A Perpetual Motion Machine Is The Key To Free Energy Creation.

Colors of Earth

When we think of our globe from a distance, we generally visualize two colors: blue and green. Water and land. Mostly water, consequently, our planet’s nickname of the blue marble.

Traveling around the globe every 90 minutes covering millions of miles with a focused lens on our beautiful planet from 250 miles above, I’ve captured many beautiful colors beyond blue and green that showcase Earth in new and interesting ways. Some colors are indicative of nature like desert sands and weather like snow. Other colors tell stories of Earth’s climate in bright splashes of yellows and greens of pollen and muted grey tones and clouded filters of pollution.

Blue and green still remain vivid and beautiful colors on Earth from the vantage point of the International Space Station, but here are some other colors that have caught my eye from my orbital perspective.

African violet

Bahamas blues

Tropical in Africa

Yellow desert

Orange in Egypt

Red surprise 

Snow white 

Follow my Year In Space on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram! 

What’s Up for February 2016?

Five morning planets, Comet Catalina passes Polaris and icy Uranus and icy Vesta meet near Valentine’s Day.

February mornings feature Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. The last time this five-planet dawn lineup happened was in 2005. The planets are easy to distinguish when you use the moon as your guide. Details on viewing HERE.

If you miss all five planets this month, you’ll be able to see them again in August’s sunset sky.

Last month, Comet Catalina’s curved dust tail and straight ion tail were visible in binoculars and telescopes near two galaxies that are close to the handle of the Big Dipper. Early this month, the comet nears Polaris, the North Star. It should be visible all month long for northern hemisphere observers.

There will be more opportunities to photograph Comet Catalina paired with other objects this month. It passes the faint spiral galaxy IC 342 and a pretty planetary nebula named NGC 1501 between Feb. 10 – 29. For binocular viewers, the magnitude 6 comet pairs up with a pretty string of stars, known as Kemble’s Cascade, on Feb. 24.

Finally, through binoculars, you should be able to pick out Vesta and Uranus near one another this month. You can use the moon as a guide on Feb. 12, and the cornerstone and the corner stars of Pegasus all month long.

For more information about What’s Up in the February sky, watch our monthly video HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

If you’ve ever bitten into a chocolate-covered bonbon, you may have noticed that the candy’s chocolate coating is remarkably uniform. Inspired by this observation, a group of engineers have investigated how viscous fluids poured over a curved surface flow and solidify; their findings were published this week. 

Rather than heated chocolate, the group used polymer-filled fluids that cure and harden over time. Interestingly, they found that the final shell is quite uniform and that its thickness does not depend on the pouring technique. Instead, they can predict the final shell thickness based on the radius of the mold and the rheological properties of the fluid–specifically its density, viscosity, and curing time. The reason for this is that the time it takes for the fluid to drain and coat the mold is much shorter than the time it takes for the polymer to cure. As a result, the amount of fluid that sticks to the mold depends on geometry and fluid properties - not how the fluid was poured. 

Amateur confectioners rejoice: pouring uniform chocolate coatings may be easier than you thought!  (Image credit: MIT News, video; research credit: A. Lee et al.)

Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiter’s north pole, taken during the spacecraft’s first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on.

NASA got JUpiter bussin it open for the cam like never before and we just not gonna talk about it?

Opal

Austrailia

TOP TEN RAREST GEMSTONES

Note: This list is in reverse order, unlike most of my top ten lists.

1. Tanzanite - Found only in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, it is expected than tanzanite will be mined out within the next twenty to thirty years. Market value: $600-$1000 per karat.

2. Taaffeite - Pronounced ‘tar-fite’ and found in colors ranging from nearly colorless to lavender, mauve and violet, only a handful of these gems have ever been found, mostly in Sri Lanka and Tanzania. Market value: $1500-$2500 per karat.

3. Black opal - Almost all black opal comes from a single mine in New South Wales, Australia. Market value: $2355 per karat.

4. Benitoite - Benitoite is the official state gem of California due to the fact that it is found almost exclusively near the San Benito River, which flows through California. A few specimens have been found in Arkansas and Japan, but its only commercial mine is located in California. It also glows when placed under UV light (picture). Market value: $3000-$4000 per karat.

5. Red beryl - Also known as ‘bixbite’ or ‘Scarlet emerald’, red beryl is found exclusively in the American states of Utah and New Mexico. Market value: $10,000 per karat.

6. Alexandrite - Named for Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Alexandrite has color-changing properties which makes it both unique and rare among gemstones. When exposed to incandescent light (such as candlelight), it appears to have a pink hue; but when exposed to daylight, its color changes from pink to green. You can watch a video of it changing color here (video). Market value: $12,000 per karat.

7. Jadeite - Although its name resembles the semi-precious gemstone jade, jadeite is actually many times more valuable than its less common counterpart. Jadeite is found only in limited quantities in Myanmar. Market value: $20,000 per karat.

8. Musgravite - A precious gem in the same family as taaffeite, this mineral’s color ranges from purple to a brilliant greenish grey. Although very small quantities have recently been found in Greenland, Antarctica, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Madagascar, for several decades there were only eight known specimens of this rare gem. Market value: $35,000 per karat.

9. Painite - Only a handful of these reddish-brown crystals have ever been discovered, and only in Myanmar. Up until a few years ago, only two specimens had ever been found. Market value: $50,000-$60,000 per karat.

10. Pink Star diamond - The Pink Star diamond is a “fancy vivid pink” diamond that was mined in South Africa in 1999. Weighing in at 59.6 karats, it was sold by Sotheby’s for a record $83 million - more than any other gem ever sold. That’s about $1,395,761 per karat.

Vanadinite and Barite -  Mibladen, Meknès-Tafilalet Region, Morocco      

How was planet Earth born tho?

Astronomers think the whole Solar System was born together, so to understand how Earth formed, you have to understand how the Sun formed. 

Stars like the Sun are born in enormous clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The nebula that gave birth to our Sun and planets was 99% hydrogen and helium - the lightest and most abundant gases in the Universe - laced with 1% heavier elements like iron, silicon, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. These elements, which make up most of our planet and our bodies, were made inside earlier generations of stars and released into space when they exploded, so we are quite literally made of stardust. This is still the pattern of elements we find in the Sun today.

About 4.57 billion years ago we think the shockwave from a nearby supernova (exploding star) rippled through our nebula, causing it to become unstable, and the nebula began to collapse under its own weight. It’s a bit like disturbing a house of cards. (This can also happen if nebulae collide, or due to spiral density waves rippling through the Galaxy’s disk. In our case we’re pretty sure it was a supernova because meteorites from the Solar System’s earliest days contain the leftover decay products of short-lived radioactive elements that are only produced in supernovae.) 

The densest parts of the nebula began to collapse the fastest (as they had the strongest gravity) and so the nebula broke up into a cluster of small, collapsing globules of gas and dust. Our little globule was called the Solar Nebula because it would go on to form our Solar System. As the Solar Nebula shrunk as gravity pulled everything inwards, two things happened:

The nebula began to heat up, as gas and dust was squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. Compressing a gas will heat it up.

Nothing in space is still, and the nebula originally had a small amount of spin. Not enough to be noticeable at first, but it was spinning very, very slightly. The only way you wouldn’t get an overall spin is if all the random motions of gas and dust particles in the cloud exactly cancelled each other out - not very likely! As the nebula shrunk, however, that tiny spin got faster and faster as everything was drawn in towards the centre, like an ice skater drawing their arms in when they spin on the ice. As it spun faster and faster, it began to bulge out at the edges more and more, like pizza dough. The end result was that most of the material ended up falling towards the centre of the shrinking nebula, but a small amount was flung out into a flattened disk around it.

(Source)

Collisions between gas and dust particles also helped flatten out the disk, as particles above and below the disk tended to collide and either destroy each other or cancel each others’ motion out until everything stabilised in one flat plane, with everything spinning around in the same direction. So at this point the Solar Nebula looks like this:

(Source)

You’ve probably guessed that the big blob in the centre of the nebula is going to become the Sun, and the disk around it is going to form the planets. So how do we know this happened? One piece of evidence is that the planets, moons, asteroids, dwarf planets etc. mostly orbit the Sun in the same flat plane, the plane of the Sun’s equator, orbit around in the same direction the Sun spins, and spin around their axes in the same directions too, with moons orbiting planets in that direction and plane as well. This is what you would expect if the whole Solar System formed together out of a spinning flat disk. (There are exceptions, of course - the orbits of Mercury, Pluto and many small bodies are quite tilted, and Venus and Uranus spin backwards, but these exceptions have their own explanations which we’ll come to later. The overwhelming majority of everything in the Solar System orbits and rotates in the same plane and in the same direction, so that’s strong evidence we all came out of the same disk.)

The second big piece of evidence for this stage is that we can actually see it happening! When we look at other nebulae we can sometimes see dusty disks surrounding newly forming stars in them:

(Source, source)

This disk is sometimes called the protoplanetary disk, because the planets formed in it, and sometimes called the accretion disk because accretion is a later stage in planet formation.

As the Solar Nebula’s central bulge, now called a protostar, contracted, it got hotter and hotter, and began to glow. Hot things expand, so this hot gas pushed back against the force of gravity pulling it inwards. For now, gravity is winning, causing the proto-Sun to shrink and making it glow hotter and hotter…

The protoplanetary disk had grown hot during its collapse too, and only the toughest grains of interstellar dust (pre-solar grains) had survived without being vaporised. (More on these later!) As the disk settled down into a flat plane though, it stopped collapsing and began to cool down. As it cooled, solid grains of dust began to form again, condensing out of the gas molecule by molecule like raindrops or snowflakes in a cloud. Like the proto-Sun, the disk was made mostly of hydrogen and helium, with a tiny smattering of heavier elements. But hydrogen and helium remain gases down to fractions of a degree above Absolute Zero and are gases even in the coldest regions of space. The other elements, however - oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, silicon, magnesium, sulfur - all condensed out to form microscopic grains of various solid substances. This condensation stage progressed slowly, and what kind of dust grains formed depended on where you were in the disk. 

Close to the proto-Sun, it was very hot. The cloud was denser there, with rings of gas and dust whirling round at high speed and rubbing against each other, and the blazing heat of the young proto-Sun intensifying. As a result, only high-temperature materials could condense out, stuff like metallic iron and grains of silicate minerals. Further out, the temperature was a little cooler. Conditions were right for iron to oxidise and form more minerals, so more rocky dust condensed out and less metallic iron. Even further out, organic materials began to condense out, and carbon-rich sooty material formed. Further out still, water ice could begin to form, and tiny snowflakes condensed out of the cloud just like the ones you see falling from the sky in winter. The distance from the proto-Sun at which this started to occur is called the frost line or snow line, and this was significant. Remember, hydrogen made up most of the disk, and oxygen was the third most abundant element in it after hydrogen and helium, so hydrogen oxide - water - was by far the most abundant compound in the disk and the biggest source of solid grains. There was probably about ten times more solid material just beyond the frost line than there was just inside it, because of the enormous amount of ice that formed there! Finally, even further out, gases like methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and even nitrogen froze in the outermost regions of the disk, where the disk was thinnest, particles moved most slowly and were more spread out, and where the proto-Sun was little more than a distant twinkle in the sky.

(Source)

(Source)

The next phase in planet formation was accretion - you’ve seen it yourself if you’ve ever stepped out on a snowy day and seen snowflakes clinging together on your scarf and gloves, or if you’ve ever seen dust bunnies form under your bed. Accretion simply means “clumping together.” Experiments done on board the International Space Station show that in zero gravity, dust particles will gently stick together through static electricity if given a slight shake. Fluffy aggregations of dust and ice particles began to form, sometimes glued together through localised melting and forming small glassy droplets called chondrules. Exactly why these chondrules formed is a bit of a mystery, although some think static discharge in the disk as rings of dust and gas rubbed against each other and caused small flashes of lightning in the disk. Whirlpools and eddies of gas also helped concentrate dust particles together in one place, causing more gentle clumping and bigger fluffballs to form. As fluffballs grew larger, they began to grow faster, because they had a larger surface area for more dust and fluff to stick to. 

Once fluffballs had grown to a few hundred metres or a few kilometres in size - something computer simulations suggest may have taken a few hundred thousand years - their gravity began to become quite significant. Their interiors were squeezed, compressing fluff into solid rock. Gravity pulled in more dust and fluff and rocks, and soon collisions turned from gentle clumping into violent cosmic traffic accidents. The rocks - now called planetesimals - began crashing into each other at high speeds. Some of them were destroyed and broke up into smaller rocks, but the biggest continued to grow faster and faster as they pulled in more and more material, their surfaces grew larger, and their gravity grew stronger…

(Source)

As planetesimals grew larger, they began to heat up - partly from gravitational compression (just like the Solar Nebula itself!), partly from radioactive decay of certain elements (the individual atoms released only a tiny amount of energy, but accretion formed lots of those atoms into one place, releasing a lot of energy together, and causing things to heat up quite a lot. This was especially true for planetesimals that accreted quickly in the early stages of planet formation, as the supernova explosion that had caused the nebula to collapse in the first place produced quite a few short-lived radioactive isotopes like aluminium-26, which are only highly radioactive for a few million years), and partly from the release of energy during collisions (not much when it was just tiny dust grains sticking together, but huge amounts of energy when it was asteroids colliding!) All this heat at first had a small but noticeable effect - melting ice and driving water out of certain water-rich minerals caused liquid water to flow through some of these planetesimals, precipitating out other minerals that cemented them together, or perhaps chemically altering some of the minerals and causing metamorphism. Some planetesimals however grew so hot they melted, and as they melted, the denser metals sank to the centre (forming cores) while the lighter rocks floated on top (forming mantles and crusts). So some planetesimals remained a relatively primitive mixture of rock and metal, some planetesimals were slightly altered by heat and pressure and fluids, and some got so hot they melted and differentiated into layers.

(Source)

Evidence for this era comes in the form of asteroids and meteorites. Asteroids are thought to be planetesimals that never made it past this stage (and why that happened, I’ll explain soon!), and they show the general pattern we’d expect from the condensation theory - more rocky asteroids on the inner edge of the asteroid belt, while those further out contain more dark, carbon-rich material and those on the outer edge of the belt even contain some ice. Meteorites are also known to be fragments of asteroids that have broken up in collisions and ended up on Earth, so examining them can tell us a lot about planetestimals. 

Some meteorites appear to be jumbled up mixtures of rock and iron, named chondrites. Chondrites consist of a matrix of grains of rock and metal all stuck together (sometimes cemented together by other minerals or the action of water, or sometimes quite crumbly and only weakly stuck together) - the grains seem to have formed from cooling and condensation of solid material in the Solar Nebula, and then clumped together during the accretion phase. Some chondrites have a relatively pristine matrix, while others seem to have been altered by heat, pressure or reactions with water and other fluids, so they show the accretion process in many different stages. Chondrites also contain chondrules - those small, glassy droplets I mentioned earlier - and many contain pre-solar grains (grains of substances like silicon carbide that have a REALLY high melting point and survived from the earliest solar nebula before it began to contract and heat up) and calcium-aluminium inclusions (fluffy aggregates of metal grains rich in calcium and aluminium that formed at high temperatures, showing the earliest stages in accretion). What’s more, several minerals in chondrites can be dated, showing them all to be a similar age - somewhere between 4.57 and 4.55 billion years old. This is strong evidence that they really are bits of leftover planetesimals from the earliest Solar System. Finally, if you ignore gases like hydrogen and helium and focus only on the elements that formed solid grains in the Solar Nebula, the matrices of most chondrites have pretty much the same chemical composition as the Sun - further evidence that they came fresh out of the Solar Nebula.

(Source)

Chondrites also come in three main types - enstatite, ordinary, and carbonaceous chondrites - with slightly different chemical make-ups. Carbonaceous chondrites, for example, contain more oxidised iron and less metallic iron than enstatite chondrites, and are much richer in water-containing minerals and carbon-rich material, giving them a dark colour. It seems that enstatite chondrites formed at a higher temperature than ordinary chondrites, which formed at a higher temperature than carbonaceous chondrites. We think these correspond to asteroids that formed in the inner, middle and outer regions of the asteroid belt respectively, where different grains condensed out.

Some meteorites are also much richer in silicate minerals (more “rocky”) than chondrites and are called stony achondrites. Some contain blobs of metal mixed in with rock, or blobs of rock mixed in with metal - these are stony-iron meteorites or pallasites. Finally, iron meteorites are made almost entirely of iron and nickel. We think these three groups come from the outer layers, middle layers, and core of differentiated planetesimals destroyed in huge collisions respectively.

(Source)

As the Solar Nebula aged, planetesimals and protoplanets continued to collide, growing larger and larger. Enormous collisions were now generating so much heat that all of the largest protoplanets melted and differentiated out into layers. Their gravity was strong enough to overcome the forces keeping their shape and pull equally in all directions, rounding them into roughly spherical shapes. Planets were forming - and they hit each other. It was highly unlikely these collisions would totally destroy any forming planets, though, as their gravity was so strong that after being shattered into pieces those pieces would most likely pull back together and re-form into a larger, combined planet under their own gravity. Slowly but surely, a recognisable Planet Earth appeared out of these collisions, taking about 30 million years to form - so Earth should be about 4.54 billion years old. No rocks on Earth have ever been found that are older than this, except meteorites, so we think this value for Earth’s age is correct. These major collisions, by the way, may explain some of the unusual spins and orbits mentioned earlier that don’t fit the pattern of the Solar Nebula. Everything formed spinning in the same plane and the same direction, and major collisions have wrecked a small minority of them and spoiled the nice neat pattern.

What kind of planets formed depended on what kind of material had condensed out of the Solar Nebula. Close to the Sun where only rocky and metallic dust had formed, rocky and metallic planets formed - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Further out, the asteroid belt contains some carbon-rich material, and even ice-rich rocks on its outer edge. Just beyond the snow line, there was a LOT more solid material to build planets out of, causing enormous balls of rock and ice to form. These globes were so large they could hold on to the light hydrogen and helium gas that made up most of the Solar Nebula, and ballooned to enormous sizes, becoming the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. (Jupiter is the reason the asteroid belt never formed into a planet - with lots of sticky snow and ice around to grow into a huge, fast-forming planet, Jupiter formed earlier than the other planets. Jupiter is huge, and its gravity stirred up the asteroid belt, flinging most of the asteroids out of it and leaving the belt mostly empty, and perturbing others into eccentric, inclined orbits that regularly collided with each other. So asteroids in the belt found themselves either too spread out from their neighbours to collide with them and grow any bigger, or forced into violent, high-speed collisions that were more likely to cause them to break up and shatter than stick together and grow. Thanks to Jupiter, collisions slow enough to facilitate planet growth just couldn’t happen!) Further out still, the ice giants Uranus and Neptune formed from more diverse and colder frozen gases like methane as well as just water, and they too grew large enough to hold on to thick atmospheres of hydrogen and helium. However, these planets formed from material that was more spread out and orbited the Sun more slowly, so it took longer for them to build up their icy cores. By the time they’d grown large enough to hold on to their gaseous envelopes, the Sun had blown most of the gas left in the nebula away into outer space, and so Uranus and Neptune contains more ice and less gas than Jupiter and Saturn. Even further out, where Pluto is, material was too widely spaced out and moving too slowly to accrete into large planets, and remained a bunch of frozen tiny comet nuclei and dwarf planets, made of rock, frozen gases, and water ice as hard as steel is on Earth. So the nebular theory explains the structure of the Solar System too - four small, rocky inner planets close to the Sun, an asteroid belt, four giant gassy and icy planets, and finally small icy comets and dwarf planets far out.

(Source)

So Earth was born from collisions, a molten ball of rock and iron constantly being bombarded by everything from dust to rocks to planetesimals to protoplanets. Earth even suffered a few collisions with small planets - the last big one happened after Earth had differentiated into a rocky outer mantle and iron inner core, stripping some Earth’s outer layers off. The Moon probably formed from the debris of this collision, which is why the Moon is chemically very similar to the outer layers of the Earth but doesn’t have a large iron core like Earth does.

(Source)

Our newborn molten Earth was a terrible place to live, but slowly, the debris of planet formation began to clear away. Planetesimals either collided with planets, were flung out of the Solar System altogether, or ended up safely stored in the asteroid belt or the deep outer Solar System beyond Neptune. Collisions slowed down, although they’ve never entirely stopped (ask anyone who’s ever seen a shooting star!), and the young Sun - now finally stabilising and stopping its contraction as nuclear reactions began in its core - blew away most of the remaining gas and dust with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles. The early Solar System was still more violent than it is today by a long way - we think the outer planets have moved since they first formed, due to gravitational tugs from each other and from planetesimals, leading to a second, much smaller round of collisions around 4 billion years ago. (This time it was a bombardment by asteroids and comets - no more major collisions of planets!) But in general, Earth had cooled and a solid outer crust had formed by 4.4 billion years ago, as this is the age of Earth’s oldest minerals. Earth would have had an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with some nitrogen and steam, and perhaps some methane and ammonia, belched out from volcanoes or directly from the previously-molten ground in a process called outgassing. Steam may have been driven out of minerals, or it may have arrived as ice from further out in the Solar System beyond the snow line from asteroids or comets. Either way, as Earth cooled further, steam in its atmosphere began to cool and condense, and millions of years’ worth of rain slowly began to form the first seas and oceans. Earth was slowly becoming the planet we know today.

(Source)

(Source)

(Source)

The hellish conditions on Earth at this time would have killed any human time traveller - intense heat, blasted by solar radiation with no ozone layer to protect them, heavy meteorite bombardment, a poisonous atmosphere and a total lack of breathable oxygen. But these conditions are similar to today’s hot springs and deep-sea volcanic vents, places where quite alien microbes thrive. Earth wouldn’t have been suitable for us - but it was the perfect place for some microbes. With liquid water, a source of energy, and abundant carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements required for life on Earth’s surface, the stage was now set for life to begin.