Skip to main content

Science Friday: Comet Heading Our Way | Uncertainty Principle Misunderstood | 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Deserts

Submitted by Tjadendevries on Fri, 09/28/2012 - 7:06pm

A Newly Discovered Comet Is Headed Our Way

    Last Friday, a pair of Russian astronomers, Artyom Novichonok and Vitaly Nevski, were poring over images taken by a telescope at the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) in Kislovodsk when they spotted something unusual. In the constellation of Cancer was a point of light, barely visible, that didn’t correspond with any known star or other astronomical body.

    Their discovery—a new comet, officially named C/2012 S1 (ISON)—was made public on Monday, and has since made waves in the astronomical community and across the internet.

    As of now, Comet ISON, as it’s commonly being called, is roughly 625 million miles away from us and is 100,000 times fainter than the dimmest star that can be seen with the naked eye—it’s only visible using professional-grade telescopes. But as it proceeds through its orbit and reaches its perihelion, its closest point to the sun (a distance of 800,000 miles) on November 28th, 2013, it could be bright enough to be visible in full daylight in the Northern Hemisphere, perhaps even as bright as a full moon.

    With current information, though, there’s no way of knowing for sure, and experts disagree on what exactly we’ll see. “Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) probably will become the brightest comet anyone alive has ever seen,” wrote Astronomy Magazine’s Michael E. Bakich.” But Karl Battams, a comet researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory, told Cosmic Log, “The astronomy community in general tries not to overhype these things. Potentially it will be amazing. Potentially it will be a huge dud.”

    [...]

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/09/a-newly-discovered-comet-is-headed-our-way/

Famous Uncertainty Principle Has Been Misunderstood, Scientists Say

    More than 80 years after the uncertainty principle was first proposed, scientists are ironing out some uncertainties about the famous physics notion.

    The uncertainty principle, proposed in 1927 by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, states that the more precisely a particle's position is measured, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. It has long been invoked to describe the way measuring an object disturbs that object.

    But a new experiment shows this doesn't have to be true.

    [...]

http://www.livescience.com/23426-uncertainty-principle-measurement-disturbance.html

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Deserts

One has been around for 40 million years, one is running into a wall, and one may soon power much of Europe.

    1 Sure, our planet looks like a watery blue marble from space, but one-third of Earth’s land surface is partially or totally desert.

    2 The world’s largest desert is Antarctica. That’s right, an area doesn’t have to be hot to qualify—it just needs to lose more moisture than it gains.

    3 There are parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile where no rain has ever been recorded. Scientists believe portions of the region have been in an extreme desert state for 40 million years—longer than any other place on Earth.

    4 And yet more than 1 million people live in the Atacama today. Farmers extract enough water from aquifers and snowmelt streams to grow crops and raise llamas and alpacas.

    5 If you get lost in the desert, you don’t have to urinate on your shirt and wear it on your head like Bear Grylls to avoid dying of thirst. You can suck water from the branches of some palms, such as buri and rattan.

    6 Contrary to lore, cacti are not a sure thing. If you want a sip from a barrel cactus, you’ll need a machete to carve it open—and choosing the wrong species could give you headaches and diarrhea.

    7 Then again, if you are lost in the desert, headaches and diarrhea might not be your biggest problem.

    8 You’re better off with a prickly pear cactus. But wait until night so you don’t expend water sweating.

    [...]

9-20 at the link

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-deserts