This Is What A Massive X9 Class Solar Flare Looks Like

Zero Hedge

Not all solar flares are Earth-facing, but it is only a matter of time before the next big one cripples modern society. Then what?

Scientists from Caltech Astronomy examined the great solar flare of 1990 that occurred in active region NOAA 6063. The eruption and subsequent shockwave were so massive that scientist decided to write a report on their findings titled “Tangential Field Changes in the Great Flare of 1990 May 24.”

The region on the sun gave rise to a dangerous X9.3 flare, which was visible in white light. The flare was observed by several observatories, including the Big Bear Solar Observatory at Caltech.

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Earth 2.0: What we know about Kepler 452b, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered

The Independent 

Nasa scientists have announced the discovery of Kepler 452b, also known as 'Earth 2.0', an earth-like planet in our galaxy. 

Over the course of years of data-gathering by the Kepler space telescope and even more analysis and work here on Earth, scientists confirmed the existence of the distant exoplanet, which is the most earth-like planet ever discovered.

Although the planet is far too far away to photograph, advanced Nasa technology means we know a surprising amount about this 'New Earth'.

[...] 

It's the most similar planet to Earth that has ever been discovered

Beginning the conference, John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said: "Today we're announcing the discovery of an exoplanet that as far as we can tell is a pretty close cousin of Earth. It's the closest so far. It's Earth 2.0." 

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Astronomers Baffled By Mystery Radio Bursts From Space

Top Secret Writers

Baffled astronomers, surely not! A series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), have left astronomers bemused as to what is causing the strange signals. So baffling is the occurrence that aliens have even been cited as possibly being responsible.

The light signals occur for several milliseconds and come out of nowhere. The occurrence was first detected in 2007, with only a handful of FRB incidents happening since.

In April this year, the latest rapid frequency bursts were sighted; their explanation still remains unknown. That has, however, not stopped people from speculating what the mysterious pulsing signals could be. Theories include the light being caused by colliding neutron stars and, predictably, that aliens are trying to make contact with us.

Due to the fact FRB’s occur sporadically and temporarily, these radio emissions are not only difficult to find but they are almost impossible to study.

It was in 2007 when the first FRB was picked up by radio telescopes. The temporary nature of the radio messages meant it took time for scientists to even agree that the signal wasn’t caused by a glitch in one of the telescope’s instruments. The signal lasted for just five milliseconds. It was named the Lorimer Burst after Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown who made the discovery.

“This is something that’s completely unprecedented,” Lorimer noted at the time.

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Asteroid impact risks 'underappreciated'

Comment: Another classic understatement from the experts...

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BBC News

A visualisation showing where sizeable asteroids have hit the Earth in recent years has been released by the B612 Foundation.

The US-based group, which includes a number of former Nasa astronauts, campaigns on the issue of space protection.

It hopes the visualisation will press home the idea that impacts are more common than we think.

The presentation leans on data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). 

The CTBTO operates a network of sensors that listens out for clandestine atom bomb detonations.

Between 2000 and 2013, this infrasound system catalogued 26 major explosions on Earth.

None were caused by A-bombs; they were all the result of asteroid strikes.

They ranged in energy from one to 600 kilotons. By way of comparison, the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device.

Fortunately, most of these space rocks disintegrated high up in the atmosphere and caused few problems on the ground.

A few, people will have heard about, such as the 20m-wide object that ripped across the sky above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk last year.

But many will have gone unseen because they occurred far out over the oceans.

And just one of the 26 events was detected in advance, and then by only a matter of hours.

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Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’

Comment: The shock and surprise at a little rock causing a ruckus should pale into insignificance when you compare it to the massive symmetrical anomaly - and a host of others both on the Moon, Mars and our very own planet Earth over the decades - which have baffled and disturbed scientists. Though some are clearly faked from people with too much time on their hands, many others are very genuine indeed. They remain very outside the mainstream media purview.

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The Independent 

A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is "like nothing we've ever seen before", according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa. 

Experts said they were "completely confused" by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity's various measuring instruments.

Astronomers noticed the new rock had "appeared" without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier. The rover has been stuck photographing the same region of Mars for more than a month due to bad weather, with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California monitoring the images it sends.

Nasa issued a Mars status report entitled "encountering a surprise", and lead Mars Exploration rover scientist Steve Squyres told a JPL event it seems the planet literally "keeps throwing new things at us".

He said the images, from 12 Martian days apart, were from no more than a couple of weeks ago. "We saw this rock just sitting here. It looks white around the edge in the middle and there’s a low spot in the centre that's dark red - it looks like a jelly doughnut.

"And it appeared, just plain appeared at that spot - and we haven't ever driven over that spot."

 

 Images captured by Opportunity show the mysterious rock 'appeared' on an outcrop that had been empty just 12 Martian days ('Sols') earlier Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there - that there's "a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby" and it was caused by a meteor, or that it was "somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

"We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation," Squyres said.

Yet the story got even stranger when Opportunity investigated further. Squyres explained: "We are as we speak situated with the rover's instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

"We've taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and the got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

"It's like nothing we've ever seen before," he said. "It's very high in sulphur, it's very high in magnesium, it's got twice as much manganese as we've ever seen in anything on Mars.

"I don't know what any of this means. We're completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

"That's the beauty of this mission... what I've realised is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalising, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn't quite get to - and that's the nature of exploration."

Squyres was speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit on the surface of Mars.

While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared "dead" in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. Nasa said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of "Sol 3547" (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km). 

 

Earth-like planets may be quite common, relatively close, study says

Los Angeles Times
Amina Khan

November 4, 2013

Is the Earth a “cosmic freak” or a planetary average Joe around our galactic neighborhood? UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy says we’re in good company.

With some clever sleight of hand, scientists using Kepler data have calculated that a whopping one in five Sun-like stars has an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone – and, if they have the right chemical ingredients on board, could be capable of supporting life.

The kicker? The nearest one may lie just 12 light-years away.

The results, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also add 603 exoplanet candidates to Kepler’s tally, including 10 Earth-sized ones in the habitable zone.
“If we ever get star travel, we’d probably see a lot of traffic jams,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s lead scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.


Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler space telescope has uncovered a strange menagerie of alien worlds, some utterly unlike the inhabitants of our own solar system. Scientists have picked out what Borucki called a “bewildering variety” of planets, from mini-Neptunes to super-Earths. Some may be composed entirely of water; others have densities greater than iron or lower than Styrofoam. Some are smaller than Mercury and others are many times bigger than Jupiter.

For this study, the scientists had one driving question, said UC Berkeley astronomer and lead author Erik Petigura: Among all these different types of planets, how common were the ones that were sized like Earth?

The problem with answering that question is that it’s not easy to find such planets, Petigura said. A transit-watching telescope like Kepler waits for dips in brightness as a planet travels in front of its star and blocks a tiny fraction of its light. But that only works if we’re properly aligned and can catch them in the act of transiting.

Of those stars whose planetary transits we manage to see, many are simply too noisy, with their light patterns changing, to pick out a tiny dip in starlight from a transiting planet. (To put it in perspective, an Earth-sized planet would cause a 0.01% blip in its star’s light.)

The researchers decided to see if they could figure out how many planets they were missing. They injected synthetic planets into the starlight data, then ran the software that searched for those signals. Not all of them were found. Since they already knew how many fake planets they’d had to start with, the scientists now knew about how many planets were missing.

Based on that analysis, the researchers surmised that about 22% of stars like our sun have planets in the habitable zone that are just one to two Earth radii.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these planets will actually be habitable – that depends on whether they’re made of rock and iron, have protective atmospheres and ingredients like water and other chemical building blocks for life as we know it.

But the researchers said they were encouraged by the discovery of Kepler-78b – an Earth-sized planet with an Earth-like density that also appears to be made of iron and rock. Though it was far too close to its star to be habitable, scientists said it was a sign that more promising discoveries would be on the way, as astronomers analyze the fourth and final year of data from Kepler, which suffered a malfunction this spring.