Space News/UFO's Etc...(Discussion/Pics/Vids)

[ilan]

Great info, Wicked...

[wickedjoker]

Oh I like that very cool! I need a telescope but I'm to poor!

[wickedjoker]

Eta Aquarids meteor shower peaks this week

The Eta Aquarids meteor shower will put on a brilliant show for stargazers as it peaks Thursday evening and Friday morning.

The annual light show starts in mid-April but really starts to dazzle in the first week of May. It's created by the dusty debris left behind by Halley's Comet, which flew by Earth in 1986.
Although the famous comet won't be entering our solar system again until 2061, its remnants appear in our skies each year. The frozen particles from the comet disintegrate in our atmosphere, creating a bright and colorful display.
What's happening above?

The Eta Aquarids are highly visible for people living in the Southern Hemisphere, but more difficult to observe for those north of the equator.
Hear CNN Meteorologist Brandon Miller pronounce "Eta Aquarids"

Observers in the Northern Hemisphere can expect to see about 10 meteors per hour. They can also see "earthgrazers," long meteors that seem as though they are skimming the surface of our planet, just along the horizon.

These meteors are known for their speed, traveling about 148,000 mph into ​the Earth's atmosphere. Since they are moving by so quickly, they often leave behind "trains," glowing bits of debris that streak the night sky.

No special equipment is required to view the celestial event. All observers need are clear skies.

Source -- CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/05/tech/eta-aquarids-meteor-shower-irpt/index.html

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[ilan]

It will be visible with the naked eye, but being able to see it is contingent on being able to differentiate it from the rest of the glowing menagerie. Check this image and the page for observational tips.

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/skyreport

[wickedjoker]

Nice thanks for the Ilan bummer part for me is it will still be daylight here I will miss it or just have to wait a few hours...

[ilan]

Yes. everything has to be adjusted a bit. I saw it last week on a clear night, but it was really just one more glowing speck in the night sky. However, I did enjoy knowing the identity of that particular glowing speck.

[ilan]

What if a black hole swallowed Earth? Scientist describes 3 possible scenarios
Reuters News | 16 February 2016

Black holes are shrouded in mystery despite scientists’ attention, but a British academic has now outlined three ways we could perish if one ever swallowed Earth – and they'll make you want to keep on the good side of the supermassive galactic phenomena.

None of the three scenarios is particularly pretty, though one of them at least has an interesting title.

'Spaghettification'

Although the name is imaginative and perhaps even fun to say, make no mistake – the process would be anything but fun. In fact, it would involve being stretched out like spaghetti, in a procedure that seems painful and terrifying.

“In brief, if you stray too close to a black hole, then you will stretch out, just like spaghetti. This effect is caused due to a gravitation gradient across your body,” Kevin Pimbblet, a senior lecturer in physics at the University of Hull, wrote in an article for The Conversation.

He went on to explain that the two sides of a human – the feet and arms – would be pulled in different directions, lengthening the body and thinning out the middle.

“Hence, your body or any other object, such as Earth, will start to resemble spaghetti long before it hits the center of the black hole,” Pimbblet wrote.

Death from radiation

But don't worry, there's a chance you'd be fried by radiation before being “spaghettified.”

Radiation is generated when a black hole feasts on new material.

“This is a problem for anything orbiting (or near) a black hole, as it is very hot indeed. Long before we would be spaghettified, the sheer power of this radiation would fry us,” Pimbblet wrote.

Becoming a hologram

But if turning into a piece of spaghetti and being fried by radiation sound completely unappealing, there is potentially a third option – the world could be transformed into a hologram, and humans probably wouldn't even realize it.

According to Pimbblet, if a black hole appeared next to Earth, the same effects that produced spaghettification would start to take effect and “the doom of the entire planet would be at hand.”

But there's potentially light at the end of the black hole. We might not even notice if Earth was swallowed, because everything would appear as it once was – at least for a short period of time.

“In this case, it could be some time before disaster struck,” the physics professor wrote.

Or we could also live holographically, Pimbblet noted, referencing a theory created last year by Dr. Samir Mathur from Ohio State University (OSU).

The theory states that everything touching a black hole is not destroyed, but rather becomes an imperfect copy of itself, existing exactly as it did before.

In short, it means that black holes are seen not as killers, but as “benign copy machines,” OSU said at the time.

While that option clearly seems most appealing, no one can predict what may or may not happen in the future. In the meantime, enjoy life on Earth and try not to upset the galactic bullies lurking in the depths of the universe.

[anon2599]

Amazing! and intriguing stuff you been posting Sir...I really appreciate all that you and others post for us all on this splendid thread.
Thank you.

Regards,

[ilan]

Did a Super-Mega-Ultra Neutrino Come From a Black Hole Gobbling Down Matter 10 Billion Light-Years Away?
By Phil Plait | May 6, 2016 Slate.com

Astronomers may have solved a mystery that started a few years ago. Or 9.5 billion years ago, depending on how you look at it.

Even better? This mystery involves, in no particular order: neutrinos, Antarctica, faster than light travel, bizarre radiation, the Fermi observatory, gamma rays, and a supermassive black hole with its barrel aimed right at us. That’s like astronomical mystery bingo right there.

OK, here’s how this played out.

In 2012, astronomers detected an extremely high-energy neutrino slamming into the ground. Neutrinos are a weird kind of subatomic particle, created by things like nuclear fusion in the Sun’s core, fission in nuclear reactors on Earth, stars exploding out in the Universe, and even when matter falls into a black hole. Neutrinos are very standoffish and don’t react to matter; they can easily pass through the entire Earth like it was completely transparent. Which to them it really is.

So detecting them is very difficult. But, it turns out, there’s a clever way to see them: Sometimes very high-energy neutrinos slam into ice molecules, creating a barrage of subatomic particles like shrapnel. These move so rapidly from the collision that they actually move faster than the speed of light through the ice. (Note: Before you start angrily writing comments, remember that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in a vacuum; light slows down when passing through solids, so the particles were moving faster than light can through the ice, but not faster than light can through a vacuum.)

When they do this, they create a flash of energy that’s the equivalent of a sonic boom, but with light. I sometimes call this a photonic boom, but the technical term is Cherenkov radiation. That flash of blue light can be detected if the ice is clear enough. There are parts of Antarctica where that’s the case, and so scientists built IceCube, a series of detectors buried deep in the south polar ice.

In 2012 it detected a whopper of a neutrino (nicknamed Big Bird; all these events are named after Sesame Street characters to make it easier to keep track of them). The energy in that single neutrino was staggering beyond staggering: It contained 1,000 trillion times as much energy as a photon of visible light. If that neutrino had hit someone they would have felt it. A blow from a single subatomic particle. Egads.

The mystery is a bit obvious: What the heck can create a neutrino with that kind of soul-crushing energy?

One suspect is a supermassive black hole, the kind located in the centers of galaxies. Matter falling into them forms a swirling disk, and can also focus twin beams of matter and energy that scream out of the poles of the disk at very high speeds. Many such active galaxies are known, and most emit energy across the electromagnetic spectrum at one level or another. But if the beams are aimed right at us, we see a lot of very high energy light from them, including gamma rays. We call these objects blazars.

We see blazars all over the sky, though. Is there any way to narrow down the suspect list?

The suspect blazar blasts out gamma rays, as seen by Fermi.

Yes! IceCube was able to track the subatomic shrapnel shower backward, upward, and give a very rough area in the sky from which it must have come. Astronomers then used Fermi, an orbiting gamma-ray observatory, to see if any blazars happened to be particularly active at that time.

And they did. Confirming this with TANAMI, an array of radio telescopes, they found that the blazar PKS B1424-418 had a monstrous flare-up during this time. During the yearlong blast, it blazed with gamma rays 15–30 times brighter than usual. That’s just such an event that could create the ultra-high energy of Big Bird.

Astronomer Roopesh Ojha, from the Fermi team, gives his perspective on this event:

https://youtu.be/Fq-5RI9C69I

So, case closed? Well, maybe. Blazars don’t flare like that often, and the fact that it happened at the right place at the right time is pretty compelling. There’s always room for doubt, but this seems like the astronomers have made a pretty good case. They found the motive, means, and opportunity.

Now I know at this point your head may be swimming with all these terms and technology, but I still have one more thing I want to plant into your brain. Think on this for a moment: PKS B1424-418 is one of the brightest gamma ray sources in the sky … even though it’s located 9.5 billion light-years from Earth. That’s two-thirds of the way to the edge of the observable Universe!

That’s a long, long way. And yet it produces enough energy to shine brightly in our skies, if you have gamma ray eyes. Which, I’ll note, astronomers do.

And that mind-stompingly distant galaxy produced a hail of subatomic particles that shot across the cosmos at just a hair under the speed of light, passing galaxies and clouds of dust and gas and heaven knows what else, only to be stopped by a single molecule of frozen water on a tiny blue-green planet, creating a flash of light so faint it took sophisticated technology and advanced science to see it at all.

And astronomers traced that flash of light led backwards to one of the most energetic and violent objects in the Universe.

Look. I love science fiction, and superhero movies, and all that. But no matter how bizarre a story fiction tells, they can’t hold a candle to the real thing.

The Universe has way better stories than we do. And we read them through science.

[Kimbo]

WOW, good reads!!