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HubbleSite: Image - Uranus and Neptune
Hubble Reveals Dynamic Atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune
During its routine yearly monitoring of the weather on our solar system's outer planets, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new mysterious dark storm on Neptune (right) and provided a fresh look at a long-lived storm circling around the north polar region on Uranus (left).
Like Earth, Uranus and Neptune have seasons, which likely drive some of the features in their atmospheres. But their seasons are much longer than on Earth, spanning decades rather than months.
The new Hubble view of Neptune shows the dark storm, seen at top center. Appearing during the planet's southern summer, the feature is the fourth and latest mysterious dark vortex captured by Hubble since 1993.
Hubble uncovered the latest storm in September 2018 in Neptune's northern hemisphere. The feature is roughly 6,800 miles across.
To the right of the dark feature are bright white "companion clouds." Hubble has observed similar clouds accompanying previous vortices. The bright clouds form when the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the dark vortex, causing gases to freeze into methane ice crystals.
It's unclear how these storms form.
The snapshot of Uranus, like the image of Neptune, reveals a dominant feature: a vast bright cloud cap across the north pole.
Scientists believe this feature is a result of Uranus' unique rotation. Unlike every other planet in the solar system, Uranus is tipped over almost onto its side. Because of this extreme tilt, during the planet's summer the Sun shines almost directly onto the north pole and never sets. Uranus is now approaching the middle of its summer season, and the polar-cap region is becoming more prominent
Both planets are classified as ice giant planets. They have no solid surface but rather mantles of hydrogen and helium surrounding a water-rich interior, itself perhaps wrapped around a rocky core. Atmospheric methane absorbs red light but allows blue-green light to be scattered back into space, giving each planet a cyan hue.
These images are part of a scrapbook of Hubble snapshots of Neptune and Uranus that track the weather patterns over time on these distant, cold planets.
Analyzing the weather on these worlds also will help scientists better understand the diversity and similarities of the atmospheres of solar-system planets, including Earth.
A Year On Uranus:
Uranus has some of the strangest annual and seasonal variations of any planet in the Solar System. For one, the gas/ice giant takes about 84 Earth years (or 30,688.5 Earth days) to rotate once around the Sun.
A Year On Neptune:
Given its distance from the Sun, Neptune has the longest orbital period of any planet in the Solar System. As such, a year on Neptune is the longest of any planet, lasting the equivalent of 164.8 years
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Scientists Claim to Find “Neurological Signature” of Consciousness
A breakthrough finding could solve the mystery of conscious thought.
(Is this an example perhaps of 'emergence' with respect to understanding the 'phenomenon' of consciousness...? Chuck)
Seat of Consciousness
Back in the middle of the 19th century, a physician named William Carpenter theorized that a part of the brain called the sensory ganglion was the “seat of consciousness.” He was wrong — we now know that what he called the sensory ganglion, since renamed the thalamus, is more of a switchboard for most of our senses. But the mystery of where consciousness comes from remained unsolved.
Now we may finally have an answer. An international team of neuroscientists from universities and hospitals spanning the Americas and Europe say that they’ve determined the neurological signature for consciousness. Rather than a specific chunk of the brain that’s responsible for consciousness, the researchers say they’ve located a brain-wide pattern of activity that’s only present when people are awake and responsive.
Looking Inward
To track down the elusive consciousness pattern, scientists scanned the brains of 159 people from Liège, New York, Ontario, and Paris using a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) system, which is a common tool in neuroscience research that reveals not only the structure but the activity levels of someone’s brain.
They studied healthy people who were instructed to focus on a mental task, as well as those same people when they were more relaxed. Their brain scans were compared to those from comatose people who were left with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome after a brain injury as well as people who were awake but unresponsive after a brain injury and people who were in a minimally-conscious state, which served as a middle ground between the comatose and conscious participants.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, describe how those brain scans let the the team of neuroscientists isolate four distinct patterns of neurological activity that correlated with a person’s level of consciousness.
The first pattern, and most complex, showed high-level, efficient coordination across wide swaths of the brain. This pattern was more prevalent in participants who were awake and healthy but less so in participants with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome as well as those were in a minimally conscious state, according to the research.
In contrast, a separate pattern emerged in unresponsive people’s brains that was less complex and more linked to specific brain regions, suggesting a lower level of coordination within the brain. The other two patterns, the researchers suggest, exist as transition states between the two other patterns.
Altered States
Ultimately, the researchers concluded, consciousness stems from the ability of the brain to process information using its various specialized lobes and cortices in concert. Meanwhile, when in less conscious states — or, their research suggests, when a conscious person loses focus — brain activity is more isolated and limited to the specific, local connections within and between parts of the brain.
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‘Everything is not going to be okay’: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble
By Dan ZakJanuary 24What does it mean to be alive right now? Right now. Right this second, right this epoch, as mankind alters the Earth beyond recognition.
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Liberals and conservatives react in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures
To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical revulsion.
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Harvard’s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us — and he doesn’t care what his colleagues think
Avi Loeb poses in the observatory near his office in Cambridge, Mass. His theory about an alien spaceship has made the rounds in the media and caused controversy in the academic community. (Adam Glanzman/For The Washington Post) -
New view of the Pillars of Creation — visible
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars.
The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.
Credit:
NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team
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Westerlund 2 — Hubble’s 25th anniversary image
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the cluster Westerlund 2 and its surroundings has been released to celebrate Hubble’s 25th year in orbit and a quarter of a century of new discoveries, stunning images and outstanding science.
The image’s central region, containing the star cluster, blends visible-light data taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys and near-infrared exposures taken by the Wide Field Camera 3. The surrounding region is composed of visible-light observations taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Credit:
NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
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dark energy could be growing in strength
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft have found evidence that an invisible force called dark energy, widely thought to be constant, may be getting stronger with time. If confirmed, this result could force astronomers to re-examine their fundamental understanding of the history and structure of the Universe.
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The Great American Chile Highway
(An Article shared by Kevin Percival)Yay! Pueblo Chile’s are a star... along with Three Sisters in Colorado City, and Santiago’s in Denver. They rave about Pueblo Chile’s over Hatch...as they should!Fun article. Good story about Chile’s in this part of the country.The Great American Chile Highway
Published in 'EATER'A palate-scorching, Mexican hamburger- and avocada-fueled road trip up I-25 from Las Cruces to Denver
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