CaaC (John)

Alien moon likely seen forming in the first-of-its-kind picture Nadia Drake © Image by A. Isella, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)This ALMA image of dust in the star system PDS 70 shows two faint smudges inside a larger disk surrounding the star. One of those faint blobs may be the first picture of a moon forming around an alien world. In a possible first, a giant, faraway planet may have been caught in the act of growing moons. Seen in an image from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, the young planet orbits a small star roughly 370 light-years away, and it appears to be swaddled in a dusty, gassy disk—the exact type of structure scientists think produced Jupiter’s many moons billions of years ago. (Tour the moons of our solar system with our interactive atlas.) “It’s quite possible there might be planet-size moons in a formation around it,” study leader Andrea Isella of Rice University says in a statement. “It’s certainly plausible that giant planets could have giant moon-forming disks around them,” says Stanford University’s Bruce Macintosh of the observation, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s an intriguing and quite possible result.” Sean Andrews of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics agrees, adding that he is optimistic that the image is a first of its kind. “If the result holds up,” he says “this will be an important ‘first strike.’” Spin right ‘round Astronomers have seen many similar dusty clouds surrounding stars. Called circumstellar disks, these structures are the milieu in which planets form—although the exact process by which worlds emerge from the dust is unknown. In some cases, astronomers think they can see newborn planets ploughing lanes into these circumstellar disks, and ALMA has captured many images of these nascent planetary fingerprints. But until now, no one had seen a dusty disk surrounding a planet itself; it’s hard enough to directly image planets beyond our solar system, let alone see the diffuse clouds of debris hugging younger, giant worlds. Isella and his colleagues studied one dust-encircled star system, called PDS 70, using data gathered in 2017 by ALMA, an array of 66 radio dishes sprinkled over a patch of the Atacama desert. The star system includes a Jupiter-size planet called PDS 70b, which has vacuumed up a gap in the dusty shroud surrounding its small, six-million-year-old home star. Another planet, called PDS 70c, traces a path near the inner edge of the gap, at roughly the same distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun. Initially, the hazy area around PDS 70c looked like a faint arm of gas. But this year, when the team reprocessed the ALMA data using a slightly different method, the irregularities resolved into a dust ring. Isella and his colleagues interpret the newly processed image as depicting a circumplanetary debris disk, the type of structure from which moons grow and burgeoning planets siphon material. “We believe that Jupiter’s moons formed in a disk around the young Jupiter, and that circumplanetary disks play an important role in the formation of planets,” he says. A faint disk of dust surrounds a large planet, possibly giving rise to a new moon, in an illustration of the star system PDS 70. Straight to the point But it’s not a rock-solid detection yet. “There are certainly some puzzling aspects of these results,” Andrews says. He notes inconsistencies between observations made at different wavelengths, which produce slightly different images of the disk swirling around the star. When viewed by ALMA, that disk clearly contains a point source that looks like a planet: PDS 70c. But when studied in shorter, infrared wavelengths, that point source becomes much more diffuse. “The environment around ‘c’ appears pretty complicated,” Andrews says. Isella notes that “the ALMA detection is quite faint,” and he says that the team is working on confirming their result with additional observations. “We have an ongoing ALMA program to re-observe this system and measure the orbital motion of the circumplanetary disk,” he says. “So, stay tuned.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/alien-moon-likely-seen-forming-in-first-of-its-kind-picture/ar-AAEfmfk?MSCC=1562994500&ocid=chromentp

You try telling the wife that Spider > Wife...

Just Googled that photo, it came up as a Red Trapdoor Spider.

Erm...a spider? Nah, fucked if I know but it's bloody huge, my guess is it is a spider from Sth America or Africa I guess? before the bloody thing jumped out I thought it would be a small spider, but I jumped a wee bit when I saw that.

@nudge, you will love this

Good wee player this guy, stop being a meanie Klopp, give him to Gerrard for another season or whatever. Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp is set to block Steven Gerrard's attempt to bring Ryan Kent back to Rangers this summer. The 22-year-old winger spent the last term on loan with the Scottish club. (Express)

Some crackers amongst this lot Bizarre celebrity statues from around the world 1-32 SLIDES Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip Terracotta busts of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, are displayed at Fifield House Farm near Windsor, England.

'Oldest remains' outside Africa reset human migration clock AFP © asiafoto / Istock.com Two fossilised but badly damaged skulls unearthed in a Greek cave in the 1970s were identified as Neanderthal at the time. A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind's arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said Wednesday. In a startling discovery that changes our understanding of how modern man populated Eurasia, the findings support the idea that Homo sapiens made several, sometimes unsuccessful migrations from Africa over tens of thousands of years. Southeast Europe has long been considered a major transport corridor for modern humans from Africa. But until now the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens on the continent dated back only around 50,000 years. There has however been a number of discoveries indicating the ancient presence of Neanderthals -- an early human cousin -- across the continent. Two fossilised but badly damaged skulls unearthed in a Greek cave in the 1970s were identified as Neanderthal at the time. In findings presented in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers used state-of-the-art computer modelling and uranium dating to re-examine the two skulls. One of them, named Apidima 2 after the cave in which the pair were found, proved to be 170,000 years old and did indeed belong to a Neanderthal. But, to the shock of scientists, the skull named Apidima 1 pre-dated Apidima 2 by as much as 40,000 years and was determined to be that of a Homo sapiens. That makes the skull by far the oldest modern human remains ever discovered on the continent, and older than any known Homo sapiens specimen outside of Africa. "It shows that the early dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa not only occurred earlier, before 200,000 years ago but also reached further geographically, all the way to Europe," Katerina Harvati, a palaeoanthropologist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany, told AFP. "This is something that we did not suspect before, and which has implications for the population movements of these ancient groups." Apidima 1 lacked classic features associated with Neanderthal skulls, including the distinctive bulge at the back of the head, shaped like hair tied in a bun. - Multiple migrations? - Hominins -- a subset of great apes that includes Homo sapiens and Neanderthals -- are believed to have emerged in Africa more than six million years ago. They left the continent in several migration waves starting about two million years ago. The oldest known African fossil attributed to a member of the Homo family is a 2.8 million-year-old jawbone from Ethiopia. Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals across Europe for good around 45,000-35,000 years ago, in what was long considered a gradual takeover of the continent involving millennia of co-existence and even interbreeding. But the skull discovery in Greece suggests that Homo sapiens undertook the migration from Africa to southern Europe on "more than one occasion", according to Eric Delson, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. "Rather than a single exit of hominins from Africa to populate Eurasia, there must have been several dispersals, some of which did not result in permanent occupations," said Delson, who was not involved in the Nature study. Harvati said advances in dating and genetics technology could continue to shape our understanding of how our pre-historic ancestors spread throughout the world. "I think recent advances in palaeoanthropology have shown that the field is still full of surprises," she said. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/oldest-remains-outside-africa-reset-human-migration-clock/ar-AAE9lrc

Unbelievable that.

A western with Kurt Russell & Samuel Lee Jackson 'The Hateful 8', our son put it on for us last night because he knows I like westerns, I am afraid he was wrong with this one as it was not my type of western, started off slow, livened up a wee bit then to me it just became stupid and I completely lost the plot, a 6/10 for me.

Half-mile-wide asteroid found ‘hiding in our solar system’ Rob Waugh The asteroid has the shortest year yet detected (Caltech) Don’t panic, but astronomers have found a huge, half-mile-wide asteroid lurking in our solar system - which had eluded decades of asteroid hunts. The newly found space rock poses no danger to us, of course - but it’s very unusual, with the shortest ‘year’ known for an asteroid. The rock, called 2019 LF6, is about a kilometer in size and circles the sun roughly every 151 days. In its orbit, the asteroid swings out beyond Venus and, at times, comes closer in than Mercury, which circles the sun every 88 days. 'You don't find kilometre-size asteroids very often these days,' says Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who discovered 2019 LF6. 'Thirty years ago, people started organizing methodical asteroid searches, finding larger objects first, but now that most of them have been found, the bigger ones are rare birds,' he says. 'LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and in size—its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid eluded several decades of careful searches.' (3d illustration, elements of this image are furnished by NASA) 2019 LF6 was discovered via the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, a state-of-the-art camera at the Palomar Observatory that scans the skies every night for transient objects, such as exploding and flashing stars and moving asteroids. 'We only have about 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset to find these asteroids,' says Ye. © Johannes Gerhardus Swanepoel Close-up of an asteroid entering the atmosphere at high speed and starting to burn -3D artwork 2019 LF6 is one of only 20 known "Atira" asteroids, whose orbits fall entirely within Earth's. To find the Atira asteroids, the ZTF team has been carrying out a dedicated observing campaign, named Twilight after the time of day best suited for discovering the objects. Twilight was developed by Ye and Wing-Huen Ip of the National Central University in Taiwan. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/half-mile-wide-asteroid-found-hiding-in-our-solar-system/ar-AAE8xqo?ocid=chromentp

Daniel Sturridge: Former Liverpool striker reunited with missing dog Daniel Sturridge's dog Lucci has been safely returned to the former England international Former Liverpool striker Daniel Sturridge says he is "absolutely delighted" after being reunited with his dog Lucci. Sturridge, 29, offered a £30,000 reward for the return of the Pomeranian, which he said was stolen during a break-in at his house in Los Angeles. A video and pictures of the dog were tweeted on Wednesday, and Lucci has now been returned to Sturridge. "I can't believe it," he said in a video message on Instagram. "I just want to say a big thank you to everyone on social media who supported us and raised awareness. I'm so thankful." Sturridge did not say if he had paid a reward. LA Police said they are investigating. No arrests have been made. These pictures were tweeted on Wednesday asking if the dog belongs to Sturridge https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48940762

Thick fucking bastards doing that, could have been some young kiddie running up and trying to kick it then could have broken a bone.

The Kiwis have their tails up, upset ahead? If they can get Pant out then the upset is possible.

Did the Hubble Telescope Confirm the First Exomoon? The Hubble and Kepler space telescopes found evidence for what could be a giant moon accompanying a gas-giant planet that orbits the star Kepler-1625, located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The moon may be as big as Neptune and it orbits a planet several times more massive than Jupiter. Credit: NASA’s Goddard https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/videos/index.html

You're the boss, but I will still check more carefully though before posting

Whoops, knock them off, my whoops I think I will leave this thread for others to contribute.

Mysterious shark ‘older than the dinosaurs’ caught on film Rob Waugh The shark was captured on film (Ocean X) A shark which has been on our planet for nearly 200 million years, and which has eluded researchers has finally been caught on film - and tagged. It’s the first time the bluntnose sixgill has been satellite-tagged in this way, the researchers say, with the mysterious creatures usually staying 8,200 feet down. The team from Ocean X and Florida University tagged the creature from a submersible vehicle. It’s the first time this has ever been achieved, as the creatures have previously been ‘surface-tagged’ (ie taken to the surface), which researchers have worried could affect the data. Gallery: Amazing facts about sharks (Best Life) The researchers wrote, ‘Because bluntnose sixgills are a deep-sea species, it’s hard on them physiologically to be tagged in this way. ‘In their typical life cycle, they won’t experience daylight, and very rarely will they feel the low pressure, warmer temperatures of surface waters. © Provided by Oath Inc. The shark was captured on film (Ocean X) Typically, the data obtained after surface tagging of a sixgill is believed to be skewed, as the shark does not return to its natural behaviours for some time after the tagging.’ In a blog post, the researchers write, ‘This is historic for a variety of reasons. Now that we’ve proven this method can work for the sixgill, we can unlock the world of leviathan deep-sea dwellers and gain important insights into their movement and behaviour.’ https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/mysterious-shark-older-than-the-dinosaurs-caught-on-film/ar-AAE27ue?ocid=chromentp