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The "Science and Space" Thread #2

382K views 6K replies 43 participants last post by  ekim68 
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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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World's first space factory, now in orbit, is also a hypersonic test bed


Why manufacture in space? Well, when you're operating in zero gravity – or at least, in the microgravity environment of orbit – you're altering a very significant physical variable that's pretty much a constant for any Earth-based lab.

With gravity out of the equation, things like convection currents don't exist, because there's no "up" for heat to rise towards. And particles in liquid don't form clumps and rise to the surface or sink to the bottom like they do on Earth.
 
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New Tatooine-like exoplanet discovered orbiting twin suns. Meet BEBOP-1c.


For decades, astronomers wondered if planets with twin suns like Luke Skywalker's fictional home world of Tatooine were only science fiction. Now, scientists have now discovered a new Tatooine-like system that is home to multiple worlds.

Binary stars, or two stars orbiting each other, are very common — about half of the sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy are in binary systems. Up to now, astronomers had confirmed the detection of 14 circumbinary planets — ones that whirl around both stars of a binary system at once.
 
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40 Years Ago: STS-7 and the Flight of Sally Ride


On June 18, 1983, space shuttle Challenger lifted off on its second journey to space, the STS-7 mission. Among its five-person crew, Challenger carried the first American woman into space, NASA astronaut Sally K. Ride. Other notable firsts for the mission included the first five-person crew, the first flight of astronauts from the Class of 1978, and the first astronaut to make a second flight on the shuttle.
 
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Scientists conduct first test of a wireless cosmic ray navigation system


GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, mapping, and timing across a broad spectrum of applications. But it does have a few shortcomings, most notably not being able to pass through buildings, rocks, or water. That's why Japanese researchers have developed an alternative wireless navigation system that relies on cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. The team has conducted its first successful test, and the system could one day be used by search and rescue teams, for example, to guide robots underwater or to help autonomous vehicles navigate underground.
 
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Scientists hope Euclid telescope will reveal mysteries of dark matter


In just a few weeks, a remarkable European probe will be blasted into space in a bid to explore the dark side of the cosmos.
The €1bn (£850m) Euclid mission will investigate the universe’s two most baffling components: dark energy and dark matter. The former is the name given to a mysterious force that was shown – in 1998 – to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, while the latter is a form of matter thought to pervade the cosmos, provide the universe with 80% of its mass, and act as a cosmic glue that holds galaxies together.
 
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Webb Makes First Detection of Crucial Carbon Molecule


A team of international scientists has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH3+), the molecule is important because it aids the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules. Methyl cation was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.
 
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NASA contacts Ingenuity Mars helicopter after two-month silence



After over two months of silence, NASA has been able to reestablish contact with its wayward Ingenuity robotic helicopter on Mars after radio transmissions were blocked by a hill. This marks what is now the official end of flight 52.
Ingenuity is one of space exploration's more remarkable success stories.
Making its first flight over three years ago, it was only expected to last 30 days at most, and its purpose was simply to show that it was possible to build a helicopter that could fly on the Red Planet. If it managed to stand upright, survive a couple of Martian nights, and complete a single liftoff and landing, NASA's engineers would have been happy, but now it has flown 52 times and is used routinely as a way to scout destinations for the Perseverance rover to visit.
 
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A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos


Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles — those moving much faster than the rest — traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists have sought the origin of these “cosmic” neutrinos. Now, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has finally collected enough of them to reveal telltale patterns in where they’re coming from.
 
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