Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 387

Are near-Earth objects a threat to Earth?

An asteroid is a metallic or rocky body that orbits the Sun within the asteroid belt, a region of space between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids are believed to be remnants of the early formation of the solar system. They are often called “minor planets”, although they do not have an atmosphere. They can be the size of a dwarf planet, but they can also be as small as 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter —which is the case of the tiniest asteroid ever found, 2015 TC25.

Most asteroids are not that small. If it were to hit the Earth, a sufficiently large asteroid may have a higher chance of surviving the entrance to our atmosphere and impacting the ground.

Source: ESO

Continue reading “Asteroids near Earth: are we in danger?” | >

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have given us direct confirmation that some alien worlds have clouds of rock.

The telescope has directly detected silicate clouds in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf – the first time, according to an international team of astronomers, that such a detection has been made in a planetary-mass companion outside the Solar System.

The complete findings, the team says, constitute the best spectrum yet for a planetary mass-object. These results could not only help us better understand these so-called ‘failed stars’, but represent just a foretaste of what the JWST can do.

Read more | >

This will create new types of jobs especially in software industries.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—()—For the third-straight quarter, robot sales in North America hit a record high, driven by a resurgence in sales to automotive companies and an ongoing need to manage increasing demand to automate logistics for e-commerce. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, of the 12,305 robots sold in Q2 2022, 59% of the orders came from the automotive industry with the remaining orders from non-automotive companies largely in the food & consumer goods industry, which saw a 13% increase in unit orders over the same period, April through June, in 2021.

Robot sales hit new record in North America for 3rd straight quarter: Includes renewed surge in #automotive and continued uptake of #robotics and #automation in food and consumer goods industries driven by #ecommerce, industry group @a3automate reports. Tweet this

“While automotive entities have long been the frontrunner in deploying robotics and automation, the last few years have seen food & consumer goods, life sciences and other industries grow at even higher rates,” said A3 President Jeff Burnstein. “While this quarter shows a marked shift back to historic norms with more robots going to automotive than to any other industry, the continued growth of robotics in food & consumer goods companies especially demonstrates the ongoing need to automate warehouse logistics for handling the exploding growth of e-commerce. We’re excited to share the latest on robots in the logistics space at our upcoming Autonomous Mobile Robots & Logistics Week in Boston in October.”

Read more | >

Squeaky, cloudy or spherical—electron orbitals show where and how electrons move around atomic nuclei and molecules. In modern chemistry and physics, they have proven to be a useful model for quantum mechanical description and prediction of chemical reactions. Only if the orbitals match in space and energy can they be combined—this is what happens when two substances react with each other chemically. In addition, there is another condition that must be met, as researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Graz have now discovered: The course of chemical reactions also appears to be dependent on the orbital distribution in momentum space. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Chemical reactions are ultimately nothing more than the formation and breakdown of electron bonds, which can also be described as orbitals. The so-called molecular orbital theory thus makes it possible to predict the path of chemical reactions. Chemists Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann received the Nobel Prize in 1981 for greatly simplifying the method, which led to its widespread use and application.

“Usually, the energy and location of electrons are analyzed. However, using the photoemission tomography method, we looked at the momentum distribution of the orbitals,” explains Dr. Serguei Soubatch. Together with his colleagues at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-3) in Jülich and the University of Graz in Austria, he adsorbed various types of molecules on in a series of experiments and mapped the measured momentum in the so-called momentum space.

Read more | >

At opposition, and on surrounding nights, Neptune rises in the east around sunset and will be visible all night long, traveling along the ecliptic (the apparent path of the Sun and planets in Earth’s sky). Neptune can be seen in the constellation of Aquarius, below the “circlet” asterism of Pisces, and to the west of Jupiter.

The planet is in apparent retrograde motion (appearing to travel backwards in its orbit relative to Earth) from June 28 to December 3. Neptune will be at its closest to Earth the day before opposition, September 15, at only 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion km) distance. At opposition, the Sun’s light will fully illuminate the planet’s surface, casting light directly onto Neptune from Earth’s point of view.

Since it is not visible to the naked eye, Neptune was unknown to astronomers until the 1800s, when it was the first planet to be discovered by mathematical prediction, rather than direct observation, owing to gravitational perturbation on the orbit of Uranus.

Read more | >

Diamonds are forever, but they might not be that rare.

Diamonds are forever, the saying goes. The precious stones may also be surprisingly abundant throughout the universe, a press statement reveals. Scientists have used common plastic to recreate the process that leads to diamond rain on Uranus and Neptune in the lab. They found that it is likely diamonds actually form in these planets’ atmospheres.

Previously, the consensus was that high pressure and temperature conditions deep below the surface of these ice giants turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds.

SLAC

The precious stones may also be surprisingly abundant throughout the universe, a press statement reveals. Scientists have used common plastic to recreate the process that leads to diamond rain on Uranus and Neptune in the lab. They found that it is likely diamonds actually form in these planets’ atmospheres.

Read more | >

Japanese astronomers report the detection of a new polar ring galaxy using the data obtained with the Subaru Telescope as part of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP). The discovery was detailed in a paper published August 26 on the arXiv pre-print server.

The so-called polar ring (PRGs) are systems composed of an S0-like galaxy and a polar ring, which remain separate for billions of years. In general, these outer polar rings, composed of gas and stars, are aligned roughly in a perpendicular orientation with respect to the major axis of the central host galaxy.

However, although more than 400 PRG candidates have been discovered to date, only dozens of them have been confirmed as real polar ring galaxies by follow-up .

Read more | >