The Kepler and K2 missions have found over 2,500 planets around distant stars, but the end is coming.
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Category: space – Page 915
An all-seeing eye
Posted in space
Astronomers spend their time gazing out into the Universe — and occasionally the Universe seems to peer right back! This image, a composite of data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a very rare cosmic sight: a pair of interacting galaxies that have taken on an ocular structure.
As the name suggests, some types of grazing encounters between galaxies create shapes that resemble the human eye. While galaxy collisions of this type are not uncommon, only a few galaxies with eye-like, or ocular, structures have been observed. The paucity of these features is likely due to their very ephemeral nature — ocular structures like these tend to only last for several tens of millions of years, which is merely the blink of an eye in a galactic lifetime.
These two galaxies are named IC 2163 (left) and NGC 2207 (right) — IC 2163 displays the ocular structure in this image. The duo lies approximately 114 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Canis Major (The Greater Dog).
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Ballet of interacting galaxies
Posted in space
The pair of galaxies NGC 1531/2, engaged in a spirited waltz, is located about 70 million light-years away towards the southern constellation Eridanus (The River). The deformed foreground spiral galaxy laced with dust lanes NGC 1532 is so close to its companion — the background galaxy with a bright core just above the centre of NGC 1532 — that it gets distorted: one of its spiral arms is warped and plumes of dust and gas are visible above its disc. The cosmic dance leads to another dramatic effect: a whole new generation of massive stars were born in NGC 1532 because of the interaction. They are visible as the purple objects in the spiral arms.
This exquisite image was made using the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile. It is based on data obtained through three different filters: B, V and R. The field of view is 12 × 12 arcmin.
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Since their invention, computers have become faster and faster, as a result of our ability to increase the number of transistors on a processor chip.
Today, your smartphone is millions of times faster than the computers NASA used to put the first man on the moon in 1969. It even outperforms the most famous supercomputers from the 1990s. However, we are approaching the limits of this electronic technology, and now we see an interesting development: light and lasers are taking over electronics in computers.
Processors can now contain tiny lasers and light detectors, so they can send and receive data through small optical fibres, at speeds far exceeding the copper lines we use now. A few companies are even developing optical processors: chips that use laser light and optical switches, instead of currents and electronic transistors, to do calculations.
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A team of researchers with the University of Copenhagen and the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions has come up with a new explanation regarding the difference in composition of the planets in our solar system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe their study of the calcium-isotope composition of certain meteorites, Earth itself, and Mars, and use what they learned to explain how the planets could be so different. Alessandro Morbidelli with Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.
As Morbidelli notes, most planetary scientists agree that the planets in our solar system had similar origins as small rocks orbiting the sun, comprising the protoplanetary disk, which collided and fused, creating increasingly larger rocks that eventually became protoplanets. But from that point on, it is not clear why the planets turned out so differently. In this new effort, the researchers have come up with a new theory to explain how that happened.
The protoplanets all grew at the same rate, the group suggests, but stopped growing at different times. Those that were smaller, they continue, stopped growing sooner than those that were larger. During this time, they further suggest, material was constantly being added to the disk. Early on it, it appears that the composition of the material was different from the material that came later, which explains why the rocky planets we see today have such differences in composition.
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A young startup called Relativity is pushing space technology forward by pushing 3D printing technology to its limits, building the largest metal 3D printer in the world. And other major companies anxious to try these new ways of manufacturing, too. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at some of the amazing advances that’s launching the technology into a new era.
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