Circa 2015
A nighttime shot shows some of the antennas of the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array in California, with the center of our galaxy in the background. (Credit: Gregg Hallinan)
Continue reading “New radio telescope scans entire sky instantly” »
SYDNEY, Australia — When you look up at the night sky, which constellations can you make out? Can you spot the Big Dipper? Do you see Orion’s Belt? Counting stars is pretty difficult in areas with lots of light, like major cities. A study says even in the clearest skies, you’re still seeing turbulence in the atmosphere that makes stars twinkle. Want a truly perfect view of outer space? An international research team has found the spot, but you’ll need to bundle up. It’s in Antarctica!
Stars aren’t supposed to twinkle?
According to the University of New South Wales, turbulence causes light coming from stars to bend as it reaches the Earth’s surface. That instability in the air gives stars their trademark twinkling effect.
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A comet has been captured on camera streaking across the skies over Stonehenge.
Comet Neowise has been spotted by stargazers across the UK and around the world as it heads past Earth.
Continue reading “Comet Neowise streaks over Stonehenge night sky” »
Must watch astronomy events this month.
Top 5 Space Apps: https://www.secretsofuniverse.in/astronomy-apps/
How to watch the planets: https://www.secretsofuniverse.in/planet-roundup-august-2020/
Continue reading “Don’t Miss These Astronomy Events In The Month Of August 2020!” »
In a Q&A, spacesuit designer Amy Ross explains how five samples, including a piece of helmet visor, will be tested aboard the rover, which is targeting a July 30 launch.
NASA is preparing to send the first woman and next man to the Moon, part of a larger strategy to send the first astronauts to the surface of Mars. But before they get there, they’ll be faced with a critical question: What should they wear on Mars, where the thin atmosphere allows more radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays to reach the ground?
Amy Ross is looking for answers. An advanced spacesuit designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, she’s developing new suits for the Moon and Mars. So Ross is eagerly awaiting this summer’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover, which will carry the first samples of spacesuit material ever sent to the Red Planet.
Scientists have traced mysterious radio signals detected on Earth to a dead star within our Milky Way galaxy.
The millisecond-long burst of radiation was emitted by a magnestar — a type of star with an extremely powerful magnetic field — roughly 14,000 light-years away, according to a study.
Known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), signals such as these have baffled scientists for years and typically originate from far beyond the Milky Way.
The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.
Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and lead author on the paper, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.
“When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,” said Serreze. “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”
Geneva. At the 40th ICHEP conference, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced new results which show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute the matter content of the Universe. While electrons are classified as a first-generation particle, muons belong to the second generation. The physics process of the Higgs boson decaying into muons is a rare phenomenon as only about one Higgs boson in 5000 decays into muons. These new results have pivotal importance for fundamental physics because they indicate for the first time that the Higgs boson interacts with second-generation elementary particles.
Physicists at CERN have been studying the Higgs boson since its discovery in 2012 in order to probe the properties of this very special particle. The Higgs boson, produced from proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, disintegrates – referred to as decay – almost instantaneously into other particles. One of the main methods of studying the Higgs boson’s properties is by analysing how it decays into the various fundamental particles and the rate of disintegration.
CMS achieved evidence of this decay with 3 sigma, which means that the chance of seeing the Higgs boson decaying into a muon pair from statistical fluctuation is less than one in 700. ATLAS’s two-sigma result means the chances are one in 40. The combination of both results would increase the significance well above 3 sigma and provides strong evidence for the Higgs boson decay to two muons.
What are some skywatching highlights in August 2020? 🔭
You can see the Moon posing with various planets throughout the month, and catch the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Find out when and where to look up: https://youtu.be/fuuUbYjN9Oo
