Spacecraft Measurements Indicate Shifting Interstellar Wind 75
Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity, but larger context in which the Earth moves has some trends to deal with as well, according to new research published in Science and summarized by Science Now: "As Earth and the other planets orbit the sun, the solar system itself travels through space. Its slow journey is taking it though a wispy expanse of gas called the Local Interstellar Cloud. Now, astronomers have discovered signs of potential turbulence in the cloud, indicated by a shift in direction of helium atoms that flow into the solar system. If the shift is real and continues for hundreds to thousands of years—a dicey extrapolation—it could be a harbinger of more dramatic changes in our solar system, notes study co-author David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. ... To detect the wind shift, researchers drew on measurements by 11 spacecraft and satellites that have recorded directly or indirectly the flow of helium atoms into the solar system. Many kinds of atoms infiltrate the heliosphere, but helium is a particularly good tracer for all of them because it is abundant and typically survives in its uncharged, atomic state all the way to Earth’s orbit, [study co-author Priscilla] Frisch says."
WE'RE DOOMED!!! (Score:1)
it's coming for us. we're all dead! of course, we will be by the time it gets here.
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Helium? (Score:2)
Helium, hah! According to Asimov [wikipedia.org], it's the flows of carbon into the star that can cause it to go nova.
Re:WE'RE DOOMED!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WE'RE DOOMED!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure about that. People survive poticial rallies all the time, the source of expanding hot gas directly behind the podium.
I've seen what that does to their behavior sometimes. It's not as harmless as you think.
Re: WE'RE DOOMED!!! (Score:3)
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it's coming for us. we're all dead! of course, we will be by the time it gets here.
I can tell you're excited because you're starting to sound a little squeaky.
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Uh, whoever modded that guy's comment offtopic needs more coffee. It wasn't a hilarious joke and was kind of obvious, but it's on topic.
OK, I guess I need to metamoderate...
BTW, my comment is off topic (yes, I checked the "no bonus" buttons").
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Are they sure it wasn't just God farting?
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Just more proof (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just more proof (Score:5, Funny)
Well, we knew it was only a matter of time with all the global warming happening on the other planets too. Maybe we can plant some trees in space or something?
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Idiot. You think the Earth gets "hotter" when it gets closer to the sun, too? That's absolutely not true. Distance from the sun has a minimal impact on temperature. Angle of sunlight through the atmosphere (affected by the tilt in the Earth's axis of rotation) is responsible for the seasons. So if distance from the sun doesn't heat or cool the Earth, imagine what an impact it has on Uranus. Zero.
The amount of light from the sun is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the sun. For Earth, that would mean we receive at aphelion 93.533% of we get at perihelion. On Uranus due to its more eccentric orbit, that figure is 83.716%. Those figures are based on orbital data on wikipedia so may not be entirely accurate, but it does show that Uranus is more susceptible to change based on what part of its orbital cycle it is in than Earth is.
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Best ever was one guy who posted quite seriously that in the neighborhood of Jupiter's Red Spot it was experiencing global warming, locally.
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Of course, the whole "global warming everywhere in the solar system" can be dismissed out of hand by considering the number of events mentioned; in a system of 9(ish) planets, however many moons, and other odd bodies, presenting a list of 4 or 5 which are getting warmer is like proving a coin is heads on both sides because you have evidence that it came up heads half a dozen times when you flipped it 50 times.
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Sigh.
don't get your panties in a knot just because I made a joke with your religion in it.
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you'd think that if the solar system was heating up due to the sun or whatever, the moon might be warming too. we can measure its temp almost as well as we can the earth's, and it is as good a control for what would happen to the temp of a body in this locality without an atmosphere that we have. but the denialists are always more interested in the temperature on Pluto, whose very existence we have only known for less than one of its years.
It's raining helium (Score:1)
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It's all a conspericy! The weather in space is causing the changes on Earth! There is no such thing as global warming - its a myth dreamed up by tree huggers!
Re: Just more proof......Now you've done it! (Score:1)
oblig. (Score:1)
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This leaves open the hypothesis that he is an evil scientist. Certainly denialists believe the world is full of them.
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Right, just like Newton proved F=MA. Until it was disproved by the unknown hypothesis of relativity.
You can't ever prove a hypothesis in the physical sciences. Any hypothesis, however well developed and conforming to the data and however clear the mechanism, can always be countered with "No it's not, it might be something else entirely you don't know about." For example, the unbreakable critique of evolution, geological theory, etc. that God made the earth 6000 years ago, exactly as it would appear if it we
Vogon Construction Marker (Score:5, Funny)
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It's actually a marker laid down by the Vogon construction fleet for the up coming Hyper Space Express Route.
Nope. Eddies in the space-time continuum. ("And this is his sofa, is it?")
Global Warming Link (Score:1)
"Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity....".
I think every /. article should start out with some click-baiting about something. Global warming, Mitt Romney, New Age of Linux, Trayvon Martin, the NSA, and so on. No matter how farfetched or ridiculous the link is just crowbar and shoehorn in something that gets those clicks. Get those clicks!
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You guessed it... (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Helium (Score:2)
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In 4.5 billion years not much has happened (Score:1)
What could possibly go wrong now?
Termination shock vs. conservative shock (Score:5, Interesting)
Neptune orbits at 30 AU, but the "solar system" is understood to extend at least to the Oort cloud, 50000 AU distant. Earth orbits at 1 AU which is well inside the heliosphere, where the solar wind is much more important. That's why these spacecraft have to look at neutral helium atoms, which are the only interstellar wind components that can actually make it down here without being deflected by solar magnetic fields. Outside the solar system they have a rough density of about ten helium atoms per mL.
This has much less influence on the Earth's climate than the "sunspot activity" referred to by politicians, but you can expect to hear a lot of crap soon, e.g. "Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity, but larger context in which the Earth moves has some trends to deal with as well".
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Whether it's human-caused or not, we should be fighting pollution for its own sake. Even if it has no affect on global warming, we should be environmentally conscious.
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Swoden Files: NSA Hacks Solar Wind (Score:1)
According to documents provided by Beatrice Snowden, former NSA Social Activities and Black Ops Administrator, NSA Director General Keith-Tricky-Dick Cheney personally authorized a highly trained cadre of HVAC technicians to construct
The more things change... (Score:2)
"Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity,"....It sort of starts to sound like Medivalist's cant, doesn't it?
In the same sense that, for them, God suffused everything ("Glory be to God, the cow calved today and I didn't stub my toe!"), AGW is referenced ever-more frequently entirely out of context ("Humans are changing the climate, and my coffee was too hot this morning, I think I'll read the paper!").
Funny, that.
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Absolutely. The helium supply on earth is fixed, it's hard to make any without kicking up a big mess, and we're going to run out, just when we need it for air transport because we won't have hydrocarbon fuel any more.
http://www.livescience.com/38990-looming-helium-shortage.html [livescience.com]
Shifting wind? (Score:2)
No problem. We'll just change tack.
"Turbulence in the cloud" (Score:1)
only now? (Score:2)
I have been saying this on /. for 10 years atleast! Now finally someone gets it, yes there are 3 orbits to the earth, the daily, and the yearly and the ??? which comes from the orbit we are in from the solar system spinning inside the galaxy, which "IT" could affect the gravity/orbit of the other 2.
If you take a coin and put it on a table top to spin it and use your finger to spin it, you will see that eventually gravity will affect the orbit as it slows down, but if it did not slow down it would still be a
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