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Climate projections: Visualizing global warming in the round
I wonder if the Gamma-Ray bubbles detected at the center of our galaxy has anything to do with the warming up of our solar system?
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Climate projections: Visualizing global warming in the round
By Katherine Harmon
BOULDER—Thin clouds of dust blow off the west coast of Africa toward the Caribbean; wisps of black carbon emissions roil over the U.S. These big-picture global chemical equations can often get lost deep in complex climate datasets. But a seemingly simple idea is helping school children and scientists alike visualize models of carbon, climate and even continental drift.
Working at home in his garage 15 years ago, Sandy MacDonald, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory, started devising a way to project animations of climate models onto a round surface. The final project, known as Science on a Sphere, now has hundreds of animated models that can play across the surface of a six-foot suspended globe, mapping everything from projected ocean acidification to global shipping routes.
"It was pretty crude," MacDonald said, recalling his early prototypes. But now, he noted, with more than 50 of the spheres set up worldwide, the whole system takes just one or two computers and four projectors to run. "It's not enough to just do the science," MacDonald said, switching model visualizations with a Wii remote.
But nailing down the science is a crucial first step. "We know we've got to get the oceans right," MacDonald said. And one of the most simple animations drives home the unequal nature of temperature change predictions. As the years flash in the animations, the continents heat up several more degrees than do the oceans, represented as a bright, deep red. That differential, MacDonald described as the "ugly secret of global warming." Oft-cited predictions for global surface temperature increase of six degrees Celsius over the next 90 years are misleading because "they're talking about the average," rather than the more localized, severe jumps that are predicted to occur on land, where people live. By his estimate, he noted, the U.S. will experience a rise of about 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, which averages out to about a degree every decade this century.
And to try to help stem the continental temperature—and sea level—rise, a more accurate tracking of carbon emissions is going to be crucial; it's "going to be absolutely essential to find who is producing it" and how it varies over season, MacDonald said. Despite the improvements in models and visualizing them, he noted, on carbon emission tracking, "we're still pretty crude."
Read more at www.scientificamerican.com
Image and video courtesy of NOAA/OAR
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Hidden in Plain Sight: Researchers Find Galaxy-Scale Bubbles Extending from the Milky Way
Last I heard, Gamma-Ray bursts would incinerate the surface of the earth.
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Hidden in Plain Sight: Researchers Find Galaxy-Scale Bubbles Extending from the Milky Way
An analysis of public data from a NASA satellite turns up massive, previously unseen galactic structures
DOUBLE BUBBLE: An artist's conception showing the approximate scale of the newfound Fermi bubbles above and below the Milky Way.
Image: NASA/GSFC
A group of astrophysicists has located two massive bubbles of plasma, each extending tens of thousands of light-years, emitting high-energy radiation above and below the plane of the galaxy. The researchers found the structures in publicly released data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which was launched in 2008 to investigate sources of extremely energetic photons—namely, gamma rays, which have higher frequencies than x-rays.
From its orbital perch hundreds of kilometers above Earth's surface, Fermi has charted the location of gamma-ray sources with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). But just where the gamma rays originate is not always clear; the foreground of Fermi's view is clouded with emission from events such as cosmic rays striking dust in the Milky Way's disk. To get a better picture of the gamma-ray environment, Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues carefully subtracted those sources based on maps showing locations of cosmic dust, models of the galactic disk, and known emitters of gamma rays, such as active black holes in other galaxies.
"There are many kinds of emission in the Fermi maps—there are things that we're expecting to see, like the dust-correlated emission," Finkbeiner said in an interview during the May meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Finkbeiner presented at the conference an early version of the research, which has now been finalized and readied for publication. "But then we saw some other things that we weren't expecting," Finkbeiner said in the interview. "We saw these giant bubbles reaching above and below the galactic center." The study, co-authored with graduate students Meng Su and Tracy Slatyer, will appear in The Astrophysical Journal. (Slatyer is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.)
Finkbeiner compared the shape of the lobes of the so-called Fermi bubbles with teardrops or hot-air balloons. The two bubbles are symmetric, and each appears to originate at the Milky Way's center, where a black hole with the mass of four million suns lurks. Together they span a distance roughly half the diameter of the Milky Way. The origin of the Fermi bubbles is unknown, but a population of high-energy electrons that collides with mundane photons, boosting them to gamma-ray energies, seems to be the cause. Matter falling onto the galaxy's central black hole could give off a good deal of energy to produce electrons swept up in a hot plasma—and ultimately the gamma rays.
"When stuff falls into that black hole, as you can imagine, it makes a big mess," Finkbeiner said. "One of the things that happens is very high-energy particles get ejected, and probably shock waves, and you can get jets of material coming off of the thing." Those jets could blast into the interstellar medium above and below the plane of the galaxy and form bubbles that emit gamma rays.
An alternate possibility is a relatively recent burst of star formation in the inner galaxy, probably within the last 10 million years. "If you have many young stars all forming in the same place at the same time, they have tremendous stellar winds; some of them will blow up as supernovae—a lot of things can happen that heat gas and cause bubbles to expand," Finkbeiner said.
The researchers found flaws with both proposed explanations but noted that some combination of the two could be the cause. And indeed, David Spergel, a Princeton University astrophysicist who did not contribute to the study, explains that black hole accretion and starbursts can be related. "What we see in some external galaxies is the same inflow onto a black hole also produces a burst of star formation," Spergel says.
Spergel notes that much astrophysical work focuses on filtering out the foreground of Milky Way structures to see into the distant universe. "For most cosmologists our galaxy is an enormous nuisance," he says. "This is one of those instances where one scientist's foreground and garbage is another scientist's field of study."
Scooping new discoveries from a mission's public data sometimes causes disagreements of interpretation between the independent data miners and the mission's own scientists. To wit, Finkbeiner's 2003 detection of a haze of excess microwave emission near the galactic center in data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has not been fully accepted by Spergel and other members of the WMAP team.
But the Fermi team appears to be on board with the new finding. "Our view of this work is that this is an important discovery," offers Stanford University astrophysicist Peter Michelson, the principal investigator for Fermi's LAT. "Doug's work is excellent." Michelson adds that the study highlights the importance of involving a wider community of scientists through public data releases and notes that the mission team is working on its own follow-up analysis. "There remains much interesting work to do to figure out the real origin of these incredible bubbles in our galaxy," Michelson says.Read more at www.scientificamerican.com
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Time Travel & Outer Space - Now Airing on Coast To Coast AM
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Time Travel & Outer Space
Date:
11-15-10
Host:
George Noory
Guests:
J. Richard Gott,
Michael S. Roberts
Professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, J. Richard Gott will talk about his work with the physics of time travel and helping people quantify how vast outer space really is, as well as the "Doomsday Argument" which shows how statistically there is a 95% chance of human extinction within 9,120 years.
During the first hour, pilot Michael Roberts talks about refusing the TSA's new whole-body security scan.
Book(s):
- Sizing Up the Universe
- Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time
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Arizona desert drivers warned of zombies ahead | Reuters
(Reuters) - Arizona drivers were warned of the undead roaming a desert highway near Tucson over the weekend, after a suspected prankster tampered with an electronic road sign, police and news media said.
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Robber's shooting death by Police in York PA ruled a homicide
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Robber's shooting death in York ruled a homicide
York, PA -
An autopsy performed Monday on the body of an armed robber -- fatally wounded by a York City Police officer Saturday -- confirmed the man died from multiple gunshot wounds.
The York County Coroner's Office also ruled that the manner of Victor Arvelo's death was homicide.
A York City Police officer shot and killed Arvelo, 24, of York, early Saturday morning after the two struggled and Arvelo pulled a pistol, according to state police.
Two officers chased Arvelo after he robbed a man of his car keys in a city parking lot, state police said. One officer caught up with Arvelo and tried to subdue him, but the suspect resisted arrest, state police Trooper Tom Pinkerton said.
A preliminary
investigation showed the officer involved in the struggle saw Arvelo pull a pistol, and the officer shot him, Pinkerton said.
Police recovered Arvelo's pistol at the scene, and it was a stolen firearm, Pinkerton said.
Pinkerton said today state police's investigation into the shooting is ongoing.
York County District Attorney Tom Kearney said of the autopsy results, "All that means is that a death is the result of another's actions; it doesn't mean it's criminal in nature."
Kearney said he would wait until the state police report was submitted to him, and then, "I'll have to make a call as to whether it was criminal or whether the shooting was justified."Read more at www.ydr.com
The two officers involved in the shooting, who have not been named, have
been placed on administrative leave, per the department's protocol, city police Chief Wes Kahley said.
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Coroner's office seeking family of dead man Lawrence Racz Jr.
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Coroner's office seeking family of dead man
The York County Coroner's Office is seeking family members of a York City man who died Monday of natural causes.
Lawrence Racz Jr., 58, of 1043 E. Market St., died Monday morning in his home, the coroner's office said.
The coroner's office is searching for Racz's family members.
Anyone with information is asked to call the coroner's office at 840-7617.
Read more at www.ydr.com
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