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Water vapour and ice crystals

17 August 2018
Electromagnetism

At https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/15/strange-events-earths-upper-atmos… … a strange event – earth's upper atmosphere is creating glowing clouds.

   … This summer, extra water vapour in the mesosphere is creating more glowing night time clouds. Somewhere in the region of 83 km above Earth's surface wisps of water vapour wrap themselves around meteor smoke. The resulting swarms of ice crystals form noctilucent clouds – an annual event mostly restricted to May and June. They glow in the night sky at high latitudes.

   … Noctilucent clouds are still hanging around in July and August thie year. The image above was taken by Kairo Kiitsek above Estonia. They were visible for 3 hours on July 26th. Over at www.spaceweather.com noctilucent clouds have featured over several years – but this year reports have tripled (possibly in part because they are better known phenomena). According to researchers at the University of Colorado there has been an unexpected surge of water vapour in the mesosphere. They show that this summer the mesosphere is the wettest for the last eleven years – from one solar minimum to the next. In addition, the mesosphere has been colder – created the conditions for ice crystals to form.

 

Over at https://phys.org/print453454067.html … astronomers discover a supermassive black hole in an ultra compact dwarf galaxy. The velocity dispersion at its centre is so high that it can only be explained by the presence of a massive black hole. However, quoting the researchers, 'to be able to say with complete assurance that htis hypothesis is correct we need to discover more supermassive black holes in ultra compact dwarf galaxies …' which seems to mean they didn't actually see a black hole at all but modelled its presence (by ignoring other possibilities).

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