Ashes can dry up the sky

This is the conclusion of Israeli scientists studying storm formation in the Amazon basin. While some particulates (ashes, aerosols) do promote rain formation, a well known fact for several decades now, their excess actually does the opposite: preventing rain and restricting the formation of clouds.

This may affect the ongoing process of global warming in several ways: restricting rain in wildfire and highly polluted areas and reducing the overall cloud cover of Earth and hence its albedo, allowing for more solar radiation to reach the surface.

More details at Science Daily.

Ref. O. Almaratz et al., Lightning response to smoke from Amazonian fires. Geophysical Research Letters, 2010. Pay per view.

Official report on radioactivity and dioxin pollution in Iraq

The Iraqi government has issued a much worrying report on the radioactive and dioxin pollution generated by the two wars the country has suffered in the last decades. The use of low grade nuclear weapons (depleted uranium bombs) and the destruction of oil facilities are apparently the main causes of this horrifying landscape but the report fails to mention the dropping of a 5 kiloton nuke near Basra, as reported by Desert Storm veteran Jim Brown.

The generalized radioactive pollution is causing a major increase of birth defects. Another environmental problem of Iraq today is the drought and the low quality of the water that Turkey and Syria, which use the Euphrates for their own purposes, allow to flow.

Full story at The Guardian.

Ice deposits on Moon's poles

The finding by NASA's miniSAR aboard Indian probe Chadrayaan-1 has detected ice deposits at the Moon's poles, making the presence of water in the Moon even more official (see previous posts on this matter: here and here).

More at Science Daily.

The real obstacles for more or less permanent human presence on the Moon are then others, notably the lack of a natural shield against solar radiation (and cosmic radiation in general).

Moon has water

And apparently lots of it.

These are the results of a NASA probe (Centaur) that intently impacted on a Lunar crater in order to raise a plume of debris that could be analyzed by telescopes and the Lunar satellite LCROSS. The plume was smaller than expected but after due research in the last weeks it has been determined beyond doubt that a good deal of it was water vapor.

In fact, the water detected was more than 100 Kg. (100 liters at normal Earth pressures and temperatures, I guess). Future research will determine if this finding is confirmed and if there is water also in other spots.

If so, the path for space colonization would be a step closer to reality. However we must remember that the conditions in space and other planetary objects out there are highly hostile: extreme cold, radiation and lack of naturally breathable atmospheres make the whole affair still extremely difficult, much more than colonizing frozen Anctartica for example.

Source: BBC.
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Moon has water!

Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan has found that the Lunar dust has a small apportion of water moisture, about 0.1%. Apollo project samples of Lunar dust were known to have that tiny amount of water but it was uncertain until now whether the moisture had formed in the journey to Earth or was genuine.

This finding may make the possibility of estabilishing a scientific Lunar base more feasible, as you could in principle extract the water from the soil and use it as such water, or electrolyse it into oxygen, even more necessary for human life, or even use the water molecular components, oxygen and hydrogen as portable fuel for rockets or whatever.

It is also possible that some craters, specially towards the poles, could hold significative amounts of water ice, as suggested by the strong hydrogen signal detected by NASA's Lunar Prospector towards the poles.

Source: BBC. See also this article at SD, more detailed in some aspects.
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Official: Black Hole is "the sun of the Sun"

Nothing really new for those with some interest for astronomy but the 16-years research at Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (Germany) have confirmed that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. After long years of observations, the astronomers involved have concluded that there is no other possible explanation for the behaviour of the stars near Sagittarius A*. They found that there is an inner group of very fast rotating stars with randomly inclined orbits and an outer one of stars orbiting the black hole in an ecliptic-like plane.

The most important evidence has come, for what I could infer, from the orbit of S2, a star that moves so quickly that has completed one whole orbit around the GC black hole in those 16 years of watch. In their own words:

Observations by our group and by the UCLA group of the velocities and accelerations of stars in the Galactic Center over the course of the last decade have already provided strong evidence that SgrA* is in fact a black hole of about 2.6 million solar masses. However, these measurements could not rule out some alternatives to the black hole model. Two such alternatives are a ball of massive, degenerate fermions, like neutrinos, or a cluster of dark astrophysical objects, such as stellar mass black holes or neutron stars. These two alternative explanations can now be excluded by analyzing the orbit of S2:

In spring 2002 S2 was passing with the extraordinary velocity of more than 5000 km/s at a mere 17 light hours distance -- about three times the size of our solar system -- through the perinigricon, the point of closest approach to the black hole. By combining all measurements of the position of S2 made between spring 1992 and summer 2002, we have obtained enough data in order to determine a unique keplerian orbit for this star, presented in Figure 1. It is highly elliptical (eccentricity 0.87), has a semimajor axis of 5.5 light days, a period of 15.2 years and an inclination of 46 degrees with respect to the plane of the sky. From Kepler's 3rd law we can determine the enclosed mass in a straightforward manner to be 3.7±1.5 million solar masses. Therefore at least 2.2 million solar masses have to be enclosed in a region with a radius of 17 light hours. It is not possible to explain this result with a neutrino ball model because the required neutrino masses would be too large, or with a dense cluster of dark astrophysical objects because such a cluster would have the extremely short lifetime of at most a few hundred thousand years. Compared to the lifetime of our Galaxy of the order of 10 billion years this configuration is highly improbable. The only remaining alternative to the black hole model is a ball of bosons, which would be hard to distinguish from a black hole because of its small size. However, eventually, after some time such a ball would eventually collapse to a black hole after having accreted enough matter from its surroundings. Hence, the observed keplerian orbit of S2 around SgrA* provides compelling evidence for the existence of a massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy.

The inner cluster of fast rotating stars, artistic reconstruction

In the media:
- Science Daily
- BBC



Water and CO2 in extrasolar planet:

This also called my attention and has been mediatically relevant: an extrasolar "Jupiter" shows clear signs of having CO2 and water, substances that we immediately associate with life (though this extreme is, of course, unconfirmed yet).

(At BBC, at SD)

Snow falling on Mars

That is what the NASA robot Phoenix has detected: large water-ice crystals falling from Martian clouds. It is not clear if these reached the ground or vaporized while falling.

The snow was detected with the LIDAR instrument (top) falling from Martian clouds (bottom)

Through its mission Phoenix has detected permafrost in the ground, growing humidity as the Martian summer advanced and the increased frost as it was left behind. It is expected that the module will not survive the Martian winter as temperatures will drop brutally to at least -120ºC and sunlight will not be enough to feed its batteries anyhow.

Source: BBC.

Thermodynamics challenged

Well, only the Third Law, not the whole theory - not yet.

The third law states that, as materials approach to absolute zero temperature, their enthropy also approaches zero.

But which is the maybe most fascinating, yet common, material of all: water, has been shown to break this rule. It is not the only one: other non-crystaline materials also breach the same "law". And now artificially generated meta-materials that mimic the behaviour of water ice have been shown to do exactly the same. The third law of thermodynamics seems therefore to be more like a guideline, not any absolute law.

Fully official: there is water at Mars

NASA probe Phoenix has confirmed its presence in Martian soil via chemical detection. It was already almost sure but now it's certfied.

I can only imagine that this is more important than it may look on first sight. If there's water out there (there's some chance of ice water at Moon too and there are other asteroids and satellites that probably have it) the issue of supplying for water and oxygen may be solved and that can push ahead increased Solar System exploration and maybe even some sort of limited colonization (Antarctica-like).

There are still many issues anyhow like the incredibly long duration of travel that would really require submarine-like crews, the huge threat of solar radiation and what the heck can be Mars and other Solar System bodies of use for (other than mere scientific research). And most importantly: how to transport enough supplies across the huge distances of open space to provide for even the tiniest of crews. But guess this discovery can only push ahead the people who is crazy about going to Mars and stuff like that.

I have never been enthusiastic about outer space colnization (there's nothing like Earth out there, really) but guess our species has got too used to be always looking ahead (as remedy against looking inside and fixing our real problems down here) that it's almost unavoidable that the uncertain path of space colonization will be explored sooner than later.

Maybe even the next economic bubble is about Martian real state. Not tomorrow in any case, of course.

More in the sort-run, it looks like the next big scientifical question must be: is there life in Mars. Microorganisms of course.

Moon had water!

Yes, THE Moon, our Moon, not any other moon (natural satellite) over there. So far the mainstream belief was that it was completely dehydrated when the parent object, a planet the size of Mars hit the Earth in a violent collision at the beginning of the their respective histories.

But now a new study claims that volcanic eruptions threw water out some some three billion years ago. It seems that some of the rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo program expeditions have been found to have minimal remains of water (46 parts per million).

Most of this archaic water must have vanished in outer space, as the Moon's gravity is too weak to retain it but there is now speculation that some of it may have remained frozen at polar craters.

More at BBC.

Lots of water in the Solar System

The latest news is that Saturn's Moon Titan also seems to have an liquid ocean under the crust of ice (ref1, ref2). But it's not the first such body to be discovered: Jupiter's satellites Callisto, Ganymede and Europa also have subsurface oceans. Additionally dwarf planet Ceres also has a large mantle of ice-water that may be as much as 60% of its total volume and that is more freshwater than can be found on Earth.

We are still trying to find out if there is water on (or rather in) Mars but in any case it seems that water is much more common than we first thought in our little stellar system. This offers lots of posibilities: first of all the potential of naturally existing life, even if of microbial type maybe, in some of these bodies - but also, long term thinking, it may be of help for space exploration, as water can be a source not only of the much needed liquid that makes up 70% of our bodies but also of oxygen to breath.

Gaza Holocaust: forced to drink polluted water.

They have no choice: Israeli blockade has cut the provisions of chlorine to disinfect the water. Those who can't afford to buy bottled water have to drink that poison or die of dehydratation.

An affected mother described the effects:

Our kidneys and stomachs hurt, but I don't have means to buy mineral water. We are compelled to drink this water that is totally undrinkable.

Original article at Rebelión (in Spanish).

In relation with this crime and similar ones in the occupied Golan Heights, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign is promoting an international boycott to Eden Springs (an Israeli bottled water multinational, that sells in many European countries).