The Dunes of Mars, Bennu, Blazars and Cats in Boxes

It's official - being in space can alter your DNA !
Expect returning astronauts to resemble giant rubber - suited monstrosities of yore
Actually, nothing so dramatic, but there is evidence of unexpected alterations .
This could have major implications for long, manned journeys - to Mars, for instance.
Speaking of which, a recent image shows the dunes in the northern hemisphere of Mars - fun facts; whilst perusing the photos, I became aware that there are different kinds of dune - I am guilty of thinking how one pile of sand was pretty much like another.

Mars - Pahrump Hills - Curiosity                  pic NASA /JPL-Caltech

The image below had me confused for some time, and shows the problem of pictures without objects of reference for scale ; to be fair, Mars is rather short of monuments and landmarks to judge scale by - I thought that this was just a close up of a dry riverbed with cracked mud...but apparently some of the thin ridged areas are 16 storeys high.

Mars image by HI RISE        NASA/ Caltech / University of Arizona

A new test for biosignatures has been developed, which is 10,000 times more sensitive than those onboard Curiosity.
The article which mentions this discovery also name-checks Europa as a suitable target for testing, In preparation of which, this piece describes a proposed lander for Europa .
Personally, I'm disappointed that it looks so - underwhelming.

The tiny blue smudge in the centre is our solar system...

The illustration above shows our solar system compared to the largest black hole yet found.

Don't fret, it's not actually swallowing us - it is 12.1 billion light years away , thankfully.
Of course, given its immense size and the voracious appetite of black holes, it may well munch its way here, like a giant Pacman*...
This supermassive black hole is part of an immense quasar - if it were 280 light years away from us, it would give us heat equivalent to the sun.
I am now feeling small and insignificant , still banjaxed by all the big numbers involved , so in order to preserve my sanity, I will extricate myself from the event horizon of this monstrosity (diameter of 236.7 billion kilometres)

In a previous post , I mentioned the exciting project which would use lightsails powered by sunlight to achieve incredible speeds reaching 20% the speed of light, and enabling exploration of Alpha Centauri within a mere 20 years.
The caveat to that was the lack of a braking system - obviously a craft travelling at 60,000 km/s without brakes could have a problem with landing...
It turns out they have worked out a way to slow the craft down - although this will also affect the overall speed, bringing it down to a 95 years journey rather than a mere 20 years, so it becomes a generational thing.
Which means if you're travelling with Virgin Galactic , don't get a return.
Unless they solve longevity, too.
Which maybe connected to this earlier piece.
Longer telemeres, longer life ?

More immediate space exploration is the Bennu mission which aims to return sample material from an asteroid to Earth, with contact planned for 2018.
The Bennu-Rex explorer is also tasked with discovering whether Earth has any 'trojan' asteroids following its orbit.
This could unlock details of our distant past , as potential asteroids would likely be composed of material dating from Earths creation.
This little ' side-mission' is happening now ( Feb 2017)

If, like me, you've been struggling to understand quantum mechanics, there is now  a Ladybird guide to the strange , but inevitable realm.
Before you ask, the answer is no - I still don't understand it .
Cats in boxes ?
Yes - and no.
At the same time.
That's quantum .

Until next time, keep it ...erm...in a state of flux.



* Showing my age here, is Pacman still a thing ?

Vanishing Planets , Alien Balls and Hydrogen Pi

In recent news, our closest Earth-like planetary neighbour, the snappily - named Alpha Centauri bb , a mere 4.3 light years away, has vanished.
 Conspiracy a go - go !
Not really, it was only discovered in 2012, and that was due to the wobble of a star which indicated an Earth-sized planet nearby.
The fact is that it may have never existed, just one problem when trying to determine an objects existence based on vague data.
So there we have the disappearance of something that possibly never was.
Good thing we didn't send out a probe, eh?

With the current increase in better quality telescopes free of light pollution (i.e. in orbit), it's surely only a matter of time before some entrepeneur offers unique planetary names, perhaps as gifts for the person who has everything, and whose tastes are jaded by constant indulgence and a lack of restraint , - which makes me wonder , given the proposed joint lunar mission between Europe and Russia, how are they going to negotiate all those lunar land deeds that have been sold ?

Oort cloud                                    © NASA jpg

In other news,astronomers have discovered the furthest object in the solar system , a small world known as V774104 in the Oort cloud .
If its orbit doesn't bring it closer to the sun, then apparently it will be of interest to astronomers (as a world from the beginning of the solar system) , but they're holding off until the orbit can be accurately determined - which takes a year.
Essentially they're hoping that its orbit has never been affected by Neptune.
Planetary scientist Michael Brown said :
"There's no reason to be excited yet".
Heady stuff, eh?

V774104  in all its glory...                         © S Sheppard, C Trujillo & S Tholen

Meanwhile back on Earth...
A flurry of metallic balls have dropped from the sky, four at the last count, in Spain and Turkey.
Possibly man-made and pertaining to satellites or even a hoax (check the smiling people handling the strange, possibly toxic objects...) hmmm...
Oddly though, this is news the day before the landing of the space junk known as WT1190F.
I say landing, but it's actually scheduled to crash into the ocean a few kilometres south of Sri Lanka.
That's if there is anything left after re-entry.
Interesting and odd though, that it should be flagged in advance, when so many similar incidents occur without prior information.

Cryovolcanoes on Pluto                  ©NASA/JPL/ Sci-News

In still other news, it is now believed that Pluto houses at least two cryovolcanoes, hinting at a subsurface ocean.
To reduce the scientific terms to reality : this means ice volcanoes.
The mind boggles.
Does this mean that they erupt in showers of snowballs ?
Or that, instead of molten lava slides, we have rivers of slush with dry-ice fog, for dramatic effect ?

Water is an element as much as fire, but how bizarre!
So, with Enceladus, Ganymede, possibly Europa and now Pluto, we have a slew of potential water worlds in our solar system.
Quite a change from the dry, rocky and cratered planets that were illustrated (artists depiction) in text books in my youth .
Infact, I remember being quite devastated that there was such a dissonance between tne exotic alien worlds presented in film and the likes of Star Trek, and the dull reality of our nearest neighbouring planets.

It is a thing, apparently!

Usb cable and quantum mechanics...

Bringing all this speculation down to an individual level - I read an interesting piece of conjecture which speculated that objects which are theoretically entangled - for instance, one in a black hole , and the other on the opposite side of the universe, could be conjoined by a wormhole.
Wormholes are a great sci-fi staple as a method of taking shortcuts through 'spacetime', and the idea of wormholes providing a link between two 'entwined' particles would neatly eliminate gaps in the theory of relativity, as well as giving us an example of quantum mechanics at work in our universe-
Why not? After all, the signs are already here, on an almost hum-drum level.
Seriously - a daily occurence.
For instance, say you want to insert a usb cable into your pc.
Annoyingly, it doesn't fit first time.
So you flip it, and try again. No.
Flip it again - it works .

This implies a superposition - a third state of readiness for the cable.
But we know it only has two sides...in this dimension.


Let's not stop there - a recent discovery is the presence of the equation pi in the base state of the hydrogen atom, which, if true, hints at a level of prior knowledge that defies linear time .


Until next time!