Ceres ... yet another ocean world

Yet another ocean world.

In the foreground, is Cerealia Facula ("facula" means bright area), a 9-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) region with a composition dominated by salts. The central dome, Cerealia Tholus, is about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) across at its base and 1,100 feet (340 meters) tall. The dome is inside a central depression about 3,000 feet (900 meters) deep..

Ocean worlds are cropping up all over with Ceres joining Enceladus, Europa and Ganymede as entities containing the elements needed to harbor life as we know it.

Data from NASA's recent Dawn mission answers two long-unresolved questions: Is there liquid inside Ceres, and how long ago was the dwarf planet geologically active?
NASA's Dawn spacecraft gave scientists extraordinary close-up views of the dwarf planet Ceres, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. By the time the mission ended in October 2018, the orbiter had dipped to less than 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the surface, revealing crisp details of the mysterious bright regions Ceres had become known for.

Scientists had figured out that the bright areas were deposits made mostly of sodium carbonate - a compound of sodium, carbon, and oxygen. They likely came from liquid that percolated up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a highly reflective salt crust. But what they hadn't yet determined was where that liquid came from.

By analyzing data collected near the end of the mission, Dawn scientists have concluded that the liquid came from a deep reservoir of brine, or salt-enriched water. By studying Ceres' gravity, scientists learned more about the dwarf planet's internal structure and were able to determine that the brine reservoir is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) deep and hundreds of miles wide.

Ceres doesn't benefit from internal heating generated by gravitational interactions with a large planet, as is the case for some of the icy moons of the outer solar system. But the new research, which focuses on Ceres' 57-mile-wide (92-kilometer-wide) Occator Crater - home to the most extensive bright areas - confirms that Ceres is a water-rich world like these other icy bodies.

But she is closer to the sun than the ocean worlds listed in this piece. :)

Addendum ... “The material found on Ceres is extremely important in terms of astrobiology,” she said.“We know that these minerals are all essential for the emergence of life.”

The resolution varies from about 11 feet (3.5 meters) per pixel in the bright regions to about 115 feet (35 meters) per pixel in the background. The color data that is overlain on the topographic data was obtained during the prime mission in 2015 when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 915 miles (1470 kilometers). It has a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel.

Fragility/Rev XX

Fast-moving tropical storm Isaias visited the Northeast on Monday, August 3rd with relatively moderate winds and virtually no rain yet the power outages wrought by the storm far exceeded 2012's Cat 3 Hurricane Sandy by a long shot. Why may you ask ... because of trees because trees are really heavy and totally uncooperative when they fall and snap power lines with the greatest of ease. Imagine if Isaias was a Cat 3 or Cat 4 storm. The impact of the hurricane would close down the Northeast corridor for months or ... maybe forever due to the dire straits the US finds itself in as we move further into the year of our lord 2020. To this rube, it points out the irrevocable fact the foundation of modern civilization is comprised of sticks, where any given disruption can bring the system to its knees in an NYC second just as Isaias did 8 days ago. Something to consider, don't you think?

Any questions?

Isaias storm track 

At one point, nearly 100 tornado warnings were issued 

across ten states as the storm raced up the East Coast. 

The Great Unraveling/Rev III

BRT has waxed "poetic" about why America is in such dire trouble. From gross and inept malfeasance performed by W and Weapons of Mass Destruction to The Donald mishandling COVID-19 to the nth degree, this once great nation has been ravaged by the so-called owners of the country in ways boggling the mind and ... we haven't even discussed the bankrupting kleptocracy of the MIC or the acceleration of climate change, the existential gorilla threatening to end our sorry ass existence on planet earth. 

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

Read the rest of Wade Davis' excellent and detailed article as to why America is unraveling, a notion yours truly has been writing about for quite a long time.

Adding insult to injury comes from an insightful blurb from Australia titled We are witnessing the fall of a great power describing the rottenness of the US political system with passion and accuracy, a take yours truly concurs with without question. In reading both pieces, a connect to the French Revolution comes to mind due to the fact America cannot handle the truth of a flawed political system needing a complete reset if the nation is to survive as a viable entity as it moves further into the 21st century. 

Just how rotten is the United States' political system? The answer is rotten, as in it will only take a small kick for the whole edifice to fall in, let alone a big kick like COVID-19.

The idea is about as fanciful as the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan famously demanded: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Yet, a short time later, a little chink in the Iron Curtain at the Hungary-Austria border saw the whole rotten regime collapse.

"Viewed from 2020, exactly 50 years since it was published, Amalrik's work has an eerie timeliness. He was concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to understand the dark logic of social dissolution and how discrete political choices sum up to apocalyptic outcomes."

Tragically, American exceptionalism - 'we are the first and best democracy on Earth' - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy.

Just look at US foreign policy for the past 60+ years to see why this take rings true.

Asleep @ the switch :)

Asleep @ the switch comes to mind when talking about a lazy black hole but what it means to star-making is anything but.

"Without the black hole actively pumping energy into its surroundings, the gas can cool enough so this impressive rate of star formation can happen," said co-author Carter Rhea, also of the University of Montreal. "This kind of black hole shut down may be a crucial way for stars to form in the early Universe."

Awesome to a fault. :)

Mid Summer

Beauty, stealth, survival and renewal, the four states of the cycle of life apply
to all living entities without exception. Enjoy.

Uranus ...

Factoids "r" us. :)

What’s the most interesting fact you know about Uranus? The fact that its rotational axis is completely out of line with every other planet in the solar system?  Or the fact that Uranus’ magnetosphere is asymmetrical, notably tilted relative to its rotational axis, and significantly offset from the center of the planet?  Or the fact that it’s moons are all named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope?

Any questions? :)

Sad but true

The Juice Media rocks without a doubt. :)

Climate change anyone?

Sad but true without question.

Swifts

Yours truly gets memorized by swifts hunting for insects in a meadow, endlessly flying in ways that seem to defy physics as we know it. Wonderful, never-ending, the common swift does something, save for raising chicks, no other bird does ... it stays in the air without landing, for years.

I found a dead common swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames, where sunlight from the water cast bright scribbles on the arches above. I picked it up, held it in my palm, saw the dust in its feathers, its wings crossed like dull blades, its eyes tightly closed, and realized that I didn’t know what to do. This was a surprise. Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead. I cleaned and polished fox skulls; disarticulated, dried and kept the wings of roadkill birds. But I knew, looking at the swift, that I could not do anything like that to it. The bird was suffused with a kind of seriousness very akin to holiness. I didn’t want to leave it there, so I took it home, swaddled it in a towel and tucked it in the freezer. It was in early May the next year, as soon as I saw the first returning swifts flowing down from the clouds, that I knew what I had to do. I went to the freezer, took out the swift and buried it in the garden one hand’s-width deep in earth newly warmed by the sun.

And they are doing more. As Dokter and his colleagues write, migratory birds orient themselves through a complex of interacting compass mechanisms. During vesper flights, swifts have access to them all. At this panoptic height, they can see the scattered patterns of the stars overhead, and at the same time they can calibrate their magnetic compasses, getting their bearings according to the light-polarization patterns that are strongest and clearest in twilit skies. Stars, wind, polarized light, magnetic cues, the distant stacks of clouds a hundred miles out, clear cold air, and below them the hush of a world tilting toward sleep or waking toward dawn. What they are doing is flying so high that they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves.

Read Helen Macdonald's extraordinary article in its entirety. Worthwhile to the max.

Delving into the small/Rev XX

Black Eyed Susan

A noontime snack

Holding Pattern

Strike a pose

In the grip of passion

Starting on a journey

Moons et al ...

They come in all sizes. :)