Fixing mankind’s furthest-flung spacecraft wasn’t as easy as sending an update to the App Store. Still, NASA engineers were able to extend the probe’s mission.
Biodefence experts have asked NASA to crack down on ‘space viruses’ and stop them from affecting humans as some viruses loitering in space have unknown potential and can put the entire civilization in danger, according to reports.
Recent observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA ’s Chandra have revealed three unusually cold, young neutron stars, challenging current models by showing they cool much faster than expected.
This finding has significant implications, suggesting that only a few of the many proposed neutron star models are viable, and pointing to a potential breakthrough in linking the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics through astrophysical observations.
Discovery of unusually cold neutron stars.
“I’ve always been fascinated with new things. I like to develop things,” Douglas told Space.com in March about the Artemis program, which later this decade aims to put astronauts on the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972. “I really believe in pushing ourselves, in understanding what is our true potential: both me as an individual, [and] within all of us as a species.”
“This is the perfect place to be, where we’re going to push that boundary,” he said.
NASA astronauts Mike Barratt, Matt Dominick, Tracy C. Dyson, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, and Suni Williams share a Fourth of July message and extend their best wishes to those back on Earth in a video recorded on June 28, 2024.
The crew members are currently living and working aboard the International Space Station. Their missions aim to advance scientific knowledge and test new technologies for future human and robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, including NASA’s Artemis lunar missions.
Continue reading “NASA Astronauts Send Fourth of July Wishes From the International Space Station” »
A recent study has unveiled the origins of the mysterious “heartbeats” observed in neutron stars, relating them to glitches caused by the dynamics of superfluid vortices.
Researchers found that these glitches follow a power-law distribution similar to other complex systems and developed a model based on quantum vortex networks that aligns with observed data without extra tuning.
Discovering Neutron Stars’ Heartbeats
Set for completion this decade, the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile will be the largest telescope globally, with a main mirror spanning 39 meters and made from 798 precision-engineered segments. It represents a significant international effort in astronomy.
Currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO ’s ELT) is one step closer to completion. German company SCHOTT has successfully delivered the blank for the last of the 949 segments commissioned for the telescope’s primary mirror (M1). With a diameter of more than 39 meters, M1 will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope.
As bristling with volcanoes as a porcupine with quills, Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System. At any given time, around 150 of the 400 or so active volcanoes on Io are erupting. It’s constantly spewing out lava and gas; a veritable factory of volcanic excretions.
And, thanks to the Juno probe’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) imaging Jupiter and its surrounding environment, we now know a lot more about what a gloriously hot mess Io is.
Continue reading “The Whole Surface of This Hellish Moon Is Covered in Lakes of Lava” »
We study the possibility that the vacuum energydensity of scalar and internal-space gauge fieldsarising from the process of dimensional reduction ofhigher dimensional gravity theories plays the role of quintessence. We show that, for themultidimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills system compactifiedon a R × S3 × Sdtopology, there are classically stable solutions suchthat the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe atpresent can be accounted for without upsetting structureformation scenarios or violating observational bounds onthe vacuum energy density.
For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom’s nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today’s atomic clocks to be replaced with a nuclear clock that would be the most accurate clock to ever exist, allowing advances like deep space navigation and communication. It would also allow scientists to measure precisely whether the fundamental constants of nature are, in fact, really constant or merely appear to be because we have not yet measured them precisely enough.
Now, an effort led by Eric Hudson, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, has accomplished the seemingly impossible. By embedding a thorium atom within a highly transparent crystal and bombarding it with lasers, Hudson’s group has succeeded in getting the nucleus of the thorium atom to absorb and emit photons like electrons in an atom do. The astonishing feat is described in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
This means that measurements of time, gravity and other fields that are currently performed using atomic electrons can be made with orders of magnitude higher accuracy. The reason is that atomic electrons are influenced by many factors in their environment, which affects how they absorb and emit photons and limits their accuracy. Neutrons and protons, on the other hand, are bound and highly concentrated within the nucleus and experience less environmental disturbance.
