My Happy Place

This photo pretty much sums up why I love all things space.

Credit: NASA

Called "Earthrise", this photo was taken by astronaut William Anders during the 8th Apollo mission, the first manned mission to the moon in 1968.

From there, our Earth looks like a small marble hanging in emptiness, its top illuminated by the life-giving sun and the bottom submerged in total darkness. From the edge of the solar system, earth is nothing but a "pale blue dot" against the vastness of space.

When I look at this photo, all I can think about is how minuscule humankind is - 6,000 years of civilisation is a mere blink of the eye in space terms; how fragile our home is - shielded by a thin blue atmosphere that supplies the air we breathe every day; and yet how lucky we are that life happened on this planet! (I do believe we're not the only ones but all the coincidences that take for a planet to be habitable?!?!)

It's a truly humbling reminder of how small and special we are. Suddenly, human problems seem minute and silly.

When life gets me down, I turn to the sky for peace and comfort. The universe puts things in perspective for me. It's sheer scale humbles me and keeps my silly problems away. It makes me ponder about our existence and reminds me to appreciate and cherish. It gives me a sense of calmness and helps me chase away the clouds.

I guess that's why ;)

Andromeda - The Girl Next Door (She’s Loaded… with Stars)

On January 5, 2015, NASA wowed the world with ‘the largest picture ever taken’ in human history - a panoramic picture of the Andromeda galaxy, measuring 1.5 billion pixels (a high quality Canon SLR takes 20-megapixel [=20 million pixels] photos) and requiring 4.3 GB of disk place. The giant mosaic - 411 images put together - was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope from low Earth orbit. 

A stunning image of a corner of Andromeda captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA

The image captures one third of the Andromeda Galaxy, showing her central galactic bulge on the left and the galaxy’s outskirts on the right - and every star, sparkle and stardust in between. You would be amazed to know that this extremely high-res photo contains 100 million stars from our neighbor galaxy… you’ve got to see it to believe it! Watch the video as the camera zooms in, then pans from the right to the left as the the stars get denser and denser, eventually replacing specs of light in the dark blue cosmic sky with a carpet of golden jewels.

Most call her Andromeda, also known as M31 by her nerdy fans - a beautiful daughter of a North African king in Greek mythology, it is the closest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way Galaxy, a “mere” 2.5 million light-years away. This is where most people become misled - it is the closest SPIRAL galaxy only - our closest galaxy is actually the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, which is obviously not spiral and probably majorly dwarf.

This girl next door is quite the giant, she measures 220,000 lightyears in diameter. Along with the Milk Way, they are the largest galaxies in the Local Group. What is the Local Group? It’s just the way we group galaxies in terms of scale. Simply put, Earth is within the Solar System, which is within the Solar Interstellar Neighborhood, which is within the Milky Way Galaxy, which is within the Local Galactic Group. Or see the illustration below. 

(What if inhabitants of Andromeda one day find us and come visit us on Earth. Will they then be considered “local” or “alien”….? Hmmm. )

brighthub.com

Andromeda (M31) vs Milk Way

# of stars: Andromeda - one trillion; Milky Way - 400 billion

Amount of dark matter - data unstable, but earlier findings suggest Milky Way has more

Solar masses - Milk Way wins (8.5×10¹¹)

Andromeda (M31). Credit: NASA

As a matter of fact, Andromeda (M31) is quite the queen bee. She was formed by violently colliding into another galaxy 8 billion years ago (“oops!”), which produced most of her stars. When her long-time neighbour Triangulum Galaxy (M33) bypassed her “zone” 3 billion years ago (“watch it!”), Andromeda flipped (metaphorically) and disturbed M33’s outer disk, causing another wave of star formation. One after the other she "satellised", M32 and M110 followed suite, not to mention all the other smaller galaxies she absorbed over the lightyears. But to be fair, M33, M32 and M110 did not go down without putting up a fight - they distorted Andromeda’s spiral pattern during the interactions (“mwahaha”), which explains why her cross-section looks like an S-shape as opposed to a flat disk.

The bullying seems to have stopped. She has now established herself as one of the most luminous and iconic deep sky objects as viewed by the naked eye. 

Current view of the night sky with Andromeda showing off her luminosity next to the Milky Way belt. Our neighbor is 2.5 million light years away and expected to crash into us in 4 billion years. Credit: Blip TV

As much as we strive to love our neighbor as ourself, sometimes clashes are unavoidable, literally. Milky Way and Andromeda are predicted to collide, eventually merging into one huge elliptical galaxy ("Milk-omeda") in about 4 billion years (just about the same time it took to make Earth). Ok, so humankind has 4 billion more years to live, if we don’t get hit by an asteroid (2014 EC), or get fried from ozone-depletion, or kill each other off in a nuclear war, or get wiped out by a giant volcanic eruption (Yellowstone), global pandemic (Ebola, The Flu), overpopulation, etc. It’s a miracle we are still alive.

So brightly Andromeda shines in the night sky. Next time you look up on a clear night, spot the fuzzy bright disk - that’s the girl next door in all her swirly splendor.

Do you see her? Right there on top right! This is a telephoto of the southern Alps in Tyrol, Austria. Apart from Andromeda, on the top left you can see the Double Star Cluster. What an amazing photo!!! Credit: TWAN twanight.org?id=3003880

Sources:

NASA

spacetelescope.org

wikipedia.org

LIVE: First Lunar Eclipse of 2014

***LIVE***

Watching live lunar eclipse webcasts as viewed from Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles (NASA) and Prescott Observatory, Arizona (Slooh). #bloodmoon #lunareclipse #moonday

NASA: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc (much better images)

Slooh: http://live.slooh.com/ (commentary intercepted with annoying membership promotion)

T-minus 1 hr 13 min

T-minus 52 min

T-minus 37 min

T-minus 25 min

Getting redder and redder... anytime now.


T-minus 0 min - the blood moon has arrived

24 min into totality

Truly magnificent.

***END OF LIVE REPORT***

Upside Down on the (Magnetic) Pole

Let's come back from Mars and talk about something closer to home - Earth's magnetic field.

We all know that the reason compasses work is because of Earth's magnetic field - so if you have a compass in hand facing North, the needle points North. Obviously. But did you know that our North and South poles can "flip" - North becomes South, South becomes North - and that it is a natural geological occurrence that happens every 200,000 - 300,000 years?

Scary huh. Even scarier is that we are long overdue for another flip.

Our magnetic North pole is not constant - it has been shifting northward by ~600 miles (1,100 km) since the early 19th century. 

What causes magnetic fields?

Before you google "doomsday", let's take a refresher course on Magnetic Field 101. At the center of our planet is a solid iron core, wrapped around by a liquid outer core, then mantle and crust. The motion of the liquid outer core, which is essentially a fluid blanket of hot liquid metal, creates electric currents, which in turn creates the magnetic field.

Earth's insides. You've seen this before in high school. The motion of the liquid outer core is what generates our magnetic field.

How do we know that polar reversals have happened before? 

We know because they leave evidence in rocks, fossil records and plate tectonics. Deep inside the ocean floor lies ridges (e.g. Mid-Atlantic Ridge) where lava seeps up from the core. As lava cools and solidifies, it preserves the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at the time it is formed.

Polar reversals have happened at least a hundred times over the last 3 billion years (Earth is 4.5 billion years old). The last "flip" was during the Stone Age some 780,000 years ago, called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. According to fossil records, it has happened more "frequently" in the last 20 million years, with an interval of 200,000 - 300,000 years as mentioned before. As frequent as it is, it has been twice that long since the last reversal. OOOOPS.

So... are we flipping soon?

Well, yes and no. (Very anti-climatic I know. Read on...)

"Yes" in the sense that there is evidence to show that we are in the early stage of an upcoming reversal. By "upcoming", I'm really talking about a few hundred or thousand years later, that's how long it takes for the whole transition to take place. What happens is, the magnetic field progressively gets weaker and weaker and then reappears with reversed polarity.

Signs that tell us we are at the beginning of a flip:

• The intensity of our field has been depleting by an alarming rate of 5% over the last century
• Reverse-alignment has been detected in the iron current beneath Brazil and South Atlantic
• Our magnetic North pole has been shifting rapidly in the last decade, drifting out of Canada into the Arctic Ocean towards Russia by about 10 miles (16km) per year

Our magnetic poles get all confused and go haywire during a reversal, before reappearing with reversed polarity.

With that said, just because there are telltale signs of a looming reversal doesn't mean that it is guaranteed to happen. We could simply be going into a minor shift instead of a complete polar swap. Who knows. Like life, Earth is too dynamic and complex to predict!

Scientists and geophysicists are looking to find out more though. On November 22 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent 3 satellites on the Swarm Mission to measure Earth's magnetic signals. The satellites are now in their respective orbits and ready to deliver what is being called "the best survey of the Earth's magnetic field to date."

Is it doomsday?

As inhabitants of this life-friendly planet, we live in a magnetic bubble that protects us from harmful solar winds and cosmic rays, with the North and South poles deflecting these charged particles to outer space and other planets like Mars (that's why Mars, which does not have a major magnetic field, is a lifeless barren rock, and Earth is not. The universe is a cruel, cruel place.) During a polar reversal, the magnetic field will weaken, but there is no indication that it will disappear completely in the process. As a result, solar radiation will increase, but Earth's thick atmosphere will be sufficient to protect us against solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) from the sun.

Solar winds carry atmosphere-stripping particles that destroy life. Our magnetic sphere shields us from the radiation. 

Solar flare - a violent ejection of magnetic energy when the sun sneezes.

With a weakened magnetic field, satellites in Earth's orbit will be at a higher risk of being damaged, potentially causing GPS malfunction, communication blackouts and power outages. Migratory wildlife as birds, salmon, whales, turtles and bees could be affected as they rely on geomagnetism for navigation. There is, however, no evidence of species extinction due to polar reversal.

Unless you plan to freeze your body and be brought back to life in a few thousand years, you have nothing to worry about. But Santa, on the other hand, might be in big trouble.

Mayhem on the pole. "Oh crap, which way is North?!"

Images: NASA, phys.org, dailymail.co.uk
References: NASA, livescience.com, European Space Agency, Red Orbit, Wikipedia, rense.com, Activist Post

Golden Ticket to Space - to Buy or Not to Buy?

3 years ago today, I was *this close* to getting a loan for a roundtrip ticket to space with Virgin Galactic. I'm dead serious.

That was a time when collective buying websites exploded. Remember back then, upon firing up our PCs in the morning, first thing to check was Facebook (still is), then Groupon (still big apparently) and the likes for too-good-to-be-true deals, or yoga sessions/facials you never ended up going? It was that kind of morning, when I came across THE deal of my life...

(Screen cap of deal, page still live surprisingly but garbled)

99% off the golden ticket to space!! USD1900 to get the thrill of zero gravity!! Includes 3 days of pre-flight training!! Holy cow MUST GET THIS.

Obviously I jumped at the opportunity - I called my bf at the time, called my family, called the bank to ask about loans and even called the Virgin Galactic space agent in Hong Kong, Miramar Travel, to verify the development of the program. They put me on the phone with one of their "fully trained Accredited Space Agents" who sounded surprised to receive an enquiry, like ever. The Space Agent even chuckled when he told me the regular ticket price was US$250,000 a pop. (Why, you don't think I can afford it?!) They're totally legit but just not very professional, I thought. But I'll let it slide. (Is that how you handle your millionaire clients?) Anyway, that was how I knew I was getting a reallllyyyy good deal.

The clock was ticking and I needed to act fast! After 3 hours of probing, googling, contemplating and discussing with all parties, I confidently and reassuringly clicked "BUY NOW".

I got my credit card ready... waited for the page to load... my heart rate was going off the charts... I envisioned the soft blue atmosphere melting into the black tranquility of space...

Giant pink letters popped up. "Happy April Fool's Day! From all of us at Twangoo.com :)"

Ffff.....  >.<

I checked the date on my computer - April 1, 2011. Happy April Fool's Day people.


Credit: Twangoo.com

Darwin Deez x Napoleon Dynamite

Recently digging Darwin Deez, a cosmically expressive indie band from NYC. Randomly stumbled upon their song Constellations in The Happy Hipster playlist on Spotify. This one's really addictive!

"Constellations"

Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are
There's a million little lights when the sky turns black tonight
Are there patterns in our skies, are patterns only in our eyes?

Or is a constellation, just a constellation?
Is a constellation, just a consolation?

Wrinkle, wrinkle little scar, count the freckles on my arm
If freckles don't mean anything, does anything mean anything?

Or is a constellation, just a constellation?
Is a constellation, just a consolation?

We are twinkling stars resurrected
Just like twinkling stars we seem connected but I know that

A constellation is just a constellation
Constellation is just a consolation

The science teacher I never had

Another one with great lyrics (but not as catchy):

"Red Shift"*

Spiral galaxies would turn in your eyes
When I came by with a small surprise
You loved all of my little quarks, so what went wrong?
Don’t superstring me along, come on

Was there a big bang that I just missed?
Did some explosion cause a redshift?
‘Cause you’re moving away from me but what did I do?
The universe is mostly empty space without you

Wave or particle, I can’t be both
So just say which way you like me most
I can be an experiment in your bedroom lab
To figure how the light we had went bad

[chorus]

I’ll build a collider and smash us to bits
To see what’s inside us, to see if we stick
‘Cause I will try anything this side of the Milky Way
To figure out why in the world you’re drifting away

[chorus x2]

*Red shift is a term to describe wavelengths from light or electromagnet radiation being stretched (lower frequency) hence shifting to the red end of the spectrum. Cosmological redshift is evidence of an expanding universe.

Image:YouTube, ClashMusic.com

Lyrics: azlyrics.com

Reference: Wikipedia, European Space Agency

We will be descending onto Mars shortly, current temperature -55 degrees Celcius

Mars. The dusty, cratered, red planet.

Mars is like the unassuming next door neighbor who's always been around, never says much and has a somewhat dark personality. It somehow intrigues you because he is, well, kinda sexy that way. He is so close yet so far, so intimidating yet so tantalizing. Every time you strike a conversation, he amazes you with the little information he gives out. So you probe and you probe, and each time the discovery is jaw-droppingly unreal.

Mars is the 4th planet from the Sun, after Mercury, Venus and Earth. Iron oxide on its surface gives it a reddish glow.

That is how Mars tickles my fancy and made me a stalker - every once in a while something life-changing is discovered and gets you hooked on finding out more. Like back in 1971 (remember?) when NASA's unmanned Mariner 9 orbiter, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, sent back clear images of dry riverbeds during its exploration program. What is the significance of that? It proves that there was once water, a source of life, on the desert-like planet!

Over the last 40 years, several rovers and orbiters have been sent up there on more aggressive missions, collecting ample evidence of ancient streams, rivers and lakes that once glided on Martian surface.

Rovers that have been sent to Mars (in addition to numerous orbiters):
1971 - Mars 2 (USSR) - failed landing
1971 - Mars 3 (USSR) - failed landing
1997 - Soujourner (US) - in operation for 3 months
2003 - Beagle 2 (UK) - failed landing
2003 - Spirit (US)- in operation for 6 years
2003 - Opportunity (US) - still in operation
2011 - Curiosity (US) - going strong
2018 - ExoMars (Europe and Russia) - planned

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover driving past "Dingo Gap" inside Gale Crater. Taken on Feb 11 2014.

So, did bacteria life, or more realistically, brain-headed Martians with bulging eyes, roam our neighbor planet some 3.6 billion years ago? Or are they still in existence and planning an attack on New York? That is still in much debate, but what's for sure is that Mars used to be way wetter and warmer 3.6 billions years ago than it is now, making it more hospitable for life back then. Up till now, scientists have only been able to confirm that human of the male species originated from Mars.

Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars on July 4, 1007, subsequently snapped a photo of the Soujourner rover, posing on what looks to be a floodplain with rocks of various types - evidence of a wetter and warmer past.

Anyway, forget the past, what's the next giant leap? Dun dun dun... human settlement on Mars... by 2024!

In April 2013 a Dutch non-profit called Mars One started accepting applicants to be the first inhabitants of the dusty planet. For the next 10 years, you will get trained up as an astronaut, sort out personal issues with loved ones, learn to deal with loneliness and potential voices in your head, then board a 7-month rocket ride to outer space and make a triumphant landing on Martian soil, if all goes according to plan. There will be pre-sent cargo up there to help you get started - sort of like checking into a Sochi hotel - you'll have a roof over your head but that's about it. So while you're starting a colony and all that, you'll work on construction, maintenance and research to prep the place for the next batch of astronauts. They come in 4s every 2 years. You'll also grow your own food in the greenhouse, exercise regularly to slow down the rate of rapid osteoporosis caused by reduced gravity (38% less than Earth), and even video chat, whatsapp and watch the Superbowl with a mere 3-minute delay (no complaints - Mars to Earth distance is 56 million km after all.)

However there is a catch - it's a one-way ticket, there's no going back. That didn't stop 200,000+ people from signing up though. I did.

Mars settler in fully-enclosed Mars suits photobombing a view of his living quarters, which he shares with the rest of the Martian population - that'll be 3 other astronauts. Year 2026.

I am personally skeptical about Mars One, it seems over-ambitious and makes everything sound too easy - it's not only about technology anymore, but involves starting a human colony from scratch in a hardly habitable environment and calling it home. Nonetheless, if we can take humanity to Mars within our lifetime, the next big question is - will this be our final frontier?

For more Martian fun, check out Expedia's spoof on April Fool's Day 2009 and the crater-spotting Google Mars.



Images: NASA, History.com, Mars One
References: Wikipedia, Time, Bloomberg, Mars One