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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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#3,946 ·

Mysterious magnetic pulses discovered on Mars


At midnight on Mars, the red planet's magnetic field sometimes starts to pulsate in ways that have never before been observed. The cause is currently unknown.

That's just one of the stunning preliminary findings from NASA's very first robotic geophysicist there, the InSight lander. Since touching down in November 2018, this spacecraft has been gathering intel to help scientists better understand our neighboring planet's innards and evolution, such as taking the temperature of its upper crust, recording the sounds of alien quakes, and measuring the strength and direction of the planet's magnetic field.
 
#3,947 ·

Astronomers watch six galaxies suddenly fire up into quasars


Normally things happen slowly out in space. It can take thousands, millions or even billions of years for stars and galaxies to evolve. But now astronomers have spotted an event that was thought to happen over millennia play out in a matter of months, as a usually-quiet galaxy suddenly fired up into an energetic quasar - and not just once, but in six different cases.
 
#3,950 ·

Second interstellar visitor confirmed, officially named


The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has now confirmed that a strange object discovered in our solar system on August 30 is unambiguously interstellar in origin. This makes it only the second such object, after 'Oumuamua in 2017, and it's now been given an official name.

On August 30, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered what looked like a comet, using a telescope he built himself. After follow-up observations were conducted by astronomers from around the world, it began to look like this object was on a hyperbolic trajectory - meaning it doesn't circle the Sun but is just passing through our solar system.
 
#3,951 ·

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/nasa-is-moving-forward-with-space-based-mission-to-hunt-1838444548']NASA Is Moving Forward With Space-Based Mission to Hunt for Hazardous Asteroids
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NASA will begin developing a space-based telescope to track the asteroids near Earth, according to a statement by NASA's associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen.

Space News reports that the mission will be based on a previous concept mission called NEOCam. The Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission will be led by NASA, unlike NEOCam, which would have been part of the agency's proposal-based, principle investigator-led Discovery Program. The mission will help NASA fulfill its congressional mandate to discover asteroids that potentially threaten Earth.
 
#3,954 ·
Good stuff.. :cool:


Into the great unknown: The Parker Solar Probe


From Fukushima to the darkest corners of the ocean, robots built for extreme environments and an appetite for discovery continue to enlighten our understanding of places too dangerous to tread. Those launched into deep space may be the most daring examples, continually pushing the limits of human ingenuity and expanding our understanding of the universe. In this series New Atlas will be profiling space probes, both past and present, tasked with pushing the boundaries of science by leading us into the great unknown. This week: a spacecraft built to "touch the Sun".
 
#3,955 ·

Musk unveils SpaceX rocket designed to get to Mars and back


Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry a crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.

In a livestreamed speech from SpaceX's launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said Saturday that the space venture's Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 65,000 feet (19,800 meters) before landing back on Earth.
 
#3,958 ·

Juno probe dodges Jupiter's shadow


NASA's Juno deep-space probe has completed a major orbital maneuver to keep it out of Jupiter's deadly shadow. The 10.5-hour burn began on September 30, 2019, at 7:46 pm EDT and was executed to keep the solar-powered unmanned spacecraft from being eclipsed by the giant planet on November 3, which would have caused the orbiter to permanently shut down.

One of the novel features of Juno is that, unlike previous missions to the outer solar system, the spacecraft is solar-powered, generating electricity thanks to large, advanced photovoltaic panels. It's a testament to how far solar technology has come, but it also means that Juno is dependent on the Sun to keep on functioning.
 
#3,960 ·

Hayabusa 2 sends third and final robot towards asteroid Ryugu


Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has made its presence known on Ryugu since entering orbit around the asteroid in June 2018, deploying a pair of bouncing robots and touching down on its surface not once, but two times. The spacecraft has now sent in a third and final rover for a closer look, as mission control begins to think about bringing the probe and its precious samples home.

The Hayabusa 2 probe launched in 2014 on a mission to study the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. Packed aboard was a shoebox-sized lander called the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT), which touched down in October last year, along with a pair of skipping robots which were deployed a month earlier.
 
#3,961 ·

The violent history of the big galaxy next door


Astronomers have pieced together the cannibalistic past of our neighbouring large galaxy Andromeda, which has now set its sights on the Milky Way as its next main course.

The galactic detective work found that Andromeda has eaten several smaller galaxies, likely within the last few billion years, with left-overs found in large streams of stars.
 
#3,962 ·

2,000 "Schrodinger's Cats" break record for large-scale quantum superposition


The world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be in two places at once or entangled with each other across vast distances, sounds spooky to us living in the macroscopic world of classical physics. But where exactly the boundary between the two lies is still a mystery. Now physicists have blurred the line more than ever before, with a new experiment showing that massive molecules containing up to 2,000 atoms can exist in two places simultaneously.

The discovery was made using an advanced version of an experiment that's been conducted countless times over the last 200 years - the double slit experiment. It was through this experiment that scientists came to understand the duality of light as both particles and waves.
 
#3,964 ·

NASA launches a new planet-hunting telescope using a giant balloon


A new telescope will seek out planets that resemble Earth from a height of around 125,000 feet, using special optical technology that will filter out light from the stars they orbit to provide a better view. The telescope is the product of UMass Lowell, and took off on Tuesday morning from Fort Sumner, New Mexico aboard a helium balloon roughly the size of an entire football field.
 
#3,965 ·

Japanese gravitational wave detector to join LIGO and Virgo


Later this year a new detector is set to begin hunting for gravitational waves - ripples in the very fabric of spacetime. The Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan will join the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and Virgo in Italy, and together the three observatories will be better able to triangulate where any waves are coming from.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy to distort spacetime itself, but collisions between massive objects like black holes and neutron stars can do the trick. Over a century ago, Einstein himself predicted that such events would produce ripples he called gravitational waves, but they weren't detected directly until 2015.
 
#3,966 ·
Good stuff.. :cool:


Where is the Sun located in the Milky Way?


I get email. Most of the time it's people asking a question or two that are Google-able (hint hint), and sometimes it's a question I have to dig around a bit to answer. I like those, because it means I Get to Learn a Thing.

In this case, Bad Reader Joshua Brown it was about the Sun's location in the galaxy. Not how far we are from the center, which we know pretty well now (about 26,700 light years), but how far we are from the midplane of the galaxy. Our Milky Way galaxy is a flat disk 100,000 light years or so across, but it's also about 2,000 light years thick.
Atmosphere Spiral galaxy Galaxy Astronomical object Science
 
#3,968 ·

A scientist captured an impossible photo of a single atom


A student at the University of Oxford is being celebrated in the world of science photography for capturing a single, floating atom with an ordinary camera.

Using long exposure, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate web of laboratory machinery. In it, the single strontium atom is illuminated by a laser while suspended in the air by two electrodes. For a sense of scale, those two electrodes on each side of the tiny dot are only two millimeters apart.
 
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