We wouldn't be here but for the solstices. Be thankful!

December 21 was the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere - the shortest day in the year. The solstices occur on most planets because they do not spin upright, or perpendicular to their orbits.

The Earth, for example, slouches 23.5 degrees on a tilted axis (inclination). This leaves the planet’s North Pole pointed toward the North Star over relatively long periods of time, even as Earth makes its year long migration around the sun. That means the Northern Hemisphere will spend half the year tilted slightly toward the sun, bathing in direct sunlight during summer’s long, blissful days, and half the year cooling off as it leans slightly away from the sun during winter’s short, frigid days. December 21 marks the day when the North Pole is most tilted away from the sun.

But every planet slouches at different angles.

The axial tilt of Venus, for example, is so extreme — 177 degrees — that the planet is essentially flipped upside down with its South Pole pointing up. Perhaps counter-intuitively, that means that there’s very little tilt to its upside-down spin and its hemispheres will never dramatically point toward or away from the sun. As such, the sun’s dance across the sky will remain relatively stable — shifting by a mere six degrees over the course of a Venusian year.

The axial tilt of Venus is so extreme that the planet is essentially flipped upside down with its South Pole pointing up

Had we evolved on Venus, it’s likely that we would not have noticed solstices or seasons at all.

The same can’t be said for Uranus!

An axial tilt of 98 degrees causes the ice giant to spin on its side. So, whereas one of Earth’s poles leans slightly toward the sun at solstice, one of Uranus’s poles points almost directly toward the sun at solstice — as though poised to make a perfect bulls eye. That means that one hemisphere will bask under the sun both day and night, while the other will experience a frigid and dark winter and not catch a glimpse of the sun for that entire season.

Two images of the same view of Uranus made by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1986. The false-color image on the right shows how Uranus’s pole points towards the sun, its axis tilting at 98 degrees

Such a tilt on Earth would mean that the Arctic Circle didn’t begin 66 degrees north of the Equator, but at the Equator itself. All of North America, Europe, Asia and half of Africa would spend winters in permanent darkness and summers under constant sunlight. And on Uranus, which takes 84 Earth years to orbit the sun, these seasons last for decades.

But the king of extreme seasons is Pluto.

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrived at the dwarf planet in 2015, scientists discovered a unique world overflowing with surface features that look like networks of drainage channels and even a frozen lake. But given Pluto’s low atmospheric pressure and chilly surface temperature, liquids cannot flow across the surface — at least not today.

Scientists now have an explanation: seasons in Pluto’s past pushed atmospheric pressure high enough to allow liquids of methane and nitrogen to flow and pool on the surface.

A changing axial tilt is the biggest driver of wildly varying seasons on Pluto. Over the course of 4 million years, Pluto’s inclination shifts back and forth between 102 and 126 degrees, causing its equivalent of an Arctic Circle to grow and shrink. That occasionally creates seasons where the atmospheric pressure is high enough that liquid methane and nitrogen can flow.

Although, astronomers remain uncertain how a planet’s seasons might affect its likelihood to host life, it is believed that such dramatic swings — like those on Pluto — are likely a hindrance because they can make a planet unfit to live on for long stretches of time. Life needs a continuously habitable zone to thrive. Similarly, astronomers have long suspected that life would likely not survive on Earth should it have an axial tilt more akin to Uranus.

So, as the sun reaches its farthest point in the sky on December 21, be grateful. Never will the sun dip so far below the horizon that it plunges half of the globe into a months long night and the other half into an equally long summer. Nor does Earth’s tilt change drastically over millions of years, thanks to the influence of the moon. Instead, the sun appears to trot back and forth between the extremes, like the pendulum of a great clock, keeping the planet cozy while steadily counting off its years.

Source - The New York Times

Aldebaran – the fiery eye of the Bull, the red 'Rohini' or the red giant

The reddish star Aldebaran – the fiery eye of the Bull in the constellation Taurus – is an aging star and a huge star! The computed diameter is between 35 and 40 solar diameters. If Aldebaran were placed where the sun is now, its surface would extend almost to the orbit of Mercury. Follow the links below to learn more about this prominent and fascinating star.

Science of star Aldebaran

This star glows with the orangish color of a K5 giant star. In visible light, it is about 153 times brighter than the sun, although its surface temperature is lower (roughly 4000 kelvin compared to 5800 kelvin for the sun).

Aldebaran is about 65 light-years away, much closer than the stars of the Hyades with which it misleadingly seems associated. The Hyades are about 150 light-years away.

Aldebaran is an erratic variable with minor variations too small to be noticed by the eye. It also has a small, faint companion star, an M-type red dwarf, some 3.5 light-days away. In other words, light from Aldebaran would need to travel for 3.5 days to reach the companion, in contrast to light from our sun, which requires 8 minutes to travel to Earth.

How to see Aldebaran

Aldebaran is easy to find. Frequently imagined as the fiery eye of Taurus the Bull, Aldebaran is part of a V-shaped star grouping that forms the face of the Bull. This pattern is called the Hyades.

We can also locate Aldebaran using the famous constellation Orion as a guide. Simply locate the three stars of Orion’s Belt. Then draw an imaginary line through the belt to the right. The first bright star we come to will be Aldebaran with its distinctive reddish-orange glow.

Aldebaran is the 14th brightest star, but five of those that outshine it are only barely visible or not visible at all from much of the Northern Hemisphere. Aldebaran is primarily a winter and spring star. At least, that is when this red star is most easily visible in the evening sky. By early December, it rises shortly after sunset and is visible all night. Three months later it is high to the south at sunset, and sets at around midnight. By early May, it hangs low about the western sunset glow – and before the end of the month, it’s lost altogether. It returns to the predawn sky around late June.

Although it appears among them, Aldebaran is not actually a member of the V-shaped Hyades cluster. It is actually much closer to us in space than the actual Hyades stars.

History and mythology of Aldebaran

Aldebaran is often depicted as the fiery eye of Taurus the Bull. Because it is bright and prominent, Aldebaran was honored as one of the Four Royal Stars in ancient Persia, the other three Royal Stars being Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.

The name Aldebaran is from the Arabic for “The Follower,” presumably as a hunter following prey, which here likely was the star cluster we call the Pleiades. The latter was often viewed as a flock of birds, perhaps doves. According to Richard Hinckley Allen in his classic book Star Names, the name Aldebaran once was applied to the entire Hyades star cluster, a large loose collection of faint stars.

In Hindu myth, Aldebaran was sometimes identified with a beautiful young woman named Rohini, disguised as an antelope and pursued by her lecherous father, disguised as a deer, Mriga. Apparently several ancient peoples associated the star with rain. In another Sioux story, Aldebaran is associated with the formation of the Mississippi river in America.

Aldebaran is the name of one of the chariot horses in the movie Ben Hur

On a different note, astronomer Jack Eddy has suggested a connection with the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, an ancient circle of stones atop a mountain in Wyoming, USA. He wrote that the ancient Americans may have used this site as a sort of observatory to view the rising of Aldebaran just before the sun in June to predict the June solstice.

Interestingly, in about two million years, the American space probe Pioneer 10, now heading out into deep space, will pass Aldebaran.

Source - EarthSky.org

Can You Hear Something That Doesn’t Make a Sound?

Recently, University of Glasgow psychologist and researcher Lisa DeBruine created a mini-sensation on social media when she tweeted a playful animated GIF in which an electrical transmission tower appears to be jumping rope and asked, "Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif?" In a subsequent non-scientific poll of more than 315,000 Twitter users, 67 percent said they heard "a thudding sound" when they watched the animation, and another 3 percent said they heard "something else." Only 20 percent said they heard nothing at all.

That's seven out of 10 people who think they heard a sound accompanying a silent image. So what's up with that?

The explanation, according to research, is that while we think of sound as being generated by the world around us, the experience of hearing sounds actually happens in the auditory cortex, which is located in the temporal lobe of the brain. When something actually occurs — for example, the honk of an automobile horn — that creates sound waves in the air, it causes our eardrums to vibrate, which transfers the information through a complex anatomical path. That eventually generates an electrical signal, which the auditory nerve carries to the auditory cortex, which processes the information and tells us that we're hearing a loud noise.

Interestingly, though, in the absence of sound waves in the air, our brain will try to fill in the silence. In a study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers showed subjects hundreds of different still images, such as a man playing a saxophone or using a power saw, and also images that suggested silence, such as a woman sitting on a sofa reading a book. When the scientists measured the electrical activity in the subjects' brains, they found that the brain's auditory cortex was stimulated by pictures associated with sounds, in less than 200 milliseconds.

Back in 2008, Radiolab's Jad Abumrad spent time in an aneochoic chamber, a space designed to be super-quiet. He discovered that in the absence of actual sound, his brain soon began imagining sounds, ranging from the buzz of a swarm of bees to the vocals from a Fleetwood Mac song.

In yet another study published in Consciousness and Cognition, University College London researchers found that 21 percent of subjects reported being able to hear faint sounds when viewing flashes of light, a phenomenon known as visually-evoked auditory response.

Source -

1. Patrick J. Kiger "Can You Hear Something That Doesn’t Make a Sound?" 19 December 2017. HowStuffWorks.com. 24 December 2017
2. Nature Scientific Reports "When a photograph can be heard: Vision activates the auditory cortex in 110 ms"
3. Consciousness and Cognition "Hearing through your eyes"

Newton's apple: The real story

We've all heard the story.

A young Isaac Newton is sitting beneath an apple tree contemplating the mysterious universe. Suddenly... an apple hits him on the head. "Aha!" he shouts, or perhaps, "Eureka!" In a flash he understands that the very same force that brought the apple crashing toward the ground also keeps the moon falling toward the Earth and the Earth falling toward the sun: gravity.

Or something like that. The apocryphal story is one of the most famous in the history of science and now we can see for yourself what Newton actually said. Squirreled away in the archives of London's Royal Society was a manuscript containing the truth about the apple.

It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such -

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

So it turns out the apple story is true - for the most part. The apple may not have hit Newton in the head, but we'll still picture it that way. Meanwhile, three and a half centuries and an Albert Einstein later, physicists still don't really understand gravity. We're gonna need a bigger apple.

Source - Newton's apple: The real story by Amanda Gefter