Somethin Odd: July 2009

Giraffe and goat form unlikely friendship when kept in same enclosure

Friday, July 31, 2009

They'll always have a very different outlook on life.

But even though Gerald the giraffe is rather lofty and Eddie the goat is more down to earth, they are the perfect pairing.

They have formed an unlikely bond after Eddie was placed with 15ft Gerald as a short-term solution to keep the giraffe company at Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol.

Three years on the pair are as close as ever. Keeper Sammi Luxa said: 'They hit it off straight away, and Eddie has proved to be a great companion for Gerald.

'They bonded from day one and you can always see them running around the enclosure chasing each other.

'They are a real hit with our visitors - outside of the zoo nobody has ever seen anything like this before. We just thought it was normal for a giraffe and a goat to get along so well.

'Although Gerald eats off a raised platform and Eddie grazes from the floor, they like to be close to each other when they eat.

'Gerald even lets Eddie get his nose in the trough first.

'They are always together and they really are best mates despite the obvious height difference.

'One of the zebras they live with called Zebedee can be a bit of a bully sometimes and often chases Eddie.

'But he soon turns tail when Gerald steps in a shoos him away - he is a very loyal giraffe to Eddie.'

Gerald arrived at the zoo as a two-year-old in 2006 and was expected to be quickly matched with a female.

But when the zoo found it difficult to find him a mate, they put Eddie in his enclosure to prevent him becoming lonely.

Ms Luxa told how the pair are often affectionate with each other, particularly during the Summer months.

She said: 'When it is warmer Gerald often bends down and licks Eddie on the head.

'Eddie then climbs onto Gerald's neck and gives him a cuddle.

'Whenever the public come and visit the animals, the pair always go to see them together.

'It would be good if we can get a female giraffe for Gerald but there can be a lot of red tape to get through.

'I think Eddie will be ok if Gerald gets a mate moved into the enclosure. He isn't really the jealous type, but you never know.'

Awesome images of Betelgeuse reveal how explosive red supergiant loses mass

It looks like a catastrophic explosion in the latest sci-fi action thriller but this awe-inspiring image is actually based on the latest state-of-the-art space imaging.

The artist’s impression, inspired by the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse, reveals an enormous plume of gas almost as big as our own Solar System blasting outwards.

The discoveries, revealed by the latest techniques on the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope, could help unravel why the mammoth plasma ball spews out material at such an incredible speed.

Almost 1,000 times larger than our sun, Betelgeuse is the second largest star in the constellation of Orion and one of the biggest stars known to man.

The red supergiant is also one of the most luminous stars, emitting 100,000 times more light than the Sun.

For decades, astronomers have struggled to explain how the mysterious red supergiants expel such vast amounts of material. They can shed the mass of the Sun in just 10,000 years.

One theory was that the loss could be shed from areas above the star’s polar caps as they rotate.

But the two teams, who have studied the supergiant with the NACO and AMBER instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, have concluded that it is powerful gas motions within the star that force out the huge mass of gas.

One team captured the sharpest image to date of Betelgeuse using NACO, an adaptive optics instrument, and a ‘lucky imaging’ technique, which combines the sharpest exposures to surpass the accuracy of a long exposure.

The resulting image approaches the theoretical limit of resolution possible with the 8-metre telescope. It is so sharp it could even spot a tennis ball on the International Space Station from Earth.

‘Thanks to these outstanding images, we have detected a large plume of gas extending into space from the surface of Betelgeuse,’ lead researcher Pierre Kervella from the Paris Observatory told the website PhysOrg.

The plume bursts out to at least six times the diameter of the star - about the distance from Sun to Neptune.

‘This is a clear indication that the whole outer shell of the star is not shedding matter evenly in all directions,’ adds Kervella.

Meanwhile, results from AMBER revealed intense up-and-down motion of gas within Betelgeuse’s atmosphere.

Keiichi Ohnaka from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, said: 'Our AMBER observations are the sharpest observations of any kind ever made of Betelgeuse.

'Moreover, we detected how the gas is moving in different areas of Betelgeuse’s surface - the first time this has been done for a star other than the Sun.

Combined, the unrivalled observations have led the astronomers to propose that these large-scale gas motions roiling under Betelgeuse’s red surface are behind the ejection of the massive plume into space.