Two NASA-funded studies trace how the Sun’s changing galactic surroundings may have altered Earth’s climate and helped warm the young planet.
The post The Sun’s Ancient Journey Through the Galaxy May Have Changed Earth’s Climate appeared first on Curiosmos.
Our star and primary energy source that makes life on this planet possible may also be a cosmic cannibal. That's according to new research that suggests the sun may have swallowed a super-Earth planet billions of years ago in its early history. And our star may still be hiding the evidence.
The scientists behind this research think that the fingerprints of this violent consumption of a planet may still exist within the solar interior. Super-Earths are common occupants of other planetary systems, and these findings can explain why the solar system lacks such a world.
"Our new study suggests that a planet several times more massive than Earth may have fallen into the young sun and left a lasting chemical imprint deep inside it," Mutlu Yildiz, of Ege University, Turkey, said in a statement.
Yildiz and colleagues theorize that the sun's act of planetary infanticide may help to explain differences between observations of the sun and what is predicted by models of stellar evolution. This includes the depth of the sun's convection zone and the so-called sound-speed structure just below the convection zone.
It could also explain why the surface of the sun is depleted of the element lithium.
"By modelling the sun's evolution and comparing the results with precise observations of its interior, we find that the ingestion of a super-Earth could help explain long-standing differences between standard solar models and observations, including subtle changes in the sun's internal structure and its depleted lithium abundance," Yildiz said. "We were interested in whether these problems might have a common origin in the early chemical history of the sun."
The researcher explained that young stars like the sun during its infancy are surrounded by vast flattened clouds of gas and dust called protoplanetary discs, where substantial amounts of material can move between the disc and the star.
"Since planets are made of material that is chemically different from the gas in the disc, we wondered whether the early engulfment of a planet could have left a chemical signature inside the young sun," Yildiz said.
Using advanced stellar evolution software, Yildiz and colleagues tested their idea by investigating different ways the sun could have swallowed a planet.
Their results found the best fit for the sun's current characteristics was the cannibalism of a planet between five and ten times the mass of the Earth, a type of planet called a super-Earth. This could explain the strange, unpredicted characteristics of the sun.
We thought planetary engulfment might affect the solar structure but did not expect the calculations to converge on such a specific super-Earth mass range," said Professor Yildiz. "That was one of the most interesting outcomes of the study."
The team's research is supported by previous studies that suggests one or more super-Earth planets could have formed with the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.
These worlds would have then migrated through the protoplanetary disk surrounding the infant sun before crashing into the star.
But this new study leaves open the possibility that something else, other than this violent collision with the sun, may explain the discrepancies in measurements of the sun's interior and its lithium content. The team's model doesn't need a planet to have been totally engulfed by the sun.
Currently, this idea is based on computer modelling and unexplained solar features, but the researchers think that the predicted structural and chemical signature of a planetary engulfment could still exist within our star and could be detected.
"The earlier work proposed that a super-Earth could have formed and migrated into the young sun. Our paper asks whether the sun itself could still carry observable evidence that such an engulfment actually happened, and we believe it could," Yildiz concluded. "The next step is to see if these fingerprints can be independently detected."
The research was published on Thurs (Sept. 10) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Look up at the night sky and it is easy to imagine a few bright worlds hanging in an empty blackness. But what are we really looking at when we say “the Solar System”? It is a family shaped by one star’s gravity, built from the same ancient disk of gas and dust, and still […]
The post What Is the Solar System? How Our Cosmic Neighborhood Took Shape appeared first on Curiosmos.
If you were a Windows user of the 90s and 2000s, you might remember defragmenting hard drives, a sort of hocus-pocus Windows maintenance maneuver that had legitimate function where it would gather files spread across a drive and put them in a tidier order to make reading them faster. While someone with a lot of ... Read More
The post Use a Goofy Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator as a Prank appeared first on OS X Daily.
Continuing on our journey through retro classic computing experiences, here’s another fun one reborn for retro gamers in the modern MacOS era: Chonkcraft. Remember Warcraft 2, the award-winning classic real-time strategy game from Blizzard circa 1995? You’d play as Orcs or Humans, build a village and an army, and then command that army through battles ... Read More
The post Play Warcraft 2 on MacOS with Chonkcraft appeared first on OS X Daily.
If you’re a longtime Mac user you might recall the popular After Dark screensaver series of Classic Mac OS, which featured a fun range of screen saver options including the infamous Flying Toasters, Mowing Man, Boris the Cat, Bad Dog, Bouncing Ball, Art Critic, Nightlines, and many more. Many of these screensavers were just plain ... Read More
The post Run After Dark Screensavers on Modern MacOS with Afterglow appeared first on OS X Daily.
The sharpest images ever taken of the Sun’s surface reveal ribbons of solar plasma curling into tight, wave-like vortices near the edge of a sunspot — a pattern never before seen on our star. The experiment behind the discovery was designed to push the technical limits of a new camera system, not hunt for newContinue reading "World’s largest solar telescope reveals the Sun’s hidden texture"
The post World’s largest solar telescope reveals the Sun’s hidden texture appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.
Forecasting a solar storm is a little like watching a wave leave a distant coast and trying to guess when it will reach the beach. Scientists can see a coronal mass ejection (CME) leave the Sun, but its speed and shape can change as it crosses space. By the time it reaches Earth, the warning […]
The post NASA’s PUNCH Mission Cut Solar-Storm Arrival Uncertainty to 30 Minutes appeared first on Curiosmos.
Scientists have captured the sharpest image ever of our sun's surface. This view has revealed incredible new details about the inner mechanisms driving stellar activity.
An international team of researchers using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Inouye Solar Telescope has captured the highest-resolution view of the sun's surface.
In analyzing observations from this telescope, the team, made up of researchers from the National Solar Observatory, the NSF NCR High Altitude Observatory and the German Max Planck Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, discovered strange patterns on the sun's surface. The whirling patterns, they found, are actually evidence of what's called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), or instability that happens when there is a change in velocity of fluids.
This image is groundbreaking. Capturing the highest-resolution view of the sun's surface is a massive accomplishment, and in the time-lapse video above, you can even see the fluid dynamics on the surface of the sun in motion.
But this view is much more than a beautiful, high-resolution image. These observations have revealed swirls on the sun's surface at the edges of the magnetic areas, allowing the team to identify KHI on the sun's surface. This fluid instability has long been suspected on the sun, but these observations are the first time they have ever been directly seen like this.
“We believe that the discovery of Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in the solar photosphere, backed up by analysis of numerical simulations, is a major step forward in our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of solar and stellar plasma, and will serve as a basis for future discoveries," David Boboltz, the deputy director at the National Solar Observatory, said in a statement.
A paper describing these findings was published recently in the journal Nature.
Millions of people across Europe and North America will witness a solar eclipse on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but the event will vary greatly depending on the location. A narrow corridor stretching from Greenland to northeastern Spain will experience a total solar eclipse, much of Europe will enjoy a deep partial eclipse, and parts of North America will see a smaller partial eclipse.
Want to know what you can expect to see from where you are? Here's an overview of the event from various locations, along with the exact viewing times for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse.
Remember, it's important to wear certified solar eclipse glasses during all partial phases of the eclipse. Totality — when the sun's face is completely blocked by the moon — is the only time it's safe to remove your eclipse glasses. (It’s not too late to order last-minute eclipse glasses if you don’t have a pair on hand.)
If you're fortunate enough to be inside the 180-mile-wide (290 kilometers) path of totality — the path of the dark shadow of the moon — in eastern Greenland, western Iceland or northeastern Spain, you'll experience the moon completely covering the sun for up to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. The sky will darken to twilight, bright stars and planets may appear in the daytime sky, and the sun's spectacular corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) will become visible. Here’s a handy guide to all the gear you’ll need to get the most out of totality.
The closer you are to the centerline of the path, the longer totality will last. But the most important consideration is to stay within the boundaries of the path, because it has a hard edge. Madrid, for example, is barely outside the path and will see a 99.99% partial eclipse — and no totality whatsoever. The partial phases last an hour on each side of totality.
Here's when totality will occur in various locations for the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse:
Viewers in North America will see a modest partial eclipse, with the biggest eclipse seen from northern and eastern Canada, Alaska and the northeastern U.S. The farther northeast you are, the deeper the eclipse will appear. Eclipse glasses are essential at every stage of the two-hour event, because there will be no totality. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in various locations:
If you want to watch totality from outside the path, there are many live stream options available, including planned streams from NASA and the European Space Agency.
Most of Europe and far northwestern Africa will see a spectacular deep partial eclipse, with more than 90% of the sun covered in many western cities. Although the eclipse will never become total, it will still be an impressive sight, though solar eclipse glasses will be required throughout the event. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in some major cities:
To check exactly what you'll see and when, enter your location on an interactive map of the eclipse, which will give you a schedule for when the eclipse begins, peaks and ends where you are.
Do jogo que desafia as regras absurdas das passwords ao simulador que deixa lançar asteroides sobre qualquer cidade, passando pela viagem ao fundo do oceano e pela ferramenta para gastar a fortuna de Bill Gates, o neal.fun é uma das colecções de experiências interactivas mais originais da web.
The post Neal.fun: o site onde um programador criou alguns dos passatempos mais criativos e viciantes da internet appeared first on Tek Notícias.
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