By Mark Daymont
Space Center Educator
"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19 percent beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," said Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."
The surge, which poses no threat to Earth, was detected by NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft.
The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep lull in the sun's activity that began around 2007 and continues today. Researchers have long known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down, because strong solar activity inflates and bolsters a protective bubble around our entire solar system.
Right now solar activity — marked by sunspots, solar flares and space storms — is as weak as it has been in modern times, setting the stage for what Mewaldt calls "a perfect storm of cosmic rays."
The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.
Three spacecraft picked up the signature of water, not just in the frigid polar craters where it has long been suspected to exist, but all over the lunar surface, which was previously thought to be bone dry.
"Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the moon," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the studies detailing the findings.
While the findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, don't mean there are pools of liquid water sitting on the moon, it does mean that there is — entirely unexpectedly — water potentially tied up or mixed in the minerals that make up the lunar dirt.
"What we're detecting is completely unexpected," Pieters said. "The moon continues to surprise us."
The moon dirt would be akin to soil from an arid environment like Arizona — it wouldn't feel wet to the touch, but there's certainly water bound up in it, Pieters told SPACE.com.
This discovery may well revolutionize our understanding of the nature of the moon's surface, experts say, and it has geologists eager to go back to the moon and dig up some lunar dirt.
"I rank this as a game changer for lunar science," said University of Colorado astrophysicist Jack Burns, chair of the science committee for the NASA Advisory Council. Burns was not involved in the new findings. "In my mind this is possibly the most significant discovery about the moon since the Apollo era."
Ellen Stofan, a planetary geologist at Proxemy Research in Maryland and an honorary professor at University College London is suggesting NASA do just. She is leading an effort to design and propose a low-cost mission to Titan, one of Saturn's moons.
Sailing — But Not In Water
Titan is the only place in our solar system other than Earth known to have lakes on its surface, Stofan says.
The liquid isn't water, of course. Temperatures on icy Titan reach minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. The lakes are actually liquid methane and ethane.
Here on Earth, methane is an odorless gas. But on Titan, methane acts just like water acts on Earth. Methane forms clouds in the atmosphere. It rains down on to the surface and forms rivers, lakes and seas.
This radar image taken by the Cassini Space Probe in July 2006 of Titan, one of Saturn's moons, provides evidence that it is covered by large bodies of liquid.
A few years ago, the Cassini spacecraft sent back radar images of the north pole of Titan, and those pictures showed evidence of hundreds of lakes. Some of them are large — the size of North America's Great Lakes.
One of the large lakes — either Ligeia Mare or one called Kraken Mare — would be the target for a probe that would splash down and float around, according to the plan that Stofan is working on with some other Titan experts.
And that would be something new. In the past, space exploration has been done with spaceships that orbit planets or fly by them, or with probes that land on a planet's surface and maybe drive around, like the Mars rovers.
Floating Space Capsule
The "boat" or "lake lander" that Stofan is designing with her colleagues would not look anything like the ships used to explore Earth back in the days of Christopher Columbus or Ferdinand Magellan.
"It's certainly not going to look like what most people conceive of a boat looking like," says Stofan. "It'll look more like a little capsule that floats." She says it will drop straight into the sea. It will have a mast, "but that's just to hold a camera. We don't have a sail," she says.
Titan's wind will push this capsule around the lake. The probe could drift for months. It would have a small, nuclear-powered engine. And it could shout its data directly back to Earth.
There's no danger of a shipwreck, according to Stofan. Titan's lakes have waves, but probably just gentle ones — unless there's a storm. Still, even that doesn't worry her. "In fact, we'd love for that to happen, to be able to return an image showing a rainy day on Titan and to see those methane raindrops falling down into the lake," she says. "The wind might kick up a little, but nothing as violent as sort of the tropical storms and hurricanes we get here on Earth."
Eventually, she says, the ship might just run aground in a muddy beach and get stuck.
I watched a National Geographic Special on this cute star named Wolf-Rayet 104. Isn't it something the way it pinwheels in space? The pinwheel is actually caused by a smaller companion star. You see, they orbit each other which causes their solar winds to interact making a kind of space dust that we can see here on Earth a mere 8,000 light years away.
WR104 is soon to become a naughty star. It will blow its top in a brilliant explosion. That explosion is the problem we may have to face on Earth. Now when I saw 'may' I mean it could happen tomorrow or over the next few hundred thousand years - a mere snap of the fingers in space time but forever away from human perspective.
So we can add Wolf -Rayet 104 to the list of things that are queueing up to snuff us out. Don't know where to put it on the list? Let's see:
The North Koreans may blow us up with one of their kitchen crock pot made nukes because we don't pay proper homage to their Dear Leader.
Iran may do the same just because we are infidels. I don't recall ever converting to Infidelism but if they say I did then who am I to argue? Infidel and proud of it. Are there any benefits?
There is always Global Warming. Of course the benefit to going this way is the chance my home on benches overlooking beautiful Pleasant Grove and Utah Lake may someday become oceanfront property. Let those Ice Caps melt! I'm taking surfing lessons.
Let's not forget a Pandemic. They say somewhere in the world lurks a virus that has our names written into its DNA. Well, it will have to find me first. Let the little bugger try to get me. I'll retire (luckily I'm close enough to buy out my last few years. That will give me a monthly income) and seclude myself in my Fortress of Solitude only coming out at 3:00 A.M. to purchase necessities at the Lindon WalMart. The plan is flawless with one exception. What if this virus turns people into brain eating walking dead? Mmmmmmm. The thought of trying to enjoy an evening of pleasant TV with several former associates banging at my door and windows crying "Brains......Brains......." makes me think a different course of action may be required. I'll pack necessities and loved ones into the Battlestar and head to rural South Dakota. I own 8 acres of pine covered land in the Black Hills where the only thing I'd need to fear are rabid squirrels.
Then there is the potential for an Asteroid Impact. That one is tricky. It could come from anywhere and anytime because NASA and the Feds aren't spending enough money to track all the near Earth objects that could bring Armageddon down upon us. This is one where I hope we have at least a few days warning if its going to hit anywhere near the intermountain west. Knowing the roads will be clogged with the unprepared hopelessly trying to get out of Dodge, I'll plan on driving to my favorite exercise spot - Timp Cave. I've made friends with several of the Rangers. I'm trusting they'll let a few of us into the cave to ride out the impact and ensuing fire (trusting the cave doesn't 'cave' in around us). If that doesn't work well...... here's hoping there will be a forgiving priest in the cave with us ;)
Did one of you mention Alien Attack? Come on, we got that covered. I control five starships - don't I? I say "LET 'EM COME! LOAD PHOTON TORPEDOES AND PHASER BANKS." And if all else fails we can beam Admiral Schuler into their ship complete with an assortment of Slime Devils. Nothing could survive a double knockout.
The Obama Administration? Are you asking me if its possible to survive the Obama Administration? Are you serious? I'm an independent. I sit on the fence with one leg on each side. Listen, if I survived Bush / Cheney then I can survive Obama / and.......what's his name?
Taken from Space.com
A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.
Unlike the moon-sized Death Star from Star Wars, which has to get close to a planet to blast it, this blazing spiral has the potential to burn worlds from thousands of light-years away.
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
The fiery pinwheel in space in question has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other. As they circle one another, plumes of streaming gas driven from the surfaces of the stars collide in the intervening space, eventually becoming entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by the orbits of the stars.
The pinwheel, named WR 104, was discovered eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius. It rotates in a circle "every eight months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock," Tuthill said.
Both the massive stars in WR 104 will one day explode as supernovae. However, one of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, the last known stable phase in the life of these massive stars right before a supernova.
"Wolf-Rayet stars are regarded by astronomers as ticking bombs," Tuthill explained. The 'fuse' for this star "is now very short — to an astronomer — and it may explode any time within the next few hundred thousand years."
When the Wolf-Rayet goes supernova, "it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way," Tuthill said. "If such a 'gamma ray burst' happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way."
Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.
Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe. They can loose as much energy as our sun during its entire 10 billion year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more.
The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. "It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," Tuthill said.
The findings are detailed in the March 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.
Unfortunately for us, gamma ray bursts seem to be shot right along the axis of systems. In essence, if this pinwheel ever releases a gamma ray burst, our planet might be in the firing line.
"This is the first object that we know of that might release a gamma ray burst at us," said astrophysicist Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who did not participate in this study. "And it's close enough to do some damage."
This pinwheel is about 8,000 light years away, roughly a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. While this might seem far, "earlier research has suggested that a gamma ray burst — if we are unfortunate enough to be caught in the beam — could be harmful to life on Earth out to these distances," Tuthill said.
What might happen
Although the pinwheel can't blast Earth apart like the Death Star from Star Wars — at least not from 8,000 light years away — it could still cause mass extinction or possibly even threaten life as we know it on our planet.
Gamma rays would not penetrate Earth's atmosphere well to burn the ground, but they would chemically damage the stratosphere. Melott estimates that if WR 104 were to hit us with a burst 10 seconds or so long, its gamma rays could deplete about 25 percent of the world's ozone layer, which protects us from damaging ultraviolet rays. In comparison, the recent human-caused thinning of the ozone layer, creating "holes" over the polar regions, have only been depletions of about 3 to 4 percent, he explained.
"So that would be very bad," Melott told SPACE.com. "You'd see extinctions. You might see food chain collapses in the oceans, might see agricultural crises with starvation."
Gamma ray bursts would also trigger smog formation that could blot out sunlight and rain down acid. However, at 8,000 light-years away, "there's probably not a large enough effect there for much of a darkening effect," Melott estimated. "It'd probably cut off 1 or 2 percent of total sunlight. It might cool the climate somewhat, but it wouldn't be a catastrophic ice age kind of thing."
Cosmic ray danger
One unknown about gamma ray bursts is how many particles they spew as cosmic rays.
"Normally the gamma ray bursts we see are so far away that magnetic fields out in the universe deflect any cosmic rays we might observe from them, but if a gamma ray burst was pretty close, any high-energy particles would blast right through the galaxy's magnetic field and hit us," Melott said. "Their energies would be so high, they would arrive at almost the same time as the light burst."
"The side of the Earth facing the gamma ray burst would experience something like getting irradiated by a not-too-distant nuclear explosion, and organisms on that side might see radiation sickness. And the cosmic rays would make the atmospheric effects of a gamma ray burst worse," Melott added. "But we just don't know how many cosmic rays gamma ray bursts emit, so that's a danger that's not really understood."
It remains uncertain just how wide the beams of energy that gamma ray bursts release are. However, any cone of devastation from the pinwheel would likely be several hundred square light-years wide by the time it reached Earth, Melott estimated. Tuthill told SPACE.com "it would be pretty much impossible to for anyone to get far enough to be out of the beam in a spaceship if it really is coming our way."
Still, Tuthill noted this pinwheel might not be the death of us.
"There are still plenty of uncertainties — the beam could pass harmlessly to the side if we are not exactly on the axis, and nobody is even sure if stars like WR 104 are capable of producing a fully-fledged gamma-ray burst in the first place," he explained.
Future research should focus on whether WR 104 really is pointed at Earth and on better understanding how supernovae produce gamma ray bursts.
Melott and others have speculated that gamma ray bursts might have caused mass extinctions on Earth.