Menotrome Peer Pressure

Not much astronomy news lately or at least nothing interesting to me. The new Mars rover found a steambed but nothing really unexpected about that so I just decided to post again about it if it finally finds what it came for in Mars -- a definite sign of life.

And so what is it about that title? Well I had no idea what a menotrome was before I saw this video I'm about to share. Tradition ally it looks like this:

I looked it up and according to wikipedia its a tool for musicians to keep their music tempo. Although I can't remember when and where I know I saw one in the past and that to me it looked like a reverse pendulum that someone could use to hypnotize someone.

Watch this video and I'll discuss more after.



What just happened was -  32 menotromes were set on a table on same tempo but started at different intervals. And while they were at a chaotic tempo at start, they somehow managed to synchronize on their own after just a couple of minutes or so.

So what happened?

Physics. If you noticed, the table is not solid. It is a little flexible and probably also suspended with strings. As the rod of one menotrome sway from side to side it transfers a small force that gives small motions to the flexible table. Which in turn transfers it to the other monotromes that in small increments speeds up or slows downs the other monotromes. This transfer of force will continue and increase until everyone matches the speed and direction of movement of the original menotrome.

Here's a blooper: Observe the second pink one at the rightmost corner, it will take it a while to realize it is the only one left doing the wrong direction. Or maybe it's just me but it looked funny like a soldier marching out of order with the rest before finally realizing it.

Jupiter Impact 2012

In 1994 almost all telescopes were pointed to Jupiter for the whole world to see the Shoemaker-Levi 9 impact. Like so, just this week, last Monday, a similar thing happened only the there was no one looking, no one except one amateur astronomer. Thanks to George Hall from Dallas Texas. And hurrah! to all amateur astronomers. They say it was probably an unnamed comet who will never be discovered.

So what else are we missing? How about that asteroid headed to earth?

Here is the vid.

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The Pencil Nebula

The European Southern Observatory(ESO) in Chile has released new images of a massive glowing cloud of gas called The Pencil Nebula a.k.a NGC 2736, about 800 light years away from us. The clouds of gas we see is the remnants of a star that exploded 11,000 years ago. To be honest, it doesn't look like any pencil but rather more like a witches' broom to me. But so does alot of other nebulas, i couln't figure out how they look like their names. See for yourself.

Planet XXX

If you don't know planet X and google it, it would probably get you little confused because there are different interpretations. you will get Pluto, Nibiru, Senda, Tyche and others.That's because  Planet X is a name for any hypothetical planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.

The conceptions of undiscovered planet X goes back up as early as 1840. Back then, observations in the orbit of Uranus reveiled disturbances in its expected behavior of orbit. This led to a conclusion and later on the discovery of planet Neptune. But even after then, some still speculated that Neptune alone was not enough to explain the discrepancies in the observation. Thus it led to further searching.

And in 1906, the discovery of Pluto temporarily satisfied the search.  Until later observations led to determine that the real size of Pluto and another conclusion that it was not the same mass as the predicted by the expected Planet X. And so the search was revived until Voyager 2  flew by Neptune in 1989. Voyager 2 gave better data that revised it earlier known mass and this new mass led to elimination of the puzzle in the  discrepancy thus disproving the need of existence of  a Planet X. But although that particular concept of Planet X was disproved, the idea was again revived with discoveries of the Kuiper belt objects and the Kuiper cliff.

The observation was that there was a sudden decline in the number of objects(KBOs) in a region, thus suggesting a clearing that may only due to gravitational affect from massive object.

In May this year 2012, National Observatory of Brazil modeled the orbits of  Kuiper belt objects and found that some of those orbits were far more elongated than  predicted. The simplest explanation was the gravitational pull of a distant planetary companion, about as big Neptune to as small as Mars and to far to be spotted by our best telescopes.

Aside from Pluto, there were two more popular candidates taking the name Planet X. One is the hypothetical planet Tyche and another is (and more mythical doomsday) Planet Nibiru. Some people will says these two are same. But not really.

We may have all those breath-taking pictures from Hubble Telescope and others. But the truth is we can not even find a planet our own solar system if there is one due to the vastness of if. While we may all think that we can contain in our heads the idea of its vastness, we most likely, have not really thought of it that much.