Understanding the Chain Fountain

Over 2.5 million viewers, including many physicists, have been astonished by Steve Mould's videos of a chain flowing along its own length from a pot to the floor below. Apparently defying gravity, the chain rises above the pot as a fountain before falling down. Proceedings A has published a paper which explains why this fountain occurs by considering the forces bringing successive links into motion. In this podcast, authors Mark Warner and John Biggins explain what is going on in an easy to understand and straightforward manner.

Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates

Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

This animation shows the 2299 high-quality (multiple transits), non-circumbinary transiting planet candidates found by NASA's Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They are drawn to scale with accurate radii (in r / r* ), orbital periods, and orbital distances (in d / r*). They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to -110 C at the coldest — red indicates warmest, and blue/indigo indicates coldest candidates.

When the system is animated edge-on, it is clear that there is no time during which the sample of stars the Kepler spacecraft is observing does not contain a planet transiting a star. In fact, on average there are dozens of transits occurring amongst the Kepler sample at any given instant.

The Kepler observatory has detected a multitude of planet candidates orbiting distant stars. The current list contains 2321 planet candidates, though some of these have already been flagged as likely false-positives or contamination from binary stars. This animation does not contain circumbinary planets or planet candidates where only a single transit has been observed, which is why "only" 2299 are shown.

Check out the current list of planet candidates and find more information on the Kepler mission on their website.

15 Years of the International Space Station

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the ISS, NASA published a video featuring highlights from the past 15 years on the space station. They also created a graphic detailing how many meals astronauts have eaten on the space station, how many scientific investigations have been performed, and more. Let's not forget that today is also Edwin Hubble and SETI's birthdays!

Cosmic Queries: Gravity, the Movie!

To answer your questions about the movie Gravity, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice get a little help from 2-time Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino. They explore the scientific inaccuracies in the movie – and how much Gravity got right. Mike gives it 2 thumbs up for the look and feel of being in space, from the spacesuits to the tools he actually used. He discusses how actual NASA astronauts train for emergencies, the time he tore his glove fixing the Hubble telescope, and the real rescue plans for his flights. @Astro_Mike (he was the first human to Tweet from space!) also describes impact of weightlessness on your inner ear and sense of balance, and how your brain adapts after a few days of zero-g. Neil explains why you’re weightless in space in the first place – it’s free fall, not lack of gravity – and describes an experiment you can do at home to prove it and amaze your friends and family.

Bohemian Gravity: A Musical Explanation of String Theory

A Montreal physics student has created an online music video to explain string theory, and Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May has taken note. McGill grad student Tim Blais performs his song "Bohemian Gravity" to the tune of "Bohemian Rhapsody" to explain the complicated theory, which proposes that all fundamental particles in the universe are made of oscillating filaments.

Gravity Represented through Artwork

Shizouka-based designer Kouichi Okamoto of Kyouei Design became inspired by gravity and created the Magnetic Field Record, a mobile artwork that offers a new look at gravity.

The overturned bottle on one side of the contraption is filled with sumi ink, balanced by a large magnet on the other end. Ink slowly drips out, initially slowly and then more closely together, as the mobile contraption rotates. The shift in weight causes the bottle to raise up, shrinking the diameter of the circle.

Hangout with SETI

SETI Institute researchers Jill Tarter and Franck Marchis (host & moderator) will hangout with Jason Wright, professor of astronomy at Penn State, Matt Povich, professor of astronomy at Cal Poly Pomona and Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist and mathematician of the Institute for Advance Studies. These scientists will discuss the potential for the WISE telescope to detect extraterrestrial super-civilizations that acquired large a energy supply by building a mega-structure to harvest the energy of their star ("Dyson Sphere") or their entire galaxy. The title of the event is "Searching for Kardashev Type II and III Civilizations with WISE."

This is a public event and will occur Wednesday, September 18th at 11am. This hangout is the first of the SETI Institute's Curiosity Series.