CaaC (John)

Spot Ronaldo

Bloody hell, the Tree has been clipped

Exoplanet discovered around a neighbouring star By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website 14 November 2018 Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun. Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes. The planet's mass is thought to be more than three times that of our own, placing it in a category of the world know as "super-Earths". It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away. Writing in the journal Nature, Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's. "We think that this is what we call a Super-Earth - that would be possibly a mostly rocky planet with a massive atmosphere. It's probably very rich in volatiles like water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide - things like this. Many of them are frozen on the surface," Dr. Anglada Escudé, from the Queen Mary University of London, told BBC News. The Sun's closest neighbors Dr Anglada Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, added: "The closest analogue we may have in the Solar System might be the moon of Saturn called Titan, which also has a very thick atmosphere and is made of hydrocarbons. It has rain and lakes made of methane." The planet, Barnard's Star b, is about as far away from its star as Mercury is from the Sun. It's the next nearest star to the Sun after Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri - which are much better known. Barnard's Star is an extremely dim object known as a "red dwarf"; it's about 3% as bright as the Sun, emitting far less solar energy. The planet orbits beyond a boundary called the "snow line", which is past the traditional habitable zone, where water can remain liquid on the surface. On distance alone, it's estimated that temperatures would be about -150C on the planet's surface. However, a massive atmosphere could potentially warm the planet, making conditions more hospitable to life The researchers used the radial velocity method to detect the new planet. This technique detects "wobbles" in a star which are likely to be caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. These wobbles affect the light coming from the star. As the star moves towards the Earth its spectrum appears slightly shifted towards the blue and, as it moves away, it is shifted towards the red. Team members re-examined archive data obtained over a 20-year period and added new observations with the Carmenes spectrometer in Spain, the Eso/Harps instrument in Chile and the Harps-N instrument in the Canary Islands. This wealth of data provided the accuracy needed to identify the planet to a high degree of certainty. This is the first time this technique has been used to detect a planet this small so far away from its host star. When the new generation of telescopes come online, scientists will be able to characterize the planet's properties. This will probably include a search for gases like oxygen and methane in the planet's atmosphere, which might be markers for biology. "The James Webb Space Telescope might not help in this case, because it was not designed for what's called high contrast imaging. But in the US, they are also developing WFirst - a small telescope that's also used for cosmology," said Dr Anglada Escudé. "If you take the specs of how it should perform, it should easily image this planet. When we have the image we can then start to do spectroscopy - looking at different wavelengths, in the optical, in the infrared, looking at whether light is absorbed at different colors meaning there are different things in the atmosphere." This is not the first time there have been claims about the discovery of a planet around Barnard's Star. In the 1960s, the Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp, working in the US, published his evidence for a planetary companion, based on perturbations in the motion of the star. However, van de Kamp's claims proved controversial, as other scientists were not able to reproduce his finding. The star is named after the American astronomer E E Barnard, who measured properties of its motion in 1916. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46196279

Bloody hell man, I wish I could write and speak English like you and speak different languages, the only other language I know besides English is if I stub my big toe and then yell out "AAAAHHH...you fucking bastard!!".

Oh, how I wish that was me with the baby pandas.

FFS, Health & Safety are way out of the window with this one

Lol, you got me worried then, not sure where nudge stayed so that was just a thought in the back of my mind so I inserted the photo, never mind and I will carry on as per normal.

Don't know, I don't every post, why, don't you like me adding photos lol

Dortmund, stationed at Napier Barracks.

It's yuk, it's as if you can taste the tin like rust, nothing beats a pint of lager in a glass with a lovely head on top and get all the froth all over your mouth.

I loved my army days in Germany where I was stationed in the 70's go to the local German pub with the wife and I would have a pint of Carlsberg or more or in the camps NAAFI bar, those were the days.

My son bought around some cans of Tiger once he got from Sainsbury's, not bad but I had to put into a pint glass as I don't like drinking out of cans.

You two have made me thirsty now!!

I was trying to figure out what the name of the lagers was, gold or something?

Aye, pretty bad looking at the news. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46194770 'Three minutes separated me from death' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46181390

The guy looks pissed already carrying the cans of lager in the video Police make arrest in David Schwimmer lookalike probe By Kim Pilling, Press Association 3 hrs ago © Blackpool Police/@DavidSchwimmer (Blackpool Police/David Schwimmer/PA) Police looking for a suspected thief with a resemblance to Friends actor David Schwimmer have made an arrest in London. Social media users pointed out the likeness to Schwimmer’s character Ross Geller in the popular US sitcom when police in Blackpool posted an image of a man leaving a restaurant and carrying what appeared to be a carton of cans. Schwimmer later responded to the picture by posting a video to his Twitter account that showed him scurrying through a convenience store carrying a carton of beer before looking up furtively at a CCTV camera. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/police-make-arrest-in-david-schwimmer-lookalike-probe/ar-BBPEvsT?li=BBoPWjQ

Thank you @Stan the man.

'WAKEY WAKEEEEEE'

Astronomy Picture of the Day 2018 November 8 Mars in the Loop Image Credit & Copyright: Tunc Tezel (TWAN) Explanation: This composite of images spaced some 5 to 9 days apart, from late April (bottom right) through November 5 (top left), traces the retrograde motion of ruddy-colored Mars through planet Earth's night sky. To connect the dots and dates in this 2018 Mars retrograde loop, just slide your cursor over the picture (and check out this animation). But Mars didn't actually reverse the direction of its orbit. Instead, the apparent backwards motion with respect to the background stars is a reflection of the motion of the Earth itself. Retrograde motion can be seen each time Earth overtakes and laps planets orbiting farther from the Sun, the Earth moving more rapidly through its own relatively close-in orbit. On July 27, Mars was near its favourable 2018 perihelic opposition, when Mars was closest to the Sun in its orbit while also opposite the Sun in Earth's sky. For that date, the frame used in this composite was taken during the total lunar eclipse. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181108.html Edit: @Stanor whoever Admin/Mod is around, I meant to post this in 'The Jeopardy of Landing on Mars' thread in the 'News & Politics' Forum but went and posted this in here by mistake, any chance of moving (merge) it, please?

Mystery monkey: the history of unique Xenothrix fossil revealed A mysterious extinct monkey from Jamaica that is unlike any other in the fossil record has South American roots, according to new evidence. DNA extracted from fossilised bones suggests the monkey first colonised the island 11 million years ago. It had no predators there and it evolved strange features not seen in living monkeys today. But the animal went extinct a few hundred years ago, likely due to hunting and habitat loss. Scientists say the discovery highlights how vulnerable unique island animals are to extinction. "It was a really weird animal indeed," Prof Samuel Turvey from international conservation charity, Zoological Society of London (ZSL), told BBC News. "Possibly with legs like a rodent; body maybe like a slow loris. Because it's so weird no-one's been able to agree what it was related to." The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the fossilised cave bones of the Jamaican monkey, Xenothrix mcgregori. DNA evidence shows it was a type of titi monkey with some unusual morphological features, not a wholly distinct branch of evolution. "Evolution can act in unexpected ways in island environments, producing miniature elephants, gigantic birds, and sloth-like primates," said Dr Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History. More stories you might like: Mystery ape found in ancient tomb 'Living fossil' heading for extinction 'Oldest animal painting' found in Borneo cave Titi monkeys are small tree-dwelling animals found across tropical South America, with long soft red, brown, grey or black fur. They are active during the day, and very vocal, with an elaborate system of communication. Xenothrix's ancestors likely reached Jamaica from South America after being stranded on natural rafts of vegetation that were washed out of the mouths of rivers. Other animals, such as large rodents called hutias, that still survive on some Caribbean islands, probably arrived in the same way. The islands of the Caribbean have been home to some of the most unusual species to have ever walked the Earth. The region has also experienced a very high rate of mammal extinction, likely caused by hunting and habitat loss by humans, and hunting by animals brought in by early settlers. The research, published in the PNAS journal, also reveals that monkeys must have colonised the Caribbean islands more than once. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46187670

Had his good days but a lot of bad days, lovely diver though