Jupiter Descending 

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Locality: Eagle’s Nest Mine, Placer Co., California, USA

Size: 9 x 6.1 x 1.8 cm

Photo Copyright © Anton Watzl Minerals

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oh my god. apparently during the making of the Voyager golden record they had to fly the recorder by commercial airlines to add some material onto the record last minute and they booked a seat for it under the name of Mr. Equipment

NGC 4590 (M68) Globular Cluster

33,000 light years from the Earth, this globular cluster has an odd orbit around our galaxy, orbiting like a comet does around a star, and moving away as far as 100,000 light years from the centre. 

It’s theorised that it’s likely a captured cluster, and appears to be undergoing core collapse, where the gravitational influence of the entire cluster bares down at the centre and causes black holes and dense stars to slowly migrate towards the centre, much as our own galaxy has the same mechanism creating the central black hole. 

cosiscience

Walking dinosaur, Columbus Interactive Science Museum

The Most Hardcore Period in Earth’s History, or the Permian, was preceded by a complete ecosystem collapse, and featured three different major mass extinction events - including the largest in earth’s history, the Great Dying, which lead to nearly all life on earth dying out. 

During the Permian, all the land on Earth was in one supercontinent, called Pangea; and all the water was in one ocean, called Panthalassa. This meant that life intermingled and expanded all over the world, more so than it was able to in other periods (besides the Triassic, which also featured a single continent and a single ocean). 

Pangea, and the Permian, was characterized by extremes. The beginning of the Period featured the end of the Karoo Ice Age - the poles were filled with ice caps, the center of the continent was dry, and temperature extremes were found throughout the land and ocean. The end featured multiple mass extinctions and a rapid warming of the continent, reaching the extreme heat of the Triassic period. 

By @franzanth​ 

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse was primarily caused by an intensification of that ice age - leading to the start of the Permian featuring dry, harsh, extreme climates. This time period featured the rapid diversification and specialization of some of the earliest animals adapted for a dry existence - prior to now, life almost entirely existed in the oceans, or in the forested and swampy world of the Carboniferous. This was the first truly dry time for (at least some) life.  

By @alphynix​

Olson’s Extinction marked a change from that initial habitat in the Cisuralian epoch to the next, the Guadalupian. As the world began to rapidly warm after the Karoo Ice Age ended, this lead to a major extinction of plants and vertebrates especially. The vertebrates would not fully recover before the Triassic; however, it did lead to many new forms, especially among synapsids, appearing in the new vacant environmental roles. 

(By @paleoart​) 

The Capitanian Extinction was caused by the explosion of a moderately sized laval flow system, the Emeishan Traps, which lead to immediate global cooling followed by rapid global warming. This greatly affected ocean chemistry, making it far more acidic than previously. Many reef animals were killed by this extinction, in addition to brachiopods; many vertebrates were also affected. 

(By @paleoart​) 

So the Permian was a hard, broken world when the Siberian Traps - one of the largest lava flows in Earth’s History, and one of the largest volcanic events known - exploded, leading to even more dramatic climate change and extremely rapid global warming. This lead to acidification of the ocean’s and a dramatic drop in ocean oxygen. Almost every group of organisms was dramatically affected, and this extinction was the largest known in Earth’s History, with between 85-96% of life on Earth dying out (and some researchers thinking it may have even been higher), leading to this extinction being dubbed The Great Dying. Many groups utterly disappeared, despite having been features of the entire Paleozoic Eon (the eon that the Permian was at the end of) - trilobites, eurypterids, “spiny sharks”, tabulate and rugose corals, and blastoids complete disappeared, as did many other groups. Brachiopods, Gastropods, Ammonites, Radiolarians, Foraminiferans, Crinoids, and most Parareptiles also went extinct, as did many synapsids and amphibians. It was an utter catastrophe. 

(By @paleoart​) 

The Permian was a time of extensive hardship, dramatic changes, and extinction event after extinction event. Life was truly on the brink - just as it was beginning to settle into terrestrial existence. So new animals, from insects to amniotes to conifers, spent their school years in a prehistoric hunger games - and only a few species managed to reach the weirdness kiln of the Triassic. 

Welcome to the Permian. 

The Most Hardcore Period of Earth’s History. 

Shout out to all of my awake friends!

After about a decade of slowly making friends with all the local crows in our neighborhood by feeding them peanuts when we go out walking, and putting peanuts out on our porch when they’re watching us, about three years back a pair of crows started bringing their fledgling by our porch to get peanuts. He was nervous at first but they showed him that it was safe and led him through the steps of cautiously getting nuts. Like one of his parents (we’re using male pronouns out of laziness, we can’t actually tell the gender of any of the crows), he has a funny habit of ruffling up his feathers into a big puff-ball, something we’ve really only seen this one and his parent do. We called his parent Fluffy because of this habit, so the fledgling was dubbed Fluffy Junior, often called just Junior.

Junior grew up coming by our porch for peanut treats, and following Jack and me when we go out walking. He’s easy to pick out because he’s far less skittish around us than any of the other crows who come to us for treats, and because he’s continued to do the fluff-ball thing. At first he came along with his parents, and then eventually just him, and then last winter he started bringing another crow along with him who was a lot more nervous around us than Junior or his parents had ever been.

Then for awhile this spring, we were only seeing Junior or his very skittish mate, never both of them together, and about two weeks back we finally found out why – Junior has a fledgling! They brought the baby over to the rooftop that’s across from our porch and fed him there, within easy access of the porch treats. The crow we’ve known since he was a baby now has a baby of his very own, and is carrying on the tradition of introducing the baby to us young.

So today we could hear Junior and his mate feeding the baby across the way – and if you’ve never heard crow fledglings being fed, it’s a very distinctive noise that sounds like a crow is being loudly strangled, and if you see it in process, you’ll notice that one crow has a much smaller beak that opens much wider and is bright red on the inside. When you know what to listen and look for, you can pretty easily spot fledglings being fed this time of the year, and often hear it from as much as a block away.

We want to encourage Junior to keep bringing his mate and their baby over to our place (and hopefully outlast the work-from-home era of our hateful neighbor who comes outside and claps at the birds when they make too much noise), so we put out some peanuts and a little bit of cheese for them, which is their absolute all time favorite treat. 

We figured Junior or his mate would get the food and continue to feed their baby on the roof like they’ve done frequently since the beginning of the month, but instead the entire family of three flew over and landed on our porch, and fed the baby right there, about four feet from our door, while Jack and I hid behind the curtains to get a look without spooking them. 

That’s a show of trust that not even Junior’s parents attempted, and it’s so exciting to think that this third generation of this little family will grow up that comfortable with being so close to us. They’re still rightfully skittish about being watched too closely, and we would never try to approach them or touch them, but it is lovely to get to see them behaving so calmly from such a close distance.

Gosh I love my crows.

The Titanoboa, is a 48ft long snake dating from around 60-58million years ago. It had a rib cage 2ft wide, allowing it to eat whole crocodiles, and surrounding the ribcage were muscles so powerful that it could crush a rhino. Titanoboa was so big it couldn’t even spend long amounts of time on land, because the force of gravity acting on it would cause it to suffocate under its own weight.

Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn = Ultra-Cool Science

On Sept. 15, 2017, our Cassini spacecraft ended its epic exploration of Saturn with a planned dive into the planet’s atmosphere–sending back new science to the very last second. The spacecraft is gone, but the science continues!

New research emerging from the final orbits represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the Saturn system – especially the mysterious, never-before-explored region between the planet and its rings. Some preconceived ideas are turning out to be wrong while new questions are being raised. How did they form? What holds them in place? What are they made of?

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work Oct. 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017.

Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly. For the first time, it probed Saturn’s magnetized environment, flew through icy, rocky ring particles and sniffed the atmosphere in the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between the rings and the cloud tops. Not only did the engineering push the spacecraft to its limits, the new findings illustrate how powerful and agile the instruments were.

Many more Grand Finale science results are to come, but today’s highlights include:

Complex organic compounds embedded in water nanograins rain down from Saturn’s rings into its upper atmosphere. Scientists saw water and silicates, but they were surprised to see also methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The composition of organics is different from that found on moon Enceladus – and also different from those on moon Titan, meaning there are at least three distinct reservoirs of organic molecules in the Saturn system.

For the first time, Cassini saw up close how rings interact with the planet and observed inner-ring particles and gases falling directly into the atmosphere. Some particles take on electric charges and spiral along magnetic-field lines, falling into Saturn at higher latitudes – a phenomenon known as “ring rain.” But scientists were surprised to see that others are dragged quickly into Saturn at the equator. And it’s all falling out of the rings faster than scientists thought – as much as 10,000 kg of material per second.

Scientists were surprised to see what the material looks like in the gap between the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere. They knew that the particles throughout the rings ranged from large to small. They thought material in the gap would look the same. But the sampling showed mostly tiny, nanograin- and micron-sized particles, like smoke, telling us that some yet-unknown process is grinding up particles. What could it be? Future research into the final bits of data sent by Cassini may hold the answer.

Saturn and its rings are even more interconnected than scientists thought. Cassini revealed a previously unknown electric current system that connects the rings to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a new radiation belt around Saturn, close to the planet and composed of energetic particles. They found that while the belt actually intersects with the innermost ring, the ring is so tenuous that it doesn’t block the belt from forming.

Unlike every other planet with a magnetic field in our Solar System, Saturn’s magnetic field is almost completely aligned with its spin axis. Think of the planet and the magnetic field as completely separate things that are both spinning. Both have the same center point, but they each have their own axis about which they spin. But for Saturn the two axes are essentially the same – no other planet does that, and we did not think it was even possible for this to happen. This new data shows a magnetic-field tilt of less than 0.0095 degrees. (Earth’s magnetic field is tilted 11 degrees from its spin axis.) According to everything scientists know about how planetary magnetic fields are generated, Saturn should not have one. It’s a mystery physicists will be working to solve.

Cassini flew above Saturn’s magnetic poles, directly sampling regions where radio emissions are generated. The findings more than doubled the number of reported crossings of radio sources from the planet, one of the few non-terrestrial locations where scientists have been able to study a mechanism believed to operate throughout the universe. How are these signals generated? That’s still a mystery researchers are looking to uncover.

For the Cassini mission, the science rolling out from Grand Finale orbits confirms that the calculated risk of diving into the gap – skimming the upper atmosphere and skirting the edge of the inner rings – was worthwhile.

Almost everything going on in that region turned out to be a surprise, which was the importance of going there, to explore a place we’d never been before. And the expedition really paid off!

Analysis of Cassini data from the spacecraft’s instruments will be ongoing for years to come, helping to paint a clearer picture of Saturn.

To read the papers published in Science, visit: URL to papers

To learn more about the ground-breaking Cassini mission and its 13 years at Saturn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

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