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| Moon story gets sillier; invert palm strike | May 19, 2012 12:08 AM PDT | url | discuss | + share |
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Added 1 new A* page:A* reader Latrans, whose nifty A* art inverts you may recall, hit upon one of a recent page that came out particularly niftily:
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A chunk has been knocked out of the silly yet persistent notion that the Moon was created by debris from a primordial collision between the Earth and a made-up Mars-sized planet; the story goes that the core of that planet sank into the Earth's, but the light stuff was blown off and gathered in orbit to form the Moon.
Sound kind of dumb? I think it does, and I don't know why real scientists would spend their time trying to disprove such a ludicrous idea, but some of them have, comparing the isotopic ratios of titanium found in Moon and Earth material; these ratios tend to vary quite a bit among asteroids and other bodies that formed in different areas of the solar system, so the thinking is that if the shell of another planet blew off after hitting Earth and formed the Moon, then the Moon should have a different isotopic signature than the Earth. (It occurs to me that if parts of that made-up planet went into both Moon and Earth, then maybe they would even out, but what do I know--anyway I don't believe any such thing could have happened. :P)
Their finding? The isotopic signatures of the Moon and Earth are pretty much identical. So this rules out some of the relatively more straightforward Earth + mystery planet = Moon ideas. Still, according to that linked article, proponents of the idea have already switched tactics and proposed other outlandish explanations to support their mystery planet.
Why are some people so dedicated to believing in another planet knocking the Moon out of Earth on extremely scanty "evidence"? You got me. Obviously, a vast conspiracy is afoot! =P
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| Coils from Mars, cheaper A* T-shirts =o | May 18, 2012 2:18 AM PDT | url | discuss | + share |
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Added 1 new A* page:A tweet tipped me off to this article about funny coil patterns found by an Arizona State graduate student looking through high resolution photos sent back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter via its HiRISE camera ("High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment"), "built under the direction of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp." Student Andrew Ryan has counted "about 269 of these lava coils just in one region on Mars, Cerberus Palus":
image by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (source)
So yeah they're thought to be patterns of dried lava; such coil patterns occur here on Earth, on the surface of lava floes on the island of Hawai'i. Says Ryan: "The coils form on flows where there’s a shear stress – where flows move past each other at different speeds or in different directions." The Martian lava coils are bigger than terrestrial ones; the largest found on Mars so far has been about 30 meters / 100 feet across (neither the article nor Wikipedia will tell me how big Hawai'ian ones get, though :P). That photo above covers an area about 500 meters across ("1640 feet").
HiRISE, incidentally, is a pretty powerful camera: weighing 64.2 kg, it consists of "a 0.5 m (19.7 in) aperture reflecting telescope, the largest so far of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures of Mars with resolutions of 0.3 m/pixel (about 1 foot), resolving objects below a meter across." And it turned around and took this pretty keen photo of Earth and its Moon from the orbit of Mars in 2007 (it had achieved Martian orbit in March 2006):
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)
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A* T-shirts are more affordable than ever! Well okay I've only got the nice minimalistic A* logo T-shirt in the A* store, but it is now a spiffy $16, down from $18. $14.40 of that $16 goes to the print-on-demand T-shirt manufacturer, so eh I guess you don't have to worry about me retiring on T-shirt profits any time soon ;). Anyway I was looking at it because I'm thinking of adding some more T-shirt designs, and I'll want to order them first to make sure they come out right, and I didn't want to have to pay $18 per shirt, even if some of it would work its way back to me eventually (in theory) :P. So yeah, (relatively) cheap T-shirts! Take that, internet! I'll let you know when the new designs are up, of course--probably be a week or two before I can get the prototypes shipped to me so I can check 'em over.
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| Supermassive Andromeda; Lockhart's Lament | May 17, 2012 2:16 AM PDT | url | discuss | + share |
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Added 1 new A* page:~~~~~~
Came across this NASA illustration of the Andromeda galaxy's core structure, as it was understood in 2005:
illustration by NASA, ESA and A. Schaller (for STScI) (source)
The caption reads:
| This artist's concept shows a view across a mysterious disk of young, blue stars encircling a supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The region around the black hole is barely visible at the center of the disk. The background stars are the typical older, redder population of stars that inhabit the cores of most galaxies. Spectroscopic observations by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the blue light consists of more than 400 stars that formed in a burst of activity about 200 million years ago. The stars are tightly packed in a disk that is only a light-year across. Under the black hole's gravitational grip, the stars are traveling very fast: 2.2 million miles an hour (3.6 million kilometers an hour, or 1,000 kilometers a second). |
Also in 2005, the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda was estimated to be between 110 and 230 *million* solar masses--quite a bit bigger than A*'s ~ 4 million! So it can definitely sling stars around faster than our own galactic core can.
In 1993, Hubble had imaged Andromeda's core, revealing what appeared to be a two-lobe structure:
image by NASA (source)
It's the darker of the two lobes that is actually the true center containing the supermassive black hole; the bright lobe is thought to be "a disk of stars in an eccentric orbit around the central black hole." Keep in mind though that the red filter used for that photo would not have captured the bright blue stars at the galactic center, which would explain why the core looks comparatively dim.
In 2000 (I think?) the Chandra X-ray telescope had taken a crack at Andromeda's core:
image by NASA (source)
The intensity of the X-ray source in the center revealed what almost had to be a million-solar-mass-class supermassive black hole in there, while various other X-ray sources around it were attributed to X-ray binaries: stars being sucked into nearby compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes; "infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays."
("Andromeda" was also the name of a mysterious central character in the 1961 BBC miniseries, "A for Andromeda": radio signals from "a distant galaxy" gave instructions for constructing an advanced computer, which in turn created a humanoid organism, played by Julie Christie. Sounds interesting! But! "As was common practice at the time, the BBC's copies of the serial were junked after broadcast and the bulk of the serial remains missing to this day." Jeez!)
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An interview with me about working on A* just went up on the Evan Yeti Community Blog, in which, among other things, I reveal my plans (in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have revealed them just yet... >_>) for galactic domination via webcomics.
Evan Yeti is also the name of (warning: sound) a webcomic made by the interviewer, concerning the adventures of a yeti (aka "abominable" snowman) named Evan.
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An engineer friend sent me a link to (PDF format) Lockhart's Lament, an article admirably advocating teaching math as an art, rather than just a bunch of formulas to memorize and use on meaningless numbers. It was written (my source is this) by mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart in 2002, and I have to say that if I had been taught math the way he's proposing...I'd probably remember a lot more beyond basic algebra than I do now. :P
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I've been reading the beginning of Gary Martin's The Art of Comic Book Inking that a miraculously wonderful reader got for me off my now-empty A* Amazon Wish List, and it's starting to become clear to me, even hilariously so, that what I'm doing on A* these days is almost the exact opposite of traditional comic book inking. For instance, one particular pet peeve of Martin's is inkers who get exterior line weights wrong--using thick lines to delineate the side of the figure illuminated by the light source, and thinner lines on the shaded side. And--today's A* page being a prime example--I seem to do that almost all the time, to a ridiculous degree. I have no idea why! I kind of like it that way, though. :P Maybe because it sort of creates a tension with the heavy black shadows on the interior of the figure? Or probably just because I have no idea what I'm doing! :D
And there's a passage where he says of working with a brush that you shouldn't, for instance, use it to draw a nostril in a single stroke; rather, you should outline the nostril, then fill it in, as this will help you preserve the shape established by the pencils. And I had to sort of chuckle to myself at that, since I'm going straight to ink and skipping pencils, and a single stroke is like the only way I ever draw nostrils.
Not that I am saying I'm doing things the right way; in fact, it's kind of nice to know I'm doing them exactly the wrong way. It's easier to break the rules once you know them, so I'm finding this book quite interesting! Seriously though, I guess the way I'm working now--straight off with ink on the blank page--has a lot more in common with painting than with traditional comic inking. I did a good deal of painting (way) back in college, so I suppose that's probably why this method feels much more comfortable to me. Except that sometimes I find myself reverting to an inking/illustrating-style arm position--resting half the palm on the table or drawing board--which I really shouldn't do because somehow I mess it up and lean on it or something and it makes my forearm and wrist sore. What I *mean* to do is to have the whole arm off the paper, like a painter does when working on a canvas. Sometimes I get this right but it seems like I have a tendency to relapse into resting it on the drawing surface when I'm doing a whole lot of (relatively) detailed little lines. Hm HM Hm. Well some day maybe I will figure this all out.
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