Evidence of alien worlds goes back farther than you think
Category: space – Page 26
Why would anyone need this level of wavelength detail in an image? There are many reasons. Car manufacturers want to predict exactly how paint will look under different lighting. Scientists use spectral imaging to identify materials by their unique light signatures. And rendering specialists need it to accurately simulate real-world optical effects like dispersion (rainbows from prisms, for example) and fluorescence.
For instance, past Ars Technica coverage has highlighted how astronomers analyzed spectral emission lines from a gamma-ray burst to identify chemicals in the explosion, how physicists reconstructed original colors in pioneering 19th century photographs, and how multispectral imaging revealed hidden, centuries-old text and annotations on medieval manuscripts like the Voynich Manuscript, sometimes even uncovering the identities of past readers or scribes through faint surface etchings.
The current standard format for storing this kind of data, OpenEXR, wasn’t designed with these massive spectral requirements in mind. Even with built-in lossless compression methods like ZIP, the files remain unwieldy for practical work as these methods struggle with the large number of spectral channels.
The warning came from one of the co-authors of the Space Weather Instrumentation, Measurement, Modelling and Risk (SWIMMR) S6 project group’s Severe space weather impacts on UK critical national infrastructure report, which was funded by the government.
The report said the government, regulators and CNI operators must “develop space weather preparedness plans” for CNI.
Space weather “is caused by disturbances from active regions of the Sun”, the report says.
Explore the fascinating intersection of resistance, permanence, and future technology with renowned OmniFuturist and author Allen Crowley. In this thought-pr…
How do water and hydrogen interact in planetary evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as a | Space
Well done Gaia & crew. [ https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Star-mapping_space_telesc…t_999.html](https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Star-mapping_space_telesc…t_999.html)
After more than a decade mapping out our home galaxy, the Gaia space telescope was powered down and sent into “retirement orbit” around the Sun on Thursday, the European Space Agency said.
Since launching in 2013, the telescope has been charting the positions, motion and properties of nearly two billion stars to create a vast map of the Milky Way, revealing many secrets of the cosmos along the way, the ESA said in a statement.
Gaia uncovered evidence of massive galaxies slamming into each other, identified vast clusters of stars, helped discover new exoplanets and mapped millions of galaxies and blazing galactic monsters called quasars.
Stephen Wolfram is a prominent computer scientist and theoretical physicist, best known for developing Mathematica and authoring A New Kind of Science. Today…
American tech giants are increasingly focusing on the humanoid robotics space, but analysts say they’re at risk of falling behind China.
A new study presents a compelling new model for the formation of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes – planets that are 1 to 4 times the size of Earth and among the most common in our galaxy. Using advanced simulations, the researchers propose that these planets emerge from distinct rings of planetesimals, providing fresh insight into planetary evolution beyond our solar system.
A new study by Rice University researchers Sho Shibata and Andre Izidoro presents a compelling new model for the formation of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes — planets that are 1 to 4 times the size of Earth and among the most common in our galaxy. Using advanced simulations, the researchers propose that these planets emerge from distinct rings of planetesimals, providing fresh insight into planetary evolution beyond our solar system. The findings were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
For decades, scientists have debated how super-Earths and mini-Neptunes form. Traditional models have suggested that planetesimals — the tiny building blocks of planets — formed across wide regions of a young star’s disk. But Shibata and Izidoro suggest a different theory: These materials likely come together in narrow rings at specific locations in the disk, making planet formation more organized than previously believed.