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Category: space – Page 178

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just made a breakthrough discovery in revealing how planets are made. By observing water vapor in protoplanetary disks, Webb confirmed a physical process involving the drifting of ice-coated solids from the outer regions of the disk into the rocky-planet zone.

Theories have long proposed that icy pebbles forming in the cold, outer regions of protoplanetary disks — the same area where comets originate in our solar system — should be the fundamental seeds of planet formation. The main requirement of these theories is that pebbles should drift inward toward the star due to friction in the gaseous disk, delivering both solids and water to planets.

A fundamental prediction of this theory is that as icy pebbles enter into the warmer region within the “snowline” — where ice transitions to vapor — they should release large amounts of cold water vapor. This is exactly what Webb observed.

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“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” said Hal Levison, referring to the meaning of Dinkinesh in the Amharic language, “marvelous.” Levison is principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”

In the weeks prior to the spacecraft’s encounter with Dinkinesh, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh might be a binary system, given how Lucy’s instruments were seeing the asteroid’s brightness changing with time. The first images from the encounter removed all doubt. Dinkinesh is a close binary. From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger body is approximately 0.5 miles (790 m) at its widest, while the smaller is about 0.15 miles (220 m) in size.

This encounter primarily served as an in-flight test of the spacecraft, specifically focusing on testing the system that allows Lucy to autonomously track an asteroid as it flies past at 10,000 mph, referred to as the terminal tracking system.

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New research offers a theory on how gold, platinum, and other precious metals found their way to shallow pockets within Earth’s mantle.

Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) say they’ve hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold.

It’s a story that begins with violent collisions of large objects in space, continues in a half-melted region of Earth’s mantle, and ends with precious metals finding an unlikely resting spot much closer to the planet’s surface than scientists would have predicted.

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The detection of ammonia isotopologues in a brown dwarf by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

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Generation of nearly deterministic OAM-based entangled states offers a bridge between photonic technologies for quantum advancements.

Quantum technology’s future rests on the exploitation of fascinating quantum mechanics concepts — such as high-dimensional quantum states. Think of these as states basic ingredients of quantum information science and quantum tech. To manipulate these states, scientists have turned to light, specifically a property called orbital angular momentum (OAM), which deals with how light twists and turns in space. Here’s a catch: making super bright single photons with OAM in a deterministic fashion has been a tough nut to crack.

Quantum Dots: Bridging Technologies

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A team of materials scientists at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, working with colleagues from the China Academy of Space Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, all in China, has found that billions of years of exposure to radiation has made glass on the moon harder.

In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they tested samples of lunar regolith brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 lunar lander and then treated the samples to rejuvenate them for comparison purposes.

Humans have been making glass for approximately 4,000 years; nature, on the other hand, has been doing it for billions of years. In this new effort, the research team studied glass that has been made naturally on the moon by meteoroids striking, and melting —some of it billions of years old.

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We spent 90 minutes with the pin and its founders at Humane’s SF offices.

A few hours after this morning’s big unveil, Humane opened its doors to a handful of press.

A few hours after this morning’s big unveil, Humane opened its doors to a handful of press. Located in a nondescript building in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, the office is home to the startup’s hardware design teams.

An office next door houses Humane’s product engineers, while the electrical engineering team operates out of a third space directly across the street. The company also operates an office in New York, though the lion’s share of the 250-person staff are located here in San Francisco.

Continue reading “Humane’s AI Pin up close” | >

SpaceX has achieved a world record by delivering over 1,000 metric tons of mass to orbit this year, as its founder Elon Musk claimed.

SpaceX/Twitter.

The mission was launched by a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:49 am local time (1:49 pm EST; 1,849 GMT). The rocket’s first stage returned to the launch site and landed vertically about 7.5 minutes later. This was the 12th flight and recovery for this booster, per SpaceX’s mission details.

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