What can the largest geomagnetic storm in decades teach scientists about extreme solar activity and how to prepare for it? This is what a recent study publ | Space
Category: space – Page 5
A study led by Paolo Padoan, ICREA research professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), is challenging the understanding of planetary disk formation around young stars.
The paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the environment plays a crucial role in determining the size and lifetime of these planetary disks, which are the sites of planet formation.
When a star forms, it is surrounded by a spinning disk of gas and dust. Over time, this material eventually forms the planets. Traditionally, scientists believed that once a disk forms, it simply loses too much over time as it feeds the star and the growing planets.
A new study shows that planets bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common outside the Solar System.
An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun.
These results are another example of how planetary systems can be different from our solar system.
Gravity or gravitational force is the result of a computational process within the universe.
A new study shows that the human brain organizes action-outcome associations in cognitive maps, much like how it maps physical space for navigation.
Modern ideas about reality sometimes sound like a wild story. The notion that everything around us might be bits and bytes is easy to brush aside, yet it continues to intrigue many curious minds.
This perspective has led some researchers to wonder if physical forces might be signals of an underlying information system.
According to physicist Melvin M. Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, certain features of gravity may hint at information contained in a universal computational code.
The May 2024 solar storm, also known as the Gannon storm or Mother’s Day solar storm, is now ranked by NOAA as one of the most memorable solar events in history, and potentially the most powerful documented this century. It included a parade of powerful solar flares between May 8–11, 2024, originating from a beastly sunspot group that measured 17 times wider than Earth’s diameter. According to NOAA, during this time frame, there were at least eight coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are giant blasts made up of magnetic field and plasma, that targeted Earth. This resulted in the creation of extreme geomagnetic storm (G5) conditions, the highest on NOAA’s space weather scale.
“The Gannon storm was a spectacular event in the sense that so many people got to see the aurora, especially those living in areas that don’t typically see it,” Mike Cook, Space Weather Lead at MITRE Corporation, told Space.com. “But, beyond that, it was a reminder that our sun is capable of producing these very disruptive events that can impact our critical infrastructure.”
HELSINKI — China is preparing to launch new modules to its Tiangong space station to meet growing demands for science and potentially boost international cooperation.
The Long March 5B, currently China’s most powerful rocket, is slated to launch new Tiangong modules, according to an official with China’s state-owned main space contractor.
“According to the plan, the Long March 5B rocket will also carry out the future launches of additional modules for the crewed space station,” Wang Jue from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) told China Central Television (CCTV) April 30.
A high-resolution imaging system captures distant objects by shining laser light on them and detecting the reflected light.
One of astronomers’ tricks for observing distant objects is intensity interferometry, which involves comparing the intensity fluctuations recorded at two separate telescopes. Researchers have now applied this technique to the imaging of remote objects on Earth [1]. They developed a system that uses multiple laser beams to illuminate a distant target and uses a pair of small telescopes to collect the reflected light. The team demonstrated that this intensity interferometer can image millimeter-wide letters at a distance of 1.36 km, a 14-fold improvement in spatial resolution compared with a single telescope.
Interferometry is common in radio astronomy, where the signal amplitudes from a large array of radio telescopes are summed together in a way that depends on the relative phases of the radio waves. Intensity interferometry is something else. It doesn’t involve addition of amplitudes or preservation of phases. Instead, light is recorded from a single source at two separate detectors (or telescopes), and the fluctuations in the intensities of the two signals are compared. Spatial information on the source comes from analyzing how these fluctuations are correlated in time and how this correlation depends on the detector separation.