New 2012 Article Published: No Geomagnetic Reversal

The 2012 doomsday scenario: geomagnetic reversal. Not in our lifetime...
The 2012 doomsday scenario: geomagnetic reversal. Not in our lifetime...

Universe Today: 2012: No Geomagnetic Reversal

After a long four-month break, I’ve finally written my next in the “No Doomsday in 2012” series of articles. This time we tackle the prediction that the world will end on December 21st, 2012 after being subject to a massive internal disturbance, effectively weakening the Earth’s magnetic field and flipping the magnetic dipole on its head (i.e. the north magnetic pole will be shifted to the geographical South Pole and vice versa). While this makes for a cool plot for a disaster movie, the doomsayers theory is only half-baked. Yes, geomagnetic reversal has happened in the past, and it will happen again. However, any geomagnetic shift in the future will not happen in four years, it probably won’t happen for a few thousand years. It appears to be a rather chaotic system, and all the (scientific) indications suggest our strong magnetic field wont be doing anything dramatic any time soon…

The series so far:

2012: No Geomagnetic Reversal Now Available in Spanish

With a special thanks, once again, to Manuel Herman, my most recent 2012 article has been translated into Spanish. Thank you Manuel for all your hard work!

Here’s the series (so far) in Spanish:

The Final Full-Frontal: Virgin Galactic Declines $1 Million Space Sex Tape Offer

It had to happen some time - the first zero-G space sex tape may appear in the near future (Misha Gravenor)
It had to happen some time - the first zero-G space sex tape may appear in the near future (Misha Gravenor)

Soon, space tourism companies such as Virgin Galactic will be flying several flights per day on sub-orbital joyrides. It is expected that this will be quickly followed by orbital “space hotels” where high-paying space sightseers can spend long periods looking down on the Earth (a venture being quickly developed by Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow; there’s an unmanned space hotel prototype currently in orbit). It’s only a matter of time before space tourism becomes commonplace, opening a massive host of scientific and recreational possibilities.

Wherever humans go, sex quickly follows, and although we don’t fully comprehend the implications of sexual pursuits in zero-G, there’s certainly a lot of people on Earth who will want to experience the 100-mile high club for themselves. Although space agencies have flirted with space sex research, the act is generally frowned upon (although the Russian study into “human docking procedures” sounded interesting). Although we are limited in our space sex understanding, the porn industry is quickly catching on, wanting to create the world’s first space porn video, making a huge offer to Virgin Galactic ahead of their first flight at the end of 2009…
Continue reading “The Final Full-Frontal: Virgin Galactic Declines $1 Million Space Sex Tape Offer”

Nancy Writes for Wired: “Giants of Earth and Space”

Gran Telescopio Canarias located on La Palma, Spain - one of the giant observatories looking at the stars (GTC)
Gran Telescopio Canarias located on La Palma, Spain - one of the giant observatories looking at the stars (GTC)

My Universe Today colleague and superb science writer Nancy Atkinson has written her first article for Wired.com! This is obviously a huge step as her writing has instantly accessed potentially millions of readers. So, CONGRATULATIONS NANCY!

Nancy was approached by Wired to put together an article about some of the biggest and boldest observatories on Earth. Her writing is accompanied by some stunning photography of these giant structures that include the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) on Mount Fowlkes, Texas (sporting 91 separate one-meter hexagonal mirrors); the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano (with two 10-meter mirrors composed of 36 hexagonal segments); and my personal favourite, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer on the Andes mountaintop of Cerro Paranal, Chile (four 8.2-meter diameter telescopes working in tandem). There is a huge amount of information in Nancy’s excellent article, making it more than worthy of being included in this hugely popular science & technology magazine website.

Be sure to check out “Giants of Earth and Space,” by Nancy Atkinson over at Wired.com.

Carnival of Space Week 73 – Alice’s Astro Info

Image from Alice's Astro Info website
Image from Alice's Astro Info website

This week’s marvellous Carnival of Space is being hosted by Seattle-based astronomer Alice Enevoldsen at Alice’s Astro Info. To celebrate 50 years of NASA, Alice has written a rather creative CoS, using the letters from HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU DEAR NASA! to form an acrostic for each submission from the space blogosphere. I love it!

From Astroengine, I decided to submit my article about the experimental evidence that radioactive decay rates do not vary with distance from the Sun, according to the power output from Cassini’s RTGs as the craft travelled from Earth to the orbit of Mars. Kinda puts a dampener on the previous terrestrial findings that decay rates may vary with distance from the Sun. Perhaps there’s another, more obvious reason for the correlated decay rate variations. I have my theory, but I’ll leave that for another day…

Particle Zoo: The Higgs Boson For Sale

Collect them all! The Standard Model of plushie particles (© Particle Zoo & Julie Peasley)
Collect them all! The Standard Model of plushie particles (© Particle Zoo & Julie Peasley)

Astroengine exclusive interview with Particle Zoo founder, Julie Peasley

The hunt for the Higgs particle may have come to grinding halt until 2009, but that doesn’t mean you can’t discover the elusive particle for yourself. In fact, it’s not just the Higgs boson that awaits discovery in the zoo of Standard Model particles. And what a zoo it is! We have protons, neutrons, the quarks that make up said hadrons; plus all the force carriers, neutrinos, photons, electrons and anti-particles. There is a delicious and varied array of subatomic particles out there, but they are too small for us to see. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what these quanta actually look like?

It seems that Particle Zookeeper Julie Peasley has an intimate connection with the tiny “beings” that make up all known matter in the Universe. She has single-handedly set up her own business putting faces to the complex particles, giving us a unique view into the quantum world we would otherwise forget in the soup of theoretical physics equations. The Particle Zoo is a Los Angeles company, where Julie brings particles to life in her “sweatshop of one,” sewing beautifully-made plushie toys of all the Standard Model particles so we can collect them all…
Continue reading “Particle Zoo: The Higgs Boson For Sale”

Hubble Malfunction Pushes Atlantis Service Mission into 2009

Hubble malfunction forces NASA to delay Atlantis launch until January (Hubblesite.org)
Hubble malfunction forces NASA to delay Atlantis launch until January (Hubblesite.org)

The fifth and final service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope is to be postponed until January as a mystery malfunction on Saturday crippled the observatory’s ability to transmit data to Earth. The STS-125 mission was set to launch in two weeks so essential upgrades to Hubble could be carried out, but Space Shuttle Atlantis will have to be stood down from her Cape Canaveral launch pad until NASA engineers can get to the root of the malfunction…
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LHC “Doomsday Lawsuit” Scrapped by Sensible Hawaiian Judge

The Large Hadron Collider is now officially safe in the eyes of the law (and no, that's not because it broke down). Credit: CERN
The Large Hadron Collider is now officially safe in the eyes of the law (and no, that's not because it broke down). Credit: CERN

Oh no! It’s all over. The US Large Hadron Collider lawsuit filed by Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho has failed. On Friday, Hawaiian Federal Judge Helen Gillmor officially declared that the American judicial system has no jurisdiction over the largest experiment ever devised by mankind. Although Wagner and Sancho were suing the US partners in CERN, it would seem this convoluted and inaccurate attempt at proving the LHC will destroy the Earth was a bridge too far for the Honolulu court to entertain.

This decision ends the seven month battle for Wagner, following quickly behind Otto Rossler’s eleventh-hour failed attempt at the European Court of Human Rights last month to convince lawmakers that the LHC was going to turn the Earth into a dot.

So in the eyes of the law (and every other sane person on the planet), the LHC is safe and the claims about the production of micro-black holes, strangelets, monopoles, bosenovas etc. etc. are totally unfounded.

But hold on, why do I feel a little sad about all this…?
Continue reading “LHC “Doomsday Lawsuit” Scrapped by Sensible Hawaiian Judge”

Falcon 1 Launch Success! SpaceX Makes History (Video)

The second stage of Falcon 1, functioning perfectly with the curvature of the Earth below (SpaceX)
The second stage of Falcon 1, functioning perfectly with the curvature of the Earth below (SpaceX)

Today marks the day when the first ever commercial space vehicle was launched into orbit. SpaceX will be relieved that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 rocket was successful; the previous three had failed. Flight 3, last month, was carrying a commercial payload when an anomaly with the first stage separation brought disaster to the mission. So, the pressure was on the Californian company and its founder Elon Musk, should this flight have failed it might have been the last…
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Enigmatic Magnetar Blasts to Life Inside Our Galaxy

An artist impression of one of the most intensely magnetic phenomena in our known Universe, the magnetar (ESO/L. Calcada)
An artist impression of one of the most intensely magnetic phenomena in our known Universe, the magnetar (ESO/L. Calcada)

It was identified as a gamma-ray burst, resulting from a massive explosion in a distant, young galaxy. Then astronomers realised that this flaring object was much closer to home, in fact it was a gamma-ray source within the Milky Way. Astronomers detected 40 visible-light flashes, only for the source to vanish as quickly as it mysteriously appeared. So what generated this huge firework display for astronomers to originally mistaken it for a gamma-ray burst?

It seems we have an answer, and it has surprised many.

One of the rarest objects ever observed may have sprung to life in our galaxy after a long period of calm. This object is a young neutron star with a magnetic field a billion billion times stronger than the Earth’s, otherwise known as a magnetar…
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Using Cassini to Test Radioactive Decay Rate Variation

Artist impression of Cassini orbiting Saturn (NASA)
Artist impression of Cassini orbiting Saturn (NASA)

In a previous Astroengine article, I explored the possibility that the variation in radioactive decay rates may be synchronised with Earth’s orbital variations in distance from the Sun. Naturally, this would be a huge discovery, possibly questioning the fundamental law that nuclear decay rates are constant, no matter where the material is in the Universe. One of the conclusions in the original decay rate research suggested that we should attach a sample of a radioisotope onto an interplanetary mission far beyond the orbit of Earth. By doing this, the relationship between decay rates and distance from the Sun should become obvious, and terrestrial decay rate variations can be tested.

But wait a minute, let’s have a think about this. Haven’t we already sent radioactive material on board interplanetary missions? What about all that plutonium we use to power interplanetary probes like Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo or Cassini? Plutonium is pretty radioactive… isn’t it?
Continue reading “Using Cassini to Test Radioactive Decay Rate Variation”