#american-astronomical-society

[astroimages]

Horizonte de Eventos - Episódio 51 - Resumo do Quarto Dia do Congresso da Sociedade Astronômica Americana

[stardustsomewhere]

who else is up late making ur abstract for the AAS cause you said u were gunna get more research done before you write it and then u just didnt......

[michaelgabrill]

Imaging X-ray Polarimetery Explorer (IXPE) Conference Presentation at the 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society

Phil Kaaret (ST12) gave a talk on “Particle acceleration and magnetic field geometry in the eastern jet of the microquasar SS 433” at the session on Black Holes on 6/12/24. At the end of his talk, Kaaret promoted the upcoming IXPE GO cycle 2 and the NICER/IXPE workshop that will be a hybrid meeting held […] from NASA https://ift.tt/vV0wymE

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

“I recently went to the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, and this little kid came and played the game. Then, an hour later, he brought his dad and said, ‘You have to try to beat my score!’ He told his dad about everything in the game, like, ‘Oh, get the exoplanet, or there’s a black hole going over there.’ It shows we are melding two generations of people coming together to play the game. Just watching his son explain the game to him as I explained to his son and seeing that he was actually really excited to play, is why I do what I do.”

[avarkriss]

listen. listen to me so carefully right now. (if you're in the eclipse path/planning on viewing). please don't stare directly at the sun tomorrow. i am begging you - do not stare at it. if you got eclipse glasses off of amazon/other, please put them on in your house and make sure you can't see anything; if you can still see like regular sun glasses, they are not safe for eclipse viewing, you will burn your retinas, and we cannot fix that. eclipse glasses should be iso/ce certified, and aas (american astronomical society) approved. please make smart choices and protect your eyes. please.

[dualcon]

Our Charity Fundraising Results

I wanted to share us handing over the funds we raised at the convention to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) WV Chapter. We were able to raise $1,056 between our charity auction and raffle. I wanted to thank everyone who helped out. I want to thank all the celebrities who donated along with Pithy Production, the Board Room, Kanawha Valley Astronomical Society, and anyone I…

[mindblowingscience]

A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn't match any known structure or formation mechanism. The Big Ring, as the structure has been named, could mean that we need to amend the standard model of cosmology. The discovery, led by astronomer Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire, was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January, and is reported in a pre-print paper available at arXiv.

Continue Reading.

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS THE GREAT RED SPOT ON JUPITER MADE OF??

Blog#415

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024.

Welcome back,

The Great Red Spot is an anticyclone, a long-lasting area of high pressure on Jupiter creating a persistent storm.

Located in Jupiter's Southern Hemisphere, it is the largest storm in our solar system, appearing as a giant red spot on Jupiter's surface. It has existed for the last 150 years, possibly even longer according to NASA.

The spot may have been discovered in 1664 by English scientist Robert Hooke or in 1665 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini, according to the American Physical Society. It is possible one or both men observed either the shadow of one of Jupiter's moons or a different spot. An illustration with a red spot on Jupiter similar to the modern spot appeared in 1831, and the spot has been observed consistently since 1878 when it was re-discovered by American astronomer C.W. Pritchett.

The Great Red Spot is an anticyclone, rotating counterclockwise once about every six days, according to The Planets, and produces winds up to 580 mph (933 kph), according to Smithsonian.

On Earth, anticyclones are created when high atmospheric pressure causes air from higher altitudes to be forced down. They are often associated with clear, warm, and dry weather. Cyclones on the other hand form around a central area of low pressure causing air to rise and are associated with cloudy, windy and rainy weather.

While anticyclones don't cause storms on Earth on the same scale as a cyclone, they can contribute to storms and inclement weather conditions, such as Anticyclone Hartmut during the 2018 cold wave in the British Isles, according to Weather and Radar.

Though scientists understand how anticyclones form on Earth, no one knows for sure exactly how or when the Great Red Spot formed, according to the Planetary Society.

It's also not clear why it is so incredibly long-lived, though scientists have several guesses. One hypothesis is that it is trapped between two opposite-flowing jet streams which act like two conveyor belts, keeping the Great Red Spot spinning on both sides, according to Insider.

Another is that the vertical flow of heat and cold inside the storm helps keep it alive. A significant factor in its longevity is the fact that Jupiter, as a gas planet, has no surface, and thus there is no friction to slow the storm, according to JStor Daily.

Originally published on https://www.space.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, July 6th, 2024)

"COULD LIFE EXIST ON TITAN??"

[autumnmobile12]

My Hero Academia: Healthcare?

I don't know if any fanfic writers will find this useful or not, but I think the information is interesting and worth speculation in the My Hero setting. This also applies to any fanfic writers in the anime fandoms who want to have more immersive and in-depth writing. Obviously, writing fics that are 'accurate' is not a requirement since the point is to have fun, but here's some knowledge to use (or not use) if anyone is interested.

Obviously, Deku's been in the hospital a lot. A lot of the characters are injured and in the hospital a lot. But for all the hospital visits, nobody in the series is going to be bankrupted by astronomical healthcare costs. (Yes, that's a jab at America's system.) And it's not because the Pros, especially the popular ones, have money.

Here's why:

Quick rundown of how healthcare in Japan works: Everybody receives healthcare, everybody has health insurance. In Japan, your employer is legally required to provide you with health insurance. If you are unemployed, you will be on a community healthcare plan. There is also a plan for citizens over the age of 75. This also applies to foreigners who have established permanent residence of three months or longer.

Article 25 of Japan's Constitution is paraphrased as follows:

“all people shall have the right to maintain a certain standard of healthy and cultured life” and that “the state shall try to promote and improve the conditions of social welfare, social security, and public health” for this purpose.

I'm not going to reiterate the system in its entirety, but if you would like to learn more, this site here (the Article 25 quote I used is also found on that page) has a brief and comprehensive explanation of how healthcare is handled. However, one thing I am going to mention that is relevant for Deku and other Pros is the threshold out-of-pocket expense.

In Japan, citizens enrolled in healthcare do not spend more than ¥90,000 per month out of pocket, protecting them from financial disaster.

(To Americans, this may sound like a sweet deal, but hold your horses because Japan also funds this system through heavy taxation. Medical procedures are expensive and people will be paying for them one way or another.)

The question that needs asking now is how does this system apply to the hero society? Well, first off, since My Hero does take place in a slightly futuristic setting, we could take into consideration the system has been revised.

Assuming not much as changed, are heroes that operate their own agency technically considered business owners and are required to insure their employees and sidekicks?

Or...

Because they are all government employees, is the Safety Commission responsible for insuring all heroes and sidekicks no matter what they rank in their popularity?

Personally, I think it would be the latter since, in the coldest sense of the word, the heroes are essential to the Commission in upholding their system. So that makes them an asset. The Commission would want to protect its assets because as shady as they are, their own system could work against them. They certainly don't want heroes going on strike for lack of benefits or complaining the government doesn't take care of their people. So I assume it's the Commission who is covering insane healthcare costs on behalf of heroes.

(And since the system is probably funded by taxpayers' money, that also feeds into the prevalent societal discontent that's ongoing throughout the series.)

Now what about Deku and his classmates since they have not graduated and are not officially licensed yet? Honestly, I think it's probably UA itself that insures the students. That probably has to do with accreditation and so on, which is another matter entirely, but again, the backing is likely coming out of the Commission (and taxpayers') pockets.

And there you have it. Happy writing, happy research.

[cerealxperimentslain]

let me show you an example of liberal zionist dishonesty and intentional misinterpretation

ID: a post by @transmascpetewentz:

“>oh look a new leftist youtuber who seems cool!

>checks their blog

>sees a video about "colonialism"

>asks them if they are talking about real colonialism or are just being antisemitic

>"what's the difference?"

>pulls out a chart explaining the difference between anti colonialism and antisemitism

>"it's a good video sir"

>look inside

>it's a 2 hour long rant about how (((they))) are in so many positions of power/are well respected for being good at their jobs and how that is allegedly bad because of palestine”

End ID.

taken at face value, this post would seem to point out a leftist youtuber who made a video of a half baked rant of nothing but antisemitic conspiracy theories. that would be bad, if that were the case. but since he so graciously mentioned the youtuber in question, i went and looked her up. Dr. Fatima has 12 videos total, and only one of them mentions colonialism in the title or thumbnail, this one:

i highly highly recommend watching the whole video (it is captioned), but it is quite long so the tldr is: this is a video mostly about the building of telescopes on colonised Hawai’ian land, specifically the sacred mountain Mauna Kea, and how scientific pursuit is not exempt from perpetuating colonialism. Dr. Fatima also talks about the genocide in Gaza, and the colonisation of Palestine, to contextualise and draw parallels between the two situations (Hawai’i & Palestine). Here’s a quote from two hours and ten minutes into the video:

“I spent SO much time back in grad school trying to understand why so many of my colleagues, who I knew to be reasonable and intelligent, seemed so wholly unperturbed at what our field [astronomy] was doing. And in recent months I found myself asking the exact same question about Palestine.”

this person either didn’t watch the video, or he did watch the video and didn’t understand a word that was said. there’s also the possibility that he did watch the video and understood perfectly what it was about, and maliciously decided to wildly mischaracterise the video to discourage his followers from watching it, or any of Dr. Fatima’s other videos.

because there is no good faith explanation for how you get “it's a 2 hour long rant about how (((they))) are in so many positions of power/are well respected for being good at their jobs and how that is allegedly bad because of palestine” from this:

Transcript:

“So I think we have enough context now that I can just come out and say the thesis of this video: the plan to build TMT on Mauna Kea, as well as the building of the telescopes that preceded it, is inherently colonial. Hawaii is a settler society where the self-determination of the native population that was nearly genocided out of existence is secondary to the utility their land brings to the United States, primarily as a military outpost, but also whatever else it can be useful for. At one point that was plantations, today it’s generally tourism, but on Mauna Kea, it is astronomy. The land the telescopes are on make them inseparable from the colonial power that controls that land. And this dynamic is underscored by the consistency of objections to their building by Indigenous voices.

And here is the really hard a to swallow part: any benefit astronomers careers gain from the use of telescopes on that land comes at the direct cost of indigenous people's alienation from it. If you think I'm being unfair because Hawaii's colonization already happened and building one more telescope doesn't change anything, you're still paying more attention to made up things like property laws and the American government than the material conditions of people's access and relationship to land. Calling the police to arrest native elders who are just standing on their land so we can build another telescope is not dissimilar to Israel bombing the shit out of Palestinians just living on their land so it can build another settlement. And if you think I'm being dramatic by comparing genocide in Palestine to building a telescope, then you're still paying more attention to the purported intention of astronomers than the long standing, violent, exploitative and still present colonial institutions that grant them power. (e.g. the police, the military, universities, government agencies, etc) Colonization is an ongoing process and the difference between Hawaii and Palestine is that in the former, there aren't enough indigenous people left to pose an existential threat to settlers, and the latter, the indigenous population is still the slight majority. Or at least they still were as of this 2018 report. [98] Honestly, this year might tip it.

And if you think I'm exaggerating the connection between the two, please remember that the United States government is involved in both far off places for exactly the same reason: their use as military outposts, one in the Middle East and one in the Pacific. That is the joint cause of both of these conflicts today: the geopolitical interests of Western imperialism. This is why you might have seen those multi-nation calls for liberation recently: Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Haiti, Free Hawaii, and beyond— not as separate issues, but as different interconnected manifestations of the same problem.”

End transcript.

in using this video to be anti-palestinian, he is also being incredibly racist and anti-indigenous by downplaying the colonisation of Hawai’i. implying that the desecration of the sacred land of a colonised people doesn’t count as “real colonialism”, interpreting “scientists in the imperial core shouldn’t participate in exploitative and colonialist practices” fucking somehow as “being good at their jobs and that is allegedly bad”. i guess?? honestly i have no fucking idea what that last paragraph in the post is even supposed to be about.

like i keep wondering if i somehow have the wrong video, but i don’t know of any other leftist youtubers called dr. Fatima who made a video over two hours long about colonialism that brings up Palestine. the more obvious explanation is that he just made shit up

i guess this bit 37 minutes into the video probably hit too close to home

ID: a quote in front of a green background:

"Let me be clear: Antisemitism in the U.S. is a real and dangerous phenomenon, most pressingly from the alt-right white-supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016. To contend against these and other antisemitic forces with clarity and purpose, we must put aside all fabricated and weaponized charges of "antisemitism" that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors in the U.S."

--Bernie Steinberg

End ID.

[quiltofstars]

M105 (upper right) // Drew Evans

M105 was discovered by Méchain in 1781, just a few days after he discovered M95 and M96. However it was not added to Messier's catalog until 1947 when Helen Sawyer Hogg (1905-1993) discovered Méchain's letter with a description of it.

Briefly, Helen Hogg was a American-Canadian astronomer who pioneered research into globular clusters and variable stars. Notably, the was the first female president of several astronomical and scientific organizations, among them the National Science Foundation, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Canadian Institute. She was considered a "great scientist and a gracious person" over a career of sixty years.

[opencommunion]

"The resistances to slavery were the principal grounds for the radically alternative political culture that coalesced in the Black communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of revolutionary, liberal, and nationalist impulses among Europeans in North America. Among Blacks, the rule of law was respected for its power rather than for any resemblance to justice or a moral order. For the slaves, the rule of law was an injustice, a mercurial and violent companion to their humiliations, a form of physical abuse, a force for the destruction of their families, and an omnipresent cruelty to their loved ones. Even for free Blacks, the rule of law was too often a cruel hypocrisy, impotent in protecting their tenuous status. For both the slaves and the free Blacks, even as revolutionary fervor increased among the colonists, the masquerades of the law were becoming more transparent: the domestic slave trade displaced the African slave trade in the late eighteenth century. With this new economy of slavery, the separation of slave families by sale and the kidnapping and enslavement of free Blacks increased astronomically.

To the very contrary, the rebellious colonial ruling class sought to invest the rule of law with a moral authority sufficient to justify their rejection of British authority. As slave traders and merchants, as slaveholders and propagandists, as lawyers, ministers, and civil authorities for slavery, the most influential men and women among the emergent American community used the rule of law as the warrant for the justness of their claims and practices. By their law they hunted, traded, bought, and sold other human beings; waged war against, whipped, dismembered, burned, hanged, and tortured their property for possessing a human will; treated their colonist servants and laboring classes with the customary disdain of the English gentle classes. Now this same law was to serve their revolutionary ambitions, their right to liberty.

On this score, the Blacks, particularly the slaves, possessed conflicting opinions. The 5,000 Blacks who fought for American independence fought for liberty, and had a very different vision of national freedom than the one imagined by their countrymen. But as we shall see, many thousands of Blacks would fight against independence, not for love of imperial Britain but because they understood that Black freedom was otherwise unobtainable. Like the Native American nations that sided with the British, the Black Loyalists sought to employ the British army to serve their own interests, for their own ends. Long after the defeated British had departed, their allies, the Native Americans and the Blacks, continued the struggle for liberty. For generations to come, Native Americans recognized America as a colonial power, and Blacks read the new nation as tyrannical. Their suspicion of and opposition toward American society survived in the political cultures of Blacks and Native Americans for the next two hundred years."

Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (1997)

[wayti-blog]

Condor telescope reveals a new world for astrophysicists

("A view created by Condor and computer technologies of extremely faint shells of ionized gas surrounding the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis. Credit: Condor Team")

"A new telescope called the "Condor Array Telescope" may open up a new world of the very-low-brightness universe for astrophysicists. Four new papers, published back to back in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) this month, present the first scientific findings based on observations acquired by Condor. The project is a collaborative led by scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)."

"The new "array telescope" uses computers to combine light from several smaller telescopes into the equivalent of one larger telescope and is able to detect and study astronomical features that are too faint to be seen with conventional telescopes."

"In the second paper, Shara and colleagues used Condor to reassess an image of the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis or "Z Cam" obtained by the Kitt Peak National Observatory 4-meter telescope back in January 2007. The image showed a partial shell of gas surrounding Z Cam, which Shara speculated was emitted by a "new star" recorded by Chinese Imperial astrologers in the year 77 BCE."

continue reading article

[michaelgabrill]

LISA Representation at the American Astronomical Societys Winter Meeting

At the recent winter AAS meeting, Michael Katz volunteered for t at the PhysCOS booth talking with folks about PhysCOS and other areas of NASA and astrophysics. Katz also participated in the Multimessenger LISA workshop that took place on the Saturday and Sunday before the official start of the meeting. He worked with a group […] from NASA https://ift.tt/KP3rCcU

[sakuraswordly]

This is an image of a small portion of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1991. This research is being presented at the 181st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, AZ on January 6, 1993, by Dr. Jeff J. Hester, of Arizona State University. The Cygnus Loop marks the edge of a bubble-like, expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion which occurred about 15,000 years ago. The HST image shows the structure behind the shock waves in the Cygnus Loop with unprecedented clarity. This is allowing astronomers, for the first time, to compare directly the actual structure of the shock with theoretical model calculations. Besides supernova remnants, these shock models are important in understanding a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, ranging from winds in newly-formed stars to cataclysmic stellar outbursts. The supernova blast wave is slamming into tenuous clouds of interstellar gas. This collision heats and compresses the gas, causing it to glow. The shock acts as a searchlight by revealing the structure of the interstellar medium. Hubble's detailed image shows the blast wave overrunning dense clumps of gas. Though HST can reveal details about as small as our Solar System, the clumps are still unresolvable. This means that they must be small enough to fit inside our Solar System, making them relatively small structures by interstellar standards. A bluish ribbon of light stretching left to right across the picture might be a knot of gas ejected by the supernoya. This interstellar "bullet," traveling over three million miles per hour (5 million km), is just catching up with the shock front (which has been slowed by plowing into interstellar material). The Cygnus Loop appears as a faint ring of glowing gases about three degrees across (six times the diameter of the Full Moon), located in the northern constellation Cygnus the Swan. The supernova remnant is within the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy and is 2,600 light-years away. Supernova remnants play an important role in stellar evolution by enriching space with heavy elements, and triggering new star formation by compressing interstellar gas. Technical Details: The photo is a combination of separate images taken in three colors. Oxygen atoms (blue) emit light at temperatures of 30,000 to 60,000 degrees Celsius (50,000 to 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit). Hydrogen atoms (green) arise throughout the region of shocked gas. Sulfur atoms (red) form when the gas cools to around 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit).

Source: The Cygnus Loop Supernova Remnant