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Category: space – Page 850

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist extraordinaire who helped discover radio pulsars while a graduate student in 1967 (though only her adviser was recognized when the discovery snagged a Nobel Prize in physics in 1974), is getting long-overdue recognition.

Bell Burnell, now a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and chancellor of Scotland’s University of Dundee, was awarded the weighty Breakthrough Prize in physics in September for her pulsar discovery and science leadership.

And tonight (Oct. 25), Bell Burnell will speak to an audience at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, about her life-changing discovery and how she persisted despite being passed up for the Nobel 44 years ago to become the prominent scientist she is today. You can watch the talk right here on Live Science.

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Star formation is one of the most important research fields in astrophysics. This process, in which gravitational instabilities cause the collapse of gas to form more compact structures and finally stars, encompasses a broad range of physical scales. These include star-forming galaxies on the large scale, individual young stars with envelopes and circumstellar disks on the smaller scale, and intermediate scales that include giant molecular clouds and protostellar cores.

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The future of humanity will be radically different than what we see today. As Ray Kurzweil put it, “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” We’ll have the potential to live on Mars, connect our minds to machines, and access an abundance of resources.

But is our youth prepared to live in such a world? Are we equipping them with the skills and values necessary to be adaptable, innovative, and purpose-driven in such a world?

Our traditional, industrial-era educational models are simply outdated. What is required is not an incremental change in education, but rather an entire overhaul of the current system. It will take creative imagination to develop new models for 21st-century education.

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After a gyroscope failure put the Hubble Space Telescope out of action on October 5, NASA engineers finally see an end to its troubles. They have its backup gyroscope operating within a normal range and expect science operations to resume imminently.

The space telescope entered a low-power safe mode in early October, suspending science operations while engineers here on Earth diagnosed, then attempted to fix the problem.

At maximum efficiency, Hubble uses three gyroscopes for orienting itself to observe a target in the sky. These gyros measure the speed at which the telescope turns, so that it can be aimed accurately.

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NASA has released an image of the Earth captured by the Parker Solar Probe on its historic journey to the Sun.

The picture was captured on Sept. 25 by Parker’s Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument.

When the image of the Earth was taken, Parker Solar Probe was about 27 million miles from Earth. The average distance between the Sun and Earth is 93 million miles.

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Large meteorite impact structures on the terrestrial bodies of the Solar System contain pronounced topographic rings, which emerged from uplifted target (crustal) rocks within minutes of impact. To flow rapidly over large distances, these target rocks must have weakened drastically, but they subsequently regained sufficient strength to build and sustain topographic rings. The mechanisms of rock deformation that accomplish such extreme change in mechanical behaviour during cratering are largely unknown and have been debated for decades. Recent drilling of the approximately 200-km-diameter Chicxulub impact structure in Mexico has produced a record of brittle and viscous deformation within its peak-ring rocks. Here we show how catastrophic rock weakening upon impact is followed by an increase in rock strength that culminated in the formation of the peak ring during cratering. The observations point to quasi-continuous rock flow and hence acoustic fluidization as the dominant physical process controlling initial cratering, followed by increasingly localized faulting.

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This Hubble image captures the unbarred spiral galaxy NGC 5033, a Seyfert galaxy that looks a lot like our Milky Way.

A dazzling photo captured by the Hubble Space Telescope showcases the glowing heart of a relatively close spiral galaxy — fairly similar to our Milky Way.

Unveiled on October 22 by the Hubble Space Telescope website, the snapshot offers a close portrait of a galaxy called NGC 5033 — a spiral galaxy nestled some 40 million light-years away from Earth, in the Canes Venatici constellation — also known as the Hunting Dogs.

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Scientists believe they’ve discovered a new method to pin down just how fast our universe is expanding over time.

In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago found that studying the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic collisions could lead to more resolute predictions about how quickly the universe is expanding.

The scientists are so confident in this method that they say they could have a ‘precise measurement’ of the universe’s rate of expansion in roughly five to ten years.

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