>O2 VISIONS >> WHY IS THE MOON SHRINKING? (video)

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Young Fault Scarps on the Moon

CEPS Contact: Dr. Tom Watters

NASA

Smithsonian Institution Photo
WEB11574-2010

The lobate scarps were formed when the lunar crust was pushed together as the Moon contracted. This causes the near-surface materials to break forming a thrust fault. The thrust fault carries crustal materials up and sometimes over adjacent crustal materials.

Smithsonian Institution Photo
WEB11565-2010

Over recent geologic time, as the lunar interior cooled and contracted the entire Moon shrank by about 100 meters (328 feet). As a result its brittle crust ruptured and thrust faults (compression) formed distinctive landforms known as lobate scarps. In a particularly dramatic example, a thrust fault pushed crustal materials (arrows) up the side of the farside impact crater named Gregory (2.1°N, 128.1°E). By mapping the distribution and determining the size of all lobate scarps, the tectonic and thermal history of the Moon can be reconstructed over the past billion years. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian

The most well known tectonic landforms on the Moon are found in and around the nearside mare basins. Wrinkle ridges, formed by contraction, and rilles or troughs, formed by extension, deform the mare basalt-filled impact basins and the adjacent highlands. The wrinkle ridges and extensional troughs are the result of loading from mare basalts that causes downward flexure of the lunar lithosphere, resulting in contraction in the interior of the basin and extension near the margins.

Tectonic landforms on the Moon not directly associated with the mare basins are lobate scarps. Lobate scarps look like stair-steps in the landscape; they are one-sided and often have lobate fronts. These landforms are the surface express of thrust faults. Thrust faults are a break in the near-surface materials formed when crustal materials are contracted or pushed together. Crustal material is thrust upward along the fault forming a scarp.

Lobate scarps were first found in the highest resolution images and photographs taken by the Lunar Orbiters and the Panoramic Cameras flow on the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. Because these high resolution images and photographs covered only a small area of the surface confined mostly to the lunar equatorial zone, it was not known how widely distributed lobate scarps were on the Moon.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launch in June, 2009, is returning the highest resolution images of the Moon ever obtained from orbit. These images, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs), have a resolution of 0.5 to 2 meter per pixel. The new NAC images are being used to search for previously unknown lobate scarps.

Newly discovered lobate scarps are being found in the LROC images. Many of the previously undetected fault scarps are located at high lunar latitudes and some have been found near the lunar poles.¹ Lunar scarps found well outside the equatorial zone indicate that they are globally distributed.

Smithsonian Institution Photo
WEB11575-2010

A plot of the locations of newly detected and previously known lobate scarps shows that the faults are globally distributed. The newly discovered lobate scarps are shown by the white dots and the previously known scarps are shown by black dots. Most of the previously known lobate scarps were found in Apollo Panoramic Camera photographs that covered only part of the lunar equatorial region. The locations of the lobate scarps are plotted on the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) global topographic model of the Moon. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian

The most likely reason for the formation of the lobate scarps is global contraction caused by interior cooling. The loss of heat from the Moon’s interior results in contraction. Although the lobate scarps indicate contraction, the Moon has not contracted by much in the recent past. The total radial contraction or decrease in the Moon’s radius is estimated to be only about 100 meters.

The age of lobate scarps is also being investigated. Examining the crosscutting relations between the fault scarps and small diameter impact craters, their age is estimated to be no more than 1 billion year old. An even younger age for the scarps is suggested by the lack of superimposed, large-diameter impact craters. Also, the scarps are very pristine and undegraded. The young age of the fault scarps indicates that the Moon has contracted very recently.

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>O2 VISIONS >> What music STARS emit?

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Structure of stars revealed by ‘music’ they emit

The sounds emitted by stars light years away from Earth have been captured by British astronomers using Nasa’s Kepler space telescope.
Writing in the journal Science, the team says the “music” created by the stars gives a much more accurate picture of their size and structure than was available previously.

WATCH THIS >>

BBC News > Pallab Ghosh reports.

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>O2 VISIONS >> The Milky Way as you’ve never seen it before!!!

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Digital fusion: Amateur astronomer Juan Carlos Casado stitched together this extraordinary shot from nine photos of the night sky

The Milky Way as you’ve never seen it before: Incredible 360-degree panorama reveals the majesty of our galaxy

  Daily Mail

This breathtaking composite image shows just how huge the Milky Way really is.
Amateur astronomer Juan Carlos Casado stitched together this extraordinary shot from nine photos of the night sky.
All were taken in a national park in the Canary Islands away from light pollution, resulting in images of astounding clarity.

Viewed as one digitally-fused image, as they are here, and the result is a 360-degree panorama.
The faint band of light that stretches across the sky is the disc of our spiral galaxy. It appears to encircle Earth – this is because we are inside the disc.

Also visible is Tenerife‘s Teide Volcano near the centre of the image, behind a volcanic landscape that includes many huge boulders.

But far behind these Earthly structures are many sky wonders that are invisible to the unaided eye, such as the bright waxing moon inside the arch.
Also visible are the Pleiades open star cluster and Barnard’s Loop, which can be seen as the half red ring below the Milky Way band.
The stars that the human eye can distinguish in the night sky are relatively near and are all part of the Milky Way.
Our galaxy contains between 100billion and 400billion stars, as well as an estimated 50 billion planets.

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>O2 HUB >> Dying white dwarf stars could be fertile ground for other Earths

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The best place to look for planets that can support life is around dim, dying stars called white dwarfs.
Eric Agol, a University of Washington associate professor of astronomy, suggests that potentially habitable planets orbiting white dwarfs could be much easier to find — if they exist — than other exoplanets located so far.
White dwarfs, cooling stars believed to be in the final stage of life, typically have about 60 percent of the mass of the Sun, but by volume they are only about the size of Earth. Though born hot, they eventually become cooler than the Sun and emit just a fraction of its energy, so the habitable zones for their planets are significantly closer than Earth is to the Sun.
“If a planet is close enough to the star, it could have a stable temperature long enough to have liquid water at the surface — if it has water at all — and that’s a big factor for habitability,” Agol said.
A planet so close to its star could be observed using an Earth-based telescope as small as 1 meter across, as the planet passes in front of, and dims the light from, the white dwarf, he said.
White dwarfs evolve from stars like the Sun. When such a star’s core can no longer produce nuclear reactions that convert hydrogen to helium, it starts burning hydrogen outside the core.
That begins the transformation to a red giant, with a greatly expanded outer atmosphere that typically envelops — and destroys — any planets as close as Earth.
Finally the star sheds its outer atmosphere, leaving the glowing, gradually cooling, core as a white dwarf, with a surface temperature around 5,000 degrees Celsius (about 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit). At that point, the star produces heat and light in the same way as a dying fireplace ember, though the star’s ember could last for 3 billion years.
Once the red giant sheds its outer atmosphere, more distant planets that were beyond the reach of that atmosphere could begin to migrate closer to the white dwarf, Agol said. New planets also possibly could form from a ring of debris left behind by the star’s transformation.
In either case, a planet would have to move very close to the white dwarf to be habitable, perhaps 500,000 to 2 million miles from the star. That’s less than 1 percent of the distance from Earth to the Sun (93 million miles) and substantially closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
“From the planet, the star would appear slightly larger than our Sun, because it is so close, and slightly more orange, but it would look very, very similar to our Sun,” Agol said.
The planet also would be tidally locked, so the same side would always face the star and the opposite side would always be in darkness. The likely areas for habitation, he said, might be toward the edges of the light zone, nearer the dark side of the planet.

The study has been published in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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>O2 HUB >> Two dying stars reborn as one ( video)

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CfA astronomers have found a pair of white dwarf stars orbiting each other once every 39 minutes. In a few million years, they will merge and reignite as a helium-burning star. In this artist’s conception, the reborn star is shown with a hypothetical world. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a Sun‘s-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around each other once every 39 minutes. This is the shortest-period pair of white dwarfs now known. Moreover, in a few million years they will collide and merge to create a single star.

“These stars have already lived a full life. When they merge, they’ll essentially be ‘reborn’ and enjoy a second life,” said Smithsonian astronomer Mukremin Kilic (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), lead author on the paper announcing the discovery.
Out of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, only a handful of merging white dwarf systems are known to exist. Most were found by Kilic and his colleagues. The latest discovery will be the first of the group to merge and be reborn.
The newly identified binary star (designated SDSS J010657.39 – 100003.3) is located about 7,800 light-years away in the constellation Cetus. It consists of two white dwarfs, a visible star and an unseen companion whose presence is betrayed by the visible star’s motion around it. The visible white dwarf weighs about 17 percent as much as the Sun, while the second white dwarf weighs 43 per cent as much. Astronomers believe that both are made of helium.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

CfA astronomers have found a pair of white dwarf stars orbiting each other once every 39 minutes. In a few million years, they will merge and reignite as a helium-burning star.

The two white dwarfs orbit each other at a distance of 140,000 miles – less than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. They whirl around at speeds of 270 miles per second (1 million miles per hour), completing one orbit in only 39 minutes. The fate of these stars is already sealed. Because they wheel around so close to each other, the white dwarfs stir the space-time continuum, creating expanding ripples known as gravitational waves. Those waves carry away orbital energy, causing the stars to spiral closer and closer together. In about 37 million years, they will collide and merge.
When some white dwarfs collide, they explode as a supernova. However, to explode the two combined have to weigh 40 percent more than our Sun. This white dwarf pair isn’t heavy enough to go supernova. Instead, they will experience a second life. The merged remnant will begin fusing helium and shine like a normal star once more. We will witness starlight reborn.
This binary white dwarf was discovered as part of a survey program being conducted with the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Ariz. The survey has uncovered a dozen previously unknown white dwarf pairs. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future.

Provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (news : web)

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>X-Flare – NASA captured the First stereo 360-degree Image of the Sun

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By Evan Dashevsky

A little more than four years ago, NASA launched a twin pair of spacecraft as part of their STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission. The crafts traveled in opposite directions along the Earth’s orbit en route to positions on opposite sides of the sun. This past Sunday the two crafts reached their respective destinations and—for the first time—captured a 360-degree view of our local celestial heavy.

The space agency is now being fed a steady stream of images of the sun from opposite sides that they are able to combine into 3D models. The STEREO probes are specifically tuned to four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation which can be used to trace key aspects of solar activity such as solar flares, tsunamis, and magnetic filaments. 

“With data like these, we can fly around the sun to see what’s happening over the horizon—without ever leaving our desks,” comments STEREO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters. “I expect great advances in theoretical solar physics and space weather forecasting.”

NASA has sent observatories to study the sun before, but this is the first time we have been given the ability to study solar activity from all angles as they occur. Even before the observatories were in their final position they were able to capture a newly-realized phenomenon: solar activity as “global” event. This past August, STEREO (along with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory or “SDO”) observed a solar eruption that encompassed two-thirds of the stellar surface. An event (which will likely be proven routine), solar scientists have dubbed “The Great Eruption.”

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>O2HUB PERSPECTIVES >>> Is Time In A Real Hurry?

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by Marcelo Gleiser

Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

 

Time keeps on flipping into the future. 

Well,  is almost over. To me at least, and I bet to most of you, it went way too fast. On average, it was a year like any other, with some new things to celebrate and others to lament. (I’ll abstain from listing them. Each person has her own list.) But it’s hard to shake off the feeling that everything happened faster, that time seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere. Sometimes, people ask me if it’s possible, from a physics perspective, for time to be passing faster. It can’t.
According to the theory of relativity, time can slow down but not speed up. There are a few ways to do this. For example, you may move faster than other people. If you get to speeds close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you relative to the others. Hard to do, as the speed of light is a whopping 186,400 miles per second, in round numbers. Or, you may go live on the surface of the Sun. Time there would tick slower than here as well. But that’s really not what people have in mind when they wonder about time. The question is about our psychological perception of time. And I am sure many of you would agree that sometimes it does feel like time is on a roller coaster.
Time is a measure of change. If nothing happens, time is unnecessary. So, at a personal level, we perceive the passage of time in the changes that happen around and within us. What’s interesting is that—as anyone who has tried to meditate knows—even if you shut off all your senses, time keeps ticking away. As our thoughts unfold, our brains give us time. To “quiet the chatter” is the big challenge for going deeper into a meditative state, to be in the now.
The passage of time is about the ordering of events, things that happen one after another. Numbers, some say, are devices that were created to help us order time. Maybe, although counting chicks is also very useful if you are a hen. However, if we are to order events, we must remember them. Ergo, the perception of time is deeply related to memory. If our memories were to be erased, we would revert to the wonder of babyhood, where time extends forever. The more we have to learn, the more memories we make, the slower time passes. Routine, sameness, makes time speed up. Since routine is not usually equated with fun, this seems to go contrary to the “time flies when you’re having fun” dictum. What’s going on here?
  The answer may be in the level of mindful engagement, that is, in how tuned-in your brain is to what you are doing. Newness, as in fun newness, works as a flood of information and places the focus on the immediate. There is no ordering between events yet and not sense of the passage of time. I have felt this disengagement when lost in a calculation for hours or trying out a new trout stream with my fly rod. This is the opposite of routine, where new memories are not being made and the now is all there is. But maybe someone will prove me wrong.
In physics, things are simpler. Time is a fundamental quantity, something that cannot be defined in terms of anything else. There are some issues with this, that we will address some other time. (Sorry…) The second is the universal unit, and it’s defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations between two levels of the cesium-133 atom. Very different from the tick-tack of old mechanical clocks, which are not very reliable.
Einstein had a colloquial definition of the relativity of time: by the side of a pretty girl an hour feels like a second; if you burn your hand on the stove, a second feels like an hour. His special theory of relativity showed that the simultaneity of two events depends on how they are observed: what may be simultaneous for one observer will not be for another moving with respect to the first. Be that as it may, even in physics the ordering of time is essential: that’s causality, causes preceding effects so that the present vanishes into the past and the future becomes the present.
At the cosmic level, there is a well-defined direction of time: the expansion of the universe, which has been going on for 13.7 billion years, pointing resolutely forward. Link it to our own passage through life, and we have a well-defined asymmetry of time, what’s sometimes called time’s arrow . There is not much we can do to escape this at the physical level. But at the psychological level, to slow down time we have to engage our minds, create more memories, absorb knowledge. Perhaps I will leave my guitar aside for a while and start playing the piano.

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