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Blog – Page 191

Merry Christmas Holidays Everyone!

The holiday season is a busy time for humankind’s sun-surfing spacecraft. This Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will be going where no probe has gone before: a mere 3.8 million miles from the sun’s surface.

Around 6:53 a.m. Eastern time on December 24, it will pass the closest that any spacecraft has ever been to our roaring sun. And it will do so in another record-breaking fashion: traveling 430,000 miles per hour—the speed equivalent of traversing from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in under a minute—making it the fastest human-made object to ever zip across the universe.

Continue reading “A NASA Spacecraft Will ‘Touch’ the Sun on Christmas Eve, Flying Closer to the Star Than Any Probe Before” | >

An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of a new pulsar, which received the designation PSR J1631–4722. The newfound pulsar, which is young and energetic, turns out to be associated with a supernova remnant known as SNR G336.7+0.5. The finding was detailed in a research paper published Dec. 16 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. They are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission; however, some of them are also observed via optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.

Pulsars directly associated with known remnants (SNRs) are generally rare as only dozens of such objects have been discovered to date. Finding these associations is crucial for astronomers as they could shed more light on pulsar formation history and supernova explosion mechanisms.

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Monitoring electrical signals in biological systems helps scientists understand how cells communicate, which can aid in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.

But devices that record electrical signals in cell cultures and other liquid environments often use wires to connect each electrode on the device to its respective amplifier. Because only so many wires can be connected to the device, this restricts the number of recording sites, limiting the information that can be collected from cells.

MIT researchers have now developed a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires. Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals.

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A glowing galaxy not far from the Milky Way has been harboring a strange, puzzling secret at its core.

In the center of NGC 5,084, some 80 million light-years away, the supermassive black hole around which the whole galaxy revolves has been discovered tipped over on its side, with its rotational axis parallel to the galactic plane.

It’s a bit like the Uranus of black holes, and astronomers are uncertain how it could have gotten that way – especially since the evidence suggests that it wasn’t always oriented as it is in our current observations.

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