Small Alien World Most Jupiter-Like Planet Ever Seen

Astronomers have detected the smallest and most solar system-like planet ever directly imaged around another star.

The newly discovered planet called 51 Eridani B is about twice the mass of Jupiter, and orbits a star about 97 light-years from Earth.

The discovery, reported in the journal Science, will provide new insights into how planets and planetary systems are made.

“Only a handful of planets have been imaged like this so far, and they were each at least five times the mass of Jupiter, so it’s incredibly hard to do,” said the study’s lead author Professor Bruce Macintosh of Stanford University in California.

“Planets like Jupiter in our solar system are a billion times fainter than the sun, so planets are usually lost in the bright light from their star.”

Macintosh and an international team of 90 scientists made the discovery using the Gemini South Observatory’s new planet imager, one of a new generation of instruments designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint planets orbiting bright stars.

It is also adept at finding very young planets, which are luminous and visible at infrared wavelengths.

Young planets

When planets form, material coalescing into the planet release energy which heats the planet up. Over the next hundred million years or so, the planet will gradually cool, radiating away most of that energy as infrared light,

“Finding very young planets is important because one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy is understanding how planets form,” said Macintosh.

“Twenty years ago we had a nice model that could form [planets in] our solar system, which was the only one we knew about.

“But in the intervening 20 years we’ve discovered that other solar systems look completely different to ours.”

There’s now a wide range of possible scenarios which could form planets, either quickly or slowly, using either solid or gaseous material.

“This is the first planet we’ve seen which has the kind of chemistry and atmospheric composition that Jupiter has in our solar system,” said Macintosh.

“Its atmosphere is full of methane and its surface is not completely enshrouded in big thick clouds, so we’ve really reached the point where we’re seeing a young 20-million-year-old equivalent of Jupiter which probably formed in a similar way.”

Prior to this discovery, methane signatures have been weak or absent in directly imaged exoplanets.

“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars,” said Macintosh.

However, 51 Eridani B has a far cooler atmosphere with a temperature of just 430 degrees Celsius.

“So this one looks like a planet,” said Macintosh.

51 Eridani B orbits its host-star at a distance of about 13 astronomical units, an astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Read more at Discovery News

The Squid That Looks Like a Bee Stung It in the Eyeball

The strawberry squid is an ophthalmologist's nightmare. I mean, imagine fitting that thing for glasses.

Before the first deep-sea scientific trawls in the 19th century started revealing what lurks in the ocean depths, some scientists reckoned all the creatures down there were blind. It was so dark down there, went the logic, that the critters must use some other means to find their way around—perhaps a nice game of Marco Polo. But how wrong those scientists were (and that’s OK, because being wrong is fine in science).

The deep is actually brimming with giant-eyed animals, which use their peepers to pick up what little light trickles down from the surface or to detect the bioluminescence of their own species—or their prey. In such a strange world, the eyes themselves get strange, and perhaps the weirdest among them belong to the strawberry squid. It has one normal eye and another enormous one that looks like it got stung by a bee. And these two eyes are looking for entirely different things: shadows and fireworks.

Now, you don’t earn the moniker of “strawberry squid” for not looking like a strawberry. “They have all these little strawberry seed dots all over them,” says Steve Haddock, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Those are all light-emitting photophores. Each has a lens and a filter to control the light output.”

A whole lot of creatures in the deep, including the strawberry squid, use something called counter-illumination as a defensive measure. The tiny bit of light that makes it into the depths can be hazardous—the squid’s predators can lie in wait below it, looking for its shadow against the light from above. But by lighting itself up with counter-illumination, the squid can in effect cancel out its shadow, helping it disappear.

Ironically, the strawberry squid hunts the same way, keeping its eye out for prey like fish and shrimp and other squid passing overhead. That’s eye—singular. Specifically, the giant one. “The hypothesis that’s most accepted right now is the reason they have such a large eye and a small eye is that these eyes are looking at different types of light,” says Katie Thomas, a marine biologist at Duke University. “So the large eye is thought to orient upwards toward the surface and detect really dim sunlight that’s trickling down through the water.”

This would not taste like a strawberry. It would, however, taste like a squid.

The small one, by contrast, points downward to detect flashes of bioluminescence that could reveal prey. (While it would seem silly for creatures to be flashing so much and giving away their position to predators like the strawberry squid, bioluminescence is pivotal for individuals to communicate with other members of their species. Getting eaten ain’t great, but not getting laid is unacceptable.)

So, the big eye. It isn’t simply a scaling-up of the little one. It’s a different shape—semi-tubular, to be precise. Big lenses gather more light, but the bigger a lens gets, the farther it needs to be from the retina to be able to focus. By going tubular, the strawberry squid’s eyes gain that distance without the increase in volume a sphere would require. It’s a matter of efficiency. “They have a smaller field of view because their eye is narrower, but they gain sensitivity,” says Thomas.

(Tubular eyes are actually common. Take, for instance, the barreleye fish [some creatures just get lucky with their names], whose peepers are even more tubular than the strawberry squid’s. They’re encased in a sort of clear dome, pointing upwards to search for food, but the fish can also pivot them forward when it approaches its prey.)

The squid’s giant eye has another brilliant adaptation: a filter. In the video above you’ll see that the eye seems to glow yellow. “They have a pigment that looks yellow to us,” says Haddock, “but it’s because it absorbs blue light preferentially to longer-wavelength light.” Say a fish’s counter-illuminating belly hasn’t perfectly matched the color of the blue downwelling light. Perhaps it’s just a bit too green. The pigment in the squid’s lens will absorb the blue to make the green stand out that much more. “If there’s any mismatch in the color of camouflaging light versus downwelling background light, it will enhance that difference.” It’s a counter-defensive measure that can overcome the prey’s cloaking tactic.

It all adds up to one incredible organ, which may have you thinking: What gives with only developing one of them? Why should the eye that keeps watch on things below be so comparatively tiny, when it’s possible to develop a supercharged eye? Well, it may be because the giant eye is so powerful.

The strawberry squid is kinda cute when its giant eye isn’t staring right into your soul.

“Eyes are really expensive,” says Thomas. “Eyes are an expensive organ metabolically to make, they’re expensive to maintain, they take a lot of neural processing power. So there’s definitely selection acting against huge eyes.” That is, natural selection would favor individuals whose eyes are great and all, but not so enormous that they’d be a drain on the organism’s energy and the resources needed to develop and maintain the things.

And keep in mind that each of the strawberry squid’s eyes has a different job. “If you’re looking at something fairly bright like bioluminescent flashes and you don’t need that extra boost of sensitivity, that could explain why the small eye isn’t equally big,” says Thomas.

Read more at Wired Science

Supersniffing Ants Smell Things Humans Can't

Ants may be experts at sniffing out body odor, according to a new study that reveals these insects have a "high-definition ability" to detect tiny chemical changes in the pheromones other ants give off.

Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, studied how ants tell each other apart in their colonies based on tiny, nearly undetectable changes in how other ants smell. The research, published today (Aug. 13) in the journal Cell Reports, revealed how much ants' sniffing abilities may have been underestimated.

Social insects, like ants, detect each other's smells using sensors in their antennae. It was initially thought that ants used these smells to distinguish between friends and foes, but the new study suggests the insects' abilities go further than this.

The researchers tested how the ants react to different odors by sticking tiny glass electrodes into single sensory hairs on the insects' antennae, which were then exposed to puffs of different hydrocarbons. The electrodes acted like sensors to show whether each antenna was responding and if the ant had recognized a smell. The researchers discovered that ants are highly sensitive to chemical changes, with sensory neurons able to respond to a variety of subtly different hydrocarbon odors.

The scientists were also curious about whether the ants understood the actual chemical compound. So in a second experiment, the researchers paired one hydrocarbon with a sugary reward and one with plain water.

"We found that the ants were really superb at being able to make way to the hydrocarbon that had originally been paired with the reward," said study lead author Anandasankar Ray, an associate professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside. "It's a very unusual ability that I think is unique to social insects that live in large colonies."

As it turns out, ants are quite the connoisseurs when differentiating among body odors. The Camponotus floridanus ants in this study have more smell-sensing genes than humans do, the researchers said.

Ray said that although people may be able to train themselves to distinguish among subtle variations in odors, such as the "difference between, say, a pinot noir and a cabernet," human noses are not up to the standards of ant antennae. In fact, most animals would not be able to detect the hydrocarbons in the study as a smell at all, he added.

"I think what is unique to the ants is that they are able to discriminate these very low-volatility chemicals — these hydrocarbons, which humans cannot perceive," Ray told Live Science.

How volatile a compound is refers to how easily it boils and turns into a gas to be smelled. Shorter hydrocarbon chains have fewer bonds that need to break, so they turn into gas faster. The hydrocarbons on the ants have low volatility, meaning they have long chains and low levels of the chemical evaporate at room temperature to be sniffed.

Detecting such small doses requires a meticulous sense of smell, which may have evolved as a way for ants to navigate their complex social networks, the researchers said.

"Imagine that there are hundreds and thousands of these social insects in a colony," Ray said. "It's really critical for them to be able to tell the difference between major worker, a minor worker, a queen and different individuals within a colony, in order to be able to coordinate their social experience."

The researchers said they think low-volatility hydrocarbons fit the bill for detecting such differences, because ants interact with each other in close quarters. If the odors were strong, the ants would likely get confused, the researchers said. Ants get so close when they touch antennae and sniff each other, it is the equivalent of "shaking hands and exchanging business cards," Ray said.

"If they were using volatile odors to try to recognize their peers, it would be a real mess because these volatile odors would be all over the colony," Ray said. "It would overrun them."

Read more at Discovery News

Island in the Bahamas Is Full of Swimming Pigs

An island in the Bahamas has some unlikely celebrity residents: 20 friendly feral pigs whose love of the water has made them a local sensation.

Affectionately dubbed Pig Beach, the island is a hopping tourist destination. In exchange for food, the charismatic pigs take to the water to greet approaching boaters:

Nobody knows for sure how the pigs ended up on the otherwise uninhabited cay in the Atlantic Ocean. Some believe that a group of sailors left the pigs on the island, intending to eventually return and cook the pigs (spoiler alert: they never came back). Others believe that the pigs were the sole survivors of a mysterious shipwreck, managing to swim ashore while their human companions drowned tragically.

Another less whimsical theory suggests that the pigs were intentionally planted to attract tourists -- which, if you ask us, is pretty genius.

From Discovery News

It's Eagle: 1, Drone: 0 in Aerial Takedown Video

Some days it can't be easy to be a non-lethal drone -- nothing trusts you, chimps will swat you down, homeowners might shoot you out of the sky, and because you're not military you don't have much in the way of defenses.

Now an eagle has gotten into the drone-busting business, as you can see in this footage, which was shot by Melbourne Aerial Videos and placed on its Youtube channel.

The video shows a wedge-tailed eagle coming in fast above the Aussie landscape and then, seconds later, we see the hapless drone lying in a whirring heap on the ground.

"Eagle was fine -- she was massive, and used talons to 'punch' the drone out of the sky," Melbourne Aerial Videos wrote on its Youtube channel. The drone, however, had to go in for some surgery, according to ABC News.

As the old saying goes -- if you mess with the eagle, you get the talons. OK, that's not quite the saying, but this drone sure saw it that way.

From Discovery News

King Tut's Tomb May Hide Nefertiti's Secret Grave

The burial chamber of King Tut has revealed many secrets over the years, but there may be a whopper yet to discover: the tomb of his mother, Queen Nefertiti.

A scan of the wall texture in King Tutankhamun’s tomb reveals indentations or faint lines, which could suggest two hidden doors. Based on other aspects of the tomb’s geometry, it’s possible that Nefertiti is hiding behind the door, said Nicholas Reeves, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who has proposed the theory of Queen Nefertiti’s secret tomb.

If Nefertiti’s tomb indeed lies undisturbed behind the wall, that would be big news.

“We could be faced for the first time in recent history with the intact burial of an Egyptian pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings,” Reeves told Live Science. “Goodness knows what that will tell us.”

However, other Egyptologists are skeptical, because the scratches on the wall are the sole indications of the queen’s burial.

King Tut’s tomb

King Tutankhamun (also spelled Tutankhamen), often dubbed the boy king, was an Egyptian pharaoh who rose to power in 1333 B.C., at the tender age of 10. His mother was Queen Nefertiti, and his father was Akhenaten. He died at age 20, possibly of malaria or bone abnormalities, and his rule could have been a footnote in Egyptian history if not for one thing: His gold-bedecked, opulently appointed tomb was discovered, mostly intact, by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.

The boy king was buried in haste; bacterial traces suggest the paint had not even dried before he was sealed into the place. And his tomb is smaller than others in the Valley of the Kings, leading many experts to believe that his death was unexpected, and so his underlings had to scramble and put him in a makeshift tomb originally intended for someone else, Reeves said.

Reading between the lines

Over the years, throngs of tourists had damaged the tomb, so the Egyptian government commissioned a replica of King Tut’s tomb for tourists to visit. As part of that process, the reconstruction company Factum Arte took photographs and created scans of the wall’s textural surface.

Reeves was studying these scans when he noticed strange “echoes of features” beneath the plaster walls inside King Tut’s tomb. He noticed vertical lines on the west wall of the tomb. When he measured the dimensions of these lines, they corresponded to the dimensions of an existing doorway in a nearby wall. He speculated that someone had plastered over a hidden doorway in antiquity.

The layout of the tomb also suggested there should be a chamber at that spot. Another wall also had faint lines suggestive of another hidden doorway and wall partition.

In addition, Tutankhamun’s tomb is smaller than others in the Valley of the Kings, and to get to the chamber, one must turn right from the main corridor — a configuration typically used for Egyptian queens, not kings, whose chambers were off to the left, Reeves said.

“I think Tutankhamun’s tomb started off as the tomb of a queen, and that Tutankhamun was buried only later and buried in the outer part of the tomb,” Reeves said. The outer part of the tomb was quickly enlarged to make it a proper royal burial that could house the nest of shrines that was due to a pharaoh.

The real centerpiece tomb — that of Nefertiti — was never discovered because it was hidden by a “blind,” or a painted wall, he speculated.

Queen to king.

Many Egyptologists believe that after King Tut’s father, Akhenaten died, Nefertiti became a pharaoh, not just a queen. For instance, a female pharaoh appears in historical records at about the same time as any mention of Nefertiti disappears, said Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study.

If Nefertiti were indeed a “super queen” or female pharaoh, she might have been buried in what was originally planned as Akhenaten’s tomb, Reeves speculated.

Supporting this super-queen theory, the dimensions of the hidden doorways suggest her tomb was large enough to fit a nest of shrines — the fitting tribute for a pharaoh, Reeves said.

However, not everyone is convinced by Reeves’ hypothesis.

“It’s a very interesting observation that there are these traces; however, the jump to ‘and Nefertiti’s behind the wall’ — the logic just doesn’t follow at all,” Dodson told Live Science. “All we’ve actually got are a bunch of scratches on a wall,” Dodson said.

There’s no proof that there is a chamber behind the vertical lines, and even if there were, they could contain other items or people besides Nefertiti, he said. Some Egyptologists believe that Nefertiti’s mummy has already been found, and is sitting in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Dodson said. (A prior DNA analysis found that mummy could have been the mother of Tutankhamun, Dodson said.)

“I think it’s a very attractive idea, but I think the evidence for it is not very solid,” said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, who was not involved in the study. “It’s rather a bold statement to say that behind painted parts of Tutankhamun’s tomb lies the tomb of Nefertiti.”

Read more at Discovery News

Millions of 'Shade Balls' to Prevent Evaporation in Calif. Reservoirs

Los Angeles officials have come up with a surprisingly low-tech way to fight the region’s water crisis: millions of floating plastic balls.

As part of a $34.5 million project, the city’s Department of Water and Power has released nearly 100 million of so-called “shade balls” into three local reservoirs in recent months. The layer of balls protects water from algae formation, dust, rain and wildlife.

Perhaps more importantly, the black balls also help to prevent evaporation. According to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the balls could conserve 300 million gallons of reservoir water each year — water that California desperately needs.

On a chemical level, the balls prevent the production of bromate, a suspected carcinogen. Bromate forms when naturally occurring bromite reacts with added chlorine and sunlight.

Shade balls will likely become a permanent fixture atop reservoirs. This particular batch will be deployed for decade, after which time they will be removed, recycled and replaced.

“LADWP’s innovative use of shade balls will protect our water supply and ensure that residents have access to clean, safe, and ready-to-drink water. As we work to ensure a more sustainable and resilient future for L.A., I look forward to more creative, trailblazing and cost-effective solutions,” Los Angeles Councilmember Felipe Fuentes, chair of the city’s Energy and Environment Committee, said in a news release.

From Discovery News

Medieval Sword Bears Mysterious Inscription

A medieval sword inscribed with a mysterious message is stumping researchers and causing a stir among armchair historians.

The 13th-century weapon was found in the River Witham in Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom, in 1825. It now belongs to the British Museum, but is currently on loan to the British Library, where it's being displayed as part of an exhibit on the 1215 Magna Carta.

The sword looks fairly ordinary at first glance. Weighing in at 2 lbs., 10 ounces (1.2 kilograms) and measuring 38 inches (964 millimeters) long, the weapon is steel, with a double edge and a hilt shaped like a cross. But on one side of the sword is a mysterious inscription, made by gold wire that has been inlaid into the steel, which reads, "+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+."

What does this strange group of letters mean? No one knows for sure, according to the British Library, which recently posted information about the weapon on its website, along with a request for readers to help crack the seemingly incomprehensible code.

Is the message some kind of magical incantation, meant to empower the weapon's owner with mystical abilities during battle? Perhaps the inscription is a religious blessing, or maybe it's just the complicated signature of whoever forged the weapon. Those who read the British Library's blog post put these and many other theories forward regarding the sword's enigmatic message.

Dozens of commenters chimed in to help solve the mystery. And luckily, one of those commenters had a lot of insight into the history of inscribed swords in Europe. Marc van Hasselt, a graduate student of medieval studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has studied similarly inscribed swords and said that these weapons were "all the rage" in 13th-century Europe. The British Library recently updated its blog post with more information from van Hasselt.

Many inscribed swords have been found in countries including Poland, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making the River Witham sword "part of a large international family," according to van Hasselt.

In 2006, researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden (as well as several other institutions) started the Fyris Swords Project, a research project dedicated to figuring out the historical context in which these inscribed medieval swords were used.

The River Witham sword was forged in Germany, which was then the blade-making center of Europe, according to the British Museum. And pre-Christian Germanic tribesman inscribed runes onto their swords, axes and armor to "endow the items with magical powers," the Fyris Swords Project researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Waffen- und Kostümkunde (Weaponry and Costumes) in 2009.

It's possible that this ancient tradition was carried over to Christian times and that the inscriptions on the blades were therefore meant to "invoke God’s holy name and his grace to gain support and protection in battle," according to the researchers.

Such swords were likely owned by wealthy warriors, according to the British Museum, which speculates that the River Witham sword belonged to a knight or some other rich individual who rode into battle during the crusades of the late medieval period. The British Museum also suggests that such swords may have been a part of the ceremony in which a man became a knight and vowed to defend the church.

Even though historians are fairly certain why inscribed swords were popular in the medieval period and who owned them, they still aren't sure just what these swords actually say. Interpreting the inscriptions on the blades is like "trying to crack a mysterious code," according to the Fyris Swords Project researchers.

While historians aren't entirely sure what language the letters on the sword represent, they are fairly certain that the letters are a short-form version of Latin, according to van Hasselt, who said that Latin was the "international language of choice" in 13th-century Europe. The first two letters on the River Witham sword are ND, which van Hasselt said might be a kind of invocation that stands for "Nostrum Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord)."

The XOXcombination that follows could refer to the Holy Trinity of the Christian faith. And the two plus sign-shaped symbols before and after the inscription are likely Christian crosses, according to the Fyris Swords Project researchers.

This sort of speculation about what the sword's inscriptions might represent has been going on for more than a century (researchers have been publishing their interpretations of the inscriptions in the journal Waffen- und Kostümkunde since 1904). The variety of the letter sequences on the swords makes it clear that the inscriptions are not general statements (i.e., a standard blessing written out in short form). Quite the opposite is true, according to the researchers.

Read more at Discovery News

During Mass Extinction, No Species Safe. Not Even Us

Dominant species spread across the globe are just as vulnerable during a mass extinction event as more fragile ones confined to a single locale, according to a study published Tuesday.

As Earth enters the sixth such concentrated annihilation of life over the last half-billion years, this could be bad news for humans, the researchers say.

The last major wipeout occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid put a relatively quick end to the age of dinosaurs after their spectacular 150 million-year run.

By comparison, humans have been around for about one tenth of one percent of that time.

Outside of these moments of planetary upheaval -- each of which decimated 50 to 95 percent of life forms -- species tend to disappear at a steady "background" rate that has varied remarkably little.

During the previous big five extinction, however, that rate increased by at least 100-fold.

And that's about where we are today.

"Rates of extinction amongst modern animal groups are as high, if not higher, than those we see in the fossil records during times of mass extinction," comments Alexander Dunhill, a professor at the University of Leeds, and lead author of the study.

Most mass die-offs were associated with climate change, itself triggered by some cataclysmic event -- a massive, continental-scale rupturing of volcanoes in the case of the Triassic-Jurassic juncture 200 million years ago.

"Organisms are unable to adapt quick enough to rapidly changing conditions and thus become extinct," Dunhill said.

Looking at the fossil record of land-living animals around the Triassic-Jurassic event -- in which 80 percent of species ceased to exist -- Dunhill and colleague Matthew Wills asked whether geographically far-flung creatures fared better.

The answer, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communication, was "no".

"Wider geographical range conferred greater resilience ... throughout most of the Triassic and Jurassic," the study concludes.

"However, this insurance weakened towards the end of the Triassic, and was imperceptible during the mass extinction itself."

Thus, the age of giant amphibious reptiles and crocodile-like creatures gave way to the dinosaurs, which in turn yielded to small mammals and birds when their time was up.

Read more at Discovery News

Get Ready for Tonight's Perseid Meteor Shower Peak

Tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower and whether you have clear or cloudy skies, there are more than a few surprising ways that you can get involved and enjoy a potentially spectacular cosmic light show.

First things first, assuming you do have clear skies, meteor viewing requires no specialist equipment. All you need to do is to, well, look up. Of course, standing around in the dark looking up for long periods of time isn’t terribly good for your neck, so you can take your observing session up a notch and recline in a comfy chair or even just lie on the floor. It’s a social event! Invite your friends, family and neighbors and make a night of it.

However, although it’s the middle of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, sitting or laying still for long periods of time at night, depending on the weather, can still get chilly, so be sure to keep warm and lay on something soft.

So, Where to Look?

As I said, “up” is a good place to start, and so long as your eyes have adjusted to the dark, you shouldn’t have any problems spotting the Perseid meteors (or “shooting stars”) flash across the sky. But if you want to be even more pro, make sure you know where the constellation of Perseus is in the sky. Perseus can be found in the northeast between the bright star of Capella (that will be rising above the horizon after 11 p.m. local time) and the constellation Cassiopeia. SPACE.com has a handy night sky rendering that can help you track down Perseus.

Why Perseus? Well, that’s the reason why the Perseids are named after this constellation — it just so happens that the meteors from this particular shower at this time of year appear to originate in the general direction of Perseus. This is what is known as a “radiant” and all the other annual meteor showers throughout the year have been named after the constellation they appear to be radiating from. However, it is not necessary to stare directly at Perseus to see tonight’s Perseid meteors, just be aware they will be coming from that direction and sweeping directly overhead.

Now you know what direction they’ll be coming from and you know where to look (hint: “up”), what are the Perseids anyway?

The Perseid meteors are tiny grains of dust that originate from the periodic comet Swift-Tuttle. During the comet’s 133 year trundle around the sun, the ancient icy body has left a trail of dust and ice particles in its wake — much like a cometary contrail — looping around the sun. It just so happens that this trail of comet dirt crosses Earth’s orbit and, at this time in the Earth’s 365 day orbit around the sun, we hit the dust as regular as clockwork.

As Earth passes through the comet’s trail, these particles — called meteoroids — hit our atmosphere at high speed. With high velocity comes high gas pressure in front of each falling dust grain, triggering a phenomenon called “ram pressure.” This process compresses the air in front of the meteor, causing the atmospheric gases to rapidly heat up to over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius). If the meteoroid is small, it is the ram pressure heating, not atmospheric friction (a common misconception) that vaporizes it, creating a bright, transient meteor and short-lived ionization trail. Bigger meteoroids may generate a bright streak of light as a meteor and then erupt as an even brighter “fireball,” the largest of which may even generate a bang that can be heard on the ground.

Which brings me to my next point…

What if it’s Cloudy?

A meteor’s ionization trail is usually all that remains of the vaporized comet dust that has impacted our atmosphere. Composed of ionized gas (atmospheric gas molecules that have lost or gained electrons), these trails rapidly dissipate, but they can be used to detect the frequency of meteors raining through the upper atmosphere (at around 60 miles in altitude). These ionized gases bounce radio waves back to Earth, a signal anyone with an FM radio set can detect, even if it’s cloudy. Check out astronomer Mark Thompson’s guide on how to do meteor spotting with a radio.

Of course, it’s not just by sight and radio that you can get involved in tonight’s Perseids peak; there’s always the internet.

During every meteor shower, various social media platforms, particularly Twitter, buzz with the #MeteorWatch hashtag. Connected to the UK-based MeteorWatch.org website, you can monitor the skies and report your meteor sightings from wherever in the world. Your meteor report is then logged and plotted on a dynamic map. For instructions on how to get involved, check out the MeteorWatch website.

Also, Slooh.com will be hosting a live online event for the Perseids tonight at 5 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT, featuring professional astronomers and live feeds from their telescopes.

And of course, NASA will also be in on the action, covering the meteor shower live online with a webcast and expert guides. Many other astronomical and space organizations will be hosting their own events.

So, if you have clear skies tonight, get out there and enjoy the cosmic fireworks. The best time to see the meteors is after midnight in the early hours of Thursday morning (Aug. 13) as, like mosquitoes hitting a car’s windshield, the leading hemisphere of our planet will be rotating into the comet dust cloud at that time.

Read more at Discovery News