ice screws were designed with relatively soft material in mind, but Agilkia turned out to be very hard and they did not penetrate the surface.
The harpoons were capable of working in both softer and harder material. They were supposed to fire on contact and lock Philae to the surface, while a thruster on top of the lander was meant to push it down to counteract the recoil from the harpoon.
Attempts to arm the thruster the night before failed: it is thought that a seal did not open, although a sensor failure cannot be excluded.
Then, on landing, the harpoons themselves did not fire. “It seems that the problem was either with the four ‘bridge wires’ taking current to ignite the explosive that triggers the harpoons, or the explosive itself, which may have degraded over time,” explains Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center.
“In any case, if we can regain contact with Philae, we might consider an attempt to retry the firing.”
The reason is scientific: the harpoons contain sensors that could measure the temperature below the surface.
Despite the unplanned bouncing, Philae completed 80% of its planned first science sequence before falling into hibernation in the early hours of 15 November when the primary battery was exhausted. There was not enough sunlight in Philae’s final location at Abydos to charge the secondary batteries and continue science measurements.
The hope was that as the comet moved nearer to the Sun, heading towards closest approach in August, there would be enough energy to reactivate Philae. Indeed, contact was made with the lander on 13 June but only eight intermittent contacts were made up to 9 July.
The problem was that the increasing sunlight also led to increased activity on the comet, forcing Rosetta to retreat to several hundred kilometres for safety, well out of range with Philae.
However, over the past few weeks, with the comet’s activity now subsiding, Rosetta has started to approach again. This week it reached 200 km, the limit for making good contact with Philae, and today it dips to within 170 km.
(Click on link and read entire article for more of this fascinating story.)
Someone shared an article about sounds made by planets on Facebook a week or so ago. It’s been in the back of my mind ever since. It seems that for some years now NASA has recorded sound waves occurring in space. Some of them sound absolutely bone chilling.
The article includes a number of video/audio recordings from multiple planets (including earth). Here’s one of them – The Eerie Sounds of Saturn:
“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.” (I Cor. 14:10 KJV) This verse is translated into English several ways, and considering the context of speaking in unknown tongues, they all express the idea that there are multiple languages in the world and each one has meaning.
However, I discovered that the original Greek words can also be translated “multiple sounds or noises in the universe, and each one has meaning.” Sounds. Universe. Hmmmmmm.
I discussed this article with the Lord the other night, asking him about sounds made by various planets. He began to explain a few things. Just matter of fact things, physics, nothing particularly spiritual, but fascinating to me.
Sound waves, like visual images, contain information. Each sound contains a specific piece of information, and if interpreted (translated) accurately by the receiver, it transmits that data to him.
He had me listen to the sounds I could hear from my bedroom and asked what information I received from each sound. Trucks. What size? Pickup trucks sound different than 18-wheelers. Train whistles. Motorcycles. Car brakes. Cars changing gears. Various automobiles going by the highway.
Ceiling fan. Humming from deodorizer. Heat pump. Footsteps walking overhead. Lighter footsteps, running. Clocks ticking. Even my own breathing, my own heart beat, the constant tinnitus I’ve had for many years… I fell asleep thinking about all the sounds that I could hear, and what data I received from each one.
Last night we continued the conversation about sound.
Every created thing makes sound, because it moves. The wind is air movement, and because it is moving, it makes sound. Creation could have been silent, made without the capacity to make noise. But it wasn’t. There was a reason for the sound, the noise, the voices.
All senses convey information / data. Some can be from close or at a distance, such as sound and sight. Others are near by, such as smell. Others must be up close and personal, such as taste and touch.
Far or near, each use of those senses brings us information which can be useful – if we pay attention to it, think about what the data is saying to us and how we can best benefit from it. Even the sounds recorded by NASA, sounds made by planets, stars, asteroids, comets, meteors, even sounds made by atoms, molecules, and subatomic particles.
Every cell of every creature and creation, from infinitesimally microscopic to majestically huge, has the capacity to make sound and transmit data. And all that information is beneficial in some way, for some purpose, to someone.
Jesus is the Word of God. God’s voice. What a mind-boggling concept! Jesus is both God and God’s expression. Creator of everything that exists, he is also maintainer, sustainer of it. Information-bringer. Explainer. Teacher. Guide. Rescuer. Healer. Provider. Lover. Friend.
Every sound of the universe, every noise, every voice, every burst of static, every clang of metal, every crash of breaking waves, every whisper of wind in trees, every murmur of nesting birds, every hum of a mother’s lullaby – all are expressions containing data.
So – I was thinking. So – what is the bottom line of all that? I asked the Lord.
Well, what is the most essential data? he replied. Then he answered the question himself. Love. God’s love, holiness, justice, mercy, affection, creativity, mindfulness, unwavering attention to his creation. His most highly treasured creation – his children.
The center of mass (barycenter) of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside either body. Because neither object truly orbits the other, and Charon has 11.6% the mass of Pluto, it has been argued that Charon should be considered to be part of a binary system. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) states that Charon is considered to be just a satellite of Pluto, but the idea that Charon might be classified a dwarf planet in its own right may be considered at a later date.
(Today’s APOD, 20 Aug 2020.)
Curiosity about space 
