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Category: space – Page 704

You’ve Never Seen The Moon Like This Before, But It’s a Real Image

Blue Moon. Strawberry Moon. Supermoon. Snow Moon. Blood Moon. Earth’s favourite satellite buddy has a name for every occasion. Yet the most glorious view of the full Moon we’ve seen to date has no name.

That’s probably because it’s not indicative of an occasion, but a way of looking at our satellite. With your naked eyes, you would never see the rainbowy, soap-bubble-like view of the Moon as pictured above.

But that’s what it looks like to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an incredibly powerful radio telescope array located in the desert of Western Australia.

Solving a Long-Standing Mystery About the Sun: How Stored Magnetic Energy Heats Solar Atmosphere

A phenomenon first detected in the solar wind may help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun: why the solar atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface.

Images from the Earth-orbiting Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, aka IRIS, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, aka AIA, show evidence that low-lying magnetic loops are heated to millions of degrees Kelvin.

Researchers at Rice University, the University of Colorado Boulder and NASA ’s Marshall Space Flight Center make the case that heavier ions, such as silicon, are preferentially heated in both the solar wind and in the transition region between the sun’s chromosphere and corona.

AI Trying To Design Inspirational Posters Goes Horribly And Hilariously Wrong

I think it has its own niche. 😃

Whenever an artificial intelligence (AI) does something well, we’re simultaneously impressed as we are worried. AlphaGO is a great example of this: a machine learning system that is better than any human at one of the world’s most complex games. Or what about Google’s neural networks that are able to create their own AIs autonomously?

Like we said – seriously impressive, but a little unnerving perhaps. That is probably why we feel such glee when an AI goes a little awry. Remember that Chatbot created by Microsoft, the one that was designed to learn how to converse with people based on what it read on Twitter? Rather predictably, it quickly became a racist, foul-mouthed bigot.

Now, a new AI has appeared on the wilderness of the Web, and it goes by the name InspiroBot. As you might expect, it designs “Inspirational Posters” for you – you know, the “Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars”-type quotes in an aesthetically pleasing font and plastered onto a calming, pretty background image of deep space or flowers or the sunrise or something.

First US Woman to Walk in Space Is Now Also The First to Reach Ocean’s Deepest Point

Sunday marked the second time Kathy Sullivan made history.

Nearly 25 years after she became the first US woman to walk in space, Sullivan became the first woman to ever reach Challenger Deep, the deepest point in our planet’s oceans. She’s the only person ever to do both.

Challenger Deep lies nearly 7 miles (11 kilometres) below the Pacific Ocean’s surface within the Mariana Trench about 200 miles (300 kilometres) southwest of Guam.

Hubble Discovers a Strange Exoplanet That Resembles the Long-Sought “Planet Nine”

The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc.

The exoplanet HD106906 b was discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. However, astronomers did not then know anything about the planet’s orbit. This required something only the Hubble Space Telescope could do: collect very accurate measurements of the vagabond’s motion over 14 years with extraordinary precision.

Proving the Existence of the Quark-Gluon Plasma With Gravitational Waves

Computer models of merging neutron stars predicts new signature in the gravitational waves to tell when this happens.

Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe. If our Sun, with its radius of 700,000 kilometers were a neutron star, its mass would be condensed into an almost perfect sphere with a radius of around 12 kilometers. When two neutron stars collide and merge into a hyper-massive neutron star, the matter in the core of the new object becomes incredibly hot and dense. According to physical calculations, these conditions could result in hadrons such as neutrons and protons, which are the particles normally found in our daily experience, dissolving into their components of quarks and gluons and thus producing a quark-gluon plasma.

This simulation shows the density of the ordinary matter (mostly neutrons) in red-yellow. Shortly after the two stars merge the extremely dense center turns green, depicting the formation of the quark-gluon plasma.

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