Solar flare erupts, creating spectacular images

Solar flare erupts, creating spectacular images — A solar flare erupted from the sun in an impressive display captured by NASA cameras, but scientists say the medium-sized event will have a minimal impact, if any, on Earth.

The flare peaked early Tuesday and created a large cloud that appeared to cover almost half the surface of the sun, NASA said. A cloud of charged particles erupted from the sun's outer atmosphere and is expected to pass by Earth late Wednesday or early Thursday, causing a minor disruption to Earth's magnetic field, according to the National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.

"This wasn't really such a big event," said Michael Hesse, chief of the space weather laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was spectacular to watch, but not big in terms of hazards to the Earth."

At most, the cloud that erupted from the sun may cause some brief interruptions to high-frequency radio communications, especially closer to the North and South poles, said Joe Kunches, a space scientist at SWPC. Some global positioning devices also may make tiny errors, he said.

This image provided by NASA shows the Sun unleashing a medium-sized solar flare, a minor radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection on June 7, 2011. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface. The ejection should deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th or June 9th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when the CME arrives. (AP Photo/NASA)

"It doesn't look like it's going to be a direct hit on the Earth," Kunches said. "It's going to be, if you use a baseball analogy, a little bit low and outside on the pitch."

The aurora borealis also may be more visible Thursday or Friday night, he said.

Images of the flare were recorded by an orbiting satellite called the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The photos and video were the most spectacular that the satellite has captured since it was launched last year, Hesse said.

A much larger solar flare erupted Saturday, but NASA didn't capture images because it happened on the side of the sun opposite Earth, Hesse said. Scientists have been expecting an increase in solar activity because the sun is moving into a more volatile period of an 11-year cycle in which its magnetic field reverses its orientation.

"The sun has woken up and is becoming more active as we approach the solar maximum," expected in 2013, Hesse said. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Solar flare erupts, creating spectacular images

Long Before Earth, Asteroids May Have Served as Incubators of Life

Long Before Earth, Asteroids May Have Served as Incubators of Life — Meteorites don't always announce their arrival, but the one bearing down on Canada on Jan. 18, 2000, was not shy. Plunging toward the ground in a roaring fireball, it took aim at Lake Tagish in the British Columbia mountains and — this being winter — smashed itself into fragments on the lake's icy surface.

It wasn't until Jan. 25 and 26 that scientists could travel to the site and collect bits of what was once a meteorite measuring perhaps 13 ft. (4 m) across. Those fragments have been kept frozen to preserve any organic compounds that may have been riding aboard the rock when it crashed and are periodically subjected to scientific analysis. The latest of those studies was published this week in the journal Science, and what the new investigators reported was eye opening: biology may have been incubating on asteroids long before it arose on Earth.

The elements that give rise to life are hardly unique to our planet. Hydrocarbons, the basic molecules from which known life is built, are made of nothing but hydrogen and carbon. Two other key players are oxygen and nitrogen — and all four of them are everywhere in the universe, often combining in interesting ways.

"There's no doubt from astronomical observations that we can see organic compounds out there in space," says geologist and mineralogist Christopher Herd of the University of Alberta, the lead author of the new paper. "You can also cook them up on Earth."

A fragment of the Lake Tagish meteorite

But if raw materials were all it took for life to exist, it would be everywhere. It's not, of course, partly because those extremely simple building blocks have to be processed into slightly less simple ones and on and on through various stages of refinement. Three of the most critical materials produced in this process are amino acids (from which DNA is made); monocarboxylic acids, a suite of hydrocarbons that readily participate in chemical reactions; and macromolecular clumps of organic material called kerogen.

Bits of some of these prebiotic materials have been observed in meteor samples before, and Herd and his colleagues were thus not terribly surprised to find them in the tiny 0.4-in. (1 cm) samples of the Tagish meteorite that they studied. What was unexpected, however, was that they saw all the materials in various stages of development, from their simplest forms to their most complex ones. It was as if the scientists had discovered not only butterflies but also cocoons and caterpillars.

"There was this linear correlation from one stage to the next to the next," says Herd. "We saw the organic materials through five different stages of sophistication."

The Tagish meteor, Herd and his colleagues concluded, must have been operating as a sort of incubator, flying through space and cooking up increasingly elaborate organic compounds until it deposited them in British Columbia. On modern-day Earth, which is saturated with life, a few more organic materials wouldn't make much of a difference. On the original, barren Earth, they could have played a meaningful role — adding at least some extraterrestrial seasonings to the organic soup already bubbling here.

Just how a dead rock flying through icy space could support such elaborate chemical processes is not clear, but Herd has a theory. The Tagish meteor formed the same way all the asteroids and meteors in the solar system formed: accreting out of the primordial swirl of gas and dust that also gave rise to the sun and planets. The oxygen and hydrogen in that cloud would have combined to create at least some water, which would also have been mixed into the matrix of the asteroid. And the gravitational heat generated as the rock was coalescing, coupled with radioactive materials onboard, would have kept the water warm and, in a sense, pulsing.

"It could have operated almost like a hydrothermal cell," says Herd, "with water circulating through the asteroid. After a while, the heat would run out and that process would shut off, and you'd be left with different stages of organic materials."

None of this means that true life could have arisen on asteroids; their warm phase would simply have been too brief. What it does mean is that biological processes may be taking place everywhere in the solar system and that some of the early chemical seeds may have been scattered on Earth. In other words, we have met the aliens — and they are at least partly us. ( time.com )

READ MORE - Long Before Earth, Asteroids May Have Served as Incubators of Life

Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California?

Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California? - The Internet is abuzz over an alleged UFO sighting in the night sky over Oakland, California.

Three fast-moving dots of light can be seen travelling close together in a video posted on YouTube by a KevinMC360.

The 'UFO squadron' shows the three lights in a triangular pattern spotted on May 26.

Scroll down for video

Spotted: Three fast-moving dots of light can be seen travelling close together

Cynics claim the cameraman has merely captured a flock of birds, but Kevin insists the sighting was genuine.

In the film, he follows a plane as a point of reference.

'For all you bird lovers out there you can call them geese, if you like, but I will only laugh at you,' he said.

The UFO video has already attracted more than 2,500 viewings.

He posted it a year after claiming to have filmed 'a group of spacecraft' over Oakland.

'I got them. There was a squadron of spacecraft,' he claimed in the video, which shows five lights in a V-formation.

That video has been viewed more than 23,780 times. ( dailymail.co.uk )

Watch the video

READ MORE - Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California?

Superflare from Crab Nebula Has Astronomers Mystified

Superflare from Crab Nebula Has Astronomers Mystified - The Crab Nebula, the dusty remains of an exploded star, has unleashed a surprisingly massive flare that is five times more powerful than any eruption previously seen from the celestial object, leaving scientists struggling to explain the event, NASA says.

The so-called "superflare" was detected on April 12 by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which is continuously mapping the sky in gamma ray wavelengths in search of gamma-ray bursts, the brightest explosions in the universe.

The Crab Nebula's strong outburst lasted six days, and its exact cause has scientists scratching their heads, especially since the superflare followed an earlier gamma-ray flare from the nebula in January.

"These superflares are the most intense outbursts we've seen to date, and they are all extremely puzzling events," said Alice Harding at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in a statement. "We think they are caused by sudden rearrangements of the magnetic field not far from the neutron star, but exactly where that's happening remains a mystery."

The outburst observed by Fermi was likely triggered by electrons with energies 100 times greater than can be achieved in any particle accelerator on Earth, scientists said. This makes them the highest-energy electrons known to be associated with any galactic source.

Based on the rise and fall of gamma rays during the April outbursts, scientists estimate that the size of the emitting region must be comparable to our entire solar system.

The Crab Nebula's legacy

The spectacular and colorful Crab Nebula is the wreckage of a dying star that emitted an explosion of light that reached Earth in the year 1054. The former star was located 6,500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Taurus when it erupted in a brilliant supernova explosion.

At the heart of an expanding gas cloud lies what is left of the original star's core, a super-dense neutron star that spins 30 times a second. With each rotation, the star swings intense beams of radiation toward Earth, creating the pulsed emission characteristic of spinning neutron stars, which are also known as pulsars.

Apart from these pulses, astrophysicists thought the Crab Nebula was a virtually constant source of high-energy radiation. But, in January, scientists representing a variety of space-based observatories, including NASA's Fermi, Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, reported long-term changes in brightness at X-ray energies.

"The Crab Nebula hosts high-energy variability that we're only now fully appreciating," said Rolf Buehler, a member of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) team at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, a facility jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University in California.

Monitoring the Crab Nebula

Since 2009, Fermi and the Italian Space Agency's AGILE satellite have detected several short-lived gamma-ray flares at energies that are hundreds of times higher than the nebula's observed X-ray variations. The observed flares measured energies greater than 100 million electron volts. In perspective, visible light has energies between 2 and 3 electron volts.

The superflare that was detected on April 12 by Fermi's LAT and later by the Italian AGILE satellite, grew about 30 times more energetic than the nebula's normal gamma-ray output, and was about five times more powerful than any previously seen outbursts. On April 16, an even brighter flare erupted, but within a couple of days, the unusual activity completely faded out.

The Crab Nebula's high-energy emissions are still mysterious, but are thought to be the result of physical processes that tap into the neutron star's rapid spin. Theorists generally agree that the flares must arise within about one-third of a light-year from the neutron star, but efforts to locate them more precisely have so far been unsuccessful.

Since September 2010, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has routinely monitored the Crab Nebula in an effort to identify X-ray emissions associated with the outbursts. When Fermi scientists alerted astronomers to the onset of a new flare, Martin Weisskopf and Allyn Tennant at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., activated a set of pre-planned observations using Chandra.

"Thanks to the Fermi alert, we were fortunate that our planned observations actually occurred when the flares were brightest in gamma rays," Weisskopf said. "Despite Chandra's excellent resolution, we detected no obvious changes in the X-ray structures in the nebula and surrounding the pulsar that could be clearly associated with the flare."

Scientists are still searching for the answer, but they think the flares occur as the intense magnetic field near the pulsar undergoes sudden restructuring. Such changes can accelerate particles like electrons to rapid velocities near the speed of light. As these high-speed electrons interact with the magnetic field, they emit powerful gamma rays. ( space.com )

READ MORE - Superflare from Crab Nebula Has Astronomers Mystified

Mercury, Venus, Mars & Jupiter Converge in Night Sky

Mercury, Venus, Mars & Jupiter Converge in Night Sky - During this month of May, four bright planets will engage in a fascinating dance with each other in the morning sky.

Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter will be involved in a series of conjunctions, joined at the end of the month by a very thin, waning crescent moon. We could even refer to this as a "celestial summit meeting," or more precisely, a series of summit meetings during May 2011.

Twice during May three planets will converge to form a "trio."

According to Belgian calculator Jean Meeus, a trio is when three planets fit within a circle with a minimum diameter of 5 degrees. Such a limit was one that Meeus chose more or less arbitrarily, but as he notes, "We have to make a choice."

On Wednesday (May 11), Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will converge within 2.05-degrees of each other, followed just 10 days later by another trio, this time formed by Mercury, Venus and Mars, which will crowd within a 2.13-degree circle. Then late in the month, on three successive mornings, May 29th, 30th, and 31st, the waning crescent moon will arrive, sweeping past Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury stretched out across the eastern sky from upper right to lower left.

Evil omen? Impending disaster?

What might ancient sky watchers from 500 or 1,000 years ago have ascribed to such a series of gatherings as this?

Most likely, they would have felt a mixture of fear and wonder. A fine example was a case in 1186 A.D. when an unusual gathering of the five planets visible to the naked eye resulted in a near-panic across the whole of Europe after religious leaders predicted that worldwide disasters would result!

Even today, in our modern world, similar fears sometimes arise.

You need only Google-search the date May 5, 2000, and you will find a number of different websites that predicted a variety of disasters attributed to the combined gravitational and tidal forces associated with a gathering of the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

One website proclaimed that it would be "one of the most exciting, powerful and transformative celestial events of our millennium according to astronomy and astrology experts."

In many ways, these words sound all too similar to the hype and tripe that has been bandied about during these past few years concerning the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012.

Needless to say, we all survived the recent 2000 celestial summit and despite what you might hear or read in the coming days ahead, absolutely nothing cataclysmic will take place (at least nothing that can be directly attributed to this impending dawn gathering of the moon and planets).

Tough to see

The only tragedy regarding this display is that those living north of the equator will have a difficult time seeing it.

At first glance there doesn't appear to be any problem concerning the visibility of these objects. Their elongations from the sun will range from 18 degrees to 26 degrees, which should place them all in dark skies. Unfortunately, during May, as seen especially from mid-northern latitudes, the ecliptic is oriented at a shallow angle relative to the eastern horizon at dawn.

As a result, the moon and planets will rise into view during late twilight and will lie very low to the east-northeast horizon by sunrise. To see them, you'll have to make sure not to have any potential obstructions to your visibility such as trees or buildings in that direction.

But coming above the horizon so near to sunrise will also mean that you'll have a fighting chance of catching only Venus (magnitude -4) and Jupiter (magnitude -2) with unaided eyes. Whether you will be able to glimpse zero-magnitude Mercury is debatable, and certainly binoculars will be needed if you have any hope of seeing Mars (magnitude +1).

The crescent moon will also prove to be a visual challenge, being only 2 percent illuminated on May 31. Low-lying clouds or haze near the horizon on any given morning will only reduce your chances of success.

In contrast, those of our SPACE.com readers in the Southern Hemisphere, where the ecliptic at dawn appears at a somewhat steeper angle, will see this ever-changing array somewhat higher and in a somewhat darker sky; more like mid-twilight as opposed to late twilight in the north.

Indeed, those living in far southern locations such as Cape Town, South Africa; Melbourne, Australia; or Dunedin, New Zealand, will have a much better chance of seeing and enjoying this month-long dance of the planets. ( SPACE.com )

READ MORE - Mercury, Venus, Mars & Jupiter Converge in Night Sky