Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
13 posts total
Corey S Powell

Taking a break from awful things:

Scientists taught rats to drive cars. The rats quickly learned to rev the engine and take longer routes just for fun.

Bonus: Watch the researcher do a little happy leap when the rat gets into the car.

theconversation.com/im-a-neuro #science #tech

Show previous comments
Rock'n'Roll_φapy 🔻

@coreyspowell
Fantastique bond de la science et de la connaissance...

GroßStadtPflanze :verified:💉⁷

@coreyspowell Das haben wir Menschen den Ratten voraus: Die Schwänze (Umgangssprachlich für Penis) von Autofahrern sind viel zu kurz, als dass die Gefahr bestünde, dass die da gegenseitig drüberfahren …

Corey S Powell

So many beautiful aurora photos going around right now. Wonder where those amazing colors come from? Here's a helpful breakdown.

When you split up the light of a typical aurora, it looks like this.

Many colors from just nitrogen & oxygen!

swpc.noaa.gov/content/aurora-t #aurora #space #science #nature

Different auroral colors come from different heights in the atmosphere primarily because the life-time of an excited atom or molecule (time spent in its excited state) is vastly different for different colors of the aurora. The green aurora from oxygen in the 1S state typically occurs from 120 to 400 km (80 to 250 miles) above the surface of Earth. The red aurora from oxygen in the 1D state is restricted to altitudes above 300 km (180 km).   This is because oxygen in the 1D state has a very long lifetime (>150 sec) and can only survive in the thinner atmosphere above 300 km.  At lower altitudes the oxygen in the 1D state collides with other atmospheric atoms or molecules before it can emit a photon which deactivates or quenches the excited oxygen. The 1S state of oxygen has a lifetime of about 1 second and therefore emits a photon more quickly and thus can emit at lower altitudes where the density is higher. The aurora sometimes has a purplish lower border which comes from emissions from molecular nitrogen. This "prompt" emission is emitted from excited states of nitrogen that have almost no delay between excitation and emission.  It survives at even lower altitudes between 120 and 200 km (80 to 120 miles).
Corey S Powell

Colors of an aurora depend not only on which element is emitting light, but also on *where* it is.

Oxygen at high altitudes glows red; at lower altitudes it glows green. Purple nitrogen is lower still.

Atoms are complicated creatures!

#aurora #science #nature #physics

Graphical breakdown of the colors of an aurora, and how they arise in different layers of the atmosphere.
Corey S Powell

This is the surface of a comet! Dust is swirling around the surface of Comet 67/P -- captured in 2016 by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, processing by Jacint Roger Perez.

Still one of the most remarkable scenes in space exploration.

#space #science #astronomy #ESA

Show previous comments
Jumping Mouse

@coreyspowell
I thought that was the live footage of the storm that shut down I-70 tonight…

Eye

@coreyspowell

I remember seeing this for the first time back then. Watching the dust passing in front of us. It was, and frankly still is, just astounding.

Meercat ✅

@coreyspowell This is such a wonderful animation - a peek into a strange world

Corey S Powell

For decades, astronomers have dreamed of setting up an observatory on the far side of the Moon. I read about it as a kid. Now it's happening!

The LuSEE-Night radio telescope is under construction, and is scheduled to land on the lunar farside in 2025. It's a pathfinder for a much bigger radio telescope that would follow. newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/09/26/ #space #nasa #science

This artist’s rendering shows LuSEE-Night atop the Blue Ghost spacecraft scheduled to deliver the experiment to the far side of the moon. Firefly Aerospace
Show previous comments
J.S. Pailly

@coreyspowell 2025? That's way sooner than I ever expected. I kind of thought of this as one of those "hopefully 20 years from now" kind of things.

Steffen Christensen

@coreyspowell It'll be the only dark skies in Earth-Lunar space soon enough.

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle

@coreyspowell

I can't help wondering what Pink Floyd would think of listening to radio on the dark side of the moon

Corey S Powell

The expansion of the universe stretches time as well as space: A new study of distant quasars shows that their clocks appear to be ticking just 1/5th as quickly as our clocks here. theconversation.com/astronomer #science #cosmology #nature

Stripe 82 is a 300 deg2 equatorial field of sky that was imaged multiple times by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from 2000 to 2008. It approximately covers the region with right ascension from 20:00h to 4:00h and declination from -1.26° to +1.26°. The quasars in the time-dilation study come from this section of sky.
Corey S Powell

Full study here: "Detection of the Cosmological Time Dilation of High Redshift Quasars"
It's a fascinating reality check that goes back to basics and asks, How can we be sure the expansion of the universe is real and not an illusion?
arxiv.org/abs/2306.04053 #astronomy #astrodon

Corey S Powell

24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock.
Brilliant video by Bartosz Wojczyński. artuniverse.eu/gallery/190705- #nature #wonder #earth

Corey S Powell

Look west this evening for a beautiful celestial display.
It is literally a can't-miss event: If you have clear skies & an unobstructed view, Jupiter, Venus & the Moon will be brilliantly obvious. skyandtelescope.org/astronomy- #conjunction

Map of Jupiter, Venus, and the crescent Moon seen in the west after sunset tonight.
Corey S Powell

For those who missed it, this is a fabulous photo of today's conjunction of Jupiter & the crescent Moon:
---
RT @_mgde_
Tonight: 🌙

10.8% waxing crescent moon w/lovely Earthshine

Jupiter w/handful of it’s moons
-Ganymede (top)
-Io (closest above Jupiter)
-Callisto (bottom)

To the right of Jupiter is HD 3628, a high proper motion star of the constellation Pisces
twitter.com/_mgde_/status/1628

Corey S Powell

If you saw this headline, or one like it, you might reasonably have thought the world has gone mad. The inside of the Earth is spinning backwards?
*But that is not at all what the actual research says.*
[a short thread] #RealityCheck t.co/x64JnH7MSp

Corey S Powell

Key point: Earth's core rotates at almost exactly the same rate as the rest of the planet. Did in the past, still does so now. It rotates at the same speed to within 0.001%!
But even the research paper is confusing on that point: #RealityCheck

nature.com/articles/s41561-022

Schematic of the inner structure of the Earth, showing the rotation of the core.
Corey S Powell

This is a real time-lapse video of planets orbiting the star HR 8799, 133 light years away: four super-Jupiter worlds dancing around their sun. Amazing!
Images collected at the Keck Observatory, processed by William Thompson (@AstroWrt@twitter.com). arxiv.org/abs/2210.14213 #astronomy #space

Corey S Powell

The planets around star HR 8799 are unusually easy to detect because they're massive (heftier than Jupiter), young (still glowing with heat from their formation), and widely separated.

Planet b is twice as far from its star as Pluto is from the Sun. Even Planet e, the innermost, is about as far out as Uranus.
keckobservatory.org/hr8799c/

#astronomy #space #discovery

Corey S Powell

The view from NASA's Artemis mission yesterday is just...words fail me.

HT @JPMajor@twitter.com and the brilliant engineers & scientists who made this happen.

#NASA #Artemis #space

Earth and Moon seen from Artemis 1.
Corey S Powell

Aurora borealis on Jupiter, imaged by the Hubble telescope on Sept 29, 2022.
See the odd, comet-like streak at right? That's the magnetic imprint of Jupiter's moon Io! Its volcanoes spew out fumes that create their own aurora display.
planetarylightshow.com/jupiter #space #Hubble

Corey S Powell

Any time you need to escape from this world, drop by the PlanetaryLightShow site & watch flickering auroras on Saturn and Jupiter. Beautiful and mind-boggling.
planetarylightshow.com/
@PlanetaryLightShow or @PlanetaryShow@twitter.com #astronomy #perspective

Corey S Powell

A group at Johns Hopkins has created a scrollable, interactive map of the entire universe, from here to the cosmic microwave background.
Extraordinary discoveries at your fingertips for free, unimaginable when I was a kid. mapoftheuniverse.net/ #astronomy #space #exploration

Go Up