Sophia Space says it has closed a $10 million seed financing round to accelerate the development of orbital computing systems.
Category: space
THE ARTEMIS TRAP — Why We’re Designing for Failure
NASA’s Lunar program is destined to fail if BIG changes aren’t made fast. Especially the plans for Artemis II to land humans on the moon.
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Mars volcano formed through multiple eruptive phases
“Our results show that even during Mars’ most recent volcanic period, magma systems beneath the surface remained active and complex,” said Dr. Bartosz Pieterek. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30240/mars-volcano-f…e-phases-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30240/mars-volcano-f…e-phases-2)
How did young volcanoes on Mars form? This is what a recent study published in the journal Geology hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the complex geological processes responsible for forming the first volcanoes on Mars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the recent environment on Mars over the last several million years and what this could mean for finding signs of life on the Red Planet.
For the study, the researchers used a combination of mapping and orbital data to analyze the mineralogical and geological volcanic features near one of Mars’ largest volcanoes, Pavonis Mons. The goal of the study was to ascertain the eruption history of these volcanoes, specifically whether they formed from single, short-lived eruptions or perhaps something that lasted longer and was more complex. In the end, the researchers found that the processes involved in forming the volcanoes were far more complex than previously thought. Specifically, the interior volcanic activity consisted of several magma chambers that grew and developed over time, resulting in multiple eruption events and several types of minerals that erupted onto the surface over several eruption cycles.
Webb Maps Uranus’ Upper Atmosphere and Finds a Magnetic Surprise
Webb just revealed Uranus’s upper atmosphere in 3D, exposing wild auroras and a planet that is still cooling.
A giant star is changing before our eyes and astronomers are watching in real time
For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times larger than the sun and emitting over 100,000 times more energy. For a long time, red supergiant WOH G64 looked like a star steadily reaching the end of its life, shedding material and swelling in size as it began to run out of fuel.
Astronomers didn’t think its final demise would happen anytime soon, because no one has ever seen a known red supergiant die. But in recent years, astronomers—including our team working with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)—discovered that this star has started to change, growing dimmer than before and seemingly warmer. This has surprised scientists and suggests the star’s final stages of life may be more complicated, and perhaps unfold faster, than once thought.
Massive stars, more than about eight times the mass of the sun, produce so much energy, which we see as light, that they run out of fuel within millions of years, instead of the billions of years of the sun’s lifespan.
The quantum world reveals reality is made of relations, not objects
The everyday picture: a world of objects
We ordinarily think of the world as a collection of things or individual objects: tables, trees, planets, particles, people.
This way of thinking is not only intuitive but also tremendously useful. Whether crossing a busy street or hunting prey, we survive by tracking the motions of objects —judging their distances, anticipating their paths, and timing our actions accordingly. Evolutionarily speaking, this is a worldview to which humanity owes its continued existence.
Auroras on Ganymede and Earth share striking similarities
New observations of Ganymede reveal a striking similarity between the auroras on the largest moon in the solar system and those on Earth. The international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers from the University of Liège, has produced new results indicating that, despite different conditions, the fundamental physical processes that generate auroras are common to different celestial bodies, and not just planets.
A team of astrophysicists from the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Planetary Physics (LPAP) has observed for the first time the fine details of the auroras on Ganymede, the only moon in the solar system to have its own intrinsic magnetic field, similar to that of Earth. The observation of auroras is a cornerstone of space weather analysis, as it provides a comprehensive view of the characteristics and effects of space particle precipitation into atmospheres.
For centuries, humanity has witnessed a diffuse and changing glow that occasionally illuminates the night sky with red, green, purple and blue lights—known as the “aurora.” Auroras are typically observed at polar latitudes, although we have just passed the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, which is producing many instances of intense auroras at mid-latitudes.
Physicists dream up ‘spacetime quasicrystals’ that could underpin the universe
Spacetime obeys a rule known as Lorentz symmetry means that something is unchanged whether you’re sitting still or moving at close to the speed of light. For example, the laws of physics respect Lorentz symmetry: They don’t change for fast moving observers. Lorentz symmetry doesn’t hold for previously known quasicrystals, or for normal crystals either: An ant sitting still would observe a different structure than would a near light-speed ant. In relativity, observers traveling at high speeds observe an apparent shortening of objects, and that distorts the materials’ structure.
But the new spacetime quasicrystals obey Lorentz symmetry. They would appear the same to an ant sitting still as to one on a speeding rocket. The researchers mathematically formulated their quasicrystals by taking a four-dimensional slice through a grid of points in higher dimensions and projecting those points onto the slice. The slice has a slope that is an irrational number — one that can’t be written as a fraction of two whole numbers, such as pi. The irrational slope means the slice never directly intersects the points on the grid, and that helps produce the structure that never repeats.
Quasicrystals are a mathematical concept that shows up in the structure of real materials, but the concept could appear elsewhere. “The spacetime that we live in could be a quasicrystal,” says Sotiris Mygdalas of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a coauthor of the study.