Breakthroughs include measuring the true nature of the universe, finding new species of human ancestors, and unlocking new ways to fight disease.
Category: space – Page 718
What can you see in the night sky this month? The peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower, Mars rises with its “rival” — the red giant star Antares — and the Moon and Venus pair up.
Get more info and sky charts at https://go.nasa.gov/2OI1iiA
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.
Playing with fire can be dangerous and never more so than when confined in a space capsule floating 250 miles above the Earth. But in the past week astronauts onboard the International Space Station have intentionally lit a series of blazes in research designed to study the behaviour of flames in zero gravity.
The scientists behind the experiment, called Confined Combustion, say it will help improve fire safety on the ISS and on future lunar missions by helping predict how a blaze might progress in low gravity conditions.
Dr Paul Ferkul, of the Universities Space Research Association, who is working on the project, said: “That is the immediate and most practical goal since NASA can use the knowledge to improve material selection and fire safety strategies.”
In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”
How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it.
Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered – and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years.
No other planet in our solar system has rings as splendid as Saturn’s. They are so expansive and bright that they were discovered as soon as humans began pointing telescopes at the night sky:
A Mars invasion, a climate meeting and human–animal hybrids are set to shape the research agenda.
On Dec. 30, 1930, the first-ever photo of the Earth’s curvature was taken.
This photo was taken by Lieutenant Colonel Albert William Stevens, who was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps and an aerial photographer. He also happened to be a balloonist, and he once broke a world record for a high-altitude balloon flight. Stevens took this photo while flying in a balloon over South Dakota.
He used infrared-sensitive film that worked well for long-distance aerial shots in which the subject was obscured by things like haze. The mountains he was photographing were more than 300 miles away, and he couldn’t see them with his own eyes. But his camera was sensitive enough! The photo was the first visual proof that our planet is, in fact, round.
INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) — One of the sky’s brightest stars has been acting a little weird recently.
Betelgeuse, a bright star in the constellation Orion, has been rapidly dimming since the beginning of December. It’s already dimmed by a factor of two, according to the Independent, which makes the change visible to the naked eye. Betelgeuse was once the ninth brightest star in our sky, but after its dimming it doesn’t even break the top 20 anymore, according to the Washington Post.
The star is known as a “variable” star, which means it’s characterized by cycles of brightening and dimming. However, scientists have never recorded it dimming so fast. Astronomers Villanova University say this is an all time low in brightness for the star.