Tag Archives: physics

Here’s an Incredible Image of Venus Passing in Front of the Sun

by 41laowo Posted on August 20, 2013

The sun is not a planet, but if it was it would probably be your favorite. Just look at this incredible image that NASA released recently.

Image: NASA

What you’re seeing is a strange solar eclipse, in which Venus passed in front of the sun. The tiny black dot on the top lefthand side is Venus. The giant psychedelic fireball is the sun, imaged in three colors of ultraviolet light.

NASA captions the image more technically:

An unusual type of solar eclipse occurred last year. Usually it is the Earth’s Moon that eclipses the Sun. Last June, most unusually, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, the phase of Venus became a continually thinner crescent as Venus became increasingly better aligned with the Sun. Eventually the alignment became perfect and thephase of Venus dropped to zero. The dark spot of Venus crossed our parent star. The situation could technically be labeled a Venusian annular eclipse with an extraordinarily large ring of fire. Pictured above during the occultation, the Sun was imaged in three colors of ultraviolet light by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, with the dark region toward the right corresponding to a coronal hole. Hours later, as Venus continued in its orbit, a slight crescent phase appeared again. The next Venusian solar eclipse will occur in 2117.

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Here’s an Incredible Image of Venus Passing in Front of the Sun

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For the First Time, NASA Took a Photo of the Sun’s Tail

by f45 Posted on July 11, 2013

Interstellar material builds up in front of the star LL Ori. Photo: NASA / Hubble Heritage Team

Yesterday we wrote about how the Earth is awash in the solar wind, charged particles that flow from the Sun and interact with everything in their reach. When the aurora light up the poles, that’s the solar wind. When people talk about the Voyager probes ‘leaving the solar system,’  they’re talking about the the edge of the reach of the solar wind.

Solar wind particles can stream from the Sun at speeds of more than two million miles per hour. When these particles hit the Earth, they push against our planet’s magnetic field—squashing it in the front and stretching it into a long tail in the back. The solar wind does this to all the other things in the solar system with a magnetic field, too—the tail of Jupiter’s magnetic field stretches up to 304 million miles. But the Sun’s magnetic field is being pushed as well, and for the first time researchers with NASA have taken a photo of the Sun’s stretched out tail. It may not look like much, but science is often just a bunch of colored blotches:

The Sun’s tail, or ‘heliotail,’ as seen by IBEX. Photo: NASA / IBEX

As the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, it passes through what’s known as the interstellar medium, a mélange of dust and gas and cosmic rays. Like a ship passing through the ocean, the Sun’s passage through the interstellar medium causes the Sun’s magnetic field to build up in front of the solar system, and to sweep the Sun’s magnetic field back in a long tail behind it. According to NASA, though we’re learning a lot about the Sun’s magnetic field because of a relatively new satellite known as the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, we still don’t know how far the Sun’s tail may be.  NASA has more detail on how they took their photo:

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For the First Time, NASA Took a Photo of the Sun’s Tail

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When the Sun Gets Violent, It Shoots Antimatter at the Earth

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on July 10, 2013

The Earth hangs some 93 million miles from the Sun, with the seemingly empty void of space as a backdrop. But space, though vast, is hardly empty. The Earth is bathed in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that emanates from our star. Once in a while, when the Sun gets uppity, a gigantic solar flare will plow through the solar wind and slam into the Earth. The collision sends a torrent of charged particles arcing along the Earth’s magnetic field and triggers beautiful auroral displays.

But the northern lights aren’t the only thing solar flares bring to the Earth

New observations, says Space, show that solar storms produce a spout of antimatter.

Solar flares were predicted to release some antimatter particles among the deluge of charged particles spat out during these eruptions. But this is the first time researchers have observed antimatter coming from the sun.

Antimatter particles have the same mass and other characteristics as their regular-matter counterparts, but they have opposite charge. When the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, there was probably about as much matter as antimatter, scientists think. Somehow, collisions with matter destroyed most of the antimatter (when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate), leaving a slight surplus of matter, which became the planets, stars and galaxies in our universe.

The Sun isn’t the only thing spouting antimatter, though. A weird kind of lightning here on Earth, called Dark Lightning, sends a shock of antimatter flying into space.

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When the Sun Gets Violent, It Shoots Antimatter at the Earth

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Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars

by Remona86L Posted on May 10, 2013

Image: Loring Loding

Have you ever noticed that almost every barn you have ever seen is red? There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the chemistry of dying stars. Seriously.

Yonatan Sunger is a Google employee who decided to explain this phenomenon on Google+ recently. The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part.

Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars. Sunger explains:

The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.

As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart. It doesn’t make anything heavier than 56. What does this have to do with red paint? Because the star stops at 56, it winds up making a ton of things with 56 neucleons. It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse).

The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint.

And that, Sunger explains, is how the death of a star determines what color barns are painted.

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Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars

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Scientists Just Recorded the Brightest Explosion We’ve Ever Seen

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on May 7, 2013

When a huge star collapses in a supernova, it can produce a gamma-ray burst, spires of tightly-concentrated energy shooting from the dying star. Photo: NASA

A star being ripped to shreds in a violent supernova is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. The largest supernovae can produce gamma-ray bursts: a tightly concentrated lance of light that streams out into space. Gamma-ray bursts, says NASA, “are the most luminous and mysterious explosions in the universe.”

The blasts emit surges of gamma rays — the most powerful form of light — as well as X-rays, and they produce afterglows that can be observed at optical and radio energies.

Two weeks ago, says NASA, astronomers saw the longest and brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected. It was the biggest shot of energy we’ve ever seen, streaming from the universe’s most powerful class of explosions. NASA:

“We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright,” said Julie McEnery, project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“The event, labeled GRB 130427A, was the most energetic gamma-ray burst yet seen, and also had the longest duration,” says Matthew Francis for Ars Technica. “The output from GRB 130427A was visible in gamma ray light for nearly half a day, while typical GRBs fade within a matter of minutes or hours.”

The gamma-ray burst was a stunningly bright spot against the background gamma ray radiation. Photo: NASA

There are a few different of classes of gamma-ray bursts in the world. Astrophysicists think that some—short gamma-ray bursts—form when two neutron stars merge and emit a pulse of energy. Huge ones like the one just detected are known as long gamma-ray bursts, and they form when huge stars collapse, often leading to the formation of a black hole.

Gamma-ray bursts focus their energy in a tightly-concentrated spire of energy. A few years ago, says Wired, researchers calculated what would happen if a gamma-ray burst went off nearby, and was pointed at the Earth.

Steve Thorsett of Princeton University has calculated the consequences if such a merger were to take place within 3,500 light-years of Earth, with its energy aimed at the solar system. The blast would bathe Earth in the equivalent of 300,000 megatons of TNT, 30 times the world’s nuclear weaponry, with the gamma-ray and X-ray radiation stripping Earth of its ozone layer.

While scientists cannot yet predict with any precision which nearby stars will go supernova, the merger of neutron star binaries is as predictable as any solar eclipse. Three such binary systems have been discovered, and one, PSR B1534+12, presently sits about 3,500 light-years away and will coalesce in a billion years.

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Scientists Just Recorded the Brightest Explosion We’ve Ever Seen

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Physicists to Shoot Extremely Fast-Moving Electrons at Dinosaur Skin Fossil

by Arkady549e Posted on May 1, 2013

Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus skeleton, Field Museum. Image: Field Museum Dinosaurs

We generally think of dinosaurs as green, lizard-like creatures. But the actual color of dinosaur skin is still very much up for debate. During fossilization the dinosaur’s skin rarely survives, and there are just a few tiny pieces of fossilized skin in existence. Physicists are about to shoot a bunch of extremely bright lights at one of them, in order to try and identify the color of the duck-billed dinosaur to which this small piece of skin belonged.

Those extremely bright lights will come from a synchrotron, which will let physicists at the Canadian Light Source research facility examine the fossils more closely. The synchrotron will shoot a beam of infrared light at the fossil. Some of that light will be reflected. By analyzing that reflection, scientists can try to figure out what the skin was made of. That’s because the chemical bonds in some compounds create different light frequencies than others. So if there’s protein, that will look different than sugar or fat.

Physicist Mauricio Barbi told the press, “If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur. We have no real idea what the skin looks like. Is it green, blue, orange…There has been research that proved the colour of some dinosaur feathers, but never skin.”

The scientists are also curious about why this particular fossil has skin. What happened to this dinosaur, unlike nearly all the others, that allowed for its skin to be preserved?

Answering these questions will not only provide more accurate pictures of dinosaurs, but also might hint at where they can find more samples of preserved skin.

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Physicists to Shoot Extremely Fast-Moving Electrons at Dinosaur Skin Fossil

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