Recent discoveries reveal that bursts of slow pulsing radio waves originate from a binary star system consisting of a red dwarf and a white dwarf.
These findings challenge current pulsar theories and indicate a wider variety of stellar systems may emit similar signals.
As the multi-polar world of global politics becomes ever more complex, who better to cast light on its workings than a physicist turned President? Join Armen Sarkissian, former President of Armenia, as he argues for his new theory of quantum politics, in which individuals are necessarily connected across space and our world is dominated by randomness, uncertainty, and possibility.
However, “the idea that Saturn’s rings are young seemed very strange in the context of the solar system’s long evolutionary history,” study lead author Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Science Tokyo, told Space.com. “A few million years ago is the time of the dinosaurs on Earth. This would mean that the solar system was already well-established and relatively stable.”
In contrast, when Saturn formed about 4.5 billion years ago, or during the era called the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago, “the solar system was far more chaotic,” Hyodo said. “Many large planetary bodies were still migrating and interacting, greatly increasing the chances of a significant event that could have led to the formation of Saturn’s rings.”
To shed light on the age of Saturn’s rings, in the new study, Hyodo and his colleagues developed 3D computer models simulating crashes between micrometeoroids and the rings. These impacts typically occur at speeds of about 67,100 mph (108,000 km/h), they said.
A Neptune-sized planet, TOI-3261 b, makes a scorchingly close orbit around its host star. Only the fourth object of its kind ever found, the planet could reveal clues as to how planets such as these form.
An international team of scientists used the NASA space telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), to discover the exoplanet, then made further observations with ground-based telescopes in Australia, Chile, and South Africa. The measurements placed the new planet squarely in the “hot Neptune desert”—a category of planets with so few members that their scarcity evokes a deserted landscape.
The team, led by astronomer Emma Nabbie of the University of Southern Queensland, published their paper on the discovery, “Surviving in the Hot Neptune Desert: The Discovery of the Ultrahot Neptune TOI-3261 b,” in The Astronomical Journal in August 2024.
New observations show that planets forming in protoplanetary disks like that around PDS 70 can trigger the formation of subsequent planets.
This finding, based on high-resolution images from ALMA, supports the domino effect in the sequential formation of planetary systems.
Discoveries in Multi-Planet Systems.
Thirty-five years ago, our Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, was launched! The satellite was a crucial stepping stone in understanding the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the earliest moments of our universe.
Launched from what’s now Vandenberg Space Force Base on Nov. 18, 1989, COBE carried three instruments to space to measure microwave and infrared light across the whole sky. COBE’s observations helped us learn how our universe started and evolved.
Continue reading “Season 5, Episode 31: Meet a Webb Scientist Who Looks Back in Time” »
With billions of stars in the Milky Way, some nomenclature standardization is necessary.
By Phil Plait edited by Lee Billings.
This timelapse of future technology, the 3rd year of the video series, goes on a journey exploring the human mind becoming digital. Brain chips turn memories and thoughts into data; could this data be sent out into space to live in the cosmos encoded into the magnetic fields between stars.
Other topics covered in this sci-fi documentary video include: bio-printing, asteroid habitats, terraforming Mars, the future of Teslabots, lucid dreaming, and the future of artificial intelligence and brain to computer interfaces (BCI — brain chips).
Continue reading “TIMELAPSE OF FUTURE TECHNOLOGY 3 (Sci-Fi Documentary)” »
As much as we want to tell Mr Sulu to “Take us to warp factor five”, dangerous causality problems, tricky maths and negative energy could get in the way.
Brown dwarfs are curious celestial bodies that appear to straddle the mass divide between stars and planets. Often referred to as “failed stars,” brown dwarfs form in isolation from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like a star.
However, while fully-fledged stars continue to gather material from the gas and dust cloud that births them, brown dwarfs are less successful at this mass harvesting. As a result, they don’t reach the masses of the smallest stars and can’t trigger the process that defines main sequence stars, like our sun.
