Fortunately the Earth’s magnetosphere deflects most of these away from us. But the field comes back to Earth at the poles and these high energy charged particles come rushing down into the atmosphere (in some cases accelerated by the Earth’s magnetic field).

These particles “excite” the atoms in the air by giving the atoms electrons more energy, which then get rid of the energy again as light. Blue or Red for nitrogen (70% of the air) and Red and Green for the oxygen.

At high altitude oxygen red dominates, then oxygen green and nitrogen blue/red, then finally nitrogen blue/red when collisions prevent oxygen from emitting anything. Green is the most common of all auroras. Behind it is pink, a mixture of light green and red, followed by pure red, yellow (a mixture of red and green), and lastly pure blue.

Just like iron filings line up along a magnetic field, so do the charged particles. We get sheets of air glowing when hit by the particles following the Earth’s field lines, drifting and swirling around. We call them Aurora. Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. The Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (The Southern Lights).

Here is a BBC Stargazing Live video explaining Aurora – it’s aimed at Primary kids so it’s kept nice and simple.

Below is a slide show of Aurora photos taken during January 2012.

Mr G

Sources: Wikipedia, BBC News, BBC Stargazing Live, Various Newspaper websites.

The existence of life outside our planet just got a bit more likely.

Following years of finding planets around other stars, a new study thinks that every star has planets which form from the remaining material in the gas/dust cloud that formed the star. The study – originally published in Nature magazine is also discussed in this BBC News article.

That means there are likely 10 Billion (10,000,000,000) planets that are like Earth in size. Many of those could be the right temperature and have the right chemistry for life to have developed.

One thing to bear in mind – we currently don’t know how to travel faster than light so even if aliens do exist – unless they do know how we might never meet them.

Mr G

Sources: Nature, BBC News

Magnitude 2.4 is not massive on the scale of earthquakes – but it is one of the more noticeable ones for this area.

Most of the earthquakes in North Staffordshire are to do with old coal mines shifting and settling. But this one is to do with the plates of rock in the Earth’s surface shifting. Although the UK is away from the edges the large continental plates (so no large earthquakes) – there are still big pieces of rock moving around. This is why we have mountains and hills in certain parts of the country while others are fairly flat.

The south end of Stoke on Trent (Barlaston on this map) is right at the point where two plates are moving – above that are the hills of the Staffordshire Moors and the Derbyshire Dales. To the west – the Malvern Hills and the Welsh mountains. To the east are “concealed” mountains – the mountains possibly buried by sedimentation when this was sea bed.

The sudden movement of the rocks will release lots of energy (earthquake) that has built up over time. As the sliding rocks get “jammed” and their movement stops, stored energy builds up.

In the UK movement of faults between plates of rock are generally slow, but over years the effects can be seen.

Mr G

Sources: BBC News,  Quarterly Journal of Engineering (images)

The Curiosity Rover has started its journey to Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is biggest robotic probe we have ever sent to Mars, the size of a car. It is 5 times larger and 10 times the mass of the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity that we landed on Mars in 2004. Each was due to run for 90 Mars days – Spirit finally broke in 2010 and Opportunity is still going having driven 21 miles so far. The Curiosity rover is nuclear powered – so it does not rely on solar panels – should be running for 668 Mars days (which are slightly shorter so this is 688 Earth days). It might run a lot longer though if it does as well as the previous two.

Here is the launch…

Landing something that size is a problem – before we wrapped probes in air bags and after a parachute slowed it down they bounced onto the ground.

This one needs a bit more care. It involves a heat shield, a parachute and a rocket powered hovering crane that lowers the rover the last few meters.

This is a computer animation of what the rest of the journey will be like.

It’ll hopefully land at Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012.

Mr G

Sources NASAKennedy YouTube channel, The Guardian, Wikipedia

Everyone loved the Zeppelins (well – the way they were used after the War)

Giving people luxury transport across vast oceans, faster than boats, bigger, more comfortable and a better range than planes.

Then along came the Hindenburg disaster. (There are many videos of YouTube – But I am not going to post one here)

Since then, airships tended to be smaller designs filled with helium. Now a new company Hybrid Air Vehicles is trying to revitalise commercial airships.

With designs that can lift heavier cargo and transport it longer distances, with less fuel, do not need long runways and are cheaper to buy than a cargo plane. You can find facts and figures about these designs here.

The Telegraph has written about HAV too.

It is not just cargo that is set to get the airship treatment – cruise holidays could be heading back to the skies.

Design company Seymourpowell has envisioned a time when we take cruises through the sky. You can read more about this on the Geeks are Sexy website.

Mr G

Sources: BBC, Wikipedia Commons, HAV, Fast Company, The Telegraph, Seymourpowell, Geeks are Sexy

So far they have been looking for things we already know about, just to check the thing is working properly.

Now they have started looking for new Physics – in this case trying to work out why the antimatter and matter created at the Big Bang did not cancel each other out. 1 particle in billions of billions got left behind.

LHCb, the detector looking for the beauty quark has noticed that the matter and antimatter quarks are decaying in different ways.

You can see the red curve is different for matter B particles (left graph) and antimatter B particles (right graph). This extra time might be the reason why more matter existed than antimatter after the universe had started expanding.

At the moment the data is mostly certain (sigma 3.5) – we need a sigma of 5 for a formal discovery to be published. Sigma is a measure  standard deviation, the likelihood of the results being by chance.

• Particle physics has an accepted definition for a “discovery”: a five-sigma level of certainty
• The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect
• Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a “loaded” coin
• The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
• Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
• A five-sigma result is highly unlikely to happen by chance, and thus an experimental result becomes an accepted discovery

What is Tau I hear you ask???

We all know about pi… that number that links the diameter and circumference of a circle. But since we rarely use diameter (we use radius again) we need to add a factor of 2 to all our maths…

e.g.

circumference = 2 x pi x radius

Anything else we do with circles has this extra 2 in it. E.g. Angles in radians – a whole rotation is 2 pi radians.

So along comes Tau where tau = 2 pi

That 2 disappears.

• curcumference = tau x radius
• 1 rotation is tau radians
• Think of the difference that would make to Unit 4 A-level Physics

These videos show how visual arts, music and science can create something quite amazing…

I will be hoping for something similar for the Academy show next year – with Science, Music, Art and Media working together

Mr G

Source: Physics.Org

All very important words to a scientist. They help us explain what our results mean and how we can compare our results and the results of others.

But does the public understand in the same way? This question formed a large chunk of my Masters of Science course when we looked at science communication.

This BBC article sums up the issue quite well (pity it wasn’t around last year… it would have been useful to quote from…) It was triggered by the latest OTT writing about mobile phones and cancer…

Does not knowing something for certain (what ever “certain” is) make us more worried or less worried?

The problem we have (as the public and the scientists) is that lack of evidence FOR a link between things does not mean evidence AGAINST a link (though if 2000 experiments said “no” we get fairly well convinced) – this Digital Lifestyles article from  2 008 sums up the evidence – but notice the “hedging of bets” in the very last sentence…

Mr G

Sources – BBC News, Digital Lifestyles

This BBC webpage has a slide show of pictures from the recent eruptions in Chile.

Update – PopSci also has a gallery of photos.

This ties in well with the Y8 topic on Geology. For more volcano photos you can look back at these old blog posts here, here and here.

Mr G

Sources: BBC News Website