Your humble moderator will grant you that it’ll take a significant amount of time, but the results of this one ought to be spectacular.
It’s large, it’s fast, and it’s heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation. In fact, the cloud contains enough gas to form a million stars like our sun, astronomers reported here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding also indicates that pristine material is still entering the relatively mature Milky Way.
Many clouds of hydrogen surround the Milky Way. But astronomers didn’t start spotting them until a half-century ago–after the advent of radio telescopes, which are able to detect cold, neutral hydrogen gas. The early observations were not accurate enough to determine the clouds’ distances, masses, or directions of motion, however.
Now, thanks to more powerful telescopes such as the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, these clouds are finally getting their close-up. The first to be spotlighted in extreme detail is Smith’s Cloud, named after Dutch astronomy student Gail Smith, who discovered it in 1963. Curious about the cloud’s elongated shape, a team of astronomers led by Felix “Jay” Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, took tens of thousands of radio brightness measurements. The data reveal that the cloud is just 8000 light-years away from the Milky Way’s central plane, making it the closest one known. Its cometary shape is apparently due to the tidal effects of the Milky Way.
According to this astronomy article, there should be some spectacuar fireworks when this gas cloud gets incorporated into the Milky Way, creating tens of thousand of massive clouds millions of years into the future. It’s going to be some kind of light show.
This comes under the wowsers category. Halfway back to the big bang, a short gamma ray burst 100 times more powerful than most.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
“This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder,” says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.
GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.
The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.
Your humble moderator is continually awed by the findings in astronomy that we’re making. From gravity to cosmology, relativity to the life of black holes, some of the most remarkable advances being made in science and technology are being made in astronomy, though this may change in the future with the growth of biology and chemistry.
Your humble moderator has spent a lot of time reading scitech articles and many of them have been about the future of solar cells. I’ve read about them for a long, long time and finally something is being done with them. It would be wonderful if we could capture even a small fraction of the energy of the fusion reactor that is Sol, whether by small steps like these solar cells or a Dyson Sphere.
We have to start somewhere though and this is as good a place to start as anywhere.
The CNet website reports:
Well-financed solar start-up Nanosolar on Tuesday said it has started shipping its flexible thin-film solar cells, meeting its own deadline and marking a milestone for alternative solar-cell materials.
On the company’s blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen announced that the first megawatt of its solar panels will be used as part of a power plant in eastern Germany.
Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen with printed solar cells.
(Credit: Nanosolar)
The release of Nanosolar’s first products is significant because the company develops a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.
The 5-year-old company, based in San Jose, Calif., has raised more than $100 million in financing and has drawn in Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as investors.
It seems to your humble moderator that this kind of computer technology comes under the category of “Big Brother.” It’s easy to say that this kind of thing will be used for productivity gains, but it’s waaaay too easy to corrupt something like this into an all around spy tool that can be put to used by any group from private industry to government to military.
From the Register, UK:
It gives a whole new meaning to the word “micromanager.”
Judging from a recent patent application, Microsoft hopes to build some sort of “activity monitoring system” that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various “physiological or environmental sensors.” These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response.
Yes, galvanic skin response is what drives a lie detector.
Redmond sees this system as a way for companies and, um, governments to monitor “group activities.” “In particular, the system can monitor user activity, detect when users need assistance with their specific activities, and identify at least one other user that can assist them,” the patent application reads, in classic patent speak. “Assistance can be in the form of answering questions, providing guidance to the user as the user completes the activity, or completing the activity such as in the case of taking on an assigned activity.”
In other words: If you don’t do your duty, the system will make sure your duties are assigned to someone else.
The system is designed to provide its unique brand of “assistance” as workers slave away on various computing devices, including desktops, laptops, and cell phones. But it doesn’t just track your physical use of such devices. It also monitors things like “frustration and stress.”
Imagine the ways that something like this can be abused and it can gives your humble moderator nightmares. Of all the technologies in the scitech realm, perhaps computer technology is the easiest to corrupt. Keep in mind that the data that these systems can collect is sent to backup logs and can be used to put together “productivity” profiles over years.
EASILY corruptible! *shiver*