The universe just keeps getting weirder…

‘Zombie Planet’ Resurrected: Fomalhaut b is Real

If you’ve been reading the right news feeds, you’ll probably know by now that Fomalhaut b has officially been confirmed as a planet. And it’s an interesting one, too. Orbiting the star Fomalhaut, an A-type star somewhat more massive and hotter than the sun, this planet has a wildly eccentric orbit. As befitting a larger star, Fomalhaut b’s orbit is huge compared to our solar system.

Even at the closest point in its orbit, the orbits of every planet in our own solar system could fit between it and Fomalhaut (as shown in this, now outdated, image). At the furthest point in its orbit, it reaches nearly 10 times the distance between Neptune and the sun, ploughing through a thick disk of dusty material held in Fomalhaut’s gravitational grip.

So what was the controversy over this planet? As it happens, it’s quite an interesting story, and an excellent example of the way good science works.

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Posted for Sky. He likes this kind of stuff.

The lady is a rock star.

NASA Voyager 1 Hits New Region At Solar System’s End

Specifically, beginning in late July, the number of low-energy particles began to dip as the number of high-energy particles increased. While this was expected, as the Sun’s particles are dissipating into outer space and cosmic rays streaming in and replacing them, what followed was not: The two types of particles increased and decreased over the course of several days and weeks, lapping and receding “like an ocean tide” according to NASA, until finally, on August 25, Voyager appeared to have entered a completely new region for good.

Full story

My wife and I recently re-designed a client’s website and one of the things I was asked to do is track site visits with google analytics. I finally figured out how to get it set up, but unfortunately it only verifies that almost no one is going to the website (yet). Wondering if a couple of you could take a tour through the half dozen or so pages so there’s a tiny bit more to track before I show her the results. It also tracks time spent on the site, so if you’d leave a page or two up and forget about it for a while that might help too.

Sorting Things Out

Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the “Big Bang machine” that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at MIT and Rice University.

The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either “color-glass condensate” — a flattened nucleus transformed into a “wall” of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be “quark-gluon plasma,” a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.

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This should bring him back if anything can.

Scientists claim to have discovered something “earthshaking” on Mars
Nancy Atkinson – Universe Today

The Mars Science Laboratory team has hinted that they might have some big news to share soon. But like good scientists, they are waiting until they verify their results before saying anything definitive. In an interview on NPR today, MSL Principal Investigator John Grotzinger said a recent soil sample test in the SAM instrument (Sample Analysis at Mars) shows something “earthshaking.”

“This data is gonna be one for the history books,” he said. “It’s looking really good.”
What could it be?

Source

Sort of how Planet and Sky begins… Could suddenly be topical.

Ada Lovelace

Bernoulli number ‘algorithm’, Ada Lovelace, 1843

Who was Ada Lovelace?

The woman most often known as ‘Ada Lovelace’ was born Ada Gordon in 1815, sole child of the brief and tempestuous marriage of the erratic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, and his mathematics-loving wife Annabella Milbanke.

I think the NWer’s all know about Ada but just in case you want to read more here are some other links.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/contents.html
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/

and this one is from the BBC radio – a 45 minute program about Ada:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0092j0x

Small spherical objects fill the field in this mosaic combining four images from the Microscopic Imager on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The view covers an area about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) across, at an outcrop called “Kirkwood” in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The individual spherules are up to about one-eighth inch (3 millimeters) in diameter.

The Microscopic Imager took the component images during the 3,064th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s work on Mars (Sept. 6, 2012).

NASA

While her sister Spirit became a statue a while back, Opportunity continues to go above and beyond the call of duty in what has become an amazingly successful mission of exploration. What a little wonder bug she is!

Definitive evidence of rushing water at some point in Mars’ (ancient) history. Quite exciting.

“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”

NASA

The latest issue of New Scientist:
New Scientist: The Algorithm That Runs The World

[WARNING: for 'geeks' only]

I found this of interest since I’ve used the ‘simplex’ method to optimise for several variables when I was evaluating modem chips at Intel back in my murky past. While very useful, I ran into a couple of problems with the algorithm. (1) It is pretty slow. Of course, computers are much faster than the were during my Intel days when Mammoths still munched on the weeds out back… and (2) It can sometimes ‘fixate’ on ‘local minima’… while failing to find the global minimum. This is no problem in a smooth ‘simple’ topology (image above), but in ‘bumpy’ or ‘dimpled’ multivariate functions it can be a serious complication. That is my experience. Still, it is a valuable tool for optimisation over several variables.

My solution to problem (2, above) was to ‘pre-wash’ the problem with a ‘simulated annealing’ algorithm, which is also slow, but if used properly, WILL find the the global minimum. Simulated Annealing, as the name implies, simulates a blacksmith heating and then cooling metal to strengthen it by ‘jiggling’ the molecules to find lower energy levels… thus ‘optimising’ the metal’s molecular structure. Mathematical ‘annealing’ involves randomising the results by a fixed percentage at each iteration. The randomisation amount is slowly reduced, simulating a lowering of temperature over time, thus ‘annealing’. Then, by knowing ‘where’ the global minimum is, I can apply the simplex method using ‘fixed’ initial conditions to force it to ‘look’ in the right place.

A pain in the ass and very slow to be sure, but with near guaranteed accuracy.

The NS cover article focuses on the algorithm’s speed (or lack thereof). For real-time applications, even with super-fast computers, it can be problematic, especially with more than a very few variables.

MathWorld: the Simplex Method

Surprisingly perhaps, Wikipedia offers a fair to good description of the Simplex method:
Wikipedia: Simplex Algorithm

And more on simulated annealing:
MathWorld: Simulated Annealing

It should come as no surprise that these same algorithms are routinely used to ‘optimise’ economics problems and help predict stock share prices. Sometimes they even work. Sometimes they DON’T.

* Not ‘herpes simplex’!