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Category: space – Page 859

(CNN) — While astronomers estimate that the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own Milky Way galaxy 8 billion years from now, they now believe that another collision will happen even sooner.

The Large Magellanic Cloud will catastrophically collide with the Milky Way in 2 billion years, according to a study published this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The impact, which they believe is long overdue, has a chance of sending our solar system “hurtling through space.”

Our galaxy is orbited by smaller satellite galaxies, the kind of dance that can go on undisturbed for billions of years. Other times, things take a violent turn, and satellite galaxies can migrate toward the Milky Way until they collide and are gobbled up.

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Watch out, Earth gardens: Space is set to become the next destination for growing fresh vegetables.

Following the successful cultivation of lettuce at the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015, beans could be the next legume to leave our planet in 2021, said a Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU) press release. Other salad essentials could also be cultivated in space, and they would provide cosmonauts and other intergalactic travelers with the nutrition they need to live on other planets.

“The dream of every astronaut is to be able to eat fresh food – like strawberries, cherry tomatoes or anything that’s really flavorful. Someday that will certainly be possible,” said Silje Wolff, a plant physiologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRiS) at NTNU, in the press release. “We envision a greenhouse with several varieties of vegetables.”

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Technologies have often been observed to improve exponentially over time. In practice this often means identifying a constant known as the doubling time. Moore’s law is, classically, the empirical observation that the number of electronic components that can be put on a chip doubles every 18 to 24 months. Today it is frequently stated in terms of the number of computations available per unit of cost, a formulation promoted by Kurzweil. Different doubling times describe the rate of advancement in many technologies.

A frequently noted competitor to Moore’s law is known as Wright’s law, which has aeronautical roots. Wright’s law expresses the idea that performance of a technology—price or a quality metric—improves by a constant percentage for every doubling of the total number produced. Does exploration of outer space conform to behavior like Moore’s law or Wright’s law? Our results are broadly consistent with these laws. (More)

Isaac Asimov was one the world’s most celebrated and prolific science fiction writers, having written or edited more than 500 books over his four-decade career. The Russian-born writer was famous for penning hard science fiction in his books, such as that in I, Robot, Foundation and Nightfall. Naturally, his work contained many predictions about the future of society and technology.

We’re not living in space, but the Russian science-fiction author foresaw the rise of intelligent machines and the disruption of the digital age.

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The first direct evidence of white dwarf stars solidifying into crystals has been discovered by astronomers at the University of Warwick, and our skies are filled with them.

Observations have revealed that dead remnants of stars like our Sun, called white dwarfs, have a core of solid oxygen and carbon due to a phase transition during their lifecycle similar to water turning into ice but at much higher temperatures. This could make them potentially billions of years older than previously thought.

The discovery, led by Dr. Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, has been published in Nature and is largely based on observations taken with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.

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