Cassini The Cassini spacecraft recorded this sun-facing shot from behind Saturn. The Earth appears as a small speck through the gas giant’s rings (via Pale Blue Dots: Iconic Images of Earth From Space | Wired Science | Wired.com)
How much energy whether electric, coal, nuclear, or otherwise - is required for a 100 watt lightbulb to run for a year , 24 hours a day?
Best advice for succeeding: set clear goals. Steve graduated college in three semesters through sheer determination and time management.
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.
We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth (by James W Griffiths)
Ring of Light
Dazzling Titan glows with a 360-degree sunset as light scatters through its very extended atmosphere. Some structure is visible in the hazes of the northern polar hood. To the left is Janus, far off on the opposite side of the ringplane. The rings show their unlit side to Cassini, as the spacecraft viewed them from slightly above the ringplane.
A world with strikingly Earth-like physical processes, frigid Titan is Saturn’s largest natural satellite, at 5,150 kilometers across. The view was acquired in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 2, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers from Titan.
Neutron Star Merge
Binary systems containing neutron stars are born when the cores of two orbiting stars collapse in supernova explosions. Neutron stars pack the mass of our sun into the size of a city. They are so dense and packed so tightly that the boundaries atoms nuclei disappear.
In such systems, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that neutron stars emit gravitational radiation, ripples of space-time. This causes the orbits to shrink and gradually brings the neutron stars closer together.
Shown here is such a system after about 1 billion years, when two equal-mass neutron whirl around each other at 60,000 times a minute. The stars merge in a few milliseconds, sending out a burst of gravitational waves and a brief, intense gamma-ray burst.
This animation shows the merger of two neutron stars from a horizontal perspective. Theory predicts that these kinds of collisions would not produce a long afterglow because there isn’t much “fuel” — dust and gas — from the objects and in the region to sustain an afterglow.
The computer program that draws realistic exoplanets
When astronomers discover a planet orbiting another star, they can easily deduce its size, temperature, and chemical makeup. But even the most powerful telescope cannot relate what the planet truly looks like. For that, scientists have historically relied on artistic interpretations.
Now physicist Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has developed a more accurate resource: a software called the Scientific Exoplanet Renderer (SER), which takes in observational information about the planet and its parent star, crunches the numbers in various physical models, and spits out an approximate likeness. It can visualize many breeds of planets and atmospheres, but it is intended for those that resemble Earth.
Méndez, who will make the program available to scientists next year, hopes the detailed visualizations will help them interpret the mind-numbing streams of numbers typically used to evaluate new planetary discoveries. SER will also spare the general public from the imaginative but often inaccurate artistic renderings that entertain more than inform.
