"WILWATIKTA"

Setelah Raja Kertanegara gugur dalam peristiwa penyerangan Raja Jayakatwang (Raja Kediri), berakhirlah riwayat Kerajaan Singasari. Raja Kertanegara beserta petinggi kerajaan lainnya tewas dalam penyerangan tersebut. Raden Wijaya (menantu Raja Kertanegara) segera melarikan diri ke Sumenep, Madura, dan mendapat perlindungan dari Arya Wiraraja, penguasa Sumenep. Raja Jayakatwang sangat menghormati Arya Wiraraja sehingga Raden Wijaya diampuni. Setelah mendapat pengampunan dari Raja Jayakatwang, Raden Wijaya beserta pengikutnya diizinkan untuk membabat hutan Tarik (sekarang menjadi Desa Trowulan, Jawa Timur) untuk dijadikan desa. Disinilah kemudian berdiri pusat Kerajaan Majapahit.

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Pinguin Raksasa Purba

Para ilmuwan akhirnya memiliki dua spesies punah raksasa "langsing" penguin yang hidup di Selandia Baru 25 juta tahun yang lalu, sebuah penelitian baru mengatakan.

Selama beberapa dekade, rekan penulis studi Ewan Fordyce, paleontolog Selandia Baru University of Otago, telah terjadi di seluruh tulang dari spesies sambil mencari ikan paus dan lumba-lumba fosil.

Hanya baru-baru ini, meskipun, telah tim direkonstruksi kerangka penuh. Ini komposit dibuat dengan menggunakan sebuah model modern raja penguin-merupakan spesies kedua, yang sangat mirip.

Hasilnya adalah "cukup efisien hewan itu tidak akan terlihat seperti penguin yang hidup saat ini," kata pemimpin penelitian Dan Ksepka, seorang ahli paleontologi unggas di North Carolina State University.

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Solar Dynamics Observatory's first images pose scientific puzzles

This full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun was taken by the new Solar Dynamics Observatory on March 30. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 110,000 degrees Fahrenheit); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1.8 million degrees F).

By Andrea Thompson

updated 5:24 p.m. MT, Wed., April 21, 2010

The first images of the sun beamed home from NASA's newest solar observatory have wowed mission scientists with their extraordinary detail and unexpected findings.

NASA on Wednesday released the first new images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a probe launched on Feb. 11 to peer deep into the layers of the sun, monitor solar storms and investigate the mysteries of the sun's inner workings.

"The spacecraft and the instruments are working very well," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "What we've seen is truly, in my view, spectacular."

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, carries three instruments that constantly stare at the sun, generating images that have a resolution 10 times better than high-definition television.

"I believe this is going to be a revolutionary view" of the sun, said Fisher, who likened the new observatory's impact to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

SDO will be revolutionary to the study of the sun "in the same way Hubble was revolutionary for astrophysics," he told Space.com.

The young solar observatory will also be generating an astounding amount of data.

It will stream the equivalent of half a million songs per day down to a ground station from its geosynchronous orbit. That's about 150 million bits of data per second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — almost 50 times more science data than any other mission in NASA's history.

Monitoring solar flares, storms
The simultaneous monitoring of several wavelengths of the sun's light, coupled with the more rapid pace of observations, will give scientists an unprecedentedly detailed view of the features present on the sun. It will also help monitor the solar flares and storms that can impact Earth, as well as shed light on the influence of the sun's magnetic field on the processes that take place within the sun.

"The nice thing about SDO is that we have all of the sun all of the time," said Philip H. Scherrer the principal investigator for SDO's Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument at Stanford University. Already observations of solar features and their evolution is showing that "the magnetic field is really much more dominant than we thought," Fisher said.

t's also very dynamic: "That magnetic field is never the same twice, it is always changing," said Dean Pesnell, SDO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

And though the spacecraft is still in its commissioning phase — meaning all of the instruments are being properly calibrated and the probe is entering its final orbit — it has taken images that are already making unexpected revelations.

One particularly interesting observation, Fisher said, shows the evolution of an active region of the sun, also known as a sunspot. The dark spots on the sun's surface are connected to intense magnetic activity. SDO caught this sunspot in decline that didn't look quite how scientists expected it to.

"It's a little bit baffling about what happened," Fisher said.

Tiny changes, huge impact
SDO observed that tiny changes in the magnetic field due to the decline of the sunspot "have a huge impact on the upper solar atmosphere," Fisher said, likening that to a situation on Earth where a lightning bolt in Indiana would cause a hurricane on the East Coast.

The sunspot is associated with a blast of solar material out into space known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. SDO was able to see the sunspot associated with this CME as well as the waves rippling across the sun's surface associated with it and the flare that caused it.

The CME ejected as much material as is contained in the entire Mississippi River at a speed of about a million miles per hour; the material was accelerated up to that speed in just one second, said Alan Title, the principal investigator of SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.

That SDO is already stumping scientists with its findings even though it's not yet in full observing mode (which will happen sometime next month) shows what a useful spacecraft it is, Fisher said.

"The hallmark of a successful science experiment [is] that you don't understand what you've gotten back," he said.

Helping with predictions
Such solar events aren't just interesting to scientists — they can have a major impact on the Earth by knocking out communication systems, GPS satellites and even electrical grids. Scientists hope that SDO will allow them to make better predictions on when solar flares and CMEs might erupt in Earth's direction.

"The more we know about these flares, the better we'll be able to be proactive instead of reactive" to space weather, said Tom Woods the principal investigator of the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment instrument at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

And by allowing scientists to better understand the sun, SDO will also shed light on the workings of other stars.

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Ash delays and reroutes trans-Atlantic flights

By SLOBODAN LEKIC, AP Aviation Writer – Sat May 8, 4:58 pm ET
BRUSSELS — The Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name reminded the world again that it has the power to disrupt international travel — coughing out a spreading cloud of ash that delayed or canceled hundreds of flights between Europe and North America on Saturday.
The prospects for Sunday flights remained grim, with no improvement in sight for trans-Atlantic passengers, and with a plume of low-altitude ash continuing to float eastward over Spain and southern France.
Flights had to be rerouted north over Greenland or south around Spain to avoid the 1,200-mile (2,000-kilometer)-long cloud stretching from Iceland to northern Spain.
Approximately 600 airliners make the oceanic crossing every day. Around 40 percent were rerouted southward and the rest skirted Iceland from the north, according to Eurocontrol.
The disruptions to air traffic did not compare to the five-day closure of European airspace last month, which forced the cancellation of over 100,000 flights, stranded passengers around the world and causing airlines direct losses of more than one billion euros.
In Spain, 19 airports in the north, including the international hub Barcelona, were closed on Saturday.
The country's airport authority said more than 670 flights had been canceled by 14:00 (1200 GMT). Likewise, 125 flights in and out of Portugal were canceled up to noon local time (1100 GMT).
On a normal day, European air traffic control centers handle between 26,000 and 30,000 flights.
Until Eyjafjallajokul (pronounced ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl), the volcano in southern Iceland, stops its emissions, the future course of Europe's ash crisis will depend heavily on the prevailing winds. The eruption of the glacier-capped volcano has shown no signs of stopping since it began belching ash April 13. It last erupted from 1821 to 1823.
Aer Lingus canceled flights from the United States to Dublin, citing the exceptionally circuitous routes to get around the cloud.
Eurocontrol's forecast chart of volcanic activity for early Sunday showed a solid line of cloud extending from Greenland to the Azores and Madeira Islands in the mid-Atlantic, at altitudes up to 35,000 feet — right in the path of most trans-Atlantic flights. The Brussels-based air traffic management agency said the area of potential ash contamination was expanding in particular between the ground and 20,000 feet.
"Depending on the winds, the ash could impact south France and possibly north Italy tomorrow," said Eurocontrol spokeswoman Kyla Evans.
In Paris, Jerome Lecou, an engineer with the national weather service Meteo France, said that the Civil Aviation authority was doing a flight evaluation with an aircraft equipped with sounding devices to gather a maximum of information in order to determine whether the closure of some airports may be warranted.
He said it remained unclear whether the annual Cannes Film festival, which opens Wednesday, would be affected by the flight disruptions. Normally, stars, journalists and fans descend in hordes on the Riviera site.
A trans-Atlantic trip from New York to Paris is normally about 5,800 kilometers (3,600 miles) long. But rerouting could add on an additional 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), prolonging the flight by more than an hour and requiring about 10 percent more fuel.
Due to the congestion on the alternate routes, particularly over southern Portugal and Spain where many of the planes were being funneled, some trans-Atlantic flights were taking significantly longer. An Air France flight from Boston arrived in Paris Saturday with a delay of more than four hours.
Tracks across the Atlantic normally follow "great circles" — the shortest path between two points on the globe. They are determined each day by air traffic control centers on both sides of the Atlantic, generally depending on the jet stream from North America to Europe.
Planes flying the track system typically follow each other in 10-minute intervals and at altitude levels 1,000 feet (300 meters) apart, in order to maintain safety in airspace which is beyond the range of radar control. Read More ...