astralavista

Scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico have squeezed a diamond so hard that it turned into a pool of liquid. The herculean grip came courtesy of huge magnetic fields generated by Sandia's monumetal "Z Machine."

The Z Machine is a powerful energy booster designed to approach conditions required for nuclear fusion by employing traditional energy sources. The machine uses wall-current electricity to charge giant capacitor banks. The capacitors then connect via gargantuan cable tentacles to a vacuum chamber, 10 feet in diameter and 20 feet high.

Sandia said that when the accelerator fires "highly synchronized laser-triggered switches allow the stored energy to be discharged simultaneously through the 36 cables, each as big around as a horse and 30 feet long, arranged like spokes of a wheel and insulated by water. The enormous electrical pulse of 50 trillion watts strikes a complex target about the size of a spool of thread." The result is pressure equivalent to 10 million times the atmospheric pressure at the sea level.

(In something of an anticlimax, the scientists did not name the machine Z after, say, the awesome thunder-throwing god Zeus, but because the current passing directly into the target travels vertically.)

Sandia reported that most recently scientists at the lab turned the crushing pressure on a diamond sheet. Powerful magnetic waves generated by the Z were hitting the diamond target at 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet and turned it into a liquid. "At the pressures we're interested in, everything is compressible," shrugged Mark Herrmann, a Sandia researcher.

Sandia said that the object of the experiment was to better understand the behavior of fuel pelets that may in the future power a fusion reaction. The lab also said that the "results of the fusion reaction also will be used to validate physics models in computer simulations used to certify the safety and reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile."



Image: Electrical discharges illuminate the surface of the Z machine, the world's most powerful X-ray source. Photo by Randy Montoya. Sandia.

Scientists have long believed that our baby solar system looked something like a fried egg: the yolk of the Solar orb in the center a flat disc of of gas and dust from which the planets were forming.
Now this model got a little scrambled. Scientists at the university of Toronto and the European Space Observatory in Chile have observed two massive planet-like objects called "planemos" orbiting each other on their journey through space.
Pairs of stars orbiting each other are quite common. (The dog days of August are named after the dog star Sirius, one of the brightest objects in the late summer sky, which in fact is a system of two stars spinning around each other.) However, a pair of planemos orbiting in a similar fashion has never been seen.
"Their mere existence is a surprise, and their origin and fate a bit of a mystery," said Ray Jayawardhana, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Jayawardhana and his colleague Valentin D. Ivanov of the European Southern Observatory report the discovery in the August 3 issue of Science Express.
The planemos in question are quite chunky. The smaller one is seven times as large as Jupiter, the biggest planet in the Solar system, the other one is twice its size. But the scientists wrote that "both objects have masses similar to those of extra-solar giant planets, usually found in orbit around a star."
Jayawardhana and Ivanov wrote that he newborn pair is barely a million years old. The planemos are staring at each other across a vast cosmic chasm some six times the distance between the sun and Pluto wide. They are located in the Ophiuchus star-forming region approximately 400 light years away.
"Roughly half of all sun-like stars, and about a sixth of brown dwarfs, come in pairs," Jayawardhana said . Brown dwarfs are moribund stars that weigh less than 75 Jupiter masses. Their mass is not sufficient to ignite and sustain nuclear fusion, and burn like a regular star.
The Toronto team wrote that the "existence of this wide pair poses a challenge to a popular theory which suggests that brown dwarfs and planemos are embryos ejected from multiple proto-star systems. Since the two objects in...are so far apart, and only weakly bound to each other by gravity, they would not have survived such a chaotic birth."
Jayawardhana and Ivanov said that planets are thought to form out of disks of gas and dust that surround stars, brown dwarfs and even some planemos. They believe that "these planemo twins formed together out of a contracting gas cloud that fragmented, like a miniature stellar binary.
"We are resisting the temptation to call it a 'double planet' because this pair probably didn't form the way that planets in our solar system did," says Ivanov. "Now we're curious to find out whether such pairs are common or rare. The answer could shed light on how free-floating planetary-mass objects form."

Ever ponder the precariousness of life. Here's an image to stir up your thoughts. Somehow, improbably, life has evolved in the Milky Way, a galaxy similar to
this one captured so beautifully by the Hubble Space Telescope. Here we are, suspended in space, anchored to a dusty island of 100 million stars, which together don't amount to much more but a cosmic comma.

The galaxy in the picture is clumsily called NGC 5866. It floats in space in the constellation Draco, some 44 million light years away. It is some 60,000 light years in diameter, about two-thirds the size of the Milky Way. But it has the same mass, suggesting that it may be much denser.

The Hubble image shows the galaxy, which is tilted nearly edge on to us, as a crisp dust lane. The Hubble team said that the picture "highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo."

The team said that NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). "Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure," the astronomers said. "It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called "ellipticals." Such S0 galaxies, with disks like spirals and large bulges like ellipticals, are called 'lenticular' galaxies."

The Hubble team said this image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Courtesy of NASA: Enceladus hangs like a single bright pearl against the golden-brown canvas of Saturn and its icy rings. Visible on Saturn is the region where daylight gives way to dusk. Above, the rings throw thin shadows onto the planet. Icy Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Don't get alarmed tomorrow night if you look up at the sky (with a suffiently powerful telescope) and see a man drifting between the stars. Blame it on the Russians. For Feb. 3 is the launch date of one of the strangest experiments in the history of space science. Cosmonauts flying the International Space Station will throw overboard an empty Russian space suit rigged with batteries, a radio transmitter, and an array of thermal and other sensors to monitor the impact of cosmic radiation, solar rays, and temperature on the empty shell. "SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm," said Frank Bauer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Some of our Russian partners ... had an idea: Maybe we can turn old space suits into useful satellites."
SuitSat, as the project is called, is the first test of that idea.Transmissions from the suit will be beamed to Earth and anybody with a police scanner can listen in by tuning to the FM frequency of 145.990 MHz. It should remain in range for 5-10 minutes per orbit.(Check on NASA's JPass when the suit will be flying over your house. Use the same coordinates as for the ISS to find it.) The suit will stay in orbit for about 6 weeks before it tumbles and burns in the atmosphere. Go here for more info on SuitSat.

Image: Oleg Kulik, Cosmonaut (2003) at the Venice Biennale

Late in October, the Cassini probe exploring Saturn and it's immediate cosmic neighborhood snapped a beautiful image of Saturn's rings wrapping the planet's cloudy surface in a curved, striped sash of shadow and light. The resulting effect brings to mind a modernist lampshade, even a flying saucer. Note that some of the rings let some sunglight through, lending their shadow smoky translucency.
According to NASA, the three thin and bright arcs in this scene represent three well-known gaps in the immense ring system. From bottom to top here (and widest to thinnest) they are the Cassini Division, the Encke Gap and the Keeler Gap.
NASA said that the image was taken in infrared light (752 nanometers) using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2005, at a distance of approximately 446,000 kilometers (277,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel. The image was contrast enhanced to improve visibility of features in the atmosphere.

In May 2004, an east Texas logger died after being stung hundreds of times by a swarm of bees. The Beekeepers' Association newsletter cited data from Texas A&M University, saying that bees have killed 15 Texans since 1991. But what if these deaths weren't just accidents? What if the bees had it in for the victims?
A team of European and Australian biologists just reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology that honeybees "can discriminate and recognize images of human faces."
The researchers were curious whether the ability to recognize faces was something only mammals could do. "There is evidence that the mammalian brain may have specialised neural circuitry for face recognition tasks, although some recent work questions these findings," they wrote in the abstract of their paper. "Thus, to understand if recognising human faces does require species-specific neural processing, it is important to know if non-human animals might be able to solve this difficult spatial task."
Apparently they do. They tested honeybees (Apis mellifera) to "evaluate whether an animal with no evolutionary history for discriminating between humanoid faces may be able to learn this task."
Here's what the team found out: "Using differential conditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a standard face recognition test used in human psychology. Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials and bees discriminated the target face from a similar distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level of choices for the target face, indicating an ability for face recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180° there was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible disruption to configural type visual processing."

Image Credit: Smoky River Express, Caption: Area beekeepers (from left) Paul Benoit and Fernando Sanchez were brave during the Bee Beard Contest in last year's Honey Festival.