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Scientists want to use quantum mechanics to capture higher-resolution images of the night sky.

For the purposes of astronomy, the two beams are collected by two telescopes that are separated by some distance (called baseline interferometry). But despite its effectiveness, classic interferometry is subject to some limitations. Andrei Nomerotski, an astrophysicist with the BNL and a co-author on the paper, explained to Universe Today via email.

“Interferometry is a way to increase the effective aperture of telescopes and to improve the angular resolution or astrometric precision,” he said. “The main difficulty here is to maintain the stability of this optical path to very high precision, which should be much smaller than the photon wavelength, to preserve the photon’s phase. This limits the practical baselines to a few hundred meters.”

Continue reading “Quantum Telescopes Could Offer Clearer Views of Our Solar System and Beyond” »

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese startup announced plans Tuesday to launch commercial space viewing balloon flights that it hopes will bring an otherwise astronomically expensive experience down to Earth.

Company CEO Keisuke Iwaya said passengers do not need to be billionaires, go through intense training or have the language skills needed to fly in a rocket.

“It’s safe, economical and gentle for people,” Iwaya told reporters. “The idea is to make space tourism for everyone.” He said he wants to “democratize space.”

The NEOMIR mission aims to provide advanced warning for asteroids capable of devastating cities.

The European Space Agency (ESA) aims to make the world safer with a spacecraft that can detect asteroids that the sun’s glare would otherwise hide.

The NEOMIR space observatory is designed to give an advanced warning about asteroids in a blindspot caused by intense sunlight.

The observation reveals high-energy X-rays that could help solve a mystery regarding the Sun’s corona.

As a new series of NASA observations show, there’s a lot more to sunlight than meets the eye.

This hidden light could help solve a mystery related to our host star’s incredibly hot outer atmosphere, the corona.

Continue reading “NASA image reveals hidden sunlight that may help solve solar mystery” »

Ever wondered what our solar system might be like with an earthlike planet —- or one even five or six times larger —- orbiting between Mars and Jupiter?

Conventional theory has long held that the gravitational influence of Jupiter would have ripped any terrestrial mass planet to shreds or never allowed it to form there at all. But a new paper just accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal argues that a “hypothetical planet” ranging from one to ten earth masses located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would wreak havoc on our inner solar system within a timeframe of only a few million years.

There’s been much speculation about whether the solar system could safely harbor an additional planet between Mars and Jupiter where most of our asteroids are located, Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California in Riverside and the paper’s lead author, told me via email. This study shows how such a planet would destabilize planetary orbits, he says.

Kilonova explosions created when neutron stars collide and merge are perfectly spherical, not flattened discs as previously expected, a new study suggests.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is still doing its job — and doing it very well. Released today, this image shows the arms of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1,433 teeming with young stars that can be seen affecting the clouds of gas and dust around them. The image was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) collaboration, of which more than 100 researchers around the world are a part.

One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first science programs is to image 19 spiral galaxies for PHANGS with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which is capable of seeing through gas and dust clouds that are impenetrable with other types of imaging.

David Hilbert was a great leader and spokesperson for the discipline of mathematics in the early 20th Century. But he was an extremely important and respected mathematician in his own right.

Like so many great German mathematicians before him, Hilbert was another product of the University of Göttingen, at that time the mathematical centre of the world, and he spent most of his working life there. His formative years, though, were spent at the University of Königsberg, where he developed an intense and fruitful scientific exchange with fellow mathematicians Hermann Minkowski and Adolf Hurwitz.

Sociable, democratic and well-loved both as a student and as a teacher, and often seen as bucking the trend of the formal and elitist system of German mathematics, Hilbert’s mathematical genius nevertheless spoke for itself. He has many mathematical terms named after him, including Hilbert space (an infinite dimensional Euclidean space), Hilbert curves, the Hilbert classification and the Hilbert inequality, as well as several theorems, and he gradually established himself as the most famous mathematician of his time.

Scientists of the University of Antwerp and University of Liège (Belgium) have found how the human brain changes and adapts to weightlessness after being in space for six months. Some of the changes turned out to be lasting—even after eight months back on Earth. Raphaël Liégeois, soon to be the third Belgian in space, acknowledges the importance of the research “to prepare the new generation of astronauts for longer missions.”

A child who learns not to drop a glass on the floor, or a tennis player predicting the course of an incoming ball to hit it accurately are examples of how the brain incorporates the physical laws of gravity to optimally function on Earth. Astronauts who go to space reside in a weightless environment, where the brain’s rules about gravity are no longer applicable.

A new study on brain function in cosmonauts has revealed how the brain’s organization is changed after a six-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the adaptation that is required to live in weightlessness. The findings are published in the journal Communications Biology.