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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:32 pm 
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There was talk of sending a spacecraft to check it out. Whats the likelihood of a spacecraft made with current technology sucessfully completing that task? I presume it would have to come back as well.


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 1:56 pm 
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337693,00.html

More Evidence That Life Started in Space

Nobody knows how life on Earth began, but the primordial soup likely got a lot of its ingredients from space.

Scientists have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than 10 times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites.

Amino acids are organic molecules that form the backbone of proteins, which in turn build many of the structures and drive many of the chemical reactions inside living cells.

The production of proteins is believed to constitute one of the first steps in the emergence of life.

Meanwhile, meteorites found on Earth are typically chunks of material created in the solar system's youth.

So the finding suggests that the early solar system was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought.

The researchers speculate that rocks from space may have spiked Earth's primordial broth.

It's an argument that's been made before. In fact, the hypothesis of "panspermia" has been around for more than a century. But the prevalence of amino acids strengthens the reasoning.

Scientists already knew amino acids could have formed in some environments on the early Earth, but the presence of these compounds in certain meteorites has led many researchers to look to space as a source.

The meteorites used for the study were collected in Antarctica in 1992 and 1995 and held in the meteorite collection at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Researchers took small samples from three rare CR chondrites, which date from the time of the solar system's formation. The rocks likely came from an asteroid that was long ago shattered.

"The amino acids probably formed within the parent body before it broke up," said Conel Alexander of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. "For instance, ammonia and other chemical precursors from the solar nebula, or even the interstellar medium, could have combined in the presence of water to make the amino acids.

"Then, after the break up, some of the fragments could have showered down onto the Earth and the other terrestrial planets," he added. "These same precursors are likely to have been present in other primitive bodies, such as comets, that were also raining material onto the early Earth."

The study will be detailed in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:21 pm 
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Ceebs, if I haven't already, I strongly recommend that you watch "The Universe" on the History Channel every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET. It's a pretty amazing series, and it covers topics such as space and time travel, worm holes, quasars (which are pretty fucking awesome), black (and white) holes, alien moons, supernovas, etc. It's even better in Hi-Def. I love it.

That is all.


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:38 pm 
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Chris_H_2 wrote:
Ceebs, if I haven't already, I strongly recommend that you watch "The Universe" on the History Channel every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET. It's a pretty amazing series, and it covers topics such as space and time travel, worm holes, quasars (which are pretty fucking awesome), black (and white) holes, alien moons, supernovas, etc. It's even better in Hi-Def. I love it.

That is all.

thank you for the heads up, sir.

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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 4:13 am 
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080317/ ... sonjupiter

Io Creates Spots on Jupiter

Newfound glowing spots on Jupiter seem unexpectedly to come from electron beams whipping around the giant planet's volcanic moon Io.

Io is the most volcanic body in the solar system, with its entire surface likely made up of lava from the moon's hundreds of volcanoes.

Io also causes glowing spots hundreds of miles across on its mother planet that are similar to the aurora borealis or northern lights in the Northern Hemisphere on Earth.

As Jupiter spins, its magnetic field sweeps past Io, stripping off roughly 1 ton (about 1,000 kilograms) of matter off Io every second. This matter becomes electrically charged plasma in the magnetic field, forming a doughnut-shaped cloud. As Io orbits the planet, plasma surges around it like rivers do around boulders, creating waves that blast Jupiter's atmosphere with electrons to create auroras.

The glowing spots on Jupiter are typically located downstream of the flow of charged particles from the plasma torus. Now a team of planetologists unexpectedly found auroras occurring upstream of this flow.

"The results are surprising because no theory predicted upstream spots," said researcher Bertrand Bonfond of the University of Liege in Belgium.

Bonfond and colleagues in Belgium and Germany saw these new spots by using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Jupiter in ultraviolet wavelengths.

>The researchers think interactions between Io and Jupiter cause electrons to curve from one hemisphere of the planet around the moon to the other hemisphere, creating these unexpected spots, Bonfond told SPACE.com.

These new findings could shed light on very common occurrences in the universe — when electrically conductive bodies such as Io orbit near magnetic bodies such as Jupiter. For example, some recently discovered exoplanets are thought to be in such configurations with their parent stars.

To further test their new theory of how these glowing spots form, Bonfond and his colleagues plan further observations of the auroras later this year, after scheduled repairs and improvements to Hubble are made.

The scientists detailed their findings online March 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
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What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 4:14 am 
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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 6:44 am 
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Io crosses Jupiter
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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 6:48 am 
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sorry for the pr0n :oops:

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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:38 am 
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this has probably been posted here or you've seen it somewhere before but its well worth watching again.

a pale blue dot



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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 1:46 pm 
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,340034,00.html

Evidence Found That Ocean May Exist Beneath Surface of Saturn's Largest Moon

An ocean seasoned with the chemical ingredients of life may lie hidden beneath the icy surface of Saturn's moon Titan.

The evidence? The entire surface of Titan appears to be sliding around, scientists say, like cheese over tomato sauce on a slice of pizza.

Titan is the largest of the more than 50 known moons orbiting Saturn, and is in fact bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan possesses a thick, planet-like atmosphere — the only moon in the solar system known to have one. And the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons revealed a surface at Titan covered with icy mountains, oily lakes and seas and what might be "cryovolcanoes" that spew plumes of water and ammonia.

Scientists had long suspected that an underground ocean might exist on Titan, much as Jupiter's moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa do.

"Models of heat flow in Titan's interior suggested years ago that Titan would likely have an internal water or water-ammonia ocean," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md.

Lorenz and his colleagues analyzed several years' worth of radar data from the Cassini-Huygens mission. They found evidence that some features on the moon's surface had drifted.

"As we were mapping Titan's surface, we were building maps up in little strips. Some of these strips overlapped, help tying the map together, but when you looked at where the features were in one strip compared with another strip, the coordinates weren't the same," Lorenz explained.

Their research suggests that winds in Titan's dense atmosphere might actually rock the moon back and forth on its axis, influencing how it spins. The winds can accelerate the small moon's rotation speed and then, as the winds change with the seasons, they can decelerate it.

"Titan's winds should spool up and spin down with the seasons, and because Titan's atmosphere is so massive and Titan is relatively small, the winds have a measurable impact on Titan's rotation," Lorenz said. "If you adjust the parameters of how Titan rotates very slightly, we could make the features on the maps match up."

Winds actually sway the rotation of Earth too, changing the length of the day by roughly 1 millisecond over the course of the year. "But Titan's atmosphere is so massive and its crust is light, so the changes are much bigger there," Lorenz explained.

The size of these shifts hints that Titan's crust and core have to be separated by a liquid ocean to allow the atmosphere to move the crust around. Titan is about 3,200 miles (5,150 km) in diameter. The hidden ocean may be 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 km) thick and its ice crust may be 30 to 90 miles (50 to 150 km) thick, Lorenz said. Beneath that may be a few hundred miles of a heavier form of ice "that you get at higher pressures," he explained, on top of a rocky core roughly 1,800 to 2,100 miles (3,000 km to 3,400 km) wide.

This underground ocean is likely mostly water with a dash of ammonia. As organic molecules — the chemical ingredients of life on Earth — have been detected on Titan's surface, it may be they are in the ocean as well.

"Whether life has ever evolved on Titan is another question, but whether it did or didn't, Titan can tell us about the chemical processes that ultimately lead to life," Lorenz told SPACE.com.

Cassini may make magnetic and gravity measurements that show more evidence of an ocean, "but in the future it would be ideal to put a long-lived lander on Titan with a seismometer to detect the ocean that way," Lorenz said. "ESA and NASA are right now evaluating such a mission for launch in the 2017 timeframe."

However, there might be another explanation other than a hidden ocean behind these findings. Titan might have a reoccurring wobble in its orbit, said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory planetologist Christophe Sotin, who did not participate in this study. To confirm if Titan has an underground sea or not, Sotin said, Cassini would need to observe that moon for another six years to see if its spin slows down, as would be expected if there was a subterranean ocean.

"If there is the presence of an ocean there, with a pressure and temperature very similar to Earth's oceans, the question of life is now open for Titan," Sotin said.

Lorenz and his colleagues detail their findings in the March 21 issue of the journal Science.

Staff Writer Andrea Thompson contributed reporting to this story.

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
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What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 2:43 pm 
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corky wrote:
this has probably been posted here or you've seen it somewhere before but its well worth watching again.

a pale blue dot


:thumbsup:


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 2:54 pm 
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that was absolutely fucking phenomenal.

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
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What about us when we're down here in it?
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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:12 am 
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some of this site's photos of our solar system's planets are mind bending.

http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/cesd-astronomy.htm

Image

Image

Image

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:19 am 
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corduroy_blazer wrote:
Image


Wow. It almost looks.... edible.


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:21 am 
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did i really hear correctly before that it would take eight years to travel to jupiter?

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:23 am 
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mercury, venus, earth and mars:

Image

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
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We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:40 am 
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i watched two good specials tonight on the science channel called "search for second earth" and "europa."

http://science.discovery.com/tv-schedul ... .25679.0.0

http://science.discovery.com/tv-schedul ... 111059.0.0

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:37 pm 
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... nburst.jpg

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:51 pm 
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Hey corduroy_blazer,
Keep this stuff coming yeah? i love this thread. :D
dave

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 Post subject: Re: our universe is so rad
PostPosted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:54 pm 
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"i just looks like you could ... just reach out and rip it from the sky," my cousin once said while we gazed at the big, bright moon on a clear night in the suburbs of long island.

yet while outer space is just 62 miles straight up, the moon is roughly 239,000 miles away. that's like driving back-and-forth between new york and california 40 times. and that's close! consider it would take 80,000 years traveling at the fastest speed we've traveled in space, 40,000 miles per hour, to reach the nearest star system.

as i was laying down on the rooftop of my apartment building last night (with the help of perception enhancers) i was just amazed at the vastness i was really looking into. incredible. i'm looking at light from stars that may have already died and contemplating just how inconsequential, and just how small, much of our life is.

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No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge
What about us when we're down here in it?
We gotta watch our backs


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