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Ready for some existential nausea? Today magical astronomer wizards spotted an insane solar prominence. The whacky space ejaculate rippled out into space. Like, really rippled out there. The solar loop of plasma is half a million miles long.

These features are known as prominences, and they form in the sun’s photosphere. Cooler plasma pushes out into the hotter, ionized gases of the Sun’s corona, creating massive loops that take about a day to form but can sometimes persist for months. This particular prominence, one of the biggest we’ve ever seen, isn’t expected to last much longer than a few hours, after which it should harmlessly break up.

But right about now, there’s a loop of plasma running around the Sun that could encircle the Earth twenty times over.

That’s god damn impressive. That rippling prominence can encircle the Earth twenty times. And as always, remember how god damn small the Sun is, compared to other suns. Oh the cosmos, I fucking adore you.

Via.

What are we going to do when we consummate the inevitable? You know, destroying the Earth? Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll be throwing a fucking kegger on Rhea. It appears that one of Saturn’s sixty moons has a breathable atmosphere.

io9:

Saturn’s icy moon Rhea has an oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is very similar to Earth’s. Even better, the carbon dioxide suggests there’s life – and that possibly humans could breathe the air.

It seems oxygen is far more abundant than we ever suspected, particularly on moons that seem to be completely frozen solid. We recently found evidence of oxygen on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and now this finding on Europa. In fact, because the region of space surrounding Saturn’s rings has an oxygen atmosphere, it’s thought even more of the icy moons within the gas giant’s magnetosphere likely have little atmospheres of their own.

According to new data from the Cassini probe, the moon’s thin atmosphere is kept up by the constant chemical decomposition of ice water on the surface of Rhea. It’s likely that Saturn’s fierce magnetosphere is continually irradiating this ice water, which is what helps to maintain the atmosphere. Researchers suspect a lot of Rhea’s oxygen isn’t actually free right now, but is instead trapped inside Rhea’s frozen oceans.

Maybe. Fucking scientists. Someday there will be a statement that has the words “absolutely” or “certainly” or “positive” that I can get psyched for.   I’m waiting for the proclamation that’s like “Definitely hot chicks and Mountain Dew on Mars! Plus, small boners are cool there.” Try and stop me from getting on that space shuttle.

Did you just shit out the nineteen pounds of stuffing you conquered yesterday? Or are you like me, completely enraptured with the headline, but failing to comprehend the implications?

io9:

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator smashed together lead nuclei at the highest energies possible, creating dense sub-atomic particles that reach temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. Beyond being awesome, this achievement shows the early universe was actually a liquid.

Normal matter can’t exist in any form at these sort of absurdly hot temperatures. Instead, matter is thought to melt into a strange, soup-like substance known as quark-gluon plasma. Researchers are still investigating exactly what happens when this quark-gluon plasma emerges, but the early results seem to confirm the theory that the plasma acts like a liquid, not a gas.

Well uh, wait, then? So the entire universe existed as a soup-like substance known as quark-gluon plasma. That’s funny, since I seemed to blast some quark-gluon plasma inside my boxer-brief last night after my thirtieth pumpkin spice cookie.

io9:

“Although it is very early days we are already learning more about the early Universe. These first results would seem to suggest that the Universe would have behaved like a super-hot liquid immediately after the Big Bang.”

I love this sort of mind-warping speculation. I mean, since that’s what it really is, speculation. But it’s neat, no?

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Hubble has found Mount Doom in space. Or at least that’s how the chaps at io9 are describing the Carina Nebula. Am I riding their title to fame and glory? Naw, probably just to infamy and derivation. How do you top a title like that? Hint: you can’t. They go on to quote the Hubble website’s explanation:

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.

This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble’s launch and deployment into an orbit around the Earth.

Gorgeous.

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Sometimes when I go to sleep, I picture myself gallivanting about in a space faring society. I know it sounds dorky. Alright, it is dorky. But it brings me some sort of existential tranquility to picture a civilization where the humans haven’t blown themselves to smithereens, or even worse, simply stagnated. No, I picture them flying about, perhaps still bound by the same petty and persistent human drives. But flying.

So when I see this picture of Tracy Caldwell Dyson looking out of a porthole in the ISS, I know for certain that someone is coming close to living my dream. I can’t imagine the sort of mind-fuck nirvana it is, to gaze down at the big blue marble all us lead feet are stuck on. The mind-fuck that comes from saying “I was down there, but now I am up here. But we are all in outer-space, spinning merrily on our way.”

It’s gorgeous.

Do you know what I have in my backyard? Dog shit and leaves. That’s about it. A few lawn chairs. But primarily? Dog shit and leaves. But that’s okay! Because I’m part of Spaceship Earth! And apparently astronomer wizard people have discovered a black hole that’s only thirty years old (if I understand this article correctly, which I probably don’t) close to us. Mind you, in space terms, close is a really fucking relative term.

Nasa via io9:

The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth. Data from Chandra, NASA’s Swift satellite, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007. This suggests the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or a binary companion.

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The idea of a black hole with an observed age of only about 30 years is consistent with recent theoretical work. In 2005, a theory was presented that the bright optical light of this supernova was powered by a jet from a black hole that was unable to penetrate the hydrogen envelope of the star to form a GRB. The results seen in the observations of SN 1979C fit this theory very well.

These astronomer wizards man, I’m pretty sure they’re just magicians. The world is powered on magic. And we’ve all been tricked. This is some insane bullshit, and I love it. Of course, there’s the usual laundry list of “either” and “possibly” and “potentially” and “probably”, but who the fuck cares?

We’re neighbors with a black hole! Maybe! Sort of? That’s gotta be cool for you folks. I mean, my backyard is covered in dog shit, and my neighbors have to deal with me walking through our windows all day long covered in stains and merely boxer briefs.

Make no mistake, our Earth is part of the cosmos that I continually wank to. And make no mistake, the Earth, and all its denizens (you and me) have created a pretty light show with all our modern technologies and demon-bulbs burning brightly. Recently, the International Space Station captured such sexiness.

Space Fellowship via io9:

From 220 miles above Earth, one of the Expedition 25 crew members on the International Space Station took this night time photo featuring the bright lights of Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt on the Mediterranean coast. The Nile River and its delta stand out clearly as well. On the horizon, the airglow of the atmosphere is seen across the Mediterranean. The Sinai Peninsula, at right, is outlined with lights highlighting the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba.

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. Hit the jump to check out their pictures.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every cosmonaut geek knows one thing: you can’t go a month or two without a new story about water on Mars. Or life. Microbes and water. Every month, coming atcha courtesy of our favorite Red Planet. This time, the OH MY GOD WATER ON MARS storyline revolves around the Spirit Rover, and its dumb ass getting stuck in Mars’ soil. Dost it drag up some interesting bullshit whilst stuck there? Why, just maybe!

io9:

For the past year and a half, Spirit has been stuck at a Martian site called Troy, where the rover’s wheel broke through a crust and churned into soft sand. But it hasn’t sat completely idle. NASA researchers have used Spirit’s downtime to investigate the soil at Troy, and have found the site may see liquid water during certain climate cycles.

Near the soil’s surface sit relatively insoluble minerals, which the researchers believe to be hematite, silica and gypsum. Further down in the soil are ferric sulfates, more soluble minerals that the researchers speculate were carried down in the soil by liquid water. None of the minerals are exposed at the surface despite the wind constantly stripping and altering the landscape, which indicates that the minerals were carried down relatively recently and continuously, with the ferric sulfates being carried down further than the less soluble minerals.

Interesting? Sure. Sure? Sure! I’m waiting for the day the US government finally unveils the fact that it found artifacts from a fallen human civilization. You know, the one that made it to Mars, only to have their existence on Earth obscured from history by the fact that they were wiped out by a prehistoric robot uprising. Clearly, they colonized Mars, and but were then wiped out again. By a robotic uprising.

Well, isn’t this embarrassing. A star way out in a distant galaxy was trying to off itself per usual fashion, courtesy of the supernova. But unfortunately for the son of a bitch, its dazzling explosion was muffled by two huge dust clouds that were cast off before the star died. Bummer, yo. Not only is this poor star about to go out, but it didn’t even suffer the dignity of being able to complete its supernova. Carry on my wayward star, may you get the respect in your afterlife that you failed to achieve in this dimension.

Well fucking hell, there’s cracks in the universe? Usual caveat: it’s probably not correct, it’s highly contested, you know the drill. But let’s just bask in the hypothetical. These theoretical faultlines in the universe are called cosmic strings. The sons a bitches are broken links between different regions of the universe that arose as the universe cooled moments after the Big Bang. Good god, I knew that the universe were merely a program in the Universal Machine! And if all of this shit isn’t confusing enough to my fat brain with its greased synapses, these cosmic strings are one-dimensional, possessing only length, but not width or height. Bah?

io9:

Of course, that doesn’t capture the full measure of their one-dimensional weirdness. Since they have no width or height, they are incomprehensibly narrow, with a diameter that would make even a tiny photon look fat. They’re also dense, as a string that’s even a mile long would weigh considerably more than Earth. These strings expanded right along with the universe, ultimately stretching across the entire known universe in a more or less straight line, or forming massive rings many thousands of times bigger than our galaxy.

I just puked Doritos and Dew all over my fucking tits trying to comprehend this bullshit. My testicles puckered, and receded into my guts a little at this magnitude.

We’ve not yet directly observed these strings, but researchers at the University of Buffalo say they’ve found clear indirect proof. They studied 355 quasars – incredibly bright galaxies with super-massive black holes at their center – at the furthest corners of the observable universe. All quasars emit massive energy jets pointed in a particular direction, and through very careful study it’s possible to figure out the directions of the jets.

183 of those quasar jets lined up to form a pair of enormous rings in the sky, suggesting two massive circular structures exist – or had existed – to orient the direction of the jets. The only known candidates for such colossal structures are cosmic strings, providing compelling indirect evidence for them. If we confirm the existence of cosmic strings, it will greatly improve our understanding of the formation of the earliest galaxies.

Man, I can’t even see the TV from across the room, what the fuck is going on here? What lies beyond the cracks? This universe thing of ours has faulty hyperlinks, and faultlines. Fucking weird, yo. This universe thing of ours? Pretty fun.