In the late afternoon yesterday (February 13, 2011) sunspot 1158 released a decent-sized solar flare, a magnetic eruption on the Sun. This was classified as an M6.6 flare, which is above average in explosive energy, but hardly up to the nastiness we experienced in late 2003 when the Sun was throwing an epic hissy fit.
From “First earthward-heading solar flare of the cycle” by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer.
More Kepler news earlier this week, and this time it’s a doozy. The press release, via Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society: “Kepler announcement today: More than a thousand exoplanets including one 6-planet system”
“The number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date [is] 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size — up to twice the size of Earth — to larger than Jupiter.” In addition, they note “Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.”
Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait puts it in his usual subdued fashion in “Motherlode of potential planets found: more than 1200 alien worlds!”
This is incredible! Even though I was expecting a number like this, actually hearing it for real is stunning. In 15 years we’ve found about 500 planets orbiting other stars, but in the almost two years since Kepler launched it may have easily tripled that number! Now, to be careful: these are candidate planets, which means they have not been confirmed. But in most cases these look pretty good, and if these numbers hold up it indicates that our galaxy is lousy with planets. They’re everywhere.
Google is teetering towards being On Notice, if not Dead to Me yet.
/. “Google CEO Says Privacy Worries Are For Wrongdoers”
In a surprising statement to CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporter Maria Bartiromo, ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’
Yeah, and you shouldn’t mind getting arbitrarily pulled over and searched by the cops for no reason if you don’t have anything to hide.
The key, apparently, is to drink coffee with friends.
Drinking coffee could help to cut the risk of advanced prostate cancer, a US study suggests.
and
Fresh evidence adds weight to suggestions that loneliness makes cancer both more likely and deadly.
BBC: “Hubble sees most distant galaxies”
Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured its deepest view of the Universe, producing images of galaxies that have never been seen before.
As Bad Astronomer Phil Plait says,
I haven’t heard much from the Hubble Space Telescope folks since it was refurbished earlier in the year. Maybe that’s because they’ve been busily working on putting together an incredible image, the deepest ever taken in the near infrared. Feast upon this:
LA Times — “Expo Line project costs and delays are ballooning”
The rail line from downtown L.A. to Culver City is $220 million over budget and a year behind schedule. Officials hope to open part of the route next year.
I gotta get one or both of these T-shirts from zero per gallon:
ComputerWorld: “High-Energy Linux: Linux & the Large Hadron Collider”
The biggest, most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams, is finally up and running, with Linux in control.
Beware the Atom-Smashing Penguin! ;)
The New Yorker: “I Dreamed I Met William Burroughs”, poem by Franz Wright.
I met William Burroughs in a dream. It was some sort of bohemian farmhouse, and he was enthroned, small and skeletal, in a truly gigantic red armchair.
LA Times — “Santa Muerte in L.A.: a gentler vision of ‘Holy Death’
The sect is linked to narcotics trafficking in Mexico. As it moves north, it takes on the benign glow of virtue.
The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujosbrujos — witch doctors — in his family.
The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or “Holy Death,” a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.
About two dozen devotees recited a rosary and stood and sat on cue to offer praise to this unconventional icon one Sunday at a storefront shrine near MacArthur Park.
“Angel created by faith,” they chanted, “allow the power in me to be released.”
Santa Muerte is not a Catholic saint, and in recent decades her popularity in Mexico, especially among the poor and criminal classes, has led to clashes with church officials and government authorities. Her first adherents included Mexican prisoners, drug dealers and prostitutes, and those in legitimate but dangerous nighttime work, such as security guards and taxi drivers.
“It’s sort of like the Virgin for people on the edge,” said Patrick A. Polk, a folklorist and curator at UCLA’s Fowler Museum.