Friday Science Highlights – Oceans of Fire, Distended Atmospheres, and a New Meaning for Super-Massive

Science Photo of the Week

It’s a beautiful sight to see fog rising from a lake or stream early in the morning, hovering over the surface and making the air cool and moist. In a different way can we admire the enormous quantities of smoke pouring out of Canada and Alaska, enveloping the upper states of America and passing into the arctic regions of the North Pole and Greenland. This has been one of the worst years for wildfires (a record-breaking season for Alaska) and the devastation of brush and undergrowth will undoubtedly have regrettable consequences. Nevertheless, the power of nature is one we science fiction writers repeatedly turn to for inspiration, and this picture makes me wonder what kind of elements would have to be present to make up a literal sea of fire? Imagine an ocean made up of some substance that in liquid form is constantly burning and sending off some sort of smoke or fume. How much more deadly and terrifying if the burn was invisible?

Pluto is Orbiting the Sun in a Coma

Fear not, the planet is not comatose – rather, researchers are now gathering data that shows Pluto’s atmosphere is being blown back by the solar wind, much like the fragile atmospheres of comets (called the coma – get it? I will not apologize).

Mars and Venus experience a similar loss of their atmospheres to the power of solar radiation, due to the fact that they have no magnetic field protecting the gases from the ferocity of the sun.

But not only does Pluto’s stretched atmosphere make it look like tadpole, it even has the tail – made out of plasma, of all things! What this means for Pluto is not yet entirely clear, but we can expect more updates as data continues to come in over the next few months.

What would you do in a story with a planet that has a tail made of plasma? Comment below!

Super-Sized Black Hole Discovered in Average Sized Galaxy

This is it – a scientific game changer. Boy do we love those. As soon as we get a little comfortable with a subject, the universe presents an exception and calls everything into question. Then again, how well can we say we really know black holes?

Black holes fascinate me, perhaps because they are so complicated, perhaps because the forces they exert are so incredibly powerful. Nothing escapes the crushing force of a black hole, not light, not gravity, and certainly not matter. They suck in and spin up such a disturbance that they are the drain around which the matter of the universe floats. These pits of darkness are everywhere – it is believed that they exist at the center of most galaxies, and how many galaxies are in the universe? Well, a lot.

Black holes come in different sizes and rotate at different speeds, giving us a wide variety of scenarios to observe. Each one has what is called an “event horizon” – the boundary beyond which gravity becomes so strong that satellite matter no longer orbits the black hole but falls into it. And previously, there seemed to be some sort of sensible relationship between the size of a black hole and its respective galaxy. But that may all change, since a recent study that was meant to observe “normal” sized black holes has accidentally discovered a black hole 7 billion times the size of our sun residing at the center of a relatively average sized galaxy.

What does it mean???? How has this black hole not gobbled up everything in this puny little galaxy already? Its mass is a tenth the size of all the matter that surrounds it. Putting aside the mystery of the very existence of the galaxy, what kind of amazing things could it be undergoing with the gravitational spin of a 7 billion sun black hole gnawing at its innards?

This week I read a short story (“A Galaxy Called Rome”) that was written in the earlier, golden years of science fiction, and I found it interesting that the author called what we know now as a black hole a “black galaxy.” Perhaps this is Rome. 

1969 Moon Landing Footage in Two Minutes

And here’s a nice little nugget of nostalgia for you – this week marked the anniversary of man’s historic landing on the moon. If you weren’t lucky enough to be a witness to the event back in 1969, fear not – Scientific American has you covered with a new, two minute compilation of the footage, from lift-off to landing to the safe return to Earth eight days later.