Spectacular Collision Of Stars Will Create New Star In Night Sky In 2022

As a paleo-artist, one of my biggest pet peeves are prehistoric whales reconstructed not as whales but as sinewy, snarling, shrink-wrapped marine reptiles. It’s just not a plausible reconstruction, even if it’s highly speculative, and it paints an incorrect image in the public eye. Granted, this is a struggle I’ve exlpored in all forms of paleo-art and reconstructive illustration. But the whales have really been getting to me recently.

Here are some recontructions of Basilosaurus, if you don’t know what I mean (one by Karen Carr, the other by an artist I could not determine):

These snakey, reptilious reconstructions may stem from the fact that Basilosaurus, one of the first early cetaceans to be found, was believed to be a reptile when first discovered (hence the name). Maybe we simply haven’t fully shaken that mindset.

But still! Even the damn Smithsonian, which has such a wonderful collection of ancient cetaceans, is at fault in this:

Don’t even get me started on their recently-closed dinosaur hall. Thank the lord they’re finally renovating that dated piece of crap.

I have struggled to find a way to reconstruct these animals so that they are just a little bit more believeable. Up top I’ve done a really really quick sketch of Dorudon. I tried to not only make its body more streamlined and whale-like (because Dorudon has a lovely, almost but not quite modern-looking skeleton), but I also tried to give it markings similar to what we find on modern cetaceans for camouflage. Because hey, who’s to say they didn’t have ‘em? I tried to make them familiar but not directly copied from any modern species.

Aaaaand end rant.

The world’s smallest snowman is only 2.7 microns tall (for comparison, a human hair is 75 microns thick). To create it, scientists stacked 3 tiny silica spheres, added a nose and arms made of platinum, and cut the eyes and mouth with a focused ion beam. Source

Cristobalite, Hematite

SiO2, Fe2O3

Locality:

Caspar quarry, Bellerberg volcano, Ettringen, Mayen, Eifel, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

An interesting homoepitactic intergrowth from brown and black hematite  

Photo: Michael Förch

Cristobalite is a silica polymorph that is thermodynamically stable only at temperatures above 1470°C, up to the melting point at 1705°C, at atmospheric pressures. It commonly metastably persists or even forms at much lower temperatures in silica-rich volcanic and sedimentary environments. It can form crystals in cavities, probably vapour-deposited, or spherulites in obsidian or other silicic volcanics.

Hematite is rather variable in its appearance - it can be in reddish brown, ocherous masses, dark silvery-grey scaled masses, silvery-grey to black crystals, and dark-grey masses, to name a few. What they all have in common is a rust-red streak.

Victoria LaBarre was climbing out of a canyon and into a bright, vast, seemingly lifeless landscape when she started to experience an astronaut’s nightmare.

“Suddenly,” she said, “I couldn’t breathe.”

The symptoms were real — maybe from claustrophobia, or from exertion at high altitude. But LaBarre didn’t unlatch her helmet to get a breath of fresh air because, in this simulated Mars exercise in the Utah desert, she was supposed to be an astronaut. The canyon was standing in for Candor Chasma, a 5-mile-deep gash in the Red Planet’s surface. On Mars, there’s no oxygen in the air — you do not take off your helmet.

So, instead, LaBarre radioed for help from fellow members of Crew 177. The team of students and teachers from a Texas community college had applied together to live and work for a week this spring in a two-story metal cylinder at the privately run Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah.

Elijah Espinoza, a freshman assigned to be a crew engineer and geologist for the week, heard LaBarre’s call and walked her through some breathing exercises.

“I think that’s really one of the best things about Mars — the teamwork,” said LaBarre.“I don’t think you could live without it.”

To Prepare For Mars Settlement, Simulated Missions Explore Utah’s Desert

Photos: Rae Ellen Bichell/NPR

lab partner: *hands me precisely 1 mole of a substance*

me: *vine voice* an avogadro!!! thanks!!

Cost per kg for human spaceflight

via reddit

New comic! (link)

I’m going to be honest, this it the most I have ever used the science courses I took in undergrad. Glad all those thousands of dollars finally paid off.

Newest LIGO Signal Raises A Huge Question: Do Merging Black Holes Emit Light?

“The second merger held no such hints of electromagnetic signals, but that was less surprising: the black holes were of significantly lower mass, so any signal arising from them would be expected to be correspondingly lower in magnitude. But the third merger was large in mass again, more comparable to the first than the second. While Fermi has made no announcement, and Integral again reports a non-detection, there are two pieces of evidence that suggest there may have been an electromagnetic counterpart after all. The AGILE satellite from the Italian Space Agency detected a weak, short-lived event that occurred just half a second before the LIGO merger, while X-ray, radio and optical observations combined to identify a strange afterglow less than 24 hours after the merger.”

Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies it. A supernova emits light; a neutron star merger emits gamma rays; a quasar emits radio waves; merging black holes emit gravitational waves. But if there’s any sort of matter present outside the event horizons of these black holes, they have the potential to emit electromagnetic radiation, or light signals, too. Our best models and simulations don’t predict much, but sometimes the Universe surprises us! With the third LIGO merger, there were two independent teams that claimed an electromagnetic counterpart within 24 hours of the gravitational wave signal. One was an afterglow in gamma rays and the optical, occurring about 19 hours after-the-fact, while the other was an X-ray burst occurring just half a second before the merger.

Could either of these be connected to these merging black holes? Or are we just grasping at straws here? We need more, better data to know for sure, but here’s what we’ve got so far!

The Big Dipper Enhanced https://go.nasa.gov/2n7qmQc