What Is The Hottest Place on Earth?

What Is The Hottest Place on Earth?

We’ve talked about Venus, the hottest planet in the Solar System, but we know things can get pretty hot here on Earth, too. You may be wondering, where on the surface of the Earth has the highest natural temperature been recorded?

The location of this world record has had some controversy, but as of 2013, the hottest spot on record was the Furnace Creek Ranch in California’s Death Valley. On July 10, 1913, weather instruments measured 56.7 degrees Celsius, or 134 degrees Fahrenheit.
The previous record of 56 degrees at El Azizia, Libya was overturned because a systematic study in 2012 discovered there were errors in the measuring methods.

Similar temperatures to Death Valley’s record have been recorded around the World:
55 degrees in Africa,
53.6 in Asia,
50.7 in Australia,
and 49.1 in Argentina.

But these are just measurements from weather stations. It’s likely there are hotter temperatures, but nobody was around to measure. NASA satellites have spotted regions in Iran’s Lut desert which might have reached 70 degrees Celsius during the summers of 2004 and 2005.

So that’d be the hottest spot on the surface, but what about the hottest natural spot anywhere in the entire planet? Now you’ve got to travel straight down 6,371 kilometers to the very center of the Earth. At the inner core, the temperatures rise to about 5,430 degrees C, or 5700 Kelvin. Amazingly, this is about the same temperature as the surface of the Sun.

Some of this high temperature comes from leftover heat from the formation of the planet, 4.54 billion years ago, but the vast majority comes from the decay of radioactive minerals inside the Earth. It was likely hotter in the past, but all the short-period isotopes have already been depleted.

I keep saying the word “natural”, but what about “unnatural”? Wondering about the hottest temperature EVER generated on Earth? Thermonuclear explosions reach temperatures of tens of millions of Kelvin. Fusion experiments have hit 500 million Kelvin. But that’s nothing.

In 2012, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider were investigating the conditions that might have existed during the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
They generated a quark gluon plasma that had a temperature of 5.5 trillion Kelvin.
Unless aliens can do better, this is not only the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, it’s easily the hottest temperature anywhere in the Universe since the Big Bang itself.

Say Goodbye to Boring Airline Safety Presentations

Image from the new Virgin American safety presentation video. Credit: Virgin Airlines.

No more falling asleep before takeoff during those boring safety presentations – at least on Virgin America Airlines. Delta Airlines previously made their safety presentation a bit more interesting (see below) but Virgin has taken the presentation to new heights, turning the video into a song and dance, literally, with the help of dance stars like Todrick Hall and Madd Chadd.

Virgin also has a competition for their next video and are looking for audition videos of the best freestyle dance moves — from ballet to breakdance. Find out how you can enter the competition and submit your video here.

Watch the Sun Split Apart

Canyon of Fire on the Sun, Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA)

Here’s your amazing oh-my-gosh-space-is-so-cool video of the day — a “canyon of fire” forming on the Sun after the liftoff and detachment of an enormous filament on September 29-30. A new video, created from images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and assembled by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, shows the entire dramatic event unfolding in all its mesmerizing magnetic glory.

Watch it below:

Solarrific! (And I highly suggest full-screening it in HD.) That filament was 200,000 miles long, and the rift that formed afterwards was well over a dozen Earths wide!

Captured in various wavelengths of light by SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) the video shows the solar schism in different layers of the Sun’s corona, which varies greatly in temperature at different altitudes.

According to the description from Karen Fox at GSFC:

“The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun’s magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.”

Now, there’s not really any “fire” on the Sun — that’s just an illustrative term. What we’re actually seeing here is plasma contained by powerful magnetic fields that constantly twist and churn across the Sun’s surface and well up from its interior. The Sun is boiling with magnetic fields, and when particularly large ones erupt from deep below its surface we get the features we see as sunspots, filaments, and prominences.

When those fields break, the plasma they contained gets blasted out into space as coronal mass ejections… and this is what typically happens when one hits Earth. (But it could be much worse.)

Hey, that’s what it’s like living with a star!

Stay up to date on the latest solar events on the SDO mission page here.

Watch All Six Apollo Moon Landings at Once

Apollo moon landing sites
Apollo moon landing sites

So often, when we think of all the Apollo missions to the Moon, we recall the videos of the astronauts walking, jumping and driving around on the Moon. But the actual landing of the Lunar Module was such a key – if not nail-biting – part of the mission. Here in this video you can watch all six Apollo lunar landings at once. The footage uses the original descent camera coverage, realigned by the person who put this together —lunarmodule5 on YouTube — to 45 degrees to show what the lunar module pilots saw on the descent. There’s also the actual audio from all the landings. It’s amazing to hear both calm and anxiety in the voices of the LMP, Commander and Mission Control, as well as the jubilation after landing.

You can also watch all thirteen Saturn V launches at once in the video below — Apollo 4 thru Skylab with the Apollo 4 CBS audio added.

Best to go full-screen on these!

Two Beautiful Timelapse Videos of the 2013 Perseid Meteor Shower

Composite image of the Perseid Meteor Shower radiant, from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter in Arizona. Credit and copyright: Adam Block.

We’re still swooning over the great images and videos coming in from this year’s Perseid Meteor Shower. Here are a couple of timelapse videos just in today: the first is from P-M Hedén showing 25 Perseid meteors, but you can also see Noctilucent clouds, a faint Aurora Borealis, airglow, satellites passing over and lightning. “It was a magic night!,” P-M said.

See another view from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter in Arizona, below:

This timelapse was created by Adam Block and shows a few hours of the experience guests at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter had on August 11/12, 2013 during the Perseids: they could look through the 0.8m Schulman telescope and enjoy being outside to see the meteors streaking overhead. Flashlights and other sources illuminate the ground and the observatory. Find out more about the observatory here.

Beautiful Noctilucent Clouds 2013 — The Movie

Noctilucent clouds taken from the ISS Image Credit: NASA
Noctilucent clouds taken from the ISS Image Credit: NASA

Intrigued by mysterious noctilucent, or night-shining clouds? This beautiful new film from TWAN (The World At Night) photographer P-M Hedén combines timelapse and real-time footage to provide a stunning compilation of his month in the field in Sweden this summer to capture these lovely blue electric clouds. Noctilucent clouds are visible sometimes low in the northern sky during morning and evening twilight, usually through late May through August, and they seem to be increasing the past few years.

Enjoy the stunning, tranquil views (lots of wildlife and night sky imagery too!) and lovely music in this new film, just published yesterday.

For more information about NLCs, Bob King wrote a great overview for us earlier this year about these “visitors from the Twilight Zone!

Noctilucent clouds 2013 The Film from P-M Hedén on Vimeo.

Whimsical and Beautiful New Timelapse: Borrego Stardance

A still from the new timelapse, 'Borrego Stardance' by Gavin Heffernan/Sunchaser Pictures.

Just outside of Borrego Springs, California, monsters lurk. Life-size metal statues of dinosaurs, dragons, and wooly mammoths stand among giant insects, birds and several other creatures. But the 600,000 acre Anzo-Borrego State Park is also an astronomer’s dream, since it is one of four communities in the world to be classified a “Dark Sky Community” by the International Dark Sky Association.

Timelapse maven Gavin Heffernan from Sunchaser Pictures has now combined these monsters and the beautiful dark sky for his latest astronomical timelapse video, Borrego Stardance. It’s an unusual and fanciful look at the night sky –- where else can you see dragons and star trails at the same time? Watch below — and crank the volume for added effect!

“Despite the grueling 112 degree temperatures, my team and I had an amazing shoot, with some of the clearest Milky Way footage we’ve ever captured” Gavin wrote Universe Today via email, “as well as some exciting creature-filled star trails, and more experiments with “Starscaping” (switching from stars to trails mid-shot).”

It’s a beautiful addition to Gavin’s already impressive timelapse and video collection. You can see a behind-the-scenes video of the Borrego site here.

You can find more information on the statues at the Galleta Meadows website.

BORREGO STARDANCE from Sunchaser Pictures on Vimeo.

Why are We Driven to Explore?

Why do we explore? Is it the desire to break through boundaries, or to probe the perimeters of possibilities? With his lightning-fast mind, self-professed wonder junkie Jason Silva can quickly list all the great quotes about space exploration and why it is important for the human species to explore; and he does it in this new video from his “Shots of Awe” series on You Tube.

Strap in and enjoy the fast ride that is Jason Silva!
Continue reading “Why are We Driven to Explore?”

Beautiful Timelapse — and an Invitation to Try Capturing the Night Sky from a City

Screenshot of the Moon rising over Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Bruno Letarte.

Can you get good astrophotography shots from within a city? Astrophotographer Bruno Letarte has proved you can capture stunning shots of both city and night sky and turn them into a beautiful timelapse. Last fall we featured a timelapse by Bruno taken at the dark sky site of the South African Large Telescope (SALT), but he said his latest project of shooting among the city lights was a “real learning experience.”

“It was a completely different challenge, much trickier than shooting a perfect dark sky, where you find your optimal exposure time and stick to it for everything,” Bruno told Universe Today via email. “Different objects and different focal lengths, lights in the foreground, moving cars, etc. Many sequences had to be decided on the spot with no time to really think it through.”

He captured various objects (Moon, Sun, planets, comets) either rising or setting against a nice city landscape — with light pollution and all – and all taken with an entry level enthusiast camera.

“It was a real learning experience for me to shoot in these various conditions. It’s also an invitation to the general public to look up in their night sky to see what’s up there, even in a city,” Bruno added. “And for the amateur photographer out there, I’ve included the tech details and comments for each sequences with a few seconds of flashing text.”

Add Shots of Awe to your Life

Ever find yourself thinking about how the Universe came to be, or how humans have evolved to their current level of intelligence, or just why that certain song tugs at your heartstrings? Self-professed wonder junkie Jason Silva has a new video series that feature his reflections on the human condition, the nature of what it means to be alive, and the role of philosophy in everyday life.

Called “Shots of Awe” these under three-minute videos are what Silva calls “inspired nuggets of techno-rapture,” and every week can provide a nudge to contemplate your life; whether it be to look at the complex systems of society, technology, or the beauty of nature and science.

Hang on, though; Silva’s faster-than-thought dialogue takes you for a ride that might leave you spinning … but in a good way!

There are new episodes every Tuesday and below is today’s newest, titled “Singularity.”

Hosted on Discovery’s TestTube network, you can subscribe on YouTube here.