 |
| The big BURP |
At this time of year many of the world's Jews, Christians and Muslims are focused on the heavens. Just in case you missed it, many scientists are also focused on space due to some very interesting events discovered by the new Kepler telescope and other orbiting survey devices.
 |
| Black hole 10 billion times the size of our sun |
If you often suffer from bloating and gas after a big holiday meal consider the gas bubble in the above photo. This burp was let out by a black hole that had just swallowed a star. The blazing belch is one light year across (1 light year = 9.4605284 × 1015 meters) TUMs anyone?
Speaking of black holes, take a look at the one in the 2nd picture. Astronomers just discovered this monster and a twin about the same size. It has a mass that is approximately 10 billion times as large as our sun. And you thought your Christmas Mass was a big event!
 |
| Kepler 22b |
The Kepler spacecraft is an American space observatory, the space-based portion of NASA's Kepler Mission to discover Earthlike planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft, named in honor of the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, was launched in March 2009.
The Kepler Mission is "specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets." Kepler's only instrument is a photometer that continuously monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. This data is analyzed to detect periodic fluctuations that indicate the presence of extra-solar planets that are in the process of crossing the face of other stars. Just last week this unique device discovered a planet that is almost identical to ours although several times larger. Not only does the planet appear to be covered in water like ours and has a benign surface temperature, its orbit around its star is similar in distance and speed as ours. (see the photo on the right).
 |
| Zones of habitability |
Unfortunately Kepler 22b (name of this remarkable discovery) is 600 light years away so we probably won't be visiting it anytime soon.
Here's a more earthbound discovery. Below is a ground seeking radar photo of the land mass of Antarctica. The darker colors are the peaks of mountains. Almost this entire continent has been under a 1,000 or more feet of ice for all recorded history... or so they say. On 6th July 1960 Lt Colonel Harold Ohlmeyer, a United States Air Force Commander, sent a reply to a letter from one Professor Charles Hapgood who had requested his opinion on a feature found on a map of 1513 CE called the Piri Reis Map (Piri Reis ws a Turkish Admiral). Lt Colonel Ohlmeyer's reply was a bombshell. The map, showing the coastline of the east coast of the Americas and the west coast of Africa, the Colonel remarked, also seemed to show the coastline of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica free of ice - a condition it had not been in for some 9,000 years! Notes in the margin of the map state that Admiral Reis had taken data from maps that came from the ancient Egyptian library in Alexandria. This has led to much debate as to whether or not a civilization existed in pre-history that might hve been around when Antarctica was a tropical island!
 |
| Ground radar map of Antarctica |
|
|
|
Below is a photo of our entire family taken last month in Palm Desert during my 70th, our daughter-in-law Susan's 50th, and our youngest son Johnee's 40th birthday celebrations... hence the 70-50-40 on the T-shirts.
 |
| Schwartz clan |
No comments:
Post a Comment