Posts

Watch SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch 81 satellites early on July 7

Image
SpaceX will launch a passel of satellites to orbit early Tuesday morning (July 7), and you can watch the action live. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 81 payloads is scheduled to lift off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday, during a 95-minute window that opens at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0410 GMT; 12:10 a.m. local California time). You can watch the mission, which is called Transporter-17, live via SpaceX . Coverage will begin about 15 minutes before launch. As its name suggests, Transporter-17 will be the 17th mission of SpaceX 's Transporter rideshare program. The company operates another rideshare series as well, called Bandwagon, which has launched four missions to date . The 20 Transporter and Bandwagon missions that have flown to date sent more than 1,800 payloads to Earth orbit. Transporter-1 lofted 143 of those back in January 2021 , which remains the global single-launch ...
Post a Comment
Read more

More clues surface about the origins of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

More evidence that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is much older than our solar system has come to light, along with clues that it formed on the outskirts of the protoplanetary disk belonging to its parent star long ago. Earlier this year, researchers led by Martin Cordiner of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center revealed that data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggested that 3I/ATLAS is between 10 and 12 billion years old , based on the ratios of its carbon and deuterium isotopes. This would make it more than twice the age of our 4.6-billion-year-old solar system . Now, new results from the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope support the JWST observations of carbon isotopes, and also introduce measurements of nitrogen isotopes that arrive at very interesting conclusions. Isotopes are versions of atom...
Post a Comment
Read more

NASA just found a planet 'hiding' in TESS spacecraft data, all thanks to Einstein

Image
NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has a new method for detecting worlds beyond the solar system. The technique relies on a phenomenon introduced by Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, called gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet in question is called Gaia23bra b. The first hints of this exoplanet were found in 2023 by the now-retired Gaia space telescope via the slight brightening of a star caused by a microlensing event. TESS usually spots planets by the tiny drop in the light output from their parent star as they cross, or transit, its face. This technique is most effective for very large gas giants that orbit close to their star, so it most likely wouldn't work for Gaia23bra b, which has 1.6 times Jupiter's mass but orbits its star at a similar distance to Jupiter's orbit around the sun. Additionally,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black holes buried in mysterious 'little red dot' galaxies could blast cosmic ghosts at Earth

Image
Mysterious "little red dots" discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could harbor buried black holes that fire high-energy cosmic "ghost particles" through the cosmos. Neutrinos are referred to as ghost particles because as chargeless and near-massless particles, hundreds of trillions of them stream through your body every second at nearly the speed of light. Plus, the source of high-energy neutrinos frequently detected on Earth is something of a mystery. And another cosmic mystery is the existence of the "little red dots," which are galaxies that have been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Though common around 600 million years after the Big Bang, these dots seem to disappear before the universe gets to 2 billion years old. Some researchers have theorized that these curious small galaxies could harbor black holes that...
Post a Comment
Read more

5,000-year-old wolves found on remote island rewrite what we know about domestication

Scientists discovered ancient wolves on a tiny Baltic island where they could only have been brought by humans, suggesting an unexpectedly close relationship between people and wolves thousands of years ago. Evidence indicates the wolves were fed, possibly cared for, and may even have been managed or selectively bred long before modern ideas of domestication. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/7O8RsnZ
Post a Comment
Read more

Quantum mechanics once baffled scientists. Now it's changing the world

Quantum mechanics has journeyed from a strange and controversial idea to the foundation of some of humanity’s most advanced technologies. Now researchers are pushing its boundaries even further, with potential breakthroughs in energy, medicine, computing, and our understanding of the universe. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/z8AM4vO
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists may have finally solved the black hole information paradox

Researchers have proposed that black holes stop evaporating at the last moment, leaving behind tiny remnants that preserve all the information they contain. The same seven-dimensional geometry behind this idea could also help explain why elementary particles have mass. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/fiWZks4
Post a Comment
Read more