electricspacekoolaid:

NASA Status Update on Voyager 1 Location

“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed.”

The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, 

Learn more about the current status of the Voyager mission here

(via thescienceofreality)

Source: electricspacekoolaid

Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System

Several years ago the Voyager spacecraft neared the edge of the Solar System, where the solar wind and magnetic field started to be influenced by the pressure from the interstellar medium that surrounds them. But the expected breakthrough to interstellar space appeared to be indefinitely put on hold; instead, the particles and magnetic field lines in the area seemed to be sending mixed signals about the Voyagers’ escape. At today’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union, scientists offered an explanation: the durable spacecraft ran into a region that nobody predicted.

Study links exposure to light at night to depression, learning issues For most of history, humans rose with the sun and slept when it set. Enter Thomas Edison, and with a flick of a switch, night became day, enabling us to work, play, and post cat and kid photos on Facebook into the wee hours. However, according to a new study led by a Johns Hopkins biologist, this typical 21st- century scenario comes at a serious cost: When people routinely burn the midnight oil, they risk suffering depression and learning issues, and not only because of lack of sleep. The culprit could also be exposure to bright light at night from lamps, computers, and even iPads. “Basically, what we found is that chronic exposure to bright light—even the kind of light you experience in your own living room at home or in the workplace at night if you are a shift worker—elevates levels of a certain stress hormone in the body, which results in depression and lowers cognitive function,” said Samer Hattar, a biology professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The study, published in the Nov. 14 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, used mice to demonstrate how special cells in the eye (called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or ipRGCs) are activated by bright light, affecting the brain’s center for mood, memory, and learning.
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Study links exposure to light at night to depression, learning issues

For most of history, humans rose with the sun and slept when it set. Enter Thomas Edison, and with a flick of a switch, night became day, enabling us to work, play, and post cat and kid photos on Facebook into the wee hours.

However, according to a new study led by a Johns Hopkins biologist, this typical 21st- century scenario comes at a serious cost: When people routinely burn the midnight oil, they risk suffering depression and learning issues, and not only because of lack of sleep. The culprit could also be exposure to bright light at night from lamps, computers, and even iPads.

“Basically, what we found is that chronic exposure to bright light—even the kind of light you experience in your own living room at home or in the workplace at night if you are a shift worker—elevates levels of a certain stress hormone in the body, which results in depression and lowers cognitive function,” said Samer Hattar, a biology professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

The study, published in the Nov. 14 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, used mice to demonstrate how special cells in the eye (called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or ipRGCs) are activated by bright light, affecting the brain’s center for mood, memory, and learning.

(via thescienceofreality)

Source: hub.jhu.edu

Abroad, armed with science, the United States could make an even bigger difference. Instead of paying $1 billion for a new B-2 bomber or $2 billion for a Virgina Class Submarine – tools designed to forcefully combat the symptoms of the world’s problems — we could pay less and actually work to solve those problems. We live in a new age where people can collaborate as never before, working cooperatively across previously insurmountable barriers of distance and language. In this modern age, we don’t need an army of soldiers; we need an army of scientists.
Steven Ross Pomeroy - Stop Building Bombs and Start Building Starships (via ikenbot)

(via thescienceofreality)

Source: ikenbot

explore-blog:

Higgs boson data from CERN turned into a melody? Yes, please! Best thing since the Solar System set to music and this three-movement choral suite inspired by Sagan.

(↬ Open Culture)

(via jtotheizzoe)

Source:

rhamphotheca: blackkittenclan: exactly what we’ve been waiting for. In its infancy, just microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe consisted of a plasma of quarks and gluons (QGP), the fundamental building blocks of matter. By colliding heavy ions, physicists can turn back time and recreate the conditions that existed back then, allowing us to understand the evolution of the early universe… (CERN)
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rhamphotheca:

blackkittenclan: exactly what we’ve been waiting for.

In its infancy, just microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe consisted of a plasma of quarks and gluons (QGP), the fundamental building blocks of matter. By colliding heavy ions, physicists can turn back time and recreate the conditions that existed back then, allowing us to understand the evolution of the early universe…

(CERN)

Source: blackkittenclan

rhamphotheca:

Weird Planets

Once, astronomers thought planets couldn’t form around binary stars. Now Kepler has found a whole system of planets orbiting a double star. This finding shows that planetary systems are weirder and more abundant than previously thought.

(via: NASA Science)

First Animal to Survive in Space

cozydark: Sounding Rocket Mission to Observe Magnetic Fields On the Sun | On July 5, NASA launched a mission called the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation or SUMI, to study the intricate, constantly changing magnetic fields on the sun in a hard-to-observe area of the sun’s low atmosphere called the chromosphere. Magnetic fields, and the intense magnetic energy they help marshal, lie at the heart of how the sun can create huge explosions of light such as solar flares and eruptions of particles such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). While there are already instruments — both on the ground and flying in space — that can measure these fields, each is constrained to observe the fields on a particular layer of the sun’s surface or atmosphere. Moreover, none of them can see the layer SUMI will observe. “What’s novel with this instrument is that it observes ultraviolet light, when all the others look at infrared or visible light,” says Jonathan Cirtain, a solar scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. and the principal investigator for SUMI. “Those wavelengths of light correspond to the lowest levels in the sun’s atmosphere, but SUMI will look at locations higher in the chromosphere.” The chromosphere is a narrow layer above the photosphere that raises in temperature with height. Normally, it can’t be seen by the naked eye because the light from the photosphere of the Sun overpowers it. The coloring of the chromosphere (deep red) is caused by the immense hydrogen supply it contains. continue reading
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cozydark:

Sounding Rocket Mission to Observe Magnetic Fields On the Sun |

On July 5, NASA launched a mission called the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation or SUMI, to study the intricate, constantly changing magnetic fields on the sun in a hard-to-observe area of the sun’s low atmosphere called the chromosphere.

Magnetic fields, and the intense magnetic energy they help marshal, lie at the heart of how the sun can create huge explosions of light such as solar flares and eruptions of particles such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). While there are already instruments — both on the ground and flying in space — that can measure these fields, each is constrained to observe the fields on a particular layer of the sun’s surface or atmosphere. Moreover, none of them can see the layer SUMI will observe.

“What’s novel with this instrument is that it observes ultraviolet light, when all the others look at infrared or visible light,” says Jonathan Cirtain, a solar scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. and the principal investigator for SUMI. “Those wavelengths of light correspond to the lowest levels in the sun’s atmosphere, but SUMI will look at locations higher in the chromosphere.”

The chromosphere is a narrow layer above the photosphere that raises in temperature with height. Normally, it can’t be seen by the naked eye because the light from the photosphere of the Sun overpowers it. The coloring of the chromosphere (deep red) is caused by the immense hydrogen supply it contains. continue reading

(via thescienceofreality)

Source: nasa.gov

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