Like cream drops in black coffee

How hot is this shit?!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up atoms -- but there also is an even larger amount of invisible "dark" matter.

Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

"We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe," said Mike Shull of the University of Colorado, who helped lead the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The matter is spread as superheated oxygen and hydrogen in what looked like vast empty spaces between galaxies.

However, observations of a quasar -- a bright object far off in space -- show its light is diffused much as a lighthouse can reflect on a thin fog that was invisible in the dark.

"It is kind of like a spider web. The gravity of the spider web is what produced what we see," Shull said in a telephone interview. "It's very thin. Some of it is very hot gas, almost a million degrees."

This is where the dark matter comes in. The dark matter is heating up the gas, Shull said.

"Dark matter has gravity. It pulls the gas in," Shull said. "This causes what I call sonic booms -- shock waves. This shock heats it to a million degrees. That makes it even harder to see."

The atoms of oxygen are in a stripped-down, ionized form. Five of the eight electrons are gone. It emits an ultraviolet spectrum of light that instruments aboard FUSE and Hubble can spot, Shull said.

These web-like filaments of matter are the structure upon which the galaxies form, he said.

"So when we look at the distribution of galaxies on a very large scale, we see they are not uniform," Shull said. "They spread out in sheets and filaments."

Some faint dwarf galaxies or wisps of matter in these structures could be forming galaxies right now, the researchers said.

Shull and colleagues said these webs of hydrogen and oxygen are too hot to be seen in visible light and too cool to be seen in X-rays.

credit:By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
(Editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand)

(too many cooks, but still....--ss)

Photo: Human Figure on Mars?

This website suggests the Mars photo could be showinga human-like statue.



Here's the original image:

A celestial event

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of radio waves

said on Thursday they had never seen anything like it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or dying black holes.

They were searching for pulsars -- a type of rotating compacted neutron star that sends out rhythmic pulses of radiation -- when they spotted the giant radio signal.

It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come from about 3 billion light-years away -- a light-year being the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.

"This burst appears to have originated from the distant universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole," said Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Writing in the journal Science, Lorimer and colleagues said they were looking at old scans done by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia when they spotted the burst.

The burst appears to have lasted 5 milliseconds and may be the radio fingerprint of a single event such as a supernova or the collision of black holes, the astronomers said.

"This burst represents an entirely new astronomical phenomenon," Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia said in a statement.

credit: Reuters

A South American Smallville

From the AFP via Yahoo:

Mystery illness strikes after meteorite hits Peruvian village

LIMA (AFP) - Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and pparticles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.

Saturn's Hex

There's WTF


... and then there is


What The Fuck ?!?

A mysterious giant hexagon lies above Saturn's north pole, captured by cameras on Nasa's Cassini Orbiter.

Spanning 25,000km - equivalent to the width of two planet Earths - the bizarre geometric feature appears to remain virtually still in the atmosphere as clouds swirl around it.

The infra-red images show the hexagon - which contains a smaller six-sided formation - extends about 60km down into the clouds.

The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal shape.

The six-sided shape is in stark contrast to the swirling, hurricane-like vortex at Saturn's opposite pole.

The feature was first photographed more than 20 years ago by Nasa's Voyager 1 and 2 probes, but this is the first time the hexagon has been seen in one image.

The latest pictures were taken at nighttime using infra-red because the pole is currently in darkness and the red colour indicates the amount of heat being generated from inside the planet.

Kevin Baines of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said: "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides.

"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

Yeah, cause it's the planet Saturn
W.T.F....

Space Storm

Space.com had this on Dec. 13, 2006~>New Forecast: Severe Space Storm Headed to Earth

Space weather forecasters revised their predictions for storminess after a major flare erupted on the Sun overnight threatening damage to communication systems and power grids while offering up the wonder of Northern Lights.

"We're looking for very strong, severe geomagnetic storming" to begin probably around mid-day Thursday, Joe Kunches, Lead Forecaster at the NOAA Space Environment Center, told SPACE.com this afternoon.

...

Radio communications, satellites and power grids could face potential interruptions or damage, however.

Solar flares send radiation to Earth within minutes. Some are also accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CME), clouds of charged particles that arrive in a day or two. This flare unleashed a strong CME that's aimed squarely at Earth.

"It's got all the right stuff," Kunches said.

However, one crucial component to the storm is unknown: its magnetic orientation. If it lines up a certain way with Earth's magnetic field, then the storm essentially pours into our upper atmosphere. If the alignment is otherwise, the storm can pass by the planet with fewer consequences.

Kunches and his team are advising satellite operators and power grid managers to keep an eye on their systems. In the past, CMEs have knocked out satellites and tripped terrestrial power grids. Engineers have learned to limit switching at electricity transfer stations, and satellite operators sometimes reduce operations or make back-up plans in case a craft is damaged.

Another aspect of a CME involves protons that get pushed along by the shock wave. Sometimes these protons break through Earth's protective magnetic field and flood the outer reaches of the atmosphere—where the space station orbits—with radiation. The science of it all is a gray area, Kunches said

"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light, the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles."
~ Francois Voltaire

Deep Impact

(Spotted by the Friendly Stranger)

New asteroid at top of Earth-threat list

* 11:52 01 March 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Kimm Groshong

Observations by astronomers tracking near-Earth asteroids have raised
a new object to the top of the Earth-threat list.

The asteroid could strike the Earth in 2102. However, Don Yeomans,
manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, told New Scientist: "The most
likely situation, by far, is that additional observations will bring
it back down to a zero."

He adds: "We're more likely to be hit between now and then by an
object that we don't know about."

On 23 February, new observations allowed researchers to more
accurately calculate the orbit of the asteroid, named 2004 VD17, which
was originally detected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
LINEAR project. Since the improvement did not rule out a potential
collision with the Earth on 4 May 2102, they increased the asteroid's
rating to level 2 on the Torino Scale, a relatively rare event.

Degrees of danger

The Torino Scale, adopted in 1999, is akin to a Richter scale for
asteroid impacts. The vast majority of the 4000 or so near-Earth
objects (NEOs) detected so far have been assigned to level zero on the
Torino scale, meaning they have "no likely consequences".

Level 1, colour-coded green, suggests a possible impact that "merits
careful monitoring". Beyond that, the risk continues to rise along the
scale – levels 2, 3 and 4 are yellow; 5, 6 and 7 are orange; while 8,
9 and 10 earn red.

The highest level ever reached by an asteroid was level 4 by Apophis
(2004 MN4) in December 2004, but subsequent calculations downgraded
that concern to a level 1. So VD17 currently claims the top spot on
NASA's online list of potential asteroid impacts.

Despite the rarity of the yellow designation, Yeomans says "Torino 2
is not very alarming." He notes that the scale does not take account
of how soon an impact may occur, unlike its rival, the Palermo Scale.

Based on current observations, he says the asteroid has a 1 in 1600
chance of striking the Earth in 2102 and a 1 in 500,000 chance of
hitting two years later. But further observations will soon refine the
orbit calculation for VD17 – and hopefully ease minds.

NEO hunter, Andrea Milani Comparetti of the University of Pisa, Italy,
says VD17 "is a serious problem, but not for our generation". He also
notes that VD17 is dim and distant and is not projected to pass close
by the Earth before 2102. "You will need fairly powerful telescopes to
see it before it arrives," he told New Scientist.
Smaller threats

Since 1998, NASA has had a US Congressional mandate to locate 90% of
all NEOs of 1 kilometre or larger by 2008. Yeomans says that 830 out
of a predicted 1100 have been found so far, along with thousands of
smaller objects.

In the NASA Authorization Act of 2005, Congress directed the space
agency to study and report back on the best way to cost-effectively
locate 90% of all asteroids down to a diameter of just 140 metres.
Yeomans says there are likely to be about 100,000 such NEOs.

Yeomans and Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in
Boulder, Colorado, were both members of a team that reported in 2003
that a survey to locate such small asteroids would be cost-effective,
considering the damage an impact could cause. Bottke says the group
found that to find 90% of the remaining hazard would cost roughly $300
million.

2004 VD17 is estimated to have a diameter of about 580 metres. An
asteroid of that size would produce an impact crater about 10
kilometres wide and an earthquake of magnitude 7.4 if it struck land.

NASA Detects 'Totally New' Mystery Explosion Nearby

Astronomers have detected a new type of cosmic outburst that they
can't yet explain. The event was very close to our galaxy, they said.

The eruption might portend an even brighter event to come, a supernova.

It was spotted by NASA's Swift telescope and is being monitored by
other telescopes around the world as scientists wait to see what will
happen.

Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for the Swift mission at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, called the event "totally new, totally
unexpected."

If the eruption indeed precedes a supernova, then it would reach peak
brightness in about a week, scientists said.

The event, detected Feb. 18, looks something like a gamma-ray burst
(GRB), scientists said. But it is much closer—about 440 million
light-years away—than others. And it lasted about 33 minutes. Most
GRBs are billions of light-years away and last less than a second or
just a few seconds.

Other aspects of the newfound eruption were inexplicable, astronomers
said. It was dimmer than most. Even so, the newly spotted point of
light in the sky outshines the entire galaxy in which the event
occurred.

"This could be a new kind of burst, or we might be seeing a gamma-ray
burst from an entirely different angle," said Swift scientist John
Nousek at Penn State University.

Astronomers don't fully understand gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). But they
theorize that when one is pointed our way, it appears brighter than
when the beams it produces shoot off in other directions.

The explosion has been catalogued as GRB 060218. It is the
second-closest GRB ever detected. But it's not clear if it will
ultimately be called one.

Italian researchers using the European Southern Observatory's Very
Large Telescope in Chile found signs in the event's optical afterglow
that it may become a supernova. The scenario outlined by some
researchers is that a very massive star has collapsed into a black
hole and then exploded.

If the event is indeed a supernova in the making, scientists may get
the first look at one unfolding from start to finish.

The eruption occurred in the constellation Aries.

(Credit: Friendly Stranger for the catch)