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Category: space – Page 180

Oh yea? I just learned the steps to copperhead road so… whatever.

Light is something in our world that we are very familiar with, and yet it can still throw some incredible curveballs when you look at it in detail. A newly discovered one comes from a pretty well-established phenomenon: what happens when light passes through an interface? That could be glass, water, or something completely different. The solution for that has long been established, but scientists have now found something weird going on in the middle.

As light goes through an interface, its speed changes. The solution for the behavior of light on one side of the interface or the other is the well-established standard wave equation. They can be linked with no problem (a piecewise continuous solution) but this still doesn’t explain what happens at the interface itself. There, the wave should experience an acceleration that is not accounted for by the current solution.

Now, an equation has been put forward in the case of a universe with one space dimension and one time dimension.

Continue reading “Solution To Complex Light Problem Shows That Time Can Only Go Forward” | >

A recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets examines the 39th drilling sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars from a rock named “Sequoia”, which comes shortly after the pioneering robot passed its 4,000th sol, or Martian day, exploring the Red Planet. This sample was found to contain starkeyite, which is a magnesium sulfate mineral analogous to extremely dry climates such as Mars and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the climate of the Red Planet, specifically pertaining to how it got so dry.

Image of the drill hole made by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover collect a sample on Oct. 17, 2023, the 3,980th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

“The types of sulfate and carbonate minerals that Curiosity’s instruments have identified in the last year help us understand what Mars was like so long ago. We’ve been anticipating these results for decades, and now Sequoia will tell us even more,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, who is a project scientist on the Curiosity mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) and one of almost three dozen co-authors on the study.

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Once valued at $47 billion, the company is now worth $50 million and trading of its stock paused on Monday.

After many tumultuous months, coworking space provider WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US and Canada, CNBC

Founded in 2010, WeWork became synonymous with coworking spaces after operating in more than 700 properties worldwide. The company offers its customers the option to rent offices for as little as a day, plush with fancy furniture, and opportunities to add meeting rooms as and when required.

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A team of researchers at Kyoto University has been hard at work on a satellite made of wood — and they say it’s now scheduled to launch into space next summer in a joint mission between Japan’s JAXS space agency and NASA.

While it may sound like an odd choice of materials, they say wood is a surprisingly suitable material for space.

“When you use wood on Earth, you have the problems of burning, rotting, and deformation, but in space, you don’t have those problems: there is no oxygen in space, so it doesn’t burn, and no living creatures live in them, so they don’t rot,” Koji Murata, a Kyoto University researcher who’s been working on the project, told CNN.

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Dinkinesh, previously thought to be a single asteroid, is revealed by NASA’s Lucy probe to in fact be a binary pair.

“Moonrise” of the new satellite as it emerges from behind Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab.

Dinkinesh, a main-belt asteroid with an orbital period of 3.2 years, was discovered on 4th November 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey at Socorro, New Mexico. Less than two weeks after being observed, astronomers lost track of the object and it went unrecognised for several years. Additional sightings occurred in the mid-2000s, helping to re-establish its position and greatly reduce the uncertainties of its orbit.

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“We are interested in studying shear deformation on icy moons because that type of faulting can facilitate the exchange of surface and subsurface materials through shear heating processes, potentially creating environments conducive for the emergence of life,” said Dr. Liliane Burkhard.

Two recent studies published in Icarus examine tectonic processes known as shear stresses which are also referred to as strike-slip faults on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and Saturn’s largest moon, Ganymede. While such processes are common on Earth, specifically with the San Andreas Fault in northern California, and have been observed on several icy moons throughout the solar system, these two studies hope to shed new light on the inner workings that cause these processes to occur on Titan and Ganymede, the latter of which is the largest moon in the solar system.

True color image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, passing in front of the ringed planet taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Image of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and the largest moon in the entire solar system, taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS, Kalleheikki Kannisto)

Continue reading “Titan and Ganymede Revealed: Understanding Shear Deformation on Icy Moons” | >

“We’ve assembled the most accurate list of Kepler planet candidates and their properties to date,” said Dr. Jack Lissauer. “NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, and this new catalog will enable astronomers to learn more about their characteristics.”

Though NASA’s Kepler space telescope officially “retired” in October 2018, scientists are still pouring over data from the iconic exoplanet hunter that operated for more than nine years. Most recently, scientists came upon data that added four more exoplanets to the Kepler-385 system, which is located approximately 4,700 light-years from Earth and had previously been known to contain three exoplanets, all of which were discovered in 2014.

Artist’s illustration displaying two of the seven planets within the Kepler-385 system. (Credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

The data shows the sizes of all seven planets are between Earth and Neptune, also known as Super-Earths, with the two inner planets hypothesized to be rocky while the remaining five are hypothesized to be gaseous. All the planets are hypothesized to be exposed to greater amounts of radiation per area than all the planets in our solar system. This is due to its parent star being approximately 10 percent larger and 5 percent hotter than our own Sun. This finding comes as NASA is about to release an updated Kepler catalog, which contains almost 4,400 exoplanet candidates.

Continue reading “Seven Sweltering Exoplanets Found in Kepler Data” | >

When summarizing facts, ChatGPT technology makes things up about 3 percent of the time, according to research from a new start-up. A Google system’s rate was 27 percent.

When the San Francisco start-up OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT online chatbot late last year.

When Google introduced a similar chatbot several weeks later, it spewed nonsense about the James Webb telescope. The next day, Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot offered up all sorts of bogus information about the Gap, Mexican nightlife and the… More.

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A large space mirror heats up an asteroid, slowly melting it. Water, which was injected into the center of the body expands, blows up the melted material, creating the shape of a balloon. After cooling down, rotation is induced into the hollow body creating artificial gravity. An artificial fusion Sun brings daylight to the dark interior. A team of bio-life-support system experts, urban planners, and ecologists starts to create an artificial world inside the balloon, preparing it for the first settlers. The small world is then provided with a propulsion system and launched to one of the next stars or used as a space colony.

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