Tag: weather

Could be worse

As we come to terms with the latest numbers and updates about everyone’s favourite virus, we can be thankful, at least, that we don’t have this to worry about:

Wasp-76b: The exotic inferno planet where it ‘rains iron’ – BBC News
Wasp-76b, as it’s known, orbits so close in to its host star, its dayside temperatures exceed 2,400C – hot enough to vaporise metals. The planet’s nightside, on the other hand, is 1,000 degrees cooler, allowing those metals to condense and rain out. It’s a bizarre environment, according to Dr David Ehrenreich from the University of Geneva. “Imagine instead of a drizzle of water droplets, you have iron droplets splashing down,” he told BBC News.

ESO telescope observes exoplanet where it rains iron – ESO
This strange phenomenon happens because the ‘iron rain’ planet only ever shows one face, its day side, to its parent star, its cooler night side remaining in perpetual darkness. Like the Moon on its orbit around the Earth, WASP-76b is ‘tidally locked’: it takes as long to rotate around its axis as it does to go around the star.

Greater problems are ahead, however.

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Behold our dazzling night sky when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in 4 billion years – Kottke
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at NASA have predicted that our own Milky Way galaxy and the nearby Andromeda galaxy (M31) will collide about 4 billion years from now. As part of the announcement from 2012, they produced a video of what the collision would look like and a series of illustrations of what our sky will look like during the collision process.

Meanwhile.

Betelgeuse – Quartz
What’s going on with Betelgeuse? There are two possibilities: Betelgeuse will brighten again and continue its pattern, or it will explode.

Waiting in the rain

Here’s a little video I made a while ago. I can’t remember who or what I was waiting for, now, but I remember being mesmerised by the way the wind and rain worked together to create these patterns through the windscreen onto the dashboard. An audible visualisation of the weather outside.

Relaxing ASMR rain on a car at night

Cool clothes (literally)

I could have done with one of these yesterday.

Sony’s new Reon Pocket is an in-shirt air conditioner
Called Reon Pocket, the small, lightweight gadget slides into the upper back pocket of a specially designed t-shirt. Controlled with a smartphone app, it’s capable of heating or cooling the wearer via the Peltier effect, a thermodynamic principle widely used in refrigeration.

Yes, it’s been quite warm.

And not just here.

Europe’s heat wave shatters temperature records and cities are struggling to cope
Meteorologists say that Europe is on track for the hottest July on record, following the warmest June since records began in 1880.

Scientists warn that the world should expect more scorching heat waves due to climate change and that current temperature highs are in line with predictions made over a decade ago.

Just a taste of things to come, then?

Rain has fallen, generally cloudy

The changing shape of UK weather: Historic maps show 142 years of rain, sun and wind
Thousands of weather maps throughout the past 142 years have been unearthed showing how fashion and technology have drastically changed the diagrams. The wealth of maps are largely drawn by hand and feature ink notes and tea cup rings as the Met Office did not draw maps on computers until 1981.

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Earth wind globe

An amazing visualization of global weather conditions. You can rotate the globe and watch the wind patterns at different altitudes.

Earth :: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions
A visualization of global weather conditions. Forecast by supercomputers. Updated every three hours.

As well as wind speed data, you can mesmerise yourself following the currents across the oceans, or even watch the sun make its way across the globe.