Blomkamp's RAKKA is fantastically weird and BRUTAL

Director Neill Blomkamp's Oats Studios released the first episode--in three parts--of his new experimental films. RAKKA tells the story of an alien-occupied Earth, now turned... you know what? I'm not going to say.

Just watch it. And know that it's not for the faint of heart. I watched this after mindnight last night and I'm certain I didn't sleep well because of it. (So you know it's good ;-)

Enjoy!

First Ringed Asteroid Discovered!

NASA announced today an intrasolar oddity--a Centaur astroid called Charilko looks to be the first ever ringed asteroid system. The rings are likely made up of ice drummed up from another object impacting the asteroid, which sits between Saturn and Uranus.

From Wired:

At 155 miles across, or about the length of Massachusetts, Chariklo is the largest known asteroid in its neighborhood. Looking to get a better idea of its exact size and shape, astronomers trained their telescopes on the giant space rock as it passed in front on a distant star in June 2013. As Chariklo performed its eclipse, researchers noticed something odd: The star’s light flickered just a bit immediately before and after Chariklo’s pass.

The reason for this darkening was the asteroid’s two dense rings, which had briefly blocked the starlight. The thicker inner ring is about four miles wide, while the thinner outer ring is a little less than two miles. Spectroscopic analysis of the starlight also revealed that the rings are composed partially of water ice.

Pretty sweet discovery--and it doesn't sound like astronomers had expected it!

Click to enlarge:

Arist conception by artist Lucie Maquet

More coverage:

• NBC News
• Universe Today

GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING GIANT MONSTERS!

 TAKE MY MONEY!!!

VOLCANO PLANET, DAY 241: AND YOU THINK YOUR JOB SUCKS!

Universe Today says:

Looking like it comes from the latest natural disaster flick, this incredible real footage was captured by Geoff Mackley, Bradley Ambrose, Nathan Berg, who came within 30 meters of the bubbling, spewing lava stream from the mouth the Marum volcano on Ambrym, a volcanic island in the archipelago of Vanuatu, off the east coast of Australia.

I can see the next X-plorers campaign: "Fishing for Mordorite" where the heroes must don high-temp EVA suits and go bobbing for a strange mineral with darkly psionic effects.....

New trailer for Cloud Atlas

NASA: We found 2.5 million supermassive black holes gorging themselves

DUDE. Don't look up, lest your eyeballs be sucked into any one of 2.5 MILLION supermassive black holes currently digesting spacetime. NASA announced today that they've pinpointed the suckers (ha!) using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope.

All those little circles are really reality-ripping hot DOGs (dust obscured galaxies) with black holes at their centers that care not for your puny "sentience" or pleas for mercy. NOM-NOM-NOM. From Universe Today:

WISE scanned the whole sky twice in infrared light, completing its survey in early 2011. Like night-vision goggles probing the dark, the telescope captured millions of images of the sky. All the data from the mission have been released publicly, allowing astronomers to dig in and make new discoveries.

The latest findings are helping astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black holes at their centers grow and evolve together. For example, the giant black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, has 4 million times the mass of our sun and has gone through periodic feeding frenzies where material falls towards the black hole, heats up and irradiates its surroundings. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut down star formation in galaxies.

In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away. About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light.

It's funny, but quasars always seem to come up as "extroverts" on the Myers Briggs.

WISE actually picked up other objects too, including asteroids, quasars, and a whole mess o' other stuff that you probablly think is cool, but should thank your stars isn't headed this way.

STAY IN SCHOOL, BECAUSE SCIENCE. IS. COOL.

Coverage:

• NASA (all images are from NASA, check out their page for more!)
• Universe Today
• io9.com did a live blog with recap
• Red Orbit
• Wired.com

NASA: 100+ Billion Planets in the Milky Way

NASA has conducted a recent survey of our home galaxy and through the sheer power of statistics, came up with this astonishing find:

The survey results show that our galaxy contains, on average, a minimum of one planet for every star. This means that it’s likely there are a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth.

The study is based on observations taken over six years by the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration, using a technique called microlensing to survey the galaxy for planets. In this technique, one star acts like a magnifying lens to brighten the light from a background star. If planets are orbiting the foreground star, the background star's light will further brighten, revealing the presence of a planet that is otherwise too faint to be seen.

The study also concludes that there are far more Earth-sized planets than bloated Jupiter-sized worlds. A rough estimate from this survey would point to the existence of more than 10 billion terrestrial planets across our galaxy.

They seem to be on to something--three more smaller-than-Earth-sized exoplanets were just discovered.

All of this comes on the heels of last month's discovery of Kepler22-b, hypothosized to be the first habitable planet outside our own solar system.

Kepler22-b; artist's rendering

And the 100 billion+ discovery STILL does't count the billion+ rogue planets thought to be out there as well.

It's such an exciting moment for science and the whole human race. I'm really, profoundly moved just to be hearing news like this. Take a moment and think about this pale blue dot we live on and it's true place in the universe, and sheer promise of what lies out there waiting for us to discover.



The Milky Way study will appear in tomorrow's issue of Nature.

All images: NASA

STARGATE?

Image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Looky what Hubble found:

A giant cosmic necklace glows brightly in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image.

The object, aptly named the Necklace Nebula, is a recently discovered planetary nebula, the glowing remains of an ordinary, Sun-like star. The nebula consists of a bright ring, measuring 12 trillion miles wide, dotted with dense, bright knots of gas that resemble diamonds in a necklace.

A pair of stars orbiting close together produced the nebula, also called PN G054.2-03.4. About 10,000 years ago one of the aging stars ballooned to the point where it engulfed its companion star. The smaller star continued orbiting inside its larger companion, increasing the giant’s rotation rate.

The bloated companion star spun so fast that a large part of its gaseous envelope expanded into space. Due to centrifugal force, most of the gas escaped along the star’s equator, producing a ring. The embedded bright knots are dense gas clumps in the ring.

The pair is so close, only a few million miles apart, they appear as one bright dot in the center. The stars are furiously whirling around each other, completing an orbit in a little more than a day.

The Necklace Nebula is located 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta. In this composite image, taken on July 2, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured the glow of hydrogen (blue), oxygen (green), and nitrogen (red).

Wonder where the other end is.  ;)

Scientists find "billions" of isolated planets in Milky Way

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

Astronomers are reporting in the journal Nature a colossal find of "hundreds of billions of rogue, Jupiter-like planets that outnumber the stars in the Milky Way.

Imagine, what that means for moment. Hundreds of billions of shadowy worlds that could have moons or their own. So plentiful there aren't nearly as many stars in comparison.

I posted more at Threads of Adventure, including a little animation from NASA/JPL-Caltech.