On Saturday evening (Oct. 8), should local weather conditions permit, you’ll be able to enjoy a view of a waxing gibbous moon hovering near to the “king of the planets,” Jupiter.
Both will be posed about one-quarter up in the east-southeast part of the sky as darkness begins to fall. The moon, which will be less than 24 hours from full phase — 99-percent illuminated by the sun — will be situated just below and to the left of Jupiter, a distance measuring roughly 4 degrees.
Scientists have discovered a pair of stars locked in an incredibly close orbit that circle each other once every 51 minutes — and according to the results of a new study, they are only going to speed up.
The universe is a chaotic place when it comes to orbital mechanics. Our solar system, when viewed in relation to the rest of the cosmos, is a little vanilla. We have our central star — the Sun — which is orbited by eight major planets that are in turn are escorted through the heavens by a plethora of moons and rings of varying levels of impressiveness.
However, astronomers have discovered that roughly half of the stellar systems in our Milky Way are actually comprised of multiple stars that are gravitationally bound to one another. The Alpha Centauri system — which is the closest neighboring stellar population to our Sun — is in fact a collection of three stars that orbit one another roughly 4 light-years from Earth.
For billions of years, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation, leaving astronomers baffled.
“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”
A team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer, with the help of data from NASA.
Comparing his experience to Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, Shatner added, “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”
In the excerpt, Shatner wrote that he later learned he “was not alone in this feeling,” which is called the “Overview Effect” and is “not uncommon among astronauts.”
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These days when we are struggling with the pandemic, even breathing with peace of mind has become challenging. Especially the form of the mammalian respiratory system, requiring inhalation and exhalation, leaves us more vulnerable to the propagation of viral diseases.
But now, a group of South Korean artists, Bongkyu Song of BKID and Moon&Jeon, has devised a metal lung concept that uses algae to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. This device named Super Lung is inspired by the respiratory system of birds. Moreover, its designers assert that this concept increases mammalian respiratory efficiency by 300%. But how?
Researchers have shown that 3D laser printing can be used to fabricate a high-quality, complex polymer optical device directly on the end of an optical fiber. This type of micro-optical device—which has details smaller than the diameter of a human hair—could provide an extremely compact and inexpensive way to tailor light beams for a variety of applications.
“Communication technologies, the internet and many other applications are based on optical fibers,” said research team leader Shlomi Lightman from Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel. “When light comes out of the fiber, large bulky optical elements are typically used to route it to the next location. Our approach minimizes both the size and cost for this process by integrating the routing process into the fiber itself.”
In the journal Optics Letters, Lightman and colleagues describe how they fabricated the tiny multi-component beam shaper directly onto a fiber. The device turns normal laser light into a twisted Bessel beam that carries orbital angular momentum and doesn’t expand in space like typical light beams.
Recently I had the pleasure of reading what is likely the most terrifying science fiction book series I’ve ever read. I’ve always enjoyed scary stories. As a kid, I read anthologies like goosebumps or scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. But I didn’t know true fear until I encountered the works of Stephen King, and H.P. Lovecraft in my teenage years. Lovecraft’s works opened up such terrifying vistas of thought that I would while reading them become transfixed and filled with ultimate existential dread. The cosmic terrors he wrote about in his stories struck me as somehow realer than the monsters and ghost of goosebumps and that is probably because in truth Lovecraft, being the flawed man he was, was expressing a very simple fear, fear of the unknown. And what is more unknown than the blackness of space. I must admit that not since my early teenage years have I felt such poignant terror while reading as I did when first encountering the work of Lovecraft. That Is until I read the Remembrance of Earth’s past trilogy.
There are three books in this series, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Deaths End, there is also an additional book not written by Cixin Liu himself, called Redemption of Time. The first books in the series The Three-Body Problems start off as a mystery. As the story unfolds it starts to feel as though we are reading the unfolding of some grand conspiracy, a conspiracy written into the fabric of the universe itself. Early on in the story, you find out that scientists around the world have been killing themselves. A note left behind by one of the late scientists, Yang Dong ominously added to the mysteries, saying only:
All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist. I know what I’m doing is irresponsible. But I have no choice.
We base so much of our own perception of what we consider to be reality on what we can observe. We look upon the universe as it is and extrapolate from that point. But what if we will never be able to know the truth about the universe. What if the universal constants are not constant. What if the laws of physics are not laws, what if reality isn’t real. Before we get any further into the video I have to give a spoiler warning. If you have not read the series I highly recommend you stop this video and do so. If you’ve read the series, or just don’t care about spoilers then continue forth. Now we won’t be getting into all of the details of the series, I’ll be giving context to why exactly I think this series is so unnerving.
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Cover art: The Fourth Dimension by Marc Simonetti.
Astronomers studying cosmic dust in a spiral galaxy discovered an even more distant galaxy.
And the light being shed, in this case, comes partly from the elliptical galaxy on the left side of the image. Astronomers used Webb and Hubble to watch the light from the elliptical galaxy, which is farther away than its partner, shining through the dusty arms of the spiral galaxy. The two galaxies are close neighbors, but not quite close enough to be in danger of colliding and merging.
In fact, the elliptical galaxy on the left is doing a lot of work in this image. Not only is it backlighting the dust in its neighbor’s spiral arms, but it’s providing a gravitational lens to reveal a distant galaxy that astronomers had never seen before.
A galaxy far, far away — The reddish arc just above and to the left of the elliptical galaxy, at about the 10 o’clock position, is actually another galaxy, stretched and warped by the effects of the gravitational lens, which bends the distant galaxy’s light around the closer elliptical galaxy’s mass. A red dot at about the 4 o’clock position is another refracted image of the same distant galaxy.
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Have you ever looked up at the night sky and pondered about your very own existence? Maybe you were camping out with some friends, or all alone marvelling at the big canvas of darkness plastered with countless glowing stars. Well, you’re not alone. Looking above and contemplating the sheer immensity of the Universe is something humans have been doing since the dawn of time.
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