Hasta La Gadget!

Our planet had kind of a rough year in 2012, but thanks to its array of satellites and a certain floating lab, NASA documented every divine and terrifying moment from afar. On top of the usual beauty shots and time-lapses rendered by the ISS and true-color satellites, NASA also showed some spectacular data and modeling visualizations of atmospheric movement, storms and ocean salinity. That helps even the densest of us understand how hurricanes form, gulf streams flow and arctic ice breaks off and drifts seaward. But enough talk — if a picture equals a thousand words, there are three million of them in the two minute video, after the break.

Filed under: Cameras, Science, HD

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Via: Gizmodo

Source: NASA

We’ve been waiting with bated breath all afternoon to find out what NASA, MIT and the Department of Energy has observed with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Well, we still don’t quite understand the exact nature of dark matter, but highly precise measurements of positron fraction (the ratio of positrons to electrons and protons) do bring us a small step closer to proving the existence of the theoretical material. The AMS found a small excess of positrons coming from all directions instead of a single source. That could indicate the presence of dark matter, which is believed to generate the antimatter particles when it collides and annihilates itself. As usual though, this is far from conclusive. The excess of positrons could be caused by a number of cosmic phenomenon, including pulsars, but researchers are hopeful that further testing will narrow down the possibilities. Those of you hoping for direct and obvious evidence of dark matter may be a little disappointed, but let’s be honest — you were being overly optimistic. Besides, don’t you want some mysteries left to solve? For more information, check out the PR after the break.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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NASA just released its 2012 compilation of the best views of Earth from orbit over the past year. They’re stunning. They mix “true-color” imagery with data visualizations and 3D imagery from some of the newest satellites in NASA’s fleet. Time-lapses, weather patterns, even the movement of currents—the way NASA sees our planet is something beautiful to see. [NASA via BetTube] More »

The moon known as Titan should ring a bell for you if you’re interested in the possibility of life on planets other than our own. Saturn’s yellow moon has been the subject of life-sustaining chatter for some time now, the most recent discovery about it having been found in an experiment done right here on Earth. Down at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, an experiment has been done that suggests life in a whole new region before suspected to be devoid of it.

The experiment at hand simulated the atmosphere of Titan and suggested that complex organic chemistry extends lower into the atmosphere than science previously suspected. These strands are such that the building blocks of life could spring forth – these results point toward prebiotic materials swimming around an area of this moon that makes this heavenly body exciting all over again.

“Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon’s atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull. Our experiment shows that’s not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth’s surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity.” – Murthy Gudipati, lead author of the paper on this subject published at JPL.

The paper published on these findings can be found in Nature Communications this week. Co-author Mark Allen, principal investigator of the JPL Titan team that is a part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, headquartered at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, had a bit to say as well.

“We’ve known that Titan’s upper atmosphere is hospitable to the formation of complex organic molecules. Now we know that sunlight in the Titan lower atmosphere can kick-start more complex organic chemistry in liquids and solids rather than just in gases.” – Allen

The result of the experiments conducted by this team show a much larger volume in the bits of Titan’s atmosphere involved in the production of more complex organic chemicals than previously suspected. The full team of researchers involved on this project included Ronen Jacovi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow from Israel; Isabelle Couturier of the University of Provence, Marseille, France; and Antti Lignell, a Finnish Academy of Science postdoctoral fellow from Helsinki at JPL.

NOTE: Straight from NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, the image above is a “true color snapshot” from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of Titan itself!

[via Michael Interbartolo]

Saturn’s moon Titan reveals even more life-sustaining possibilities is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Astronomers at the European Space Agency have watched a hitherto-dormant black hole wake and gorge upon a nearby substellar object the size of a “super Jupiter”, a months-long feasting that consumed a tenth of its mass. The sudden flaring of the black hole – believed to have a mass around 300,000 times that of our Sun – came after several decades of inactivity, the ESA said, but is a timely example of the appetite the super-dense anomalies can have. Scientists expect a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way to flare in a similar way, potentially as soon as this year.

This particular observation occurred in galaxy NGC 4845, roughly 47 million light years away from Earth, and caught the attention of astronomers by virtue of its extreme X-ray flaring. The XMM-Newton worked with the INTEGRAL space observatory, NASA’s Swift, and Japan’s MAXI X-ray monitors to pinpoint the cause.

Although NGC 4845 had never before been a source of high-energy output, that rapidly changed over the course of several months. At its maximum, the ESA says, the output made the galaxy brighter by a factor of a 1,000 in January 2011.

The cause of all that brightness was the vast appetite of a supermassive black hole, which awoke unexpectedly to consume great quantities of mass from an orbiting object. Exact figures on the size of the object are unknown, though there are estimates that it could be anywhere from 14-30x the mass of Jupiter, potentially putting it on a par, mass-wise, with a brown dwarf. Alternatively, it could have been significantly smaller – a few times that of Jupiter – making it more like a large gas giant.

Either way, the black hole at NGC 4845 took a big, prolonged bite out of it. Over a roughly 2-3 month period, ESA says, the external layers – or roughly 10-percent of the overall mass – were peeled away and consumed, as per this short animation from the agency:

“This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole” Roland Walter of the Observatory of Geneva, Switzerland, and co-author of a paper detailing the incident, said. What remains is “a denser core” that has been “left orbiting the black hole.”

Supermassive black hole wakes to feast on giant planet as astronomers watch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.