Top 10 Most Remote Extreme Observatories in the World

Photo of the South Pole Telescope at sunset by NSF (U.S. National Science Foundation)

From Denny: Brrrrr! Check out this article on the Top 10 Extreme Observatories in the world. Some of these stargazing facilities are truly one of a kind places around the globe. Remember, this is the Year of Astronomy.

This is the South Pole Telescope on the Antarctic Plateau where this place is so barren it sits atop a two mile thick glacier supporting little life.

What is their job down here in cold land? They are measuring cosmic background radiation that's been traveling for billions of years through space and is now bombarding Earth all over the place.

So, why here for this job? This barren place is perfect because you get a clear sky with very little, sometimes, no, moisture. That moisture can absorb the light.

What that amounts to is that this special place is like a perfect window out into space with a clear view without the expense and bother of having to leave the planet to get the same results. Not bad! Just don't go putting up a row of fast food chains, guys, as we all know that civilization lights are bad for stargazing...



Photo of Svalbard EISCAT system (European Incoherent Scatter)

Remember hearing about the Doomsday Seed Vault located in Norway in case the world ended and we had to start over again? Yep, located in one inhospitable place in the Arctic Ocean! There are more polar bears than human in this frigid place, about 2100 humans to 2500 polar bears if you want the count. They study the auroral ionosphere here since those famous romantic northern lights are best visible in far northern locations. These scientists spend all their time observing the aurora borealis (northern lights) as they best reveal the interactions of the sun and Earth relationship in the atmosphere.

There are some really cool places and studies going on all over this planet! Let's see, there's Puerto Rico, Hawaii (volcano), Chile (desert), Japan (underground), Siberia (Lake Baikal, the largest fresh water lake in the world)and much more. Check out the How Stuff Works article from Discovery for the other observatories, go here.

Video: What is Quantum Tunneling?

From Denny: This is a short little video. This sure takes me back to philosophy class where nothing is certain and the best you can do is kind of figure out where it might post up! :) From The Tabletop Explainer...

"This video is an adaptation of an earlier piece of mine--Perspective on quantum mechanical tunneling. That film, however, was designed for a unique audience, and I felt its overall length was limiting its appeal here. So I've repackaged it as one of my weekly postings. I Hope you enjoy.

People have been asking for the math. So here it is. The Sun's core temp is ~13.6 MK. For hydrogen nuclei the Coulomb barrier is roughly 0.1 MeV. This corresponds to a temperature in excess of 1 GK! Luckily, tunneling and the distribution of speeds among nuclei lower the actual temperature required. So without tunneling even the Sun's core isn't hot enough for fusion. To see most of this worked through, check out this link:

http://burro.cwru.edu/Academics/Astr2...
for a less mathematical explanation, try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_...

Transcript: http://www.davidcolarusso.com/edblog/...

The Tabletop Explainer is an intermittent educational vlog presenting answers to viewer questions, brief science lessons, and ideas for teachers and students. It is a feature of my blog "Tilts at Windmils" which can be found at http://www.davidcolarusso.com/blog/"

Category: How-to & Style




quantum tunneling physics sub-atomic physics quantum mechanics tunneling fusion potential energy star reality uncertainty measurement

Astronomy: Photo of Our Galactic Center!

From Denny: A very cool photo from the folks over at ESO.org (European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere). Taken during the ATLASGAL survey this is really a color composite image of the Galactic Center and Sagittarius B2. The center of our Milky Way Galaxy is home to a supermassive black hole. That's a bit scary! How big is it? (This is starting to sound like a fish story...) That huge black hole is four million times the mass of our very own Sun! This galactic center is only 25,000 light years from our planet Earth.

X-ray mosaic of Galactic Center: Chandra takes in the bright lights, big city of the Milky Way - Image by Smithsonian Institution via Flickr

OK, you ask, so who is this Sagitarrius B2 guy? It's one of the largest clouds of molecular gas in our Milky Way. Definitely one of the big guys on the block. According to the ESO, this Sagitarrius B2 is "rich in many different interstellar molecules" because it lies close to the Galactic Center. Sort of sounds like vitamins for the Universe, doesn't it? :)

Now who's who on this photo?

- the ATLASGAL submillimetre-wavelength data are shown in red, overlaid on a view of the region in infrared light

- from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) in green and blue.

- Sagittarius B2 is the bright orange-red region to the middle left of the image, which is centered on the Galactic Center.

Galactic Center Milky Way Galaxy supermassive black hole Midcourse Space Experiment Sagittarius B2 ESO.org European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere Earth Sun infrared light black hole astronomy

Science: Earth Gets Billion-Year Life Extension

From Denny: It seems like every few years scientists decide the Earth is really an older planet and, oh, by the way, they think the sun will exist for a few million or so years longer. Not to worry, folks, we will still have a home for mankind for a little while longer! :) Here's the latest from Wired.com's Wired Science blog.

"The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life’s horizon by more than 1 billion years.

King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.

If the new idea proves correct and can be extended to other planets with biospheres, it could increase the chances that earthly civilization finds extraterrestrial life by doubling the percentage of time that planets could be inhabited.

“[T]he Earth will be identifiable as an inhabited planet for nearly half the total lifetime of the Sun, an important point to consider in the search for life on extrasolar planets,” the authors write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over the next hundreds of millions of years, the sun will continue to get brighter until eventually, Earth becomes too hot to inhabit. Previous calculations had pegged that time at about a billion years from now, but the new paper argues that earlier models had neglected the role of atmospheric pressure in regulating the temperature of the planet on astronomical time scales.

Atmospheric pressure is a key variable in the overall greenhouse-gas effect because it determines how much infrared radiation greenhouse gases absorb. Higher pressures mean more absorption and consequently, more heat. Lower pressures have the opposite effect.

Life itself would be the mechanism for these temperature changes. By “fixing” nitrogen, pulling it out of the air and eventually into the Earth’s deep ocean, microbes could be making the atmosphere lighter one atom at a time.

“I am glad that Li and colleagues have raised the issue of how overall variation in atmospheric pressure may have affected past and may affect future climate,” ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University said in an e-mail. “This could be relevant for understanding climate change on the billion-year time scale.”"

For the continuation of this article just click on the title link.

Science: Sun Induces Strange ‘Breathing’ of Earth’s Atmosphere

From Denny: Seems like I'm still getting caught up on what's going on in our solar system, published in December 2008. This was a fascinating article about something I had never given thought: there is a rhythmic contraction and expansion of the Earth's atmosphere in relation to the sun. I find it interesting that the scientist being interviewed has the last name of Solomon, after the wisest man ever to walk the Earth. Read on from Wired.com's Wired Science blog:

NASA Seal Image via Wikipedia

"SAN FRANCISCO — New satellite observations have revealed a previously unknown rhythmic expansion and contraction of Earth’s atmosphere on a nine-day cycle.

This "breathing" corresponds to changes in the sun’s magnetic fields as it completes rotations once every 27 days, NASA and University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists said Monday at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.

The sun’s coronal holes, seen as dark regions in the image above, direct plasma away from the sun and out into the solar system. When these particles get to the Earth, they heat the upper atmosphere, causing the outer atmosphere to expand and contract.

"What’s going on in the solar side is indeed mysterious and challenges the solar physics understanding," said Stan Solomon, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the research.

The finding emphasizes the many ways that solar activity impacts the Earth — and its increasingly space-utilizing humans.

"From the Earth’s perspective, we’re in the sun’s outer atmosphere," said Jeffrey Thayer, an aerospace engineer at UC-Boulder.

The new discovery could help scientists and engineers design better satellites that account for the changing conditions in the ionosphere. Eventually, it might be possible to predict the severity of ionospheric storms and protect the world’s communication infrastructure.

The scientists used changes in the density of the Earth’s atmosphere to pinpoint this previously unknown pattern. As the atmosphere contracts or expands, it also gets more or less dense, respectively. In response to the "hills and valleys of density," satellites subtly speed up or slow down, recording those motions with on-board accelerometers. And that’s the data that allowed the scientists to back into the discovery of this new atmospheric cycle.

Solomon said that while the cycle on Earth is interesting, the really strange aspect of this work is what it says about our local star.

"What’s going on in the sun that’s causing all this?" Solomon said. "It’s not entirely clear. That part of it is quite mysterious.""

soul on a sunbeam

soul on a sunbeam
Originally uploaded by sapaho

...I pick the prettiest part of the sky and I melt into the wing and then into the air, till I'm just soul on a sunbeam. ~ Richard Bach