dailyseinfeld:

(George enters the apartment wearing goggles)
KRAMER: Yeah, rock on!

(via The Glasses)

vimeo:

Brent Bonacorso brings to the surreality of dreams to life in the ambitious and romantic “West of the Moon.”

(image created with Echograph)

Chemistry of White Dwarf Planets —“Basically Earth-like”

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.

The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyadesstar cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.

Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.

The two “polluted” Hyades white dwarfs are part of a search of planetary debris around more than 100 white dwarfs, led by Boris Gänsicke of the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Using computer models of white dwarf atmospheres, Detlev Koester from the University of Kiel in Germany is determining the abundances of various elements that can be traced to planets in the COS data.

Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.

(via dailygalaxy)

Thursday…1.0

siphotos:

SI photographer Hy Peskin with a rare color picture of the NHL is 1957 as the Red Wings and Rangers square off. (Hy Peskin/SI)

These old hockey photos are amazing.

Is Antigravity Real? —“If Antimatter Falls Upward We Need to Rethink How the Universe Works”

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“Is there such a thing as antigravity? Based on free-fall tests so far, we can’t say yes or no, ” says Joel Fajans of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “This is the first word, however, not the last.” These questions have long intrigued physicists, says Fajans, because “in the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we’d have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works.”

So far, all the evidence that gravity is the same for matter and antimatter is indirect, so Fajans and his colleague Jonathan Wurtele, both staff scientists with Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division and professors of physics at the University of California at Berkeley – as well as leading members of CERN’s international ALPHAexperiment – decided to use their ongoing antihydrogen research to tackle the question directly. If gravity’s interaction with anti-atoms is unexpectedly strong, they realized, the anomaly would be noticeable in ALPHA’s existing data on 434 anti-atoms.

The first results, which measured the ratio of antihydrogen’s unknown gravitational mass to its known inertial mass, did not settle the matter. Far from it. If an antihydrogen atom falls downward, its gravitational mass is no more than 110 times greater than its inertial mass. If it falls upward, its gravitational mass is at most 65 times greater.

(via dailygalaxy)

Wednesday…2.0

discoverynews:

Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100

Are you ready for the robocalypse? Nah, I’m sure it’ll be peaceful.

Wednesday…1.0

Tuesday…1.0

theonion:

Nation’s Amateur Skateboarders Haven’t Landed Trick In 12 Years | Full Report