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Category: space – Page 267

Beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, there are physical limits on our access to the Universe. In this new video from PBS Space Time, we explore the absolute limit of our future view of the Universe, and of the Universe’s ability to influence us.

We humans have always been explorers. The great civilisations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole Universe out there waiting for us. Future generations may one day explore the cosmos and could even settle entire other galaxies.

However, there is a fundamental limit to how much of the Universe we can expand into. So, just how big could humanity get? Matt O’Dowd, astrophysicist and host of PBS Space Time, looks at the obstacles that our descendants could face in the very distant future.

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Bedrock allows its users to build and scale generative AI applications like chatbots.

Becoming the latest actor to join the generative AI space race, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Bedrock. Not to be confused with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard which are AI-powered chatbots.

What Bedrock does is allowing users to build and scale generative AI applications such as chatbots, text generation, image generation using language prompts, etc. There’s a range of pre-trained models that the users can customize and embed their own data into and then integrate and deploy in applications using the AWS tools.

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The robot tasked with making bricks out of lunar soil will be launched during China’s Chang’e-8 mission around 2028.

With Artemis II set to launch on November 24, it is no surprise that science journals are buzzing with research on lunar regolith, building bases on the moon, and working with moon soil to grow plants… you get the drift.

A recent study in the journal Communications Biology described an experiment in which the moon soil samples collected during the Apollo missions were used to grow plants. And for the first time, an Earth plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called thale cress, grew and thrived in the lunar soil samples during the experiment.

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The protoplanet was found surrounding HD 169,142, a star located 374 light years from our solar system.

Astronomers have caught a rare glimpse of a planet’s formation. This is only the third time scientists have discovered a protoplanet — an early stage in forming a planet, where cosmic material clumps in a disk surrounding newborn stars.

The observation of new protoplanet.

NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Continue reading “Astronomers confirm presence of third protoplanet about 374 light years away” | >

West Australian researchers have developed a breakthrough method to measure the brain fluid pressure in humans, which may reduce vision damage experienced by astronauts on long-haul space flights.

A cross-disciplinary team from the Lions Eye Institute and the International Space Centre at The University of Western Australia has developed a clever technique to measure the pressure in the brain fluid, the study was published in Nature in npj Microgravity.

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The mystery of ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) and their astonishing brightness has been partially unraveled through a recent study utilizing NASA’s NuSTAR.

Scientists have long been perplexed by ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), cosmic objects that emit about 10 million times more energy than the Sun and appear to break the Eddington limit — a physical boundary that determines the maximum brightness of an object based on its mass. In a groundbreaking study published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers have confirmed that these extraordinary light emitters surpass the Eddington limit, potentially due to their strong magnetic fields.

The effect of Eddington limit and magnetic fields

The Eddington limit plays a crucial role in determining the balance between the outward push of photons and the inward pull of an object’s gravity. When an object reaches the Eddington limit, its light pushes away any gas or material falling toward it, thus controlling its brightness. The study focused on the ULX M82 X-2, a neutron star that was found to be stealing about 9 billion trillion tons of material from a neighboring star annually. The researchers’ calculations confirmed that M82 X-2 exceeds the Eddington limit.

Continue reading “Ultra-luminous X-ray sources defy Eddington limit and unlock universal secrets” | >

An astronomical discovery was made in New Mexico after an observatory called the Very Large Array picked up radio waves from a neighboring star system.

Scientists near Magdalena were looking for protective magnetic fields similar to Earth’s. The planet, titled YZ Ceti B, might be the first planet outside the solar system discovered with those properties, located just 12 light years away from Earth.

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Exciting.

The search for the chemical origins of life represents a long-standing and continuously debated enigma. Despite its exceptional complexity, in the last decades the field has experienced a revival, also owing to the exponential growth of the computing power allowing for efficiently simulating the behavior of matter—including its quantum nature—under disparate conditions found, e.g., on the primordial Earth and on Earth-like planetary systems (i.e., exoplanets). In this minireview, we focus on some advanced computational methods capable of efficiently solving the Schrödinger equation at different levels of approximation (i.e., density functional theory)—such as ab initio molecular dynamics—and which are capable to realistically simulate the behavior of matter under the action of energy sources available in prebiotic contexts.

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