James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Kelly Korreck is still thinking about the time her spacecraft flew into the sun, how one moment, the probe was rushing through a stormy current of fast-moving particles, and the next, it was plunging somewhere quieter, where the plasma rolled like ocean waves. No machine had ever crossed that mysterious boundary before. But Korreck and her team had dispatched a mission for that exact purpose, and their plan worked. For the first time in history, a spacecraft had entered the sun’s atmosphere.

“This is a totally cool place to go—well, I guess, hot place to go,” Korreck, a solar physicist at NASA, told me. “We’ve touched plasma and gas that actually belongs to the sun.”

The NASA probe, named Parker, made the historic dive in April of last year, but scientists waited until last month to announce the news, after they’d analyzed the data and made sure that the spacecraft had indeed crossed into the top layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona. NASA then declared that Parker had “touched the sun,” basking in a bit of poetic license. The spacecraft can’t reach down to the photosphere, the layer that radiates light, what’s commonly understood to be the “surface” of the sun. But even that isn’t a distinct, solid surface like the ground on Earth, hence the quotation marks. So touch, shmuch: Parker certainly has, to use a less scientific term, booped the sun.

.

The sun, in three different wavelengths (NASA / SDO; The Atlantic)

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Some content on this page was disabled on April 15, 2025 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Guardian Media Group. You can learn more about the DMCA here:

https://wordpress.com/support/copyright-and-the-dmca/

Click the link below the picture

.

Pluto is the gift that keeps on giving as more photos from the distant dwarf planet continue to roll in from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

The first hi-res color shot of the planet, a strange image of Pluto’s rippled, “snakeskin” surface, and a close-up of a couple of ice mountains were issued Thursday.

In the color image of the entire planet, Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds, NASA said. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode.

Speaking about the “snakeskin” region (below), “it’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles,” said William McKinnon from Washington University in St. Louis.

It captures a vast rippling landscape of strange, aligned linear ridges that “astonished” New Horizons team members, according to NASA.

“It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology,” McKinnon said in a statement. “This’ll really take time to figure out; maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight.”

In the other photo, a textured surface of the plain surrounds two isolated ice mountains.

.

A high-resolution color-enhanced image of Pluto NASA

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The largest meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in Australia had sickle-shaped claws the size of chef’s knives, a daunting feature that likely made up for its fairly delicate jaws and small teeth, a new study finds.

The dinosaur’s 10-inch-long claws likely helped it hunt, said study lead researcher Phil Bell, a lecturer of paleontology at the University of New England in Australia.

“They didn’t have skulls like T. rex, which could crush bones with their incredible bite,” Bell told Live Science. “Instead, they probably used their hands and massive claws — a bit like a raptor — to bring down their prey.”

The newfound claw-wielding dinosaur lived about 110 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous, and likely measured about 20 feet long. Miners discovered and excavated the partial skeleton in the 1990s in the opal fields near the town of Lightning Ridge, located in New South Wales in eastern Australia. The fossils, most of them a bluish hue, thanks to the opals, were donated to the Australian Opal Centre in 2005 and remained on display until Bell and his colleagues decided to study them.

.

An illustration of the “lightning claw” megaraptorid.Bell P.R., et al. Gondwana Research

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________