Have you seen today’s Space Weather?

EVER think to check the space weather forecast? Power suppliers and the operators of oil pipelines and railroads might want to start. Although it would take a truly massive space storm to truly massive space storm to cause a catastrophe. it is becoming clear that even modest solar activity poses a threat in our technology-dependent world. It makes railway signals go haywire and rusts oil pipelines to the point that they may leak, not to mention wearing down key components in power grids, which could drive up the cost of electricity.
If our planet happens to be in the line of fire when the sun belches out clouds of plasma, these coronal mass ejections (CMEs), can greatly disturb Earth's magnetic field. Such magnetic disturbances in turn can generate currents in power transmission lines, which act like giant antennas to pick up the disturbances.
A huge solar burst similar in strength to one observed in 1859, the biggest on record - could wreck the world economy. Big storms that occur about once per decade can also create chaos, like one that caused a 9-hour blackout in Quebec, Canada, in 1989.
Relatively minor space storms now appear to be behind a range of mysterious mishaps - railway signals malfunctioning in Archangel province in north-western Russia, for example, between 2000 and 2005. A study led by Eugenia Eroshenko of the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magneyism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation in Troitsk, Russia, examined episodes when signals turned red for minutes or even hours though the track ahead was clear, then spontaneously reverted to green.
Eroshenko's team found that 16 malfunctions of this sort observed between 2000 and 2005 coincided with space storms. "We were surprised by such a clear correlation," Eroshenko says.
How could space weather switch railroad signals from green to red? CMEs appear to interfere with circuits used to sense whether a segment of track is occupied. A power source connected to the two rails normally maintains a voltage between them while they are unoccupied. When a train is present, it eliminates the potential energy difference between the rails by allowing electricity to flow from one to the other. Space storms may have the same effect on the rails as a train, generating unwanted electric currents that could cause the voltage between the two rails to drop and the signal to turn red.
Team member Risto Pirjola of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki thinks that if other countries start examining the timing of unexplained signal problems, they may turn up a similar link to space weather. The evidence of a link to space storms is "very convincing", says Rod Perala of Electro Magnetic Applications, a consultancy in Lakewood, Colorado, that studies the effects of space weather. It would be wise for railways in other countries to check their equipment for vulnerability to space weather, too, he says.
It should be possible to modify railways to prevent these problems. Some sections seem immune to space weather, perhaps because of minor differences in electrical hardware, and the parts used in the problem-prone areas could be changed, Eroshenko says, but funds have been lacking.
Space weather may also make oil and gas pipelines more prone to rusting - a particular concern because rusty pipelines sometimes spring leaks, creating costly and environmentally damaging spills.
The chemical reactions that cause rust require electrons to flow from the pipe into the surrounding soil, so one way to keep corrosion at bay is to create a potential energy barrier that impedes this flow of electrons, using a power source attached to the pipe. Space storms, however, generate currents in pipes that can overwhelm this barrier, allowing corrosion to proceed.
Richard Marshall of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology 's space weather unit found that space storms disrupted voltages in pipelines in northern Australia, which is just 20 degrees from the equator
"Geomagnetic effects are becoming an issue that must be considered for pipelines at all latitudes," says Boteler.Subtle effects of run-of-the-mill space storms may also wear down key components in electric power grids, making them liable to early failure.More recently, there are signs that transformers can be destroyed by smaller currents over a period of hours or more. A long-lasting 2003 space storm delivered only relatively low-intensity currents to the South African power grid, but damaged several transformers anyway, notes US-based storm analysis consultant John Kappenman.

Geoneutrinos May Help Drive Earth's Internal Heat

An international team working below an Italian mountain has detected subatomic particles hanging out beneath the Earth's surface, where they may very well be affecting things like earthquakes and volcanoes.
Geoneutrinos -- which are anti-neutrinos -- result from the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle. Like their regular-matter counterparts, geoneutrinos are chargeless and tiny, passing through matter almost undisturbed. Regular neutrinos are emitted by the sun and cosmic rays.
The Borexino experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory was actually designed to watch for regular neutrinos, but scientists at Princeton University, part of an 88-member team, realized it could also look for subterranean subatomic particles. Geoneutrinos were first studied in 2005.
The Borexino study, published in the April issue of Physical Review Letters B, contains data from two years of observations, according to a Princeton news release. Geoneutrinos and neutrinos are hard to detect because they are so small and just barely interact with other matter, so it takes a long time to make just a handful of observations.
Earth scientists would like to know more about how decaying elements like uranium and thorium affect the planet's temperatures and cause convection in its mantle. Convection is the steady flow of hot rock deep in the Earth that drives plate tectonics -- the movement of continents, seafloor spreading, volcanoes and earthquakes. Scientists don't know whether radioactive decay drives the heating action, or is one of several factors.
At the observatory, scientists look for neutrinos by examining a lot of liquid. When the neutrinos hit the detector, tiny heat changes happen, and those observations allow scientists to indirectly detect the neutrinos.
The detector consists of nested spheres, containing thousands of tons of hydrocarbon liquid and highly purified water. An array of sensitive photodetectors watches for the telltale signals of solar neutrinos and geoneutrinos.
Scientists can imagine a day when a network of geoneutrino-detecting facilities, located at strategic spots around the globe, can sense particles to better understand the Earth's interior dynamics. Data about Earth's internal heat could one day provide enough information to predict volcano eruptions and earthquakes, according to the Princeton news release.

Something Strange on Titan !

The Cassini spacecraft is heading toward its closest encounter with the mysterious world of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, during a daring flyby Sunday night that scientists hope will answer a key question.
New findings on Saturn’s hydrocarbon-shrouded moon Titan reveal anomalies that although are likely explained by chemical processes, still leave the room open for the possibility of life.
The craft's magnetometer will be used to discover whether Titan has its own magnetic field, a feature that would unlock the unknown about the moon's interior. But to perform the experiment, Cassini has to dive deeper into the outer fringes of Titan's atmosphere than ever attempted before.
Titan is place that fascinates scientists because of its similarities to a young Earth. The moon has lakes and rivers of liquid methane shaping its surface, a thick atmosphere and complex organic chemistry.
Sunday night at 9:31 p.m. EDT (0131 GMT Monday), Cassini's controls will switch from the reaction wheel devices to its thrusters to manage the flyby. The spacecraft makes the turn to the proper orientation for the encounter at 10:15 p.m. EDT. The moment of closest approach happens at 10:44 p.m. EDT (0244 GMT) some 547 miles above Titan's surface with Cassini traveling at 13,200 miles per hour.
the two findings – a depletion of hydrogen and the apparent absence of acetylene at the surface– point to some surprising activity on Titan, which is the ringed planet’s largest moon and is covered in lakes of liquid methane. Molecular hydrogen is the third most common molecular species in Titan’s atmosphere.
There are two possibilities. Because Titan’s hydrogen comes from molecules of methane being split into carbon and hydrogen atoms by ultraviolet light from the Sun, it is possible that they could then recombine at the surface. However, at temperatures of –179 degrees Celsius, any chemical reactions would proceed very slowly and, with a lifetime of 80,000 years in the atmosphere, the hydrogen should build-up to high levels unless there was a catalyst to speed this reaction along.
In 2005, Heather Smith and Chris Mckay of NASA Ames Research Center published a speculative paper about the possibility of primitive microbial life on Titan, which would be based around liquid methane rather than water. If such life existed and was consuming hydrogen the same way we do oxygen and plants carbon dioxide, they suggested that it would then, “have a measurable effect on the hydrogen mixing ratio in the troposphere [lower atmosphere],” which to all intents and purposes is what Strobel’s computer model indicates. However, in a statement written by McKay in response to these findings he points out that life is the least likely possibility, while Mark Allen, the Principal Investigator of the Titan team at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, also remains skeptical.
“Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed,” he says. “It is more likely that a chemical process, without biology, can explain these results.”

Aliens invasion at Barcelona!

At first glance, it looks like Barcelona is being visited by aliens - with a powerful and other-worldly shaft of light beaming down from a bright object in the heavens.
But it is actually the handiwork of Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda.The effect is achieved by Ikeda concentrating 64 separate beams of light so that they slightly fan out into the night sky. The interaction with clouds above the Spanish city means that the display is constantly changing.Ikeda calls his work Spectra Barcelona, and gives it the rather more lofty title of light sculpture. He has shone similar beams from Nagoya Castle in Japan, Vondel Park in the Netherlands and Paris.Barcelona's beam was arranged to coincide with the city's electronic music festival, called Sonar.

Good news from Mission Kepler

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.
If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.
The Kepler space observatory monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate the presence of alien planets passing in front of them as seen from Earth. Astronomers will use the newly-released data from Kepler to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

Should We've to worry from Betelgeuse?

Is the constellation Orion's famous red supergiant due to go supernova sometime in the next few months? Mmmm, not likely, says Phil Plait, the scientist and skeptic who runs the Bad Astronomy website. And even if Betelgeuse does blow up, it won't pose a threat to Earth, he says.
Plait should know. He's the author of "Death From the Skies", a book that goes into supernovae and other bad things that the cosmos can dish out. The buzz started with a posting on the Life After the Oil Crash Forum, claiming that Betelgeuse's blast might "burn the crops" and "freak everybody out." Plait weighed in with the reasons why that won't be the case.
It is true that Betelgeuse appears to be shedding mass and looks as if it might explode sometime in the next 10,000 years or so. But it's hard to pinpoint exactly when the end will come - and at a distance of 600 light-years, the blast won't have a big effect on Earth, Plait says.
The doomsday talk is reminiscent of earlier scares over the Large Hadron Collider and 2010's approach And the bottom line is the same: DON'T PANIC!

Yes, Life Can Survive on Mars !

Researchers at McGill's department of natural resources, the National Research Council of Canada, the University of Toronto and the SETI Institute have discovered that methane-eating bacteria survive in a highly unique spring located on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's extreme North. Dr. Lyle Whyte, McGill University microbiologist explains that the Lost Hammer spring supports microbial life, that the spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, and that therefore they too could support life.
The subzero water is so salty that it doesn't freeze despite the cold, and it has no consumable oxygen in it. There are, however, big bubbles of methane that come to the surface, which had provoked the researchers' curiosity as to whether the gas was being produced geologically or biologically and whether anything could survive in this extreme hypersaline subzero environment. "We were surprised that we did not find methanogenic bacteria that produce methane at Lost Hammer," Whyte said, "but we did find other very unique anaerobic organisms -- organisms that survive by essentially eating methane and probably breathing sulfate instead of oxygen."
It has been very recently discovered that there is methane and frozen water on Mars. Photos taken by the Mars Orbiter show the formation of new gullies, but no one knows what is forming them. One answer is that there could be that there are springs like Lost Hammer on Mars.
"The point of the research is that it doesn't matter where the methane is coming from," Whyte explained. "If you have a situation where you have very cold salty water, it could potentially support a microbial community, even in that extreme harsh environment." While Axel Heiberg is already an inhospitable place, the Lost Hammer spring is even more so. "There are places on Mars where the temperature reaches relatively warm -10 to 0 degrees and perhaps even above 0ºC," Whyte said, "and on Axel Heiberg it gets down to -50, easy. The Lost Hammer spring is the most extreme subzero and salty environment we've found. This site also provides a model of how a methane seep could form in a frozen world like Mars, providing a potential mechanism for the recently discovered Martian methane plumes."
The research was published in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal and received logistical support from McGill University's Arctic Research Station and the Canadian Polar Continental Shelf Project. Funding was received from NASA, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Space Agency. Additional funding for student research was provided by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies.

life found on Saturn moon Titan !

Two potential signatures of life on Saturn's moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon's surface.
In 2005, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field and Heather R Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, calculated that such microbes could eke out an existence by breathing in hydrogen gas and eating the organic molecule acetylene, creating methane in the process.This would result in a lack of acetylene on Titan and a depletion of hydrogen close to the moon's surface, where the microbes would live, they said.
Now, measurements from the Cassini spacecraft have borne out these predictions, hinting that life may be present.Infrared spectra of Titan's surface taken with the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) showed no sign of acetylene, even though ultraviolet sunlight should constantly trigger its production in the moon's thick atmosphere. The VIMS study, led by Roger Clark of the US Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado, will appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Cassini measurements also suggest hydrogen is disappearing near Titan's surface, according to a study to appear in Icarus by Darrell Strobel of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.Observations with the spacecraft's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer and its Composite Infrared Spectrometer revealed that hydrogen produced by UV-triggered chemical reactions in the atmosphere is flowing both upwards and off into space as well as down towards the surface.
Yet the hydrogen is not accumulating near the surface, hinting that something may be consuming it there. The results reveal "very unusual and currently unexplained chemistry", McKay told New Scientist. "Certainly not proof of life, but very interesting." It is possible that the hydrogen is combining with carbon in molecules on Titan's surface to make methane. But at the low temperatures prevalent on Titan, these reactions would normally occur too slowly to account for the disappearing hydrogen.
Similarly, non-biological chemical reactions could transform acetylene into benzene – a hydrocarbon that the VIMS instrument did observe on Titan's surface. But in that case, too, a catalyst would be needed to boost reaction rates enough to account for the dearth of acetylene."Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed," says Mark Allen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We have a lot of work to do to rule out possible non-biological explanations."

Jupiter the Big Savior

A huge fireball has been spotted on Jupiter in yet another collision from space caught on camera and video by amateur astronomers.
The new Jupiter crash occurred on June 3 at 20:31 UT (4:31 p.m. Eastern Time) and was spotted by skywatcher Anthony Wesley in Australia and fellow amateur astronomer Christopher Go in the Philippines.
Wesley's photos show the Jupiter fireball blazing in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet. So far, no visible scar in the clouds has been reported from the event.
Wesley described the event as a "large fireball" on his website, where he posted the photos taken from Broken Hill, Australia.
This new impact on Jupiter comes less than a year after a spectacular crash on July 19, 2009, when what scientist now think was an asteroid about 1,600 feet (500 meters) wide slammed into the planet. That collision created a massive bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. It was Wesley, too, who first spotted the July 2009 collision. His observations kicked off an international observation campaign to study the impact site.

Mars simulation to start in Moscow

The unusual isolation experiment, called Mars 500, is designed to probe humankind's ability to undertake long-distance space travel even though a manned mission to the Red Planet remains years away. Participants will not experience weightlessness or the higher radiation levels associated with such travel but organisers say the experience will nonetheless be authentic.
The crew, made up of three Russians, a Chinese man, a Frenchman and an Italian, will spend 520 days locked up in a "spaceship" forged from metal tubing in Russia's Moscow-based Institute for Biomedical Problems.Their task is to conduct dozens of experiments and simulate a flight to and from Mars, as well as a landing and a series of 'spacewalks' on the Red Planet.Participants are not professional astronauts but volunteers who were chosen because they had specific medical and technical skills.They will earn the equivalent of about £70,000 each.
The biggest challenge will be loneliness. They will only be able to contact loved ones over the internet which will often only function with a forty minute delay. They will also, of course, be deprived of the company of the opposite sex.The mission commander, Alexei Sitev, said he only got married a few weeks ago and admitted it was going to be "difficult."Organisers say they chose an all male crew to avoid conflict. A similar but shorter experiment in 1999 was marred when a Russian participant tried to forcibly kiss a Canadian female crew member.