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Keyword: oliverkmanuel

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  • Violent Past: Young sun withstood a supernova blast

    10/27/2013 6:03:53 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 68 replies
    Science News ^ | May 23, 2007 | Ron Cowen
    Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues set out to determine the amount of iron in the early solar system. To do so, they measured nickel-60, a decay product of iron-60, in eight meteorites known to have formed at different times during the first 3 million years of the solar system. The meteorites that formed more than about a million years after the start of the solar system contain significantly more nickel-60 than do those that formed earlier, the team found. In a neighborhood of young stars, only a supernova could have produced iron-60, the parent of...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day -- A Year on the Sun

    04/25/2013 9:46:20 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 21 replies
    NASA ^ | April 26, 2013 | (see photo credit)
    Explanation: Our solar system's miasma of incandescent plasma, the Sun may look a little scary here. The picture is a composite of 25 images recorded in extreme ultraviolet light by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory between April 16, 2012 and April 15, 2013. The particular wavelength of light, 171 angstroms, shows emission from highly ionized iron atoms in the solar corona at a characteristic temperatures of about 600,000 kelvins (about 1 million degrees F). Girdling both sides of the equator during the approach to maximum in its 11-year solar cycle, the solar active regions are laced with bright loops and...
  • Pole flips tied to plate tectonics

    11/26/2011 8:27:27 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 37 replies
    Science News ^ | November 19th, 2011 | Alexandra Witze
    Assumed to be caused by random fluctuations in the circulation of the molten iron core, the flips may actually be tied to what's going on at Earth's surface. At times in the geologic past when landmasses have bunched together on one side of the equator, the Earth's magnetic field has begun flipping soon thereafter... "What we see clearly is that the surface positions of the continents are linked with the frequency of the reversals," says group member François Pétrélis, a geophysicist at the French research agency CNRS in Paris... Computer simulations have shown how molten iron in the spinning core...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day -- SDSS J102915+172927: A Star That Should Not Exist

    09/07/2011 1:17:20 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 37 replies
    NASA ^ | September 07, 2011 | (see photo credit)
    Explanation: Why does this star have so few heavy elements? Stars born in the generation of our Sun have an expected abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium mixed into their atmospheres. Stars born in the generation before our Sun, Population II stars, the stars that created most of the heavy elements around us today, are seen to have some, although less, elements heavier than H and He. Furthermore, even the elusive never-seen first stars in the universe, so-called Population III stars, are predicted to have a large mass and a small but set amount of heavy elements. Yet...
  • Solar Flare Activity Prompting NASA to Convene a News Briefing Thursday in Washington

    08/18/2011 2:58:28 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 17 replies
    My Weather Tech dot com ^ | August 17, 2011 | Kyle Shilt on. Filed under SPACE.
    Increasing solar activity and the threat that coronal mass ejections (CME) pose to Earth has prompted NASA to convene a news briefing at its Headquarter building in Washington on Thursday afternoon. Thursday's briefing has been arranged, space agency officials say, in light of new information coming from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), spacecraft and other NASA probes. The briefing will feature new details about the structure of solar storms and the impact they have on Earth... A massive solar flare, the largest recorded in four years, occurred last Tuesday prompting fears the blast could result in some disruption to...
  • Really Hot Doin's Discovered on the Sun

    01/10/2011 4:23:39 PM PST · by neverdem · 14 replies · 1+ views
    ScienceNOW ^ | 6 January 2011 | Richard A. Kerr
    Enlarge Image In the eye of the beholder. Sharper views of the sun at a variety of wavelengths are revealing small jets from the solar surface that are helping heat the overlying corona to 1 million˚C. Credit: Bart De Pontieu The mystery of the solar corona is obvious enough. The vanishingly thin atmosphere of the sun—the wispy stuff that can be glimpsed faintly during total solar eclipses—simmers at 1 million˚C, 200 times hotter than the "fire" beneath it. What gives? Researchers now believe they have caught the sun in the act of heating bits of itself to coronal temperatures...
  • To Find New Planets, Look for the Lithium? [headline wrong -- s/b look for low lithium levels]

    11/15/2009 6:15:09 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 17 replies · 1,136+ views
    National Geographic News ^ | November 11, 2009 | John Roach
    Sunlike stars that harbor planets are low on lithium, according to a recent study that may offer a new tool in the hunt for planets beyond our solar system. Stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. A small percentage of a star's mass comes from heavier elements, which astronomers refer to as metals. Young, yellow stars like our sun usually have more metals than older, redder stars, although the exact mix of those metals can vary. But astronomers have been unable to explain why otherwise similar sunlike stars have widely different lithium levels.The new study suggests that the...
  • Scientific maverick's theory on Earth's core up for a test

    12/05/2004 11:17:28 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 80 replies · 2,526+ views
    SF Chronicle ^ | Monday, November 29, 2004 | Keay Davidson
    Researchers are preparing to test the highly controversial theory of a San Diego scientist, J. Marvin Herndon, who thinks a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- exists at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet... [I]t might help to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field... If Herndon's theoretical nuclear reactor really exists, then it should be gushing out antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.
  • Messenger from Mercury: Orbiter returns images of odd landforms on innermost planet

    11/26/2011 6:03:38 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 18 replies
    Science News ^ | November 19th, 2011 | Nadia Drake
    Hot and heavy little Mercury is warming up to NASA's MESSENGER probe and revealing its true planetary colors -- in enhanced-color images. Among the spacecraft's finds are bizarre landforms (shown here in blue) tucked inside impact craters on the planet's surface. David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and his colleagues report these puzzling scarlike hollows in the Sept. 30 Science, which features seven papers describing the compact world. The pits resemble sunken Swiss cheese holes -- smooth, rimless depressions that vary in size between several meters and a few kilometers across. Irregularly shaped, the clustered hollows...
  • Eclipses yield first images of elusive iron line in the solar corona

    01/04/2010 1:59:59 PM PST · by decimon · 9 replies · 531+ views
    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center ^ | Jan 4, 2009 | Unknown
    GREENBELT, Md. – Solar physicists attempting to unlock the mysteries of the solar corona have found another piece of the puzzle by observing the sun's outer atmosphere during eclipses. Ground-based observations reveal the first images of the solar corona in the near-infrared emission line of highly ionized iron, or Fe XI 789.2 nm. The observations were taken during total solar eclipses in 2006, 2008, and 2009 by astrophysicist Adrian Daw of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with an international team of scientists led by Shadia Habbal from the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA). "The first...
  • Theory of the sun's role in formation of the solar system questioned

    09/09/2008 12:35:14 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 20 replies · 145+ views
    FirstScience ^ | Thursday, September 4, 2008 | University of California - San Diego
    A strange mix of oxygen found in a stony meteorite that exploded over Pueblito de Allende, Mexico nearly 40 years ago has puzzled scientists ever since. Small flecks of minerals lodged in the stone and thought to date from the beginning of the solar system have a pattern of oxygen types, or isotopes, that differs from those found in all known planetary rocks, including those from Earth, its Moon and meteorites from Mars. Now scientists from UC San Diego and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have eliminated one model proposed to explain the anomaly: the idea that light from the early...
  • The Surface Of The Sun

    08/29/2008 12:19:10 PM PDT · by valkyry1 · 26 replies · 278+ views
    The Surface of the Sun ^ | copyright 2008
    The composition and mechanical inner workings of the sun beneath the visible photosphere have remained an enigma for thousands of years. There are a whole host of unexplained phenomena related to the sun's activities that still baffle gas model theorists to this day because they fail to recognize the existence of an iron alloy transitional layer that rests beneath the visible photosphere. Fortunately a host of new satellites and the
  • Is Iron Causing All the Flares?

    11/19/2003 9:15:52 AM PST · by LibWhacker · 175 replies · 1,157+ views
    Universe Today ^ | 11/18/03
    Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry, believes that iron, not hydrogen, is the sun’s most abundant element. In a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Fusion Energy, Manuel asserts that the “standard solar model” -- which assumes that the sun’s core is made of hydrogen -- has led to misunderstandings of how such solar flares occur, as well as inaccurate views on the nature of global climate change. Recent solar flares erupting on the sun’s surface have unleashed powerful geomagnetic storms -- gigantic clouds of highly charged particles that pose a threat to electric utilities, high-frequency...
  • The Sun: A Great Ball of Iron?

    07/17/2002 11:33:32 PM PDT · by per loin · 67 replies · 680+ views
    Science Daily
    Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...
  • Evolved stars locked in fatalistic dance

    07/14/2011 6:00:53 AM PDT · by LibWhacker · 20 replies
    PhysOrg ^ | 7/13/11
    White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.The two white dwarfs are circling...
  • Study Peels Back More of the Magnetic Sun

    03/12/2010 11:45:54 PM PST · by neverdem · 12 replies · 730+ views
    ScienceNOW ^ | March 12, 2010 | Phil Berardelli
    Enlarge Image Turmoil. Magnetism produces much of the sun's surface phenomena, such as these sunspots, seen in ultraviolet light. Credit: NASA/TRACE Researchers have discovered that one of the mysterious forces that sweep the sun's surface shows an unexpectedly strong connection with the number of sunspots, magnetic disturbances that can affect Earth's weather and telecommunications. The findings should improve predictions of the sun's dynamics and might even help scientists develop better climate models. Along with heat and light, the sun emits x-rays and magnetically charged particles that can endanger astronauts, fry circuits aboard satellites orbiting Earth, and overload electric power...
  • Biggest stars produce strongest magnets

    01/30/2005 1:17:24 PM PST · by Willie Green · 14 replies · 1,000+ views
    SpaceFlightNow ^ | January 28, 2005 | HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS
    For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Astronomy is a science of extremes - the biggest, the hottest, and the most massive. Today, astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues announced that they have linked two of astronomy's extremes, showing that some of the biggest stars in the cosmos become the strongest magnets when they die. "The source of these very powerful magnetic objects has been a mystery since the first one was discovered in 1998. Now, we think we have solved that mystery," says Gaensler. The astronomers base their conclusions on data taken with CSIRO's...
  • Magnetic Stars

    10/15/2004 8:29:46 AM PDT · by ckilmer · 8 replies · 525+ views
    eurekalert/Nature/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ^ | October 14th, 2004 | J. Braithwaite and H.C. Spruit
    Magnetic Stars The puzzle of `magnetic stars' solved by astrophysicists of the Max Planck Society How does one explain the enormous magnetic field strengths of the so-called `magnetic stars'? This question concerning magnetic fields in the cosmos, first posed half a century ago, has now been answered by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. With 3-dimensional numerical simulations they have found the magnetic field configurations that underly the strong magnetic fields observed on the surface of the so-called magnetic A-stars and magnetic White Dwarfs, and how these fields can survive for the life time of these...