Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted July 30, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted July 30, 2021 Quote How to see tonight’s twin meteor shower in the UK Both the Alpha Capricornid and Delta Aquariid meteor showers are set to peak – here's how to spot shooting stars. Want to spot a meteor shower tonight? You can have two: both the Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids are both set to peak at the end of July 2021. This means you can expect to see up to 30 meteors shoot across the night sky – with up to five of these being spectacular slow-moving yellow fireballs. But how exactly can you see them? When? And what exactly actually is a meteor in the first place? Glad you asked: we’ve answered all these celestial quandaries (and much more) below. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted July 31, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted July 31, 2021 Quote Is the truth out there? How the Harvard-based Galileo Project will search the skies for alien technology. Can we find alien technology? That is the ambitious goal of the Galileo Project, launched this week by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb with substantial private financial backing. The project is far from the first attempt to detect signs of civilisations beyond Earth. Loeb has been criticised in the past for his dismissive approach to previous efforts to find extraterrestrial life and his argument that an alien artefact passed through our solar system in 2017. So why do Loeb and his collaborators think they have a chance of finding something where others have failed? There are three triggers that suggest they might. Exoplanets, ‘Oumuamua, and UFOs FULL REPORT Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 1, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 1, 2021 VIEW Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 3, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 3, 2021 The Nauka incident on ISS turned out to be pretty serious https://www.space.com/nauka-module-space-station-tilt-more-serious Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 3, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 3, 2021 47 minutes ago, nudge said: The Nauka incident on ISS turned out to be pretty serious https://www.space.com/nauka-module-space-station-tilt-more-serious Gives me the heebie-jeebies reading anything like that, they must have a plan b if anything goes wrong and could risk the space station's crew life threatening danger where they could launch a rescue mission. I know that is only like watching a movie on anything like that but how many times have we been through a scenario where they said "That could never happen, that's only for the movies..." and it happens, they say it takes a disaster to happen to stop another one happening, as I said, that gave me the heebie-jeebies reading that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 3, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 3, 2021 12 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said: Gives me the heebie-jeebies reading anything like that, they must have a plan b if anything goes wrong and could risk the space station's crew life threatening danger where they could launch a rescue mission. I know that is only like watching a movie on anything like that but how many times have we been through a scenario where they said "That could never happen, that's only for the movies..." and it happens, they say it takes a disaster to happen to stop another one happening, as I said, that gave me the heebie-jeebies reading that. Oh they definitely have more than one contingency plan, haha. In this case, the Crew Dragon and Soyuz we're both ready to evacuate the astronauts/cosmonauts, if needed. And I agree, as you said, anything can happen. Space is always a dangerous place for a person to be, regardless of all the advancement and progress. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 3, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 3, 2021 Quote Blobs in space A new cargo of weird and wonderful experiments is headed for the International Space Station. Fake muscles, the Blob, and a 3D printing project that aims to turn Moon dust into human habitats are about to head to the International Space Station (ISS). The uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft, carrying the latest series of space science experiments, is due to launch in a fortnight. On board is a slime mould, Physarum polycephalum – otherwise known as the Blob. United States biologists recently showed the brainless Blob could make long-range decisions. On the ISS, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet will observe the Blob, which can “move, feed, organise itself and even transmit knowledge to other slime moulds”. He will observe how it explores its environment and its eating patterns in microgravity. School students will replicate the experiments on the ground and compare the results. The Blob is a single-cell creature, and scientists are unsure how it remembers things. One recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA found that when parts of the organism come into contact with a food source, it releases a substance that softens its internal tubes, effectively imprinting on itself where the food is. The ISS experiment will use Blob food (oats) to test what it can do. Travelling with the Blob is hardware to see if regolith – dust from the surface of the Moon, or Mars – can be used in the ISS’s 3D printer to make housing on demand. The Redwire Regolith Print (RRP) project will see if planned crewed missions in the future will be able to use that dust, instead of carrying habitat material. The printed samples will be taken back to Earth and compared with samples made here. A range of strength tests will demonstrate the technology’s capabilities. Redwire president Andrew Rush said it would show “a key manufacturing capability for building critical infrastructure on the Moon”. “Technology that enables us to use local, available resources to produce what we need off-Earth is critical for NASA’s Artemis missions and sustainable exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond,” he said The RRP hardware and the Blob will be also be accompanied by engineered human muscle cells, which will be introduced onto a collagen scaffold on the ISS, and encouraged to grow. Scientists hope that studying the way the muscles waste will help both astronauts and the aging. Human lose 30% of their muscle mass by the time they are 80, a process known as sarcopenia. Astronauts experience a similar loss in spaceflight. The process is hard to study on Earth because it happens so slowly, but in the microgravity of the ISS the process will be sped up. The fake muscles will also be used to test potential therapeutic drugs to halt the loss. Other experiments headed into orbit include a CO2 scrubber, and a new heat transfer system that will more efficiently cool spacecraft. The Cygnus cargo ship delivering the scientific experiments will be the 16th launched by Northrop Grumman. Its predecessor, the 15th, has undocked from the ISS. The 15th took up its own array of scientific projects, and was filled with rubbish before being disconnected. Its final job will be to put five CubeSats into orbit before de-orbiting itself and burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/new-experiments-on-iss/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 3, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 3, 2021 I'm most definitely am looking forward to this... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 4, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 4, 2021 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 4, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 4, 2021 Quote Spinning star hurtling out of the Milky Way New data from a runaway star sheds light on its origins. Astronomers have discovered that the runaway star LP 40−365 is not only catapulting out of our galaxy, but it’s spinning as it goes. “This star is moving so fast that it’s almost certainly leaving the galaxy…[it’s] moving almost two million miles an hour,” says JJ Hermes from Boston University, co-author of a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Astronomers have known for a few decades that LP 40−365 is a stellar oddball – not only is it hightailing it out of the Milky Way, but it’s also tiny (0.14 solar masses) and one of the most metal-rich stars ever detected. Previous studies have suggested that it is the remains of a white dwarf star after a failed supernova detonation, where the star wasn’t completely destroyed. This explosion gave the star-shrapnel an almighty kick that is now propelling it out of the Milky Way. “To have gone through partial detonation and still survive is very cool and unique, and it’s only in the last few years that we’ve started to think this kind of star could exist,” says Odelia Putterman, co-author of the study. Hermes and Putterman have now examined data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), specifically looking at brightness patterns, and deduced that LP 40−365 is rotating on its way out of the galaxy. “We dug a little deeper to figure out why that star [was repeatedly] getting brighter and fainter, and the simplest explanation is that we’re seeing something at [its] surface rotate in and out of view every nine hours,” says Hermes. It’s normal for a star to rotate – all of them do, with our Sun spinning once on its axis every 27 days. But for a remnant of such a violent explosion, LP 40−365’s nine-hour rotation is positively leisurely. This rotation rate might give us clues about the system in which the star originated. The star is thought to be the result of a failed subtype of Type Ia supernova called a Type Iax. In this system, a white dwarf is locked in orbit with another star, which it ‘feeds’ on, stealing gas and dust until the white dwarf grows big enough to collapse under its own gravity and explode. Based on the rotation rate, this new study suggests that LP 40−365 is the remnant of the self-destructing white dwarf and not the other star, which likely slingshotted off in another direction. “By understanding what’s happening with this particular star, we can start to understand what’s happening with many other similar stars that came from a similar situation,” says Putterman. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/spinning-star-hurtling-out-of-the-milky-way/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 5, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 5, 2021 (edited) Quote Dancing ghosts A new, deeper scan of the sky throws up surprises for astronomers. Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were. Several weeks later, we had figured out we were seeing two radio galaxies, about a billion light-years away. In the centre of each one is a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons that are bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind. But where does the intergalactic wind come from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? We still don’t understand the details of what is going on here, and it will probably take many more observations and modelling before we do. We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, using CSIRO’s new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope that probes deeper into the Universe than any other. When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries. A deep search returns many surprises The Dancing Ghosts were just one of several surprises found in our first deep search of the sky using ASKAP. This search, called the EMU Pilot Survey, is described in detail in a paper soon to appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. The first big surprise from the EMU Pilot Survey was the discovery of mysterious Odd Radio Circles (ORCs), which seem to be giant rings of radio emission, nearly a million light-years across, surrounding distant galaxies. These had never been seen before, because they are so rare and faint. We still don’t know what they are, but we are working furiously to find out. We are finding surprises even in places we thought we understood. Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected. This new galaxy too contains a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons nearly five million light-years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission. What EMU can do Most known sources of radio emissions are caused by supermassive black holes in quasars and active galaxies, which produce exceptionally bright signals. This is because radio telescopes have always struggled to see the much fainter radio emission from normal spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. The EMU project goes deep enough to see them too. EMU sees almost all the spiral galaxies in the nearby Universe that were previously seen only by optical and infrared telescopes. EMU can even trace the spiral arms in the nearest ones. EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies. These are some of the first results from the EMU project, which we started in 2009. The EMU team of more than 400 scientists in more than 20 countries has spent the past 12 years planning the project, developing techniques, writing software, and working with the CSIRO engineers who were building the telescope. It has been a long haul, but we are at last seeing the amazing data we have dreamed of for so long. But this is only the start. Over the next few years, EMU will use the ASKAP telescope to explore even deeper in the Universe, building on these discoveries and finding more. All the data from EMU will eventually be placed in the public domain, so that astronomers from around the world can mine the data and make new discoveries. But don’t take my word for it. You can already use EMU Pilot Survey data to explore the radio sky yourself, using the zoomable image on our website. Use your mouse wheel to zoom in from the big picture down to the finest details, and see what you find. Perhaps you may even discover something there that the astronomers have missed. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/dancing-ghosts-emu-project/ Edited August 20, 2021 by CaaC (John) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 6, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 6, 2021 This is incredible. Meet the most powerful, the tallest ever assembled, and the only fully reusable rocket ever. First fully stacked Starship 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 7, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 7, 2021 Quote Precision planet detection New tool to search for worlds beyond our solar system. How do astronomers hunt for exoplanets? FULL REPORT Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 9, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 9, 2021 (edited) Astronomy Picture of the Day 2021 August 9 Perseus and the Lost Meteors Image Credit & Copyright: Tomas Slovinsky (Slovakia) & Petr Horalek (Czech Republic; Institute of Physics in Opava) Explanation: What's the best way to watch a meteor shower? This question might come up later this week when the annual Perseid Meteor Shower peaks. One thing that is helpful is a dark sky, as demonstrated in the featured composite image of last year's Perseids. Many more faint meteors are visible on the left image, taken through a very dark sky in Slovakia, than on the right image, taken through a moderately dark sky in the Czech Republic. The band of the Milky Way Galaxy bridges the two coordinated images, while the meteor shower radiant in the constellation of Perseus is clearly visible on the left. In sum, many faint meteors are lost through a bright sky. Light pollution is shrinking areas across our Earth with dark skies, although inexpensive ways to combat this might be implemented. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html Edited August 9, 2021 by CaaC (John) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Gonzo Posted August 9, 2021 Share Posted August 9, 2021 https://screenshot-media.com/the-future/business/spacex-digital-billboard/ One day my great-grandkids will go look up at the night sky, they won't see any stars but they'll see an advert from Cola-Cola. And I fear that's the best case scenario... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 9, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 9, 2021 27 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said: https://screenshot-media.com/the-future/business/spacex-digital-billboard/ One day my great-grandkids will go look up at the night sky, they won't see any stars but they'll see an advert from Cola-Cola. And I fear that's the best case scenario... Not a concern at this point, as it's just a tiny cubesat with an LCD screen and a selfie stick which will be used to film the screen and livestream it on the web, but the intent is definitely there and it is just so fucking stupid. I hope that before it becomes viable, orbital ads will be made illegal, putting an early end to such nonsense. On top of that, we need more regulation on satellite launches, in general. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Gonzo Posted August 9, 2021 Share Posted August 9, 2021 1 minute ago, nudge said: Not a concern at this point, as it's just a tiny cubesat with an LCD screen and a selfie stick which will be used to film the screen and livestram it on the web, but the intent is definitely there and it is just so fucking stupid. I hope that before it becomes viable, orbital ads will be made illegal, putting an early end to such nonsense. On top of that, we need more regulation on satellite launches, in general. I mean, I'm generally worried about how much crap is just sent into orbit generally. How many satellites are flying around in space? I assume not all of the ones up in space work - I dunno if that's true or not. I'm very much in the group of people that think space is very cool and I appreciate space exploration... but I really am concerned about what the hell unregulated billionaire meddling into space will mean for the world. But with the idea of orbital ads, I just read a bit of that article and felt disgusted. Yeah, it's not something we'll see when we look at the sky, right now... but like you said... you know that's exactly what the intent is. The idea of ads in space is fucking sickening tbh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 9, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 9, 2021 2 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said: I mean, I'm generally worried about how much crap is just sent into orbit generally. How many satellites are flying around in space? I assume not all of the ones up in space work - I dunno if that's true or not. I'm very much in the group of people that think space is very cool and I appreciate space exploration... but I really am concerned about what the hell unregulated billionaire meddling into space will mean for the world. But with the idea of orbital ads, I just read a bit of that article and felt disgusted. Yeah, it's not something we'll see when we look at the sky, right now... but like you said... you know that's exactly what the intent is. The idea of ads in space is fucking sickening tbh. Several thousands of satellites, and more than half of those are defunct space junk. So yeah, it's true - as if there's not enough trash on the planet, we also have to put rubbish around it, too. With satellites getting cheaper as well, I assume it'll only get worse - the rough estimates say about a thousand new ones are expected to be launched into orbit every year in the near future, and that's not including Starlink that hopes to have over 40 THOUSAND satellite constellation once it's finalised! Add Amazon's Project Kuiper and Airbus's OneWeb on top of that. It's ridiculous really; of course communication, navigation and scientific sats are an important part of infrastructure, but you surely have to draw a line somewhere? It's a disaster waiting to happen. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Gonzo Posted August 9, 2021 Share Posted August 9, 2021 1 hour ago, nudge said: Several thousands of satellites, and more than half of those are defunct space junk. So yeah, it's true - as if there's not enough trash on the planet, we also have to put rubbish around it, too. With satellites getting cheaper as well, I assume it'll only get worse - the rough estimates say about a thousand new ones are expected to be launched into orbit every year in the near future, and that's not including Starlink that hopes to have over 40 THOUSAND satellite constellation once it's finalised! Add Amazon's Project Kuiper and Airbus's OneWeb on top of that. It's ridiculous really; of course communication, navigation and scientific sats are an important part of infrastructure, but you surely have to draw a line somewhere? It's a disaster waiting to happen. There really has to be more regulation. Having that much "space junk" floating around is definitely going to come back around and bite us in the arse one day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 9, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 9, 2021 6 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said: There really has to be more regulation. Having that much "space junk" floating around is definitely going to come back around and bite us in the arse one day. This is a great visualisation of what's there - just mindblowing: http://astria.tacc.utexas.edu/AstriaGraph/ And yeah, people in the industry keep on thinking about possible solutions to dealing with space junk, but kinda miss the main one - stop fucking generating it in the first place... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Gonzo Posted August 9, 2021 Share Posted August 9, 2021 7 minutes ago, nudge said: This is a great visualisation of what's there - just mindblowing: http://astria.tacc.utexas.edu/AstriaGraph/ And yeah, people in the industry keep on thinking about possible solutions to dealing with space junk, but kinda miss the main one - stop fucking generating it in the first place... Makes you wonder wtf those purple "uncharacterised" ones are Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted August 9, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted August 9, 2021 4 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said: Makes you wonder wtf those purple "uncharacterised" ones are Probably just tiny fragments of junk that are too small to be recognised. As pieces of junk in orbit collide at high speed, that creates even more tiny debris. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Gonzo Posted August 9, 2021 Share Posted August 9, 2021 27 minutes ago, nudge said: Probably just tiny fragments of junk that are too small to be recognised. As pieces of junk in orbit collide at high speed, that creates even more tiny debris. I assume, at least one, of the plans to deal with space junk is "let's just blow it up." But that'll just cause more junk, that's just smaller... so it's probably not a great solution 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 11, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 11, 2021 NASA Science Cargo Launch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted August 15, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted August 15, 2021 Quote Where’s the edge of the observable Universe? And what’s beyond? It’s all very well saying the Universe encompasses everything, but everything has to end somewhere, right? Well, not exactly. Does the Universe have an edge? If by ‘Universe’ we mean ‘everything there is’, then the Universe clearly does not have an edge. If we thought it did, we would be guilty of not including everything! But people often ask the question in a slightly different way, which assumes there is an edge: “If the Universe is expanding,” they say, “what is it expanding into?” This, though, misunderstands what is meant by ‘expanding Universe’. In Berlin in 1915, at the height of World War One, Albert Einstein came up with a revolutionary theory of gravity, which supplanted Newton’s and, in 1916, he applied it to be the biggest source of gravitating mass he knew of: the Universe. What Einstein’s theory showed (it was others who spotted this, not Einstein) was that the Universe could not be still but had to be in motion: either expanding or contracting. In fact, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are flying away from each other like pieces of cosmic shrapnel in the aftermath of a titanic explosion – the Big Bang. This, in essence, is what we mean by the expansion of the Universe: that the distance between galaxies is growing. Einstein’s theory could easily describe a Universe that goes on forever and therefore has no edge, or one that curves back on itself like a higher-dimensional version of the surface of a ball, and so also has no edge. In the latter case, confirmation would be to observe the same galaxies on opposite sides of the Universe when we look far enough away with our telescopes. Of course, others will say the Universe does have an effective edge, because it was born 13.82 billion years ago in the Big Bang. We can therefore see only those galaxies whose light has taken less than 13.82 billion years to reach us (about two trillion). Those galaxies exist in a sphere of space centred on the Earth that we call the ‘observable Universe’. It’s actually about 92 billion light-years across as the Universe ‘inflated’ far faster than the speed of light in its first split-second of existence. The observable Universe is bounded by a ‘cosmic horizon’, much like the horizon at sea. Just as we know there’s more ocean over the horizon, we know there are more galaxies (possibly an infinite number) beyond the cosmic horizon. Their light simply hasn’t had time to reach us yet. https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/the-universe-edge/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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