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Tag: astronomy
red dwarfs may not be as habitable as we thought, as they’re low on uv radiation, which is crucial for RNA formation
ultraviolet radiation may even have played a critical role in the emergence of life here on Earth. As such, determining how much UV radiation is produced by other types of stars could be one of the keys to finding evidence of life any planets that orbit them.
neural networks can accurately analyze the complex distortions in spacetime known as gravitational lenses 10M times faster than traditional methods.
By bouncing light off a vibrating nanomembrane, researchers can now detect radio waves with 10000x less energy
If the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had showed up 10 minutes earlier or later, there would have been no mass extinction, and hence no primates.
The first spacecraft to fly into the sun’s atmosphere will also be the fastest human-made vehicle ever, at 195 km / s.
2019-07-29: There’s a related experiment that simulates the solar magnetic field in a lab:
The twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field control the flow of charged particles throughout the solar system. For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of this mysterious environment. “Because they’re a lab experiment, they can change some of their parameters, right?. And we can’t. The sun does what it’s going to do.” As the Parker Solar Probe circles the sun over the next few years, it will pass through the corona and collect data that researchers can compare to the laboratory results. “Stuff that they’re seeing, if it’s real, we should see it.”
2021-12-15: This has now happened.
The first passage through the corona, which lasted only a few hours, is one of many planned for the mission. Parker will continue to spiral closer to the Sun, eventually reaching as close as 8.86 solar radii from the surface. Upcoming flybys, the next of which is happening in January 2022, will likely bring Parker Solar Probe through the corona again.
the motions of the Local Group—the cluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way—are being driven by 2 primary sources, the previously known and incredibly massive Shapley Supercluster (Great Attractor) and a newly discovered repeller, which the researchers dub the Dipole Repeller.
abundance everywhere
a team of planetary scientists have come together to propose a new meaning for the term “planet”. Based on their geophysical definition, the term would apply to over 100 bodies in the Solar System, including the Moon itself.
It is estimated that there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer Solar System and possibly more than 10K in the region beyond
7 tidally locked earth-like planets in 1 system, only 40LY away. you may want to adjust your drake equation priors upward, again.
Unlike the Kepler Space Telescope—which monitored 100k stars and looked for slight dimming to determine when planets passed in front of their parent stars—Project Blue will use high-contrast imaging. Technical studies have shown that, with an advanced coronagraph to block light from the stars and data processing techniques, such a telescope could reject light from the 2 stars at a rate of 10B to 1. This is sufficient to allow direct imaging of a planet with observations made over the course of several years. Put another way, such an observation system is akin to detecting a firefly next to a lighthouse 16km away.
The proposed telescope should be able to resolve a world that is 0.5 to 1.5 times of the size of Earth and orbiting within the host star’s “habitable zone,” where water theoretically could exist on the surface. Based on Kepler’s data, with 2 Sun-like stars to search around, the odds of at least 1 terrestrial planet in the habitable zone is 80%.
A new dwarf planet has been found and it is 530 km across and some 13.7B km from the sun, 3x farther than Pluto. It takes 1100 years to complete 1 orbit.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 