Supernova

So apparently a supernova is a long process... But I can't find any news about it on the web? If only my Astro teacher were to link it

This is kind of exciting that this supernova can wait a couple of days/weeks until my finals are over. And my trip to Palomar would insure the greatness of this even for me!

So anyways, with this thing going off and rated as type 1a supernova, which is the brightest of them all (When the star had enough mass to collapse it's neutron core for further reactions). Apparently this star might have had a red giant nearby to provide extra weight for the collapse:

One model for the formation of this category of supernova is a close binary star system. The progenitor binary system consists of main sequence stars, with the primary possessing more mass than the secondary. Being greater in mass, the primary is the first of the pair to evolve onto the asymptotic giant branch, where the star's envelope expands considerably. If the two stars share a common envelope then the system can lose significant amounts of mass, reducing the angular momentum, orbital radius and period. After the primary has degenerated into a white dwarf, the secondary star later evolves into a red giant and the stage is set for mass accretion onto the primary. During this final shared-envelope phase, the two stars spiral in closer together as angular momentum is lost. The resulting orbit can have a period as brief as a few hours. If the accretion continues long enough, the white dwarf may eventually approach the Chandrasekhar limit.
A second possible mechanism for triggering a Type Ia supernova is the merger of two white dwarfs whose combined mass exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit (which is called a super-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf). In such a case, the total mass would not be constrained by the Chandrasekhar limit.
Collisions of solitary stars within our galaxy are thought to occur only once every 10⁷-10¹³ yr; far less frequently than the appearance of novae. However, collisions occur with greater frequency in the dense core regions of globular clusters. (cf. blue stragglers) A likely scenario is a collision with a binary star system, or between two binary systems containing white dwarfs. This collision can leave behind a close binary system of two white dwarfs. Their orbit decays and they merge together through their shared envelope.
The white dwarf companion could also accrete matter from other types of companions, including a subgiant or (if the orbit is sufficiently close) even a main sequence star. The actual evolutionary process during this accretion stage remains uncertain, as it can depend both on the rate of accretion and the transfer of angular momentum to the white dwarf companion.

What if we left the solar system?

Nothing that human hands ever touched has gone as far as Voyager I.

As of August 2010, Voyager 1 was at a distance of 17.1 Billion Kilometers (114.3 AU) from the sun and Voyager 2 at a distance of 13.9 Billion kilometers (92.9 AU).

A few new space missions out there are brewing. These missions involve a solar sail technology. Such ideas date back to Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky! A Russian scientist (1857 – 1935). (Google him and you'll see his amazing progressive thoughts of that era, it's mind-boggling!)
But anyways, since Einstein's E=mc^2, it's a fact that photons carry a bit of momentum with them and therefore this momentum could be harbored and used in spacecraft propulsion! Currently, the idea of a 15 Astronomical Units/year speed is entertained to achieve a feat of getting hundreds of AUs away from solar system to explore. Thomas Zurbuchen of University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Ralph McNutt of the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are working on Large and Medium sized Solar sail crafts (36 ton and 1 ton respectively). Or another 500 kg spacecraft with a solar sail of 200 meters across will swoop towards the Sun to get flung out into space by the intense sunlight. Just before passing Jupiter's orbit, it would cast off the sail and continue on gliding outward. But at first the solar sails would have to get realworld testing done and be able to fold, since it'd be impossible to get those sails out in space unfolded.

Where'd you come from?

Samantha posted a video with the question to an astrophysicist about what was the most mindboggling thought to him and the answer was "we are all made of stars".

Well, I guess another question we can ask is where'd planets come from and in which order?
So the Stardust program returned some results with capture from coma of dust that surrounds a solid comet nucleus.
Jupiter, as the study suggests, was the first-born of planets but did it build up slowly or in a single gravitational swoosh just like a small star? Did it form further from the Sun and move in closer as the anomalously high levels of heavy elements suggest?
Another oddity of our solar system is that the asteroid belt formed before Mars which formed before Earth. This means that the planet formation swept inward. How about Venus? Well, there's not much data to speculate because of hostile environment inside Venus' atmosphere. However, there's a plan to have a hot air balloon to land for just a brief moment, which would be enough to collect some sample data and get back in orbit. Since Venus sits on the inside edge of habitable zone and Mars sits on the outside with Earth in the middle, there are some answers to be found by studying these planets on origins of life as well as where we came from and how we formed in more detail.

This is very interesting to have answers to such answers with hard samples rather than just theories and simulations.

Hello? Anyone there?

Well, herro thera!

Looking for new life forms or actually any life forms outside of Earth is what I'm talking about!

I really enjoyed the soothing voice coming from my computer.

But all in all, it'd be pretty interesting to find some kind of microbial life form on some other planet, hell, may be even slimeballs of living goo or some mammoth sized viruses!

I mean NASA spending 1.5 billion on Mars Science Laboratory - a car sized rover that will store Samples of Mars for later extractions by future missions. Another 2 billion project is to send a probe to Mars to look for biology and study it.
Hot air balloon is an ideal way to get around Titan with 160 kg of equipment, while sticking around 10 km altitude. All this could be accomplished with a plutonium power source that generates enough waste heat.



And here's the interesting food for thought:

Last year, Nasa scientists claimed they had found vital clues which appeared to indicate that primitive aliens could be living on Titan, one of Saturn’s biggest moons.

Data from Nasa's Cassini probe revealed the complex chemistry on the surface of Titan, which experts say is the only moon around the planet to have a dense atmosphere.

Experts suggested that life forms may have been breathing in the planet’s atmosphere and also feeding on its surface’s fuel.

A research paper, in the journal Icarus, claimed that hydrogen gas flowing throughout the planet’s atmosphere disappeared at the surface. This suggested that alien forms could in fact breathe.
A second paper, in the Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded that there was lack of the chemical on the surface Scientists were then led to believe it had been possibly consumed by life.
Researchers had expected sunlight interacting with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene gas. But the Cassini probe did not detect any such gas.
In 2008, astronomers found organic chemicals on a planet outside our solar system, which was also heralded as a milestone in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
Researchers identified water in the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a so-called alien planet close to its parent star and too hot for conditions favorable for life as we understand it.
But the ability of scientists to analyse its atmosphere and detect carbon-based molecules was a crucial feat in efforts to find planets that may harbor extraterrestrial life.
The finding, reported in the journal Nature, made the planet one of the best understood of hundreds detected. It was discovered in 2005 in the constellation Vulpecula, a realm so distant that it takes light 63 years to reach Earth.
The achievement demonstrated the ability to detect organic molecules in "Goldilocks zones'' – so-called because they are just right for liquid water, neither too hot nor too cold.
The planet is made of gas similar, but hotter, to that found on Jupiter. Previous studies predicted that methane and water would be present in its atmosphere, but definitive evidence had not been found. Water has already been detected on another alien world.
Using light analysed by the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr Mark Swain of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and colleagues confirmed the presence of methane. They also reported that they found the signature of water, though carbon monoxide, originally expected to be abundant in the upper atmosphere, was not identifiable.
On Earth, methane is produced by natural sources such as termites, oceans and cows, but also man-made sources such as waste landfills.
A discovery much closer to home also ignited a frenzy of speculation about aliens last year, when experts detected a microbe at the bottom of a lake capable of living in conditions previously thought to be inhospitable to any form of life.
Researchers found a microbe at the bottom of Mono Lake in Yosemite National Park that was thriving in an arsenic—rich environment previously thought too poisonous for any form of life to survive.
It raised the prospect that similar life could exist on planets without the Earth's benevolent atmosphere.

So Hubble technicians, eh?

I just watched the "Hubble's Amazing Rescue"

And apparently that friggin' thing is getting serviced constantly, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2008, 2009.

But the most interesting thing is that it has batteries that die and need replacements. The fact that wide field camera was replaced/upgraded 3 times.

Apparently things never got really repaired in space, but are simply replaced by new units on every space walk, except the mission in 2009 when the astronauts had to take Hubble's guts out and replace with new circuit boards. This had never been done in space because of the amount of screws that were undone and such. With the risk of any screw stripping or getting lost or hitting the mirror would pretty much murder Hubble. But alas, the guys did it.
Astronauts, carried to Hubble by the Space Shuttle Atlantis, installed two new instruments on Hubble during Servicing Mission 4: Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).
WFC3 sees three different kinds of light: near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared, though not simultaneously. The camera's resolution and field of view is much greater than that of previous instruments. Astronauts removed Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to make room for WFC3.
COS, a spectrograph that breaks light into its component colors, revealing information about the object emitting the light, sees exclusively in ultraviolet light. COS improves Hubble's ultraviolet sensitivity at least 10 times, and up to 70 times when observing extremely faint objects.
COS took the place of the device installed in Hubble during the first servicing mission to correct Hubble's flawed mirror, the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR). Since the first servicing mission, all of Hubble's replacement instruments have had technology built into them to correct Hubble's marred vision, making COSTAR no longer necessary.


Pretty badass.

FIRE ZE MISSEEEEEL!!!

PREPARE AN ASTEROID DEFENCE! (It's an actual space program and should be treater with respect)

How awesome of a job would that be!? I'd get to scream at a german lady to start countdown to FIRE THE LASER! (Austin Powers reference? Wasn't sure if it'd be obvious)
On a serial note though: THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!! (Haha, seems like it's a classic way to get money from the US govt/people!)

Ok, now to real cerial thingy: I've saved money on my auto insurance with Geico! LMAO!!! Haha, I'm sorry, I am just kidding, and NO I did not get an endorsement to advertise for that green lizzard! (I bet the color of money rubs off on that little bastard with an awesome accent!)

So the real serious thing now, like PHO REALZ yo: Large bodies with about a 1km size would pose a real threat not only to the region that they would strike, but our whole planet! Or continent or whatever, it's kinda dangerous. Reading some papers and reports in Scientific American these are the facts I've come across:

  Dinosaur Killers, 10 km across, hit every 100 million years on average.
  Globally devastating asteroids, 1km ID or larger, come ~half million years.
  City destroyers, 50 meters across, strike ~once a millenium.

With these fun facts, it's kind of irrelevant for us, since the chances of us getting hit in our lifetime is minimized since we live at most around a century (If we eat right, excercise and live in a clean environment - sooooooooo like not a lot of people in US population haha!). So WHO THE EF CAAAARES, let our grandchildren worry about that ish! But I guess some people in congress are either a lot less selfish or just need a job, so they are pushing for an asteroid defense program!

So here are a few more facts:

 LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) that is mainly funded by Google will cost millions of dollars and will be able to map around 80% of moving, winking or blinking objects within a decade of operation (2014-2024). However for a modest amount of 100 million dollars more, it'd be able to map 90% of those objects. However it will have blind spots: That is, the ground based telescope will not be able to map objects slightly behind or ahead of Earth in it's orbit because of the Sun's glare. Second issue is that this telescope will be limited to visible light, therefore the mass of an object will be very inaccurate. For example: A massive asteroid can pose as a bright but half the size, since the mass of an asteroid will be based on such factors as brightness and other indirect factors.

So with little of budget for this kind of program, scientists are forced to get creative and along with using this LSST,  JPL personel is thinking of a much more precise idea, such as launching a satellite that will actually orbit the Sun and map out the sky in IR (Infrared you noobs!) in order to track these objects. Being able to use multiple wavelengths, the mass could be determined down to 20% error. Which is decent, I mean I wouldn't get far with that kind of GPA (B-), but I guess people that made it already are just too boss! SO this little program will cost US about 500 million USD!

Another thing, once the asteroid is discovered, would we be able to do ANYTHING about it?
As a rule of thumb goes: it'd take about a decade of changing the velocity of the asteroid by a millimeter per second to divert it's course by a full Earth Radius! All I got to say to this is GAWD DAYUMN and CHEEZITS!

So there's another proposed project that might cost 400 million. This project is to fire a 400 kilogram projectile at a distant asteroid just to see what happens.
HOW EFFIN' SWEET OF A PROPOSITION IS THAT!? I get to throw ISH at things really far away just to say I did it and justify it with SCIENCE! I am soooo happy to be a physicist!

THAT IS ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOO!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20030674-501465.html

To "weather monitor" or not to "weather monitor"

What are some things that we can do in space? This question has been a real thing since 1957, GO MOTHERLAND! And since 2004 when Bush decided to do something about the Moon, boo hoo...



Number one thing that we can do is monitor and record Earth's climate via Satellite.

At the moment (issue's date), there is some budget cutting going on and some funds that were directed towards climate, ice caps on poles,  CO2 and monitoring other things. 600 x10^(6)$ of these funds were redirected towards space shuttle and space station over 5 years! Which means that satellites that are monitoring these thigns will have gaps in data because Earth sciences are forced to replace/fix/update satellites minimally, i.e when they break... So that sucks and such cases are there because some of the data was actually bought from India's satellites to monitor crop productivity. And other satellites that will have gaps in data might run on problems, such as: if new satellite detects that the Sun is brighter, so now it'll be impossible to determine without a trendline whether the Sun actually got brighter or the instrument was not properly calibrated!