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Wow.... |
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I want one :cheesy:
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Galaxy's centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers
Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it tastes vaguely of raspberries.
The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life. Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules. In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries. "It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian. Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum. The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star. Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies depending on the type of molecule. While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud. The two molecules are the largest yet discovered in deep space. Dr Belloche and his colleague Robin Garrod at Cornell University in New York have collected nearly 4,000 distinct signals from the cloud but have only analysed around half of these. "So far we have identified around 50 molecules in our survey, and two of those had not been seen before," said Belloche. The results are being presented today at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire. Last year, the team came tantalisingly close to finding amino acids in space with the discovery of a molecule that can be used to make them, called amino acetonitrile. The latest discoveries have boosted the researchers' morale because the molecules are as large as the simplest amino acid, glycine. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are widely seen as being critical for complex life to exist anywhere in the universe. "I wouldn't be surprised if we find an amino acid out there in the coming years," said Belloche. Previously, astronomers have detected a variety of large molecules, including alcohols, acids and chemicals called aldehydes. "The difficulty in searching for complex molecules is that the best astronomical sources contain so many different molecules that their 'fingerprints' overlap and are difficult to disentangle," Belloche said. The molecules are thought to form when chemicals that already exist on some dust grains, such as ethanol, link together to make more complex chains. "There is no apparent limit to the size of molecules that can be formed by this process, so there's good reason to expect even more complex organic molecules to be there," said Garrod. source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...s-astrobiology Isn't that kinda romantic in a Trekkie sort of way <3 |
http://news.yahoo.com/hairy-crazy-an...150823360.html
Crazy ants, we will never, live in the south, ever! |
I had the misfortune of being bitten by the well named "fire ant" when I lived in Texas and made the mistake of resting my hand on a log as I was videotaping a scene. I won't soon forget that feeling.
Disturbing story, Corkey. Quote:
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http://news.yahoo.com/photos/snapsho...318537744.html
I just thought this was pretty flippen cool. Milky Way a meteor and the Northern Lights all in one shot. |
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Remember that comets are, essentially, large space snowballs. As they approach the inner solar system they start to melt which is why comets have tails--the tail is the melting ice and the dust that is going with it. As they exit the solar system, provided they had enough mass to survive the trip to the inner solar system, they refreeze the further they get from the Sun. Don't know what this comet will do on its way out but if anyone tells you that there is the least thing to be concerned about, you can tell them with confidence that there's absolutely *nothing* to worry about. Nothing. As one of the scientists quoted in the article said, your *car* exerts a whole lot more gravitational influence on the Earth than this comet will. Cheers Aj |
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Neutrino speed may have been miscalculated
A few weeks ago, quite a bit of buzz was created when CERN announced that preliminary results from an experiment ran clocked neutrinos moving faster than light. As it turns out it may be that this is a calculation error having to do with using a time signal from a GPS satellite to synchronize the clocks. The problem is that the *satellite* is in motion in relationship to the Earth which means it's in motion relative to the detector. The upshot of this is that there was an error of ~32 nanoseconds on both the sending and detector ends of the experiment. That would equal an error of ~64 nanoseconds. The FTL-neutrinos were arriving ~60 nanoseconds ahead of the light. Meaning that in reality the neutrinos were likely moving at a substantial portion of the speed of light but not exceeding it.
It appears that once again, Special Relativity has stood up to yet *another* challenge. As I hear more I'll post here. Full article is here. Cheers Aj |
http://news.yahoo.com/rapidly-inflat...142805969.html
Rapidly inflating supervolcano creating mystery. |
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