Sales of corporate jets surged during the pandemic. Growth is taking off again due to a tax break passed last year in the tax law championed by President Trump. But where do you park all those planes when they’re not in the air?
Category: space – Page 2
Astronomers Find Escaping Helium on Rocky World LHS 1140 b
By detecting helium escaping into space, astronomers have found the first direct evidence of an atmosphere on LHS 1,140 b, a rocky exoplanet located in its star’s habitable zone.
A collaborative team of researchers recently announced the discovery of an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star. While this finding is intriguing for the search for life beyond Earth, the atmosphere is not only comprised of helium, but it was found to be escaping the exoplanet. The researchers discuss these findings in a recent study published in the journal Science and it holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of rocky exoplanets while narrowing the search for life beyond Earth.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data about LHS 1,140 b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 50 light-years from Earth and has a radius and mass about 1.7 and 5.6 of Earth, respectively, designating LHS 1,140 b as a super-Earth. While the researchers note this is the first time an atmosphere has been detected around a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, LHS 1,140 b’s atmosphere is primarily comprised of helium and was also found to be escaping the exoplanet or being stripped away.
This is because red dwarf stars have been found to be significantly more active than Sun-like stars, meaning its intense radiation is potentially stripping LHS 1,140 b’s upper atmosphere where the helium is found. Despite this, the team noted other types of gases could be present in the lower altitudes of the atmosphere.
A tiny universe in a bottle reveals clues to the origins of life
Researchers have created cosmic dust from scratch by recreating space-like conditions inside glass tubes. The dust contains complex carbon-rich molecules built from elements essential to life and produces infrared signals similar to real material found in space. By studying these laboratory samples, scientists can explore how organic chemistry unfolds around stars and how comets, asteroids and meteorites may have carried those ingredients to Earth.
Japan space probe skims asteroid in test for planetary defense
A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.
The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.
The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide (525-foot-wide) Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.
Scientists are Teaching Shrimp to Eat in Microgravity for Future Moon Bases
As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is seafood, yet we know surprisingly little about how aquatic animals would react to the microgravity environment they would experience in space. A new paper by researchers at Japan’s Okayama University of Science, which was recently published in Microgravity Science and Technology, hopes to tackle that question. It used a novel way to simulate microgravity to watch how crustaceans would react to the space environment, and found that they could likely be good candidates as part of a future space food chain.
Most microgravity experiments on Earth take place in drop chambers or parabolic flights — both of which only offer a few seconds of true “microgravity”, and aren’t suitable for longer duration testing. The International Space Station offers an alternative, but is extremely expensive and has very limited space to run additional experiments. So the researchers turned to an alternative tool — the clinostat.
These specialized chambers rapidly change the orientation their contents are subjected to, varying the gravity field they experience and mimicking at least some of the effects of microgravity. They rotate in such a way that the combination of gravity and centrifugal force will eventually come out to essentially zero over a period of time. These machines work well for single-celled organisms and plants. But they’re not as effective for complex animals.
Webb telescope discovers hidden planet in famous star system
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hiding within one of the most intensely studied planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy.
The young, nearby star Beta Pictoris was already known to host two giant planets: Beta Pictoris b, one of the first exoplanets ever directly imaged, and Beta Pictoris c. The newly identified Beta Pictoris d makes it only the second planetary system known to contain at least three imaged planets.
Unlike Beta Pictoris b and c, however, Beta Pictoris d was discovered not by identifying a bright point of light but by detecting the unique chemical fingerprint of its atmosphere, a technique that could transform the search for worlds around other stars.
Some agentic AI browsers may come with major cybersecurity risks
In the last year or so, artificial intelligence companies have rolled out a spate of web browsers equipped with AI agents. A user might ask one of these agents to plan a vacation, and it will open browser tabs to research routes and restaurants, then make reservations and add events to the user’s calendar. How well it does any of this varies.
New research from the University of Washington found that the most powerful of these browsers also open users up to significant cybersecurity risks. A UW team studied seven popular agentic browsers and found that four create ways for malicious actors to bypass a fundamental cybersecurity protocol called the “same-origin policy,” which makes websites that are open in a browser unable to interact with each other’s information.
Researchers ran a successful proof-of-concept cyberattack on one browser, ChatGPT Atlas. They had a website steal information from another site embedded within it—as if an ad on an email site could snatch sensitive information from the user’s emails. Researchers also found the right conditions for similar attacks in three other browsers: Chrome with Gemini, Claude for Chrome and Perplexity Comet. The browsers that gave agents fewer permissions were generally safer.