Brights News Feed

News broke this morning that the world-famous historic tea clipper ship, the Cutty Sark — housed in Greenwich on the banks of London’s Thames River — has suffered major damage in a blaze which is being treated as suspicious. (See Guardian: “Fire devastates Cutty Sark“)

On the same day in the same township, known as the “centre of the world” on account of being the meridian according to which all international date limes refer, the Greenwich villagers had been celebrating a new addition to their rich scientific heritage: a new planetarium with a conical design which geometrically links it to the shape of the world. (See Guardian: “Keep Watching the Skies“. Sadly, this article, also published this morning but pre-written, refers to the Cutty Sark restoration project and the plan to re-house the ship in a giant glass structure, unknowing of this morning’s fire.)

A shiny lump of unidentified magnetic rock, with a colour akin to “fool’s gold”, fell through the roof of a house in New Jersey, US, earlier this week. Its properties were apparently unusual for a meteorite, though its force and trajectory implied that it fell from space. Speculation began that it might be a piece of a satellite or a lost astronaut’s tool, melted and misshapen in re-entry (National Geographic, which also has an image).

Experts and test results now agree that the unidentified meteorite-like object is in fact… a meteorite (Asbury Park Press). To prevent similar non-news spreading across the internet again, Slate has a handy guide on How to tell if a rock fell from outer space.

Speaking shortly before receiving one of science’s oldest and most prestigious awards — the Royal Society’s Copley Medal — Professor Stephen Hawking has said today that humankind will “sooner or later” be wiped out by a cosmic diaster like a meteorite strike, or an anthropogenic cataclysm like nuclear war, and only by travelling to Earth-like planets orbiting other stars can we hope to survive in the long term.

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The final decision has just been made by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Under its 2006 Resolutions 5A and 6A (IAU: “Result of the IAU Resolution votes“) Pluto is now deemed a “dwarf planet”. (Also see, BBC: “Pluto loses status as a planet“.) The number of planets as such is reduced to eight. However, the door is now open for numerous other “Small Solar System Objects” to reach dwarf planet status along with Pluto, including: Pluto’s “twin”, Charon; an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres; and 2003 UB₃₁₃ (tentatively nicknamed “Xena”) orbiting beyond Pluto.

This probably won’t shake up your “naturalistic worldview”! But perhaps the re-definition will raise and change public awareness about the number and diversity of objects in the solar system.

The universe could be 15% grander — that is, 15% larger and older — than previously thought. This according to new research led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, US. (New Scientist: “Big bang pushed back 2 billion years“.) Their new technique looks at the relationship between various factors in binary star systems to measure the distance to astronomical objects, hopefully with greater accuracy. What’s 2 billion years between friends?

A view of the largest-scale structures in the universe, the light from whole clusters of galaxies distributing along cosmic “filaments”, from the 2005 Millennium Simulation (Image from Max Planck Institute)