Northern Lights Mystery May Be Solved

Astrophotographer Shawn Malone of Marquette, Mich., took this shot of an aurora on Feb. 18, 2012. Malone appears in the photo seated in the chair.

Scientists may have solved a longstanding mystery about the origin of the energetic particles that cause Earth's dramatic aurora displays.
The electrons responsible for the auroras — also known as the northern and southern lights — are likely accelerated to incredible speeds in an active region of Earth's magnetosphere, according to a new study. This region is 1,000 times larger than scientists had thought possible, providing enough volume to generate lots of the fast-moving electrons, the study reports.
"People have been thinking this region is tiny," lead author Jan Egedal, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. But now, he added, "we’ve shown it can be very large, and can accelerate many electrons."

Egedal and his colleagues analyzed data gathered by various spacecraft, including the European Space Agency's four Cluster probes. They also performed simulations using a supercomputer called Kraken at the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Kraken has 112,000 processors working in parallel. The team used 25,000 of these processors for 11 days, following the motions of 180 billion simulated particles in space to map out how aurora-generating electrons move.
The researchers determined that these electrons are likely being rocketed to their tremendous speeds in the magnetotail, a portion of Earth's protective magnetosphere that has been pushed far into space by the solar wind.
As the solar wind — the million-mph stream of charged particles coming from the sun — stretches Earth's magnetic-field lines, the field stores energy like a rubber band being stretched, Egedal said. When the normally parallel field lines reconnect, that energy is released like a rubber band being snapped, and electrons are propelled back toward our planet at fantastic speeds.
When these fast-moving electrons hit molecules in Earth's upper atmosphere, the impact generates the phenomenon that we know as the northern and southern lights. [Photos: Dazzling Northern Lights of February 2012]
Some physicists had viewed this origin story for the aurora-causing electrons as improbable, because they didn't think the active magnetotail region was big enough to generate the huge numbers of electrons that slam into Earth's atmosphere.
Egedal and his team found, however, that the region is likely plenty big — roughly 1,000 times larger, in fact, than theorists had thought possible.
"It used to be people said this was a crazy idea," Egedal said. "I don’t get that anymore."
In addition to creating a beautiful glow at Earth's higher latitudes, these super-energetic electrons can damage or destroy spacecraft. So a better understanding of their behavior may help operators better protect their satellites, researchers said.
The study is detailed in the Feb. 26 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

INCREDIBLE! Cloaked alien spaceship near Mercury ? Giant UFO in our Solar System ?

Thanks to siniXster's visuals upload. Here we get a better look at the supposed cloaked alien ship near the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. A theory has emerged that it is a cloaked spaceship orbiting Mercury after a camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft captured a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun. This collided with the planet on Thursday. The images represent a "coronal mass ejection" (CME) which suggests that alien life could possibly exist within our solar system.

The Mystery of the Giant Planet Hidden In Our Solar System

There's a giant planet right here, hiding in our Solar System. One that nobody has ever seen, even while it is four times larger than Jupiter and has rings and moons orbiting it. At least, that's what two astrophysicists say.
The name of the planet is Tyche. The scientists are John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. According to them, this colossus is hiding in the Oort Cloud—the asteroid beehive that forms the outer shell of our home system, one light-year in radius. They claim that data already captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer proves its existence. It only needs to be analyzed... over the next two years.
Matese and Whitmire are convinced that Tyche is very real now, however. 15,000 times farther from the Sun than Earth, Tyche would be made mostly of hydrogen and helium. The titanic planet would orbit the Sun with moons and rings around it, bubbling with clouds and storm systems similar to Jupiter. It would even have a mild temperature (-73ºC/-99.4ºF) compared to the asteroids around it, which are almost near absolute zero. Whitmire says that the temperature difference is because a titan of this size takes a long time to cool off after its formation.
Would Tyche be the 9th planet of our Solar System, after Pluto's demise? If its existence is finally confirmed, its Solar System planet status may not be guaranteed. The reason: Astronomers theorize that Tyche could be a planet born in another star system and captured by ours. But whatever classification it gets, it's exciting to think that there may be a new neighbor just around the corner. [The Independent]
Original image by NASA is not a concept of Tyche—used to illustrate size.

One of the Great Mysteries of Our Universe

Time is always running!

From VOA Learning English, this is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in Special English. I'm June Simms.

Our program today is about a mystery as old as time. Bob Doughty and Sarah Long tell about the mystery of time.

​​If you can read a clock, you can know the time of day. But no one knows what time itself is. We cannot see it. We cannot touch it. We cannot hear it. We know it only by the way we mark its passing.

For all our success in measuring the smallest parts of time, time remains one of the great mysteries of the universe.

One way to think about time is to imagine a world without time. There could be no movement, because time and movement cannot be separated.

A world without time could exist only as long as there were no changes. For time and change are linked. We know that time has passed when something changes.

In the real world -- the world with time -- changes never stop. Some changes happen only once in a while, like an eclipse of the moon. Others happen repeatedly, like the rising and setting of the sun. Humans always have noted natural events that repeat themselves. When people began to count such events, they began to measure time.

In early human history, the only changes that seemed to repeat themselves evenly were the movements of objects in the sky. The most easily seen result of these movements was the difference between light and darkness.

The sun rises in the eastern sky, producing light. It moves across the sky and sinks in the west, causing darkness. The appearance and disappearance of the sun was even and unfailing. The periods of light and darkness it created were the first accepted periods of time. We have named each period of light and darkness -- one day.

People saw the sun rise higher in the sky during the summer than in winter. They counted the days that passed from the sun's highest position until it returned to that position. They counted 365 days. We now know that is the time Earth takes to move once around the sun. We call this period of time a year.

Early humans also noted changes in the moon. As it moved across the night sky, they must have wondered. Why did it look different every night? Why did it disappear? Where did it go?

Even before they learned the answers to these questions, they developed a way to use the changing faces of the moon to tell time.

The moon was "full" when its face was bright and round. The early humans counted the number of times the sun appeared between full moons. They learned that this number always remained the same -- about 29 suns. Twenty-nine suns equaled one moon. We now know this period of time as one month.

Early humans hunted animals and gathered wild plants. They moved in groups or tribes from place to place in search of food. Then, people learned to plant seeds and grow crops. They learned to use animals to help them work, and for food.

They found they no longer needed to move from one place to another to survive.

As hunters, people did not need a way to measure time. As farmers, however, they had to plant crops in time to harvest them before winter. They had to know when the seasons would change. So, they developed calendars.

No one knows when the first calendar was developed. But it seems possible that it was based on moons, or lunar months.

When people started farming, the wise men of the tribes became very important. They studied the sky. They gathered enough information so they could know when the seasons would change. They announced when it was time to plant crops.

The divisions of time we use today were developed in ancient Babylonia 4,000 years ago. Babylonian astronomers believed the sun moved around the Earth every 365 days. They divided the trip into 12 equal parts, or months. Each month was 30 days. Then, they divided each day into 24 equal parts, or hours. They divided each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.

Humans have used many devices to measure time. The sundial was one of the earliest and simplest.

A sundial measures the movement of the sun across the sky each day. It has a stick or other object that rises above a flat surface. The stick, blocking sunlight, creates a shadow. As the sun moves, so does the shadow of the stick across the flat surface. Marks on the surface show the passing of hours, and perhaps, minutes.

The sundial works well only when the sun is shining. So, other ways were invented to measure the passing of time.

One device is the hourglass. It uses a thin stream of falling sand to measure time. The hourglass is shaped like the number eight --- wide at the top and bottom, but very thin in the middle. In a true "hour" glass, it takes exactly one hour for all the sand to drop from the top to the bottom through a very small opening in the middle. When the hourglass is turned with the upside down, it begins to mark the passing of another hour.

By the eighteenth century, people had developed mechanical clocks and watches. And today, many of our clocks and watches are electronic.

So, we have devices to mark the passing of time. But what time is it now? Clocks in different parts of the world do not show the same time at the same time. This is because time on Earth is set by the sun's position in the sky above.

We all have a 12 o'clock noon each day. Noon is the time the sun is highest in the sky. But when it is 12 o'clock noon where I am, it may be 10 o'clock at night where you are.

As international communications and travel increased, it became clear that it would be necessary to establish a common time for all parts of the world.

In 1884, an international conference divided the world into 24 time areas, or zones. Each zone represents one hour. The astronomical observatory in Greenwich, England, was chosen as the starting point for the time zones. Twelve zones are west of Greenwich. Twelve are east.

The time at Greenwich -- as measured by the sun -- is called Universal Time. For many years it was called Greenwich Mean Time.

Some scientists say time is governed by the movement of matter in our universe. They say time flows forward because the universe is expanding. Some say it will stop expanding some day and will begin to move in the opposite direction, to grow smaller. Some believe time will also begin to flow in the opposite direction -- from the future to the past. Can time move backward?

Most people have no trouble agreeing that time moves forward. We see people born and then grow old. We remember the past, but we do not know the future. We know a film is moving forward if it shows a glass falling off a table and breaking into many pieces. If the film were moving backward, the pieces would re-join to form a glass and jump back up onto the table. No one has ever seen this happen. Except in a film!

Some scientists believe there is one reason why time only moves forward. It is a well-known scientific law -- the second law of thermodynamics. That law says disorder increases with time. In fact, there are more conditions of disorder than of order.

For example, there are many ways a glass can break into pieces. That is disorder. But there is only one way the broken pieces can be organized to make a glass. That is order. If time moved backward, the broken pieces could come together in a great many ways. Only one of these many ways, however, would re-form the glass. It is almost impossible to believe this would happen.

Not all scientists believe time is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. They do not agree that time must always move forward. The debate will continue about the nature of time. And time will remain a mystery.

Mysteries of the Sacred Universe

A short clip from a film by Richard L. Thompson. He explains the world and universe from the Srimad Bhagavatam's cosmological viewpoint.

The Universe Was Invented From Nothing

Materialism is a one thinking system that assumed an object or thing as a static existence and denied other existences. Originated from the ancient Greek and obtained enhancement in public society acceptance, particularly during 19th century, it became famous with materialism understanding dialectic (based on discussion and debate) brought by Karl Marx, this thinking system alleged an object or thing existed since the beginning and will be existed forever. Because he defended an object or thing was not invented, he did not accept the existence of creator.

Just like we told before, materialism understanding became popular especially during 19th century. One of the main reason is "Static Universe" model was invented to answer the circumstance of "how the universe was created". This model answered the circumstance by stating a fact that the universe was not invented, but it existed since the beginning and will be existed forever. The universe was accepted as a collection of objects that stable, fixed and never change and this understanding has promoted the universe as if we do not need to believe in the Creator.

An opposite confirmation with the universe model, which was a contrivance that the universe has a beginning and it can definitely change, could not be doubtful again, proved the existence of a creator. In his book "Principles Fondamentaux de Philosophic", Georges Politzer, a famous materialism philosopher has accepted this fact in his denial to creation based on the model "boundless universe":

The universe was not created. If it was created, it has to be created instantly by God and manifested from nothing. To confess creation, a person must make a confession first, an existence when the universe does not exist, and something has exists from nothing. This cannot be accepted by science.

At the end of a term which began on the second day of 20th century, modern science has proved a fact that accepted by a group of materialists when they said: "If that was the fact, we have to agree on the existence of a Creator", which, the universe has a beginning. This fact has been spread through a few levels.

Top Ten Mysteries of the Universe

 
1. What Are Fermi Bubbles?
No, this is not a rare digestive disorder. The bubbles are massive, mysterious structures that emanate from the Milky Ways center and extend roughly 20,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The strange phenomenon, first discovered in 2010, is made up of super-high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray emissions, invisible to the naked eye. Scientists have hypothesized that the gamma rays might be shock waves from stars being consumed by the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
2. Rectangular Galaxy
“Look, up in the sky! It’s a…rectangle?” Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a celestial body, roughly 70 million light-years away, with an appearance that is unique in the visible universe: The galaxy LEDA 074886 is shaped more or less like a rectangle. While most galaxies are shaped like discs, three-dimensional ellipses or irregular blobs, this one seems to have a regular rectangle or diamond-shaped appearance. Some have speculated that the shape results from the collision of two spiral-shaped galaxies, but no one knows for now.
3. The Moon’s Magnetic Field
One of the moon’s greatest mysteries—why only some parts of the crust seem to have a magnetic field—has intrigued astronomers for decades, even inspiring the buried mythical “monolith” in the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But some scientists finally think they may have an explanation. After using a computer model to analyze the moon’s crust, researchers believe the magnetism may be a relic of a 120-mile-wide asteroid that collided with the moon’s southern pole about 4.5 billion years ago, scattering magnetic material. Others, though, believe the magnetic field may be related to other smaller, more recent impacts.
4. Why Do Pulsars Pulse?
Pulsars are distant, rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals, like a rotating lighthouse beam sweeping over a shoreline. Although the first one was discovered in 1967, scientists have for decades struggled to understand what causes these stars to pulse—and, for that matter, what causes pulsars to occasionally stop pulsing. In 2008, though, when one pulsar suddenly shut off for 580 days, scientists’ observations allowed them to determine that the “on” and “off” periods are somehow related to magnetic currents slowing down the stars’ spin. Astronomers are still at work trying to understand why these magnetic currents fluctuate in the first place.
5. What Is Dark Matter?
Astrophysicists are currently trying to observe the effects of dark energy, which accounts for some 70 percent of the universe. But it's not the only dark stuff in the cosmos: roughly 25 percent of it is made up of an entirely separate material called dark matter. Completely invisible to telescopes and the human eye, it neither emits nor absorbs visible light (or any form of electromagnetic radiation), but its gravitational effect is evident in the motions of galaxy clusters and individual stars. Although dark matter has proven extremely difficult to study, many scientists speculate that it might be composed of subatomic particles that are fundamentally different from those that create the matter we see around us.

6. Galactic Recycling
In recent years, astronomers have noticed that galaxies form new stars at a rate that would seem to consume more matter than they actually have inside them. The Milky Way, for example, appears to turn about one sun’s worth of dust and gas into new stars every year, but it doesn’t have enough spare matter to keep this up long-term. A new study of distant galaxies might provide the answer: Astronomers noticed gas that had been expelled by the galaxies flowing back in to the center. If the galaxies recycle this gas to produce new stars, it might be a piece of the puzzle in solving the question of the missing raw matter.
7. Where Is All the Lithium?
Models of the Big Bang indicate that the element lithium should be abundant throughout the universe. The mystery, in this case, is pretty straightforward: it doesn’t. Observations of ancient stars, formed from material most similar to that produced by the Big Bang, reveal amounts of lithium two to three times lower than predicted by the theoretical models. New research indicates that some of this lithium may be mixed into the center of stars, out of view of our telescopes, while theorists suggest that axions, hypothetical subatomic particles, may have absorbed protons and reduced the amount of lithium created in the period just after the Big Bang.
8. Is There Anybody Out There?
In 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake devised a highly controversial equation: By multiplying together a series of terms relating to the probability of extraterrestrial life (the rate of star formation in the universe, the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of planets with conditions suitable for life, etc.) he surmised that the existence of intelligent life on other planets is extremely likely. One problem: Roswell conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, we haven’t heard from any aliens to date. Recent discoveries of distant planets that could theoretically harbor life, though, have raised hopes that we might detect extraterrestrials if we just keep looking.
9. How Will the Universe End? [Warning, Potential Spoiler Alert!]
We now believe the universe started with the Big Bang. But how will it end? Based on a number of factors, theorists conclude that the fate of the universe could take one of several wildly different forms. If the amount of dark energy is not enough to resist the compressing force of gravity, the entire universe could collapse into a singular point—a mirror image of the Big Bang, known as the Big Crunch. Recent findings, though, indicate a Big Crunch is less likely than a Big Chill, in which dark energy forces the universe into a slow, gradual expansion and all that remains are burned-out stars and dead planets, hovering at temperatures barely above absolute zero. If enough dark energy is present to overwhelm all other forces, a Big Rip scenario could occur, in which all galaxies, stars and even atoms are torn apart.
10. Across the Multiverse
Theoretical physicists speculate that our universe may not be the only one of its kind. The idea is that our universe exists within a bubble, and multiple alternative universes are contained within their own distinct bubbles. In these other universes, the physical constants—and even the laws of physics—may differ drastically. Despite the theory's resemblance to science fiction, astronomers are now looking for physical evidence: Disc-shaped patterns in the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang, which could indicate collisions with other universes.