Category: Natural Science

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Natural Science

Seven worlds will collide, whenever I am by your side…

Even though this story‘s old news by now I’m just listening to last week’s Mike Harding show on BBC iPlayer and it’s the last snippet of news before the show starts and as a story it really annoys me.

Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth – though it would not happen for at least a billion years.

Mars or Venus could collide with Earth. At its closest Venus is 41 million km from Earth, Mars about 56 million. Things are already looking a little suspect.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet.

Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter – whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System.

Mercury is something like 50 million km from Venus on average (Mercury has the most eccentric orbit of any planet so it’s hard to say) and Mars is something like 550 million km from Jupiter. And this story is saying that one or more of these planets may at some point billions of years in the future collide with an adjacent planet. But it could go either way. As in Mars’s orbit could decay bringing it 50 million km closer or it could end up going about 500 million the other way. Wow. Glad to know we’re on this one.

The researchers carried out more than 2,500 simulations. They found that in some, Mars and Venus collided with the Earth

And I think we can assume that there are a few more than just these 2,500 outcomes. So what we’ve learnt is that in a billion years the orbits of the planets within our Solar System will have changed and as such there’s a very small chance that some of them may collide and/or get caught in each others gravity. The part that annoys me most is that this became a national news story – not that science research shouldn’t be news, it should, I’m just not sure something that’s not especially likely to happen and even if it does it won’t be for at least a billion years really counts.

In addition, I think if you’d’ve asked me to predict what was going to happen to the orbits of our planets in a billion years time I reckon I probably would’ve come up with outcomes along similar lines. I haven’t read the full article in Nature but I hope it has a bit more to it than was reported on.

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Natural Science

It just doesn’t add up…

An article from New Scientist listing 13 things that science can’t explain. They mainly relate to space – Dark Matter, Dark Energy, the Universe’s thermal equilibrium, life on Mars – though I think the one I find most interesting is the Placebo effect:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

The Belfast homeopathy trials are interesting too, or at the very least the potential consequences are:

If the results turn out to be real…we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

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Natural Science

Higgs Boson

“In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson”

6. If the Higgs boson begins creating mass in your esophagus or stomach before you reach a hospital, you will need to perform an immediate bosonectomy on yourself. Luckily, surgical knowledge is not necessary. Just choose from the array of probable outcomes that will manifest themselves upon your decision to perform surgery, and make the one most favourable to yourself into reality. Be sensible—do not wait for the outcome in which you successfully remove the boson and win the lottery and grow wings.

(via kottke)

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Natural Science

15 Minute Warning

New Scientist has an article about a recent NASA-funded report into plasma ejections from the Sun that could potentially wipe out our power grids with fairly chilling consequences:

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts.

Given that pretty much everything we do relies on electricity (water, food and heat are fairly important not to mention the world’s financial markets, healthcare, communications, the Internet) the simultaneous destruction of transformers would leave us severaly impaired.

According to the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion [for the US alone]. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years.

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Natural Science Photography

Quadruple Saturn moon transit

Snapped by the Hubble telescope this is a pretty rare thing to be able to see. From left to right we have:

  • Enceladus – named after one of the Gigantes, Enceladus has water ice on its surface and could have liquid water too which raises the possibility of it supporting life
  • Dione – is apparently named after an archaic Greek goddess/Titan who might be Aphrodite’s mother (though I was fairly sure Aphrodite was born from Uranus’s genitals and not much else), Dione also has surface ice and ‘wispy terrain’
  • Titan – named for the Titans is the only body in the solar system (apart from Earth) that appears to have stable bodies of surface liquid (methane)
  • Mimas – named after another Gigante, Mimas kinda looks a bit like the Death Star
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Natural Science

Helix Nebula

This photo on the BBC website reminded me of getting the Encyclopedia of Stars and Planets for my ninth or tenth birthday.

It’s ridiculous to think that the inner disc alone is 32 trillion kilometres across. The diameter of our Sun is 1.3 million kilometres so this thing is 24 million times bigger than the Sun.

It’s such an unfathomable size – any comparison is utterly meaningless: our Sun is to the inner disc of the Helix Nebula as a garden pea is to the Earth. I can’t even hold the twin concepts of the pea and our planet in my mind at the same time.

The diameter of the outer ring of the nebula is over three times that of the inner ring.