#which is dinkinesh in amharic

[sad-writers]

glancing up, reaching down

my mother is angry at the traffic jam on the street- its a homeless man who got hit while trying to cross the road. The person who hit him had just glanced over him like he was already gone. Tonight, his candlelight vigil is comprised of blinking red tail lights and his gospel song a wailing siren. sometimes a person's whole life is worth fifteen minutes of delay and someone who will throw their hands up in exasperation and ask, “What is it this time?” 

Yes, up is the direction we all tend to glance. Maybe someone looks skyward and sees god but I spent my whole life in city and I can’t see the heavens through all the smog. the only figures i know capable of causing world ending floods and life saving miracles are the ones who hold conference meetings at the top of the buildings i drive past on the way to school. After all, they offer the same promise: a splendid routine. Predictability, efficiency, calculability, control. “God” is at the top of a building reassuring you. Don’t worry, there is a place for you, preternaturally assigned based upon your actions, your worthiness. Oh, sorry, worth. A dead man in the road is just an obstacle on the stairway to heaven

The billionaires will chase comet tails but I know the divinity I'm looking for is in the ground. Two months ago I held Lucy’s plastic skull in my hands and stared her in her empty eyes and saw the cosmic dust that sparked the long line of coincidences and butterfly wing flaps that became our reality. Did you know that we left africa twice? The first time we failed and yet the second time we lived. history likes to tell a linear story (a winners story), like the hominins all got in lanes divided by broken white lines and coasted. In that tale, no one crosses the road when they aren’t supposed to and we proceed cleanly to our great modern society. 

And yet Lucy left africa, even though she was never meant to and the best part is that she went home too. She went home but by sheer love and adoration, her head was in my hands, and the plastic was warm because someone else had held her just before. She wasn’t one of us but she is loved all the same.

My roommate whispers to me in the lecture hall, “I'm not supposed to be here,” and yet here you are! You ought to thank Lucy! She is winking at you- her other name has stretched its hand across the binding ties of time to place itself on your shoulder to give you her own promise: “you are marvelous!” the bones in the earth love you more than the buildings ever will

Maybe god is in the sky but everything we love we eventually put in the ground.

[spacenutspod]

There are millions of asteroids floating around the solar system. With so many of them, it should be no surprise that some are weirdly configured. A recent example of one of these weird configurations was discovered when Lucy, NASA’s mission to the Trojan asteroids, passed by a main-belt asteroid called Dinkinesh. It found that Dinkinesh had a “moon” – and that moon was a “contact binary”. Now known as Selam, it is made up of two objects that physically touch one another through gravity but aren’t fully merged into one another. Just how and when such an unexpected system might have formed is the subject of a new paper by Colby Merrill, a graduate researcher at Cornell, and their co-authors at the University of Colorado and the University of Bern. The paper, in particular, looks at when the system might have formed and does so through modeling. A theory in asteroid formation called the binary Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect, which, since no one wants to say the full name, is shortened to the acronym BYORP. This model explains how binary asteroid systems happen in the first place.  Essentially, the asteroid speeds up its rotation due to radiation pressure. Eventually, due to those rotational forces, it gets to a point where its gravity is no longer capable of holding all of its material on its surface, and some of that material is ejected out into space, eventually coalescing into a “moon” for the slightly larger asteroid. Video from NASA Goddard showing the image from Lucy that found Selam.Credit – NASA Goddard YouTube Channel Dinkinesh isn’t a “large” asteroid by any measure – at its widest point, it only measures about 790 meters in diameter. It’s also named after the Amharic word for Lucy; the fossil remains of a potential human ancestor found in Ethiopia and the namesake of NASA’s mission. Its satellite, Salem, is the Amharic word for “peace,” but another fossil set found in 2000 which, though that of a child, predated Lucy’s by 100,000 years. But it is even smaller than Dinkinesh – only about 220 m at its widest point. But Selam actually has two widest points because it is shaped in what is technically called a bilobate but is more commonly thought of as a “dumbbell” shape. This might be partially due to another force that influences the formation of asteroids—tides.  Traditionally, people think of tides as caused by our Moon moving around the Earth. However, tides can also happen on the insides of asteroids when there is a gravitational force on a small body by an even smaller one that happens to be nearby. For example, Selam induces tides on Dinkinesh, and understanding how the two developed together requires understanding how those tidal forces played out. Close up of Dinkinesh & Selam from Lucy.Credit – NASA/Goddard/SwRI/John Hopkins APL/NOIRLab/Brian May/Claudia Manzoni Modeling both tidal forces and the BYROP acceleration process is complex mathematically. This is especially true because the inputs to the equations used to model them contain plenty of uncertainties. Luckily, there is a mathematical technique to help with that. The Monte Carlo method uses statistics to find a “correct” answer by varying the inputs to equations and randomly sampling the results. The authors used this technique to determine how long the Dinkinesh / Selam system had been in orbit around each other, using inputs like each object’s sizes and orbital speeds. They came up with an answer of between 1 and 10 million years – not very long in the grand scheme of the solar system’s evolution. Given that binaries are thought to make up at least 15% of near-Earth asteroids, and contact binaries make up between 14% and 30% of small bodies that are still larger than 200 m, studying these kinds of unexpected systems could prove fruitful in understanding how asteroids more generally are formed. As the paper mentions, more work is needed, especially an analysis of the craters present on Selam, which could provide an alternative view of its age. Given that we only just discovered this binary system by chance in November 2023, that data, and much else from the Lucy mission, will doubtless be forthcoming soon. Fraser discusses the discovery of Selam. Learn more:Merrill et al. – Age of (152830) Dinkinesh I Selam constrained by secular tidal-BYORP theoryUT – Contact Binary Asteroids are Common, but We’ve Never Seen One Form. So Let’s Make OneUT – Awesome Radar Images Reveal Asteroid 2014 HQ124’s Split PersonalityUT – What? Wow! That New Asteroid Image from Lucy Just Got Even More Interesting Lead Image:Dinkinesh and Selam in situ via a Lucy snapshot.Credit – NASA/Goddard/SwRI/John Hopkins APL The post Finding The Age Of A Contact Binary “Moon” appeared first on Universe Today.

[earthstory]

evolution_soup

Here's Lucy! Well, a cast of the famous 40% skeleton displayed at the Natural History Museum London.

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Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone fossils representing 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin   species Australopithecus afarensis. In Ethiopia, the assembly is also known as Dinkinesh, which means "you are marvelous" in the Amharic language.

•••••

Lucy was discovered in 1974 in Africa, near the village Hadar in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle  in Ethiopia, by paleo- anthropologists Donald Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.