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.
The most powerful telescope ever built.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope that has been designed to study the universe in infrared light. It is the largest and most powerful telescope ever built, and it is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
JWST was launched on December 25, 2021, and it is now operational. The telescope is located at the second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.
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In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory supported by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT. It’s designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. It’s multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves. It consists of two widely separated interferometers within the United States—one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana.
Asteroid starships are built by hollowing out an asteroid and creating a habitat inside plus adding a propulsion system.
Image credit: David A. Hardy, Erik Wernquist, Roy Scarfo, Wikipedia.
#interstellar #asteroid #starship #spacecolonization #spacecraft #ProjectHyperion
“That’s one less cosmic hazard we have to worry about!”
A huge cosmic catastrophe has been averted!A massive rogue dead star was initially predicted to brush through our solar system roughly 29,000 years from now. Fortunately, updated calculations show that our planet will be spared from the damage…
Nazarii Neshcherenskyi/iStock.
A massive rogue dead star was initially predicted to brush through our solar system roughly 29,000 years from now.
A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters discusses a groundbreaking discovery using the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) onboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to reveal the processes responsible for planetary formation, specifically the transition of water from the colder, outer regions of a protoplanetary disk to the warmer, inner regions. This study was conducted by an international team of researchers and holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the complex processes behind planetary formation, which could also help us better understand how our own solar system formed billions of years ago.
“Webb finally revealed the connection between water vapor in the inner disk and the drift of icy pebbles from the outer disk,” said Dr. Andrea Banzatti, who is an assistant professor of physics at Texas State University and lead author of the study. “This finding opens up exciting prospects for studying rocky planet formation with Webb!”
Using MIRI, which is sensitive to water vapor in protoplanetary disks, the researchers analyzed four protoplanetary disks orbiting Sun-like stars, although much younger, at only 2–3 million years old, and the four disks analyzed consisted of two compact disks and two extended disks. The compact disks were hypothesized to deliver ice-covered pebbles to a distance equivalent to the orbit of Neptune in our solar system, and the extended disks were hypothesized to deliver ice-covered pebbles as far out as six times Neptune’s orbit. The goal of the study was to determine if the compact disks exhibited a greater amount of water in the inner regions of the disk where rocky planets would theoretically form.
We live in an age of exoplanet discovery. One thing we’ve learned is not to be surprised by the kinds of exoplanets we keep discovering. We’ve discovered planets where it might rain glass or even iron, planets that are the rocky core remnants of gas giants stripped of their atmospheres, and drifting rogue planets untethered to any star.
Now, astronomers have uncovered evidence of an exoplanet in a circumbinary disk around a binary star. The remarkable thing about this discovery is that the disk is in a polar configuration. That means the exoplanet moves around its binary star in a circumpolar orbit, and this is the first one scientists have found.
AC Herculis (AC Her) is a binary star about 4,200 light-years away. The primary star is well-studied, while its partner is invisible. It has a polar circumbinary disk, which is unusual but not unheard of. In a new paper, a team of researchers presents evidence for the polar circumbinary exoplanet.