First spied in the 1960s, the huge dust clouds have now been confirmed—and may affect plans for future space exploration.
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#ParkerSolarProbe
Parker Solar Probe is alive and well after skimming by the Sun at just 15 million miles from our star’s surface. This is far closer than any spacecraft has ever gone — the previous record was set by Helios B in 1976 and broken by Parker on Oct. 29 — and this maneuver has exposed the spacecraft to intense heat and solar radiation in a complex solar wind environment.
“Parker Solar Probe was designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this close approach, with no control from us on Earth — and now we know it succeeded,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “Parker is the culmination of six decades of scientific progress. Now, we have realized humanity’s first close visit to our star, which will have implications not just here on Earth, but for a deeper understanding of our universe.”
We hear a lot about Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and that’s because we have extremely fancy hardware floating around and, in some cases, cruising on the surface of those planets. The planets that lie further away from the Sun don’t get nearly as much attention, but they may soon, as NASA is currently spitballing some missions that will give us a better look at Uranus than we’ve ever gotten.
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These maps sketch out the remnants of long-lost landmasses trapped within drifting continental plates called cratons. While some cratons are already well-understood, Antarctica’s lithospheric structure is tough to examine because of its remote location and the enormous ice sheets that obscure its underlying geology.
“These gravity images are revolutionizing our ability to study the least understood continent on Earth—Antarctica,” said study co-author Fausto Ferraccioli, science leader of geology and Geophysics at the British Antarctic Survey, in a statement. “In East Antarctica, we see an exciting mosaic of geological features that reveal fundamental similarities and differences between the crust beneath Antarctica and other continents it was joined to until 160 million years ago.”
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Lattice QCD is not only teaching us how the strong interactions lead to the overwhelming majority of the mass of normal matter in our Universe, but holds the potential to teach us about all sorts of other phenomena, from nuclear reactions to dark matter.
Later today, November 7th, physics professor Phiala Shanahan will be delivering a public lecture from Perimeter Institute, and we&s;ll be live-blogging it right here at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT. You can watch the talk right here, and follow along with my commentary below. Shanahan is an expert in theoretical nuclear and particle physics and specializes in supercomputer work involving QCD, and I&s;m so curious what else she has to say.
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