Going to space in a caravan

September 11, 2014 TopSpacer

Here’s an interesting report about a “bunch of guys [who built] a starship simulator in a caravan” (i.e. a “trailer” in US/Canada) : The DIY Spaceship Simulator That’s More Immersive Than Virtual Reality – Motherboard

While virtual reality games are often called “immersive,” this experience showed that the most captivating experiences don’t have to involve wearing goggles. I was inside the LHS Bikeshed spaceship simulator, a DIY, sci-fi styled caravan that takes immersive gaming to the next level.

Unlike VR, the game delivers its real kicks through off-screen elements. When the ship shakes, the whole caravan actually physically shakes. When you have to plug in an emergency cable to save the ship, you have to actually, physically get up and plug the right cable into the right port. It’s not virtual reality, it’s real-life reality—and that’s what made it the best space simulator I’ve ever set foot in.

Find a history of the project at LHS BIKESHED.

[]

Astronomy, Exoplanets

Video: Earth-size planets in habitable zones of cool stars

September 10, 2014 TopSpacer

In this SETI Institute talk, Elisa Quintana talks about Earth-Sized Planets in the Habitable Zones of Cool Stars:

Caption:

Abstract: A primary goal of the Kepler mission is to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of other stars. M dwarfs, stars that are smaller and cooler than the Sun, comprise more than 70% of the stars in our galaxy. Finding that Earth-sized planets around M dwarfs are common, therefore, has big implications for determining the frequency of other Earths.

In April 2014 we announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first definitive Earth-sized planet found to orbit in the habitable zone of a star other than our Sun. We will discuss our methods of combining ground-based observations with transit modeling to confirm this system, and will present our theoretical studies on the formation and habitability of this planet. We will also present updates on several promising multi-planet systems that have Earth-sized, and possibly sub-Earth-sized, candidates in the habitable zones of cool low-mass stars in the Kepler field-of-view.

Space Arts, Space Music

1950s-60s Electronic and Space Age Lounge music

September 10, 2014 TopSpacer

Here’s a long list of early electronic music: The greatest electronic albums of the 1950s and 1960s – The Vinyl Factory. (via Behind The Black.)

See also my Space Age Sounds section, which focuses on spacey sounding jazz-orchestral style music, usually with electronic sounds included, of the 1950s and early 1960s. This music is sometimes referred to as Space Age Lounge music. Some of the it overlaps with the Vinyl Factory’s list.

Here’s one of my Space Age Lounge classics:

http://youtu.be/iAUuUiwA7yU

Astronomy

The Lithium Problem and Messier 54

September 10, 2014 TopSpacer

A new finding from the European Southern Observatory (ESO):

This Star Cluster Is Not What It Seems

This new image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile shows a vast collection of stars, the globular cluster Messier 54. This cluster looks very similar to many others but it has a secret. Messier 54 doesn’t belong to the Milky Way, but is part of a small satellite galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. This unusual parentage has now allowed astronomers to use the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to test whether there are also unexpectedly low levels of the element lithium in stars outside the Milky Way.

Loading player…

This video takes you on a journey past the centre of the Milky Way
and far out the other side to the globular cluster Messier 54.
This cluster looks very similar to many others, but it has a secret.
Messier 54 doesn’t belong to the Milky Way, but actually is
part of a small satellite galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.
The final close-up view comes from the VLT Survey Telescope
at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile.

The Milky Way galaxy is orbited by more than 150 globular star clusters, which are balls of hundreds of thousands of old stars dating back to the formation of the galaxy. One of these, along with several others in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), was found in the late eighteenth century by the French comet hunter Charles Messier and given the designation Messier 54.

For more than two hundred years after its discovery Messier 54 was thought to be similar to the other Milky Way globulars. But in 1994 it was discovered that it was actually associated with a separate galaxy — the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. It was found to be at a distance of around 90 000 light-years — more than three times as far from Earth as the galactic centre.

Astronomers have now observed Messier 54 using the VLT as a test case to try to solve one of the mysteries of modern astronomy — the lithium problem.

Most of the light chemical element lithium now present in the Universe was produced during the Big Bang, along with hydrogen and helium, but in much smaller quantities. Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe, and from this work out how much they should see in old stars. But the numbers don’t match — there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected. This mystery remains, despite several decades of work [1].

Up to now it has only been possible to measure lithium in stars in the Milky Way. But now a team of astronomers led by Alessio Mucciarelli (University of Bologna, Italy) has used the VLT to measure how much lithium there is in a selection of stars in Messier 54. They find that the levels are close to those in the Milky Way. So, whatever it is that got rid of the lithium seems not to be specific to the Milky Way.

This new image of the cluster was created from data taken with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory. As well as showing the cluster itself it reveals the extraordinarily dense forest of much closer Milky Way stars that lie in the foreground.

Notes

[1] There are several possible proposed solutions to the riddle. The first is that the calculations of the amounts of lithium produced in the Big Bang are wrong — but very recent tests suggest that this is not the case. The second is that the lithium was somehow destroyed in the earliest stars, before the formation of the Milky Way. The third is that some process in the stars has gradually destroyed lithium during their lives.