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Solar Activity Heats Up August
28 saw a major solar flare erupting from a complex sunspot group crossing the
Sun's southern hemisphere. The intensity of the eruption placed it in the most
powerful "X" category. The flare was accompanied by a coronal mass
ejection (CME) which was clocked at 600 km/hr as it headed past the Earth. This
CM Leaking Earth Could run dry Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology say that Earth could be dry and barren within a billion years because the oceans are draining into the planet's interior. They have calculated that about 1.12 billion tonnes of water leaks into the Earth each year. Although a lot of water also moves in the other direction, not enough comes to the surface to balance what is lost. The scientists believe that eventually all of it will disappear. They predict that the Earth's surface will look a lot like the surface of the planet Mars where a similar process seems to have taken place. This research was published in the New Scientist magazine. Mir drifts free Russian space station Mir has gone into "free drift" mode as control passes to a new onboard computer. The free flight is necessary to reduce power consumption so that Mir can survive for months in space before a possible return by cosmonauts. The last crew left on August 27, just 10 days before Mir would have celebrated 10 years of continuous crewing. The new computer keeps the solar panels pointed at the Sun so Mir's batteries remain charged. Russia is expected to make a decision late this year or early next on whether Mir will remain in orbit. The station costs about $250 million a year to operate and while this is not too high in space terms, Russia just doesn't have the money. Shaking Earth The centuries-old mystery of why the Earth appears to wobble has been solved. Every 1.2 years, the planet appears to move about its axis by about 20 ft at the North Pole, but since discovering the so-called Chandler Wobble in 1891, scientists had been unable to explain it. Now NASA believes that the cause lies in the Earth's oceans. Fluctuating pressure of water on the ocean bed caused by temperature, salinity and current changes - forces the Earth to move slightly on its axis. Atmospheric fluctuations add to the wobble. The findings were made by analyzing data from the International Earth Rotation Service, set up in Paris in 1988. Moon Magic The Moon
has always been an object of fantasy as well as research but we still don't know
exactly how the Earth got its moon. According
to the 'giant impact theory', proposed in the 1970s, the moon was formed after
the Earth was hit by a huge object, as big as Mars. Using the
new model, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute and the University of
California at Santa Cruz, created high-resolution simulations to show that an
oblique impact by an object with 10 per cent of the mass of Earth could have
ejected sufficient iron free material into Earth's orbit to eventually coalesce
into the moon, while also leaving the Earth with its present mass and correct
initial rotation rate. The simulation also implies that the moon formed near the very end of Earth's formation, some 4.5 billion years ago. The moon is believed to have played an important role in making the Earth habitable because of the stabilizing effect it had on the tilt of Earth's rotation. New Solar System Is Like Ours After 15 years of
searching, astronomers say they have found an alien planetary system that
reminds them a lot of home. This is the first time planet hunters have detected
what they believe is a Jupiter-like gas ball orbiting a star much like our Sun,
at a distance that allows for the possibility of an unseen Earth-type planet
orbiting in between. In the last decade and a
half, scientists have found more than 90 so-called extra-solar planets around
stars outside our solar system. But none of these earlier discoveries has held
the same potential to answer an essential question: Might there be other Earths
in the universe? "We have a
(planetary) system that is maybe not a sibling of the solar system… it might
be more accurately classified as a first cousin," Paul Butler of the
Carnegie Institution said on Thursday. Butler and fellow
planet-hunter Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California-Berkeley noted that
the newly discovered Jupiter-type planet is the third thought to orbit 55 Cancri,
a star in the constellation Cancer that can be seen without telescopes or even
binoculars. It is about as old – five billion years or so – and about the
same size as our Sun. Aside from it known planets, the new planetary system has
a tantalizing gap between the new Jovian discovery and two other big gas planets
orbiting very close to the star, Marcy said. Heavy Traffic Heads for Mars American space agency NASA has outlined ambitious, long-term plans to explore the planet Mars. It says six major missions will take place in little more than 10 years, with Italy and France also participating. At an annual cost estimated at $400 million to $450 million a year for the next five years, the agency will dispatch a combination of orbiting spacecraft and landers to the Red Planet. Then, after 2010, the agency will undertake a mission to bring back samples from Mars. In 1999, NASA lost two Martian missions : the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter. The failures were a huge blow and prompted a major review of the way NASA carries through its space operations. The campaign to explore Mars is unparalleled in the history of space exploration. It’s meant to be a robust, flexible, long-term programme that will give the highest chances for success. The new strategy is aimed to answer questions about Mars’ mineralogy, geology and climate history. The idea is to ‘follow the water’ so we may know the answers to far-reaching questions about the red planet humans have asked over the generations: Did life ever arise there, and does life exist there now ?" A Sun-like star just out
of infancy has winked at astronomers, indicating its eclipse by cosmic dust and
rocks, the stuff of which planets like Earth could possibly form, scientists
reported on Wednesday. The star, located in the
Unicorn constellation about 2,400 light years from Earth, disappeared from view
for regular periods of about 48 days over the past six years. Its disappearance
suggested an eclipse, but not a typical one caused by an intervening planet,
star or moon. Only a collection of
smaller objects, like dust and rocks, could cause the long eclipse the
astronomers saw. Known as KH 15D, the star is only about 3 million years old, a
prime age for monitoring by astronomers interested in our solar system's
planet-forming past. "We've monitored
thousands of these stars over the years and this is the only that behaves this
way," said astronomer William Herbst of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
"Essentially the star winks at us." The dust that caused the
wink is different from the fine interstellar dust that is distributed throughout
the cosmos. Herbst said. Its particles are bigger, indicating that it is
clumping into what astronomers call a protoplanetary disk - the disk from which
planets can form. "Is there a mass in
here that is somehow sculpting the obscuring clouds so that it's producing these
rings of material which then circle around the star and alternately block the
object? We think that's very possible," Herbst said. There could be two
blobs circling the star, or just one, but there is no confirmation as yet of
exactly what could be causing this kind of disk to form, said Herbst's colleague
Catrina Hamilton. At just 3 million years
old, KH 15D is a cosmic toddler barely out of infancy. By contrast, our solar
system is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old. However, some astronomers
believe the planets may have begun forming when the Sun was a few million years
old. The disk is forming quite
close to the star, closer than the planet Mercury is to the Sun. "The star
is ... like the Sun was when it was 3 million years old, so the processes that
are going on in this inner disk region, where terrestrial planets would be
forming - could be analogous to what was going on with the formation of
Earth," Herbst said.
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Exploreuniverse.com
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passed south of Earth's orbital plane and did not cause any major effects here.
However, CMEs that collide directly with the Earth can excite geomagnetic
storms, which have been linked to satellite communication failures. In extreme
cases, such storms can induce electric currents in the earth and oceans that can
damage electric power transmission equipment. Scientists expect to see solar
flare-ups daily during the solar max, which is expected in mid-2000.