A recent study revealed that a plastic bag, like the kind given away at grocery stores, is now the deepest known piece of plastic trash, found at a depth of 36,000 feet inside the Mariana Trench. Scientists found it by looking through the Deep-Sea Debris Database, a collection of photos and videos taken from 5,010 dives over the past 30 years that was recently made public.
https://vimeo.com/219216194
Bonus: The Moonraker (James Bond) score works great even if the obvious (and maybe overused) choice would have been Holst’s track.
One of the most fundamental questions in astronomy is that of just how many galaxies the universe contains. The landmark Hubble Deep Field, taken in the mid-1990s, gave the first real insight into the universe’s galaxy population. Subsequent sensitive observations such as Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field revealed a myriad of faint galaxies. This led to an estimate that the observable universe contained about 200 billion galaxies.
The new research shows that this estimate is at least 10 times too low.
Tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations.
It’s been 74 years since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and we’re just now getting a good look at the wreckages of the attack’s first few casualties on the ocean floor.
Twenty-seven Catalina PBY-5 seaplanes that were docked at the Kāne‛ohe Bay, located approximately 20 miles away from Pearl Harbor, were destroyed and sunk to the bottom of the bay in a cloudy, dark murk that prevented photographers from taking proper photos of the wreckage.
Yesterday, results were released from an international team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, where they measured 129 objects-of-interest identified by Kepler for a period of five years. They did spectroscopic analysis, which means they studied the individual wavelengths of light coming from the star, and expected a false positive rate of about 10-to-20%, which is what most scientists estimated.
But they found, instead, that over half (52%) of the planetary candidates were, in fact, eclipsing binaries, with another three candidates turning out to be brown dwarfs.
“The idea behind ‘Transit’ is to document how people interact and how lives intersect and bind while traveling.” says Remera, a photographer born in Rwanda in 1981. Now living and working in Luxembourg, Remera got into photography through workshops and classes while studying in Strasbourg. Then in 2010, he fell deeper into love with the art form while travelling.
Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.