Suicide Comets, Solar Storms a 'Cosmic Coincidence'

Suicide Comets, Solar Storms a 'Cosmic Coincidence' - A huge solar eruption that occurred right after a comet plunged into the sun was likely a coincidence, experts say.

The so-called "sungrazing" comet streaked toward the sun Saturday (Oct. 1) and disintegrated after getting too close. The sun then unleashed a massive eruption of solar plasma known as a coronal mass ejection, which can rocket through space at 3 million mph (5 million kph). But there's no reason to think the two dramatic events were related, scientists said.

"There still remains zero evidence for a link between sungrazing comets and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can't be better explained than by simple coincidence," Karl Battams of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory wrote in a blog post Tuesday (Oct. 4).

Solar astronomers with the sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory agreed.

"The question of whether a sungrazing comet can somehow trigger a coronal mass ejection is an intriguing one," SOHO scientists wrote in a website update this week. "So far, the feeling is that [the] apparent relationship between some comets and some mass ejections is simply one of coincidence."

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory captured this shot of a huge coronal mass ejection on Oct. 1, 2011, shortly after a comet dove into the sun (inset, right).

No mechanism known

CMEs and other solar storms are magnetically driven, erupting after magnetic field lines on the sun twist, break and reconnect.

Scientists don't know how a comet could spur such a process, wrote Battams, who does computer processing for SOHO and runs the sun observatory's comet-sighting website for the Naval Research Lab.

The likelihood seems more remote when you consider that death-diving comets rarely actually reach the sun's surface. Instead, they generally break up after veering too close.

And sungrazing comets tend to be small.

The comets spotted by SOHO have cores about 330 feet (100 meters) wide at most, according to Battams. The sun, on the other hand, is about 865,000 miles (1.39 million kilometers) across.

"I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by some of the best solar physicists in the world, and none of them can think of a reasonable mechanism in which physics would allow this event to be initiated by any comet, let alone such a tiny one," Battams wrote.
Researchers also have a pretty good idea of where Saturday's CME originated, he added, and it looks like the death-diving comet didn’t come anywhere close to that spot.

Finally, Battams has gone through the SOHO data and found many sundiving comets whose death plunge was not followed by a CME. But the times when the two dramatic events occur one after the other tend to stick out in people's minds, he added.

An active sun

The most reasonable explanation, Battams and other scientists say, is that when sungrazing comets and solar storms coincide, that's all it is: mere coincidence. [The Sun's Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History]

When the sun is active, it can unleash a dozen or so CMEs per day, and perhaps even more, Battams wrote. And sungrazing comets aren't all that rare, either. During a 10-day stretch in December 2010, for example, at least 25 comets hurled themselves into the sun.

So it would be surprising if at least some CMEs didn't occur shortly after a comet plunge, just by chance alone. And that could start happening more and more, because the sun is in an active phase right now, researchers said.

"At this stage of the solar cycle, the sun is producing many mass ejections — in fact there were several earlier in the day [Saturday] — and it probably just happened by chance that one of them was around the same time as the approach of the comet," researchers with SOHO, which is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency, wrote in an update Monday (Oct. 3).

"Some researchers have been looking for a more direct relationship, but nothing as yet has come out of these efforts," they added.

Activity in the current cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, should peak around 2013, experts say. ( foxnews.com )

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Will humans ever reach the Andromeda Galaxy?

Will humans ever reach the Andromeda Galaxy? - The 40-Year Itch - Would-be space explorers, scientists, and a couple of crackpots gather at DARPA’s 100-Year Starship Symposium to try to get interstellar travel unstuck.

The fastest a person has ever traveled is just 24,791 miles per hour. The three men of Apollo 10 went that fast on their way back from the moon in 1969.

The fastest a man-made object has ever traveled out of the solar system is 39,000 miles per hour—the speed with which Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977.*

David Neyland wants to beat these dusty, decades-old records. Neyland is a tall man, with the bushy beard of a frontier prophet and the measured tones of a midranking bureaucrat. He is both of these things. The head of the tactical-technology office at the military research agency DARPA, he convened a group of more than 1,000 at the Orlando Hilton last weekend to strategize about the next great era in space travel. The mission of the 100-Year Starship Public Symposium: to set about organizing a century-long effort to send a spaceship to another star. Neyland opened the conference to the public, drawing sci-fi fans and space geeks along with professional scientists. Ph.D. or not, all were frustrated with the lack of progress in space. As one wag in the audience would say, we should be having this meeting at the lunar Hilton. There was a sense that, for the just over 40 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, nothing new has been done.

Will humans ever reach the Andromeda Galaxy? Image by Comstock/Thinkstock.

The symposium was far-reaching, with presentations including “Modular Aneutronic Fusion Engine for an Alpha Centauri Mission” and “To Humbly Go ... Breaking Previous Patterns of Colonization.” The meat of the conference was hard science: the physics and engineering of propulsion. The dessert, which drew in the public, came in the form of sessions on space and religion (“Did Jesus die for Klingons, too?”) and panels with sci-fi writers.
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But many came for the dessert and strayed to the meat. One of the hard-core tracks (“Time-Distance Solutions: Exotic Physics”) was so popular it had to be moved to the symposium’s biggest room. The session’s moderator, John Cramer, a physics professor from the University of Washington in a plaid shirt and sport coat, said, “In times to come I predict this will be looked back on as the Woodstock of star travel.” He compared the exotic physicists to “the punk bands, the guys that break the rules in order to get laid faster.”*

There are many complications to interstellar travel, but the fundamental problem is that we need to go faster. Burning things—what almost every spacecraft so far has relied on for propulsion—would require trips that last tens of thousands of years. Nuclear rockets of various types—fission, fusion—would be faster but have their own drawbacks. Fission rockets are, in principle, technically feasible today, but launching them would be politically impossible because of the risk of radioactive contamination, if the rocket were to blow up on lift-off. The next option is solar sails, which aren’t so different from regular sails, except instead of wind, they rely on the pressure of light bouncing off them. They have the big advantage of not having to carry propellant (which nuclear rockets, like regular rockets, would have to do). A variant on solar sails, the simplest of which rely on sunlight, would instead bounce off a beam—laser or microwave—sent from earth, which has the advantage that it could be tightly focused.

After years of being all talk, a Japanese probe launched last year became the first to use solar sails for propulsion, making it to Venus in just over six months. James Benford, an entrepreneur who founded the company Microwave Sciences, gave one of the most focused talks of the conference, addressing the economics of microwave-driven sails. Because microwave ovens are cheap, he said, we could assemble an array of thousands of microwave ovens into an array to push sails. This was a great example of the reverse spin-off argument: It’s more likely that Earth-bound developments will make things in space feasible than that astronaut ice cream will take over the nation’s stomachs.

These two most obvious paths—solar sails and nuclear rockets—are methods that, if we spent a lot of money and time on developing them, would definitely work moderately well. But neither will ever be that good. The stars are just too far. What we really need is something radically different, a game-changer. For that, I turned to Kramer’s exotic physics session.

Usually musical festivals build up to the big names. But the exotic physics session opened with a rock star in the world of space geeks: Marc Millis.* Millis was famous for having persuaded NASA to run a short-lived “breakthrough propulsion physics” project from 1996 to 2002. During my subsequent interview with him, we were interrupted three times by attendees eager for Millis’ autograph. He now runs his own outfit, the Tau Zero Foundation, which scrapes by on donations. He also literally wrote the book on the subject: Frontiers of Propulsion Science, which has whole sections on how to dissuade crackpots.

While careful not to overpromise, Millis is trying to think of ways that a spacecraft could be propelled without fuel. “You have to pick something completely different,” he says. “Why don’t we go back to the fundamental physics and try and find solutions around that?” One of his ideas is to try to push against the universe. “You move one way and the universe moves the other way. If you start thinking about this, your head starts spinning. What,” he asks, “are you pushing the universe relative to?”

Throughout the weekend, there was some disconnect between the space-curious members of the public, eager for visions of Star Trek futures, and the scientists engrossed in the nitty-gritty. Millis was followed by Harold “Sonny” White, from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. While talking about the field equations of general relativity, he had the excitement of someone describing a running back juke around a defender. When he segued into the Chung-Freese metric, the woman next to me, a matronly type with dyed red hair, turned to her companion and asked, “Do you understand this?” He had a bushy mustache and sneakers, and if nerdish looks were any guide, looked like he should. He wrote his answer on a piece of paper, a scrawled “No.” It’s good to get the public excited, but the best way to do this is to actually do exciting things, not to have a deliberate strategy of public engagement that leaves lay audience members baffled in Orlando conference rooms.

White is currently designing an experiment to test whether he can demonstrate a small gravity-distorting effect in the lab. “This is highly speculative physics. It may not have any basis in physical reality,” he cautioned. “Nobody get excited. It’s still very, very hard.” That was the line between the serious types and the crackpots—the serious types had crazy ideas, too; they just didn’t forget that their ideas were probably wrong. “You want to tackle the challenges that make your peers feel uneasy,” Millis says.

Millis, White, and their colleagues are trying hard to strike a balance; they know they must be both audacious and methodical. Others at the conference weren’t trying as hard.

On Sunday morning, the guys from Sol Seed (“Bringing Life Even Unto the Galaxy”) passed out fliers stating four rather ambitious, and divergent, goals. The first is to build an “eco-village community in Portland,” while the fourth is “contributing to the destiny of life: spreading beyond Earth to take root amongst the stars!” Surprisingly, though, only one guy ranted about UFOs. (“I’m not talking about the crazy people. I’m talking about solid military evidence, CIA, DIA.”) He left the room quietly when the panelists refused to engage him.

Then there were those who weren’t crazy, but weren’t helpful, either. One presenter vaguely said that it would be good to be able to communicate faster than light. He was riveted by his own slides, which said, “This problem appears insoluble.” Toward the end, he mentioned the potential military application of his non-existent technology: It would work underwater. This is a bit like saying that if you were immortal, not having to worry about a long wait for a table at Applebee’s would be one of the important benefits.

Tufts University’s Ken Olum had the biggest beard I saw at the conference, which is saying a lot. His beard goes around a big U along the whole of his head, giving him a sort of upside-down halo. He looks like I imagine an alchemist might. But he wouldn’t like that comparison. “We should not be alchemists,” he told the conference. “They wanted a goal and that’s what they thought about. After a while they were doing nothing useful. They were replaced by chemists who had the desire to learn about the world as it is, and not the desire to do some particular thing.”

Speaking of misguided desires, a subsequent panel of science-fiction writers engaged in a long and pointless argument about the sociology of space colonies: It had all the substance and weight of a nuanced public policy debate, except that the dilemmas they were talking about were fictional. Michael Waltemathe, a young German academic with a pink tie, talked about religion and space colonization. Apollo 14, he told the audience, had taken 100 microfiche Bibles to the surface of the moon and back. This made him wonder how many bishops a space colony would have to take along to uphold apostolic succession. “Since I’m a Protestant,” he said, “I would take all of them.” That was the problem with a conference that deliberately tried to cultivate dreamers: They started planning the wedding before they’d even asked the girl out.

As the symposium drew to a close, James Benford sounded a note of optimism with a hint of longing: “We’ve been asking how to build starships. If we can’t, the rest of the questions are moot. The answer, I think, is that we can.” No one expects more money from DARPA, or from NASA, but they really are convinced that change is coming. Outside the main session, I stood talking with Millis. He took out a recent article he wrote for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. There was a triptych of rockets: a NASA rocket, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip One, and SpaceX’s Falcon rocket. “Fail!” he exclaimed when he pointed to the NASA rocket. “We are at the threshold of a sociological change,” he said: Space is about to be opened up to private industry in a fundamentally new way. If industry lives up to the hopes of those assembled in Orlando, maybe the fastest human beings in history will soon be traveling toward something instead of back to Earth, like the Apollo 10 crew. ( slate.com )

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Katy Perry transformed into gladiator for new music video E.T.

Golden girl: Katy Perry transformed into gladiator for new music video E.T. - She's already been transformed into an alien for her new video E.T.

But it looks like Katy Perry may be seeking inspiration from this world as well, as she becomes a female gladiator.

In a new promotional shot from her forthcoming new video, which premieres on Thursday, the singer wear a gold breastplate and dramatic make-up, inspired by the ancient Roman look.

Going for gold: Katy Perry looks like a gladiator in her gold breast-plate in a promotional shot for her new single E.T.

Inspiration: A woman re-enactor dressed as a female gladiator (file picture)

The new single, which is already in the top of the U.S. Billboard charts, sees Miss Perry team up with rapper Kanye West.

Over the last week, Perry has been leaking sneak peeks of the video shoot before the promo is seen in its entirety on Thursday.

Perry's other worldliness appearance is inspired by the lyrics of the song, about falling in love with a foreigner.

The song contains many extraterrestrial references, hence Perry's sci-fi appearance in another image.

Perry is currently on the UK and Ireland leg of her California Dream World Tour.

On Monday, she was embroiled in a Twitter row after Scottish DJ Calvin Harris pulled out supporting her Dublin gig.

Calvin was scheduled to open for Katy’s gigs but cancelled at the last minute after being angered over set arrangements.

The furious I Kissed A Girl singer vented on Twitter, posting: ‘Calvin Harris will NOT be joining in on the fun and has CANCELLED last minute.’

Spaced out: With the help of some extreme make-up, Perry transformed herself into an alien in her new video

To which Calvin, 27, replied: ‘Sorry to all who wanted to see me with Katy – her team suddenly moved the goalposts and I was to appear on stage with no production.’

Katy hit back again with: ‘The goalpost seems to be perfectly fine for New Young Pony Club, Yelle, Robyn, Marina & The Diamonds, to name a few.

‘Or how bout Janell Monae and her 16 piece band… It’s fine, I’m used to you cancelling on me, it’s become ur staple!’

Calvin then tried to explain by tweeting: ‘It would have looked s***, sounded s*** - trust me you would have been more disappointed SEEING the show than u are with me cancelling.’

He then began complimenting Perry, tweeting: ‘Her show is AWESOME, you’ll have an amazing time without me. (especially w/o me DJing on a cardboard box in front of a pink curtain)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Her husband Russell Brand was spotted at Los Angeles' LAX airport yesterday

And then apologised, posting: ‘I’m really sorry @katyperry I’m just upset because I really wanted to play but ur team made it impossible.

‘We tried really hard to sort it out, but playing side of stage for 30 mins, it seemed pointless me even being there. Didn’t intend to cause offence or upset anybody.’

Perry is yet to accept his apology on Twitter.

Meanwhile, her husband Russell Brand has enthused about the couple's long-distance romance.

The comedian, who was spotted flying out of Los Aneles yesterday, told The Sun: 'Considering her schedule and the way I'm working as well, it's amazing.

'She does two or three gigs then has four days off. During those days we're meeting. She's been brilliant. We're still excited to see each other.' ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Doomsday Midwest Quake Predictions Overblown

Doomsday Midwest Quake Predictions Overblown, Scientists Say - Fears of the next big earthquake in America's heartland are just a bunch of hype.

That's according to a new book that explains how there's little scientific evidence to back up the apocalyptic predictions that a set of faults in the Midwest that set off huge quakes a couple centuries ago, known as the New Madrid Seismic Zone, could rupture violently again soon.

In "Disaster Deferred: How New Science Is Changing Our View of Earthquake Hazards in the Midwest"(Columbia University Press, October 2010), author and geologist Seth Stein tries to reassure folks living near the infamous New Madrid faults by explaining the science behind earthquakes in the middle of the continent.

Stein, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said there's little scientific evidence for the fear of "the next big one" in the New Madrid seismic zone - the site of some of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the continental United States, nearly 200 years ago.

Scare tactics

In 1990, a widely touted prediction said a big quake would hit the area, and a media circus ensued. The prediction proved false but highlighted the fear and hype surrounding the idea of a big Midwestern earthquake, Stein says.

As the 200th anniversary of the earthquakes that occurred in the area of New Madrid, Mo., approaches, talk of catastrophe is rising again.

"It's said that the 1811 and 1812 earthquakes were the biggest in U.S. history, which isn't true," Stein said. "Or that they rang church bells in Boston, which isn't true. And that another huge earthquake is on the way, which there's no reason to believe."

The findings detailed in "Disaster Deferred" come from more than 20 years of research regarding the New Madrid seismic zone. The book describes Stein's scientific adventures that ultimately found no sign that large earthquakes will hit the New Madrid area within the next several hundred - or even thousands - of years.

"We, of course, can't say there will never be another New Madrid earthquake like the ones in 1811 and 1812, but there's no sign of one coming. The next could be thousands of years or tens of thousands of years in the future," Stein said.

Remaining Risk

The seismic zone today generates about 200 tiny quakes annually, but it also let loose a magnitude 4.1 quake in February 2005 and a magnitude 4.0 quake in June 2005. An estimate from the 1980s asserted a 9-in-10 chance of a magnitude 6 or 7 temblor occurring in this area within the next 50 years. Later estimates have reduced this probability somewhat, although there is no consensus among researchers.

The Mississippi River is somewhat to blame for the 1811 and 1812 quakes, according to a study released earlier this year. Sediment erosion from the river released a great weight off the fault, allowing the Earth to buckle and the faults to rupture. That study also suggests that an earthquake is unlikely to hit anytime soon on the same faults in New Madrid.

Some seismic risk remains, however. A 2007 study discovered that an ancient, giant slab of Earth called the Farallon slab that started its descent under the West Coast 70 million years ago is causing mayhem and deep mantle flow 360 miles (579 kilometers) beneath the Mississippi Valley where it effectively pulls the crust down nearly half a mile (1 km).

The Farallon plate will continue to descend into the deep mantle and thus cause mantle downwelling in the New Madrid region for a long time, suggesting there will be seismic risk in the New Madrid region that will not fade with time, the authors of that study said. ( LiveScience.com )

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Big explosion reveals most massive star known

Big explosion reveals most massive star known. Supernova still visible 2 years later, and may have had mass 200 times sun’s. All supernova explosions are violent affairs, but this one takes the cake. Astronomers have spotted a new type of extremely bright cosmic explosion they think originates from an exceptionally massive star.

This breed of explosion has been long predicted, but never before seen. Like all supernovas, the blast is thought to have marked the end of a star's life. But in this case, that star may have started out with 200 times the mass of the sun.

The supernova in question, SN2007bi, was observed in 2007 in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Scientists knew at once it was something different because it was about 50 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova.

"It was much brighter, and it was bright for a very long time," said researcher Paolo Mazzali of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. "We could observe this thing almost two years after it was discovered, where you normally don't see anything anymore."

After analyzing its signature, astronomers published a paper in the Dec. 3 issue of the journal Nature confirming that it matches theoretical predictions of a so-called pair-instability supernova.

"There were some doubts that they existed," said astronomer Norbert Langer of the University of Bonn in Germany, who did not work on the project. Langer wrote an opinion essay on the finding in the same issue of Nature. "There were severe doubts that stars that massive could ever form in the universe. Now we seem to be very sure that there was a star with 200 solar masses."

In a pair-instability supernova, the star has neared the end of its life and exhausted its main supplies of hydrogen and helium, leaving it a core of mostly oxygen. In smaller stars, the core continues to burn until eventually it is all iron, then collapses in a Type II supernova, leaving behind a remnant black hole or neutron star.

But in the case of an extremely massive star, while its core is still made of oxygen, it releases photons that are so energetic, they create pairs of electrons and their anti-matter opposites, positrons. When the matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other. This reaction reduces the star's pressure, and it collapses, igniting the oxygen core in a runaway nuclear explosion that eats up the whole star, leaving no remnant at all.

The discovery of this rare type of supernova suggests that a few stars actually can grow into such large behemoths — which has long been a topic of debate.

"I was never a believer in very massive stars," Mazzali told SPACE.com. "Seeing something like this explode means these things exist. This is a fairly new development in the formation of stars." ( space.com )

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Meteor showers in much of Asia

Meteor showers in much of Asia. Clouds, fog disappoint stargazers looking for dazzling meteor showers in much of Asia - Thousands of stargazers across Asia stayed awake overnight to catch a glimpse of what was advertised as an intense Leonid meteor shower, but the show fizzled rather than sizzled for many because of cloudy conditions.

One group of about 30 amateur Indian astronomers saw the meteors light up the sky at the Siriska wildlife sanctuary, about 95 miles (150 kilometres) south of New Delhi - counting 78 during a four-hour period.

"There was no moon in the sky, which is good for observation," said Yogeshwar Kanu Aggarwal, a member of the Space Science Popularization Association of Communications and Educators. "We could see flashes of light for almost 10 seconds."

Leonid meteors are bits of debris from the Comet Tempel-Tuttle and were named after the constellation Leo, from which they appear to originate. NASA scientists had projected there would be up to 300 raining down every hour, compared to a typical night when there are about eight an hour.

Night owls in Manila, however, were left staring at the lights of passing airplanes because of cloudy conditions. More than 1,000 Thais who camped out in a parking lot on the outskirts of Bangkok had better luck, spotting 52 over several hours.

"The sky was clear and there were many meteors around 4 a.m.," said Suranand Supawannakij, director of the Science Center for Education in Rangsit, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) north of Bangkok. "They came from many directions. I am always excited seeing a meteor shower."

The Leonid meteors travel at 156,000 miles (251,000 kilometres) per hour. They consist mostly of dust and ice, and evaporate long before they reach the ground, so "you can go outside and watch the Leonid meteor shower without worrying about getting whacked on the head," said scientist Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

When a Leonid meteor storm was first observed in 1833, Cooke said it must have seemed like something out of the apocalyptic saga "2012." More than 30,000 meteors an hour rained down on an unsuspecting public, sparking panic and fears of the end of the world, he said.

"They were seeing 10 meteors per second all over the sky," he said. "You read newspaper accounts and robbers were returning what they stole because they wanted to be right with God. People were praying in churches, in their yards."

This time around, the meteor shower was greeted with the oohs and ahhs that one hears at fireworks displays rather than screeches of fear.

"I've seen meteors before but this was different," said Akradech Lekkla, a 39-year-old taxi driver who joined several whiskey-drinking Thais in Ayutthaya, about 30 miles (50 kilometres) from Bangkok.

"It looked like it was raining meteors," he said. "They came in so quick that if you didn't pay attention you missed them."

In India, a cloudy sky disappointed thousands of stargazers in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Pawan Sharma, a 36-year-old photographer, could only spot meteors, one of them big enough to be seen streaking across the sky in a window between the clouds.

"It was a momentary thing. It was so disappointing," he said.

In Nepal, cloud and fog cover over much of the Himalayan nation blocked views of the meteors.

Jayanta Acharya, astronomy professor at Kathmandu's Tribhuwan University, said he woke up early to view the meteor shower from the rooftop of his house.

"It was a big event for us and we are all disappointed to have missed it," Acharya said.

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