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Category: space – Page 12

Evidence of giant rings in Venus’s atmosphere uncovered in archived observations

In 2010, scientists waiting to use the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands captured a brief 36 minutes of images of Venus. They were waiting for the sun to set so they could look at distant stars and dust disks around young stars. Consequently, little attention was paid to the data, which was filed away in the archives.

Hidden in the archives Fast-forward more than a decade, and researchers from the Netherlands decided to look at the old observations. What they discovered, hidden in the data, was a series of faint, planetwide concentric rings in the upper atmosphere. Their findings are published in a paper in The Planetary Science Journal.

The team analyzed images captured with ExPo, a highly sensitive instrument designed to measure polarized light. They compared ordinary images with polarized images taken through several visible-light filters to search for patterns that might reveal hidden atmospheric features.

The helical model — our solar system is a vortex

How our solar system moves through space. This is a non-conventional view of our solar system that is different from the standard ‘flat’ diagrams. We travel, never return to the same spot again. Helical motion, how the planets move through space.
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New version: Solar System 2.0: • Solar System 2.0 — the helical model.
Full story and philosophy: http://www.djsadhu.com/research/solar… 2 is here: • The helical model — our Galaxy is a vortex Information & research: http://www.djsadhu.com/the-helical-mo… Music: https://djsadhu.bandcamp.com/album/dj… French subtitles provided by the Resonance Project Greek subtitles provided by vasoula2908 Download the sound track: http://www.djsadhu.com/audio-video/vo… (FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY) No, this was not made with Universe Sandbox, but with 3DsMax. Yes, I messed up two orbits.

PART 2 is here: • The helical model — our Galaxy is a vortex.
Information & research: http://www.djsadhu.com/the-helical-mo…
Music: https://djsadhu.bandcamp.com/album/dj…

French subtitles provided by the Resonance Project.
Greek subtitles provided by vasoula2908
Download the sound track: http://www.djsadhu.com/audio-video/vo… (FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY)

No, this was not made with Universe Sandbox, but with 3DsMax.
Yes, I messed up two orbits.

Scientists tracked 12 people in Antarctica for 10 months—what happened could shape future Mars missions

A ten-month Antarctic experiment found that astronauts may struggle not only with loneliness but also with spending too much time around the same people. Frequent contact was linked to greater tension and mistrust, while the crew increasingly divided into cultural and language-based groups.

Two decades of blazar observations, and the mysteries keep piling up

Narrow jets of luminous matter may be emitted toward Earth from the nuclei of active galaxies billions of light-years away. The galaxy then appears as a point source and is called a blazar. A Polish-German team of scientists has, for the first time, analyzed the activity of one such blazar over an extended period and, instead of finding answers, encountered an ever-increasing number of intriguing questions.

Distant, active galaxies that emit jets of matter at small angles toward Earth, known as blazars, present astronomers with numerous observational and interpretative challenges. Their immense distance and specific orientation, combined with the high variability of the emitted radiation—which, moreover, is generated across a very wide energy range—are the main reasons why understanding the phenomena responsible for the properties of blazars is particularly difficult.

Are the current interpretations of the nature of these objects, based on short-term and rather sporadic observations, correct? A group of scientists from the University of Heidelberg and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Krakow set out to answer this question. The research carried out on the Polish side focused on the blazar PKS 2155-304, located one and a half billion light-years away. It is situated in the southern celestial hemisphere, in the background of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The paper is published in the Journal of High Energy Astrophysics.

Pluto’s Heart Glacier Shows Signs of Liquid Nitrogen

*New Horizons* data reveals evidence of liquid nitrogen recently flowing onto Pluto’s surface. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30869/pluto-s-heart-…nitrogen-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30869/pluto-s-heart-…nitrogen-2)

Is Pluto geologically active enough to have liquid nitrogen on its surface? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the possibility of Pluto’s geologic activity, specifically focusing on liquid nitrogen rising to the surface. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the intricate geological processes on Pluto and how they occur so far from the Sun.

For the study, the researchers used a combination of computer models and Earth-based imagery to discuss the potential upward movement of liquid nitrogen within Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia, which is the dwarf planet’s most prominent surface feature. The primary motivation for this study comes from Sputnik Planitia being primarily smooth with boundary lines and various regions of dark and light colors. The researchers note this indicates evidence of ongoing geologic activity, specifically liquid nitrogen cycling from Pluto’s interior to its surface. After careful analysis, specifically noting how similar features identified in Greenland exhibit the same dark and light features, the researchers concluded that liquid nitrogen could be cycling from Pluto’s interior to its surface.

“The surface of Sputnik Planitia is quite young, probably less than one million years based on modeling of the surface overturn, and thus these features that we are looking at must have formed since then,” said Dr. Kelsi Singer, who is a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and a co-author on the study. “Pluto has many unique terrains seen nowhere else in the solar system, and this area of Sputnik Planitia is one of them. Its surface provides a different set of conditions compared to what we are used to on Earth, and exploring that allows us to better understand how materials behave in environments that are difficult to produce on Earth.”

Miniaturized laser technology paves the way for fundamental physics experiments in space

An international team of researchers has succeeded in producing atomic quantum gas mixtures with an unprecedented particle flux. In the journal Nature Communications, the scientists report on experiments conducted with the MAIUS-B apparatus, in which Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) consisting of two different atomic species—rubidium and potassium—were generated and studied under microgravity conditions in the Einstein Elevator at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany.

A key contribution to this achievement came from a technological development at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU): the highly sophisticated and compact optical system used to control the atoms.

Tiny vortices discovered on the sun’s surface

Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the U.S. have made a discovery in solar physics. New images of the sun’s surface taken with the world’s largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO in Hawaii, along with sophisticated computer simulations, reveal tiny plasma vortices that had never before been visible.

“To detect the vortices, we needed to resolve structures on the solar surface about 20 kilometers (12 miles) in size. That is at the limit of what even the world’s largest solar telescope and state-of-the-art simulations can achieve,” said MPS scientist and co-author of the new publication Michiel van Noort, who, among other things, contributed to the observations and conducted the data reduction and image restoration. The researchers used a broadband imaging camera provided by MPS.

The vortices occur at the edges of so-called granules, which densely cover the sun’s visible surface. They measure between 500 and 2,000 kilometers (310 to 1,240 miles) in diameter. Taken together, they form the sun’s granulation: a pattern reminiscent of bubbles in a boiling liquid.

Neuraspace raises $18 million to expand sovereign space awareness

TAMPA, Fla. — Neuraspace, the Portuguese space traffic management startup, announced 15.6 million euros ($18 million) in fresh funding Aug. 5 to expand European space domain awareness (SDA) and defense capabilities.

The financing comprises a six million euro Series B round from venture capitalists and 9.6 million euros from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, an EU-backed national program created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Neuraspace spokesperson said the public funding will directly support NeuraspaceDEF, an AI-powered, SDA platform for civil and defense users.

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