dirty space news: NASA reveals heptane fuel

i'll let the folks at NASA do the explainin' after i show the photo...

credit: NASA (!)

i mean...!?!

"Because of the absence of gravity, fuels burning in space behave very differently than they do on Earth. In this image, a 3-millimeter diameter droplet of heptane fuel burns in microgravity, producing soot. When a bright, uniform backlight is placed behind the droplet and flame and recorded by a video camera, the soot appears as a dark cloud. Image processing techniques can then quantify the soot concentration at each point in the image. On the International Space Station, the Flame Extinguishing Experiment examines the combustion of such liquid fuel droplets.

This colorized gray-scale image is a composite of the individual video frames of the backlit fuel droplet. The bright yellow structure in the middle is the path of the droplet, which becomes smaller as it burns. Initial soot structures (in green) tend to form near the liquid fuel. These come together into larger and larger particles which ultimately spiral out of the flame zone in long, twisting streamers."

i dont really know why there is a mirror-image affect. not really the point though.... ;)

dirty space news: planet-bearing stars

the last sentence of the abstract of this paper is just too good not to share.

"Finally, the fingering region is found to extend deeply into the star, a result which would provide a simple theoretical explanation to the measurements of higher lithium depletion rates in planet-bearing stars."

seriously.

thanks to peter yoachim for thinking of me when he spotted some dirty astronomy ;)

mandelbrot fractals

benoît mandelbrot died on october 14th, 2010 at the age of 85.

he was the mathematician who invented fractals: rough (not smooth) geometric shapes that have the cool property that if you look at small parts of the whole, they look (almost) exactly like the whole, only smaller. here is the famous mandelbrot set:


fractals occur all over in nature including clouds, snow flakes, crystals, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, cauliflower or broccoli, and even our blood vessels.

in july of this year, mandelbrot gave an interesting TED talk called Fractals and the art of roughness describing how he came about the idea of fractals, and how they are used in a wide variety of ways today:



ps. someone sent me this fractal which could sort of maybe loosely qualify as dirty space news.

dirty space news: jets at all scales

i did not attend this conference myself, but a fellow astrophysicist pointed out to me that the poster for a recent IAU symposium obviously fits the criteria for being dirty space news:


its just an added bonus that they called the meeting jets at all scales.

dirty space news: solar mass ejections

solar scientists are reporting that the sun has recently experienced FOUR solar mass ejections and soon the earth's atmosphere will glow in the aftermath.

an aurora occurs because energetic particles coming from the sun react with a planet's magnetic field. magnetic fields naturally have directional field lines which act as "traffic lanes" that guide the electrically charged solar particles to the north and south magnetic poles.

for updates on aurora sightings, go to space weather.

dirty space news goes global

about a month ago i got an email titled "space porn" which i have to admit, isnt so unusual these days as people like to point me towards pictures of things that resemble sexual organs. if this makes no sense, please read the related post: dirty space news.

what was notable about this particular space porn email was that it was from phil plait, the bad astronomer, asking if he could use the idea and some of the images for his upcoming w00tstock talk. well, of course i said yes and now we are all able to see his talk from last week.



UPDATE: i changed the video to a better quality version. thanks phil!

how do you "go" in space?

astronaut mike massimino, who was on the mission to fix the hubble space telescope, teaches us the process of how one uses the toilet while in the weightless atmosphere of space. the astronauts discuss their individual techniques (not in too much detail, dont worry), and they also reveal the dirty little secret of NASA space flight: the "alignment camera."

dirty space news

we can't always take ourselves too seriously, and the universe likes to remind us of this sometimes.

which is why i'm sharing with you one of the best astronomical follies i've come across in recent times. today someone brought to my attention a recently-submitted research paper on hickson compact group 31, a group of small galaxies gravitationally interacting with each other. the paper shows an image of the galaxies in a way i've not seen before:


hahaha! and if that wasnt blatant enough, they changed the color scale and showed the image again later on in the paper!


this is not the only unintentional astronomical knob gag i've seen... the radio image below of the well-studied galaxy, M87, reveals "spectacular and complex structure" in the galaxy that is 50 million light years away.


and last but not least, this is an artist's impression of the XMM-Newton telescope:


amazing(ly detailed!)!

i guess i'll never be too old or "professional" to enjoy a good knob gag! do you know of any others?


UPDATES and CONTRIBUTIONS:

a fellow astronomer, who writes at dark matter sheep, shared with me his image of the cone nebula. here is the published pretty picture, which is pretty good:


here is the version my friend accidentally created in an attempt to make a mosaic. the image caused them to rename the cone nebula: the "knobula!"



telescoper peter coles, who writes at in the dark, has kindly contributed this image of the actual XMM telescope (most phallic design ever?):



"You'll be interested to see these massive space cocks known by astronomers as Herbig Haro objects... this one's even animated!" according to the wiki page, herbig haro objects "are formed when gas ejected by young stars collides with clouds of gas and dust nearby at speeds of several hundred kilometres per second." couldnt have said it better myself!



"no list is complete without Smolčić et al. 2004." indeed. this isnt an actual telescopic image of an object in the universe, but it certainly fits in with today's phallic friday theme! the graph shows the "colors" of thousands of stars. a color is the difference between the light output in one imaging filter compared to another.



we've had an entry from an astrochemist, which i'm going to allow. he explains "Seemingly, these two large molecules experience strong interactions between each other. In solution, they like to pair up and... self organise. To quote the paper, one of these molecules requires "the presence of suitable partners.""



"There is also the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph, or PNS. The logo looks phallic enough but they actually call it the P-N-S just to make sure..."



andy lawrence writes, "The only suitable reply I feel is John Peacock's redshift space correlation function, which you can find at this link. I think you will agree that it reminds one of something that goes nicely together with those cosmic phalli."


this is science people! and i'll point out that most of the contributions to this post have been made by professional astronomers, well beyond graduate school levels of academia. this post also brings a whole new connotation to the slogan of astropixie which has always been "i prefer the hard truth, not a comforting fallacy."