Significant improvements global warming

In the past decade global warming levels have remained stable, despite no significant improvements in green house emissions have been observed. A lot of explanations have been hypothesized by scientists as to why this is happening, offering various factors like aerosol deflection of radiation or soot absorption, however according to a recently released report by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), global warming has been put at a halt by deep oceans.
Despite the fact that satellite measurements show a discrepancy between incoming sunshine and outgoing radiation from Earth actually increased in the past years, variations in temperature in the air is insignificant. This has caused scientists to wonder where this missing heat has been going for all these years. Part of the study to pinpoint where the majority of this missing heating has been absorbed, scientists ran complicated computer simulations which eventually suggested that the heat’s to be found in ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet. The computer models, which took into account complex interactions between the atmosphere, land, oceans and sea ice, predicted that temperatures would rise by several degrees during this century, but with hiatus periods interrupting the increase.

“We will see global warming go through hiatus periods in the future,” says NCAR’s Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study. “However, these periods would likely last only about a decade or so, and warming would then resume. This study illustrates one reason why global temperatures do not simply rise in a straight line.”

Shallow waters warmed substantially less, while deeper waters warmed by about 18 to 19 percent more during the hiatus periods.

“This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean,” said Kevin Trenberth, a study author and NCAR scientist. “The heat has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.”

During these hiatus periods, simulations showed that extra energy entered the oceans, with deeper layers absorbing a disproportionate amount of heat due to changes in oceanic circulation. A pattern has been observed as well: sea-surface temperatures decreased across the tropical Pacific, while increasing in the higher latitudes, during hiatus period. Interestingly enough the pattern very much resembles that of La Niña event.
The study is of particular importance since it shows that global warming is not actually decreasing, but gets absorbed by the world’s oceans, fact which certainly won’t be without consequences.

 

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Planet orbiting around two suns found by Kepler telescope

A remarkable discovery which turns once again turns fiction into reality, the Kepler spacecraft has found the first confirmed planet to orbit around two suns, much like the iconic Tatooine in the Star Wars Universe.
It’s by no means habitable, however. Located 200 light years from Earth and the size of Jupiter, the planet dubbed Kepler-16b, is half rock, half gas and has surface temperature ranging from -70C to -100C. It’s not a haven for never ending sunshine either, like some of you might have imagined, since two suns are in too close of proximity. Thus, a double sunset phenomenon is experienced and once ever 20.5 days the two sun come together into an eclipse.

“This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life. Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars,” said Kepler principal investigator William Borucki in a NASA statement. “I am going to guess there are 2 million more such dual-sun planets,” said Laurance Doyle, the lead researcher on the Kepler-16b report.

While Kepler’s main goal is that of finding Earth-like planets, Doyle, who I’m willing to bet is a big Star Wars fan, has taken the liberty to search for binary systems capable of housing planets and he’s been doing it for the past 20 years – finally he’s struck gold. Alan Boss, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC , said “this discovery is stunning. Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality,” he said.
While planetary binary systems have well been dubbed a valid hypothesis up until now, they’ve more or less stayed in the realm of Hollywood.
The binary system was observed after unusual signals in the data collected by the Kepler spacecraft. The data showed that the system had two stars orbiting one another, which regular intervals of brightness shift due to the eclipses. Further investigation showed a third eclipse described by additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, indicating that the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. The subtle drop of light from the star was attributed to a third planet, Kepler-16b.
Josh Carter, a co-author on the study, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said: “Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet – a planet orbiting not one, but two stars. Once again, we’re finding that our solar system is only one example of the variety of planetary systems nature can create.”

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