This week in science: Make Pluto a stamp

      
Sign the petition for Pluto’s encounter with New Horizons to be honored with a new stamp

From the scientific vantage of medicine to the politics of abortion, low cost accessible contraception makes sense all the way around. Healthier women with more money to spend, fewer abortions and unwed mothers. But conservatives and a tiny handful of democratic enablers, who can’t seem to read polls or just don’t give a goddamn, continue to dream of the Republic of Gilead:

Any women who votes for these bozos is probably too far gone. For men, the last time birth control was illegal, there was no such thing as genetic testing and court mandated child support. Then again it wouldn’t take a theocracy long to strip those laws and ban genetic testing. After all, it’s the always women’s fault, and babies are always a blessing … just ask any Handmaid.

Most of my male conservative buddies pretend not to care about the issue while whining that we’re not going along and playing solely on their rhetorical terms. But I got a call from another reliable GOP voter this week — after Rush’s tirade — and herfirst three words were, “You were right.”

  • It’s been a good week for giant insects, extinct monster fleas with a hankering for Jurassic dino blood and extant “tree lobsters,” gentle six-legged giants so striking in appearance that they might make interesting pets …for the right kind of animal enthusiast anyway.
  • Mixing chemistry with climate change has unexpected consequences: An ongoing reaction with dissolved GHGs and seawater has made the ocean more acidic than anytime over the last 300 million years. Another, even more obscure consequence of polar warming might kick off a toxic reaction producing elemental mercury.
  • The asteroid reported to be on course for a possible 2040 rendezvous is no dino killer and highly unlikely to hit earth. If it beats the long odds, depending on the closing velocity, strike angle, and the composition of impactor and target, simulations predict it would be similar to a standard hydrogen bomb in blast, without the deadly gamma ray flash, radioactive fallout, or blinding white fireball. It could annihilate entire city blocks, kick off house or forest fires in the vicinity, but the damage would be mostly localized.
  • Pluto is the most exciting first-time encounter in the near future. But New Horizons doesn’t need to settle for one stamp, there are dozens of Kuiper Belt Objects it could also reach after it sails by distant Pluto and Charon. Beyond even the last KBO is the mysterious Oort Cloud, reaching so deep into interstellar space that newly inferred rogue planets may float silently by. Could life exist on such a wandering world untethered to a star?

Solar tsunamis could be in the mail for next several years

A filament breaks free and blasts off the sun on 24 Feb 2012. This one happened on the sun's north pole and poses no danger for earth. Image courtesy NASA SoHo.

NASA scientists are closely monitoring the sun as it heads into the most active phase in its sunspot cycle. The sun’s magnetic poles flip every 22 years, meaning the field strength maxes and wanes in each polar hemisphere a little over once a decade. Each 11 year cycle produces large flares and other phenomena, and if the earth happens to lay in the path of a big one it can cause problems. That’s what happened in 1859, when large flare disrupted early communication networks and lit up skies as far south as Jamaica with rare, ghostly aurora. If something like the Carrington Event were to happen today, the consequences could be even more catastrophic: [Read more…]

The Milky Way could be full of nomads

Artist's conception of a Jupiter-size rogue planet with the edge on disk of a spiral galaxy in the background. Image via the Wiki

In ancient times planets were easily distinguished from stars because they’d wander from one constellation to another. It was that feature that eventually led Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to record exact positions — without the aide of telescopic lenses — giving birth to modern planetary astronomy. Now a new class of wandering planets has been proposed, and Kepler’s NASA namesake might play a role in learning about these mysterious objects too. Call them Nomads: [Read more…]

The mysteries of Titan

Titan, locked in thick clouds, with Saturn and rings in the background. Image courtesy of Cassini/NASA/JPL

Titan has always excited planetary astronomers and science-fiction writers. For good reason. It’s a romantic place, orbiting lovely Saturn, the ringed celebrity of the solar system, and its the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Titan has an active surface carved by wind and rain dotted with oceans and rivers where natural gas falls in big fat droplets and volcanoes spew water like lava. In fact Titan is composed of so much icy stuff that if it were as close to the sun as Mars about half the moon would evaporate into a giant puffball, by some guestimates growing to half the size of Uranus, before the volatile gases took flight on the solar wind and blew away in a massive cometary tail. It would make for a spectacular sight!

But those icy layers offer a possible alien refuge for life, and to understand a hypothetical Titanian biosphere we don’t have to look into deep space for evil green slime, we only have to look beneath our own oceans for exotic microbes and bizarre metazoans. [Read more…]

Here comes the sun, like you’ve never seen it before

NASA’s SOHO mission team has posted some beautiful images of our local star under the fitting header The Sun as Art with descriptive captions. Some of the images have been reworked, but most are simply composites or color filters. They’re remarkable, and a reminder of the enormous power of a massive hydrogen fusion reactor (And potential energy source) pumping out 4 trillion terawatts a mere 93 million miles away. Now if only I could find the original slideshow link … [Read more…]

The beautiful and incredibly violent Eta Carina

Eta Carinae, 7th sun in its constellation, is not your ordinary star, or even a familiar crusty old red-giant. At the heart of the gorgeous double lobed cloud are at least two massive stars, and one of them is one the most unusual kinds of stellar objects in the universe: an unstable, misshapen blue-white colossus that could burst open and shower this section of the galaxy with deadly gamma rays any day. It almost happened once before, in 1843, when the object suddenly became the second brightest star in the sky for a few weeks. What’;s neat is astronomers have now found a way to study that original light, once thought long gone at the speed of 300,000 KM/sec: [Read more…]