Astronomers may have detected a dozen large objects lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, suggesting there could be another equally massive, “second Kuiper Belt” hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.
That’s the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.
“In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers,” said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara. The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. “The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes,” he noted. “This is what the evidence clearly shows.”
Scientists worldwide are already using artificial intelligence to sort through huge amounts of data, suggesting that the future of astronomy belongs to AI.
That looks promising. 90% accuracy isn’t bad. Now the trick is getting there though we have options on our own solar system possibly. You never know until you try. I doubt we’ll find high level life remnants but perhaps something much less like at most insect level but more likely microbial. I’m just guessing of course.
A team of scientists supported in part by NASA have outlined a simple and reliable method to search for signs of past or present life on other worlds that employs machine learning techniques. The results show that the method can distinguish both modern and ancient biosignatures with an accuracy of 90 percent.
The method is able to detect whether or not a sample contains materials that were tied to biological activity. What the research team refers to as a “routine analytical method” could be performed with instruments on missions including spacecraft, landers, and rovers, even before samples are returned to Earth. In addition, the method could be used to shed light on the history of ancient rocks on our own planet.
Continue reading “Machine Learning in the Search for Agnostic Biosignatures” »
Have you seen an unusually bright object moving through the evening sky recently?
Chances are that it wasn’t one of the mysterious objects that the DoD and NASA are currently studying, but was instead one of the growing number of manmade spacecraft taking up residence in Earth’s orbit.
And this one has astronomers particularly concerned.
The surprising detection of light 200 times more powerful than previous observations from the nearby pulsar Vela indicates hidden physics around dead stars.
The Vela pulsar has claimed the record for emitting the most powerful gamma rays among all known pulsars.
A corpse of a dead star has been found to be emanating the most intense gamma rays ever observed. This unexpected observation was found coming from the Vela pulsar, situated in the constellation Vela.
Astronomers noted that the detected gamma rays had an astonishing energy level of 20 tera-electronvolts (TeV), which is ten trillion times higher than the energy of visible light.
Continue reading “Most energetic gamma-ray emission detected from a pulsar” »
After decades of searching, scientists have found stars accompanying the gas streaming from two smaller galaxies that orbit our Milky Way.
Our galaxy is so big that astronomers are still exploring its stellar backwaters. Now, new observations have enabled them to map a previously uncharted structure in the Milky Way.
Scientists have found 13 stars that they believe are associated with the Magellanic Stream — a giant ribbon of gas stretching over three-quarters of the way across the sky. The researchers presented their findings on the arXiv astronomy preprint server in June.
Two conflicting methods to measure the expansion rate of the universe give different results, but researchers could resolve the disparity by watching merging neutron stars explode.
