Super Earth

Discovery Of A New World
On February 2, 2012, astronomers found yet another planet. Although it's not that big of news to find a new planet as astronomers do so regularly, the story behind this one can be skewed to be exciting. What's special about this planet is the fact that it resides within its star's habitable zone, the region in which the energy output would be enough to maintain life, but not so much as to scold it.

This planet has been titled GJ 667Cc. Really this title is nothing spectacular, just another label for identifying the planet. It orbits a red dwarf located roughly 22 light-years from the Sun. That's pretty far. There's no way in which we could reach this planet, so in all reality for all practical purposes the discovery of this planet means next to nothing for the average person. To astronomers, however, it's the beginning of a series of new discoveries to come. The search for extraterrestrial life and habitable environments is an ongoing cause. This is because it is vital for humans to evolve beyond the Earth or we'll be consumed by our star's death. Of course, this is not going to happen any time soon; however, if humans do survive that long it'll gradually become a pressing issue if we haven't already conquered it.

In all reality, there's a lot of hype for next to nothing. Astronomers can only make speculations at this time. They don't know the actual composition of the planet, whether it is rocky with an atmosphere or just an iron sphere with some gasses. All they can do is say if. If the planet is rocky with an atmosphere, it could retain liquid water and potentially life. The only fairly certain things that they can say about the planet is "If it has an atmosphere, it's probably reddsh all the time because the star is really red. It would be like being evening all the time." (Anglada-Escude)

The only thing we have from any of this data is speculation. Possible cases which we have determined by different solar environment conditions. And because we've never traveled to another solar system or even planet for that matter, we cannot say for certain anything. So why do scientists get so excited over things like this? Typically it's because it would represent something we didn't know before. In this specific case it's because it begins the discovery of many habitable-zone planets as previously we could almost only search for planets very close to the sun. Now, with our constantly improving technology, we're able to detect planets further and further away from their host star.

The search for a suitable extrasolar destination is only just beginning and is bound to become very interesting over the next several decades. You know they say Space is the final frontier.

Weapons of Mass Destruction? Hardly...

The Weapons
Remember your history classes where you learned of the bombing of Hiroshima? Remember how devastating that was? An entire city flattened in a few moments. Approximately 60x10^12 Joules of energy were released by Little Boy destroying Hiroshima in what seemed to be an instant. And shortly after  What if I were to tell you that 60x10^12 Joules is weak? That it really is just a small event?

Well think about it like this. Remember the Tohoku earthquake that hit Japan last year? The estimated total energy released by that earthquake and the resulting tsunami was 4x10^22 Joules. That means roughly 670 million Little Boys would be needed to equate the same energy as just that one earthquake and tsunami. This may seem crazy and impossible because the damage wasn't quite as bad, but the biggest difference is the earthquake and tsunami's energy was spread out over huge areas relative to that of Little Boy.

But what if I were able to tell you that even the total energy from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were also  minimal and negligible? I wouldn't be lying...

The Real Explosion

As I'm sure you've already figured out, I'm telling you that what we consider to be a massive explosion is really negligible. Just a speck, a point, a mere event. You see, as a star ages, it eventually runs out of fuel. At that point the star has no pressure holding itself in a spherical shape and the star collapses. This collapse turns into an explosion as the matter reaches the center where there's an extremely dense core of neutrons which prevent the matter from collapsing any further. It's really incredible. This is considered a supernova. The star releases massive amounts of energy as solar wind and exhausted materials and light. Energy amounts on the order of 10^45 joules. Just to add perspective:

The amount of energy consumed annually by every country on the Earth is estimated to be 5x10^20 Joules. That means that it would take humans roughly 2*10^22 years to consume the same amount of energy. Imagine the possibilities if we could harness even one millionth of a percent of the energy released in a supernova. We'd be able to sustain the entire planet's energy for longer than the age of the universe.

Are You Sirius?

That's incredible. Of course, there are many more factors which we'd have to work out; however, our general energy consumption problem would be solved forever.

The Impossible Scale

One concept that I think nobody, not even myself, fully understands is the scale of the Universe. In all honesty, I'm not sure it's possible to truly grasp such a scale; however, the purpose of this post will be to try to open your eyes to the incredible size of the world in which we live. One of the best representations of this scale that I've ever seen was posted on February 8th by Dr. Siana. Through a fairly simple flash program you can actually cycle through vast sizes and learn of different things which measure in at that size. (That was a little bit confusing, but I think I got the message across.)

The scale that we're adjusted to is fitted to sizes which we can directly relate to. Sizes which we deal with on a daily basis, focused on our minuscule range of the extreme size of the universe. A spoonful, a few feet, a mile, a meter. All of these units of measure are incredibly close to the our own size in the universe. I feel that this video gives a great tour through the universe:

As you can see, the Earth is insignificant in our universe. In our solar system, perhaps, but definitely not in the overall universe. What happens to the Earth has such a small effect on everything beyond the solar system that it is completely negligible. Its unfathomable how large the universe is and how many individual particles are actually within it. All of the distance you travel throughout your lifetime added up together will still be negligible compared to the size of the universe.

Give that a thought...

The Sun's Fury

Thanks to the Earth's atmosphere, we weren't really effected by the Sun's recent solar storm. On March 14, 2012 the Sun had one of the worst gatherings of sun spots in years. Not much to say to this, I just think it's a cool picture!

Luna

This here is NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day from March 20, 2012. It's a short video demonstrating the evolution of the moon. One thing that I really like about this is the fact that it shows how a rocky body without an atmosphere evolves over time as it sweeps out it's orbit.

Another thought that this video provokes is what if the Earth's atmosphere didn't protect us from meteorites? What would the Earth look like if every piece of rock or space dust that the Earth came into contact with was not disintegrated in the atmosphere? For starters, there would be thousands more craters. Craters everywhere. Where your house is would probably be a small crater from some small asteroid that came hurtling toward the Earth. 

Climates would be extremely different. Think of all of the waves that would be caused by meteorites smashing into the ocean. Of course, these would be fairly small for the most part, but once in awhile you'd get a nice sized meteorite slamming into the ocean with enough energy to, perhaps, cause a tsunami of some sort. I don't even know how it would effect forests with the blast radii of all of the meteorites. Would plants survive such an event?

Also, what would happen to the night sky? Meteor showers wouldn't exist. Instead we'd probably live in fear of the meteorites smashing into our house at random. All of those streaks of light that we see during meteor showers and regularly throughout the year would be instead a rock slamming into the ground with surprising effects.

Of course, this is all assuming that the space rocks are able to pass freely through the atmosphere, which is obviously not the case. Because our atmosphere protects us from the meteorites we don't have to worry about things like a small meteorite taking out a bridge or something like that. The only things we have to worry about are comets, meteors, and the like which periodically pass by the Earth. What would we do if one were to be on a collision course with Earth? Could we do anything?

The Milky Way

Ever wondered how vast and mysterious our galaxy really is? Here's some insight:

http://www.astrosurf.com/sguisard/Pagim/GC.html
This is an incredibly large image of the region around the center of our galaxy. Zoom in and look around. How can one think that we're on the only planet with life in the universe with this many stars just in our galaxy?

http://www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/B.html
This is a panorama of the plane of our galaxy. Again, look at the billions of stars that we can see in just these images. If we are the only life forms out there, how disappointing would that be? Think about it. A whole universe in which we are only a mere speck, yet we're the only speck of life. How lonely would we be in this universe if we discovered that we're the only life forms in existence?

http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/
I particularly like this image. It's an image sphere. Click and drag around to see just how vast our local universe is. There's so much to it that you can't even imagine. Look up into the day time sky and see the Sun. What if there were at least one intelligent life form per one hundred thousand stars. Think of how many civilizations would exist!

If You Haven't Noticed...
If you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of the potential for extraterrestrial life. If we are the only existing intelligent life form in this incredibly large and vast universe then what would that mean? All of these questions that cannot be answered disturb me every day. What would we do if an alien life form were to show up on Earth say tomorrow. Would we be friendly? Would we put them "under arrest" and study them? Would we even notice? What would they do? Would they demand domination over the entire species? Request us to pay tribute? Recruit us for some sort of intergalactic war? There's so much to ask and so little answered. Our next major scientific goal should be to develop a self-sustained spacecraft for interstellar travels.

This isn't an easy task though. One thing we hugely rely on to get from place to place is fuel. How would we create a spacecraft which is self-sustaining in fuel? Currently all of our fuel sources (aside from solar power) rely on the Earth's resources. Would it even be possible to have a self-sustaining spacecraft? The Earth isn't exactly self-sustaining. As Dr. Siana expressed in his final lecture, the Earth is actually running out of resources. We're gradually depleting its plethora of fuel and will very soon have to discover some new, extremely efficient manner.

Perhaps self-sustainability isn't the answer? Maybe we just need to find a low-mass, high-energy source of energy to serve as fuel for times more than just a few months? Maybe several years? I'd say we should figure out how to turn Solar energy into thrust, but I expect that soon enough we'll be wanting to travel beyond the practical reaches of the Sun's solar winds.

The final question is how will we explore the final frontier?

Blogging Siriusly

The Focus of the Sky

Look up into the night sky during the Winter. What are your eyes immediately drawn to? A constellation? A star? A planet? A satellite? A passing airplane? The moon? Maybe a rock burning through in the Earth's atmosphere? For me, this is without a doubt Sirius:

This is Sirius, one of the most easily identified stars in the sky. With an apparent magnitude of -1.46 it is actually, the Sun aside, the brightest star in the sky. Again, with the Sun aside, this means that Sirius delivers the most visible light to the Earth. But what does this mean?

Well, think about it like this: The Sun's apparent magnitude is -26.74. But that's only 18 times lower than the apparent magnitude of Sirius. Obviously, the Sun appears much more than 18 times brighter than Sirius. If this weren't the case then the Earth would be frozen solid because it wouldn't get nearly enough heat from the Sun. In fact, the full moon alone is more than 30,000 times brighter than Sirius, and the moon wouldn't be able to provide enough heat to the Earth. Therefore, the magnitude doesn't really say much about the actual brightness of a star and is thus easily misinterpreted. 

Instead, we must convert magnitude into flux ratios which tells us that the Sun is almost thirteen billion times brighter to us than Sirius. It's almost impossible to conceive a thirteen billion difference. It's just crazy!

The Truth

In all reality, however, distance is key. Sirius is more than 540,000 times further away from us than the sun. Therefore, we must make adjustments to our measurements accordingly. To do so, we have to use absolute magnitude, which is the magnitude of a star at a distance of 10 parsecs. The absolute magnitude of Sirius is 1.42 and the absolute magnitude of the Sun is 4.8. That is correct: Sirius is actually brighter than the Sun. 22.9 times brighter, to be more precise. Who'd have ever guessed?