1. Three Ways To End Life As We Know It

2008 Apr 15. Gauging a Collider's Odds of Creating a Black Hole. By DENNIS OVERBYE, NY Times. Excerpt: ... the Large Hadron Collider... starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.
To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. ...In a paper published in 2000 with the title "Might a Laboratory Experiment Destroy Planet Earth?" Francesco Calogero, a nuclear physicist at the University of Rome and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Pugwash conferences on arms control, deplored a tendency among his colleagues to promulgate a "leave it to the experts" attitude. ...society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than "informed betting odds," said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal and the author of "Our Final Hour." ...the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons.
...Next year will see the release of the film version of "Angels and Demons," ...in which the bad guys use a Cern accelerator to gather antimatter for a bomb to blow up the Vatican, and it includes scenes at Cern.
...Neither Dr. Calogero nor Dr. Rees say they are losing sleep over the collider. Some risk is acceptable, even inevitable, in the pursuit of knowledge, they say, and they trust the physicists who have built it....

2007 September 20. Meteorite likely caused crater in Peru. By MONTE HAYES Associated Press Writer. The Associated Press Excerpt: Peruvian astronomers said Thursday that evidence shows a meteorite crashed near Lake Titicaca over the weekend, leaving an elliptical crater and magnetic rock fragments in an impact powerful enough to register on seismic charts….
The Earth is constantly bombarded with objects from outer space, but most burn up in the atmosphere and never reach the planet's surface. Only one in a thousand rocks that that people claim are meteorites turn out to be real, according to Jay Melosh, an expert on impact craters and professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona….
Such impacts are rare, and astronomists still want to do other tests to confirm the strike…. Meteorites are actually cold when they hit Earth, astronomists say, since their outer layers burn up and fall away before impact…..
More details emerged when astrophysicist Jose Ishitsuka of Peru's Geophysics Institute reached the site about 6 miles from Lake Titicaca. He confirmed that a meteorite caused a crater 42 feet wide and 15 feet deep, the institute's president, Ronald Woodman, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Ishitsuka recovered a 3-inch magnetic fragment and said it contained iron, a mineral found in all rocks from space. The impact also registered a magnitude-1.5 tremor on the institute's seismic equipment - that's as much as an explosion of 4.9 tons of dynamite, Woodman said….
Peasants living near the crater said they had smelled a sulfurous odor for at least an hour after the meteorite struck and that it had provoked upset stomachs and headaches….
Meteor expert Ursula Marvin said that if people were sickened, "it wouldn't be the meteorite itself, but the dust it raises...."

2007 March 16. The Sky Is Falling. Really. By RUSSELL L. SCHWEICKART (a former Apollo astronaut, is the chairman of the B612 Foundation, which promotes efforts to alter the orbits of asteroids). Tiburon, Calif. Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036. What few probably realize is that there are thousands of other space objects that could hit us in the next century that could cause severe damage, if not total destruction.

2007 January 6. What Landed in New Jersey? It Came From Outer Space. By KAREEM FAHIM. Excerpt: The object that tore through the roof of a house in the New Jersey suburbs this week was an iron meteorite, perhaps billions of years old and maybe ripped from the belly of an asteroid, experts who examined it said yesterday. ...it landed - and ruined a second-floor bathroom - the meteorite is only the second found in New Jersey, said Jeremy S. Delaney, a Rutgers University expert who examined it. ...from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to tell that the object it had been part of - perhaps an asteroid - cooled relatively fast. It is magnetic, and reasonably dense, they determined. The leading edge - the one that faced forward as it traveled through the earth's atmosphere - was much smoother, while the so-called trailing edge seemed to have caught pieces of molten metal. ..."The worth of a meteorite like this is almost completely determined by where it fell," said Eric Twelker, a geologist and a dealer in meteorites, who buys and sells perhaps a hundred of them a month on http://meteoritemarket.com, his Web site. He was speaking of the premium placed on meteorites with a compelling back story, like the football-size rock that crashed into a parked Chevrolet in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1992.

2006 November 14 Ancient Crash, Epic Wave. By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, NY Times. Excerpt: Did catastrophe fall from above in 2807 B.C.? Mega-tsunamis following meteor impacts left their mark, researchers say. At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction - toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface. The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land. Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described "band of misfits" that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world's shorelines and in the deep ocean. ...Peter Bobrowski, a senior research scientist in natural hazards at the Geological Survey of Canada, said "chevrons are fantastic features" but do not prove that megatsunamis are real. There are other interpretations for how chevrons are formed, including erosion and glaciation... It is up to the working group to prove its claims, he said. ...Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico ...thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C. Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. ...14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C. Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami. Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, "and we're not there yet."

Weather Photography has images of many types of weather/atmospheric phenomena.

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2. Astronomers Tools

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3. Cosmic Engines

2007 April 24. NASA Releases 3D Images of Sun. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: GREENBELT, Md. (AP) -- NASA released the first three-dimensional images of the sun Monday, saying the photos taken from twin spacecraft may lead to better predictions of solar eruptions that can affect communications and power lines on Earth. ... 'Wow!''' scientist Simon Plunkett said as he explained the images to a room full of journalists and scientists wearing 3D glasses. The images from the STEREO spacecraft (for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) are available on the Internet and at museums and science centers nationwide. The twin spacecraft, launched in October, are orbiting the Sun, one slightly ahead of the Earth and one behind. The separation, just like the distance between our two eyes, provides the depth perception that allows the 3D images to be obtained. That depth perception is also particularly helpful for studying a type of solar eruption called a coronal mass ejection. Along with overloading power lines and disrupting satellite communications, the eruptions can endanger astronauts on spacewalks. Scientists would like to improve predictions of the arrival time from the current day or so to a few hours, said Russell Howard, principal investigator for the Naval Research Laboratory project. See http://www.nasa.gov/stereo

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4. Fathoming Huge Distances

Rich Lohman's Asteroid Parallax Activities:

• Distance to Asteroid 1998wt
• The Parallax of Asteroid "Austria"
• Parallax powerpoint slides (100Kb)

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5. Color, Temperature, and Age

New section

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6. Dramatic Change in Stars

2008 May 21. X-RAY OUTBURST LEADS TO ALL-OUT STUDY OF SUPERNOVA. by Robert Sanders. NASA's Swift satellite caught the rare birth of a supernova earlier this year, allowing astronomers to rapidly deploy ground-based telescopes to follow its evolution and learn about normal stellar explosions. UC Berkeley astronomers have analyzed the data to conclude that the original star was more than 30 times the mass of the sun, but only slightly larger, when its core ran out of fuel and imploded, blowing the star to smithereens.

2008 May 14. DISCOVERY OF MOST RECENT SUPERNOVA IN OUR GALAXY. NASA RELEASE: 08-126. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- The most recent supernova in our galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array, will help improve our understanding of how often supernovae explode in the Milky Way galaxy.

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7. Planet-Star Systems

2008 June 17. A Bounty of Midsize Planets is Reported. By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times. Excerpt: There is a lot of new territory out there in the cosmos, but nothing you would want to pitch camp on — yet.
About a third of all the Sun-like stars in our galaxy harbor modestly sized planets, according to a study announced Monday by a team of European astronomers.
At a meeting in Nantes, France, Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory and his group presented a list of 45 new planets, ranging in mass from slightly bigger than Earth to about twice as massive as Neptune, from a continuing survey of some 200 stars.
All of the planets orbit their stars in 50 days or less, well within the corresponding orbit of Mercury, which takes 88 days to go around the Sun, and well within frying distance of any lifelike creatures.
Dr. Mayor called the discoveries "only the tip of the iceberg" in a news release from the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.
About one in 14 stars harbors a massive giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn, Dr. Mayor estimated. If in fact one in three harbors a Neptune or super-Earth, that is an appealing situation for astronomers and others who would like someday to find someplace livable or even someone living Out There...

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8. Search For Habitable Planets

In the Exoplanet Transits investigation, if you want to generate a light curve for another exoplanet transit, the you may find images provided by the Zen Observatory, from their TrES-3 page.

Articles about planet finding and articles specifically about the Kepler mission may be found on the NASA Kepler mission website.

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9. Cosmos Begins ... and Ends?

2008 Aug 18. The Struggle to Measure Cosmic Expansion. By DENNIS OVERBYE, NY Times. Excerpt: Hoping to understand why the universe seems to be coming apart at its seams, a young astronomer and his colleagues have embarked on one of the oldest quests in cosmology, to measure how fast the universe is growing, how big it is and how old it is. That information is encoded in the value of an elusive number known as the Hubble constant that has led astronomers on a merry chase for three-quarters of a century. "It is the most fundamental number in cosmology," said Adam Riess, 38, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, and one of the discoverers 10 years ago that some kind of "dark energy" is speeding up the expansion of the universe.
This spring, in what he called "a triumph of metrology," Dr. Riess announced that he and his comrade, Lucas Macri of Texas A&M University, had used the Hubble Space Telescope to make the newest and most precise measurement yet of this parameter.
Expressed in the quaint terms astronomers favor, the Hubble constant, Dr. Riess reported, is 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec. It means that for every additional million parsecs (about 3.26 million light-years) a galaxy is from us, it is going 74 kilometers per second faster. ... with...an uncertainty of only 4.3 percent.
Only 30 years ago, distinguished astronomers could not agree within a factor of two on the value of Hubble's constant, leaving every other parameter in cosmology uncertain by at least the same factor and provoking snickers from other fields of science.
...Dr. Riess's distance ladder has only three rungs and one telescope, leaping from the Milky Way's neighborhood to supernova explosions as distant as a billion light-years.
It starts with a galaxy known as NGC 4258 (a k a Messier 106 in Ursa Major), where astronomers have found clouds emitting radio waves at a frequency characteristic of water vapor circling the center of the galaxy, as well as the all-important Cepheid stars. By tracking the speeds and motion across the sky of these clouds with high resolution radio observations, a team led by James Herrnstein of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, N.M., in 1999 determined its distance as 23.5 million light-years.
Knowing the distance to that galaxy allowed Dr. Riess and his team to calibrate the Cepheids, which they then used to calibrate supernovas....

2008 May. Underground Astronomy. By Kathleen M. Wong, ScienceMatters@Berkeley. Excerpt: Most scientists who study the cosmos keep their eyes fastened firmly on the sky. Not so Bernard Sadoulet. A Berkeley professor of physics, Sadoulet is stalking dark matter, the elusive material that forms the scaffolding of the universe. And the place he's laid his traps is just as shadowy-a former iron mine more than 2,300 feet underground.
Speculations about dark matter's identity range from the side effects of additional dimensions to ultralight particles known as neutrinos. But several lines of thinking have converged on heavy particles known as WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles).
"If these particles are the dark matter, they form a dark halo around the galaxy. We are in this halo, and there are billions of these particles going through us all the time," Sadoulet says.
Sadoulet leads an experiment to find these particles within Minnesota's Soudan Mine. His Cryogenic Dark Matter Search employs detectors made of silicon or germanium crystals cooled to nearly absolute zero.
"Within five years, three totally different approaches to catching WIMPS should be in operation, and we may be at the brink of a discovery" says Sadoulet. "It's an interesting time to be searching for dark matter."

2008 Jan 4. NASA Scientists Identify Smallest Known Black Hole. NASA Release No. 08-28. Excerpt: GREENBELT, Md. - Using a new technique, two NASA scientists have identified the lightest known black hole. With a mass only about 3.8 times greater than our Sun and a diameter of only 15 miles, the black hole lies very close to the minimum size predicted for black holes that originate from dying stars.
"This black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question," says lead author Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
...lowest-mass known black hole belongs to a binary system named XTE J1650-500...

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