Images of C/2014 UN271 – a comet 128km in diameter and completing an orbit of the sun every few million years – were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Category: space – Page 494
First-of-its-kind cosmic ray sensor successfully observes tsunami waves
Highly energetic particles called muons are ever present in the atmosphere and pass through even massive objects with ease. Sensitive detectors installed along the Tokyo Bay tunnel measure muons passing through the sea above them. This allows for changes in the volume of water above the tunnel to be calculated. For the first time, this method was used to accurately detect a mild tsunami following a typhoon in 2021.
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, approximately 100,000 muon particles will have passed through your body. But don’t worry, muons pass through ordinary matter harmlessly, and they can be extremely useful too. Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka from Muographix at the University of Tokyo has made his career out of exploring applications for muons. He’s used them to see inside volcanoes and even detect evidence of ancient earthquakes. Recently, Tanaka and his international team of researchers have turned their focus to meteorological phenomena, in particular, tsunamis.
In September 2021, a typhoon approached Japan from the south. As it neared the land it brought with it ocean swells, tsunamis. On this occasion these were quite mild, but throughout history, tsunamis have caused great damage to many coastal areas around Japan. As the huge swell moved into Tokyo Bay, something happened on a microscopic level that’s almost imperceptible. Atmospheric muon particles, generated by cosmic rays from deep space, were ever so slightly more scattered by the extra volume of water than they would be otherwise. This means the quantity of muons passing through Tokyo Bay varied as the ocean swelled.
NASA’s Mars rover just spotted a critical part of its landing equipment
The parachute was jettisoned during the landing sequence so the Skycrane could lower the rover down to the surface on its wheels.
The sun has blasted Mercury with a plasma wave
The wave likely scoured the surface of the weakly magnetic planet.
Previously, scientists were unsure if Mercury’s magnetic field was strong enough to induce geomagnetic storms. However, research published in two papers in the journals Nature Communications and Science China Technological Sciences in February has proved that the magnetic field is, indeed, strong enough. The first paper showed that Mercury has a ring current, a doughnut-shaped stream of charged particles flowing around a field line between the planet’s poles, and the second paper pointed to this ring current being capable of triggering geomagnetic storms.
“The processes are quite similar to here on Earth,” Hui Zhang, a co-author of both studies and a space physics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, said in a statement. “The main differences are the size of the planet and Mercury has a weak magnetic field and virtually no atmosphere.”
The sun’s activity has been increasing far faster than past official forecasts predicted, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. The sun moves between highs and lows of activity across a rough 11-year cycle, but because the mechanism that drives this solar cycle isn’t well understood, it’s challenging for scientists to predict its exact length and strength.
Chatbots could one day replace search engines. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea
It was cute—even though LaMDA went on to make a few errors. The AI language model that powers it is still in development, Pichai explained. And Google says it has no plans yet to use LaMDA in its products. Even so, the company is using it to explore new ways to interact with computers—and new ways to search for information. “LaMDA already understands quite a lot about Pluto and millions of other topics,” he said.
The vision of a know-it-all AI that dishes out relevant and accurate information in easy-to-understand bite-size chunks is shaping the way tech companies are approaching the future of search. And with the rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, language models are becoming a go-to technology for finding stuff out in general.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is ready for calibration after chilling out
The JWST has been gradually cooling down ever since its successful, but the telescope took a major step forward on that front when it its massive 70-foot sunshield at the start of the year. That component allowed JWST’s systems, including its critical Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to drop to a temperature of approximately minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit (or about minus 183 degrees Celsius).
Getting the JWST to its final operating temperature required NASA and the European Space Agency to activate the telescope’s electric “cryocooler.” That in itself involved passing a technical hurdle dubbed the “pinch point,” or the stage at which the James Webb’s instruments went from minus 433 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 448 Fahrenheit.
“The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point,” said Analyn Schneider, MIRI project manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The team was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end, it was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.”