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Mounded, luminous clouds of gas and dust glow in this Hubble image of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH 45.

Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a newborn star collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves. In this image, blue indicates ionized oxygen (O II) and purple shows ionized magnesium (Mg II). Researchers were particularly interested in these elements because they can be used to identify shocks and ionization fronts.

This object is located in the nebula NGC 1977, which itself is part of a complex of three nebulae called The Running Man. NGC 1977—like its companions NGC 1975 and NGC 1973—is a reflection nebula, which means that it doesn’t emit light on its own, but reflects light from nearby stars, like a streetlight illuminating fog.

Roscosmos launched a new docking node module to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, November 24 at 13:06 UTC / 8:06 am EST.

Launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the module will add additional docking ports to the Russian Segment of the station to provide options for future expansion but is the final Russian model planned for the outpost.

Continue reading “Russia launches new docking node to space station” »

Major sales milestone gives birth to a compact UNO clone, finished in eye-catching black and gold — and even boasting castellated pins.

A now-patched vulnerability affecting Oracle VM VirtualBox could be potentially exploited by an adversary to compromise the hypervisor and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.

“Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox,” the advisory reads. “Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized ability to cause a hang or frequently repeatable crash (complete DoS) of Oracle VM VirtualBox”

Tracked as CVE-2021–2442 (CVSS score: 6.0), the flaw affects all versions of the product prior to 6.1.24. SentinelLabs researcher Max Van Amerongen has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue, following which fixes have been rolled out by Oracle as part of its Critical Patch Update for July 2021.

In 2012, astronomers announced a startling result: The had used Hubble to very carefully measure the motion of the Andromeda galaxy, and found that it appeared to heading very nearly directly toward the Milky Way at 100 kilometers per second. They predicted that in about 4 billion years the two galaxies would collide, and chaos would ensue.

In 2019, an update to the measurements indicated that Andromeda was sliding to the side a little bit more than previously thought, delaying the inevitable collision by about 600 million years.

Continue reading “Uncertain future: Is Andromeda going to collide with the Milky Way or not?” »

Parkland Corp. is moving to pause its refinery processing operations in Burnaby, B.C., due to a lack of crude oil supply from the Trans Mountain pipeline, which has been shut down as a precaution due to the flooding in B.C.

The company says it plans to maintain the refinery, which is a key source of gasoline for the Vancouver area, on standby mode so that it can resume processing quickly.

“We are maintaining the refinery in ready-mode…which positions us to recommence processing once sufficient crude oil feedstocks become available”, Ryan Krogmeier, Parkland’s senior vice-president of refining, said in a statement.

When we talk about the distance to an object in the expanding Universe, we’re always taking a cosmic snapshot — a sort of “God’s eye view” — of how things are at this particular instant in time: when the light from these distant objects arrives. We know that we’re seeing these objects as they were in the distant past, not as they are today — some 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang — but rather as they were when they emitted the light that arrives today.

But when we talk about, “how far away is this object,” we’re not asking how far away it was from us when it emitted the light we’re now seeing, and we aren’t asking how long the light has been in transit. Instead, we’re asking how far away the object, if we could somehow “freeze” the expansion of the Universe right now, is located from us at this very instant. The farthest observed galaxy GN-z11, emitted its now-arriving light 13.4 billion years ago, and is located some 32 billion light-years away. If we could see all the way back to the instant of the Big Bang, we’d be seeing 46.1 billion light-years away, and if we wanted to know the most distant object whose light hasn’t yet reached us, but will someday, that’s presently a distance of ~61 billion light-years away: the future visibility limit.

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Paper referenced in the video:
How many steps a day to reduce the risk of all-cause mortality? A dose–response meta-analysis.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34808011/

Featuring endless calculations in black ink on wrinkled, lightly yellowed paper, the manuscript challenges Einstein’s popular image as an absolute genius, because it shows that even he made mistakes.