There’s a partial lunar eclipse overnight— or rather in the very early morning.
It’ll be to the southwest and low to the horizon— sets up here right around 5 o’clock. Sam and I realized that’s only an hour before we’ve been getting up these days, so we’re going to make a go of it.
It’s not a typo.
Today, in Shamelessly Stolen, I read an article on Bad Astronomer about breathless rumors of an imminent supernova at everyone’s favorite supergiant— Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! It’s been known to be shrinking for a while and, when it goes, it’ll briefly be two and a half times brighter than the moon.
Some guy, soapboxing on a Life After The Oil Crash forum, said his son knew somebody who knew somebody who said the latest observations from Mauna Kea showed a rapid shift to an oblate, non-spheroid shape, purple monkey dishwasher. Bad Astronomer kind of shits all over the idea it’s going to blow (rightfully so with the attribution available, anyway), but here’s where the Shamelessly Stolen bit comes in:
One of the top comments on reddit for the story pointed the way towards the website for the SuperNova Early Warning System— specifically, its mailing list, where you can sign up for automatic emails announcing a rapid increase in neutrino flux. When a star undergoes Type II core collapse, its infalling matter becomes dense enough for electrons and protons to overcome their mutual hatred and merge, giving birth to neutrons and neutrinos. Neutrinos are the ninjas of the subatomic particle world— small, electrically neutral and moving near the speed of light, they whiz around and through ordinary matter mostly unmolested. (Count to one. 50000000000000 neutrinos from Sol just moved through your body.) Fleeing the dying star, they’ll be our first sign that a nearby star is about to buy the farm. As long as it’s not close enough to fry us with gamma rays, it should be one of the singular events of the next millennium.
A team of researchers sequenced the gene to produce wooly mammoth hemoglobin.
Then they inserted the gene into bacteria which grew it— and it has anti-freeze properties. Let’s hope dinosaur urine cures cancer and that can be the science story of 2010 instead of ongoing ecological devastation.
(By the way— regarding the Gulf disaster— I really hope it stops increasing exponentially soon. 5k a day— 20k— 200k gallons a day according to this article! I think that’s about 3/10ths of an Olympic size swimming pool. But I also noticed the estimate of total discharge in that article was 1.6 million— almost an order of magnitude less than the estimate I read in another article today.
That’s about 4.2 million gallons then— six Olympic size swimming pools. See if you can find Sam and I getting married for scale.)
Jeez, Louise— only a theoretical physicist would make gravity a function of an expanding information limit sphere on the edge of the universe spitting entropy into the system. It’s in the third to last paragraph, if you still want to read the article based on that excerpt. It makes my head hurt in the same way this Scrabble hand did:
Hope for an open A? Noun highway? All due credit to anyone who can figure out a salvageable play there.
But please— do yourself a favor and check out the press gallery for this Hubble 20th celebration. There’s a lot more than just the feature photo. It’s a nice time to be a space person…
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