The new Halloween haunted house soundtrack just dropped, courtesy of the European Space Agency.
New Halloween haunted house soundtrack just dropped, courtesy of the European Space Agency.
Category: space – Page 407
Astronomers Puzzled by Extremely Peculiar Object in Deep Space
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious neutron star that’s far lighter than previously thought possible, undermining our understanding of the physics and evolution of stars. And fascinatingly, it may be composed largely of quarks.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, the neutron star has a radius of just 6.2 miles and only the mass of 77 percent of the Sun.
That makes it much lighter than other previously studied neutron stars, which usually have a mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun at the same radius.
TITAN is a thing of great strength, intellect, and importance: For the Army, it’s all that for JADC2
A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors. Graphic courtesy of Raytheon.
With Project Convergence, the Army has sought to further its integration into the Joint Force and change the way it fights, with an eye toward greater speed, range, and accuracy — particularly for long-range precision fires. Army leadership is looking particularly to close the gaps around sensor-generated intelligence — specifically how it’s sensed, made sense, and acted upon.
To that end, Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) was selected in June for a competitive, prototype phase in the continued development of the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. Awarded under an Other Transaction Agreement, TITAN seeks to turn battlefield intelligence into targeting information. A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors.
Toward Flawless Atom Optics
The engineering of so-called Floquet states leads to almost-perfect atom-optics elements for matter-wave interferometers—which could boost these devices’ ability to probe new physics.
Since Michelson and Morley’s famous experiment to detect the “luminiferous aether,” optical interferometry has offered valuable tools for studying fundamental physics. Nowadays, cutting-edge applications of the technique include its use as a high-precision ruler for detecting gravitational waves (see Focus: The Moon as a Gravitational-Wave Detector) and as a platform for quantum computing (see Viewpoint: Quantum Leap for Quantum Primacy). But as methods for cooling and controlling atoms have advanced, a new kind of interferometer has become available, in which light waves are replaced by matter waves [1]. Such devices can measure inertial forces with a sensitivity even greater than that of optical interferometers [2] and could reveal new physics beyond the standard model.
Student uses NASA data to reveal new details on planets in other solar systems
In the past decades, the number of known exoplanets—planets in other solar systems—has skyrocketed. But we’re still in the dark about a number of details, including how massive they are and what they’re made up of.
A University of Chicago undergraduate, however, was able to tease some clues out of data that most scientists had overlooked.
Jared Siegel, B.S. ‘22, spent six months analyzing data taken by a NASA spacecraft. Some of this data was full of statistical noise, making it hard to differentiate planets from other phenomena; but Siegel and his advisor, astrophysicist Leslie Rogers, were able to extract useful information about these planets, setting an upper bound on how massive they could be.
Astronomers find a potential “quark star” that defies conventional physics
Quarks all the way down.
Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind by the collapse and explosion of a supergiant is now roughly 77 percent the mass of our Sun, packed into a sphere about 10 kilometers wide. That’s a mind-bogglingly dense ball of matter — it’s squished together so tightly that it doesn’t even have room to be atoms, just neutrons. But as neutron stars go, it’s weirdly lightweight. Figuring out why that’s the case could reveal fascinating new details about exactly what happens when massive stars collapse and explode.
What’s New — When a massive star collapses, it triggers an explosion that blasts most of the star’s outer layers out into space, where they form an ever-widening cloud of hot, glowing gas. The heart of the star, however, gets squashed together in the final pressure of that collapse and becomes a neutron star. Normally, what’s left behind is something between 1.17 and 2.35 times as massive as the Sun, crammed into a ball a few dozen kilometers wide.
New simulation reveals Moon formed in hours
Billions of years ago, a version of planet Earth that looked very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.
Until now, most theories have claimed that the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. However, a new simulation presents a different outcome – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.
“This opens up a whole new range of possible starting places for the Moon’s evolution,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and lead author of a paper this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We went into this project not knowing exactly what the outcomes of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, on top of the big eye-opener that standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results could include a tantalisingly Moon-like satellite in orbit.”
The most iconic radio telescope ever is gone for good, U.S. government declares
The collapse of Arecibo’s radio telescope was a devastating blow to the radio astronomy community. Issues began in 2017 for the nearly 55-year-old telescope when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, shearing off one of the 29-meter (96-foot) antennas that was suspended above the telescope’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) dish, with falling debris puncturing the dish in several places.
In early 2020, earthquakes temporarily closed the observatory for safety reasons; then a succession of cable failures ultimately led to the December 2020 collapse of the 900-ton instrument platform suspended above the observatory, which crashed down on the iconic telescope’s giant dish. This collapse officially ended any possible hopes of refurbishing the famous observatory.
Since then, many have called for the telescope to be rebuilt or for building an even better replacement telescope at the site. Instead, the NSF wants Arecibo to serve as a hub for STEM education and outreach.
NASA team is set to study mysterious unidentified flying objects
The ultimate purpose of the group will be to recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis.
NASA has put together an independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that will begin its research on Monday, October 24, according to a statement by the Space Agency published on Friday. The assignment will run for nine months and will lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs.
Recommending a road map.
The ultimate purpose of the group will be to recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis by the agency going forward and will focus solely on unclassified data. Once the research has been completed, a full report will be released to the public in mid-2023.
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Is our planet surrounded by a giant magnetic tunnel? Let’s find out
It would consist of magnetic ropes.
A Dunlap Institute astronomer is speculating that our solar system may be surrounded by a magnetic tunnel that can be seen in radio waves, according to a press release by the institution published October 14.
Rope-like filaments surrounding our planet
Dr. Jennifer West, Research Associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, is claiming that the two bright structures seen on opposite sides of the sky that were previously considered to be separate are actually connected. They are further made of rope-like filaments that form a tunnel around our solar system.