stufftoblowyourmind:

What if Earth were a cube?

Back in 1884, a Swiss astronomer by the name of Arndt made headlines when he claimed to have discovered a very curious planet in an orbit beyond Neptune — a surprisingly cubical planet.

You know, like Bizarro World from the Super Man comics.

Of course even in 1884, everyone knew this was bunk. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “The Cubical Planet” in their Nov. 16 edition. As informative as it is stuffy, the Gilded Age article interviews physicist Dr. Theodore Vankirk, who first dismisses the prospect of a square planet as pure hooey, and then proceeds to wax scientific about just what a cube world would be like.

It all comes down to gravity. On our spherical Earth, gravity pulls “down” us toward the planet’s center of mass. So on a flat surface, we naturally stand up straight.

A hypothetical cube world, however, would feature six square faces and you’d only encounter up/down gravity toward the centers of these regions. As you traveled closer and closer to the edge, it would feel like you were walking up an incline and it would be difficult to stand up straight because the gravitational pull would draw you toward the center of the massive cube, which wouldn’t lie directly beneath your feet. Standing on the “edge” of this cube world would feel like standing atop a mountain range.

Contemporary cosmologist Dr. Karen L. Masters also finds the topic of cube worlds fascinating — especially the atmospheric possibilities. As she explains in Cornell’s Ask a Physicist feature, all six faces of the plant aces would boast temperate weather, centralized bodies of water and none of them would feature polar or equatorial weather.  What’s more, the pointy edges of the cube would actually poke through the planet’s atmosphere like titanic mountains. Here’s her explanation:

Let’s assume that the atmosphere goes up 1000 km above the Earth (when it is a sphere), and so is a sphere itself of radius 6400km+1000km=7400km. This should be about the right number. A cube with the same volume as the spherical Earth would have a side 10,000 km (6,400 miles) long so the corners are 8700 km from the centre! They would definitely stick out above the atmosphere.

As I was poking around the net on this topic, I also ran across this amusing tidbit from a 1964 edition of the Rice University campus paper. A mysterious, well-dressed gentleman had been observed hanging out around the Houston-area campus, distributing literature about an alien, cubical planet.

The man claimed that the planet was called Aocicinori and that it was the 63rd in a system of 96 planets. He showed off maps of the world, as well as some colorful illustrations of the creatures that lived there. The Rice University article reveals that these materials were created by Scotland L. Moore, an outpatient form the Houston State Psychiatric Institute.

As best I can tell, these are the maps and sketches in question.  Oh, and be sure to check out our podcast episode on this topic.

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About the author: Robert Lamb is a senior writer and podcaster at HowStuffWorks, where he co-hosts Stuff to Blow Your Mind with Julie Douglas. He has a love for monsters, an aversion to slugs and a hankering for electronic music.

Originally published at STBYM: What if Earth were a cube?

electricspacekoolaid:

New Evidence Found for Europa’s Vast Ocean

Based on new evidence from Jupiter’s moon Europa, astronomers hypothesize that chloride salts bubble up from the icy moon’s global liquid ocean and reach the frozen surface. Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Brown—known as the Pluto killer for discovering a Kuiper-belt object that led to the demotion of Pluto from planetary status—and Kevin Hand from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have found the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa’s frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.

Hand emphasizes that, from an astrobiology standpoint, Europa is considered a premier target in the search for life beyond Earth; a NASA-funded study team led by JPL and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have been working with the scientific community to identify options to explore Europa further. “If we’ve learned anything about life on Earth, it’s that where there’s liquid water, there’s generally life,” Hand says. “And of course our ocean is a nice salty ocean. Perhaps Europa’s salty ocean is also a wonderful place for life.”

“We now have evidence that Europa’s ocean is not isolated—that the ocean and the surface talk to each other and exchange chemicals,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor and professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. “That means that energy might be going into the ocean, which is important in terms of the possibilities for life there. It also means that if you’d like to know what’s in the ocean, you can just go to the surface and scrape some off.”

The finding, based on some of the first data of its kind since NASA’s Galileo mission (1989) to study Jupiter and its moons, suggests that there is a chemical exchange between the ocean and surface, making the ocean a richer chemical environment, and implies that learning more about the ocean could be as simple as analyzing the moon’s surface. “The surface ice is providing us a window into that potentially habitable ocean below,” says Hand, deputy chief scientist for solar system exploration at JPL.

Since the days of the Galileo mission, when the spacecraft showed that Europa was covered with an icy shell, scientists have debated the composition of Europa’s surface. The infrared spectrometer aboard Galileo was not capable of providing the detail needed to definitively identify some of the materials present on the surface. Now, using current technology on ground-based telescopes, Brown and Hand have identified a spectroscopic feature on Europa’s surface that indicates the presence of a magnesium sulfate salt, a mineral called epsomite, that could only originate from the ocean below.

“Magnesium should not be on the surface of Europa unless it’s coming from the ocean,” Brown says. “So that means ocean water gets onto the surface, and stuff on the surface presumably gets into the ocean water.”

Read

(via scinerds)

moderation:

50 Years After First Interplanetary Probe, NASA Looks To Future

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Fifty years ago, on Dec. 14, 1962, reporters gathered for a press briefing at NASA headquarters and heard an unearthly sound: radio signals being beamed back by a spacecraft flying within 22,000 miles of Venus.

The Mariner 2 mission to Venus was the first time any spacecraft had ever gone to another planet.

These days, vivid photographs showing scenes from all around the solar system are so ubiquitous that people might easily forget how mysterious our planetary neighbors used to be.

“The planets were all known to exist by the Mariner 2 mission in 1962, but very little was known about them, and much of what was believed to be true about them turned out to be wrong,” says Erik Conway, a historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built the Mariner 2 spacecraft.

(via NPR) (LISTEN)

(via thescienceofreality)

circleoftyrants:

inothernews:

There’s a hexagon at Saturn’s north pole.

THERE’S.

A.

HEXAGON.

Here’s an explanation, from Physicists at University of Oxford

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/saturns-strange-hexagon-recreate.html?sms_ss=email

Things are even more awesome when they’ve been explained with science.

inothernews:

There’s a hexagon at Saturn’s north pole.

THERE’S.

A.

HEXAGON.

discoverynews:

Organics Discovered on Mercury! New results from the MESSENGER spacecraft not only confirm that the planet closest to the sun has ice inside shaded craters near the north pole, but that a thin layer of very dark organic material seems to be covering a good part of the frozen water.

The smallest planet in the Solar System has joined the Organics Club…

leadingtone:

Thermal imaging of Saturn’s moons Mimas (L) and Tethys (R) reveals “Pac Man” patterns of surface temperature. Scientists believe the heated regions are the result of electrons bombarding the part of the surface which faces the direction of orbital travel.

(via scinerds)

nationalpost:

Scientists find Jupiter-dwarfing rogue planet floating through the cosmic void
CFBDSIR2149-0403 is the unromantic name of the ‘rogue planet’ scientists have found floating through the empty space between stars only 100 light years away from Earth.

Scientists have a hard time figuring out just how common rogue planets, that is planets without stars, are because the primary way to see extra-solar bodies is from the light that their suns reflect off of them.

However now that the planet has been found, the absence of a star actually allows scientists to examine the planet more closely, as it no longer is overwhelmed by the light from a sun. (ESO/L. Calçada/P. Delorme/Nick Risinger/R. Saito/VVV Consortium)