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Category: space – Page 374

A NASA X-ray spacecraft delivers new dimensions to the first images from the Webb telescope.

Images touch people in a way that words cannot. The unprecedented clarity of the Webb telescope’s first scientific images dazzled people across the world when they became public on July 12, 2022. Three months later, the team working on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory released new images of the same target objects: Stephan’s Quintet, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.3–7327, and the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula. An image that Webb later took of the Cartwheel Galaxy also got an update. All these visuals add more “turbulent” information about these structures and give the originals a whole new dimension.

The full set of images is available here. To appreciate the new data, Inverse set some of them side by side with their corresponding original image.

Chandra launched in 1999 and is named after Indian-American Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The new images became public the same day the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, which highlighted achievements in quantum entanglement, were announced, coincidentally.

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A fluid dynamics theory that violates causality would always generate paradoxical instabilities—a result that could guide the search for a theory for relativistic fluids.

The theory of fluid dynamics has been successful in many areas of fundamental and applied sciences, describing fluids from dilute gases, such as air, to liquids, such as water. For most nonrelativistic fluids, the theory takes the form of the celebrated Navier-Stokes equation. However, fundamental problems arise when extending these equations to relativistic fluids. Such extensions typically imply paradoxes—for instance, thermodynamic states of the systems can appear stable or unstable to observers in different frames of reference. These problems hinder the description of the dynamics of important fluid systems, such as neutron-rich matter in neutron star mergers or the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions.

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Peering incredibly far back into time, astronomers found a group of much older stars than they expected.

Astronomers made a new discovery in the very first full-color image released from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The first full-color James Webb image, revealed by President Joe Biden on July 11, shows a vast network of galaxies and peers billions of years into the past. Within that network, astronomers believe they have identified the most distant globular clusters ever identified, as per a BBC report.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, and stsci

The discovery is indicative not only of the new insight James Webb is yet to reveal but also of the treasure trove of information stored in every image it has already released.

Continue reading “Astronomers may have found some of the very earliest stars thanks to James Webb” | >

The helicopter has been scouting the red planet for over a year.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter went from being a proof of concept for off-world flight to becoming a fully-fledged aerial scout for NASA’s Perseverance mission.

The helicopter wasn’t alone, as per a blog post from NASA. Images from the chopper show a flowing debris object, resembling a piece of a plastic bag, for part of its journey.

NASA

The helicopter was initially only expected to fly about five times — proving humans could perform a controlled flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere — but it took off for the 33rd time on September 24 for a short repositioning flight.

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New underwater camera could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change.

More than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, according to estimates by scientists, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars.

Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. It is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.

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Is the future of humanity in space or on multiple planets?

You can’t build massive space habitats without harvesting resources from nearby asteroids. The resources of the Moon and asteroids are needed to create their proposed habitats.

The prospects for colonization of other planetary surfaces are unappealing.

It is an exciting time to be alive for fans of space exploration. Between the launch of Artemis I, the fabled “return to the Moon,” plans to send the first astronauts to Mars in the next decade, and the almost-daily updates coming from the commercial space industry, there is a level of interest and activity in space that has not been seen for generations.

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