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Category: space – Page 832

When a star is born, a chaotic light show ensues.

NASA’s long-lived Hubble Space Telescope captured vivid bright clumps moving through the cosmos at some 1,000 light years from Earth. The space agency called these objects clear “smoking gun” evidence of a newly formed star — as new stars blast colossal amounts of energy-rich matter into space, known as plasma.

Seen as the vivid blue, ephemeral clumps in the top center of the new image below, these are telltale signs of an energy-rich gas, or plasma, colliding with a huge collection of dust and gas in deep space.

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Ceramic aerogels have been protecting industrial equipment and space-bound scientific instruments for decades, thanks to their incredible lightness and ability to withstand intense heat. The problem is they can be pretty brittle. Now, a team led by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a new ceramic aerogel that’s far hardier and more flexible, even after repeated exposure to wild temperature swings.

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Beam Me Down

Needless to say, the biggest problem for a floating power plant is figuring out how to get the energy back down to Earth.

The scientists behind the project are still sorting that part out. But right now, the plan is to have solar arrays in space capture light from the sun and then beam electricity down to a facility on Earth in the form of a microwave or a laser, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Alvin Retamar, Chief Science Research Specialist and Project Leader of Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation Center (PEDRO) said some institutions they have been helping are even calling for higher level training in the space sciences.

“In some areas where we are providing support they are already keen on developing aerospace engineering degree programs,” Retamar said.

Original post from ABS-CBN News

MANILA — The Philippines has enough brainpower to staff a proposed space agency, officials from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said Wednesday.

A bill creating the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) was passed in the House of Representatives last December, while counterpart legislation is pending in the Senate.

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A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water.

In the past, Mars was a much warmer and wetter place. Now, Mars is still home to lots of water, mostly as vapor and ice. But in August 2018, a study published in Science showed a 20-km-wide (12-mile-wide) lake of liquid water underneath solid ice at the Martian South Pole.

The authors of that study suggested that the water was probably kept in liquid state by the pressure from above, and by dissolved salt content.

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Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto — this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars.

It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth through binoculars, as you might have guessed from the name; we only get a few of them each year.

This particular comet was only discovered a couple of months ago – credit due to amateur astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto – and the icy rock is calculated to take 1,371 years to orbit the Sun on a stretched out, elliptical path.

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