These are beautiful! They almost look sedimentary, which at least makes some sense given that the region Opportunity is roving, Meridiani Planum, was once under water. Closeups of those rocks show they have the famous "blueberries", concretions of jarosite formed by mineral-laden water.
Stuart has lots more pictures he’s fiddled with, too, and it’s well worth your looking around his site. You should also read Emily Lakdawalla’s great description of Concepcion, talking about how we know it’s a fresh crater about 1000 years old. It’s a fascinating read.
I’ve been posting sporadically on how sunspots are starting to come back to the Sun, and I’m glad to see a new group sprouted up recently… and it’s a monster:
These images are from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The orange one is in visible light, and the sunspots are pretty obvious. The green one shows the Sun in the far ultraviolet, and you can see the sunspots are pretty intense, blasting out high-energy light. Sunspots are indicators of magnetic activity, and the intense magnetic field can accelerate plasma (ionized gas) to high energies.
Just so’s you know, a hundred Earths could fit across this image, so that oughta give you an idea of just how big these blemishes are.
What this means is that the Sun is becoming active again. You can see it better in this video I put together using SOHO animations. These are real SOHO observations. Note that some of the data are missing so the Sun’s rotation is a bit jerky, and that you can see that data dropouts and other problems plague these sort of observations. Oh– actually, another group popped up on the Sun earlier, too, and you can see those in the visible light data.
You can actually see the plasma flowing along the magnetic field lines in the latter part of the video.
Right now, the Sun is struggling to climb back up to the peak of its magnetic cycle, which will probably occur in 2013 or later, given how slow this has been — which you might want to keep in mind if some crackpot or scammer is trying to sell you on the idea that solar activity will destroy the Earth in 2012. When the Sun is at its peak, the magnetic field is at its strongest, and we see the most sunspots. However, the strongest solar flares and other explosive events tend not to happen until well after the cycle peaks, so it’ll be late 2013 or 2014 before we see the most vigorous activity, if the Sun holds to its previous behavior.
Again, people selling you on 2012 disasters generally have a very tenuous grasp on science. The less you know the better for them.
I expect we’ll be seeing more and more sunspots now as time goes by. It’s nice to see this happening, as it adds to the activity seen in December, and ends a long period of minimal sunspots — heck, for a long time, there were none at all. Boring. Now we can look forward to some exciting action again… just in time for SDO to launch, too!
[P.S. If anyone can tell me why the first few frames of my uploaded videos turn gray sometimes, that would be nice. I don't know whether to curse iMovie, Flash, YouTube, or all three.]
And now I can honestly say I’ve worked with WHil WHeaton! WH00t! You can find out who’s in it and all that on Boing Boing. It was created by Elaine Doyle and Olga Nunes, and I thank them for letting me be in it!
I don’t watch the show Dragon’s Den, though I’ve heard of it: potential entrepreneurs pitch their products to a group of wealthy investors in the hope that they will get some capital. The investors — the dragons — are blunt when they need to be, and it does make for an interesting show.
Too bad ultradistilled water doesn’t cure vulturism. That guy looks pretty unhappy as he left, but he was treated very nicely indeed compared to what he deserves.
That’s right: we can now watch video, live, from the International Space Station.
<Futurama voice>Welcome to the world of TOMORROW!</Futurama voice>
This is very cool. You can watch live as the astronauts on board do their duty, see shots outside the portal to view the station components, and even watch as the Earth rolls by under the station at 8 kilometers per second. Wow.
This is precisely the kind of thing I’ve been harassing my friends at NASA media to implement for years. I’m glad they’ve finally done it!
Pity poor Pluto. The debate over its planethood has caused much consternation over the years. Part of the problem is that it’s so dinky and so far away! If it were closer, or bigger, we almost certainly wouldn’t be having this debate.
These images, just released today (but taken in 2002), represent the most detailed surface map of Pluto ever taken. Even in Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys Pluto is only a few pixels across, but it’s possible using sophisticated image processing techniques to tease out the detail seen.
Very cool. But these maps are more than just eye candy. They show significant changes on Pluto’s surface since the last maps were made using Hubble 16 years ago. Pluto’s north pole is brighter and the south pole darker, implying that material has migrated from one pole to the other, or at least that the poles are changing in different ways. Pluto orbits the Sun "on its side", dramatically more tilted than Earth’s mere 23.5°. Right now, the north pole of the world is facing the Sun, meaning it’s summer on Pluto’s northern hemisphere (as it’ll remain for a long time, given Pluto’s 248 Earth-year long year).
Not only that, these images show that Pluto has reddened quite a bit in the past few years. This is one reason it took so long to release the images; Marc Buie, the astronomer who took them, saw some things in the data that were difficult to understand, and wanted to make sure they were correct. These images are composites of pictures taken using a blue and a green filter. During the time these observations were made, in 2000 – 2002, Pluto got much darker in blue, which was unexpected. Pluto’s moon, Charon, did not get any bluer, indicating that the cause was something intrinsic to Pluto and not that something weird happened with Hubble.
So why is Pluto redder now? That’s not clear. In general, ultraviolet light from the Sun interacts with the chemicals on Pluto, creating reddish organic molecules; this is seen on lots of distant, icy objects in the Kuiper Belt (the region past Neptune where Pluto orbits). Incredibly, even at the numbing distance of over 4 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) from the Sun, Pluto is still strongly affected by it. But this is happening while overall the northern hemisphere got brighter and the southern darker. You’d expect Pluto to get darker if it gets redder, so clearly there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
These maps will prove crucial in planning the imaging run of the New Horizons probe, which will scream past Pluto in 2015. Having even a crude map in advance of the encounter will help scientists plan their limited time more carefully.
Plus, these Hubble images may very well be the best view we’ll get until New Horizons gets to Pluto, for that matter. And whether you think Pluto is the littlest planet or one of the biggest of the Kuiper Belt Objects, it’s a fascinating place worthy of a lot more study. And in just a little more than five years we’ll see fantastic images of it, too. I can’t wait!
Video courtesy Emily Lakdawalla (and my thanks to her for a helpful conversation). Image and video credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (SwRI)
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising