Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Mystery of the Million-mass Smith’s Cloud

The beginning

Gail Bieger-Smith is a 69 old woman who lives a quiet life in Wassenaar, a small, wealthy town west of Leiden, the Netherlands. She never expected to be dragged again by her brief astronomy career 45 years ago, but in early January she started getting phone calls from reporters and radio astronomers. The extragalactic cloud she discovered in 1963 had been found to be on a collision course with our Milky Way Galaxy. Some 20 to 40 million years from now, a million Suns' worth of hydrogen gas will smash into the galactic plane, likely causing a huge burst of star formation in the Perseus Arm about a quarter of the way around the galaxy from us. Long forgotten, Smith's Cloud was suddenly headline news.

Meteorites from Mercury

A rare few rocks lying around on Earth may have been blasted here from Mercury, say two Canadian theorists. It is known that most meteorites which found on earth comes from asteroids, but a few only came from the Moon and Mars and they are very rare. They end up here after asteroids or comets smash into these objects hard enough to kick some debris to escape velocity. The ejected pieces go into solar orbit, and a few eventually end up hitting Earth, and even fewer find its way on it's surface if they survive the rough journey of Earth's atmosphere.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Camping and Outdoor Lanterns

What is a lantern

A lantern simply is a portable flashlight case with transparent sides to give to allow the light to be spread around the lantern 360 degrees unlike the spot-bean of the regular flashlight, it is like you taking a living room lamp with you. It usually bring fainter bean than the focused flashlight but you will gain the wide benefit of it's beam.

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Future of Energy from Tides and Waves

Think about taming the huge ocean powers from tides and waves to produce a clean endless energy, water crashes against the steep, rocky cliffs on the western coast of Mainland, the largest of the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. The waves comping from the Atlantic are typically 6 to 10 feet high in the summer. In winter, they can reach 30 feet(about 10 meters). It's a perfect location for the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC), a testing ground for wave and tidal-power installations.