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.
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.
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.
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.
When you’ve been in operation since 1990, you need to hibernate things for seven years every once and awhile.
“Following the October 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time,” NASA reports. “On October 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.”
Now, the space agency plans to test the gyro under conditions like those during routine science activities. Once these tests are done, the telescope should resume normal science observations.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation since its launch in 1990.
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.
Researchers at the Research Center for IT Innovation of Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, have recently developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that has binary neurons at the output layer of the generator. This model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can directly generate binary-valued predictions at test time.
So far, GAN approaches have achieved remarkable results in modeling continuous distributions. Nonetheless, applying GANs to discrete data has been somewhat challenging so far, particularly due to difficulties in optimizing the model distribution toward the target data distribution in a high-dimensional discrete space.
Hao-Wen Dong, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore, “I am currently working on music generation in the Music and AI Lab at Academia Sinica. In my opinion, composing can be interpreted as a series of decisions—for instance, regarding the instrumentation, chords and even the exact notes to use. To move toward achieving the grand vision of a solid AI composer, I am particularly interested in whether deep generative models such as GANs are able to make decisions. Therefore, this work examined whether we can train a GAN that uses binary neurons to make binary decisions using backpropagation, the standard training algorithm.”
China is planning to launch its own “artificial moon” by 2020 to replace streetlamps and lower electricity costs in urban areas, state media reported Friday. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.
