October 1, 2017 | Page 3 of 14 | Science Of Cycles News and Research

Four Large Earthquakes In Iceland’s Most Powerful Volcano

Four large earthquakes occurred in the Bárðarbunga volcanic system last night, the largest earthquakes since the 2014-2015 volcanic eruption.

The first earthquake of magnitude 3.9 on the richter scale occured at 23:02 last night, followed by a 3.2 earthquake at 23:03. The third quake hit the volcano at 23:26 and measured 4.7. The fourth earthquake of magnitude 4.7 occured 16 minutes past midnight.

An earthquake measuring 4.1 took place in the volano earlier this week and several earthquakes hit the volcano in September.

Bárðarbunga is the largest and most powerful volcano in Iceland. It is located under the northern part of the Vatnajökull glacier in South Iceland, Europe’s largest glacier. The Bárðarbunga volcanic system is approximately 200 km (120 miles) long.

Earthquakes of magnitude 4.7 are the largest quakes that have occured in the Bárðarbunga caldera since the 2014 eruption. The Holuhraun eruption began on August 31st 2014 and lasted until February 28, 2015. It is the largest eruption in Iceland since 1783 and produced a massive lava field of more than 85 km2 (33 square miles) in the middle of the island.

Science Of Cycles Update – October 26th 2017

Hi Folks, the last two months have been very trying for many of us. If I took one more trip in helping assist in the multitude of recent disaster, I might come home to an empty house. Not really, but my wife and kids would probably cut off the electricity making sure I don’t type one letter or answer the phone.

So every now and then over the last 20 years I have to put out an sos call to my community to keep Earth Changes Media and Science Of Cycles alive. This is one of those calls. I am putting two links below for you assistance to keep us on life-support. One link you can place any amount you wish, on the others they are set for certain amounts so you can just select one of your choice.

Lots more news and research outcome coming your way…………….

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of a community, which in my opinion, is a few years ahead in knowledge of Earth and the connection to the universe.
Cheers, Mitch

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Astronomers Discover Sunscreen Snow Falling On Hot Exoplanet

Astronomers at Penn State have used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a blistering-hot giant planet outside our solar system where the atmosphere “snows” titanium dioxide — the active ingredient in sunscreen. These Hubble observations are the first detections of this “snow-out” process, called a “cold trap,” on an exoplanet. This discovery, and other observations made by the Penn State team, provide insight into the complexity of weather and atmospheric composition on exoplanets, and may someday be useful for gauging the habitability of Earth-size planets.

“In many ways, the atmospheric studies we’re doing now on these gaseous ‘hot Jupiter’ kinds of planets are test beds for how we’re going to do atmospheric studies of terrestrial, Earth-like planets,” said Thomas Beatty, assistant research professor of astronomy at Penn State and the lead author of the study. “Understanding more about the atmospheres of these planets and how they work will help us when we study smaller planets that are harder to see and have more complicated features in their atmospheres.” The team’s results are published in October 2017 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

Beatty’s team targeted planet Kepler-13Ab because it is one of the hottest of the known exoplanets. Its dayside temperature is nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Kepler-13Ab is so close to its parent star that it is tidally locked, so one side always faces the star while the other side is in permanent darkness. The team discovered that the sunscreen snowfall happens only on the planet’s permanent nighttime side. Any visitors to this exoplanet would need to bottle up some of that sunscreen, because they won’t find it on the sizzling-hot daytime side.

The astronomers didn’t go looking for titanium oxide specifically. Instead, their studies revealed that this giant planet’s atmosphere is cooler at higher altitudes — which was surprising because it is the opposite of what happens on other hot Jupiters. Titanium oxide in the atmospheres of other hot Jupiters absorbs light and reradiates it as heat, making the atmosphere grow warmer at higher altitudes. Even at their much colder temperatures, most of our solar system’s gas giants also have warmer temperatures at higher altitudes.

Intrigued by this surprising discovery, researchers concluded that the light-absorbing gaseous form of titanium oxide has been removed from the dayside of planet Kepler-13Ab’s atmosphere. Without the titanium oxide gas to absorb incoming starlight on the daytime side, the atmospheric temperature there grows colder with increasing altitude.

The astronomers suggest that powerful winds on Kepler-13Ab carry the titanium oxide gas around, condensing it into crystalline flakes that form clouds. Kepler-13Ab’s strong surface gravity — six times greater than Jupiter’s — then pulls the titanium oxide snow out of the upper atmosphere and traps it in the lower atmosphere on the nighttime side of the planet.

“Understanding what sets the climates of other worlds has been one of the big puzzles of the last decade,” said Jason Wright, associate professor of astronomy at Penn State, and one of the study’s co-authors. “Seeing this cold-trap process in action provides us with a long sought and important piece of that puzzle.”

The team’s observations confirm a theory from several years ago that this kind of precipitation could occur on massive, hot planets with powerful gravity. “Presumably, this precipitation process is happening on most of the observed hot Jupiters, but those gas giants all have lower surface gravities than Kepler-13Ab,” Beatty explained. “The titanium oxide snow doesn’t fall far enough in those atmospheres, and then it gets swept back to the hotter dayside, revaporizes, and returns to a gaseous state.”

The researchers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to conduct spectroscopic observations of the exoplanet’s atmosphere in near-infrared light. Hubble made the observations as the distant world traveled behind its star, a transit event called a secondary eclipse. This type of transit yields information on the temperature of the components of the atmosphere on the exoplanet’s dayside.

“These observations of Kepler-13Ab are telling us how condensates and clouds form in the atmospheres of very hot Jupiters, and how gravity will affect the composition of an atmosphere,” Beatty explained. “When looking at these planets, you need to know not only how hot they are, but also what their gravity is like.”

Solar Research On The Sun’s Chromosphere

At any given moment, as many as 10 million wild snakes of solar material leap from the Sun’s surface. These are spicules, and despite their abundance, scientists didn’t understand how these jets of plasma form nor did they influence the heating of the outer layers of the Sun’s atmosphere or the solar wind. Now, for the first time, in a study partly funded by NASA, scientists have modeled spicule formation.

For the first time, a scientific team has revealed their nature by combining simulations and images taken with the NASA’s IRIS spectrograph and the Swedish Solar Telescope of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). The study, led by Dr. Juan Martinez-Sykora, researcher at Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (California, USA) and astrophysicist at the University of La Laguna (ULL), is published today in the journal Science.

The observations were made with IRIS (NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph), a 20 cm ultraviolet space telescope with a spectrograph able to observe details of about 240 km, and the Swedish Solar Telescope, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. This spacecraft and the ground-based telescope study the lower layers of the solar atmosphere, where the spicules form: chromosphere and the region of transition

In addition to the images, they used computer simulations whose code was developed for almost a decade. “In our research,” says Prof. Bart De Pontieu, also author of the study, “both go hand in hand. “We compare observations and models to figure out how well our models are performing, as well as how we should interpret our space-based observations.”

Their model is based in the dynamics of plasma – the hot gas of charged particles that streams along magnetic fields and constitutes the Sun. Earlier versions of the model treated the interface region as a uniform, or completely charged, plasma, but the scientists knew something was missing because they never saw spicules in the simulations.

The model they generated is based on plasma dynamics, a very hot partially ionized gas flowing along the magnetic fields. Previous versions considered the lower atmosphere to be a uniform or fully charged plasma, but they suspected something was missing since they never detected spikes in the simulations.

The key, the scientists realized, was neutral particles. They were inspired by Earth’s own ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere where interactions between neutral and charged particles are responsible for numerous dynamic processes. In cooler regions of the Sun, such as the interface region, plasma isn’t actually uniform. Some particles are still neutral, and neutral particles aren’t subject to magnetic fields like charged particles are. Scientists based previous models on a uniform plasma in order to simplify the problem – modeling is computationally expensive, and the final model took roughly a year to run with NASA’s supercomputing resources – but they realized neutral particles are a necessary piece of the puzzle.

“Usually magnetic fields are tightly coupled to charged particles,” said Juan Martínez-Sykora, lead author of the study and a solar physicist at Lockheed Martin. “With only charged particles in the model, the magnetic fields were stuck, and couldn’t rise to the surface. When we added neutrals, the magnetic fields could move more freely.”

Neutral particles facilitate the buoyancy the marled knots of magnetic energy need to rise through the boiling plasma and reach the surface. There, they snap producing spicules, releasing both plasma and energy. The simulations closely matched the observations; spicules occurred naturally and frequently.

“This result is a clear example of the breakthrough that can be achieved by combining powerful theoretical-numerical methods, state-of-the-art observations and supercomputing tools to better understand astrophysical phenomena,” explains Prof.Fernando Moreno-Insertis, solar physicist at IAC, Professor ar the ULL and supervisor of the work Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA) of Juan Martínez-Sykora. “The great complexity of many of the phenomena that occur in the solar atmosphere forces us to consider at the same time the dynamics of partially ionized gas, the magnetic field and the radiation-matter interaction in order to be able to explain them satisfactorily.”

“This result is a clear example of the breakthroughs that can be achieved by combining powerful theoretical-numerical methods, state-of-the-art observations and supercomputing tools to better understand astrophysical phenomena,” explains Fernando Moreno-Insertis, solar physicist at IAC, Professor at the ULL and supervisor of the DEA thesis (equivalent to a master´s thesis) of Juan Martínez-Sykora. “The great complexity of many of the phenomena that occur in the solar atmosphere forces us to consider at the same time the dynamics of partially ionized gas, the magnetic field and the radiation-matter interaction in order to be able to explain them satisfactorily.”

The scientists’ updated model revealed something about solar energy transport as well. It turns out the energy in this whip-like process is high enough to generate Alfvén waves, a strong kind of wave scientists suspect is key to heating the Sun’s atmosphere and propelling the solar wind, which constantly bathes the solar system with charged particles from the Sun.

The National Academy of Sciences awarded Prof. Mats Carlsson and Prof. Viggo H. Hansteen, both developers of the model and authors of the study, with the 2017 Arctowski Medal in recognition of their contributions to the study of solar physics and the Sun-Earth connection. Juan Martínez-Sykora included the effects produced by the presence of the neutral particles.

How Neanderthals Influenced Human Genetics at the Crossroads

When the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa, they passed through the Middle East and Turkey before heading deeper into Asia and Europe.

Here, at this important crossroads, it’s thought that they encountered and had sexual rendezvous with a different hominid species: the Neanderthals. Genomic evidence shows that this ancient interbreeding occurred, and Western Asia is the most likely spot where it happened.

A new study explores the legacy of these interspecies trysts, with a focus on Western Asia, where the first relations may have occurred. The research, published on Oct. 13 in Genome Biology and Evolution, analyzes the genetic material of people living in the region today, identifying DNA sequences inherited from Neanderthals.

“As far as human history goes, this area was the stepping stone for the peopling of all of Eurasia,” says Omer Gokcumen, PhD, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. “This is where humans first settled when they left Africa. It may be where they first met Neanderthals. From the standpoint of genetics, it’s a very interesting region.”

The study focused on Western Asia. As part of the project, scientists analyzed 16 genomes belonging to people of Turkish descent.

“Within these genomes, the areas where we see relatively common Neanderthal introgression are in genes related to metabolism and immune system responses,” says Recep Ozgur Taskent, the study’s first author and a UB PhD candidate in biological sciences. “Broadly speaking, these are functions that can have an impact on health.”

For example, one DNA sequence that originated from Neanderthals includes a genetic variant linked to celiac disease. Another includes a variant tied to a lowered risk for malaria.

The bottom line? The relations that our ancestors had with Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago may continue to exert an influence on our well-being today, Gokcumen says.

He led the study with Taskent and Mehmet Somel, PhD, from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Co-authors included Nursen Duha Alioglu and Evrim Fer from the Middle East Technical University, and Handan Melike Donertas from the Middle East Technical University and European Bioinformatics Institute.

Early contact with Neanderthals, but relatively little Neanderthal DNA

In addition to exploring the specific functions of genetic material that the Turkish population inherited from Neanderthals, the study also examined the Neanderthals’ influence on human populations in Western Asia more broadly.

The region is thought to be where modern humans first interbred with their Neanderthal kin. And yet, research has shown that people living in this area today have relatively little Neanderthal DNA compared to people in other parts of the world.

The new study supports this finding. The research team analyzed genomic data from dozens of Western Asian individuals, and observed that, on average, with a few exceptions, these populations carry less Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, Central Asians and East Asians.

The differences in Neanderthal ancestry between Western Asian and other populations may be due to the region’s unique position in human history, Taskent says.

Tens of thousands of years ago, when modern humans first left Africa to populate the rest of the world, Western Asia was the first stopping point — the only land-based route for accessing the rest of Eurasia.

People who live in Europe, Central Asia and East Asia today may be descended from human populations that treated Western Asia as a waystation: These human populations lived there temporarily, mating with the region’s Neanderthals before moving on to other destinations.

In contrast, the ancestors of present-day Western Asians had a deeper connection to the region: They settled in Western Asia instead of just passing through. These ancient humans had contact with Neanderthals, too, but two factors may have diluted the Neanderthals’ influence.

The first was a constant influx of genetic material from ancient Africans, who had no Neanderthal DNA and who continued to pass through Western Asia for thousands of years as human societies grew in Europe and Asia. The second was the hypothesized presence of a “basal Eurasian” population — a population of Western Asians that never interbred with Neanderthals.

“Both of these factors may have helped to limit the amount of Neanderthal DNA that was retained by human populations in the region,” Taskent says.

Solar Research On The Sun’s Chromosphere

Spots On Supergiant Star Drive Spirals In Stellar Wind

A Canadian-led international team of astronomers recently discovered that spots on the surface of a supergiant star are driving huge spiral structures in its stellar wind. Their results are published in a recent edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Massive stars are responsible for producing the heavy elements that make up all life on Earth. At the end of their lives they scatter the material into interstellar space in catastrophic explosions called supernovae — without these dramatic events, our solar system would never have formed.

Zeta Puppis is an evolved massive star known as a ‘supergiant’. It is about sixty times more massive than our sun, and seven times hotter at the surface. Massive stars are rare, and usually found in pairs called ‘binary systems’ or small groups known as ‘multiple systems’. Zeta Puppis is special however, because it is a single massive star, moving through space alone, at a velocity of about 60 kilometers per second. “Imagine an object about sixty times the mass of the Sun, travelling about sixty times faster than a speeding bullet!” the investigators say. Dany Vanbeveren, professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, gives a possible explanation as to why the star is travelling so fast; “One theory is that Zeta Puppis has interacted with a binary or a multiple system in the past, and been thrown out into space at an incredible velocity.”

Using a network of ‘nanosatellites’ from the “BRIght Target Explorer” (BRITE) space mission, astronomers monitored the brightness of the surface of Zeta Puppis over a six-month period, and simultaneously monitored the behavior of its stellar wind from several ground-based professional and amateur observatories.

Tahina Ramiaramanantsoa (PhD student at the Université de Montréal and member of the Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec; CRAQ) explains the authors’ results: “The observations revealed a repeated pattern every 1.78 days, both at the surface of the star and in the stellar wind. The periodic signal turns out to reflect the rotation of the star through giant ‘bright spots’ tied to its surface, which are driving large-scale spiral-like structures in the wind, dubbed ‘co-rotating interaction regions’ or ‘CIRs’.”

“By studying the light emitted at a specific wavelength by ionized helium from the star’s wind,” continued Tahina, “we clearly saw some ‘S’ patterns caused by arms of CIRs induced in the wind by the bright surface spots!.” In addition to the 1.78-day periodicity, the research team also detected random changes on timescales of hours at the surface of Zeta Puppis, strongly correlated with the behavior of small regions of higher density in the wind known as “clumps” that travel outward from the star. “These results are very exciting because we also find evidence, for the first time, of a direct link between surface variations and wind clumping, both random in nature,” comments investigating team member Anthony Moffat, emeritus professor at Université de Montréal, and Principal Investigator for the Canadian contribution to the BRITE mission.

After several decades of puzzling over the potential link between the surface variability of very hot massive stars and their wind variability, these results are a significant breakthrough in massive star research, essentially owing to the BRITE nanosats and the large contribution by amateur astronomers. “It is really exciting to know that, even in the era of giant professional telescopes, dedicated amateur astronomers using off-the-shelf equipment in their backyard observatories can play a significant role at the forefront of science,” says investigating team member Paul Luckas from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at the University of Western Australia. Paul is one of six amateur astronomers who intensively observed Zeta Puppis from their homes during the observing campaign, as part of the ‘Southern Amateur Spectroscopy initiative’.

The physical origins of the bright surface spots and the random brightness variations discovered in Zeta Puppis remain unknown at this point, and will be the subject of further investigations, probably requiring many more observations using space observatories, large ground-based facilities, and small telescopes alike.