May 14, 2013 | 4,863 notes
X-ray vision tracks lightning bursts
Blink and you’ve missed it. Researchers in the US have captured the world’s first X-ray images of lightning, by creating a special camera that can capture radiation at 10 million frames per second. They presented their new findings at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco and they say that this new view of lightning could help to solve some of the mysteries of this spectacular natural phenomenon.
The research was carried out at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing, located in Florida. It is one of the few sites in world where lightning is initiated and studied under controlled conditions. By firing rockets with trailing wires into thunder clouds, scientists are able to generate electric fields that are large enough to trigger bolts of lightning, which then propagate back down towards the rocket launch tower.
Joseph Dwyer and colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology became interested in the fact that lightning emits X-rays as it propagates through the air, a phenomenon that was only noted in the past decade. But given that X-ray sources in lightning travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at velocities approaching the speed of light, it is difficult to catch them on camera before they disappear. In addition, they cannot be imaged with standard mirrors and lenses because huge amounts of material are required to prevent X-rays and gamma rays from entering through the sides of a camera.
Dwyer’s team has created a customized camera that has 30 detectors made from a combination of sodium iodide and photomultiplier tubes, each measuring 3 × 3 inch. The device, which is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator, is also equipped with a 3 inch pinhole aperture, and can record X-rays at 10 million frames per second. “This is actually a very old technique for making images, like that seen in a camera obscura,” Dwyer says.
During July and August this year, Dwyer’s team studied four rocket-triggered lightning flashes at the Florida test site. Each flash lasted for approximately two seconds and the resulting sequences of images revealed that X-rays emerged primarily from the vicinity of the lightning tip as it propagated towards the Earth. As the lightning crashed into the control tower it also triggered large bursts of gamma radiation, which were also captured by the camera.
“For the first time we’re catching a glimpse of lightning in the X-ray emission,” says Dwyer. “We’re seeing lightning as Superman would see it with his X-ray vision”.
Credit: James Dacey/physicsworld.com
via: spaceplasma
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May 14, 2013 | 13,754 notes
April 8, 2013 | 10,508 notes
NASA’s Drawing Board - J R Eyerman
Via: wnycradiolab & propaedeuticist:
April 2, 2013 | 45 notes
Michael Benson’s Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System
The photographer’s 40 large-scale photographs, on display in the AAAS Art Gallery, are remarkably crisp views of the rings of Saturn, moons in transit, a sunset on Mars and volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon, Io (pictured above). Each image is in “true color,” as Benson puts it.
To make his photographs, Benson starts by perusing through thousands of raw image data collected on missions led by NASA—Cassini, Galileo, MESSENGER, Viking and Voyager, among others—and the European Space Agency. He has compared this process to panning for gold—the precious gold nuggets being beautiful sequences of images, rarely seen by the public, that he can piece together into one seamless photograph. It can take anywhere from tens to hundreds of raw frames to arrange, like a mosaic, one legible composite image. Then rendering the photograph in realistic colors adds another layer of complexity. See more photos and continue reading at Smithsonian.com.
Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures
March 26, 2013 | 8,653 notes
What is an Analemma?
An analemma is the figure “8″ loop that results when one observes the position of the sun at the same time during the day over the course of a year. Due to the earth’s tilt about its axis (23.45°) and its elliptical orbit about the sun, the location of the sun is not constant from day to day when observed at the same time on each day over the course of a full year. Furthermore, this loop will be inclined at different angles depending on one’s geographical latitude.
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February 15, 2013 | 198 notes
102 years ago, the world was wowed by a meteorite that crashed in Egypt, supposedly landing on a dog. Two pieces of that meteorite are now stored at our National Museum of Natural History. In 1983, scientists discovered the rock was originally a piece of Mars. More about its story
February 12, 2013 | 558 notes
The Unlikely Pair of Brooklyn Designers Who Are Building a Better Space Suit
When they first met in 2007, Ted Southern and Nik Moiseev came from two very different worlds. Nik had spent over two decades working in the Soviet Union and Russia as an engineer of cutting edge garments that would be used to take cosmonauts by Soyuz rocket up to the International Space Station. Ted was an artist and sculptor who had studied at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and worked as an apprentice at a costuming studio in Manhattan. The closest he had come to having a garment of his fly to outer space was at Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, where models still wear his impressive angel wings.
WATCH THE EPISODE
- by David Feinberg
Smithsonian Magazine: The spacesuits that kept U.S. astronauts alive now owe their survival to one woman.
February 6, 2013 | 316 notes
New Photos Shows Stars on the Brink of Death and the Precipice of Life
Space added several stunning new images to its photo album this week, including the one above of spiral galaxy M106, located 23.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, Notice something?
The image, released yesterday, actually contains two spirals overlain on each other. One is the cloudy, blue-white spiral with a yellow core. The core itself is a composite of images take by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 detectors. Spiraling outward, the cloudy arms also come from Hubble, but were colorized with ground-based images captured from relatively small telescopes (12.5-inch and 20-inch) as they imaged from dark, remote sites in New Mexico. The telescopes, owned by photo-astronomers Robert Gendler and R. Jay GaBany, helped these astronomy enthusiasts fill in gaps left by Hubble’s cameras. The images were meticulously assembled into a mosaic by Gendler, a physician by training, to form the base spiral of the photo illustration above
But what about the second spiral? Emanating at odd angles is a glowing red swirl, known as the “anomalous arms” of M106, These arms, captured by Hubble imagery and GaBany’s telescope, are enormous streamers of irradiated hydrogen gas molecules which glow red when seen through special filters. This begs the question–what’s cooking the hydrogen
The answer is…a black hole! As astronomer Phil Plait blogs in Slate, “Every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core. The Milky Way has one, and it has about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole at M106’s heart is about 30 million times the mass of our Sun. Besides being heftier it’s also actively feeding, gobbling down material swirling around it (our own galaxy’s black hole is quiescent; that is, not eating anything at the moment).
While this photo shows stars at the brink of death within M106, another photo released yesterday shows the environment of stars at their birth
Tinged an eerie green–like smoke from a witch’s brew–the new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was taken after zooming in on bright dot in the “sword” of the constellation Orion. Visible to the naked eye as a single fuzzy star (also known as M42), the dot is actually a cluster of stars, surrounded by the Orion nebula. Here, stars are born
The image captures the infrared nimbus formed as newborn stars are compressed from vast clouds of gas and heat the wisps that remain. White regions are the hottest part of these stars’ first dust bath, while greens and reds show lukewarm dust. Carving holes through the dust are massive stars–newly formed–such as the one seen at the picture’s center
The Orion nebula is a site of star formation close to the Earth, giving scientists the opportunity to study its characteristics and hypothesize on how our Sun was born five billion years ago, perhaps from a similar cloud of dust. The white orbs seen here are less than 10 million years old
The images of the death and birth of stars–both hauntingly beautiful–showcase the evolving nature of space. Mirrored by our own cycles of life and death, the pictures help to link our daily grind with the vastness beyond Earth.
January 30, 2013 | 151 notes
In this new view of the Andromeda galaxy from ESA’s Herschel space observatory, cool lanes of forming stars are revealed in the finest detail yet.
Andromeda, also known as M31, is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way at a distance of 2.5 million light-years, making it an ideal natural laboratory to study star formation and galaxy evolution. - Continue reading at esa.int.
Ed note: What happens when galaxies collide?
January 28, 2013 | 207 notes
Iran Sends Terrified Monkey to Space
Iran claims to have sent a rocket into sub-orbital space with a small monkey on board. The photo, released by Iranian state media, shows the monkey after its “safe” return to Earth. - Read more at WashingtonPost.com.
Photo by: Mashregnews.ir
Ed note: Ever wonder what types of animals have been to space? The answer is quite surprising.
