Giant Rubik’s Cube floats on Hudson to celebrate creator's birthday

Beyond Rubik's Cube at Liberty Science Center

New Yorkers were treated to the surreal sight of a giant Rubik’s cube floating on the Hudson river on Friday.

Towed on a barge, the colorful inflatable cube made its way from Staten Island to Manhattan’s west side and back again, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the iconic toy and the seventieth birthday of its creator, Erno Rubik.

The cube’s river journey was part of ‘Beyond Rubik’s Cube,' an exhibition running at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J, in partnership with Google and Erno Rubik. The $5 million exhibition offers 7,000 sq ft of puzzles, history, art and engineering inspired by the famous cube.

“The goal of the exhibition is that it’s interactive and designed to inspire peoples’ creativity – we’re doing things like this (floating cube) to get people thinking,” Liberty Science Center spokeswoman Mary Meluso told FoxNews.com.

The exhibition, which runs at Liberty Science Center until November, will go on an international tour (accompanied by the inflatable cube), for seven years, Meluso told FoxNews.com. “We want this to go out into the world and get peoples’ creative juices flowing,” she added.

Hungarian inventor and architect Rubik, who turns 70 on Sunday, was looking for a model to explain three-dimensional geometry when he created his famous cube in 1974.  Since then, more than 350 million of the cubes have been sold, making it the bestselling toy of all time.

Liberty Science Center is inviting people to celebrate Rubik’s birthday via social media using #RubiksParty.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

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Humanity Again Ready to Make Giant Leaps into Space (ContributorNetwork)

Yahoo! News asked its readers and contributors to share their memories of the space shuttle program as it nears its end in July. Below is a story from a contributor.

[Your Voice: Sign up with the Yahoo! Contributor Network to share your thoughts.]

Intellectually, I am certain that it is time to retire the space shuttles from active service. We need to focus on the future instead of continuing to fly outdated vehicles into orbit. Emotionally, however, I have to say I have mixed feelings about the end of the space shuttle era.

[Related: Former NASA Chief of Staff Explains Why It's Time to Retire the Space Shuttle]

I remember the sense of wonder and excitement that I felt when a classmate in grammar school, knowing my interest in the space program, handed me the latest edition of Scholastic Magazine that featured and article about a planned reusable space shuttle in development by NASA. By the popular demand of thousands of Star Trek fans, the article said, NASA had to change the name of one of the early test shuttles to Enterprise.

The idea of a reusable launch vehicle that could glide to a runway landing seemed to me at the time to bring us one giant leap closer to making space travel a reality for the average person. Today, as the last space shuttle flight prepares to launch, that vision is even closer to reality. George Whitesides, President and CEO of Virgin Galactic told me he expects to be sending paying passengers to the edge of space next year.

I also remember watching the space shuttle Challenger as it seemed to disappear in forked trail of smoke. As I watched, I hoped that the smoke was caused by the jettisoning of malfunctioning booster rockets and that the shuttle itself would reappear and perhaps proceed to an emergency landing. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and seven brave souls lost their lives on January 28, 1986.

[Related: Why Do So Many Remember Exactly Where They Were When the Challenger Exploded?]

The return to space after Challenger demonstrated that we, as a nation, could overcome adversity, learn from our mistakes, and push forward toward our goals. It also taught me that where much is at stake, one must use an abundance of care to make sure that things go the way one expects them to go.

[Related: Space Shuttle Rocket Scientist Discusses the Return to Space Effort]

Moving forward after the space shuttle, my hope is that we can develop safer and more cost-efficient launch and recovery vehicles, freeing resources for those grander goals that represent the next steps in our journey. With private companies beginning to find profit in space travel, we are once again ready to take one more giant leap into a future of nearly limitless possibilities.

[Related: Three Big Goals for NASA to Inspire a New Generations of Students]

Follow @Space_Matterson Twitter or 'like' the Space Matters Fan Page on Facebook for more of this author's space-related writing.

Brad Sylvester writes about the space program for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. Watching the Apollo missions through the static on a small black and white television sparked a lifelong interest in the space sciences for him. Since then, he has spent 40 years watching improvements in the technologies of space travel and our understanding of the universe unfold.

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Solar Storms Sparked By Giant 'Magnetic Rope,' Study Finds (SPACE.com)

A giant "magnetic rope" made up of twisting magnetic field lines could produce the strong electric currents that trigger solar storms, a new study finds.

Researchers at George Mason University sifted through data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the magnetic rope phenomenon. Scientists have predicted that this rope is the cause of violent eruptions on the sun, but have previously struggled to prove its existence because of how quickly it moves.

Confirming the magnetic rope's existence would not only help astronomers understand the formation of solar storms, but would also be a key first step toward mitigating the adverse effects these eruptions can have on satellite communications on Earth. [Amazing New Sun Photos from Space]

Jie Zhang, an associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, and graduate student Xin Cheng closely examined images taken by SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) telescope.

The researchers were able to pinpoint an area on the sun where a magnetic rope was forming. The AIA telescope captures images of the sun every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day.

"The magnetic rope triggers a solar eruption," Zhang said in a statement. "Scientists have been debating whether or not this magnetic rope exists before a solar eruption. I believe that the result of this excellent observation helps finally solve this controversial issue."

Powering solar storms

It is widely believed that magnetic fields in the sun play an essential role in storing energy and powering solar storms. Yet, the exact form that magnetic field lines take prior to eruptions is not well understood. Most field lines are semicircular loops with their foot-points rooted on the surface of the sun. As a result, they cannot erupt easily, and in fact, they often can prevent eruptions.

Scientists suspected that the magnetic rope, if it indeed exists, is the phenomenon that powers eruptions. A magnetic rope contains many magnetic field lines wrapping around a center axis and possibly twisting around each other.

Because of the twisting, a strong electric current can be carried by the magnetic rope. Theoretically, the electric current could produce enough electromagnetic force to overcome the overlying constraining force from other field lines and power the magnetic rope to move outward. [Photos: Sunspots on Earth's Star]

Images from the AIA telescope now reveal that, prior to eruption, there is a long and low-lying channel running through the entire active region, which heats to a scorching-hot temperature and slowly rises. When it reaches a critical point, it starts to erupt quickly.

This feature is distinctly different from the surrounding magnetic field lines, and the intensely hot channel is now believed to be the magnetic rope that scientists have been looking for.

More than just a pretty picture

Solar storms are violent eruptions on the sun that send a wave of charged particles, called plasma, into space at the speed of more than one million miles per hour. The cloud of plasma carries with it a strong magnetic field.

Sometimes these plasma clouds are directed at Earth, and can deposit a large amount of energy into the planet's magnetosphere.

Normally, the Earth's magnetosphere acts as a shield from these harmful particles and protects the environment. But a solar storm has the potential to disrupt the shielding effect, and severe space weather can have harmful effects on a wide array of technological systems, including satellite operations, communications, navigation and electric power grids.

Studies of space weather aid in the development of early warning systems for solar storms and help to minimize the damage from turbulent solar activity, researchers said.

"Understanding the eruption process of these storms will definitely help us better predict them," Zhang said. "We cannot prevent solar storms, just like we cannot prevent earthquakes or volcanoes. But the development of prediction capacity can help mitigate adverse effects. For instance, satellite operators can power-down key systems to prevent the possible damage to the systems."

The results of the study were reported at the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division Meeting, which is being held from June 12 to 16 at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Rare Sight: Giant Black Hole Devours Star, Fires Beams at Earth (SPACE.com)

A powerful beam of energy has been spotted blasting out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star in a rare sight that astronomers say likely happens only once every 100 million years, a new study finds.

When a NASA satellite first detected the intensely bright flash deep in the cosmos, astronomers initially thought it was a powerful burst of gamma rays from a collapsing star, one of the most powerful types of explosions in the universe. But, when the tremendous amount of energy could still be seen months later, they realized something more mysterious was going on.

"This is a really, really unusual event," study co-author Joshua Bloom,assistant professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, told SPACE.com. "It's now about two-and-a-half months old, and the fact that it just continues on and is only fading very slowly is the one really big piece of evidence that tells us this is not an ordinary gamma-ray burst." [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

NASA’s Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the gamma-ray flash, called Sw 1644+57, within the constellation Draco, at the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion light-years away.

Using Swift observations and others by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Bloom and his colleagues concluded that the strange activity they were seeing was likely from a star being ripped apart by a massive black hole, rather than the effects of a gamma-ray burst, which typically can only be observed for about a day.

"This burst produced a tremendous amount of energy over a fairly long period of time," Bloom said. "That's because as the black hole rips the star apart, the mass swirls around like water going down a drain, and this swirling process releases a lot of energy."

These findings are published online in the June 16 issue of the journal Science.

Death of a star

Bloom's research showed that the highly energetic and long-lasting X-rays and gamma-rays were produced as a star about the size of our sun was violently shredded by a black hole a million times more massive.

But, what makes this a rare event is that this particular black hole has not been eating up matter around it like some other active black holes in the universe, Bloom said. In fact, the researchers sifted through historical records of that region of the cosmos and could not find evidence of previous long-lived X-ray or gamma-ray emissions.

"This event was not the act of gobbling lots of gas, but instead was a sort of impulsive thing," Bloom said. "This sort of thing could happen at the center of any galaxy, but the rate at which this happens is very low. It's sort of a one-off event that really shouldn't happen again." [Top 10 Strangest Things in Space]

Astronomers were even luckier to have been able to witness the event with such detail and clarity, since the jet of X-rays and high-energy gamma rays were punched out along a rotation axis that placed Earth in the eye of the beam.

“The best explanation that so far fits the size, intensity, time scale, and level of fluctuation of the observed event, is that a massive black hole at the very center of that galaxy has pulled in a star and ripped it apart by tidal disruption," said Andrew Levan of the University of Warwick in the U.K., lead author of a companion piece that was also published in Science. "The spinning black hole then created the two jets, one of which pointed straight to Earth.”

A lucky view

Essentially, astronomers here on Earth are looking down the barrel of the jet, witnessing an event which is likely to happen about once in 100 million years in any given galaxy, Bloom said.

"This is part of the special nature of the event," he said. "What we have is a geometrical rarity on top of an already rare event. I would be surprised if we saw another one of these anywhere in the sky in the next decade."

The astronomers suspect that the gamma-ray emissions began on March 24 or 25, at a distance of about 3.8 billion light-years away. And while they are still detecting activity from this event, Bloom and his colleagues estimate that the emissions will fade over the next year.

And while this may be an incredibly rare event, it does help astronomers further understand how black holes grow.

"I think this adds another piece of evidence that black holes grow organically by gobbling not just other black holes during mergers of galaxies, which is one of the ways people think black holes grow, but they also grow by eating up their surroundings in the form of gas and stars," Bloom said. "If this picture is right, black holes grow in many different ways. It addresses some unanswered question in astrophysics: these infants aren't just feeding on one baby product, namely merging with brethren, but they're gobbling up different types of foodstuffs."

You can follow SPACE.com Staff Writer Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Moons Around Asteroid Reveal a Giant Rubble Pile (SPACE.com)

Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor
Space.com Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor
space.com – 1 hr 20 mins ago

Like the ancient Egyptian queen it was named for, the asteroid Kleopatra has birthed twins — a pair of moons that have helped scientists learn that the huge space rock is a rubble pile rather than a chunk of solid rock.

These two moons, named Alexhelios and Cleoselene after the twin children of the queen, were discovered in 2008. Now, astronomers studying their orbits have deduced that their parent asteroid is a jumble of loosely held rocks.

"That's the point of looking for triple and binary asteroids," study co-author Franck Marchis of the University of California, Berkeley told SPACE.com. "They're the only ones that allow us to measure the mass of the system." [See asteroid Kleopatra and its rocky moons]

Studying the asteroid system

Since the researchers knew Kleopatra's orbit, they were able to use data from various telescopes — including several operated by amateur astronomers — to observe Kleopatra as she passed between Earth and various bright stars.

They also used measurements from as far back as 1980 to examine other, similar passes. For each transit, they timed how long the star "winked" out of view from various positions on the planet. [Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space]

Because each location views the asteroid differently, combining these observations allowed the team to calculate the space rock's size and shape, as well as to view the moons and measure their orbit.

Having determined the orbits of Kleopatra's satellites, the team, lead by primary author Pascal Descamps of the Institut de Mecanique Celeste et de Calculs des Ephemerides (IMCCE) of the Observatoire de Paris, then was able to calculate the mass of the system as a whole.

With mass and size in hand, figuring out the asteroid's density was a breeze. The researchers concluded that the asteroid was not a solid rock.

"Our observations of the orbits of the two satellites of 216 Kleopatra imply that this large metallic asteroid is a rubble pile, which is a surprise," Marchis said in a statement.

The team reported its results in the February issue of the journal Icarus.

Big asteroid surprise

There are a number of smaller asteroids throughout the solar system that are loose, gravitationally bound piles of rock rather than solid objects.

But to find one in such a large system is surprising. At about 135 miles (217 km) in length, Kleopatra is among the largest of these rubble pile asteroids discovered over the past few years, topped only by 174-mile (280 km) 87 Sylvia.

"You expect something (this size) to be less porous," Marchis told SPACE.com.

In fact, given the density of its likely primary iron components, Kleopatra is between 30 and 50 percent empty space.

The rubble pile structure of the asteroid provides clues to its formation, as well as that of its satellites, researchers said. The collision of two larger, rocky asteroids likely resulted in the destruction of one, and the resulting rubble was held together by gravity.

As the pile continued to spin, it slowly shed mass, including its two moons. The outermost moon, Alexhelios, likely spiraled out around 100 million years ago, while the inner moon, Cleoselene, began its journey within the last 10 million years.

Kleopatra was discovered in 1880. Astronomers used stellar transits to determine it was elongated, but it wasn't until 2000 that it was revealed to be shaped more like a dog bone than a cigar. Descamps' team wanted to study whether the bulges at the end were connected to the body of the asteroid or were separate pieces entirely.

The team continues to study other binary or triple asteroid systems, but the tools that allow them to do so are limited.

"The only telescope in the world that can detect these (types of systems) is the Keck, because it has the largest aperture and the best AO (adaptive optic) system," Marchis said.  

However, thousands of astronomers vie for the use of the largest optical and infrared telescope. Marchis expressed his hope that more telescopes like the 33-foot (10-meter) giants in Hawaii will be built, allowing more research to be done.

Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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