Typhoon Hagupit about to Smash into Philipines

The anticipated arrival in Eastern Samar province on Saturday of Typhoon Hagupit, Filipino for "smash" comes a year after Typhoon Haiyan left more than 7,300 dead as it swept inland along the same route.

Meteorologists tracking it over the Pacific, 435 miles off the country's eastern coast, say it has sustained winds of 127mph and gusts as high as 149mph.

Haiyan survivor Emily Sagales said many of her neighbours in central Tacloban city, which was ravaged by Haiyan, had packed their clothes and fled to a sports stadium and safer homes of relatives.

She said long queues had formed at food stores and petrol stations as residents stocked up on basic goods.

The 23-year-old, who saw her mother-in-law killed and her home washed away in Haiayan, gave birth to her first child in a crowded makeshift clinic following the disaster.

"The trauma has returned," she said.

"It's worse now because I didn't have a baby to worry about last year."

Haiyan destroyed around one million homes and displaced some four million people in the central Philippines, and hundreds of residents still living in tents in Tacloban have been prioritised in an ongoing evacuation.

Hotels in Tacloban, a city of more than 200,000 people still struggling to recover from last year's damage, were running out of rooms as wealthier families booked ahead for the weekend.

Roan Florendo, of the hilltop Leyte Park hotel, said: "The sun is still shining but people are obviously scared. Almost all of our rooms have been booked."

The military has been put on full alert and evacuation centres have been opened, while food packs, medicines and body bags have been transported to far-flung villages that could be cut off by heavy rains.

In capital Manila, President Benigno

Aquino III held an emergency meeting of disaster-response agencies and ordered steps to prevent panic-buying and hoarding of goods.

He checked on the readiness of Philippine air force aircraft, hospitals and police contingency plans, amid fears of a repeat of the looting that happened in Tacloban after Haiyan crippled the city's police force.

"I think we've been challenged worse by Yolanda," Mr Aquino said, referring to Haiyan's local name.

Astronomers thrilled by extreme storms on Uranus

These are infrared images of Uranus (1.6 and 2.2 microns) obtained on Aug. 6, 2014, with adaptive optics on the 10-meter Keck telescope. 

The white spot is an extremely large storm that was brighter than any feature ever recorded on the planet in the 2.2 micron band. 

The cloud rotating into view at the lower-right limb grew into the large storm that was seen by amateur astronomers at visible wavelengths. 

Credit: Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley) & Keck Observatory images.

The normally bland face of Uranus has become increasingly stormy, with enormous cloud systems so bright that for the first time ever, amateur astronomers are able to see details in the planet's hazy blue-green atmosphere.

Imke de Pater

"The weather on Uranus is incredibly active," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that first noticed the activity when observing the planet with adaptive optics on the W. M. Keck II Telescope in Hawaii.

"This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus's once every 42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator," noted co-investigator Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

"But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody's guess."

Heidi Hammel

In all, de Pater, Hammel and their team detected eight large storms on Uranus's northern hemisphere when observing the planet with the Keck Telescope on August 5 and 6.

One was the brightest storm ever seen on Uranus at 2.2 microns, a wavelength that senses clouds just below the tropopause, where the pressure ranges from about 300 to 500 mbar, or half the pressure at Earth's surface.

The storm accounted for 30 percent of all light reflected by the rest of the planet at this wavelength.

When amateur astronomers heard about the activity, they turned their telescopes on the planet and were amazed to see a bright blotch on the surface of a normally boring blue dot.

'I got it!'

French amateur astronomer Marc Delcroix processed the amateur images and confirmed the discovery of a bright spot on an image by French amateur Régis De-Bénedictis, then in others taken by fellow amateurs in September and October.

He had his own chance on Oct. 3 and 4 to photograph it with the Pic du Midi one-meter telescope, where on the second night, "I caught the feature when it was transiting, and I thought, 'Yes, I got it!'" said Delcroix.

"I was thrilled to see such activity on Uranus. Getting details on Mars, Jupiter or Saturn is now routine, but seeing details on Uranus and Neptune are the new frontiers for us amateurs and I did not want to miss that," said Delcroix, who works for an auto parts supplier in Toulouse and has been observing the skies, Jupiter in particular, with his backyard telescope since 2006 and, since 2012, occasionally with the Pic du Midi telescope.

"I was so happy to confirm myself these first amateur images on this bright storm on Uranus, feeling I was living a very special moment for planetary amateur astronomy."

These are optical images of Uranus on Sept. 19 and Oct. 2, showing the dramatic appearance of a bright storm on a planet that normally displays only a diffuse bright polar region. 

Credit: Photo by Anthony Wesley, Murrumbateman, Australia.

Interestingly, the extremely bright storm seen by Keck in the near infrared is not the one seen by the amateurs, which is much deeper in the atmosphere than the one that initially caused all the excitement. De Pater's colleague Larry Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, identified the amateur spot as one of the few features on the Keck images from August 5 that was only seen at 1.6 microns, and not at 2.2 microns.

The 1.6 micron light is emitted from deeper in the atmosphere, which means that this feature is below the uppermost cloud layer of methane-ice in Uranus's atmosphere.

"The colours and morphology of this cloud complex suggests that the storm may be tied to a vortex in the deeper atmosphere similar to two large cloud complexes seen during the equinox," Sromovsky said.

Such vortices could be anchored much deeper in the atmosphere and extend over large vertical distances, as inferred from similar vortices on Jupiter, including its Great Red Spot.

An expanded team of astronomers led by Kunio M. Sayanagi, an Assistant Professor at Hampton University in Virginia, leveraged the amateur observations to activate a "Target of Opportunity" proposal on the Hubble Space Telescope, which imaged the entire planet on Oct. 14.

Observing at a variety of wavelengths, HST revealed multiple storm components extending over a distance of more than 9,000 kilometers (5,760 miles) and clouds at a variety of altitudes.

De Pater, Sromovsky, Hammel and Pat Fry of the University of Wisconsin will report the details of their observations on Nov. 12 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in Tucson, Ariz.

Ice giant

This is an animation showing the movement of the bright spot as Uranus rotated over a two hour period on Oct. 4, 2014. 

The infrared images were taken at the Pic du Midi telescope in the French Pyrénées. 

Credit: Marc Delcroix and F. Colas (S2P).

Uranus is an ice giant, about four times the diameter of Earth, with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, with just a bit of methane to give it a blue tint.

Because it is so distant, 30 times farther from the sun than Earth, astronomers were able to see little detail on its surface until adaptive optics on the Keck telescopes revealed features much like those on Jupiter.

De Pater and her colleagues have been following Uranus for more than a decade, charting the weather on the planet, including bands of circulating clouds, massive swirling storms and convective features at its north pole.

Bright clouds are probably caused by gases such as methane rising in the atmosphere and condensing into highly reflective clouds of methane ice.

Because Uranus has no internal source of heat, its atmospheric activity was thought to be driven solely by sunlight, which is now weak in the northern hemisphere. Hence astronomers were surprised when these observations showed such intense activity.

Observations taken with the Keck telescope by Christoph Baranec, an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii on Manoa, revealed that the storm was still active, but had a different morphology and possibly reduced intensity.

"If indeed these features are high-altitude clouds generated by flow perturbations associated with a deeper vortex system, such drastic fluctuations in intensity would indeed be possible," Sromovsky added.

"These unexpected observations remind us keenly of how little we understand about atmospheric dynamics in outer planet atmospheres," the authors wrote in their paper.

NASA SDO: Extreme Solar Flare heading to Earth

The Sun by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. 

Credit: NASA

Scientists say an extreme X-Class solar flare is blasting its way to Earth and could mess up some power grids, satellites and radio transmissions.

Forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center don't yet know when Wednesday's solar storm will arrive here and which part of the planet will be facing the sun and bear the brunt of the effects.

It could be as early as Thursday morning to a few days.

Prediction Center director Tom Berger said scientists will have a better idea after they get more satellite data.

The X-Class flare is considered extreme on forecasters' scale, but just barely. Flares like this cause geomagnetic storms which can knock some power grids offline temporarily.

They also can damage satellites and disrupt radio transmissions but they expand the colourful Aurora Borealis (northern lights).

W. M. Keck Observatory: Extreme Volcanic activity on Jupiter's moon Io

These are images of Io obtained at different infrared wavelengths (in microns, μm, or millionths of a meter) with the W. M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter Keck II telescope on Aug. 15, 2013 (a-c) and the Gemini North telescope on Aug. 29, 2013 (d). 

The bar on the right of each image indicates the intensity of the infrared emission. 

Note that emissions from the large volcanic outbursts on Aug. 15 at Rarog and Heno Paterae have substantially faded by Aug. 29. 

A second bright spot is visible to the north of the Rarog and Heno eruptions in c and to the west of the outburst in d. 

This hot spot was identified as Loki Patera, a lava lake that appeared to be particularly active at the same time. 

Credit: Imke de Pater and Katherine de Kleer, UC Berkeley.

Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiter's moon Io within a two-week period last August, leading astronomers to speculate that these presumed rare "outbursts," which can send material hundreds of miles above the surface, might be much more common than astronomers thought.

"We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they're usually not this bright," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of one of two papers describing the eruptions.

"Here we had three extremely bright outbursts, which suggest that if we looked more frequently we might see many more of them on Io."

Io, the innermost of Jupiter's four large "Galilean" moons, is about 2,300 miles across, about the size of Earth's moon.

Aside from Earth, is the only known place in the solar system with volcanoes erupting extremely hot lava like that seen on Earth.

Because of Io's low gravity, large volcanic eruptions produce an umbrella of debris that rises high into space.

Images of Io were taken in the near-infrared with adaptive optics at the Gemini North telescope tracking the evolution of the eruption as it decreased in intensity over 12 days. 

Due to Io's rapid rotation, a different area of the surface is viewed on each night; the outburst is visible with diminishing brightness on Aug. 29 & 30 and Sept. 1, 3, & 10. 

Credit: Katherine de Kleer/UC Berkeley/Gemini Observatory/AURA

De Pater's long-time colleague and coauthor Ashley Davies, a volcanologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said that the recent eruptions match past events that spewed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles in a short period of time.

"These new events are in a relatively rare class of eruptions on Io because of their size and astonishingly high thermal emission," he said.

"The amount of energy being emitted by these eruptions implies lava fountains gushing out of fissures at a very large volume per second, forming lava flows that quickly spread over the surface of Io."

All three events, including the largest, most powerful eruption of the trio on 29 Aug. 2013, were likely characterised by "curtains of fire", as lava blasted out of fissures perhaps several miles long.

The papers, one with lead author Katherine de Kleer, a UC Berkeley graduate student, and coauthored by UC Berkeley research astronomer Máté Ádámkovics, and the other coauthored by Ádámkovics and David R. Ciardi of Caltech's NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, have been accepted for publication in the journal Icarus.

More Information: Near-infrared monitoring of Io and detection of a violent outburst on 29 August 2013 - Authors: Katherine de Kleera, Imke de Patera, Ashley Gerard Daviesd, Máté Ádámkovicsa: DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.006

ESA Aausat-4 cube satellite: Undergoing extreme temperature changes

Credits: Jari Makinen

The miniature Aausat-4 satellite undergoes repeated temperature variations in a vacuum chamber, cooling the CubeSat to –10°C and heating it to +45°C for more than two weeks.

This harsh baptism will make sure that it can cope with the conditions in space.

Aausat-4 is a 10x10x10 cm satellite designed and built by students of the Aalborg University in Denmark.

As part of ESA education’s Fly Your Satellite! programme, the satellite will be sent into space and the students have the chance to test it at the Mechanical Systems Laboratory at ESA’s technical heart, ESTEC, in the Netherlands.

The wires trailing from the satellite are to measure temperature and for power, it will fly without the wires and plastic casing.

The satellite seen here, Aausat-4, will track ships around Greenland using radio identification signals.

Its predecessor, Aausat3, is reaching the end of its life after 18 months in space, having received 100 000 signals from ships in the first week alone.

Aausat-4 features a significant upgrade in software and better-protected solar panels that will deliver more power.

ESA’s education programme is supporting Aausat-4 testing, and if the satellite confirms its flightworthiness, the Agency will sponsor a launch opportunity.

“Aausat-4 is run and made by students,” explain Mathias Mølgaard and Kasper Hemme, students from Aalborg University.

“The systems are designed inhouse and it has been a great help for completing our thesis.”

“ESA Education is offering interesting hands-on programmes to university students,” says Piero Galeone, programme manager for Fly Your Satellite!

“Students can participate in space programmes under ESA supervision, and can use state-of-the-art facilities, acquainting themselves with concepts and work practice used by space professionals.”

Aausat5 will be a copy of this model, but it will be released into space in 2015 by none other than Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen during his nine-day mission on the International Space Station.

ESO Astronomers discover extremely rare triple quasar

An infrared image of the triple quasar system QQQ J1519+0627, made using the 3.5-m aperture telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory. 

The three quasars are labelled A, B and C.

Image Credit: Emanuele Paolo Farina

For only the second time in history, a team of scientists including Michele Fumagalli from the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States have discovered an extremely rare triple quasar system.

Their work is published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Quasars are extremely bright and powerful sources of energy that sit in the centre of a galaxy, surrounding a black hole.

In systems with multiple quasars, the bodies are held together by gravity and are believed to be the product of galaxies colliding.

It is very difficult to observe triplet quasar systems, because of observational limits that prevent researchers from differentiating multiple nearby bodies from one another at astronomical distances. Moreover, such phenomena are presumed to be very rare.

The team led by Emanuele Farina of the University of Insubria in Como, Italy, combined observations from the New Technology Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at La Silla, Chile and from the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain with advanced modelling.

This enabled them to find the triplet quasar, called QQQ J1519+0627. The light from the three quasars has travelled 9 billion light years to reach us, which means the light was emitted when the universe was only a third of its current age.

Advanced analysis confirmed that what the team found was indeed three distinct sources of quasar energy and that the phenomenon is extremely rare.

Two members of the triplet are closer to each other than the third. This means that the system could have been formed by interaction between the two adjacent quasars, but was probably not triggered by interaction with the more-distant third quasar.

Furthermore, no evidence was seen of any ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (galaxies with very strong emission in infrared light), which is where quasars are commonly found.

As a result, the team proposes that this triplet quasar system is part of some larger structure that is still undergoing formation.

"Honing our observational and modelling skills and finding this rare phenomenon will help us understand how cosmic structures assemble in our universe and the basic processes by which massive galaxies form," Fumagalli said.

"Further study will help us figure out exactly how these quasars came to be and how rare their formation is," Farina added.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).

Water Spout - Image

A waterspout appears close to the shoreline near Batemans Bay, about 225 km (140 miles) south of Sydney

Picture: REUTERS/NSWRFS/Phil Caminiti

NASA NEEMO: Undersea Asteroid Mission Halted Due to Hurricane Rina

The 15th NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) ended ahead of schedule due to the predicted path of Hurricane Rina.

In a preparation for future space exploration, the six aquanaut crew lived in the Aquarius underwater research laboratory at Key Largo, Florida for five days.

Usually the mission is for 10 days, but due to the Hurricane Rina which heads towards Key Largo, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates the lab, determined Rina posed a risk to the safety of the mission taking place near the area.

"Despite the length, we accomplished a significant amount of research," said NEEMO project manager Bill Todd. "We're already learning lessons from working in this environment."

The six-member NEEMO crew -- Commander and NASA astronaut Shannon Walker, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Steven Squyres of Cornell University and James Talacek and Nate Bender of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, kicked off this year's mission Oct. 20, after an initial delay caused by another storm in the area.

The aquanauts conducted six underwater spacewalks and one day of scientific research inside the Aquarius habitat.

The crew completed four days of scientific asteroid exploration analog operations using the deep worker submersibles that stood in for the Space Exploration Vehicle.

This year's mission was the first NEEMO to focus on operational concepts that would be used in human exploration of an asteroid.

NASA said the remainder of NEEMO 15 will not be rescheduled, and all media events are canceled. The NEEMO 16 mission is tentatively set for the summer of 2012.

The NEEMO crew focused on three different aspects of a mission to an asteroid surface. The first is anchoring to the surface of the asteroid.

Unlike the Moon or Mars, an asteroid would have little, if any, gravity to hold astronauts or vehicles to its surface, so an anchor would be necessary.

Mike Gernhardt (NASA) pilots the DeepWorker to a location that will allow Zeb Scoville (NASA) to capture an interesting specimen.

Source: NASA

 

It will require a method of connecting multiple anchors to form pathways to move around on the surface of an asteroid.

The best way to connect these anchors was the second aspect of a near-Earth asteroid mission addressed by NEEMO 15.

Finally, since NASA's purpose in visiting an asteroid would be for scientific research, the third aspect of this mission investigated by NEEMO 15 was different methods of sample collection.

Take a glimpse of more NEEMO 15 asteroid research under the sea.

Hubble Image of Carina Nebula: Star birth in the extreme

Star birth in the extreme Hubble spacetelescope.org

Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail.

The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno.

In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.

The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).

This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

Families in Inner Space - mystery abounds

Three groups of strikingly different-looking fish that turn out to be males, females and young of the same family.

Tapetails (pictured, top) live in shallow waters and are named for the long streamers that trail behind them. Whalefish and bignoses are both deep-sea fish, but while whalefish (middle) lack scales and have huge jaws, bignoses (bottom) have long nasal organs and immobile jaws, and live off energy stored in their gigantic livers.

Nobody thought these groups were related. "The differences were so extreme," says marine biologist David Johnson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Then a study found that whalefish and tapetail mitochondrial DNA is virtually identical, prompting Johnson to re-examine museum specimens. This revealed one in the process of changing from a tapetail into a whalefish. Specimens intermediate between tapetails and bignoses were collected in 2007, and together with more DNA analysis this proved that the three families are really one.

A "tapetail" larva grows up to be a "whalefish" female or "bignose" male. Johnson claims this is the most extreme metamorphosis ever seen in a vertebrate.

Families! How can members of the same family be so different?