Seriously, we all have our problems, but if a connection to rational thought and common sense is any measure of sanity then people like Jones and his followers have to be close to certifiable.
HELSINKI (AFP) – The Northern Lights have petered out during the second half of this decade, becoming rarer than at any other time in more than a century, the Finnish Meteorological Institute said Tuesday.
The Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, generally follow an 11-year "solar cycle", in which the frequency of the phenomena rises to a maximum and then tapers off into a minimum and then repeats the cycle.
"The solar minimum was officially in 2008, but this minimum has been going on and on and on," researcher Noora Partamies told AFP.
"Only in the past half a year have we seen more activity, but we don't really know whether we're coming out of this minimum," she added.
The Northern Lights, a blaze of coloured patterns in the northern skies, are triggered by solar winds crashing into the earth and being drawn to the magnetic poles, wreaking havoc on electrons in the parts of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere and magnetosphere.
So a dimming of the Northern Lights is a signal that activity on the sun which causes solar winds, such as solar flares and sun sports, is also quieting down.
For researchers like Partamies, it is the first time they can observe through a network of modern observation stations what happens to this solar cycle when it becomes as badly disrupted as it is now.
"We're waiting to see what happens, is the next maximum going to be on time, is it going to be late, is it going to be huge?" Partamies said.
During the cycle's peak in 2003, the station on Norway's Svalbard island near the North Pole, showed that the Northern Lights were visible almost every single night of the auroral season, which excludes the nightless summer months.
That figure has fallen to less than 50y percent, while the southernmost station, situated in southern Finland, has been registering only two to five instances annually for the past few years.
Numbers of stars in universe tripled Thursday, 2 December 2010
by Heather Catchpole .. Cosmos Online ..
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 and its surrounding region. Astronomers have dubbed NGC 1132 a "fossil group" because it contains an enormous amount of dark matter – but could it be just many more red dwarf stars? .. Credit: NASA/ESA/CXC
SYDNEY: There are three times as many stars in the universe as they had previously supposed - and "possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars" - say astronomers.
The startling find, published in the British journal Nature, has exciting implications for the discovery of new planets as well as theories on galaxy formation and dark matter.
Astronomers Pieter van Dokkum and Charles Conroy found greater than expected numbers of faint, small stars known as red dwarfs in relatively close galaxies as observed with Hawaii's twin Keck Telescopes.
"Possibly trillions of Earths"
More stars means potentially many more planets, says lead author and astronomer van Dokkum, from Yale University, Connecticut: "There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars," he said.
There are currently 504 known exoplanets, most of which are large gaseous planets similar to or larger than Jupiter. But Earth-like planets have been found around red dwarf stars, including Gliese 581, a red dwarf whose planet count was recently [Sept] updated to six.
The red dwarf stars that the team discovered are typically more than 10 billion years old, old enough for complex life to have evolved, van Dokkum points out. "It's one reason why people are interested in this type of star."
More red dwarfs in elliptical galaxies
In terms of sheer numbers, stars of low mass are more dominant that hotter stars such as the Sun, which is five to 10 times more massive than a red dwarf, according to University of Sydney astronomer Scott Croom, who was not involved in the research.
Although there is no reason for red dwarf stars to have more Earth-like planets than Sun-like stars, "if there are more stars, there are more stars that can support life," Croom says.
Van Dokkum and Conroy found 80% of stars within eight elliptical galaxies 50 million and 300 million light-years away were red dwarfs. Elliptical galaxies are egg-shaped galaxies that generally evolved earlier than spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.
Major impact on theory of dark matter
"No one knew how many of these stars there were," says van Dokkum.
The results show elliptical galaxies have 20 times the number of red dwarfs as the Milky Way, which has a "major impact" for theories on galaxy evolution and calculations of the amount of dark matter required to 'balance' observations of the galaxies, says Conroy, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
"We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies," he says. If red dwarfs are more abundant that astronomers realized, it may mean less dark matter is required in models that look at how star mass and galaxy rotation are linked.
Astronomers first postulated the existence of dark matter after observations of physical factors such as motion of galaxies didn't fit with galaxies' supposed mass.
This 'missing mass' became known as dark matter and is intrinsic to theories of galaxy evolution. "It's telling us elliptical galaxies have less dark matter than we originally thought and more of the mass is provided by stars," said Croom.
Forgot about the Julia Sweeney videos .. revisit .. one day ..
Late thought .. since there are three times as many stars in the universe does that mean there will be three times as many people with stars in the eyes? LOL
Kepler Space Telescope Picks Up Six-Planet System By Jesse Emspak | February 3, 2011 3:31 PM EST
NASA's Kepler space telescope has picked up multiple planets in a system with a star much like the sun, the largest group of transiting planets yet discovered.
NASA This artist’s conception shows the Kepler-11 planetary system and our solar system from a tilted perspective to demonstrate that the orbits of each lie on similar planes.
The system is very different from the one we call home. The star, about 2,000 light years away, is very much like the sun, but the planets around are in fast, tight orbits. One takes as little as ten days. Five of the six are closer to their sun than Mercury is to ours.
One of the most surprising things about the system is that it is stable at all, says jack Lissauer, a co-investigator for the Kepler Mission at NASA's Ames Research Center. For that many planets to be crammed into a small radius the orbits have to be nearly circular, and they have to have just the right distance from each other.
"This is why I was so surprised," he said. "There were so many planets so close in."
Many of the solar systems discovered have been the homes of Jupiter-sized planets in eccentric orbits. Those types of systems are much easier to see, because a big planet's effects on the parent star are more visible. Kepler is designed to seek out planets closer in size and mass to Earth.
Thus far Kepler has had one big success - in January NASA confirmed it had found the first rocky planet outside our solar system. It is 4.6 times as massive as Earth and has a surface temperature approaching 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and like the most recent crop of planets, orbits close to its star.
In this case, Kepler found six planets, all of them transiting the face of the star, called Kepler-11. The planets, in order of their distance from the star, are Kepler-11b, 11c, 11d, 11e, 11f and 11g. Kepler 11b is at about 9 million miles from its sun. The outermost one is on the order of 45 million miles out.
The sizes of the planets around Kepler-11 range from 1.97 to 4.5 times the radius of Earth. The largest are comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune, which means they probably have a lot of hydrogen and helium, Lissauer said. Their heavy gravity allows them to keep those gases in their atmospheres for a relatively long period.
The smaller planets, Lissauer says, are denser, and could have a mixture of rock and water. But the water wouldn't be like an ocean on Earth. Without any other gases in the atmosphere, the water would vaporize and become the atmosphere. Descending onto one of those worlds would be like falling into a cloud that got thicker and thicker until it became liquid. At a certain point one might hit the core of the planet, which could be solid or molten, or the pressure could get so high that the water would solidify. "But we don't really know if any of them has any water," Lissauer said.
Whether a planet retains an atmosphere at all depends on the surface temperature and the gravity, Lissauer says. In our own solar system, a planet like Mercury can't hold an atmosphere very long because it gets blasted by the sun's heat and any gases (and most liquids) boil off and get blown away by the solar wind.
In the Kepler-11 system, the fact that the planets are heavier would mean they can hold an atmosphere longer. Lissauer says the only ones they are reasonably sure about are the largest two, which given their diameters and masses would have to have retained a lot of hydrogen and helium.
For Kepler 11's planets, the surface temperatures would be between 1,400 degrees and 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, assuming they had no atmosphere at all. (Venus, by comparison, has a very thick atmosphere and maintains a surface temperature of 860 degrees F, while Mercury, which is airless, gets to about 750 F at noon).
Scientists can learn so much about the system because of the way Kepler finds planets. When a planet transits across the face of its star, the light dips slightly. The size of the planet can be deduced from how the brightness changes, and by observing over several months one can estimate the period of its orbit. That gives a good estimate of the planets mass.
Lissauer says the team poring over the data will keep looking for evidence of more planets. He notes that the telescope can only see a small portion of the sky, and even then, only those planetary systems that are facing edge-on towards Earth. That means there are many more that Kepler can't see.
Thus far more than 1,200 candidates for planets have been found.About 68 of them are Earth-sized, with a fraction of those in the "habitable zone" of their stars, the distance at which liquid water can exist.
Kepler won't be the last mission like this. Kepler only looks at a relatively small part of the sky, centered on the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Lissauer says he has a proposal in for another mission, one that will survey the whole sky, using better camera technology (Kepler was designed a decade ago). While that one won't be quite as sensitive as Kepler is, it will do a better job of finding systems closer to us as it will look at a wider area. He hopes to get it launched about five years from now.
To contact the reporter responsible for this story call (646) 461 6917 or email j.emspak@IBTimes.com.
Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'
Stephen Hawking dismisses belief in God in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. Photograph: Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/Discovery Channel
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence
Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 May 2011 22.00 BST
A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.
In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.
Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.
The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.
"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said.
"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.
Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.
The 69-year-old physicist fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the US in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health. He has since returned to his Cambridge department as director of research.
The physicist's remarks draw a stark line between the use of God as a metaphor and the belief in an omniscient creator whose hands guide the workings of the cosmos.
In his bestselling 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking drew on the device so beloved of Einstein, when he described what it would mean for scientists to develop a "theory of everything" – a set of equations that described every particle and force in the entire universe. "It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God," he wrote.
The book sold a reported 9 million copies and propelled the physicist to instant stardom. His fame has led to guest roles in The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Red Dwarf. One of his greatest achievements in physics is a theory that describes how black holes emit radiation.
In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."
In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics.
Hawking responded to questions posed by the Guardian and a reader in advance of a lecture tomorrow at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"
In the talk, he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.
Hawking suggests that with modern space-based instruments, such as the European Space Agency's Planck mission, it may be possible to spot ancient fingerprints in the light left over from the earliest moments of the universe and work out how our own place in space came to be.
His talk will focus on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.
M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.
Evidence in support of M-theory might also come from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
One possibility predicted by M-theory is supersymmetry, an idea that says fundamental particles have heavy – and as yet undiscovered – twins, with curious names such as selectrons and squarks.
Confirmation of supersymmetry would be a shot in the arm for M-theory and help physicists explain how each force at work in the universe arose from one super-force at the dawn of time.
Another potential discovery at the LHC, that of the elusive Higgs boson, which is thought to give mass to elementary particles, might be less welcome to Hawking, who has a long-standing bet that the long-sought entity will never be found at the laboratory.
Hawking will join other speakers at the London event, including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Science, truth and beauty: Hawking's answers
What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"
The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.
You've said there is no reason to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper. Is our existence all down to luck?
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.
So here we are. What should we do?
We should seek the greatest value of our action.
You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
What are the things you find most beautiful in science?
Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology, and the fundamental equations of physics."
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