Potato Shape?

Researchers have found that our world, planet Earth is not as round as we thought of, and that it is not a pale blue dot. But how we know this? A supersensitive gravity detecting satellites showed us that the earth is a colorful, irregular lump, it looks like a tuber.

 “Rotating potato — I don’t like this word,” said Roland Pail, a geoscientist at the Technical University of Munich. He and other researchers revealed the new map of the Earth’s gravity field on March 31 at a scientific workshop in Munich.

The new information will help us to improve our understanding of how the Earth works and improve predictions regarding the impacts of climate change.

The image represents a sort of theoretical sea level known as the “geoid”, a surface where the Publicar entradaocean would rest if not pushed around by internal currents, tides and the weather.

Gravity in the earth varies from place to place because of many factors, such as the presence of mountain ranges, the lump around Earth’s equator, and the moon’s gravitational influence.

This new snapshot comes from the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite, launched in 2009 to map the geoid. GOCE dances along at the top of the atmosphere, using six special accelerometers to measure, many times a second, how the Earth’s gravity tugs on the spacecraft.

This is a great discovery because there was a 2 day conference on the GOCCE data in Munich, and they are finding ways in which this data will help us to understand better events like earthquakes or measuring ocean circulation, changes in sea level and movements of ice sheets.

“This field model is each time getting better and better”- a researcher says.

From:http://news.discovery.com/earth/potato-earth-110405.html

Distant world which may have life

Scientists have found a planet named Kepler-22b which has a 290-day orbit that parks it firmly within its star’s life-friendly zone. With a radius 2.4 times larger than Earth’s, Kepler-22b is the smallest planet confirmed to sit comfortably in a sunlike star’s “habitable zone,” this means that its situated in a place where temperatures allow liquids water to exist.

 Kepler-22b’s home star is shining 600 light-years away near the constellation Cygnus and is very similar to the sun, though a bit cooler. This discovery is catalogued as important because it has the potential to have inhabitants due to its resemblance to the Earth, but of course for this to be proved it needs more years of research.

A planet passing in front of one of these stars produces a telltale dimming in the star’s light, and scientists use these flickers to calculate a planet’s radius and orbital period. The team waits for three of these dimming events before considering whether a planet might be the culprit, which is why detecting longer, Earthlike orbits takes years.

Scientists still don’t know if Kepler-22b has a surface, and an atmosphere, they’ve calculated that its average surface temperature should be around 72 degrees Fahrenheit. “It would be like a pleasant day on Earth, a little bit warmer than we have today in California,” Borucki said.

During the telescope 1000 day proof, there have been more planets discoveries, these newbies bring the total number of exotreasures in the Kepler clutch to 2,326, including 207 Earth-size, and smaller planets.

There are also another 10 potential Earth-sized candidates in their stars’ habitable zones. Five are “very, very viable candidates,” Batalha said, noting that about 20 percent of the candidate planets are organized in planetary systems, which make it easier to confirm the presence of the littlest, most Earthlike orbs.

From:http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/336715/name/nd_607693main_Kepler22bArtwork_1600-1200.jpg

Sea-ice loss in 2011

Scientists from 14 nations have compared how the climate has change over the past 5 years and they’ve found out that the artic each time warmer and icy. Sea-ice loss in 2011 was the second most severe in the 32-year satellite record of Arctic monitoring.

Jacqueline Richter-Menge of the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Egineering Laboratory said that “This shift is characterized by the persistent decline in the thickness and summer extent of sea-ice cover and by a warmer, less salty upper ocean.”

There were unusually warm Arctic temperatures in 2006 together with a persistent weather pattern that pushed ice across the Arctic and into the North Atlantic through the Fram Strait east of Greenland. Jacqueline says “We like to call it the perfect storm of the Arctic.”

There is a big loss of old, multi-year ice, scientist are trying to adjust to the “new normal”. Regional warming and melting of land ice cover have also continued at a record pace, the new report finds. Monitoring systems have been used for a decade to detect continuous warming at Arctic sites near the coast, and we have seen that there has been accompanied by a greening of the landscape as reduced snow cover has allowed small shrubs to grow bigger and seeds of trees and other plants to germinate in formerly frozen soils.

The most recent data suggest that this warming “has begun to propagate south towards the northern foothills of the Brooks Range, where a noticeable warming in the upper 20 meters of permafrost has become evident since 2008,” the report says.

The major melting has substantially darkened the sea and landscape, making both better absorbers of solar energy and accelerating the region’s warming. Many people ask themselves if they are going to be able to recover this dark scenario, but this recovery seems to be very difficult and faraway from achievement.

If this change continues on the Arctic, our whole climate could change. We have seen already early patters of change like altered wind particles which in the future when other patterns develop will affect us and the environment. Researchers have also seen that the cold Artic air isn’t staying in the Artic anymore instead it’s going to the south (temperate regions).

Jacqueline said that: “These changes represent a persistent condition” — with consequences far beyond the Arctic.