Star goes boom, telescopes zoom
<p>Supernova in nearby Pinwheel Galaxy excites astronomers</p> <p> <span class="exclusive print">Web edition</span> : Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 </p> <p>Many people appreciate a good light show, but probably not as much as the astronomers who recently spied a rare cosmological treat.</p> <p>On August 24, telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in southern California captured a white dwarf star just 21 million light-years away ? the next state over, astronomically ? as it went supernova, exploding in a blaze of light. Scientists involved in the Palomar Transient Factory sky survey raced to record the detonation?s early death throes.</p> <p>?We think we found it probably 12 hours after it exploded,? says astronomer Mark Sullivan of the University of Oxford in England. ?The amazing thing for me is, that supernova exploded 21 million years ago. It?s taken light 21 million years to arrive. And we just happened to open up the telescope on that Wednesday night, and in came the photons.?<st
Star goes boom, telescopes zoom <p>Supernova in nearby Pinwheel Galaxy excites astronomers</p> <p> <span class="exclusive print">Web edition</span> : Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 </p> <p>Many people appreciate a good light show, but probably not as much as the astronomers who recently spied a rare cosmological treat.</p> <p>On August 24, telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in southern California captured a white dwarf star just 21 million light-years away ? the next state over, astronomically ? as it went supernova, exploding in a blaze of light. Scientists involved in the Palomar Transient Factory sky survey raced to record the detonation?s early death throes.</p> <p>?We think we found it probably 12 hours after it exploded,? says astronomer Mark Sullivan of the University of Oxford in England. ?The amazing thing for me is, that supernova exploded 21 million years ago. It?s taken light 21 million years to arrive. And we just happened to open up the telescope on that Wednesday night, and in came the photons.?<st
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POPSAn Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age Maj. Harold Hering and the forbidden question that cost him his career. By Ron Rosenbaum It was a question that changed his life, and changed mine, and may have changed—even saved—all of ours by calling attention to flaws in our nuclear command and control system at the height of the Cold War. It was a question that makes Maj. Hering an unsung hero of the nuclear age. A question that came from inside the system, a question that has no good answer: How can any missile crewman know that an order to twist his launch key in its slot and send a thermonuclear missile rocketing out of its silo—a nuke capable of killing millions of civilians—is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president?
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POPSDeal finalised on fusion reactor But since the science of how to achieve this type of fusion hasn't been settled, the plans for the Iter project have been the subject of several revisions in recent years, each one leading to an increased price tag
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POPSDoomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event This is scary. Read entire article. A huge cover up is occurring. If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives.
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POPSAntimatter Supernova -The Biggest Bomb in the Cosmos The antimatter annihilates with its opposite, as antimatter is wont to do, but the problem is that the speed of antimatter explosion - which is pretty damn fast - is still a critical delay in the gamma-pressure holding up the star. The outer layers sag in, compressing the core more, raising the temperature, making more energetic gamma rays even more likely to make antimatter and suddenly the whole star is a runaway nuclear reactor beyond the scale of the imagination. The entire thermonuclear core detonates at once, an atomic warhead that's not just bigger than the Sun - it's bigger than the Sun plus the mass of another ten close by stars.
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POPSEurope's 5 "Undeclared" Nuclear States The "Official" Nuclear Weapons States Five countries, the US, UK, France, China and Russia are considered to be "nuclear weapons states" (NWS), "an internationally recognized status conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)". Three other "Non NPT countries" (i.e. non-signatory states of the NPT) including India, Pakistan and North Korea, have recognized possessing nuclear weapons.
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POPS Obama's Legacy That far exceeds what's needed to turn on the lights, but it's also beyond what's needed for a basic nuclear weapons program. Consider North Korea, which manufactured two limited yield nuclear weapons using only a plutonium reactor, a plutonium reprocessing facility, and -- presumably -- some sort of weapons laboratory. Why is Iran pumping billions more into building and protecting triple the number of facilities required to build a basic nuclear weapon, akin to the Fat Man or Little Boy bombs detonated in 1945? The answer could be that Tehran is skipping basic weapons construction and moving towards an advanced thermonuclear design. Consider that they've already experimented with advanced weapons designs like two-point implosion, nuclear triggers, and have built their own facility at Arak that could be used to produce both tritium, which is a suspected boosting agent in hydrogen bomb designs, as well as weapons-grade plutonium.
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POPSCzar Obama Takes Aim at Congress
Indeed, when the original law was approved by Congress, nobody said a word about any agency of the federal government telling any business or industry in America how much CO2 it could emit. By now saying the law gives it unilateral authority to declare CO2 dangerous pollutants, the EPA is grabbing power to regulate the 85 percent of the U.S. economy that depends on energy derived from the burning of carbon-based fuels. Those fuels -- oil, natural gas, and coal -- are heavy CO2 emitters. This ruling thus renders congressional intent irrelevant. If the ruling stands, the law will then be whatever the president and his bureaucratic minions in the executive branch decree, not what the people decide acting through their elected representatives in Congress. Congressional liberals who failed to get their cap-and-trade scheme approved in the Senate are ecstatic about the EPA's ruling. There was a time when American liberals worried about excessive executive power;
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