Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 2, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 2, 2018 Quote China set to launch first-ever spacecraft to the far side of the Moon Chang’e-4 mission will test plant growth on the Moon, and listen for radio emissions normally blocked by Earth's atmosphere. Early in the New Year, if all goes well, the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e-4 will arrive where no craft has been before: the far side of the Moon. The mission is scheduled to launch from Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan province on 8 December. The craft, comprising a lander and a rover, will then enter the Moon’s orbit, before touching down on the surface. If the landing is successful, the mission’s main job will be to investigate this side of the lunar surface, which is peppered with many small craters. The lander will also conduct the first radio astronomy experiments from the far side of the Moon — and the first investigations to see whether plants will grow in the low-gravity lunar environment. “This mission is definitely a significant and important accomplishment in lunar exploration,” says Carolyn van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster, Germany. The ultimate goal of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is to create a Moon base for future human exploration there, although it has not announced when that might happen. Chang’e-4 will be the country’s second craft to ‘soft’ land on the lunar surface, following Chang’e-3’s touchdown in 2013. Landing site The CNSA has remained tight-lipped about many of the mission’s details, including the landing site. The most likely location is inside a 186-kilometre-wide crater called Von Kármán, says Zongcheng Ling, who studies the formation and evolution of planetary bodies at Shandong University in Weihai and is a member of the mission’s science team. “We scientists are very happy” to have the chance to visit the far side, says Ling. The crater is part of the South Pole–Aitken basin, the largest known impact structure in the Solar System and the oldest on the Moon. “It is a key area to answer several important questions about the early history of the Moon, including its internal structure and thermal evolution,” says Bo Wu, a geoinformatician at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who helped describe the topography and geomorphology of this site. The Chang’e-4 rover will map the region surrounding the landing site. It will also measure the thickness and shape of the subsurface layers using ground-penetrating radar, and measure the mineral composition at the surface with a near and infrared spectrometer, which could help geologists to understand the processes involved in the Moon’s early evolution. Because the far side of the Moon never faces Earth, CNSA mission control won’t be able to communicate directly with the craft once it has landed. In May, China launched a communications satellite called Queqiao to beyond the Moon where it can act as a relay station for communications between the lander and Earth. Greenhouse studies Although the Chang’e-4 rover and lander were designed as backups for Chang’e-3, and carry several instruments similar to the earlier mission, the lander will also carry some unique experiments. One of those will test whether potato and thale-cress (Arabidopsis) seeds sprout and photosynthesize in a sealed, climate-controlled environment in the low gravity on the lunar surface. “When we take the step towards long-term human habitation on the Moon or Mars, we will need greenhouse facilities to support us, and will need to live in something like a biosphere,” says Anna-Lisa Paul, a horticultural scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The proposed Chinese experiments will seek to verify previous studies on the International Space Station, says John Kiss, a space biologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. These found that potato and thale-cress can grow normally in controlled ecosystems in lower gravity than on Earth, but not in gravity as low as on the Moon. Radio astronomy The lander’s radio astronomy experiments will explore parts of the Milky Way that are poorly understood, such as the gases between stars, and the magnetic fields that propagate after a stars’ death. A radio spectrometer, built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will collect electromagnetic data between 0.1 and 40 megahertz to create a map of low frequency radiation from the night sky. Capturing these measurements from Earth is difficult because low frequency radiation is mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, says Heino Falcke, a radio astronomer at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and a member of the Dutch team that has built a low-frequency radio spectrometer carried on the Queqiao satellite. “We have completely blurred vision at low frequencies,” he says. Astronomers will use this data to better understand how energy released by dying stars heats up the gases between them, which could affect how stars form, says Flacke. He also plans to combine data from the Moon experiment with those from Queqiao. Astronomers are also interested in this spectrum of radiation to study the first few hundred million years of the Universe, a time before the formation of galaxies and stars. The data could help them filter out background noise that could be hiding a signal from this time period. If found, that signal could reveal information about the distribution of ordinary matter compared with dark matter in the Universe. But even with the help of the moon lander, it is not certain that they will detect the signal, says Falcke. “It is a first step.” China’s next venture to the Moon will be even more ambitious. Chang’e-5, scheduled to launch in 2019, will endeavour to bring samples from the Moon back to Earth. More on: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07562-z They'll reach the far side of the Moon almost exactly 50 years after humans first saw it with their own eyes on Apollo 8... This is cool. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 2, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 2, 2018 6 minutes ago, nudge said: They'll reach the far side of the Moon almost exactly 50 years after humans first saw it with their own eyes on Apollo 8... This is cool. And I hope it's a big success it will be strange seeing landing craft's with Chinese flags other than American and European, these countries should unite in the conquest of space, which one day will be our home when planet Earth fades away when the Sun disappears and becomes a white dwarf. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 2, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 2, 2018 16 minutes ago, CaaC - John said: And I hope it's a big success it will be strange seeing landing craft's with Chinese flags other than American and European, these countries should unite in the conquest of space, which one day will be our home when planet Earth fades away when the Sun disappears and becomes a white dwarf. Ha, if we don't destroy ourselves well before we're able to colonise our galaxy or at least the outer solar system... Space gives me existential crisis 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 3, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 3, 2018 (edited) Science & Environment Gravitational waves: Monster black hole merger detected By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 19 minutes ago Gravitational waves have been detected from the biggest black hole merger yet, scientists will formally announce on Monday. Their exquisite laser labs observed the ripples in space-time from this gargantuan collision on 29 July 2017. The event saw two holes, weighing more than 50 and 34 times the mass of our Sun, uniting to produce a single object over 80 times the mass of our star. The discovery follows a major data re-analysis project Researchers from the LIGO-VIRGO Collaboration will also list three other black hole mergers that were missed in the initial run-though of the data; and the promotion to full detection status of a previously uncertain "candidate". The re-analysis brings the total number of gravitational waves events now in the catalogue to 11. Ten are black hole mergers; one occurrence was the result of a collision between dense star remnants, so-called neutron stars. Gravitational waves: So many new toys to unwrap Einstein's waves detected in star smash Einstein's waves win physics Nobel Why have the detections come to light now? The international collaboration operates three laser interferometer facilities - in Washington and Louisiana states in the US, and Pisa province in Italy. Their super-sensitive instruments "listened" for gravitational waves emanating from cosmic events during two periods, across 2015, 2016 and 2017. Algorithms hunting through the colossal streams of data saw what they regarded as the obvious patterns relating gravitational waves at the time, but it was always planned to go back through the data and do a reassessment. Writing on his blog at the weekend,, collaboration member Prof Shane Larson from Northwestern University, in Evanston, said: "Since [the initial discoveries], we've been sifting through the data, looking at every feature, comparing it to our astrophysical predictions, cross-checking it against monitors that tell us the health of the instruments, determining if it appears in all the detectors, and using our most robust (but slow-running) super-computer analysis codes." It is this fine-tooth comb search that has thrown up the new black hole mergers. All of the new detections come from the second period of operation, which ran for nearly nine months from November 2016 to August 2017. In the catalogue, they are given the "GW" prefix, for "Gravitational Waves", followed by the date (yr/month/day) of occurrence: GW170729, GW170809, GW170818 and GW170823. Gravitational waves - Ripples in the fabric of space-time Gravitational waves are a prediction of the Theory of General Relativity It took decades to develop the technology to directly detect them They are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light Detectable sources include merging black holes and neutron stars LIGO/VIRGO fire lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light Detecting the waves opens up the Universe to completely new investigations What of the uncertain candidate? The advanced laser labs in Washington and Louisiana began their first science run in September 2015 and almost immediately made the historic detection of a black hole merger on 14 September (GW150914), a discovery that would later earn a Nobel Prize. But less than a month later, the alarms triggered again at the lab to raise the possibility of a second detection. At the time, scientists didn't think this event met the necessary criteria for a confident discovery, and so they labelled it LVT151012, where LVT stood for "LIGO-VIRGO Trigger". It was frequently mentioned in communications, but could not really be counted in the catalogue of full detections. This has now changed following the re-analysis. The criteria are met and the LVT prefix is replaced with GW. Prof Christopher Berry at Northwestern called GW151012 a "Cinderella story, a quiet signal that could". What do these extra detections mean? The hunt for gravitational waves is a game of statistics. From the number of detections so far made, scientists can extrapolate the likely number of black holes in a given volume of space. So, that number has just gone up. Also, the expanded catalogue tells us something about the probable future success of the laser laboratories. They are currently offline for upgrades that will improve their performance. When they come back online in spring next year, they should have the ability to sense twice the distance, with hopefully, therefore, eight times the detection rate. We are rapidly moving towards a time when the detection of gravitational waves becomes a daily occurrence. And as that happens, new details will emerge about the nature of black holes and neutron stars, and - with luck - about some completely novel and unexpected sources of gravitational waves. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46428010 1 Edited December 3, 2018 by CaaC - John 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 4, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 4, 2018 (edited) NASA spacecraft arrives at ancient asteroid, its 1st visitor 2 hrs ago © The Associated Press This Nov. 16, 2018, image provided by NASA shows the asteroid Bennu. After a two-year chase, a NASA spacecraft has arrived at the ancient asteroid Bennu, its first visitor in billions of years. The robotic explorer Osiris-Rex pulled within 12 miles (19 kilometers) of the diamond-shaped space rock Monday, Dec. 3. The image, which was taken by the PolyCam camera, shows Bennu at 300 pixels and has been stretched to increase the contrast between highlights and shadows. (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona via AP) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After a two-year chase, a NASA spacecraft arrived Monday at the ancient asteroid Bennu, its first visitor in billions of years. The robotic explorer Osiris-Rex pulled within 12 miles (19 kilometers) of the diamond-shaped space rock. It will get even closer in the days ahead and go into orbit around Bennu on Dec. 31. No spacecraft has ever orbited such a small cosmic body. It is the first US attempt to gather asteroid samples for return to Earth, something only Japan has accomplished so far. Flight controllers applauded and exchanged high-fives once confirmation came through that Osiris-Rex made it to Bennu — exactly one week after NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars. "Relieved, proud, and anxious to start exploring!" tweeted lead scientist Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona. "To Bennu and back!" With Bennu some 76 million miles (122 million kilometers) away, it took seven minutes for word to get from the spacecraft to flight controllers at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado. The company built the spacecraft there. Bennu is estimated to be just over 1,600 feet (500 meters) across. Researchers will provide a more precise description at a scientific meeting next Monday in Washington. About the size of an SUV, the spacecraft will shadow the asteroid for a year, before scooping up some gravel for a return to Earth in 2023. Related slideshow: NASA spacecraft rockets toward the sun for the closest look yet (Provided by Photo Services - See link) Scientists are eager to study material from a carbon-rich asteroid like dark Bennu, which could hold evidence dating back to the beginning of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. As such, it's an astronomical time capsule. A Japanese spacecraft, meanwhile, has been hanging out at another near-Earth asteroid since June, also for samples. It is Japan's second asteroid mission. This latest rock is named Ryugu and about double the size of Bennu. Ryugu's specks should be here by December 2020 but will be far less than Osiris-Rex's promised booty. Osiris-Rex aims to collect at least 60 grams, or 2 ounces, of dust and gravel. The spacecraft won't land, but rather use a 10-foot (3-meter) mechanical arm in 2020 to momentarily touch down and vacuum up particles. The sample container would break loose and head toward Earth in 2021. The collection — parachuting down to Utah — would represent the biggest cosmic haul since the Apollo astronauts hand-delivered moon rocks to Earth in the late 1960s and early 1970s. NASA has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles before, but never asteroid samples. Japan managed to return some tiny particles in 2010 from its first asteroid mission, also named Hayabusa. Both Bennu and Ryugu are considered potentially hazardous asteroids. That means they could smack Earth years from now. At worst, Bennu would carve out a crater during a projected close call 150 years from now. Contact with Bennu will not significantly change its orbit or make it more dangerous to us, Lauretta stressed. Scientists contend the more they learn about asteroids, the better equipped Earth will be in heading off a truly catastrophic strike. The $800 million Osiris-Rex mission began with a 2016 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its odometer read 1.2 billion miles (2 billion kilometers) as of Monday. Both the spacecraft and asteroid's names come from Egyptian mythology. Osiris is the god of the afterlife, while Bennu represents the heron and creation. Osiris-Rex is actually a NASA acronym for origins, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security-regolith explorer. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/nasa-spacecraft-arrives-at-ancient-asteroid-its-1st-visitor/ar-BBQstVz Edited December 4, 2018 by CaaC - John 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 4, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 4, 2018 Astronauts aboard Soyuz spacecraft arrive safely at the ISS Mallory Locklear 3 hrs ago The three crew members aboard the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft have safely arrived at the International Space Station after launching from Kazakhstan earlier today. Anne McClain of NASA, David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos are all getting settled on board the ISS following a six-hour journey. This was the first crewed launch of a Soyuz rocket since an equipment malfunction caused astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to abort their launch and engage an emergency landing in October. The crew arrived at the ISS at 12:33 PM Eastern and the hatch between their spacecraft and the space station opened a little over two hours later. The three will spend more than six months on the ISS conducting hundreds of science experiments. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/astronauts-aboard-soyuz-spacecraft-arrive-safely-at-the-iss/ar-BBQsIMV Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 4, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 4, 2018 This is so mind-blowing; both the achievement itself and the fact that it's barely reported outside of specialised news... It's the first of the few planned extra-terrestrial sample return missions that not only will tell us a lot about the earliest history of the Solar System, how the planets formed and life began, but it might also be the very first step into the new direction in natural resources gathering and economic development, not to mention that it enables us to study the possibilities of altering the course of potentially hazardous asteroids in the future (impact mitigation); all of which is not just interesting stuff for scientists and armchair enthusiasts, but might (and most likely will) have serious practical applications for the survival and advancement of humanity. Now let's hope it successfully starts orbiting Bennu within three weeks as that's the biggest task of the mission so far! Also must keep an eye on NASA's New Horizon mission which is the first mission to explore the Kuiper Belt. It has just completed its first course-correction on approach to its Jan. 1 flyby target, the mysterious object nicknamed “Ultima Thule”. The encounter will occur approximately 4 billion miles from Earth. Mind boggling... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 4, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 4, 2018 6 minutes ago, nudge said: Also must keep an eye on NASA's New Horizon mission which is the first mission to explore the Kuiper Belt. It has just completed its first course-correction on approach to its Jan. 1 flyby target, the mysterious object nicknamed “Ultima Thule”. The encounter will occur approximately 4 billion miles from Earth. Mind boggling... Exciting times ahead for space lovers. Ultima in View: NASA’s New Horizons Makes First Detection of Kuiper Belt Flyby Target. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 6, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 1 hour ago, CaaC - John said: The launch of the cargo ship was successful but the rocket missed the landing as the first-stage booster crashed into the ocean haha. Appears to be undamaged so it's good news anyway! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 11 minutes ago, nudge said: The launch of the cargo ship was successful but the rocket missed the landing as the first-stage booster crashed into the ocean haha. Appears to be undamaged so it's good news anyway! How about this, this is my current wallpaper on this Laptop (I change it every so often) The story behind this screenshot... Astronomers Have Spotted Something Very, Very Strange Surrounding A Distant Star Since its first light in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning the cosmos in search of habitable worlds beyond our Solar System. During its routine observations, the telescope observed something very unusual. Nestled between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, sits a strange and intriguing star. Kepler is designed to observe stars and look for tiny dips in their brightness. These dips, especially if they repeat, can be a sign the star has one or more planets orbiting it. By measuring the timing and the size of the dips, scientists can learn a great deal about the transiting planet. The data is then processed automatically by computers with algorithms designed to look for repeating patterns – a sign that something is orbiting the star. Kepler focused on this one region for four years, observing as many as 150,000 stars simultaneously. Due to the massive amounts of data collected, Kepler scientists rely on “citizen scientists” through a website called Planet Hunters to help them scour the data for anything unusual. In 2011, one star in particular was flagged as unusual. Kepler observed the star KIC 8462852 for four years starting in 2009. Typically, orbiting planets only dim the light of their host star for a period of a few hours to a few days depending on their orbit. A group of citizen scientists noticed that this star appeared to have two small dips in 2009, followed by a large dip lasting almost a week in 2011, and finally a series of multiple dips significantly dimming the star’s light in 2013. Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” The pattern of dips indicates that the star is orbited by a large, irregular-shaped mass. If it were orbiting a young star, this mass might be a protoplanetary disc, but KIC 8462852 is not a young star. We would also expect to see the presence of dust emitting infrared light, which hasn’t been observed. So what is this orbiting mass? Scientists predict that whatever it is, it had to have formed recently as it would have been pulled in by the star’s gravity and consumed. Boyajian recently published a paper offering several possible explanations for the bizarre transits. The leading theory is that a family of exocomets passed too close to the star, and were shredded into pieces by the star’s massive gravity. The remaining dust and debris could be left to orbit the star. But researchers from UC Berkeley’s SETI Institute think it could be something else entirely: They think this could be a sign of alien technology. Boyajian is working with SETI and Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, to develop a proposal to observe the star with NRAO’s Green Bank Telescope to search for radio waves. If they detect anything intriguing, they then have plans to use the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to listen for what could be the sounds of alien technology. The first observations are estimated to take place in January, with a potential follow-up planned for next fall. Of course, if they stumble upon something incredible, the researchers could expect to follow-up with the VLA straight away. Kepler also plans to observe KIC 8462852 in May 2017, when the mass is expected to transit the star again. https://www.iflscience.com/space/milky-ways-most-mysterious-star/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 6, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 27 minutes ago, CaaC - John said: How about this, this is my current wallpaper on this Laptop (I change it every so often) The story behind this screenshot... Astronomers Have Spotted Something Very, Very Strange Surrounding A Distant Star Since its first light in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning the cosmos in search of habitable worlds beyond our Solar System. During its routine observations, the telescope observed something very unusual. Nestled between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, sits a strange and intriguing star. Kepler is designed to observe stars and look for tiny dips in their brightness. These dips, especially if they repeat, can be a sign the star has one or more planets orbiting it. By measuring the timing and the size of the dips, scientists can learn a great deal about the transiting planet. The data is then processed automatically by computers with algorithms designed to look for repeating patterns – a sign that something is orbiting the star. Hide contents Kepler focused on this one region for four years, observing as many as 150,000 stars simultaneously. Due to the massive amounts of data collected, Kepler scientists rely on “citizen scientists” through a website called Planet Hunters to help them scour the data for anything unusual. In 2011, one star in particular was flagged as unusual. Kepler observed the star KIC 8462852 for four years starting in 2009. Typically, orbiting planets only dim the light of their host star for a period of a few hours to a few days depending on their orbit. A group of citizen scientists noticed that this star appeared to have two small dips in 2009, followed by a large dip lasting almost a week in 2011, and finally a series of multiple dips significantly dimming the star’s light in 2013. Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” The pattern of dips indicates that the star is orbited by a large, irregular-shaped mass. If it were orbiting a young star, this mass might be a protoplanetary disc, but KIC 8462852 is not a young star. We would also expect to see the presence of dust emitting infrared light, which hasn’t been observed. So what is this orbiting mass? Scientists predict that whatever it is, it had to have formed recently as it would have been pulled in by the star’s gravity and consumed. Boyajian recently published a paper offering several possible explanations for the bizarre transits. The leading theory is that a family of exocomets passed too close to the star, and were shredded into pieces by the star’s massive gravity. The remaining dust and debris could be left to orbit the star. But researchers from UC Berkeley’s SETI Institute think it could be something else entirely: They think this could be a sign of alien technology. Boyajian is working with SETI and Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, to develop a proposal to observe the star with NRAO’s Green Bank Telescope to search for radio waves. If they detect anything intriguing, they then have plans to use the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to listen for what could be the sounds of alien technology. The first observations are estimated to take place in January, with a potential follow-up planned for next fall. Of course, if they stumble upon something incredible, the researchers could expect to follow-up with the VLA straight away. Kepler also plans to observe KIC 8462852 in May 2017, when the mass is expected to transit the star again. https://www.iflscience.com/space/milky-ways-most-mysterious-star/ Great picture and an interesting read... it's cool that the article mentions citizen science projects; I did a bit of work every once in a while on a similar one that has the same objective (i.e. identifying transiting exoplanets from Kepler's data using stars' lightcurves); it's quite fun. Crowdsourcing research is such a fantastic way to analyse huge amounts of data and get common people involved in science. Did they ever find out what was the deal with that weird star? (the article mentions May 2017 hence my question...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 34 minutes ago, nudge said: Did they ever find out what was the deal with that weird star? (the article mentions May 2017 hence my question...) The Mysterious Star KIC 8462852 Apr 19, 2018 Tabby's Star's dimming could be signs of an alien civilization. The Allen Telescope Array searches radio frequencies to investigate this strange behaviour. Allen Telescope Array credit: Seth Shostak By Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer The SETI Institute is following up on the possibility that the stellar system KIC 8462852 might be home to an advanced civilization. This star, slightly brighter than the Sun and more than 1400 light-years away, has been the subject of scrutiny by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It has shown some surprising behaviour that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 per cent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light. For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favoured suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star. But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star. To investigate this idea, we have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-natural radio signals from the direction of KIC 8462852. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals (similar to traditional SETI experiments) as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft. But what if ET isn’t signalling at radio frequencies? Our ATA observations are being augmented by a search for brief but powerful laser pulses. These observations are being conducted by the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory in Panama, part of a nascent global network of optical SETI observatories. Both the observations and the data analysis are now underway. Once the latter is concluded, we will, of course, make them known here and in the professional journals. On the basis of historical precedent, it’s most likely that the dimming of KIC 8462852 is due to natural causes. But in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, any suggestive clues should, of course, be further investigated – and that is what the SETI Institute is now doing. https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/mysterious-star-kic-8462852 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 Astronomers Think They've Figured Out the Raging Swirls of Gas Around Supermassive Black Holes By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | December 6, 2018, 07:15 am ET There are churning, hellish, hot-and-cold gas storms swirling around our universe's supermassive black holes. But the scientists who discovered them would prefer you call them "fountains." That's a change from "donuts," the term researchers previously used to describe the roiling masses. But a paper published Oct. 30 in The Astrophysical Journal reveals that the donut model of the mass around black holes may have been too simplistic. About two decades ago, researchers noticed that the monster black holes at the centers of galaxies tended to be obscured by clouds of matter — matter that wasn't falling into the black holes but rather circulating nearby. But astronomers couldn't get a clear look at those clouds. They were able to simulate the currents around black holes, though, as in this example published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2002, and they concluded that those clouds were donut-shaped — gas falling toward the black hole, getting heated up by proximity and bouncing away, only to fall back toward it again But there are better telescopes now, producing better images of those clouds. And it turns out that the situation is a lot more complicated than previously thought. It turns out that, more than anything else, the clouds of matter around black holes more closely resemble fountains like this one, with rings of arching water surrounding inner columns of matter shooting straight into the air. When astronomers turned the superprecise eye of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory on the the supermassive black hole in the Circinus galaxy, 14 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern Circinus constellation, they were able to observe its surrounding cloud in unprecedented detail. A constant stream of relatively cold gas does fall toward the black hole, the observations showed, and some of it gets superheated and is then thrown away from the black holes out into space. Some of that gas, still in the thrall of the black hole's gravity, curves back around and re-enters the falling stream. Some of the gas shoots out in a more or less straight line into space. The whole mess is a lot less orderly than a fountain, but the analogy makes sense. Also, the disk of circling matter looks as thick as it does because it gets stripped from molecules into bare atoms as it approaches the black hole, according to the research. Those more lightweight atoms rebound farther into space, creating a fatter disk. https://www.livescience.com/64248-black-hole-fountain.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 (edited) @nudge, @Mel81x NASA Live: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive Upcoming Live Events (all times Eastern) Thursday, Dec. 6, 2 p.m.: Hubble servicing mission 25th-anniversary discussion of the history of Hubble servicing missions and the future of satellite servicing. Friday, Dec. 7, 1:30 p.m.: Hubble servicing mission 25th-anniversary-panel discussion on Hubble deployment and servicing missions. Tuesday, Dec. 11, 10 a.m.: Coverage of Russian spacewalk. Spacewalk at the International Space Station is scheduled to begin at 11:03 a.m. EST and will last around 6 hours. Tuesday, Dec. 11, 8 p.m.: Live from Washington National Cathedral: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Presents “The Spirit of Apollo”—A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 8 Mission to the Moon. Wednesday, Dec. 12, 3 p.m.: International Space Station Expedition 59-60 news conference. Tuesday, Dec. 18, 4:25 p.m.: International Space Station Expedition 57-58 change of command ceremony. Wednesday, Dec. 19, 4:45 p.m.: Expedition 57 crew farewell at International Space Station and Soyuz spacecraft hatch closure. Hatch closure is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. EST. Wednesday, Dec. 19, 7:45 p.m.: Undocking of the Soyuz spacecraft with the International Space Station Expedition 57 crew. Undocking is scheduled at 8:42 p.m. EST. Wednesday, Dec. 19, 10:45 p.m.: Coverage of Soyuz deorbit burn and landing with the Expedition 57 crew. Deorbit burn scheduled at 11:09 p.m. EST with landing scheduled at 12:03 a.m. EST, Dec. 20. Edited December 6, 2018 by CaaC - John 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 6, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 It's amazing that we live in a time where anyone can have breakfast in bed and watch ISS astronauts having a spacewalk live This is also a great livestream that streams live HD Earth views as seen from the Space Station; it's breathtaking (make sure to choose HD in options and go fullscreen!) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 6 minutes ago, nudge said: It's amazing that we live in a time where anyone can have breakfast in bed and watch ISS astronauts having a spacewalk live I keep coming back to the live video, put it on HD and full screen, sit back on this sofa and watch the Earth from Space and keep thinking I am down there somewhere right now and knowing the astronauts are up there floating around in their Space Station and looking down at Mother Earth, breathtaking. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber Mel81x+ 3,612 Posted December 6, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 52 minutes ago, nudge said: It's amazing that we live in a time where anyone can have breakfast in bed and watch ISS astronauts having a spacewalk live This is also a great livestream that streams live HD Earth views as seen from the Space Station; it's breathtaking (make sure to choose HD in options and go fullscreen!) Goddamn. When the sun comes out towards the end my mouth opened wide. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 6, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 6, 2018 20 minutes ago, Mel81x said: Goddamn. When the sun comes out towards the end my mouth opened wide. Beautiful and stunning, I wish I was one of them, astronauts, up there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 7, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 7, 2018 I think we need a separate topic for Space Launch in about three hours! Unfortunately no livestream. Other than this being the first landing on the far side of the Moon, there's more interesting things about this mission. One of them is a mini biosphere experiment - they are sending potato seeds and silkworm eggs in a biocan to test photosynthesis and respiration in the low-gravity lunar environment. More infos about the mission here: https://gbtimes.com/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-change-4-mission-to-the-far-side-of-the-moon?cat=chinas-space-program 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 7, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 7, 2018 1 minute ago, nudge said: I think we need a separate topic for Space You are the Mod with the tools young lady, go for it, a new topic like "Space, the Final Frontier" 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 7, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 7, 2018 Due to popular demand (not really ), here's a thread for anything Space related... Topic title credit: @CaaC - John 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluewolf 7,161 Posted December 7, 2018 Share Posted December 7, 2018 Beat me to it... I was going to start 'All Things Sci-Fi' thread last week but got side tracked with mafia wars... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 7, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 7, 2018 A women of my heart, sigh, now, seeing you have the tools maybe you can merge all the space content posts in Science & Discovery into here, cough, cough 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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