From the IOL Newsletter: Google Earth dives into ocean exploration 03 February 2009 at 06h00 IOL News Sab Francisco - Online search powerhouse Google launched a new service on Monday to allow Internet users to explore the depths of the world's oceans from the comfort of their homes on dry land. The "Ocean in Google Earth" feature allows users to virtually dive beneath the water surface, explore 3D underwater terrain and browse ocean-related content contributed by marine scientists. Nearly four years after Google Earth enabled users to zoom in to view streets, and later explore galaxies in the sky, the latest version of the software allows virtual travellers to cross miles of unchartered territory underwater. |585|1103815|0|165|AdId=2207670;BnId=1;itime=727981591;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;"|585|1103815|0|165|AdId=2207670;BnId=1;itime=727981591;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;" Ocean in Google Earth was unveiled formally at the San Francisco Academy of Sciences by former vice president Al Gore, acclaimed oceanographer Sylvia Earle and Google executives. "With this version of Google Earth... you can now dive into the world's oceans that cover almost three quarters of the planet and discover new wonders," said Gore, a champion in the battle against climate change. Gore pointed out a history feature at Google Earth that lets people see how parts of the planet are changing over time, often due to human influences. "This is an extremely powerful educational tool," Gore said. "My hope is that people around the world will use Google Earth to see for themselves the reality of the climate crisis." Google Earth users can click icons on sea maps to see video of creatures that thrive in those locations. Internet surfers can opt to swim virtually undersea as though they are sharks, dolphins or turtles. Ocean was inspired in part by a teasing comment Earle made to Google Maps and Earth director John Hanke. Earle was at an event when she praised the California firm's online mapping service but suggested it be called "Google Dirt" because it ignored the 71 percent of the planet covered by water, Hanke recounted. "Talk about a dream coming true," Earle said as she stood behind an aquarium lectern and demonstrated Ocean on a large wall screen. "They compressed what it took me 50 years to understand; that the world is really blue. People talk about the world being green, but without the blue there wouldn't be any green." Google Earth users will be able to record videos of undersea adventures, overlay their own voices or sound tracks, and then share them with friends, according to Hanke. Musician Jimmy Buffett, whose hits include "Margaritaville" and "Son of a Son of a Sailor," is collaborating with Google to use Earth and Ocean to let fans travel with him on a coming concert tour starting in the Hawaiian Islands. Buffett joked that he has lived by the bumper sticker motto: "Without geography, you are nowhere." "You will see the travels of Jimmy," Buffett said. "It's fun, but it makes people aware of what we need to do to protect this beautiful planet and its blue heart." By allowing users to explore underwater volcanoes, hunt for whales and learn more about shipwrecks, Google says Ocean offers a platform for everyday Internet browsers to link up with the scientific community. The feature includes 20 different layers of content contributed by leading ocean explorers, scientists and researchers, such as photos and videos of "hot spots" around the world and information on marine protected areas. It also has an animal tracking device in which users can follow animals that have been tagged by satellite. "Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the planet's surface but only a little bit has been explored," said Florence Diss, head of Google's geographical partnerships, referring to findings that humans have examined just five percent of world's seas. Diss added that the decision to expand Google Earth to cover the world's oceans "is not about making money." Diss would not reveal the project's cost. Google employees, affectionately referred to as "Googlers," worked on Ocean as part of a company program that allows workers devote work time to causes about which they are passionate. Google said its updated version of Earth will also take visitors to Mars, using "street view" style images taken by a Rover exploration craft that recently manoeuvred about that planet. Since its launch in June 2005, Google Earth has been downloaded more than 400 million times. From IOL NEWS www.iol.co.za  July 02 2008 at 08:21PM

Paris - Millions of textbooks depicting our Solar System as spherical have got it all wrong, according to studies of data sent back from deep space by NASA's venerable probe, Voyager 2. The Sun's zone of influence - called the heliosphere - turns out to be seriously asymmetrical, like an egg, and not round, they say. The heliosphere comprises space dominated by the solar winds, or particles blasted out by the Sun. It goes way beyond the orbit of Pluto, which circles the Sun at a distance of nearly six billion kilometres. Launched in 1977 on a historic trek of the outer planets, Voyager 2 has now crossed the turbulent boundary, known as the "termination shock," where the heliosphere yields to interstellar space. Its twin probe Voyager 1, crossed the same threshold four years earlier at a different spot some 1,5 billion kilometres farther from the Sun. This difference proves that the heliosphere is not even close to perfectly round, but is oblong, like an egg, according to the studies, released by the British journal Nature on Wednesday. The "bottom" of the egg is flattened by a permanent clash of particles, as the outbound solar wind smashes into atomic debris hurtling in from interstellar space, the scientists theorise. Voyager 2 also crossed the "termination shock" several times within the space of a single day, showing that the boundary is in perpetual flux, like the ebb-and-flow of a tide. University of Arizona astronomer Randy Jokipii paid tribute to the two Voyagers, which have been operating faithfully since their launch in 1977. Crossing the heliosphere "opens a new age of exploration," said Jokipii. "The stream of in situ and remote data from the outer reaches of the heliosphere has revolutionized our view of how the Sun interacts with the Galaxy." For decades to come, the two spacecraft - speeding outward at more than 17 kilometres per second - will be the only source of local observations of the far limits of our Solar System. The probes were originally sent to fly by and observe Jupiter and Saturn, which they did with thrilling results, including the discovery of active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, and unknown intricacies in Saturn's rings. After that their mission was reconfigured to explore space beyond the Solar System's planets. They became the first man-made objects to enter these cold, dark reaches, powered by long-life nuclear batteries in the absence of solar energy. The spacecraft are so distant that commands from Earth, travelling at light speed, take more than a dozen hours to reach them. Each Voyager logs approximately 1,6 million kilometres per day. Should they ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, the two probes each carry a time capsule, a "golden record" of sounds and images about life on Earth in the mid-1970s. - Sapa-AFP

Cosmic explosion leaves astronomers in awe  IOL News, February 19 2005 at 11:05AM

By Richard Ingham Paris - Stunned astronomers on Friday described the greatest cosmic explosion ever monitored - a star burst from the other side of the galaxy that was briefly brighter than the full moon and swamped satellites and telescopes. The high-radiation flash, detected on December 27 last year, caused no harm to Earth but would have literally fried the planet had it occurred within a few light years of home. Normally reserved skywatchers struggled for superlatives. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Rob Fender of Britain's Southampton University. "We have observed an object only 20km across, on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the sun emits in 100 000 years." "It was the mother of all magnetic flares - a true monster," said Kevin Hurley, a research physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. Bryan Gaensler of the United States' Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, described the burst as "maybe a once per century or once per millennium event in our galaxy". "Astronomically speaking, this explosion happened in our backyard. If it were in our living room, we'd be in big trouble." The blast was caused by an eruption on the surface of a known, exotic kind of neutron star called SGR 1806-20, located about 50 000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Sagittarius and about three billion times farther from us than the sun. A neutron star is the remnant of a very large star near the end of its life - a tiny, extraordinarily dense core with a powerful magnetic field, spinning swiftly on its axis. When these ancient star cores finally run out of fuel, they collapse in on themselves and explode as a supernova. There are millions of neutron stars in the Milky Way but, so far, only a dozen have been found to be "magnetars": neutron stars with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. Magnetars have have a magnetic field measuring about 1 000 trillion gauss, hundreds of times more powerful than that of any other object in the Universe. To give an idea of this in earthly terms, the field is so powerful that it could strip the data off a credit card at a distance of 200 000 kilometres. SGR 1806-20 is an even rarer bird. It is one of only four known "soft gamma repeater" (SGR) magnetars, so called because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays in a mammoth burst. Why this happens is unknown. One theory is that the energy release comes from magnetic fields which wrestle and overlap because of the star's spin and then snap back and reconnect, creating a "starquake" rather like the competing faults that cause an earthquake. What is sure, though, is that the outpouring of energy is massive. The SGR 1806-20 spewed out about 10 000 trillion trillion watts, or about 100 times brighter than any of the several "giant flares" that have been previously recorded. Despite this energy loss, the strange star did not even pause, Britain's Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) said. "SGR 1806-20 spins once in only 7,5 seconds. Amazingly, the December 27 event did not cause any slowing of its spin rate, as would be expected," the RAS said. The flare, detected by satellites and telescopes operated by Nasa and Europe, was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. For over a tenth of the second, it was actually brighter than a full Moon, and briefly overwhelmed delicate sensors, RAS said. Two science teams, formed by observations provided by 20 institutes around the world, will report on the blast in a forthcoming issue of the British weekly journal Nature. Many questions will be thrown up by the event, including the intriguing speculation that the dinosaurs may have been wiped out by a similar, closer gamma-ray explosion 65 million years ago, and not by climate change inflicted by an asteroid impact. "Had this happened within 10 light years of us, it would have severly damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said lead-author Gaensler. The good news, he noted, is that the nearest known magnetar to Earth, 1E 2259+586, is about 13 000 light years away. - Sapa-AFP

Captured: an exploding giant star   IOL News February 04 2005 at 12:00PM

By Steve Connor, Science Editor The Hubble space telescope has captured a dramatic moment when a searing pulse of light from an exploding star races across the vast interstellar void of deep space. Hubble's latest image, released on Thursday, shows the "echoing" of light as it continues its journey from the exploding red supergiant star at the centre of the picture. Just as sound produces an echo, the same happens for light as it propagates out from the explosion to illuminate huge swirls of dust clouds that are thought to have emanated from a previous outburst.

Hubble has offered convincing proof of black holes

Astronomers first detected the exploding red supergiant star back in 2002 and, since then, have captured a series of dramatic images as the light pulse explosion expands at a speed of about 300 000km per second. The exploding star is known as V838 Mon and is about 20 000 light years away from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, on the very edge of the Milky Way. During its 15 years, Hubble has offered convincing proof of black holes, provided insight into huge explosions of energy known as gamma ray bursts, captured images of the earliest galaxies that formed after the Big Bang and measured the speed at which the universe is expanding. Escalating costs of repair and maintenance of Hubble has led Nasa and the White House to consider putting the space telescope into retirement - its batteries will run out in two or three years' time if they are not replaced.