The Sun
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Scientists are expected to unveil on Wednesday the first-ever photograph of a black hole, a breakthrough in astrophysics providing insight into celestial monsters with gravitational fields so intense no matter or light can escape.
The U.S. National Science Foundation has scheduled a news conference in Washington to announce a “groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project,” an international partnership formed in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.
Simultaneous news conferences are scheduled in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.
A black hole’s event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust, all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light – gets sucked in irretrievably.
While scientists involved in the research declined to disclose the findings ahead of the formal announcement, they are clear about their goals.
“It’s a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of over 200 people internationally,” astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said at a March event in Texas.
The news conference is scheduled for 9 a.m. (1300 GMT) on Wednesday.
The research will put to the test a scientific pillar – physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, project scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope. That theory, put forward in 1915, was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.
SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES
The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes.
The first – called Sagittarius A* – is situated at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
The second – called M87 – resides at the center of the neighboring Virgo A galaxy, boasting a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light-years away from Earth. Streaming away from M87 at nearly the speed of light is a humongous jet of subatomic particles.
Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are extraordinarily dense entities formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation and perhaps merging with other black holes.
Psaltis described a black hole as “an extreme warp in spacetime,” a term referring to the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time joined into a single four-dimensional continuum.
Doeleman said the project’s researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 from a global network of telescopes. The telescopes that collected that initial data are located in the U.S. states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the network.
The scientists also will be trying to detect for the first time the dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds before being swallowed into oblivion.
The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light – radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon – around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole’s shadow or silhouette.
Einstein’s theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole.
“The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein’s theory,” Psaltis said. “If we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, ‘Clearly, something is not exactly right.'”
Source: NewsMax America
When NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover landed in 2012, it brought along eclipse glasses. The solar filters on its Mast Camera (Mastcam) allow it to stare directly at the Sun.
Over the past few weeks, Curiosity has been putting them to good use by sending back some spectacular imagery of solar eclipses caused by Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ two moons.
Phobos, which is as wide as 16 miles (26 kilometers) across, was imaged on March 26, 2019 (the 2,359th sol, or Martian day, of Curiosity’s mission); Deimos, which is as wide as 10 miles (16 kilometers) across, was photographed on March 17, 2019 (Sol 2350). Phobos doesn’t completely cover the Sun, so it would be considered an annular eclipse. Because Deimos is so small compared to the disk of the Sun, scientists would say it’s transiting the Sun.
In addition to capturing each moon crossing in front of the Sun, one of Curiosity’s Navigation Cameras (Navcams) observed the shadow of Phobos on March 25, 2019 (Sol 2358). As the moon’s shadow passed over the rover during sunset, it momentarily darkened the light.
Solar eclipses have been seen many times by Curiosity and other rovers in the past. Besides being cool — who doesn’t love an eclipse? — these events also serve a scientific purpose, helping researchers fine-tune their understanding of each moon’s orbit around Mars.
Before the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed in 2004, there was much higher uncertainty in the orbit of each moon, said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, a co-investigator with Curiosity’s Mastcam. The first time one of the rovers tried to image Deimos eclipsing the Sun, they found the moon was 25 miles (40 kilometers) away from where they expected.
“More observations over time help pin down the details of each orbit,” Lemmon said. “Those orbits change all the time in response to the gravitational pull of Mars, Jupiter or even each Martian moon pulling on the other.”
These events also help make Mars relatable, Lemmon said: “Eclipses, sunrises and sunsets and weather phenomena all make Mars real to people, as a world both like and unlike what they see outside, not just a subject in a book.”
To date, there have been eight observations of Deimos eclipsing the Sun from either Spirit, Opportunity or Curiosity; there have been about 40 observations of Phobos. There’s still a margin of uncertainty in the orbits of both Martian moons, but that shrinks with every eclipse that’s viewed from the Red Planet’s surface.
Brian Stelter is famous for complaining too much.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO – Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex attend a Commonwealth Day youth event at Canada House in London, Britain, March 11, 2019. Chris Jackson/Pool via REUTERS
April 8, 2019
By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) – Last May, millions across the world tuned in to watch Queen Elizabeth’s grandson Prince Harry tie the knot with his American actress girlfriend Meghan Markle, with the media feting the couple as the epitome of glamor and royal modernity.
But less than a year later, the couple have found themselves on the receiving end of much less flattering coverage as they prepare for the birth of their first child this spring.
“Frown Jewels: Meg is banned by Queen from using Di gems,” the front page headline on Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper the Sun said on Thursday over a story which claimed the monarch had banning Meghan from wearing royal jewelry, a sign of growing tensions between Harry’s wife and senior Windsors.
“Meghan Markle ‘pretty difficult’ person to deal with – ‘Harry is Miserable,’” said a Daily Express headline last month, while the Daily Mail ran this story in January: “How Meghan’s favourite avocado snack … is fuelling human rights abuses, drought and murder”.
There is no doubting the enduring, global fascination with the British royals. On Tuesday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as Harry and Meghan are officially known, launched their first Instagram account. Two days later, it had 3.4 million followers.
While much reporting by the British press on the royal family is respectful, verging on the sycophantic, at other times it can be harshly critical, even cruel.
“The press here in Britain is very aggressive, and they don’t hold back,” said veteran Sun photographer Arthur Edwards who has covered the royals for more than four decades.
The first public acknowledgement that Harry and Meghan were dating in November 2016 came in a statement criticizing the media for intruding into his then girlfriend’s private life.
It was indicative of how Harry views the media which he blames for the death of his mother Princess Diana. She died in Paris in 1997, when he was just 12, when her limousine crashed as it sped away from chasing paparazzi photographers.
“If there is a story and something’s been written about me, I want to know what’s been said. But all it does is upset me and anger me,” Harry said in a broadcast interview while on military service in Afghanistan in 2012.
In his youth, Harry found himself in the headlines for under-age drinking, wearing a Nazi outfit to a costume party and scuffling with photographers outside London nightclubs.
But his popularity grew both with Britons generally and the media who loved his antics when on official engagements, such as posing with the likes of Olympic gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt.
“FANTASTIC”
“When you went on tour with Harry before he was married, it was a fantastic tour. Every day he would make great pictures, he would do something that was spectacular,” Edwards said. “We think he’s the best thing in the royal family.”
But since Harry tied the knot, something changed, he said.
Newspapers were given minimal access to the couple’s wedding in May and there has some discontent among senior figures in the industry about the level of access to the royals who continue to be a huge draw for readers.
“Suddenly he’s turned completely the other way – he’s Mr Cool,” Edwards said. “He thinks, possibly, ‘why should I do anything for them?’”
The reason is likely to be the recent coverage of his wife.
There have been numerous reports of excessive demands the new duchess has made of staff and of rifts between Meghan and Harry and his elder brother William and his wife Kate.
Also, Meghan’s family, particularly her father, have regularly made headlines with critical comments about her.
Meghan herself said she avoided newspapers or Twitter. “I don’t read anything, it’s much safer that way,” she told a panel discussion at King’s College London in March.
But in January, U.S. magazine People said five of Meghan’s close friends had broken their silence to speak about the “lies and untruths” and “global bullying” the duchess had suffered and their fears about how this would affect her and her baby.
The following month, her friend, Hollywood film star George Clooney told Australian magazine WHO the media were harassing Meghan as they had Diana.
“She’s a woman who is seven months pregnant and she has been pursued and vilified and chased in the same way that Diana was and it’s history repeating itself,” he said.
Royal commentators and even those on the receiving end say media negativity is a rite of passage for the royals.
“It was something that Prince Charles said years ago when he and Diana were receiving some negative coverage. People put you on a pedestal just to knock you off,” Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine, told Reuters.
Those who write about the royals say the problem is not so much the media itself, but vicious comments from online trolls and heated social media arguments involving Meghan’s fans. The rise in such abuse led Britain’s royals to unveil a new online protocol last month warning users of possible police action. [nL5N20R2OX]
“There’s been an awful lot of negativity online, social media, racism, all sorts of vile abuse but that’s not coming from the mainstream media,” said Robert Jobson, veteran royal correspondent for the London Evening Standard newspaper.
“The odd commentator may say something but actually on the whole it’s been very, very positive,” he added, saying people were shooting the messenger for covering negative stories coming from Meghan’s own family.
Readers, though, are not so sure.
“I think she’s been treated a bit unfairly from what I’ve seen,” said student Savanah Edwards. “I see that she’s criticized for a lot and I don’t think that’s fair to her.”
American student Laura Youngblood, 21, said: “I think that she gets a bit of bad rap. Marrying into the royal family is difficult coming from an American background which is a completely different culture. As Americans as a whole, we admire her so much – we think she’s great.”
In a speech to 12,000 children and teachers at Wembley Arena in London last month, Harry made little secret of his ongoing dislike of the media.
“Every day you are inundated with an over-exposure of advertising and mainstream media, social media and endless comparisons, distorting the truth and trying to manipulate the power of positive thinking,” he told them. “But you don’t let them sway you.”
Whatever the Windsors might think of the media, royal watchers say there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.
“The bottom line is when they’re doing their job they want to be seen doing what they’re doing and they’re quite happy to give access to the media,” Jobson said.
(Additional reporting by Jayson Mansaray; editing by Stephen Addison and Robin Pomeroy)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: A supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun is seen in an undated NASA artist’s concept illustration. REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout/File Photo
April 6, 2019
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists are expected to unveil on Wednesday the first-ever photograph of a black hole, a breakthrough in astrophysics providing insight into celestial monsters with gravitational fields so intense no matter or light can escape.
The U.S. National Science Foundation has scheduled a news conference in Washington to announce a “groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project,” an international partnership formed in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.
Simultaneous news conferences are scheduled in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.
A black hole’s event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust, all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light – gets sucked in irretrievably.
While scientists involved in the research declined to disclose the findings ahead of the formal announcement, they are clear about their goals.
“It’s a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of over 200 people internationally,” astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said at a March event in Texas.
The news conference is scheduled for 9 a.m. (1300 GMT) on Wednesday.
The research will put to the test a scientific pillar – physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, project scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope. That theory, put forward in 1915, was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.
SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES
The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes.
The first – called Sagittarius A* – is situated at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
The second – called M87 – resides at the center of the neighboring Virgo A galaxy, boasting a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light-years away from Earth. Streaming away from M87 at nearly the speed of light is a humongous jet of subatomic particles.
Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are extraordinarily dense entities formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation and perhaps merging with other black holes.
Psaltis described a black hole as “an extreme warp in spacetime,” a term referring to the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time joined into a single four-dimensional continuum.
Doeleman said the project’s researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 from a global network of telescopes. The telescopes that collected that initial data are located in the U.S. states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the network.
The scientists also will be trying to detect for the first time the dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds before being swallowed into oblivion.
The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light – radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon – around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole’s shadow or silhouette.
Einstein’s theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole.
“The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein’s theory,” Psaltis said. “If we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, ‘Clearly, something is not exactly right.’”
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Source: OANN
Apr 4, 2019; Augusta, GA, USA; A general view of the sun rising near the 18th green during the second round of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur at the Champions Retreat. Mandatory Credit: Chris Trotman/Augusta National/Handout Photo via USA TODAY Sports
April 5, 2019
By Steve Keating
AUGUSTA, Georgia (Reuters) – A lot of fathers found themselves out of jobs on Friday as golfers playing in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur (ANWA) opted for club caddies over daddies for the final round.
After the opening two rounds of the 54-hole tournament staged at Champions Retreat in nearby Evans, awed young women, many with their equally-awed fathers on their bags, got first look at the revered layout that is home for the Masters, the year’s first major.
But walking with their daughters in Friday’s practice round is as close as some dad caddies will come to Augusta National with several deciding on a switch and handing their fathers pink slips.
While dads may know their daughters better than anyone, local caddies, some who have worked Augusta National for decades, know the course and particularly the baffling greens.
For some, including Jennifer Kupcho, who will take a one- shot lead over Mexico’s Maria Fassi into the final round, that kind of knowledge trumps family ties.
The world’s top-ranked amateur, Kupcho’s decision to go with a local caddie was an easy one, although the American laughed she had not yet broken the news to her father Michael.
“I had my caddie there with me the first time I played so we had fun and he knows what he is doing,” said Kupcho, who used the same caddie Brian Murphy when she played Augusta as a guest. “I think he’s hired.”
HISTORIC DAY
Instead of being part of an historic day on which the first competitive women’s round will be played at Augusta National and a champion crowned, Michael Kupcho will watch from outside the ropes along with Kevin Harford, who was on his daughter Haylee’s bag the first two rounds.
A tough choice, however, was made easier when Harford told his daughter the smart move might be to go with a local caddie.
“We came into the day kind of trying to figure it out and I was going to decide afterwards but I think I am going to go to a local caddie because they know so much,” said Haylee, who sits at one-over, six off the pace.
“But my dad was able to kind of walk to get some notes and feel it out so we could make that decision.
“He’s willing to do anything that makes me happy and is best for me so he kind of came to me on the second hole and said I don’t know maybe you should take the caddie.”
For Spain’s Marta Perez, who describes herself as a golfer who plays with passion and emotion, having someone on her bag who can read her is more important than reading greens.
And in her case father Jose knows best.
“My dad, he is my coach, he started coaching me when I was eight years old so this is special for me,” said Perez.
“We had a discussion if it was better to have a local caddie tomorrow but I want to stick with our plan I think it is great that he is here, he knows me more than anyone.
“I think it is special for him to be here with me because we are going to remember this forever.”
(Editing by Ed Osmond)
Source: OANN
For five months in mid-2017, Emily Mason did the same thing every day. Arriving to her office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, she sat at her desk, opened up her computer, and stared at images of the Sun — all day, every day.
“I probably looked through three or five years’ worth of data,” Mason estimated. Then, in October 2017, she stopped. She realized she had been looking at the wrong thing all along.
Mason, a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., was searching for coronal rain: giant globs of plasma, or electrified gas, that drip from the Sun’s outer atmosphere back to its surface. But she expected to find it in helmet streamers, the million-mile tall magnetic loops — named for their resemblance to a knight’s pointy helmet — that can be seen protruding from the Sun during a solar eclipse. Computer simulations predicted the coronal rain could be found there. Observations of the solar wind, the gas escaping from the Sun and out into space, hinted that the rain might be happening. And if she could just find it, the underlying rain-making physics would have major implications for the 70-year-old mystery of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is so much hotter than its surface. But after nearly half a year of searching, Mason just couldn’t find it. “It was a lot of looking,” Mason said, “for something that never ultimately happened.”
The problem, it turned out, wasn’t what she was looking for, but where. In a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Mason and her coauthors describe the first observations of coronal rain in a smaller, previously overlooked kind of magnetic loop on the Sun. After a long, winding search in the wrong direction, the findings forge a new link between the anomalous heating of the corona and the source of the slow solar wind — two of the biggest mysteries facing solar science today.
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How It Rains on the Sun
Observed through the high-resolution telescopes mounted on NASA’s SDO spacecraft, the Sun – a hot ball of plasma, teeming with magnetic field lines traced by giant, fiery loops — seems to have few physical similarities with Earth. But our home planet provides a few useful guides in parsing the Sun’s chaotic tumult: among them, rain.
On Earth, rain is just one part of the larger water cycle, an endless tug-of-war between the push of heat and pull of gravity. It begins when liquid water, pooled on the planet’s surface in oceans, lakes, or streams, is heated by the Sun. Some of it evaporates and rises into the atmosphere, where it cools and condenses into clouds. Eventually, those clouds become heavy enough that gravity’s pull becomes irresistible and the water falls back to Earth as rain, before the process starts anew.
On the Sun, Mason said, coronal rain works similarly, “but instead of 60-degree water you’re dealing with a million-degree plasma.” Plasma, an electrically-charged gas, doesn’t pool like water, but instead traces the magnetic loops that emerge from the Sun’s surface like a rollercoaster on tracks. At the loop’s foot points, where it attaches to the Sun’s surface, the plasma is superheated from a few thousand to over 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit. It then expands up the loop and gathers at its peak, far from the heat source. As the plasma cools, it condenses and gravity lures it down the loop’s legs as coronal rain.
Mason was looking for coronal rain in helmet streamers, but her motivation for looking there had more to do with this underlying heating and cooling cycle than the rain itself. Since at least the mid-1990s, scientists have known that helmet streamers are one source of the slow solar wind, a comparatively slow, dense stream of gas that escapes the Sun separately from its fast-moving counterpart. But measurements of the slow solar wind gas revealed that it had once been heated to an extreme degree before cooling and escaping the Sun. The cyclical process of heating and cooling behind coronal rain, if it was happening inside the helmet streamers, would be one piece of the puzzle.
The other reason connects to the coronal heating problem — the mystery of how and why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is some 300 times hotter than its surface. Strikingly, simulations have shown that coronal rain only forms when heat is applied to the very bottom of the loop. “If a loop has coronal rain on it, that means that the bottom 10% of it, or less, is where coronal heating is happening,” said Mason. Raining loops provide a measuring rod, a cutoff point to determine where the corona gets heated. Starting their search in the largest loops they could find — giant helmet streamers — seemed like a modest goal, and one that would maximize their chances of success.
She had the best data for the job: Images taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, a spacecraft that has photographed the Sun every twelve seconds since its launch in 2010. But nearly half a year into the search, Mason still hadn’t observed a single drop of rain in a helmet streamer. She had, however, noticed a slew of tiny magnetic structures, ones she wasn’t familiar with. “They were really bright and they kept drawing my eye,” said Mason. “When I finally took a look at them, sure enough they had tens of hours of rain at a time.”
At first, Mason was so focused on her helmet streamer quest that she made nothing of the observations. “She came to group meeting and said, ‘I never found it — I see it all the time in these other structures, but they’re not helmet streamers,’” said Nicholeen Viall, a solar scientist at Goddard, and a coauthor of the paper. “And I said, ‘Wait…hold on. Where do you see it? I don’t think anybody’s ever seen that before!’”
A Measuring Rod for Heating
These structures differed from helmet streamers in several ways. But the most striking thing about them was their size.
“These loops were much smaller than what we were looking for,” said Spiro Antiochos, who is also a solar physicist at Goddard and a coauthor of the paper. “So that tells you that the heating of the corona is much more localized than we were thinking.”
While the findings don’t say exactly how the corona is heated, “they do push down the floor of where coronal heating could happen,” said Mason. She had found raining loops that were some 30,000 miles high, a mere two percent the height of some of the helmet streamers she was originally looking for. And the rain condenses the region where the key coronal heating can be happening. “We still don’t know exactly what’s heating the corona, but we know it has to happen in this layer,” said Mason.
A New Source for the Slow Solar Wind
But one part of the observations didn’t jibe with previous theories. According to the current understanding, coronal rain only forms on closed loops, where the plasma can gather and cool without any means of escape. But as Mason sifted through the data, she found cases where rain was forming on open magnetic field lines. Anchored to the Sun at only one end, the other end of these open field lines fed out into space, and plasma there could escape into the solar wind. To explain the anomaly, Mason and the team developed an alternative explanation — one that connected rain on these tiny magnetic structures to the origins of the slow solar wind.
In the new explanation, the raining plasma begins its journey on a closed loop, but switches — through a process known as magnetic reconnection — to an open one. The phenomenon happens frequently on the Sun, when a closed loop bumps into an open field line and the system rewires itself. Suddenly, the superheated plasma on the closed loop finds itself on an open field line, like a train that has switched tracks. Some of that plasma will rapidly expand, cool down, and fall back to the Sun as coronal rain. But other parts of it will escape – forming, they suspect, one part of the slow solar wind.
Mason is currently working on a computer simulation of the new explanation, but she also hopes that soon-to-come observational evidence may confirm it. Now that Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is traveling closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it, it can fly through bursts of slow solar wind that can be traced back to the Sun — potentially, to one of Mason’s coronal rain events. After observing coronal rain on an open field line, the outgoing plasma, escaping to the solar wind, would normally be lost to posterity. But no longer. “Potentially we can make that connection with Parker Solar Probe and say, that was it,” said Viall.
Digging Through the Data
As for finding coronal rain in helmet streamers? The search continues. The simulations are clear: the rain should be there. “Maybe it’s so small you can’t see it?” said Antiochos. “We really don’t know.”
But then again, if Mason had found what she was looking for she might not have made the discovery — or have spent all that time learning the ins and outs of solar data.
“It sounds like a slog, but honestly it’s my favorite thing,” said Mason. “I mean that’s why we built something that takes that many images of the Sun: So we can look at them and figure it out.”
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Source: InfoWars
A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by University of Warwick astronomers in a disc of debris formed from destroyed planets, which the star ultimately consumes.
The iron and nickel rich planetesimal survived a system-wide cataclysm that followed the death of its host star, SDSS J122859.93+104032.9. Believed to have once been part of a larger planet, its survival is all the more astonishing as it orbits closer to its star than previously thought possible, going around it once every two hours.
The discovery, reported in the journal Science, is the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy to discover a solid body in orbit around a white dwarf, using subtle variations in the emitted light to identify additional gas that the planetesimal is generating.
Using the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, the scientists studied a debris disc orbiting a white dwarf 410 light years away, formed by the disruption of rocky bodies composed of elements such as iron, magnesium, silicon, and oxygen – the four key building blocks of the Earth and most rocky bodies. Within that disc they discovered a ring of gas streaming from a solid body, like a comet’s tail. This gas could either be generated by the body itself or by evaporating dust as it collides with small debris within the disc.
The astronomers estimate that this body has to be at least a kilometer in size, but could be as large as a few hundred kilometers in diameter, comparable to the largest asteroids known in our Solar System.
White dwarfs are the remains of stars like our sun that have burnt all their fuel and shed their outer layers, leaving behind a dense core which slowly cools over time. This particular star has shrunk so dramatically that the planetesimal orbits within its sun’s original radius. Evidence suggests that it was once part of a larger body further out in its solar system and is likely to have been a planet torn apart as the star began its cooling process.
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Lead author Dr. Christopher Manser, a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics, said: “The star would have originally been about two solar masses, but now the white dwarf is only 70% of the mass of our Sun. It is also very small – roughly the size of the Earth – and this makes the star, and in general all white dwarfs, extremely dense.
“The white dwarf’s gravity is so strong – about 100,000 times that of the Earth’s – that a typical asteroid will be ripped apart by gravitational forces if it passes too close to the white dwarf.”
Professor Boris Gaensicke, co-author from the Department of Physics, adds: “The planetesimal we have discovered is deep into the gravitational well of the white dwarf, much closer to it than we would expect to find anything still alive. That is only possible because it must be very dense and/or very likely to have internal strength that holds it together, so we propose that it is composed largely of iron and nickel.
“If it was pure iron it could survive where it lives now, but equally it could be a body that is rich in iron but with internal strength to hold it together, which is consistent with the planetesimal being a fairly massive fragment of a planet core. If correct, the original body was at least hundreds of kilometers in diameter because it is only at that point planets begin to differentiate – like oil on water – and have heavier elements sink to form a metallic core.”
The discovery offers a hint as to what planets may reside in other solar systems, and a glimpse into the future of our own.
Dr. Christopher Manser said: “As stars age they grow into red giants, which ‘clean out’ much of the inner part of their planetary system. In our Solar System, the Sun will expand up to where the Earth currently orbits, and will wipe out Earth, Mercury, and Venus. Mars and beyond will survive and will move further out.
“The general consensus is that 5-6 billion years from now, our Solar System will be a white dwarf in place of the Sun, orbited by Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets, as well as asteroids and comets. Gravitational interactions are likely to happen in such remnants of planetary systems, meaning the bigger planets can easily nudge the smaller bodies onto an orbit that takes them close to the white dwarf, where they get shredded by its enormous gravity.
“Learning about the masses of asteroids, or planetary fragments that can reach a white dwarf can tell us something about the planets that we know must be further out in this system, but we currently have no way to detect.
“Our discovery is only the second solid planetesimal found in a tight orbit around a white dwarf, with the previous one found because debris passing in front of the star blocked some of its light – that is the “transit method” widely used to discover exoplanets around Sun-like stars. To find such transits, the geometry under which we view them has to be very finely tuned, which means that each system observed for several hours mostly leads to nothing. The spectroscopic method we developed in this research can detect close-in planetesimals without the need for a specific alignment. We already know of several other systems with debris discs very similar to SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, which we will study next. We are confident that we will discover additional planetesimals orbiting white dwarfs, which will then allow us to learn more about their general properties.”
President Trump spoke out many times about the dangers of vaccinating young children before he became president. Alex exposes the globalist agenda to use vaccines for population control.
Source: InfoWars
Apr 4, 2019; Augusta, GA, USA; A general view of the sun rising near the 18th green during the second round of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur at the Champions Retreat. Mandatory Credit: Chris Trotman/Augusta National/Handout Photo via USA TODAY Sports
April 4, 2019
(Reuters) – Jennifer Kupcho’s bogey-free run finally came to an end but the American hung on for a one-stroke lead after the second round of the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur on Thursday.
Kupcho, the world’s top-ranked amateur, shot a one-under par 71 at Champions Retreat Golf Club in Evans, Georgia, leaving her at five under on the week going into the final round on Saturday at Augusta National Golf Club ahead of next week’s Masters.
The 21-year-old American, fresh off what she called her first “perfect” round, started on the back nine and was cruising along at three-under for the day until her 14th hole, the par-four fifth, where she made her first bogey of the week.
Kupcho then made bogey at her penultimate hole before a par at the last left the overnight co-leader one shot clear of Mexico’s Maria Fassi (70), whose roller-coaster round included five bogeys, five birdies and an eagle.
Thailand’s Pimnipa Panthong (70) and Americans Sierra Brooks (70) and Kaitlyn Papp (69) were a further shot off the pace.
American Zoe Campos, who at 16 is one of the youngest players in the field, started the day in a share of the lead but mixed six bogeys with three birdies for a three-over 75 that left her four shots behind Kupcho.
Only the top-30 players after two rounds advanced to the final round, when they will become the first women to compete at the home of the Masters, but all 72 players in the field can play a practice round at Augusta National on Friday.
(Reporting by Frank Pingue in Toronto; Editing by Ken Ferris)
Source: OANN
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives for a Liberal Party caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Chris Wattie
April 3, 2019
By Steve Scherer and Julie Gordon
OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party rallied behind him on Wednesday over his expulsion of two former Cabinet ministers who had questioned his leadership, but he is still in a battle to regain dwindling support before a general election in October.
Trudeau told an emergency meeting of legislators on Tuesday that former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and former Treasury Board chief Jane Philpott had undermined the party and betrayed its trust.
The almost two-month old scandal centered on Wilson-Raybould, who in February said officials had inappropriately pressured her while she was justice minister to ensure construction company SNC-Lavalin Group Inc would escape a corruption trial.
In recent weeks, senior party figures and lawmakers had grown frustrated with Trudeau’s handling of the crisis, especially since both former ministers remained in the caucus despite their open hostility.
A long list of ministers and Liberal parliamentarians echoed Trudeau’s emphasis on party unity on Wednesday, but the opposition reiterated that the expulsions were proof of a cover up.
It is too soon to say whether Trudeau’s problems are over, political analysts said.
“This scandal has blotted out the sun. Now the question is, did he kill it?” said Ipsos pollster Darrell Bricker. Last week Ipsos put the Conservative Party 10 points ahead of the Liberals, thanks to the SNC-Lavalin affair.
“This issue has taken Trudeau into a territory where he could really lose,” Bricker said, adding that while the prime minister had now shored up his standing as party leader, he still must win back public opinion.
But another pollster, Frank Graves at Ekos, said there were signs the damage had been limited and that there was fatigue over the issue among the general public. Ekos polls showed the Liberals had lost 3-4 percentage points during the scandal.
“But the numbers we are seeing now are same as they were before,” Graves said.
Wilson-Raybould and Philpott, who quit as minister because she disagreed with how the SNC Lavalin affair was being managed, stood side-by-side while speaking to reporters on Wednesday.
They said they had defended the independence of the judiciary and had no regrets, but they stopped short of attacking Trudeau head on or threatening legal recourse.
The affair has hurt the prime minister’s image as a self-avowed feminist and a leader who has taken to heart the cause of Canada’s indigenous population.
He recruited candidates such as Wilson-Raybould, who was named as the first indigenous justice minister, and Philpott in part because they were new to politics.
During a special event in parliament aimed at encouraging more women to get involved in politics, some of the attendees turned their backs on Trudeau as he spoke, prompting several of his Cabinet ministers to come to his defense.
“We have a strong prime minister that is a feminist,” Tourism Minister Melanie Joly told reporters.
“I would argue that loyalty and feminism are two different things. There’s no male or female definition of loyalty. Either you want to work in a team, or you don’t.”
(Reporting by Steve Scherer and Julie Gordon; editing by David Ljunggren and Grant McCool)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: The sun sets behind an oil pump outside Saint-Fiacre, near Paris, France March 28, 2019. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann/File Photo
April 3, 2019
TOKYO (Reuters) – Oil prices rose for a fourth day on Wednesday, holding firm despite an industry report showing that U.S. inventories rose unexpectedly last week, with supply cuts and sanctions supporting the market.
Brent futures rose 22 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $69.59 a barrel by 0028 GMT, after earlier reaching $69.68, the highest since Nov. 13. The global benchmark closed half a percent higher on Tuesday.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude rose 6 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $62.64 cents a barrel. On Tuesday, the contract rose 1.61 percent, to settle at $62.58 a barrel, after touching $62.75, its highest level since Nov. 7.
“With output falling for a fourth month thanks to continued OPEC production cuts and sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, oil prices are well supported,” Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at Cityindex said in a note.
“On the demand side, easing economic slowdown fears are also offering support,” she said.
Supply from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting countries hit a four-year low in March, a Reuters survey found earlier this week. [OPEC/O]
Three of eight countries granted waivers by Washington to import oil from Iran have cut the imports to zero, a U.S. official said on Tuesday, adding that improved global oil market conditions would help reduce Iranian crude exports further.
“In November, we granted eight oil waivers to avoid a spike in the price of oil. I can confirm today three of those importers are now at zero,” Brian Hook, the special U.S. envoy for Iran, told reporters, without identifying the countries.
Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday the United States would continue to pressure Venezuela’s oil industry and those who support it with economic sanctions, citing world oil prices as low enough to allow for the measures.
Venezuela’s state-run energy company, PDVSA, kept oil exports near 1 million barrels per day in March despite U.S. sanctions and power outages that crippled its main export terminal, according to PDVSA documents and Refinitiv Eikon data, Reuters reported later in the day.
U.S. crude stocks rose unexpectedly last week, while gasoline and distillate inventories drew, industry group the American Petroleum Institute said late on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Aaron Sheldrick; editing by Richard Pullin)
Source: OANN
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