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The "Science and Space" Thread #2

382K views 6K replies 43 participants last post by  ekim68 
#1 ·
Big Bang Conditions Created in Lab.

By smashing gold particles together at super-fast speeds, physicists have basically melted protons, creating a kind of "quark soup" of matter that is about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and similar to conditions just after the birth of the universe.

-- Tom
 
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#3,535 ·

Cassini data reveals hexagonal vortex rising above Saturn's clouds


Sept. 4 (UPI) -- Newly analyzed data collected during the Cassini mission has revealed a hexagon-shaped vortex rising above Saturn's clouds. The vortex boasts the same shape as a similar vortex found deep within Saturn's atmosphere.

"While we did expect to see a vortex of some kind at Saturn's north pole as it grew warmer, its shape is really surprising," Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester said in a news release. "Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower in the clouds and one high in the stratosphere, or the hexagon is in fact a towering structure spanning a vertical range of several hundred kilometers."
 
#3,536 ·

Last gasp? NASA fires up fading Kepler telescope for Campaign 19


Although the science mission of its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is now underway, NASA isn't done with the Kepler Space Telescope just yet. Its scientists have awoken the deep space probe to gather scientific data yet again, though with an unknown amount of fuel and a compromised performance, there's no telling how successful the venture will be.

Launched in March of 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has already gone far beyond what anybody expected of it. The original mission was slated for a three-and-a-half-year duration and has since been extended multiple times.
 
#3,537 ·
Here we go again.. ;)


Pluto should be reclassified as a planet, experts say


In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to "clear" its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit.

Since Neptune's gravity influences its neighboring planet Pluto, and Pluto shares its orbit with frozen gases and objects in the Kuiper belt, that meant Pluto was out of planet status. However, in a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Icarus, UCF planetary scientist Philip Metzger, who is with the university's Florida Space Institute, reported that this standard for classifying planets is not supported in the research literature.
 
#3,538 ·

Mosaic showcases Ceres' brightest bright spot


Sept. 7 (UPI) -- A new mosaic image shared Friday by NASA showcases one of Ceres' bright spots.

The dwarf planet's bright spots were first discovered and photographed in 2015. In the time since, high resolution images have offered scientists clearer and clearer views of the bright spots.

Ceres' brightest spot is located on a feature called Cerealia Facula, found in the Occator Crater. The latest mosaic combines several photographs of the feature, some from altitudes as low as 22 miles above the dwarf planet's surface.
 
#3,539 ·

Mysterious 'lunar swirls' point to moon's volcanic, magnetic past


The mystery behind lunar swirls, one of the solar system's most beautiful optical anomalies, may finally be solved thanks to a joint Rutgers University and University of California Berkeley study.

The solution hints at the dynamism of the moon's ancient past as a place with volcanic activity and an internally generated magnetic field. It also challenges our picture of the moon's existing geology.

Lunar swirls resemble bright, snaky clouds painted on the moon's dark surface. The most famous, called Reiner Gamma, is about 40 miles long and popular with backyard astronomers. Most lunar swirls share their locations with powerful, localized magnetic fields. The bright-and-dark patterns may result when those magnetic fields deflect particles from the solar wind and cause some parts of the lunar surface to weather more slowly.
 
#3,540 ·

EPFL plan outlines how to build a Mars colony


If you're going to set up a colony on Mars, it's a good idea to have a plan, and scientists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have put one together. The team's step-by-step strategy involves setting up a long-term manned outpost at one of the Martian poles that could later be expanded into a permanent colony.
 
#3,542 ·

Astronomers Have Found the Universe's Missing Matter


Now, in a series of three recent papers, astronomers have identified the final chunks of all the ordinary matter in the universe. (They are still deeply perplexed as to what makes up dark matter.) And despite the fact that it took so long to identify it all, researchers spotted it right where they had expected it to be all along: in extensive tendrils of hot gas that span the otherwise empty chasms between galaxies, more properly known as the warm-hot intergalactic medium, or WHIM.
 
#3,543 ·
When I was Young I thought that some day I would go into Space and it would be a regular thing.. :cool:


SpaceX will send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the Moon


This evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Japan's largest online clothing retailer site Zozotown, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the company's future massive rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). He plans to fly on the trip as early as 2023, and he wants to turn the entire ride into an art project called #dearMoon. A website for the mission went live after the announcement.
 
#3,544 ·

Ice volcanoes have likely been erupting for billions of years on Ceres


All of the bodies in our Solar System started out hot, with energy built up by their gravitational collapse and subsequent bombardment. Radioactivity then contributed further heating. For a planet like Earth, that has kept the interior hot enough to sustain plate tectonics. Smaller bodies like Mars and the Moon, however, have cooled and gone geologically silent. That set the expectations for the dwarf planets, which were thought to be cold and dead.

Pluto, however, turned out to be anything but. It turns out that water and nitrogen ices need far less energy input to participate in active geology, and radioactive decay and sporadic collisions seem to be enough to sustain it. Which brings us to Ceres, a dwarf planet that is the largest body in the asteroid belt. The Dawn spacecraft identified an unusual peak called Ahuna Mons that some have suggested is a cryovolcano, erupting viscous water ice. But why would Ceres only have enough energy to support a single volcano?

A new paper suggests it doesn't. Instead, there may be more than two dozen cryovolcanoes on Ceres' surface.
 
#3,545 ·

Hubble uncovers never-before-seen features around a neutron star


An unusual infrared light emission from a nearby neutron star detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope could indicate new features never before seen. One possibility is that there is a dusty disk surrounding the neutron star; another is that there is an energetic wind coming off the object and slamming into gas in interstellar space the neutron star is plowing through.

Although neutron stars are generally studied in radio and high-energy emissions, such as X-rays, this study demonstrates that new and interesting information about neutron stars can also be gained by studying them in infrared light, say researchers.[/url]
 
#3,547 ·

How Breakthrough Listen Trained AI to Spot Elusive, Mysterious Radio Bursts


To date, radio astronomers have cataloged fewer than 300 fast radio bursts, mysterious broadband radio signals that originate from well beyond the Milky Way. Almost a third of them-72, to be precise-were not detected by astronomers at all but instead were recently discovered by an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained to spot their telltale signals, even hidden underneath noisy background data.
 
#3,548 ·
#3,549 ·

Hayabusa 2 probe drops two robotic landers on asteroid Ryugu


Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has released its two miniature robotic landers toward the target asteroid Ryugu.

If the landing is successful, the miniature spacecraft, which can hop around, will use their cameras and instruments, including temperature and optical sensors, to observe Ryugu.

"They will become the first ever mobile robots to conduct observations on an asteroid," according to Japanese newspaper The Mainichi.

Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, confirmed the release of the two landers, MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B, on Twitter. The agency is waiting on data and images to confirm the craft landed safely.
 
#3,553 ·

Sprayable antennas turn surfaces into ultra-thin, transparent transmitters


If a device connects wirelessly to other things, chances are high that it has an antenna in it. But as crucial as these components are, the rigid metals they're made of can limit what devices they can be built into. To help with that, researchers at Drexel University have developed a new kind of antenna that can be sprayed onto just about any surface.

The antenna is made up of an incredibly thin, metallic material known as "MXene" (pronounced "Maxine"). This stuff is a two-dimensional form of titanium carbide that's highly conductive, which allows it to transmit and direct radio waves.
 
#3,554 ·

MAVEN probe celebrates 4th birthday with selfie


Sept. 24 (UPI) -- NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has been in orbit around Mars for four years. To celebrate its birthday, the probe snapped a selfie using its array of instruments.

The selfie, shared by NASA over the weekend, is a composite image. Each of MAVEN's instruments measured the sun's ultraviolet rays reflecting off the spacecraft's different components. Scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, compiled the observations to produce a rendering of the probe.
 
#3,556 ·

Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics


There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it.

Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray - a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about - the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics - shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side.
 
#3,557 ·

Hunting alien planets and protecting Earth from asteroids: Five ways NASA is using AI


It isn't just people who are wrestling with the big questions about the cosmos.

At NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL), researchers are using machine learning to explore whether life could exist on other planets, how to defend Earth from asteroids, and how to spot pristine meteorites on our planet's surface.

The FDL is an applied AI research accelerator hosted by the SETI Institute in partnership with NASA Ames Research Center. The lab focuses on how AI can tackle some of the hardest problems in space science, and brings together researchers from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and academia with those from Google, IBM, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Nvidia and various other companies.
 
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