The Solar Fried Planets Atmosphere

An international team of astronomers has fixed a star in the work of devouring one of its planets. BD+48 740, a red giant they pragmatic using the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, appears to have the gas of a scorched planet in its atmosphere.  This is reliable with a rocky world, recently destroyed.

The great researchers who concentrate in stellar evolution have lengthy known that the inner planets are in danger.  The trouble starts in the isolated future when the sun's core runs out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion. To keep the fires flaming, the sun will begin to fuse hydrogen external the core, in a layer closer to the stellar surface. This will turn the sun into a red oversize, at least 200 times wider than it is today. Mercury, Venus, Earth and possibly even Mars might be engulfed. 

The fate of Earth is not a confidence, however. Some researchers believe that Earth's orbit might spiral outward, keeping the planet at a safe space from the future inferno.  This could happen if solar winds carry a path a major fraction of the sun's mass in the years most important up to the red giant phase. On the other hand, the sun might get bigger so fast that our planet has no chance to escape.  Earth would get trapped in the sun's rapidly advancing atmosphere and spiral innermost to oblivion.

NASA Funded Study Shows Desert Dust Cuts Colorado River Flow

Snow melt in the Colorado River basin is occurring earlier, reducing runoff and the amount of crucial water available downstream. A new study shows this is due to increased dust caused by human activities in the region during the past 150 years. The study, led by a NASA scientist and funded by the agency and the National Science Foundation (NSF), showed peak spring runoff now comes three weeks earlier than before the region was settled and soils were disturbed. Annual runoff is lower by more than five percent on average compared to pre-settlement levels.

The findings have major implications for the 27 million people in the seven U.S. states and Mexico who rely on the Colorado River for drinking, agricultural and industrial water. The results were published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team was led by Tom Painter, a snow hydrologist at both NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California at Los Angeles. The team examined the impact of human-produced dust deposits on mountain snowpacks over the Upper Colorado River basin between 1915 and 2003. Studies of lake sediment cores showed the amount of dust falling in the Rocky Mountains increased by 500 to 600 percent since the mid-to-late 1800s when grazing and agriculture began to disturb fragile but stable desert soils.

The team used an advanced hydrology model to simulate the balance of water flowing into and out of the river basin under current dusty conditions and those that existed before soil was disturbed. Hydrologic data gathered from field studies funded by NASA and NSF and measurements of the absorption of sunlight by dust in snow were combined with the modeling. More than 80 percent of sunlight falling on fresh snow is typically reflected back into space. In the semi-arid regions of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin, winds blow desert dust east, triggering dust-on-snow events. When dark dust particles fall on snow, they reduce its ability to reflect sunlight. The snow also absorbs more of the sun's energy. This darker snow cover melts earlier, with some water evaporating into the atmosphere.