For humans to ever venture out among the stars, we will have to solve some hefty logistical problems.
Not the least of these is the travel time involved. Space is so large, and human technology so limited, that the time it would take to travel to another star presents a significant barrier.
The Voyager 1 probe, for instance, would take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, at its current speed.
A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.
In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their observations and outline what might be learned from future study of the star system.
The work by the team on this new effort came on the heels of work done by another team that discovered a pair of protostars still in the very early stages of their development—in their first 500,000 years of existence. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a closer look at the two protostars and also the environment in which they exist.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to open the Orbital Reef commercial space station by the end of the decade, with shuttles available to the tourist hotel via the hypersonic Dream Chaser.
Kepler-1658b’s orbit is getting a little shorter — and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star — every year.
Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation — first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018 — to notice the slow shrinking of Kepler-1658b’s orbit. Recognizing the signs of deadly orbital decay in other exoplanets is going to take a similar amount of time and a similar volume of data, but Vissapragada and his colleagues say they’re getting there.
“We should begin to see hints of orbital decay for these planets within the next decade,” he and his colleagues write in their recent paper.
As for Kepler-1658b, it’s got about 2.5 million years left. When the time comes, whoever is watching (from whatever alien world harbors astronomers in the distant future) won’t see the planet simply fall into the star’s outer layers and burn up, like a meteor falling into Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, the same tidal forces that sealed its fate will probably rip the planet apart shortly before it takes the final plunge. Something similar probably happened to long-dead moons of planets like Saturn, which now make up parts of the planet’s famous ring system.
Turning astrophysical data into audio has led to all sorts of surprising discoveries, from micrometeoroids bombarding spacecraft to lightning on Saturn. Now, there is a push to get more astronomers to use sonification.
Posted in space
“M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before. A living masterpiece that was created by a mosaic of unique circumstances, choices and risks taken at a particular time and place, and that continues to evolve in the changes it brought to the country.
Since I’m neither a local, nor deeply involved with the African markets (yet), I would not dare to simply impose my DIY analytics on my readers. Instead, I invite you to listen to my conversation with M-PESA’s own Kevin Amateshe reflecting on Kenya’s digital financial services space, M-PESA’s role, the past, present and future: https://youtu.be/QlZuKwnsAS4
Carrying on from the video part, let us have a deeper look at M-PESA.
A research team led by Prof. Li Di from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has revealed circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts based on precise observations of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).
Their findings were published in Science Bulletin.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are the most luminous radio flashes in the universe. The estimated equivalent energy of one FRB event can rival the energy output the sun over a whole day or even a month to a year.
A comet that only orbits the sun once every 50,000 years is expected to be visible from Earth with the naked eye. The last time the comet visited, the Sahara desert was wet and fertile, Neanderthals and woolly mammoths still walked the Earth, and humans were—as far as we know—yet to reach North America.
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was first spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) on March 2, 2022, and is set to reach its closest point to the sun, or perihelion, on January 12, 2023. ZTF is an astronomical survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in California.
Comets are “cosmic snowballs” made up of frozen gases, dust and rock that orbit the sun. As they approach our star, these fragile constructs are blasted with increasing amounts of radiation, a process that can produce two vast tails of gas and dust.
A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
