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Category: space – Page 88

“We’re showing that, everywhere we look now, there was some sort of magnetic field that was responsible for bringing mass to where the sun and planets were forming,” said Dr. Benjamin Weiss.

What can dust grains that were returned to Earth from the asteroid Ryugu teach scientists about the early solar system? This is what a recent study published in AGU Advances hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated how dust grains from the asteroid Ryugu that returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission could help unlock secrets of the early solar system, specifically regarding the formation of the gas giants that orbit beyond the asteroid belt.

For the study, the researchers analyzed three dust grain particles for evidence of magnetic fields that might have existed when Ryugu first formed billions of years ago. In the end, they found that the particles displayed an ancient magnetic field equal to 15 microtesla, which is 30 percent of the Earth’s current magnetic field at 50 microtesla. Despite this decrease, the researchers hypothesize that this could be powerful enough to allow matter in the early solar system to coalesce, known as accretion, to form the asteroids and possibly the gas giants that orbit in the outer solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago.

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A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences elucidated the high-resolution structure of the Orf2971-FtsHi complex, a chloroplast motor complex from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The study reveals the highly complex and assembly details of the complex, and explores the potential translocation pathway of precursor proteins.

The study, conducted by Prof. Li Mei’s team from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Yang Wenqiang’s team from the Institute of Botany is published in Molecular Plant.

The Orf2971-FtsHi complex is a structure with 20 subunits formed by 19 proteins, spanning the chloroplast inner membrane and extending into the intermembrane space as well as the stromal side.

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Teams lifted NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II test flight out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell and moved it to the altitude chamber to complete further testing on Nov. 6 inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Engineers returned the spacecraft to the altitude chamber, which simulates deep space vacuum conditions, to complete the remaining test requirements and provide additional data to augment data gained during testing earlier this summer.

The Artemis II test flight will be NASA’s first mission with crew under the Artemis campaign, sending NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.

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The dream of traversing the depths of space and planting the seed of human civilization on another planet has existed for generations. For long as we’ve known that most stars in the Universe are likely to have their own system of planets, there have been those who advocated that we explore them (and even settle on them). With the dawn of the Space Age, this idea was no longer just the stuff of science fiction and became a matter of scientific study. Unfortunately, the challenges of venturing beyond Earth and reaching another star system are myriad.

When it comes down to it, there are only two ways to send crewed missions to exoplanets. The first is to develop advanced propulsion systems that can achieve relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). The second involves building spacecraft that can sustain crews for generations – aka. a Generation Ship (or Worldship). On November 1st, 2024, Project Hyperion launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel via generation ships that would rely on current and near-future technologies. The competition is open to the public and will award a total of $10,000 (USD) for innovative concepts.

Project Hyperion is an international, interdisciplinary team composed of architects, engineers, anthropologists, and urban planners. Many of them have worked with agencies and institutes like NASA, the ESA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their competition is sponsored by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), a non-profit organization incorporated in the UK dedicated to research that will enable robotic and human exploration and the settlement of exoplanets around nearby stars.

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Until now, only a small fraction of meteorites that land on Earth had been firmly linked back to their parent body out in space – but a set of new studies has just given us compelling origin stories for more than 90 percent of meteorites today.

Past analyses of meteorites striking our planet today suggest some kind of shared origin; they’re made from very similar materials and have been baked by cosmic radiation for a suspiciously short amount of time, hinting at a relatively recent break-up from shared parent bodies.

The teams behind three new published papers used a combination of super-detailed telescope observations and computer modeling simulations to compare asteroids out in space with meteorites recovered on Earth, matching up rock types and orbital paths between the two.

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Today, only about 6% of the observable Universe is reachable due to cosmic expansion.

The Universe is a vast, wondrous, and strange place. From our perspective within it, we can see out for some 46 billion light-years in all directions. Everywhere we look, we see a Universe filled with stars and galaxies, but are they all unique? Is it possible, perhaps, that if you look far enough in one direction and see a galaxy, that you’d also see that same galaxy, from a different perspective, in the opposite direction? Could the Universe actually loop back on itself? And if you traveled far enough in a straight line, would you eventually return to your starting point, just as if you traveled in any one direction for long enough on the surface of the Earth? Or would something stop you?

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Part of a groundbreaking effort to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is a key collaborator in the newly launched NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI, pronounced “sky”), led by Northwestern University.

Jointly funded by a $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation, SkAI aims to revolutionize how researchers explore the universe by developing innovative AI technologies capable of handling the vast data generated by astronomical surveys.

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As detailed in a new study published in the journal Astronomy & and Astrophysics, the tunnel exists as part of an enormous structure of hot gas with a radius of hundreds of light years that surrounds our solar system known as the Local Hot Bubble. What’s more, the findings suggest that it could connect with a nearby and even larger bubble.

Using extensive data collected by the eROSITA telescope, the first x-ray observatory fully outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the researchers generated a 3D model of the entire LHB, confirming some features that astronomers had predicted, but also uncovering entirely new ones.

“What we didn’t know was the existence of an interstellar tunnel towards Centaurus, which carves a gap in the cooler interstellar medium,” said study coauthor Michael Freyberg, an astronomer at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in a statement. “This region stands out in stark relief thanks to the much-improved sensitivity of eROSITA and a vastly different surveying strategy compared to ROSAT,” the space telescope’s predecessor.

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