Black Holes: Seeing The Invisible!

50 Foot Long Congo Snake

In 1959 Remy Van Lierden was flying over the Katanga region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was flying a helicopter and returning to the base that he commanded in Kamina. As he passed over a clearing in the jungle he noticed a large animal laying out in the sun. What he saw was a 50 foot long snake, with green and brown scales. He couldn’t believe his eyes and neither could his passengers. He circled around and made several passes off the monstrous snake, however he flew away when it got into the striking position and thought it was too dangerous to contour to fly over the animal. During one of the passes he made a passenger on his aircraft snapped this picture to prove what they saw. The snake in question is clearly large and it’s easy to see how it could have been a threat to a low flying helicopter. It’s believed that the snake is a Titanoboa which is thought to be extinct, and has been for millions of years. But it’s possible that the species may have survived. The natives claim that the snake pictured here is a small one and that they can get up to twice and three times the size.

Ten interesting facts about Uranus

Like the classical planets, Uranus is visible to the naked eye, but it was never recognised as a planet by ancient observers because of its dimness and slow orbit. Sir William Herschel announced its discovery on 13 March 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the Solar System for the first time in history and making Uranus the first planet discovered with a telescope.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It has the third-largest planetary radius and fourth-largest planetary mass in the Solar System. Uranus is similar in composition to Neptune, and both have different bulk chemical composition from that of the larger gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

(The five largest moons of Uranus) Like all of the giant planets, Uranus has its share of moons. At present, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 27 natural satellites. But for the most part, these moons are small and irregular. 

Uranus’ moons are named after characters created by William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. These include Oberon, Titania and Miranda.  All are frozen worlds with dark surfaces. Some are ice and rock mixtures.  The most interesting Uranian moon is Miranda; it has ice canyons, terraces, and other strange-looking surface areas.

Only one spacecraft in the history of spaceflight has ever made a close approach to Uranus. NASA’s Voyager 2 conducted its closest approach to Uranus on January 24th, 1986, passing within 81,000 km of the cloud tops of Uranus. It took thousands of photographs of the gas/ice giant and its moons before speeding off towards its next target: Neptune.

Uranus has rings: All the gas and ice giants have their own ring systems, and Uranus’ is the second most dramatic set of rings in the Solar System.

Uranus makes one trip around the Sun every 84 Earth years. During some parts of its orbit one or the other of its poles point directly at the Sun and get about 42 years of direct sunlight. The rest of the time they are in darkness.

All of the planets in the Solar System rotate on their axis, with a tilt that’s similar to the Sun. In many cases, planet’s have an axial tilt, where one of their poles will be inclined slightly towards the Sun. But the axial tilt of Uranus is a staggering 98 degrees! In other words, the planet is rotating on its side. 

Uranus is approximately 4 times the sizes of Earth and 63 times its volume.

Uranus is blue-green in color, the result of methane in its mostly hydrogen-helium atmosphere. The planet is often dubbed an ice giant, since 80 percent or more of its mass is made up of a fluid mix of water, methane, and ammonia ices.

Uranus hits the coldest temperatures of any planet. With minimum atmospheric temperature of -224°C Uranus is nearly coldest planet in the solar system. While Neptune doesn’t get as cold as Uranus it is on average colder. The upper atmosphere of Uranus is covered by a methane haze which hides the storms that take place in the cloud decks.

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Images credit: NASA/ wikipedia

Crows Are Capable of Conscious Thought, Scientists Demonstrate For The First Time

The research has been published in Science.

New research into the minds of crows has revealed a jaw-dropping finding: the canny corvids aren’t just clever - they also possess a form of consciousness, able to be consciously aware of the world around them in the present. In other words, they have subjective experiences.

This is called primary, or sensory, consciousness, and it had only previously been demonstrated in primates - which means we now may have to rethink our understanding of how consciousness arises, in addition to reconsidering the avian brain.

“The results of our study opens up a new way of looking at the evolution of awareness and its neurobiological constraints,” said animal physiologist Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen.

Continue Reading.

Bioluminescent Plankton

Scientists have only recently discovered that this type of plankton glows when they are moved because of stress - ironic when you consider how relaxing the sight of the shimmering waves are in the dark night. Bioluminescence is used as a defence mechanism to draw predators towards the creature trying to eat the plankton. The tiny flashes of light also disorientate and surprise the predator.

These tiny organisms produce light using a chemical called luciferin. The process of creating a bioluminescent light, which is simply light produced within a living creature, differs between organisms. Some need a particular food or another creature for the effect to happen. But this type of plankton, called dinoflagellates, produce luciferin on their own. The light the tiny plankton emit is called ‘cold light’, meaning less than 20% of the light generates heat.

Huge areas of the ocean can become populated by glowing plankton but the effect is especially common in warm-water lagoons that have narrow openings to the sea. This causes the plankton to gather and become trapped, causing the water to turn orange.

Image credit: Will Ho, Kin Cheung, Landscapes Maldives & eyegami

Source: Kuoni

Jupiter seen by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft

Animation taken from video: Jeff Quitney

Captain’s Log | September 15, 2017

The end is now upon us. Within hours of the posting of this entry, Cassini will have burned up in the atmosphere of Saturn … a kiloton explosion, spread out against the sky in a pyrrhic display of light and fire, a dazzling flash to signal the dying essence of a lone emissary from another world. As if the myths of old had foretold the future, the great patriarch will consume his child. At that point, that golden machine, so dutiful and strong, will enter the realm of history, and the toils and triumphs of this long march will be done.

For those of us appointed long ago to undertake this journey, it has been a taxing 3 decades, requiring a level of dedication that I could not have predicted, and breathless times when we sprinted for the duration of a marathon. But in return, we were blessed to spend our lives working and playing in that promised land beyond the Sun.

My imaging team members and I were especially blessed to serve as the documentarians of this historic epoch and return a stirring visual record of our travels around Saturn and the glories that we found there. This is our gift to the citizens of planet Earth.

So, it is with both wistful, sentimental reflection and a boundless sense of pride in a commitment met and a job well done that I now turn to face this looming, abrupt finality.

It is doubtful we will soon see a mission as richly suited as Cassini return to this ringed world and shoulder a task as colossal as we have borne over the last 27 years.

To have served on this mission has been to live the rewarding life of an explorer of our time, a surveyor of distant worlds. We wrote our names across the sky. We could not have asked for more.

I sign off now, grateful in knowing that Cassini’s legacy, and ours, will include our mutual roles as authors of a tale that humanity will tell for a very long time to come.

A rendered view of the night sky from a planet in a globular cluster. Source: Reddit

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night comes out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) | I. Isaac Asimov, in Nightfall, had a very different take.

Titanoboa

Titanoboa is an extinct genus of snakes that is known to have lived in present-day La Guajira in northern Colombia. The giant snake lived during the Middle to Late Paleocene epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. 

The only known species is Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake ever discovered. By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae to those of extant snakes, researchers estimated that the largest individuals of T. cerrejonensis found had a total length around 42 feet and weighed about 2,500 pounds. 

While initially thought to have been an apex predator of the Paleocene ecosystem in which it lived, evidence has pointed to the genus being predominantly piscivorous. Titanoboa’s massive size would have made it difficult to move on land, so the giant snake would probably have spent most of its life in the water, hunting for fish and other aquatic prey.

Scientists Stunned By a Neanderthal Hybrid Discovered in a Siberian Cave

Okay, the title of The Atlantic’s article might be a little click-bait-y. But the discovery is truly remarkable. A new bone has been analyzed from the already-famous cave in Russia, and it belonged to, per DNA analysis, the daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.