Rainbow-submarine-blog - C E C I L E

My bit on #NetNeutrality from Twitter.

Sunset Sea

老凌

A cosmic barbecue: Researchers spot 60 new ‘hot Jupiter’ candidates

Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new “hot Jupiters"—highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars.

Hot Jupiters constitute a class of gas giant planets located so close to their parent stars that they take less than a week to complete an orbit. Second-year Ph.D. student Sarah Millholland and astronomy professor Greg Laughlin identified the planet candidates via a novel application of big data techniques. They used a supervised machine learning algorithm—a sophisticated program that can be trained to recognize patterns in data and make predictions—to detect the tiny amplitude variations in observed light that result as an orbiting planet reflects rays of light from its host star.

Millholland and Laughlin searched systematically for reflected light signals in the observations of more than 140,000 stars from four years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission. The Kepler spacecraft is best known for enabling the detection of thousands of exoplanets that transit their host stars. During a transit, a planet passes in front of a star and causes a periodic dip in the observed starlight.

Reflected light signals can be difficult to distinguish from stellar or instrumental variability, the researchers said, but a big data approach enabled them to pull out the faint signals. They generated thousands of synthetic datasets and trained an algorithm to recognize the properties of the reflected light signals in comparison to those with other types of variability.

The reflected light signals hold rich information about the planets’ atmospheres, according to the researchers. They contain characteristics such as cloud existence, atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and day-night temperature contrasts. Read more at: phys.org

I think you’re strong and I think you can get through anything, even if it’s the worst sadness you ever experienced. I believe you can get through this and you should believe it too.

reblog for positivity (via ashleymacleanblog)

Today’s Mood

Celebrating The First Americans Means Green, Not Red White and Blue

American jade is made up of a group of semiprecious hard stones. Chief among them is a dense rock composed almost entirely of the mineral jadeite, a sodium aluminum silicate of the pyroxene family noted for its beautiful color when worked. All American works of art in jade are basically green, but they are vary widely in tone, ranging from a pale apple hue, like below, to a distinctive blue green, to almost black.

As in China, where semiprecious hard stones — also known collectively as jade — were worked from very early times, the initial use of jade in the Americas is thought to have developed from the production of tools, weapons, and ornaments of more common stone. Jade is particularly hard and therefore useful for tools and weapons. But jade’s beautiful color, and shine when polished, would have made it stand out. Over time, jade became more and more favored for works of special status, like jewelry and ceremonial items. By the Olmecs in 1000 BCE, jade was high enough of a status symbol that the stone was being carved into non-useful sculptures and being placed in royal burials, never to be seen or used again.

The Leavenworth Weekly Times, Kansas, April 12, 1888