A new artificial intelligence method removes the effect of gravity on cosmic images, showing the real shapes of distant galaxies.
Category: space – Page 610
Upcoming Moon ‘wobble’ could cause mass flooding across Earth, scientists warn
A NASA study has revealed how a ‘wobble’ in the Moon’s orbit could cause devastating flooding in the 2030s.
Research led by the US space agency predicts cities along the country’s coast could see three or four times as many high-tide flood days annually for a decade.
The Moon’s gravitational pull impacts tidal forces on Earth.
UK May Ban Boiling Lobsters Alive Under “Sentient Being” Law, So Can They Really Feel Pain?
Boiling lobsters alive may be banned under a new law in the UK designed to protect the welfare rights of animals considered sentient beings. So, are lobsters sentient, do they feel pain, and what does science have to say about the moral quagmire of crustacean agony and cooking pots?
Back in May 2021, the UK government introduced a bill to formally recognize animals as sentient beings. Among the many facets of the bill, it aimed to limit the import of products from trophy hunting, push for fairer space requirements for farm animals, and stop people from owning primates as pets.
However, the bill only covered animals with a backbone and didn’t include any protections for non-vertebrates, which includes octopuses, squid, insects, and crustaceans. The Times reports that ministers are now preparing to back an amendment to the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK Parliament, to extend the legislation to shellfish and cephalopod mollusks. As per the report, this is likely to involve an outright ban on boiling lobsters alive.
Self-supervised machine learning adds depth, breadth and speed to sky surveys
Sky surveys are invaluable for exploring the universe, allowing celestial objects to be catalogued and analyzed without the need for lengthy observations. But in providing a general map or image of a region of the sky, they are also one of the largest data generators in science, currently imaging tens of millions to billions of galaxies over the lifetime of an individual survey. In the near future, for example, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will produce 20 TB of data per night, generate about 10 million alerts daily, and end with a final data set of 60 PB in size.
As a result, sky surveys have become increasingly labor-intensive when it comes to sifting through the gathered datasets to find the most relevant information or new discovery. In recent years machine learning has added a welcome twist to the process, primarily in the form of supervised and unsupervised algorithms used to train the computer models that mine the data. But these approaches present their own challenges; for example, supervised learning requires image labels that must be manually assigned, a task that is not only time-consuming but restrictive in scope; at present, only about 1% of all known galaxies have been assigned such labels.
To address these limitations, a team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is exploring a new tack: self-supervised representation learning. Like unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning eliminates the need for training labels, instead attempting to learn by comparison. By introducing certain data augmentations, self-supervised algorithms can be used to build “representations”—low-dimensional versions of images that preserve their inherent information—and have recently been demonstrated to outperform supervised learning on industry-standard image datasets.
Star’s Death Will Play a Mean Pinball With Unusual Planetary System Locked in a Perfect Rhythm
Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future.
Astronomers have modeled how the change in gravitational forces in the system as a result of the star becoming a white dwarf will cause its planets to fly loose from their orbits and bounce off each other’s gravity, like balls bouncing off a bumper in a game of pinball.
In the process, they will knock nearby debris into their dying sun, offering scientists new insight into how the white dwarfs with polluted atmospheres that we see today originally evolved. The conclusions by astronomers from the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
NASA is Testing out new Composite Materials for Building Lightweight Solar Sail Supports
Space exploration is driven by technology – sometimes literally in the case of propulsion technologies. Solar sails are one of those propulsion technologies that has been getting a lot of attention lately. They have some obvious advantages, such as not requiring fuel, and their ability to last almost indefinitely. But they have some disadvantages too, not the least of which is how difficult they are to deploy in space. Now, a team from NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed a novel time of composite boom that they believe can help solve that weakness of solar sails, and they have a technology demonstration mission coming up next year to prove it.
The mission, known as the “Advanced Composite Solar Sail System” (ACS3) mission is designed around a 12U CubeSat, which measures in at a tiny 23cm x 23 cm x 34 cm (9 in x 9 in x 13 in). The solar sail it hopes to deploy will come in at almost 200 square meters (527 sq ft), and both it and its composite booms will fit inside the CubeSat enclosure, which is not much larger than a toaster oven.
The booms themselves are made out of a novel composite that is 75% lighter than previous deployable booms, while also suffering from only 1% of the thermal distortion that previous metallic booms were subjected to. They also conveniently roll into a 18 cm diameter spool that can be easily stored and easily deployed once the CubeSat is in space.
Powerful solar storm approaching Earth, can impact GPS, cell phone signals
A powerful solar storm is approaching the Earth at a speed of 1.6 million kilometers and this storm will hit the Earth either on Sunday or Monday. According to website Spaceweather.com, the storm that originated from the Sun’s atmosphere can have a significant impact on a region of space dominated by Earth’s magnetic field.
View of celestial lighting
Due to the solar storm, there will be a view of beautiful celestial lighting for the people living at the North or South Pole. The people living closer to these areas can expect to see beautiful aurora at night.