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Category: space – Page 355

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources defy Eddington limit and unlock universal secrets

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.

The new study supports an alternative hypothesis that suggests strong magnetic fields can distort atoms into elongated shapes, reducing the photons’ ability to push atoms away and ultimately increasing an object’s maximum brightness. By examining more ULXs, scientists may be able to further understand the role of magnetic fields in their extraordinary luminosity.

Observatory discovers radio waves from distant planet in neighboring star system

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.

A Computational Quantum-Based Perspective on the Molecular Origins of Life’s Building Blocks

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.

Sarah Bakewell on Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and What it Actually Means to Be “Human”

Every time a person dies, writes Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate, the entire world that has been built in that individual’s consciousness dies as well: “The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out… flowers have lost their color and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes that one day we may engineer a machine that can have human-like experiences; but if we do, it will have to be enormous—so vast is this space of consciousness, even within the most “average, inconspicuous human being.”

And, he adds, “Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.” Trying to think those two thoughts together is a near-impossible feat, even for the immense capacities of our consciousness. But will machine minds ever acquire anything like our ability to have such thoughts, in all their seriousness and depth? Or to reflect morally on events, or to equal our artistic and imaginative reach? Some think that this question distracts us from a more urgent one: we should be asking what our close relationship with our machines is doing to us.

Jaron Lanier, himself a pioneer of computer technology, warns in You Are Not a Gadget that we are allowing ourselves to become ever more algorithmic and quantifiable, because this makes us easier for computers to deal with. Education, for example, becomes less about the unfolding of humanity, which cannot be measured in units, and more about tick boxes.

New ‘AI scientist’ combines theory and data to discover scientific equations

In 1918, the American chemist Irving Langmuir published a paper examining the behavior of gas molecules sticking to a solid surface. Guided by the results of careful experiments, as well as his theory that solids offer discrete sites for the gas molecules to fill, he worked out a series of equations that describe how much gas will stick, given the pressure.

Now, about a hundred years later, an “AI scientist” developed by researchers at IBM Research, Samsung AI, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has reproduced a key part of Langmuir’s Nobel Prize-winning work. The system— (AI) functioning as a scientist—also rediscovered Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, which can calculate the time it takes one space object to orbit another given the distance separating them, and produced a good approximation of Einstein’s relativistic time-dilation law, which shows that time slows down for fast-moving objects.

A paper describing the results is published in Nature Communications on April 12.

Auroras Unplugged: NASA’s EZIE To Unveil the Charged Link Between Earth and Space

NASA ’s EZIE mission has passed a critical review and remains on track for a launch next year. The mission aims to study auroral electrojets in Earth’s ionosphere, providing insights into the Sun-Earth connection and space weather impacts on Earth. The project will also distribute educational kits to inspire the next generation of scientists.

With an orbit that will take it from pole to pole, NASA’s Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) mission will provide never-before-seen imaging of the electrical currents that link our planet and the surrounding space. But before it can do that, the EZIE team has to pass a series of reviews to demonstrate the mission is on track.

On March 23, the team successfully cleared one of those critical reviews, marking a major milestone for the project and keeping it on pace for a scheduled launch next year.

Space Force to propose plan to acquire high-capacity satellite communications

WASHINGTON — In an effort to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of U.S. military services, the Space Force will propose a new plan to acquire high-capacity satellite communications.

Senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are set to be briefed on this plan in the coming weeks, said Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements.

“We are working through the wideband satellite communications force design, and we’re going to brief that to the JROC sometime before early May,” Garrant told SpaceNews.

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