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Left ball: the event display of a proton-proton collision producing the "God particle" (Higgs boson), observed in its very rare decay into a pair of muons by the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This recent result is the first evidence of the Higgs boson interacting directly with muon particles, an important new step in the understanding of how the very different masses of all elementary particles (and, therefore, the mass of our world) are generated.
Right ball: the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector.
cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/public...
The CMS Experiment at CERN:
more than 5000 scientists, engineers and technicians
from 241 institutes and 55 countries, collaborating to uncover the deepest secrets of Nature.
[Cover image of the official CMS Christmas greetings card]
We are preparing a stand promoting modeling as role play in SL19Birth Community Celebration. There will be gifts and a lot of information, in case someone wants to follow that path.
Climate scientists swear there's nowhere drier than Chile's little-known Atacama Desert and in particular the Cordillera de la Sal (Salt Mountains). It was formed million of years ago. It was an old lake, which bottom went raising by the same movements of the terrestrial coast which gave origin to the Andes Mountains.
Contrails (short for condensation trails) or vapor trails are line-shaped clouds produced by aircraft engine exhaust or changes in air pressure, typically at aircraft cruising altitudes several miles above the Earth's surface. Contrails are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals. The combination of water vapor in aircraft engine exhaust and the low ambient temperatures that exist at high altitudes allows the formation of the trails. Impurities in the engine exhaust from the fuel, including sulfur compounds (0.05% by weight in jet fuel) provide some of the particles that can serve as sites for water droplet growth in the exhaust and, if water droplets form, they might freeze to form ice particles that compose a contrail. Their formation can also be triggered by changes in air pressure in wingtip vortices or in the air over the entire wing surface. Contrails, and other clouds directly resulting from human activity, are collectively named homogenitus.
Depending on the temperature and humidity at the altitude the contrails form, they may be visible for only a few seconds or minutes, or may persist for hours and spread to be several miles wide, eventually resembling natural cirrus or altocumulus clouds. Persistent contrails are of particular interest to scientists because they increase the cloudiness of the atmosphere. The resulting cloud forms are formally described as homomutatus, and may resemble cirrus, cirrocumulus, or cirrostratus, and are sometimes called cirrus aviaticus. Some persistent spreading contrails contribute to climate change. R_825
in front of Science World in Vancouver....Science World is a science centre run by a not-for-profit organization called ASTC Science World Society in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is located at the end of False Creek and features many permanent interactive exhibits and displays, as well as areas with varying topics throughout the years...( the name of the scientist are in the tags)
Se promener à Vancouver... j'habite à Vancouver depuis plusieurs années et c'est etrange je n'avais pas encore porté attention à ces sculptures de scientifiques canadiens. Après une courte recherche , je constate que ces sculptures sont assez nouvelles ( 2016) Science World est un centre scientifique géré par une organisation à but non lucratif appelée ASTC Science World Society à Vancouver, Colombie-Britannique, Canada. Il est situé à la fin de False Creek et propose de nombreuses expositions et expositions interactives permanentes, ainsi que des zones avec des sujets variés au fil des ans.
globalnews.ca/news/3021118/new-bronze-sculpture-outside-s...
The extreme beauty of a place can give the incomparable and strange feelings of fullness and of living intensely.
Please, have a visit to the" World Scientist's Warning to Humanity" and share the article as widely as possible. Thanks.
🎧Music inspiration🎧
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-RcX5DS5A
lesclairsdelunederoxaane.blogspot.com/2021/04/scientist.html
www.instagram.com/p/CNUNaV7JWhw/
Vehicule/Fashion Style| Culprit @ Neo-Japan╰☆╮Dango bike - Cybersuit & boots╰☆╮
Hair Style| no match ╰☆╮Group gift NO_SURE╰☆╮
Breaking News: A Revolutionary Hybrid - Chili Pomegranate Created in Genetic Engineering Lab!
In a groundbreaking experiment conducted in our cutting-edge Genetic Engineering Laboratory, scientists have successfully developed a new hybrid through the revolutionary chromosomoribocomo method. Behold the Chili-Pomegranate—a fiery yet fruitful innovation that defies the boundaries of nature!
This hybrid combines the zest and heat of a homegrown chili pepper with the vibrant allure of a perfectly round pomegranate (albeit this one is plastic for demonstration purposes!).
"Our new method allows for endless possibilities," said the lead researcher.
This bold experiment, staged in my very own garden, showcases not only the potential of this technique but also our ability to imagine the unimaginable. Stay tuned for more hybrids that will redefine what is real—or not!
Which hybrid would you like to see next? 🍎🌶️
The dodgy kind. Works in the kind of place where you enter with a broken arm and leave without legs.
Thanks to model Richard de Grataine Suoh aka richardgratainesuoh, for his invaluable collaboration and great styling.
We were missing the mad scientist with the typical laboratory full of instruments. Thanks to people with this great creativity, much progress was made in the use of steam in the steampunk world.
Style card here:
www.flickr.com/photos/richard_de_grataine/52138279276/in/...
Come experiment with new designers through they're generous gifts! Fab Free shows you all the best gifts on the grid for 17 years now! Today, group gifts from [erotiK], scaredsquare and VALKIRIA!
Fab Free: fabfree.wordpress.com/2025/04/25/the-scientist/
I was just guessin' at numbers and figures
Pullin' your puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
And tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Oh, and I rush to the start
Runnin' in circles, chasin' our tails
Comin' back as we are
☢️ SUIT - DEADWOOL
☢️ HAIRBASE - FUOEY
☢️ FACE TATTOO - FUOEY
☢️ RINGS - REALEVIL
☢️ EARS - SWALLOW
☢️ SEPTUM - RICHB
☢️ DRINK - MOVEMENT
☢️ CIGARETTE - KUNST
☢️ BODY - SIGNATURE GIANNI
☢️ HEAD - LELUTKA GUY
Memphis Sits on the New Madrid fault which scientists say will be bigger than anything California has ever had when it hits. The last time it happened was in 1811 and it created a huge lake on the Tennessee Kentucky border. Something that size would cause Memphis to gall off into the Mississippi.
I've been busy the last few weeks (work) and I haven't had much time for photos. Apparently while I've been frantically working, my minifigs decided to build an active volcano on my kitchen table :-) Last night I found the new female Volcano Scientist photographing the lava. I hope they clean up the mess :-)
I'm trying to get back into the swing of taking pictures especially since the Olympics are starting today :-)
The Scientist Christ Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Interesting reflections, contrasts and clouds on a warm night last July.
From the Lost Files of Buzz's Adventures:
Yes, Buzz is retired. But a dedicated exploration of the Buzz files has uncovered a few never before seen photos of his adventures, including this one. Buzz has great repute as a scientist, a bacterial geneticist, studying the intricacies of the bacterial world. He is, no doubt, considering whether his next time point will be the one that breaks open the mystery....
That's what this Great Egret chick reminds me of ... a mad scientist laughing away as he prepares to bring his latest creation to life, or Christopher Lloyd, or Albert Einstein, or Phyllis Diller. Rookery, Dallas, Texas, USA, May 2016
Best viewed large by pressing "L"
FE 4/19:
ant: seta
sig: cactus
detail from the "25 scientists" gateway to the biochemistry building at the university of arizona, tucson
Still on series 11 today with the scentist. The regular kind, not the mad kind. This one is mostly based on my memories from the lab in school, as I went on to study IT after that and stopped fiddling with microscopes and other typical science lab equipment. Although a part of me still wants to have my own lab where I can conduct crazy science experiments ...
My favourite part of this one is the microscope. Really wanted to create one that resembled a real microscope as much as possible, which is really hard when you still want it to be small enough to work with minifigs!
I had intended to put a petri dish in the form of an upside down trans clear round tile under the microscope, but I forgot to when taking the picture. Ah well.
There is more than meets the eye in this image! 👀
A team of international scientists has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH3+), was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.
Carbon compounds form the foundations of all known life, and as such are particularly interesting to scientists working to understand both how life developed on Earth, and how it could potentially develop elsewhere in our universe.
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), and the PDRs4All ERS Team
Visual description: The scene is divided by an undulating formation running diagonally from lower left to upper right. On the left side, clouds are various shades of blue with some translucent orange wisps throughout. On the right side, clouds vary from bright orange-red to brown. Stars are scattered across the entire image.
I lived on Kwajalein Island in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean for 18 months. It’s in a coral atoll.
—————————
How Corals Fight Back against Warming Seas
Most corals can’t relocate, but they’re finding ways to beat the heat.
By Rohini Subrahmanyam edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier
A colorful coral reef under the sea
Many corals have creative ways to fight the dangers of warming seas.
imageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy Stock Photo
Deep underneath the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean lies a dazzling landscape of undulating coral reefs colored by photosynthetic algae, from which corals get their energy. But in the early 1980s an aquatic heat wave caused by the El Niño climate phenomenon led to a record-breaking mass-bleaching event, turning more than 90 percent of these corals a pale, lifeless white. The algae—which had thrived inside their coral hosts for millions of years—could no longer bear to live within them.
Strong El Niño events warmed up the same Pacific waters in the late 1990s and again in 2015–2016, but scientists noticed that these heat waves didn’t affect the reefs as badly as the first. Diving after the latest event, University of Miami marine biologist Ana Palacio saw that some of the corals seemed to be resisting or recovering from the bleaching. Maybe, Palacio thought, they’ve found a way to adapt.
Many adult corals are tethered to the reefs they build. Swimming to cooler waters is not an option, making them particularly vulnerable to the changing climate. But corals are also resilient, and scientists are discovering how they adapt. Some corals switch out their algal tenants for more heat-resistant species. Others can use rows of tiny hairs on their bodies to “fan” away excess harmful oxygen released by stressed-out algae. And certain baby corals modify their own metabolisms to withstand the warming waters. Scientists hope to use such natural adaptations in the race to preserve these crucial ecosystem anchors.
When Palacio and her team examined coral reefs after the 2015–2016 heat wave, they found that particular corals called Pocillopora—the main reef-building coral species in the eastern tropical Pacific—seemed to have expelled the algae that usually reside within them and taken in other species that were more tolerant to the heat.
“They start changing their [algae] community as the water becomes warmer and warmer, and they associate more and more with this thermotolerant algal symbiont called Durusdinium glynnii,” Palacio explains. This species’ name comes from the Latin word durus, meaning “rough” or “tough.” Most symbiotic algae produce toxic levels of oxygen under heat stress, forcing the corals to evict them. But Durusdinium keeps its levels tolerable.
Curated by Our Editors
Pink stony coral.
Saving Coral Reefs with Dental Tech
Susan Cosier
High-Tech Seafloor Mapping Is Finding Surprising Structures Everywhere
Mark Fischetti
Despite Many Threats, Some Coral Reefs Are Thriving
Paul Tullis, Brian Zgliczynski & bioGraphic
Long-frozen whitebark pines emerge from a melting ice patch
Pristine Ancient Forest ‘Frozen in Time’ Discovered in Rocky Mountains
K.R. Callaway & LiveScience
Yet the corals don’t always rely on their algal guests to avoid excessive oxygen, researchers have found; sometimes they can take matters into their own “hands.” Rows of cilia—tiny, hairlike projections—can act like corals’ own personal ventilation system by fanning excess oxygen toward spots that lack it.
In 2022 marine biologists Cesar O. Pacherres and Soeren Ahmerkamp, then at the University of Bremen in Germany, showed that these fast-beating cilia create microscopic whirlpools in the water, swirling the oxygen around and preventing it from harmfully accumulating in any one spot. All corals have this ventilation system, but how much they use it can vary between species. The scientists now plan to test if and how some vulnerable corals—such as those in the Great Barrier Reef—beat their cilia faster in response to higher temperatures.
And corals aren’t always stuck in place; their larvae float freely through the ocean before settling, which offers crucial opportunities for a species to shift to more hospitable waters or spread its heat-tolerant genes. That’s why Ariana Huffmyer, a marine biologist at the University of Washington, is particularly interested in how baby corals adapt to higher temperatures. She and researchers at the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology recently showed that coral larvae, if exposed to warm water for as little as three days in the laboratory, alter their own metabolism to cope with heat stress and avoid bleaching.
Corals typically provide a small amount of nitrogen to their resident algae, and in return they get carbon, which they use as an energy source. “To maintain [the algae’s] own survival and give the nutrients required to the host, there’s a really intricate, delicate and very complex nutritional relationship between the two,” Huffmyer says. Under stress, corals produce too much nitrogen. This excess causes the algae to go into hyperdrive and divide a lot more—hoarding the carbon and keeping it from their hosts. Huffmyer discovered that baby corals exposed to short periods of heat stress learn to keep the excess nitrogen to themselves and don’t overshare with the algae, maintaining a stable symbiosis.
Pacherres cautions that such adaptations can protect an organism only to some extent. “They have the tools to withstand certain things, but past that limit there’s not enough they can do. For example, if it’s hot, we [humans] can sweat to alleviate the heat. But if it gets too hot, we die,” he says. “At one point sweating is not enough.”
But whatever heat-beating tools corals do have can help scientists develop protection strategies. Baby corals that can withstand stress are especially important for conservation efforts because they can travel between reefs and potentially share heat-tolerant genes in new locales. “The larvae from those reefs are already preadapted to some degree to rising temperatures, so we need to protect them because they’re in some ways the source of the future,” says Madhavi Colton, a conservation scientist who researched science-based tactics to save corals at the nonprofit Coral Reef Alliance.
Natural coral adaptations can also aid direct interventions like stress-hardening corals in nurseries before planting them back into ocean reefs. “You need to grow corals that are more likely to survive than the corals that died before,” Palacio says. If researchers can persuade corals to adopt heat-resistant algae or if they activate genes that can deal with heat stress, it raises the corals’ chance of surviving future ocean heat waves.
“When you dive and see a beautiful healthy reef with these colorful corals ... I still feel this euphoria of being in this whole alien underwater world,” Huffmyer says. “It’s hard to go back after a bleaching event and see it dead. But that does give you the motivation to want to use whatever your skill set is, whatever your passion is, to try to help.”
Rights & Permissions
Rohini Subrahmanyam is a biologist turned science journalist. She loves writing about interesting creatures on our planet. Subrahmanyam received a Ph.D. from the National Center for Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @rohsubb and on LinkedIn, and see her portfolio here.
As the military space vessel, IRC Agatha Christie leaves Stonehenge Spacefort in pursuit of the Frigus Iustitia, that ship is dropping out of tach speed near a distant IRC outpost, Septem Caelum.
Septem Caelum Comm Tech: (his image appears on the forward holoscreen) Frigus Iustitia, welcome to Outpost Septem Caelum.
MSS: (on the bridge, in the command chair) Thank you. This is Major Sky. We are rendezvousing with another ship -- soon.
SCCT: Understood. Which ship are you meeting?
MSS: I don't know, but Captain Jetsam will be aboard.
SCCT: Do you plan to vee over?
MSS: No. We're on a tight schedule.
SCCT: Understood. Let us know if you need anything. (his image is replaced by one of the outpost)
MSS: (leans back in the command chair) Now, we wait.
Aboard the IRC Agatha Christie, Cpt Jetsam is leaning back in the command seat, appearing calm. A low tone from the Pilot's station draws her eyes.
Pilot: Captain Jetsam, that signal you had me scanning for; it just appeared at Outpost Septem Caelum.
CDL: (leans forward in the chair with a small smile) Take us there. Tach five.
CMOLB: (moves to stand by CDL's seat) I hope we make it in time.
Cpt Jetsam says nothing to this vocalized concern she shares, she simply gazes at the holo projection of stars and planets they pass until the screen glows purple as they drop out of tach speed, replaced by an image of the Frigus Iustitia orbiting Outpost Septem Caelum.
QDPN: Assume orbit.
Pilot: Aye, sir.
QDPN: Comm Officer, contact the Frigus Iustitia.
CommO: Aye, sir. IRC Agatha Christie to Frigus Iustitia, please respond.
MSS: (her holo image fills the forward screen) Frigus Iustitia, welcome to Outpost Septem Caelum.
CDJ: Major Sky, you have my ship.
MSS: On the contrary, Captain Jetsam. I have your ship, and I have Major Sky.
CDJ: You have? Who are you?
MSS: First, please allow me to apologize for what has happened, but the circumstances are dire, and there was no time to explain.
CDJ: Oh, then apology accepted. Give me back my friend, and my ship.
MSS: (smiles) Scrummy's told me about your sense of humor.
CDJ: You may call her, Major Sky. Has she told you about my overdeveloped protective instincts?
MSS: She has, which is why the two of you were chosen, actually.
CDJ: Chosen? Look, who the red nova are you?
MSS: My name is, Koe Ghitatio, Tech Mentalist to her Highness Princess Bhonumm Durus of the planet, Vhipernhal.
CDJ: Vhipernhal? (looks around the bridge) Anyone know the name? (the entire bridge crew shakes their heads, no) Never heard of it.
MSS-KG: Our planet lies beyond your current exploration.
CDJ: Why have you attacked Major Sky? Why did you kill Dr. Litefful? And why did you steal my ship?
MSS-KG: You misunderstand, Pips.
CDJ: (raises a hand) No. Oh, no, no no.
MSS-KG: Apologies, Captain. I did not kill Dr. Litefful. I was unable to properly express myself to her. My mentalist tech is experimental. She assumed I was trying to seize control of her mind. She killed herself.
CDJ: It appears she was correct. You HAVE seized control of Major Sky, AND my SHIP.
CMOLB: (quietly, to CDJ) Careful, Captain.
MSS-KG: This merging with Scr--Major Sky was consensual. We took your ship, knowing you would follow. Captain Jetsam, the people of Vhipernhal, all of us, are dying! We desperately need your help!
CDJ: Consensual? Then let me talk to Major Sky.
MSS-KG: I'm sorry, Captain. If I sever the connection, I might not be able to reconnect. I barely managed to communicate with her after Dr. Litefful killed herself.
CDJ: I just call that, convenient.
MSS-KG: Captain, we don't have time for this verbal sparring. The people of my planet are dying. That is why our king took your scientists--
CDJ: (interrupts) YOU kidnapped the scientists?
MSS-KG: No, King Durus did. He's desperate to save our people, but his desperation verges on madness. He will do anything to save us, even risk going to war.
CMOLB: What are your people dying from?
MSS-KG: You are the chief medical officer of this ship. Good, I'm glad you chose to accompany the Captain. We don't know what is killing us, but we do know the source. A great, stellar cloud of unknown properties is slowly engulfing our world. There is nowhere for our people to hide. As our world rotates, all points ultimately come into contact with the phenomenon.
CDJ: How are the scientists supposed to help you with that? They aren't medical scientists.
MSS-KG: Plicare.
CDJ: (tenses, pretty sure this crew didn't know the secret of Plicare) You clearly have ships that can traverse space, if you need to move your people.
MSS-KG: King Durus doesn't want to move ships, Captain. He wants to move the world.
(Theme music)
freemusicarchive.org/music/hot-dope/background-epic-music...
Major Scrumptious Sky/Koe Ghitatio: Bailey
Captain Debris Jetsam: Teddi
Quartermaster DeiPhi Ngravity:
Chief Medical Officer Lance Boyle: Seth
Comm Officer:
Pilot: Seth
*Working Towards a Better World
I continue to believe that President Obama is going in the right direction by using diplomacy rather than war and my beliefs are supported by the New York Times Article:
29 U.S. Scientists Praise Iran Nuclear Deal in Letter to Obama
www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/world/29-us-scientists-praise-...
Thank you for your kind visit. Have a wonderful and beautiful day! xo❤️
From left to right:
- A female Miralan scientist, working for the Imperial Department of Military Research, now taken over by the Stygian Caldera Society.
- Two scientist working on top secret dark-science projects for the Stygian Caldera Society.
- A Major General of the Imperial Department of Military Research, now serving the Imperial Consortium and the SCS, that has put body to his own experiments.
- A high ranking officer of the Imperial Consortium, overseeing science projects in collaboration with the SCS.
Imperial Consortium colonel (science officer, same rank as Galen Erso from R1)
- Another Imperial Consortium officer devoted to dark science
Planet Earth From Space, one of a series of photos shot By Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders.
Taken from am official NASA video..
On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Birman, Jim Lovell, And Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the Moon, and the first to witness the magnificent sight called “Earthrise.”
NASA’s Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Adviser Dr. Katherine Calvin sat down with Bill Anders to discuss the historic Earthrise photos.
Looking pretty derelict, this used to house a revolving Restaurant and is a notable feature of the Canberra skyline. I once dined there with the boyfriend (now Mad Scientist) and put my hat and gloves on the ledge beside the table, only to have them disappear behind me as the restaurant floor revolved. I am presuming the tower is still maintained for communication reasons but the entrance is behind high fences and surrounded by trees.
Wikipedia notes"It was closed to the public in 2021, but in 2023, the ABC reported the tower was set to reopen in 2025 with a makeover celebrating Ngunnawal culture. The tower is currently set to reopen in December 2027" - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra_Tower
Thank you to my sponsor #error for the clothing in this photo.
Today's world is full of things to be afraid of. We have 24-hour news cycles hellbent on telling us of all of the scary things going on in the world. I think in a lot of cases we are paralyzed from actually experiencing life on the off chance something 'bad' may happen. The thing is, by living in this fear we miss out on all the good things that absolutely will happen too.
There comes a time in everyone's life when you have to stop observing what is happing around you and decide to be an active participant in the life experiment. Reach out and touch it.
Body: [ INITHIUM ] KUPRA HD BOM V.001/4
Head: LeLUTKA Gaia Head 3.1
Skin: .E l e i. - Sully (Complete Skin) / FST002
Eyes: Gloom. - Empty Collection - Fatpack available at CYBER Fair
Hair: CAMO - Makko Dreads - FATPACK available at CYBER Fair
Top: #error - allyson set - fatpack Kinky Event
Bottom: #error - allyson set Kinky Event
Nails: RAWR! Marina Nails
Earrings: RAWR! Ivy Elf EvoX
Drone: BONDI. V.I.P. Drone - Black
Clipboard: [vaak] Clipboard and pen
First Church of Christ, Scientist, located at 809 South Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a historic structure that on December 3, 1998, was determined to be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the owner objected to the property being listed on the Register. It is still a functioning Christian Science church.
Credit for the data above is given to the following websites
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Church_of_Christ,_Scientist_(West_Palm_Beach,_Florida)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Abele
© All Rights Reserved - you may not use this image in any form without my prior permission.
Just back from my visit to North Korea with Young Pioneer Tours and many thanks to them for the great guides and well-planned itinerary. There are more images and stories to come and do private message me if you have any questions or experiences to share with me.
On the last evening in Pyongyang, our guides took us to the Future Scientists street, or known as Mirae Scientists street. One of the standout architecture there was this and I managed to get a few exposures to have enough light trails on the road. Pretty neat buildings there. A great shoot to round off an enjoyable time in North Korea.
Mr. Rock Squirrel is a Mad Scientist in Golden Valley Az. who plays around with chemistry, in his underground Laboratory and wants to help solve all the Worlds problems.
Rock squirrels dig burrows with their sharp claws and muscular legs. The burrows provide shelter, safety, living space, and food storage. Burrow systems can be complex and lengthy, as they are enlarged over a period of years. Entrances are usually hidden beneath rocks and can be larger than 3 inches in width. Wikipedia
Taking time out to return to the basics, get back in touch with the mojo, and find my feet, with a little bit of minifig scale photography.
Doc Ock and friends, hard at work on a deadly Octopod robot. Needs more dynamite.
becki's side of our collaboration on 'the scientist' is up! check it here!
i'm done with school for the week because i'm headed up to minnesota for my sister's wedding. :) should be good. (my parents just practiced dougie-ing for a good hour in prep.) &now i'm going to get some free pie, as per every wednesday<3 hope you loves are doing well. i'm sorry i haven't been doing much lately, it's just i've been terribly busy. since you've seen me last, i've done two client shoots. you can see them on my fbook page! :)
+3
While scanning the sky to chart a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, ESA’s Gaia satellite is also sensitive to celestial bodies closer to home, and regularly observes asteroids in our Solar System.
This view shows the orbits of more than 14 000 known asteroids (with the Sun at the centre of the image) based on information from Gaia’s second data release, which was made public in 2018.
The majority of asteroids depicted in this image, shown in bright red and orange hues, are main-belt asteroids, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter; Trojan asteroids, found around the orbit of Jupiter, are shown in dark red.
In yellow, towards the image centre, are the orbits of several tens of near-Earth asteroids observed by Gaia: these are asteroids that come to within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) to the Sun at the closest approach along their orbit. The Earth circles the Sun at a distance of 1 AU (around 150 million km) so near-Earth asteroids have the potential to come into proximity with our planet.
Most asteroids that Gaia detects are already known, but every now and then, the asteroids seen by ESA's Milky Way surveyor do not match any existing observations. This is the case for the three orbits shown in grey in this view: these are Gaia’s first asteroid discoveries.
The three new asteroids were first spotted by Gaia in December 2018, and later confirmed by follow-up observations performed with the Haute-Provence Observatory in France, which enabled scientists to determine their orbits. Comparing these informations with existing observations indicated the objects had not been detected earlier.
While they are part of the main belt of asteroids, all three move around the Sun on orbits that have a greater tilt (15 degrees or more) with respect to the orbital plane of planets than most main-belt asteroids.
The population of such high-inclination asteroids is not as well studied as those with less tilted orbits, since most surveys tend to focus on the plane where the majority of asteroids reside. But Gaia can readily observe them as it scans the entire sky from its vantage point in space, so it is possible that the satellite will find more such objects in the future and contribute new information to study their properties.
Alongside the extensive processing and analysis of Gaia’s data in preparation for subsequent data releases, preliminary information about Gaia’s asteroid detections are regularly shared via an online alert system so that astronomers across the world can perform follow-up observations. To observe these asteroids, a 1-m or larger telescope is needed.
Once an asteroid detected by Gaia has been identified also in ground-based observations, the scientists in charge of the alert system analyse the data to determine the object’s orbit. In case the ground observations match the orbit based on Gaia’s data, they provide the information to the Minor Planet Center, which is the official worldwide organization collecting observational data for small Solar System bodies like asteroids and comets.
This process may lead to new discoveries, like the three asteroids with orbits depicted in this image, or to improvements in the determination of the orbits of known asteroids, which are sometimes very poorly known. So far, several tens of asteroids detected by Gaia have been observed from the ground in response to the alert system, all of them belonging to the main belt, but it is possible that also near-Earth asteroids will be spotted in the future.
A number of observatories across the world are already involved in these activities, including the Haute-Provence Observatory, Kyiv Comet station, Odessa-Mayaki, Terskol, C2PU at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network. The more that join, the more we will learn about asteroids – known and new ones alike.
Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); Gaia Coordinating Unit 4; B. Carry, F. Spoto, P. Tanga (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France) & W. Thuillot (IMCCE, Observatoire de Paris, France); Gaia Data Processing Center at CNES, Toulouse, France
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC