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LaPORTE COUNTY, Ind. ( WGN) — In freezing temperatures in rural LaPorte County, Indiana, a skywatcher was able to capture the rare “green comet” passing by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years.

Space enthusiasts like Patrick Thompson have been talking about C/2022 E3 — more commonly known as the “green comet” — for the last couple of weeks. The comet was discovered only last year as part of a survey that monitors the solar system for moving objects with a wide-field survey camera.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JV7K8CvA26I&feature=share

Source: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics https://youtu.be/f1x9lgX8GaE
Courtesy of the Perimeter Institute https://www.youtube.com/user/PIOutreach.
Inside the Perimeter https://insidetheperimeter.ca.

In October 2015 Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) located in Waterloo, Canada opened the new season of the PI Public Lecture Series with a talk about the remarkable simplicity that underlies nature. Professor Turok, who was born in South Africa and now lives in Canada, discussed how this simplicity at the largest and tiniest scales of the Universe is pointing toward new avenues of research and revolutionary advances in technology.

SAI https://spaceandai.com

Researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies.

The newly discovered ice is amorphous—that is, its molecules are in a disorganized form, not neatly ordered as they are in ordinary, crystalline ice. Amorphous ice, although rare on Earth, is the main type of ice found in space. That is because in the colder environment of space, ice does not have enough thermal energy to form crystals.

For the study, published in the journal Science, the research team used a process called ball milling, vigorously shaking ordinary ice together with steel balls in a jar cooled to-200 degrees Centigrade.

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Written by Joseph Conlon.
Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford.
Author, Why String Theory? https://www.amazon.com/Why-String-Theory-Joseph-Conlon/dp/14…atfound-20
Edited and Narrated by David Kelly.
Thumbnail Art by Ettore Mazza.
Animations by Jero Squartini https://fiverr.com/freelancers/jerosq.
Huge thanks to Jeff Bryant for his Calabi-yau animation.

Footage from Videoblocks, Artlist. Footage of galaxies from NASA and ESO.
Music from Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Silver Maple and Yehezkel Raz.

Image Credits:

Sometimes to know what the matter is, you have to find it first. When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter today, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.

Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles Jan. 31 in Physical Review D.

The internet is abuzz with mentions of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) a.k.a., the green comet, which on Wednesday could be seen with the naked eye.

As per NASA, the comet paid our planet a visit after a good 50,000 years. It was a rare feast for stargazers and astronomers alike as people around the globe witnessed the astronomical event.

With simulations that go into finer details than ever before, Brooke Polak of the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have modeled a key phase in the formation of planets in our solar system: the way that centimeter-size pebbles aggregate into so-called planetesimals tens to hundreds kilometers in size. The simulation reproduces the initial size distribution of planetesimals, which can be checked against observations of present-day asteroids. It also predicts the prevalence of close binary planetesimals in our solar system.

In a new study published on arXiv and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, astrophysicists Brooke Polak from the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy used simulations to derive key properties of so-called planetesimals—the intermediate-size bodies from which planets formed in our solar system roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Using an innovative method for simulating planetesimal formation, the two researchers were able to predict the initial size distribution of planetesimals in our solar system: how many are likely to have formed in the different “size brackets” between roughly 10 km and 200 km.