Geeks in Space: Cosmic Rays, Super Storms and Rogue Planets – Oh My!
Yesterday astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour successfully installed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the sprawling framework of the International Space Station. The AMS is the most expensive piece of equipment at the space station and will search for antimatter, dark matter and cosmic rays. The deployment marks the conclusion of the United States’ role in the construction of the ISS.
As shuttle commander Mark Kelley said, “It’s a $2 billion cosmic particle detector, it’s got 600 physicists that have been working on…and it was all in the hands of four of my crew members.” Commander Kelley also stated that his wife, who was present at the shuttle’s launch, is doing very well after her surgery on Wednesday, which replaced a portion of her skull with a piece of molded plastic. In a side note, on Saturday the shuttle will receive the first ever papal internet phone call to space. I guess this will be the Holy Father’s farthest communication other than to you know who.
Think Our Storms are Bad? Guess Again!
Saturn Northern Storm in Infrared and Visible Light
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and a European Southern Observatory ground-based telescope are watching a giant storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. The storm is so powerful it reaches around the entire planet. “Nothing on Earth comes close to this powerful storm,” says Leigh Fletcher, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “A storm like this is rare. This is only the sixth one to be recorded since 1876, and the last was way back in 1990.”
Cassini first detected the storm in December 2010 and scientists and amateur astronomers have been watching it grow – and grow – and grow, ever since. As it grew, the heart of the storm developed into a giant thunderstorm and has produced a 5,000km wide vortex similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Not only is it wide, but the storm expands into the highest layer of Saturn’s stratosphere. As one scientist pointed out, here on Earth, planes can fly above storms to avoid them, but if a storm here was as intense as the one on Saturn, they wouldn’t be able to do so.
While conditions on Saturn might not be too pleasant at the moment, the storm actually gives scientists a helping hand. By stirring up materials located in the gas giant’s atmosphere’s lower layers, the storm can help us increase our body of knowledge of the atmosphere’s composition. And as one wise group of people liked to say: knowledge is power.
I Was Born Under a Wand’rin’ Star
Can you tell I’m also a Western geek in addition to a space geek? Kudos to those of you get the reference. Anyway, this week, astronomers participating in a joint Japan and New Zealand survey have reported that a scan of the center of the Milky Way galaxy reveals at least ten free-floating planets roughtly the same size as Jupiter. Also known as orphan planets, these rogue worlds are approximately 10k to 20k light years from us and are most likely ejected from their birth solar systems due to gravitational encounters with other planets or stars.
The team also estimates that this discovery is just the start. They suspect there might be as many of these wandering worlds as there are stars and in a galaxy with at least 100-400 billion stars, that’s a whole lotta planets out there. Add to that their estimate that smaller planets – which they have yet to detect – are more likely to be ejected than the larger gas giants.
The survey was conducted by a 5.9-foot (1.8-meter) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand and scans the stars in the center of the Milky Way. The telescope can detect when the planet-sized object’s gravity distorts the light of a background star, revealing its presence.
Need a Job? Visit this website for an application to become a NASA astronaut.
Have a great week!
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