SpaceX software team members who helped “develop and deploy software that flew” the Crew Dragon capsule used to launch NASA astronauts into orbit in May, held a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session on June 6. They answered questions about how to land a job at Elon Musk’s rocket company.
Turns out the Red Planet is a little more green than we thought. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has detected a tinge of green in the atmosphere, making it the first time this aurora-like glow has been spotted around a planet other than Earth.
Here at home, green glows in the sky are caused by glowing oxygen, excited by collisions with electrons that stream into the atmosphere from solar wind. While aurora are the most dramatic examples, the sky glows almost constantly. At night it can appear green as molecules previously ripped apart by solar winds begin to recombine.
It was predicted that this same effect should be visible around other planets, but it’s hard to spot since the bright surfaces of planets can wash out the color. Now, astronomers from ESA have managed to detect it around Mars for the first time.
An international collaboration bringing together over 200 scientists from 13 countries has shown that the very high-energy gamma-ray emissions from quasars, galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus, are not concentrated in the region close to their central black hole, but in fact, extend over several thousand light-years along jets of plasma. This discovery shakes up current scenarios for the behavior of such plasma jets. The work, published in the journal Nature on June 18, 2020, was carried out as part of the H.E.S.S collaboration, involving in particular the CNRS and CEA in France, and the Max Planck society and a group of research institutions and universities in Germany.
Over the past few years, scientists have observed the universe using gamma rays, which are very high-energy photons. Gamma rays, among the cosmic rays that constantly bombard the Earth, originate from regions of the universe where particles are accelerated to huge energies unattainable in human-built accelerators. Gamma rays are emitted by a wide range of cosmic objects such as quasars, which are active galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus.
The intensity of the radiation emitted from these systems can vary over very short timescales of up to one minute. Scientists therefore believed that the source of this radiation was very small and located in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, which can have a mass several billion times that of the sun’s. The black hole is thought to gobble up the matter spiraling down into it and eject a small part of it in the form of large jets of plasma at relativistic speeds, close to the speed of light, thus contributing to the redistribution of matter throughout the universe.
Via Jacob Gunn Glanville
Here’s the Forbes article on our program. Press release and some media to follow. We will be publishing our manuscript within a week to bioarxiv.
Jacob Glanville is an admirer of the human immune system — but he thinks we can do better.
A rejuvenation roadmap, and some info on Rejuvenate Bio.
Ray Kurzweil predicted the Technological Singularity will be reached in 2045. This actually means there will be strong AI, something like AGI that is 1 billion times more capable than the human brain in many aspects.
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An experiment buried underground in Italy has turned up a mysterious result, and a never-before-seen “axion” particle seems like the most likely explanation.
An excess of events spotted in the XENON1T experiment could be signs of solar axions or weird, new properties of neutrinos, but not dark matter itself.
Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging firm is currently completing a tunnel at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
You’ve seen his art.
A conversation with space artist Don Davis about his life and work.
