To launch another pair of Starlink stacks to orbit this week, SpaceX will break its all-time launch pad turnaround record. The first launch, Starlink Group 5–4, is currently scheduled to lift off at 12:10 AM EST (05:10 UTC) on Sunday, Feb. 12, pending a forecasted 20% chance of acceptable weather.
If the launch target holds, the mission will break the record for both Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and the overall record across all three Falcon 9 launch pads. The second mission, Starlink Group 2–5, is slated to launch at 8:32 AM PST (16:32 UTC) on Wednesday, Feb. 15 from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
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Our telescopes find new exoplanets and reveal deeper details about them everyday, unveiling massive hydrogen-rich atmosphere planets and icy worlds which may be able to harbor life even far from any star.
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Credits:
Hycean Planets & Ice Worlds.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 381, February 9, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.
Editors:
Briana Brownell.
Donagh Broderick.
David McFarlane.
Graphics:
While time may be a worldwide constant, it can be quite tricky. Several individuals have felt like childhood summers were extremely long in comparison to how they experience the same 3 months as adults. Though individuals can argue about time perception and the factors that dilate and compress time, it is possible to look into it experimentally.
Time Perception Is Different For Adults and Children
A team of researchers proceeded to do just that. According to Neuroscience News, the scientists looked into how eventfulness impacts estimates of duration across various cognitive development milestones.
Google announced in last week’s earnings call that it would pay millions of dollars to consolidate office leases across the globe.
“In the first quarter of 2023, we expect to incur approximately $500 million of costs related to exiting leases to align our office space with our adjusted global headcount look,” Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said. “We will continue to optimize our real estate footprint.”
Many of the lease terminations will be in the Bay Area. “We’re ending leases for a number of unoccupied spaces, and will work to consolidate under-utilized spaces in the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont wrote SFGATE in an email. “Our campuses remain a cornerstone of our culture, but we’re working to ensure we invest in real estate efficiently and that our investments match the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce.”
Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.
And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.
Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.
Optical pulses, which appear as a flash of light, are used to transmit information in high speed optical fibers, and are increasingly used in Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for 3-dimensional imaging. Both of these applications demand light sensors or photodiodes that are capable of detecting very low levels of light intensity down to a few photons, where a single photon is the quantized energy unit of light.
A newly published paper, “Extremely low excess noise avalanche photodiode with GaAsSb absorption region and AlGaAsSb avalanche region,” in Applied Physics Letters, details a discovery by a Sheffield research team that has the capability to transform a single electron at its input to a cascade of electrons at its output.
This multiplication process is commonly known as avalanche breakdown, while a photodiode incorporating this process is called avalanche photodiode (APD). Though the application of reverse voltage, avalanche photodiodes (often referred to as APDs) have internal gain, which means that when compared to PIN-photodiodes they typically have a higher signal-to–noise ratio.