Everything at the Membrane Domain
“I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
“There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.”
— Pink Floyd
NASA has taken a picture of the far side of the moon:
The far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, is seen as it crosses between our ‘EPIC’ camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, and the Earth – one million miles away.
NASA — NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another “Earth.”
The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet — of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.
“On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0.”
Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.
While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.
“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment,” said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. “It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”
To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team conducted ground-based observations at the University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These measurements were key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b, to refine the size and brightness of its host star and to better pin down the size of the planet and its orbit.
The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.
In addition to confirming Kepler-452b, the Kepler team has increased the number of new exoplanet candidates by 521 from their analysis of observations conducted from May 2009 to May 2013, raising the number of planet candidates detected by the Kepler mission to 4,696. Candidates require follow-up observations and analysis to verify they are actual planets.
Twelve of the new planet candidates have diameters between one to two times that of Earth, and orbit in their star’s habitable zone. Of these, nine orbit stars that are similar to our sun in size and temperature.
“We’ve been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates, which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly,” said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led the analysis of a new candidate catalog. “This gives astronomers a statistically sound population of planet candidates to accurately determine the number of small, possibly rocky planets like Earth in our Milky Way galaxy.”
These findings, presented in the seventh Kepler Candidate Catalog, will be submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. These findings are derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on the original Kepler mission’s four-year data set. The final analysis will be conducted using sophisticated software that is increasingly sensitive to the tiny telltale signatures of Earth-size planets.
Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/kepler
A related feature story about other potentially habitable planets is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/finding-another-earth
-end-
It’s been many years since NASA has taken a picture of Earth. Now, they released the Blue Marble image captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s #DSCOVR spacecraft.
This is the first photo of the entire Earth taken in 43 years:
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.
In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects.
It also marked the first time people on Earth had advance notice their planet’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. More than 20,000 people around the world participated.
“We can’t see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.”
Pictures of Earth from the outer solar system are rare because from that distance, Earth appears very close to our sun. A camera’s sensitive detectors can be damaged by looking directly at the sun, just as a human being can damage his or her retina by doing the same. Cassini was able to take this image because the sun had temporarily moved behind Saturn from the spacecraft’s point of view and most of the light was blocked.
A wide-angle image of Earth will become part of a multi-image picture, or mosaic, of Saturn’s rings, which scientists are assembling. This image is not expected to be available for several weeks because of the time-consuming challenges involved in blending images taken in changing geometry and at vastly different light levels, with faint and extraordinarily bright targets side by side.
“It thrills me to no end that people all over the world took a break from their normal activities to go outside and celebrate the interplanetary salute between robot and maker that these images represent,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “The whole event underscores for me our ‘coming of age’ as planetary explorers.”
In the MESSENGER image, Earth and the moon are less than a pixel, but appear very large because they are overexposed. Long exposures are required to capture as much light as possible from potentially dim objects. Consequently, bright objects in the field of view become saturated and appear artificially large. (To view the MESSENGER images, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/16Vnt5G)
“That images of our planet have been acquired on a single day from two distant solar system outposts reminds us of this nation’s stunning technical accomplishments in planetary exploration,” said MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “And because Mercury and Saturn are such different outcomes of planetary formation and evolution, these two images also highlight what is special about Earth. There’s no place like home.”
Credits: Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA
by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies
Ocean measurements taken more than 135 years ago during the scientific expedition of HMS Challenger have provided further confirmation of human-produced global warming over the past century.
The researchers also found the thermal expansion of sea water caused by this global warming contributed to around 40 per cent of the total sea level rise seen in tide gauges from 1873 to 1955. The remaining 60 per cent was likely to have come from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers.
“Our research revealed warming of the planet can be clearly detected since 1873 and that our oceans continue to absorb the great majority of this heat,” said lead author Dr Will Hobbs, a researcher at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
“Currently scientists estimate the oceans absorb more than 90 per cent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and we attribute the global warming to anthropogenic causes.”
The Challenger expedition, from 1872-1876, was the world’s first global scientific survey of life beneath the ocean surface. Along the way scientists measured ocean temperatures, lowering thermometers hundreds of metres deep on ropes made from Italian hemp during its voyage.
Researchers combined these data with modern observations and used both in state-of-the-art climate models to get a picture of how the world’s oceans have changed since the Challenger’s voyage.
“The key to this research was to determine the range of uncertainty for the measurements taken by the crew of the Challenger,” said study co-author Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“After we had taken all these uncertainties into account, it became apparent that the rate of warming we saw across the oceans far exceeded the degree of uncertainty around the measurements.
“So, while the uncertainty was large, the warming signal detected was far greater.”
Uncertainties around the Challenger’s measurements were caused by the limited areas measured during the voyage; the actual depths the thermometers descended to and the likely natural variation in temperature that could occur in each region during the voyage.
To get the most reliable results the researchers used the most conservative estimates after taking into account the maximum possible variation caused by these uncertainties.
“Because we took the most conservative outcome, we are likely to have underestimated the true temperature rise,” said Dr Hobbs.
“A simple analysis of our results suggests we may have underestimated the warming by as much as 17 per cent. In fact many of the stations most prone to bias were in the Eastern Pacific – a region showing one of the strongest ocean warming trends – so the true warming may be even larger than that.”
In addition to determining the increase in temperatures, the measurements from the Challenger expedition revealed the amount of thermal expansion in sea level rise in the oceans before the 1950s. Prior to this research, climate models offered the only way to estimate the change.
“This research adds yet another suite of compelling data that shows human activity continues to have a dramatic influence on the Earth’s climate,” said Dr Hobbs.
The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment
According to NOAA scientists, the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. for 2012 was 55.3°F, which was 3.2°F above the 20th century average and 1.0°F above the previous record from 1998. The year consisted of the fourth warmest winter, a record warm spring, the second warmest summer, and a warmer-than-average autumn. Although the last four months of 2012 did not bring the same unusual warmth as the first 8 months of the year, the September through December temperatures were warm enough for 2012 to remain the record warmest year, by a wide margin.
The average precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. for 2012 was 26.57 inches, 2.57 inches below average, and the 15th driest year on record for the nation.
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index indicated that 2012 was the second most extreme year on record for the nation. The index, which evaluates extremes in temperature and precipitation, as well as landfalling tropical cyclones, was nearly twice the average value and second only to 1998.
Additional Resources
In the years after Columbus’ voyage, burning of New World forests and fields diminished significantly – a phenomenon some have attributed to decimation of native populations by European diseases. But a new University of Utah-led study suggests global cooling resulted in fewer fires because both preceded Columbus in many regions worldwide.
“The drop in fire [after about A.D. 1500] has been linked previously to the population collapse. We’re saying no, there is enough independent evidence that the drop in fire was caused by cooling climate,” says the study’s principal author, Mitchell Power, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Utah.
“The implication is that climate is a large-scale driver of fire. That’s a key finding. Climate is driving fire on global and continental scales,” says Power, who also is curator of the Garrett Herbarium at the Natural History Museum of Utah, which is part of the University of Utah.
The new study analyzed worldwide charcoal samples spanning 2,000 years. It will be published online during August in the journal The Holocene, which is the name of the geological epoch covering roughly the last 11,500 years of Earth’s history. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Natural History Museum of Utah.
The study deals with the Little Ice Age, a period when Earth’s climate cooled, causing New York Harbor to freeze over in 1780, among other effects. Estimates of when the Little Ice Age started range from the 1200s to the 1500s. It ended in the early 1800s. Possible causes include some combination of increased dust from volcanic eruptions, decreased solar activity, and changes in circulation of the ocean and atmosphere.
“The decrease in fire on a very large scale – globally and in the Americas – was controlled by this cooling climate, which began prior to the population collapse, and climate alone is sufficient to explain large scale changes in burning,” says Power.
“In a cooler atmosphere, you tend to get reduced convection, so you get reduced thunderstorms and ignition from lightning,” he says. “Cooler climate also tends to maintain high levels of fuel moisture and soil moisture.”
Today, warming climate and drought have been tied to increasing fires in the U.S. West and elsewhere. “In a world where climate is rapidly changing we need to pay more attention to this relationship between climate and fire,” Power says
Power conducted the study with 19 other scientists, including paleoecologist Frank Mayle at the University of Edinburgh, U.K., and climatologist Patrick Bartlein at the University of Oregon. Other coauthors – who provided charcoal data or samples – are from University of Wisconsin, Madison and Oshkosh; Northern Arizona University; University of Gottingen, Germany; Canadian Forest Service; University of Montpellier, France; University of Bern, Switzerland; University of Calgary, Canada; University of Tennessee; Virginia Tech; University of North Carolina; University of Chile; Laval University, Quebec; Fordham College, New York; and Central Washington University.
Cooling Climate or Population Collapse?
After Columbus reached the New World in 1492, explorers brought European diseases such as smallpox that “decimated populations in the Americas – 10 million to 100 million dead, with most estimates in the 60 million range,” Power says.
“All these people died abruptly – Mayans, Incas, Aztecs and down in Patagonia – they were all affected,” he adds. “Agriculture was sharply reduced. Landscapes that had been cleared for agriculture started a process of plants growing back and infilling those abandoned fields. In terms of greenhouse gases, when you change from maintained cropland to woodlands, plants take up more carbon dioxide and there is less in the atmosphere. This has been pointed to as one mechanism for causing the Little Ice Age.”
Power agrees population collapse may have led to reduced biomass burning in some local regions of the Americas. But the new study indicates the reduction in fire was actually global and began before Columbus in most areas, suggesting the Little Ice Age triggered most of the reduction in burning – not the other way around, Power says.
“If you look at independent climate records, cooling from the Little Ice Age was happening about 200 years before the population collapse,” or about A.D. 1300, he says.
Power notes there is room for debate because the Little Ice Age varied in time and space, and didn’t affect all parts of the world equally, although most places cooled.
A Record of Fire Left in Charcoal
The study used existing records and-or new samples of charcoal – burnt wood or other biomass – found in sediment cores from lake bottoms and bogs from some 600 sites around the world, about half in the Americas, and dated within the past 2,000 years.
“Whatever was burning, we see a record of that fire in lake sediments, from either aerial transport or erosion” of burned material, Power says.
Power manages the Global Charcoal Database that compiles data from all the existing studies that date charcoal samples and describe where they came from. The new study included 498 existing charcoal records and 93 new samples.
“We have gone back in and calculated the ages of all these charcoal samples,” except for some dated independently in other recent studies, and then used recent radiocarbon dating calibrations to make sure all data are consistent, Power says.
“Greater than 80 percent of biomass burning records show a decline post-1500 in the Americas, he says. The other 20 percent may be from areas that were still fire-prone despite cooling or that simply had burning declines for which there are inadequate charcoal samples, he adds.
The study compared the charcoal records with previously published ancient climate records and population reconstructions. It found:
– Clumping all the charcoal data in two groups – from the Americas or the Eastern Hemisphere – shows that in the Americas, biomass burning declined between 1500 and 1650 and stayed at a minimum until 1700, the same time as the peak of the Little Ice Age. That period was the lowest level of burning in the past 6,000 years.
– In the Eastern Hemisphere, there was a prominent decline in burning that began about 1400 – well before the population collapse in the Americas. Power says cooling also started about a century earlier in the Eastern Hemisphere than in the Americas – more evidence cooling caused reduced burning. There was no parallel population collapse large enough to explain the reduction in burning, although a small downward blip in burning is noted in Europe around the time of the bubonic plague or Black Death.
– In tropical Middle America – the Caribbean Basin, Mexico and Central America – climate cooling starting around 1350, when burning also begins to decline. Population collapse didn’t begin until around 1500.
– In tropical South America, climate changed around 1350 to 1400. There is debate whether it warmed or cooled. The population collapsed after 1500. Power says neither climate nor population strongly influenced post-Columbian biomass burning in that region, which declined only subtly and not until 1700. It also is possible the population that collapsed didn’t use fire very much in agriculture – something a recent study coauthored by Power found in French Guiana.
– In southern South America, ice-core and tree-ring growth studies show cooling began about 1450, well before an abrupt decline in burning in 1550. That would seem to support the theory that population collapse reduced burning – except that the region had little population, certainly not enough for any decline to trigger a reduction in burning.
– Ice cores from Greenland show cooling started about 1450, and fire started to decline about 1500, according to charcoal for boreal Canada and the western United States. Cooling and reduced burning stopped about 1800. Despite the 50-year lag, Power says that is more evidence tying climate cooling to reduced biomass burning, particularly since the region had relatively few people at the time.
At a time not so long ago, there was a vision… of a slow, painful demise. Now, so says the government:
The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life–and it killed in stages–according to a newly published report.
It shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events.
Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, and 13 colleagues have produced a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.
Their analysis, published today in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth’s biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.
About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet.
Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called “The Great Dying.”
Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.
The world revealed by their research is a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge “dead zones” in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.
The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia as a factor.
“The scientists relate this extinction to Siberian Traps volcanic eruptions, which likely first affected boreal life through toxic gas and ashes,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.
The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock in Siberia. The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth’s geologic history, continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary.
The term “traps” is derived from the Swedish word for stairs–trappa, or trapp–referring to the step-like hills that form the landscape of the region.
A large portion of western Siberia reveals volcanic deposits up to five kilometers (three miles) thick, covering an area equivalent to the continental United States. The lava flowed where life was most endangered, through a large coal deposit.
“The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal,” Algeo said. “Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
“We’re not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”
Much of the evidence was washed into the ocean, and Algeo and his colleagues look for it among fossilized marine deposits.
Previous investigations have focused on deposits created by a now vanished ocean known as Tethys, a precursor to the Indian Ocean. Those deposits, in South China particularly, record a sudden extinction at the end of the Permian.
“In shallow marine deposits, the latest Permian mass extinction was generally abrupt,” Algeo said. “Based on such observations, it has been widely inferred that the extinction was a globally synchronous event.”
Recent studies are starting to challenge that view.
Algeo and co-authors focused on rock layers at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.
That location, at the end of the Permian, would have been much closer to the Siberian volcanoes than sites in South China.
The Canadian sedimentary rock layers are 24 meters (almost 80 feet) thick and cross the Permian-Triassic boundary, including the latest Permian mass extinction horizon.
The investigators looked at how the type of rock changed from the bottom to the top. They looked at the chemistry of the rocks and at the fossils contained in the rocks.
They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marine mass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites.
What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes.
Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.
The research was also supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Program.
In addition to Algeo, co-authors of the paper are: Charles Henderson, University of Calgary; Brooks Ellwood, Louisiana State University; Harry Rowe, University of Texas at Arlington; Erika Elswick, Indiana University, Bloomington; Steven Bates and Timothy Lyons, University of California, Riverside; James Hower, University of Kentucky; Christina Smith and Barry Maynard, University of Cincinnati; Lindsay Hays and Roger Summons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Fulton, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Katherine Freeman, Pennsylvania State University.
-NSF-
It is impossible to unpublish something. Unpublish is not even a word.
To attempt to unpublish something is worse than futile. Please, just consider the last of the famous to try.
Book burning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burningBook burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often …. A much-quoted line in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is … Fahrenheit 451, stating, “It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, …
Then, please consider basic human law:
First Amendment to the United States Constitution – Wikipedia, the …
en.wikipedia.org/…/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constit…The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an …
My suggestion: if you do not like the truth that has been published, please create a better reality for us. Thank you.
by Daniel Brouse
When you login to a computer server running on Linux, it gives you free words of wisdom. After posting the article on the Voyager Golden Records, these words happen to appear:
Flying saucers on occasion
Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
While they brand these tales as lies.
