Many of Earth’s most iconic landmarks are currently closed to the public due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But maybe you have some time on your hands? If so, you can start exploring Earth online. Let’s go to the U.K. and Europe first … then some sites in Africa and India … then South America. Thanks to David Callejas of Float On Boat Rentals in Austin, TX for putting this together for us! Visit Float On for all of your Lake Travis boat rentals and Lake Austin boat rental needs.

Start your virtual explorations in the U.K., with a tour of Buckingham Palace, official home of British sovereigns since 1837. When you’re finished, hop over to Windsor Castle, where the Queen and Prince Phillip are said to be currently self-isolating. Before leaving England, make sure to make a quick virtual stop at Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire.

Next, fly on over to France for a firsthand virtual view of the Eiffel Tower and the Musée du Louvre, world’s largest art museum,

Now try Italy. You might start with these virtual photos of the Colosseum in Rome. The Vatican gives you an up close look into the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s Rooms and a few other areas with 360-degree cameras. The Royal Palace of Caserta in southern Italy is one of the largest palaces erected in Europe during the 18th century.

Before leaving Europe make sure you drop into Ireland where you can enjoy a virtual tour of the Jameson distillery in Midleton, and explore Blarney Castle, a medieval stronghold near Cork, Ireland.

Now … Africa. Africam has multiple live cameras for viewing elephants, lions, and leopards in the wild! Explore various highlights, or even tune into Africam’s LIVE feature to see what you can spot. Now how about a quick trip to the Giza pyramid complex, also called the Giza Necropolis.

From there, try India. Pay a visit to the crown jewel of India, the Taj Mahal. This monument is recognizable to people around the world because of its symmetry, white marble, and the love story that brought it to life.

Ready to travel? Machu Picchu in Peru offers a voice-guided virtual tour that gives you 360 views from various vantage points at this amazing landmark.

Or go to Brazil. Visit the Sanctuary of Christ the Redeemer. You can look over the city of Rio de Janeiro, or walk around zooming in and out. Very beautiful.

Want more? EarthTV has live webcams from around the entire world! Check out the Sydney Opera House, Athens Acropolis, Venice, Prague, New York, and many many more. It’s cool, fun and eerie at the same time to get lost in this world of webcams, and to witness the historic limited activity around the world right now.

Bottom line: Virtual tours, galleries and live webcams from around the world. Start exploring! Know a great site that we missed? Share it via the Comments section of this post. Thanks, everybody!

The post Ready, set, explore Earth from home first appeared on EarthSky.

Known as the Sometimes Islands in Lake Travis, this strange string of islets appears and disappears from the water’s surface every few years. You can visit by boat or land.

Image taken by our friends at Float On –Lake Travis Boat Rentals, the best place to go for lake travis boat rentals in the Austin, TX area. Also check them out on Lake Austin for Lake Austin boat rentals.

The post Sometimes Island on Lake Travis first appeared on EarthSky.

We’ve known for decades that our sun will someday swell into a red giant star, swallowing the inner planets Mercury and Venus within its outer layers. That’ll happen billions of years from now. But our solar system isn’t the only one destined to lose planets to its aging star. Astronomers say that they now know of two distant exoplanets – Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c – that will be swallowed by their star in a relatively short time, on an astronomical timescale. Their ends will come in 130 million and 155 million years, respectively. Lead author Gongjie Li of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) presented this research yesterday (June 2, 2014) at the meeting in Boston of the American Astronomical Society, which is going on now. She said:

As far as we know, this is the first time two known exoplanets in a single system have a predicted time of death.

The star Kepler-56 is becoming a red giant star now. It has already ballooned out to four times the size of our sun. As it continues to age, it will continue to expand further and further outward. Not only will the star grow larger, but its gravitational tides will get stronger, dragging these distant worlds inward to their eventual doom.

Both Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c are much closer to their star than Mercury. The first planet orbits its star in only 10.5 days, and the second orbits every 21.4 days. Before they’re submerged beneath the outer layers of their star, the two planets will be subjected to immense heating from the star. Their atmospheres will begin to boil off, and the planets themselves will be stretched into egg shapes by their star’s gravity.

The only known survivor in this distant solar system will be Kepler-56d, a gas giant planet circling in a 3.3-Earth-year orbit.

Read more about the pending deaths of these two exoplanets, via Harvard CfA

The post Two planets destined to die as their star expands first appeared on EarthSky.

Carbon-rich planets may be more common than previously thought, according to new research by Yale University astronomers.

Some of these planets, all located far beyond Earth’s solar system, could contain vast deposits of graphite or diamonds, and their apparent abundance prompts new questions about the implications of carbon-intense environments for climate, plate tectonics, and other geological processes, as well as for life.

“Despite the relatively small amount of carbon on Earth, carbon has been critical for the emergence of life and the regulation of our climate through the carbon-silicate cycle,” said Yale doctoral candidate John Moriarty, who led the research, recently published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s an open question as to how carbon-rich chemistry will affect the habitability of exoplanets. We hope our findings will spark interest in research to help answer these questions.”

Exoplanets are planets outside Earth’s solar system. In October 2012 Madhusudhan published a paper arguing that 55 Cancri e, a rocky exoplanet twice Earth’s size, is likely covered in graphite and diamond.

Astronomers generally believe that rocky exoplanets are composed — as Earth is — largely of iron, oxygen, magnesium, and silicon, with only a small fraction of carbon. In contrast, carbon-rich planets could have between a small percentage and three-quarters of their mass in carbon. (Earth has 0.005%.)

Moriarty, Madhusudhan, and Fischer developed an advanced model for estimating exoplanet composition. Previous models were based on static snapshots of the gaseous pools (or disks) in which planets form. Their new model tracks changes in the composition of the disk as it ages.

The researchers found that, in disks with carbon-oxygen ratios greater than 0.8, carbon-rich planets can form farther from the center of the disk than previously understood. They also found that carbon-rich planets can form in disks with a carbon-oxygen ratio as low as 0.65 if those planets form close to their host star.

Previous models predicted carbon-rich planets could only form in disks with carbon-oxygen ratios higher than 0.8. This is important, the researchers said, because there are many more stars with carbon-oxygen ratios greater than 0.65 than there are with carbon-oxygen ratios greater than 0.8.

Said Madhusudhan, “Our study shows that extraterrestrial worlds can be extremely diverse in their chemical compositions, including many that are drastically different from our earthly experience.”

There are more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets and more than 3,000 exoplanet “candidates.”

“An important question is whether or not our Earth is a typical rocky planet,” said Fischer. “Despite the growing number of exoplanet discoveries, we still don’t have an answer to this question. This work further expands the range of factors that may bear on the habitability of other worlds.”

Via Yale

The post Diamond planets more common than astronomers thought? first appeared on EarthSky.

The slopes of a giant Martian volcano, once covered in glacial ice, may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, according to new research led by Brown University geologists.

Nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, Arsia Mons is the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system. This new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano’s northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago. The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes — bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube.

The ice-covered lakes of Arsia Mons would have held hundreds of cubic kilometers of meltwater, according to calculations by Kat Scanlon, a graduate student at Brown who led the work. And where there’s water, there’s the possibility of a habitable environment.

“This is interesting because it’s a way to get a lot of liquid water very recently on Mars,” Scanlon said.

While 210 million years ago might not sound terribly recent, the Arsia Mons site is much younger than the habitable environments turned up by Curiosity and other Mars rovers. Those sites are all likely older than 2.5 billion years. The fact that the Arsia Mons site is relatively young makes it an interesting target for possible future exploration.

“If signs of past life are ever found at those older sites, then Arsia Mons would be the next place I would want to go,” Scanlon said.

A paper describing Scanlon’s work is published in the journal Icarus.

Scientists have speculated since the 1970s that the northwest flank of Arsia Mons may once have been covered by glacial ice. That view got a big boost in 2003 when Brown geologist Jim Head and Boston University’s David Marchant showed that terrain around Arsia Mons looks strikingly similar to landforms left by receding glaciers in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. Parallel ridges toward the bottom of the mountain appear to be drop moraines — piles of rubble deposited at the edges of a receding glacier. An assemblage of small hills in the region also appears to be debris left behind by slowly flowing glacial ice.

The glacier idea got another boost with recently developed climate models for Mars that take into account changes in the planet’s axis tilt. The models suggested that during periods of increased tilt, ice now found at the poles would have migrated toward the equator. That would make Mars’s giant mid-latitude mountains – Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons – prime locations for glaciation around 210 million years ago.

Fire and Ice

Working with Head, Marchant, and Lionel Wilson from the Lancaster Environmental Centre in the U.K., Scanlon looked for evidence that hot volcanic lava may have flowed in the region the same time that the glacier was present. She found plenty.

Using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Scanlon found pillow lava formations, similar to those that form on Earth when lava erupts at the bottom of an ocean. She also found the kinds of ridges and mounds that form on Earth when a lava flow is constrained by glacial ice. The pressure of the ice sheet constrains the lava flow, and glacial meltwater chills the erupting lava into fragments of volcanic glass, forming mounds and ridges with steep sides and flat tops. The analysis also turned up evidence of a river formed in a jökulhlaup, a massive flood that occurs when water trapped in a glacier breaks free.

Based on the sizes of the formations, Scanlon could estimate how much lava would have interacted with the glacier. Using basic thermodynamics, she could then calculate how much meltwater that lava would produce. She found that two of the deposits would have created lakes containing around 40 cubic kilometers of water each. That’s almost a third of the volume of Lake Tahoe in each lake. Another of the formations would have created around 20 cubic kilometers of water.

Even in the frigid conditions of Mars, that much ice-covered water would have remained liquid for a substantial period of time. Scanlon’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the lakes could have persisted or hundreds or even a few thousand years.

That may have been long enough for the lakes to be colonized by microbial life forms, if in fact such creatures ever inhabited Mars.

“There’s been a lot of work on Earth — though not as much as we would like — on the types of microbes that live in these englacial lakes,” Scanlon said. “They’ve been studied mainly as an analog to [Saturn’s moon] Europa, where you’ve got an entire planet that’s an ice covered lake.”

In light of this research, it seems possible that those same kinds of environs existed on Mars at this site in the relatively recent past.

There’s also possibility, Head points out, that some of that glacial ice may still be there. “Remnant craters and ridges strongly suggest that some of the glacial ice remains buried below rock and soil debris,” he said. “That’s interesting from a scientific point of view because it likely preserves in tiny bubbles a record of the atmosphere of Mars hundreds of millions of years ago. But an existing ice deposit might also be an exploitable water source for future human exploration.”

Via Brown University

The post Habitable environment on Martian volcano? first appeared on EarthSky.

The climate in southwestern Australia has been drying for more than 40 years. Residents there are bracing for a continuing drier and warmer trend, according to scientists at the Curtin University Institute for Biodiversity and Climate in Australia. Scientists at that institute have been working on a method to identify potential refugia – that is, areas in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavorable conditions – as rainfall continues to decline in southwestern Australia. They say their newest results – which involved the use of Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) instruments – are encouraging. The journal PLOS One published the work in early January 2014.

Grant Wardell-Johnson and Gunnar Keppel, along with former Curtin scientist Tom Schut (now at Wageningen University in the Netherlands) were able to translate a traditional plot observation to an entire landscape. The key, the team said, was finding a strong relationship between three things: vegetation types in southwestern Australa, soil depth and rainfall.

They say their finding means they can now compare current climate and future climates under a continuing trend of reduced rainfall in the region.

In turn, Wardell-Johnson said, this comparison will let them apply expected future changes in rainfall to landscape-scale vegetation and, thereby, find potential sites where populations of organisms could survive.

They say these findings are “essential for conservation efforts.” Wardell-Johnson added:

Global warming is a particular issue in Mediterranean-climate regions. It is especially so in the flat landscapes of south-western Australia – home to a global biodiversity hotspot.

Understanding where refugia will be is of particular importance in light of human-caused global warming, to offer the best chances for our precious flora and fauna in times of transformative change.

Bottom line: Australian scientists are making headway in learning how to predict future safe havens for biodiversity, as climate changes. In particular, they are looking at a technique that will let them apply expected future expected changes in rainfall to landscape-scale vegetation and, thereby, find potential sites where populations of organisms can survive.

Read more about this study via Curtin University

The post Seeking safe havens for biodiversity, as climate changes first appeared on EarthSky.

Moderate eruption activity has once again been observed at Klyuchevskaya Volcano. The activity began on August 15, 2013 and it has increased in intensity during the first few weeks of October. During October 11 to 20, lava fountains and thick plumes of ash and steam were ejected from the summit. Ash plumes rose 7.5 to 10 kilometers (24,000 to 32,000 feet) above the summit prompting aviation alerts.

See more Landsat images of eruption at Klyuchevskaya

The post Heat from the lava flows at Klyuchevskaya first appeared on EarthSky.

October’s Draconid meteor shower – sometimes called the Giacobinids – radiates from the fiery mouth of the northern constellation Draco the Dragon. Because the radiant is located so far north on the sky’s dome, this shower favors temperate and far-northern latitudes, such as the U.S., Canada, Europe and northern Asia.

This beautiful shot was captured by RichardTurnerPhotography of Flickr in early October, 2011. Usually, this meteor shower offers no more than a handful of languid meteors per hour. But two years ago – in October 2011 – people around the globe saw an elevated number of Draconid meteors, despite a bright moon that night. European observers saw over 600 meteors per hour in 2011. That’s one reason Richard was able to capture two in the same frame!!

Great shot, Richard. Thank you.

Everything you need to know: Draconid meteor shower

Tonight: Legendary Draconid meteors best after sunset October 7

The post Draconid meteors first appeared on EarthSky.

Venus and Saturn will occupy the same binocular field of view from about September 15 to September 21.

Bob King aka Astro Bob had this to say about finding Saturn in the evening sky:

I easily saw it with the naked eye last night three fingers (5 degrees) above and left of Venus starting about 40 minutes after sunset.

Although Saturn shines as brilliantly as a first-magnitude star, Venus outshines Saturn by about 80 times. If you can’t see Saturn on these September evenings, try aiming binoculars at Venus to spot Saturn nearby.

More on spotting Venus and Saturn here

Thanks Astro Bob for this beautiful image!!

The post Venus and Saturn above the fog first appeared on EarthSky.

We see many photos of star trails. These star trails from Manish Mantani Photography are different, though. The photo was taken not in visible light, but in infrared. In other words, the wavelength of this “light” is just greater than that of the red end of the visible light spectrum.

Manish Mamtani captured this photograph with a full spectrum Canon t2i with a Canon 10-22mm lens. He had this to say about the shot:

This is my first infrared star trail shot that I created a week ago in Texas. I have taken many pictures of night sky in infrared but not the star trails. I hope you like it.

We do. We love it.

Infrared radiation is popularly known as heat radiation. It’s used in night vision equipment when there’s not enough visible light to see. Click here to learn more about the use of infrared to aid night vision.

What are star trails?

Learn more about infrared in this post about the electromagnetic spectrum.

See more of EarthSky’s Today’s Images

The post Infrared star trails over Texas first appeared on EarthSky.