Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/10/12

Skydiver breaks sound barrier:

it was a quite spectacular event, the one set up and performed by Felix Baumgartner, Austrian skydiver that pushed his passion a bit too far: farther than any of his colleagues before him, to be precise.

On 14 October, he jumped from a helium balloon at the height of  39,045m (breaking a world record) and reached the free-fall speed of 1,342.8km/h (breaking another world record).

With nothing on apart from his parachute and suit (which served a similar purpose to an astronaut suit), he fell freely for 93% of his 39km trip. It took less to fall for 36km (4'20") than to reach land with his parachute for 3km (4'43").

The skydiver claims he did the dive to collect scientific data on developments of high-altitude parachutes, but the event shook everyone for its spectacular altitudes.

It is fair to underline that the view from the stratosphere is not as fantastic as the one from the ISS. It is easy to be tricked by the high curvature of Earth in the pictures. Those are "fish-eye lens" picture which are distorted to include angles which would be otherwise left out. Nonetheless impressive, the height from which he jumped was still relatively very close to Earth, being only 0.6% of Earth's radius. At that height just a glimpse of curvature can be caught with perfect visibility.

In this picture, the height from which Felix jumped is exactly one pixel. I drew it on top, it might be visible with some zoom. This should give a good sense of the scales involved.

Physics Nobel goes to Serge Haroche and David Wineland

Planet with four suns discovered