Some Of My Favourite Absolutely SICK Facts About The Trappist-1 Exoplanets: - Theyre All Very Close To

Please join the Department of Awesome Natural Phenomena as they marvel at the jaw-dropping sight of a ‘dirty thunderstorm’ taking place above Sicily’s Mount Etna during its latest eruption on December 3, 2015. Mount Etna is the tallest active volcano on the European continent.

A dirty thunderstorm, also known as volcanic lightning, is the result of electrical charges generated by the collision of rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in a volcanic plume. These collision produce a static charge in the same way that colliding ice particles do during regular thunderstorms.

Freelance photographer Marco Restivo captured this incredible image by combining a sequence of five separate photos.

Head over to The Huffington Post for timelapse video and additional images.

[via The Telegraph]

Why not just buid a solar panel around the sun to solve all energy problemss?

Behold the Dyson Sphere

Dyson sphere is a hypothetical mega-structure that completely encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output.

Over the years many variants have been explored:

The simplest such arrangement is the Dyson ring, in which all ‘energy harvesting structures’ share the same orbit.

Add multiple Dyson ring structures and you will get a Dyson swarm.

Now what if you didn’t like a consistent orbit for your structures, you could employ a solar sail to continuously modify its orbit( called a statite ).

Such an arrangement would be known as a Dyson Bubble

Then there is the fictionally popular version - The Dyson Shell, where a uniform solid shell of matter just encapsulates the entire star.

And many many more. But you get the gist.

Could there be Dyson Spheres out there?

When scientists were monitoring the brightness from some stars, they found that it fluctuated in some odd ways like so:

                          Brightness v/s time for KIC 8462852

It is common for such dips to occur since when a planet eclipses a star, there would a drop in the brightness observed from the star.

                       Brightness v/s time for a binary star system

But what was baffling was the duration and period of occurrence of these dips.

Although the main line of rationale remains as asteroid impact remnants or interstellar collisions causing these aberrations in data.

But to say that these could the signs of an alien civilization does remain to be the more entertaining interpretation.

Great Question. Thanks for asking !

** For more information. check out this TED talk

Newest LIGO Signal Raises A Huge Question: Do Merging Black Holes Emit Light?

“The second merger held no such hints of electromagnetic signals, but that was less surprising: the black holes were of significantly lower mass, so any signal arising from them would be expected to be correspondingly lower in magnitude. But the third merger was large in mass again, more comparable to the first than the second. While Fermi has made no announcement, and Integral again reports a non-detection, there are two pieces of evidence that suggest there may have been an electromagnetic counterpart after all. The AGILE satellite from the Italian Space Agency detected a weak, short-lived event that occurred just half a second before the LIGO merger, while X-ray, radio and optical observations combined to identify a strange afterglow less than 24 hours after the merger.”

Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies it. A supernova emits light; a neutron star merger emits gamma rays; a quasar emits radio waves; merging black holes emit gravitational waves. But if there’s any sort of matter present outside the event horizons of these black holes, they have the potential to emit electromagnetic radiation, or light signals, too. Our best models and simulations don’t predict much, but sometimes the Universe surprises us! With the third LIGO merger, there were two independent teams that claimed an electromagnetic counterpart within 24 hours of the gravitational wave signal. One was an afterglow in gamma rays and the optical, occurring about 19 hours after-the-fact, while the other was an X-ray burst occurring just half a second before the merger.

Could either of these be connected to these merging black holes? Or are we just grasping at straws here? We need more, better data to know for sure, but here’s what we’ve got so far!

Giant squids might be even bigger than we realized

According to research from Charles Paxton, fisheries ecologist and statistician at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, published in the Journal of Zoology this month, the giant squid could grow to reach as much as 65 feet. But even that is a “conservative analysis,” as size could protect against their #1 predator.

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As a paleo-artist, one of my biggest pet peeves are prehistoric whales reconstructed not as whales but as sinewy, snarling, shrink-wrapped marine reptiles. It’s just not a plausible reconstruction, even if it’s highly speculative, and it paints an incorrect image in the public eye. Granted, this is a struggle I’ve exlpored in all forms of paleo-art and reconstructive illustration. But the whales have really been getting to me recently.

Here are some recontructions of Basilosaurus, if you don’t know what I mean (one by Karen Carr, the other by an artist I could not determine):

These snakey, reptilious reconstructions may stem from the fact that Basilosaurus, one of the first early cetaceans to be found, was believed to be a reptile when first discovered (hence the name). Maybe we simply haven’t fully shaken that mindset.

But still! Even the damn Smithsonian, which has such a wonderful collection of ancient cetaceans, is at fault in this:

Don’t even get me started on their recently-closed dinosaur hall. Thank the lord they’re finally renovating that dated piece of crap.

I have struggled to find a way to reconstruct these animals so that they are just a little bit more believeable. Up top I’ve done a really really quick sketch of Dorudon. I tried to not only make its body more streamlined and whale-like (because Dorudon has a lovely, almost but not quite modern-looking skeleton), but I also tried to give it markings similar to what we find on modern cetaceans for camouflage. Because hey, who’s to say they didn’t have ‘em? I tried to make them familiar but not directly copied from any modern species.

Aaaaand end rant.

Cristobalite, Hematite

SiO2, Fe2O3

Locality:

Caspar quarry, Bellerberg volcano, Ettringen, Mayen, Eifel, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

An interesting homoepitactic intergrowth from brown and black hematite  

Photo: Michael Förch

Cristobalite is a silica polymorph that is thermodynamically stable only at temperatures above 1470°C, up to the melting point at 1705°C, at atmospheric pressures. It commonly metastably persists or even forms at much lower temperatures in silica-rich volcanic and sedimentary environments. It can form crystals in cavities, probably vapour-deposited, or spherulites in obsidian or other silicic volcanics.

Hematite is rather variable in its appearance - it can be in reddish brown, ocherous masses, dark silvery-grey scaled masses, silvery-grey to black crystals, and dark-grey masses, to name a few. What they all have in common is a rust-red streak.

The Drake Equation

In 1961, following an early SETI experiment using radio telescopes called Project Ozma, astronomer Frank Drake arranged a historic meeting at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The ten attendees - among them a young Carl Sagan - discussed the feasibility and methodology of detecting extraterrestrial civilizations using radio astronomy. They formulated the Drake Equation - a rough, speculative means of estimating the possible number of current technologically-advanced civilizations in the galaxy. 

N = the number of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations potentially detectable by radio signals in the Milky Way Galaxy.   

Depending on the values used for each variable, N can work out to be hundreds of thousands or more, or very few. 

R* = Rate of new star formation. 

One estimate is 7 stars per year.

Fp = Percentage of stars with planetary systems around them.

New solar systems are being discovered every year. 

Ne = Number of planets per star system capable of sustaining life. 

Depending upon the temperature, type, and size of the star, the habitable zone of a planet for Earth-like life may be nearer or further from its star. Based on our own solar system, we might guess 1 or 2.

Fl = Fraction of those planets upon which life appears. 

How many of those habitable planets upon which life has developed is difficult to estimate. In our own solar system, it’s at least 1 - there is a good chance that at one point, life developed on Mars, though traces of it have yet to be found.

Fi = Fraction of those planets where intelligent life appears.

Estimates vary wildly. We know it’s happened at least once here on Earth. As ‘intelligence’ is subjective, it may be that it has developed in other non-human, communicating species, like whales. 

Fc = Fraction of those societies that develop advanced communication technology and send signals into space.

Intentional or unintentional, other civilizations might transmit identifiable signals into outer space that modern Earth technology could pick up.

L = Lifetime of communicative civilizations. 

Do technologically-capable civilizations inevitably self-destruct, or can they last forever? This is an immensely uncertain question. We’ve been communicating with radio waves for fewer than 100 years, with the long-term survival of our species and our status as ‘technological’ uncertain. 

Nope.

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.