Surprised science - a good theory predicts...

[electrobleme]

It's always a surprise to Space Scientists - a good theory predicts


2012 posts


** Water on the moon. Surprised and exactly as not predicted - "The traditional view that the Moon was entirely dry has been proven incorrect in recent years, with growing evidence that icy drops of water can be found on its surface."

** Planets orbiting a pair of stars - "These planets are very difficult to form using the currently accepted paradigm, and I believe that theorists will be going back to the drawing board to try to improve our understanding of how planets are assembled"

** Dust ring around star disappears in a few years - "The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 1 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be in error in some strange way" ... "A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a really satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star"

2011 posts

** comet lovejoy - dirty snowball or electric rock comets -"I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun and I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge"

** Mysterious Radio filaments in our galaxies center - "There's a long literature about these objects, and there have been some ideas as to what might generate their emission - but frankly no one really knows"

** What happens when they find an object younger than the Big Bang? - Scientists are struggling to explain how these objects could have evolved so big, so fast. "It is safe to say that the existence of this quasar will be giving some theorists sleepless nights"

** Voyagers ride 'magnetic bubbles' - "Researchers confess to being surprised; they thought the outskirts of our solar neighbourhood would be more sedate - that the Sun's field lines would simply turn around and reconnect with the Sun."


2010 posts

** retrograde "black" holes - "This new model also solves a paradox in the old spin paradigm," said David Meier, a theoretical astrophysicist at JPL not involved in the study. "Everything now fits nicely into place."

** Suprised science - everything?

** spacequakes - plasma bombs create galaxy earthquakes - "This is all new for us," marvels Kalevi Mursula University of Oulu in Finland, an expert on solar wind

** Mystery object - 2 asteriods colliding? - they dont know what it is ...

** Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) 20MeV or more - nobody knew they even existed!

** The Pioneer anomaly (the Pioneer effect) and the end of the gravityVerse? -  The Pioneer anomaly was discovered by John Anderson, also of JPL, in the 1980s. For years he didn't publish what he'd noticed. Then he discussed it with physicist Michael Martin Nieto at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Nieto says he "almost fell off my chair."

** Sun's protective 'bubble' (heliosphere) is shrinking - Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.

** The Mystery of the Fading Star in a Gravity Universe - what is surprising about a star fading/brightening in a 27 year cycle?

** hot companions - orbiting objects/planets(?) hotter than their host stars !!! - "The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination," said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.


2009 posts

water water everywhere - even in Mercury exosphere - "Nobody expected that.  I don't know a single person that did.  We were astonished, just astonished"

Mid-ocean Gakkel Ridge - plate tectonics? - "I just about fell off my chair"..."it was surprising to find rocks that had not been remixed inside the mantle for two billion years."

Planet found that defies the laws of physics - exoplanet WASP-18b - "This is another bizarre planet discovery"

Saturns flat rings? No, they have "ripples" miles high! - "We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we've come across walls more than two miles high," ... "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

Water on the moon? Computer and the man from Del Monte they say YES. We say NOOO - "The first reaction that I think all of us had was, this is ridiculous,"

Maelstrom of magnetism - Surprising Mercury - "Magnetic" circuit and exosphere - "One of the biggest surprises was how...."

Surprise! Its an electric universe! Sorry, we mean a magnetic universe... - "This is a shocking new result...We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it."

The Great Wall, Great Attractor and surprising Dark Flow - "We never expected to find anything like this"

Dark Flow - the end of the Gravity Universe? - "It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else"

Mystery of the Solar Tsunami -- Solved (?) - they doubted their senses. The scale of the wave was staggering:...Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the satellite's eye—but surely not a real wave.

Stars brightness vary - "but instead of backing up any of the existing ideas for why these stars see additional fluctuations, the observations contradicted all of them...So with this new data, astronomers will have to go back to the drawing board to come up with an explanation."

Earths atmosphere not from Volcanoes - "We will now have to redraw this picture"

The surprising Northern Lights Show - "Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time...It was like nothing I had seen before," Lyons recalls.


A good theory predicts...

If science and astronomy is so correct and proved by its predictions then why are they always so surprised. By virtually everything they find.

Everytime you read a report on something new discovered take note of the words, surprised, amazed, unexpected and the classic "this surprising result means we are going to have to go back to the drawing board".

The only real test of a good theory is that it proves the predictions, especially long term.  Space scientists make a prediction and then constantly change it until it is virtually unrecognisable.

""This backs up our prediction that the water is found in the jet from the supermassive black hole, rather than the rotating disc of gas that surrounds it." European Week of Astronomy and Space Science meeting

Was not the whole point of a Black Hole that it did not let anything out? So if it's not a Black Hole then what is it? When was this prediction made that water came from the jets coming out of a Black Hole. When was a jet spurting out of a Black Hole ever predicted?

Does any of astronomy and science reflect the nature around you? Is it really that complicated? Would the Universe really create a different set of rules for every single thing in it? Would the Universe create 95-99% Dark Matter and Dark Energy that can not be seen or measured but is there?

[electrobleme]

"Nobody expected that.  I don't know a single person that did.  We were astonished, just astonished"

As MESSENGER flew past the night side of Mercury in January, ...scooped up ions from an atmosphere so tenuous that it's usually called an "exosphere."  ... but to the science team's great surprise there was also water present, and in large amounts.  "Nobody expected that.  I don't know a single person that did.  We were astonished, just astonished," said MESSENGER science team member Thomas Zurbuchen.

At the same briefing, scientists announced the answer to the three-decade-old question of whether volcanism was important in shaping Mercury's surface as it has been for the Moon by showing visual evidence for volcanic constructs.

They also reaffirmed their earlier conclusion that Mercury has a liquid core whose motions drive a dipolar magnetic field and whose slow solidification results in surface faulting as a the whole planet shrinks.  All these results came from just one flyby encounter; there are two further flybys and MESSENGER's full orbital mission yet to come.
planetary .org/news "MESSENGER Scientists Astonished"

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"I just about fell off my chair"..."it was surprising to find rocks that had not been remixed inside the mantle for two billion years."

The mantle, the rock layer that comprises about 70 percent of the Earth's mass, sits several miles below the planet's surface. Mid-ocean ridges like Gakkel, where mantle rock is slowly pushing upward to form new volcanic crust as the tectonic plates slowly move apart, is one place geologists look for clues about the mantle. Gakkel Ridge is unique because it features -- at some locations -- the least volcanic activity and most mantle exposure ever discovered on a mid-ocean ridge, allowing Snow and his colleagues to recover many mantle samples.

"I just about fell off my chair," Snow said. "We can't exaggerate how important these rocks are - they're a window into that deep part of the Earth."

...mantle rocks devoid of sea floor alteration. Analysis of the isotopes of osmium, a noble metal rarer than platinum within the mantle rocks, indicated they were two billion years old...

Since the mantle is slowly moving and churning within the Earth, geologists believe the mantle is a layer of well-mixed rock. Fresh mantle rock wells up at mid-ocean ridges to create new crust. As the tectonic plates move, this crust slowly makes its way to a subduction zone, a plate boundary where one plate slides underneath another and the crust is pushed back into the mantle from which it came.

Because this process takes about 200 million years, it was surprising to find rocks that had not been remixed inside the mantle for two billion years. The discovery of the rocks suggests the mantle is not as well-mixed or homogenous as geologists previously believed, revealing that the Earth's mantle preserves an older and more complex geologic history than previously thought.
Journey To The Center Of The Earth: Discovery Sheds Light On Mantle Formation - Science Daily .com

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Surprising super planet to close to its sun - "This is another bizarre planet discovery"

It's the planet that really shouldn't exist – or at least not for long. It is 10 times the size of Jupiter, orbits its own star in under 24 hours and should soon be spiralling into the surface of its searingly-hot sun.

Under the laws of physics, planet WASP-18b orbiting a star 1,000 light years from Earth is too big and too close to its sun for comfort. The tidal interactions between the two massive objects should be pulling them together in a deadly gravitational embrace.

British astronomers say they have made a highly unusual planetary discovery in finding WASP-18b. Either they just happened to have witnessed an exceptionally rare event that they have likened to winning the lottery, or they do not understand the tidal forces affecting distant planets beyond our own solar system.

"The problem with this planet is that it's very massive and very close to its star. It should be creating tidal bulging that makes it spiral into its star," said Professor Andrew Collier Cameron of St Andrew's University.

The planet is at least one billion years old, yet at this rate it should have no more than half a million years left before it crashes into its own star. The chances of finding it at this point in its life cycle is about 1 in 2,000.

Professor Cameron said: "This is another bizarre planet discovery. The situation is analogous to the way tidal friction is gradually causing the Earth's spin to slow down, and the Moon to spiral away from the Earth," he said. "In this case, however, the spin of the star is slower than the orbit of the planet, so the star should be spinning up, and the planet spiralling in," he said.

WASP-18b, one of more than 300 known "exoplanets" orbiting distant stars, was discovered by a team led by Coel Hellier of Keele University, whose study is published in the journal Nature.

It is a hot, Jupiter-like planet where temperatures exceed 2,100C – high enough to create clouds of silica-based gems, according to Professor Cameron. If anyone could visit this planet, and survive, they might see a sky full of diamonds and sapphires, he said.
WASP-18b -
Planet found that defies the laws of physics

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"We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we've come across walls more than two miles high," ... "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

NASA scientists are marveling over the extent of ruffles and dust clouds revealed in the rings of Saturn during the planet's equinox last month. Scientists once thought the rings were almost completely flat, but new images reveal the heights of some newly discovered bumps in the rings are as high as the Rocky Mountains. NASA released the images Monday....

"The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings," said Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at JPL. "To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving."

The chunks of ice that make up the main rings spread out 85,000 miles from the center of Saturn, but they had been thought to be only around 30 feet thick in the main rings, known as A, B, C, and D.

In the new images, particles seemed to pile up in vertical formations in each of the rings. Rippling corrugations -- previously seen by Cassini to extend approximately 500 miles in the innermost D ring -- appear to undulate out to a total of 11,000 miles through the neighboring C ring to the B ring.

The heights of some of the newly discovered bumps are comparable to the elevations of the Rocky Mountains. One ridge of icy ring particles, whipped up by the gravitational pull of Saturn's moon Daphnis as it travels through the plane of the rings, looms as high as 2.5 miles. It is the tallest vertical wall seen within the rings.

"We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we've come across walls more than two miles high," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."
Cassini Reveals New Ring Quirks, Shadows During Saturn Equinox  - NASA

Saturn's moon Daphnis is 5 miles across but seems to have a large gravity pull. Or could it be Electrical Universe activity?

Now that they had not predicted these walls, or even clumpy stuff in the rings, they will be able to carry on using their models to increase our understanding of the rings.

"The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings," said Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at JPL. "To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving."


Scientists also were intrigued by bright streaks in two different rings that appear to be clouds of dust kicked up in collisions between small space debris and ring particles. Understanding the rate and locations of impacts will help build better models of contamination and erosion in the rings and refine estimates of their age.

Surprised science - clumpy Saturns Rings and gaps in Saturns Ring system

Saturn’s largest, most compact ring consists of tightly packed clumps of particles separated by nearly empty gaps, according to new findings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

“We originally thought we would see a uniform cloud of particles,”....Instead we find that the particles are clumped together with empty spaces in between."

Because previous interpretations assumed the ring particles were distributed uniformly, scientists underestimated the total mass of Saturn’s rings, researchers said: the mass may actually be two or more times previous estimates.

“These results will help us understand the overall question of the age and hence the origin of Saturn’s rings”
Saturn rings found clumpier, heavier than thought

All weights/mass in space are calculated using math theories which are built on other theories use support another theory... If something is wrong along the line then the mass/weight of everything could be wrong.

[electrobleme]

Water on the? Computer says YESSSS! Scientits say no you Fucking Stupid Universe

Water and hydroxyl are related molecular species and have similar spectroscopic signatures—the wavelengths characteristic of each reside nearby in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The three-micron absorption band indicative of water appeared broadly across the lunar surface in spectrometric data taken by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument that circled the moon aboard India's Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft until the orbiter's mission ended prematurely last month.

At first, the instrument's minders were confounded, figuring that something on M3 had gone awry. "The first reaction that I think all of us had was, this is ridiculous," says Carle Pieters, a planetary scientist at Brown University and principal investigator for M3. The team was finding evidence for water not in permanently shadowed craters but on the sunlit portions of the moon, which just did not add up.

"We spent months going through our data, trying to find what went wrong," she recalls. "What is it that gives us this signature that we can't get rid of?" Unable to troubleshoot the odd result, Pieters's group turned to a second, and then a third, independent observation.

Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey spectroscopist on the M3 team, reanalyzed archival data from the Cassini spacecraft, now exploring Saturn and its satellites, taken during a 1999 flyby of the moon. The Cassini data agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.  
Stream of Evidence from 3 Spacecraft Indicates That the Moon Has Water

Overwhelming evidence not just found 10 years before but a paper was written on it that could not get through the peer review and be publicised.

[electrobleme]

Maelstrom of magnetism with Magnetic Mercury and its Magnetic circuits


Mercurys magnetic circuit and magnetic stuff

Magnetopause current...plasmoid...flux rope..flux transfer events...spluttering...

At least any article on it will mention that magnetism is not the creator but a secondary effect...

WASHINGTON -- A NASA spacecraft gliding over the surface of Mercury has revealed that the planet's atmosphere, the interaction of its surrounding magnetic field with the solar wind, and its geological past display greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected...

"This second Mercury flyby provided a number of new findings," said Sean Solomon, the probe's principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "One of the biggest surprises was how strongly the dynamics of the planet's magnetic field–solar wind interaction changed from what we saw during the first Mercury flyby in January 2008...

The variability that the spacecraft observed in Mercury's magnetosphere, the volume of space dominated by the planet's magnetic field, so far supports the hypothesis that the great day-to-day changes in Mercury's atmosphere may be a result of changes in the shielding provided by the magnetosphere.

"The spacecraft observed a radically different magnetosphere at Mercury during its second flyby compared with its earlier Jan. 14 encounter," said James Slavin from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Slavin is a mission co-investigator and lead author of one of the papers. "During the first flyby, important discoveries were made, but scientists didn't detect any dynamic features. The second flyby witnessed a totally different situation."
MESSENGER Spacecraft Reveals a Very Dynamic Planet Mercury  - nasa .gov

spaceweather.com front page article on Mercurys magnetic circuit and space weather

Maelstrom of magnetism...magnetic field...magnetic tornadoes...twisted bundles of magnetic fields...magnetic twisters....explosive magnetic reconnections...solar wind magnetic field boundary...

Scientists will be continually surprises about Mercury, its exosphere and especially its magnetic field


Mercury has an atmosphere?

Water in Mercurys atmosphere was surprising?

The spacecraft also made the first detection of magnesium in Mercury's thin atmosphere, known as an exosphere. This observation and other data confirm that magnesium is an important constituent of Mercury's surface materials.

The probe's Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer instrument detected the magnesium. Finding magnesium was not surprising to scientists, but seeing it in the amounts and distribution observed was unexpected. The instrument also measured other exospheric constituents, including calcium and sodium.

The variability that the spacecraft observed in Mercury's magnetosphere, the volume of space dominated by the planet's magnetic field, so far supports the hypothesis that the great day-to-day changes in Mercury's atmosphere may be a result of changes in the shielding provided by the magnetosphere.

MESSENGER Spacecraft Reveals a Very Dynamic Planet Mercury  - nasa .gov

Are the changes due to the magnetosphere or are they the magnetosphere?

[electrobleme]

"This is a shocking new result...We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised

"This is a shocking new result," says IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. "We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised."

NASA - Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System
   10.15.2009

October 15, 2009: For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the "heliosphere," it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it.

Until now.

NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. The maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin:

Above: IBEX's all-sky map of energetic neutral atom emission reveals a bright filament of unknown origin. V1 and V2 indicate the positions of the Voyager spacecraft. [more]

"This is a shocking new result," says IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. "We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised."


Although the ribbon looks bright in the IBEX map, it does not glow in any conventional sense. The ribbon is not a source of light, but rather a source of particles--energetic neutral atoms or ENAs. IBEX's sensors can detect these particles, which are produced in the outer heliosphere where the solar wind begins to slow down and mix with interstellar matter from outside the solar system.

"This ribbon winds between the two Voyager spacecraft and was not observed by either of them," notes Eric Christian, IBEX deputy mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It's like having two weather stations, but missing the big storm that runs between them."

Unlike the Voyager spacecraft, which have spent decades traveling to the edge of the solar system for in situ sampling, IBEX stayed closer to home. It is in Earth orbit, spinning around and collecting ENAs from all directions. This gives IBEX the unique "big picture" view necessary to discover something as vast as the ribbon.

The ribbon also has fine structure--small filaments of ENA emission no more than a few degrees wide: image. The fine structure is as much of a mystery as the ribbon itself, researchers say.

One important clue: The ribbon runs perpendicular to the direction of the galactic magnetic field just outside the heliosphere, as shown in the illustration at right.

"That cannot be a coincidence," says McComas. But what does it mean? No one knows. "We're missing some fundamental aspect of the interaction between the heliosphere and the rest of the galaxy. Theorists are working like crazy to figure this out."

Understanding the physics of the outer heliosphere is important because of the role it plays in shielding the solar system against cosmic rays. The heliosphere's size and shape are key factors in determining its shielding power and, thus, how many cosmic rays reach Earth. For the first time, IBEX is revealing how the heliosphere might respond when it bumps into interstellar clouds and galactic magnetic fields.

"IBEX is now making a second all-sky map, and we're eager to see if the ribbon is changing," says McComas. "Watching the ribbon evolve--if it is evolving--could yield more clues."

Stay tuned for updates.

NASA - Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

A good theory predicts and our standard theories didnt predict this and dont predict most things.

So they will revise the standard theory that did not predict this and use that as the new theory? Genius. And your tax $$s are paying for this mathematical wet dream and gravy train. Your tax money that you have got up on a Monday morning to work towards paying will fund this new research into the revised ideas. Now that is Genius.


So what 2 things are perpendicular to each, one is magnetic fields and the other is? No, cant work it out but it is an important clue.

Scientists have known since the early part of the 19th century that electrical fields and magnetic fields are intimately related to each other and applications of this connection are found all around you. Moving electric charge (electric current) creates a magnetic field...

A changing magnetic field creates electrical current---an electric field...James Clerk Maxwell (lived 1831--1879) put these ideas together and proposed that if a changing magnetic field can make an electric field, then a changing electric field (from an oscillating electric charge, for example) should make a magnetic field. A consequence of this is that changing electric and magnetic fields should trigger each other and these changing fields should move at a speed equal to the speed of light. To conclude this line of reasoning, Maxwell said that light is an electromagnetic wave. Later experiments confirmed Maxwells's theory.

Electric and magnetic fields oscillate together but perpendicular to each other and the electromagnetic wave moves in a direction perpendicular to both of the fields.
Electric and Magnetic Fields - astronomynotes .com

Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

One important clue: The ribbon runs perpendicular to the direction of the galactic magnetic field just outside the heliosphere, as shown in the illustration at right.

"That cannot be a coincidence," says McComas. But what does it mean? No one knows. "We're missing some fundamental aspect of the interaction between the heliosphere and the rest of the galaxy. Theorists are working like crazy to figure this out."

Stay tuned for updates.

NASA - Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

So you know the ribbon runs perpendicular to the direction of the galactic magnetic field , thats an important clue and cannot be a coincidence but what could cause the ribbon. What could cause a magnetic field perpendicular to it?

Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

But what does it mean? No one knows. "We're missing some fundamental aspect of the interaction between the heliosphere and the rest of the galaxy. Theorists are working like crazy to figure this out."

Stay tuned for updates.

NASA - Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System

Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System

Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System
October 15th, 2009

Since it launched a year ago, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has been monitoring heliosphere and how our Sun interacts with and the local interstellar medium — the gas and dust trapped in the vacuum of space. The first results from the mission, combined with data from the Cassini mission, are showing the heliosphere to be different from what researchers have previously thought. Data show an unexpected bright band or ribbon of surprisingly high-energy emissions. "We knew there would be energetic neutral atoms coming in from the very edge of the heliosphere, and our theories said there would be small variations in their emissions," said David McComas, IBEX Principal Investigator at a press conference on Thursday. "But instead we are seeing two-to-three hundred percent variations, and this is not entirely understood. Whatever we thought about this before is definitely not right."

The energies IBEX has observed range from 0.2 to 6.0 kiloelectron volts, and the scientists said its flux is two to three times greater than the ENA activity throughout the rest of the heliosphere. McComas and his colleagues said that no existing model can explain all the dominant features of this “ribbon.” Instead, they suggest that these new findings will prompt a change in our understanding of the heliosphere and the processes that shape it.

McComas suggested that the energetic neutral atom (ENA) ribbon could be caused by interactions between the heliosphere and the local interstellar magnetic field. "The local interstellar magnetic field is oriented in such a way that it correlates with the ribbon. If you 'paint' the ribbon on the boundary of the heliosphere, the magnetic field is like big bungie cords that pushing in along the sides and at southern part of the heliosphere. Somehow the magnetic field seems to be playing a dominant roll in these interactions, but we don't know it could produced these higher fluxes. We have to figure out what physics were are missing."

The solar wind streaks away from the sun in all directions at over a millions kilometers per hour. It creates a bubble in space around our solar system.

For the first ten billion kilometers of its radius, the solar wind travels at over a million kilometers per hour. It slows as it begins to collide with the interstellar medium, and the point where the solar wind slows down is the termination shock; the point where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance is called the heliopause; the point where the interstellar medium, traveling in the opposite direction, slows down as it collides with the heliosphere is the bow shock.

The Voyager spacecraft have explored this region, but didn't detect the ribbon. Team member Eric Christian said the ribbon wound in between the location of Voyager 1 and 2, and they couldn't detect it in their immediate areas. Voyager 1 spacecraft encountered the helioshock in 2004 when it reached the region where the charged particles streaming off the sun hit the neutral gas from interstellar space. Voyager 2 followed into the solar system's edge in 2007. While these spacecraft made the first explorations of this region, IBEX is now revealing a a more complete picture, filling in where the Voyagers couldn't. Christian compared Voyager 1 and 2 to be like weather stations while IBEX is first weather satellite to provide more complete coverage.

McComas said his first reaction when the data started coming in was that of terror because he thought something must be wrong with the spacecraft. But as more data kept coming back each week, the team realized that they were wrong, and the spacecraft was right.

"Our next steps will be to go through all the detailed observations and rack them up against the various models and go find what it is that we are missing, what we’ve been leaving out," he said.
Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System - universetoday .com

Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System

Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System
October 15th, 2009

...The first results from the mission, combined with data from the Cassini mission, are showing the heliosphere to be different from what researchers have previously thought. Data show an unexpected bright band or ribbon of surprisingly high-energy emissions. "We knew there would be energetic neutral atoms coming in from the very edge of the heliosphere, and our theories said there would be small variations in their emissions," said David McComas, IBEX Principal Investigator at a press conference on Thursday. "But instead we are seeing two-to-three hundred percent variations, and this is not entirely understood. Whatever we thought about this before is definitely not right."

...McComas and his colleagues said that no existing model can explain all the dominant features of this “ribbon.” Instead, they suggest that these new findings will prompt a change in our understanding of the heliosphere and the processes that shape it.

...Somehow the magnetic field seems to be playing a dominant roll in these interactions, but we don't know it could produced these higher fluxes. We have to figure out what physics were are missing."

McComas said his first reaction when the data started coming in was that of terror because he thought something must be wrong with the spacecraft. But as more data kept coming back each week, the team realized that they were wrong, and the spacecraft was right.

"Our next steps will be to go through all the detailed observations and rack them up against the various models and go find what it is that we are missing, what we’ve been leaving out," he said.
Spacecraft Detects Mysterious "Ribbon" at Edge of Solar System - universetoday .com

[electrobleme]

"We never expected to find anything like this"

WASHINGTON -- Using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. The cause, they suggest, is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe.

"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," says lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."

Kashlinsky calls this collective motion a "dark flow" in the vein of more familiar cosmological mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion," he says.

Hot X-ray-emitting gas in a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background. Clusters don't precisely follow the expansion of space, so the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster's individual motion.

This results in a minute shift of the microwave background's temperature in the cluster's direction. Astronomers refer to this change as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.

A related distortion, known as the thermal SZ effect, has been observed in galaxy clusters since the 1980s. But the kinematic version is less than one-tenth as strong and has not been detected in any cluster.

In 2000, Kashlinsky and Fernando Atrio-Barandela from the University of Salamanca, Spain, showed that astronomers could, in essence, amplify the effect isolating the kinematic SZ term. The trick, they found, is to study large numbers of clusters.

The astronomers teamed up with Dale Kocevski at the University of California, Davis, and Harald Ebeling from the University of Hawaii to identify some 700 X-ray clusters that could be used to find the subtle spectral shift. This sample includes objects up to 6 billion light-years -- or nearly half of the observable universe -- away.

Using the cluster catalog and WMAP's three-year view of the microwave background, the astronomers detected bulk cluster motions of nearly 2 million miles per hour. The clusters are heading toward a 20-degree patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

What's more, this motion is constant out to at least a billion light-years. "Because the dark flow already extends so far, it likely extends across the visible universe," Kashlinsky says.

The finding flies in the face of predictions from standard cosmological models, which describe such motions as decreasing at ever greater distances.

Cosmologists view the microwave background - a flash of light emitted 380,000 years after the big bang - as the universe's ultimate reference frame. Relative to it, all large-scale motion should show no preferred direction.

Big-bang models that include a feature called inflation offer a possible explanation for the flow. Inflation is a brief hyper-expansion early in the universe's history. If inflation did occur, then the universe we can see is only a small portion of the whole cosmos.

WMAP data released in 2006 support the idea that our universe experienced inflation. Kashlinsky and his team suggest that their clusters are responding to the gravitational attraction of matter that was pushed far beyond the observable universe by inflation. "This measurement may give us a way to explore the state of the cosmos before inflation occurred," he says.

The next step is to narrow down uncertainties in the measurements. "We need a more accurate accounting of how the million-degree gas in these galaxy clusters is distributed," says Atrio-Barandela.

"We’re assembling an even larger and deeper catalog of X-ray clusters to better measure the flow," Ebeling adds. The researchers also plan to extend their analysis by using the latest WMAP results, released in March.
Scientists Detect Cosmic 'Dark Flow' Across Billions of Light Years - NASA

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"It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else"

Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space

As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.

Mysterious motions

Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies. These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays. By observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.

The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.

They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).

"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."

Inflationary bubble

The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.

In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation."

Surprising find

Though inflation theory forecasts many odd facets of the distant universe, not many scientists predicted the dark flow.

"It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else," Kashlinsky said. "For some particular models of inflation you would expect these kinds of structures, and there were some suggestions in the literature that were not taken seriously I think until now."

The discovery could help scientists probe what happened to the universe before inflation, and what's going on in those inaccessible realms we cannot see.
Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space - space .com

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they doubted their senses. The scale of the wave was staggering



What has been solved?

PhysOrg.com) -- Sometimes you really can believe your eyes. That's what NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) is telling researchers about a controversial phenomenon on the sun known as the "solar tsunami."

Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing across the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the wave was staggering: It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the satellite's eye—but surely not a real wave.

"Now we know," says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Solar tsunamis are real."

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a coronal mass ejection, or CME) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun's surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90 degrees, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event.

"It was definitely a wave," says Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University, lead author of a paper reporting the finding in Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Not a wave of water, but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism."

The technical name is "fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical wave," or "MHD wave" for short. The one STEREO saw reared up about 100,000 kilometers high, raced outward at 250 km/second (560,000 mph), and packed as much energy as 2400 megatons of TNT (1029 ergs).

Solar tsunamis were discovered in 1997 by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). In May of that year, a CME came blasting up from an active region on the sun's surface, and SOHO recorded a tsunami rippling away from the blast site.

"We wondered," recalls Gurman, "is that a wave, or just a shadow of the CME overhead?"

SOHO's single point of view was not enough to answer the question—neither for that first wave nor for many similar events recorded by SOHO in years that followed.

The question remained open until after the launch of STEREO. At the time of the February 2009 eruption, STEREO-B was directly over the blast site, while STEREO-A was stationed at a right angle —"perfect geometry for cracking the mystery," says co-author Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The physical reality of the waves has been further confirmed by movies of the waves crashing into things. "We've seen the waves reflected by sunspots," says Vourlidas. "And there is a wonderful movie of a solar prominence oscillating after it gets hit by a wave. We call it the 'dancing prominence.'"

Solar tsunamis pose no direct threat to Earth, but they are important to study. "We can use them to diagnose conditions on the sun," notes Gurman. "By watching how the waves propagate and bounce off things, we can gather information about the sun's lower atmosphere available in no other way."

"Tsunami waves can also improve our forecasting of space weather," adds Vourlidas, "Like a bull-eye, they 'mark the spot' where an eruption takes place. Pinpointing the blast site can help us anticipate when a CME or radiation storm will reach Earth."

And they're pretty entertaining, too. "The movies," he says, "are out of this world."
Mystery of the Solar Tsunami -- Solved

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Variations in stars brightness - destroys all standard theories

Mystery of Changing Star Brightness Deepens

Unusual fluctuations in the brightness of older sun-like stars have long mystified astronomers, and new, detailed observations of the phenomenon have only deepened the mystery.

The new data, taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, contradict all of the explanations that astronomers have previously put forward to account for years-long variations seen in the brightness of one-third of sun-like stars that are in the later stages of their lives.

"We have obtained the most comprehensive set of observations to date for this class of sun-like stars, and they clearly show that all the possible explanations for their unusual behavior just fail," said study team member Christine Nicholls of Mount Stromlo Observatory, Australia.

The mystery investigated by Nicholls and her team dates back to the 1930s and affects about a third of sun-like stars in our Milky Way and other galaxies. All stars with masses similar to our sun become, towards the end of their lives, red, cool and extremely large, just before retiring as white dwarfs.

Also known as red giants, these elderly stars exhibit very strong periodic variations in their luminosity over timescales up to a couple of years.

"Such variations are thought to be caused by what we call 'stellar pulsations,'" Nicholls explained. "Roughly speaking, the giant star swells and shrinks, becoming brighter and dimmer in a regular pattern. However, one third of these stars show an unexplained additional periodic variation, on even longer timescales — up to five years."

In order to find out the origin of this secondary feature, the astronomers monitored 58 stars in our galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, over two and a half years.

But instead of backing up any of the existing ideas for why these stars see additional fluctuations, the observations contradicted all of them.

"The newly gathered data show that pulsations are an extremely unlikely explanation for the additional variation," said team leader Peter Wood of Australia National University. "Another possible mechanism for producing luminosity variations in a star is to have the star itself move in a binary system. However, our observations are strongly incompatible with this hypothesis too."

The team found from further analysis that whatever the cause of these unexplained variations is, it also causes the giant stars to eject mass either in clumps or as an expanding disc.

So with this new data, astronomers will have to go back to the drawing board to come up with an explanation.

"A Sherlock Holmes is needed to solve this very frustrating mystery," Nicholls said.
Mystery of Changing Star Brightness Deepens

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Earth's Atmosphere Came from Outer Space, Scientists Find

The gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere -- and probably its oceans -- did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists.

The report published in the journal Science means that textbook images of ancient Earth with huge volcanoes spewing gas into the atmosphere will have to be rethought.

According to the team, the age-old view that volcanoes were the source of the Earth's earliest atmosphere must be put to rest.

Using world-leading analytical techniques, the team of Dr Greg Holland, Dr Martin Cassidy and Professor Chris Ballentine tested volcanic gases to uncover the new evidence.

The research was funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

"We found a clear meteorite signature in volcanic gases," said Dr Greg Holland the project's lead scientist.

"From that we now know that the volcanic gases could not have contributed in any significant way to the Earth's atmosphere.

"Therefore the atmosphere and oceans must have come from somewhere else, possibly from a late bombardment of gas and water rich materials similar to comets.

"Until now, no one has had instruments capable of looking for these subtle signatures in samples from inside the Earth -- but now we can do exactly that."

The techniques enabled the team to measure tiny quantities of the unreactive volcanic trace gases Krypton and Xenon, which revealed an isotopic 'fingerprint' matching that of meteorites which is different from that of 'solar' gases.

The study is also the first to establish the precise composition of the Krypton present in the Earth's mantle.

Project director Prof Chris Ballentine of The University of Manchester, said: "Many people have seen artist's impressions of the primordial Earth with huge volcanoes in the background spewing gas to form the atmosphere.

"We will now have to redraw this picture."
Earth's Atmosphere Came from Outer Space, Scientists Find

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The surprising Northern Lights show

A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. Movies of the phenomenon were unveiled at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union today in San Francisco.

"Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time," says space scientist Larry Lyons of UCLA, a leading member of the team that made the discovery. "These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras."

The collisions occur on such a vast scale, isolated observers on Earth with limited fields of view had never noticed them before. It took a network of sensitive cameras spread across thousands of miles to get the big picture.

..."It was like nothing I had seen before," Lyons recalls. "Over the next several days, we surveyed even more events. Our excitement mounted as we became convinced that the collisions were happening over and over."

The explosions of light, they believe, are a sign of something dramatic happening in the space around Earth—specifically, in Earth's "plasma tail."

...By examining many collisions, Lyons and Nishimura have identified a common sequence of events. It begins with two elements: (1) a broad curtain of slow-moving auroras and (2) a smaller knot of fast-moving auroras, initially far apart. The slow curtain is quietly glowing over the Arctic when the speedy knot rushes in from the north. The two auroras collide and an eruption of light ensues.

How does this sequence connect to events in the plasma tail?

"It took some creative thinking to come up with an answer, but I believe this team has done it," says THEMIS project scientist Dave Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

(to read more click here) Colliding Auroras Produce Explosions of Light - science.nasa .gov

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hot companions - what the hell are they?

2 orbiting "objects" just discovered are hotter than the stars they orbit! What are they, how come they are so hot?  Will they be found to be very "magnetic" (its seems you can not have a magnetic field without a flow of current), will they be "gas giants" of a new type, will they have connections to the star (physical material and "magnetic"? More should be found and will some be hotter and smaller?

"The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination," said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars.

The Kepler Telescope, launched in March, discovered the two new heavenly bodies, each circling its own star. Telescope chief scientist Bill Borucki of NASA said the objects are thousands of degrees hotter than the stars they circle. That means they probably aren't planets. They are bigger and hotter than planets in our solar system, including dwarf planets.

"The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination," said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

The new discoveries don't quite fit into any definition of known astronomical objects, and so far don't have a classification of their own. Details about the mystery objects were presented Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.

For now, NASA researcher Jason Rowe, who found the objects, said he calls them "hot companions."

How hot? Try 26,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to melt lead or iron.

There are two leading theories for what the objects might be and those theories cover both ends of the cosmic life cycle:

Rowe suggests they are newly born planets. New planets have extremely high temperatures, and in this case Rowe speculates they might be only about 200 million years old.

Ronald Gilliland of the Space Telescope Science Institute says they could be white dwarf stars that are dying and stripping off their outer shells and shrinking.
Planet-hunting telescope unearths hot mysteries