Slowly giving up their secrets ...

Black holes, the connect between quantum and relativity, are slowly giving up their secrets via exquisite tech able to see how these mysterious systems work.

Scientists have charted the environment surrounding a stellar-mass black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using the NICER payload aboard the International Space Station. NICER detected X-ray light from the recently discovered black hole, called MAXI J1820+070 (J1820 for short), as it consumed material from a companion star. Waves of X-rays formed “light echoes” that reflected off the swirling gas near the black hole and revealed changes in the environment’s size and shape.

“NICER has allowed us to measure light echoes closer to a stellar-mass black hole than ever before,” said Erin Kara, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented the findings at the 233rd American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Previously, these light echoes off the inner accretion disk were only seen in supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of solar masses and undergo changes slowly. Stellar black holes like J1820 have much lower masses and evolve much faster, so we can see changes play out on human time scales.”

What's really interesting is if the echoes mean something else altogether ...

To whit.

"Wormholes do not have an event horizon, but act as a space-time shortcut that can be traversed, a kind of very long throat that takes us to another universe," says Pablo Bueno from KU Leuven University (Belgium). "The confirmation of echoes in the LIGO or Virgo signals would be a practically irrefutable proof that astrophysical black holes don't exist. Time will tell if these echoes exist or not. If the result were positive, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of physics."

The scientific collaborations LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from the fusion of two black holes, inaugurating a new era in the study of the cosmos. But what if those ripples of space-time were not produced by black holes, but by other exotic objects? A team of European physicists suggest an alternative—wormholes that can be traversed to appear in another universe.

Wormhole Echoes Would Be One of the Greatest Discoveries Ever –“Irrefutable Proof That Black Holes Don’t Exist”

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes

A model of single and binary particles passing through a wormhole.

Something else altogether :)

Something else altogether.

Only in the fleeting darkness of a total solar eclipse is the light of the solar corona easily visible. Normally overwhelmed by the bright solar disk, the expansive corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is an alluring sight. But the subtle details and extreme ranges in the corona's brightness, although discernible to the eye, are notoriously difficult to photograph. Pictured here, however, using over 120 images and meticulous digital processing, is a detailed wide-angle image of the Sun's corona taken during the Great American Eclipse in 2017 August.

Something else indeed. :)

Ecocide

Man is killing the planet at speeds millions of time faster than the Great Dying of 250 millions years ago thanks to environmental degradation, resource depletion and fossil fuel production. With this not withstanding, BRT has often stated earth will recover but for us, the question of survival is questionable at best.

It started in December, just before Christmas.

Hundreds of dead perch were discovered floating along the banks of the Darling River – victims of a "dirty, rotten green" algae bloom spreading in the still waters of the small country town of Menindee, Australia.

Things didn't get better. The dead hundreds became dead thousands, as the crisis expanded to claim the lives of 10,000 fish along a 40-kilometre (25-mile) stretch of the river. But the worst was still yet to come.

This week, the environmental disaster has exploded to a horrific new level – what one Twitter user called "Extinction level water degradation" – with reports suggesting up to a million fish have now been killed in a new instance of the toxic algae bloom conditions.

It gets worse ...

Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia's north wiped out almost one-third of the nation's spectacled flying foxes, according to researchers.

The animals, also known as spectacled fruit bats, were unable to survive in temperatures which exceeded 42C.

BRT has "waxed" poetic about climate change for years as it is the existential threat we face, a catastrophe of our own making.

Last but not least ...

It turns out that New Zealand is not alone. Giant trees are dying all over the globe.

2,000-year-old baobab trees in Africa are suddenly and rather mysteriously giving up the ghost.  These trees survived happily for 2,000 years and now all of a sudden they're dying. Are the deaths of our most ancient trees all across the globe some sort of natural process? Or is there a different culprit we need to recognize?

In Japan they're lamenting record low squid catches.  Oh well, maybe it’s just overfishing?  Or could it be another message we need to heed?

To all this we can add the numerous scientific articles now decrying the 'insect Apocalypse' unfolding across the northern hemisphere. The Guardian recently issued this warning: “Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’”. Researchers in Puerto Rico's forest preserves recorded a 98% decline in insect mass over 35 years.  Does a 98% decline have a natural explanation? Or is something bigger going on?

Meanwhile, the butterfly die-off is unfolding with alarming speed. I rarely see them in the summer anymore, much to my great regret.  Seeing one is now as exciting as seeing a meteor streak across the sky, and just as rare:

ec·o·cide

/ˈēkōˌsīd,ˈekōˌsīd

    noun

destruction of the natural environment, especially when willfully done.

"their crime is nothing less than attempted ecocide"

The little rover that could ... RIP

After 15 years, Opportunity has died an "Honorable Death".

When Opportunity landed in 2004, it was only expected to last for 90 days. Instead, it powered through an extraordinary 5,111 — nearly a decade and a half of exploration on another world.

The spunky rover added appreciably to scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet, was immortalized by XKCD, and took an iconic selfie. Its “immense scientific legacy” helped NASA plan the follow-up Curiosity rover mission.

RIP little guy. You "done" good. :)

Chasing Ice & The Blood Moon

Winter finally showed up with freezing cold with an end result of ice, the dangerous beauty that never ceases to amaze. Along with this is the Super Wolf Moon, complete with a total lunar eclipse to end this 4k shoot with a bang. Enjoy.

Eye Candy Rev X

The Wormhole - Timelapse 4K from Michael Shainblum on Vimeo.

Eye candy yet again. :)

Freak Wave: Hokusai would be proud :)

A team of researchers based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh have recreated for the first time the famous Draupner freak wave measured in the North Sea in 1995.

The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a freak wave in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform. Freak waves are unexpectedly large in comparison to surrounding waves. They are difficult to predict, often appearing suddenly without warning, and are commonly attributed as probable causes for maritime catastrophes such as the sinking of large ships.

The team of researchers set out to reproduce the Draupner wave under laboratory conditions to understand how this freak wave was formed in the ocean. They successfully achieved this reconstruction by creating the wave using two smaller wave groups and varying the crossing angle – the angle at which the two groups travel.

How cool is that? :)

Super Blood Moon 2018

12/21/2018 5 Phase Data Set

A VERY short clip showing the progression of the 4K total lunar eclipse.

Every day ...

Every day, yours truly thinks about what my grandchild will experience just 2 decades away ...

Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a “tipping point,” and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.

The album Elephant Mountain comes to mind here. Listen to see why this sentiment rings true. 

Darkness Darkness - The Youngbloods

Darkness, Darkness

Be my pillow

Take my head

And let me sleep

In the coolness of your shadow

In the silence of your deep

Darkness, Darkness

Hide my yearning

For the things I cannot be

Keep my mind from constant turning

Toward the things I cannot see now

Things I cannot see now

Things I cannot see

Darkness, darkness,

Long and lonesome,

Is the day that brings me here

I have felt the edge of sadness,

I have known the depth of fear.

Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,

Cover me with the endless night,

Take away, take away the pain of knowing,

Fill the emptiness of right now,

Emptiness of right now, now, now

Emptiness of ri-ight now.

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow,

Take my hand, and let me sleep.

In the coolness of your shadow,

In the silence, the silence of your deep.

Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,

Cover me with the endless night,

Take away, take away the pain of knowing

Fill the emptiness of right now,

Emptiness of right now now now

Emptiness of right....

Oh yeah Oh yeah

Emptiness, emptiness

Oh yeah

Jessie Colin Young

A simple matter of size :)

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's satiric masterpiece, has always fascinated this writer regarding the relative sizes of the Lilliputians vs the Brobdingnagians as the former are about 6 inches tall while the latter tops out at about 72 feet.

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver by James Gillray (1803), (satirising Napoleon Bonaparte and George III). Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seems an astute scientist did some rather interesting research regarding the intrepid Lemuel Gulliver and the remarkable nations he visited  To whit ...

"The sizes of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians are close to those of rats and large dinosaurs, respectively."

Gulliver is described as being less than 6 feet tall in the book. Per Kuroki, a 2000 survey of heights across England found that the average height for men in the 18th century was around 5 feet 6 inches, so this seems about right. Apparently Swift "adopted the base of 12 in imagining these fictitious peoples," Kuroki wrote. Per Swift's text, the Lilliputions were 1/12 the size of Gulliver, while the Brobdingnagians were 12 times his size. That would make the Lilliputions just under half a foot, with the Brobdingnagians towering above everyone at just over 67 feet. Both fictional species are described as having bodies shaped similarly to humans.

Swift assumed weight would be proportional to the cube of the height, and used that to estimate the relative energy requirements of the three species. But Kuroki cites Quetelet's rule (1869), stating that weight is proportional to the square of the height. It was kind of the body-mass-index (BMI) of the 19th century, and Kuroki came up with an average BMI of 23 for his analysis. That would put the average Lillipution's weight at 1 pound, Gulliver's at 148 pounds, and the Brobdingnagians at 21,351 pounds. 

Interesting to a fault as is the book.  :)