A 14-frame clip showing the atmosphere of Jupiter as viewed from the NASA probe Cassini. Taken over a span of 24 Jupiter rotations between October 31 and November 9, 2000, this clip shows various patterns of motion across the planet. The Great Red Spot rotates counterclockwise, and the uneven distribution of its high haze is obvious. To the east (right) of the Red Spot, oval storms, like ball bearings, roll over and pass each other. East-west bands adjacent to each other move at different rates. Strings of small storms rotate around northern-hemisphere ovals. The large grayish-blue “hot spots” at the northern edge of the white Equatorial Zone change over time as they proceed eastward across the planet. Ovals in the north rotate counter to those in the south. Small, very bright features appear quickly and randomly in turbulent regions, possibly lightning storms. The smallest visible features at the equator are about 600 km (370 miles) across.
Some curiosities about white dwarfs, a stellar corpse and the future of the sun.
Where a star ends up at the end of its life depends on the mass it was born with. Stars that have a lot of mass may end their lives as black holes or neutron stars.
A white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. Near the end of its nuclear burning stage, this type of star expels most of its outer material, creating a planetary nebula.
In 5.4 billion years from now, the Sun will enter what is known as the Red Giant phase of its evolution. This will begin once all hydrogen is exhausted in the core and the inert helium ash that has built up there becomes unstable and collapses under its own weight. This will cause the core to heat up and get denser, causing the Sun to grow in size.
It is calculated that the expanding Sun will grow large enough to encompass the orbit’s of Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth.
A typical white dwarf is about as massive as the Sun, yet only slightly bigger than the Earth. This makes white dwarfs one of the densest forms of matter, surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes.
The gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth.
White dwarfs reach this incredible density because they are so collapsed that their electrons are smashed together, forming what is called “degenerate matter.” This means that a more massive white dwarf has a smaller radius than its less massive counterpart. Burning stars balance the inward push of gravity with the outward push from fusion, but in a white dwarf, electrons must squeeze tightly together to create that outward-pressing force. As such, having shed much of its mass during the red giant phase, no white dwarf can exceed 1.4 times the mass of the sun.
While many white dwarfs fade away into relative obscurity, eventually radiating away all of their energy and becoming a black dwarf, those that have companions may suffer a different fate.
If the white dwarf is part of a binary system, it may be able to pull material from its companion onto its surface. Increasing the mass can have some interesting results.
One possibility is that adding more mass to the white dwarf could cause it to collapse into a much denser neutron star.
A far more explosive result is the Type 1a supernova. As the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star, the temperature increases, eventually triggering a runaway reaction that detonates in a violent supernova that destroys the white dwarf. This process is known as a single-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova.
If the companion is another white dwarf instead of an active star, the two stellar corpses merge together to kick off the fireworks. This process is known as a double-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova.
At other times, the white dwarf may pull just enough material from its companion to briefly ignite in a nova, a far smaller explosion. Because the white dwarf remains intact, it can repeat the process several times when it reaches the critical point, briefly breathing life back into the dying star over and over again.
A storm complex nearly the size of Earth has been seen in a usually quiet area of Neptune. Ned Molter from the University of California, Berkeley in the US spotted the storm while performing a test run of twilight observing at the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The storm system appears as a very bright region about 9000 km in length and spans at least 30° in both latitude and longitude. “Seeing a storm this bright at such a low latitude is extremely surprising,” explains Molter. “Normally, this area is really quiet and we only see bright clouds in the mid-latitude bands, so to have such an enormous cloud sitting right at the equator is spectacular.”
“This photograph depicts a classified ‘listening station’ deep in the forests of West Virginia.
The station is located at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a region of approximately 34,000 square kilometers in West Virginia and parts of Maryland.
Within the Quiet Zone, radio transmissions are severely restricted: omnidirectional and high-powered transmissions (such as wireless internet devices and FM radio stations) are not permitted.
The listening station, which forms part of the global ECHELON system, was designed in part to take advantage of a phenomenon called moonbounce.
Moonbounce involves capturing communications and telemetry signals from around the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth.
The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light.”
Fundamental proportional relationships between the Earth and the Moon are encoded into the Great Pyramid of Giza as are Fibonacci number, Pi Number, Phi - 1:1.618 - the Golden Ratio and even the speed of light…
