“Erik, Dear, Tourists Are Making A Buzz Of Your Giant Cat Sunbathing On The Roof Of Your Penthouse,

boston gothic

- there is no grid system in boston. every street is a circle. you miss your turn and try to double back, but the asphalt is giving way to cobblestone. you can hear muskets just ahead.

- boston common always closes at 9pm. it locks from the inside.

- you walk out of mike’s pastry in the north end and the streets are deserted. there’s a rumbling beneath your feet. it smells like molasses.

- every time you crane your head to peek down the dark subway tunnel for the train, you can see two bright pinpricks of light in the distance. they’ve been there for 30 years, watching. you look away and try not to breathe.

- they’re always trying to fill the pot holes and the cracks in the sidewalks. it’s from the ice, they say. come morning, the holes always return. bigger. deeper.

- the next train will arrive in 5 minutes. days have passed; winter is setting in. the next train will arrive in 5 minutes.

- you arrive at logan airport and it’s empty. the intercom crackles, “this is the final boarding call.” no flight is specified. it’s time to go.

- the red line train pulls up, empty. you get on and it comes to a sudden halt in the tunnel. the lights go off. you hear the muffled sounds of ‘sweet caroline’ in the distance. it’s getting closer.

- the citgo sign looms above the brownstones. no matter how far you walk, it is always there. 

- you hear rustling. it’s just the turkeys, you say. you hear screams echo in harvard square. it’s just the turkeys.

“Many dwarf-men do not wish to marry, as they are too busy with their crafts.”

oh same

The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?

One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that! 

In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.

Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:

Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe? 

To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.

Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.

When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions. 

Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.

According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.

Earth is still special, but according to Suzaku, there might be other special places too. Suzaku recently completed its highly successful mission.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

The Daily Grump | December 24, 2012

cause of death: james mcavoy’s gray streak

I spend lots of time at Dank Millet.  I only wish I got off at Queer Parrots.

Anagram map of the MBTA

And here they are! The first hi resolution images released by NASA from yesterday’s flawless flyby of Pluto.

The close-up is a view of a region on Pluto at the bottom of ‘the heart’, the feature seen on the pre-approach image posted on July 14, yesterday, at 7:23 am. It reveals a smooth area in the upper left, a hummocky region in the lower right, and in between mountains that are 11,000 feet high! The only material on Pluto that is strong enough to build mountains is water ice. The other volatiles, nitrogen and methane, which are escaping Pluto as vapor, are apparently no more than a thin veneer. This image has a resolution of ~ 1 mile/pixel.

The other image is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, about ½ the size of Pluto, seen at an image scale of ~ 3 miles/pixel. It surprises in several ways: a long chasm reminiscent of Saturn’s moon Tethys, a variable surface appearance, and very few craters that indicate a relatively youthful surface.

How mind-blowing it is that we are today discussing processes operating at 32x farther from the Sun than is the Earth, and over 3x farther away than Saturn. And yesterday, it was just a dream.

Think about that! CICLOPS.org: The Icy Mountains of Pluto CICLOPS.org: Charon’s Surprising Youthful and Varied Terrain

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