Gosh, you gotta love those scientists. They probably had a quiet chuckle amongst themselves when they decided to create the acronym of WIMP when they came up with a possible explanation to support the theory of dark matter. These theoretical particles are huge and can’t be seen by the naked eye (or telescope for that matter).
The only way they can be ‘seen’ (they don’t absorb or emit light) is by viewing their gravitational impact on other visible objects.
A couple of students from the UK Sheffield University set upon the challenge of determining the ideal number of baubles, length of tinsel and lights necessary to decorate the picture perfect tree. The magical formulas are:
Where: h is the height of your tree in cm.
If you don’t believe me, check out the Uni site for full details, including a cool on line calculator.
Not surprisingly, a whole heap of bacteria. From a measly 60 volunteers, they managed to:
…and what about the cartoon? Well, one of the volunteers was found to have bacteria only found in the soils of Japan (they had never visited Japan before). Another volunteer had bacteria typically only found in ice caps (must have a cold innie).
Gosh, I love scientists….Must be why I ‘married’ one.
Planet WASP 12-b (named so, as it was discovered by the UK SuperWASP team – cool, I want to be in a team with a funky name like that too) is believed to be the closest orbiting planet to its star.
So close, it’s being devoured by it. A gas planet about 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, it has a mean surface temperature of 2,200°C and completes its orbit in just 1.1 days (just the thought make me dizzy). Due to its proximity, scientists believe that WASP 12-b is being boiled off and blown into space and creating a cloud of super heated gas around the planet. Estimates assume it will be ‘consumed’ in the next billion years.
I couldn’t help myself and had to do a bit of a Google hunt on those wacky scientists, who give new interstellar discoveries these rather unmemorable and uninspiring names. Well, sure enough I found my answer and not surprisingly much, much more.
Did you know there is an organisation called the International Astronomical Union (IAU)? One of their tasks is the approval of names to newly discovered celestial bodies and their surface features. A staged process, first you get a series of letters and numbers (typically to define the type of object and accompanying co-ordinate locations. How they give co-ordinates to a rogue planet is beyond me. I tried reading their site for nomenclature rules, but seriously, life is too short).
If the discovery is of significance you can then get a Working Group within the IUA to help in the certification of a ‘common’ name, but (a big BUT), you must follow a series of their rather unique rules. From a logical, structured approach, they obviously felt it was appropirate to let loose when it came to naming.
Here are but a few of the rules:
What about a bit closer to home? Easy, just use the category naming table for features on planets within our solar system. Here are the crater naming requirements for some planets:
I couldn’t help myself and had to make another Usain Bolt cartoon, but this time I teamed him up with our latest subatomic particle friend, Higgs Boson. Higgs is not known for his speed, unlike our friends the photon and neutrino, but perhaps his life span is the more impressive aspect. The Higgs’ mean life span is a measley 1 zeptosecond (10−21). No wonder physicists have found him to be so elusive in nature!
Poor Neutrino, after his initial glory of the being the fastest, and then an error in equipment leading to his rapid demotion, and just recently with Usain Bolt pipping him at the post with an amazing Olympic record time of 9.63s for the 100m sprint.
This cartoon was a true team effort, with my thanks going to Mark from AusMigrate who provided the initial idea.
And for subscribers, consider this extra surprise cartoon for the day as a thanks for all your support!
The experimental proof of the elusive Higgs Boson was announced last week with some claiming that this discovery was to physics, the equivalent of what evolution was to biology. In a nutshell, a Higgs boson is a subatomic particle and is responsible for turning other sub atomic particles into mass, therefore enabling the creation of the stars and planets just after the big bang. This has lead it to be called ‘God’s particle’, as without it, there universe could not have formed
