Visualization of Space Environment at Pluto

NASA Releases New Visualization of Space Environment at Pluto

This video shows a simulation of the space environment all the way out to Pluto in the months surrounding New Horizons’ July 2015 flyby. At the time, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, worked with the New Horizons team to test how well their models—and other models contributed by scientists around the world—predicted the space environment at Pluto. Understanding the environment through which our spacecraft travel can ultimately help protect them from radiation and other potentially damaging effects. Visualizers at Goddard recently updated the movie of the model, creating this new release.

---

---

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) and the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), Enlil and Dusan Odstrcil (GMU).
Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Though the vacuum of space is about a thousand times emptier than a laboratory vacuum, it’s still not completely empty. The sun releases a constant stream of particles called the solar wind—as well as occasional denser clouds of particles known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs—both containing embedded magnetic fields. The density, speed, and temperature of these particles, as well as the direction and strength of the embedded magnetic fields, make up the space environment.

To map the space environment at Pluto, scientists combined the predictions of several models—and looked at events that had long since passed Earth.

This artist’s concept depicts the New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 encounter with Pluto and one of the dwarf planet’s moons, Charon.
Credits: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

“We set the simulation to start in January of 2015, because the particles passing Pluto in July 2015 took some six months to make the journey from the sun,” said Dusan Odstrcil, a space weather scientist at Goddard who created the Enlil model. The Enlil model, named for the Sumerian god of the wind, is one of the primary models used to simulate the space environment near Earth and is the basis for the New Horizons simulation.

The new, combined model tracks CMEs longer than ever before. Because particles must travel for many months before reaching Pluto, the CMEs eventually spread out and merge with other CMEs and the solar wind to form larger clouds of particles and magnetic field. These combined clouds stretch out as they travel away from the sun, forming thin ring shapes by the time they reach Pluto—quite different from the typical balloon shape of CMEs seen here at Earth.

---

---

– Credit and Resource –

NASA

---

Visualization of Space Environment at Pluto

evolution in real time

Scientia — In ongoing research to record the interaction of environment and evolution, a team led by University of California, Riverside biologist David Reznick has found new information illustrating the evolution of a population of guppies.

David Reznick is a distinguished professor of biology at UC Riverside. Credit: L. Duka.

Working in a river in Trinidad, the researchers determined which male guppies would contribute more offspring to the population as well as which would live longer and which would have a shorter lifespan.

“We’re detailing how evolution happens,” Reznick, a distinguished professor of biology, said. “Usually people look at evolution as change over time but they don’t know the details of how it changes.”

---

---

The new work is part of research that Reznick has been doing since 1978. It involved transplanting guppies from a river with a diverse community of predators into a river with no predators – except for one other fish species, an occasional predator – to record how the guppies would evolve and how they might impact their environment.

To do this, the team, which includes Reznick’s former graduate student Swanne P. Gordon and two undergraduates working in his lab, used scales from the guppies to archive their DNA. When they returned the guppies to the river and new unmarked guppies showed up, the latter were marked and samples of their scales were taken for study. In this way the team tracked the guppies’ differential success in making babies and surviving.

“We could look at their appearance and see how male color pattern affected their ability to make babies or to survive,” Reznick said. “We used the DNA from the scales to identify who their parents were. That means we could reconstruct their pedigree and eventually know over time their success for contributing offspring.”

The research also found that males with more or larger orange and black spots produce more offspring; males with black spots also have a higher risk of mortality.

The findings, which appeared online Aug. 19 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show how real time evolution can be resolved into differences among fathers in siring sons, which could be attributed to how successful the father is in finding mates or how long he lives. It also shows how evolution can link these differences to heritable individual attributes.

“People think of evolution as historical. They don’t think of it as something that’s happening under our nose. It is a contemporary process. People are skeptical; they don’t believe in evolution because they can’t see it. Here, we see it. We can see if something makes you better able to make babies and live longer,” Reznick said.

---

---

“People look at the genetics of aging in mice and apply that to humans,” he added. “But those mice are in a lab. Results from studying animals in captivity may not be the same as you get when you look at an animal in nature.”

Results from the new work could also be used in biological conservation or anywhere researchers are looking at change overtime because these methods can reveal the attributes of individuals that enhance survival and reproduction. Another important goal of Reznick’s research program is detailing how the animals are evolving and influencing their environment.

“We call this the ‘interaction between ecology and evolution,"” he said. “Animals can change their environment around them and that change can adapt to how they evolve. The idea of ecology and evolution interacting is a different view. If you look at ecological evolution, it treats animals as a constant. But this research has recorded the guppies evolving and how they change their environment as they evolve. An interaction between ecology and evolution could yield entirely different results from what you would expect if you modeled the process without the interaction.”

Reznick emphasized that evolution is not a linear process.

“It’s a series of episodes,” he said. “What we set out to do is watch and get a real sense of how evolution happens. The path is unpredictable and it is happening now.”

– Credit and Resource –

More information: Selection analysis on the rapid evolution of a secondary sexual trait, Published 19 August 2015.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1244

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Provided by: University of California – Riverside

---

evolution in real time