But the true nature of the pillars was famously revealed in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, an image that wowed the public and was soon one of the most recognized and widely published photos ever captured by the venerable observatory.
But Hubble is primarily a visible-light telescope with only a limited ability to detect cloud-piercing infrared emissions from the interior of the pillars and from stars shining in and behind a translucent, obscuring layer of gas making up the interstellar medium that is most apparent looking into the plane of the galaxy.
Aeromine says its unique “motionless” rooftop wind generators deliver up to 50% more energy than a solar array of the same price, while taking up just 10% of the roof space and operating more or less silently. In independent tests, they seem legit.
Distributed energy generation stands to play a growing part in the world’s energy markets. Most of this currently comes in the form of rooftop solar, but in certain areas, wind could definitely play a bigger part. Not every spot is appropriate for a bladed wind turbine, though, and in this regard, University of Houston spinoff Aeromine Technologies has designed a very different, very tidy form of rooftop wind energy capture that looks like it could be a real game-changer.
As with traditional wind turbines, size is key. So while Aeromine’s wind energy boxes take up a relatively small footprint on your roof, they’re still pretty bulky. The wings themselves are maybe 10 feet (3 m) high, at a rough guess, and looking at the latest imagery they’re now sitting on top of boxes that might add another 6 ft (1.8 m) or more to their height – so they’re no shrinking violets. On the other hand, they don’t create the noise, or the constantly moving visual distraction of a regular, bladed turbine, so they may prove to be less unwelcome in populated areas.
The 2022 Global Satellite Servicing Forum, the DARPA-originated @_CONFERS consortium’s annual event, is Oct. 19–20. In-space servicing and manufacturing stakeholders will discuss in-space lessons learned and their work toward achieving common technical and safety standards to extend satellite utility, resilience, & reliability. Learn more and register at https://www.satelliteconfers.org/gssf/#satelliteservicing #inspaceservicing #GSSF22
Imagine taking a star twice the mass of the sun and crushing it to the size of Manhattan. The result would be a neutron star—one of the densest objects found anywhere in the universe, exceeding the density of any material found naturally on Earth by a factor of tens of trillions. Neutron stars are extraordinary astrophysical objects in their own right, but their extreme densities might also allow them to function as laboratories for studying fundamental questions of nuclear physics, under conditions that could never be reproduced on Earth.
Because of these exotic conditions, scientists still do not understand what exactly neutron stars themselves are made from, their so-called “equation of state” (EoS). Determining this is a major goal of modern astrophysics research. A new piece of the puzzle, constraining the range of possibilities, has been discovered by a pair of scholars at IAS: Carolyn Raithel, John N. Bahcall Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences; and Elias Most, Member in the School and John A. Wheeler Fellow at Princeton University. Their work was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Ideally, scientists would like to peek inside these exotic objects, but they are too small and distant to be imaged with standard telescopes. Scientists rely instead on indirect properties that they can measure—like the mass and radius of a neutron star—to calculate the EoS, the same way that one might use the length of two sides of a right-angled triangle to work out its hypotenuse. However, the radius of a neutron star is very difficult to measure precisely. One promising alternative for future observations is to instead use a quantity called the “peak spectral frequency” (or f2) in its place.
With the help of NASA’s QueSST mission, aeronautical innovators hope to break the sound barrier once more, but this time in a totally different fashion that…
In this video, you are going to learn: what dangers are waiting for us in seemingly empty places? Can physicists on Earth destroy the entire cosmos? And most importantly, can a vacuum end the world we know and love?
