Glossary
We’re back in 2019 with an episode that would have been more appropriate to release during hurricane season: a discussion of the Coriolis force! This force was observed centuries ago but takes its name from the scientist who first considered it in terms of theory and physics. It has an impact on a vast range of natural phenomena, from weather patterns to ocean waves to the flights of flies and moths.
Below the cut are the glossary, transcript, a timeline of the people I mention, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my so-far-monthly-updated podcast, and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!
(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking, Hedy Lamarr, or famous comets. The next episode will go up in late February.)
Glossary
Coriolis force - a force in a rotating system that acts perpendicular to the direction of motion and to the axis of rotation. On Earth, this tends to deflect moving objects to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere.
Ekman transport - the net motion of fluid that results from the balance between Coriolis and turbulent drag forces.
Eötvös effect - the change in perceived gravitational force that results from eastbound or westbound movement on Earth’s surface.
Kelvin waves - an ocean wave that is trapped at the Earth’s equator and along vertical boundaries like coastlines. They move towards the equator when they have a western boundary; towards the poles when they have an eastern boundary; and make a whirlpool when they have a closed boundary, moving counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Lagrange points - five points where three bodies can orbit each other, yet stay in the same position relative to each other in a stable configuration. L1-L3 are in line with each other, while L4 and L5 are at the points of equilateral triangles in the configuration.
prograde - when a planet spins from east to west.
Rossby number - used to determine the relative importance of the centrifugal and Coriolis forces in maps of weather patterns. A small Rossby number indicates that a weather system is strongly affected by Coriolis forces, while a large Rossby number signifies that a system is affected by inertial and centrifugal forces.
Transcript
Timeline
Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Italian (1598-1671)
Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Italian (1618-63)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange, French (1736-1813)
Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis, French (1792-1843)
Sir William Thompson, AKA Lord Kelvin, Scots-Irish (1824-1907)
Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény, Hungarian (1848-1919)
Ottokar Tumlirz, Austrian (1856-1928)
Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian (1861-1930)
Vagn Walfrid Ekman, Swedish (1874-1954)
Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby, Swedish-born American (1898-1957)
Sources
Coriolis Effect via the University of Oregon
Coriolis Force via Wikipedia
Coriolis effect, two centuries before Coriolis via Physics Today (Aug 2011)
Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis via Wikipedia
Coriolis effect via National Geographic
Hurricane, cyclone, typhoon, tornado – what’s the difference? via African Reporter (Sep 2017)
Wang, B. Kelvin Waves. University of Hawaii: Honolulu, 2002.
Ocean in Motion: Ekman Transport Background via NASA
Ekman transport via Wikipedia
What is a Geodesist? via Environmental Science
“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats via Poetry Foundation
Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity
Filler Music: ‘Ambergris’ by Tipper off their EP Fathoms
Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught
More Posts from Fillthevoid-with-space and Others
I imagine most people wanted to be astronauts when they learned it was a job they could have - I certainly did! And then I thought about it and realized podcasting about outer space was much less scary and much more achievable than becoming an astronaut, with the bonus of not having to wonder how hard I’d panic in an enclosed-yet-surrounded-by-vastness space. There have been a lot of people braver than me who went to space, and some of them went to space on long-term missions lasting months or a year, living on the International Space Station (or the historical equivalent, depending on when in history this happened). Learn what resources are available to ISS astronauts, and what risks there are out there (apart from the obvious ones).
Sorry I missed last week, but it was New Year’s and I don’t feel very guilty. Get excited about more space podcasts in 2018, though! Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. I bolded any videos or sources that I mentioned in the podcast, if you’re looking for those specifically. Go ahead and suggest what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me. Please subscribe on iTunes, rate it and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it!
(My thoughts on the next episode are more about astronauts, or I could go into the transit of Venus. I have a couple books about space I should really get into reading… The next episode will go up January 22nd.)
Glossary
free fall - the downward movement of an object that is due to the force of gravity alone.
gravity - the phenomenon which causes all things with mass to move towards each other. On the universal scale, this is caused by the warping of spacetime by objects with large mass, e.g. stars and planets, and is explained through Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
microgravity - the state of perpetual free fall in a gravity field.
orbit - the gravitationally curved trajectory of an object, e.g. the trajectory of a satellite around a planet.
Script/Transcript
Sources
Yuri Gagarin via NASA
Microgravity via NASA (Feb 2012)
The history of astronaut life via the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
Menstruation in space via National Geographic (Apr 2016)
The Air We Breathe via the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Breathing Easy on the Space Station via NASA (Nov 2000)
Jay Perry: “the chemical-mechanical systems are much more compact, less labor intensive, and more reliable than a plant-based system.”
Astronaut’s Home Videos Show How to Cook in Space via Space.com (Mar 2013)
Astronaut Hygiene: How to Wash Your Hair In Space (Video) via Space.com (July 2013)
Interview with former astronaut Prof. Jeremy Hoffman via the University of Leicester
A day in the life aboard the International Space Station via NASA (2015)
Zvezda Module Overview via NASA
Food for Space Flight via Nasa (Feb 2004)
John Glenn via NASA (Feb 2012)
Crew From U.S., Russia and Japan Expands Space Population to Six via NASA (Dec 2017)
ISS blog with experiment updates via NASA
Astronaut daily life via ESA (Nov 2012)
The Skylab 4 Mutiny, 1973 via libcom.org (Apr 2004)
Carr: “On the ground, I don’t think we would be expected to work a 16-hour day for 85 days, and so I really don’t see why we should even try to do it up here.”
‘Space Oddity’ by Chris Hadfield via YouTube
Interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield via NPR (Oct 2013)
Col. Chris Hadfield: “The contrast of your body and your mind inside … essentially a one-person spaceship, which is your spacesuit, where you’re holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you — just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It’s like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it’s the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions. It’s like a huge yawning endlessness on your left side and you’re in between those two things and trying to rationalize it to yourself and trying to get some work done.”
Excerpt from memoir by former astronaut Scott Kelly via the Sunday Morning Herald (Oct 2017)
Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity
Filler Music: ‘Major Tom’ by Shiny Toy Guns off their album Major Tom.
Background Music: ‘Leaves’ by Patients aka Ben Cooper, who primarily releases music as Radical Face but also has at least three other bands or band names he’s working with/has released music as.
Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught
It’s international dark sky week! Please enjoy this great Bortle scale.
skyglowproject What sky do you live under? Learn more at SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM
My microphone just arrived! Now to set it up and figure out how the hell it works....
TODAY IN HISTORY: The first-ever color image of Mars, taken by NASA’s Viking 1 lander on July 21, 1976. (San Diego Air & Space Museum)
A Giant Star Factory in Neighboring Galaxy NGC 6822 NASA
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What's Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!
A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays - some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe - coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes.
So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?
Thunderstorms form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.
The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air - and zap! You get lightning.
Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth!
When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all - thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite!
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.
There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over the 10 years that Fermi has been in space, it has spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day - we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe.
The map above shows all the flashes Fermi has seen since 2008. (Notice there’s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That’s the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)
Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. The most productive system we’ve seen was Tropical Storm Julio in 2014, which later became a hurricane. It produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!
Learn more about what Fermi’s discovered about gamma rays over the last 10 years and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
A podcast project to fill the space in my heart and my time that used to be filled with academic research. In 2018, that space gets filled with... MORE SPACE! Cheerfully researched, painstakingly edited, informal as hell, definitely worth everyone's time.
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