Slashdot Mirror
Spacecraft Measurements Indicate Shifting Interstellar Wind
Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity, but larger context in which the Earth moves has some trends to deal with as well, according to new research published in Science and summarized by Science Now: "As Earth and the other planets orbit the sun, the solar system itself travels through space. Its slow journey is taking it though a wispy expanse of gas called the Local Interstellar Cloud. Now, astronomers have discovered signs of potential turbulence in the cloud, indicated by a shift in direction of helium atoms that flow into the solar system. If the shift is real and continues for hundreds to thousands of years—a dicey extrapolation—it could be a harbinger of more dramatic changes in our solar system, notes study co-author David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. ... To detect the wind shift, researchers drew on measurements by 11 spacecraft and satellites that have recorded directly or indirectly the flow of helium atoms into the solar system. Many kinds of atoms infiltrate the heliosphere, but helium is a particularly good tracer for all of them because it is abundant and typically survives in its uncharged, atomic state all the way to Earth’s orbit, [study co-author Priscilla] Frisch says."
it's coming for us. we're all dead! of course, we will be by the time it gets here.
Are they sure it wasn't just God farting?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
See how bad global warming is getting? We are now even screwing with the weather in space!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's actually a marker laid down by the Vogon construction fleet for the up coming Hyper Space Express Route.
It's coming from uranus.
What could possibly go wrong now?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Note that the quoted article says absolutely nothing about "weather on Earth". It's talking about "dramatic changes in our solar system", i.e. a distortion in the shape of the termination shock, which lies 75 to 90 AU away from the sun. That is an effective boundary between the heliosphere and the ISM, where the solar wind and the interstellar wind are equally dominant.
Neptune orbits at 30 AU, but the "solar system" is understood to extend at least to the Oort cloud, 50000 AU distant. Earth orbits at 1 AU which is well inside the heliosphere, where the solar wind is much more important. That's why these spacecraft have to look at neutral helium atoms, which are the only interstellar wind components that can actually make it down here without being deflected by solar magnetic fields. Outside the solar system they have a rough density of about ten helium atoms per mL.
This has much less influence on the Earth's climate than the "sunspot activity" referred to by politicians, but you can expect to hear a lot of crap soon, e.g. "Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity, but larger context in which the Earth moves has some trends to deal with as well".
Please dont get the National Spies Association in this, they do very important work! (/me try to cover reak huge smile)
Tomorrow is another day...
Given we are talking about helium, may I suggest it is a galactic clown? Or maybe his royal Noodle highness with many respactable appendages!
Tomorrow is another day...
Nah, it's a "Big Bagel
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Any scientist who claims he can "absolutely rule out" anything is not a scientist at all. Science is about proving the hypothesis, not disproving unknown hypotheses. Or are you so arrogant that you think you know everything?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Helium, hah! According to Asimov, it's the flows of carbon into the star that can cause it to go nova.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
According to documents provided by Beatrice Snowden, former NSA Social Activities and Black Ops Administrator, NSA Director General Keith-Tricky-Dick Cheney personally authorized a highly trained cadre of HVAC technicians to construct an unholy abomination known as the Passing Solar Wind-inator (PSW). Completed in January of this year, the PSW secretly ties into the HVAC systems of ALL American households with a mean household occupant age of 70 years old or greater. In a clear breach of U.S. Constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, the PSW siphons off all human, canine, and feline bodily emanations from the affected homes, concentrates them, and then funnels the emanations into a giant, multi-thousand dollar underground collection facility buried somewhere in the deserts of Utah.
The exact methodology is still unclear, however, the flatulance concentrate is then force fed to baby artic seal pups transforming their mitochondrial DNA into super powerful rare earth magnets. Simultaneously and inexplicably the baby seal pups also gain the ability to psychicly control ambient magnetic fields. Naturally, full baby seal cranial evacuation is the final step in the transformation process. The end product is a biomechanical monstrosity, the PSW.
Multiple power point presentation provided by Snowden show General Cheney sitting astride his massive heap of squirming and super magnetically charged seal pups. Heaving to and fro, the pups writhe in ecstasy as the general directs their collective psycho-magnetic powers, altering the path of helium atoms traversing our solar system.
The end result, of course, is that the NSA can now listen in on every canasta game in the world! Russian President Putin has yet to comment on this matter.
Dominar Rygel XVI
"Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity,"....It sort of starts to sound like Medivalist's cant, doesn't it?
In the same sense that, for them, God suffused everything ("Glory be to God, the cow calved today and I didn't stub my toe!"), AGW is referenced ever-more frequently entirely out of context ("Humans are changing the climate, and my coffee was too hot this morning, I think I'll read the paper!").
Funny, that.
-Styopa
No problem. We'll just change tack.
Have gnu, will travel.
Since this is slashdot not a scientific article, I'm allowed some literary license. But you're right. I should have said "I don't believe he's a good scientist".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sigh.
don't get your panties in a knot just because I made a joke with your religion in it.
Turbulence As A Service ?
I have been saying this on /. for 10 years atleast! Now finally someone gets it, yes there are 3 orbits to the earth, the daily, and the yearly and the ??? which comes from the orbit we are in from the solar system spinning inside the galaxy, which "IT" could affect the gravity/orbit of the other 2.
If you take a coin and put it on a table top to spin it and use your finger to spin it, you will see that eventually gravity will affect the orbit as it slows down, but if it did not slow down it would still be affected in terms of the direction the coin would be spinning in. I have seen this and consider this to be more the reason why we haveglobal events then say global warming being the cause. The climate changes and locations on the planet are getting strange weather but only strange to that location, but say you shifted the worlds axis by 1.5 degrees, then you would see a change everywhere, and the weather would be normal for that location based on the new degrees, although my example could be off degree wise, you get the picture.
I am no scientist yet can figure this out, so how much more should the real scientist know , or maybe they knew all along but didnt want the world to freak over this??
We are so frelled . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
you'd think that if the solar system was heating up due to the sun or whatever, the moon might be warming too. we can measure its temp almost as well as we can the earth's, and it is as good a control for what would happen to the temp of a body in this locality without an atmosphere that we have. but the denialists are always more interested in the temperature on Pluto, whose very existence we have only known for less than one of its years.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Right, just like Newton proved F=MA. Until it was disproved by the unknown hypothesis of relativity.
You can't ever prove a hypothesis in the physical sciences. Any hypothesis, however well developed and conforming to the data and however clear the mechanism, can always be countered with "No it's not, it might be something else entirely you don't know about." For example, the unbreakable critique of evolution, geological theory, etc. that God made the earth 6000 years ago, exactly as it would appear if it were billions of years old. This is a critical brick in the edifice of AGW denialism. "It might be something else you don't know about that looks just exactly like the AGW effect you theorize, while something else you don't know about prevents the AGW effect you theorize from occurring". See also "It's not smoking that causes cancer, it might be something else you don't know about". That's why Occam shaves.
Whereas disproving a negative, even an unknown negative, is trivially easy. The fact that I can see a yellow house disproves numerous unknown hypotheses, such as that there are no houses, there are no yellow houses, there are no yellow houses visible in my vicinity, and so on quite literally ad infinitum.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
This leaves open the hypothesis that he is an evil scientist. Certainly denialists believe the world is full of them.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Absolutely. The helium supply on earth is fixed, it's hard to make any without kicking up a big mess, and we're going to run out, just when we need it for air transport because we won't have hydrocarbon fuel any more.
http://www.livescience.com/38990-looming-helium-shortage.html
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I know you were trying to be funny (ha ha), but, now all the climate change deniers will latch onto this as "proof" that man has no part to play in climate change. Remember, there are two types of climate change deniers; A: those who have a profit motive, i.e. oil companies, coal producers, etc., etc. and B: those who are not well educated enough to understand the science behind it and buy into the propaganda of group "A". Why do you think the Republicans are cutting funding for education across the land as fast as they can?
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!