New Discoveries About Star Formation In The Flame Nebula

Uneasiness in Observers of Unnatural Android Movements Explained

It has been decades in the making, but humanoid technology has certainly made significant advancements toward creation of androids - robots with human-like features and capabilities. While androids hold great promise for tangible benefits to the world, they may induce a mysterious and uneasy feeling in human observers. This phenomenon, called the “uncanny valley,” increases when the android’s appearance is almost humanlike but its movement is not fully natural or comparable to human movement. This has been a focus of study for many years; however, the neural mechanism underlying the detection of unnatural movements remains unclear.

The research is in Scientific Reports. (full open access)

Radar Observations of Asteroid 2014 HQ124

Radar data of asteroid 2014 HQ124 taken over for hours on June 8, 2014, when the asteroid was between 864.000 miles (1.39 million kilometers) and 902.00 miles (1,45 million kilometers) from Earth. The data reveals asteroid 2014 HQ124 to be an elongated, irregular object that is at least 1200 feet (370 meters) wide on it long axis. The radar was obtained using NASA’s 70 meters Goldstone antenna, the same antenna used for communicating with spacecraft in deep space. The Goldstone radar team paired with the Arecibo Observatory (Goldstone sending radar, Arecibo receiving) for the first five frames of this movie in order to collect higher quality data resulting in shaper images. The other frames were made by both sending and receiving with antennas at the Goldstone complex.

Credit: NASA/JPL

Ask Ethan: How Do We Know The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old?

“You’ve heard the story before: the Universe began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and formed atoms, stars, galaxies, and eventually planets with the right ingredients for life. Looking at distant locations in the Universe is also looking back in time, and somehow, through the power of physics and astronomy, we’ve figured out not only how the Universe began, but its age. But how do we know how old the Universe is? That what Thys Hauptfleisch wants to know for this week’s Ask Ethan:

Ethan, how was the 13.8 billion years calculated? (In English please!)”

There’s a unique relationship between everything that exists in the Universe today – the stars and galaxies, the large-scale structure, the leftover glow from the Big Bang, the expansion rate, etc. – and the amount of time that’s passed since it all began. When it comes to our Universe, there really was a day without a yesterday, but how do we know exactly how much time has passed between then and now? There are two ways: one complex and one simple. The complex way is to determine all the matter and energy components making up the Universe, to measure how the Universe has expanded over the entirety of its cosmic history, and then, in the context of the Big Bang, to deduce how old the Universe must be. The other is to understand stars, measure them, and determine how old the oldest ones are.

The complex answer is more accurate, but more importantly, they both agree with each other. Get the details on this week’s Ask Ethan!

5 Vital Lessons Scientists Learn That Can Better Everyone’s Life

“4. Following your intuition will never get you as far as doing the math will. Coming up with a beautiful, powerful and compelling theory is the dream of many scientists worldwide, and has been for as long as there have been scientists. When Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, it was attractive to many, but his circular orbits couldn’t explain the observations of the planets as well as Ptolemy’s epicycles – ugly as they were – did. Some 50 years later, Johannes Kepler built upon Copernicus’ idea and put forth his Mysterium Cosmographicum: a series of nested spheres whose ratios could explain the orbits of the planets. Except, the data didn’t fit right. When he did the math, the numbers didn’t add up.”

There are a lot of myths we have in our society about how the greatest of all scientific advances happened. We think about a lone genius, working outside the constraints of mainstream academia or mainstream thinking, working on something no one else works on. That hasn’t ever really been true, and yet there are actual lessons – valuable ones – to be learned from observing scientists throughout history. The greatest breakthroughs can only happen in the context of what’s already been discovered, and in that sense, our scientific knowledge base and our best new theories are a reflection of the very human endeavor of science. When Newton claimed he was standing on the shoulders of giants, it may have been his most brilliant realization of all, and it’s never been more true today.

Come learn these five vital lessons for yourself, and see if you can’t find some way to have them apply to your life!

The Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across. Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star’s evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.

Object Names: Cat’s Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: Josh Smith (Via Nasa)

Time And Space

The Great Nebula in Carina : In one of the brightest parts of Milky Way lies a nebula where some of the oddest things occur. NGC 3372, known as the Great Nebula in Carina, is home to massive stars and changing nebulas. The Keyhole Nebula , the bright structure just above the image center, houses several of these massive stars and has itself changed its appearance. The entire Carina Nebula spans over 300 light years and lies about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina. Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically. Eta Carinae is the brightest star near the image center, just left of the Keyhole Nebula. While Eta Carinae itself maybe on the verge of a supernova explosion, X-ray images indicate that much of the Great Carina Nebula has been a veritable supernova factory. via NASA

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That’s Electrooculography!

The eye is a basically a dipole ( a separation of electric charges )

It was observed by Reymond in 1848 that the cornea of the eye is electrically positive relative to the back of the eye.This potential was surprisingly not dependent on the amount of light falling on the eye.

                The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye

Dipoles and Eye Tracking

This means that as the eye moves from side to side, the dipole moves as well. To capture the movement of the dipole, one places two electrodes on both sides of the eye. ( like the one placed on this guy )

If the eye moves from the center position to the right, one of the electrodes becomes slightly positive and the other negative. This leads to a spike in the positive direction.

                                                  Source

And if the eye moves from the center position to the left, the polarity of the electrodes reverses. This leads to a spike in the negative direction.

That’s about it. That’s EOG for you all. I hope you guys enjoyed this post.

Have a great day!

Sources and Extras:

More about EOG

Gif source : The backyard brains

Cosmic horseshoe is not the lucky beacon

A UC Riverside-led team of astronomers use observations of a gravitationally lensed galaxy to measure the properties of the early universe

Although the universe started out with a bang it quickly evolved to a relatively cool, dark place. After a few hundred thousand years the lights came back on and scientists are still trying to figure out why.

Astronomers know that reionization made the universe transparent by allowing light from distant galaxies to travel almost freely through the cosmos to reach us.

However, astronomers don’t fully understand the escape rate of ionizing photons from early galaxies. That escape rate is a crucial, but still a poorly constrained value, meaning there are a wide range of upper and lower limits in the models developed by astronomers.

That limitation is in part due to the fact that astronomers have been limited to indirect methods of observation of ionizing photons, meaning they may only see a few pixels of the object and then make assumptions about unseen aspects. Direct detection, or directly observing an object such as a galaxy with a telescope, would provide a much better estimate of their escape rate.

In a just-published paper, a team of researchers, led by a University of California, Riverside graduate student, used a direct detection method and found the previously used constraints have been overestimated by five times.

“This finding opens questions on whether galaxies alone are responsible for the reionization of the universe or if faint dwarf galaxies beyond our current detection limits have higher escape fractions to explain radiation budget necessary for the reionization of the universe,” said Kaveh Vasei, the graduate student who is the lead author of the study.

It is difficult to understand the properties of the early universe in large part because this was more than 12 billion year ago. It is known that around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, electrons and protons bound together to form hydrogen atoms for the first time. They make up more than 90 percent of the atoms in the universe, and can very efficiently absorb high energy photons and become ionized.

However, there were very few sources to ionize these atoms in the early universe. One billion years after the Big Bang, the material between the galaxies was reionized and became more transparent. The main energy source of the reionization is widely believed to be massive stars formed within early galaxies. These stars had a short lifespan and were usually born in the midst of dense gas clouds, which made it very hard for ionizing photons to escape their host galaxies.

Previous studies suggested that about 20 percent of these ionizing photons need to escape the dense gas environment of their host galaxies to significantly contribute to the reionization of the material between galaxies.

Unfortunately, a direct detection of these ionizing photons is very challenging and previous efforts have not been very successful. Therefore, the mechanisms leading to their escape are poorly understood.

This has led many astrophysicists to use indirect methods to estimate the fraction of ionizing photons that escape the galaxies. In one popular method, the gas is assumed to have a “picket fence” distribution, where the space within galaxies is assumed to be composed of either regions of very little gas, which are transparent to ionizing light, or regions of dense gas, which are opaque. Researchers can determine the fraction of each of these regions by studying the light (spectra) emerging from the galaxies.

In this new UC Riverside-led study, astronomers directly measured the fraction of ionizing photons escaping from the Cosmic Horseshoe, a distant galaxy that is gravitationally lensed. Gravitational lensing is the deformation and amplification of a background object by the curving of space and time due to the mass of a foreground galaxy. The details of the galaxy in the background are therefore magnified, allowing researchers to study its light and physical properties more clearly.

Based on the picket fence model, an escape fraction of 40 percent for ionizing photons from the Horseshoe was expected. Therefore, the Horseshoe represented an ideal opportunity to get for the first time a clear, resolved image of leaking ionizing photons to help understand the mechanisms by which they escape their host galaxies.

The research team obtained a deep image of the Horseshoe with the Hubble Space Telescope in an ultraviolet filter, enabling them to directly detect escaping ionizing photons. Surprisingly, the image did not detect ionizing photons coming from the Horseshoe. This team constrained the fraction of escaping photons to be less than 8 percent, five times smaller than what had been inferred by indirect methods widely used by astronomers.

“The study concludes that the previously determined fraction of escaping ionizing radiation of galaxies, as estimated by the most popular indirect method, is likely overestimated in many galaxies,” said Brian Siana, co-author of the research paper and an assistant professor at UC Riverside.

“The team is now focusing on direct determination the fraction of escaping ionizing photons that do not rely on indirect estimates.”

(no word to describe this feeling)

eat mor chikin