đ”ïžââïž Beware of Quasar RAT: A sneaky malware exploiting DLL side-loading to hide its tracks on compromised Windows systems.
Category: space – Page 380
James Webb shows mysterious âsub-Neptuneâ is probably a water world
The idea of a water world, a planet covered by water, has fascinated both scientists and artists for centuries. For scientists, a water world is a planet that has a great deal of water on its surface (or beneath the surface). Some studies have suggested that exoplanets with oceans are common in the Milky Way, but we havenât really been able to find them.
This is where GJ 1,214 b comes in.
This planet (also called Gliese 1,214 b or Enaiposha) is 48 lightyears away from Earth. Itâs a âsub Neptuneâ or âmini Neptune.â Mini Neptunes are a type of planet less massive than Neptune but resembling Neptune in general structure and in that they lack a thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere.
Could Neptuneâs largest moon swing a spacecraft into the planetâs orbit?
One problem with a return mission to Neptune is that a flyby focused solely on that world does not provide significant bang for the buck. Without the lucky alignment available to missions in the 1970s and â80s, weâd have to spend even more fuel to send a probe in that direction, and we wouldnât get that much more science than we did decades ago.
The next logical step after a successful flyby mission is an orbiter, but the extreme distance to Neptune poses significant challenges. We have no clear way to haul a large enough orbiter to the Neptune system, pack enough fuel to allow it to slow down and do it all in a reasonably short amount of time.
However, researchers have shared a radical new idea for how to overcome these challenges: Use the thin atmosphere of Triton, Neptuneâs largest moon, to capture a spacecraft.
Astronomers detect mysterious 8 billion-year-old energetic burst
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (Reuters) â Astronomers have detected an intense flash of radio waves coming from what looks like a merger of galaxies dating to about 8 billion years ago â the oldest-known instance of a phenomenon called a fast radio burst that continues to defy explanation.
This burst in less than a millisecond unleashed the amount of energy our sun emits in three decades, researchers said. It was detected using the Australian SKA Pathfinder, a radio telescope in the state of Western Australia. Its location was pinpointed by the European Southern Observatoryâs Very Large Telescope in Chile, one of the most powerful optical telescopes.
A fast radio burst, or FRB, is a pulse of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation. It lasts a small fraction of a second but outshines most other sources of radio waves in the universe. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.
350-Year-Old Theorem Reveals New Properties of Light
Ever since the 17th-century debates between Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens about the essence of light, the scientific community has grappled with the question: Is light a wave or a particle â or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once? Now, researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology have revealed a new connection between the two perspectives, using a 350-year-old mechanical theorem â ordinarily used to describe the movement of large, physical objects like pendulums and planets â to explain some of the most complex behaviors of light waves.
The work, led by Xiaofeng Qian, assistant professor of physics at Stevens and reported in the August 17 online issue of Physical Review Research, also proves for the first time that a light waveâs degree of non-quantum entanglement exists in a direct and complementary relationship with its degree of polarization. As one rises, the other falls, enabling the level of entanglement to be inferred directly from the level of polarization, and vice versa. This means that hard-to-measure optical properties such as amplitudes, phases, and correlations â perhaps even those of quantum wave systems â can be deduced from something a lot easier to measure: light intensity.
Fast radio bursts trigger aftershocks resembling earthquakes, but not solar flares
ABSTRACT. The production mechanism of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) is still a mystery, and correlations between burst occurrence times and energies may provide important clues to elucidate it. While time correlation studies of FRBs have been mainly performed using wait time distributions, here we report the results of a correlation function analysis of repeating FRBs in the 2D space of time and energy. We analyse nearly 7,000 bursts reported in the literature for the three most active sources of FRB 20121102A, 20201124A, and 20220912A, and find the following characteristics that are universal in the three sources. A clear power-law signal of the correlation function is seen, extending to the typical burst duration (⌠10 msec) towards shorter time intervals (Ît). The correlation function indicates that every single burst has about a 10â60 per cent chance of producing an aftershock at a rate decaying by a power law as â (Ît)âp with p = 1.5â2.5, like the OmoriâUtsu law of earthquakes. The correlated aftershock rate is stable regardless of source activity changes, and there is no correlation between emitted energy and Ît. We demonstrate that all these properties are quantitatively common to earthquakes, but different from solar flares in many aspects, by applying the same analysis method for the data on these phenomena. These results suggest that repeater FRBs are a phenomenon in which energy stored in rigid neutron star crusts is released by seismic activity. This may provide a new opportunity for future studies to explore the physical properties of the neutron star crust.
Cassini-Huygens
Eventually, maybe by the early 2040s, would like to see every large body in solar system, from the Sun out to Pluto to have a probe like the Cassini probe in a permanent orbit around it. So we have 24/7 live feed / study of all of them. And, ASI could run all of it by that point.
Launch and mission info for NASAâs mission exploring Saturn and its system of moons.
New patterns in sunâs layers could help scientists solve solar mystery
Astronomers are one step closer to understanding one of the most enduring solar mysteries, having captured unprecedented data from the sunâs magnetic field.
The groundbreaking data collected from the US National Science Foundationâs (NSF) Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaiiâthe most powerful solar telescope in the worldâhas provided the most detailed representations to date of the magnetic field of the so-called âquietâ surface of the sun.
An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Sheffield, believe the data has implications for how we model energy transfer between the layers of the sun. The research has been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Scientists propose sweeping new law of nature, expanding on evolution
WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) â When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1,859 book âOn the Origin of Speciesâ â proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction â it provoked a revolution in scientific thought.
Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.
It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.